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This guy is ignoring the twin elephants in the living room: the unbelievably massive amount of energy that we obtain from fossil fuels, and the reliance on the
by api 15y ago
This guy is ignoring the twin elephants in the living room: the unbelievably massive amount of energy that we obtain from fossil fuels, and the reliance on the modern financial system on continuous growth simply to maintain the status quo.
These are linked issues.
All fossil fuels will peak this century. It's not politics... it's physics. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. Actually, I suspect they will all peak before 2050. Many knowledgeable people think oil has already peaked.
Peaking doesn't mean running out, it means exponentially declining EROEI (energy return on energy invested). There's plenty of oil left, but when it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil we are out of oil.
Nothing except maybe nuclear has the muscle right now to fill the gap for electricity generation. Just try to sell that now, post-Fukushima. Nothing except biofuel can presently fill the gap for transportation, and it is dubious that biofuels can scale to those levels.
Does this mean apocalypse? I'm actually not a "doomer" per se. But consider this: as we pass peak on all fossil fuels, the vast majority of our surplus energy and labor will have to go to simply treading water and maintaining our standard of living in the face of rapidly declining energy availability. There's also going to be a lot of demand destruction: people buying less, traveling less, using less.
All that does spell doom for our financial system. Even a short interruption in growth results in financial catastrophe, since without continuous growth you get a wave of debt defaults.
It could be a very chaotic century.
Edit: but on the upside, there's going to be a ton of entrepreneurial opportunities around saving energy, making energy, and storing energy. Personally I think IT isn't where it's at... if I wanted to get back into entrepreneurship now (and I might in the future) I'd get into something energy-related.