“THE NEXT 50 YEARS WILL BE NOTHING LIKE THE LAST 50 YEARS.” Prepare for a world like we've never seen.
We've never known anything but ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels. The inevitable decline of energy consumption will bring a fundamental change that "no one" is prepared for.
Dr. Simon Michaux—who holds a PhD in mining engineering, and teaches at the Geological Survey in Finland—asserts that we don’t have the energy or the materials (e.g., metals, like copper and cobalt) to implement any of the plans of the “Cornucopians,” the pundits, advisors and analysts who drive the public discourse around energy and who assume that we will always have plenty of energy, because we always have had plenty in the past.
One fish says to the other: The water is warm today.” The other fish responds, “What’s water?” That’s how we are with energy. We’ve never known a world with anything but an overabundance of it.
Here is a portion of my conversation with Dr. Michaux and a link to the full interview on YouTube.
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HART HAGAN: In the future, are we going to live in a very different economy? If so how?
SIMON MICHAUX: Yes. To quote Chris, Martenson, the future, the next 50 years, will be nothing like the last 50 years. The reason is that the things that underpin our existing industrial ecosystem, our money, our energy, and our raw materials, all of a sudden are not going to be as available or as abundant as they were.
The way we've lived up until now, we've taken certain things for granted. And all of a sudden the fundamentals won’t be as readily available.
Just like the oxygen we breathe, we don't see it. We don't consider it. And we've always had energy at our fingertips. We still have energy at our fingertips. But we're starting to see that the existing way of getting hold of energy is becoming more expensive and unreliable.
HART HAGAN: Cheap energy and easy credit.
SIMON MICHAUX: Well, they are linked at the hip due to the petrodollar agreement. As of 1973 all oil contracts are purchased in US dollars. And that's held until now. But it's now becoming unsteady.
That resulted in a situation where the entire world would have to interact with the US currency, and the US currency was able to maintain its global status. Every time the US wanted to balance the budget, they could just print money. So the US never was in a situation where it had to plan for the future. They didn't have to put something off to pay for it later. They did not have to show discipline.
HART HAGAN: The conversation around the future of energy is driven by two camps. One camp says fossil fuels forever, no problem. Another camp says we need to switch to 100% renewable energy (with all the bright-eyed bushy-tailed attitude that goes along with that).
And then there's a third option that says, we don't have the energy or the materials to implement renewable energy and we're going to run out of cheap oil. So it's like “none of the above,” right?
SIMON MICHAUX: Yep. And from there we've got three or four options, right? So it requires us to actually work on multiple programs in parallel.
But the reality is those two camps I believe are mistaken. Both camps are actually going to be in what I call the Cornucopia group.
HART HAGAN: Cornucopia is the Horn of Plenty. We have plenty. We've always lived with plenty. We really think we're always going to live with plenty.
SIMON MICHAUX: Yep. My work has been criticized recently quite a bit by saying: You're suggesting a solution that would never happen. The purpose of my work was not to put the optimal solution on the ground. It was to show those who control our society that their thinking is wrong.
I welcome any thoughts from my readers. Thanks.