I am learning so much at the ASPO conference that I thought I should just ‘stream’ it along to you as I learn it. While I could sit on it for a while and work it into more polished content, I think that getting it to you faster has its benefits.
One of my greatest joys here is meeting all the enrolled members and Crash Course admirers in attendance. I love being able to put faces with screen names. I would like to find more chances to do this somehow.
At any rate, what follows will simply be stream-of-consciousness writing from my time here.
The big theme that’s emerging for me is that many, even within the very sophisticated Peak Oil community, do not yet appreciate how the economy depends upon energy. Sure, there is a very deep acceptance of the idea that an economy needs energy to grow, but I’ve seen many presentations that assume that the economy will more or less decline in a nice, orderly fashion along with energy. This fails to appreciate the extent to which we are currently levered up with debt and the role of debt in forcing/contributing to past growth. My view is that the greater risk here is that declining energy will trigger a debt/financial crisis (already underway in a market near you), which will exacerbate energy declines by withdrawing needed capital from new and existing projects. Of course, this will exacerbate the financial crisis by withdrawing needed energy from the economy. So on and so forth. Such feedback loops may not happen, but they are a very real possibility and I’ve not yet seen them fully appreciated here. I plan to address this head-on in my talk.
by gaborzol 
