THIRTEEN PERCENT GREAT
Let me immediately get to the
point. We have 13% of the energy that we
used to. In case any of you confuse our
decline in resources with another factor that you think we can reverse. You know the old saw. Oh, if we only elect X, all our problems
would be over. Oh, if we only allowed
more globalism and less communism, America Would Be Great Again! Oh, if we only didn’t have moral decline with
butt pirates giving each other AIDS, we could be the world’s leading empire
again. Wishful thinking at its worst.
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Take a rather hefty fellow, super
sized Fat Boy. He weighs 300
pounds. Now, take away 87% of his
food. How quick does he lose his weight? With 87% less energy to do everything, how
great do you expect our economy to be? And
with a declining economy, how great to you expect our military effectiveness to
be? To put that one aspect into
perspective, we had almost twice as much available energy to conduct our losing
Vietnam War as we do to fight in the Graveyard Of Empires, Afghanistan. Now, energy isn’t THE single indicator. It is merely a benchmark through time.
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Here is what I did to come up with
the back napkin calculation. It is far
from perfect. I’m sure there will be
quibbles. I took our domestic oil
production numbers and paired them with the estimated EROI of that period, then
added in imports, if any, using the same net energy as our domestic production
( since east Texas oil has been the benchmark ). I took the population figures and divided
that into the energy available. So, if
1930 is estimated at 100:1 EROI, and the population was 120 million, the daily
production of 4 million barrels, that is our baseline.
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Without adding in a bunch of zero’s
in the calculator, I arrived at a .3 figure.
There was no need to translate the barrels into millions of BTU’s, as
that would all translate back into the same percentages. Net energy is more important than delivered
thermal units since you need to know the amount of energy used, not delivered. If we were producing 4 million barrels a day,
and the EROI was 100:1, I took the 100 x 4 divided by 120. When EROI is 10:1 the barrels per day are
times ten.
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In 1950, we had 66% of the available
energy per capita as we did in 1930. In
1990 we were about at the half way mark.
In 2000 we had 33% of the energy per person as we did in 1930. Today, we are down to 13% ( 5 million
conventional at 10:1 EROI, 5 million Fracking Oil at 4:1, and 8 million
imported barrels per day at 10:1 net energy, divided by 338 million-I added a
few under counted illegals ). Our .3
figure we had is now .04, if you were wondering.
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As I said, this is just a
benchmark. You can’t take this alone
without factoring in other issues. For instance, if our fracking oil
disappeared in 2022 as some project, we only went from 13% of our base energy
to 10%, but the actual effects would be far worse since we just lost nearly a
third of our liquid transportation fuel ( and need I remind anyone that our
food in not only grown with oil, it is JIT inventory also? ). And the first half of our energy decline was
no where near as bad economically as the later half.
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Our 1930 economic collapse was NOT
about resource decline. It was resource
overproduction. Wasting that, such as
for huge hydro- electric dams that were surrounded by depopulated desert, was
both feasible because we had the excess energy and it was later a form of
energy savings we cashed in to fight the global oil war in 1940 ( we were
waiting for the Pearl Harbor excuse-we had begun getting ready long
before. We couldn’t use enough energy in
welfare to kill overproduction-but a war could ). That literally took a third of our energy
use, but that also came back to save us in 1970.
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That was when Saudi Arabia let us
back our dollars with a growing resource of immense importance, oil, instead of
the shrinking resource of gold. Since
then we have been desperately using more energy to protect “our” oil over
there, plus using our historic energy legacy systems to do the same. But remember, our last war to protect the
Petrodollar that ended successfully was 2011.
The same year Fukishima blew and took a decade or two off each of our
lives with its continuing radiation. The
good news is that by then no one will be able to afford medical mis-care.
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You might recall that the late 1950’s
saw the US reach Peak Iron Ore. That was
the decade we also “encouraged” ( read, “financed” ) our Pacific allies to
begin their own steel industries. Under
the guise of strengthening their economy to prevent communist representation in
their governments, of course. One
wonders how much of that was knowing our own ore supply was endangered, and how
much was our declining energy supply. But
you can also see how much economic decline was assured by the loss of our
available energy compared to our Oil Age beginning.
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From 1930 to 1990, sixty years, we
lost half of our per capita oil energy.
In just the next ten years, we lost another 17%. And another 20% on top of that over the next
fifteen years, AFTER we started fracking for oil which doubled our domestic
production. That points to how much
population we gained and how crappy fracking oil is in net energy. We would have lost nearly a quarter of the
energy since 1930 in just those fifteen years without the fracking fake oil
substitute, of course, so small favors there.
That means that we are decreasing in oil at a pace four times what we
started out at
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( underscoring the point that global
conventional oil discoveries peaked in the 1960’s, and as the regular life of
an oil field is forty years, and lately it has been all ultra low net energy
finds. Also that we are finding a lot
less oil than before, of any kind ).
Take away our fracking oil, and see our imports cease ( and that can be
from a friendly nation like Mexico if their production declines too much as
their population soars ) and we would be at 3% of our oil use per capita.
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Yet even at 13%, if that doesn’t yell
out to you “empire collapse”, nothing I can ever say will convince you. May God have mercy on your dumb ass.
( .Y. )
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