Global Madness

In politics, perception is the rule but in science, it is dangerous. The government sometimes pushes solutions that are nothing of the sort in order to satiate a public all too sure that solutions hang like apples from trees. One only needs the will to pick them.

In a talk I once gave on the problems with renewable energy technology, a woman became so frustrated that she said that the government was purposefully denying technology from the public in order to help the oil companies. It's an all too common complaint, even in our educated society. What was most troubling was that this person was a trained scientist.

The idea is very simple. The luxury that we enjoy depends on high yield energy sources. With oil and coal, you can get 4 times as much energy as you put into it. That's a 400% yield. That affords us a lot of extra energy to spend it on items we need but do not produce energy, e. g., home electronics, nice clothes, fast cars, air conditioning. Going to something less than petroleum based sources as a basis for your national energy usage, means, necessarily, a contraction in living standard.

Actually, the quality of oil in terms of overall yield has been steadily going down since the late 60s. However, our effieciency has increased dramatically, masking the decrease. We've gotten better in not only deriving energy from fossil fuels but in all processes in our society. We saw an explosion in wealth in the 90s not due to more oil being found but to the impact of cell phones and the internet.

Oil will not run out suddenly, it will slowly get more rare and more expensive and we will either keep finding new efficiencies or we will have to contract our living standard.

My former teacher in this subject has written a good book called "The Prosperous Way Down". A bit academic but accessible.