If You Don’t Know These 10 Facts, You’re Energy Blind

This piece is made possible by the brilliant work of Nate Hagens. He interviews physicists, mining engineers, geologists, and other experts to explain how energy and materials run our world, and what their decline means for the future.

Simply put, economic growth requires growth in energy and material production, and the current decline of those two inputs will force growth to end in the next decade or two. What will emerge is a new system completely different from the one we live in. One that shrinks to use 1/4th the energy we now consume. That is, of course, the best-case scenario.

1.) We don’t replace old energy sources with new ones. We just add them to the system.

We’re told a story that humans started with fire, then switched to coal, then oil and natural gas, and we’re now switching to nuclear and renewables. This is misleading. We currently consume more wood, coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables than ever before. Rather than switching energy sources, we add them.