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| Piemonte! My family's origin. |
Just a short post today. I do keep up on many commodity indexes, and I have done my research lol - and played around with my own projections... on the topic of energy I have a few thoughts to share: in my humble opinion, contraction is every bit as important as growth as far as economic realities impact our selves and fellow travelers. Energy, unlike a shortage of oranges, is a big deal. Eventually whomever possesses it and controls it pretty much owns this place. That is until societies are forced to move on.
If you look at, and I encourage you to, B, OFW and EE, this is an old story. Hiram Rickover and his peers in the 1950's saw nuclear as a hope for an energy dense replacement for depleting oil. It didn't happen. It can't happen either. The numbers and the extraction rates of energy feedstocks and minerals vs the energy required to turn all of this to support a continuing lifestyle of greed and consumption including all the so called alternatives although transiently useful (but not sustainable) are merely additions (but not substitutions) so sadly this has not so far produced the silver bullet. So - as predicted so many years ago - huge shortfalls dead ahead.
So we have the same societal collapse post peak energy situation in front of us that we've known about for 3 or 4 generations. Truly a slow train wreck - yep maybe the hard bite doesn't get felt for a couple more years but make no mistake, the collapse train has left the station and it is coming down the tracks toward us. Money and the aggregation of digital or paper "money" is simply an illusory promise that this economic system will continue to deliver "money" in exchange for goods. Goods you need. No matter how you look at it, that thing in your app doesn't have a guarantee of asset protection or acquisition. Perhaps some new thinking would define and encapsulate that idea that is not dystopian in nature. The trading systems we know of have long ago deleted the lenders down side risk - and that thinking is not part of any guarantee you have on an investment. Perhaps that is a problem that should be addressed as we scale down? Contraction is going to be the mathematical artifact of the next several generations. Maybe our governments filled with ivy league bureaucrats which have gotten used to spending "money" created out of thin air could require some be sent your way to keep your savings and investments from evaporating via inflation by adding "money" to your account to compensate for that inflation? I think there are innovative ways to evolve an economy and the way we think about trade. Maybe your elected people who are paid by you should be debating how this should work unfettered by special interests? Maybe they will honor the notion that your hard earned resources are yours and not a digital weapon used to bar access to, upon the whim of any dim witted prime minister's conditions... but I digress. Looking at you Canada. LOL.... Why do Nordic countries pay taxes and at the end of the year have no additional tax filing to correct (or fleece) a compliant population? How does that make sense when we have the all seeing AI, digital everything and techno-topian grand plans? In stead it appears that Western "thinkers" believe in acquiring other peoples stuff same as any good colonial power ever did. Why waste time and money peacefully coexisting when intimidation, coercive geopolitics and projection of force through your proxy's or the home team keep those profits (energy feedstocks) rolling in and under your thumb? Because this time it's different. The realization of where the World actually is, is well known to all the real players of any influence - has been for generations. Good old skulduggery and wicked alignments of old cooked up by spooky "thinkers" ain't gonna solve these problems - they are too big, too well known and too serious. Business as usual in foreign policy might make for some fantastic end results though. This time the energy crunch will make it clear there are no good options. Perhaps an enlightened, moral and ethical World will emerge after this energy driven reorganization about to unfold runs its course. We can hope and we can strive to help make it that way, although you may find yourself alone in that intent. My suggestion is to turn off your TV and internet and revert back to a flip phone.
LOL, in the near term there are a lot of things you can do to mitigate the sting. We have a garden - every year more of that organic produce gets consumed. Canned for winter and cooked into delicious dishes we curate. It has offset going out to dine almost completely because we can eat better by every measure and it's also driven the grocery bill to half! You can do it too. A few solar panels can bridge your residential electrical power needs for the next 15yrs or so, but alas, after that, when the useful life of those panels and batteries expires the next source of energy might be the sweat of your brow. It depends on how we move through and decide to manage de-growth and what new (enlightened or draconian) form of economics and thuggery tainted governments take. Data centers and digital anything needs a lot of energy to sustain - so that has a finite life and will actually soon compete for energy that can and should be used for other necessities. LOL, it's going to be a very different World in just one generation. The quicker we re-learn local, sustaining, and organic methods the faster we will transition to a the sustainable future. There are some obvious - profitable upon growth only - business adventures that won't take the news well.
"peace requires energy to achieve, maintain and regain once lost...." - Quincy Write 1942
So why the Piemonte flag? Its motto is: Fides Est Regni Tutela - Faith is the Protector of our Kingdom. I hope you have faith in God, because that will get you through.
AML
