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Page added on September 15, 2015
Peak oil, the next Kondratiev cycle, generational turnings, and ERE
If you’ve read practically all my posts and all the forum posts as well, you’re probably aware of the fact that one of the early catalysts for my own trajectory to what became ERE was my discovery of peak oil(*) in 2001. (I attribute the other two catalysts to the idea of anticonsumerism and fractional reserve banking.)
(*) I was fairly involved in this. For a time, I was the webmaster on the referenced site. I wrote a chapter for The Final Energy Crisis and I had what, at the time, was a top ranking site. This was at a time when coming sky-high oil prices was still thought of as a nutjob conspiracy and generally denied by agencies like USGS and IEA. Then in 2007-08 oil prices hit ~$150 and in 2010, the IEA came out with a 180 and admitted, that “hey, maybe resources on a finite planet aren’t infinite after all and the economic idea that demand will always create demand is a bit of a pipe dream—sort of similar to the story of an economist who jumps out of an airplane and start calling out bids, $50, $100, $500, $4000, $10,000 … under the presumption that a sufficiently large amount will cause a parachute to materialize on his back.
The three sites linked above was my primary wake-up call to realizing that the economic linear-progress StarTrek future I had envisioned may not be so realistic or likely as I had previously assumed.
I immediately started making fairly drastic lifestyle changes to prepare for this alternate future by practicing how to live on the reduced means of an energy-poor world. It was already clear back then that replacing oil and gas with alternative energy was pretty much a pipe-dream. There are simply FAR too many solar cells and windmills that needs to be build to compensate for the slide of output. Clue: You can’t solve meta-macro issues with something as simple as technology. Technology is not the [cause of the] solution. It is the [cause of the] problem!! What I mean is that technology creates a certain way of life. That technology can not be replaced with other technology and be expected to preserve this way of life—it will create a new way of life.
If you asked me ten years ago, how I saw the future, I was preparing for the eventual Mad Max scenario. Today I am far more optimistic. I have shown that one can live a very good life on a quarter of the resource use of an average American family. (This realistically compares to the energy use of our grand parents, thereabouts.)
I have not spent the past decade with an idle mind. Ten years ago, I didn’t know anything about economics. I knew little about history (other than as a list of memorized facts about kings and wars—the way I was taught history was in a sense similar to trying to understand a forest by a deep study of the limb of a tree, a mushroom, and a random bird; I was taught nothing about the connections.) Today, I’d like to think I’m somewhat wiser.
Also, I do not think the world is going to end. “The world as we know it” may end, but it’s going to happen so slowly that only a few deep thinkers (who suffer from the affliction of worrying about things they can’t change anyway) will see it. Yet, following the Eisenhower ideal of making a strategy or plan not in order to follow exactly but as a tool to think deeply about possible outcomes, I’ll plod along…
What we’re currently experiencing is not the end of the world. It is simply the winter stage of the Kondratiev cycle. The current Kondratiev cycle is built on cheap oil. This means things like globalization, personal cars, mass production, and generally cheap crap—excuse me “snazzy throwaway electronic toys” for everybody—predicated on planned obsolescence. Energy is cheap (but won’t be any longer) and with cheap energy comes cheap resources. Humans being what they are will happily waste cheap resouces. Incidentally humans aren’t unique in that sense. Pretty much any species will try to use resources as fast as they can. That’s because pretty much all creatures including humans have absolutely no foresight as a species. Anyway …
The current Kondratiev cycle began in 1949 and will likely end sometime between now and 2020, maybe 2025. We can call this “the cheap oil era”. The previous era was built on the chemical industry (plastic fantastic, war gas) and electricity (domestic lights, motors). The one before that on steel and railways. The one before that on steam power. The one before that on timber (which pretty much deforested many countries).
Each Kondratiev cycle lasts about 60 years plus minus a decade. There’s a generational theory behind this too. The winter season is the end of the cycle. This is the time when the system collapses under its own weight. We currently see the collapse of the financial system. The political system is also in dire straights. Traditional means of understanding no longer works but it takes some time for the old generations to realize that. They’re too calcified in their understand because they believe that since it’s been this way since they were born, it’s the only way. In particular, the young generation (Millenials) no longer see politics and red vs blue or left vs right. They see the two as essentially being the same thing (which it actually now is). The financial system has the same problem. Before the crash, the financials comprised 20%+ of the entire US economy. There you have an industry which essentially produces nothing but a governing system that determines where your money goes alongside with a government which by definition only makes things which the private market refuses to suply because the ROI is negative comprising over 50% of the entire. It’s bound to collapse.
The GI Joe generation came into being after WWII. That generation worked hard to build institution after a world that had razed the previous system in the analogy of what a fire does to a mature forest. Interestingly enough major wars rarely happen during the Winter season (1929-1949)—however, keep in mind that the instigator of WWII, namely Germany was an economic powerhouse at the time having moved into Spring season. Most wars occur during spring when nations start growing and competing for resources.
We will have some form of global war between 2020 and 2040. I’m calling it! This war will be between the current superpower and the next superpower for the next resource (not oil). In particular, it will be in a form that reflects the form of the next Kondratiev cycle. As you recall, the current one was industrial mass production and global transporation. Hence WWII was a Total War with the goal of large scale destruction. World War III will not be like this.
The GI Joe generation was followed by the baby boomer generation. The baby boomers worked hard to support the GI Joe vision (UN, IMF, the European Uninion, social security, Medicare—all mass (<=- yes, it was all mass-scale thinking) institutions for the purpose of ensuring that the Great Depression and WWII wouldn’t be repeated. The boomers eventually become managers. In turn their advice to Generation-X was to work hard. All generations give the advice they received along to the next generation where it obviously won’t work. It’s like having a weed plant tell a tree that all it needs to do to succeed is to spread and grow as fast as possible. That’s incorrect. A tree needs to grow slow and solid. While being advised to work hard in order to succeed, Gen-Xers found their jobs outsourced, being replaced with robots and global labor and competing with their cohort for jobs that usually receive anywhere between 50 and 500 applications. Cronyism, networking, politics and other factors replaced “old-fashioned” virtues like hard work and skill. People realized they needed to start gaming the system in order to win. The financial mess where in now is a prime example of what happens when that attitude becomes dominant. This also explain why different generations have such different takes on what “retirement” means. GI Joes are rightfully concerned with spending all their lives trying to make sure that the previous disasters never happen. Boomers think that having put in their hard work, retirement is the time to have fun. Gen-X thinks of retirement as having enough money to say “Fuck you” to a system they feel screwed them over. Millenials weren’t told any lies but on the other hand they aren’t receiving any hope either. They’ll see Gen-X as the overseers of this collapse. Henceforth, Gen-X will have a poor legacy in the future as having made the choices (slashing SS, Medi*) that are needed for the system to survive. Humans tend to blame the helmsman for the storm. And the president for the economy. I’m sorry it has to be this way, but this is the way it is. Moving forward, the generation that hasn’t come into play yet (Z, your average ten year old) will determine the form of the next cycle. X will be the cranky real-politik politicians, and Y/Millenials will be the managers. This will likely not be a cycle in which massproduced technology will be an answer to everything. You can stop hoarding money and supplies right now because they won’t be the answer going forward. One possible solution with be the global relationships formed by the internet. Tribes, clans, or what have you. World War III might very well be a propaganda war concerning which cultural understanding should be the dominant one. I’m not kidding you. This may well be the way things go down. Just as the previous cycle would think of the use of weapons of mass destruction as incomprehensible and we see the idea of soldiers lining up 100 yards from each other and proceeding to launch disciplined rifle volleys at each other without taking cover as proper military conduct; the next form of war will be seen as “plain weird”. People are always preparing for the last war. Similarly, people are preparing for the previous depression. We’re hoarding money and supplies, but in reality, that’s probably not what we should be concerned about. Rather we need to think about what the next Kondratiev cycle will focus on and concentrate our energies in that direction. Forward, not backward. Specifically, this means moving away from a lifestyle that’s intensive in energy (driving, living far away, buying products from far away), massproduction (buying products instead of thinking and improvising), and quantity (more and bigger instead of longer and better). It means that there will be less opportunity for the frivolous waste of commodities that has characterized the era since 1949. Houses will be smaller and closer. Life will be more localized. Specialization will decrease. This, of course, is what ERE is all about.
22 Comments on "Peak oil, the next Kondratiev cycle, generational turnings, and ERE"
ghung on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 8:21 am
“It means that there will be less opportunity for the frivolous waste of commodities that has characterized the era since 1949.”
…. and what will all of those people involved in providing those ‘opportunities’ do? What percentage of folks (in the US especially) make their livings providing, marketing, trading, transporting, cleaning up after… all of those dispensable goods and services?
BobInget on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 8:39 am
Safe prediction on a ‘global war’ in the next five years.
Twelve years ago:
Americans traveled six thousand nine hundred miles to invade Iraq.
We managed to kill 500,000 Iraqis convincing them to keep selling oil to China.
Wikipedia:
An estimated 151,000 to 600,000 or more Iraqis were killed in the first 3–4 years of conflict. The United States officially withdrew from the country in 2011 but became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition; the insurgency and many dimensions of the civil armed conflict continue.
If that’s not ‘global’ enough, I can cough up a few more exampes.
Davy on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 9:00 am
I am not optimistic like the author. Pain and suffering are always a part of decay. Overshoot is what it is. Society is not prepared to go backwards and can’t go forward much more.
I am optimistic the worst won’t happen. I am optimistic that many of us will find purpose in the coming crisis. This is not the end of the world yet but it is the end of that world all of us have grown up with.
I am deeply worried about climate change. I feel we are in abrubt climate change now. We are two bad harvest away from famine being common in the world. We are a fuel shortage away from food insecurity and possible hunger even in rich countries.
The global economy is entering a vicious cycle of demand and supply destruction. It will likely not recover. A lower economic level will be our future. How low is debatable but we know what industries have no future post hydrocarbon abundence.
The only logical choice for any kind of significant mitigation of this predicament is a massive back to the land effort. Unfortunately this may have to be communes and camps. What other choice do we have unless we start adjusting now while we are still relatively rich. That will not happen because the elites have no interest in upsetting the status quo they will do everything they can to maintain.
We are also going to have to go back to locally produced necessities. Since most high quality resources are depleted especially per a reduced energy world we will have to do allot of salvage work. I am optimistic for a few years. I am not optimistic for civilization long term or our species a bit longer term then that.
joe on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 9:08 am
If only to save society was all of us to lose 50lbs, use Skype instead of flying and start focusing on living for today instead of focusing on a long and decrepid old age paid for by some young jerks I never heard of.
If the writer truly read the history books they would have read that chronic water shortages and overpopulation drove poverty and instability that destroyed the people of Ankor. That when Rome lost its monopoly of African wheat it’s over populated society imploded.
Try lifting a hot air balloon to 3000ft above the ground then cut your basket free. It’s not going to end well. By the time society realises the pickle it’s in, it will be too late, there will certainly be 7-11bln people in the world and no financial system to act as a means of exchange of value or labour, so the first thing that happens when a PILLAR COMMODITY vanishes (oil, wheat, gold, water) is that a media of exchange of value is lost so exchanges must happen physically, so people begin to move, as we can see already in Middle East and Europe. The next thing is resentment and instability, then conflict, then a period of fluid political dynamism, new ideas, and finally a settlement and establishment of a new order of political power (maybe, but not usually, peace). Spain and Portugal suffered the loss of their imperial power when they destroyed the human labour they enslaved in the Americas and Asia, all the gold they had gathered up became nothing but metal for decoration when it could no longer be used to buy slaves and achieve much profit from them versus the new and expanding financial systems of Britain and France who realised they could use fiat money instead of heaps of gold to pay for slaves. When the British Empire fell, the US simply continued it under another flag, and minus the less profitable bits, thus avoiding a need for a prolonged collapse, instead all we got was TWO WORLD WARS and a long series of global policing wars to regulate the empire. So as we face either a future of using less energy in order to share global resources, or, peak oil, the difference may only be academic as the average person faces the same thing, a decline in the energy available to them at X cost. To put it another way, energy MUST get more expensive, absent some new technology, or to put it yet another way, the cost of living must rise. Japan should be an example of a society that has chosen it’s path well. It has largely not given itself over to the option of failure that most of the world has followed.
When it maximised it’s profits with a young and vibrant workforce in the 1980s it did not succumb to the temptation of importing of cheap foreign labour to keep the party going instead it has stoically carried on, using its position as a US ally to access markets and allowed it’s people to live their lives largely unmolested by the greed sickness and love of excess that has infected the West. They are however slowly being won over the the wrong path, at the worst possible moment.
Russia used it’s victorious position to exploit rather then nourish the nation’s it found itself the master or, post WW2, it’s this model that most centers of power will try to follow in a lower energy future. As trade routes shift and move, cities in the middle east will empty as the cost of running A/C and pay for water will see the desert reclaim much of what is there now. Europe will probobly have its maps redrawn again as nuclear weapons politics is probobly going to prevent a war there, but there will be a drive to do ‘somthing’ with the Muslim population there. In the US it’s probobly the case that since nuclear war will only break out if a nation nukes another, any attempts to break up the union will likely be met with threats from Washington that nukes could be used, without fear of a Russian response. Sound impossible? I can imagine a Plutocrat like Trump saying he would use them if he thought it would aid his ends. Trumps are the future, not the past, of US politics.
BobInget on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 9:34 am
Is there another poster who doubts Putin’s
resolve to defend Syria’s President Assad ?
Try diagraming.
Iran and Russia are determined to defend Syria.
The US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, are trying to bring down Syria’s army and sitting government.
All sides are fighting “Islamic State” (ISIL)
ISIL is winning. IS fighters live in the neighborhood. Russians, Americans don’t.
Now, suddenly no one wants any more Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, Sudanese, Libyan or
Nigerians.
Hungarian Fascists are freezing out
global war refugees.
Global wars generate global refugees.
Tens of thousands will die in the next seven months unless the West sends aid instead of tanks.
rockman on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 9:43 am
ghung – Exctly. A large portion of our society supports themselves providing such “frivolous” activities. Especially services. A point most of the “0problem solvers” ignore. All well and good to get rid of the unnecessary. But what are you going to do with those folks: deport them…kill them…pretend they don’t exist and let them go feral?
We have a very well constructed trap we’ve designed over the decades. It will take more then a bumper sticker mentality to deal with our evolving reality. At the moment our economy (except for the oil patch) is getting a bit of a breather thanks to lower oil prices. But in time that dynamic will again go negative. And IMHO there will be little or no significant effort to change the drive for BAU: the majority will demand the effort and the politicians will follow their orders.
ghung on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 10:22 am
Yeah, Rock, what baffles me is how folks ignore the systemic nature of complex societies. I think every highschool student should be required to take a course on MOL (minimum operating levels). Just as you can’t reduce the flow of oil in the Alaska pipeline to 100,000 barrels a day while expecting to keep the oil flowing, maintain the pumps, heaters, valves,, all that. Reducing the flow of goods and capital through all of our systems will have the same effect. Feedbacks ensue, mitigation and adjustment strategies can’t be paid for, these changes must occur in real time, and eventually all of these systems begin to shut down. Cut highway traffic by half and the highways don’t get maintained. Cut electrical use by 3/4 and the grid begins to fail due to lack of investment. Of course, those who previously did the work stop spending in the coffee shop down at the corner…..
That’s how collapse will play out. As all of our various systems drop below their MOL, they get abandoned, with all of the cascading knock-on effects.
There will be no managed contraction. We have to keep going; burning stuff until all supports fail. This is why I believe contraction is bound to accelerate over time.
Digging the hole ever deeper; that’s our lot, collectively. No going back (by choice). Trap, indeed.
beamofthewave on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:03 am
I just wish the government would be honest about the predicament and harness the resources of the country to deal like they did with rationing during ww2, victory gardens etc. everyone working together as a nation to deal.
ghung on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:16 am
Beam said: “I just wish the government would be honest about the predicament…”
They wouldn’t be “the government” for long, not in today’s environment of delusion and entitlement. Besides the risk of stampeding the herd (low, IMO, since folks these days believe what they want), people don’t vote for Cassandras.
The WWII “Greatest Generation” came out of a decade of being tempered by depression, and there was a clear and present danger, especially after Pearl Harbor. Things are very different these days.
Makati1 on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:17 am
I didn’t get far into this article before I saw the unicorns peaking out of the words and stopped reading.
In the real world:
I haven’t checked this out but, it seems accurate.
“21,995,000 to 12,329,000: Government Employees Outnumber Manufacturing Employees 1.8 to 1” (US)
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/21955000-12329000-government-employees-outnumber-manufacturing
Now how many jobs are actually necessary in the US? And what happens when the Federal, State & Local governments lose tax income, as they ALL are? Add in the food stamp crowd, the unemployment insurance crowd, the welfare crowd, the disability crowd, and yes, the Social Security crowd and the total supported by the various governments is staggering.
When the economy collapse’, and it will, what is going to happen to the service crowd that do not provide a ‘necessary’ service?
When no one can afford a $3 SB coffee or a Big Mac meal, or a dog groomer, or a stylist, or have need of a financial adviser or an economist or a banker or a professor of literature or ….
What do YOU do for a living?
BTW: Age old professions like prostitution will continue, along with their pimps, as long as humans last, that is.
ghung on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:17 am
…. besides, that was just a World War.
Davy on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:26 am
G-man, I try to get this across to the cornucopians when they crow about growth. My point has been the growth they are crowing about may or may not be quality growth and or it is not enough growth for systematic “minimum operating levels”. Time is a factor also on quality adequacy and minimum operating levels.
If MOL is not reached entropic decay sets in at some point. Currently we need to consider this with the vital oil patch. Once decay starts the slow and insidious economic abandonment, dysfunctional vital networks, and irrational policies begins. This is the demand and supply destruction scenario that is likely occurring currently.
These examples are why the cornucopians cannot use growth figures as if they are true to reality. They are just abstract representations that have a use but they are not reality. Once must look at quality and level of growth. One must look at resilience and sustainability of that growth. Finally is it real growth or just bad debt without any value other than distorting the growth figures in the first place.
zaphod42 on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:42 am
Essentially we all seem to be recognizing that we need a new paradigm, having a lower MOL. That is why “going local” is finding its place. It works.
And we can be fairly certain that in some locations, currently inhabited by man, all life will vanish.
On other sites today I have seen reasonable predictions that 10,000 or more ‘refugees’ may die; above we saw an assertion that 500,000 Iraqis died during our misguided adventure there.
I look to the lesson of St. Matthews Island reindeer as a possible evolutionary response to man’s overshoot.
Craig
ghung on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 11:57 am
I’ve been listening to Jeffrey Brown interview at Peak Prosperity (I think Ap posted the link)…
http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/94378/jeffrey-brown-understand-oil-story-need-understand-exports
…. and Jeff talks about decoupling quality-of-life from income level and consumption. I speak from experience that quality-of-life improved in our home as our consumption and spending fell.
That said, some folks, somewhere, have seen their incomes decline as our consumption has been dropping. Tough shit. Maybe they’ll discover the magic of a better life through less, though they’ll have to get their minds right first.
Jerry McManus on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 12:59 pm
At the risk of nit-picking, the talk of Minimum Operating Levels (MOL) is usually more broadly applied to complex systems as Liebig’s Law, which can be stated as “a system is only as robust as its most scarce essential resource”.
I’ve frequently seen the law illustrated as a wooden barrel with slats of different heights. It doesn’t matter how high the largest slats are, the barrel will only hold as much water as the smallest slats will allow.
This can be directly related to the concept of carrying capacity. A population can only grow as large as the most scarce essential resource will allow. Keeping in mind that viable sinks for safely absorbing waste products is also an “essential resource”.
Us clever monkeys have been able to greatly expand our short term carrying capacity with the application of fossil sunlight dug up from the earth’s crust, although even now we are starting to see the consequences of overflowing our atmospheric sink with greenhouse gasses.
Eventually our combustible fossil trust fund will run dry, or more to the point will become far too costly to extract (and no I’m not talking about the price in worthless dollars), long term carrying capacity will reassert itself, and the excess population will be culled. Although, depending on how much damage is done to the environment before then, the remaining population on the other side of that bottleneck might be much smaller than many people suppose.
Another interesting parallel from the world of biology is the idea that complex organisms are highly susceptible to even relatively small amounts of damage. I don’t have a link handy, but I’ve seen somewhere that lab experiments have shown that an organism which is subjected to random periodic damage can still be as much as 90% or 95% intact before it ceases to become viable and dies.
Obviously it greatly depends on where the damage is done, war casualties inform us that some soldiers can have all their limbs blown off and still survive, while others sustain a single wound to the head or heart and die instantly.
Even so, it’s worth pondering what the equivalent would be in our complex society… How much damage would it really take, and in what critical system, to bring the whole mess down all at once? Some have suggested that if the electrical grid goes down it will take everything else with it.
Anyway, either way you look at it, collapse in our lifetime may not be as far fetched as some would have us believe.
Davy on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 1:22 pm
Jerry, good point bringing up Liebig. I see minimum operating level and Liebig law functioning together. For example with the economy and oil when demand destruction and supply destruction negative influence each other. MOL from slowing economic activity hits a critical level causing a resource to drop bellow an economic amount causing the whole system to bifurcate.
Davy on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 1:47 pm
Jerry, I guess what I am trying to say is minimum operating level is part of Liebig’s law with MOL being the action variable and the resource in question being the physical variable. We may have a scenario of adequate resources but velocity of activity goes bellow a minimum or we may have adequate velocity of activity but a resources level drops below critical levels. This is all a fascinating area of discussion because we are seeing a convergence of critical activity and resource levels currently in the global system.
peterev on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 4:16 pm
I see us having problems like the Roman’s did 1600 years ago where an elite sucked the life out of the working/middle class. The only difference is that I think we have more understanding of the world around us and we have alternatives that could be utilized that were unavailable to the Romans.
Makati1 mentioned the number of gov’t workers to manufacturing jobs. Automation plays a big roll in the number of people required to build a car (or motherboard, etc.) nowadays. It may even get to the point where each town could have something like this:
http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/open-source-design-is-changing-the-way-we-make-cars/ with only a couple of people required to build a car say at a dealership instead of mile long distant assembly lines but I’m not holding my breath. The car is real and runs. Not sure of the cost or the materials needed. The body is carbon fiber. Parts would have to come from recycling and/or be brought in.
I wonder if things like this will put a crimp into the LTG/ 4th Turning scenarios while addressing decreases in FF reserves, employing people locally, emitting less CO2 into the air, and where such vehicle could be modified to transport locally grown food?
I sounds cornucopia-ish but I’m just wondering at the possibilities. It seems like we view things as they are and not as they should be be. Ghung has pointed out that changing your meme is not that hard but it does take a redirection effort.
Makati1 on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 8:36 pm
peterv, no, machines, no matter how ‘sophisticated, will NOT make a difference in the 4th Turning. They will never be a significant percentage of manufacturing. Someone still has to make the machines, and they still require ore to be mined, refined and made into parts that wear out, etc.. Often the parts come from all over the world, as the US doesn’t make them anymore, and that too is creating a problem.
And, what major corporation is not bleeding all over the C.E.O.s office today? Car sales will continue to shrink. All optional consumption is contracting. Soon the level, where production of items will be unprofitable, will be reached and factories will close their doors, not ‘robotize’ and those who do may find the masses will destroy them when they realize what happened. Sabotage is easy in electronics.
Today is NOT different from the Romans except the dates. The life blood of the middle class is being siphoned away and into the bodies of the elite, until the middle class is dead. The elite planned it that way. I see no salvation for the middle class anywhere the world. The West will die and it will happen multiples faster than the Roman Empire.
apneaman on Tue, 15th Sep 2015 10:11 pm
peterev, the Romans knew what was happening. Every civilization that has come and gone had clear warning signs, yet did nothing to change. We have all the science and history and it is only exceeded by our arrogance, which is what we share with the others that came before us. Energy, environment, economy, by every metric we keep doing all the things we know we should not do if we wanted long term stability and it gets worse every year. Why is that? Are we stupid? Were they stupid? Why has every civilization before us disappeared? A study of the matter clearly shows we are making exactly the same mistakes and it’s global and existential this time. We are not capable of changing if it cost too much. Hard wired for the short term while smart enough to know we are committing suicide. Thats our curse – knowing, but unable to stop.
BC on Wed, 16th Sep 2015 11:00 am
Mak, good points. In terms of net energy per capita and inefficient distributional factors, the US is grossly OVEREMPLOYED in that there are WAAAAAAAY too many people drawing a paycheck doing nothing productive or working in low-paying, dead-end, soul-sucking, mind-numbingly-boring jobs and wasting time, energy, and their intellect sitting in traffic on the way to work or the mall.
This GROSSLY inefficient/wasteful process is required to sustain the obscene wealth and income inequality and the hierarchical system of upward flows of resources, production, income, wealth, and political power to the rentier top 0.001-1% at the top of the pyramid.
The bottom 90-99% can no longer afford the system of COLOSSAL waste and disproportionately unequal flows to the top 0.001-1%.
The top 0.001-1% to 10% have 40-85% of financial wealth and receive 20-50% of income. The top 0.001-1% have effectively disengaged from productive activities and do not need the economy to grow. The bottom 90%+ of society are now a cost per capita to maintaining BAU and the hierarchical system of upward net flows.
Davy on Wed, 16th Sep 2015 12:46 pm
Amen to that BC. Most of those people need to be back on the land producing food and or making vital tools and consumables. All of this is so simple as to be complexed for a society that is so complexed as to be simply absurd.