We often forget how we got to today. Once there where no fossil fuels and no engines, not even steam engines. Everything ran on food or fodder and the occasional wind and water flows. The wealth people created came at a considerable effort, healthcare was weak and so was the social fabric of society. Banks had a simple job, keep money safe, hand out money to people that had good ideas how to use capital (money was NOT capital in those days) to produce wealth more efficiently. This all made a lot of sense.
Coal was discovered, the steam engine invented, the lathe to work metal and produce precise copies of mechanisms. Suddenly we could produce more wealth than before, limited this time by the number of steam engines and of course the job of hauling coal to where the steam engines where (but that was solved by steam trains). Suddenly heavy loads could be moved over enormous distances, steel could be mined and worked to build more machines that ran on coal steam.
In this frenzy of development banks learned a quick lesson : You can create money, that money buys coal, that coal creates products, which neutralizes the inflation your money represents. The money ends up with the coal producers, who have no reason to spend it. More wealth going around meant more need for money. But the limit was the value of gold and silver, the currencies where backed by those metals. That represented a restriction on money creation, a restriction that had to be removed.
When oil came along in the eary 1900s and the diesel engine was used (originally invented to run on vegetable oil) the same dynamic got hold on the world, of course the countries that quickly armed themselves with diesel warships could put a lid on other countries trying to get to the new found black gold. The banks saw the same process playing out, but this time on a ridiculous scale. More engines meant more use of oil, meant more wealth creation, comfort and ‘progress’. The correct word however is ‘modernity’ which is the needless replacement of old habits to accomodate for the oil ‘pressure’. The fossil-economy and the mentality of economism was born.
What is economism according to me? It is the idea that you finance the use of fossil fuel (enable, because the money you create is worthless if you -can not- buy fossil fuels with it). This then allows for the purchase of engines, to produce wealth, new products etc.
- If this is a succes then this means more fossil fuel use, more cashflow
- If it is a failure there was initial fossil fuel use and cashflow
- The winners can be rewarded and the losers punished through the use of debt
- The whole system is backed by the armies who would not be able to fight modern wars without fossil fuels
The above system serves the fossil fuel industry and the banks. It is build into the economic theory. It is a game. All players that should not produce must be in debt, all producers that fail will become non-producers, and of course anyone who wants to try to become producers can, banks and fossil ALWAYS win. If you do well as a player you are welcome at the WEF.
The above ‘game’ has had a lot of benefits for many in the world. No doubt. But it also has meant there was constant ‘pressure’ to burn more fossil fuels, which would be called economic develoment and growth. This in turn caused and is till causing massive emissions, and this is why this game is a problem.
Now there is talk of a Great Reset, which is really not a reset at all, according to Wikipedia it denotes an industrial revolution based on most recent innovations in the fields of AI, Quantum computing, nano technology. The WEF and Klaus Schwab do not want to end the fossil/banking game, they see no harm in it maybe, but of course no matter how much Quantum computation and Nano technology you use, you’re not going to develop enough renewable energy sources as long as the economistic game is not pointed out and worked around.
Now to create renewable energy sources we still need to use a lot of fossil energy. This means the players of the economistic game have to agree with the transition, and they DONT. This is clearly demonstrated by Manchin’s behaviour vs. the Build Back Better act in the US. He is a fossil lobby controlled republican pretending to be a democrat. There are many such shills on the political left : Why not after all, you can steer you leftist friends towards economism and feel good about yourself. Some more hardline economists are on the right. The whole political spectrum, at least that part with power, is pro economism, because it has a tight grip over so many lives.
It is clear though that expanding fossil use and/or replacing fossil use from coal to gas or from gas to hydrogen (made with gas) are all variations of the same game described above. So many people are involved that only think in terms of money that this system has reached high rigidity.
The added difficulty is that armies are dependent on fossil fuels, and thus the availability of them is a national security issue, and although nuclear can replace fossil in ships and submarines, on land there’s no clear alternative (small reactors have been proposed). Earlier I concluded that armies are also there mainly to secure fossil, so if the world would switch to renewables the need for wars would deminish. Facing climate change you would think war would be lowest on the agenda, but for people trying to keep a fossil game going they are they put it the highest. Its a fatalist game but players think they will be able to escape the negative effects and they don’t care what happens after. It is a dead end mentality run by sadists who hope to get away in time.
What is the alternative? Renewables of course, but those can be anywhere, and are not easily controlled and limited by banks. In fact, banks are going to lose all control, their entire franchise in a world without fossil fuel. Only forced cartels or restrictions can build a new hierarchy as we have today. The big obstacle to the alternative of economism is of course economism, you are asking to use fossil fuels to exit from fossil fuels! This is why there needs to start a shadow ‘Roboeconomy’ networking renewable producers and users outside the influence of the global economy. This sounds impossible but it is not. You can have solar fields in france feeding into a rail based battery system that then drives to Rotterdam to deliver its energy. You can have private grids to carry wind power on shore. But most importantly you can have many small energy producers that deliver to local manufacturers. This concept is of course fought at every level by the same powers that thrive in the economistic game.
In another post (which got lost during an update of WP) I pleaded for a new currency, the Joule. This should be a currency next to the Euro, with quite specific rules that localize its value. Batteries are literally energy banks and can do much to level out value differences in combination with the grid and other energy transportation solutions. Hydrogen is out of the question because you lose 70% of your input, which means you build 70% of your renewable energy sources for nothing. That makes them 3 times more expensive, and causes a lot of emissions you are trying to avoid.
Will find the post and insert a link here. The website is https://joulecurrency.org