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Growth and the good times are over because the resources that provided that growth are dwindling. Peak oil is almost certainly behind us and everyone knows it, shifting their foreign policy accordingly. Recent events have laid bare that there's no facade of "manifest destiny" or ideology behind it... it's just naked aggression, scrambling for a bigger slice of the shrinking pie.

If it were just a shrinking energy/resource base, we could muddle through and build a better political system. Same with climate change. And biodiversity loss. And chemical pollution. And global nuclear warfare. And the decay of social morality. All of these things are solvable in themselves, but in aggregate I think we're running into harsh economic realities that we might not be able to solve all of it at the same time.

Not to go to far off topic, but from an energy perspective, I'm not worried. We're about to hit 1TW/year in global solar deployment, batteries are following fast behind that. My concern is what happens when stakeholders deeply entrenched in the petro economy start to fail (Russia, Middle East, etc), as well as the lagging impact of climate change; we're on escape trajectory with regards to clean energy and electrification, but climate change mitigation will still cost trillions, and the resulting climate changes will be felt by those existing over at least the next century (assuming humans discover an efficient, inexpensive greenhouse gas sequestration mechanism and a reversal can be engineered).

Energy abundance is coming, but the transition and disruption will be messy.

https://rmi.org/insight/x-change-the-race-to-the-top/

Demographics dynamics is where the pain will come from.

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

Those machines don't provide energy, they simply capture it. We get our energy from solar radiation, either directly or stored in underground carbon bonds. We burned through our oil reserves, which represent the solar energy of millions of years of photosynthetic capacity, in a few centuries. And demand keeps growing. How do you intend to maintain and continue growing the energy supply without access to fossil fuels? Reverting to an annual energy budget determined by the sun is a fundamentally different game to having millions of years of energy at our match tip.

It's the difference between living on a fixed income vs drawing down a savings account. And as we draw down our savings account (burn oil) to invest in our fixed income future (solar) we should not fool ourselves into thinking this means an infinite savings account. Whether we draw our savings to zero or plan wisely for fixed-income, either way we are looking at decreased energy availability, aka degrowth.

The Earth receives enough energy from the Sun in ~30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Electrification is highly efficient vs thermal losses with combustion. Half of marine traffic disappears if you're not shipping fossil fuels around. Etc, etc. Humanity can live within the energy budget available between solar energy received and geothermal energy available (imho).

Certainly, we're going to bump into limits if we're exhausting total solar potential falling on the Earth and geothermal reserves, but that is a problem decades into the future at current electrical generation technology deployment rates.

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612

True, the solar potential could theoretically cover what we lose from fossil fuels. We could building a dyson sphere around the sun. But the mere existence of energy is not the same thing as a proven economical way to capture it.

Have you looked at the graphs for solar power rollout? We‘re on the vertical part of the hockey stick.

Have you seen the studies that project the hockey stick graph of resource extraction required to continue that scaling? Have you seen the studies that show the orders of magnitude increase in mining required? Have you accounted for the fact that all of that cannot be done with solar panels? How do you assume to mine that much material from elsewhere for your own benefit, at the detriment of the communities you're extracting from?

Your plan is curiously devoid of answers to the basic questions.

"Chart goes up now, chart must go up forever" is an ideology, not a characteristic of any physical ecosystem. Certainly not an actionable plan that any serious person would follow.

Instead of an ideology, how about a real viable plan pinned to physical reality (CO2 emissions, terrawatts, acres, tons of ore, things we can measure empirically)? I keep being promised this solar future, yet fossil fuel emissions keep rising. Your ideology sounds appealing, but you've got a long way to go to make it reality.

Looks like the installed GWh per year is projected to continue to grow until 2035 or longer: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/03/global-solar-capacity...

I'm still waiting for the solar-powered lithium mining trucks... Until then, solar panels are just stored fossil fuels.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101287 (comment with citations on China being the first electrostate, how much energy is produced from low carbon sources)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057045 (comment with citations on automated, electrical heavy haul vehicles in China)

Reminder to think in systems. Low carbon generation keeps pushing fossil generation out. Electric vehicles keep pushing combustion vehicles out. We’re still 10-15 years away still, but trajectories are clear.

And yet, despite all these pushes, fossil fuel consumption has yet to show signs of ever going down. In relative terms? sure, but in absolute, we're still burning more dead dinosaurs than ever.

EDIT: but I've got to say, I didn't know about those electric mining trucks. Those are pretty cool.

Can you share more about the "has yet to show signs of ever going down?"

I'm not trying to say "source!" and make you prove anything.

I'm genuinely interested. All the stats I'm aware of show fossil fuel usage going down but I'm sure there is more context to the data I'm missing.

I don't remember my exact source, and I admit that the situation might have changed in the last year, but here's what a quick "global energy usage over time by type" google search yielded:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy

> All the stats I'm aware of show fossil fuel usage going down but I'm sure there is more context to the data I'm missing.

The research you're thinking about shows that fossil fuel usage is declining as a percentage of overall energy use. That much is true. Solar is making progress relative to coal, oil, and gas.

But don't confuse the derivative of the relative difference with the scalar value of interest. Measured in physical units, fossil fuel consumption keeps increasing, as the IEA reports constantly.

That's perfect thanks.

I think coal consumption has plateaued and we‘ll finally see it coming down in a year or two. Oil and gas will need a couple more years, current US policies will cause an unnecessary delay.

And the manufacturing. And transport, installation, maintenance. There is no part of the "renewables" supply chain that has ever been free of fossil fuels. Curious how we hope to repair solar panels wind turbines and hydroelectric dams without fossil fuels.

> If I could choose to have children again, I wouldn't.

A lot of people aren't willing to admit this publicly, or even privately to themselves.

My ego is dead, I am emotionally healthy and actualized, and in a few decades we'll all be gone and none of this will have mattered. I cannot speak for others, but I will speak the truth for me. If a compliment, thank you. I hope it encourages others to be more honest with themselves.

> After failing hard earlier in life, I became risk adverse, but also have had some success. I hope to have enough investments by the time I stop working that my kids can survive without working if needed. I also hope I have provided them enough resources and life skills to live a good life after I'm good until they're gone. This is my apology to them for their existence in this macro, I hope they accept it, and failing that, at least understand it.

I like this.

> If I could choose to have children again, I wouldn't.

I agree. I feel that I've done my children a disservice by bringing them into the world as it is. I just didn't know this is how things would go.

When would have been a good time to bring children into the world? There has never been a perfect time and there never will be.

Billy Joel's 1989 song 'We didn't start the fire' addresses the idea that the past wasn't always better than the present.

Of course there's never been a perfect time. Every time has its problems. But the ones we're facing now are greater than at any time in my life, and we're not only failing to address them, we seem to be intent on making them worse.

The world my children are inheriting is a substantially worse one that the world I inherited.

I would have been more worried if I lived through 1939-1945, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kids going duck and cover under their desk. Nuclear exchange seemed inevitable. And yet the cold war never went hot. The experts of the 1960s didn't see the Soviet Unions collapse in the 1990s coming. We may find the inevitability of climate apocalypse as inevitable as nuclear apocalypse with the Soviet Union turned out to be

Life involves some measure of suffering, but also an opportunity for existence, love, and joy. Denying that completely is absurd and an incel attitude.

I saw the handwriting on the wall 30 years ago, but couldn't say what form it would take. I knew that prices of things would go up, wages and employment would decline, and misery would increase over time.

I think there may be some very large scale (conventional, hopefully) wars and billions of people migrating as climate refugees within the next 5-25 years. Imagine Gaza but it's entirely possible Putin will not be stopped and the MAGA movement leaders will emulate Bibi and Putin in terms of war-making. It's also probable that even more brutal, repressive, and self-destructive future leaders in the spirit of Nero and Caligula will emerge.

None of this is set in stone. Fate doesn't exist. Nothing bad has to happen. We can choose to reorganize and change attitudes if we are willing to be steadfast with solidarity.

Ironically, this kind of mindset just makes the demographic freight train of population collapse even worse. The best thing you can do for society rn is to keep making babies, so that the population doesn’t collapse faster than we can handle