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Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers to force fake rescues
(www.independent.co.uk)
In the collapse community people have been aware of a "thermodynamic" collapse of energy supplies for quite a while.
So for example, to mainstream people and the investors, there is something called 'oil' which seems like a commodity item.
In the collapse community, worldwide supplies of diesel and heavy oil energy products (shipping, trucking, agriculture, mining and gasoline refining among many other applications) has been in a 10-year long period of decline with major implications for our global civilization.
(Diesel / heavy crude comes from several places globally. The USA has run out but Venezuela and Iran are two heavy hitters for the molecules needed.)
The blockade on the strait is only having any impact because it's a zero sum game now that nobody can raise production any higher. Like you don't see Norway and Canada suddenly ramping up and filling demand, right?
I consider this the most parsimonious and cogent world view.
In a short summary: the blockade is an artificial shortage that is designed to collapse and bankrupt the most dependent and vulnerable nations in the global periphery, which is a "triage" that preserves oil supplies for the wealthy nations in the long run. Like this triggers collapse, and then as a second order effect global demand will fall for energy which is in an irreversible depletion event. This is the only way the most developed nations extend their existence through the crash.
This is all an open secret, you can dig into technical papers and agency reports and academic publications, everything will say the same thing. However, this is not really a "mainstream" consciousness.
To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.
The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.
Pretty shocking number if you don't have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.
So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it's now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.
Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.
So it's not "just" a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.