Richter has provided more recent evidence to support a thesis which long-time energy analyst Gail Tverberg has been hammering on for a number of years: that cheap, easily accessible oil and gas have been used up; thus the costs for future fossil fuel based energy is going to climb steeply to the point where it will have dramatic impacts on the economy.
Because capitalism functions like a pyramid scheme that relies on future growth, the implications of this thesis for capitalism is staggering; so staggering that capitalists, who are addicted to this system because it provides them with so much wealth and power, refuse to face reality. (This scheme has worked for capitalists in the past because humans had not yet reached the finite resource limits that they are now approaching, nor have they been faced with impending climate destabilization.) It's very much like one of the end stages that have been described by Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross:
As the reality of loss is hard to face, one of the first reactions to follow the loss is Denial. What this means is that the person is trying to shut out the reality or magnitude of his/her situation, and begins to develop a false, preferable reality.Thus, they keep indulging in fantasies like migrating to other planets, or promising that technology will come up with new sources of cheap energy. One of their favorite fantasies is fusion energy--but the reality of cold fusion is far different. As physicist Tom Murphy expressed the enormous problems of fusion energy so well:
No one can truly say whether we will achieve fusion in a way that is commercially practical. If teams of PhDs have spent over 60 years wailing on the problem while spending tens of billions of dollars, I think it’s safe to use our fusion quest as the definition of hard. It’s a much larger challenge than sending men to the Moon. We have no historical precedent for an arduous technological problem on this scale that ultimately succeeded to become a ho-hum commercial reality. But for that matter, I don’t think we have any precedent for something on this scale that has failed. In short, we’re out of our depths and can’t be cocky about predictions in either direction.
