This post examines our own history on the planet, outlines how the ancient-derived reward pathways of our brain are easily hijacked by modern stimuli, and concludes that in very real ways, we have become addicted to the 'consumptive behaviors' linked to oil.

Gold Plated Porsche

Editor's note: I have learned a great deal more on the twin drivers of consumption - relative status and habituation/addiction since what follows was first written. However, despite best intentions, I am personally even more habituated to stimulation offered in modern American culture and my life still has about the same physical dependence on oil's emergent properties as it did back then. On the bright side however, I have continued my decade long shift of 'competition for status' away from pecuniary metrics...

While writing the recent piece on home heating, I was surprised to calculate many different numbers for the energy return on firewood. Though the outputs were only slightly different in quantity of BTUs, there was a wide range of inputs. But the primary reason for the return disparity was the presence of the market economy - those processing firewood for their own use had higher energy returns than those selling wood for profit - the accelerated drying time to process large amounts of wood required an additional wood input which dropped the energy return. Graphically this showed up as a tradeoff between maximizing energy return on TIME versus maximizing energy return on ENERGY. This reminded me that energy return is not a hard-and-fast principle, and also that society, obviously, will optimize its resources based on what it perceives to be its most limiting input(s). However, in an upcoming world constrained by energy, or any limiting variable other than time/money, we can increase our energy available by reducing the return on other inputs, such as time.