What has unfortunately been quite absent from most of the political discussions about how to get the economy "back on track" is the true role of energy resources and technologies. With all of the talk in the United States about the need to "connect the dots" for the "War on Terrorism", what we really need to do is accept the way the energy and economic dots are connected in our modern industrial society.

By taking the following factors into account and enhancing our knowledge of how we can and cannot affect these indicators, we will "connect the dots" on our future as well as possible:

• (1) Jevon's Paradox states that increased efficiency in the use of resources (in this case energy resources) through the use of technology and structural change increases total resource consumption.
• (a) Policy point: if we target increasing efficiency, we can expect to only delay environmental problems.
• (2) The energy return on energy invested (EROI) for the combination of energy resources, renewable and fossil, together with technology that converts those resources into services dictates the level of complexity attainable by society.
• (a) Policy point: society seems to have reached a level of complexity in the last 1-3 decades such that:
• (3) The EROI of energy services has been extremely high with the use of fossil fuels, and EROI will eventually come to a value such that it is equal for fossil and renewable resources. That time of EROI equality will mark a turning point in human civilization.
• (4) The human species has now grown in size that it is capable of affecting the environment on a global scale as opposed to only very localized impacts before the industrial revolution.

The connecting of the dots goes as follows: