Societal Diet

I was thinking about people when they are going on a diet.  This is typically necessary when you've been in the habit for a long time of binge eating whatever you wanted without constraints.  The act of cutting back would come with immediate consequences.  Your high calorie fueled body would have to calm down and accept lower energy content. You would have to convince yourself to not answer to the screaming voice inside of your head that is saying "NEED MORE SUGAR!" and make due with what you really need, which is much less than you want.

This is exactly like society, which needs to be saying it needs less energy, not always screaming for more.  It's about as possible and likely as going on a diet.  There is too much resistance on a societal level to make these changes voluntarily without some kind of threat or price explosion.  It may not be impossible to do, but it's very difficult.

Excess energy in a single human body turns to fat. I wonder if there is an analogy in this in society as a whole?  Have we grown fat with our energy consumption?  In some ways, cheap and easy energy allowed us to bulk up our economies with high industrial output.  Has there been a downside that makes us less reluctant to get out and work hard or less able to exert effort because of the extra weight we carry in having grown into the shape we are now in.  We rely on not just the energy we consume, but the way we generated it.  We might have a hard time transitioning to new forms.

During World War II we had lean production, and ran a lean country with no extravagant energy use. Like the way that an individual soldier is in shape, we as a country were in shape and producing more equipment than any point in our history.

It seems we will be able to dodge the bullet and put off the day of accountability for a few more years.  I heard a report from the new North Dakota oil fields.  It was a jobs story, detailing the incredible amount of oilfield work available and the difficulty finding enough people to fill the jobs. It also outlined the extent of what was found in the oil fields.  It said we will be producing more energy in the form of oil and natural gas just 3 years from now, than the national increase in energy demand requires.

This makes us fat in the head.  Rather than spending the time and money developing the next forms of energy, sustainable forms that will not have a looming end point at some time in the future, we get lazy sucking out the last dregs of our old way of powering ourselves.

I have a co-worker that is fond of saying that American needs a crisis before it takes action.  Imagine if we treated our person health that way.  If we waited until we had a heart attack before we started going to the gym, would that not be too late?  You'll never get into good shape if you let yourself go for so long that you harm your health.  It seems to me that this is what we are doing with our planet and its environment.  You need to work toward sustainable energy in order to map out a sustainable long term future.  We don't want to have a planetary heart attack before we start going on an energy diet.  By then, it's too late.