ASPO Newsletter #51, March 2005

It is true that no high-energy society has ever halved its material throughput and existed at that level across generations. But an absent precedent for an unprecedented situation merely tells us the situation is new, not what people will do.

With age, I’ve become more aware of the world’s complexity but also better equipped to come to simple, albeit painful, conclusions: We need to replace fantasies of endless growth with ideas about managing the contraction.

In this post, I examine differences in economic behaviour by comparing two types of periods: those with low energy affordability and those with high energy affordability.