Thanks, Richard. I appreciate and value your own thoughts and writing on this topic. Your comment means a lot.

The text you highlight is my summary of the situation, yes, but I'm using Steve Genco's "energy descent realism" to name it. I prefer this language and mental model to "collapse acceptance." I think the differences are subtle but important.

You say collapse is inevitable; I don't know that. You say that even accepting that collapse is inevitable, we should make it as "mild" as possible. I believe another way to say this is "mitigation." Yet I've heard from writers espousing collapse acceptance who precisely say mitigation is impossible.

Collapse means "something falling in and giving way," and so is applied ambiguously here. Does the planet become void of all life? Is it total chaos and war? An apocalyptic hellscape with a few straggling cannibals wandering around?

And acceptance literally means consent.

So with this new term in the lexicon, without doing a lot of explaining and caveating, we're saying "consent to the ambiguous end of all things."

I picture a cult member drinking the Kool Aid.

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I've heard from people who say they think geologically. That in a thousand, a million, a billion years, none of this will matter anyway. Enjoy your trip to the Bahamas!

To me, that kind of mindset is an escape hatch, and it has more in common with "collapse acceptance" than "energy descent realism."

We're using language and mental models to engage the climate crisis; I think it's important we choose the most apposite. "Energy descent realism" may not be the best there is, but it's better, in my estimation.

"Descent" is a process. And it relates most pointedly to the abundant, cheap and dirty energy we now enjoy. It leaves room for uncertainty, too. There is "realism," but not "lie back and let it happen" acceptance. It is a framework for working on the situation.

All the best

TJ