Migrants of Ape in the Gasoline Crack of History
"Forget Mars rockets. Only a time machine will get us out of this now." S omewhere in a Riyadh sitting room in 2004, a Saudi prince and a Bush family pollster worked out, over multiple finjans of black gahwa , that the American electorate’s memory is exactly ten months long. Not nine. Not eleven. Ten. Prince Bandar bin Sultan—nicknamed “Bandar Bush” on account of being closer to the Oval Office than most cabinet secretaries—had figured out that you don’t need to fix an economy; you just need to get it wobbling in the right direction. They all knew James Carville’s maxim—“It’s the economy, stupid.” SUNY Professor Charles Hall laid the ground for Bandar’s number. Hall argued that a modern, high-GDP society with advanced healthcare, education, and art requires a high societal Energy Return ratio (EROI of roughly 10:1 or better). When energy prices spike or easy-to-reach fracked reserves deplete, a nation must spend a massive chunk of its GDP just to acquire more, st...
