#214. Needed – a new model tin-opener
THE LIMITS OF TRANSITION
Logically considered, 2021 ought to have been the place where old assumptions go to die.
In many ways, it is.
Specifically, orthodox, money-based economic interpretation is being debunked. Current events are demonstrating that the economy isn’t, after all, entirely or even primarily a financial system. The proposition that demand produces supply is being discredited, because no amount of stimulus can deliver low-ECoE energy where that energy does not exist. In short, we’re discovering that the economy is an energy system.
Since the start of the Industrial Age, that has meant, overwhelmingly, a fossil fuel energy system. We’re in the process of encountering two constraints to the continuity of an economy built on oil, gas and coal.
The well-known constraint is that we have reached (or passed) the limits to environmental tolerance of our use of fossil fuels.
The second, barely-recognized-at-all constraint is that fossil fuels’ ECoEs – their Energy Costs of Energy – are rising exponentially, in a process that would destroy the fossil-dependent economy even if we were so unwise as to ignore the environmental issue.
The consensus answer to this situation is that we must endeavour to transition from reliance on fossil fuels to an economy based on alternative sources of energy.
This, undoubtedly, is a realistic conclusion.
The snag, though, is that the consensus view combines the logical conclusion of transition with the unfounded assumption of an economy which, far from contracting, continues to expand.
A balanced assessment of the issues indicates, rather, that a sustainable economy will also be a smaller one.
An appraisal of outcomes
At the level of theory, there’s nothing much wrong with the idea of outdated notions undergoing a mass extinction event.
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