André Sautou

Sign of the Times: Companies Experiencing Difficulties

I am not surprised to read such news.

I have suspected for many decades that fast economic growth could only be sustained with energy produced at low cost, sold at low price and able to satisfy a growing demand.

I have also suspected that such kind of energy could only be provided by easily accessible concentrated deposits (such as oil, gas and coal, or nuclear fuel such as uranium or thorium) and that renewables would remain to costly (being generally diffused and/or intermittent).

I suspect now that the Golden Age we have known after World War II may have ended last July. Maybe our present world has reached or is about to reach its maximal power, now producing and consuming around 11 Gtoe per year (1 Gtoe = 1 billion ton of oil equivalent) when adding oil, coal, gas, nuclear and renewables (including hydraulic).

[Only a few people know that this power was worth about 1 Gtoe/year in 1929 and 1.5 Gtoe/year in 1945 ; it then increased by around 1.5 Gtoe every ten years or so until 2005, as show some curves that can be found on a few WEB pages, typing the following keywords : Schilling & Al. (1977), IEA (2002), Observatoire de l'Energie (1997).
One of such pages is energycurves1860to2000.../ .]

And I suspect also that our present world may have lost its capability to invest money in order to sustain its growing population while at the same time being able to devote a sufficient part of its investments so as to increase its annual energy production. In other words, it may have reached the ultimate limits of its expansion, previously anticipated by the Club of Rome in 1972… Will it soon enter into decline, after having reached “Peak Energy” and “Peak Humanity” ?

Hush! Let us talk about something else. For the time being, such Club of Rome talk is “taboo”. Heads of state, politicians, economists and mainstream media do not want to hear such kind of talk, want to ignore the many warnings expressed by experts such as Colin Campbell and many others (for instance: ASPO January 2009 Newsletter, www.aspo-ireland.org/c... ) and still want to believe that there is a future for long term economic growth.