Everybody should know about Nicholas Georgescu Roegen

 There have been many thinkers over the last century that understood the flaws in our Western view of economic frameworks.  Buckminster Fuller who I read as a university freshman was the first I read that started me on a path that opened my eyes to the obvious missing information in our financial machinations.  I kept on looking for the chapter in the econ books that read "Print More Money."  Suddenly, I realized that the whole story is a grand illusion.  That colored my cognition of lots of history and how the world really works.  But you have to be willing to test the narrative and find knowledge that is outside of the conventional indoctrination to climb higher and see what is over the next hill.   

Here is a link to one of NGR's papers, "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process." Even as an elementary school student, I intuitively felt that exploiting minerals and using up a finite supply of fuel had to some day create a big problem. In my young mind I didn't know this road had been explored by many. USN Admiral Rickover tried to bring awareness in the 1950's too.  But it seems nobody - NOBODY - wanted to break up the phenomenal party for a train wreck that was decades away.  A look at Steady State and Ecological Salvation is worth the read too. Finally, Energy and Economic Myths - a "have to" read.

Even early accounts can be cited in such places as the "Popular Mechanics - Dec 1910 V14 pp 827-832," caution is given that nobody knows how much of this stuff is around.  I have to laugh because J. Willway Treadwell an engineer made the claim in 1910 that "it's a diatomic process" meaning the Earth makes the stuff!  Well we've come along way since the oil derricks dotted the landscape in Bakersfield, California.  If the Earth does make it, we're burning it faster than it's made - witness the hundreds of thousands of dry wells all over the globe...

A few other thinkers you may not be aware of... perhaps you will be inspired to do a little research?

Mauro Bonaiuti

Ashish Kothari

Niko Paech

Kohei Saito

Jason Hickel

Giorgos Kallis

Serge Latouche

Sound familiar?

So we lack not for scholars who were influenced by reality which led them to reject the dogma and search for the missing data that makes the modern economic theories unsustainable fantasies.  But they were trying to crash the party before the beer ran out.  Nobody listened.

Energy is the whole economy, and we've been ignoring it institutionally in Western thought since the beginning.  A flawed concept which will have very unpleasant consequences in the not too distant future.  As far as I can tell Marxists and Capitalists have both been blind to the implications. What it appears we need is a new way of thinking - not Globalist with backwards facing oligarchs that want the game to continue, or monarchies just itching to get the serfs sworn in, but sustainism. No wars, equality, profitable pursuits based on neutral draw down and replacement of low density energy, common brotherhood where we all care deeply about each other.  

If you can find a copy of NGR's "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process" snag it!  

The harmonics of history

 It is a beautiful spring day, and as I enjoy the budding trees and the sight of green grass and all of God's creatures scurrying about I thought it may be a good time to take stock in the world around us and take a stab at making sense of the cover stories and the hoopla.  I'm particularly amused by the the revisionist media historical accounts from places like the BBC.  The fun never ends.  Resources.  Resources.

When the world was a much less populated place and virtually unconnected because of distance and as yet unknown technology, civilizations rose and fell largely on the fate of natural events such as the weather, the soils ability to sustain agriculture or influences like favorable solar cycles, floods or fires.  Not yet understood by the people of those times but the natural environment was basically the primary factor that provided success or doom.  Interesting to note, it wasn't universities, banks or technology.  Belief in those systems will come  later. As time and inventive cultures will evolve, a lack of awareness will lull may into thinking those brick and mortar creations hold all the answers and if only economics could provide the dollars - anything can be done.  Meh, crazy fantastical thinking, but your 401k needs a legion of believers to exist.  After all that investment is based on a promise of growth and those days are numbered.  What happens next for the industrial West doesn't look to good IMHO. Promises made doesn't always end up being promises kept.  

Back in time, as a drought might happen or some other resource pressure appear, a growing population had to find new ways to survive or perish in place.  There are a few options here.  Conquest or wars to capture some weak neighbor's resources were common.  Sometimes that worked for a short while but what if the drought extended out into the conquered land and lasted for many years? Problem. Even more so if depletion is exponential. When that happened historians often wonder how, why, where'd they go?  Lol, fast collapse doesn't leave a long trail to follow.

Here we have the emergence of another option. The invention of economics which becomes a one dimensional crude form of control - eventually finding the ultimate power projection partner - the military!  Colonialization or the systematic installation of projected force to send the resources of a conquered land back to the conquering empire emerges and it's still sticking around just with different words to describe it.  That idea has dominated cultures for hundreds of years or as long as the empire had energy to enforce the acquisition of and conversion of resources into something useful and then turn them into a mechanism for wealth and sustaining political power.  Technology makes its appearance and shazam, here comes a century of energy dependent innovation and the energy driven industrial age which convinced so many that the sky is the limit.  This is akin to believing the Earth's supply of energy is infinite.  Oopsie.  Economics didn't deliver - copious amounts of cheap energy and creative minds did.  Hmmmm, think about that! By the way, sustainable living doesn't yield control, power or financial aggregation. In fact it creates peace, harmony and equality. So the sociopathic among us would never go along with that.  Nothing has changed yet, don't expect it to either.  Sustainable living will emerge as a regional phenomena.  If history is any teacher governmental forms of sustainability were monarchies with serfs plowing the fields and a king throwing the banquets.  That's all we know. 

As the world got smaller and those once abundant resources got harder to find and what was left was of poorer quality something not very obvious to the average citizen was happening.  Economics as a philosophic arm of governance was loosing its relevancy.  Very few fringe intellectuals considered energy to be the underpinning requirement for sustaining the system and not financial machinations.  So as depletion of high grade resources went on, and depletion of low cost energy reserves continued there evolved a paradox.  Economics needs to grow.  Finite energy reserves will not allow this to happen indefinitely.  Under the phrase "once and done" we can be a bit existential and reflect that once that tank of fuel is burned, it is gone forever.  Fly in the ointment. This model is doomed to fail, conquest or not. So we have a modern day fault line of financialists vs industrialists.  Neither wanting to address the elephant in the room - depletion.  But both taking differing views on how to deal with global depletion of critical minerals and energy feedstocks and continue to make a buck. Because after all, the financial system doesn't have a solution for not making a buck. But I digress.

So as time went on and energy was abundant we grew as per economic dictate into an interconnected world more dependent on energy than ever and dominated by economics (which needs to grow by organizing cheap product manufacturing costs and selling those widgets at a profit to somebody) ignoring finite energy resources as well as refusing to acknowledge the high rate of depleting critical minerals etc.  When energy and resource quality deplete it is not unlike the ancient drought that no one expected that lasted for a dozen years...  Only the rain may come back - the hydrocarbons won't.  Once and done.  Here is an interesting take on a roadmap to adjust to this reality. Whenever you hear the words "net zero emissions" substitute the words "energy depletion" and you can make a bit more sense out of the thinly veiled exercise.  Well, if you are running out of coal, oil and natural gas I guess you are sort of correct in saying you'll soon be living in a zero emissions world. But it is a linguistic slight of hand IMHO.  The whole depletion reality is packaged in the climate mumbo jumbo as it sounds better and by golly economic "solutions" can still be promoted to keep the financialization game going for a while longer.  Unlike the past though, we now have a belief that the bricks and mortar institutions hold all of the answers and define our future.  That may be a fatal error if the concept of funded research and economic complexity isn't dispatched with soon. Funded research has an agenda and economic based world views that worked yesterday are not going to work tomorrow. Of course destruction of demand (aka profitable conservation of energy resources) by regulatory strategies are being promoted by governments globally.  But even simple implementation looks to be a chaotic poorly understood plan wrapped up in a scheme to keep old systems delivering. We can argue about which is the better conquest or tyranny machine to eventually reform our bad behavior; capitalism, fascism, socialism or some other kind of ism but understand this... when you're out of Schlitz you're out of beer.  Period - full stop.  None of them have advanced to understanding how anything but brute force works.  

Sine waves are an over simplification of the rise and fall of empires. An interesting aside from this simple graphic is that many factors are rising and falling at their own frequency that combine to build complex waves that can actually tell us a lot about the future.  This is what the Limits to Growth models did using many differential equations. Several analysts have reconfirmed we are on the business as usual trajectory.  

So I will close by citing  a record album from a great 70's rock band "You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish".  REO was the band.

The phrase could be modernized and edited just a bit to say, "You can print money but you can't print energy".  As Shakespeare's Hamlet famously said...  "ay there is the rub. " Economic machinations won't fix depletion and that's a fact.  Physics will do what it does and the think tanks know very well where we are headed.  None of the obviously ludicrous policies emerging are intended to sustain BAU.  Buckle up, the model they seem to be following is BFI - Brace For Impact.

Time for me to fly...