Letters to the Editor
had_enough
Published Letters: 846 Editor's Choice: 50
-
@sunspot...it's even worse than that..
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]sunspot wrote:
But we'll burn through our remaining coal reserves in just a decade or two as a result, and at those fuel prices the economy is likely to be plunged into a permanent depression. Still, it may give us enough time for alternative technologies to be developed and deployed, or for the infrastructure to be retooled away from the automobile.
************
James Howard Kunstler ( www.kunstler.com ) makes the compelling case that in the United States we will desperately, then frantically, do everything to preserve our current insane way of living...a way of living that cannot possibly be sustained.
We will do this because any alternative will seem impossible. People hate change. There are people who will die before they change what they EAT. Humans may be adaptable, but they really hate change. You have to force them to it almost at the point of a gun.
I work in downtown Los Angeles. I can see the city all around, and I can tell you right now, without cheap fuel, this way of life is utterly unsustainable.
Redeploying new technology, and new infrastructure, assuming we can afford it, and have the energy to do it, is just a band-aid on a gaping wound. We are going to have to come up with an entirely new way of organizing society if we are to have any hope of sustaining our affluent, technologically advanced civilization.
People like Jay Hanson have been saying this for over 15 years. I urge you to take a look at his new site www.warsocialism.com. Lots of food for thought.
If we don't rearrange things pretty dramatically, we will simply fight to the death to sustain a totally unsustainable way of living. I'd rather re-arrange, myself.
-
@cdunlea... clearly your mind is made up, but...
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Look, you're still missing the point.
First, the use of fossil fuels and the growth of population is not just correlation, it's causation. Without fossil fuels, our population could never have grown to six billion. The Earth can't sustain that population without fossil fuels.
How is that? Because, contrary to your plain statement, we DO eat oil and coal. Modern hydrogen fertilizers require massive amounts of natural gas and oil to manufacture. We've been eating coal, and oil and natural gas for nearly 100 years.
There is no other way to make a fertilizer that will allow the growth of the massive amounts of food a planet of 6 billion needs.
Not to mention..just how do you think we prepare the soil, plant the crops, and harvest, store, and transport them? All with big machines that use oil. You aren't going to power a bulldozer on solar, just as you're not going to be able to make the magic fertilizer with nothing but cow shit.
Fossil-fuels made the rapid transport of food to major population centers possible...when it starts to get a LOT more expensive to transport that food, and grow it, we're in very big trouble.
Without fossil fuels, food production goes to something like a 1/4th the amount per acre we grow now.
That, all by itself, is something no technology can fix. Without the fossil fuels, we can't grow the food.
And you can't be serious when you say that fossil fuels aren't responsible for the rise in life-span and drop in infant mortality. They're *totally* responsible. Modern medicine would not exist without cheap energy. The dense, easy-to-use energy contained in fossil-fuels.
I'll concede, my comment about the Bronze Age was, perhaps, an exaggeration. But when 6 billion people start competing for the last of the energy resources, just where the hell do you think we're gonna end up? Hm? You think we're all gonna make nice?
I wish.
And you still haven't addressed my point that we have MANY more people here now then we did in 1795. Tell you what, you take energy use per-capita, worldwide, in 1795, and you divide that energy-use among the 6 billion on the planet today, and what to you get? Why, I bet you get approximately the world-wide per-capita energy use of someone in the Bronze Age!
You think?
Sure, it's just a thought-problem, I don't have the numbers to back it up.. but it's an interesting thought problem, isn't it?
Finally... in order to think about this entire problem clearly, you cannot monetize energy. That's one big reason why we're IN this mess. Modern economists monetized everything, including energy. Well, the problem there is that without energy, you got nothin'. And I mean nothin'. The worst thing we ever did as a society was to monetize energy. Natural to do in a capitalistic economy, but it was still a deadly error.
the day it takes more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel out of the ground, is the day our entire modern political economy grinds to a halt. And disintegrates.
Tell you what, when you tell me how we're supposed to support 6 billion people with the total amount of energy available in 1795, to the entire world, I'll pack my bags and go. But, so far, you haven't explained just how in hell we're gonna do that.