Tursiops
Tuesday 24th June 2008 1:52am
Welwyn Garden City
9,788 posts
Without fossil fuels the planet could support only a quarter of its current population. Peak production of oil has passed, and demand is increasing. Prices have nowhere to go but up. A telling story in the newspaper at the weekend was that demand for organic produce is on the increase because the price differential with supermarket produce is falling, as a result of the increase in the cost of fertilisers (manufactured from natural gas) and of the supermarket centralised distribution systems. Our economic system is unsustainable and the question is how quickly it will collapse. There are worrying signs that the collapse has begun and that it could soon spiral out of control. This is much more than just another recession.
And all the time we are degrading our environment and heating up our atmosphere, meaning that when the crash comes we will have even less resources to live on. And the rose-tinted argument of the economists, that we do not need to worry because the laws of supply and demand will ensure that markets provide a new energy source to replace fossil fuels, simply ignores the laws of physics.
Any animal, when they encounter a new resource, will expand to plague proportions until that resource has been exhausted, populations will then stabilise at a reduced level in a degraded environment. This was the cycle that began when humans learnt to unlock the stored sunlight in fossil fuels, and the consequence has always been inevitable.
Sorry to go all gloomy and survivalist, but it is time to be very scared. Or to say it f**k it and have a party while you still can.
