Ignore the current glut of oil on the market today. It's the long term, at least two decades ahead, that is of concern in this article about energy.
Heinberg has been warning us of the diminishing supplies of economically extracted fossil fuels for many decades, while advocating more reliance on renewable energy. This lengthy article is a kind of summary of all that he has learned over these many years. What I think is really significant about this article, and many others like it especially among people who get published at this website, is the strange avoidance of pursuing a well-developed logic to its logical conclusion. Earlier in the article he made this prescient statement:
What are the right questions? The first, already noted, is: What kind of society can up-to-date renewable energy sources power? The second, which is just as important: How do we go about becoming that sort of society?Unfortunately, he eventually arrives at only a very timid answer to his very important questions:
As we’ll see, once we begin to frame the picture this way, it turns out to be anything but bleak.
...it’s fair to assume that this overall shift would constitute the end of consumerism (i.e., our current economic model that depends on ever-increasing consumption of consumer goods and services). Here again, there are more than a few people who believe that advanced industrial nations consume excessively, and that some simplification of rich- and middle-class lifestyles would be a good thing.This same, strange phenomenon is also found in another article posted on Resilience, an associated website, entitled "A New Theory of Energy and The Economy - Part 1 - Generating Economic Growth" authored by another long-tine expert on issues of energy--Gail Tverberg. This is another overly complicated essay exploring the relationship between energy and the economy in which the economic system is a given, sort of a natural fact of history, instead of a system created by a class of people who imposed it on others. She writes:
The economy is a self-organized system. In other words, it grew up gradually over time, one piece at a time. New businesses were added and old ones disappeared. New customers were added and others left. The products sold gradually changed. Governments gradually added new laws and removed old ones. As changes were made, the system automatically re-optimized for the changes.This strange avoidance of recognizing the actual economic system by both authors suggests to me that they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalist controlled academia that they cannot see the obvious. In college sociology courses I learned that this was due to "trained incapacity". Herman Kahn gives a lengthier explanation of this phenomenon. Of course, there is another possible explanation--self censorship to protect their careers.
This does not bode well for social change that can lead to real solutions to the crises now facing all capitalist societies. Prof. Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre put this well when he remarked:
It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.” [quoted in The Guardian]
