What lies at the bottom of the bottomless well isn't oil, it's logic. Fuels recede, demand grows, efficiency makes things worse, but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic we attain the impossible-infinite energy, perpetual motion, and the triumph of power. It will all run out, but we will always find more. Some say this is not good for the planet, but that's how it works, regardless. What we will forever seek, and forever find, is not energy but the logic of power. Many people don't believe this is true, and would be unhappy if it were. "Giving society cheap abundant energy at this point," Paul Ehrlich declared three decades ago, "would be equivalent to giving an idiot child a machine gun." Most right-thinking pundits have since come around to that same view, though few dare put it quite so truculently.
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