The latest piece from Tim Watkins makes sobering reading
“So no, until someone can come up with a scalable and cheap energy-dense replacement for fossil fuels, no amount of wishful thinking is going to generate the high-skilled and high-paid economy that a growing number of commentators hope to create in the aftermath of the pandemic. The massive and self-inflicted drop in energy implicit in the various versions of “building back better” can only result in demand for labour growing even as the wealth to pay for it is disappearing (either through inflation, market crashes or both). It is true enough that in the future “you will own [almost] nothing…” but it is unlikely that anyone is going to be happy about it.”
Future “business as usual” seems like a pipedream. Which is denied by the powers that be.
This reminds me of a piece I wrote on the Radix think-tank just before the pandemic hit us.