by dcoyne78 » Wed 20 Dec 2017, 18:51:52
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', '&')quot;The unnecessary bells and whistles ironically comes from economics. Put simply, we have an economic system measured in terms of money but dependent on energy and material resources. The first keeps growing through financial speculation while the latter becomes less available due to EROEI. The title thread implies that by creating more money we can reverse a downward trend in EROEI. That's not going to happen."
BRAVO!
As for being a Believer, well you all seem to easily believe the Mainstream authorities and Media. You also BELIEVE, the Etp is wrong as you are not able to interpret its more technical/mathematical formulations nor have you offered any disqualifying evidence beyond references again to the Mainstream communiques.
Then you try to convince us that Economics trumps physicis and biophysical conditions. Sorry it does not. Ultimately, economics is simply a way to measure what is happening related to resources and to allocate and distribute them in pre-planned ways. The Etp has tried to transcend this limited economic perspective and get at the status of the resource involved in this case OIL.
A major shortcoming of the ETP analysis is that it looks at only a single energy source- oil.
For an economy to operate it clearly needs energy, but to claim the economy will be "shorton energy", we would need to look at all energy sources, not just a single source of energy.
Oil is a very convenient form of energy relative to coal an natural gas and would be valuable even if it was only an energy carrier and only had an EROEI of 1. As long as other forms of energy (natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar) have a combined EROEI that is high enough for the economy to function, the physics works out fine.
The economic system simply allocates the resources so that they are used as efficiently as possible to provide for the needs of the population again all of this run onthe basis of a market system with some measure of government regulation for externalities, public goods, and natural monopolies.
The system is far from perfect, we just have not found something better.