Before oil, we had whale fat. Great for oil used in lamps. So good we hunted them to near extinction.Wealth creation is actually the extraction, conversion and consumption of energy. All other forms of wealth are merely derivatives that are layered on top of and powered directly by the underlining energy infrastructure of society/civilization. For billions of years, through a process of photosynthesis and thanks to the natural energy from our closest star the sun, our planet has steadily built up a massive reserve of energy, mainly in the form of hydrocarbons underneath the ground. And yet in less than 150 years since the industrial revolution began, we have globally already consumed more than half of all available hydrocarbons and nearly all of the sweet crude, high density EROEI, and other easy-to-extract low-hanging-fruit energy sources on earth. The implications are indeed foreboding.
Modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the energy is gone... purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and high quality energy and the assumption that it would always be the case.
Pertaining to the “Energy Cliff”, modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...
The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slowdown means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself...
Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was an EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, it’s just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says it’s still half full...
Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a Petri dish right before it encounters rapid die-off as it hits its resource constraints...
... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the global energy is gone... the purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and abundantly high-quality energy (and the work/productivity multiplier derived thereof) and the assumption that it would always be the case of remaining exercisable into perpetuity.....
Civilisation didn't collapse when whale stocks went low, we started using petroleum oil and gas.
If oil or gas ever run low, we'll switch to nuclear, wind, solar and or geothermal. All of those are being underutilised because of the cheap price of fossil fuels.
Are you a boomer?
