Peak Oil News and Message Boards

efarmer wrote: he has the best chance possible for hitting the growth target area.

Here in lies a dilemma for me. As I hope for a transition to a lower economic level to cope with the effects of Peak Oil (or the effects of the Peak Oil dynamics as Rockman likes to call it), and a lower level of pumping CO2 etc into the atmosphere growth seems to be a bad idea. Yet the current economic system is geared to growth and peoples' well being (and jobs) are also tied to growth.

So for the current situation and for the general public I hope growth rates can be hit, yet for the long term I wonder if it would be best if the economy stalled forcing a transition (that many do not seem to be willing to make when times are good for them).

EdwinSm wrote: Yet the current economic system is geared to growth and peoples' well being (and jobs) are also tied to growth.

I don't know if you actually meant that the current economic system is geared toward people's well being as you stated it but this is a common fallacy.

Napkin or chalkboard, there is no correlation between fedgov individual income or total tax revenues relative to GDP and the top individual marginal tax rate in the post-war historical record.

The great exponential growth that dominated my 60+ years on the planet have had the exploit of fossil fuels but especially petroleum at it's core. I do believe the huge upward climb of this exponential growth allowed us the luxury of applying socialist, liberal, conservative, and other sorts of analysis to how to throttle and manage or predict the system as "tools". These "tools" all rely on the upward slope of exponential growth as the magic behind the curves and theories and principles and can be proven as valid or shown to have merit so long as one is on the upward slope of exponential growth. When you get towards apogee, it gets dire as you face having to contend with gravity in the absence of acceleration. The left and right in their own divergent way wish to impose the behaviors or societal situations of an earlier time when they were empowered by the upward slope, I submit they are really just wishing to reset the exponential growth curve back to a nice steep point below apogee and it isn't going to work. Huge deficit expenditures of wealth for this purpose therefore just represent reduced hang time for us before our accleration yields to gravity. The deal has always been to fit your lifetime and those you love going foward within the span of wonderful upward exponential growth and thus have the luxury of seeing it as a given, but this is really a gift of the timing of your existence. Life forms build up exponentially when the have the resources available to bloom and then they peak out, fall back and the next thing comes along, perhaps our species, perhaps not. Political theory takes credit for exponential growth, and it blames the lack of it on various groups and ideas, but it doesn't create it, resources do.
If you don't believe we are on an exponential growth curve, then nevermind, nothing to see here.

Great post Efarmer. It is easy to score a run when you are already born on 3rd base. It's a bit more challenging when it's the bottom of the 9th with two outs and nobody on.