So here is an analogy. The beaver population is growing. Beavers make dams. They make dams out of trees. So...as long as there are still plenty of trees around, the beaver population should continue to grow, right?
It sure seems to be the case. So say beavers represent Human beings and dam building represents the global economy and trees represent oil.
Oil reserves are declining, much of the global economy is based on oil, so the economy should continually contract.
This would be like a bunch of busy beavers cutting down all the trees faster than they could regenerate.
But what if the beavers only used up one species of tree, the species beavers seemed to prefer? Say it was birch trees, for the sake of argument. Say 99% of beaver dams were composed of birch trees and birch trees were declining.
You could make some seemingly airtight arguments that beavers would begin declining with the decline of birch trees.
The hidden assumption here is that beavers would not be able to adapt to exploiting new sources of wood.
That's the assumption behind peak oil. That humanity and by extension the global economy cannot adapt to a new source of fuel and thus there will be no more growth as we "outstrip" the resources neccessary to sustain our current population and rate of economic growth.
So are there a bunch of veritable oak trees, maple trees and pine trees around? Are there enough alternatives? Can they be as efficient as the declining "birches"(energy sources) in building "dams" (economy)? That is the question.
Another hidden assumption related to the above is the assumption that trees=dams. A beaver dam is "simply" a bunch of trees. It neglects the intelligence behind the equation. This is a blindspot of a materialistic worldview. Materialistic worldviews neglect role of human consciousness in nearly every equation.
This is the argument that "We eat oil." Actually we don't. I mean you could say we eat sunlight, or each other by the same logic. Our food is the result of photosynthesis, which is how plants turn sunlight into sugar. So we eat sunlight, sunlight that has been turned into carbohydrates or animal proteins.
Labor is also part of food production, human farmers provide the labor. So you could say we eat farmers also as easily as you could say we eat oil. We eat their hands and arms and legs and torsos, especially their backs (you know farming is hard work, you have to put your back into it) We eat farmer brains, because intelligence goes into food production, just like beaver intelligence goes into dams.
That's not any more ridiculous than saying we eat oil because the machinery, runs on oil, and the fertilizer is made of oil.
Its all just sunlight and intelligent organization. I know, oil is sunlight too, condensed liquid sunlight.
It takes intelligence to get the energy from it however. That's the part that gets overlooked. Its like oil is birch and we busy beavers came to favor birch over other trees for whatever reason, but that's not to say we can't adapt.
I know I can get into all these complex arguments about EROI, etc. All that really involves is looking backwards and saying "see the beavers used birch in the past! that's because its the only tree they could have used! We know this because that is the tree they used. We know all the other trees won't work because they weren't used.
Its a circular argument. It makes sense in a way because, we have used a lot of oil and still are dependent on it and there are alternatives that at the present time have not proven to be cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuels. Its easier to look backwards than forwards. But the bottom line is that its human intelligence that extracts the energy from the oil. Its doesn't create energy to grow food and feul the economy just sitting in the ground any more than trees create beaver dams without being cut down and arranged by the beavers. A beaver dam is not simply trees. Its trees plus beaver intelligence.
Our economy is not simply resources such as oil. Its resources plus human intelligence. Throughout history as certain resources declined others were opened up. The constant has been human intelligence. Human intelligence remains at work, just like the beavers.
