The World After Abundance

I may have finally found an article that provides an intuitive understanding of EROEI.

For most of today’s environmentalists, renewable energy isn’t something that people produce for themselves – unless they happen to be wealthy enough to afford the rooftop photovoltaic systems that have become the latest status symbol in suburban neighborhoods on either coast. Instead, renewable energy is something that utilities and the government are supposed to produce as fast as possible, so that Americans can keep on using three times as much energy per capita as the average European and twenty times as much as the average Chinese.

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Even among those who warn that today’s Great Recession could bottom out at a level equal to that reached in the Great Depression, very few have grappled with the consequences of a near-term future in which millions of Americans are living in shantytowns and struggling to find enough to eat every single day. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, that did happen here, and it happened at a time when the United States was a net exporter of everything you can think of, and the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum to boot. The same scale of economic collapse in a nation that exports very little besides unpayable IOUs and is the world’s largest consumer and importer of petroleum could all too easily have results much closer to those of the early 20th century in Central Europe…

Any chance these handsome hovels come with built-in wifi? :(