ROI on free "cool aid" seems to be enormous. LOL.

We have never produced food on a wide scale that comes from anything other than "agricultural photosynthesis". If you believe otherwise, please document the case.

As for quantities and durations, yes that matters far more in reality than human abstractions about freedoms. So far as the universe is concerned it does not matter whether we are "free" or not. What matters is that there are N resources and we can never use more than N, no matter how much you cry about "freedom".

Finally, your assumption that life at Cuban levels of energy consumption must be bad seems to ignore the US itself from about 1776 to about 1940. People then seemed to live fine "free" lives without living in concentration camps. Your "concentration camp" argument is a strawman intended to invoke an emotional reaction. It has failed, probably because you fail to understand the physics of the problem.

Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett

The actual quality or awfulness of your life, the degree to which you have any economic, political, or religious freedom, or instead live in what amounts to a concentration camp, the presence of art and culture; these and all other considerations are omitted from the picture as seen through that carnival mirror.

Considering you live in a country which is trying to near the limit of totalitarian fascism (with severely limited civil rights) while trying hard not to look like one, I don't think your comparison is without it's problems.

I live in a country with half the energy use, half the energy need and half the CO2 output compared to you. And probably have equal amount of if not more "nice additional freedom" than you have.

It's just that even where I live, the energy use is a multiple of what is sustainable.

Look, the HDMI is not a joke. You have have your own subjective "feels-good-to-me" index, but don't be so sure that other people would share it or would like to measure their happiness by it.

If you want objective data, you look at what sociologists, economists and psychologists have found out with mass samplings from various cultures.

And these all say pretty much the same thing.

After a certain level of material well being, people only become less happy, not more.

Regardless of how they spend it. Even if they consume extra cultural and non-material things with this wealth.

As for the non-material things that cannot be consumed with wealth (political, artistic and other freedoms).

Yes, they are important, but they are even harder to judge.

You may like your certain set of freedoms, but you seem to be clearly oblivious to the restrictions you live under in your culture of choice.

To me they are painfully obvious.

But it's a matter of preference. I'll give you that.

What is not matter of preference is the PHYSICAL day-to-day living. The material bit. You know, getting enough of energy, food, clean water, heat, shelter and that short of thing.

Only after that can you start choosing the other nice bits you prefer.

But if you haven't got those basic things, there isn't anything to choose from.

In that case nature chooses on your behalf and makes you part of this one gigantic performance art piece called emergency survival, whether you prefer it or not.

That's why this article is important and your arguments completely seem to miss the point. Even Maslow understood this.

As for the "agricultural photosynthesis" quib. Surely you are joking? You aren't that removed from the biological/physical reality, are you? Do you have any idea how your body is able to live?

When the going gets rough, I'll trade all my art collection, my library, opera seasonal ticket and my freedom of speech for your last 1000 liters of clean water and 10 Mjoules of food.

See you on the other side of the great equalizer. Be ready to make the switch, you'll get double the amount of all the "nice bits" you prefer so much :)

Paul S sounds rather bitter. Of course, given the preparedness of the US (which after 1970 after all did become the first industrialised nation to seriously consider the long term oil problem at the highest official levels) in the present day, conditions in the US some 10-20 years from now are going to produce a lot more of this sort of bitterness.

ciao,
Bruce

ps pity the awareness didn't exactly percolate to the rest of the society, especially after 1980 and the return to There's a Will There's a Way mentality

Paul, I will suggest that long term (I'm talking centuries here) almost certainly "we have to live solely from...photosynthesis". IMO it is VERY arrogant for humans to assume they can make a solar collection system superior to that produced by literally billions of years of competition and selection. I'm waiting to see the human-designed energy gathering and concentrating system that:

repairs itself
reproduces itself
produces useful waste products (such as O2)
produces no waste nor structure that is not biodegradeable

Since I'm on a roll, I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that a big part of how humans got into this mess is arrogance. We arrogantly believe we are somehow more important than everything else on the planet. We arrogantly believe we know better than 3 billions years of competition and selection. We arrogantly believe we're so damn smart we'll figure our way out of our present predicament without giving up comfort and convenience.

The ancient Greeks were aware of this; more than one of their tragedies demonstrated the outdcome of hubris. Our turn will come. Again from the ancient Greeks: "The mill of the gods grinds slow, but it grinds exceeding fine".

PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol

I am especially pained by the typical reactionary notion that even though the Cubans might be living at a sustainable economical level it is unacceptable because they have a supposed communist government. Just in case that is too complicated for some: It is possible to be doing something right even if you do everything else wrong. Even if it is an accident. Noticing that does not make one a commie sympathizer.

But...I doubt Cuba would be in the "sustainable" box, if not for its Communist dictatorship.

If they were not Communist, they would probably be much like the U.S. Fully part of the global economy, with the benefits and drawbacks there of.

If they were not a dictatorship, could they have done the things they did to cut back their energy consumption?

This reminds me of something Diamond talks about in Collapse. He argues that the key to avoiding collapse may be strong central control, because otherwise, the tragedy of the commons rules.