Is energy policy science or politics?

In the long run (when John Maynard Keynes said cynically we are all dead) civilization depends on energy. A permanent civilization could only maintain itself on income rather than capital.

Capital, which is being run down, is oil, coal and mineral deposits. These are finite.

Income consists of the various forms of solar energy: wind, waves, direct sunlight, falling water, temperature differences; and also gravitational energy: tides in the sea.

Thus western industrial civilization in its present form is ephemeral because it depends on a wasting asset.

People who live by spending their capital end up poor.