Energy futurist Chris Nelder explores the common ground between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party: declining energy leading to declining economic surplus. Beneath the complex narratives of the Occupy and Tea Party movements, and beneath the unfolding collapse of our complex global financial system, is a simpler narrative about energy. Yet this narrative continues to elude most observers, because they don’t understand the fundamental relationship between energy and the real economy. This week I’ll attempt to tell a simple version of that story, in the plainest possible terms, and explain the Occupy and Tea Party movements in that context. Let’s begin with some economic history. For nearly all of U.S. history up through the late 1960s, the production of energy, especially oil, had grown continuously. And economic activity, as measured by GDP, grew right along with it. At the same time, the U.S. dollar was pinned to gold, […]