Greetings and Happy New Year.

I'm traveling quite a bit in the coming weeks.

So I wanted to just briefly do a frankly on something I first mentioned in I think the

2021 Earth Day talk about a mortar economy.

And I mentioned it again in Art Berman's podcast last week. And a mordor

economy, I suggested somewhat facetiously, is one day when humans would spend 50% of our energy on getting energy and 50% on remediating

the environmental damages from the use of the energy.

So that clearly can't happen because we need at least some for food and shelter and

the like.

But I want to explain briefly the logic of how I do think we could head in that direction

and why there are two general trajectories scenarios that I foresee.

So first off, a brief review, there is the maximum power principle in nature

where organisms and entire ecosystems self-organize to better degrade an energy gradient.

And this can be trees or elephants or mice or humans or human societies. And in fact,

there's something called Kleber's Law in nature, which is the metabolic use of energy by an organism

scales with its mass or size to the three-quarter power.

And this scaling function is largely the same, irrespective of the size of the organism,

from tiny little cells to small rodents to blue whales. It's not exactly the same, but it's

close. It so happens that if you do a slope of all of the countries in the world that produce

economic output, the slope of that line is around 0.75, the square of its size.

So this metabolism, as Tim Garrett and others have noticed, is our civilization has an energy requirement that,

irrespective of all of our wishes and conferences and policies, we continue to function

...