by MonteQuest » Tue 20 Jan 2009, 14:16:47
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Electric_Economy_2025', 'M')Q,
I think you hit the nail on the head with your slow decline theory, I would like to know what you think about these thoughts.
Do you think/believe it is possible to have everything happening at the sametime?
Meaning can we see a world where the rich change to new technologies to keep their way of live the same or better and at the sametime the rest of the world changing back to a simpler way a life with less energy use.
Sorry. I do not believe there is a techno-fix; not for even the rich. The exponentiality of the technological fix is a one-way ticket to disaster for life and for the planet. It is Cargoism.
As Catton writes in his book Overshoot, "People continue to advocate further technological breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many minds for"de-colossalization" to be a really feasible alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to apply remedies that aggravate the problem."
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') see America and all first world countires becoming like third world countries, where the mass of the people live poor to stay alive and to make life eazy for the rich, in the end I believe people will become the new source of cheap energy until the rich use technology to free the world of work by human hands.
I disagree. Peak Oil will control our destiny.
The decades to come will see many things that are now done by machines handed back over to human beings, for the eminently pragmatic reason that it will again be cheaper to feed, house, clothe, and train a human being to do those things than it will be to make, fuel, and maintain a machine to do them.
Peak oil will force people to view the world differently, to a degree almost unimaginable to those who scarcely understand the concept just now.
Being 'green' and 'environmentally friendly' will have next to nothing to do with it. Being 'rich' might not help much either, although it probably will not hurt.
However, it may end up a better world as we return to simpler, healthier and more community oriented lifestyles. Priorities will shift to self-sufficiency and sustainability.
A culture of quantity to a culture of quality.