Reshuffling the Deck of Scarcity Is No Solution to Our Existential Risks

Only abundance is

I have long written on the distinction between real and financial economies. Real economies are based on matter, energy, and human effort. Financial economies are largely accounting fictions that mainly focus on the exchange aspect of real economies. Money and banking (and my profession of accounting) are purely concerned with the exchange function, for instance. But in industrial economies, people live in the financial economy (almost nobody raises their own food, for instance, but buys it with money, or somebody gives it to them, usually bought with tax money), and hence, tend to ignore the real economy, which the financial economy is merely derivative of.

As Bucky Fuller said, if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity derived from it, it would cost $1 million per barrel. Obviously, the market system fails to depict that importance. If that barrel was fed into machines, it would produce ten man-years of work, and those machines can perform feats far beyond human capability. Average Americans ride on the backs of several hundred “energy slaves” as they go about their days, and relatively few are aware of it to any significant degree.

We live in a world of scarcity, particularly energy scarcity, at least as far as public life goes. The world’s oil is being burned up a million times as fast as it was made, and it will all be gone in this century. But all currently used energy sources, with the exception of solar and wind, have already peaked or soon will, even uranium.

But virtually all instances of political activism that I have seen do not address the foundation of our real economies, energy, especially with anything like real solutions. As Brian O’Leary said, the conventional energy alternatives are all too little and too late. Only the technologies that my friend witnessed long ago will usher in an Epoch of abundance. I recently received an email from Steven Greer’s organization that linked to this paper that he wrote in 2001. It is remarkably close to my description of what I call the Fifth Epoch. I heard about my friend’s underground technology show before I ever heard of Greer, and I have been imagining the Fifth Epoch since I became Dennis Lee’s partner in 1987. In 2001, when I told Brian about my friend’s show, he was not even surprised. I eventually heard plenty of similar stories to my journey from fellow travelers, at least from those who survived the experience.

To his credit, Greer understands that the arrival of free energy will be the biggest event in the human journey. Thinking people cannot live with the idea of free energy for very long before they begin to realize it. The arrival of free energy means the end of the world as we know it, but the arrival of all Epochs did that.

Greer has an apartment in Washington, D.C., and keeps beating on the doors there. I recently saw his entreaty to Trump. I strongly doubt that the retail political route will work. Soon before he died, Brian told me that electoral politics was a dead-end, and he would have known. Brian remarked on his “codependence” with Washington, D.C., and Greer seems to suffer from the same affliction. I wish Greer the best, but he is beating his head against that wall, and several aspects of his efforts I consider vulnerabilities. But kudos to him all the same, for trying. He is aware of my work, but considers it to be too scholarly (“Who reads anymore?”). In a sane world, there would be 50 like Greer, doing what he was, my work would not be a marginal phenomenon, and people like Brian would not be shut out from all “progressive” venues, while they feted doomsayers such as Richard Heinberg.

Efforts that only seek to reshuffle the deck of scarcity, by reallocating tax dollars here and there, confronting politicians and corporations with protests, playing the capitalist game, etc., will not solve the problem of scarcity. Unless we permanently banish scarcity, and soon, we might not make it as a species. Only abundant energy will bring abundance to humanity. Everything else is noise. I have a plan.