A valiant effort to engage with the facts, but ultimately a triumph of ideology, theory and PR-need over reality. At least you have the honesty to show the data along with the made-up curves that drive the conclusions. The reality is far less conclusive than the article makes it out to be. Looking at just the data, I see a cyclic pattern that overwhelms any long term trends by 5x or more. This suggests that the overriding factor driving EROEI is the appearance of technological revolutions that create vast new efficiencies, die out, and are followed by new revolutions, again and again. The latest revolution is “out of scope” for Court and Fizane: the EROI of PV solar power has doubled in the past 7 years, according to the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
The argument that GDP cannot be decoupled from energy consumption is far from watertight. It’s contradicted by the fact that GDP is now growing faster than energy consumption. Honest economists will admit that they don’t understand the recent slowdown in productivity growth, but the possibility that their measurement frameworks are defective should be taken seriously. All the time that is spent in Facebook and Instagram adds very little to GDP, but their value to their users clearly dominates other activities that generate more easy-to-measure economic activities.
But that degree of honesty doesn’t support “groundbreaking investigative journalism”. Ambiguous news doesn’t sell as well as “the sky is falling” stories. Sorry about that.
