A quote from the excellent 'The Party's Over' by Richard Heinberg a summary of a lecture given by the Geologist Marion K. Hubbert.

"The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin. The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system.

Nevertheless, the montary, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed. Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable co-existence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phrase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.

Hubbert thus believed that society, if it is to avoid chaos during the (upcoming) energy decline, must give up its antiquated, debt-and-interest-based monetary system and adopt a system of accounts based on matter-energy - an inherently ecological system that would acknowledge the finite nature of essential resources."