Rapidly declining net energy means that POST World War II society is over. We must seize the initiative if there is to be a decent future.

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We live in uncertain and tumultuous times. All that was certain in our past including the stability and fundamental constitutionality of government, the certainty that pension obligations--both public and private--would be rigorously upheld, is now vanishing. Detroit's municipal bankruptcy places banks as secured creditors, ahead of pensioners. In fact the riskiest obligations--derivatives, usually based on so called "swaps", have been given "super priority" under the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act. (1) This maneuver seems likely to become the template for stripping tens of millions of Americans of their pensions.   

We are all familiar with the endless NSA scandals, unconstitutional spying on all Americans--indeed upon the entire planet! Most of us realize, at some level at least, that America has ceased to exist as the imperfect, but fundamentally good nation that it was during our youths. Instead concentrated wealth has completely overwhelmed its political institutions at the national level. Similar decay is ongoing in Canada and across the planet.

My objective today, at least, is not to dwell on any of this. Rather, it is to demonstrate that all of the diverse phenomena related to our political, economic, and societal decay are intrinsically related. Consider the graph below. The amount of oil and other hydrocarbon liquids is shown by year, with respect to availability per capita.

Graphed like this, we see that the peak of oil production per person was reached in 1979. According to the graph, it has held steady for the past 44 years, more or less, as rising production has kept pace with rising population. Well as Mark Twain may have said: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Here, oil production had essentially flat-lined since 2005. A small uptick has occurred mainly due to "fracking"-produced oil and natural gas in North America.

Source: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2013/07/peak-oil-what-peak-oil.html

The most essential data omitted from the above graph is EROEI, which is an acronym for Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Post World War II, the EROEI of oil from reservoirs such as Gahwar in Saudi Arabia, or Spindletop in Texas, was approximately 100:1. This means that it required the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to produce the energy equivalent of one hundred barrels of oil. If this EROEI were to continue indefinitely, then the world could coast by for decades using fossil fuels--well except of course for the human-induced climate change. However, that is a subject for another time.

The EROEI of deepwater, polar, and other "unconventional" sources of oil is down to about 10:1. (2) Basically, all of the "low-hanging fruit" the easy-to-get, high net-energy oil, has already been gotten. All that remains is the hard-to-get, hard-to-produce, stuff.   The average, net EROEI of the graph just below illustrates the effects of declining EROEI on actual net-energy availability. Note that if this were adjusted for population as in the first graph, the result would be declining net energy per capita globally.

Source: http://peakoil.com/generalideas/energy-part-ii-eroei

The chart just below shows the net EROEI for a number of common energy sources.

EROEI and Cents per kilowatt-hour

Energy mechanism

EROEI

Cents/kWh

Hydro

11:1 to 267:1

1

Coal

50:1

2 to 4

Oil (Ghawar supergiant field)

100:1

Oil (global average)

19:1

Natural gas

10:1

4 to 7

Wind

18:1

4.5 to 10

Wave

15:1

12

Solar Photovoltaic

3.75:1 to 10:1

21 to 83

Geothermal

2:1 to 13:1

10

Tidal

~ 6:1

10

Tar sands

5.2:1 to 5.8:1

Oil shale

1.5:1 to 4:1

Nuclear

1.1:1 to 15:1

2 to 9

Biodiesel

1.9:1 to 9:1

Solar thermal

1.6:1

6 to 15

Ethanol

0.5:1 to 8:1

Source: http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Energy+return+on+energy+invested

Industrial civilization was built for an EROEI of around 100:1. Energy in equals production of goods and services out. We are now at about 10:1 and declining. This must have fateful consequences for us all. As the old, high EROEI stuff gets used up, it is replaced with lower EROEI substitutes. However, as production of goods becomes ever more "expensive" in net-energy terms, the economy responds with job outsourcing. Essentially this is labor arbitrage wherein cheap transportation costs allow for cheap labor in Third World nations to be substituted for more expensive labor in the Developed World. High-paying industrial-sector jobs are lost as a consequence. As the EROEI-diminishment continues, financialization of the economy occurs. Basically, the banksters on Wall Street, in their relentless, utterly amoral, search for the greatest return on capital in the shortest time, stop investing in real-world "bricks and mortar" projects in favor of the enormous yields obtained from financial masturbation. Risk is not a factor as they have not only been declared "too big to fail" under the W. Bush Administration, but actually "too big to jail" under the Obama Administration.

Any profits made by the banksters are theirs; any losses are "socialized" via government bailout to the taxpayers. Since net EROEI will continue its relentless downward trajectory, and since the banksters own Washington, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the media, etc., the near-term future becomes fairly obvious.

Concomitant with the above the US has rapidly become ever-more unequal. The top one percent of Americans own at least 40 % of the nation's wealth. The bottom EIGHTY percent, own just seven percent. America is more unequal than most Third World nations! (3). Worse, this trend towards ever-growing inequality is actually accelerating! Political democracy cannot survive the ever-growing concentration of power and wealth. Though like in the late Roman Republic, the trappings of democracy can endure under elite manipulation for some time. Politically, this is present-day America (also to varying degrees, Canada under Harper, Great Britain under Cameron etc) (4).

It is not a particularly new or bold observation to note that the nature of the economy determines the economy and politics of the resultant society. Our future is now predicated upon:

1)       Ever-diminishing net energy (EROEI).

2)       Ever-growing inequalities of wealth between the few and the many.

3)       Ever-growing cooption of government, by the bankster and corporate elite, specifically the police power of the state, to enforce the financial interests of the controlling few over all the rest of us.

Things just get progressively worse due to net EROEI decline. They do NOT ever get fundamentally better. They can't because our political institutions are prevented from adapting rationally as that would not be in the self-interest of their bankster owners. Sequentially, everything, and everyone, is sacrificed to preserve and expand the wealth of the very few. The corporate-owned mass media cannot report on the true problem as they are mouthpieces for those who ARE the problem. The Congress is bought and paid for, as is the President. Judges are selected by the President and subject to confirmation by the Senate. As these branches are bankster-owned, so too are the members of the judiciary. As former US President Jimmy Carter recently told a German audience: "The U.S. has no functioning democracy at this moment." (5) There exists no hope whatsoever that politics as usual will have any effect on our ever-more-rapid slide towards a dystopian future, the likes of which would sicken even Orwell and Huxley. This is due to the rapidly declining EROEI of our energy base.

If fundamental change is to occur, and it MUST, it must be revolutionary in nature. The entire structure of the US political economy must be uprooted. All bankster and corporatist wealth, being stolen, must be confiscated, all banksters and corporatists must be swiftly arrested and rendered permanently harmless. All of the corrupt politicians and government agents who would inevitably seek to preserve the status quo, under cover of "national security", must be summarily relieved of duty, fired, and arrested.

Article V of the US Constitution should be invoked by mass gatherings of citizens in all fifty states. These mass gatherings would vote to call for a a national Constitution Convention. On a state-by-state basis, they would then vote to convene a Constitutional Convention. Once the required thirty-four states have done so, the Second Constitutional Convention would be convened. It would, necessarily, rule by decree, the previous governments at both the national and state levels dissolved. If we get this far, a new birth of freedom may lie ahead. If not, only ever-growing misery awaits us.

The key is a rapid national, hopefully global, mass popular insurrection, which is non-violent, at least until/unless deadly force is brought to bear against it, while following the existing Constitution about as closely in replacing it, as was the case for replacing the Articles of Confederation back in 1787. The key to THAT occurring is mass awareness that our decline is inevitable in that it is caused by immutable physical laws in conjunction with the corresponding actions of a wholly despicable, infinitely avaricious, utterly amoral, elite who will never voluntarily give up their deceitfully obtained, illegitimate grasp on power. As the laws of physics are not going to change, the political economy must.

The high-energy past will never return; post WWII America will not either. This is not, however, to say that a decent, ecologically sustainable, democratic, future can't be ours. We CAN change history! A new birth of freedom is possible. It is up to you and me!

References:

1)       http://truth-out.org/news/item/17996-the-detroit-bail-in-template-fleecing-pensioners-to-save-the-banks

2)       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested

1)       http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/12/inequality-us-_n_3421381.html

4)       http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/oligarchy-exists-inside-our-democracy.html  

5)    http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/jimmy_carter_us_has_no_functioning_democracy_partner/

Authors Website: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3979729587610286911

Authors Bio:

Michael P Byron is the author of The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad. This book is a manual for taking effective action to deal with the crises of our age including global climate change, peak oil, and political failure to deal with these and other problems.

His previous book is Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.

Byron-has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine.--He teaches all aspects of Political Science and Political Economy in local colleges in the San Diego area.- He was the Democratic Party's candidate for United States Congress in California's 49th Congressional District in 2004. In 2002,-he- ran as a write-in candidate upon discovering that the Republican incumbent, Darrell Issa, had no major-party challenger.

Mike lives in Oceanside, CA with his wife, Ramona Byron. Both are Navy veterans.