What does Post-Monetarism Mean?

[stevebowers]

..one of the problems today - the main problem I would argue - is that we are using between 1,33 and 1,50 Earths globally annually, and that it eventually will cause a mass extinction and thereby the social collapse of our civilization.

This is true only because we are able to consume fossil fuels that were created millions of years ago by long-dead organisms. Once it is no longer economical to consume fossil fuels at this rate we would need to find another, longer-term source of energy, or reduce our consumption to fit within the global footprint.

As an optimist I think it is possible to do both. We only consume a minute fraction of the sunlight that is incident on our world, and we could use oceanic deuterium and fissiles for the foreseeable future, so energy need not be the world-killer some might think. If we for some reason could not extract enough energy from the seas and the sky to power our society, we could import energy from space-based solar power (note that this does exist in the OA Interplanetary Age, but it is mostly used to power the economy off the Earth).

And in addition we could make our civilisation much more energy-efficient. I've got a number of ideas on how to make our civilisation more efficient, and I'm open to more - but the energy situation isn't entirely hopeless, even without such savings.