My Energy Journey – Part 13

The 21st century

I began this series with my life’s experiences, and how the USA’s first oil crisis, combined with my mentor’s engine, gave me my first energy dreams. I had no idea what I was in for. As soon as I became Dennis Lee’s partner, I began having visions of what I call the Fifth Epoch. But my days of study were ahead of me, and much of energy’s role in the human journey I had yet to learn. When I did, I saw many events in the world in my lifetime in a new light.

Hitting Peak Oil in the USA in 1970 meant that the postwar boom would soon end, and the USA’s standard of living has declined ever since. The world reached Peak Oil in 2005-2006, and the inevitable decline is upon us. The EROI concept helped me understand that all of the fracking, mining tar sands, and other activities are merely sucking at the dregs of Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits. Just like humanity burned through the easy meat, the easy wood, and the intact soils, we have burned through the easy hydrocarbons. In this century, at current trajectories, we will burn through all of Earth’s oil of significance. But by then, atmospheric carbon dioxide will likely reach 600 parts per million or so, and Global Warming will be galloping along. Humanity may have already ended this ice age, by burning hydrocarbons like we have. The last time an ice age ended, the biggest extinction in the eon of complex life happened. Do we really want to see how this turns out?

If this trend continues, parts of the Middle East and the American Southwest will become uninhabitable in this century, at minimum. But the biggest risk to humanity will be epic crop failures. Billions of people could starve. Industrialized nations will fare better, but poor nations will bear the brunt of that. If people think that the oil genocides inflicted by the USA and friends have been horrific, just wait until the fight is over water and food. I do not want to live to see that. The NetZero “solutions” bandied about by elites call for a shock treatment of austerity and a deindustrialization (and possible depopulation) of humanity. Brian O’Leary said that the mainstream “solutions” are all too little and too late, and I won’t disagree.

With what I know what exists, calling the organized suppression and sequestering from humanity of it by global elites criminal is too tame. It is evil on a scale that few people can really fathom, but the hardest part for those who become aware of the situation is realizing that nearly all humans are accomplices to this situation, in their ignorance, denial, fear, and other unproductive orientations to the issue. This situation is 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity. A relative heroic few are trying to right humanity’s ship, but very few on Earth are addressing the free-energy situation, especially with approaches that have a prayer of success. Overcoming the tactics of organized suppression is no mean feat. Nobody has succeeded yet, but humanity’s inertia is by far the largest problem, and I gave up on the mass-movement approach over 20 years ago. A successful effort will have to aim far higher than that.

Humanity has its toes over the edge of the abyss, in many ways, and few people know or care much, not enough to do anything about it. For those who do, they nearly invariably hack at branches, at best. I had to relinquish judgment of the situation long ago. It is just the reality of my species and the state of our planet. It is surreal to me that the solution to all of our existential risks is ignored, denied, feared, suppressed, etc. When it is acknowledged, the issue is rarely discussed in productive fashion, but it is subjected to tabloid-level conspiracism or it gets stuck on inventors, scientists, and the like, thinking that they are the answer, when they are only a small piece of the puzzle.

We are facing what Bucky Fuller called “Utopia or oblivion,” and he wrote a book with that title. I have called our options the Fifth Epoch or the Sixth Mass Extinction that might take humanity with it. I know what will work, if I can find the people for it, which will be the hard part. But if a quixotic effort like mine succeeds, then what? I have written on that plenty, and the implications of free energy and related technologies that are so carefully sequestered from public awareness and use.

While I began imagining the Fifth Epoch in 1987, the past 35 years of study have made it far clearer to me, and what the transformative effects of abundant and harmlessly produced energy will very likely be. That comes next.