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!