Today’s guest post by Hideaway reviews our ‘plan’ to transition off fossil energy, and shows it is in fact a mirage.
Hideaway is a new force active at un-Denial and other sites that discuss energy and overshoot. He focusses on the feasibility of transitioning our energy system, and brings a data-backed, reality-based, adult conversation into a space that is more often than not filled with ignorance, hope, and denial.
As I was writing a post about EROEI, I came across data for energy production and consumption from Our World in Data. It’s all very professionally made and ‘free’ for anyone to use in their energy discussions.
I spotted one problem though, the data presented has a caveat, they use the substitution method for non-fossil fuel generated electricity, and in the fine print this is explained as… “ Substituted primary energy, which converts non-fossil electricity into their ‘input equivalents’: The amount of primary energy that would be needed if they had the same inefficiencies as fossil fuels. This ‘substitution method’ is adopted by the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, when all data is compared in exajoules.”
OK, how do they convert non-fossil energy into fossil fuel equivalents??
This chart provides the conversion factor.
An efficiency factor of 0.4 means that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, biofuels and other renewables are made to look much larger than they really are by a factor of 2.5 in the following chart.
It suggests we are making good progress at replacing fossil with renewable energy, and that with a bit more effort we can convert all fossil energy to renewable electricity.
As is common in energy discussions today, reality differs from what is presented. The following chart shows electricity production by source.
Notice that total world electricity consumption for 2022, which of course must equal production, is 28,660Twh. Yet the above chart for energy consumption by source shows that nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other renewables are by themselves 11,100Twh.
If we divide non-fossil electricity consumed by the 2.5 efficiency factor we get 11,740Twh which is close to the correct amount of non-fossil electricity produced. I say close because the energy from non-fossil sources adds up to 641Twh more than that shown on the electricity production chart, so this extra energy must be used for some other purpose, but has still been treated as 2.5 times more efficient.
From the above chart we see 10,212Twh of electricity from coal and 6,443Twh of electricity from gas, and we can calculate how much of the total oil and gas production was used for electricity by multiplying by 2.5.
From the 44,854Twh of total world coal consumption we used 25,525Twh for electricity, and 19,329Twh for other purposes. Likewise for the 39,412Twh of total world gas consumption we used 16,107Twh for electricity and 23,305Twh for other purposes.
With oil we only produced 904Twh of electricity. Assuming the same 40% efficiency for oil as coal and gas, then only 2,260Twh of oil was used for electricty and 50,710Twh was used for other purposes.
We can now complete the following table and use it for assessing how our energy transition is going.
Total primary energy production is 134,313Twh of which wind and solar contribute 3,408Twh or 2.5%.
Electricity is 21.3% of total energy, and fossil fuels produces 61.3% of electricity.
Only 8.2% of total energy comes from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and other renewables, and the remaining 91.8% comes from fossil fuels and traditional biomass.
The following chart illustrates this graphically. Blue is all non-electricity energy, orange is electricity from fossil fuels, and grey is electricity from all other sources.
The world is currently trying to replace fossil fuel produced electricity (orange) with electricity from nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and other ‘sustainable’ methods (grey). It is not possible to manufacture, install, or maintain more ‘sustainable’ energy (grey) without fossil fuels. Even the newest mines and factories require fossil fuels in many forms.
There is no plan for the non-electricity portion of energy (blue).
Let’s now consider how fossil fuel and traditional biomass use has changed over time. Are we getting anywhere?
Traditional Biomass was 100% of energy used, according to Our World in Data (OWiD), until coal started to be used in the year 1800 at 1.7% of total energy. Interestingly, they attribute no energy to water power, wind (sails), or animals, perhaps because they were too small or hard to measure.
Fossil Fuels (FF) and Traditional Biomass (TB) contributed 100% of total energy until 1920 when Hydro contributed 1%.
The contribution of FF and TB to total energy changed as follows:
- <1920 100%
- 1920 99%
- 1940 99.2%
- 1960 98.4%
- 1980 97.6%
- 1990 95.2%
- 2000 94.4%
- 2010 94.3%
- 2020 92.1%
- 2022 91.8%
Most energy analyses lump TB in the mix without paying much attention to the size of its contribution. At 11,111Twh, as measured by OWiD, TB is a larger source of energy than nuclear, hydro, wind, solar and biofuels combined! TB is not going to be replaced by any other type of energy. Most energy analyses place TB on the other side of the ledger from FF, when in fact TB should be added to the FF side, as it is burnt and adds to greenhouse gasses.
The following chart shows the total contribution of energy from non-FF or TB, with columns 1-4 representing the period 1990-2020, and column 5 is what is ‘expected’ to happen by 2050.
We can see how little decarbonization progress we have made over the last 30 years, and the extraordinary progress we expect to make over the next 26 years, towards achieving our climate goals.
Now let’s consider fossil energy used as feedstock for products, and high heat applications.
There are around 1,100 million tonnes of coking coal mined, 700 million tonnes of oil products, plus vast quantities of gas (I couldn’t find the quantity of gas used as feedstock for products or high heat applications) to make 430 million tonnes of plastics, 240 million tonnes of ammonia (fertilizer), 160 million tonnes of asphalt, plus huge amounts of high end heat for cement and steel production, and hundreds of other products and high heat applications.
OWiD does not provide data on energy used for product feedstocks, or high heat, or normal heating, or transportation, or agriculture, or mining. It’s a huge weakness in all energy calculations.
Product feedstocks, by themselves, are a huge gap in our plan for an electricity only future. A world based on renewables would have to make these products from captured carbon, because there is no unused biomass, and we cannot increase our use of biomass without causing significant further damage to the natural world that sustains us. Only if we were willing to decimate remaining forests could we replace fossil fuel products with biomass, especially as world food demand is expected to go up by 60-70% by 2050 according to the FAO.
The only example of using renewable energy to create synthetic fuel, which is the base for all fossil fuel products, is the Haru Oni plant in Southern Chile. It has a 3.4Mw Siemens Gamesa wind turbine with an expected 70% capacity factor producing an expected 20,848Mwh of electricity per year. The first ‘commercial’ (sic) shipment of e-fuels was just sent 11 months after beginning operation, and 8 months after declaring commercial operations, of 24,600 litres. That is a process efficiency of only 1.77%, assuming an annual production of 36,900 litres, without considering the energy expended in the capital ($US75M), or operating and maintenance costs (unknown or not released).
Assuming we had to make ‘products’ from this process, replacing the Coking Coal 1.1Bt = roughly 7,700Twh, plus approximately 10% of a barrel of oil (using all liquids), another 6,205Twh, the raw energy needed from renewables to do this at a 1.77% efficiency rate would be 785,000Twh, or nearly 5 times current annual energy production from all sources!!
This is before adding the energy needed to mine, process, manufacture, and transport the materials required to build it all!!
It’s a ridiculous idea.
Considering I didn’t include the products from natural gas, or any capital, operating, or maintenance costs, and even assuming significant improvements in efficiency, it’s not even close to being possible.
One final calculation to further expose the mirage.
To make the products from renewable energy, with a Haru Oni type efficiency, would require over 1.8B tonnes of copper for the energy production side of the operation, based on 5 tonnes per Mwh of a solar power plant, and over 5 hrs/day of sunshine. This would consume 100% of our current copper production for about 80 years.
Modern civilization is a complex system. It has systems within systems, and a complexity far too high for anyone to understand as a whole. Our discussions and plans for continuing modern civilization after changing from fossil to renewable energy usually concentrate on one minor part of the overall system. It’s the only way to get an answer that looks plausible.
When multiple feedback loops are considered, it becomes obvious that we do not have the energy nor materials to keep modern civilization going for all. Unless of course, the real plan is to retain modern civilization for only a very small portion of humanity, much smaller than present…
February 15, 2024
Rob here, there are many interesting comments by Hideaway below that expand on his energy and materials analysis.
I found one comment particularly interesting because it introduced Hideaway’s background and the life path that led him to his current clear-eyed view of our overshoot predicament.
I’ve copied that comment here for better visibility.
I first learnt about limits to growth in 1975 in my first year of an Environmental Studies course. I’ve been studying and researching everything about energy and resources for decades. My wife and I moved to the country 40 years ago onto a block of land and started farming.
I was the state secretary of an organic farming group and on the certifying committee over 30 years ago. Virtually all organic, biodynamic, permaculture, regenerative properties I came across had similar characteristics. The profitable ones used lots of off property resources, which I argued was unsustainable, because of diesel use etc. I left the organic movement, also decades ago, because there was nothing really sustainable about it.
I was a believer in a renewable future for decades, always believing it was only a matter of time until they became better and cheaper than fossil fuels, which were clearly depleting. I had an accident 15 years ago, and since then have had way more time to do research than just about anyone. I really got stuck into working out how mines could go ‘green’ until I just couldn’t make the numbers work. (BTW I also had some economics and geology in my tertiary studies, but have learnt way more on both subjects in the last 15 years).
Eventually I reluctantly did my own calculations on EROEI because I just couldn’t find anything with an unbiased approach that came close to making sense. I’ve been against nuclear for decades, mainly because of humanities failure to deal with wastes and the nuclear bombs we create, so I very reluctantly calculated the EROEI using my method and was stunned at the results.
I use to be a believer in the 100:1 EROEI that everyone in favor of nuclear constantly states (before I worked it out for myself). The reality is nothing like that, it’s pitiful worse than solar and wind, which instantly made me realise that modern civilization is not sustainable any any way, shape or form.
I also kept checking the numbers I calculated for Saudi oil and a small gas project in WA. Sure enough these came to the rough numbers we need for modernity, but of course fossil fuels are leaving us due to depletion, they are a dead end anyway, even before we consider climate issues.
All my work, over years, has given me a point of reference for when the world as we know it is in real trouble. It’s when the oil extraction decline accelerates to the downside. Everything runs on oil, especially farming and mining and heavy transport. The world falls to pieces without any of these, once they struggle to get the diesel/bunker fuel they need, collapse is baked in. A date of when? no idea, but suspect we will know by higher oil prices and a failure to respond with greater oil production, then the next year a further decline in oil production, while oil prices remain high etc.
Not even coal can save modernity, the EROEI is too low. Even if we went on a massive Coal to Liquids campaign, the energy return for the cost is way too low. When coal was last king we had approximately a 70% rural population even in the west, now we have multiples of the overall population, mostly in cities, and badly degraded agricultural land.
un-Denial 
Thanks, Hideaway. I think I understand primary energy now. It’s the energy that’s embodied in the raw input (coal, etc.) to obtain the energy civilisation needs to operate. Given that the energy output by coal fired power plants and by internal combustion engines, for example, the actual energy we get for running civilisation is a lot less than the primary, initial, energy that was input. So, for non-FF (and non-TB) output energy (mainly electricity), OWiD assume that the input primary energy is the same a for FF/TB, for the purposes of comparison. But what is the real energy input for non-FF energy processes? I could say that solar panels only convert about 20% of the sunlight falling on them, so they are only, at most, 20% efficient. But would that be reasonable?
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Hi Mike, You are correct they don’t compare apples with apples, they compare energy input to coal and gas fired plants with output from solar, to make coal and gas look more efficient. Realistically they should look at yearly output of electricity from a coal or gas plants to output over a year of solar. I also assume they don’t want 20% solar efficiency widely known with the other 80% being waste heat that goes directly into the environment warming the planet. of course it’s not especially hidden, more hidden in plain sight and never mentioned..
Obviously it would become quickly noticeable by everyone that you need 6 to 8 times the quantity of solar in GW capacity to equal the output from 1 GW of Coal, if they highlighted real the apples to apples comparison. (The world average output from all solar panels according to the IEA is 11.4% capacity in one document and 13.2% capacity in another).
No-one wants to use the 13.2% capacity as it makes the solar output look poor and you would have to spend somewhere around $US7B to build the same output as a 1GW coal plant which would only cost $US1B, if built in the old way. Of course if the transmission lines were only set up to take 1GW, then a lot extra would need to be built to move the 7GW of power when the sun shines, or a lot of batteries would need to be near the Solar power station to smooth out the output over time. Of course no-one wants to count all the extra energy cost in building all the extra stuff.
The deeper you look into everything about energy, the more holes appear in the attempt to run a future civilization off just renewables or nuclear or some combination of the lot.
Rob, a big thankyou for cleaning up the post above. To me it’s clear evidence that 2 minds working on something is way better than just one especially when we are on the same page with our thinking..
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Just reading this. Your paragraph below the chart “Electricity Production by Source, World ” is incorrect. You
don’t understand how to read the chart. Someone else can explain to you. I can’t be bothered. Very basic mistake. I won’t be reading any more of this. David Higham
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You are correct the sum of Hydro, Nuclear, Wind, Solar and other comes to just 11,100Twh or 8.2% of total world energy use. I’ve used the actual output of electricity from Coal, Gas and Oil, and in the table below of ‘Total Energy Use,’ subtracted 2.5 times the numbers given for Coal, Gas and Oil, as per the way Our World in Data adjusted for primary energy use with non fossil fuels.
It probably deserved a total post on it’s own, as I think I’ve tried to cram too much info into one post, and be relatively brief in the attempt. I apologise for the error.
Rob, could you please correct the 29,352Twh to 11,100Twh in the first paragraph below the “Energy Production by Source, World” Chart..
I certainly do understand how to read the charts, I’ve been researching energy for over 30 years since I worked out that the Limits to Growth authors were incorrect in one aspect. That being energy is the master resource. Other resources are plentiful if we had unlimited very cheap energy. For a silly example the estimated above ground gold mined throughout human history, is around 200,000 tonnes. However there is something like 4,800,000,000,000 tonnes of the metal in the mantle (at about 1.2PPB), all of which would be accessible with unlimited (cheap to free) energy. The Limits to Growth authors only included a ‘5 times’ (IIRC) known resources in one model, that only took peak forward by a couple of decades, they didn’t consider thousands to millions of times resources with unlimited cheap/free energy.
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Very interesting thread on energy and the monetary system, too long to copy here in full, between HHH, Hideaway, and others at POB.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/september-world-oil-production-rebounds/#comment-768908
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B today discusses why a simplification of civilization is imminent and how it might unfold.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point
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Rintrah today. My government is still running frequent ads telling citizens to get mRNA boosters.
https://www.rintrah.nl/igg4-against-nucleocapsid-is-no-excuse-there-is-zero-evidence-of-a-class-shift-after-infection/
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Do your part to fix climate change and upgrade to Windows 11.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-is-now-carbon-aware-a53f39bc-5531-4bb1-9e78-db38d7a6df20
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LOL we really are in the end of days
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I am still using Win7!
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Now we know who to blame for the arctic melting.
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I am using Linux.
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How do efficiency gains help in the long term? What about efficiency gains of non renewable resources like oil, coal and gas. IMHO they don’t help at all, they hinder finding an alternative, or recognizing there is no alternative, they rely upon increasing technology, meaning more complexity to use up whatever resource. Of course Jevon’s paradox come into play as well, with the resource being used faster.
It is of course a denial of a bad outcome from the resource going into decline at some point soon, so as long as the problem is put off by xxx years then ‘we’ those currently living in this world, don’t have to worry at all.
When supply chains start to fall apart, as we had a brief glimpse of with the Covid shutdowns, will all or any of the highly complex energy saving devices be available? Will governments change rules to allow less efficient (but more robust) vehicles to be made, even if in contravention of pollution and energy saving laws and the direction they have been heading for generations?? Will any politician, or leader, or mainstream media admit ‘we were wrong’ for years, or will they start blaming ‘others’ for the problems?? Most likely the latter IMHO.
How would anyone set up their new factories to produce more simple manufactured products, when parts for everything rely upon many technical advances over the decades in even the simplest of machines, especially when there are supply constraints across the board. Machines are made by machines, the retooling needs to start at the bottom, is there the time and energy to do this? Probably not, even now when there are some of us that realise there is a problem.
By the time it is widely recognised we have a huge problem by both mainstream and government, the answer IMHO is definitely no, there will be supply and energy constraints especially as people just try to live, there will be no investment money for just about anything as everyone scrambles to survive in a world of diminished resources of every type, especially food, water, shelter and clothing which will all be in very low availability.
I assume the time honoured tradition of taking from others will win out, so most new ‘effort’ or investment will go to the military to ‘take’ the resources off those we blame for our predicament. The future for humans if history is any guide, is going to be very bleak. I think Thomas Hobbs was incorrect, life will become solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short because of government for most. How was life turning out for the natives in America around the time Hobbs made his famous comment? I’m sure the natives would have preferred much less ‘government’…
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I know I’m late to the party, but am commenting anyway. We’ve climbed up the technology ladder, kicking out the rungs below us as we go. I see it everywhere. Simplicity, redundancy, resilience all run counter to tech enabled “efficiency” so go against the dominant narrative.
There are millions around the world who might notice a lack of contrails in the sky, but otherwise see no change in their lives as things progress, but as for us…………….
As Vonnegut encapsulated years ago-” so it goes”.
And thanks for the post expanding on your take on our predicament.
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Despite all of this Elon Musk believes that the Earth could support 80 billion people.
https://www.unilad.com/news/elon-musk-believes-earth-could-hold-80-billion-people-799394-20231031
I have to conclude that Elon Musk is either clueless or completely delusional.
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LOL, how about both clueless and delusional, or are they one and the same? Currently there is about 0.625ha of agricultural land per person on planet Earth. To support 10 times this population would mean 0.0625ha/person or just 625sqm/person …
It’s probably just doable on a highly intensive scale of every square metre of agricultural land. Of course there could be no droughts, or floods, or heatwaves, or cold frosty snaps, I’m sure Elon could arrange all that. Shame the climate is heading in the opposite direction.
Of course there would be nothing of nature left with 80B people, and shortly after we rid ourselves of every other species, being the pests they are, we could live in blissful harmony with ourselves until we all die because we didn’t realise some bacteria or virus was really important in keeping life on the planet functioning, perhaps we shouldn’t have exterminated all those phytoplankton after all…
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Or a big fat lying con man
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Thank god, the cavalry’s coming to save us.
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I thought Canada was beyond redemption? Apparently even the immigrants are giving up on Canada, at least that’s what the news tells me
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The last time I felt good about my country was when the truckers converged on the capital. I remember crying with pride. Then Trudeau declared an emergency, broke up the protest with force, and threw its leaders in jail. Our supreme court just declared his actions unconstitutional.
Trudeau and his cohorts have killed millions so far, with more to come. He, like Fauci, needs to go to prison for murder.
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“Draining America first is a terrible idea”, but does demonstrate that we are governed by the Maximum Power Principle and deny reality.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/draining-america-first-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-shale-gas/
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Dr. Joe Lee is not giving up. He periodically copies his tweets to a Substack post so if they delete his X account he has proof that the medical authorities are guilty of negligence and/or murder by ignoring his warnings that the mRNA boosters are killing people.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/140984621
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I fear that the debt bubble will pop within the next few years.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/counting-the-cost/2024/1/6/is-a-global-debt-crisis-looming
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I don’t think that Greg Swenson’s Reaganomics proposal will allow the debt to be served. Hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt will have to be either inflated away, or be written off. The Debt crisis will likely start in developing countries like Pakistan and nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, and will work its way up to wealthy countries including but not limited to Japan, The U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the Eurozone.
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It’s pretty clear that debt is the substitute for lower EROEI and no-one at the ‘top’ understands this (or is saying it out loud). Even the comment about UK spending on green renewables (include nuclear) is not adding anything but debt. There is no ‘growth’ from it too pay off the debt.
With the African countries, the debt trap is just the modern form of colonialism, keeping the locals too poor to use their own natural resources so the west (and China) can stay ‘richer’. The IMF gives loans with high interest rates, and necessary ‘reforms’, which is just austerity on the population to stop them using too many of ‘our’ resources, that happen to often reside in their countries. The IMF creates the funds for those loans out of thin air like all money is created..
We are headed for a gigantic collapse and every story like this just reinforces this reality..
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I generally agree with the authors of this post, as this energy cost comparison analysis has been available in the energy descent network for years. Still, it’s nice to be reminded with neat charts.
However, the statement, “ TB is not going to be replaced by any other type of energy. ” stopped me dead. Consider:
Among cooked foods, beans take one of the longest cooking times, about 2 hours simmering on a gas stove or our wood range. On our home-made solar cooker with a parabola reflector, beans cook only a little longer, maybe 2.5-3 hours at most. No traditional biomass used.
My experiences with passive solar design and reading the literature demonstrate that compared to a conventional house of the same size, passive solar can use at least 6 times less TB – 2 cord/yr versus 12 cord. See my paper,
Three Farmhouses: A Study in Passive Solar Design (http://karlnorth.com/?p=653)
I think will power more than technological limits will decide how much TB is replaced by direct capture of current solar gain, going into the end of the oil age. Most of the essential elements of the simple direct capture examples described above can be found and built without fossil fuel use, or even much TB consumption. Even ancient Romans used mica instead of glass, stone instead of wood, etc.
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Most of the traditional biomass is used in developing countries that don’t have the funds to build anything like needed, plus in the developed world a lot more people will turn to wood or whatever they can burn as gas heating becomes too expensive. Traditional biomass use has risen a lot over the last couple of hundred years, not gone down despite all the ‘cheap’ coal, oil and gas we’ve had in this time.
How many richer people that can afford to pay for passive solar design will go off natural gas or expensive heat pumps for wood burning fires from their own woodlots if they can afford the land in an attempt to ‘save’ on energy costs? Going from zero to 2 cords is going to be an increase. It’s a big world out there..
BTW we designed and built our own house 40 years ago along passive solar design guidelines. I’ve been involved in alternatives for decades, it’s just the numbers do not go close to adding up on a worldwide scale of 8.1B people..
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“richer people that can afford to pay for passive solar design”
The false idea that passive solar design has to be expensive is perhaps because most of it to date has been the plaything of a gentrified class that can afford to do it that way.
“Most of the traditional biomass is used in developing countries that don’t have the funds to build anything like needed”
Anyone who has lived in “developing countries” (actually mostly neocolonial satrapies) and paid attention to the way natives have solved their problems with inexpensive technologies for a thousand years knows that Western notions of what funding is needed are a Western conceit.
“the numbers do not go close to adding up on a worldwide scale of 8.1B people..”
Anyone who is familiar with the energy descent literature knows that in the post-petroleum age, the global population will be only a tiny fraction of 8.1 billion people.
However, on the way down one can expect many crises of traditional stored biomass (wood), as have occurred during the crash of many civilizations going back to ancient history. The loss of the fabled cedars of Lebanon and the like facilitated the downfall of the ancient societies of the fertile crescent. A 17th century European firewood crisis was one of the drivers of colonization of the New World. Any North American who has lived in Europe is struck by how little forest is left.
One of Nate Hagens’ contributions to dramatize the issue on The Oil Drum was a map of the US that showed how long existing forest would last in every state at present rates of energy consumption by the state’s population, if forest became the only source of energy. In NY state where I farmed at the time, it would last 16 days.
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Hi Northsheep, great web site you have, lots of interesting bits and pieces. I don’t disagree with any of your thoughts on what should happen, but we both know there is a vast difference between what shoud happen and what is actually happening.
Try as we might to change the world, the reality of what’s happening is a continuation of BAU and that is where I tend to be looking. Traditional biomass will of course be decimated on the way down from 8. whatever billion people. We are just in such deep overshoot, that the only way is down, eventually. The real problem is if population does get to 9B or 10B, we fall hard from a much higher level it becomes much worse on the overall environment.
What the mainstream and even green groups as a whole are ‘selling’ is that we can all prosper by using more resources providing we stop polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and methane plus a couple of other gasses. It’s all nonsense, we, the collective we, including all of us that use computers, are part of the overall problem of massive overshoot.
As a former state secretary of an organic certifying group, the largest in the country at the time, and a member of the certifying committee, I don’t believe that any form of agriculture is sustainable in the long term to feed a population off the land. I saw lots of farms being ‘organic’, ‘sustainable’, ‘regenerative’, using ‘permaculture’ or whatever other buzzword applies. None of it is sustainable. The nutrients are effectively mined, no matter how much is returned to the land, they will be depleted, as natural rainfall guarantees that Liebig’s law of the minimum eventually reduces yields drastically.
Whenever I hear the term ‘we need to build more… “of anything!!”, it doesn’t matter what it is, means the person hasn’t thought through all the implications of ‘more’. This especially includes those in the ‘alternative green’ groups. The building of ‘more’ is just the continuation of what we have been doing for thousands of years. We need to build less, less of everything. If anyone needs to change their living environment, it realistically means they are living where humans shouldn’t be living, but we justify to ourselves it is a better, lighter way.
More passive solar design and better use of materials is just continuation of BAU with justifying our part of overshoot. I’m not having a go at you, I’m just as guilty with what we have built, as we all have a life to live. None of us wants to give up all our lifestyle even if we perceive it as ‘better’ than standard suburban living in la, la, head in the sand land.
“The illusion that a policy of compromising ecosystem imperatives to meet market demands is sustainable.” This from one of your pages pretty much sums up our entire situation. A world where we have gone from around 4-10 million hunter gatherers to over 8B living unsustainably, using every resource possible, denying it’s our numbers and lifestyle that are the real problem. The carrying capacity of the world is now probably much lower than it was 10,000 years ago with the damage we have done to biodiversity, environment and climate..
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Hello again Hideaway.
There is something I wonder. You state: “Traditional biomass will of course be decimated on the way down from 8. whatever billion people”
Do you think that is true?
I have this (maybe false) idea that much of forest cutting operations are made possible thanks to fossil fuels (like wind and solar). I don’t have numbers, I am just considering the size and complexity of the machinery involved, the level of energy expanded during transportation, local environmental considerations and nimby…
So that, hopefully, one consequence of fossil fuels declining availability may also be a decline in biomass availability, or at least global deforestation?
Would there be a way to confirm or disprove this hunch with some data?
I already asked this question in the comments of the previous post and got this interesting answer by monk: https://un-denial.com/2023/12/25/by-mike-roberts-humans-are-a-species/#comment-92978.
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The problem is people will spread out form the cities to try and survive, pushing the people already outside the cities further ‘out’. The problem is 8B people, and the damage they can do on the way down when there is still some availability of modern equipment fuels, but not enough for a governed society. Think rechargeable batteries on electric chainsaws that can be powered by a solar panel, compared to using an axe. People will move to where they think they are safe, as far away from others as possible, maybe a group, and settle in a current wilderness and try agriculture, and use wood for heating and cooking..
The developing world will see the billions of people spread out into any last remaining wilderness areas and create havoc in all equatorial rainforests, there is just too many dammed people on the planet to stop it happening..
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Oh, I see. It somewhat makes sense. For now, that’s indeed what I am seeing happening in my country. Unfortunately, many civilized people are (have been taught to be) short-sighted, brutes and savages. Until their machines break down…
However, a part of me still thinks the world is more complex than that. Maybe lots of people are going to stay in towns (inertia). People will have increasingly harder lives and die (hopefully slightly) younger than projected. Machinery will break more easily than we believe (new machines are more brittle and more complex) and not necessarily be available (supply chain issues).
I think that, in theory at least, land already used for agriculture should be enough to feed (for a while, until the trend goes down) humanity. From my personal experience, I have really an extremely hard time believing industrial agriculture can be more productive and have less impact than manual intensive care. After all, if I am not wrong, there is still 0.6 ha agricultural land per person https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-area-per-capita?country=~OWID_WRL. My understanding is that 0.4/0.5 ha would be the lower limit. (Even though I have read some estimates, which I do not believe can be generalized, going as far down as 300m^2=0.03 ha) I am ready to admit, though, that it requires a certain mindset, skill, that time is needed for the land to recuperate depending on its level of degradation, and that there is the delicate issue of land distribution (property rights and the ego). And we are not really starting…
So you may well be right, but I find the situation has more to do with who the human beings are, rather than the actual conditions on the ground.
The decades ahead are going to be interesting… The pulse of energy moved from sun to fossil fuel to humanity. The 8 billion people and their infrastructure are now the energy stock.
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“I have really an extremely hard time believing industrial agriculture can be more productive and have less impact than manual intensive care.”
I think you are right, but it all hinges on what manual intensive care is or becomes as it evolves and adapts under increasing deindustrialization.
” I find the situation has more to do with who the human beings are, rather than the actual conditions on the ground.”
I think this is important to keep in mind as well.
So, given the above, I think a likely or at least plausible scenario is the following.
Industrial agriculture is almost wholly dependent on fossil fuels, especially oil, and will gradually disappear with the end of the oil age. Most of humanity is also dependent on oil, and will not survive. The remnant will include a small minority that, for various reasons have learned enough about how natural ecosystem produce food for their denizens to survive at least long enough to raise children who will begin create an agroecosystem that increases chances for human survival. In my paper published here,
“An agroecological model for the end of the oil age” (http://karlnorth.com/?p=1554), I said,
“Historically, Nature’s ‘farming systems’ have a much better track record for durability than ours. This is why, in the words of two pioneering agroecologists[9], “farming in Nature’s image” needs to become our design standard.”
This design standard is far above most farming systems in the organic farming movement. I say this not to dismiss those efforts , for I have been an active farmer and educator in that movement. But most organic farmers, like most of society, cannot imagine the end of oil.
However, one advantage for designers, as long as it lasts, is the immense salvage materials from the industrial age. Salvage will be useful to cushion the trial and error adaptation to a post-petroleum age. Intelligent designers of farming systems will repurpose this salvage to create simpler technologies, including repossessing ones from pre-industrial times.
As I have written, multipurpose animals dependent on perennial forage will probably enhance design in many locations. People who say animals steal land from food cropping, such as many trained in engineering, have usually given little thought to these questions. Much currently cropped farmland is too prone to erosion, and therefore should be in multistory perennials that include forages to support draft animal power, livestock for food and soil building, etc. Models that include animals can enhance both food production and the healath of ecosystem processes, not steal food land.
Another important design issue is how to manage land in a larger social whole than the family farm. I have suggested a scenario at a county scale in a six-part series, Visioning County Agriculture, available in my Core Papers (http://karlnorth.com/?page_id=9), which I wrote as a particilpant in an energy descent education group in Ithaca, New York.
BTW Charles, having lived for ten years in France and other French speaking places, I read French. in case you know of information in French that might interest me. You can email me (in French if you wish) at northkarlo@gmail.com.
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Yes, this is all fascinating.
Indeed, participating in systems that feed ourselves while building soil at the same time, is, to me, key. In a way, this is the crux of the matter: how do we go from being an agent of exploitation and destruction, to a participant in the overall movement of life to build abundance? (I guess the first step is to trust that it is possible, that we are not “inherently” evil or just designed to consume/burn/take. To break through this cultural barrier is maybe the most difficult step) Yes, animals (the right ones in the right quantity) are a necessary piece of this puzzle.
About some resources in French, that’s a good question. Thank you for sharing your email. As, it may interest others, I still decided to post my answer directly in this comment 🙂
First some personal impressions. I’d like to say that I find there are many people who talk about a lot of things. But, there is fundamentally not much (if anything) that is really necessary to know. That’s why, ultimately, really, after reading much and trying some, I like to stick to Masanobu Fukuoka’s perspective.
I don’t know anybody in France who has his prescience and strength. For now, we seem to have a lot of followers, and not many free minds. I also tend to dislike theoreticians who never put their ideas in practice.
That being said, here is my list of personal favourite (on the topic of agriculture only, I excluded philosophers or theoreticians of collapse):
– Gérard Ducerf (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Ducerf): this guy is really great. He is a botanist. His focus is plants as bio-indicators. Basically the idea goes like this: each species seed germinates in a very specific set of conditions and its goal is to do some kind of transformation which will somehow restore balance. So just by looking at the plants that naturally thrive in a place, one can infer the nature of the soil, the imbalances… He wrote a few books and has a few conferences which can be found on youtube. I’d advise this tiny book: “Fascicule des conditions de levée de dormance des plantes bio-indicatrices”, which has tables such as this one https://www.tela-botanica.org/actu/IMG/page_20dormance3.jpg.
– Maurice Chaudière (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Chaudi%C3%A8re): expert in bee-keeping and grafting.
– Marceau Bourdarias: expert in soft pruning of trees and vine (but he cites researchers from US and the UK, so I think the source is probably english speaking). No books unfortunately on this topic…
And then a secondary list:
– Annaëlle Thery: the only resource I found in french about syntropy (by Ernst Gotsch). She wrote a book which will be soon out (https://joala.fr/le-livre/). I don’t know about the quality of this book. But syntropy offers some very interesting (sometimes counter-intuitive) ideas: the notion that pruning is a key to boost productivity. The idea of designing multi-year, multi-layered systems. The idea of cycles of increasing productivity, with resets every 10/20 years (in a way, it is the opposite of conservation: the idea that Nature should be a pristine sacred and somewhat static ideal)
– Christian Tarpin: was in charge of the transformation of AuroOrchard, the farm which feeds Auroville, into a regenerative system. https://journals.openedition.org/com/11323
– Lucien Seguy: agronomist, expert in large-scale no-till cultivation. Interesting talks such as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beZd8V8FBg4
– https://www.youtube.com/@VerdeTerreProduction: lot’s of very interesting resources. However, I don’t really like this movement. They are very active and have quite a lot of funds. They push no-till agriculture at the industrial scale, and do not shy away from glyphosate. This is a problem for me. In any case, I am not really interested in agriculture at this scale. Too big and as such, dependent on large machinery (or slaves?).
And a few researchers (some fringe) to impress friends with extensive knowledge on the complexity and beauty of life:
– Ernst Zucher (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Z%C3%BCrcher): swiss forester. Trees, climate change and the influence of the cosmos
– Hervé Covès: agronomist, mycologist and Franciscan brother, expert in black truffle: he is a great story teller. For instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rGRgEivXy4 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zO2uEpmtkc.
– Francis Hallé (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hall%C3%A9): expert in tropical forests, trees and tree architecture.
– Marc-Andre Selosse (https://isyeb.mnhn.fr/fr/annuaire/marc-andre-selosse-404): theoretical researcher in biology. Experts in soils interactions, chemistry…
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Why do you think that there is an “overall movement of life to build abundance?” The drive for life is to procreate. That’s how evolution gets going.
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Hello Mike,
I am replying to your comment here because we appear to have reached the right edge of comments.
The “overall movement of life to build abundance”, I am talking about, is not a statement of absolute truth, not even a theory.
This is simply what I am observing on the field, at my level, at my time-scale, in my region of the world: if I let a piece of land without any intervention, it will slowly get “richer” (= soil quality increases, life diversity and quantity increases, pollution being eaten away or buried). When practising agriculture, many human interventions can go against this flow and destroy life (= desertification). For instance, tilling, over-harvesting (starving the soil), leaving the soil naked to erosion, over-fertilizing (creates obstruction in the cycles), and of course chemicals (in a way the most crazy of all: the killing of our kin). On the other hand, the right interventions at the right pace and with the right state of mind can accelerate the natural process of regeneration. This boils down to first forgetting everything we leaned, removing all preconceptions and then asking oneself questions about the well-being of this community of life and how to best fulfill its needs.
From the prison of our current culture, it is difficult to understand what I am talking about. One has to go on the field and observe and practice and be in the right state of mind and heart.
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Hi Charles. I’m not sure about comment indentation as I usually use the WordPress reader for commenting, which doesn’t cause me any problems but doesn’t indent beyond the second level (admittedly making it difficult to look back at a sub-thread).
Anyway, yes, I agree that, with non-human species, a climax ecosystem could probably appear abundant but it would take a long time to reach that state and it could all change with some external forcing or evolutionary mutation. Certainly, some local changes could be observed when leaving an area alone to find its own way, e.g. undergrowth could become lush, if chaotic for a while. With a bit of help, the birds come flocking in. It can be awesome to observe.
How us humans become more like other species, in building climax ecosystems, is to either become extinct or lose the ability to build and manipulate tools.
But life, in general, isn’t working towards abundance and nature will eventually leave this planet a lifeless hunk of rock.
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Yes, you are probably right about the ultimate destination of the planet. I don’t think that far 🙂
Yes, birds are a great way to fertilize and get inputs (seeds, insect eggs…) from afar.
“How us humans become more like other species, in building climax ecosystems, is to either become extinct or lose the ability to build and manipulate tools.”
I am not so sure… (really I don’t know, this is neither denial or blind faith) For now, facts are proving you right. We will see. Especially once energy decline really kicks in and the current power structure crumbles and our numbers are reduced. It seems to me, we still have some way to go before being extinct.
Among others, I think we are an animal which can bring down large trees (which is a good thing when not over-done), can keep and propagate seeds, can select the best plants/animals and contribute to the health of the forest.
It’s like we have this ability to both increase or reduce life flows, like a faucet. We can monitor things. Like the underground mushrooms, we could be the overground brain of the ecosystems. For now, we are not making wise use of this power.
So yes, maybe the species will go extinct, but maybe not.
As for myself, I am not extreme to the point I don’t use any tools but my hands (even though I considered it). But I do not allow myself any tool with a motor and almost never wear gloves (I love direct contact).
I have mixed feelings about watering. I still do (otherwise, I would really not have much to eat :), but think I shouldn’t. I have to find a way…
That’s my little experiment ahead/in the midst of collapse and my part in kicking the can of life down the road.
While still acknowledging the gravity of the situation, and against all apparent odds, I am still choosing (almost) every day not to give up. You can call that faith. I have no problem with that 🙂
I thank this site for making this kind of discussion possible. Because most of the time, it’s just not even possible to get till that point. (My behaviour makes no sense for most people: it’s too inefficient, unnecessarily difficult…)
🙂
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I recognise the desire in you, Charles, to live without tools. I’m probably too old to try the non-tool way now (I’m 70) but would have loved to have taken some primitive technology class (perhaps using the techniques of John Plant) and tried a truly primitive existence. However, a wife and family would have nixed that as I would not have been able to persuade them to go that route.
For a long time I avoided powered tools but had to succumb when I built my son’s family’s house (with my son and the help of others occasionally) from a kitset. I would still have been building it years later if I only had hand tools. However, I much prefer hand tools and I also almost never wear gloves, including for gardening. I use a scythe quite often. It used to be my primary grass control tool and I hope it will be again when I’ve finally done all of the jobs I need to do on our new (or relatively new) property.
I understand the watering dilemma. Swales and ponds can help there but I’m hoping that completing my small food forest will make watering largely a thing of the past.
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Nice. This all sound like a lot of fun.
I am sure the food forest will turn out great 🙂
Thanks for the swale/pond tip. Probably, there are multiple great experiments to be made with plants and water flows (for instance with cacti and succulents, edible or not). But this is so estranged from my home culture…
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A few weeks ago I put up a post saying I was rethinking all of my beliefs about covid based on many hours of listening to Dr. J.J. Couey. I subsequently pulled the post down because I saw Couey do something unethical: he discredited Dr. Joe Lee’s string theory without providing a reason, despite string theory being complementary to, and not in conflict with, Couey’s hypothesis. I have not yet forgiven Couey however I am still following him because I think he may have the best explanation of what is going on, and has been going on for decades, to build a profitable vaccine industry.
Couey’s hypothesis is complex and nuanced. He is not saying there’s no such thing as a virus, or that vaccines have never worked, or that no one got sick from covid.
He is saying that:
– a not so dangerous RNA virus was engineered
– viruses like covid do not replicate in the wild with sufficient integrity to explain the spread and well defined mutations we think we observed
– large quantities of the virus were produced using proven manufacturing techniques
– the virus was released in various locations to create the appearance of a spreading pandemic
– panic was created by managing the story and data, using inappropriate PCR tests, and causing deaths by withholding effective treatments, in many cases for non-covid illnesses like pneumonia, flu, and opioid addictions
– the goal was to create demand for a new mRNA vaccine technology, and a reason to bypass normal testing procedures
Controversies like lab leak, bioweapons, ivermectin, lockdowns, masks, DNA contamination, etc. were encouraged to distract us from the core issues:
– there was no dangerous contagious virus
– there was no need for mRNA
– transfection by mRNA is fundamentally dangerous and always will be
Couey is not always clear so it can be difficult to understand his hypothesis. He does best when forced to be clear by presenting live to a large group of people he wishes to impress.
Today’s presentation to Doctors for Covid Ethics is an excellent starting point if you’d like to try to understand Couey’s hypothesis.
It would be nice if one or two of you confirmed I’m not crazy, as you did for Dr. Joe Lee’s string theory. Or set me straight if you see a fatal flaw in Couey’s hypothesis.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2041515078
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Hungarian blogger H.C. is also impressed with J.J. Couey (and Dr. Joe Lee). He’s already written a post on yesterday’s excellent presentation by Couey.
https://hcfricke.com/2024/01/24/c31-j-j-couey-beim-c-ausschuss-ueber-den-rna-virus-betrug-und-einer-wissenschaft-die-mit-falschen-fragen-gesteuert-wird/
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https://hcfricke-com.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de
in english
Saludos
el mar
HC Fricke is German who emigrated to Hungaria!
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Hi Rob,
I watched Couey’s entire presentation, thanks for the link.
I have no expertise to comment on the science/biology he talks about.
His final points are plausible, but I have no way of knowing how much weight to give them.
Not to knock his message, but rotating gifs and dual flashing meters are distracting to me.
The idea that a virus was seeded, and really didn’t spread is interesting.
My one take-away is something I’ve gotten from other presentations – I need to do the best I can with taking care of my health.
Good health, Weogo
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Thanks! I agree caring for our health should be a top priority.
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The idea that covid doesn’t spread is BS. My partner got it (tested for). We stuck cotton buds up her nose and then up mine so that I would get it. I presented two days later with exactly the same symptoms (very different to a flu feeling). We then had a friend come round to get it from me by the same method. She had it two days later exact same symptoms.
Basically covid is a man manipulated respiratory virus that is not that severe to healthy people. The vaccines are another story.
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Couey is the first to say biology is far too complex for us to understand it well. Maybe covid type RNA does replicate with fidelity and does spread, we just don’t understand how cells do it, because they lack the machinery for genetic error detection and correction.
If the no-spread piece of his story is wrong, the rest of his story could still be correct, and is basically what I beleieved to be true until I started listening to Couey.
I’m watching the debates unfold against Dr. Rancourt’s all-cause mortality analysis that shows no evidence of global spread. I don’t respect Rancourt because he denies climate change so it’s hard to keep an open mind.
If I get an opportunity, I will present your story to Couey for an explanation.
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Let us know
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I really hope that Trump does not win. William Catton said this (paraphrased because I don’t remember the exact wording) “We need to consider not what we must do to solve overshoot, but what must we avoid doing so that we don’t make a bad situation unnecessarily worse”.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/727012094674731008/1199528552534642710/1706053156829.jpg?ex=65c2df05&is=65b06a05&hm=17525d12f93fdaf924439a5360b2c93317a9b43fa78f60f30fb818a097ff35cd&
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But what Rob is saying is both candidates would be terrible for overshoot. But one would be more funny because he upsets the powers that be – even if nothing materially changes. As an outsider looking at the USA, I just can not see enough empirical evidence that Trump is so much worse than Biden. I personally find them both hilarious, but feel bad for laughing at Biden because his comedy is due to a health condition
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Somewhat disagree with you. I would hate to see Trump win because I still think he is an unstable insecure sociopathic bully. BUT I think Biden is in full blown Alzheimer’s and the people controlling him are moving us inexorably toward WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. IHMO that is worse than Trump.
AJ
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Is it not true that Trump is the only president in modern history that did not start a war?
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As someone who lives in the U.S., I really don’t find the prospect of a 2nd Trump presidency funny.
I think that both Trump and Biden need to pass the torch to future generations (Trump is only 4 years younger than Biden). Neither Trump nor Biden are capable of fixing overshoot. Trump openly denies climate change and Biden believes that various technofixes will solve it. It is sad that Trump and Biden are the only viable choices that the American political system is offering this election season.
So far I have read that the chance of Nuclear War is about 1 in 6, which is still unacceptably high. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dod9AWz8Rp4Svdpof/why-i-think-there-s-a-one-in-six-chance-of-an-imminent.
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An add on to the comment above. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/doomsday-clock-nuclear-weapons-climate
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Sorry, but I don’t know who that person is you referenced, but they’re an idiot, nonetheless. Anybody who thinks that Russia’s GDP is on the same level as Italy is sadly mistaken. The US GDP is all financial services and junk. We don’t manufacture anything. Russia’s GDP is based on energy, heavy industries and manufacturing, they can out produce the military weapons of the west and we have no ability to counter that. in addition, their weapons are 10 to 20 years, more advanced than anything the US can field. PPP (purchasing power parity) is a more accurate way to compare economies.
As for escalation, I think you should revisit the Nate’s interviews with Chuck Watson. Watson knows what he’s a talking about because he is familiar with (and participated in) the Proud Prophet exercises that Ronald Reagan initiated. All escalation scenarios ended up in nuclear war. Nate was shaken by these discussions.
On the other side, I agree we should have better choices than Biden or Trump (maybe RFK jr ?). But no president can stop collapse from occurring and we are there.
AJ
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The person I referenced is Max Tegmark. He is an intelligent physicist, but this (nuclear war and geopolitics) doesn’t seem to be his area of expertise.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-to-the-us-gdp-by-industry/
According to Statista, 20.2% of U.S. GDP is finance, insurance and real estate, 13.1% is “professional and business services”, which is a rather vague term, 11.6% is government, and 11.0% is manufacturing. In contrast, mining, utilities, and agriculture are only 1.9%, 1.7% and 1.1% respectively.
https://www.trade.gov/report/professional-and-business-services
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Apparently, Carter, Ford and Nixon also didn’t start new conflicts. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/01/fact-check-trump-not-first-president-since-eisenhower-without-new-war/6086636002/
An oddity about the coming contest is that, assuming Biden or Trump win the election, either would be the oldest president ever (Biden currently is the oldest).
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Thanks. I know I heard that war stat. Shouldn’t believe anything in politics!
Mind blowing that Trump & Biden are the best candidates that 330M people can produce. Really says something. I like RFK Jr. but it doesn’t look like he has a chance. There’s no one to blame for bad presidents except the citizens. There is a smart aware ethical candidate they could elect, but they won’t.
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The fact that Trump is by far the best thing that America has to offer as president is an accurate reflection on how far down the collapse curve the US is right now. Least he will make it interesting. If you don’t like it then you should have fought harder to stop your country from becoming the sh it hole that it is.
I just had family come back from the states after a visit. They were seriously considering moving there after their last visit a few years ago. Well not now. They were stunned at the level of collapse in the last three years.
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I’m sure this isn’t what you meant but it implies that it’s possible for one person to have avoided the US becoming the shit hole that it is. That’s obviously not the case.
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I meant americans in general should have seen a long time ago where they were headed and should have thought about what that trajectory aimed them at. Well now they are living it, just like the shit shows that the EU, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ are.
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but welcome to the real world, niko.
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Hello Hideaway.
Thank you for your post. It was an interesting read. And a good example of how to proceed critically with incomplete or massaged data.
It’s nice to get a sense of the real scales. (I particularly like the blue/orange/grey pie chart)
I just had a little bit of difficulties understanding this sentence: “If we divide non-fossil electricity consumed by the 2.5 efficiency factor we get 11,740Twh which is close to the correct amount of non-fossil electricity produced”.
Probably, because, it was placed after the electricity production chart. I had to go to the energy production chart at the world in data, retrieve and add values for non-fossil energy: 6702 (Nuclear) + 11299 (Hydro) + 5487 (Wind) + 3448 (Solar) + 2413 (Other renewables) = 29349Twh. And 29349/2.5 ~11740TWh.
Maybe, it would have been easier to understand if this computation were placed between the two charts and if the word electricity were replaced by energy in “If we divide non-fossil energy consumed…”
This is just a minor remark to make life easier for the reader…
Lately, I read this article https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2024/01/why-is-society-still-mired-in.html and liked it…
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Thanks Charles, I’m pretty sure you are correct, adding that in would have been better. I have noticed that Gail on her blog gets her work checked by several like minded people before publishing, which is making a lot of sense to me. 2-3 or 4 minds working on an article is always going to make it flow better for the final reader.
I think the problem is I had too much of the information in my head as writing, thinking or expecting the reader would be able to follow. The other problem is trying to cut down on lengthiness of article. I think it’s a weakness of mine trying to cram too much information in at one time.
Love the link and Erik Michaels work, he is 100% accurate about civilization.
The actual clincher for me of why ongoing civilization is not possible, is that it answers the Fermi paradox, as in where are all the aliens? IMHO physics works the same everywhere, so the development of life has probably worked out, in very similar way across the universe.
Assuming that intelligent life that had the ability to mold their environment to make their life more comfortable, like humans have done, exist elsewhere, then why wouldn’t they have continued to develop like us using up every resource, then gone into self destruction, of their environment, around the time of peak resource use, then self terminated their civilization, just like we are about to do?
It would mean that if they created radio waves like we have, then after a short period of their civilization they would stop broadcasting, hence the window for us to pick up errant radio transmissions from afar was always short given the timespan of the life of any civilization relative to geologic and planetary time. Perhaps the denial of bad outcomes is universal in every species that change their environment, grow exponentially and change the environment by their mere existence in what they do, until it can be no longer sustained. In other words no different to yeast living in a vat of grape juice, poisoning the environment and consuming every resource.
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I think your article is good that way. So much material is trimmed down to be just a façade. Textbooks, novels used to be a lot denser and harder.
I feel our attention span has reduced too. Who reads “War and Peace” these days? We want to go too fast and grasp too much. We end up shallow. Isn’t it?
Maybe that’s just a rant which shows I am aging 🙂 Maybe I am just talking about myself 🙂
Anyway, about Fermi paradox and all that. Really, I don’t know. Maybe.
Knowledge now sounds like a belief to me. I am in a phase where I have somewhat stopped looking for answers and rather appreciate them coming to me. I feel my ability to welcome is somewhat lacking and now focus on training this dimension. In a way, knowing is killing. And there is so much we are not ready to acknowledge about the nature of reality. It is all paradoxical.
But yes, from a materialistic point of view, maybe the only source of energy is the sun. So that there may only be two ways to increase the rate of energy consumption: concentrate in time or concentrate in space. Trees do the former by storing energy in their structure, while animals do the latter by moving around. Civilizations are then particularly potent at drawing down stocks from all over the place. The rise and fall of empires is a kind of energy respiration. Hence, if we would like to replay our current brief experiment in the future, we would have to first slowly amass sun energy during million of years: a true test of wisdom for any species. Who plans for that long, except the Bene Gesserit?
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Physicists warn that the Earth could Feasibly Descend into Chaos
When I watched this video, there were ads for oversized passenger vehicles. I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.
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Tim Watkins today with an interesting but too long essay on the fall of recent empires.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/01/25/when-empires-die/
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A major impression I have of WW1 is that it was about the royal and aristocrats trying to hang on to power and privilege. They were against each other and also against the rising socialists across Europe. I see WW1 very much as a war of the rich against their rivals and the up-&-coming proletariat. Look how many monarchies died during the world wars
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Good point. Fits with fossil energy starting to be used to increase worker productivity thus creating middle class wealth and power.
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Off topic but I thought Rob might appreciate it.
From Krebs on Security.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is currently being cast in a negative light, which is likely well deserved. Some of the ‘Older Comments’ are disconcerting – there are too many people that fail to understand how easy it is to become a victim.
A précis of the above :
– The Buyer : Timothy Barker uses his Amazon account to place an order.
– The Amazon Seller (a criminal) : accepts the order and pockets the money.
– The Seller uses a compromised Walmart account to fulfill the order.
– A woman discovers her Walmart account is compromised and gets angry.
– The RCMP shits the bed and tries to ruin Tim Barker’s life.
The woman, who likely installs all kinds of Apps on her phone, has no idea why all her contacts are being spammed / scammed.
For more examples of how broken our world is and Joseph Tainter’s never ending complexity consider the following:
Mr Bates vs The Post Office
The Beekeeper movie with Jason Statham
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Is there a US citizen here that can explain what’s actually going on, and why, with the US border? I don’t trust anything I read because the issue is so politicized.
It seems many people are illegally crossing the border. Is this true? If true, why are the immigration laws not being enforced? Is it due to genuine compassion for unfortunate refugees experiencing climate change or some other crisis? Or is there a different motive for not enforcing the laws?
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Rob, Preston Howard here …
The problem with US immigration differs little from current problems faced by UK, Spain, Italy, and Greece. And, for the same reasons. Collapsing economies lose jobs, people go hungry, and people with guns start taking whatever they want. In Latin America, there are new or long-standing problems in the Central American countries, Peru, Ecuador, and more. Venezuelans are flooding Colombia.
So, is Climate Change the cause? Probably an indirect cause, since crops don’t grow when there are big floods and long droughts as increasingly occur everywhere. When folk with guns show up and say give us your food. Also your teenagers need to join their group or else. When this occurs, families head north. Their lives are threatened and their kids are at risk. Does someone whose life is threatened qualify for admission or not? Probably. But, it’s complex. Some politicians suggest those folk are economic migrants, and they do not qualify (even though US needs the entry-level workers).
US has immigration judges (about 400 if I recall correctly) that make those determinations. Except that there are thousands of immigrants, so the system is so overloaded it functions poorly. This is my “sanitized” version of the situation.
Personally, I think this shows the early stages of societal collapse. Things will probably get worse. Many more will risk everything to attain safe harbor anywhere, and USA is a safe harbor compared to wherever they are now. Those who remain will suffer food shortages and crime increases. USA will also, but not yet. My 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
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Thanks Preston. You think the core issue is the quantity of overshoot refugees is overwhelming the resources of the state to process them. It seems Texas is trying to enforce immigration laws and the federal government is trying to stop them. How do you explain this?
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Hello everyone. I am a newbie to this terrific website. MORT is helping me connect some important dots that I have been frustrated about. Rob has an incredible talent of filtering out the bullshit. And everyone in the comments section seems super intelligent regarding collapse. I’m just an average Joe with a below average IQ. I enjoy reading peoples journey into collapse. I thought I might share mine with you. Instead of focusing on what I have learned (would be too novice for you experts), I am focusing mostly on the sources that got me here.
Title: Sources of My Journey to Collapse Acceptance
Carl Sagan has a quote in his brilliant 1980 ‘Cosmos’ series, “The key is to be reading the right books.” Understatement of the millennia. Life would be so much easier if we were guided to the correct sources instead of being on our own to find them in this cesspool of information. For the record I am a 47-year-old white male, born and raised in the USA. Most of my life I have been willfully ignorant. In my thirties, I started to have nagging questions in my head about things I had never taken the time to think about: Has it always been like this? How did we get here? and what’s gonna happen next?
Here is how I ended up getting my answers:
2008-2011:
Slowly waking up. 1st time in my life I am interested in trying to understand what’s going on in the world. My main sources were Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Peter Joseph and Naomi Klein.
This helped me to see how evil & corrupt the USA is and always has been. But then I made a major mistake by becoming interested in politics and mainstream news. I was genuinely happy when Obama was elected and thought things would get better. (hard to even say that now, without cringing)
2011-2018:
My sources here were Keith Olbermann, The Young Turks, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Needless to say, I was hypnotized and dead asleep to anything of importance. Not reading books anymore. And more ignorant than prior to 2008.
2018-2021:
Took a while, but I was able to slowly break away from the stranglehold of mainstream media. My sources now were Chris Hedges, The Intercept, WSWS, Chomsky again, and Matt Taibbi. And then all hell broke loose with COVID. But when the vaccination process starts to roll out, I got very confused. All of these sources have taught me to never trust the US govt. Never!!! All they do is lie and manipulate. So, no way am I getting this shot. But the confusion was because some of these same sources and especially people in the comment sections that I trusted, were hollering about doing the right thing and getting the shot. Wait. What? All you’ve been saying is how the US govt lied about this, this, and this…. but now all of a sudden we should take them at their word and get the shot? It was so bizarre. It still boggles my mind to this day. I needed to find new sources to figure out what was happening.
2021-2023:
This marks the timeframe where I finally started to “read the right books”.
Michael Dowd’s yt channel was the first one. He introduced me to concepts that I had never thought about in my life: collapse of civilization, ecological overshoot, human centered vs life centered worldviews, wetiko, etc. I instantly took a liking to his videos, and it made me thirsty for more knowledge. His post doom conversations, his soundcloud audio site, and his recommendations gave me a whole new world of people that I would have never found. Unfortunately, Michael recently passed away, but his content is still online waiting for more people to discover.
Some of my favorites that he pointed me too:
Sid Smith – not much content on his yt channel, but the little he has is gold for a beginner trying to understand energy and EROEI
William Catton – his book ‘Overshoot’ (1980) is the bible for most people in the collapse world. An absolute must read
Joseph Tainter – not much from this guy, but the book ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ (1988) is cited by everyone.
William Reese – no website, but a ton of articles and interviews. so good at articulating “how we got here”
Meg Wheatley – she is a badass warrior!
Guy McPherson – yt channel. Seems like he understood too much and was vilified for his scary predictions
Erik Michaels – great blogger at Problems, Predicaments, and Technology.com
Stephen Jenkinson – documentary called Griefwalker. And book Die Wise (2015) helped me with my fear of death issues
Daniel Quinn – great writer. He connected some dots for me that nobody else could
John Michael Greer – author of many great works. good blog site at ecosophia.net
Then I found the 2nd most important person for my journey (I’ll always be biased toward Dowd because he was my first). Nate Hagens. Nate’s yt channel is a goldmine, and more advanced and a deeper dive. I’ve found lots of great people here too:
Tom Murphy – his blog Do the Math is one of my favorites
Daniel Schmachtenberger – intimidatingly intelligent. Almost too much. Does not come off as pompous but seems like he knows he is the smartest person in the room and likes it that way
Arthur Berman – an energy expert
Mary Evelyn Tucker – her voice and choice of words make me smile constantly. And Journey of the Universe was great
I still follow Peter Joseph on his podcast ‘Revolution Now’, and he has turned me onto:
Robert Sapolsky – his stanford lectures on yt are very educational and entertaining (such a rare combo)
Charles Eisenstein – has a yt channel, but I dont go there much. Just mentioning him because certain interviews and writings have blown my mind away.
David Graeber – every interview with him is worth watching. And his books are great too.
Donella Meadows – she was one of the authors of the famous book ‘Limits to Growth’ (which I have not read). Any interview you can find with her is fascinating.
Another great place to look is on substack and medium:
The Honest Sorcerer, also known as “B” – my favorite of all the collapse writers
Alan Urban – he’s also on collapsemusings.com
Steve Bull – I mainly see him in comment sections, but he has good articles too
2024:
So here we are now and I have completed my journey. Ya right. I doubt I know even one percent of the whole picture. I have wasted much time going down incorrect rabbit holes. Stuff like the Great Reset, and Dr Greer’s alien stuff, or how we can save civilization if we just (fill in the blank). And even more time wasted by getting hung up on the blame game. At certain stages of my journey, I have blamed our predicament on rich people, white people, usa, europe, technology, agriculture, and organized religion. I have a litmus test now for anything I watch or read regarding collapse. If it is not rooted in at least two of the following areas, then it’s most likely a waste my time: overshoot, energy limits, human supremacy, and overpopulation.
And I know its a shame that I have no Native Americans listed above as sources. Hopefully that will change for me. Another crystal-clear message that my journey has provided me with is that when it comes to wisdom, they were the only people left in the world that had some. Topics like wetiko and pre-Columbus america captivate me (there is a superb 3 hour video on yt called 1491). I also enjoy learning how we used to live prior to fossil energy. Great BBC series called “Tales from the Green Valley” on yt that recreates life on a Welsh valley farm in the year 1620.
I finally have a firm grasp for the questions I wanted to know. What was once impossible for me to answer is now incredibly easy:
Has it always been like this? No, it has never been like this. In fact, all you have to do is look at a world population by decade chart or the famous ‘carbon pulse’ diagram to instantly know this is the most abnormal moment in human history.
How did we get here? Ecological overshoot of carrying capacity. Extreme human supremacy worldviews. And a one-time only bonanza of God like energy.
Whats gonna happen now? Collapse of civilization guaranteed. And probably most life forms on earth going extinct.
Throughout the last couple years there has been one gnawing thought that keeps creeping into my head and giving me some doubt on everything about my journey. And that is how in the hell could some of the people that I look up to and consider extremely intelligent, not know and understand this stuff, but I can? Makes no sense. For example, Carl Sagan was completely energy blind. How could that be? He’s an absolute genius. Surely, he was heeding his own advice and “reading the right books”.
Well, that leads me to the final piece of the puzzle for my journey. I recently found a website run by Rob Mielcarski at un-denial.com. He is a big fan of a book by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower titled “Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind”. Plenty of my sources above talk about denial. But it’s never focused on in great detail. This book is about a theory called Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT). I have not read the book yet, but after reading tons of content on Rob’s site, it just clicked for me. Makes perfect sense. And maybe it is my cognitive bias to latch on to MORT because it explains away that gnawing sense of doubt I had. Fine, I don’t care. It’s just a huge relief for the puzzle to finally make complete sense.
Thanks for listening,
Chris
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Hi Chris, welcome and nice to meet you. I think you now hold the record for the most interesting introduction by a new commentor.
Looks like you have been very busy since you started following the right people in 2021. I also a long time ago read people like Chomsky but now avoid them because they are blind to everything that is important.
I spotted one person not on your list that you might want to check out, my recently deceased friend Gail Zawacki. Her claim to fame was identifying that trees worldwide are sick and dying due to ground level ozone pollution that is a byproduct of industrial combustion. She’s also a superb writer.
https://un-denial.com/?s=Zawacki%3A
FYI, I suspect I may have the deepest and widest documentary/audiobook/podcast/e-book library on overshoot and post-carbon topics. If you’re looking for something, just ask, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve got it, and I’d be happy to share with you.
I also loved Tales from the Green Valley (2005). It was produced by Lion Television studio for BBC and they also produced:
– A Tudor Feast at Christmas (2006)
– Victorian Farm (2009)
– Victorian Farm Christmas (2009)
– Edwardian Farm (2010)
– Victorian Pharmacy (2010)
– Going Medieval (2012)
– Wartime Farm (2012)
– Tudor Monastery Farm (2013)
– Secrets of the Castle (2014)
– Full Steam Ahead (2016)
Also similar in tone and highly recommended are the series produced by Peter Thoday for BBC:
– The Victorian Kitchen Garden (1987)
– The Victorian Kitchen (1989)
– The Victorian Flower Garden (1991)
– The Wartime Kitchen and Garden (1993)
I’ve got them all and they’re all excellent.
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Thanks for these recommendations. Was up all night watching. Seems like anything with Ruth Goodman, I can watch all day.
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Hi Chris,
Interesting path you/we are on!
A good read by Russell Means, an, “Oglala Lakota patriot”:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/russell-means-mother-jones-interview-1980/
Indigenous cultures have much to offer us.
At various times in history, some were pushing against the limits of overshoot and used war and/or slavery to maintain balance.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Thanks Rob and Weogo. Always looking for new trusted sources. I will definitely check those out. Appreciate it.
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Israel rapidly losing support worldwide, poll shows, facing genocide charges at Hague
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This one is for Rob 🙂 It shows which side French government is on (growth).
Last week, INSEE (French public statistical institute) published its annual demographic report (https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/7757334?sommaire=7751503).
Their sub-title is “fertility fell, life expectancy recovered”. Indeed, the natural increase was only +47 000. They don’t advertise that “net migration” was +183 000. (This number is probably higher since it is provisional data. The last “real” data-point is 2020 with +223 005. To get an idea of the quality of estimation, I checked last year report where 2020 was still provisional and estimated at +161 000)
For those who like charts, the dashboard is quite well made and has an english version: https://www.insee.fr/en/outil-interactif/5543645/details/20_DEM/21_POP/21E_Figure5.
Anyway, two days later, our chief manager (Macron) called for a “demographic rearmament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVPqTG-hOIo.
At this point, in this context, isn’t this borderline criminal? I personally would prefer to see France population gradually declining (like is already the case in eastern Europe, Japan, South Korea, even China…)
Anyway, I believe this is all only gesticulation from Macron, as infertility is a growing issue in Europe, raising children is costly, and the societal values have changed (this is not Vichy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travail,_famille,_patrie, Germany had the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder,_K%C3%BCche,_Kirche).
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Thanks Charles. Nobody thinks long term. 😦
Looks like European leaders think their citizens will need to fight the Russians soon, so you might need some more babies to backfill.
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Insightful essay today by Indrajit Samarajiva comparing the US military-industrial complex to the mafia.
https://indi.ca/the-military-industrial-mafia/
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I am in complete agreement with Indrajit above and Denninger below. The U.S. ceased being a Super Power years ago, all that remains is pretense. Some people (in the West) might conclude that this results in a reason to fear e.g. China. The following video from Simon Whistler, about China corruption might calm some nerves. The prognosis however remains grim – the party is over, a lot of us are going to die.
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Interesting but I would caution that determining who is funding the reporting of China miltary weakness should be investigated before assuming all is true. Brian Berletic of The New Atlas usually does a great job on these investigations.
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J. David Hughes and Richard Heinberg today discuss the same topic as Hideaway’s essay above.
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-370-an-ancient-chinese-text-and-a-2023-scorecard
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Karl Denninger today on the essence of politics and democracy.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250578
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Dr. Thomas Binder reminds us he was one of the first to understand and explain the plandemic.
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The farm I assist just made a big decision to change their business focus after more than 10 years.
Due to the labor cost and high hours required they are abandoning most vegetables. We will instead focus on more profitable perennials like blueberries, black currants, hazelnuts, rhubarb, plus a few lower effort vegetables like potatoes, garlic, and onions.
I know of no small farms here that can survive without off-farm income of some kind. Will this improve or get worse when SHTF? I’m thinking worse and food security is going to be a huge problem.
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Every once in a while FE says something close to truth. Unfortunately his next comment returned to the moon landing hoax.
I don’t think FE is aware that MORT explains what he observes.
h**ps://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/01/15/2024-too-many-things-going-wrong/comment-page-7/#comment-451194
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https://endurancea71.substack.com/p/next-level-gaslighting
This careful review of the deceptions of the official narrative and the responses of critics covers many issues, including difficult ones like the virus vs no-virus debate.
But for me, it adds a major new revelation to the story. What follows is a summary of only what the article says that I think is relevant to that question. First, it uses official graphs of the perpetrators themselves (like CDC) to show what many critics have found:
“There was no widespread pandemic. There was the impression of one, which was created by the universal use of a PCR test that was configured in such a manner as to return a positive test from a wide variety of samples, including a quail, a papaya fruit and a goat.(11) But there is no evidence of contagion beyond this deception.”
Using the graphs, it shows that unusual peaks in fatalities were short spikes caused by the scare campaign and its bad effects on medical decisions, and disallowing cheap, safe and effective treatments in a timely fashion. The rise in all cause mortality after the injection rollout has been due to toxic effects of the injection. In the rare locations that proper treatments were administered (e.g., Romania, Toledo in Spain, Udar Pradesh in India), fatalities dropped to normal levels.
https://zenodo.org/records/8254894
The new revelation for me was a reference to this Japanese research paper, which I had heard of but had not found until now. The study analyzed the evolution of the Covid variants from Alpha to Omicron. It found that the Omicron variant, and presumably the previous variants, could not have been natural mutations. Hence, they all had to be genetically engineered in labs. The chance of all those variants being lab leaks is very small. They had to be deliberate. This opens consideration of a whole new angle to the pandemic story, adding to the existing circumstantial evidence of a centrally planned and orchestrated pandemic hoax. Only the US has a world-wide complex of biowarfare labs with the capability to carry out such a scheme.
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Thanks Karl. I read that when it was published and it’s good.
There are so many smart people trying to figure out what happened that I’m hopeful we will eventually know the truth.
On your conclusion I remember some smart people saying when it was detected that Omicron looked suspiciously like an effective antidote to the original mistake.
Instead of using Omicron as an excuse to cease further mRNA transfections our leaders doubled down and pushed it into children plus boosters for people already transfected.
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You have to admire Andrii Zvorygin for his effort at trying to do something constructive about overshoot and the coming collapse.
Yesterday he made a presentation to the town council of his 20,000 person community in Ontario Canada about peak oil and the policies they should be implementing to prepare.
Here are his slides:
Click to access 2024-transition-presentation.pdf
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Chris Martenson today weighs in on the immigration issue.
He discusses his recent trip to Panama to view the immigration first hand.
https://rumble.com/v49hbb0-exposed-the-hidden-agenda-behind-mass-migration-in-the-western-world.html
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Migrants will continue to want to come to the US until we have an economic depression and we move into collapse. This continued movement of humanity from places that are collapsing to those that have some semblance of normality will give rise to dictators that will secure borders with force (Trump?). My personal fear is for minorities that are already here in the US (such as my wife & kids) getting swept up in the hate such dictators will foster. Nothing about either the near term or long-term future looks good.
AJ
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You don’t need dictators to foster hate. It will rise immediately when resources are cut off. Especially food.
Practically no one will give up their lifestyle to help strangers. We naturally look for someone or something to blame. Tribalism will return. What will be interesting is to see how we manage to display our tribe these days due to blending of the cultures and phenotypical features.
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Sabine Hossenfelder today provides a really good overview of the one number that climate scientists are debating and are most worried about: climate sensitivity. This is the same issue that Nate Hagens recently discussed with Leon Simmons.
Sabine says she’s very worried about what she’s reading. It’s possible, maybe probable, that climate sensitivity is a lot higher than the majority of climate scientists have until recently been assuming.
If true, we have about 20 years before our civilization collapses due to climate change, and she goes into the details of how this is likely to unfold.
It’s remarkable, in my opinion, that the collapse forces from energy depletion and climate change are aligned and will strike us roughly simultaneously. Maybe this is not a coincidence and is a consequence of our species evolving in a climate established by a lot of carbon being sequestered underground by biology and geology.
Then, enabled by a tendency to deny reality, we evolved an intelligence high enough to dig up the carbon and burn it to build our economy, and our reality denial prevented us from seeing what we were doing, until it was too late.
As another confirmation of MORT, Sabine says the videos she occasionally does on climate change are by far her least popular on YouTube.
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I love the ending where Sabina falls for exactly the same claptrap that most people do, instead of doing the work to see if ‘the solution’ is possible.
Right after doing the research to find out that most climate scientists are probably wrong about the sensitivity of climate, which seems to have changed her mind, she falls back to the standard, introduce a carbon tax, more renewables, more nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, all without any research of if it’s possible, or any type of a solution.
Perhaps that’s evidence of human’s biggest weakness. We work out something new, get shocked by what we have worked out, but fall back on what’s known as a solution, instead of doing the research on that as well. If the initial premise suddenly proves to be incorrect, then why assume anything about the answers?
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Yes, I saw that too. I’ve tried to make her aware of the bigger overshoot picture and why we deny it but I’ve seen no evidence that she understands the significance of energy depletion or Varki’s MORT.
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Sabine Hossenfelder ” … introduce a carbon tax …”
Coal, oil and natural gas provided and maintain the economy we have, therefore all taxes are carbon taxes. The taxes have lots of names; VAT, sales, tariffs, income tax, corporation tax, inheritance, capital gains, property, council tax, etc. but they are all carbon taxes.
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Exactly.
Question: How is it possible that a truth-seeking phycisist as smart as Hossenfelder does not see this?
Answer: MORT
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Sigh… Unfortunately.
To me, the best part of the video and the moment of truth is when she says: “And that’s really bad news. Because if the climate sensitivity is indeed that high, then we have maybe 20 years or so until our economies collapse, and what’s the point of being successful on YouTube if my pension savings will evaporate before I even retire.” (https://youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4?t=761)
Note also, that even if the climate sensitivity is not that high, things are already as bad as to ensure economic collapse within 20 years.
There surely must be some result in game theory which explains the situation we find ourselves in.
If everybody were to act rationally, and among others retrieved all of their savings, then the musical chairs would stop. We are going to get there eventually.
Maybe the only thing which keeps the system together today is the intuitive understanding of all actors that the play stops brutally, once they stop pretending.
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Great point Hamish, of course all taxes are carbon taxes. In the modern world no carbon energy, no excess to generate any taxes.
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In the U.K. in the (near?) future, taxes will be collected once a year in person by the sheriff (of Nottingham).
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If our most brilliant educators of the public are unable to see the most important and obvious things about our civilzation, how can we expect regular citizens to have any clue what is going on?
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To be fair (possibly) she might have done some research on those things but that’s not what the video was about and may have tripled the length of it. It’s hard to see how someone looking objectively at the evidence could come up with her conclusions on that but, again to be fair, there are other apparently intelligent people who have also come to the same conclusions. Remember, also, that no-one wants to see civilisation collapse (Sabine thinks it will go on is some form for much longer).
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Our planet Gaia said the same thing when she saw our reproduction rate. “i hope these numbers are wrong”.
I don’t know why people bother with CC arguments as it boils down to this.
Humans created an entire civilisation and lifestyle on fossil fuels that there is no alternative energy supply for.
Even if there was the result is continued overshoot and collapse and further climate change.
Give up fossil fuels now and collapse fast or cling on and collapse slower.
This will all right itself in time and the species is pretty much going to go extinct, just as our sun will eventually extinguish.
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She makes the same annoying F#$%ing mistake. Threatening us that climate change will destroy the economy. Well, what do you think stopping fossil fuels will do?? There’s no excuse for this dumb analysis anymore; I’m sick of it!
And while we’re at it destroying the economy, let’s chuck the final nail in the coffin by wasting the last of our resources building cargo cult, environment destroying, low energy return, nuclear power. Considering nuclear makes no money, it’s probably negative net energy. These scientists need to grow up and get their heads out of the stupid sci-fi nonsense they grew up with. The real world aint science fiction
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Hossenfelder’s ignorance of all that is important fascinates me.
I have read her book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” twice. She is SUPER smart!
I think we need MORT to explain what’s going on here.
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We have to remember that Hossenfelder is a human.
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A damn smart human that understands everything about energy except the bit her brain doesn’t like and blocks her from seeing.
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Even smart humans are members of our species. She’s definitely not alone in being smart and knowledgeable but still an optimist for civilisation’s continuing.
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Physicists are not optimistic that we’ll develop an anti-gravity device so we can colonize another planet to keep growth going. They know it’s impossible.
She’s a brilliant PhD trained to question everything and to think scientifically yet she is unable to see the key piece of an energy puzzle for which she is an expert.
My point is this is further validation of Varki’s MORT.
If your point is that MORT overrides human intelligence then we are in full agreement.
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I think she said she also has children??
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I have a vague recollection she does. All the more reason she should be aware of reality so she can advise her children not to have children.
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Our financial system is an inherently unsustainable Ponzi scheme. At this point it is so structurally unsound and such a big obstacle to sustainability that I am starting to think that we should just let it collapse under its own weight.
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I made it half way through and had to stop. Bendell is a milquetoast. Sure, he attends protests, but I suspect that is simply to raise awareness of himself. Like all academics, he cannot tell (anywhere near) the whole truth without risking his position.
Maybe one day (when it is woefully too late) he will try to follow in the steps of people like Derrick Jensen, or Paul Watson (Canadian Captain of Sea Shepherd). But so far, all I’ve seen is talk. No doubt he is working on some very strongly worded pamphlets and if that doesn’t work move it up to some vowing.
A Ladybird Book – It’s fucked.
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Nice short 3 minute explanation by Tad Patzek on why the earth’s carrying capacity for humans is about 250 million, and because we are destroying ecosystems, this number is trending lower.
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Nice. Mind you, he was assuming a life-expectancy (really, average life-span) of what it is today. With 250 million people, globally, I wonder whether the medical facilities which support such a high average life-span would exist.
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All the big covid dissidents remain silent on string theory. It’s a disgrace.
They have a golden opportunity to take down mRNA and they do nothing except blah blah blah and fight amongst themselves about issues with less promise for success.
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It’s VERY strange. Even the king of covid conspiracies, FE @ OFW, is silent on string theory. Maybe FE and all the other “dissidents” are employed by pharma to confuse us. Pharma’s got plenty of money to throw around. Look how they captured 100% of the news media and politicians. They even own the opposition parties in most countries.
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rob you are the only website that mentions it. Two minutes into the first interview you linked to with Lee, he came across as someone I wouldn’t pay attention to, so I didn’t. I think most people are not interested in these battles when there are more straight forward evils to contend with.
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I’m also the only web site that discusses MORT, our creator and destroyer. Environmental activists who ignore MORT are wasting their time and will continue to fail.
If you want to stop further murder by mRNA, string theory is the most promising way to do it. Dr. Joe Lee is a prick, but people who ignore his string theory are not serious dissidents.
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https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/scientific-blog/unfortunately-its-not-over
I received this from Geert vanden Bossche. I do not know how he got me email adress (-:
Saludos
el mar
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If you are a fan of Dr. Tom Murphy, as I am, you might enjoy this interview.
A few interesting points. Murphy is retiring early and will focus on understanding human behaviors causing overshoot and ecocide, but no mention that he intends to study MORT. He has moved from California to a safer spot in Washington state. His view of the world has changed so much over the last 3 years that he no longer likes the book he wrote on energy and overshoot.
His key shift in perspective is that humanity does not equal modernity. Modernity is going away. A lot of people will die but humanity can continue without modernity.
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Excellent podcast. I just think Tom is a little too optimistic and doesn’t want to say that extinction is a distinct possibility for humanity. I also think his timeline for collapse is long, if modernity made it another 10 years, I would be shocked. The complexity of this civilization is so great that any simplification (by war, pandemic, or economic collapse) will probably cause the edifice to fall.
AJ
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I wouldn’t be shocked at modernity lasting another 10 years but I’d be shocked if it was not clearly locked into terminal decline by then.
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Another good one today by Indrajit Samarajiva on colonization, overshoot, and collapse.
Very tough to be young and smart and aware today. 😦
https://indi.ca/the-collapse-within-collapse-within-collapse/
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Yes, another good one. I appreciated “… is like watching a knife fight on the Titanic over dinner rolls.”
The “unsinkable” Titanic actually sinking on it’s first sailing provides many analogies : two groups arguing over whether climate change is (or not) caused by humans, is like two groups arguing over which end goes down first, the bow or the stern.
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If you are seeking to understand the Russian perspective, or have doubts about what you are being told by western leaders and media, then today’s very long essay by Endurance, which includes a most illuminating counter-factual story, is the best I have seen.
https://endurancea71.substack.com/p/dog-days
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Art Berman with another excellent essay today. On oil depletion, he is the brightest star shining today.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/bakken-break-even-prices-threaten-profits/
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Interesting discussion on how we have completely forgotten our fear of triggering a nuclear war, and the risk of nuclear war today has never been higher.
Audio quality is poor.
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It seems to me we have an acceleration of everything going wrong, all at the same time. I just read this article of how the Hinkley Point C power station cost has gone up again, likewise for the timeframe when it’s finished..
https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/hinkley-point-c-could-go-28bn-over-budget-as-edf-predicts-further-delays/#:~:text=EDF%20SAYS%20its%20Hinkley%20Point,46bn%20(US%2458bn).
It’s now going to cost $US58B for the 3.26Gw of capacity. Assuming it doesn’t go up in cost again and O&M are around the US average of $US30-32/Mwh, then it will only ever return 90% of the energy spent to build it, if it lasts 60 years.
Energy is what gives us money in the modern world, everything we spend money on has embedded energy, so the amount we spend on something is directly related to the energy spent on providing it or after providing it.
All debt has been dragging future use of energy into the present. We are using the last of our future energy resources to build devices we kid ourselves will provide energy. Hinkley Point C assumes the UK can actually obtain the necessary uranium to power it.
Just as funny to me is how in the UK the next nuclear power plant Sizewell C, exactly the same design as Hinkley is meant to cost 20B pounds or $US25B, despite the blowouts in cost of Hinkley. Must be an assumption that energy gets cheaper in the future for that to happen, instead as energy gets more expensive so will the cost to build and operate these monstrosities.
Perhaps these megaliths will be what our civilization leaves behind so future people can wonder what was the point of building them when they do nothing, perhaps we were/are worshipping the energy gods hoping they will smile upon us. Eventually the reactor core will likely be believed by some, as potentially some type of sacrificial chamber used in religious ceremonies, or something similar. Plus of course they would wonder why our civilization bothered to waste so many resources on such a religious edifice, when the civilization around them was falling to pieces..
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Not saying you’re wrong but it’s hard to imagine a nuclear power plant consumes more energy to build than all the energy it produces in its lifetime.
If true, this is a good example of how debt steals energy from our grandchildren.
Also if true, nuclear essentially converts coal/gas/diesel burned today into a lower quantity of future “carbon free” electrcity, meaning nuclear does nothing to help with reducing CO2 emissions.
Could be another good topic for a guest post.
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Hi Rob,
” it’s hard to imagine a nuclear power plant consumes more energy to build than all the energy it produces in its lifetime.”
It’s not just the energy to build, but also the energy used over it’s lifetime in operating and maintenance.
A simple example, the worker at the nuclear power plant gets a wage of say $50k/yr. He spends that wage on his lifestyle, car, home, food, holidays, gadgets, medical and everything else. Each and every cent spent is energy used, but people don’t want to count it as energy invested in the NPP, yet without all the workers at the plant it wouldn’t operate. Likewise for all the money spent on building the plant, it goes to workers, corporations, banks, governments in fees etc. The people who earn wages in every facet of design and construction spend that money on some type of energy in some form.
I’ve started to normalise energy production from different type of energy to a base number. I’ve chosen the Walyering gas project by a junior gas company as a perfect example as I have all the numbers for it. Over it’s life it will produce 15,000,000Mwh worth of gas piped into the existing Perth Basin pipeline, where they pay a fee to cover ongoing costs.
Assuming Hinkley Point C lasts the 60 years, it will produce 1,713,456,000Mwh of electricity, about 114 times as much as Walyering. Divide the $US58B cost by 114 = $US508,771,929.
Ongoing operating and maintenance is $US0.45/Mwh for Walyering and $US32/Mwh for Hinkley.
The difference between all the energy spent on $19M or $508M for 15M.Mwh and the O&M of $0.45/Mwh Walyering or $32/Mwh, Hinkley.
We built our world on energy like the Walyering plant, and are attempting to replace it with energy like Hinkley..
Walyering is wildly profitable for the owners, giving multiples of investment as ‘profit’. This monetary profit is an energy profit. The House of Saud makes massive profits from oil, because the energy cost to gain the oil is so low. There are no wildly profitable nuclear plants because the energy invested to build and operate them is so high.
Likewise there are no wildly profitable renewable energy projects anywhere, because the energy cost to build and operate them is too high. Which is why they need subsidies and grants to build them, plus laws that make others have to have contracts to ‘take’ carbon free energy.
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Hideaway, reading your post takes me back to Barnwood, Gloucester and the CEGB, Coal Fired Reference Design team in the mid 1980s.
Part of my job was to create Lotus 123 spreadsheets containing discounted cash flow models for two steam cycles (Super and Sub Critical) x three different name plate ratings x with/without cooling towers.
2 x 3 x 2 = 12 permutations.
The goal was to work out which was the best value for money over 30 years and even took into account revenue being staggered as units came online.
This was when flue gas desulphurisation just entered the picture, thanks to acid rain falling in scandinavia.
To Rob – yes, (contemporary) Nuclear, Renewables and even Fusion (if it ever materializes) are nonsense.
We might as well hope for dilithium crystals.
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Fusion has no hope of a good EROEI, and never will even if they ‘solve’ it. It’s just too expensive, basically magical thinking.. (perhaps that’s the point, keep people believing in a positive future because of technology).
Dilithium crystals are obviously our best bet… LOL
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Any idea of the energy cost to decommission a nuclear plant or reactor? This site claims that it’s only a small fraction of the cost of electricity generation. It claims that about 700 reactors (most research reactors) have ceased operation but only 25 have completed the decommissioning process. I’m guessing those were closed in the 60s. So decommissioning can take more than 50 years. My guess is that it’s possible that there will be hundreds of reactors which can’t be properly decommissioned as societies fall apart.
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I agree. I expect the energy cost will be too high to afford decommissioning, which is one of the core reasons to not build more. The other reason is when SHTF it is unlikely we will be able to safely govern and operate them.
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To me, sounds awfully like an example of the fifth law we have discussed before (https://un-denial.com/2023/12/25/by-mike-roberts-humans-are-a-species/#comment-93082)…
I really wonder if it has any veracity (maybe restated as something like: “the energy which is output by an energy transformation device (an engine), can not exceed the energy which is expanded to build and maintain the device”)
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Scratch that. It doesn’t make sense. If it were, I don’t see how the industrial revolution could have bootstrap.
We really are in a strange point in time, where we can waste energy we get from our legacy infrastructure in order to “invest” into energy devices which will ultimately never pay back.
(Sorry for restating what Hideaway said just before, it is the time it sinks in…)
If I understand well, the term EROEI is somewhat misleading. It is not really energy output over energy input in a transformation device. It is rather a profitability concept which does not include the part of energy which is a gift from nature.
I mean, I first incorrectly assumed that EROEI would be the energy out / (energy to build + energy to operate + energy to maintain). But the energy to operate includes the fuel input, which is often times just free (sun, water, wind, fossil fuel stock, biomass).
In a way, we live in a subsidized/gift economy at its root.
In other words, EROEI is not an intrinsic property of the device, but depends on its context: a coal-fired power station has a better EROEI next to a coal mine (we don’t pay for the coal energy content, we pay for its extraction and transportation).
Am I getting this right?
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Charles, this is how I see it. All energy sources are free to humanity, they exist in nature. It is humans that apply human values and notions of ‘ownership’ that allow some humans to sell gifts of nature to other humans.
The concept often used by those trying to prove the value of solar and wind machines, is that solar and wind are free, while coal and gas have a cost to buy. This is total nonsense IMHO.
The energy we spend digging out the coal, transporting it to the power station, the energy we spend building the power station, then operating and maintaining it is the real ‘input’ cost of energy, best represented by the dollar cost. The electricity out over it’s ‘lifetime’ is the total output. The coal has always been free.
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I too suspect nuclear are negative net energy. Based dont he fact that they don’t make money. Currency is a proxy for energy return on energy invested
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Did you arrive at the conclusion a nuclear power plant consumes more energy being built & operated than it generates by comparing the sum of construction + maintenance costs against the value of the electricity it will generate over 60 years?
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It’s not the value of energy over 60 years, it’s the total energy returned over 60 years, related to the ‘value’ of energy today.
The latest IEA average cost of oil (the largest form of energy we use) is for 2022 where the ‘average’ price is given as $US100.98/bbl over the year. The cost of everything is based upon the price of energy to build whatever it is. Of course it varies between different energy types, in various places, and is also determined by contracts and when they were written. I’ve used the $US60/Mwh (there being ~1.7Mwh of energy in a barrel of oil) as the basis of energy cost today “on average”. As long as the cost of energy is used consistently between all the different ‘builds’ then they become relatively comparable.
I change the existing capital cost, plus add up all the future operating and maintenance costs, in today’s dollars, to give a total cost today for all lifetime expenses in building and operating whatever. So for Hinkley $US58B + $US32/Mwh = $32 X 3,260Mw X 24 hrs X 365d X 60 years = $54,830,592,000
$58B + $54,830,592,000 = $112,830,592,000 total cost in today’s dollars when ‘energy’ is around $60/Mwh. I then divide this total cost by today’s energy cost to give an approximate energy use today in Mwh.
112,830,592,000/60 = 1,880,509,666Mwh. (Please note we could BUY this much energy in today’s dollars.
The EROEI using this method gives a total energy produced over life 1,713,456,000Mwh divided by energy used over lifetime operation 1,880,509,666 = EROEI 0.991
Doing exactly the same for Walyering gives an EROEI of 34.9. Using Saudi oil wells from a UN document I found at $US2.50/bbl total cost (still checking this), gives an EROEI of ~40. Other countries, even in the gulf much lower, but still wildly profitable and very positive energy return.
Solar and wind come in better than nuclear, providing we ignore transmission lines and storage, which everyone does to ‘prove’ their point of how ‘good’ (sic) they are.
My problem with writing up a post on EROEI is that it is virtually a book in length to cover everything. All the existing EROEI calculation papers I’ve come across, totally ignore entropy as if it didn’t exist, which allows them to miss out on including giant energy costs in the building of any electricity producer.
For me this article is the absolute classic in trying to prove the cost of coal powered generation is higher than solar..
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/coal-killed-by-renewables/
The biggest cost of the coal power plant they have is the ‘price’ of coal and the transport costs. Yet this particular coal power plant is just 4km from the coal, uses a conveyor to move the coal and has the ‘right’ to mine the coal. The real cost is way below what the article ‘claims’ for coal. The EROEI is 4.8, much better than any solar, wind or nuclear power I’ve worked out the numbers on, but not enough to run modern civilization. It’s oil, gas and metallurgical coal that give the fantastic EROEI numbers for us to run a civilization upon.
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Thanks!
It’s a never ending source of wonder to discover how far off from reality all of our plans for the future are.
There are millions of people around the world working on “renewable” energy and they all don’t have a clue. Of course they’re not doing it to save the planet, they’re doing it to earn a living.
Some day you should write an essay proving that all of our plans to address climate change are making it worse, and that we’d be better off burning all the gas and coal for electricity until it is gone.
You might make splash. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an essay that explicit about our collective denial.
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Rob …. “There are millions of people around the world working on “renewable” energy and they all don’t have a clue. Of course they’re not doing it to save the planet, they’re doing it to earn a living.”
That is the crux of the matter. You can earn a good living telling a nice story that people want to listen to. IMHO that’s what all the university papers on EROEI really are.
Most solar, wind and nuclear give a slightly modest energy return, but use way more materials so possibly better than just burning all the coal and gas, but realistically nowhere near a solution. Nuclear, solar and wind give ‘growth’, which just using coal and gas don’t, so probably the real reason for the push for the renewable future from the ‘elites’ that would already know it’s nowhere near a solution.
I worked out what would be required by solar to give a good ‘civilization level’ EROEI. It came to something like 1/3rd the current capital cost, 1/3rd the O&M costs, and twice the actual expected lifetime, to get up to around the EROEI of 10.
However it would only give us electricity. We would destroy the remaining natural environment and use most fossil fuels in the process of ‘solarifying’ the world. Realistically not even close to an answer for overshoot. I actually think it is just as well all the replacements are NOT good enough.
The entire problem is 8.1B and growing people, on a planet that could support 5-10M humans at most in the long term as the world did for 100,000 years or more.
The hardest thing appears to be convincing people that money is energy, just like energy is money, but energy has many forms so disguises itself to the point people don’t consider money as energy. It seems to be one aspect of why all the EROEI authors only look at ‘process’ energy in their calculations.
My classic example is the Aluminium smelter. In EROEI calculations, the masters of numbers don’t use the process energy, they use something different allowing for all sorts of improvements in current smelters. They fail to see any energy that has gone into building the plant, educating the workers and even the workers themselves.
The energy they count is what gets recorded on the meter when you turn on the switch to turn bauxite into aluminium, then turn it off after the smelter has done it’s job. xxx number of Kwh, that’s it. The smelter exists, so they don’t count it, the workers exist, so not counted, the trucks exist, so not counted. the roads they drive on exist, so not counted. It’s absurd whenever I think about it..
One of the funniest documents on EROI, is from the World Nuclear Association…
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx
All just process energy as if all workers have zero energy costs, industrial plants have zero energy cost, roads, ports, bridges all zero energy cost etc. People choose to be blind to all of it, as it gives a comforting answer. Denial at it’s finest, or MORT.
At POB, the pushback I get is boundaries have to be set somewhere. That’s bullshit, total money cost includes all those extra costs, so no boundaries are needed. My method doesn’t give the ‘correct’ answer, so those in denial don’t want to use it.
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I love your method because it’s brutally simple (and I understand it).
It just makes sense.
And you have got boundaries: indeed the tightest boundaries, the ones which include only the project. If I understood well, the only thing to really be wary of, is to use the cost of energy at a fixed date (even though it is going to be bought for maintenance and sold for profit during the whole lifetime)
BTW, if I understood well, decommissioning costs are not taken into account in any of these calculation. From an EROEI point of view it makes sense, but not from the environmental (and even financial, provided the costs are not dumped on society) point of view, am I right? (I mean, in a way, the picture is even worst 😦 )
I am very much anticipating your post 🙂
If this is any help, I can proof-read it before it is published (provided this is not during vacations, I will try to give a feedback quickly).
I think for a first post you could just limit yourself to something simple: explain the method with a theoretical simple example (simple calculations step by step to get all the details).
Then maybe give one concrete example (even better if the example doesn’t give the “correct” answer). And stop there.
Later posts can address further topics, such as the comparison of the EROEIs of various energy types.
(Just my 2 cents…)
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Great suggestions Charles. I think the reason why I haven’t written up an article about EROEI yet is that it’s such a large topic, it’s virtually a book or a series of books to cover everything properly. I also think more than one person working on an article is better than just one, as others will pick up mistakes, and add points about where further explanation is needed etc.
The point about being simple is very important. I’m fairly sure that most modern research on EROEI by different university professors is very deliberately complicated to hide the real issue.
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I meant to add that I deliberately tried to find a method that was simple and covered what was known, so nothing had to be ‘assumed’ about the future.
The only assumptions are that the advertised lifespan of the different energy producers are real.
Plus the assumption that everything we build today is related to today’s energy price.
This last assumption has been proven true in 2022 when the dollar cost of all renewables went up, despite years of declining prices, just as the price of fossil fuels all went up. Hence anyone trying to discredit the data, is working against known data points. I would expect if the average price of oil went up to $205/bbl as the average for the year, or ~$120/Mwh, then the price of all energy generating builds would also go up, possibly after a lag, by a similar 100%.
So far some on POB are stating that in 2023 the price of renewables have come down, so my method is irrelevant. Yet I’d expect the average price for oil in 2023 prices to be a lot lower. (I’m still waiting for ‘official’ IEA average price for 2023, so use 2022 price until I have the new number)
We know approximately how long any energy source is going to last, say 60 years for Hinkley, or 25 years for a solar farm.
We know the cost of construction, we know how much energy costs today (oil), averaged out over a year from IEA statistics. We know how much energy systems cost in O&M costs today.
I have used all variables that we know today, even though the exact numbers for particular plants are very hard to come by, I then use the industries own numbers for O&M. Even with the bias built in using industry numbers, the differences between Nuclear, Solar, Wind on one hand and oil, gas and metallurgical coal, on the other are chalk and cheese. Interestingly thermal coal is much better than Nuclear, Solar and Wind, but nowhere near as good as oil and gas.
Another quick finding is that we can’t run a modern civilization from thermal coal alone, the EROEI is only around the 5-6 at best and we need around 10-20. We’ve been getting away with slightly lower by adding debt to the system and dragging forward future resource use.
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Thanks for all the extra information. It’s fascinating, because it puts number on intuitions I had (except for nuclear which I assumed was still better than solar and wind: surely the result of French engineers’ propaganda 🙂
To me, this further reinforces the feeling that peak oil is going to be peak energy.
By the was, how does the method rank hydro (if you have some numbers)?
Time for me to nitpick 🙂 (my goal is really to understand the subtleties of the approach, not to criticize it):
* when you talk about an energy type (such as nuclear, solar, wind…), really you are talking about the average plant? (because I would assume the numbers would still vary from one project to another? (maybe due to improvement in technology, or in building methods, or economies of scale, or the location of the plant…)
* correct me if I am wrong, when you assume that “everything we build is related to current energy prices”, you mean that there is (approximatively and maybe with a time-lag) a constant factor between the price of energy and the building costs? I understand you make the same assumption with operation and maintenance costs. So that current operation and maintenance costs relative to energy costs will not drastically vary over the years and can be used to extrapolate. I guess there is still an assumption that the amount of maintenance necessary does not rise with time due to the system decay, or new environmental regulations, or decreases due to technological improvements? (agreed, this might all be only on the margin, or in the past, but still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft). Also, can’t maintenance costs escalate because they are delayed?
* let’s assume that everything we build is related to energy costs, with a time-lag. Could we use the numbers to estimate the time that the energy costs propagate through the economic system?
* I guess the approach is still imprecise for plants that are not yet completely built. I mean there can be further costs overrun, for instance Hinkley may have had a positive EROEI when computed with earlier building costs estimates? Also, I would guess one doesn’t know the real costs of O&M after a few years of operation?
* and naturally, I guess all risks are ignored. I mean waves at Fukushima nullifies all previous EROEI results? Same for brutal changes of the system, I would imagine. (But this is the limit of any modelling)
* since food is a source of energy, could the same kind of computations be used for farms and different types of farming?
* also I am very interested in the EROEI of biomass. But is there such a thing? I mean the EROEI of wood cut in Brazil to be burnt in Europe (for “environmental” reasons) must be drastically different than the EROEI for wood from the backyard?
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Hi Charles, lots of good points in the above post….
*”when you talk about an energy type (such as nuclear, solar, wind…), really you are talking about the average plant?”
I like to do the numbers on specific plants that it is possible to get all the numbers for. as soon as we talk ‘average plant’, someone, who believes in latest tech, will come along and state how the ‘new’ design is so much better than average. I’m trying to work out the EROEI of what we are actually doing in the world.
“correct me if I am wrong, when you assume that “everything we build is related to current energy prices””
This is a tricky one, as lots of aspects about any build are related to both current energy prices, but also energy prices over time, sometimes a great deal of time. For example the part involving transport from A to B, the diesel is very much today’s cost, while the truck might be 10 years old and was built when energy was cheaper, so it’s embedded energy cost would be slightly different. However using the cost charged by the transport company gives a realistic number taking all this into account. Likewise for every single piece of kit in any ‘build’, the capital cost to build it takes all of these past and present energy uses into account.
*”Could we use the numbers to estimate the time that the energy costs propagate through the economic system?”
Sorry I don’t understand the question.
*”I guess the approach is still imprecise for plants that are not yet completely built. I mean there can be further costs overrun, for instance Hinkley may have had a positive EROEI when computed with earlier building costs estimates?”
This is why I like to use the Vogtle reactor and not Hinkley, because they have built it, while Hinkley is ongoing. I just did the numbers for Hinkley as the $58B ‘estimated’ build cost is so ridiculous in the article I was reading, and some people here are from the UK. Vogtle is a lower cost, with a lower energy output, and comes close to breakeven..
*”and naturally, I guess all risks are ignored. I mean waves at Fukushima nullifies all previous EROEI results?”
Very much so!! I assume the plant lives out it’s full potential. I started the whole exercise with the intention of finding out if it was possible to replace fossil fuel energy sources with electric ones on an EROEI basis. The first examples I used were some fossil fuel ones which came out at around the numbers we expect 10-30, so it seemed to be working. After using the same methodology on several ‘renewables’, projects I came to the conclusion that what the nuclear industry states about renewables was accurate, so I did the numbers for the nuclear industry, and basically couldn’t believe what I was getting as an answer, as it was so low. I was previously a ‘believer’ in the nuclear industries marketing guff about the 100/1 return on energy. It’s all fake. Even the cheapest nuclear power plants in developing countries have a low EROEI, but it is better than in developed countries as the background energy use in developing countries is so much lower than in developed countries. That background energy use, influences the energy content of every build.
*” since food is a source of energy, could the same kind of computations be used for farms and different types of farming?”
Absolutely. In fact I looked at the biofuels in the US, as in the corn ethanol EROEI, just briefly. It is highly negative. It only happens because of subsidies and rules that state ethanol has to be in the gasoline. They are getting around my EROEI method because a lot of the energy used is in the form of fertilizer from very cheap sources of natural gas that would be vented if not for the fertilizer plants. Gas energy is currently much cheaper than oil energy on a Mwh basis, especially where they are fracking for oil and the gas is a by product. There are so many aspects totally wrong with the corn for ethanol, it’s probably a perfect example of why civilization is going to crash, and needs it’s own long discussion..
*”also I am very interested in the EROEI of biomass. But is there such a thing? I mean the EROEI of wood cut in Brazil to be burnt in Europe (for “environmental” reasons) must be drastically different than the EROEI for wood from the backyard?”
Humans have used biomass for hundreds of thousands of years. In the modern world the cost of wood in Brazil will be much cheaper than the cost of Brazil wood in Europe, so that naturally effects the EROEI by my method. Likewise for any other source of energy, EROEI is not stationary. The gas project I’ve mentioned comes in at 34.9. However if the owners decided to build an export terminal, and sell the gas to China, the spend would be much higher, while the amount of gas remained the same, so the EROEI would be lower. Every extra well or spend on Ghawar oil field lowers it’s EROEI.
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Thank you for the detailed answers. Very interesting. (I am continuing the conversation here => we have reached the edge of the current comments exchange 🙂
what I meant about the “average plant”, was really the average of all the real plants you had studied, not some imaginary plant. I agree with you about the fact we must stop fantasy number crunching.
“Could we use the numbers to estimate the time that the energy costs propagate through the economic system?”. That was a bit off-topic. I imagine the economic system as an interconnected graph of energy flows. Energy which enters in the system propagates progressively through the graph. I wondered if we could, by observing various prices, infer the time it takes for an energy increase to be absorbed by the whole system. Hope this make better sense… I now very much understand you rely on the economic actors (like the transport company) to integrate all energy costs. This is smart and generally makes sense (at least when they are not in monopoly, or in a situation when most are going bankrupt due to too fierce a competition, I guess…)
similarly the notion of background energy use seems really important. If I understand well, it is kind of dictates the overall energy efficiency of an economy. And I think I just understood what you really meant by “embedded energy”: it is the total energy that was expanded by society to create a product (rather than the energy one could get out of the product if transformed.) I am unsure, because the term seems misleading to me… As you explained before: none of these calculation care about the “free” energy fraction of all things.
I would guess (energy) companies do these kind of computation in order to decide the profitability of a project? (with the slight distinction that they would take the subsidies into account: part of the business is probably of a parasitical nature)
nuclear energy is really a kind of modern faith. In France, we have this guy Jean-Marc Jancovici https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici, who is really a loud (and mostly sound) voice in the peak oil and climate change debate. He advocates very strongly for nuclear energy as a de-growth parachute, as a bridge to what comes next. It seems to me nuclear projects started today are all but a parachute: they make the situation worse by wasting large amounts of fossil energy for very improbable returns tomorrow and ensured safety risks.
You really should write a book on EROEI. This is all fascinating. But maybe start by a series of posts on un-denial, they could be the first building blocks of your book 😉
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A rather large utility scale PV, with battery storage, project was highlighted recently- “Largest US solar-storage project goes online – pv magazine International (pv-magazine.com)”
By chance have you modeled the EROEI of this type of facility?
The facility’s footprint is rather large, so I assume it’s visible by folks in the space station.
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I can only model those energy generating systems that I have access to all the data about. It’s very difficult for renewables as no-one wants to give up actual costs, especially ongoing operating and maintenance. These dollar costs are real energy costs.
For instance, I found a document that has solar built between 2007-9 as one O&M cost, while newer 2019+ plants had a much lower O&M cost, suggesting future O&M costs would be cheaper. It’s really dumb, as of course older plants take more O&M, especially the M bit!! I’m willing to bet the 2019 plants have higher O&M costs in 15 years time as well!! What I’d like to know is the total cost over the life of the plants so that real numbers can be generated, not wishful thinking!!
I use an annual 2% cost of capital over life of plant for solar, as I did find a document from the solar industry showing/expecting 1% annual costs over first 10 years, going up to 4% for beyond a decade of age, so an average of 2% of capital cost per year is being generous to solar. We simply don’t have any large utility scale solar farms that are 25 years old in existence..
The other aspect I’m thinking about is a cost of energy over a given period of 100 years to level out all costs. for example there might need to be 2 nuclear power plants, one each 50 years, compared to 4 solar and wind plants that only last 25 years.
I’m already well aware that adding batteries without known lifespans, to any project, skews the results anyway the author wants. The solar farm I do have costings for, includes about 30 minutes of storage batteries at it’s rated output, which is nowhere near enough, and the cost doesn’t allow for any replacement of these batteries.
One of the biggest mistakes I already see in all analyses about a ‘renewable future’, is how there is an expectation of everything getting cheaper in the future. It defies logic that the materials from lower grade mines, which need more energy to extract, in a world of falling fossil fuel availability, would or could get cheaper, yet that is the assumption of every LCOE and ‘renewable future’ report I’ve read.
Likewise for nuclear, the Hinkley plant is now expected to cost $US58B to build, while the yet to be started Sizewell C, using the same design as Hinkley is expected to cost $US25B to build, even though it’s going to be a decade later. It’s nonsense, as the cost of Sizewell C will also blowout until the government can no longer afford to borrow to build it, then probably abandon it. The UK can only borrow from the world while markets allow for it.
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Hideaway,
I know your frustration. I have been unable to get specifics on small wind and pv system performance and costs here in Ohio. More data is available in CA.
Initialed costs per kW for residential and commercial PV systems installed in CA, reported by the CEC, seem to have bottomed out in 2019 and have increased slightly since then. REF- .
https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov/charts/nem/
The 6.12 kW system we installed back in 2006 got a very large rebate from the state of CA, which brought our system costs per kW/AC to $4.66. The output of our system was down about 6% over the years (9400 kWh in 2007 and 08 to 8800 kWh in 2019 and 2020). The Mitsubishi panels are still performing well per the new owners of our old place. The string inverter (PVPowered 5200) was operating fine when we left CA.
I was a bit annal about keeping the system operating well, trimming some fig trees, and cleaning them once a week or so during the heavy dust/smoke/pollen time periods. Our output would drop 10% due to normal springtime pollen loads and up to 30% when the system was coated with ash from the various fires in the foothills. The fig trees would have reduced our system output about 10% on two of the three strings of our system if I failed to trim…..
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typo alert. Cost per kWh for my system was DC not AC! AC was $5.46 watt.
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One of the most interesting aspects I find is that those of us that have set up our own solar systems seem to be the ones most critical of them powering society. Perhaps it’s the hands on experience, knowledge of weaknesses and understanding of complexity and long low light periods etc.
I’ve set up 3 separate solar systems over time, first one in 1985 with a single 60w panel and deep cycle battery. It was ‘cheap’ at $10/w back then LOL.
Currently getting together pieces for my 4th system, that I will totally install by myself, so I can fix things when something goes wrong with inverter, battery, connections, whatever. I had to use licensed electricians for the grid connected system in 2011, and the off grid one in 2016 (to get the subsidies worth thousands). Our 2011 grid connected system cost $A15K for 5Kw.
If anyone comes across the full set of numbers for any large existing electrical generator, solar, wind or nuclear, could you please post them. That would be capital cost, O&M cost, lifetime expected, actual capacity factor.
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The quote below came to mind this morning as your insights hit the missing part- the technical/economic realities! – of the energy/environmental pickle.
“So, why all the posturing with ‘solutions’, untethered to political realities?”
https://thealtworld.com/alastair_crooke/the-tragic-self-destruction-of-an-enraged-israel
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In a way, we have always been in free fall from the height of the free fossil energy stock, but had just never noticed…
This will test our brakes 🙂
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Correct me if I am wrong.
When a project gets to this point where we know it will not have a positive EROEI, then the most rational decision is to take a decision in order to minimize the energy which will be lost in the process?
This means that if the energy costs already paid are still less than the value of energy which is missing to get to an EROEI of 1, then the project should definitely stop?
To give an example of what I mean, suppose a project costs 10 to build, operate and maintain for its whole lifetime. But, it has an EROEI of 0,9. So there will be a loss of 1. If more than 1 has already been invested in starting the construction, then it makes sense to try to complete the project?
I guess I understand the sunk cost fallacy/escalation of commitment better… I would hate being the one having to make decisions about the continuation of such projects.
That’s of course assuming that:
* there is not further costs overrun
* society has the capacity to continue funding the project till completion
* operation will be able to continue up to the end (for instance input fuel should still be available)
* and none of this is considering environmental costs, decommissioning, hazards…
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The problem is no economists, nor bankers, nor politicians think that money is energy or energy is money. Their concept is that the economy runs on money, not energy. Somehow more money will create more energy, because humans are very creative…
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I am about 1/3rd of the way through the video as of the writing of this post.
So far, they haven’t mentioned the elephant in the room: The fact that there are way too many humans on the planet!
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Larry Johnson today with a rare solo video from his channel warning the US to stand down or else the war will likely escalate in a direction unfavorable to the US.
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I hope cooler heads prevail. But, I doubt that they have enough intelligence to do the right thing and stand down. Combine this with what Chuck Watson has said numerous times and we’re in a terrible escalation spiral. NUCLEAR WAR ANYONE?
AJ
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Meanwhile Ben Shapiro is out there saying USA should put Iran in their place because the USA is so much more powerful. Crikey!
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B today argues that the collapse will be an uneven grind rather than an event.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/collapse-will-look-nothing-like-in
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Didn’t particularly care for his take on how collapse will be a long (till the end of the century?) process. To much like JMG’s slow “catabolic collapse” for me.
AJ
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John Michael Greer and James Howard Kunstler wrote books about the slow collapse process. JHK even coined the term that B used in his article, the Long Emergency. I think they underestimate how the interconnectedness of the world will affect the timescales.
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Exactly right Mike. I use to be thinking that collapse would be gradual, and in fact it has been for decades, with governments and central banks papering over slow collapse with higher and higher debt. However during the recent pandemic shutdowns of economies and the problems to supply chains, when there was an abundance of cheap fuel, made me rethink the entire issue.
I’ve now come to the conclusion that when the oil supply contracts at an accelerating rate year after year, at some point in the near future, the supply chains and feedback loops of much of modern civilization will all unravel at the same time. The relentless rise and simply unavailability of fuel around this time will decimate imports of important goods to western nations, just as imports of raw materials decimate industry in China, while farmers cannot get fuel, which means less food on world markets, which means more trouble in oil exporting countries, probably cutting exports faster etc. Round and round the downward spiral goes with no respite year after year. Of course the real problem being billions of people stuck in cities, doing anything they can for survival of themselves and family, which of course exacerbates the overall problem.
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Agreed. I’m sure resource wars will also have a part to play.
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We only have another decade before many essential minerals running out. That surely puts a hard limit of certain things like new computers and phones?
Wouldn’t it be nice if new people to the scene like Nate Hagens and B referenced the people whose work they are paraphrasing? I have noticed Nate making more effort of late to be fair
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B says the usual about building a resilient community of family and friends. How does one do that? Most family and friends probably don’t want to think about collapse too much and, when they do want to, it could be too late to build resilience. Also, family in friends are likely far flung (close with today’s transport options but far with tomorrow’s transport options). Aside from a few intentional communities, I just can’t see much of this happening.
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Yes! And how do you do it when you’re young and can barely afford rent? How do you do it when so many families are so dysfunctional, they can’t live in the same house? More hows would be helpful
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I agree with both of you. Nate Hagens has said on several occasions he cannot discuss what he does with neighbors. The people at the farm I assist have no interest in discussing overshoot/collapse, and get annoyed when I tell them their solar panels and EVs are not green.
Much better advice for young people is to learn a really valuable skill like seed saving, grafting, irrigation system design, beer making, fixing cars on the cheap, renovation carpentry, plumbing repair, etc. When SHTF you will have something valuable to offer in exchange for something you need, and you will be very popular.
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Yes.
The only “good” news is the recent and persisting food price inflation.
It it stays that way (without worsening) for long enough, it could gradually push change in the right direction. (people are reacting to price)
I am really not hopeful, because, unfortunately, I believe this is rather a signal, we are just about to enter breaking point.
(talking about Europe here)
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Rising diesel prices and the end of subsidies were inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-farmers-kick-off-protest-over-higher-taxes-berlin-2024-01-15/
A good question to ask is whether we should we be subsidizing something that is inherently unsustainable.
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No money to subsidize local food production but plenty of money for killing Ukranians and Russians.
Eventually all subsidies will have to end but in the interim we should get our priorities straight.
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Apparently, the Military Industrial Complex is higher on the pecking order than local food production.
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Even though this article was written in late 2007, it feels quite relevant today.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2007-10-17/age-scarcity-industrialism/
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The U.S. and some of its client states have cut funding for the UNRWA after 12 out its 30,000 workers have been accused of aiding Hamas. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send weapons to Israel, even though the ICJ has ruled that there is probable cause to believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is obscene.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/un-aid-agency-in-gaza-warns-its-operations-are-collapsing-from-wave-of-funding-cuts
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There would be no genocide without US money and weapons. Therefore the wrong country was tried at the ICJ.
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The U.S. should be charged as an accessory if not an accomplice to to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Unfortunately, many countries are probably too afraid to try it.
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I just had a small experience demonstrating how we have become fragile and unwise.
My electric cooktop is about 55 years old and has 4 of the old coil style elements. It has been reliable for all those years with no repairs. Recently the large coil has started glowing much brighter in a small section when on high. I’m thinking it may fail soon so I thought I should buy a spare just in case.
Most coils use a standard 2-wire design and are readily available at local hardware stores. Unfortunately my coils use an uncommon 4-wire connector design that no one stocks.
I thought about buying a new cooktop with the same reliable design. With the exception of two overpriced and not so great models there are no coil cooktops sold in North America today. Only “modern” smooth glass top and induction cooktops are available. These have complicated electronics, no user serviceable parts, and I’m certain won’t be working in 55 years like my old cooktop. Also coil cooktops can handle much heavier loads like a big canning pot.
I tried the used market but found nothing for sale. So I went back to Google and looked harder for a spare part. I think I found a compatible part and it’s on the way to me. Fingers crossed my cooktop will last until I die.
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you need to also check that the powerline going to your cooktop is still sound. Sometimes when this cord is damaged, it affects how the elements run (one hotter, one colder). This has happened twice to me. Once a cord was damaged by the builder during install. Another time the cord was eaten half through by rats ☹
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Thanks for the tip. I checked my cord and it is ok. My guess is that a small section of the coil has worn thinner creating more heat for given current making it a hot spot that might fail.
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Given MORT and other human behaviors I’ve often wondered if the best strategy for getting us on a better path would be to create a new religion grounded in scientific awe of the universe and our place in it. Unfortunately I don’t have the charisma or skills to pull it off. I have a hunch Michael Dowd was on that path before he passed away.
It looks like Dr. Tom Murphy may be trying to get a new religion started and today articulates its core beliefs.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/01/a-religion-of-life/
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If it catches on, it could be the religion you’re looking for to disprove MORT as there is explicitly no believe in life after death. 🙂
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LOL! I’ll bet you $100 that a little life after death will sneak in there in some form before the religion gains popularity. It has for every other religion including the new wacky ones like Scientology and the one those peak oil boys on YouTube believe in.
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I’ll bet you another $100 that if he doesn’t add a little life after death it will not take off.
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Hello everyone and welcome to a new month, with an extra day thrown in because we humans just have to prove we can control time and everything must fit into our wholly self-made calendars. After all, we must get to the Church of Life services on time and worship on a pre-ordained day of the week for hopefully not more than the requisite hour!
In all seriousness, most of the Ten Tenets have been faithfully practised by First Nation peoples around the planet for millennia, sustaining them in body and spirit through the full cycle of human and societal life. No science as we know it today was needed to instil that overarching awe of their world and understanding of their place in it, connected to all life, including the unseen, unknown and unknowable. If mythological stories and a view of an afterlife help affirm a balance with and in Nature, then these expedients are more useful and hardly less fictional than the dominant culture societal frameworks we have been inculcated to follow blindly as dogma.
If only we haven’t just about extincted the remaining descendants of these successful practitioners of the human condition, now that we could really use an emergency dose of their long gained wisdom and holistic perspective. Too bad, too sad, and too late. It seems this is our swan song as we continue to barrel headlong through our civilisational and probably biosphere collapse. We can add Too sorry to that but nothing will bring back what we have already lost and losing fast. In addition to the awe engendered from a fuller awareness of Nature and our happenstance to be alive at this juncture of time and events, I must say that it is also pretty UFB that we band of fire apes could do this much damage in a mere 200 years (as said by an erstwhile un-denial commenter).
I think the defining hymn for the new Church of Life should be The Rhythm of Life, what else? This is one of our community choir’s favourite songs to sing and it always raises the roof and our spirits. Such a hoot. Sanity and life-affirming preptip–this year join a community choir and embrace singing together with people from all walks of life, this could be the start of that resilient community we are craving. The health and wellness benefits of singing and especially with others are legion and you will definitely experience a sense of achievement and camaraderie whilst having a lot of fun. Try it, you have nothing to lose and a whole world of joy (and awe!) to gain.
Namaste, friends.
And the voice said, “Daddy, there’s a million pigeons
Ready to be hooked on new religions.
Hit the road, Daddy. Leave your common-law wife.
Spread the religion of the rhythm of life.”
And the rhythm of life is a powerful beat,
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet,
Rhythm in your bedroom, rhythm in the street,
Yes, the rhythm of life is a powerful beat.
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amen.
Hope your mother project is trending in a good direction.
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I very much appreciate Tom Murphy. Yet he is still struggling.
He is making unnecessary detours: “one could imagine adopting faith that physics and evolution are capable of accounting for all that we see—even if exactly how it does so in all its detail remains forever mysterious to us.”
Physics and evolution are still ideas, abstractions, human concepts.
Still trying to dig a hole in order to fill the ocean.
Sentences such as this one sound very strange to me: “If physics and evolution are indeed able to account for biodiversity and all our experiences”
An abstraction to describe another abstraction to relate with an abstraction of life.
If you really want to summarize everything, the answer is “”.
However you try, it can not be put in words.
Pointless.
Tools should be put to rest outside their domains of application.
Just my personal take, which I could sum up: I love mystics, I hate belief systems; both exist; that’s good how it is.
Also, I have read Daniel Quinn’s, and know about his interpretation of Genesis. I still personally have an extremely different interpretation, as I am sure there are myriad others. How are we to really know how this myth came into being, and what the people of the time intended to say? Has a myth original interpretation more value than the way it is cast differently time after time in different contexts? How do we know our actions which we think we perform with some goal in mind do not have a different objective for a greater force (I didn’t say god here) we are unaware of? What’s the nature of reality? Does time really exist, or is it just the way it seems while in this form? Any word will be too cramped, any explanation will turn out to be a prison.
🙂
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A commenter named Gordon M Shephard Posted this comment:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/01/a-religion-of-life/#comment-12493
Is this a rephrasing of MORT?
Other than that I find Tom Murphy’s posts to be deep and very thought provoking. His posts remind me of Michael Dowd’s work.
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Both Becker’s Terror Management Theory (TMT) and Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory are in agreement that awareness of mortality has a profound effect on human behavior. Beyond this agreement they differ a lot.
TMT says mortality denial is a learned response as explained above.
MORT says mortality awareness comes with evolving an extended theory of mind, and this mutation will not stick unless it is accompanied by another mutation to deny mortality, which in humans has a side effect of causing us to deny all unpleasant realities. This double mutation is improbable and has only occurred in one species on this planet which explains why we are the only species with an extended theory of mind, and why we outcompeted all other hominids, as well as every other species. MORT predicts that humanlike intelligence will be extraordinarily rare in the universe.
TMT is to MORT as Newtonian physics is to General Relativity. Both make useful predictions but MORT is a much more accurate and illuminating theory.
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