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Necessity is the mother of invention
"Everyone world-wide on average needs about 17500 kilowatt-hours a year to live comfortably."
You missed that part, didn't you? Too bad. It may be the most important part.
As Doc Brown would say, "You're not thinking 4 dimensionally". If the price of fuel were to hit $200/barrel tomorrow, or even next year, and stay there, it would be a human catastrophe of unimaginable scale. But if it were to hit that price 50 years from now, it could simply be a minor inconvenience. It's all a matter of preparation.
If people prepare now, then the crisis you pre-suppose can be easily averted. This is, I suspect, the reason Chris writes this column. He wants to get people preparing for the future because there is only one direction that liquid fuel prices are going to trend to, and that's up.
Given that life in the 1930s was not much like life in the 1980s, why should we expect that life in 2060 will significantly resemble life in 2010? To think that, (something many people do) is to be egotistical in one's thoughts. Why do we think the future will be just like today (only more so), even though today is quite different from the past?
If one looks back at the 30s, many people didn't earn enough money to be able to afford the basic necessities of life, but for the most part, they still figured out how to survive. (Barter, home gardens, etc., lots of alternatives to the way they had done things in the 1920s.)
Civilizations have risen and fallen, over and and over again. And yet, humans have always bounced back, somehow. Humans have shown themselves to be a very resilient species.
The world will get ugly before it gets better. You only need to look at the current economic news to realise this. We're in for some big changes. Large numbers of people are going to be desperately poor and are going to struggle hard before they find solutions. Some of the solutions, like the ones I used, are already in the pipeline. Others have yet to be invented.
So by saying that as the cost of liquid fuels rises (as the laws of supply and demand dictate that they will), we'll automatically have a massive crisis with fatalities all over the place, shows that you are either stuck thinking like 20th century fundamentalist, or that you lack faith in humanity's resilience. Humans can do better, and often do.
I live in a rural area. My 135 year old home is heated, for some reason, by oil-fired forced air. The room where I am sitting has no duct work to it because it's impossible to get a 4" diameter duct up here without blocking the front door. But soon, all going well, this home of mine will have a hydronic system, heated initially by electricity, and later with a wood-fired boiler. (I can easily get a pair of 3/4" CPVC pipes up beside/behind the front door.) As an entrepreneur, because I pour most money back into the company, I still make minimum wage at this point, so I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination. To boot, my spouse doesn't work so I'm the sole wage earner. Roughly $80/week is what I put into the home renovations. It's slow. But in the end, I'll have a home that's cheaper and easier to heat and cool. There is a lot of DIY here simply because I can't afford to hire people to do the work. It's an act of desperation on my part. At $600/month, this house is already too expensive to heat in the winter.
And that puts the lie to your supposition on deaths because of the high price of liquid fuels. Through desperation, people will find ways to decrease their energy consumption so they can afford the necessities. Technology is simply making this easier to do.
People lived without oil at one time, and we can do it again. The question is not "can we", but "how will we". And that's what I'm trying to encourage people to look at.
No one is saying it's going to be easy. Because if it were easy, we'd already have done it. The hardest part of the whole equation is not the technology, it's human neural pathways or thought patterns. Like paths across a lawn, they get beaten in so that everyone uses them out of habit. Only out of necessity does someone step off of the path and create a new one. To make the changes we're talking about requires us to break out of those habits, to stop thinking like late 20th century humans, and to start thinking like a human in the future. And to do that, we need to dream.
I was given a button that says "Those who say it is impossible should stop bothering those of us who are making it happen."
So I invite all others to step off the beaten path, to dream a better future, to figure out how to make it happen, and then to make it happen. And then when oil does hit $200/barrel, no one will care.
You missed that part, didn't you? Too bad. It may be the most important part.
As Doc Brown would say, "You're not thinking 4 dimensionally". If the price of fuel were to hit $200/barrel tomorrow, or even next year, and stay there, it would be a human catastrophe of unimaginable scale. But if it were to hit that price 50 years from now, it could simply be a minor inconvenience. It's all a matter of preparation.
If people prepare now, then the crisis you pre-suppose can be easily averted. This is, I suspect, the reason Chris writes this column. He wants to get people preparing for the future because there is only one direction that liquid fuel prices are going to trend to, and that's up.
Given that life in the 1930s was not much like life in the 1980s, why should we expect that life in 2060 will significantly resemble life in 2010? To think that, (something many people do) is to be egotistical in one's thoughts. Why do we think the future will be just like today (only more so), even though today is quite different from the past?
If one looks back at the 30s, many people didn't earn enough money to be able to afford the basic necessities of life, but for the most part, they still figured out how to survive. (Barter, home gardens, etc., lots of alternatives to the way they had done things in the 1920s.)
Civilizations have risen and fallen, over and and over again. And yet, humans have always bounced back, somehow. Humans have shown themselves to be a very resilient species.
The world will get ugly before it gets better. You only need to look at the current economic news to realise this. We're in for some big changes. Large numbers of people are going to be desperately poor and are going to struggle hard before they find solutions. Some of the solutions, like the ones I used, are already in the pipeline. Others have yet to be invented.
So by saying that as the cost of liquid fuels rises (as the laws of supply and demand dictate that they will), we'll automatically have a massive crisis with fatalities all over the place, shows that you are either stuck thinking like 20th century fundamentalist, or that you lack faith in humanity's resilience. Humans can do better, and often do.
I live in a rural area. My 135 year old home is heated, for some reason, by oil-fired forced air. The room where I am sitting has no duct work to it because it's impossible to get a 4" diameter duct up here without blocking the front door. But soon, all going well, this home of mine will have a hydronic system, heated initially by electricity, and later with a wood-fired boiler. (I can easily get a pair of 3/4" CPVC pipes up beside/behind the front door.) As an entrepreneur, because I pour most money back into the company, I still make minimum wage at this point, so I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination. To boot, my spouse doesn't work so I'm the sole wage earner. Roughly $80/week is what I put into the home renovations. It's slow. But in the end, I'll have a home that's cheaper and easier to heat and cool. There is a lot of DIY here simply because I can't afford to hire people to do the work. It's an act of desperation on my part. At $600/month, this house is already too expensive to heat in the winter.
And that puts the lie to your supposition on deaths because of the high price of liquid fuels. Through desperation, people will find ways to decrease their energy consumption so they can afford the necessities. Technology is simply making this easier to do.
People lived without oil at one time, and we can do it again. The question is not "can we", but "how will we". And that's what I'm trying to encourage people to look at.
No one is saying it's going to be easy. Because if it were easy, we'd already have done it. The hardest part of the whole equation is not the technology, it's human neural pathways or thought patterns. Like paths across a lawn, they get beaten in so that everyone uses them out of habit. Only out of necessity does someone step off of the path and create a new one. To make the changes we're talking about requires us to break out of those habits, to stop thinking like late 20th century humans, and to start thinking like a human in the future. And to do that, we need to dream.
I was given a button that says "Those who say it is impossible should stop bothering those of us who are making it happen."
So I invite all others to step off the beaten path, to dream a better future, to figure out how to make it happen, and then to make it happen. And then when oil does hit $200/barrel, no one will care.
Posted by mheartwood
12th Jun