This week’s Blast from the Past highlights Prof. Richard Werner’s speech on “The Case for Abundance” and the economics of growth at the Scandinavian Freedom Event that took place in Malmö, Sweden in May 2022. This is an outstanding presentation by central bank expert Richard Werner on how it is banks that create money, and how CBDCs will change the game once they are introduced.
Make sure to also watch this short segment from the Q&A session after Richard’s presentation revealing the ominous nature of CBDCs:
Related:
May 13–15, 2022, A Scandinavian Freedom Event: Malmo – Sweden
Is there really no problem with limits to earth’s resources? The story of civilization is essentially the story of “surplus energy”. That is, the amount of energy left over after a certain fraction of the total energy is spent in digging up and processing fossil fuels (which account for 80% of the energy we use).
There is a 98-99% correlation between GDP growth and energy growth. To the extent GDP growth is required for economic health, then, there must be growth in the amount of fossil fuels we extract and process for use.
Here’s the rub. The composition of that which we commonly measure as “oil production” has been changing over time (coal is expressed in “oil equivalent” terms). Oil has been getting harder and harder to extract as the wells become less accessible (think offshore and fracking), and harder to process as the quality degrades (think tar sands). Lower quality “oil” contains less energy. Also, some of what we list in the “oil” statistics is not actually used for fuel energy, it’s used to make plastic bags, etc.
In other words, it’s taking a larger and larger percentage of the energy we extract to do the extraction itself and the processing for use. This means the cost of extraction and processing is taking a larger and larger percentage of GDP.
It’s inevitable that there will come a point when our debt-driven economic system will no longer be able to support both debt servicing and the cost of energy. Therefore, we are faced with a limit to earth’s resources — a fossil fuel related limit. There will still be plenty of fossil fuels left in the ground, but they will eventually become too expensive to extract and process, possibly sooner rather than later.