Muppet Speak

Is energy the real driver of productivity?

Most of my readers would probably agree that the criminal muppets in government aren’t the real drivers of policy, they simply implement what they’ve been paid to implement. Often this isn’t direct payment (like contributions to campaigns) but can be an intricate interplay of motivating factors.

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini

What isn’t clear, and perhaps has changed, from before World War II when Mussolini promoted the concept of a fascist government, is whether it is the government controlling the corporations or the corporations controlling the government. In our modern times, it’s clearly the corporations that are in charge.

Corporate crony government is not good government. But politicians like getting re-elected (or going on to being hired to lucrative private sector jobs) so they have to pretend the government and the nation are doing okay. The muppets have employed a number of tricks to paint an encouraging picture. Remember when GNP was the figure used to measure our economy but now it is GDP? Ah, well, let me not get too far off on tangents.

Do you believe the financial figures the government publishes paint an accurate picture of the economy?

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading a book about economics and the current financial situation (well current as of 2017). The author has a chapter on the impact of weather. “Today’s climate researchers have been bribed by government grants totaling more than $100 billion to argue that human CO₂ emissions are fostering rapid global warming. When politicians discovered an imperative for linking CO₂ emissions to global warming, appreciation for the Sun’s role in climate drastically receded.” “man-made climate change does not exist and the arguments for it are not based on science.” One interesting bit of research by a solar physicist was the idea that the sun is the primary factor for warming or cooling and thus if we compare to other planets we confirm this and debunk the idea of “man made climate change” (it’s so trivial as to be irrelevant).

Now, let’s shift to an interesting concept that energy is the prime and overwhelming driver of productivity. Originally humans provided all power and a typical human can generate about 1/10th of a horsepower. To put the value of a gallon of gasoline in perspective, it would take a human roughly 428 hours to generate the same energy as a gallon of gas. Pay that human at $15 per hour and you get a cost of $6,420. Gasoline is a bargain!

The sun is and always has been the origination of power. Initially via the food we ate or as the food for animals put to work, also as wood used to make fires. Over time, the sun’s power was stored up in fossil fuels making the Earth something like a giant battery. Humans tapped into this battery and used the stored energy to make incredible advances in productivity.

Now consider that it’s becoming harder and harder (more expensive) to obtain fossil fuels. We want to be concerned with “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (ER on EI). Biofuels (ethanol) rarely exceed an ER on EI of 2:1 and sometimes are negative! Definitely not a great source of energy! Traditional oil wells have a decline usually around 7 to 10% per year (gotta keep drilling!) Fracking has a very high rate of decline. The Bakken Shale effort declined as much as 69% in the first year. Fracking is not actually very profitable. Back in the 1930s, oil drilling typically had an ER on EI of over 100:1. By the 1970s the ER on EI for oil drilling had dropped to 30:1. Now it’s rare to get an ER on EI better than 10:1. North Sea oil drilling has an ER on EI of about 5:1.

Stanley Jevons first considered the possibility of human productivity returning to lower levels, back in 1865, in an essay “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines”. Jevons was of course talking about England and at that time didn’t realize that oil would replace coal as the primary fossil fuel driving productivity.

Optimists wish to believe that our supply of fossil fuels will never be exhausted, but the evidence appears that eventually we need to face this future. A very real possibility is that the future is now, but by manipulating the data, the muppet masters are hiding this from the people.

Let’s speculate that perhaps it isn’t “climate change” that is freaking out the muppet masters, but rather declining energy sources? Perhaps “oh my gawd, we are all going to die because we are running out of fuel” wasn’t as easy to sell as “oh my gawd, we have to cut back our fossil fuel emissions or we will overheat the planet and die”?

It would appear that promoting the concept of climate change is easier than promoting the simple concept that fossil fuels are limited. The term Climate Change is a clever shift from claiming global warming – now anything that happens with the climate can be blamed on us naughty humans and our generation of CO_2. Global warming isn’t so easy to pitch anymore since we are experiencing the start of an ice age and global cooling (a worse problem to have!).

So how will the economy crash when we run out of energy? More and more in-fighting between the muppet masters as they fight over the dwindling resources? Even more pressure on the “bottom 90%”?

Certainly it looks like things are going to get ugly. But it’s not clear how fast the decline will be.