Energy shortage effect on economy

I see a strange coincidence between when coal production peaked (hit its maximum production before declining) in the United Kingdom and when World War I broke out. There was an equally strange coincidence between when the highest quality coal peaked in Germany and when World War II broke out. A good case can be made that inadequate energy supply is associated with conflict and fighting because leaders recognize how important an adequate energy supply is.

ourfiniteworld

The fallacy of supply-side eco activism

Fake eco-activists: "No pipelines, keep it in the ground"

Saudis: "Here's $10 billion to make more petrol"

Saudi Aramco signs contracts worth $10 bln to expand U.S. refining: "Saudi Aramco signed agreements with Honeywell UOP and TechnipFM valued at $US8-10 billion for expanding chemical production and potentially building a complex along the U.S. Gulf coast."

There will be no "keep it in the ground" until there are no customers.

Green-energy hoax exposed

Environmental supply-siders

If supply is the water coming over the falls, demand is gravity. In economics demand is everything. There is a lot of writing about how people are brainwashed in to being consumers. But think about it. That is a wealthy-persons outlook. Poor people do not need adverts to tell them they need heat in winter.

Just as gravity drives the waterfall, demand drives the economy.

If you believe that supply-side is "voodoo" economics, then would you support supply-side environmental action?

Yet that is what all the Big Enviro orgs are doing. Trying to block or stop the water falling down.

Let's look for what policies or actions take away customers.

Let's make cities car-free and attractive and encourage birth rates to drop faster.

Supply-side environmentalism has failed. Give it up.

A majority of Trump voters want more buses. But the anti-Trump forces are focused on such things as stopping pipelines, calming traffic, and divesting.

Trump and his likes get power from hate and profit-seeking, true, but there is a much more powerful force behind him that is openly discussed, but not in front of the public.

That force is the tsunami of people, at least a billion, who want to live like suburban Americans. What if you got a billion retweets for cutting emissions? You wont.

People do not want to hear that they have to cut back. They don't see rich people doing it.

There is a solution. Give people an alternative to sprawl. Give them car-free cities. This can be accomplished at the local level.

Can't have both

Oceans are turning acid, methane is releasing, currents are changing. There may still be time to save our species, but, unfortunately, the profit system still has the upper hand.

The hope of renewable energy seems logical, until you look at the details. Most renewable energy systems require quite a bit of fossil-fuel support. But there is a more dangerous problem. Hoping for technology breakthroughs is giving a false sense that solutions are coming.

As renewable energy is added to the for-profit inputs, it extends the life of the current system. It does not reduce the use of fossil-fuel, because all savings are immediately absorbed into the growth machine.

There is a solution that hits the Achilles heel of growth. First, make urban buses fare-free. Second, make cities car-free. This will break the critical mass of the private auto and sprawl. As people urbanize, the birth rate falls. There will be room for permaculture in the city, and the suburbs can become organic farms.