sided trade, there is no shortage of savvy New Yorkers who would even today sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for pocket change, because it seems to be a trade with no actual downside for them or credible upside for you. Likewise, the trade of a large amount of exosomatic energy for a little bit of human convenience seemed a great deal to humans in the 1700’s, and still seems so today in most ways. However, the native aboriginals in the USA ultimately found that there were longer-term consequences to such trades and began subjecting them to a hairier eyeball, but by then it was too late. A few humans are now starting to tote up the actual long-term cost of the energy “trade” described above and find that it may be analogous to the Manhattan example: the cost could be the land, environment, and future for your people. Net energy is not inherently cheap. It is hard-won by life, one molecule at a time. The last several generations of humans have come to think of it that way – cheap – despite hundreds of thousands of years’ e xperiences to the contrary - since they have been born into the brief “carbon pulse” period, analogous to an ant colony which happened to have a boxcar of sugar spill a few feet from their mound. What you’re seeing here is the inherent wastefulness which arises by pricing energy as though it were inherently (and perpetually) cheap. Increasing degrees of industrialization make immediate human wants and needs the primary salient consideration, and so push the “utility” envelope far into diminishing returns. In the past, the pharaohs would build enormous stone pyramids to help a single guy get to heaven in style. In this brief fossil -slave period, most humans engage in this to some degree. There is a human adage, “a fool and his money are soon parted.” And, a s we will see later, money is just a marker for energy.
The Bottom Line: We use large amounts of fossil energy to displace far smaller amounts of human labor.
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