Peak Oil Barrel

Kleiber,

Please provide a link if you would. I’m not finding exactly what you seem to be referring to here.

Kleiber

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/2641/2025/

Take home points:

– The removal of SO2 from marine bunker fuel since 2020 accounts for nearly a quarter of this increase.
– The change in albedo is also contributing in ways not modelled very well or at all by IPCC studies previously.
– The ECS value is much higher than expected, validating Hansen’s figures that were originally dismissed as “hot model” errors.

When you assume there’s models are wrong as there’s no way things can be that bad because if they were, we’d be utterly fucked, well, reality has a way of ruining such delusion.

Europe the last five years has been getting brutal summers. We’re now on another heatwave that round my parts is taking us to mid-30s Celsius and another ten degrees higher near the Mediterranean.

As I said, trending way above the worst case scenarios even without the emissions being at that level and this is with observed, not predicted, data.

The patient is already dead. They just don’t know it yet.

T HILL

Thank you for the link. Excellent update. I’ve feared for many years that Hansen’s technical expertise paired with his willingness to speak truth resulted in perhaps the best representation of climate change reality past, present and future.

The authors first sentence in their abstract speaks to the need for ‘evidence-based decision-making’. I get it, they’re scientists. However, such an approach would require that people understand the evidence and care about others and the future.

Hey, take heart! At this rate it may not be that long after all until Europe starts to cool down from AMOC impacts.

Pit

Bonjour (from France), I’ve been following your site for years, but this is my first post. In response to Kleiber: “global warming has accelerated to double the rate observed at the end of the 20th century, and is now essentially exponential” If global warming at the local level is observable over the space of a human lifetime, then it is significant. I’m 66 years old and when I was a child in Alsace, the snow stayed on the ground for several months in winter. That stopped decades ago. Now for the main question: are we on an exponential trend? One way of answering is to measure the size of hailstones. I’ve always known about hailstones averaging a centimetre in size, but more and more often the national news reports mention ever larger hailstones. Let’s see how they evolve…
Real-life examples:
France (2022, supercell in the North): 150 km/h gusts, VHV lines damaged. Hailstones 4cm
France (2025, supercell in Loir-et-Cher) / 250 km/h gusts, THT lines destroyed. Hailstones 10cm

In the Loir-et-Cher region north of Blois, in the communes of Suèvres and Villerbon, half a dozen electricity pylons were twisted by strong wind gusts caused by thunderstorms on Wednesday June 25, 2025.
Here’s a theoretical curve of wind resistance of EHV (400 kV) towers as a function of wind speed, extrapolated up to 400 km/h, incorporating observed damage thresholds and structural limits:
Curve: EHV tower resistance vs. wind speed
(Simplified model for a standard “guyed” steel tower)
X axis: Wind speed (km/h)
Y axis: Damage level (%)
Critical thresholds:
0-120 km/h:
No damage (normal design).
Flat curve: 0% damage.
120-150 km/h:
Cable oscillations (“galloping”), risk of short-circuits.
Gentle slope: 10-30% damage (mechanical fatigue).
150-180 km/h:
Partial deformation of towers (localized buckling).
Steep slope: 30-70% damage (cable-stay failure, insulator pull-out).
180-250 km/h:
Partial collapse (twisted towers, falling cables).
Critical level: 70-100% damage.
250-400 km/h:
Total destruction (metal torn off, foundations damaged).
Plateau at 100% (theoretical strength exceeded).

Concerning hailstones:
For a cumulonimbus to produce hailstones of around 1cm in diameter, it must have a minimum height sufficient for the updrafts to be strong enough to support the hailstones as they form.
Hailstone 1cm3 = CN 10km V (ascending) 80kmh 1gr
Hailstone (ping pong) 33cm3 = CN 15 km V 130kmh 20gr
Hailstone (tennis ball) 523 cm3 = giant supercell 25km V 200 kmh 500 gr.
Normally in France, giant 25km supercells should not exist, as they are often associated with tornadoes, which are extremely rare phenomena in France.
So, in just a few years, we’ve gone from a factor of 1 to 500, and that’s just the beginning… Knowing that all updrafts come down to the ground at the same speed on the other side of the cloud, if you combine large hailstones + high ground wind speed, you get an exponential within an exponential, because in calculating drag there’s a square. Example: if all the tiles on a roof resist, the drag is lower, but if hailstones destroy them, wind resistance increases and the roof is torn off.
All this is based on recent factual data. Now let’s get on with it…

Revelation 16: 21 And a great hail fell from heaven on men, with hailstones weighing a talent; and men blasphemed God because of the scourge of the hail, for the scourge was very great.
To obtain the hailstones of the Apocalypse 44kg:
Hailstone (44cm, foot 22cm) 44,000 cm3 44 liters
A cumulonimbus capable of generating a 44 cm hailstone would have to exceed natural limits, culminate at over 30 km, and have updrafts of a power never before measured (~250 km/h or more). It’s therefore an almost impossible scenario for the time being. The factor here would be 1 to 44,000. A cumulonimbus exploring the entire height of the stratosphere would destroy everything beneath it. Such a cloud is only possible if we are in the midst of an exponential climate change that will be unstoppable. If, in the space of a few years, we go from 10cm hailstones to 12, 15, 20cm, etc., the die is cast!

Kleiber

The current heatwave in Europe thanks to yet another heat dome, has led to me running into multiple people gaslighting me as to how, actually, they had summers just as hot, if not hotter, and longer, back when they were kids in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Show them a chart where that’s not the case and we go down the denier rabbit hole again.

In 2022 when the UK first got 40 °C heat for a few days, suddenly everyone with their head in the sand was going on about this being either no big deal or that it already happened decades ago and we just don’t remember, so it’s fine, actually.

Matt Staben

FF’s have led humans to be lazy with lots of energy slaves. These accustomed to being fed by the system will prefer to commit seppuku before having to forage.

Hideaway

06/27/2025

How is it Dennis that you don’t realise how ridiculous this graph really is?

Including just the energy we build and operate the modern world with, by excluding “traditional biomass” from energy calculations, fossil fuels provide over 90% of all energy of industrial civilization, with the remaining percentage totally relying upon fossil fuels for their very existence at all.

From Our World in data, in the 2 decades up to 2023, fossil fuel use grew by 38,412TWh while all other industrial energy, as in nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, new biomass, etc, grew by 6,358TWh.

In 2003 this “other” category made up 6.3% of total modern industrial energy use, while in 2023, despite all the talk for years about “transition”, the other category made up just 9.1% of industrial energy use.

In 20 years we’ve reduced fossil fuel percentage of the modern industrial economy by just 2.8%, with “new” energy devices that totally rely upon fossil fuels for every stage of their existence, all while growing total energy use.
Do you really think we are going to increase the percentage of “other” energy use by more than another 3% of the total, as we reach peak fossil fuel use in 5 years time??

Don’t the assumptions underpinning your model rely upon everything else remaining the same (as in ‘growth’, like the last 20 years, including FF growth), when in fact the underlying assumptions have to change from ‘growth’ to decline in fossil fuel production/consumption??

Where does the energy come from to build the continually growing “other” energy producing machines??
Do you account for lower grades of the metals and minerals that need to be mined, requiring greater energy use for mining, as fossil fuels use declines??

Assuming energy use per capita is falling past 2030, as population continues to grow, with more of the remaining energy diverted to grow “other” energy, plus more energy to mine the lower, more remote, deeper, harder ore index, ore grades, surely there is a vast decline in prosperity because of falling energy available to the rest of the economy, causing chaos in markets and economies, which will reduce complexity of the entire system, which is less efficient energetically.

In other words it’s foolish to think and draw a graph that shows an exponential rise in one form of energy, while the energy it’s based upon, fossil fuels, is crashing in availability, the metals, minerals and other materials it’s built with, are falling in grades, while demands for all energy continue to grow with population, and market size? All before we take into account the necessary complexity to do the mining, which will also be leaving us as energy availability falls?

gerryf

The majority of fossil fuel use is wasted as unusable heat. Is it more useful to use these fossil fuels to build renewable energy systems, rather than just burning it?

Near where I went to university there was a nuclear reactor system producing 2.1 GW. To add a similar system would take 10-20 years. I read that in China now, they’re installing the solar equivalent of four of these systems every week.

The economics of nuclear was always that the high initial cost was offset by minimal fuel costs over 40 years. The same rationale seems to govern solar and wind. Hard to beat free fuel.

Alimbiquated

07/02/2025

GerryF
Exactly, Hideaway is laboring under the primary energy fallacy.

The solution to the world’s energy problems is to increase efficiency, and by far the best method of doing that is switching from fuel burning (which only produces heat, or in the case of nuclear heat and hard radiation) to direct harvesting of vastly more useful ambient energy — mechanical energy (wind, hydro, tidal) or even better, electricity (solar).

Electricity is the gold standard of energy. It’s by far the flexible and easiest to transport.

Electricity generation with thermal power plants is a three step process:
fuel collection->heat->mechanical energy-> electricity.

With wind and water, it’s a one step process:
mechanical energy-> electricity

With solar, the electricity is harvested directly.

This doesn’t include the cost of building power plants, but this works in the same direction. Thermal systems require dealing with hot often pressurized fluids and with waste heat. Wind and water are simpler but still mechanical, and solar has no moving parts at all.

Of course electricity for all its advantages is hard to store. That is why liquid fuel is so widely used in moving vehicles. It’s a poor source of energy, but a convenient (though inefficient) way to store energy.

D C

Hideaway,

I characterized the scenario earlier as “this highly unrealistic scenario”, I suppose I could have used other adjectives. I agree the scenario is not one that can be achieved.

Energy is being used more efficiently in terms of energy use per unit of GDP. I agree the scenario is not realistic, an alternative scenario presented below which is more realistic, but also not likely to be achieved. Note however that sometimes technology improvements make what seems impossible today, a possibility in the future.

This scenario has non-fossil fuel growth at 4.38% per year from 2025 to 2073. World Oil and Natural gas output grew at an average annual rate of 6.7% per year for 50 years from 1923 to 1972.

This scenario assumes the fossil fuel energy consumption per unit of real GDP continues to fall at the trend from 2010 to 2024.

I do not assume this will be easy to achieve, it is an all hands on deck predicament that requires attention and a multi-factored approach to minimize negative consequences. More education, more efficiency, more recycling, lower population growth, less consumption and much more.

Note that I have included no growth in hydro, pumped hydro, nuclear, biomass or geothermal energy in my scenario, those could potentially add to non-fossil fuel energy with some growth (maybe 5%per year.)

Michael Bodenheimer

Thanks, can you also add a graph of the total of both fossile and non-fossile energy production?

D C

Michael,

In the long run they are equal, if it isn’t produced it isn’t consumed.

Hickory

Consider that the second 1/2 of the fossil fuel burn will likely be much more expensive than the first half. The per capita fossil fuel energy available will be dropping briskly over the next 3-4 decades, as the population is still increasing into the second half of this century
This scenario will certainly give a big boost to the market incentive to implement non-fossil energy deployment, as China is demonstrating as an early indicator.

Hideaway as you have alluded to- the small amount of fossil energy now utilized for the industrial backbone of non-fossil energy production sector [silicon, aluminum, uranium, copper. etc] will increase over time. This will gradually cannibalize fossil energy from use in other sectors. This dynamic will take quite a while to become a limiting factor to the global human growth machine- Certainly a much more delayed growth restriction than the scenario of doing little non-fossil energy buildout. By that I mean that energy shortage becomes dominant much quicker without a non-fossil energy sector buildout.

In the simplest terms- the non-fossil energy build-out gives humanity an energy timeline extension. A big extension if done with a sense of collective imperative.

And humans will do whatever it takes to keep the growth machine on whether or not you or I might approve or disapprove. The struggle for growth will roll on regardless of the consequence to environment or climate or soil condition or biodiversity or human living conditions. That is who we are, what we do. And eventually we will suffer mightily for the Overshoot. Some already do…such as people living in Haiti or Sudan.

Hideaway

Hickory.. “Hideaway as you have alluded to- the small amount of fossil energy now utilized for the industrial backbone of non-fossil energy production sector [silicon, aluminum, uranium, copper. etc] will increase over time.”

That’s treating the non fossil fuel sector as if it was not part of the overall system, and we cannot treat one sector as if it’s separate from the whole system as that’s not how systems work.

We currently spend around 10% of all primary energy on energy gathering of fossil fuels and around the same on all mining. This is before we separate out the energy spent building the non fossil fuel energy parts, which is obviously not possible, as we need the existing energy and materials to continue to build and grow the “other” energy providing machines.

It sounds so easy ‘to cannibalize’ energy and materials from other uses as if all the so called discretionary sectors had a lot of materials and energy to give up.

However what we find in our highly complex interrelated, 6 continent supply chain civilization, is that if we were to destroy the market for gaming computers, get rid of porn computers, financial computing, most cars, sport boats, small engines for lawnmowers, camping generators, etc etc to save both energy and materials for ‘important uses’, like building more batteries, solar, wind, nuclear etc, that we run into vast problems of shortages of the important complex building blocks for the machines needed for mining, recycling etc.

It’s because so many businesses that make a lot of the discretionary stuff also make important aspects of the machines that do the heavy lifting of mining processing and manufacture. As their sales plumet because of the cannibalizing effect, as economies crater, there will be a great simplification in what’s possible to mine, process, make and keep maintained and operating.

The catch 22 is we can only extract all the remaining fossil fuels energy and do the mining necessary, based on the huge efficiency gains we’ve acquired by using all the modern complexity of today’s highly complex machines. Going back to simpler more localised economies will be a vast reduction in efficiency, leading to greater energy and material use in just maintaining the flows of even reduced mined quantities.

Do you really think we could have modern directional drilling from off shore platforms, if we didn’t have the computer chips, all the fancy sensors, GPS locators, satellites, etc, that go along with it all?

Get rid of the sensors in mobile phones, simple hand held, infrared thermometers, car sensors etc, etc and the businesses that make the sensors go bust, as they require a large market size to exist. Small runs of such things just for drill bits will become prohibitively expensive..

If it’s not the sensors then it could be many of the thousands of components that become quickly unavailable, totally stifling the ability to mine and build anything..

Any major change to our system of civilization is much, much easier and possible in the system we’ve had for the last couple of centuries, where the population and therefore market size, has grown along with energy and material use, with all the easy efficiency gains, as there has always been ‘extra’ energy and materials available.

I agree with you that we’ll be doing everything possible to continue growth as that’s what has made life comfortable for just about everyone in the ‘wealthy’ part of the world, with the rest aspiring to it. Right now we use 97-99% of all energy and materials to just maintain the existing system.

For our system to build the 6,000+ TWh of “other” energy took/came along with, a 38,000+TWh increase in fossil fuel energy use over the same period of 20 years. If we took Dennis’s projections as being ‘real’ then there is no pronounced growth in fossil fuels at all in the next 5 years, before falling after that.

To continue to grow the “other” energy producers, will take growth in mines, processing plants, manufacturing plants as it’s ‘more’. Where will this ‘more’ for that sector come from, while we need to maintain the existing system while ore grades continue to fall, requiring more energy devoted to that sector alone, and ‘maintenance’ of the existing system that currently uses most of our energy and materials??

There is already going to be a ‘fall’ in economic activity by just having energy production flat, in a world where there is currently huge debt because the easily available energy has already been used up, requiring greater energy and materials devoted to that sector of the economy as well.

Once we pass peak fossil fuel energy use, led by oil depletion, the ability to do the mining of materials and energy becomes much more difficult because costs go through the roof for the energy and materials to do it, with so many demands for it across the entire world economy. The other sectors of the economy also get squeezed as you’ve correctly pointed out.

However without maintaining all the roads, bridges, drains, transmisison lines, pipelines, ports, warehouses, dams, farms, trucks, refrigeration etc, etc then the ability to get the materials from the more remote mines, which themselves require greater resources declines.

Meanwhile as all the so called ‘discretionary’ or ‘non essential’ aspects of the economy get squeezed with higher costs and less people able to afford it all, businesses making gadgets for everything are much more likely to go bust, as they are in a competitive world now, yet face great falls in demand/sales, just as the input costs rise rapidly.

It’s all part of the complexity of modern civilization, that has to grow to maintain itself, because of the reliance on the complexity for the energy, materials, food and even water in advanced countries. As we lose complexity and the efficiency it’s given us, the decline in production of the low grade and falling energy and material grades, will accelerate with feedback loops.

Every part of the ‘other’ energy providers are built from what is provided by fossil fuels, so the costs to build and maintain them go up rapidly, in just a flat fossil fuel production world, because building them is such an energy and material dense process.

Once we get to declines in fossil fuel production year after year, as per Dennis’s graph, which is a certainty to happen at some stage if not the shown years, then the permanent recession just sends businesses broke everywhere that make everything and most mining not possible because we used all the easy to get resources…

Collapse of civilization is guaranteed in a falling energy world because of the unravelling of complexity while we are in deep population overshoot. It’s a failure to understand the drivers of, and importance of complexity, that gives all the false hope of a bright green future that is not physically possible.

Hickory

Hideaway I agree with the gist of your commentary.
Entropy will win out, despite our colossal collective attempt to organize the universe in our favor.
Some places more quickly than others.

I will point that I have watched Dennis (and Ovi) get things more correct, and adapting to new information better, than anyone else putting up these various of projections. I find it very useful as food for thought. Appreciate the effort and diligence very much.

Hideaway

What I saw, is that if even Dennis is predicting peak fossil fuels for 2030, with hardly any growth in production of them from now on, then it’s a truely scary scenario for the near future..

My expectations for the future is not collapse this year nor next, in fact I think it will be put off until the decline in fossil fuel production accelerates, and in exactly which point along the curve, I have no idea, but during the downward acceleration.

Of course the longer into the future this takes, the worse it is for other species, climate, overall pollution, ocean acidification, etc.

To get the 6,000TWh of growth in “other” non fossil fuel energy over the last 20 years, took not just the production of solar and wind. It took the building of new mines, new factories, new roads, better port facilities, greater research in the tech and fitting it in with grids. In other words a lot of education and trained population in every aspect of it all, that had to be housed, educated and fed, or growth in the overall economy, that had to occur in the background. The 6,000TWh came with an extra 38,000TWh of fossil fuels, of which a decent proportion was used for ‘products’ that none of the ‘other’ energy provides.

If fossil fuels stay nearly stagnant in production over the next 5 years, then most economies will be struggling as the price of energy and therefore everything else rises relative to people’s earnings.

If there is a recessionary trend, and soft stock markets in this period, the capital for investment will fall, which will likely reduce the building of the “other” energy producers. If the building of “other” energy forms is prioritised, then the reduction of everything else in the economy accelerates. There is no free lunch, the building that gets prioritised still takes energy and materials to build, which has to reduce energy and materials spent on everything else.

As the energy cost of producing fossil fuels and materials also continue to rise, every attempt of governments to subsidise the growth of “other” energy forms will have to have a much greater effect on the energy and material cost to the rest of the economy, guaranteeing debt problems will rise, as growth in the majority of economic activities turns to decline.

Plus there is the law of diminishing returns to efficiency gains to also take into consideration. We increased mining trucks and excavator size, greatly in the decades after the ’60’s, that helped reduce the effect of lower ore grades, plus we were still finding plenty of high ore grades in more remote locations.

Now there are very few locations left to find high grade ore bodies. our modern satellite enhanced complexity of searching has seen to that. All while the mining trucks that went from 40 tonnes to 400 tonnes capacity that cannot be repeated due to reaching limits just below metal fatigue in the huge machines.

There is always another layer to our accumulated problems leading to the overall predicament we’re in. For example the USGS claims plenty of reserves of copper, with Australia having around 10% of world reserves, yet included in Australia’s reserves is the Olympic Dam mine, with over 11 billion tonnes of resources of an average grade of 0.6% copper, which is between 350m deep and 1,350m deep. BHP do not have any plans to mine this, as it’s not close to profitable at current near record prices (so why do the USGS call them reserves under their own definition of reserves being economic resources?).

Imagine the future without complexity. To mine the overburden of billions of tonnes of rock/dirt, if we had 100,000 workers at nearly slave state, working with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, it would take decades to remove enough overburden to gain access to the ore. However when we have no access to fossil fuels and the accompanying machinery, we also wont have access to the chemicals required for the floatation process, which is the only way we can get copper out of such low grade sulphide ores. Plus of course being in the middle of the desert, we wont be able to feed the workers required anyway.

Basically what is considered reserves, are only reserves while we have the full range of complexity, education, population, and markets that comes with modern civilization. Once we are limited by any part of the whole the rest becomes rapidly unavailable as it was only ever possible based on the whole lot continuing to grow and become more efficient.

Jt

Well Hideaway
I’d say it’s incomprehensible to Dennis because he posted that ridiculous graph again.
Once again Dennis GDP isn’t getting more efficient it’s actually disconnected from the real economy and is measuring debt flows. Banking isn’t the real economy. What’s actually happening is industrial production is collapsing globally. Governments are compensating with debt to juice the numbers.
The same thing happened in Rome as it collapsed they debased the currency kept everyone distracted with bread and circuses until the infrastructure started failing which ours already is.

HHH

Jt,

I think the biggest difference between modern day and Ancient Rome is the monetary system.

99% of all the money today is bank credit on an integrated bank ledger system. Nothing physical ever leaves one bank and goes to another. It’s just accounting entries or bookkeeping.

The price, the value of every asset and every commodity depends on what is done with these bank credits.

The whole idea of transitioning to everything electric doesn’t even matter. We either have growth or we don’t.

When we no longer have growth. All those credits or bank liabilities can’t be repaid. Principal plus interest.

And stable coins or digital currencies don’t solve anything. If debts can no longer be serviced and repaid due to zero growth. Debt will no longer be issued. Stable coins are being purchased with debt. So they are really just digital assets that can be traded currently. You might be able to use them like a currency. But you have to purchase them first.

Even if we developed stable coins or digital currencies to the point loans were being made in stable coins it doesn’t matter because you’ll need growth to repay your stable coin loan.

The reason we don’t see hyperinflation. True hyperinflation. Is because the money supply shrinks every month as debt payments are made. All the money has been loaned into existence instead of printed.

You know if the lights ever went out and stayed out. Nobody would know who owed who what and the banks wouldn’t even know how much money every account had. Even if the banks kept a physical record on actual paper on every account. Under the circumstances they wouldn’t admit to having such records.

Places like Spain have recently experienced that when the lights go out you don’t have access to your money. And you can’t pay for anything.

Rob Mielcarski

Good comment and all true.

A digital currency would enable effective rationing of scarce essential resources like food and energy which might help constrain social unrest, and would permit a negative interest rate which might squeeze a little more growth for a little longer.

Therefore, assuming the grid stays up, we should expect digital currencies in our future because they are another method of kicking the overshoot can.

HHH

I totally believe central bank digital currencies are on the way. They will give governments oversight on every transaction within an economy. If they don’t like how you vote or how good of a social score you have you likely won’t be getting a loan.

It’s more about control than solving any problem. Right now government has to subpoena all the data from banks if they want it. With a digital currency they already have the data.

It’s not really going to kick a can. The central banks will be loaning out money that can’t be repaid instead of the current commercial bank based credit system.

Negative interest rates are a cost on money just like positive interest rates are or like simple fees are. Negative rates are just a tax on those that are required to buy government issued bonds. Banks are required to buy the government debt so they will have to pay that tax. As long as commercial banks still exist that is.

The problem with negative rates is the government bonds that are purchased by the commercial banks are yielding less than what the bank needs to cover their dollar funding costs. If a bank is paying 1-2% on deposits they really need at least 4% return on the assets they own in order to pocket a 2% spread.

Commercial banks will have to go in search of yield elsewhere to make up the losses that are incurred by being required by law to buy government bonds with negative interest rates.

What happens when there is no growth and therefore nowhere to reach for yield?

The current form of stable coins is all backed by government bonds. Just another way to funnel money into government bonds. Government bonds are already the collateral that backs all the Eurodollar loans we use in global trade and finance.

The Eurodollar in theory already doesn’t have anything preventing the system from expanding debt. No rules preventing them from expanding their balance sheets. As long as there is money to be made their balance sheets can keep expanding.

But when the energy supply goes into contraction. So does the money supply.

There will be entire countries that get cut off from Eurodollar lending and finance.

The banks will look at individual countries and say hey, this country doesn’t have any available energy imports or there are no longer food imports available to country XYZ. Maybe we shouldn’t be loaning them money that they obviously no longer have the capacity to repay.

And it’s not even the countries as a whole entity. It’s all the individual businesses within a country that will be cut off from funding one by one.

Try picturing Singapore without any available oil imports. Therefore no available oil products exports from Singapore to anywhere. They might indeed install some solar power. But the amount of dollars flowing into Singapore is going to decrease dramatically.

Se

To HHH
Was there not a time in 1850’s or thereabouts (can’t remember the years) when banks did not pay the person who brought money to bank but instead took some percent of the money from the person… IIRC it was anyway safer to depositor than to keep the money at home… so banks might try that again – currently hereabouts in European country the interest is very small for a normal bank account… if the interest rate for normal person is only slightly negative that person would anyway need to keep the money in bank because paying e.g. rent, electricity, water etc is practically possible only thru the bank.

Jt

HHH
I totally agree

D C

JT,

GDP is what is produced, energy consumed per unit of real GDP produced has been falling.

Survivalist

Flip more houses and it’ll go down even more.

D C

Survivalist,

Flipping houses does not change GDP, if there are no renovations done to the home.

iron mike

DC,

The RE agent fee and legal fee would count towards GDP.

Perhaps a better metric would be money velocity = GDP / M2

LeeG

Dennis, since fossil fuels are used to create non-fossil power generation wouldn’t that mean non-fossil power generation cannot ramp up as your graph indicates?

D C