thirteen percent great

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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