It isn’t easy being green. How can I earn money without my Car? How can I run my economy if I don’t fly? All good questions. Everything must change. It will change slowly. Adjustments must be made. How difficult will it be? Many will be coy about how difficult our future is. Mostly they want to pretend that it will be easy. They pretend that the worst than could happen is that you take a bus rather than drive.

If only it would be that easy. We wish. There is more at stake than just modes of transport or whether the Chinese will every drive cars or own fridges. Human existence is at stake (at worst) and our economic stability is at stake (at best).

Let’s explain: our economies are not steady-state. They continually grow. The fuel that makes them grow is fossil fuel. It is like sunshine & water for a plant. You take it away and it stops growing. Economists talk about ‘decoupling’ only in terms of economic growth not linked to increased energy usage. There is no evidence for this. It isn’t possible. Mankind did not get to this level of sophistication and industrial development without vast resources of cheap energy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is delusional. This is intuitively true. Your pour plant food on a plant and it grows.

If you take that food away, or ration it, something stops growing. The economy stops generating more wealth. It stops growing until another source of energy is found. For it is not Oil that fuels the economy it is energy. The only decoupling we should be concerned with is decoupling our economy from Fossil Fuels. It is energy we need. Energy is required for a steady state non growth sustainable economy. The level of economic activity is directly related to the amount of energy that can be captured and utilised. This is directly proportional to other natural resources such as food. (Biomass is essentially organic materials, food, that is turned into energy.)

So if all this energy comes from the sun what level of economic activity is possible? Well, if you measure economic activity as GDP then the desirable level is relative to your population size. Herein lies the problem. Our ability to generate food from finite resources is directly related to our supply of energy. Energy can supplement the amount of natural energy would be normally consumed in the manufacture of our food. Currently it take nine times as much energy to make our food than it actually delivers as calories into our bodies. This is a frightening statistic. Nine time. Nine Calories of Oil energy to yield one calorie of food energy. If you remove the other nine calories just how much food energy can we sustain?

Our amount of food is also directly related to population growth. Energy = economic activity = food = population. Reduce the energy and everything else falls like a pack of cards. When the collapse comes the economy will meltdown and no-one will have a job. Then people without jobs will have no money. Property prices will collapse. People lose their homes. Homeless people with no jobs and no money soon find that they have no food either. Quickly follows social collapse.

Our only parachute promising a soft landing it to ensure that the collapse is handled as a gentle slide. Economic progress must halt. Food production will slow down. Birth rates plummet. This will be hard if you are a politician and used to perpetual growth. How do you sell this? The answer is you don’t. You will continue business as usual until the collapse will be it most damaging. Nothing you can do will stop the collapse but you can be ready. You can have your lifeboat ready.