Looking at the world through the 12" screen of my laptop reading reports by scientists and economists alike, I find it amazing that all projections of global warming and energy consumption run only to the year 2100. I can’t help but ask myself “What happens then?” It seems inconceivable that global industrial civilization will run as it has for another 100 years. It will buckle under the pressure of resource scarcity and lack of surplus energy and tied to that, the destruction of fiat currencies worldwide — Things that politicians avoid talking about lest they get blamed for the collapse we can no longer avoid.
The lack of critical thinking and belief in pixie dust, techno-magic, and hope masquerading as analysis is astounding. While the more banal and pedestrian among the journalists and bloggers simply regurgitate the media talking points amplified by Fox News and the New York Times, the more articulate among the “hoperatti” have such tunnel vision focused on the “solution” of their choice that if they meditated with the same intensity twice a day, nirvana wouldn’t be far off.
Homo Sapiens is captivated by a system that continually reduces the physical world around it to its smallest elements and ignores the resulting residue in the mistaken belief that its large brain and opposable thumbs have destined it to stay on top of the food chain, created just for him alone.
Human exceptionalism may play well in churches, synagogues, and mosques, but in the real world, we are just a bunch of insatiable apes expanding catastrophically on a speck of dust in space while setting it ablaze in our ignorance.
Nothing in that real world happens without energy. It has been said that technology without energy is a rock and a human without energy is a corpse.
In the real world of energy consumption, you and I and everyone you know and have ever known were born in the middle of this one-time conflagration of the planet. We have all come to consider burning ancient stored sunlight as the normal state of things, so it is very hard for us to imagine a disruption, and what a world with less energy would imply.
Since humans discovered that hydrocarbons burn brighter than trees, the human population has ballooned to unsustainable levels by the destructive exploitation of this non-renewable, finite resource, long buried in the ground before we became sapient. Unfortunately for us sophisticated apes, the world after this brief conflagration will be unable to support eight billion souls, let alone the projected ten billion by the year 2100.
We are at the precipice of a long decline in oil and gas extraction and are trying to survive on an imperiled planet with a slowly dying ecosystem. The momentum toward a collapse of the way we have structured this system seems irreversible.
The supply of alternatives to fossil fuels, such as solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectricity, will not be able to expand at rates sufficient to offset the impending decline in the production of oil, gas, and coal. The expansion of our energy consumption is greater than the speed with which we can transition away from fossil fuels.
The second law of thermodynamics, as much as economists would like to ignore it, states that energy is never “free.” Whenever energy is accessed for our use, some of that energy is always consumed in the process of accessing and transforming it to do work. Energy is used at every stage in the creation, maintenance, operation, and replacement of the systems which supply us with energy.
Prosperity, therefore, is a function of surplus energy.
Most economists tend to ignore the energetic basis of our economy. The theories and hypotheses used by economists are so ill-suited to the task that they do not even consider the possibility that an energy descent is taking place and cannot be reversed by printing more money. In the meantime, most scientists who make energy-transition scenarios tend to underestimate the reasons that make the global industrial economy so unwilling and unable to change.
Money is a human construct used for the exchange of goods, materiel, and machines, not for the creation of resources. Extraction of those resources is only made available by the harnessing, transforming, and funneling of energy.
Available energy is always limited by the energy required to utilize it. Right now, over 80% of the world’s energy is obtained by burning hydrocarbons — oil, gas, and coal, manufacture of renewable energy-capturing machines included. We can hope, pray, and engage in magical thinking, but it is a fact that those hydrocarbons are finite.
The belief that the substitution of fossil energy with renewable energy will happen smoothly and without an overall reduction in per capita availability of excess energy and a corresponding decline in prosperity is just as fantastical as the belief that human beings are at the center of creation.
There is no way to suddenly end or even seriously reduce fossil fuel use without an end to the lifestyles everyone has known for their entire lives, no matter how much we pretend that solar panels and windmills will get ridiculously cheap in the next decade and beyond.
Although we call it “inflation”, “supply chain problems”, “COVID-induced housing bubble,“ or bank crises due to “woke” ideology (whatever that means) the ensuing contraction in discretionary prosperity is energy driven and is already evident all around us.
Humanity can no longer afford the energy to keep most of itself alive and consuming.
A long-term, chronic recession is not only probable but is becoming increasingly inevitable since making these raw materials available on a huge scale will require the use of correspondingly vast amounts of energy. Energy that is becoming more and more scarce.
The energy calamity that we are confronted with does not mean we “run out” of energy suddenly. Rather, it will become less and less affordable for more and more people who will have to prioritize food over access to technology or discretionary consumption. That in turn will stifle investment in technology, which is the only thing adding to the complexity that keeps this mess going. It might end up being a blessing in disguise as far as climate change is concerned but it will also lead to the immense suffering of tens of millions while the world slows down.
The mess is about to get messier.
Eventually, things will get to a point where humanity can no longer afford the energy to keep most of its members alive.
The decline in living standards for the billions people in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australasia is likely to cause economic, social, and political upheaval on a scale that will overshadow anything in human history. Indeed, we are already witnessing the foreshocks of this as we enter the decade of sorrow that awaits us.
The destruction of millions of souls has begun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Ates Haywood is a former fimnancial advisor. After 20 years in finance, he realized it was all a lie. Now he is trying to figure out what 'it' is. He is a human being tired of being lied to.
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