A pivotal moment


This is a huge, pivotal moment in human history! What we're entering now is the end of the age of cheap energy, which has sustained historically anomalous standards of living. We're at the end of not only the industrial age, but also the whole age of material prosperity and progress itself. The beast is awakening right now. BUT... A return to something more like pre-industrial standards of living has huge silver linings! Not the least of these are natural re-equilibration and likely spiritual revival. Human beings will no longer be able to produce and provide so much "candy" to feed the hole of emptiness that comes with our consumer addictions. Human misery is always the soil for spiritual, religious and political renewal, and the emergence of great figures of change and relief (both good and bad, so it's not going to be straight ahead). The world is always becoming, but at certain times it is becoming more spectacularly than at others.

How is it that one can be fairly sure that the great shift is already here now and that its dramatic unfolding is inevitable? Economic decline comes not at the end of resource exhaustion, but starts right after peak production has been reached, according to peak oil theories, especially that of Hubbert. Almost every expert will tell you we are already at, if not slightly beyond, that point already!

To futurists who say that alternative energy will be able to sustain anything like the present standards of living, consider this: It is calculated that it would require 800 separate, Manhattan-sized light-gathering satellites in orbit, with microwave beaming of the energy to collection antennae on Earth, just to maintain current levels of energy consumption! If we tried to build this kind of light-collecting potential on Earth's surface, where far less solar energy arrives, we'd need many, many times this surface area, spread across the whole world to power round-the-clock demand, at even higher cost. A complete switch to natural gas and coal could extend the "cheap" fossil fuel-age another 40 years perhaps, but obviously not without nasty consequences. And even nuclear fission would be depleted within a hundred or two hundred years, assuming present levels of consumption, and, again, think of the consequences! What about other renewable energy sources? No renewable energy source beyond solar could possibly fill the gap and power present global consumption. Moreover, even if the political will were there to start building the mind-boggling extent of infrastructure required for large-scale roll out of alternatives - renewable or not - there is simply no time anymore to forestall the great economic downturn. It's rumbling just over the horizon now and will probably begin to manifest itself very dramatically within the lifespans of most of us here now. And such a downturn, acute and chronic at once, will likely make it harder to even muster the resources needed to start what would have to be the biggest works project in all of history.

So dramatic material decline is inexorably creeping up behind us right now. That doesn't mean it's the apocalypse at all, though. It's just the change and decline that morphs and then sweeps away civilizations. It's the normal ebb and flow of history on a particular giant scale, but life goes on. Nature continues with its laws intact long after each era's views and rules have come and gone, over and over again.


— Gabriel Fenteany, December 1, 2015


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