The US elections are a distraction from a much bigger story unfolding....energy!

I've felt for a while that the (s)election is just a huge distraction, because whatever happens the nation will be hugely divided after, and with all the accusations.of vote rigging and political interference, there is no trust in the process and the losing side will never accept the outcome as legitimate. Social unrest and open conflicts are possible especially with the global economy and banks on the edge.

In this divided state the people will be easier to control and distract, while the bigger story unfolds. The same thing is happening across Europe, deliberate destabilisation leading towards division instead of unity, and creating a need for more government and centralised control to save us from ourselves. We are all being played.

The bigger story is multi-faceted but at the core is how a falling EROI (Energy Returned On Invested) is threatening global living standards, energy security, and our basic way of life.

The world runs on energy, and the 20th century explosion in civilisation (technology, living standards, population growth etc) was made possible due to cheap energy from oil.

In 1930 domestic US oil had 100:1 EROI, which means we got 100 barrels of oil out of the ground for every barrel's worth of energy invested in drilling, exploration, refining, and distribution to get it out.

This incredibly cheap energy is what enabled the US to become the leading world power, and when US oil production peaked in the 1970s the alliance with Saudi and OPEC was formed shortly after, creating an artificial need for all countries to hold US dollar reserves in order to buy oil. USD became a de facto world currency used to trade almost all commodities to this day.

This offshore demand has propped up the dollar ever since, despite coming off the gold standard and running massive deficits every year. The US abused this position of power and leadership to project military power and full spectrum dominance abroad, to maintain dollar hegemony and print their way to prosperity.

In 1960, every dollar of new debt created 61 cents in GDP growth - today it creates just 5 cents, and this is largely due to a falling EROI.

This is why debt has to grow exponentially (US debt doubled in 8 years under Obama from $10 trillion to $20 trillion) just to maintain the same level of growth, and interest rates have to stay low to service the debt. Ironically more debt requires more consumption to keep everything going, so we have been using up valuable resources (i.e. oil deposits with a high EROI) even faster, at a time when we should be conserving them.

Accelerating off the cliff is a good analogy.

Falling EROI is massively deflationary, and below ~8:1 it makes our modern way of life impossible. For example with modern agriculture it takes 10 calories of energy just to produce 1 calorie of food, vs a typical hunter gatherer who burned 1 calorie of energy to acquire 10 calories of food. That's 100x less efficient, we just don't see these hidden costs when energy is so cheap: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-11-26/energy-return-investment-threshold

Today the EROI from oil is already below the economical price to pull it out of the ground, and this is behind the big push for developing renewable sources fast, IMO climate change is just a convenient cover story. Massive government subsidies for solar is a start, but we're nowhere near where we need to be to adapt our infrastructure in time, which requires cheap energy i.e. oil.

Uneconomical energy sources (oil, gas, and all renewables except hydro) are all being subsidised with debt, but that is about to end. We have already reached the limit where new debt can no longer create growth, because negative interest rates are deflationary and destroy credit markets.

Even the biggest oil companies like Shell and Exxon aren't making money anymore, they are massively in debt and being propped up the banks who are in turn being propped up by the FED. Exxon just wrote off 20% of their oil reserves, because the cost of production is too high: https://srsroccoreport.com/end-of-the-u-s-major-oil-industry-era-big-trouble-at-exxonmobil/

So there is no new investment in oil exploration or discoveries happening on the scale required to sustain current growth. This is why we are seeing a mad grab for resources in the last 5-10 years - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc - for more insights on the geopolitical consequences on how this will play out, the German military intelligence Bundeswehr put together a very comprehensive analysis in 2010: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-06-13/review-bundeswehr-report-peak-oil-section-22-tipping-point-nov-2010

Interestingly, the only high EROI energy sources left are coal, wood, hydro and to a lesser degree nuclear: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-11-26/energy-return-investment-threshold

China's relentless use of high EROI coal is what has allowed them to maintain growth and become the world's engine without the luxury of printing money like the US - and when the debt overhang becomes too great to keep subsidising oil and renewables, you can bet the US and everyone else will join them in firing up the coal pits again to compensate. This is why I don't buy into the official climate change narrative and agenda, because they keep pushing carbon tax as the solution when they obviously know what's coming. I will do another post on this later, as it is quite a deep subject.

I did some research on different energy sector ETFs, and coal is outperforming the rest by a mile this year - so the smart money has already figured this out. Gold, silver, and other hard commodities will also be much harder to extract without cheap oil, so we are very early in this bull move.

I guess my point is there are bigger challenges afoot, and we should be coming together to educate ourselves and solve these problems, instead of letting the media and war mongering governments divide and distract us. I expect there will be lots more distractions coming real soon.