Trend Inversion

#243. The Great Inflexion

When I write these things, I am in many ways writing to myself.  I am struggling to maintain what I have and still feel like I am growing and being productive.  I am doing this as I age with my mental and physical vigor waning over time.  One benefit of old age is an increase in wisdom which comes naturally from a long life of experience but just as importantly living the reality of less from aging.  Learning to do less and still feal good about your efforts is an important aspect of this wisdom of aging.  In some ways what the global civilization is facing is old age but with the failure typical of those who want to remain young.  Either they look like crap from not living their age or they live beyond their means with lifestyles that do not reflect their reality of their old age.

I have highlighted parts of the above article to reflect on in regards to trend inversion of civilization and the planet.  This on all levels inversion is so critical to understand if you desire a best practices lifestyle to negotiate the coming decline and failure of our global civilization.

“It’s further assumed that these secular trends are always positive – each recovery exceeds the preceding recession, and each market rebound more than cancels out the latest dip.  This latter assumption has reached the point of invalidation. What economies and markets are now experiencing is trend-inflexion. Cyclicality may indeed continue but, from here on, it will do so around downwards-inflected trends. This process of reversal can only be managed if it is recognized.”

My last post I titled inflection so this post from surplus energy economics dot com caught my attention.  This is an excellent post I urge you to read in full.  I have taken some notes and would like to offer my REAL Green interpretations.  I am speaking to people who can change, who have the funds, time, and education.  Many have some of these vital elements of adaptation.   Many have none and are trapped without options.  This adaptation is needed to negotiate a decline in energy and economics that will alter daily life from now on.  This is why I call this trend inversion and we are at the trend inflection of the tipping over into decline. 

This “trend-inflection” in a systematic sense means the centuries of exceptional material growth has shifted.  We are at the peak now so this shift is disguised with a growth and decline interaction.  The narrative disguises this inflection with techno optimism propaganda.  Energy, economics, and technological innovation are now tilted into a trajectory of decline.  At some point far off in the future a stasis will be found where the compression of affluence will stabilize and possibly inflect towards growth again.  This will likely be generations hence and the growth will not be the growth we see today.  This will be a vastly different world for generations unborn.

The key to this trend inflection of our existential condition is this will not be the same everywhere.   This decline will likely be a stairstep down much like we see with financial markets.   Complete failure is not out of the question.  If you have the right stuff then make sure and find a good location and lifestyle to attempt constructive growth.  This will not be like the great depression of the 30s where within a few years growth returns.  For some places decline will come later than others.  It is still unclear how quickly this decline will occur and the degree and duration.  This is a complex self-organizing system with many unknowns.  We will know it in the review mirror.  Honest science says we are in the vicinity of a noticeable downward inflection.

The forces of the technocratic globalist and their social and technological policy pursuits are going to take us into a sharp down turn much quicker.  This will be dirtier and more painful then to just leave things as they were.  What is needed is decentralization not centralization.  Technocracy is a centralization with knowledge and tech.   What is needed is less tech not more.  This is a dramatic contrast between what is needed and the policies of globalist technocrats of the World Economic Forum.  This proposed system is evil in the sense of being anti-life and pro-machine.  The machine has no conscience or soul.  Here I speak of soul as a life force.  This system wants to merge man with the machine because a conscience and a soul inhibits efficiency and control.

REAL Green is about green prepping.  What is green is more prepped.  This is about homesteading and permaculture in a hybridization of the old ways with modern things and knowledge. This hybridization turbo charges the old ways.  Simple and appropriate tech boosted with modern value allows these old ways to survive the modern tendency to cancel inefficient activities with cost constraints.   This hybridization will lose strength along with the trend-inversion.  This is because as net energy and economics decline an accelerated compression will occur that will wring out beneficial technologies and quality products useful in this hybridization.  Production and knowledge storage will decay over time as the compression of affluence accelerates.  This hybridization has the most important now in the inflection where growth is entering decline.  Build up and collect what you can now in your lifeboat on the sea of destructive change.  This unavailability means salvage is vital.  Salvage will extend this hybridization process.

Triage is part of this hybridization process because it is required to remove poor value items and practices. Get out of activities with no future.  Stop buying things that offer no value in a future of less.  Many of these lifestyles and products will be like stranded assets that represent significant investment in something that fails to produce.  Start now ridding your lifeboat of dead wood.  Clean and organize your life around the trend inversion.  This will make room for important activities and things needed.  It will free up time and resources for what is important.

What you want to do is get ahead of the curve so to speak.  Here “head of the curve” is get ahead of societies decline of affluence.  Make solid purchases of value with goods.  Accumulate knowledge that will matter on this inversion to less affluence.  This means an altered vision of saving.  Saving in a financial and monetary sense must be adapted.  Instead of thinking of retirement think of saving for a societal retirement party.  Money and things of monetary value like precious metals are there to address the world that will continue.  There may be a debt jubilee but it won’t be how we expect it to be.  I would not call it a jubilee but instead a wake.  In the meantime, the world will attempt to continue as it has this means a strategic effort with tactical focus.  You will still have bills to pay and will need paper wealth.  Yet, increasingly real value will be recognized with proper physical assets.  At some point 401Ks will have much lower value.  Being able to feed and keep your home warm much more important.

I would also advise being a consumer as needed to outfit your lifeboat.  I am green and I feel a guilt of sorts by buying.  Yet, I realized the age of consumerism is quickly closing so now is the time to buy and buy right.  This guilt is the realization just how trapped I am in affluence.  Consumerism harms nature and this bothers me when I buy.  My higher power includes nature. Our mother and our earth should be included in a spirituality. 

REAL Green is realistic, relative, and accepting.  The trend of civilization is inverting but society is continuing as before the inversion so you must be flexible in mind and actions.   You are trapped in a global civilization of path dependencies, carbon energy, carbon products, and the resulting waste streams.   You must consider this your ecosystem.  Realistically adapt to the decline of this self-organizing process.  Relatively change per the trend inversion.  Accept this destructive change as the new reality.  Awareness is the essential component of an awakening.  An awakening is necessary for transformation.  There is no transcendence.  The trap is complete for all but those transformed are better prepared for what is ahead.

I often speak of spiritual permaculture.  What I mean by this is an adapted spirituality for this trend inversion.  Your spiritualism adapted for the metaphysical realities of this trend inversion of the human system can be the one bright spot for constructive change where growth is possible.  Spiritual affluence is the goal of spiritual permaculture of renewal and enrichment.  A mystical awareness of life as a journey in the eternal now adapts our linear lives of destination.  An adapted spiritualism in this trend inversion is about a life boat and a journey.  It is a journey of enlightenment with a life of adaptation.

Spiritual permaculture is the hospice of this trend inversion.  It is the acceptance of decline which is a death of sorts.  When you understand what decline means systematically then you will accept that in your life you will experience material Loss.  Abandonment, dysfunction, and irrational will permeate life where in the past it was progress.  Keep in mind even in chaos there is a pattern so what this REAL Green hospice is about is strengthening your spiritual armor for the loss process.  This means embracing the reality and the nature of abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational.  The proper way to address this is decentralization, decoupling, and dematerialization.  Lower your exposure to the coming failures of progress.

Spiritually this is about accepting fear but not fearing fear.  This is grace not a refuge.  Grace is about allowing your heat to beat on its own.   Living this time of trend inversion is living in a new reality of decline and loss with acceptance.  Acceptance is the prerequisite of humility.  Humility is connecting with the sacred.  We can’t know the truth but we can get closer to it.  In this respect then embracing decline is a truth pathway.

“The consequences of trend inflexion are readily summarized. On an ex-inflation basis, economic output will deteriorate, whilst the real costs of necessities will carry on rising, even if there are some retreats from the severe spikes experienced in recent times.  The resulting process of affordability compression will drive contraction in discretionary (non-essential) activities. It will also undermine financial flows from households to the corporate and financial sectors. We can anticipate a rolling process of investment contraction, business failures, defaults and rising unemployment.”

This is an excellent basic explanation for the global economy ahead.  Keep in mind energy and economy are inextricably linked.  Energy resources can’t be booked as reserves unless an economy can take energy resources and create a surplus.  Energy sources that can’t create a surplus will not support an economy.  This reality is true with technology too since we are in the age of the technocratic globalism that often talks about technological innovation.  This innovation is bumping up to diminishing returns of effectiveness but more worryingly is now creating more problems than it solves.  Technology can’t endlessly offer substitution for the basics of energy and a properly functioning economy.  In fact, technology is what got us into this predicament.

What got us to this point is a departure from proper scale which has destroyed the human balance with the planet and its life system.  Without proper balance with the greater ecosystem there is no renewal or enrichment.  Without these necessary ingredients human civilization is a sink sucking in energy and resources and converting them into middens of waste.  Eventually necessary resources are consumed and waste streams overwhelm the local environment.  Eventually too there is no place to migrate to for virgin resources.  This is where we are at now.  A global world at the end of the road.

I personally think it is man in the more primitive state of seminomadic hunter gatherer with primitive agriculture that is humans at their optimum.  Here optimum is in a state of proper scale and balance.  What good is all our knowledge and tech when it will kill us?  I will also say since we are natural then what man has done is also natural so in a sense, we can’t be judgmental of the destruction we have wrought on the planet and life.  This is somehow what life does as it self-reflects with ever increasing intelligence.  This duality of life that is a factual of entropy and non-entropy is somehow an expression.  Grace is when we stop reflecting on this and just live.

“Transition to renewables is not just possible, but imperative. The economy, no less than the environment, is at grave and worsening risk unless this happens. Sustainability is a worthy goal, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be an attainable one.  Where this logic breaks down is at the point at which transition is spun, not as sustainability, but as “sustainable growth”…renewables cannot match the energy density of oil, gas and coal. As a result, a transition to renewables will truncate the process of diffusion which is central to the dissipative landfill economic system.  The characteristic of lesser density shows up right across the application of renewables. Despite widespread assurances to the contrary, the processes of renewables generation cannot be transformed by technological advances, because the potential of technology is bounded by the laws of physics.  The potential efficiency of solar energy is determined by the Shockley-Queisser Limit, with Betz’ Law doing the same for wind power, and best practice is already close to these physical maxima. Intermittency is part of the low-density character of renewables, and no advance in technology is going to enable batteries to match the power-to-weight ratio of the humble fuel tank.”

I have been studying energy for years starting with peak oil issues in 2000.  I actually took some classes in college in the mid 80’s on climate change and peak oil long before thy were mainstream.  I have been on blogs arguing deeper points for a decade.  I have dug through the liberal technocratic globalist narrative.  Initially I had some hope for a green machine transition with sustainable growth but that evaporated when reality testing was applied.  The machine will not save us only wisdom will.

I have solar with batteries and I love my system.  I am a green prepper.  Having solar is vital to keep some lights on and your food cold in a grid down situation.  In the meantime while everything works fine I use the system to offset my electricity cost.  In the winter I can run my outdoor wood gasifier with solar.  In the summer I can run my mini-split ac with solar.  I run my 2 refrigerators and 2 freezers with solar all the time.  A prepper must maintain a good store of food for disruptions.  I have 3600 watts of panels and two 48-volt lithium phosphate 10KWH batteries with inverter.  I use transfer switches so I can run the house on grid power and target certain circuits with solar.  This is a hybrid system.  I offset about 1/3 of my electrical usage which helps offset the cost of a $30,000 system.  It does not pay for itself until you consider the prepping qualities. 

This is how society should look at renewables not green new deal of an energy paradigm shift.  All homes should be backed up with renewables in some way either like I have or with communities that have a system.  I know renewables pencil out best in large solar or wind farms attached to the main grid but this does not pencil out after the point where intermittency destabilizes the gid.  These large power farms will be stranded assets in a grid down situation.  In a distributed system of small systems, a grid down situation is when they will show true value.  It is in these situations’ intermittency can be dealt with.

 People with panels on their roofs but tied to the grid will have nothing when the grid goes down.  The application should be like I do with individuals and small communities finding ways to incorporate renewables into a hybrid system where small scale solar and wind can be applied to various applications to offset main grid usage and if there is a grid failure offer lights and cooling for food to a community.  The same principal needs to be applied to space heating with hybrid systems.  Instead, it is being advertised a green machine transition will give us what we have now with renewables.  This is a lie! 

Transition to renewables is vital but here renewables is more than just high tech of solar and wind.  Renewables more broadly are biomass, thermal storage and insulation strategies.  Conservation must be included.  Ideally solar and wind would be applied at a more decoupled local level where intermittency can be embraced.  Lifestyles would become increasing localized.  Energy lifestyles greatly reduced.  The translation is affluence would be greatly reduced.  This is the inconvenient reality of transition that no political entities want to discuss because the public won’t hear it.  The public is being educated that progress will continue but it won’t.  The system is trapped in path dependencies of energy on demand.  Carbon energy is a trap where a system so complex as ours can’t downsize away from carbon.   Yet, carbon energy of fossil fuels is in net energy decline.  This is a predicament and one the individual can adapt to but society never will because it will end society as we know it.

This transition is a stair step because once technology is faced with net energy decline and importantly economic velocity reductions, technology will suffer decline.  Over the last century it has been technology that has been employed to substitute limits of resources.  Technology is approaching diminishing returns where its benefits are being outweighed by its problems.  In fact, technology is an unstoppable destructive force because it can’t be controlled in its effort for more efficiency and power.  There will come a point in transition to more simplicity, localism, and lower energy intensity the economy will not support the type of technologies available today.  This means the transition is a journey to a world of less energy intensity, technological complexity, and economic vigor.

The current narrative of the machine greens is one of sustainable growth.  This is just not going to be the case.  Systematically you can’t expect to use lower energy intensity and expect the economy to grow.  You can’t expect lower energy intensity and lower economic activity to support and expand technological vigor.  The best we can hope for is managed decline.  The worst is cascading decline.   The current policies of the technocratic globalist will lead to cascading decline because centralization is the wrong approach.  The globalist green transition of sustainable growth is a religion for these people.  Science is being politicized and this is being merged with authoritarianism with the goal being a controlled transition where a few stakeholders of elites in politics and business control the masses.  This not honest science it is instead a hijacking.

The transition that is being proposed is too expensive, there are not enough resources, and the technology is not sound.  There are no good storage strategies.  The technological supply line too complex.  The grid too unstable at the complexities needed.  Lifestyles are not going to be adapted properly.  The elites want to continue their moral hazard of private jets and plutocratic lifestyles.  Their chosen group will likewise be rewarded with enhanced lifestyles.  This is basically wealth transfer from the middle class and working poor to a narrow band of elites.  This wealth transfer is being done with the color revolution technics of work identity politics of cancel culture and fake virtue signaling.  This is the same old worn out Marxism of power attainment through lying, stealing and cheating.  

This green “machine” transition does not add up with the science, economically, socially, and politically.  It is a power play by the elites to maintain their power, wealth and privilege.  It is an elite hijacking.  It is also an elite merger where elites across the spectrum are being told join us or we will leave you behind.  This proposed system of the great reset is now in the open.  It is also clear to those that study it what closely.  Its intensions are clear and precise.  These plutocratic elites have finally shown their cards.  They can’t call you a conspiracist anymore if you speak out about what they are doing.

If you see machine green transition for what it is then you see it is a failure on all fronts with the science, economics, politics, and social stability.  This is important because a failure on just one aspect is enough to derail a transition.  When the failure is on all front then you see this is will be a reckless, incompetent, and nefarious effort to transform the world at a time when stability should be pursued.  This stability would be mitigated decline.  Decline of a self-organizing system can’t really be managed proactively it can only be reacted to.  A small number of proactive efforts can be attempted like education and fortification of basic human needs but for the most part it will be reaction to events.  An urban world that will be downsized relatively quickly without the resources in the rural areas to accept so many people will be a bottleneck.  This is honest science and the elites can’t have any of it so they preach a religion of machine green.

Here is the authors conclusion which dovetails with mine:

“Since the same unit of energy cannot be used twice, the question becomes one of what other energy uses are going to be relinquished to make this energy available for transition. We could, in theory, drive less, fly less, consume less and consign less to landfill, but there, is as yet, no acceptance of a need to do any of this.  None of the foregoing should be read as skepticism about the transition to renewables. There are compelling environmental and economic imperatives for committing maximum effort to transition, and there is no reason in principle why sustainability should not be accomplished.  An essential first step might be to drop, or at least water down, claims that transition can provide affordable growth, because this isn’t possible where the concentration of energy inputs is decreasing…At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities are rising. The net effect is affordability compression. This, as remarked earlier, has two principal consequences. First, the ability of consumers to afford discretionary products and services is in retreat, and cannot be expected to return to growth.  Second, we should be prepared for contraction in the streams of income which flow from households to the corporate and financial sectors. Put colloquially, people will find it ever harder to ‘keep up the payments’ on everything from mortgages and credit to subscriptions and staged-payment purchases.”