magic at your fingertips, and it was made so: to fly higher than birds, to visit other worlds; to all have an army of servants who bring you choice foods from around the world, make it unnecessary for you to work. For anyone to be able to talk with anyone else; for the poorest among you to have access to all the collected wisdom of mankind. For your lives to grow longer, your eyesight more perfect, your erections more substantial, and everyone to have their own mini-castle and large family. But now there’s one wish left. And it had better be worded carefully, because - true to literary form – you got exactly what you asked for, and only now has it become apparent what the downsides are. The Bottom Line: What society can and can’t do with oil depends on the financial and energetic cost, and as those costs rise, current levels of consumption will become increasingly difficult to sustain.
Draining America First
Summary: And thus, you begin to see it. The grand battle of narratives about our future. Our culture remains energy blind , believing not only in unlimited growth in the amount of goods and services available to future humans but also that technology perpetually can overcome limited natural resources. On the other hand (a.k.a. reality), technology is a vector to access lower and lower quality resources in a finite pool. We think we are accessing a bigger pool but have just only built larger straws. The above graph highlights this juxtaposition of stories told in our culture. The two graphs are identical histories of the last 120 years of oil production in the USA. The graph on the left is the one used by the energy optimists
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