Re: SC11

http://amandakovattana.blogspot.com/2006/03/beyond-petroleum.html

Beyond Petroleum?

......The word addiction implies that we can recover or more likely go to an alternative - shoot up ethanol, forage for grease scraped from the dumpster behind McDonalds to make bio-diesel, get technology to retrofit ourselves a hydrogen economy, bury our heads in the Canadian tar sands, give everyone a deduction on a plug-in hybrid. Anything but to stop using.

But addiction is only part of the problem. What we are stuck with is the energy obesity built into our physical environment and the population bloom as a result of our incredible success as a species aided by this rabid consumption of oil. Oil expanded our ability to trade, grow food, transport goods and people and live on a steep hill in a condo with a view.

Human labor is virtually inconsequential today because of the prevalence of machines. To get a feel for this, imagine pushing your car instead of driving it. Imagine pushing it up hill and down dale and all the way to work and back. It would probably take weeks. You might wish you had gotten on a bicycle instead. (A bicycle is the most efficient mode of transportation on the face of the earth. More efficient than walking even, in terms of carbohydrates consumed.) We get weeks of human labor for the price of one gallon of gas. Oil has created for us superhuman leverage to expand our ability to consume and, in turn, produce more consumers........

According to Albert Bartlett's lecture on exponential growth we can't really afford any kind of growth at all and therein lies the rub. The same arithmetic factor that allows us to retire with only 12% annual growth to our IRAs, thus doubling our money every 7 years, is exactly the same arithmetic miracle that we should pay attention to in terms of energy use because, as we know, oil is not forever.

Only we didn't really know it like this, like yeast making beer in a sugar solution, because, as Richard showed us with a chart of yeast production in 10% sugar water, our hockey stick growth looks exactly like yeast eating up sugar. And the other side of that hockey stick is a downward slope just as severe. The yeast die because they run out of sugar very quickly, then suffocate in their own waste. Then we humans swill that waste down as beer. Pretty smart of us if want to drink beer, but not if we're the yeast.

The yeast to beer analogy pretty much describes our triad of global crisis. Here we have diminishing oil resources (the food), a population bloom caused by earlier consumption of that food (the hockey stick growth) and catastrophic climate change brought on by greenhouse gas emissions - the waste created by our consumption of oil........

We have to give up on growth altogether in terms of energy use. Our resources simply won't stand for it. We cannot turn to coal, for example, in the hopes that our huge coal reserves would allow us to continue business as usual. Given the kind of growth we have been enjoying, we would make short work of coal supplies, as well, in about 20 years......

Nor can we have sustainable growth or "smart growth" as some environmentalist espouse. Smart growth is like deciding to buy a first class ticket on the Titanic, Richard pointed out. You're just going to your death in style. There is no such thing as growth that is sustainable. The question is can we reverse our yeast like drive to growth and use our smarts to cut back consumption soon enough to avoid extinction? Are we smarter than yeast?