There’s a lot of talk today about “the economy” – in today’s budget from Reeves, and in the final days of US Election campaigning.
So perhaps this is a good time to share an extract from a recent episode of @PlanetCritical
The punchline is:
“Money is a process to swindle people, because it’s never going to fit with thermodynamics. You cannot cheat thermodynamics. But you can cheat people.”
The following is from about 50:30 into
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-energy-collapse-louis-arnoux
…“Energy is not a substance, it’s a gradient. You cannot replace it with anything else.
To live in whatever form, you need that gradient, which is a *non-substance*. And unless you have that gradient, you’re dead. Equilibrium is unpleasant and final.
The point that energy cannot be replaced with anything else is, it’s sufficient to invalidate the whole of economics, the whole of the use of money, and the whole of finance.
Energy is not a commodity you can swap with other commodities…
…“Let’s assume there is enough decision making taking place on the energy supply side to think about energy pricing. I’m not saying coal or oil or electricity.
I’m saying *energy*, this thing between gradients.
One possibility is to decide that to make the system last a bit longer, we have HIGH energy prices. What this means is for the non-energy part of the global so-called economy, only some will be able to afford it. So you prolong the system by effectively killing a large chunk of people…
…“The other alternative is we keep energy prices LOW so that we don’t kill people. But in which case, the life of the system is drastically shortened, and… we still kill people.
In other words, if you think in terms of prices, you can’t put a price on energy.
You’re forced to reach the conclusion, which we have known for a long time, as a tiny, tiny minority on the planet, is that…
*energy is priceless*.”
And yet, our economics tries to price it…
…An example:
“Let’s say that I use 10 KW of energy in a day for doing something. And that cost me €2. And I can go to the local supermarket and buy a packet of ground coffee for €2.
From an economist’s point of view, they put an equal sign in between:
10 KW = a packet of coffee.
But if you look at how that coffee was produced, depending where it was produced and the supply channel and so on, anything like 2 to 100 kilowatt hours of energy has been used to produce that coffee…
…“It’s very unlikely that it will be exactly 10 KW, the amount of energy I want to trade it against.
So the conclusion is, if you want to do things in fair and equitable terms, because energy is priceless, you can’t price anything else either.
The problem is that when you handle money, you negate thermodynamics…
…“Money is a human creation. It’s not physical. It’s a process to swindle people. Because it’s never going to fit with thermodynamics.
And you *cannot* cheat thermodynamics. But you *can* cheat people.
…
If you *grow* an economy, it will *always* be at the expense of something else and eventually kill a number of people.”
—Louis Arnoux
The question for this century would seem to be, how many before we wake up?
https://mastodon.social/@arezzoinforma/113397148891524423