In the past 700 years, England (shown as proxy for advanced economies), went from spending nearly 100% of GDP on energy (in the form of food and power) to merely 5% in 1999. At that point, 95% of the economy’s energy use could be devoted to things OTHER than procuring energy (and food). Think about that. To enable our vast array of modern “miracles” (like MRI machines, Netflix, rollercoasters, first-class cubicles with wine and cheese on 747s, golf championships, special gear to climb (and sleep on) Mt. Everest, go-carts, sky-diving, hospitals, cathedrals, retirement accounts, universities, and Twitter), we first have to invest in the finding, extracting, refining and distributing of fossil energy to enable all the rest of these activities. That investment now requires around 8-10% of all our energy after hitting a low of 5% in 1999 . 159
As we’ll see in later sections, the shape and size of our future exosomatic energy-use pyramid is going to change – perhaps significantly – in coming decades. One way this will happen is inevitable: the red section (energy required to find, procure and deliver energy) will become a higher percentage of the whole, and the height of the whole pyramid will decline. The central question is, which of the a ctivities we’re doing now will we – as a culture – choose to “not do” in the future, as the rules of physical reality inexorably expand the red area to a larger percentage of the whole.
TaaL: The transition from 50:1 EROEI to 20:1 EROEI was pretty painless, because you were able to compensate by just increasing the total energy extracted faster than the EROEI decline ate it up. Now human EROEI is down to ~15:1 -and there is a bit of pain showing up. Of course, you know me by now and the fact that I tend to think in deeper time than you humans currently have a habit of doing. The clear fact of the matter is that, IF humans are around in the deep future, their endosomatic “pyramid” will be a reas onable match to your ancestral one, and their exosomatic pyramid will be relatively small, corresponding to the burning of
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