What will future societies be like after fossil fuels are gone?

Posted on October 24, 2026 by

Preface.  I was writing about how deadly and brutal wars are today, nuclear bombs, and all the mafia totalitarian and gangster states like Russia and Mexico, Ecuador, various African states that make the lives of their people miserable and getting pretty depressed.

Then I remembered this book by Vaclav Smil. Energy and Civilization A History (2017) MIT Press. In the future societies can’t get as bad — they won’t have the fossil energy to gain as much territory, power, and control.  Energy determines what societies are capable of.  The ability to make nuclear weapons, jet fighters, AI killing machines and more will no longer be possible.

Eventually societies will go back to wood for fuel, which limits the size of cities, which need at least 30 times as much woodlands surrounding them for energy to cook and heat with. Since it takes a lot of energy to get to a forest, cut it down, and take it back to a city, I think deforestation is more likely from forest fires than being cut down as the shift from fossils back to biomass is made.

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Phosphate: All hopes for food and LFP batteries rest on Morocco with up to 85% of remaining reserves

Posted on October 17, 2026 by
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is phosphorous-conveyer-belt-61-miles-long.jpg

Source: The world’s longest conveyor belt system of 61 miles to convey phosphate ore to the sea (atlasobscura.com)

Phosphate is absolutely essential for both plants and animals.  It’s estimated that Morocco has of 75-85% of phosphate reserves.

How long reserves will last depends on being economic. So if the price of oil rises too high or is scarce, reserves become resources again.As the best cheapest reserves are obtained, it requires more money and energy to get lower quality reserves.

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Floating Solar Farms add plastic, metal, PFAS & cut off light and oxygen to life below

Posted on October 10, 2026 by

Preface.  These exist mainly in Asia. Yet another mess left for future generations after the fossil party ends, meanwhile, in some cases, harming the ecosystem and  reducing phytoplankton and fish while increasing toxic cyanobacteria blooms and invasive bio-fouling mussels. Few solar panels are recycled.

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Peak Lithium

Posted on October 3, 2026 by

Brine and hard rock mining

Preface. The electrification of vehicles and energy storage depend on lithium batteries. What is really dumb is that energy storage systems do not need to be light like transportation batteries. Yet over 99% of energy storage systems use lithium batteries. A 200 MWh Battery energy storage system uses as much lithium as 3,300 EVs with 60 kWh batteries.

About 60% of lithium is mined from brine (lithium carbonate) because it is the cheapest. And an ecological disaster, consuming 456 billion liters of water in 2024, about 2 million liters of water per ton.

The other 40% comes from hard rock mining of Spodumene/Pegmatites. Which is more expensive and uses more energy.

There is not enough lithium to make electrifying transportation and energy storage in the long run, even with recycling. Which is not happening much now because it is not profitable. When it is, it is due to government subsidies, which cannot be counted on to last.  An NMC battery is more profitable to recycle than an LFP due to the higher value of nickel and cobalt, and only they will be extracted. Not the lithium.

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Trump eliminates birth control abroad

Posted on September 26, 2026 by

source: Kenrick DT (2021) The Psychology of Denying Overpopulation. MAHB

Preface.  This article points out that unmanaged population growth tends to lead to instability, poverty, and migration to Europe and the U.S. But does not address the dozens of other overshoot factors human overpopulation are causing such as pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil erosion, climate change, and so on. So dumb given Peak Everything and a carrying capacity of about 500,000 without fossil fuels for transportation, fertilizer, heat, electricity, concrete, steel and virtually every other human activity and manufactured product.

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In a world without people, how long would NYC last?

Posted on September 19, 2026 by

Preface.  The best book I have read on this topic of how fast the world would recover is Alan Weisman’s “World Without Us.”  But this article from Popular Science is a god summary of what to expect.  And since NYC is one of the most vulnerable to sea level rise on earth, not implausible that few will remain, and what that will do to the city is not included in what follows.

Durn S (2025) In a world without people, how fast would NYC fall apart? Here’s the timeline.
In a week, mold moves in. In a century, New York is a forest. Popular Science

Imagine the ceaseless cacophony of New York City suddenly stopped. No sirens wailed. No cars zoomed. No subways rumbled beneath sidewalks.  no one’s around to sweep the sidewalks, weed Central Park. nature would move in—and quick. Dandelions spring up in asphalt cracks. Raccoons would move into abandoned apartments.  But just how swiftly would the city disappear beneath a curtain of green? We talked to architects and urban ecologists to map out a potential timeline.

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Network States to replace democratic governments with billionaire Silicon Valley CEO dictators & Republicans

Posted on September 12, 2026 by

Introduction

This is a book review of part of Gil Duran’s “Network States and the Rise of Cryptocurrency to end democratic governments.”  Which is mainly about Peter Thiel, who has had the greatest effect, more even than Elon Musk, in his influence on U.S. right-wing libertarian radicalism,  including getting J D Vance appointed to the Vice Presidency.  And other Silicon billionaires who have joined with Thiel and his world views.

As someone interested in how people and communities will thrive in the future as we return to the 15th century as fossil fuels decline, I was quite interested in how billionaires planned to survive.  This book discusses the Network States some of them are proposing. I also have 4 other posts on this topic under What to Do/Where to be or not be/Where the Rich are going. Peter Thiel, is very aware of Peak Oil after speaking with leaders at The Oil Drum, Postcarbon and other groups and now has bunkers in New Zealand and Argentina, where he is also trying to set up a Network state and investing heavily in fracked shale oil.

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Why the kerogen in oil shale will never fill up your tank

Posted on September 5, 2026 by

Source: Oil Shale vs. Shale Oil: What’s the difference? USGS

Preface. The basic reason oil shale was never developed was because it was not cooked enough. It has tens of millions of years to go. Turning it into oil right now requires so much “cooking energy” that the energy return is negative, as the U.S. government found out after spending almost $7 billion ($42 billion 2026 dollars) in the 1970s trying to extract oil from kerogen shale in Colorado and Wyoming. Accelerating geology came with too many energy and environmental costs to make it a commercial project (Nikiforuk 2013).

It is so hopeless you will notice most of my references are not recent. Though it can be done, Estonia produces a little form an especially good deposit, and China too, where experiments continue to try to convert it to oil since there is so much of it.

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‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq

Posted on August 25, 2026 by

Source: The Oil We Eat – How Our Food System Depends On Oil and How Fragile It Makes Our Food Security

Preface. Even though this article was published in 2004, it is still true today, only worse. This article will never be out of date because it is so powerfully written:

It requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

When we say the soil is rich that’s not not a metaphor. Soil is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain–wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hyper-charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

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Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America

Posted on August 18, 2026 by

 

Preface.  Before the fossil fuel age began, up to 90% were farmers. The end of the brief blip of oil production will send us back to that time (if we aren’t so far into overshoot we go back to being hunter-gatherers). Yet we’re losing a lot of prime farmland to development.  We need all the land we can get in the future. As it is, in the Great Depression people were hungry at a time when there were 100 million people and 25% of them were farmers, while now just 1% of people are farmers and there are 348 million today.  

Kolankiewicz writes in “Vanishing Open Spaces Population Growth and Sprawl in America” below, that cities were built where the best farmland and water existed. As cities and towns grow, they sprawled outwards over this prime farmland. This is where 85% of developmental sprawl happens. The United Nations calls this soil sealing – the permanent covering of soil with impermeable materials such as asphalt or structures.  This leads to a total soil loss of food and fiber production, for water to infiltrate and be held and purified, and often increases flooding, the ability of the soil to hold water, loss of purification capacities, loss of carbon sequestration, increased urban heat from the loss of vegetation, and less biodiversity (FAO 2015).

Between 1945 and 1975, enough farms disappeared beneath concrete to pave Nebraska (Montgomery 2007), about 49.5 million acres (77,350 square miles).

Between 1982 and 2010 the U.S. lost 41.4 million acres, 14% of its crop land.  That’s equal to 65,000 square miles, an area as large as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania

Over a third of all land that has ever been developed occurred in the last 25 years.  If we keep paving over cropland at this rate, it will all be gone in 200 years.  

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