Dorothea Lange Miserable poverty. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, OK 1936
Not the exact same, but similar, just a bit more complicated. You can’t have your climate nice and ‘moderate’, your energy cheap and clean, and your economy humming along just fine all at the same time. You need to make choices. That’s easy to understand.
Where it gets harder is here: if you pick energy and economy as your focus, the climate suffers (for climate you can equally read ‘the planet’, or ‘the ecosystem’). Focus on climate and energy, and the economy plunges. So far so ‘good’.
But when you emphasize climate and economy, you get stuck. There is no way the two can be ‘saved’ with our present use of fossil fuels, and our highly complex economic systems cannot run on renewables (for one thing, the EROEI is not nearly good enough).
It therefore looks like focusing on climate and economy is a dead end. It’s either/or. Something will have to give, and moreover, many things already have. Better be ahead of the game if you don’t want to be surprised by these things. Be resilient.
But this is Nelson’s piece, not mine. The core of his argument is worth remembering:
“Everything that is not resilient to high energy prices and extreme weather events will become economically unviable…
…and approach worthlessness. On the other hand,…
Investments of time, energy, and money in resilience will become more economically valuable…“
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
