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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doc Bones who wrote (85179)

5/24/2007 3:32:26 AM

From: elmatador

Respond to of 206106

Doc, we are discussing the very basics of what made us rich. "Those countries and governments that had early access to these inexpensive energy resources were able to develop their economies rapidly. The availability of cheap energy has allowed many of the commodities of life to be produced at low cost. This applied particularly to food production. For example, grain production could be highly mechanized with fewer people needed in this area of food production, but at a high cost in the use of fossil fuel [see Table 1].

With the advent of high yielding cereal varieties, world grain production increased four fold but only with massive increases in the use of fossil fuels and electricity. The improved yields were largely a result of direct and indirect inputs of oil in machinery and production and transport of fertilizers and other inputs. The energy use efficiency was however, markedly reduced in modern agriculture as compared with traditional systems .

"In terms of future development, the availability of fossil energy resources is a major factor."

mekarn.org

Here enters the tropical belt. In one hand the tropical belt requires less energy to sustain life since it requires no heating for homes. In another, it can massively employ passive technologies to save energy.
Houses with the solar heating and energy efficient construction.

The northern hemisphere, in the new energy balance will lose competitivity vis a vis the tropical belt. It will always costs more to produce a given unit of GNP there than in the tropical belt.

You may say, why now and not before since the conditions prevailing in the tropical belt were there while the north was developing using cheaper energy.

1) They have a head start since the industrial revolution started there

2) They entered the demographic window way ahead of the countries in the tropical belt. en.wikipedia.org

3) Technology development, more widespread education, globalization, free flow of capital and goods... are late developments (appeared in the last 20 years)

I think the time is ripe for the tropical belt to start gaining advantage. They enter the demographic window in droves, while the northern hemisphere is going out of it.

Technology is now cheap and widespread and the educational level of tropical belt populations allows them to absorb these new technologies.

Add the energy bit on my equation here and you will see that costly energy puts tropical belt at an advantage.