This is the first post after being amused by the way we are consuming today ... And the way economists and politicians and looking at pumping more money into the system to promote consumption to bail us out of the meltdown.
Some observations are worth noting:
1. Since the industrial revolution energy use per capita has increased dramatically, and at more than alarming rates in last 100 years and even more alarming rates in last 10 years.
2. Coal and Crude discovery is a pure lottery and must be treated as capital. No body plans expecting that this onetime lottery can take us through generations!
3. Around 85% of the energy use today is focused towards creating leisure and enjoyment for the top few % of the population. While large part of the population is working hard in a hope that they will get some opportunity sometime to take the leisure pie. This is completely inequitable distribution of resources.
Here is a hypothesis that I would like to put forward in view of these observations:
With the use of so called higher and higher technology, we have effecively become more and more "energy inefficient"
This is easily evident from the fact we are using far more energy that say middle ages to achieve nothing particularly impressive for a very large % of mankind. It seems possible that we could have created some model islands at the expense of most of the humankind.
