"Sustainability" Comes from Peak Oil Culture

 

I have been reading a lot of posts that make me long for solid ground. Let me tell the story of sustainability as I experienced it: It all goes back to the Yahoo! groups: Running on Empty 2, Energy Resources, and Energy Round Table, where we heard horror stories which would begin when the world reached Peak Oil. Indeed, the post-Peak Oil world is similar to the world just before the advent of civilization, except that, whereas the prehistoric world got better day by day, the post-Peak Oil world would get worse. But we did not reach Peak Oil. As we all know various factors intervened and year after year we did not reach Peak Oil. This fed into a great deal of skepticism. "Perhaps we would never reach it." But this idea wasn't coming from chemical engineers. We knew that perpetual growth in a finite world was impossible. So far, sustainability was always about having a perpetual energy supply in a world neither the population nor the economy of which was growing. People kept talking about ERoEI as the criterion for sustainability or else finding some reason why it wouldn't work.

I understood that every economic action has an associated energy action; therefore, it was obvious that people were not computing ERoEI correctly. I devised the thought experiment with the Autonomous Alternate Energy District to demonstrate that. They didn't understand the thought experiment very well or else they thought I would not be able to analyze multiple energy sources and by-products; so, the new exercise which many of you are reviewing for me is still under development at https://www.eroei.net/Mark-III-Economy.pdf and https://www.eroei.net/Mark-III-Economy.html which you might as well defer until last.

The following might be interesting, helpful, or even essential:

https://www.dematerialism.net/MonetarySystem.html and the section on Sustainability in https://www.dematerialism.net/ and relevant pieces on https://eroei.blogspot.com/ and, finally, https://www.eroei.net/Mark-III-Economy.pdf . Also, there is an older version uploaded as a pre-print on ResearchGate. I am having ten times the trouble with Microsoft 365 and OneDrive as I am having with the engineering, which is complete. I just started with MS365 and OneDrive.

 

If you decide that energy is NOT virtually everything, think about a world that has completely mastered all that social science properly applied can offer. but it has only a small amount of energy and that is dwindling. Picture a nightmare on Earth. Think of all the things you'll miss because you have no energy.Nothing else is so important.

I will put together a package beginning with https://dematerialism.net/MonetarySystem.html continuing with the Sustainability section of https://www.dematerialism.net/ with ancillary pieces in https://eroei.blogspot.com/ and ending

with https://www.eroei.net/Mark-III-Economy.html that show how one supports renewable energy if it is ever attained.