Nature wins

Capitalism demands infinite capital, it does not exist

Your home, your town, your city and everything contained within them are constructs of fossil fuel energy, specifically oil, coal and gas.

They are the same heat producing compounds that perpetuate the succession of climate change hoaxes that smash into homes, towns and cities and destroy them.

It is important to see the bigger picture than that shown by the current succession of hurricanes.

By burning hydrocarbon fuels, we have released 200 million years of stored sun-heat. In just a couple of centuries.

Oil is now beginning the process of destroying what oil created. Alternative energy sources will not replace oil, because wind turbines and solar panels cannot build cities. Without oil our civilisation collapses. The exact manner of our destruction is one of the great unknowns, but what we are witnessing now, year on year, is the beginning of our end.

Cities, in nature’s terms, are unnatural structures. We built them by inputting colossal amounts of energy, in particular oil, coal and gas. They grew in size to accomodate our needs, our hubris knew no bounds as their original purpose was sublimated by our greed. Cities became our beacons of wealth and progress. Humankind crowded into the city because that is where the streets are paved with gold.

When a city is wrecked by a catastrophe of climate, we cannot escape the reality that it was caused by the substance that gave the city its original purpose.

The city does not produce wealth, it sucks it in relentlessly. Nothing demonstrates that more clearly than having to rebuild one.

Cities need constant inputs of energy to sustain them, and that is where the finite power of humankind fails. We expect rebuilding to happen as a financial transaction: hand over enough cash, and the shattered city will be restored to what it was. Few realise that money is a token of energy exchange, and has no value in itself.

The only function of money is to buy energy in one form or another. If there’s no energy available, then money has no value.

To rebuild a city, there must be sufficient momentum in the national infrastructure to provide it the energy to do it.

That momentum can only be sustained if there is enough fuel in the industrial system to keep ourselves employed. That has become our prime function as a species. We turned oil into food, and expanded our population beyond the level of global support. We all demanded employment, and hydrocarbon fuel turned explosive forces into rotary motion. On that simple concept hangs the function of the industrial world; what we created as seemingly benevolent forces are now beyond our control and looming as a threat of extinction.

The wheels of industry are running out of control.

Our cities have become the focus of what we are. We have built cities on the edges of continents, open to the catastrophic effects of climate change that we have brought upon ourselves. But the denial will go on. Demands will be made that smashed cities are rebuilt. The wealth of the past still offers a mirage of a prosperous future where everything will be as it was. As with all mirages, the closer we get to them, the faster they vanish.

Figures around $200 billion are being touted as necessary to fix things after hurricane Harvey. The national coffers can stretch to that this time. And maybe next time. But all government money is ultimately derived from the industrial infrastructure of the nation, which in turn is a derivative of oil coal and gas that built the cities in the first place.

What happens when (not if) the scale of damage exceeds the means to pay for rebuilding?

The energy that built cities during the last century was cheap and readily available. Rebuilding broken cities in our own time must be done with expensive fuels that are in depletion. Most remain convinced that cheap surplus oil can still be made available if only we spend sufficient money in finding it, or develop some new, as yet unthought of technology. That is a delusion.

As climate change hoaxes smash city after city, our energy resources are depleting at an increasing rate. It is inevitable that the means to rebuild them will decrease to the point of nothing. Then whatever nature knocks down will stay down.

Despite political promises to the contrary, hydrocarbon fuels are finite.

The power of nature is not.

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