At some point, possibly soon, simple discussions on BTU assets and flow rates will be joined and superceded by the difficult broader questions that Jay Hanson (and others before him) has been thinking and writing about for almost 15 years. Recently, he has attempted to parse his ideas into short 'videos'. I've included links to several of these draft video segments below. (all of them can be accessed on his website). Jay's videos (and writings) are most definitely not politically correct, but then neither are many of the solutions, if any, to the upcoming energy crises we collectively face. The material in the videos will be considered offensive by some, especially young people, economists, and those who haven't studied history and biology. Jay's main conclusion is that declining net energy, combined with a global blanket strategy of digging resources out of the ground to grow unneeded consumption of stuff, ultimately leads to war for resources. Indeed, each video ends with the rhetorical question (in Mr. Moose monotone) "Is war the only answer?" I agree that a world war is one of many possible futures, but not an inevitable one.

I expect to get some flak for posting these here, but this is one man whose general track record of predictions requires his current thinking at least to be heard, if not heeded. In order to know what possible paths we have open, we have to first isolate which are not possible, given our supply/demand constraints. While I was a new Phd student in 2005, Jay and I started an email correspondence which quickly disavowed me of many of the utopian environmental views espoused in my field; a prominent one being that 'facts' alone are not enough to produce meaningful action. Jay's focus on cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology has been reinforced by the explosion of recent findings in peer review science on how the human brain actually works. Optimally, there should be a think tank(s) somewhere devoted to exploring and expanding these multidisciplinary connections and producing usable research. Perhaps there is, but I can't imagine who would fund it or hearing about the results on the evening news. (Could you envision Jay Hanson as the moderator for one of the Presidential Debates?....;-)

POLITICS
ENERGY LIMITS TO GROWTH
MONEY
CORPORATIONS
BEHAVIOUR 1