Forest Man

This is from the blogpost "Money and the end of abundance. A financial crisis primer" by Tim Morgan 30.8.2022 on the blog "Surplus Energy Economics":

"Amongst the world’s decision-makers, French president Emmanuel Macron has come closer than anyone to spelling out the reality of the current economic situation, saying that “we are in the process of living through a tipping point or great upheaval”, and referencing “the end of abundance” (my emphasis).

If his words are taken seriously – as they should be – a major crisis looms. The global financial system is entirely predicated on perpetual economic growth.

As important as what Mr Macron has said is what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that abundance is over ‘for a year or two’, or that we’ll have to live through this ‘until better times return’. He didn’t make fatuous promises of ‘sunlit uplands’ or ‘a new golden age’.

Some of us have long known that an age of abundance made possible by low-cost energy was coming to an end. Until now, though, decision-makers have fought shy of this conclusion, taking refuge in the tarradiddle of ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’ proffered by a deeply flawed economic orthodoxy.

What should concern us now isn’t when, or whether, other leaders will arrive at this same conclusion. The trend of events is going to impose that emerging reality upon them.

Rather, we need to be prepared for what happens when market participants arrive at the same conclusion as Mr. Macron."

And in another place Morgan writes:

"ECoEs (energy cost of energy) have been rising over a very extended period, driven primarily by the effects of depletion on fossil fuels. Quite naturally, we have used lowest-cost resources first, leaving costlier alternatives for a ‘later’ that has now arrived.

This trend is a global one, and not even energy-rich countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia are exempt from it. Those who blame the current energy crisis on “Putin’s war” are victims of self-deception. The conflict in Ukraine has, at most, brought the end of energy abundance forward by a small number of years. Neither Saudi nor anyone else can ‘rescue’ us from the effects of rising ECoEs."

My comment: I have written much about this lately, that civilization reached its peak when Peak Oil, or rather Peak All Fossil Liquids was reached in November 2018, and has declined since. After that the pandemic and the Ukrainian war has functioned as scapegoats for bad economic times, so that we have avoided coming to the conclusion that economic growth has ended forever because of Peak Oil. Right now no big politician is interested in talking about Peak Oil as the reason for the energy crisis, they just blame Russia and the Ukrainian war. The superficial mind does things like this, it is never interested in real root causes, but just surf on the surface of things. It never digs deeper into things, never tries to see the whole picture. It loses itself in unimportant details. It's typical for politicians. It is the television culture that creates minds like this. 

So, the current global energy crisis has surely to do with the Ukrainian war, but mostly it has to do with the fact that we are past Peak Oil.