Can We Afford the Future?
Broken road image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.
As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that hasn’t happened (so far). But, in the intervening decades, progress has begun to lose its luster. Official agencies still project economic growth as far as the eye can see, but those forecasts of a better future now ring hollow.
Why? It’s simple. We can’t afford it.
To understand why, it’s helpful to recall how the present got to be so much grander (in terms of economic activity) than the past. Much of that story has to do with fossil fuels. Everything we do requires energy, and coal, natural gas, and oil provided energy that was cheap, abundant, concentrated, and easily stored and transported. Once we figured out how to get these fuels out of the ground and use them, we went on history’s biggest joy ride.
But fossil fuels are depleting non-renewable resources, and are therefore subject to declining resource quality. Oil is the most economically important of the fossil fuels, and depletion is already eating away at expectations of further petroleum-fed progress. During the past decade, production rates for conventional oil—the stuff that fueled the economic extravaganza of the 20th century—have stalled out and are set to drop (according to the IEA’s latest forecast). Between 2004 and 2014, the oil industry’s costs for exploration and production rose at almost 11 percent per year. The main bright spot in the oil world has been growing production of unconventional oil—specifically tight oil in North America associated with the fracking boom. But now that boom is going bust.
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