According to the plot of the movie, The Matrix, robots had won the war on humanity and put each and every one of us into a virtual reality prison; taking our minds back to the “peak of our civilization, 1999”. Based on the data published by the Energy Institute just recently, the Wachowskis were just two decades off the mark — not bad if you ask me. Understanding that energy is the economy, and after examining the underlying dynamics we now have every reason to believe that 2019 was indeed the high water mark for western civilization (at least in economic terms); marking the beginning of a multi-decade long descent ahead back to a much simpler life.
Oh wow. I remember people sounding the alarm about “peak oil” in the '70s and '80s.
Weird that no one talks about it now that it’s happening.
Some bloggers still do. But most people are energy blind, so they fail to see its significance.
But even fracking is on its last legs, yes. And seems the first bottleneck is diesel and bunker fuel, since tight oil is so light while the fracking rigs burn a lot of diesel per unit extracted.
The peak oil movement had another renaissance in the 2000s, but it went completely out of style about a decade ago. Most of the people who were aware of it like J.M. Greer, J.H. Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov, for example, just threw up their hands and stopped posting about it, because by that point no one outside of the subculture cared or intended to do anything about it. The “black pill” here, as I see it, is that we are just going to use it all up, whatever is accessible from the economic feasibility view anyway, and then suffer a traumatic economic disruption/contraction when it runs out.