Running Out Of Room

The idea of an 'industrial economy' is an extremely recent human invention. And we’ve staked quite a lot on its continuation.

But it faces a massive predicament: It’s running out of resources.

When talking about the “economy”, we're really referring to the flow of goods and services — which are themselves entirely dependent on energy. No energy = no goods and services = no economy. It’s really that simple.

So to track where we are in this story, put on your ‘energy goggles’. If you do, you can discover quite a lot.

Examples of our increasing use of energy to extract primary resources are all around you, if you know where to look. Most folks, though, willfully distract, if not delude, themselves with faith in our technological triumphs, so they remain blind to the evidence — even when it's right in front of their faces.

One indication of increasing energy use is exemplified in the very recent practice of drilling 5-mile long oil wells into source rocks, then performing 100-stage frack jobs that consume up to 50 million pounds of sand and 16 million gallons of water (per job!). This is the essence of the shale oil revolution.

Some see it as a technological marvel; others, as a sign of severe desperation. The media will only ever dutifully tell you the technological marvel side of the story. And while it is a marvel, that's only half the story.

More examples come to us from the world of hard rock mining. Where humans high-graded all the easy, nearby, high-yield ores during the first decades of the industrial revolution, the last few decades are clear examples of increasingly desperate efforts to go after the increasingly dilute residuals that remain.

Again, many of these new mining efforts are both testament to advancing technology and skills, as well as condemnation that the primary inputs for our economic machine are in increasingly short supply.

As mentioned, the media already does a fantastic job telling us about how wonderfully advanced all of these efforts are, so we’ll skip over that side of the story. Rather, this report will help you focus on understanding what these efforts actually represent in terms of where we are in the industrial story, which is really a tale of pursuing infinite exponential growth on a planet of finite resources.