Executive Summary

• There is not nearly enough net energy to meet our growth expectations in our lifetime
• We are past the "tipping point". A hard rendezvous with limits to growth will arrive in the next 2 decades
• What you can do to avoid that pain that the majority undoubtedly will face
• Prepare for the current "mother of all bubbles" to burst soon

If you have not yet read, In Denial: We Pursue Endless Growth At Our Peril available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Energy Denial

It is said that you cannot explain water to a fish and I have nearly as difficult time trying to explain energy to people today. We are surrounded by it so completely it is difficult to properly appreciate.

But it is in every particle of food you eat, every piece of furniture in your house, every item you wear, and every trip you take — are all 100% dependent on energy that came from somewhere and subsidizes every single item and action.

Fossil fuels are the vast majority of all the energy we use and, it cannot be repeated enough, they visibly and invisibly subsidize the so-called renewables, too. By that I mean solar and wind power cannot be generated until and unless the components are first manufactured and installed. And those activities are nearly 100% driven by fossil fuels today.

To grasp this more fully, watch this time-lapse video of a wind tower being installed and, while marveling at the ingenuity and speed of the team involved, think about where all of the components came from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84BeVq2Jm88

How were the cranes, bulldozers and trucks built? What fuels do they run on? How did all those workers get there? Who grew their food and how did they come to eat it? How are the roads they drove on built and maintained? How is concrete made and how did it all get to the job site? What do the factories and foundries run on that built the windmill? How far did each windmill component have to travel before arriving at the site?

The answer to all of those questions is “fossil fuels.”

And once the fossil fuels run out, unless we have an intact end-to-end system for taking the energy from windmills and solar and completely answering every single one of the above questions above with “alternative energy”, then those technologies will prove to be nothing more than a temporary artifact of fossil fuels.