Jan 26th 2012, 16:29:47
Exactly right about change to different sort of economy. Our generation, and maybe 2 generations of Chinese/Indian children, will be able to live the 'American' dream of big cars and high material consumption. Maybe a generation in less dense areas will continue to see the disgusting urban sprawl explosion before a complete reversal to a sort of implosion or area contraction.
In other words we can't simply look to replace our fuel consuming tools with tools that do the exact same things but only consume slightly less fuel. It's more like we need to change our living environment to require different tools that inherently have lower energy expenditures. Example of this is electronic movement of information versus post. Obviously to move humans and physical goods we require high energy expenditure. The solution to that is to not move the goods as far and to use more concentrated/massive forms of transport between hubs. Also human powered transportation.
Anyways, if we're waiting for market signals to tell us when we need to start panicking we're setting ourselves up for chaos. Wildly fluctuating markets dull people to initiative and confuse people about what really needs changed. Reliance on today's money markets to tell us to the value of something conditions us to rapid shifts and responses in priorities, plans and outlooks.
Central money/economic planning that is occuring through tools such as the Fed Reserve, aggressive intelligence/military force campaigns and monetary warfare is going to condition into the American public habits that we don't know much about.
The impression I get is that it will take generations to change our infrastructure and environment to meet the physical realities of our fuel situation. However it seems we're setting ourselves up for several large shock/crisis situations along the way as we continue to rely on manipulated markets/money to reflect physical reality. When reality and market values diverge so much there's no doubt that shocks/crisis will continue to mess us around.
In other words we can't simply look to replace our fuel consuming tools with tools that do the exact same things but only consume slightly less fuel. It's more like we need to change our living environment to require different tools that inherently have lower energy expenditures. Example of this is electronic movement of information versus post. Obviously to move humans and physical goods we require high energy expenditure. The solution to that is to not move the goods as far and to use more concentrated/massive forms of transport between hubs. Also human powered transportation.
Anyways, if we're waiting for market signals to tell us when we need to start panicking we're setting ourselves up for chaos. Wildly fluctuating markets dull people to initiative and confuse people about what really needs changed. Reliance on today's money markets to tell us to the value of something conditions us to rapid shifts and responses in priorities, plans and outlooks.
Central money/economic planning that is occuring through tools such as the Fed Reserve, aggressive intelligence/military force campaigns and monetary warfare is going to condition into the American public habits that we don't know much about.
The impression I get is that it will take generations to change our infrastructure and environment to meet the physical realities of our fuel situation. However it seems we're setting ourselves up for several large shock/crisis situations along the way as we continue to rely on manipulated markets/money to reflect physical reality. When reality and market values diverge so much there's no doubt that shocks/crisis will continue to mess us around.