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Other schemes such as tidal energy, etc. require permanently high maintenance costs. Nuclear energy has two issues which must be resolved politically: storage of waste and operational safety. Nations such as the U.S. are unable to resolve these issues; centrally controlled economies have been able to impose or manufacture political resolution.

Most alternative energy schemes share one drawback: they essentially gather low-density energy (sun, tides, biofuels, wind, etc.) into easily stored and transported concentrations/ energy densities, and that process is inherently expensive/energy-intensive.

The one "easy" high-density source, hydropower, has largely already been exploited. Geothermal has the potential of tapping high-energy density heat deep in the Earth, but the costs of drilling and maintaining a well 2 miles/3 kilometers deep are very high and possibly prohibitive. In seismically active regions, deep wells apparently have the potential to trigger earthquakes.

As the cheaply extracted oil is depleted, energy costs rise and Liebig's Law becomes a factor in all economic activity: production is limited by the scarcest resource. Thus a mine might have rich deposits of ore but if it is far from energy sources, then the cost of energy will limit production.

As the cost of energy (extracting, concentrating, processing and transporting) rises, so too do virtually all costs throughout the economy. Measured by surplus output, higher energy costs are in essence a heavy tax which lowers surplus/net output of the entire economy.

This devolution of surplus sets up a terrible irony: just as the need arises to invest trillions of dollars to construct an alternative energy complex, the surpluses generated by the economy go into steep decline.

This is what I term the paradox of energy cost/supply: once depletion drives energy costs up to the point that alternatives to fossil fuels become financially viable, the economy's surpluses have been reduced to the point the economy can no longer afford to build an alternative energy complex.

To anticipate permanently higher energy costs is to invest funds for low returns; but to wait until costs justify the investment, it's too late to rely on surpluses to fund the investment.

Thus the only alternative to running out of energy (in any form or density) is that other spending must be curtailed to fund the new energy infrastructure. This devolution of the economy is the ontological end-state of oil depletion/rising energy costs/shrinking output surpluses.

Printing $10 trillion to pay for the needed energy infrastructure might be tempting, but such an explosion of fiat money which was not based on actual surplus output would simply destroy the currency being printed, bringing another form of ruin to the economy.

There are no short-cuts: ultimately, only surplus output can be spent or invested. The market will quickly catch "cheating" like creating $10 trillion out of thin air and attempting to pass it off as surplus output; the cheaters will end up with a ruined economy and no new energy production.

The Financial Causes of Devolution

To understand the devolution of the global economy (macro) and our own communities (micro), we need to look up the chain of fallen dominoes to the first one: credit.

The debauchery of credit reached its perfection in the housing bubble. Credit, leverage and speculative fraud came to dominate the global economy: the global housing boom depended entirely on abundant credit at low interest rates, leveraged, securitized debt instruments (mortgage backed securities, CDOs, credit default swaps, etc.) and speculative fraud: housing-backed investment securities fraudulently rated and sold as "low-risk," property appraisals fraudulently jacked higher than market, mortgage applications backed with fraudulently stated income, and high-risk "toxic" exotic mortgages fraudulently presented and sold as "low-risk because the property value is rising."

Household income for all but the top 10% "high-caste" technocracy has been