EROI economy 2 of 2

EROI ECONOMY 2

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note: if you have KU, try "Dustfall" by Thorn & James.  I normally hate Centuries After The Fall fiction but this one was very well done.  Also, if you have Netflix, they have "Deliverance"  I always thought of it as a Semi-Survival Lite movie.  Most of us love to quote the dueling banjos scene and the "you've got a mighty purty mouth, boy", but I also always enjoyed the Burt's character talking about civilization ending.  WARNING!!!!! Beware, no semi-automatics are in the movie!!!!  I'm not sure how anyone ever ending up getting shot without them.
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The Roman Empire grew from a Podunk city by means of military conquest and had both slavery and new farmland as its base for energy growth ( it also had other unique advantages such as already formed concrete-just add water-from its volcanic activity nearby ).  The end of the expansion of that energy and then its contraction economically and militarily was directly tied to its energy supply.  But here is the thing.  It grew slowly and then contracted slowly because that is what its energy did.  There is no rule that says an empire must last 200 to 500 years.  The only rule is that it must follow its energy path.  The US grew into an empire in about thirty or forty years.  You can claim it started at the War Between The States and lasted until Vietnam, roughly a hundred years, but I’d take exception to that definition.  Sure, we had coal just like Britain, but we didn’t build an empire with it. 

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If coal had been the apex of energy supplies, we most likely would have followed in the British Empires shoes, taking centuries and many wars to gain supremacy through superior energy surplus.  Hell, France started building an empire just off of a food surplus.  We could have done that.  But really all we did with our coal was to overthrow the independent States in a coup by the Yankee Blue Bloods, then conquer a mostly empty desert ( it took awhile because the American business model of capitalism has always been to get the government to spend most of the money.  When corporations are that tight fisted, these things take time ) and then steal all the colonies Spain had seized after she was so weak we got them almost for free.  Then the elites preceded to keep getting rich and losing it in financial bubbles, once again ignoring the need to keep investing in empire ( it truly is amazing how cheap our Elite is.  Most likely the reason for the rumors they are all Jews ).

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It was only with oil that we could spare a surplus to keep a proper empire expanding.  And I’m serious here, and it is an important point.  Our elite HATE spending any profits.  Period.  It is pathological.  From butchering conscripts on the battlefields with Britain to acquire western lands for a few pennies an acre, to killing off half the slaves on a ship because it cost money to care for them, to strip mining the soil in our then farm belt to get the maximum tobacco profits, to giving tens of thousands of soldiers cancer to gain an extra percentage of profit off of government sales ( as well as outright killing them on the battlefield for a profit-HELLO! I‘m talking to you, you vicious twats at Colt ), to ruining a hundred year old companies reputation for a one time quarterly profit, American companies are psychopathic scumbags, one and all ( Wal-Mart didn’t invent the practices ).

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So whenever you think of ANYTHING the Elites could do to save us or cushion our collapse or postpone the end, ask yourself if it is going to cost any money.  If it is, it will not happen.  And one thing they certainly have not done is to transition to less energy usage.  They are still using the infrastructure from a hundred years ago.  The stuff built by the government and turned over to corporations to profit off of ( just because there is a low cost to the consumer doesn’t mean anything-after all, they get the inputs for free.  The city of Las Vegas and the Hoover dam.  The aircraft companies building war planes with aluminum smelted by power from the northwest dams.  The businesses in L.A. that wouldn’t have customers without public water works.  Everyone profiting off of selling land next to the Interstate, or doing business there.  Internet companies standing on the shoulders of Cold War government grants.  I could go on for pages ).  Corporations and businesses are all about using free crap ( much more so than ghetto or trailer park dwellers ) for profit. 

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Of course, all of that is just details.  The far more important consideration is that it ISN’T about money.  It is about resources.  If it was just about money the government would spend whatever it took to rebuild our entire infrastructure, from city sewers to bridges to power grids.  Then give it all away again.  All those studies claiming a complete upgrade nationally “only” costing ten trillion?  The globes central banks got double that from us in 2008.  So we could easily fix all that if we wanted to.  But there isn’t enough steel or copper or concrete or energy in the world to do so ( China used recycled material and then really build crap NOT to last quality to surmount this issue ).  Which is exactly the same reason WWII can never be fought again.  Before, we had the oil and the ore to build THOUSANDS of ships.  Today, we barely hang on to a smidge over two hundred.  It takes resources, and money is just surplus energy.  If you don’t have either, you don’t have public work projects.

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100 to 1 EROI allowed us to build FROM SCRATCH, an entire contenant full of a Industrial Economy.  It allowed us to build thousands of ships and tens of thousands of planes, all on our own oil supply.  At 30 to 1, it all started to fall apart.  That was barely enough to keep our infrastructure from imploding.  Today we aren’t even seeing 20 to 1, and that is including all the overseas oil we import-more than half our daily use.  When that half was Saudi sweet crude, we held on to our EROI.  When Canada’s tar sands replaced the Saudi oil ( it is no longer in our price range as off shore drilling has been replacing inland production ), our EROI took a big hit.  Every time some bright bulb declares energy independence from low EROI energy, he neglects to mention that the more Fake Oil you add to the total, the less Kilocalories you are delivering for use.  Just as it takes twice the low energy content coal to replace the better, more expensive, rarer high grade, so too does it take far more oil of low energy yield ( which happens when it takes more energy to extract, process and ship that energy source, not to mention the BTU’s it delivers ) being burned to replace the old better grade fuel.  We were running a manufacturing economy on 10 million barrels of oil a day, and now we can’t keep our infrastructure from falling apart on twice that.  It is because we are getting, net, far less energy now than we were.  All that fracking oil that delivers 5 to 1 EROI is diluting the 20 to 1 conventional oil and delivering AT MOST three quarters of the net energy we had fifty years ago.  With far less population.

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Just running out of oil isn’t the boogyman we feared.  Now we are NOT running out of oil but running out of BTU’s ( until the economy collapses more causing more drillers and other oil companies to bankrupt and THEN we will run out of oil-still in the ground but uneconomical to extract-AND out of BTU’s ).  So even with all the oil we are consuming, everything is failing anyway.  And it has all failed-everything from medical care to government to schooling to job creation-ultimately all from a lack of energy.  Which is why it will continue to fail, and do so even more spectacularly.  See how easy this forecasting stuff is?

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