your human authors were born.
The value of your fossil armies is the biggest blind spot in human economics and in all your institutions and well-meaning pro-social efforts. Without a reconciled conception of the huge disparity between fossil energy’s cost of extraction and its amazing utility, any economic or ecological analysis is so deeply flawed as to be practically useless - this means pretty much ALL economic analyses now being done by humans. This will become clear as we go forward.
**Thought for the day: If your fossil armies had a labor union, most humans would only be making pennies per hour.
The Bottom Line: We take for granted being able to have the attributes of Superheroes or Demigods by using an incredible and irreplaceable substance as though it were unlimited.
The “Trade” - Replacing Human Labor with Fossil Energy
Summary: The example from the textile industry showing how coal power allowed us to add 100 times the weaving spindles for an equivalent amount of human work is really a microcosm of what the industrial revolution was all about. We were able to exchange a large amount of extremely cheap exosomatic energy in the form of coal – and eventually oil and natural gas – for human labor. In doing this “trade,” we became
192
Powered by FlippingBook