-the functional exhaustion of hydrocarbons (which will happen in a time frame of no more than a century and a half, and probably a lot sooner) will eventually entail the breakdown of systems that consist of centralized, energy-intensive recombinations of materials collected in disparate locations, and redistributed as products on a global market.
-In order for any other form of energy to sustain even a shadow of a complex, technological civilization it would have to be able to "close the loop." That is, to not just produce energy at a certain cost that is competitive with fossil fuels within an economy that is still fundamentally based on fossil fuels, but also to extend the energy produced to include the harvesting, concentrating, manufacture, installation and upkeep of the machines necessary to produce that energy. No other technology even comes close to hydrocarbons, and its likely that all of our alternative forms of energy would not even be able to close the loop--that is, they require more energy to maintain than they produce.
-In the case of wind for instance, that wind power would not only have to supply homes, but would also have to power the mining machines neccesary to gather the metals, and then the huge foundries needed to form them; and also the plants to make the electric generators, and finally the large pieces of construction equipment needed to put up and maintain them. And it would also need to supply enough power to be reinvested in maintenance of the electrical grid, and the transportation networks that make all of this possible in the first place. And this is just for starters. We haven't even factored in the cost of workers, which extend far beyond food and shelter, to include a childhood gestation of many years and the requisite education. etc. etc.
I haven't done the math and I don't think anyone else has either--I'm not even sure if its possible to do the math; however, when I see those big wind turbines lazily wobbling in the wind it feels absurd. There is something comic about a wind turbine. They seem more akin to a fetish intended to ward off some impending demon. "If we just build these massive idols it will please the gods and they will continue to bless us with limitless mana."
-Conversely, oil not only closes the loop but its loop is really wide. Not only can it cover its own costs, but it can also support grossly inefficient forms of life. This is because hydrocarbons are free energy--all we have to do is dig them up out of massive pits, as with coal, or poke a hole in the ground and wait for them to come shooting up, as with oil and gas. Sometimes we have to resort to pumping--but we don't even have to pump up, against gravity; we only have to pump water down to keep up the pressure in the well. Then we just gather up the fuel, put it in an engine, light it fire and presto--instant energy, as much as we could ever need. Billions of tons of coal a day; millions of barrels of oil.
-This means that "alternative energy sources" function in a way that is quite different than they are imagined. They serve, in effect, as batteries, or at best multipliers, of fossil fuel energy. Solar and wind, for instance, require substantial inputs of fossils fuels to be produced, and only over time--over decades--do they release this energy. Nuclear is fundamentally the same; the construction costs of nuclear reactors are quite prohibitive already--in fact, a nuclear reactor has never been competitive in a fossil fuel economy, and the existing facilities have only been built at all because of massive government subsidies. What if the electricity generated in those plants had to be reinvested into all of the machines and workers that created the plant in the first place? Poppycock! Balderdash! In a pig's eye!
-concomitantly, any system that relies on fossil fuels will break down, and this includes the suburban and metropolitan forms of life. i.e. masses of humans that have entirely deterritorialized from their surrounding agricultural milieu, and reterritorialized onto the global supply network. This network requires the tapping of trapped flows of hydrocarbons--hydrocarbons that have slowed in their re-entrance into the slow, combustive economy because of geologic disturbances--and then re-trapping those hydrocarbons in combustive cycles that serve to turn wheels, props or turbines.
-This means, in English, that some day we're going to have to become peasants again.
-In other words, we're going to have to integrate our existence directly on the interplay of the slow combustive metabolism of animals and the immediate reverse-combustion processes in photosynthesizing machines, with solar energy from the sun as input. This as opposed to fast combustion processes in engines relying on inputs from many past cycles of photosynthesis.
-But that's OK since we know a lot more about how plants and everything else work. If we really put our minds to it, we can be really, really good peasants; we can be really good technicians coordinating photosynthetic machines. Photosynthetic machines have arisen through billions of years of evolution, and are quite good at what they do. We're a really efficient technician build, too. Especially with clothing and new advances in thermal mass housing, we can operate in much of the temperature range on planet earth where photosynthesis occurs, without substantial energy investment.
We are a very-open ended and flexible type that can quickly integrate into many roles, all at the cost of a few thousand calories a day. Considering there's about 31,000 calories in a gallon of gas--as an equivalent of food, that's enough to feed ten people doing a decent day's work--we're pretty darn efficient. Though of course the food has to be cooked, in most places even wood for cooking fuel could be sustainably harvested from trees in a kind of permaculture regime, as long as we're not heating homes with the fuel too.
-surplus and relatively leisurely life is possible.
-There's also no reason to assume, as some hysterics have, that the natural "hydrocarbon-free" support for planet earth was reached prior to the industrial revolution (around one billion people.) Much evidence shows that sustainable agriculture can achieve crop yields as good or better than modern industrial farming, and on an indefinite, rather than a tragically short, time-frame. It just requires many times more manpower--which, incidentally, is currently trapped in a lot of bullshit work in the cities.
-The most durable human type: the technician as peasant. The materialist as peasant. The scientist as peasant. I'd say this type is even more durable than a cockroach.
-frugal is the new green.
-Work is not a curse from the gods because there are no gods.
-We just need to find a way to keep the internet functioning, as a way to ward off the parasitism of despotism or aristocracy. Centralized bureaucracy and global capitalism should take care of themselves .
-The place of the thinker is in lodging himself in the peasant existence, exploring its facets; being an anachronism; showing up too early; readying the type through positive example.
