... waves. Its not a mechanical process with equilibrium at the end, its an exploration of a newly opened terrain in the space of technological possibilities.

The technical advances we have seen over the last century and a half have been as much a function of cheap energy as SUVs and McMansions.

This process antedates the fossil fuel are by a wide margin ... obviously when cheap fossil fuel energy was available, that was a technological space that was going to be explored sooner or later, but I don't see the anchoring in reality for the notion that fossil fuels were a requirement for technological progress, rather than the channel that technological progress has been taking most recently.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.