Do we know of any economic interest groups that do not have paidcheerleaders?
No. There aren’t any. All the more reason to not use any of them as a
source of information.
My posit is this: Oil provides so much of the world’s energy, and especially
the energy used in the US, and oil is so convenient, energy dense, portable,
storable, flexible, and right now, abundant, that there IS no alternate nor
combination of alternates that bid fair to replace any but a small fraction of
the energy from oil.
In a lot of ways, saying that we will find an alternative for oil is like
saying we will find an alternative for water or soil.
Here is where the economists trip up. Suppose you have a farm vehicle that,
for the sake of easy arithmetic, has a ten gallon tank and gets ten miles to
the gallon. . . . Then that service station closes (forever) and the next nearest station is
sixty miles away. At this point the economics don’t matter any more. There is
no way for you to get to the service station and arrive back at the farm.
You’d be out of gas before you got there. At this point you lose the use of your
vehicle.
To the economist it’s just a matter of oil getting so expensive that solar or
wind will be "cheaper" and everything will equal out.
What is requires, which we don’t have now, is an entirely new way of viewing
what our culture is all about. Looking about for something else to stuff in
the gas tank when the oil is gone is not going to get us anywhere.
Or as Al Einstein put it: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of
thinking we used when we created them."
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