An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
Pages
▼
Pages
▼
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Gail Tverberg — World Energy Consumption Since 1820 in Charts
For the file. This is an in depth analysis of global energy use for two centuries.
I question her data sources. The biomass use estimation is way high. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg)
Population growth is slowing see (http://www.economist.com/node/17492964?story_id=17492964) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)
Gail's implications that populations growth follow energy consumption directly is wrong as the time it takes to the next billion has been decreasing since the 1970s not increasing.
In fact, per capita energy consumption increase is inversely proportional to the growth rate. Per Capita energy consumption follows the rate of urbanization and with urbanization the energy consumption rises.
Urbanization causes what population biologists call density dependent limiting factors. You can't have 10 kids in a tiny single bedroom apartment in a crowded city because the economics don't allow for it. The deceasing growth rate it will really start falling like a rock once this hits the market (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3543478/ns/health-sexual_health/t/male-birth-control-pill-soon-reality/#.T19SSPXNkT8).
The physical economy works like MMT with power as the currency. The more power is consumed by a family the higher the chance that the child will become a wealthy adult with a urban lifestyle. The result as best seen in Japan is the age of reproduction and rate of fertility rate drops. However, if you start decreasing energy consumption the risk associated with that lack of power consumption means that the chances of a child reaching the wealthy urban lifestyle as an adult decrease and thus fertility rises because the lack power means that resource of physical labor power has a higher value and women will have more children.
When a nation doesn't deficit spend it's machine energy into the environment for resource extraction and instead conserves it's so called "natural resource base" it must create a surplus of labor which actually increases the demand for resources. It's the same reason why austerity doesn't work to balance with state budgets. The result is a destruction of the existing resource base. Example: Africans burning grasslands while sitting on vast amount of mineral and oil wealth. They lack national infrastructure and eco-imperialist from Europe steal the oil for themselves and leave the Africans to clean up the mess and too poor to buy the oil. The British started this "Green" BS in India in the with "conservationism" to keep the Indians from using their own lands and having national industries so they would have to rely on the Imported British goods.
However if a nation increases it energy consumption it deficit spends it's energy reserves (on capital goods not on Ipads) it creates a surplus in capital and thus deceases the resource demands per capita per square kilometer and actually begins to increase the resource base because science and technology give us more options.
The greens are left wing Austrians with the real economy.
The future problems of capitalism will like Japan's problems of deflation and declining demand if we are lucky and if we are unlucky we will have a hyperdeflation and sudden drop in agricultural monetary profits and then hyperinflation in food prices that will literally kill most of the world's population in weeks due the sudden collapse of the food system because of it's near on demand production model (this is the way most species die aka a sudden decline in primary production).
Deflation and Austerity kill!
The Malthusian menace of resource "peaks" is a covert argument for austerity and it as wrong as any of the fiscal arguments for austerity.
The NGOs funding this stuff don't care about environmental problems.
These groups work for the financial oligarchy that wants to keep people poor and unempowered so they don't demand more political equality and a better standard of living. The greatest lie of economics is that it's about the management of scarcity. Real economics is about the management of abundance starting with the abundance of labor.
I'll post this link to Adam Curtis's documentary on how "ecology" is a pseudoscience that uses essentially the same methods of the neoclassical economists use for their social engineering.
Septeus 7, you may want to crosspost this at Gail's. She is good about responding to comments, and it would be interesting to see what she has to say. I've posted there in the past about MMT and it was a lively debate with her. I don't know that I convinced her, but she listened to carefully, and I provided refs for follow up.
I question her data sources. The biomass use estimation is way high. See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg)
ReplyDeletePopulation growth is slowing see
(http://www.economist.com/node/17492964?story_id=17492964) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)
Gail's implications that populations growth follow energy consumption directly is wrong as the time it takes to the next billion has been decreasing since the 1970s not increasing.
In fact, per capita energy consumption increase is inversely proportional to the growth rate. Per Capita energy consumption follows the rate of urbanization and with urbanization the energy consumption rises.
Urbanization causes what population biologists call density dependent limiting factors. You can't have 10 kids in a tiny single bedroom apartment in a crowded city because the economics don't allow for it. The deceasing growth rate it will really start falling like a rock once this hits the market (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3543478/ns/health-sexual_health/t/male-birth-control-pill-soon-reality/#.T19SSPXNkT8).
The physical economy works like MMT with power as the currency. The more power is consumed by a family the higher the chance that the child will become a wealthy adult with a urban lifestyle. The result as best seen in Japan is the age of reproduction and rate of fertility rate drops. However, if you start decreasing energy consumption the risk associated with that lack of power consumption means that the chances of a child reaching the wealthy urban lifestyle as an adult decrease and thus fertility rises because the lack power means that resource of physical labor power has a higher value and women will have more children.
When a nation doesn't deficit spend it's machine energy into the environment for resource extraction and instead conserves it's so called "natural resource base" it must create a surplus of labor which actually increases the demand for resources. It's the same reason why austerity doesn't work to balance with state budgets. The result is a destruction of the existing resource base. Example: Africans burning grasslands while sitting on vast amount of mineral and oil wealth. They lack national infrastructure and eco-imperialist from Europe steal the oil for themselves and leave the Africans to clean up the mess and too poor to buy the oil. The British started this "Green" BS in India in the with "conservationism" to keep the Indians from using their own lands and having national industries so they would have to rely on the Imported British goods.
(continued in next post)
However if a nation increases it energy consumption it deficit spends it's energy reserves (on capital goods not on Ipads) it creates a surplus in capital and thus deceases the resource demands per capita per square kilometer and actually begins to increase the resource base because science and technology give us more options.
ReplyDeleteThe greens are left wing Austrians with the real economy.
The future problems of capitalism will like Japan's problems of deflation and declining demand if we are lucky and if we are unlucky we will have a hyperdeflation and sudden drop in agricultural monetary profits and then hyperinflation in food prices that will literally kill most of the world's population in weeks due the sudden collapse of the food system because of it's near on demand production model (this is the way most species die aka a sudden decline in primary production).
Deflation and Austerity kill!
The Malthusian menace of resource "peaks" is a covert argument for austerity and it as wrong as any of the fiscal arguments for austerity.
The NGOs funding this stuff don't care about environmental problems.
These groups work for the financial oligarchy that wants to keep people poor and unempowered so they don't demand more political equality and a better standard of living. The greatest lie of economics is that it's about the management of scarcity. Real economics is about the management of abundance starting with the abundance of labor.
I'll post this link to Adam Curtis's documentary on how "ecology" is a pseudoscience that uses essentially the same methods of the neoclassical economists use for their social engineering.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
Septeus 7, you may want to crosspost this at Gail's. She is good about responding to comments, and it would be interesting to see what she has to say. I've posted there in the past about MMT and it was a lively debate with her. I don't know that I convinced her, but she listened to carefully, and I provided refs for follow up.
ReplyDelete