From: Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Some of you will have seen a recent article in Scientific American.
I archived the Scientific American article at:
http://dieoff.com/page140.htm
ENERGY BASICS
We use up or "waste" energy in systems that supply energy -- such as
oil-fired power plants. Energy is wasted when exploring for oil, building
the machinery to mine the oil, mining the oil, building and operating the
power plant, building power lines to transmit the energy, decommissioning
the plant, and so on. The difference between the amount of energy
generated and the amount of energy wasted is known as the "energy profit".
By definition, energy "sources" must produce more energy than they
consume -- must produce a profit -- otherwise they are called "sinks".
BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
As far as I know, there has been no study that shows the US economy
could be run on solar technologies. Here one that shows we can't:
http://dieoff.com/page84.htm .
During the next hundred years, the energy profit for fossil fuel plants
(oil, gas, and coal) will become negative. It is fundamentally impossible
to provide a constant level of energy while aggregate energy profit drops.
Keeping the production of goods and services at current levels will require
more energy than we now generate. To have more energy in the future means
that energy must be diverted now from non-energy sectors of the economy into
energy generation. In other words, once oil "peaks", the world will
experience declining standards-of-living (as measured by per-capita energy
consumption) for at least the following fifty years. Can global Capitalism
run backwards for fifty years? FAT CHANCE!
What economists have been calling the "Valhalla Economy" is falling apart
NOW: was Asian miracle, now Asian nightmare. I suspect it is due to
declining natural resource quality. When resource quality is defined in
terms of energy investment, the record clearly shows that quality is
declining across almost the entire spectrum of resources. From 1972 to
1982, the fraction of GDP allocated to natural resource extraction grew from
four percent to ten percent.
Joseph Tainter has studied about two dozen failed civilizations and found
that the key to their success is ENERGY. Human civilizations collapse when
they become too complex for their energy base. Our present civilization
became too complex for it's energy base when it came to rely on fossil fuels
for life. After that, it was just a matter of time....
[ See COMPLEXITY, PROBLEM SOLVING, AND SUSTAINABLE SOCIETIES,
by Joseph A. Tainter, 1996 http://dieoff.com/page134.htm ]
What can be done to avoid the "crash"? Under Capitalism -- one dollar, one
vote -- nothing.
Jay
