Times are tough, more choppy water ahead.
My crystal ball was knocked off the shelf by a poltergeist, an' every splinter of the busted thang shows a different "future."
Meanin' --of course--that I ain't no smarter than the next opinionator when it comes to weighing what lies ahead for the economy.
What I has seen is a LOT of stuff on the Internet that scares hair off a gorilla. But some of it over-reaches.
Here is one of them: http://www.dieoff.org/BigPicture.pdf
This is a clever site, set up like Dick & Jane to explain all our basic pillars that are fallin' down--this one is BIG OIL.
The gist of the cartoon primer (very effective format --I like it!) is that the earth is finite and thus resources are finite, especially energy resources like oil, and demand is outstrippin' this resource so war over oil is a gimme.
Wind and solar "flows" are finite an' cannot be increased. Add to this grim reality the fact that it takes energy to get energy--the deeper into the earth ya go to get the ore or oil or whatever resource, the more energy to get to it and to get the resource up to the surface-- until the energy cost for acquisition is greater than the energy that will be found. Stone age, here we come.
Well, mebbe not.
First, the primer doan take note of RENEWABLE energy sources. It doan allow none at all fer better efficiency in use of resources, and it doan give a nod to how humans usually figger out how to solve big problems--especially if ya can make a buck from it, like harnessin' ocean thermals and tidal energy.
Heck, iffin' sombody ain't thunk it up yet, I got an idea: Let's put giant magnifiers in the sky to magnify solar flows---we will think of SOMEthin'.
(What the world needs now is problem SOLVERS, not jes' problem analysts.)
But most of all, in the cartoon, the raw numbers is missin'. Looky, Ever hear that the sun is gonna go out one day? Anybody you know in a panic over that? Anybody screamin'
"WOE is us! The sun is dead! The black freeze is comin'!"
Nope--cause it ain't gonna happen fer a few more gazillion years.
I ain't no petroleum engineer, so I doan know when we's due to run out of oil. But I do know that geothermal techniques have improved vastly and untapped shale oil on this globe is estimated at 2.8 TRILLION barrels...and 1.5 trillion is the USA. See? Hey we may not even use all the oil on the planet afore we colonize Uranus and mine its desserts.
Point is simple, sweet chillen': Thangs is bad, B A D, but it ain't as hopeless as some of these websites portray it.
Mah view is that it is jes' as dangerous to over state a case, or to insist on tunnel vision rather than problem solving, as it is to be an ostrich wif' yore haid in the sand.
It might get really ugly, folks wearin' crocs and gunny sack dresses, but we will make it.
I has great faith in us as humans. Not in any one human, but all of us--we's made in the image of God, who is The Creator. Know what that means? It means we is CREATIVE too. I have faith in man's ability to creatively solve technical problems...
Solving problems of the heart? That takes faith of a different order.
We Will Make It
