Energy Return on Investment by Charles A.S. Hall

Author:Charles A.S. Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

An extremely interesting, but not fully resolved, issue is the degree to which maximum power applies to explaining the behavior of nations in the exploitation of the world’s resources. Like evolution itself, understanding this is not necessarily a warm and fuzzy experience. There appeared to be selection in the past for the great colonial exploitations – England and Spain in the Americas, England in India, France in Indochina, Japan in Asia, Incas and Mayans in the Americas – at least until growing populations and burgeoning nationalism in the colonies made the costs too great for the colonists. This is hardly new – my own reading of Plutarch’s lives (of ancient Greeks and Romans) astonished me at how tyrants who defeated and sacked other cities were glorified by Plutarch. Whether whatever “Pax Romanas” were generated protected the subjugated people who might have been better off is another matter. The concept might apply now: if the US does not use Middle Eastern Oil does that mean China will be leaving us none? Are nations in competition to use up the world’s resources at some kind of optimum rate, and will that undermine any hope for generating a world safe from climate change? Was there selection for neoclassical economics despite its many obvious logical flaws because it provided a means to accelerate the power of those societies that bought into it? Such questions are beyond the scope of this book, but may be critically important.

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