Whew!!! Do you have anything in your
repertoire,
besides negative-generalizations??
Maybe you're too-young to remember
the '90s.
Funny, because I was thinking the same thing about you.
Yes, I remember the '90s well. I even remember watching Neil Armstrong step down from the LM and make his historic proclamation while it was actually happening (although there was a small time delay due to the distance between the Earth and the Moon).
You're suffering from a very widely held misconception that economy creates the need for more energy and then we just... go out and find new sources for said energy. Unfortunately, that was sort of how it worked once upon a time but that's now failing because regular conventional oil production has peaked. "All Liquids" has still been rising but even that's approaching a peak. If you were to plot a net production curve (EROEI) and further augment it with a distribution curve due to an increasingly larger consumer base, you'd see that we're definitely post-peak in terms of per-capita energy availability.
For years now we've been making up that exponentionally rising difference by increasing efficiencies in industrial manufacturing processes, vehicular powerplants, product & energy distribution and the like. But... we're nearing the point where the TARs (Time-Adjusted Return) are getting further and further "out there". That is, when CAPEX cannot be offset by lifetime OPEX reductions, then you've reached a practical limit and a "work done per energy consumed" plateau.
We've also exported manufacturing processes to developing nations to reduce labor costs. On the surface, this is always considered a betrayal to The Little Guy by some rich bastard who's looking to make yet another fast buck. Looking deeper, it's the consumer buying the product that ultimately looks at the price in the store and decides to buy the cheaper version not made in the USA. Having a plethora of cheaper foreign goods to choose from is kinda' like getting a raise because your money goes further, but the end of the story is not "...and they lived happily ever after!"
In the economic Big Picture, there are only a few ways of increasing wealth on a nation's macroeconomic scale: manufacturing, agriculture and resources. Our biggest economic problem is that we're consuming more energy from abroad than we're returning to our foreign trade partners in tangible products. Yes, we can create jobs just to put people to work but it won't necessarily translate to more wealth per capita unless said efforts actually produce a net income from sales in foreign markets. And if The Consumer in said foreign nations looks at our price and says, "...to hell with that--I can buy from China or India for half the price" then "Made in USA" isn't going to cut it. Of course, that's manufacturing and we've still got agriculture and some resources.
That's a brief summary--the devil's in the details, naturally. And I understand that I seem a bit negative, but I'm a troubleshooter--I'm employed to analyze real failures and find real solutions. To add a twist on the old saying: just because you're a pessimist doesn't mean things aren't going badly.
I'm sure you're thinking that if only we could reroute funds stolen from The Masses by The Rich, we'd return to The Glory Days. Call it: BigRobinHood-onomics. When the initial smoke clears though, Jevons Paradox is going to bite bigtime.
