pstarr wrote:Our consumer society does not run on heroic efforts rather inexpensive light, sweet, free-flowing crude oil. The Oil Expense Indicator tells us the 1st-world nations such as ourselves must pay less than 5% of our GDP on crude or the system fails
Hardly. Without much lost in standard of living I can skip on starbucks. With plenty of people doing that starbucks goes broke and plenty of man-power is now freed to go and extract oil on some God-forsaken platform somewhere. With the money I saved from not buying starbucks I can then spend it on more expensive gas. What changed? Not much, same GDP, same employment, same tax revenues, etc. Besides starbucks there's so much excessive unnecessary production and consumption it can be redirected towards more expensive extraction for a long time.
I DO NOT DISPUTE THAT PO/P-ENERGY EVENTUALLY WILL RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT HARDSHIP AND EVEN DIE-OFF. But that is far in the future (several decades).