theluckycountry wrote: the US is a shell, a dry husk compared to what it was before the peak of it's convention oil production.
Just so.
The first few hundred years of Europeans in the Americas was powered by African slaves and succeeding waves of immigrants while the last hundred and fifty by hydrocarbon slaves. The 1850-60s inflection point (civil war and Titusville) is only symbolic, coal was in use before and Jim Crow later but the general uproar in society the last 10-15 years since global conventional peak seems comparable to the run up to that transition.
The prior transition benefitted all but a very few slave owners and businesses. Fossil power was better than muscle power in every way: cheaper, more powerful, more versatile, not to mention relatively humane. The only downside was abandoning sunk costs in slave oriented livelihoods and lifestyles. The transition to fossils was made willingly (aside from outlawing slavery) based on fossil's comparative benefits.
We have the same situation multiplied by 7 billion in the sunk costs of fossil fueled suburbia, manufacturing, agriculture, and population today. The problem is the transition we face is not to something better, but to power less concentrated, less fungible, less dependable. It isn't going to be a choice of something better, it isn't go9ing to be a choice at all.
Switching to a
better power caused a civil war in this country last time. I'm not sanguine about how it is going so far this time.
George Kaplan
linked this paper over on POB that delves into how much of a PITA this transition will be, it is worth a glance
To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two.
Tanada wrote:...You do not have to replace all the oil consumption overnight, just the decline portion. As prices escalate conservation will kick back in just as it did in 2005-2008.
The problem with your example is oil production didn't decline in the '04-'14 period, it merely failed to grow enough to meet demand. Over that period until now we've had net negative economic growth, almost doubling our debt
before the pandemic. And I think it is obvious we're in worse shape as a country. We're about as far from embarking on a "planned, cooperative descent" as I can imagine.
As Lucky said, just look over the edge of your pot to see the shape we're in.
Like Madge (and Aaron) used to say:
"You're soaking in it".
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)