37 Facts About How Cruel This Economy Has Been To Millions Of Desperate American Families

[NoOneMan]

36. I believe this illustrates exactly how bad our problem is

If we all continue to deny the existence of simple truths because they clash with our neo-classical 20th century worldview, it will be very difficult to mitigate the overall damage once we can no longer maintain the status quo.

Remember, you refer to "my" definition of wealth. As I stated:

[quote]Wealth is essentially the ability to command energy; it follows that declining available energy per capita results in declining wealth.[/quote]

You keep referring to an article about more domestic crude production proving there is more energy (and hence wealth). But you continually refuse to examine how much energy it takes to explore, build infrastructure for, drill, pump and refine these new sources. I mentioned the available energy to the population (aka net energy). This amount is not equivilent to the aggregate sum of all oil coming out of the ground, because a growing percentage of that oil is pre-allocated for further energy harvesting and infrastructure maintanence. The population does not get dibs on it all for the purpose of economic growth (or there would be no energy for drilling).

Further, you also continue to refuse to acknowledge the emphasis on per capita distribution of energy. While oil production does continue to increase at a steady rate, population growth has kept pace completely, thereby negating any gains at all in oil production:



And to add to this point, more and more of that population wants their share of the energy. The recent booms in China and India are the perfect example of this.

To get back to the apple demonstration--the real wealth of such a village is apples. Eating them (processing the energy) gives one the ability to bring up more apples. But if the apple pit becomes too deep that the energy it takes to pull up a basket against gravity is more than what a human body can derive from the apples, there is no point in doing it. And just as US crude production may increase, you can have everyone pulling up basket after basket and still have no net gain in available energy per each village person at the end of the day.

Things are so bad (or good as you suggest) that we are burning oil rich sand, to produce crude--1/3rd of which must be used to keep burning more bitumen. And to boot, what use to be villages 30 years ago in China are now tech manufacturing hubs demanding the other 2/3rds of that energy go to them.

So you say crude production is increasing? I say that

1) crude production is requiring more and more energy, meaning less of this crude is available to the population.
2) there are more and more people who are in need of this crude
3) more of these people are using more of this crude more often than they use to (making it cost more, meaning more energy must be used to create the wealth to purchase energy)
4) maintaining an infrastructure required to grow the economy--built by the very cheap energy of yesterday--demands further crude and lowers the overall availability to the population for economic growth (this is one I haven't talked about much yet, but is a very interesting concept in its own right).