World Without End

How Manufactured Ignorance Became our Greatest Existential Threat

So here we all are, exhausted yet still hopeful, standing at a perplexing juncture in our history. Never before has our species possessed such comprehensive understanding of an impending catastrophe. Never before have we held the technological and financial means to avert it. And never before have we been so systematically prevented from acting on what we know. I hold my breath as I listen to intelligent people deny what’s becoming so obvious.

The climate crisis is not, at its core, a technological puzzle awaiting some miracle solution. Nor is it fundamentally a question of economic capacity—though the fossil fuel apologists would have us believe otherwise. Rather, we’re facing something far more insidious: an epistemic crisis of unprecedented scale. Our collective ability to sense, to make sense, to design a considered response, and to act has been compromised by a coordinated assault on the architecture of knowledge creation and dissemination. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact.

Let me be unflinchingly clear about the mechanisms at work. The primary obstacle to climate action is the concentration of communicative power in the hands of those whose wealth now depends upon continuing planetary degradation. Like the colonial empires that preceded them, today’s ultra-wealthy deploy media platforms as instruments of control—not only through crude censorship, but through the far more sophisticated weaponisation of the information ecosystem itself. Just take a look at the infrastructure: the fossil fuel industry, facing an existential threat to its business model, has not simply lobbied politicians or funded sympathetic think tanks. It has systematically constructed an alternative reality, then purchased the distribution channels to make that reality appear legitimate, even dominant.

Fracking billionaires pump millions into platforms like PragerU and the Daily Wire—not as charitable gestures toward “diverse viewpoints,” but as strategic investments in epistemic pollution. These are not media outlets in any traditional sense. They are disinformation factories, designed to fabricate doubt, confusion, and paralysis on an industrial scale. And this is a global operation. In Australia, where some of the world’s richest fossil fuel deposits lie waiting to be extracted, the same playbook unfolds with ruthless precision. Gina Rinehart, the mining magnate whose wealth depends on continued coal and gas extraction, has systematically acquired stakes in Australian media, while the Murdoch empire—News Corp controls roughly seventy percent of newspaper circulation across the country—functions as a de facto propaganda arm for the fossil fuel industry, treating every climate policy as an economic catastrophe while championing gas expansion as national salvation.

The digital age promised democratised knowledge. Instead, we received algorithmically-curated illiteracy. Yale researchers discovered that eight of the world’s ten most popular online shows actively spread climate science denial. This is not accidental. Platforms like Elon Musk’s X—itself a plaything purchased by a billionaire who apparently views democracy as just another market to corner—deploy algorithms that deliberately feed users an unrelenting stream of right-wing extremism, where climate denial flourishes like toxic algae in a warming sea. When Australia’s Liberal Party abandoned even the pretense of climate action by dispensing with their Net Zero policy this week, it was not a sudden outbreak of honesty but the logical endpoint of years of epistemic capture. The same media ecosystem that made Tony Abbott’s “climate change is crap” politically viable, that turned Malcolm Turnbull’s modest emissions trading scheme into career suicide, that championed Scott Morrison’s coal-fondling parliamentary theatre, had successfully created an information environment where a major political party could simply abandon any commitment to planetary habitability and face minimal electoral consequence. This is epistemic warfare achieving its objective: making the unthinkable routine, the catastrophic acceptable, the theft of the future from our children just another policy option.

These algorithms don’t just reflect user preferences; they shape them, cultivate them, weaponise them. They create epistemic bubbles where scientific consensus becomes just another “opinion,” where expertise is dismissed as elitism, where the laws of thermodynamics become subject to political debate. This is the digital enclosure of the mind—as profound and consequential as any enclosure of the commons in history. Naming the main culprits doesn’t help; we can’t lay this crisis solely at the feet of obvious villains. The rot extends deep into institutions we once trusted to adjudicate reality.

The BBC, the New York Times, and their ilk practice a particularly pernicious form of epistemic violence: the false balance. In their desperate attempts to appear “objective,” they create a manufactured equivalence between the overwhelming scientific consensus and the purchased opinions of fossil-fuel-funded “junktanks”—a term far more accurate than the legitimising label “think tanks.” When the BBC presents climate science alongside climate denial without disclosing that the denier is bankrolled by ExxonMobil or the Koch network, it’s not practicing journalism. It is practicing propaganda. When it treats heat pumps as “controversial” because a gas lobby paid a PR firm to affect outrage, then censors its own presenters for challenging this manufactured controversy, it becomes complicit in the epistemic coup. This is not balance. This is capitulation. This is the normalisation of lies in service to power.

The fossil fuel industry learned a critical lesson from the tobacco playbook: you don’t need to win the scientific argument. That’s just a waste of time and effort. You only need to create the appearance of controversy. Doubt is their product, and they have become wizards at its manufacture. Every technology that threatens fossil fuel hegemony—heat pumps, electric and hydrogen vehicles, renewable energy—is subjected to the same treatment: fund “grassroots” opposition, amplify marginal concerns, deploy armies of social media accounts, then watch as legacy media dutifully reports the “controversy” as though it emerged organically from genuine public concern. This is not democracy. This is the simulation of democracy, performed by those who understand that actual democracy would dismantle their empires in a flash.

What we witness, then, is not political inaction born of ignorance or indifference. It’s the intended outcome of a deliberate and systematic assault on public knowledge, funded and executed by some of the world’s richest individuals and corporations, with the fossil fuel industry playing the central orchestrating role. As I have said many times before, the paralysis we experience in the face of climate breakdown is not a bug in the system—it’s a feature, carefully engineered and meticulously maintained.

This realisation demands a fundamental reframing of how we understand the climate crisis. We’re not just facing a planetary emergency that requires technical solutions as well as political will and nous. We’re engaged in an information war, and we are losing. The battlefield is not primarily in legislatures or at UN climate conferences—though these do matter - in spite of my ongoing criticism of the annual COP vaudeville. The frontline is in the human mind, in our collective capacity to apprehend reality and act accordingly. And on this frontline, the forces of extraction and exploitation have deployed weapons of unprecedented sophistication.

Just imagine the perverse genius of it. The people destroying the planet’s life support systems have successfully positioned themselves as the arbiters of what counts as measured discourse about that same destruction. They have captured not just governments and regulatory agencies, but something far more fundamental: the means by which societies determine what is true. This is not lobbying. This isn’t even corruption in the conventional sense. This is a coup against the truth, executed in plain sight while most of us scroll through our feeds, algorithmically fed a diet of distraction, division, and denial, oblivious to the reality.

The implications are staggering. If we cannot collectively agree on basic physical facts—that carbon dioxide traps heat, that fossil fuels are the primary source of atmospheric carbon increase, that we are already experiencing the early stages of climate breakdown—then democratic governance becomes impossible. Not difficult. Impossible. Democracy requires a shared epistemic foundation, a common reality upon which citizens can deliberate and decide. When that foundation is deliberately fractured, when reality becomes just another partisan position, democracy collapses into a theatre of the absurd, where we debate whether to rearrange the deck chairs while billionaires have already purchased the lifeboats and convinced half the passengers that the ship isn’t actually sinking.

This is why the usual prescriptions for climate action—more renewable energy, carbon taxes, international agreements—while necessary, are insufficient. They address symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease. We can install all the solar panels we want, but if the information ecosystem remains captive to those whose wealth depends on burning the planet, every step forward will be met with a contrived backlash, algorithmic amplification of doubt, and media that treats physics as a matter of opinion. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t need to prevent all climate action; it merely needs to delay it long enough to extract every last dollar from the ground, consequences be damned. And delay is precisely what epistemic pollution achieves.

This strategy is brutally efficient. Traditional forms of political resistance can be countered, co-opted, or crushed. But resistance requires people to first understand what they’re resisting and why. If you can prevent that understanding from forming in the first place—if you can fill the information space with noise, confusion, and concocted controversy—you don’t need to crush resistance. It never gets the chance to coalesce. People remain fragmented, uncertain, arguing among themselves about whether the crisis even exists, Meanwhile the planet burns. This is social control at its most elegant and most terrifying.

We must also recognise that this epistemic assault extends beyond climate denial. The strategy has evolved. As outright denial becomes untenable in the face of visible climate impacts, the disinformation apparatus pivots to more sophisticated forms of obstruction: delay, distraction, and the promotion of false solutions. Yes, climate change is real, they now concede, but we can solve it through carbon capture technology that doesn’t yet work at scale, or through market mechanisms that allow the wealthy to continue polluting while purchasing offsets, or through individual consumer choices that place the burden on ordinary people while leaving the extractive system intact. The fossil fuel industry has become adept at co-opting the language of climate action while ensuring that nothing fundamental actually changes.

Meanwhile, those who point out these dynamics, who name the systems of power that produce and profit from planetary destruction, are dismissed as radicals or alarmists. The very act of identifying the epistemic coup is treated as evidence of paranoia rather than clear-sightedness. This is gaslighting at a civilizational scale—making us doubt our own capacity to perceive and name what’s happening to us. And it works. It works because the platforms that might allow us to organise collective resistance are owned by the same class of people orchestrating the assault, and because the legacy institutions that might validate our concerns have been so thoroughly captured by the logic of false balance that they can’t bring themselves to state plainly what is happening.

So what is to be done? We must begin by naming this for what it is: not a failure of communication or a marketplace of functioning poorly, but a deliberate war against truth, waged by those who profit from our confusion. We cannot solve a problem we refuse to accurately name. The climate crisis is inseparable from the epistemic crisis, and both are inseparable from the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a planetary oligarchy that has demonstrated, repeatedly and unambiguously, that it will sacrifice the future of human civilisation to preserve its quarterly profits and vested interests.

Defending society from this storm of lies becomes not just ancillary to climate action but central to it. We must treat the restoration of epistemic integrity with the same urgency we bring to decarbonisation, because without the former, the latter becomes totally impossible. This means building alternative information infrastructures that can’t be captured by a billionaire’s whim or fossil fuel funding. It means supporting independent media that operates outside the logic of advertiser appeasement and shareholder value. It means developing digital platforms governed democratically rather than algorithmically optimised for engagement and outrage. It means teaching media literacy as a survival skill, equipping people to recognise the signatures of manufactured controversy and astroturfed opposition.

But we must go further still. We need to fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of allowing private individuals to accumulate the kind of wealth that purchases reality itself. No one should be able to own the means by which societies communicate and deliberate. No corporation should be permitted to fund disinformation campaigns that threaten the habitability of the planet. These are no longer questions of free speech—they are questions of power, and power at this scale is incompatible with both democracy and survival. The same extractive logic that treats the atmosphere as a dumping ground treats the information commons as a resource to be exploited and enclosed. Both must be reclaimed.

We need regulatory frameworks that treat systematic disinformation as the public health crisis it is. We need transparency requirements that force disclosure of funding sources for every think tank, every media platform, every astroturf campaign. We need antitrust enforcement that breaks up media monopolies and prevents the kind of concentrated ownership that makes epistemic capture possible. We need to recognise that platforms like X, Facebook, and YouTube are not neutral technologies but active participants in the destruction of our collective capacity to know and to act. They must be held accountable - or they must be replaced.

None of this will be easy. The forces arrayed against epistemic restoration are formidable precisely because they control so much of the terrain on which such battles must be fought. They own the platforms, fund the politicians, and have successfully convinced millions of people that their own oppression is freedom and that collective action is tyranny. They have weaponised cynicism, creating populations so exhausted by conflicting information and manufactured outrage that they retreat into apathy or nihilism. This, too, serves the interests of power. A cynical population becomes apathetic and does not organise. It does not resist. It scrolls.

Yet history teaches us that even the most sophisticated systems of control contain within them the seeds of their own undoing. The self-same technologies deployed to manipulate and divide us also contain the potential for coordination and collective intelligence at unprecedented scale. The networks that spread disinformation can spread truth, if we can wrest control of them from those who have enclosed them. The climate crisis itself, as it intensifies and becomes undeniable even to the most algorithm-addled mind, creates conditions for a mass mindful awakening that no amount of fossil fuel money can suppressentirely. Reality has a way of asserting itself, eventually, though the question remains whether it will do so in time for us to respond effectively.

What is required of us, then, is nothing less than a revolution in how we produce, share, and validate knowledge. Not a return to some imagined golden age of objective journalism—that age, if it ever existed, was itself shaped by concentrations of power and capital—but a leap forward into new forms of democratic knowledge production that distribute epistemic authority more widely and make it far more difficult for any single class or interest group to capture the entire information ecosystem. We need epistemic egalitarianism: systems that allow communities to collectively determine truth through transparent processes that privilege evidence over ideology and lived experience over manufactured expertise.

This is not relativism. This is not the claim that all perspectives are equally valid or that truth is merely a social construction. The laws of physics are not up for debate, and the fossil fuel industry’s campaign to make them seem so is not a legitimate viewpoint deserving of equal time. Rather, epistemic egalitarianism recognises that our current systems for determining and disseminating truth have been captured by power, and that reclaiming them requires democratising not just political institutions but the very infrastructure of knowledge itself.

That task is daunting; it is perhaps unprecedented. We must simultaneously find ways to decarbonise the global economy and decolonise the global mind. We must build renewable energy systems while rebuilding the capacity for collective sense-making. We must transform how we produce and consume while transforming how we know and communicate. These are not separate projects. They are different dimensions of the same fundamental struggle: the struggle to create a civilisation capable of perceiving reality clearly enough to ensure its own survival.

Make no mistake—this is an immense struggle, not a polite policy debate. Those who profit from planetary destruction will not relinquish their grip on our information systems voluntarily. They will deploy every weapon in their arsenal to maintain control: they will buy more platforms, fund more disinformation, amplify more division, and wrap themselves in the language of free speech even as they systematically destroy our collective capacity for free thought, just as they are doing that today. They will call us authoritarians for demanding transparency and extremists for insisting that lies should not be amplified by algorithms designed to maximize engagement. They will use their captured media to paint any challenge to their power as a threat to liberty itself.

We cannot be distracted or deterred by these predictable tactics. We must recognise them for what they are: the death throes of a system that knows it cannot survive honest scrutiny. The fossil fuel oligarchy and the broader class of ultra-wealthy who benefit from our epistemic disarray are not strong—they’re desperate. Their entire edifice of power rests on our continued confusion, our fragmentation, our inability to see clearly what they are doing and to organise accordingly. The moment we pierce through the fog of manufactured controversy and algorithmic manipulation, the moment we achieve clarity about the nature of the crisis and the identity of those perpetuating it, is the moment their power begins to disintegrate.

This is why media barons like Rupert Murdoch invest so heavily in maintaining the fog. This is why every climate solution is met with instant, well-funded opposition that materialises as if from nowhere. This is why algorithms push us toward rage and away from solidarity, toward individual consumption choices and away from collective political action, toward despair about human nature and away from clear-eyed analysis of specific power structures that could be dismantled. They need us confused, divided, and demoralised because they can’t survive us being clear and connected.

We must become what might be called epistemic activists—people who understand that the battle for a livable planet is inseparable from the battle for a truthful, transparent, information ecosystem. This means consuming better information ourselves in adddition to actively working to generate the conditions under which better information can circulate and be acted upon. It means taking a wrecking ball to media consolidation. It means supporting and building alternative media structures. It means calling out false balance and manufactured controversy wherever we encounter it. It means refusing to treat fossil-fuel-funded propaganda as legitimate discourse deserving of respectful engagement. It means naming names, following the money, and making visible the networks of power that operate most effectively in the shadows.

Above all, it means connecting the dots for others. Most people don’t have time to trace the funding sources of think tanks or analyse the ownership structures of media conglomerates. They are working multiple jobs, raising children, trying to survive in economies designed to extract maximum labour for minimum benefit. The epistemic coup succeeds in part because its mechanisms are deliberately obscured, hidden behind layers of shell companies and nonprofit organisations with anodyne names. Our task is to make these mechanisms visible, to translate complex networks of influence into clear narratives that people can grasp and act upon. When someone encounters climate denial, they need to know immediately that they are not hearing a legitimate scientific perspective but a message crafted by fossil fuel money and amplified by billionaire-owned platforms. This knowledge is itself a form of inoculation against disinformation.

We must also reclaim language itself. The fossil fuel industry has become expert at linguistic manipulation, rebranding tar sands as “oil sands,” fracking as “energy independence,” and continued extraction as “energy security.” They speak of “clean coal” and “natural gas” as if these phrases were anything other than marketing slogans designed to obscure the reality of combustion and atmospheric chemistry. Legacy media dutifully adopts this language, normalising euphemisms that serve power. We must refuse this. We must say no. We must insist on calling things what they are: fossil fuel companies are not energy companies—they are extraction companies whose business model requires planetary ruin. Climate denial is not scepticism—it’s propaganda funded by those with financial stakes in continued emissions. Political inaction is not gridlock or polarisation—it’s the successful execution of a strategy to protect capital at the expense of our civilisation.

Language shapes thought, and thought precedes action. If we allow the framing of our discourse to be determined by those who profit from inaction, we have already lost. We may as well give up now. This is why the fossil fuel industry invests so heavily in think tanks and PR firms, in focus groups and message testing. They understand that controlling the terms of debate is far more effective than actually winning the debate. When we accept their framing—when we argue about whether climate change is “real” rather than how quickly we can dismantle the fossil fuel infrastructure, when we debate individual carbon footprints rather than corporate carbon criminality, when we discuss adaptation as if it were equivalent to prevention—we are fighting on terrain they have carefully prepared for their advantage.

This reclamation of language, obviously close to my heart as a writer, must extend to how we describe the climate crisis, or any crisis come to that. It isn’t just “climate change” we’re talking about, a euphemism focus-grouped to minimise alarm and suggest a gentle, manageable transition. This is a climate breakdown, a climate emergency, ecological collapse. These terms more accurately capture the catastrophic nature of what we face and the urgency required in response. Similarly, we must stop speaking of “the economy” as if it were a natural phenomenon separate from human choices, and start speaking of economic systems designed by and for specific vested interests. We must stop treating “growth” as an unquestioned good and start asking what is growing, for whom, and at what cost. Every act of linguistic precision is an act of resistance against the semantic fog that enables inaction.

Yet language alone is insufficient. We need material alternatives to the captured information infrastructure. This means investing in and building media platforms that operate on fundamentally different principles than those governed by advertising revenue and shareholder value. We need journalism funded by communities rather than corporations and wealthy individuals, platforms governed by users rather than algorithms optimised for engagement, and networks designed for deliberation rather than viral spread. Some of this already exists in nascent form—cooperative media models, federated social networks, community-supported citizen journalism—but these alternatives remain marginal, starved of resources while billions flow into platforms that actively undermine our capacity for collective intelligence.

Imagine, for a moment, what becomes possible when communities control their own information infrastructure. When local media is accountable to their readers rather than advertisers. When social platforms are designed to facilitate genuine connection rather than to maximize time-on-site through algorithmic manipulation of our worst impulses. When the people most affected by climate breakdown—frontline communities, Indigenous peoples, the global poor—have the means to share their knowledge and experiences without that information being filtered through editorial boards in New York and London or algorithmic systems designed in Silicon Valley. The epistemic landscape would be transformed overnight. Solutions that currently seem politically impossible would become obviously necessary. The manufactured controversies that currently paralyse action would be revealed as the astroturfed campaigns they are.

This transformation will not happen only through market forces or technological innovation. The current information ecosystem is not a market failure—it’s a market success, delivering exactly what it was designed to deliver: the protection and expansion of capital. Changing it requires political intervention, regulatory frameworks that treat information infrastructure as a commons too important to be left to private profit-seeking. It requires antitrust action to break up media monopolies. It requires public investment in alternative platforms. It requires, ultimately, a recognition that democracy cannot function when the means of democratic deliberation are owned by oligarchs with interests fundamentally opposed to democratic outcomes.

None of this should be read as technological determinism or as placing undue blame on platforms and media systems while ignoring the human choices that animate them. Algorithms don’t write themselves. Disinformation campaigns do not fund themselves. Behind every captured institution and weaponised platform stand human beings making deliberate choices to prioritise their wealth and power over the habitability of the planet and the survival of future generations. These are not abstract forces or inevitable consequences of modernity. These are particular individuals with names and addresses, sitting in boardrooms and making decisions they know will result in suffering and death on a mass scale.

We must name them. We have no option. We have to hold them accountable. And we must build movements powerful enough to strip them of the capacity to continue their assault on reality itself. This is not about vengeance or punishment—though there is certainly a case for both—but about basic self-preservation. A society that allows its wealthiest members to purchase and deploy the information infrastructure against the collective interest is a society that has opted for self-destruction. We can choose otherwise, but only if we’re willing to confront power directly and dismantle the systems that enable epistemic capture.

The fossil fuel executives in Exxon-Mobil and Royal-Dutch Shell who knew decades ago that their products would destabilise the climate and still chose to fund denial campaigns instead of transition plans. The billionaires who purchase media platforms and bend them toward their ideological preferences and financial interests. The think tank operatives who launder fossil fuel money into seemingly respectable policy positions. The PR professionals who design campaigns to manufacture controversy and delay action. The platform engineers who build algorithms knowing they amplify extremism and disinformation. The legacy media editors who practice false balance in the name of objectivity. All of these are choices, made by people who could choose differently, operating within systems we could change if we organised to do so.

The key issue that bothers me is not whether we have the knowledge or the tools to address the climate crisis. We do. The question is whether we can break free from the epistemic prison that prevents us from using what we know. Can we build movements strong enough to challenge not just fossil fuel infrastructure but the information infrastructure that protects it? Can we create new ways of knowing and communicating that cannot be captured by concentrated wealth? Can we move fast enough to matter, given how much time has already been stolen from us by decades of deliberate obfuscation?

These questions have no guaranteed answers. History is not a story with a predetermined ending, and the forces arrayed against us are formidable. But history also teaches us that systems of power that appear invincible often collapse with surprising speed once people stop believing in their legitimacy and start organising as if alternatives were possible. The fossil fuel oligarchy’s grip on our information systems is strong, but it’s not absolute. Every act of epistemic resistance—every alternative platform built, every disinformation campaign exposed, every false equivalence challenged, every network of solidarity strengthened—weakens that grip incrementally. Eventually, enough incremental weakening becomes transformation.

We’re not powerless, though they desperately need us to believe we are. We have agency. Powerlessness is itself a contrived narrative, amplified by algorithms and repeated by captured media until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The antidote to manufactured powerlessness is collective action rooted in clear analysis of where power actually lies and how it operates. When we understand that political inaction on climate is not a failure of will or imagination but the intended outcome of a well-funded assault on public knowledge, we can direct our efforts accordingly. We stop trying to convince individual politicians and start dismantling the systems that make all politicians beholden to fossil fuel money. We stop debating climate deniers as if they were operating in good faith and start exposing the funding sources that purchase their bad faith. We stop treating media platforms as neutral and start demanding they be governed democratically - or replaced entirely.

This is the work of our time: defending reality from those who would destroy it for profit or for fame. It’s unglamorous work, often invisible and unrewarded, the kind of labour that builds infrastructure rather than spectacle. But it’s essential work, the foundation upon which all other climate action must rest. We can’t build a renewable energy system if half the population has been algorithmically convinced that renewable energy doesn’t work. We can’t implement carbon pricing if manufactured controversy makes every proposal politically toxic. We can’t achieve the rapid transformation required if the information ecosystem remains poisoned by those who profit from delay.

The climate crisis and the epistemic crisis are one crisis; solving it requires us to become something we have not yet been: a global civilisation capable of perceiving collective threats clearly and responding to them rationally, despite the efforts of the powerful to prevent precisely that. This has never been done before at this scale. But then, we have never faced extinction before, not like this, not with such clarity about what is coming and what is required to prevent it.

The storm of lies will not abate on its own. It will intensify as the stakes grow higher and the fossil fuel industry’s desperation deepens. But storms can be weathered, and lies can be countered, and systems of power can be dismantled when enough people understand why they must be and choose to organise accordingly. The epistemic coup can be reversed, but only if we treat it with the seriousness it deserves—not as a peripheral concern or a problem for media critics to solve, but as the central obstacle to human survival in the twenty-first century.

We have the knowledge. We have the technology. We have, despite everything, still barely enough time. What we need now is the collective clarity to see what is being done to us, the courage to name those doing it, and the solidarity to build something better in its place. The alternative is not just continued inaction on climate. The alternative is the permanent triumph of manufactured ignorance over actuality, the final enclosure of the human mind, and the foreclosure of any future worth inhabiting.

it’s a choice that’s unavoidable: defend truth, or perish in a fog of lies. There’s no middle ground, no compromise position, no both-sides equivalence. Either we reclaim our capacity for collective knowledge and action, or we surrender the future to those who have already demonstrated they will burn it down for profit. The epistemic crisis is the climate crisis. Solving one requires solving both. And the time for solving both is rapidly running out.