We've created a global money and profit-driven structure, which consists of a circular exchange
"protocol", if you will, where money must move from the consumer, to the employer, to
the employee, which is the consumer again; and the only way again that could sustain
this pattern to keep people employed, the only way to keep people eating, the only way
to keep GDP up, the only way to keep the stock market up, is through the mandate that goods
and services, comprised again of our finite resources and energy, are constantly and perpetually
used and sold ad infinitum, irregardless of purpose, utility or respect for what we actually
have. I couldn't possibly come up with a more destructive manner for organizing society.
And the sad thing is, people don't see this whatsoever. They have been conditioned into
ideologies. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, well, guess what? Any social ideology, specifically
economic, which does not directly relate to the resources of the planet in its doctrines
explicitly, meaning the attributes of our environment, which actually sustain our lives,
is an inapplicable and thus irrelevant social ideology. Case in point, oil and fossil fuels.
We live in a hydrocarbon economy, as I'm sure you all know. Our entire economic structure,
meaning production, distribution, food cultivation, transportation, etc., is entirely based on
energy from fossil fuels. There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every 1 calorie of
food currently consumed in the industrialized world. This is M. King Hubbert, a geologist,
and interestingly enough, a technocrat. M. King Hubbert predicted in the late 1940s that
the United States would peak in its oil production in 1970. Of course, he was ridiculed, laughed
at, and scorned by the scientific establishment. And unfortunately, he was right, the US did
peak in the 1970s. In fact, some studies now show that global oil discoveries have likely
peaked around the same time. The exact date is debatable, but it doesn't change anything.
Now, before I go any further, I know some of you out there are saying, "How do we know
that these statistics are accurate?" "How do we know that the research institutions
are unaware of existing oil supplies that go undiscovered?" "And how do we know if the
oil corporations themselves, which contain the data, are not lying to simply boost their
profits?" Well, these are good questions. But there's no question about the decline
in the United States; we do import over 70% of our oil now. And as far as the global peak,
all you really have to do is look at the drilling patterns of the major corporations to see
that almost every major oil company is desperate to find new oil reserves, and they have gone
almost everywhere legally possible to do so. The oil on this planet, which took 100 million
years to generate, regardless of what you believe about depletion rates, is going to
run out, one way or another. It is an unsustainable practice. And I won't even go into the obvious
dangers associated with burning fossil fuels, in regards to its environmental effects, which
we're all hearing about today. As an aside, it is not at all irrational or hasty to consider
that the peak oil issue just might have something to do with the fact that the United States,
which consumes 25% of the world's energy, while having only 5% of the population, has
the largest permanent military bases in history, situated in the Middle East with no evidence
whatsoever of ever leaving this region. Obama has already stated that he is going to leave
50 thousand troops in the Middle East, indefinitely -this is the guy that got the Nobel Peace
prize- as we continue in the Middle East to probe and agitate countries which contain,
guess what, the majority of the remaining recoverable oil on this planet, such as Iran.
Give it some thought. And if you take a moment to consider that peak oil and its relationship
with the economic system and geopolitics might be relevant to the US involvement in the Middle
East, you'll tend to find the world starts to make a lot more sense. In the words of
M. King Hubbert, "We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to
both human and geological history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly
happen again. You can only use oil once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all
the metals mined and scattered. This is obviously a scenario of catastrophe but we have the
technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative
to money. We are not starting from zero. We have an enormous amount of existing technical
knowledge. Just a matter of putting it all together. A non-catastrophic solution is impossible
unless the society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture: the
current work ethic and the idea that growth is a normal state of life." [Applause] He
continues in a paper he wrote in 1981, called "Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and
the Monetary Culture". Hubbert writes, "The world's present industrial civilization is
handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping and incompatible intellectual
systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last 4 centuries of the properties and interrelationships
of matter and energy, and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of
prehistoric origin." You simply cannot have a society operate based on this necessity
for constant growth to maintain, ironically, stability. We have at our disposal a tremendous
number of alternative energies, and infrastructure possibilities, and sophisticated manners of
implementation, which could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels dramatically, paving the way
to a world that would have zero reliance on hydrocarbon energies, at all. Unfortunately,
you are not going to see this anytime soon for the economic paradigm we live in sets
up another serious problem that we need to address, and I simply call this "Establishment
Paralysis". Given our tremendous reliance on hydrocarbon energy at this stage of human
evolution, people, when hearing about the obvious problem of depletion, naively brush
it off under the assumption that the establishment is actually preparing for a transition out
of our dependency on hydrocarbons. Or better yet, that the establishment can actually afford
to create a transition. In order to understand the difficulty of moving out of our current
established energy paradigm, we must first realize that from a financial standpoint there
is very little motivation to move into a new system. This is the very nature of an established
institution in the monetary system. The fact of the matter is, an exorbitant amount of
money, I know this will sound strange to many of you, an exorbitant amount of money is going
to be made on the scarcity of energy, and in fact, the collapse of society itself. Our
economic system is predicated on making money on the way up, and making money on the way
down. Those in power, referencing back to that Citigroup document I talked about, have
a propensity to care more about the short term, short-sighted financial benefits of
running out of energy, than they care about the pivotal life-supporting attributes that
it provides. If you look back at history, you see that the concern over depleting fossil
fuels has been talked about for a long time. And many scientists in the 1960's and 70's
felt that by the year 2000, we would have an entirely different energy infrastructure.
Why didn't that happen? Why is it that the Reagan administration ripped off the solar
panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed? Why is it that the US government
sided with big oil, so the electric car would be squashed, in the United States? The answer
of course is that our profit-based system sets up a natural defensive propensity to
stop anything; if those changes find the prior establishment to be obsolete. This is likely
the most caustic attribute of our current situation. The knee-jerk propensity to stop
productive change for the sake of preserving market share and profit for select groups.
Think about it. If you start a company, you hire employees, you generate income. What
have you done? You've created an institution, which yourself and your co-workers rely on
for their income and hence survival. Therefore, you will do what you need to, to protect yourself
and your life-sustaining company. It is providing for your standard of living. In other words,
there is a built-in short sightedness. And this survival element, which is only operational
in our current profit-oriented system, is what is stopping needed change from coming
to pass. I could probably ramble off many examples of new advents that have been pushed
to the side because they are either too efficient, or too sustainable for the market system to
absorb, or simply money can't be made continually off of them; it can't perpetuate the system,
or it puts an industry out of work. It puts people out of work. There is a human element
to this. So there's a natural need, a natural attribute, excuse me, where people say "Well,
okay, this is probably better for society, but I need to make money now; I can't think
about the transition, so let's just push this aside for now." That's what's happening over
and over and over and over again. It's not that they are "bad" people, or anything like
that. This is what this system has created. Simultaneously, let's remember that the market
system requires constant problems. In order for the public interest and consumption to
be maintained, problems in cultural influence is required. The more problems there are,
the better the economy, generally speaking. In this system it is inherently "good" for
cars to break down. It is "good" for people to get cancer. It is "good" for computers
to become quickly obsolete. Why? More money. To put it into a sentence: Change, abundance,
sustainability and efficiency are the enemies of the profit structure. Progressive advancements
in science and technology, which can resolve problems of inefficiency and scarcity once
and for all, are in effect making the prior establishment's servicing of those problems
obsolete.