Great chart.
What we need to do now, or more likely, starting 10 years ago, is to lever petroleum into the next big thing. Solar is nowhere near a point of self-replicating (that is, at least ~50% more power generated than consumed over the real world service lifetime, including all related infrastructure).
What a shame for the real estate bubble, for it has inflated the energy requirements in the US and elsewhere, and inflated the size of the long distance commute system.
Jarad Diamond's book (Collapse...) has many examples of where favorable conditions (frequently agriculturally) leads to a population explosion. Then when the favorable conditions vanish (drought, or in our case, decline of worldwide power capacity), collapse can occur. Not like last fall in the stock market. Famine, starvation, population decline, sometimes precipitous.
It's all rather sad to read about how many times it has occurred and how abruptly societies tended to plunge over the edge with the full knowledge that they were headed there.
The grandest irony to me of all ironies is that for the money the US has "invested" in controlling the middle eastern oil, we could have created a domestic energy supply that is simply huge. What would the current investment be, about 500 billion dollars? 1 trillion? Kind of staggering to see the choice made. Wonder what China has done with it's last 1 trillion dollar investment? It ain't war, that's for sure. |
