There may be plenty of oil left, but if it takes as much energy to discover, extract, refine, transport, and sell that oil as the oil itself has, we have a problem. From Alastair Crooke at Conflicts Forum via theautomaticearth.com:
Alastair Crooke: We have an economic crisis – centred on the persistent elusiveness of real growth, rather than just monetised debt masquerading as ‘growth’ – and a political crisis, in which even ‘Davos man’, it seems, according to their own World Economic Forum polls,is anxious; losing his faith in ‘the system’ itself, and casting around for an explanation for what is occurring, or what exactly to do about it. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the WEF at Davos remarked before this year’s session, “People have become very emotionalized, this silent fear of what the new world will bring, we have populists here and we want to listen …”.
Dmitry Orlov, a Russian who was taken by his parents to the US at an early age, but who has returned regularly to his birthplace, draws on the Russian experience for his book, The Five Stages of Collapse. Orlov suggests that we not just entering a transient moment of multiple political discontents, but rather that we are already in the early stages of something rather more profound. From his perspective that fuses his American experience with that of post Cold War Russia, he argues, that the five stages would tend to play out in sequence based on the breaching of particular boundaries of consensual faith and trust that groups of human beings vest in the institutions and systems they depend on for daily life. These boundaries run from the least personal (e.g. trust in banks and governments) to the most personal (faith in your local community, neighbours, and kin). It would be hard to avoid the thought – so evident at Davos – that even the elites now accept that Orlov’s first boundary has been breached.
To continue reading: What is this ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?
Even if one accepts that (according to the EROI / debt graph in the article) it requires sixteen times as much energy to produce a BTU of US oil and gas now as in 1940, which is, to put it mildly, dubious at best, and overlooks the fact that considering one BTU economically equivalent to every other BTU, regardless of its source, is crackpot-ism on par with obsessing over the Federal Reserve being “privately” owned, correlation is not causation. Especially since when the dollar link to gold was eliminated and public debt began rising, allegedly due to decline in EROI – which BTW had been (again, according to the graph) dropping steadily for 30 years without producing so much as a twitch in the debt – there were a few other minor factors at work, such as the Vietnam War and Great Society spending binges. The notion that “falling EROI” is the root cause of present economic dysfunction is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete horseshit. It is nothing short of dumbfounding what absurdities people will embrace to deny the reality that politics is not the solution, it is the problem.