Quote from: Sovereign on July 04, 2011, 11:16:33 PM

Quote from: grod on July 04, 2011, 10:34:39 PM

Except for one minor problem. Energy is not free and unlimited for us with our current technologies. If we had limitless power, sure, absolutely. Time of scarcity is over.

Until then, you are simply wrong.

This is stupid. We never run out of resources in a free market system. Why? The price system prevents that. What happens is when supply gets low, prices start to go up, and people use less of it. What happens when oil supply becomes low? Alternative energy sources start to become viable.

That's as wrong as saying that in a free market system, there can't be famine.

What's dangerous with energy in general and oil reserves in particular is that the time needed to adapt may be MUCH shorter than the life span of such things as houses, cars, motorways and so on. We are pretty much bounded to a fossile-driven economy with a base that could largely disappear within a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_Oil

http://europe.theoildrum.com/

Quote from: benjamindees on July 04, 2011, 11:52:26 PM

So, no. The next time energy prices spike, you're not going to see people rolling up their sleeves to make anything more efficient. You're going to see wars and people dying. You're going to see a forced drop in consumption and living standards. In fact you're probably going to see this pretty soon actually, since absolutely nothing has been done to "increase efficiency" since the last time energy prices spiked, except for a bunch of taxpayer theft and subsidized waste.

That's true also. We had an energy price spike in 2009. At the same time there was a collapse of the american mortgage market. This can surely attributed to the fact that the whole american economy is debt-driven.

But there is another fact: The higher prices for gasoline becomes, the less money have people to spend for paying mortgage and other goods. The further away the houses are from workplaces, the more pronounced is this effect.

Actually, prices for houses fell much more for the ones far away from the urban centres. One can surely say that the spike in energy prices has contributed to the financial crisis.

There's another point: Oil production requires immense amounts of capital and is bound to cheap credit.
Oil production did not rise in the last five years, in spite of rising global demand.

You can think of the current industrial system as a kind of organism. It lives from cheap oil, but it is also required to sustain oil production. It may be capable to adapt, but not quickly.

If you take a lion and the choke its common carotid artery, you don't get a lion adapted to less oxygen in the blood. You get a dead lion, assumed you survive the fight.