onlooker wrote:what allows us to work in jobs typing on keyboards is the fact that some intensive agricultural work and processing is being done utilizing fossil fuels.
Yes, but the devil's in the details. Any good peaker will tell you we're not going to go from peak to empty overnight. The amount of fossil fuel required to keep big ag going is a lot less than you think. Food is actually a very low percentage of people's monthly expenditures, and it could be even lower if people didn't eat out for convenience as much.
onlooker wrote:The stock market would not exist were it not for the productivity of the real economy
But the real economy sits at the bottom of the pyramid and has very small margins. Compare that to the $50 billion valuation of Uber, a company that is basically an electronic middle-man for day-laborer taxi drivers. Elon Musk himself made his fortune with a pseudo-bank (PayPal). Non-physical assets, love them or hate them, is what makes the most money. Call it imaginary money if you will, but that's how the game works and it makes some people very rich and comfortable, and powers the majority of what's left of the middle-class.
onlooker wrote:the manufacturing of and the running of so many computers utilizes a lot of energy.
So what? That is like an incomplete statement here. What's your point? You want to talk about Olduvai theory and blackouts? Sure. In a
longer timeframe, I'm down with you. I don't see an insta-crash that will take down the grid.
onlooker wrote:Things such as the transporting of goods, mining and extraction, infrastructure construction and maintenance and agriculture not to mention getting those Americans to and from their work.
Right, but once you prioritize key activities that can't (easily) switch to alternative-energy, and then downscale the activities that don't have to be done (like IT workers commuting to their deskjobs) and you have a massive buffer-zone.
BTW, I just looked at Chevy's current lineup and all their passenger cars except the Impala get well over 30MPG. My Mazda 3 averages 29. I'm really surprised how much extra mileage the automakers are getting without even using hybrid technology. The 2015 Cruze gets around 40MPG. That's used to require a 3-Cyl Geo Metro. So don't discount efficiency gains either.
"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)