The un-Denial Decision Tree

h/t Dave Lysak

Tim Watkins today on greenwashing…

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/11/18/why-britain-desperately-needs-a-big-freeze/

It is for this reason – and despite the likely personal hardship – that I am hoping that for once the Daily Express prediction of a Big Freeze comes true. As we found out during the pandemic, we – the public, media and politicians – only take crises seriously when we have to cope with them for real. Simply issuing warnings and running table-top emergency planning exercises are not enough. And so, with the UK now dangerously over-dependent upon wind power, only a 1982 type of cold snap in which temperatures plunge below zero for several weeks as the cold air above the country refuses to budge, will bring home to the proponents of the race to green Never Never Land just how many technical problems have to be resolved before we can even begin to implement the transition away from fossil fuels.

Perhaps, after we have collectively shivered in the dark (maintaining strict social distancing, of course) for a couple of weeks, with intermittent access to everything from television and the internet through to food and… dare I say it… toilet paper, we can at least have a debate about the feasibility of green growth, and whether we might need to do far more to shrink our energy dependence and de-grow a large part of our economy.

It’s a vain hope. As I said, climate change has more or less ended the prospect of the kind of winter that was common a lifetime ago. Wishing for a prolonged cold snap is likely to be about as fruitful as wishing for politicians brave enough to tell the public uncomfortable truths about the unsustainability of our current way of life. Nevertheless, sooner or later the lights will indeed be going out across Europe. And unlike a century ago, they may not come back on again.

Today’s roundup of climate news from Panopticon was a doozy. One sample follows.

https://climateandeconomy.com/2020/11/18/18th-nov-2020-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/greenland-glaciers-sea-level-rise-b1724330.html

Greenland’s largest glaciers are currently melting at levels close to what scientists had previously expected under a future “worst-case scenario”, a study has found.

Using a combination of aerial photographs and field data, the study found that current rates of mass loss from Greenland’s three largest glaciers are higher than once thought.

The melting of these three glaciers added the equivalent of around 8mm to global sea levels from 1880 to 2012, according to the research.

Previous research had estimated that the same three glaciers would contribute 9-15mm to global sea levels by 2100 under a “worst-case scenario”.

Martenson was hilarious today. What a sad troop of political monkeys we are.

Worth watching.

Another smart guy that understands economic growth has stopped for some “structural” reason, but does not understand (or denies) the cause.

How is it possible that there are no smart guys in the mainstream that understand what’s going on?

It’s not, without Varki’s MORT theory being in play.

Gail Tverberg’s answer to a few simple but important questions…

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/11/09/energy-is-the-economy-shrinkage-in-energy-supply-leads-to-conflict/comment-page-13/#comment-267713

LWA on November 14, 2020 at 12:57 pm said:

Hi Gail,

I just recently began reading your blog and I think it’s really interesting. I have a couple of questions:

1) Why do you expect total world energy consumption to plunge the next decades until 2050?

2) Why do you think that the world population will drop to 2.8b in 2050? (The UN for example expects a population of 9.7b in 2050)

3) Do you think it’s possible to replace fossil fuels entirely with renewable energies? Why or why not and what are the consequences for developed world societies if energy isn’t abundantly available? (This could probably be an entire blog post)

Thank you and have a good weekend!

Reply ↓

Gail Tverberg
on November 14, 2020 at 3:18 pm said:

It is hard to explain these thing is the space of a comment.

1) Regarding why world energy energy consumption is likely to plunge, it is only possible to use energy if we have a healthy world economy to utilize the energy. We need to have consumers who can afford to buy houses and cars. We need airlines to be operating, so people can visit far-off lands, if they choose. We need schools to be open so children can learn the things we expect them to learn, and also so that they provide “free” child care services, so that their mothers can work.

A big issue is diminishing returns, in other word, extracting resources required more and more energy, because fossil fuels (and other mineral resources) are deeper, or are in thinner seams, or are more diluted with materials we don’t want. There is a similar problem with growing food, which is another type of energy resource. The amount of arable land doesn’t go up, but the population does. We can work around this problem by using more irrigation and soil amendments. “Fished out” oceans can be replaced by fish farms, which require fossil fuel energy to operate. Desalination can be used to provide water, if deeper wells are not sufficient.

Because of diminishing returns, the true “cost” in terms of the energy required to keep the whole system operating keeps increasing, but the benefit we get from a given amount of resources tends to fall. Fortunately, increases technology and specialization (“complexity”) can fix the situation for a while. Added debt at ever-lower interest rates can hide the problem as well.

Economists have convinced themselves and others that there will never be a problem. Scarcity will cause prices of energy products to rise, and we will be able to extract all of the fossil fuels that seem to be available. This is not really the way it works, however. Energy products are well-hidden within everything we buy. Except possibly for gasoline used for personal transport, the cost of energy is usually deeply buried in things we buy regularly. A great deal of oil goes into growing food, for example, and we don’t stop eating food. Oil is also used in paving roads, and we are required to pay taxes to cover this cost. <While the cost of extracting energy products rises, the price oil that the consumers of the economy can withstand at some point stops rising, and starts falling. The many poor consumers especially get “priced out” of buying discretionary goods. An important point that people miss is that energy is what allows people to have jobs that pay well. When oil consumption gets cut back, even if it is because of a government “stay at home” mandate, people (waiters and waitresses; airlines personnel) lose their jobs.

Once prices fall too low for energy producers, this tend to lead to a self-reinforcing system. More and more of them go out of business, because they cannot make a profit, reducing energy consumption further. More people lose their jobs, indirectly because there is not enough energy to go around. It might be because governments cannot collect enough taxes, and because of this lay off workers (or there could also be a temporary spike in energy prices that leads to cutbacks by consumers). Drilling rig companies that have gone out of business cannot easily come back, even if prices temporarily spike. The many women who were able to work because the schools provided free child care discover that they need to be at home, until their children can take care of themselves. The economy is essentially making fewer and fewer goods and services, so in the aggregate, everyone can buy less and less. The financial system cannot really handle a declining economy. Debt defaults will cause huge problems for banks.

We know that historically, many economy have suffered from overshoot and collapse. In fact, the base model described in the book “The Limits to Growth,” by Donella Meadows et al in 1972 said that this collapse would happen about now. But this is an uncomfortable finding. No one wants to even consider this possibility, but it seems to be exactly what is happening. Pandemics were often part of prior collapses, because poor people did not get adequate diets, making them vulnerable to communicable diseases. This seems to be happening again this time.

2) Why do you think that the world population will drop to 2.8b in 2050? We know that before fossil fuels were used extensively, world population was no more than 1.0 billion, so perhaps that might be a reasonable estimate. In the academic book, Secular Cycles, the “crisis” period seemed to go on between 20 and 50 years.

I took the benefit of the doubt and said that perhaps we would still have quite a bit left in 2050, which would be only 30 years. This may be wishful thinking.

3) No, I don’t think that it is possible to replace fossil fuels entirely with renewable energy. In fact, renewable energy cannot even stand on its own for very long, without fossil fuels. I suggest looking through my website for some of my many posts on this issue. Transmission lines fall down. Wind turbine parts frequently break. A whole system of roads need to be in place.

I will leave it to your imagination as to how we deal with this mess. Current governments fail fairly early, as far as I can tell. We will need a much cheaper system, such as kings overseeing minimal local governments. International trade will shrink in importance.

Reply ↓

Norman Pagett
on November 14, 2020 at 3:33 pm said:

No matter how much fossil fuel is available, it will stay in the ground if people can’t afford to use it.

Some elegant prose from James today…

I look at the same reality and marvel at how lucky we are to have evolved a unique brain, and to be alive with it in a very narrow window of time, when it can understand its origin, and what it’s doing to the rare planet that enabled it. Except of course for those majority of brains that deny reality.

http://megacancer.com/2020/09/27/from-dna-to-dna/#comment-10380

Humans and all other life forms are the most appalling means for facilitating the creation of entropy. To achieve the electromagnetic state of maximum entropy through consuming each other is an abysmal creation of the universe. Let no tasty nugget go unmetabolized. Even after initially exhausting the energy of a primeval pool of molecules, the game was kept going by a daily dose of electromagnetic manna from heaven which eventually gave rise to algae, vascular plants and the like. Poor bastards, full of delicious and energy-packed molecules, their efforts at accelerating the passage of the sun’s rays into space was inadequate. Their bodies contained too much reducible fuel to let go unmolested. And so was born the species of gnarly-toothed grazers to accelerate their conversion into feces and heat. And so began the Lotka-Volterra two-step, a state of eternal hell. And so it went for many years with one species after another coming into being to help the universe in its on-going expansion of space and time by consuming each other. Often the appetite of the universe was so great that the component cells of a dutiful dissipative being would start a cancerous fire of self-immolation.

And finally the universe produced the human, the greatest earthly consumer of them all. They stuffed fuel into their metabolic furnaces at the most prodigious rate and through a twist of fate, in mixing a diamond with a pearl (Kid Charlemagne style) they turned their technology on the world. “Marvelous”, said the universe. “Not only are you my top predator, you have reinvented life at a scale that will most assuredly consume everything in sight.” And so they did. They spent day and night building furnaces and conduits into which they fed all sorts of fuels. To speed things up they created money and loaned it to anyone with an idea for burning more. It was a marvelous bonfire for the insatiable Gods with each pop and crackle of the fire echoing into vast empty space. The human minions of entropy could not get enough, their portfolios of potential were vast, their homes large, their jets ready to make entropy upon demand. They even went to war and killed each other to gain access to more fuel. Their egotistical self-worth was expressed in the amount of entropic success they could achieve. But eventually, after many years of stunning radiation, there was not so much to burn. Very sad for a being whose whole life is about burning things. And as they finally depleted the potential of their gradients the universe let out a great burp of methane and hydrogen sulfide thereby marking the end of the era of humans. The sun continued burning for billions of more years until its fuel too was exhausted, having provided many more generations of unconscious and unwitting beings the spark of life to propel them along the entropic highway to nowhere.