Interesting videos but I am going to have to disagree with Chris when he says that we should be aggressively building new pipelines to supply the energy needed to power our economic engine, if the purpose of that is to maintain economic growth until alternative energy systems come into the picture in a significant way.
The fact is, our monetary system is flawed and broken; it was so from the very first day it was brought into existence. NOTHING can continue to grow indefinitely within a confined domain. Yet this is what economics is suggesting is possible. There has never been a single observed instance in the history of the entire known universe of biological growth continuing indefinitely. It ALWAYS ends, and population ecology clearly shows that the way biological growth typically ends is through catastrophic collapses. And no, technology is not going to be able to somehow insulate us from that crash. To the contrary, what technology has done is instead enabled us to greatly overextend our economies and societies way beyond the edge of the precipice, well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet; and this has been masked over the last 40 years by market manipulation by the Fed and through all the phoney paper promises out there (apparent wealth that amounts to nothing of real value), which is really nothing more than a giant global ponzi scheme. Just as with any unsustainable biological growth, ALL ponzi schemes crash.
I am amazed at how so many out there will dance around the ultimate and undeniable truth that cannot be argued away – that economic growth WILL stop and it MUST stop. There is nothing in this universe that can prevent this. To deny this is to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to believe in the existence of perpetual motion machines.
Do we have an acceptance and admission of this fact by our leaders? It doesn’t seem like it. Instead, what do we have? What we have is 99.9% of mainstream economists out there arguing about how we should best go about restarting economic growth – essentially, thinking about the best way of extending ourselves even further beyond the cliff. Well, here’s an idea — what if economic growth (on a global scale) is finished, and it CAN’T be restarted?
Is this not the most absurd thing that has happened in the history of humankind? When we as a species are ramming full speed ahead towards a brick wall, and at the same time 99.9% of our economic leaders are trying to figure out how to SPEED UP that train?!?! How can so many people be so completely clueless as to what’s going on? I presume this is because economists don’t have a clue about how energy and ecosystems work. One of the first things they learn in school, and then base their entire discipline of study on, is the idea that labour has “productivity”. HOGWASH!!! Labour produces ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! When the most basic building block of an entire discipline of study is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FALSE, is it any wonder that EVERYTHING in economics derived from this is also a farce?
If as Chris says it is going to take 40 years to bring alternative technologies to market in order to take up the slack from fossil fuels (I have a feeling it may come quite a bit sooner than this, because all these technologies exist, but have been suppressed from the market for a few decades), is it reasonable to assume that we will have even 40 years’ worth of DIFFICULT oil left available? I highly doubt it, the EROEI is continually dropping. So why should we be trying to continue to boost 3% economic growth for the next 40 years when that clearly isnt going to happen (a constant 3% growth rate for 40 years is NOT constant growth, but rather turns into NINE percent annual growth at the end of 40 years in terms of the original energy consumption at the beginning).
In short, there is NOTHING that can be done to prevent a crash. All those environmentalists from the 70’s right up until now who were warning that if we didn’t change our ways and get off oil and start taking better care of the environment, that this amounted to stealing from future generations … and those people were generally dismissed as being kooks … well … here’s the news … WE are that future generation!
We are literally seeing the effects of this right now. Those who believe that the economy is somehow in opposition with the environment, and that one must go down for the other to go up, are sorely mistaken. Rather, our economies are COMPLETELY depend on the environment. That is why those dire consequences that scientists and envornmentalists have been warning about for the last 50 years are now manifesting themselves as economic problems (isn’t a shortage of resources manifesting itself as significantly rising prices the same thing as saying we have environmental problems because the resources simpy do not exist anymore to support us?) The damage is done and nothing can be done to stop it. A correction is needed and it will soon arrive. We should take this as an opportunity to rip the bandage off all at once and get off fossil fuels for good. The technologies available for the average person to get off oil are all out there (I have many of them and they are no more expensive than conventional technologies). I see no point in destroying the planet to rip every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground (and then REALLY screw future generations who may actually have a legitimate use for that fossil fuel that doesn’t involve burning it in an ICE when there are much better alternatives available), in order to satisfy a fundamentally flawed monetary system that purports (but fails) to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
So when Chris says that we need a huge effort by government to ram through new pipelines and increase fossil fuel extraction, because the private sector isn’t going to be able to respond fast enough (it is the market manipulation by the Fed and energy industry in collusion which has masked this problem), I am going to have to completely disagree with him. This is because I disagree that we do not have the technologies available to get off oil. We have them all. I have had electric remote control cars since I was 5 years old, 30 years ago, and ever since then I have wondered why they can’t make remote control cars that are big enough for real people. The answer? Because then us big people wouldn’t buy gasoline anymore.
It is VERY easy to retrofit any hybrid car and turn it into a plugin hybrid that does not use any gasoline for XX kilometers, after which the gasoline engine turns on. This would result in gasoline consumption easily dropping by something like 95% for the average person driving such a car.
How can anyone still believe that it is NOT market manipulation which is keeping these vehicles out of the public’s hand? Do you honestly believe that it is only now, in 2011, that technology has finally gotten to the point where the Chevy Volt could come to market? Come on… we could have done this 40 years ago if we had wanted to (more to the point, if our LEADERS had wanted to, those same leaders that have their fingers in the oil industry chips 'n dip).
I can open up the back of my Prius and see a huge wasted empty space that could be filled with batteries! Even 10 miles worth of range would make a huge difference, because most trips are short! It is absolutely absurd to believe that the reaosn Toyota is not doing this is because somehow the technology or economics will not support it. It would increase the price of a Prius by MAYBE $5000 at most, and that’s probably a large overestimate. If you truly believe it’s limitations on technology that have prevented Toyota from figuring out how to put a wall plug on its Prius for the last FOURTEEN YEARS, I have a waterfront condo in Florida you might be interested in buying… (and Toyota, I’ll donate a toaster oven that you can reverse engineer if you need some inspiration on how to figure out how connect wall plugs to appliances…)
It may be counter argued that we simply do not have the manufacturing capability to ramp up production of hybrids and EV’s fast enough to do this. I say HOGWASH!! What happened to the US automotive industry during the second world war? It was COMPLETELY commandeered and dedicated to making war machinery, it was one of the most awesome displays of what a country CAN manufacture, if it so desires and focuses all its attention on it. There is no reason why this could not be done now (at least on a technological level, but politically it’s very different because the oil industry is largely in charge of the show).
And conversely, how much effort is going to be required to suck every last drop of fossil fuels out of the ground, as the alternative strategy for the next 40 years that Chris is suggesting? I’d guess it’s probably on the same scale of “difficulty” as cranking out millions of EV’s. So which of these options should we choose – should we devote our valuable resources towards a massive government sponsored push to pull every last drop of fossil fuel out of the ground (with tremendous collateral damage to the environment and to other parts of the economy that directly depend on a healthy environment), or should we instead use our valuable remaining resources to support a massive government-sponsored push to crank out 100 million Chevy Volts, each one of which has bodywork covered with solar panels that enable it to drive 10 km a day for free, and along with this 1000 Watts of solar panels for each household in the US?
Which of those two scenarios is more fantastic?
