7 September 2012
Norman Pagett writes:
The world financial crisis has been brought about by our greed and collective denial. And we are all in it
There are rants about banks, foreclosures, crooked politicians, job losses, too many imports, This isn’t an economic problem it’s an oil problem. Oil is the economy, the economy is oil.
Our economy can only function if it is moving forward, having year on year growth, building bigger better faster into an infinity of consumption, despite the craziness of such economic thinking.
For 200 years we have been finding and using ever greater energy sources, always able to find a surplus this year as collateral for next years debts. We gave that energy a monetary value, the more we found and burned, the more ‘wealth’ we had. Our prosperity was linked to burning it faster, so we devised means of doing just that. Building millions of shiny things, planes, wartoys, cars in an endless stream became the focus of our prosperity, and we came to regard heat, light and dragging a ton of steel everywhere as normality. Cheap oil also supplied 99% of our food and fooled us into overbreeding, now we have a billion starving while we frantically try to convert their food into more cheap oil.
We thought it was a money-economy, but what we had was an energy-economy.
Oil has quadrupled in price in 12 years. Our system can’t stand that so it’s crashed. Without cheap oil we don’t have an economy. We are not in a recession, we’ve reached full stop. Welcome to your future.
