Magazine Preview - The Big Fix - Can Barack Obama Really Transform the U.S. Economy? - NYTimes.com

[Link: NYTimes.com] "For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits — that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy."

The MSM carries the "infinite growth" ball onto an uncertain field of play. It couldn't be stated more clearly, "Growth is not finite." With a good plan we can keep the game going forever. WRONG! With a really good plan we might be able to survive, but it isn't going to look like the modern Western model of ever growing consumption by an ever growing number of people. Infinite growth may be the only thing that will save our way of life but that doesn't prove it is real.

Two geologists on saving the earth

[Link: Energy Bulletin] "Our economic system is entirely based on the creation of materials. Material wealth comes out of the earth and the level of our lifestyle is entirely based on our consumption of resources. The thing that has allowed that to accelerate so there is even a middle class in many countries, including our own, is cheap energy. Petroleum. If that becomes less available, less cheap because it’s less available, that is going to limit everything that we do. It’s going to have a major impact. It’s going to limit whether we can produce non-petroleum alternatives."

This is a good discussion of the problems that we are going to be facing from now on in our society. The primary disconnect between our ambitions and our resources. We can have a materialistic culture with a few people or live frugally with a lot of people. In the long term our choice is to limit our numbers or our appetite. Unfortunately we have become so many that the long term is knocking at our door.

How America Can Quit Its Oil Addiction

[Link: Newsweek Issues 2009: Rules for a New World | Newsweek.com]
"Around this cheap and versatile fuel, the United States built an impressive civilization—one featuring universal car ownership, highways stretching to the horizon, endless suburban tracts, affordable airline travel, malls, Disneyland and other aspects of the American Dream. But the United States no longer produces enough oil to sustain this civilization—yet it continues to rely on petroleum for a huge proportion of its energy needs."

People who should now know better continue to proclaim that if we really don't want to base our energy consumption on petroleum and other hydrocarbon supplies we need only change our minds and start towards using something else. Something that won't involve complicated political maneuvering with despicable foreign despots. Something that won't continue to feed vast quantities of carbon compounds into our atmosphere causing ongoing climate change. Something that won't require us to modify our extravagant lifestyles. Something, in fact, that doesn't exist.

It isn't a matter of will. There are no technologies that can be scaled to provide the energy density we need to go on with our life as is. Our lifestyle is a hydrocarbon lifestyle. Even if we could build a new infrastructure to harness the wind from continents filled with windmills, convert all of our roofs to solar collectors and convert all of our agriculture into producing biomass to be converted to fuels, the resulting world would not be the same as we have now. We would not have the same mobility or lifestyle flexibility that we have now. We would not have the disposable energy wealth to spend as we have now. Such a world would be complicated and difficult because it takes energy to build energy production. We would be realizing a much smaller marginal energy gain from these new supplies. As I have pondered before, how would windmills be built if we only had windmill power to build them with.

We use our petroleum reality based mind to imagine a new non-petroleum world. Forgetting that we wouldn't have any petroleum to build it with.