我们are facing an energy crisis which can quickly spin out of control, triggering a cascading collapse of industries首先在欧洲，然后在接下来的几年和几十年中，在世界其他地区。在我的上一篇文章中，我将这场危机称为阴险的反馈循环，在经济中慢慢努力：

Energy builds intoeverything, and ultimately feeds back into its own production. Oil. Coal. Natural Gas. Metals going into reactors and ‘renewables’. This is a classic self-reinforcing feedback loop, one that is very hard to escape. And just because this has been happening under the radar up until recently — a trend best described by a hockey-stick curve — it does not mean that it can’t spiral out of control very fast.

Year after year it costs more and more to produce the next unit of energy. How could this turn into a vicious circle ultimately leading to the loss of energy essential to every economic activity?

Can the recent price increases explain what is going on? I guess I don’t have introduce you to high energy prices: they kill households and industries alike. Of course prices may vary greatly based on where you live: depending on the local energy mix, foreign exchange rates, geopolitics, or how sunny or windy it gets, but these factors only serve to conceal the fact that something went deeply wrong.

Prices are in fact a very bad measure of value or actual costs. Since both metals and fossil fuels are traded in huge quantities on stock exchange floors by pension funds, energy companies, hedge funds and other investors (often leveraged by large amounts of debt), prices reflect the mental state of these traders much more than what it originally costed to mine these materials and what value they actually provide to society.

狂热地关注价格，甚至更糟：仅根据它们得出结论，类似于使用磁带量度构建房屋，该磁带度量正在将其长度按小时更改。想象一下，在早晨，您昨天刚刚饲养的墙壁的长度为10英尺，然后到中午，您读了8英尺，只是在下午之前意识到您的墙实际上已经“长到12英尺）。祝您好运，以此为基础做出合理的决定。

价格上涨本身并不能解释实际发生的事情；它们是症状而不是根本原因。必须总是敏锐地意识到基本机制，不仅影响给定商品的未来价格，而且影响其长期可用性 - 这种经济学家缺乏对物理学的深入了解。基于这种理解，人们可以感觉到我们的工业文明并不是因为战争，制裁或垄断而是因为地质而兆头。政治只是使事情变得更糟。

我们have to drill deeper and further for the next barrel of oil. Our wells dry up faster, forcing us to drill yet another one. We have to dig deeper, and haul away more rocks to get to the next ton of ever lower grade (1) copper — a metal essential in everything electric. Simon P. Michauxwrote a study在2021 for the Geological Survey of Finland, in which he explained:

这意味着，随着提取和处理每个较高质量的存款，采矿成本正在上升。特别是，需要开放矿井开采的卡车和铲子舰队每单位金属拖运更多的矿石, resulting in an增加柴油燃油消耗。将事情置于适当的情况下，降低并不意味着地面上的铜供应已经用完了。这确实意味着铜的供应是提取的经济性正在下降，forcing the productioncost going up。它也是如此mining very reliant on the energy (diesel fuel in particular).

And here, with rising fuel costs, we’ve got (our first) feedback loop.如果您错过了它：在汽油价格的潮起潮落和流动后面有一个worldwide柴油危机, already long in the making:

Global diesel and other distillate fuel stocks have been on the decline for a while now, and there is no reversal of this trend in sight. Demand, on the other hand, has been growing, leading to a widening shortage.

这是一个比乍看之下要大得多的问题：尽管需求不断增长，但似乎我们无法以更高的速度生产这种燃料（2）。柴油是这个城市化工业社会的命脉。卡车和船只不仅从矿井中携带大量的铜矿，而且还携带食物和废物 - 更不用说千卡车的沙子，水和管道来钻孔。如果柴油价格上涨，采矿和钻井的成本也会上涨 - 更不用说运输新鲜的“生产”油和铜（或其他任何东西）的成本。开采海床不会解决这个问题。

另一方面，试图使采矿/运输业务振奋人心会立即提高对金属挖掘机和卡车的需求，而卡车正忙着发掘和拖拉，这反过来会导致更严重的柴油燃料短缺……选择手指咬人。

如果this were not enough, there is another self-reinforcing feedback loop pushing oil prices (and thus the price of everything) even higher. Food. Since 8 kcal of energy goes into the production, delivery and preparation of every kcal you consume as food, it should not come as a surprise that energy price increases directly lead tofood price increases。And here comes OPEC and Saudi Arabia into the picture. AsI wrote back in last October：

好吧，似乎沙特无法增加产量，甚至可能不想他们需要高于76美元的石油价格to balance their budgets and finance their massive welfare program. It’s worth noting here that Saudi Arabia is a net food importer: if food prices rise (due to higher fertilizer costs for e.g.), their breakeven price for oil rises too… posing a huge security risk for them. If they fail to generate high enough revenues for a long enough time from oil they will be forced to make (further) cuts to public welfare.

战争结束后，乌克兰打破了屋顶上的石油价格，鼓励沙特人不断提高产量。他们在相当长的一段时间内能够将其产品远高于76 USD Mark的价格出售，因此他们已经杀死了这些高价。那时，不足为奇的是，在价格开始后（担心即将到来的衰退）之后，他们选择削减石油生产以使价格保持在此限制之上。

With that said, Saudi Arabia seems to be the only OPEC country left to play around with its production levels (3), the rest of the cartel is struggling to keep up with them. In the US only Texas and New Mexico could keep growing their extraction rates thanks to the Permian, while other states are already in decline.The rest of the world fares no better.

钻井成本上升 - 现在与不懈的粮食价格相结合 - 是不利全球油出口国的生产增长。这使世界供应更短，石油价格甚至更高，杂货店账单也更高。再加上气候变化（由于油的燃烧而引起的，导致农作物的产量降低，并且您有一个疯狂的复杂的恶性循环，以降低石油和粮食生产。

It难怪那时石油公司继续降低他们在探索上花费了什么。他们知道，但从未承认，大量等待被发现的石油躺在很难到达的地方，而且数量要小得多，远远不值得努力恢复它们。今年，尽管有创纪录的收入，大石油仍将勘探支出减少了60％ - 是的，超过一半 - 导致shrinking reserves.他们只是停止更换每年消耗的东西。该消息不可能更清楚：退休即将到来，是时候清算您拥有的东西并填满您的口袋了。

Peak oil is an economic question, but not something that we can manipulate with financialization, lax regulation or pipelines for much too long. It looks like we are fast approaching a situation where油价对于生产商来说太低（一旦我们考虑食品价格和提取石油的能源成本（4））the world economy is becoming increasingly unable to afford these high prices。

在过去的二十年中，我们一直否认存在峰值石油，更不用说它在拐角处 - 因此我们不必做任何准备。现在，它在这里 - 哎呀，实际上，它很可能早在2018年就远远落后于我们 - 我们以令人发指的核超级大国并花费数十亿美元的战争来娱乐自己，这可以轻松避免通过一些非常简单的承诺来避免。合作？互助？不，我们在这里炸毁了彼此的管道，在那里煽动叛乱，并迫使整个地区接受自我施加的贫困。这就是我们在西方“解决”我们的困境的方式。

现在，随着欧佩克对俄罗斯石油的最新削减和禁运，今年晚些时候生效，我们很可能会目睹石油时代长期下降的开始。因此，缺乏任何适当，真正独立的备份，这也是我们工业文明的长期下降。

从食品油气候变化三人到手头的柴油危机，已经激活了许多恶性周期。抛出指数（充满活力的）成本增加，这也就不足为奇了，我们已经有了一个铜供应不足在地平线上。而且，也没有办法通过回收利用来弥补缺失的卷。这不是我们“可再生”未来的最佳新闻。债务和政府补贴所涵盖的金属和石油价格以及损失的证券交易所所做的骗局可以掩盖这一不舒服的真理，但并非永远。开始变得越来越清楚：

我们不仅在这里面对峰油，而且同时还面临峰值金属。

资源枯竭和能源下降是经济过程。人类不喜欢思考它，而是在人工货币上，而是具有真实的生态意义。在自然界中，一切都围绕着物质和能量的捕获和重新分配 - 人类的生态系统没有什么不同。一旦资源过度开发 - 在我们的情况下进行石油或自然环境中的食物来源，给定的生态系统崩溃了，一个新的，更好的改编版本就取代了它。但这是一个话题要讨论。

Until then,

b

笔记：

（1）质量较低的矿石需要更多的压碎和浸出才能将铜拔出。这需要在上坡上抽更多的水，因此要处理更多的废水，更不用说机械消耗的电力增加了。与处理高级矿石相比，现在很容易看出该过程如何花费更多的纯铜能量。

(2) Pundits tend to dismiss the diesel predicament by blaming it on a lack of investment in refining capacity — all ultimately due to the electrification of road transport. As someone working in the EV business I can tell that this is utter bullshit, spun by economists and politicians. EVs only replace gasoline use (and only a tiny winey fraction of that), but does not solve the issue of diesel at all. As a资深石油地质学家可以作证柴油短缺来自缺乏合适的油来制作柴油的原因，这是由于耗尽常规井的结果。二叠纪的轻质油根本不能以足够的数量变成柴油，而委内瑞拉的重油只能通过使用大量天然气将其价格转换为这种燃料，这些天然气的价格也迅速上涨。

（3）沙特人正在吹捧他们可以生产1300万每天的桶，但他们从未设法维持1100万的产量超过一个月，这表明这是他们的实际限制。现在，他们再次超越了这个看不见的限制后不久就退缩了。

(4) It is one thing to maintain this oil production plateau and pay only for the energy used up by the pumping equipment (aka marginal cost, hence the record profits), but it’s quite another to invest in new production, or replacing old wells.