Gail Tverberg: The Coming Energy Depression
As most PeakProsperity.com readers know, we fully agree with the statement: Energy is THE master resource.
Without it, nothing can get done.
Energy analyst and professional actuary Gail Tverberg returns to the podcast this week to revisit the global energy outlook. And fair warning, Gail warns it’s quite grim.
To her, it’s a simple math problem. We have too many people placing too much demand on the world’s depleting energy resources. The cost of energy is rising, which we are compensating for in the short term by using financial gimmicks to make “affordable” — when all we’re really doing is creating future promises that cannot possibly be repaid.
The increasing cost of energy is manifesting in higher prices (for everything, not just fuels) and lower real wages, a divergence she sees only worsening from here. This path leads to another Great Depression-style crisis from which she does not see a clear path out of:
What we really live on is what we pull out of the ground each year, in terms of oil or coal or natural gas or whatever. So what we have is just what we pull out.
Now, you accurately point out that we’re making too many claims on the future using debt. We’re actually doing this via a couple of different ways, which are pretty much equivalent. One of them is by issuing equity. This has the equivalent effect as using debt because what you’re saying is I’ll pay you dividends, and you’re going to get a higher price in the future. This is simply different kind of claim on the future. Another way to borrow from the future is through government promises.
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