The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [83]
The Ugly Power of Compounding
Remember all those exponential graphs from Chapter 5 (Dangerous Exponentials) and how time ran out in a hurry toward the end of the stadium example? In theory, there’s nothing problematic with living in a world full of exponential growth and depletion curves—as long as the world doesn’t have any boundaries. However, exponential functions take on enormous importance when they approach a physical boundary, as was the case in the last five minutes of our stadium example and which will soon be the case for oil. We know that oil is finite and have always known that the day would come when we’d bump up against the roof of that particular stadium. All of the data that I’ve been collecting and observing over the past five years strongly suggests that we’ve already reached oil’s exponential boundary.
And here are the question that this possibility raises: What if our exponentially based economic and monetary systems, rather than being the sophisticated culmination of human evolution, are really just an artifact of oil? What if all of our rich societal complexity and all of our trillions of dollars of wealth and debt are simply the human expression of surplus energy pumped from the ground? If so, what happens to our wealth, economic complexity, and social order when they cannot be fed by steadily rising energy inputs? What happens then?
More immediately, you and I would be perfectly within our rights to wonder what will happen when (not if, but when) oil begins to decline in both quantity and quality. What will happen to our exponential, debt-based money system during this period? Is it even possible for it to function in a world without constant growth? These are important questions for which we currently have no answers, only ideas and speculation.
To put our oil bonanza in some sort of appropriate context, Figure 16.10 shows oil extraction placed on a four-thousand-year time line.
Figure 16.10 Global Oil Production on a 4,000-Year Timeline
It’s now up to us to wonder what we should expect in the future from a money system in which the most basic assumption might be in error. What if the assumption “the future will be not just larger, but exponentially larger than the present” is not correct?
CHAPTER 17
Necessary but Insufficient
Coal, Nuclear, and Alternatives
The primary point of this book is that the economy to which we have become accustomed, along with our entire view of wealth in the forms of stocks and bonds, rests upon vast flows of energy (and other resources), the levels of which must not only be maintained but also increased each year. Without this constant growth in energy use, everything else becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.
The purpose of this chapter, then, isn’t to completely cover the immense technical discussions that can (and should) surround energy, which economist Julian Simon rightfully called “the master resource.”1 Nor will we exhaustively cover all the various technologies and sources that could be alternatives. Instead, for our purposes, we will look at our energy predicament from a level that will permit us to address the question, How likely is it that other major sources of energy can seamlessly replace oil?
A prevalent and hopeful line of thinking found all across the political spectrum suggests that we will simply transition