EROI economy 1 of 2

EROI ECONOMY

Net energy, or Energy Returned On Investment ( EROI ), has not been a secret to those studying Peak Oil for the last roughly fifteen years.  When the Texas gushers were being exploited almost a century ago, it took an incredible one barrel of oil to obtain one HUNDRED out of the ground.  This oil was already under extreme pressure and it was light sweet crude, meaning it was very easy to refine into useable product.  This is the oil ( along with the Oklahoma and Louisiana and California stuff ) that built our industrial economy.  Granted, water power and coal got us started along that path, and without that we wouldn’t have been in a position to exploit that oil ( others would have done it for us ).  As much as I despise the monkey molester Lincoln for the evil hump he was, as well as the East Coast Blue Blood pukes that put him in power and instructed him to colonize the South as well as the West, you have to admit if you think about it for more than five seconds that without Indian and Confederate blood on your hands, you never would have been allowed to enjoy such luxuries as SUV’s, air conditioners, microwave dinners or plastic carbine semi-auto’s. 

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That pissed off redneck racing around with a rebel flag on his pick-up truck and that sanctimonious liberal college professor driving her Toyota Prius about have that in common.  The blood of innocents allowed them their oil consumption.  They are just as guilty as Blood Diamond buyers.  Do you think they stop to give a crap, or are they as a fish in water totally oblivious to their surroundings?  Do you think maybe that has something to do with why no one wants to admit the end is nigh?  For to be clear about our energy future you must know its past.  One imagines few are prepared to travel that uncomfortable road.  Our central bank was necessary to allow empire to grow.  Empire was needed to protect and exploit our energy supply.  Our energy supply was necessary to fund both a central bank and empire.  Indeed a tangled web.  The boom economically in the 1920’s did have its roots in the growth of the farm economy that was there to feed Europe as it went about in a frenzy trying to kill each other and had little ability to grow much of anything.  One dynasty after another had run up against colonial expansion limits and was also jockeying for position to control enough of the petroleum energy.  When US farm product demand crashed after the cessation of hostilities, the central bank did goose the economy to prevent an economic crash.  They just goosed it too much.  That is the accepted narrative.

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And all true as far as it goes.  But another larger factor was the flood of nearly free to capture petroleum.  That helped manufacturing, it helped the huge surge in infrastructure replacement and it helped mechanize farming.  In the short term the damage was in unprecedented supply gluts in everything with insane overcapacity.  Only throwing that vast surplus into the ocean depths and turning it into a LOT of explosions finally made enough of a dent in the supply to get it into equation with demand again and start another economic doom.  In the longer term, we were left with a huge country stocked with nothing but energy guzzling everything.  From the cloths we put on in the morning in our mobile home quality stick built houses requiring constant heating and cooling to be habitable, to the energy suckling personal auto’s driven huge distances to work at a job which required consuming energy to the very food we consumed, two thousand miles from farm to store and grown with and trucked with copious amounts of petroleum, every single moment of our existence-all 320 million plus of us-is nothing more than petroleum consumption.

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When there were less than half of us living in the same area, and we were enjoying that 99 barrel surplus, everything was just peaches and cream and glittery unicorn farts.  But that couldn’t last forever, now could it?  Nothing that good lasts forever.  The best looking woman in the world gets old and wrinkly and you wouldn’t want to stick Obammy’s junk in it after awhile.  The nicest home around eventually starts falling apart from lack of maintenance.  The richest family eventually loses all its wealth.  But Americans are STILL to this day spoon fed the magic of 90 year old 1 to 100 EROI.  It didn’t take all that long to fall to 50 to 1, then 30 to 1.  Why do you think we have been in trouble economically since the 1970’s?  Because the oil companies are greedy?  Newsflash, douche, the government gets more in taxes out of a gallon of gas than the oil company sees in profit.  Some of that goes to keep your SUV driving along paved roads but a lot of that is just parasitical greed, incompetence and laziness.  Is it because we have too many socialist politicians?  Hello!?!? 

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Anyone in there, McFly?  Redistributing wealth by force sees the vast majority of that go to the rich, not, as blathered by idiots such as Beck and Limbaugh, to the poor ( I am by no means a lefty.  I‘m a Libertarian at worst.  Just follow the money after the message ).  They get only a trifle.  Do you think our economy is in trouble because of ANY social/class agenda issue?  Those are all symptoms rather than causes.  Our ENTIRE economy from the politicians to the bankers to your employer to you, ALL are running off the code AND machinery programmed and built a century ago when oil was close enough to free and close enough to So Abundant As To Last Forever.  All the problems you are seeing is a result of that computer getting less voltage/amperage or watts as required.  It is as simple as that.  For instance, women’ s lib.  And all the cans of worms that opened from latchkey kids to a feminized ineffective military.  Net energy was dropping and to restore profit to a faltering economy, the labor force was diluted to drop wages considerably.  Do you honest Injun think ANY politician or CEO gave two craps about women being free or equal?  Hell to the friggin no, yo!  They needed profits that was no longer generated by as much surplus energy.  ALL wealth is surplus energy.  Dropping net energy, dropping wealth.  Now multiple that example by all the other stop gap, desperation fueled idiocy that has our empire in a fetid swamp of five decades of unintended consequences born of incompetence to observe the basic laws of physics. 

More tomorrow.

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