Many decades ago, we established a standard of living that was predicated on cheap energy. But, steadily, fossil fuel energy has become considerably less cheap. The American way of life should have been changing all along in response, but it hasn't. The adjustment has been delayed. The deficit has backed up, like a massive body of water threatening to break through the levees. Because of the corruption of our politicians, and because of the apathy and self indulgence of the American people, we have not developed the cheap alternative energies in time to avoid a painful adjustment.
In the face of these changing parameters, American leaders stubbornly (arrogantly, obstinately, and defiantly) declared that the American way of life was not negotiable. Well, it turns at that the American way of life (like all things) is negotiable, after all. And it's being negotiated away pretty quickly. We're like Wile E. Coyote. America went over the cliff, but we haven't looked down yet, so for a time we seemed to be defying gravity. Then we realize, oh shit, the bottom just fell out of the American Dream. We look down, and we begin to freefall.
In these past few decades, America's real wealth has been steadily eroded away by the diffuse and widespread effect of increasing fossil fuel energy costs. Our only response has been to supplement our dwindling real wealth with fictitious wealth that is the product of a series of equity bubbles and increasingly ingenious instruments of financial deception - a shell game, if you will. The optimist believes that there is money under each of the shells. The realist believes that there is money under only one of the shells. The pessimist, who may just be correct in this instance, believes that there is, indeed, no money under any of the shells.
I maintain, firmly, that the next economic boom for America is entirely dependent upon the establishment of cheaper forms of energy, along with the evisceration of the fossil fuel industry and the accompanying liberation of the decades worth of financial fortune that has been locked up in that dead-end industry. More than anything, households need to be empowered to be powered, so that a long term expense for individual citizens can be substantially diminished, thereby freeing up wealth to be spent liberally once again in other areas and revitalizing a broad spectrum of sectors of the economy.
We are paying a heavy tax by not breaking the stranglehold that fossil fuel energy has developed over us. This is a mammoth societal change that will require a movement, either a grassroots revolution, or the result of visionary political leadership. We should not be afraid to tax the fossil fuel industry to death over the next few decades in order to build what is necessary for mankind's long term health and survival, and to escape the worst outcome of catastrophic climate change.