Our existence is not our economy
We can read in the newspaper that cutbacks have to be made. Fuel prices are up, we got a failing economy and although we are trying the hardest to kickstart the economy with negative interest rates (for consumers) nothing seems to catch on. In Europe we’re advised to support a bankunion, creating a central controller for all european banks, we have to, to shore up the system! Some take the gloom so far as to predict the abandonment of the car. We can’t do it anymore! It’s like the whole world suddenly decided to be suicidally dumb.
Our media is responsible for spreading ‘no way out’ propaganda at the worst possible time. The world can not affort imagining itself caught between a rock and a hard place. It can only be propaganda because anyone with half a brain can figure out what to do. Something must work surely to regain our wealth (which is the main issue) the answer is OF COURSE!
"Mankind must go green or die." (Prince Charles)
It would be a mistake to strive to regain ‘economic growth’ because economics is the reason for this whole debacle. How did all these resources get so depleted without a structural, lasting improvement in our lives? Because economics is not about lasting. It is about wasting, consuming, because that generates cashflow from which all participants in the feeding frenzy take a cut. Trying to reestablish economic growth is like trying to get back up to a speed of 300 mph without any change after one of the tires blew and you crashed into the side of the road. Something is not working, it needs to be changed.
The environmental suicide pact (called uit by Ban Ki Moon) is intrinsically an economic suicide pact.
How can one be so sure there’s a way out? Ehm, well, if our current economy is based on fossil fuels, and those fuels bring all the wealth, then what about alternatives to those? How abundant are alternatives? About 5900 times more abundant. Say we can harness 1000 of those 5900 for our current use. So if we do badly we have 1000 times the energy we need today, 999 technically, not as a reserve but every damn day. That can create how much wealth?
Of course we are dragging resources from where they grow or exist spontaneously at a rate that can not be sustained, but those numbers above tell us that’s completely unnecessary. The resources we are underutilzing in a massive way are the sun, wind geothermal, wave, land and sea we can make fertile and teeming with life. We are underutilizing them because fossil fuels are still dominant and limit activities, because this proces of financial crisi prohibits us from realizing they are not crisi, they are policy to cut back fossil fuel consumption by reducing liquidity of consumers. People without money can’t buy fossil fuel, so for them there don’t need to be any fossil fuel, so they will not notice there ARE LESS AND LESS FOSSIL FUEL. In reality there is no need for a crisis once we try to cover our energy needs in any way possible. The problem is (as usual) that nobody tries to solve it (or is allowed to).
The way we organize the process of producing what we like and need has more options than fiat money in a ‘rigged market’ economy
The way out of this economic crisis has nothing to do with economics, it has to do with three things, the three fundamental reasons for prosperity, namely Knowledge, Energy and Raw materials. So we have metal ore, we know how to smelt it, we have the energy to do it and this yields metal. Energy can be manual labour, can be coal or gas (combined with machines), can be the sun’s heat or electricity. The energy is used to do work on the resources (with the use of knowledge) to shape something that increases wealth (the vision of which motivated someone to make it so). It is these three things we need, we don’t need any derivative peformance indicator like ‘the economy’, ‘export volume’, ‘velocity’ or the Dow Jones. We don’t need credit or money per se.
We need to abandon carbon scarcity in favour of renewable abundance
Our world has turned into a rental environment. Almost everything we may want to do industrially has to be done with the consent of intermediaries and owners that have no interest in increasing general wealth, only their own. This is the biggest problem. It is policy to endebt our economies, this was openly discussed at Davos in 2011. Another 100 trillion in debt could be created, meaning (if every debt had an interest rate of 5%) that 5 trillion would become available as fees for intermediaries keeping the system intact. You can perhaps feel how this is a self-fulfilling prophesy. It was Ban Ki Moon at the same meeting that said the world economic model was a ‘global suicide pact’. Second that!
Notice Solar is per year, coal is absolute! And you can make fuel with solar.
The funny thing is that if you take the trinity of knowledge, energy and raw materials you can start in the middle of the african desert and grow an entire economy from scratch, simply because you know the sun beams down 2000 Watt/m2 during the day, sand is silicon and pretty versatile material, there’s aquifers, greenhouses, irrigation, seeds, and all can be made with renewables, even renewable power sources. No water? What does it take to dig a channel across Africa? Only the sun and some machines. Where’s the damn limit if you abandon carbons carcity? How do you stop if you desalinate automatically using renewables?
A new dawn will come when Earth turns to face the Sun
How about the oceans? They are mostly dead. Are we breeding fish there? Are we fertilizing? Are we actively promoting growth of fish populations? The nutrients are there, plenty of whatever is needed in the deep ocean. What it requires is a mind that thinks "Lets create" instead of "Lets exploit, loot, steal". Fishing fleets will move over the southern waters like floating city blocks, gobble up all the fish and then go "There’s no more!". Never does it anyone seem to think "Lets make fish thrive here". That is what we call Extraeconomical thinking. It is NOT giving away, wasting or whatever hippy stuff, it is simply net creating resources. It is the antithesis of regular ecomics, and it works.
Using the abundabt renewable resources will mean easy work to transition, and it will also secure the lifes of millions of workers and the people the love, plus the untold billions that may come after us.
So clearly there is a way out. Those that say there isn’t simply like to be babies that haven’t learned to find their own food. No more tit, then there’s no alternative than to starve, no reorientation, thought process, just give up. Of course this is inspired by a desire to lock you in the carbon game as long as possible. Just imagine how much smart people must be involved in keeping us as dumb as that.
If we don’t solve it we will be replaced in a couple of million years by beings unlike us that won’t understand from the fossil record what kept us from remaining the dominant species. They will be around because of the sun, why don’t we try to stick around using the same.
#nowayout