Category Archives: Energy Conservation

Fighting the Problem



Humans are experts at making the wrong moves at the right time and vice-versa, to fading left instead of jumping right, or doing something when nothing would be best; of jumping to erroneous conclusions and then doubling-down on them, to solving problems by creating larger, more complex problems, of letting problems multiply and fester by not discussing them at all.

Humans are experts: our 5,000 year history is marked by follies and missed opportunities, wars and revolutions, bubbles and depressions, failed- or insane leaders and false messiahs, evolutionary change on the outside that alters nothing on the inside. Advances in one- or another area of human endeavor are matched by degradation everywhere else: “They made a desert and called it peace.” The product of our efforts is waste, our ‘good’ is entropy. We endure famines brought about by agriculture also droughts and floods. There is disease, war and death: we never learn. At the bottom is vanity, overreach and ambition. We have enough but we want more or someone in charge wants more for himself and makes false promises and the citizens believe there is something in it for them.

Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.

— Machiavelli

The solution to every problem for economists and managers is more of something. Now we have more pestilence, everyone knows about it, so the pestilence gives us the most ‘more’ we have likely ever had on so many levels, including the ‘more’ where we get the exactly what we don’t want. We’re surprised about this because all of our industrial endeavors since the 18th century have succeeded in bringing back from the future the material and credit we need while pushing into the future our costs. It never occurred to anyone that the future would inevitably arrive by way of the simple passage of time, that the shiny, new present at our feet would be strip mined of material and credit and stuffed with centuries of unmet expenses: we’re surprised and cry out ‘WHY US’ like biblical Israelites. “Let my people go!” pleads Moses.

“Okay,” sez God, playing the hangman standing on the gallows, fingering the rope, “enjoy your flight!”

Our pestilence (and it is ours) hits us below the business- or economic belt, taking away the precious scale that makes our interconnected, debt-based extraction regime function. We cannot distribute First-Law related costs. People cannot take on the debts of billionaires and tycoons. Resource capital cannot be strip mined, if it can the outgoing products must sit in inventory because they cannot be shipped or made use of. We have a supply shock because of a shortage of workers, and a demand shock because we have a shortage of customers. The scale erodes and trust vanishes both cause and effect. The pestilence exposes our systems as fragile, the managers as pathological liars and cheats, out for themselves and criminally incompetent. Because customers are unwilling to interact with each other and with vendors, there is no peer pressure except to escape the now dangerous economic activities; marketing is confounded, contradictory and otherwise useless, fashion — which drives everything modern — is short-circuited. We cannot have done any better to injure ourselves with purpose.

The pestilence is ‘ours’ because it would have never bothered us if we had left it alone. It resided perhaps for millions or tens of millions of years in some undisturbed corner of nature. But we humans are never satisfied. We view nature and creatures as property to be made use of and exploited in any way that pleases us, that we can annihilate it for entertainment purposes without considering nature can do the same thing to us for no purpose at all.

Now that we own it the next step is to figure out what to do with it. Like all our other big troubles, we can overcome our pestilence problem quickly enough by simply deciding to do so. For example, we can solve overpopulation by deciding to have fewer babies. We can reduce resource-capital throughputs by deciding to do something different with our time; by getting rid of status signaling toys like cars and jet vacations. We can decide to reduce meat consumption, or consumption overall; to borrow less and put our national finances in order. Making decisions is not difficult once the need to do is is recognized. Likewise, the first step to defeating our pestilence is to take it seriously. This means turning away from normalcy bias, the blasé unconcern and arrogance that accompanies our sense of mastery over everything. Whether we like it or not, we are animals, hairless monkeys born into- and a part of the natural world. In our haste to degrade nature, we’ve degraded ourselves at the same time, which turns out to be another thing we can decide not to do.

We also need to stop fretting over the ‘economy’ which has become little more than the cycling of dead money from one banker’s hand to the next while wasting valuable capital. Right now the world’s job description has changed: it is for everyone to stay home away from others to reduce the ruinous destructive power of our newest toy. The world’s managers job is to decide to solve the problem rather than denying- or minimizing it.

After deciding, the next step is to follow a simple plan which has already been shown to work: test, track and isolate. Infected individuals are identified by testing, they’re isolated until they recover on their own, and treated when they can’t. Persons in contact with the victim are tracked and tested themselves. People are kept indoors under lockdown until the outlines of the pestilence can be drawn by testing. Right now, public health administrators in most countries are ‘flying blind’ not knowing how many are infected and where they might be located, learning only when large numbers of cases emerge. In a few days afterward the flood of the sick becomes an overwhelming tsunami leaving medics to triage out those who have no hope of accessing treatment.

Identifying victims requires only an inexpensive pharmaceutical test kit and the manpower to administer it. The key is to act decisively without hesitation, when the number of cases is relatively small and the need for treatment does not crash the medical services. Rapid response would allow time to work in our favor as victims recover, treatment and isolation of infected persons would leave a diminished supply of hosts, the pestilence would retreat. Time is short: the disease expands exponentially faster than managers can decide.

Our pestilence is a world product, no strategy can be entirely effective unless it is universally applied. Every place in the world must do the same thing in a coordinated manner, to test, track, isolate and treat. For more than two countries to agree on anything then act on the agreement is a monstrous task. If one or two countries here or there follows the test regime successfully (like South Korea, China, Taiwan), their populations can be reinfected by travelers. Because the pestilence emerged in one person in one place in one city in one country then spread around the world in what seems like an instant, it can emerge later from another individual person, in a single place in some other country and spread from there. For the duration, a component of efforts vs our pestilence will be vigilance and the determination to act when- and wherever the virus reappears.

My best advice I can offer is to stay away from other people. When the bosses encourage you to go out and have fun, shop or go back to work or school, ignore them.

These same bosses are downplaying the pestilence. There will be severe consequences for this, something that moderns are not used to. We’re poorly trained and have faulty instincts.

Keep your head because the casualty count will be cruel.

The losses themselves will exact a heavy cost on individuals, families, communities and the greater economy. This is a mass-casualty event.

The greatest blow is likely to fall on the global south, in the great population centers, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and similar places, countries where tens of millions live in slums, where there are few places for individuals to retreat to, where sanitation is non-existent and medical care for the well to do, only.

The period of greatest danger to Americans is from now until the end of June, after which time everyone keeping their distance will have had an effect. Plan for a long siege. After then the danger will recede somewhat but not disappear. Vigilance will be required, be aware that a constant state of alert will also be psychologically grueling. Effects will be minimized by following the test, track and treat strategy but many places (like the US and UK) will not follow or will deem it too late to start.

The virus has torn down the facade of our economy, revealing the various, interlocking Ponzi schemes within. The governments and central banks are doing whatever they can to recreate illusions by throwing borrowed trillions in all directions. However the worth of Ponzi assets is declining faster than The establishment’s rescue efforts can replace. At the same time the mindless, panicky response undermines confidence in the cure in a self-amplifying cycle of asset declines, interventions, recalibrations of prices then more declines. In a way, the markets are now pricing the competence of our leaders and business managers. As long as they remain in charge the prices will decline … all the way to zero.

Meanwhile, petroleum prices are lower than they have been since the year 2000. America’s and the world’s long overdue practice in solving our resource depletion problems is well underway and working. Coronavirus is simply ‘Conservation by Other Means™’.

Crude crashes because customers are too broke to pay the higher price!