Our Fatal Flaw

Undoubtedly, the human race has to overcome the inclinations that assisted survival 10,000 years ago or thereabouts but which are worse than undesirable today. Despite the difficulties of doing this (some would say improbability), the nearly impossible task of providing truly sustainable renewable energy remains to be completed. Chief among the obstacles is the difficulty of maintaining sufficiently large storehouses of vital material resources that can be replenished from the remaining world supply without drawing down the residuum faster than prudence permits. This is a physical barrier to sustainability; however, there seems to be a psychological barrier that is preventing otherwise reasonable people from adopting ERoEI* to satisfy the critical need to be able to determine if and when sustainability has been achieved. ERoEI* greater than or equal to 1.0: result = sustainability; ERoEI* < 1.0: result = unsustainability. That's it. So far, no other technique determines sustainability.

It goes without saying, of course, that sustainability does not prevent war, epidemic disease, and many other paths to extinction. It just means that the human race could survive.

 

Let me mention, either in contradistinction or in support of the fatal flaw just discussed, Albert Bartlett's famous dictum that the most serious failing of the human race is its failure to understand the exponential function.   See the blog entry  http://eroei.net/bartlettexp.mp4 
or http://eroei.net/bartlettexp.wmv