"And there will definitely be a final nail in a coffin, but it won’t be peak oil, it will be that of society’s. Releasing a sigh of relief, the capitalistic, profit-motivated neoclassical economic system will continue to try its best to work. It can only do this by borrowing heavily from the future. And that bubble will burst taking the whole of civilization with it. What the combination of shale oil (and gas), which will be of very limited duration by the way, and the TOD’s demise will have done is take the international consciousness off of the looming problem that really exists. Peak oil is only a secondary phenomenon, not the real cause of economic problems. The real problem is the energy cost that we are paying to eke out these last accessible drops of fossil fuels (and this goes for coal as well). The net energy (gross energy, such as barrel equivalents of oil, minus the energy costs) is in decline because the work needed to get the hard stuff out is starting to exceed the benefits. The peak oil phenomenon clearly exacerbates the problem. With the global population continuing to increase and the UN’s Millennial Goals creating an increasing demand for stuff (produced by energy) the net energy per capita is THE single most important energy problem in front of us."
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 12:00:08 +0000
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