[ExI] Energy and Henson's forecast

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

> Yeah, but try to get people to analyze or even talk about the hard
> physics and chemistry you need to solve the problems.

Are you sure that "we" are smart enough to "solve"
those problems?

> It's a conditional forecast.  If we don't do *something* about the
> energy problem that is going to kill billions.

But Keith, it's *never* going to happen overnight.
We will never wake up one day and say, "oh, the
oil is all gone".

What will happen is that we will wake up one morning
and say---as almost indeed did happen last year in
September---"gee, there is no money, everyone is
broke".  Okay, I exaggerate. Never overnight. But
over a few weeks all our institutions could crumble,
and the army will be called out.

Then is the time that the scenarios you most worry
about---bleak times---will come to pass.

>> Otherwise the bigger,
>> violent gangs will take your resources. Even at the level of the
>> government sending troops to requisition your stuff.  A national
>> movement towards self-sufficiency would be good at this point in time.
> 
> I am not qualified to judge the merits of such a proposal.  But I can
> tell you that unless you have a deep understanding of industrial
> inputs and outputs, you are not qualified either.

No one is "qualified". That's why the folks in the 1970s
wisely chose not to do anything about what they could
not understand. That's why they did not embark on vast,
vast, massive, massive (oh how those words are loved)
"wars" a la Eugen, to "save the planet".

BTW, in those good old long-ago days, our planet had
a name, (it's name was "Earth"), and that name was
believe it or not, in wide use.

Oh, EXCUSE ME. I'm sorry. I forgot. The governments back
then *did* embark on massive, massive, vast, vast projects
that they could not understand.

There was the unWar in Vietnam. There was the War on Poverty.
There was the Great Society. Such smart people. Such foolish
gestures.

But don't let that stop us! We can make even greater, even
more massive, even more foolish gestures now, just so long
as we spend trillions and trillions and trillions. Let's
spend trillions on health care, *infrustructure*, carbon
credits, and saving the planet.

Trillions, that is, of dollars that do not exist.
It really doesn't matter how much in debt we put
future generations (just as the good ol' War on
Poverty and the great unWar in Vietnam and Great
Society put us. So why doesn't it matter if we
put those future generations into an economic
Black Hole? Because the economic Black Hole is
obviously going to happen anyway---everyone from
Obama on down (at least in the U.S.) is all in favor.

> It's not actually hard to solve the energy problem and that's the big one.

What we need, I guess, is an Energy Czar. Or, since
we already got a lot of czars running around, an
energy Führer. Someone with the vision and IQ of
a Lenin, say. Only a wise enough Leader with enough
Power can make everything right.

Lee