How Energy Is The Economy

And how ‘The Economy’ lives and dies

Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Van Gogh spent time with poor families in the coal-mining districts of Belgium. Here is a poor family gathered around a oil flame, eating potatoes. A picture of where we are.

As my homie B writes, energy is the economy. As Vaclav Smil says in Energy And Civilization, “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done.” In that expansive book, he details the history of human civilization through the energy sources we use.