Oil

Este capítulo sobre el pico del petróleo es trascendental. Recordarán que en el Capítulo 3 dije que vincularíamos los componentes de la sigla “EEMA”. Por el momento vamos a vincular Economía y Energía. Se trata de uno de los capítulos más importantes del Crash Course y deseo reconocer públicamente mi deuda con los cientos de estudiosos que, con suma dedicación y paciencia, fueron reuniendo los datos aquí presentados y trabajaron sin descanso para avanzar en la comprensión del papel que desempeña la energía en nuestras vidas. Rindo aquí homenaje a esas y a muchas otras fuentes.

La energía es la sangre que da vida a cualquier economía. Pero cuando una economía se basa en un sistema monetario de deudas exponenciales y al mismo tiempo necesita para funcionar un suministro también exponencial de energía, la oferta existente de dicha energía exige la mayor atención.

Si nos detenemos en el consumo de energía en Usamérica, representado aquí por este gráfico del Departamento de Energía, veremos que el petróleo representa más del 50% de nuestra energía anual. Si se consideran juntos el petróleo y el gas natural, ese porcentaje alcanza y sobrepasa el 75% de nuestra energía, calculada en cuatrillones de BTU, es decir, de British Thermal Units o unidades térmicas británicas, que representan la cantidad de energía necesaria para elevar un grado Fahrenheit la temperatura de una libra de agua en condiciones atmosféricas normales.

You are at the part of the Crash Course where everything you learned comes together into a single chapter. Chapter 19 contains a comprehensive view of how all of our problems are actually interrelated and need to be viewed as such or solutions will continue to elude us.

We will review the key trends, which appear to be converging on a very narrow window of the future. Here is a two-second recap of the key issues. If you have watched all of the videos until this point, you will undoubtedly see how they are connected:

Money, credit, growth. Exponential growth. Debt, future, history. Failure to save. Assets, housing, bubble, financial panic. Demographics, wealth, boomers, falling values. Fuzzy numbers. Energy, oil, growth. Peak Oil. Environment, resources, exploitation, change.

This chapter will connect the dots and beckon us toward the future.

In theory, there’s nothing problematic with living in a world full of exponential growth and depletion curves – as long as the world does not have any boundaries. However, exponential functions take on enormous importance when they approach a physical boundary, as seems to be the case for oil in the very near future. Both discoveries and production indicate that we could be at oil’s exponential boundary already.

We can make a very strong case that both population and our money system are utterly dependent on the continued expansion of oil energy. But what if our exponentially-based economic and monetary systems, rather than being the sophisticated culmination of human evolution, are really just an artifact of oil? What if all of our rich societal complexity and all of our trillions of dollars of wealth and debt simply are the human expression of surplus energy pumped from the ground?

What will happen to our exponential, debt-based money system? Is it even possible for it to function in a world without constant growth? These are important questions, and they deserve answers.