we've communicated for a long time since WWII and things like wild foraging and [a form of gardening where local plants are placed intelligently so as to produce dense crops without maintenance, forget the name of it] have come a long way. The concept of a 1 acre homestead is big now, and people are now designing things like 1/10th acre homesteads. Here's a random article from mother earth news. For fairness, I think mother earth news probably has a financed mainstream left wing bias. Still, they were nice when I was teenage yuppie: https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/self-sufficient-h... Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead You don’t need a lot of acreage to have a self-sufficient homestead. Even on a 1-acre farm, you can milk a family cow, raise livestock and reap garden harvests — all while improving your land’s soil fertility with manure and proper grazing management.

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-net-zero-agenda-has-devastating-co... The "Net Zero" Agenda Has Devastating Consequences... Here's What You Need To Know Human beings — regardless of race, religion or culture — like to embrace any belief that is absolute. This is because absolute beliefs are simple, easy to comprehend, and false positives that offer us a false sense of security. If we come to believe that a particular idea, place, or group of people are either all good or all bad, then we humans fool ourselves into thinking that we have got a piece of a particular equation all figured out. Such a binary viewpoint is psychologically comforting, allowing us to feel assured and in control. The more control we feel the more assured we feel so there is a feedback loop here which takes hold. Now, think of propaganda, which is, of course, a group reassuring another group of a particular narrative. Consider that if you have decided that a group of people are all bad, then all you have to do is stay away from them or keep them away from you. Life just got easier. If you decide that a group of people are your enemy, all you have to do is make war against them and once they are all gone, life would surely be better, right? The problem with absolute thinking The problem with absolute thinking is that it causes pain and suffering in the life of the person who adheres to an all-or-nothing attitude in any facet of his thought process. This is because the person is routinely exposed to contradictions to his beliefs, which creates a sense of threat to his world view. Eliminating the threat (canceling) brings about relief and even the canceling of any contradiction provides reassurance. This is why absolute thinking is the genesis of, among other things, genocides. Why bring this up? Because when hearing statements that are universally absolute like: “the science is settled.”, you know that we are dealing with a cult, not science. It is why the governments’ statements about carbon zero and the road to zero emissions are dangerous. Because they’re absolute, allow for the demonization, and hence eradication of anyone that opposes this narrative. It is literally impossible to get to truth without the ability to view the possibilities of other or new facts. This is true of any field, not just climate science. As of right now you’ll notice the “absolute,” which cannot therefore be questioned can be found in the following topics: Covid Climate change (CO2 emissions and “net zero”) Ukraine BLM LGBQT Critical race theory Privileged white males There are others, but you’ll know that all of the above will bring hell fury if you are to question the orthodoxy of views held in relation to these topics. This means that most anything can be done in the name of these topics and escape scrutiny which would otherwise not be the case. These are all worrying attributes of this current hysteria we’re living in, but let us deal with the facts and the realities. Facts and realities Facts and realities are what typically bring societies back to some sense of rationality. Mao’s China never gave up on attempting centralized farming because debate and discussion resulted in their thinking to themselves, “My oh my, this doesn’t look good, perhaps we were wrong in our assumptions.” No, they starved tens of millions of people first and only when the evidence was absolutely overwhelming and the hysteria had burned itself out there was the ability to chart a different course. We’ve many examples throughout history but let us today consider this one of CO2 emissions which feeds into “renewables” and a “sustainable” future. Never in the history of man have we transitioned from a more dense energy form to a less dense one. The reason is simple. It is “barse-ackward.” If we look at any time we’ve transitioned from a less energy dense form to a more energy dense one we see a number of things. Higher productivity Lowered inflation (the two going hand in hand) Rising standards of living It stands to reason that by doing the opposite we’re likely to see the following: Lower productivity Increased inflation Falling standard of living Energy Return on Investment (EROI) Looked at purely from an investment perspective an important ratio is energy return on investment. The multiple of your energy input that translates into output. Proponents of solar will point out that solar generates decent energy returns. What is often missed is that the numbers used to support this are more often than not cherry picked from locations (enjoying sunlight) and daytime hours. This is a problem given that solar doesn’t work when the sun doesn’t shine, which is on a cloudy or rainy day as well as at night. And this is the time when the bulk electricity demand comes into play to cover for the lack of solar energy. If a source generates electricity at a time inconsistent with demand, the price it can sell for can often be negative. It’s like trying to sell me a cold cappuccino at 3pm. I don’t want it. I want it hot and at 7am, thanks. However, to get a true reflection of overall electricity costs, we need to factor in the storage and delivery costs to obtain the EROI (energy return on investment). If future EROI will be lower than any preceding electricity EROI (and it will be due to more costly, less dense and less effective energy sources), then consequently we can expect lower productivity, higher costs, higher inflation, and lower living standards. If we look at man’s history from an energy perspective, we see the following: wood, biomass, coal, oil, natural gas, uranium. Biomass is denser in energy than wood, and coal denser still, and so on. Dense forms of energy with high EROI let nature do the work. For example, oil is just concentrated solar from eons ago. Infrastructure Another issue that requires consideration is that solar and wind infrastructure require a lot of dense fuel to build. Those wind turbines require a lot of steel. In order to produce steel we need iron ore mines and coking coal to form the steel. Then there is the concrete and the graphite. All of these things need to be mined, brought to the earth’s surface, trucked, shipped, forged, and so on. All of these processes are, if you think about it, components of energy density. But we’re told by the absolutists that we’re getting rid of all of these processes. Zero is the absolute word. Achieving Net Zero We may well approach some level of “zero” in parts of the world. It’ll be zero energy, zero food, zero life. And that means conflict of the sort we’ve never experienced in our lives. I wish it wasn’t so, but that is the road we’re on with the absolutists steering this titanic catastrophe in the making.

All nations in history have failed, and all will, so long as people insist on repeating same proven failure... government.

It's A New Era Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, This dynamic - making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era - receives little attention or understanding. Eras may last decades, and only those who've lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981. The era of digital / Internet technologies took off about 30 years ago. All of these dynamics accelerated in the early 2000s, roughly 20 years ago. Only those 60 and older experienced working in a previous era (pre-1981). All of these dynamics are entering a phase of nonlinear turbulence as the changes are outpacing these highly streamlined / optimized systems' ability to self-correct. This nonlinear instability is being accelerated by doing more of what worked in the previous era, in the mistaken belief that the 2020s are simply an extension of the eras that began 40 and 30 years ago. The fixes that worked in the past won't resolve the nonlinear instability because all these dynamics have reached saturation: adding more debt no longer generates organic expansion of productivity, all it does is inflate an even larger and more unstable credit-asset bubble. Globalization has been optimized to the point of saturation: the potential downsides to national security outweigh any remaining marginal gains in corporate profitability. Financialization has so distorted the economy that gambling on useless speculations is now viewed as the best (or only) way to get ahead. When a system has absorbed all it can absorb, adding more is just a waste of resources. We've entered a new era, and so the fixes and incentives that worked in the past 40 years no longer work. The idea that the past 30 years were not a permanent era but an anomaly that's come to an end doesn't compute for everyone who has only experienced the "glorious 30" years of cheap energy, soaring assets and falling prices due to hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization. The idea that this new era may evolve unpredictably is also anathema to a technocratic culture and economy that prides itself on forecasting and controlling everything with credit and money. The previous 40 years of material abundance has nurtured a belief that the solution to any scarcity is to create more money, as some of this new money will inevitably flow into eliminating the scarcity. The idea that some scarcities cannot be fixed by creating more money doesn't compute. It may turn out that all the lessons we learned in the past 40 years will not only be useless in this new era, they will be disastrously counter-productive. Their unparalleled success for decades may blind us to the power of previous solutions to make our problems worse than they would have been had we recognized the new era for what it is rather than seeing the future as a seamless extension of the previous era. This dynamic--making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era--receives little attention or understanding. This dynamic helps us understand why systems that seemed permanent and forever can destabilize and fall apart with astonishing speed. We thought we were fixing it by doing more of what worked in the past, but we were actually accelerating the turbulence and destabilization. We have a hard time letting go of the idea that the recent past is an accurate guide to the future. In stable eras, it generally is, but not when an era ends and a new one begins.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/01/09/__trashed/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/11/17/todays-energy-crisis-is-very-different... https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/09/20/ramping-up-renewables-cant-provide-eno... Tverberg: In 2023, Expect A Financial Crash Followed By Major Energy-Related Changes Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog, Why is the economy headed for a financial crash? It appears to me that the world economy hit Limits to Growth about 2018 because of a combination of diminishing returns in resource extraction together with rising population. The Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying financial manipulations hid these problems for a few years, but now, as the world economy tries to reopen, the problems are back with a vengeance. Figure 1. World primary energy consumption per capita based on BP’s 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy. Same chart shown in post, Today’s Energy Crisis Is Very Different from the Energy Crisis of 2005. In the period between 1981 and 2022, the economy was lubricated by a combination of ever-rising debt, falling interest rates, and the growing use of Quantitative Easing. These financial manipulations helped to hide the rising cost of fossil fuel extraction after 1970. Even more money supply was added in 2020. Now central bankers are trying to squeeze the excesses out of the system using a combination of higher interest rates and Quantitative Tightening. After central bankers brought about recessions in the past, the world economy was able to recover by adding more energy supply. However, this time we are dealing with a situation of true depletion; there is no good way to recover by adding more energy supplies to the system. Instead, the only way the world economy can recover, at least partially, is by squeezing some non-essential energy uses out of the system. Hopefully, this can be done in such a way that a substantial part of the world economy can continue to operate in a manner close to that in the past. One approach to making the economy more efficient in its energy use is by greater regionalization. If countries can start trading almost entirely with nearby neighbors, this will reduce the world’s energy consumption. In parts of the world with plentiful resources and manufacturing capability, the economy can perhaps continue without major changes. Another way of squeezing out excesses might be through the elimination (at least in part) of the trade advantage the US obtains by using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In this post, I will also mention a few other ways that non-essential energy consumption might be reduced. I believe that a financial crash is likely sometime during 2023. After the crash, the system will start squeezing down on the less necessary parts of the economy. While these changes will start in 2023, they will likely take place over a period of years. In this post, I will try to explain what I see happening. [1] The world economy, in its currently highly leveraged state, cannot withstand both higher interest rates and Quantitative Tightening. With higher interest rates, the value of bonds falls. With bonds “worth less,” the financial statements of pension plans, insurance companies, banks and others holding those bonds all look worse. More contributions are suddenly needed to fund pension funds. Governments may find themselves needing to bail out many of these organizations. At the same time, individual borrowers find that debt becomes more expensive to finance. Thus, it becomes more expensive to buy a home, vehicle, or farm. Debt to speculate in the stock market becomes more expensive. With higher debt costs, there is a tendency for asset prices, such as home prices and stock prices, to fall. With this combination (lower asset prices and higher interest rates) debt defaults are likely to become more common. Quantitative Tightening makes it harder to obtain liquidity to buy goods internationally. This change is more subtle, but it also works in the direction of causing disruptions to financial markets. Other stresses to the financial system can be expected, as well, in the near term. For example, Biden’s program that allows students to delay payments on their student loans will be ending in the next few months, adding more stress to the system. China has had huge problems with loans to property developers, and these may continue or get worse. Many of the poor countries around the world are asking the IMF to provide debt relief because they cannot afford energy supplies and other materials at today’s prices. Europe is concerned about possible high energy prices. This is all happening at a time when total debt levels are even higher than they were in 2008. In addition to “regular” debt, the economic system includes trillions of dollars of derivative promises. Based on these considerations alone, a much worse crash than occurred in 2008 seems possible. [2] The world as a whole is already headed into a major recession. This situation seems likely to get worse in 2023. The Global Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) has been signaling problems for months. A few bullet points from their site include the following: Service sector output declined in October, registering the worst monthly performance since mid-2020. Manufacturing output meanwhile fell for a third consecutive month, also declining at the steepest rate since June 2020. PMI subindices showed new business contracting at the quickest rate since June 2020, with the weak demand environment continuing to be underpinned by declining worldwide trade. The global manufacturing PMI’s new export orders index has now signaled a reduction in worldwide goods exports for eight straight months. Price inflationary pressures remained solid in October, despite rates of increase in input costs and output charges easing to 19-month lows. The economic situation in the US doesn’t look as bad as it does for the world as a whole, perhaps because the US dollar has been at a relatively high level. However, a situation with the US doing well and other countries doing poorly is unsustainable. If nothing else, the US needs to be able to buy raw materials and to sell finished goods and services to these other countries. Thus, recession can be expected to spread. [3] The underlying issue that the world is starting to experience is overshoot and collapse, related to a combination of rising population and diminishing returns with respect to resource extraction. In a recent post, I explained that the world seems to be reaching the limits of fossil fuel extraction. So-called renewables are not doing much to supplement fossil fuels. As a result, energy consumption per capita seems to have hit a peak in 2018 (Figure 1) and now cannot keep up with population growth without prices that rise to the point of becoming unaffordable for consumers. The economy, like the human body, is a self-organizing system powered by energy. In physics terminology, both are dissipative structures. We humans can get along for a while with less food (our source of energy), but we will lose weight. Without enough food, we are more likely to catch illnesses. We might even die, if the lack of food is severe enough. The world economy can perhaps get along with less energy for a while, but it will behave strangely. It needs to cut back, in a way that might be thought of as being analogous to a human losing weight, on a permanent basis. On Figure 1 (above), we can see evidence of two temporary cutbacks. One was in 2009, reflecting the impact of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. Another related to the changes associated with Covid-19 in 2020. If energy supply is really reaching extraction limits, and this is causing the recent inflation, there needs to be a permanent way of cutting back energy consumption, relative to the output of the economy. I expect that changes in this direction will start happening about the time of the upcoming financial crash. [4] A major financial crash in 2023 may adversely affect many people’s ability to buy goods and services. A financial discontinuity, including major defaults that spread from country to country, is certain to adversely affect banks, insurance companies and pension plans. If problems are widespread, governments may not be able to bail out all these institutions. This, by itself, may make the purchasing of goods and services more difficult. Citizens may find that the funds they thought were in the bank are subject to daily withdrawal limits, or they may find that the value of shares of stock they owned is much lower. As a result of such changes, they will not have the funds to buy the goods they want, even if the goods are available in shops. Alternatively, citizens may find that their local governments have issued so much money (to try to bail out all these institutions) that there is hyperinflation. In such a case, there may be plenty of money available, but very few goods to buy. As a result, it still may be very difficult to buy the goods a family needs. [5] Many people believe that oil prices will rise in response to falling production. If the real issue is that the world is reaching extraction limits, the problem may be inadequate demand and falling prices instead. If people have less to spend following the financial crash, based on the reasoning in Section [4], this could lead to lower demand, and thus lower prices. It also might be noted that both the 2009 and 2020 dips in consumption (on Figure 1) corresponded to times of low oil prices, not high. Oil companies cut back on production if they find that prices are too low for them to expect to make a profit on new production. We also know that a major problem as limits are reached is wage disparity. The wealthy use more energy products than poor people, but not in proportion to their higher wealth. The wealthy tend to buy more services, such as health care and education, which are not as energy intensive. If the poor get too poor, they find that they must cut back on things like meat consumption, housing expenses, and transportation expenses. All these things are energy intensive. If very many poor people cut back on products that indirectly require energy consumption, the prices for oil and other energy products are likely to fall, perhaps below the level required by producers for profitability. [6] If I am right about low energy prices, especially after a financial discontinuity, we can expect oil, coal, and natural gas production to fall in 2023. Producers tend to produce less oil, coal and natural gas if prices are too low. Also, government leaders know that high energy prices (especially oil prices) lead to high food prices and high inflation. If they want to be re-elected, they will do everything in their power to keep energy prices down. [7] Without enough energy to go around, more conflict can be expected. Additional conflict can be expected to come in many forms. It can look like local demonstrations by citizens who are unhappy about their wages or other conditions. If wage disparity is a problem, it will be the low-wage workers who will be demonstrating. I understand that demonstrations in Europe have recently been a problem. Conflict can also take the form of wide differences among political parties, and even within political parties. The difficulty that the US recently encountered electing a Speaker of the House of Representatives is an example of such conflict. Political parties may splinter, making it difficult to form a government and get any business accomplished. Conflict may also take the form of conflict among countries, such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I expect most wars today will be undeclared wars. With less energy to go around, the emphasis will be on approaches that require less energy. Deception will become important. Destruction of another country’s energy infrastructure, such as pipelines or electricity transmission, may be part of the plan. Another form of deception may involve the use of bioweapons and supposed cures for these bioweapons. [8] After the discontinuity, the world economy is likely to become more disconnected and more regionally aligned. Russia and China will tend to be aligned. The US seems likely to be another center of influence. A major use of oil is transporting goods and people around the globe. If there is not enough oil to go around, one way of saving oil is to transport goods over shorter distances. People can talk by telephone or video conferences to save on oil used in long distance transportation. Thus, increased regionalization seems likely to take place. In fact, the pattern is already beginning. Russia and China have recently been forging long-term alliances centered on providing natural gas supplies to China and on strengthening military ties. Being geographically adjacent is clearly helpful. Furthermore, major US oil companies are now focusing more on developments in the Americas, rather than on big international projects, according to the Wall Street Journal. Countries that are geographically close to Russia-China may choose to align with them, especially if they have resources or finished products (such as televisions or cars) to sell. Likewise, countries near the US with suitable products to sell may align with the United States. Countries that are too distant, or that don’t have resources or finished products to sell (goods, rather than services), may largely be left out. For example, European countries that specialize in financial services and tourism may have difficulty finding trading partners. Their economies may shrink more rapidly than those of other countries. [9] In a regionally aligned world, the US dollar is likely to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency. With increased regionalization, I would expect that the US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency would tend to disappear, perhaps starting as soon as 2023. For example, transactions between Russia and China may begin to take place directly in yuan, without reference to a price in US dollars, and without the need for US funds to allow such transactions to take place. Transactions within the Americas seem likely to continue taking place using US dollars, especially when they involve the buying and selling of energy-related products. With the US dollar as the reserve currency, the US has been able to import far more than it exports, year after year. Based on World Bank data, in 2021 the US imported $2.85 trillion of goods (including fossil fuels, but excluding services) and exported $1.76 trillion of goods, leading to a goods-only excess of imports over exports of $1.09 trillion. When exports of services are included, the excess of imports over exports shrinks to “only” $845 billion. It is hard to see how this large a gap can continue. Such a significant difference between imports and exports would tend to shrink if the US were to lose its reserve currency status. [10] In a disconnected world, manufacturing of all kinds will fall, especially outside of Southeast Asia (including China and India), where a major share of today’s manufacturing is performed. A huge share of today’s manufacturing capability is now in China and India. If these countries have access to oil from the Middle East and Russia, I expect they will continue to produce goods and services. If there are not enough of these goods to go around, I would expect that they would primarily be exported to other countries within their own geographic region. The Americas and Europe will be at a disadvantage because they have fewer manufactured goods to sell. (The US, of course, has a significant quantity of food to export.) Starting in the 1980s, the US and Europe moved a large share of their manufacturing to Southeast Asia. Now, when these countries talk about ramping up clean energy production, they find that they are largely without the resources and the processing needed for such clean energy projects. Figure 2: New York Times chart based on International Energy Agency data. February 22, 2022. In fact, ramping up “regular” manufacturing production of any type in the US, (for example, local manufacturing of generic pharmaceutical drugs, or manufacturing of steel pipe used in the drilling of oil wells) would not be easy. Most of today’s manufacturing capability is elsewhere. Even if the materials could easily be gathered into one place in the US, it would take time to get factories up and running and to train workers. If some necessary items are lacking, such as particular raw materials or semiconductor chips, transitioning to US manufacturing capability might prove to be impossible in practice. [11] After a financial discontinuity, “empty shelves” are likely to become increasingly prevalent. We can expect that the total quantity of goods and services produced worldwide will begin to fall for several reasons. First, regionalized economies cannot access as diverse a set of raw materials as a world economy. This, by itself, will limit the types of goods that an economy can produce. Second, if the total quantity of raw materials used in making the inputs declines over time, the total amount of finished goods and services can be expected to fall. Finally, as mentioned in Section [4], financial problems may cut back on buyers’ ability to purchase goods and services, limiting the number of buyers available for finished products, and thus holding down sales prices. A major reason empty shelves become can be expected to become more prevalent is because more distant countries will tend to get cut out of the distribution of goods. This is especially the case as the total quantity of goods and services produced falls. A huge share of the manufacturing of goods is now done in China, India, and other countries in Southeast Asia. If the world economy shifts toward mostly local trade, the US and Europe are likely to find it harder to find new computers and new cell phones since these tend to be manufactured in Southeast Asia. Other goods made in Southeast Asia include furniture and appliances. These, too, may be harder to find. Even replacement car parts may be difficult to find, especially if a car was manufactured in Southeast Asia. [12] There seem to be many other ways the self-organizing economy could shrink back to make itself a more efficient dissipative structure. We cannot know in advance exactly how the economy will shrink back its energy consumption, besides regionalization and pushing the US dollar (at least partially) out of being the reserve currency. Some other areas where the physics of the economy might force cutbacks include the following: Vacation travel Banks, insurance companies, pension programs (much less needed) The use of financial leverage of all kinds Governmental programs providing payments to those not actively in the workforce (such as pensions, unemployment insurance, disability payments) Higher education programs (many graduates today cannot get jobs that pay for the high cost of their educations) Extensive healthcare programs, especially for people who have no hope of ever re-entering the workforce In fact, the population may start to fall because of epidemics, poor health, or even too little food. With fewer people, limited energy supply will go further. Governments and intergovernmental agencies may start to fail because they cannot get enough tax revenue. Of course, the underlying issue for the lack of tax revenue is likely to be that the businesses within the governed area cannot operate because they cannot obtain enough inexpensive energy resources for operation. [13] Conclusion. If the world economy experiences major financial turbulence in 2023, we could be in for a rough ride. In my opinion, a major financial crash seems likely. This is could upset the economy far more seriously than the 2008 crash. I am certain that some mitigation measures can be implemented. For example, there could be a major push toward trying to make everything that we have today last longer. Materials can be salvaged from structures that are no longer used. And some types of local production can be ramped up. We can keep our fingers crossed that I am wrong but, with fewer oil and other energy resources available per person, moving goods shorter distances makes sense. Thus, the initial trends we are seeing toward regionalization are likely to continue. The move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency also looks likely to continue. Moreover, if the changes I am talking about don’t occur in 2023, they are likely to begin in 2024 or 2025.

1984 CBDC: Your Travel Will Be Restricted By Personal Carbon Allowances https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Intrepid-Sustainable-Futu... https://www.lsnglobal.com/futurespaces/article/29990/intrepid-travel-and-the... https://www.timeout.com/news/personal-carbon-allowances-could-restrict-how-o... https://www.thefuturelaboratory.com/reports/2022/neo-collectivism Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com, “Experts suggest” your standard of living be reduced by over 85% A report on the future of travel and tourism, co-authored by a travel agency called Intrepid Travel and The Future Labs Institute, posits a future deeply impacted by climate change and restrictions on tourist travel to combat it. “A Sustainable Future for Travel”, warns of “travel extinction”, where some areas suffer such radical climate change that all tourism there ceases, and “personal carbon allowances” that will restrict how often one is permitted travel.

From the report (pardon the length, emphasis added):

“Carbon Passports A personal carbon emissions limit will become the new normal as policy and people’s values drive an era of great change. As demonstrated by a worldwide tourism boom, the frequency at which we can fly is once again seemingly unlimited. Conscience and budgets permitting, we feel free to hop on planes from one place to the next. But this will change. ‘On our current trajectory, we can expect a pushback against the frequency with which individuals can travel, with carbon passports set to change the tourism landscape,’ says Raymond [Martin Raymond, Future Laboratories co-founder] Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint. These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget, which is 750bn tonnes until 2050. By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year. Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year – the equivalent of taking a round-trip from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. However, the average carbon footprint in the US is 16 tonnes per person per year, 15 tonnes in Australia and 11.7 tonnes in the UK. This is in stark contrast to where we may find ourselves in the future, with 2040’s travellers forced to forgo the horizon-expanding experiences so readily embraced by today’s tourists” For all practical purposes, your carbon emissions will line up with your energy usage, give or take a relatively narrow band of efficiencies (unless we have some kind of clean energy breakthrough, and the only viable one we have, nuclear, is not considered clean energy by the climate cult). Said differently: Your standard of living is your energy usage. Reducing a society’s energy usage is the same as reducing its living standards. With this in mind, let’s look at the numbers cited by the Sustainable Future for Travel report: “Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year.” The table below lays out exactly how much the standard of living for the residents of each country will have to be reduced in order to meet the recommended carbon quota set by unelected experts. This is the level of “degrowth” it will take to satisfy the objectives of climate alarmists relying on unfalsifiable premises, arbitrary computer models, and who are deliberately ignoring and suppressing countervailing data. How serious are our leaders and policymakers about reducing the citizenry’s living standards by upwards of 85%? Here is Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, rather blithely confirming that the government will limit natural gas usage in order to fight climate change: Reporter: There will be limitations on how much natural gas you can use in the winter? Guilbeault: Yes, absolutely, that’s what fighting climate change looks like. Full clip: Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault rather blithely answering a reporter who asked "will the government limit natural gas usage in the winter?" (Short answer: "Of Course! That's What fighting climate change looks like!") Watch: pic.twitter.com/sau9p2CMnW — Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) November 25, 2023 Why are we talking about carbon passports in the section on Central Bank Digital Currencies? (Today’s post is an excerpt from the “Eye on Evilcoin” section of this month’s Bitcoin Capitalist macro overview). Because we think CBDCs will invariably launch as, or morph into, personal carbon footprint quotas. Right now, what we call “the fiat money system” uses debt for money. That’s no longer sustainable, so what we’re expecting is an attempt to switch what we loosely identify as “money”, away from symbolic tokens backed by debt, to social credit scores, backed by personal carbon footprint quotas. Expanding on this theme, probably, is another report from Future Labs on “Neo-Collectivism”, which may give us a hint at how the policymakers of late stage globalism will seek to preempt free markets and universal human rights with a “we’re all in this together” retread of what is essentially, communism: “Society is facing a mass re-organisation. United by values of empathy and community, consumers are shunning individualism in favour of alliances that are decentralising industries and redistributing power at scale” LS:N Global and Future Laboratories seem like a wannabe World Economic Forum. Lots of pronouns on the “Team” page, and leaning heavily into that euphemistic WEF-speak that makes technocratic communism sound benign and fashionable. I ended up shelling out £265 to buy the Neo-Collectivist Megatrend report (a 40 page PDF) and what I found in there was along the lines of what one might expect, but it was alarming all the same. In the next post to this one, we’ll dive into it and find out just how the “Zalpha Generation” is poised to usher us into an era of Systemic Endemic Socialism.