Playing Chicken with a Wall

Controlled Acceleration

We’re going down the road at sixty miles per hour, that’s one mile a minute.  Thirty minutes ahead a large concrete barricade blocks the road.  It’s too high to go over, too wide to go around, it cannot be moved, and it won’t break when we hit it.  Hey, Hakuna Matata!  No sweat, we’ve got thirty minutes.  What we don’t know is that the brakes are shot.

Let’s react as if we’re shrewd investors or smart businessmen.  We’ll respond to our situation with controlled growth.  After all, we’ve got thirty minutes.  Let’s increase our speed by 5% every minute.  At the end of fourteen minutes we’ll double our speed, fun, and profits.  We’ve still got thirty minutes and in fourteen we’ll be doing one hundred twenty miles per hour, won’t that be exciting.  In twenty-eight minutes we’ll be doing two hundred-forty miles per hour.  In forty-two minutes we’ll be doing four hundred-eighty miles per hour.  Oh, wait, we only have thirty minutes to work with.  Hmmm….

The harsh realities of mathematics show that we only have thirty minutes if we keep the speed at sixty miles per hour.  If we increase our speed by 5% every minute, we only have eighteen minutes left.  If we decide to do something after fourteen minutes, we’ll have four minutes to ponder the discovery that our brakes are shot.  We’ll have doubled our speed and our momentum.  The good news is that the risk of anyone being maimed for life in the ensuing accident is now unlikely: everyone will be vaporized at one hundred-twenty miles per hour.  They won’t even find enough to burry.

I hope that most sensible people would want to slow down.  No brakes, let friction go to work, shift down a gear and create some engine drag.  Maybe in thirty miles we’ll be going slow enough that injuries will be minimal.  Maybe we’ll coast to a stop.  Maybe we can at least ditch it.  The bad news is that everybody might live.

Yet our government budget model is discussing controlled steady growth of nearly 5% per year.  That means in fourteen years our government will be twice its present size, twice its present consumption, and it will take on the look and feel of Jabba the Hutt.  Does everybody agree?  This is a bad plan.  We need to reduce government spending and size, and do it drastically.  Okay?

Let’s build a business model.  We’re going to run out of fossil fuels sometime or other.  When does not really matter.  If we need to know we will look up our present reserves in volume or weight, and divide by our current consumption rate in volume per year or weight per year and we will have the best possible estimate of how many years we have left if we don’t go any faster.  But if we want a nice controlled growth business model of, say 5% per year, we need to use a different formula.  Here it is:

Time Remaining = 1/.05 * ln (.05 * Reserve / Consumption +1)

I’m checking my calculus to make sure this formula is correct.  The point is that if we have the best data and the right formula we will know the best estimate of how much time is left.  So. If we have thirty years at zero growth, we will only have eighteen years at 5% growth.  Now, we can build a serious business plan for what we’ll do when the fossil fuels run out, and we’ll know how fast we have to get ready.  Every year we’ll check our data, because we’re always hopeful that new reserves will be found.  But at least we’ll have a realistic picture, and a plan for what to do when the well runs dry.

We do have alternatives: nuclear, solar, wind, wood fired steam; manpower, horsepower, and other animals in harness.  At the present time that’s pretty much it.  We need the sober-minded involvement of every citizen on earth.  This problem involves over seven billion people and it will take every last one of us to solve it.

At this point, I’m counting on the Iranians to be the very conservative sensible people they are.  If they are using their centrifuges to build nuclear weapons, they and their culture will die.  If they are using their centrifuges to build nuclear power plants, they and their culture will live.  I wonder if the rest of us will have that much sense.

It’s fair to ask where all this energy is going.  The lion’s share of it is devoted to war and war related research.  This is not hard to demonstrate.  If one looks up a graph of national debt by year, we find that the debt curve and the War activities coincide.

When will we learn that we must beat our swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4)?  When will we commit to government and business plans based on negative growth?  I know that nobody wants to hear that; but this is what we need to hear.  Jimmy Carter and James R. Schlesinger told us this; yet, nearly everybody thought them to be fools.  We should have listened then.  We need to listen now.

Will we slow down before we hit the wall?  Don’t tell me I’m wrong.  Look up the numbers and do the arithmetic yourself.