Living the Good Life in a Lower EROI Future

Abstract

We are sometimes labeled as pessimists, probably because we do believe that the future will have less oil and perhaps less energy than it does now, because we believe that the energy costs of getting whatever fuels we do use will become greater and greater, and because we think these issues will have serious energy impacts. But we do not see this automatically as a bad future, depending on how we deal with it. As boys we each had a wonderful childhood on opposite coasts in the 1950s and 1960s during a period when the U.S. energy use was only 10% or 20% of what it is now. We could go fishing and surfing (respectively) on our bicycles, and had no need for soccer moms driving us around in an SUV. We played sports all the time with neighborhood friends, and went camping and hiking to our heart’s content. There was little of today’s perspective that children must be driven everywhere for protection because we lived in neighborhoods and communities where everyone knew everyone else.