Nullus Deus ex MachinaSam Aurelius Milam III
I frequently click around the TV channels, looking for something to watch. Thus, I see a lot of short pieces of a lot of different shows. I recently came across what appeared to be some kind of a
promotional thing. Two people were happily proclaiming how modern
building codes require new houses to include hi-tech, computerized systems
to manage heating and cooling within the house. I got disgusted
and continued clicking. The two people in the program appeared to believe that such hi-tech gizmos will increase the energy efficiency of houses, resulting in less energy being used, and thereby solving our energy problems.
One fallacy in their plan is the idea that a more efficient use of energy will result in less energy being used. That isn’t true.
We won’t reduce total energy used merely by being more efficient.
A more important fallacy is their false belief that the increasing use
of energy is the actual problem. The increasing use of energy is
merely a consequence of the actual problem. The two technofools didn’t
even acknowledge the actual problem. Instead, they pretended that
it doesn’t exist. The increasing use of energy is only one such consequence of the actual problem. Consider the Ogallala Aquifer. If we stopped pumping water out of it this very day, then it would take
6000 years for its water level to return to what it was 100 or so years
ago. The truth is that we don’t have a shortage of water in the
aquifer. We have an excess of people who want to use it. Similarly,
we don’t have a shortage of energy. We have an excess of people
who want to use it. Whether it’s water, energy, space, or anything
else, the problem isn’t a shortage of something. The problem is
that there are too many people who want to use it. Increased efficiency
in our use of things won’t solve the actual problem because the actual
problem is human overpopulation. One measure of the degree of human overpopulation is the number of people who can’t find places for themselves, anywhere on the planet. According to a recent UNHCR estimate, there are more than 100,000,000 of them. Some of them live in refugee camps that are the size of towns. They rely for their survival on resources that are diverted to them from other
people. They don’t seem to do much except have more children, which
only exacerbates the problem. Some of those children have spent their
entire lives in the camps, learning how to be refugees. Today, more
than 1.3% of the entire human population is homeless. According to
that measure alone, we’ve exceeded the capacity of the planet to sustain us. The population growth curve is nearly vertical at this end. It’s obvious to me that the population is going to crash. We have a few years remaining, maybe a few decades, if we’re lucky. After that, most technology will fail, including most sources of energy. The hi-tech gizmos will stop working. The initial survivors probably won’t have the means to build new houses. They’ll need to use houses that already exist. The hi-tech gizmos in those houses aren’t going to work without electricity. The house in which I’m staying, for now, is old. I open or close the windows, ignite or extinguish the pilot light in the propane heater, and plug or unplug the window air conditioner, all according to the weather. Of course, most such low-tech things won’t work, either, after the crash, but at least someone in such a house will still be able to open or close the windows himself, and lock the doors. If he’s lucky enough to have a working fireplace, then he can demolish nearby hi-tech houses, for fuel. I don’t know of any way to solve our problem except for
what I mentioned in Problem One, in the July 2021 issue. Other than that, I doubt that
we’ll be saved by a deus ex gizmo. 
| June 2022 | Frontiersman,0c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 http://frontiersman.org.uk/ | Page 1 |
