Drawing inspiration from E.F. Schumacher, John Michael Greer (one of the least hysterical, most clearly reasoned and historically grounded thinkers around) takes a look at the failure of our current economic system to recognize that value and viability are ultimately determined by ecology. He argues that our complex, globalized civilization is complements of our historically anomalous (and now ending) access to concentrated energy sources driven by an interest-based money system, producing a society whose increased complexity is intrinsically dependent on continual growth-- a condition that is no longer viable as we reach ecological limits.

Greer draws on the distinction between the primary economy (nature's goods and services), the secondary economy (human labor's goods and services), and the tertiary economy (money making money) to describe the ways in which the abstract value system called money distorts the true cost and value of economic activity born of concentrated energy sources, conflating the real with the abstract, the primary with the tertiary, resulting in a gross and lethal mismatch between the economic activity represented by money and the decisive economy of nature. Interest plus unrestricted access to concentrated energy leads to an ever-expanding claim on ever-decreasing resources. At some point the bill comes due, the cheap forms of concentrated energy and material resources get used up, the laws of thermodynamics prevail, the money system loses its meaning, and economic systems collapse.

As in all his energy books, Greer is interested in the kind of future we can anticipate when the social complexity born of profligate use of concentrated energy is no longer viable and societies are forced to diffuse in concert with their diffused energy sources. The last chapters of the book begin look at appropriate responses to energy descent-- topics which are spelled out in more detail in his previous books The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future, which I will also recommend (along with his lively weekly blog: thearchruidreport.blogspot.com).