Carbon budget and the Energy Trap

Greetings

    It's tricky business getting from here to there.  "There" being a sustainable society -  

    Basically  it's like "we had to destroy the town to save it"  .  In order to "save" the ecosystem, we need to create a new sustainable infrastructure.  In order to create the new system, we have to burn more fossil fuels.   By burning more now, we destroy the ecosystem .

         We can't see that the way out, is to forgo consumption now, for survival later.  Kind of like not eating seed corn.

" “Politically, the most acceptable path is to finance the energetic investment not by decreasing energy use for consumption today but by maintaining energy use for consumption while increasing the total energy appropriation of the economy. But ecologically, that most acceptable path will lead to climate catastrophe.”

    

    

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/09/01/fossil-fuels-war

A realistic historical assessment tells us that there is no purely technological path to a sustainable society. Although a rapid shift to renewables is a crucial component of any conceivable path to a carbon-free, ecological world, the technical obstacles to such a transition are much greater than is usually assumed. The biggest barrier is the up-front cost of building an entirely new energy infrastructure geared to renewables rather than relying on the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure. Construction of a new energy infrastructure requires vast amounts of energy consumption, and would lead—if current consumption and economic growth were not to be reduced—to further demands on existing fossil-fuel resources. This would mean, as ecological economist Eric Zencey has explained, “an aggressive expansion of the economy’s footprint in paradoxical service to the goal of achieving sustainability.” Assuming the average EROEI of fossil fuels keeps falling, the difficulty only becomes worse. Ecological economists and peak-oil theorists have dubbed this the “energy trap.” In Zencey’s words, “The problem is rooted in the sunken energy costs of the petroleum infrastructure (which makes the continued use of petroleum energetically cheap)” even when the EROEI of such fossil fuels in the case of unconventionals is lower than wind and solar.41 It follows that building an alternative energy infrastructure—without breaking the carbon budget—would require a tectonic shift in the direction of energy conservation and energy efficiency

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http://blogs.worldwatch.org/moving-beyond-fossil-fuels-before-it%E2%80%99s-too-late/

“Unlike monetary investments, which can be made on credit and then amortized out of the income stream they produce, the energy investment in energy infrastructure must be made up front out of a portion of the energy used today,” says Eric Zencey, fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont and author of Chapter 7, “Energy as Master Resource.” “Politically, the most acceptable path is to finance the energetic investment not by decreasing energy use for consumption today but by maintaining energy use for consumption while increasing the total energy appropriation of the economy. But ecologically, that most acceptable path will lead to climate catastrophe.”