Category: Favorite

By John House, MD: A Superb Summary of Our Predicament

Here is a must read 4 part series by John House, MD that was published in the Eureka Springs Independent newspaper.

Part 1: The next decade could bring chaos

The ‘60s and ‘70s were an exciting time to be young. So much was changing; everywhere a person looked there were new technologies, new discoveries – even other planets were no longer off limits.

Like many people raised in the industrialized world during the 20th century, I was taught – directly and indirectly – that humans would experience non-stop progress; each generation would build on the successes of the last taking the human race to ever higher levels. There had been setbacks along the way, but that wasn’t something we had to worry about any more. The internal combustion engine, plumbing, electricity, modern medicine, computers, all of these advancements and more would prevent us from having to worry about the collapse of civilization ever again. At least that was the overarching message I received from my education and from society at large. Indeed, there are many who are preaching that message even today.

As amazing as the 20th century was with all the wonders it brought, the 21st century has been equally amazing in how little progress has been made. With the accelerating pace of advancements we saw in the 100 years from 1900 to 1999, it seems astonishing that so little has been accomplished in the last 16.

There are numerous reasons humanity hasn’t progressed at the same pace in recent years. Beginning in this article and continuing in ones to follow, I’m going to examine three of the biggest challenges that will dominate events in the next decade and help us understand why progress has stalled.

They are: 1) decline in net energy 2) explosion in debt as the primary engine for economic growth and 3) climate change.

Decline in Net Energy

Net energy is a simple concept: It is the amount of energy left over after expending energy to produce that energy. For example, if I want to build a fire to cook my food, I have to spend my body’s energy to gather the wood and create a spark to start the fire. The fire gives me more energy than I had to start with, so there is a net energy gain. If a rainstorm puts out my fire before I can cook my food, then there is a decline in net energy since I get very little energy from the fire but still had to spend energy to begin with.

Since the beginning of the human experience, humans have had to use manual labor to accomplish every task. From finding food, to making clothing, to building shelter, humans had only the energy gleaned from plants and animals to get the job done. There was very little excess energy left over for other activities.

With the discovery of petroleum – oil – and how to use it efficiently, humans had something that they had never had before: excess energy. With the incredible stored energy in oil, humans now could do all sorts of work without manual labor.

Fossil fuels are incredible batteries. They hold lots of stored solar energy per kilogram. For example, it would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal the energy in one barrel of oil!

Looked at a different way, a barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 1,700 kilowatt hours of electricity. To get that much energy from a typical 2’x4’ solar panel in an hour you would need almost 19,000 panels! That’s for just one barrel. The world uses 90,000,000 barrels a day!

Fossil fuels led to a paradigm shift in human activity. This advancement, more than anything else, has been responsible for technological achievements, increases in food production, excess leisure time, labor saving devices, and other conveniences that we think of as “the modern world.”

So to define this in terms of net energy, before fossil fuels, humans used virtually the energy they took in via food, simply to gather more energy (grow or hunt food). For all practical purposes, there was almost no excess net energy available.

With fossil fuels, suddenly there was so much excess energy available that humans could achieve almost anything!

But. (There’s always a “but.”) Those incredible solar energy batteries of fossil fuels take millions of years to charge. Once we figured out how to use them, we started burning through them at astronomical rates.

We pumped the easy-to-reach oil first and, since fossil fuels are a finite resource and aren’t replenished, when the easy stuff was gone, we started working on the hard-to-get stuff. Every increase in the difficulty of extraction results in spending more energy to get the energy from the oil. The more energy we spend, the less excess net energy there is.

From about 1825 to 1979 the amount of net excess energy per capita was growing almost exponentially. From 1979 through 2003, however, net energy per capita stopped growing. Since 2003, net energy per capita has been declining.

At first glance, this might not seem to be a big deal. But, it’s actually an incredibly huge problem. Remember, all that excess net energy is what has made every aspect of our modern world possible. What happens when there is less of that very thing?

Actually, we are starting to get just a glimpse of the answer to that question since net energy per capita has been declining for the last 12 or 13 years.

If you think about what excess net energy allows us to do – travel, buy non-essential items, have leisure time, etc., – then it follows that with a decline in net energy, we will have less travel, less leisure time, we’ll buy less non-essential stuff. In other words, we’ll have a recession, perhaps worse.

There is a clear relationship between oil and the economy. In fact, there have been multiple recessions since WWII and all but one have been preceded by a spike in the price of oil. When the price of oil goes too high, it leads to an economic downturn.

Many believe we entered a global recession after the oil price spike of mid-2014, even if we aren’t technically in a recession here in the U.S., and now the world is awash in cheap oil. We won’t be awash in oil long, however, as most of the hard-to-reach petroleum costs more to produce than the current market price. Very soon, supply will dwindle. And that’s how this time is different. In the past, we’ve been able to grow our way out of recessions by pumping more oil thereby creating more excess energy. Now, we can’t. Now we have a decline in net energy.

Since developing an oil-based economy, we’ve never had to face a decline in net energy. This has enormous implications to our way of life.

The modern economy is dependent on growth. With a decline in net energy, substantive growth is no longer possible. I mentioned earlier that there has been a decline in net energy since the early part of this century. So, how is it possible that we’ve had economic growth since then?

In a word, debt.

Combined with a dramatic increase in debt, a decline in net energy is an explosive combination that risks destroying the world as we know it today. In the next installment, I’ll explain what I mean by that.

Part 2: Increase of debt and decrease of net energy – what we need to know

In the first part of this series, I mentioned that economic growth and energy have been intimately connected since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The more energy available to society, the more the economy grows. Now that we have entered into an era of decreasing net excess energy, economies are shrinking instead of growing.

Debt, too, plays an integral part in powering economic growth. In fact, the modern economy can’t function without it. In recent years, debt has been substituted for excess net energy as the fuel for economic growth. The results have been less than stellar and are likely creating a situation that guarantees economic collapse.

In the loosest sense of the word, our economy is debt. Today, there is more debt than there has been in the history of humankind. Without excess net energy, that debt couldn’t be repaid.

Debt has been part of the human experience for thousands of years. It has taken, and continues to take, many forms. At its most basic, debt is the promise to pay in the future for some good or service provided now.

Another way to look at debt is as an advance of future earnings. A person takes out a loan from a bank to buy a house or car, promising to repay that loan plus interest using income that will be earned in the future. Even in such a simple scenario, a healthy economy is required for a loan to be repaid; if the borrower loses his job because a factory closes due to economic decline, for example, he can’t repay the loan.

Since debt permeates every part of our economy, growth is required in order for debt to be repaid or, at the very least, serviced. Everything talked about with respect to the economy revolves around growth. If the economy isn’t growing, it’s bad. And debt is the reason.

The banking system the average person interacts with is designed around a concept known as fractional reserve banking. That means banks are only required to have on hand – on reserve – a fraction of the money that has been placed on deposit in their bank. The rest they lend out, thereby creating money “out of thin air” while also creating enormous amounts of debt requiring a constant flow of new money being put into the system, i.e. economic growth. On its face, this is good for the economy as it spurs development, creates jobs, increases wealth, etc. If the amount of debt grows too large, or the economy slows, a serious problem develops as the debt can no longer be serviced.

Today, the debt system has grown incredibly complex with debt instruments that are convoluted and almost impossible for the layperson to understand. Most of this debt has nothing to do with “Main Street” but it, too, requires that our economy grow indefinitely and without interruption or the whole scheme collapses.

Since everything in our economy is dependent on energy, a decline in net excess energy means the economy can’t grow, leading to debt default. If the amount of debt default is large it can be devastating to the system. Since even the slightest hint of widespread default would elicit panic in the stock and financial markets, wiping out trillions of dollars overnight, it’s no wonder government and industry agencies are less than honest about the decline in net energy and the impossibility of ever paying off mountains of debt that have been created trying to stimulate the economy. The whole financial system is the very definition of a house of cards.

The financial crisis of 2008-9 brought the global financial system to the very brink of collapse. If it had not been for Herculean efforts of central banks around the world at that time, collapse would have been inevitable. That crisis was one of too much debt that couldn’t be repaid. Ironically, the central banks saved the system by creating more debt. Enormous amounts of it, in fact.

The amount of conventional debt today is estimated to be $100 trillion globally. When the derivatives market is included, the amount of global debt surges to the absurdly high number of $1.3 quadrillion. Since declining net energy is preventing the economy from having the energy it needs to grow, it seems very likely there will be massive debt defaults in the near future. When there is widespread debt, default commerce shuts down.

When commerce shuts down, there is economic collapse and many, many people suffer. Very similar events are happening right now in Venezuela, Greece, Syria, Puerto Rico, and other countries.

With decline in net energy affecting every person on the planet, and with global debt already at unsustainable levels and climbing higher every day, there is widespread agreement among financial experts that central banks will be unable to save the system next time. When that happens, every country – including the U.S. – will experience economic disaster.

We are facing some frightening challenges over the next decade. Next time I’ll explore the most serious of them all: climate change.

Part 3: Climate Change

Climate change is, by far, the most worrisome of the major challenges we face as a species. We can live without debt and a modern economy, and maybe a few of us can survive on the energy levels utilized by our ancestors, but not a single one of us can survive without a livable climate.

Over the last 20 years there has been lots of debate about global warming with respect to its causes, how fast it will happen, how severe it will be, etc. The one salient fact that in recent years has become indisputable, however, is that the climate is changing now and happening much more rapidly than almost anyone has predicted.

On a steady basis, new studies are published that demonstrate this rapid change. Sea levels are rising faster, storms are becoming increasingly intense and more common, droughts are more severe and widespread, forest fires are raging more fiercely and over greater areas, and the oceans are dying. All because CO2 and other greenhouse gases are rising faster than ever before.

It’s important to understand that there is a time lag of about 30 years in the effects of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. So the warming temperatures and climate chaos we see today are from the CO2 emitted in the 1980s.

The amount of carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere today is far greater than that of 30 years ago. This means that even if we were to stop absolutely all CO2 emissions right now, temperatures will keep climbing for another 30 years! Since it takes at least 1,000 years for CO2 to work itself out of the atmosphere, that likely unlivable temperature would be the new normal for a very long time.

Is it even possible to stop all CO2 emissions? Think about what that means: no cars, no electricity, no stores, no air conditioning, no burning fires for heat or cooking, no food except what you grow yourself by hand, no refrigeration, no medicines, no hospitals or clinics, no Internet, no phone, no TV… in other words, literally everything in our world would have to stop.

There are now more than 7.4 billion people on the planet. Almost every one of us depends entirely on food grown using fossil fuels. If we stop all CO2 emissions, almost every one of us starves to death in just a few months.

What are the odds of stopping all CO2 emissions anytime soon? It should be obvious that the chance of that happening willingly is zero.

A few years ago, politicians decided arbitrarily that Earth can adjust to a 2°C rise in average temperature without too much problem. That seems to be highly suspect, however, as we haven’t yet crossed the 1°C mark (on an annualized basis) and are already having huge problems related to climate change. What’s more, almost every model developed that keeps temperatures to 2°C warmer requires a dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions. Immediately. The longer we delay, the higher the temperature goes in those same projections.

With “business as usual” emissions, the global average temperature is projected to climb to 10° or 20°C above the historical level. Human beings cannot survive those kinds of temperatures. Even if we could, livestock, grains, fruits, and vegetables on which we all rely, can’t survive. We’d have no food.

Already there are places on the planet that are experiencing enormous amounts of suffering related to climate change. Every day one billion people go hungry due to crop failures related to drought and flood. What will it be like at 2°C?

Since it seems clear that we can’t stop CO2 emissions entirely, is it possible that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Think back to the previous part of this series. Debt requires growth in order to be repaid. All economic growth comes – ultimately – from utilizing energy. The only way to reduce CO2 in any meaningful way requires a significant reduction in economic activity. That leads to debt default and likely economic depression. What politician is going to vote to do anything that’s going to cause a severe economic downturn? What’s more, this is a global problem. One country deciding to reduce carbon emissions isn’t enough – it has to be all of us. As the recent climate accord in Paris demonstrates, no one is willing to take any meaningful action.

Sadly, switching to solar energy isn’t the solution many hope for. Solar panels, while very nice to have when the power goes out, can’t begin to replace the energy density of fossil fuels and are simply unable to provide adequate power to run our economy at anywhere near its current level.

With respect to climate change, it turns out that solar panels, due to the enormous amounts of energy used in the mining and manufacturing processes, actually produce more CO2 per kilowatt of electricity generated than a coal-burning power plant.

Our climate is changing now. There seems to be no viable solution to stop it that doesn’t result in the loss of billions of human lives. And yet, the more Earth warms, the more likely humans will be unable to survive.

When rapidly changing climate is combined with net energy decline and an economic system dependent on unsustainable debt, it’s clear that humanity is facing the biggest challenge of its existence. In the fourth and final installment of this series, I’ll outline what we can expect over the next ten years and what each of us can do to prepare for these changes.

Part 4: Coming Chaos

Decline in net energy, unsustainable mountains of debt, and climate change are just a few of the enormous problems that humanity faces. I believe, that over the next ten years, each of us will feel tangible disruptions in our daily lives related to these challenges.

Throughout the next decade there is likely to be enormous political upheaval, intermittent shortages of energy – both gasoline and electricity – and disruptions in government services, particularly Social Security and Medicare payments. There is a good chance we could see serious food shortages secondary to climate chaos and collapse of the financial system, as well as reduced availability of medications and healthcare services. I also expect to see a dramatic increase in domestic (U.S.) climate refugees as drought, fire, and flooding continue to take their toll.

I make no claim of being a fortuneteller, so I can’t say with certainty when an event will occur or even that it will happen at all. But I do know that if I hold a lit match to a piece of paper, there’s a real good chance the paper will start burning. The same can be said about the issues I’ve raised. A series of events is underway and they have a logical, expected outcome.

I began to develop an awareness of these problems more than five years ago and I’ve been educating myself and watching developments closely since then. So far, events have deteriorated at a pace consistent with my concerns.

I know that I’ve laid out a pretty depressing, “doom and gloom” picture. My intention isn’t to depress you, but to inform you. Knowing what’s coming is the best way to make provision for the future.

The core challenges humanity faces aren’t really that much different than the challenges we’ve always faced: ensuring adequate food, water, and shelter. What’s different now is that there are many, many more people on the planet, we have extracted most of the easy-to-reach non-renewable resources, and we have a climate that isn’t going to be working in our favor.

It’s too late to do anything to stop the processes that have been put into motion; the match has already lit the paper on fire. But there are some things we can do to ensure that we – and those we love – are as prepared as possible for what’s headed our way.

As you consider the short list I’ve compiled, keep in mind that no matter what happens, making these changes won’t be a waste of time as they will benefit your health and your state of mind.

I encourage you to look at every aspect of your life and find a way to meet your needs locally. Think about how the founders of Eureka Springs lived in the late 19th century and it will give you a good model to follow for your own preparations.

Start growing as much of your food as possible, or partner with some of our local growers. Most of them usually need extra help and, I suspect, would welcome the opportunity to share some of what they know and grow in exchange for a little labor. I also recommend learning how to can foods, putting away as much as possible to ensure you have enough for you and your family to eat through the winter months.

If you have a yard, get a few chickens. They are a lot of fun to care for and can provide both meat and eggs. If you have a few acres, then you might want to try your hand at raising goats. Goat’s milk is delicious and nutritious and there’s nothing quite so fun as a goat kid.

In the event that water supply is disrupted, don’t expect to get your water from bottles at the store. If you have a well powered by electricity, you may want to invest in a solar powered system. If you rely on city water, having a large storage tank is a good idea.

An adequate heat supply can be vital during an ice storm or other electricity outage. If you don’t have a wood-burning fireplace, you may want to consider having a woodstove installed.

If you’re dependent on daily medications, discuss the issue with your doctor to see if there are any you can live without. For the rest, you may want to start stockpiling those medicines to help you weather any short-term disruptions. Having a good first aid kid is always a good idea as well.

There are several good books available that provide step-by-step instructions on living a simple, self-sufficient life, describing how to garden, store your harvest, raise livestock, work with bees, make simple repairs, and more. The purchase of one or two of these books (a printed version, not electronic) can be an excellent investment.

Whether we are facing hardship or joy, the most important thing any of us can do is to live every day as if it is our last, making preparations just in case it’s not. I encourage you to be kind to those around you – human and non-human alike. As the stress of our daily existence increases over the coming years, kindness and forgiveness will make everyone’s life a little more bearable.

[Eds. Note: Dr. House responds to mining and manufacturing of solar panels producing more CO2 per kw of generated electricity than coal-burning plants, ESI May 18: The manufacture of solar panels is highly energy intensive including the cost of mining the raw materials, turning those materials into a photovoltaic cell, assembling the solar panels themselves, the packaging to protect them from breaking in shipping (usually large amounts of Styrofoam™), fuel to transport from the East to the West and then to the assembly site, the energy used to build the support structure for the panels, etc. Any number of studies can be used to support a debate one way or the other, but ultimately, the fact remains that the only way to stop catastrophic global warming is to stop all CO2 emissions right now. Since solar panels generate large amounts of CO2 in their manufacture and it would take millions of square meters of solar panels to power our world, it’s clear that solar panels do not offer a meaningful solution to the problems at hand. Don’t misunderstand me, though, fossil fuels don’t solve our problems either.]

Interest(ing) Denial: 0% for 90 Months

Interest rates have been zero for 90 months.

This is not normal. Something fundamental has changed.

It’s fascinating how rarely we discuss the root cause of zero interest rates.

David Stockman is one of the financial commentators I occasionally read because he has a good understanding of the widespread and un-prosecuted fraud that took place leading up to the 2008 crisis, and because he understands the dangers of excessive debt.

Today Stockman wrote an article on zero interest rates.

The Cult of Central Banking is Dead in the Water

Stockman understands something is seriously wrong…

There has never been a time in financial history when anything close to this happened, including the 1930s. Nor was interest-free money for eight years running ever even imagined in the entire history of monetary thought.

He understands that the symptom is insufficient growth and that more cash and credit won’t cure it…

There is a structural growth problem, of course. But it has absolutely nothing to do with monetary policy; and it can’t be fixed with cheap money and more debt, anyway.

He understands that the medicine we’ve taken is not working…

Since the year 2000 when monetary repression began in earnest, the balance sheet of the Fed has risen by 800%, while the amount of labor hours used in the US economy has increased by 2%.

At a ratio of 400:1 you can’t even try to argue the counterfactual. That is, there is no amount of money printing that could have ameliorated the “no growth” economy symbolized by flat-lining labor hours.

He understands that our response has been fraudulent, at least in an ethical sense, for future generations…

In essence, during the last 15 years the Fed has gifted the US economy with a $4 trillion free lunch. Uncle Sam bought $4 trillion worth of weapons, highways, government salaries and contractual services but did not pay for them by extracting an equal amount of financing from taxes or tapping the private savings pool, and thereby “crowding out” other investments.

He understands that zero interest rates are no longer helping household incomes because the private sector reached Peak Debt in 2007 and is now slowly reducing its debt…

He understands that cheap credit has created new problems waiting to explode…

Likewise, total US business borrowings have increased from $11 trillion to $13 trillion since the fall of 2007, but it has not lead to additional investment spending. Instead, the Fed fueled inflation of financial assets has induced businesses to cycle virtually 100% of their incremental borrowings into financial engineering. That is, stock repurchases and M&A deals.

Indeed, as we demonstrated in a post earlier this week—–precisely 100% of the entire increase in corporate borrowing since the turn of the century has been pumped back into the casino in the form of stock repurchases.

The world is drowning in excess production capacity owing to the massive worldwide credit inflation and repression of capital costs during the last two decades. That was the effect of total global credit growth from $40 trillion in the mid-1990s to upwards of $225 trillion today—-an $185 trillion expansion that exceeded the growth of global GDP by nearly 4X during the same period.

So far so good, then we get to Stockman’s diagnosis and prescription…

In fact, tepid growth of labor hours, productivity and output is a supply side problem. In that respect, replacing the current burdensome 16% payroll tax on America’s high cost labor with a consumption tax on the nation’s heavily imported goods would do more for supply side growth than central bankers could ever accomplish in a month of Sundays.

In a word it is this. Fire the Fed. Attend to supply side policy. Let market capitalism do the rest.

Stockman’s diagnosis is that growth is stalled because US labor costs are not competitive. His solution is to stimulate growth by shifting taxation from payroll to import duties.

His logic is obviously flawed. If uncompetitive labor costs are the cause of low growth, why is the entire world struggling to grow?

Stockman believes productivity originates from…

… work, exertion, sweat, discipline, enterprise, innovation, invention, sacrifice and savings.

He completely misses the vital role of energy in our economy.

Here is what is actually going on…

A growing economy means that total income is increasing. Income equals productivity (what is produced) plus the change in debt.

Productivity results from combining effort (labor), capital (machines and credit), knowledge (technology), raw materials (stuff), and energy (90+% non-renewable fossil) in an efficient manner (efficiency).

We have no shortage of labor (plenty of unemployed), no shortage of capital (plenty of idle machines and low-cost credit), no shortage of knowledge (plenty of new graduates), and no shortage of raw materials (yet). Our efficiency is pretty good and is approaching engineering limits for improvement.

Our productivity growth has stalled because our energy use growth has stalled because the cost of extracting fossil energy now exceeds what we can afford to pay while growing.

The cost of extracting fossil energy has been increasing at a compounded rate of about 17% per year because it is a finite resource and we chose for obvious reasons to burn the easy to get and inexpensive energy first. What remains is expensive and will get progressively more expensive to extract.

The trick we have used since about 1980 to hide this inconvenient energy reality is to increase our debt faster than our productivity.

When we borrow more money than we repay in a given year, the difference (credit) looks and behaves like earned income (productivity). It makes no difference to our lifestyle if we pay with a $20 bill or our MasterCard.

Eventually we reach a limit to the amount of debt we can service with our income. This limit can be extended by reducing interest rates, which we’ve done, but even at extremely low rates there is still a maximum amount of debt that can be supported by a given income.

Citizens reached their debt limit in 2007 which precipitated the 2008 crisis.

Since 2008 we have been masking our energy reality by increasing public debt which, unlike private debt, is not limited in the short-term by income because governments can print money to service their debt.

There are several ways to print money. The method we have used so far is called quantitative easing (QE) which is the government borrowing money from itself and us winking at each other and telling ourselves that we intend to repay the debt someday. Any honest assessment of our ability to repay our government debt from taxes would show that the debt cannot and will not be repaid.

Another type of money printing, which we may soon try, is to print and hand out money directly to citizens. The main difference from QE is that we will stop winking at each other.

The implication of printing money is that we have chosen to reduce the value of future money to maintain our current lifestyle. Put another way, we are living beyond our means and the difference between what we are spending and what we are earning will be subtracted from our future standard of living. This means we are making the future much worse than it needs to be.

The thing that’s sustaining our standard of living (public debt) is growing faster than the thing needed to sustain the public debt (our productivity). This is one definition of a bubble.

We are living in a giant, global, and unprecedented debt bubble.

All bubbles, by definition, must burst.

When bubbles burst they always revert through their mean. The bigger the bubble, the greater the unnecessary future pain we create.

When bubbles burst they never deflate slowing in a controlled manner. We will not experience a smooth transition from our current standard of living to a new lower standard of living. It will be a bumpy and probably unfair process where those least deserving of pain are hit the hardest.

When our bubble bursts it will create real hardship with little or no time to adjust, and will create the conditions necessary for social unrest, crime, despots, and war. The worst of history will likely repeat but on a much larger scale because our situation is unprecedented.

The relationship between the economy and energy is clear yet even the better commentators, like Stockman, are in denial and choose not to look.

Growth is over. De-growth is coming soon.

Most will say “no one could have seen this coming”.

The facts are clear for anyone that chooses to look.

We could have reduced our population and lifestyles in a safe, civil, and fair manner, with the added benefit of less damage to the environment, which we’ll desperately need when the oil is gone, but chose not to because of evolved denial.

Renewable vs. Fossil Energy: An Interesting Natural Experiment is Underway in Venezuela

There is an interesting natural experiment underway in Venezuela.

The Venezuelan grid is unable to keep up with demand and electricity shortages are starting to impact their economy.

The government is blaming a prolonged drought for reducing their hydro electricity capacity and have implemented a reduced work week for government workers and scheduled a 4 hour per day blackout to cut electricity consumption.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/venezuela-declares-two-day-work-week-in-bid-to-save-electricity

Informed skeptics have shown there is no drought and that the government is blaming drought to cover up inadequate grid maintenance and upgrades.

http://euanmearns.com/more-revelations-on-venezuelas-drought-and-the-guri-dam/

I suspect that the grid maintenance and upgrade problems are caused by low oil prices. Oil accounts for a third of Venezuela’s GDP, 80% of exports, and more than 50% of government revenue. Venezuela claims to have the largest oil reserves in the world but most of these reserves are expensive to extract and uneconomic when prices are low as they are today.

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/venezuelas-economic-success-fueled-electricity-crisis/

It is impossible to maintain complex things when you are broke.

So what we have here is a country that generates over 70% of its electricity from renewable hydroelectric dams, yet their grid is failing because they lack the funds to properly maintain it, because most of their wealth comes from fossil energy that is now uneconomic to produce.

Hydro electricity has the best return on energy invested of all renewable energies. Venezuela’s grid is therefore as good as renewables get and much better than a grid built with solar panels and wind turbines.

This supports my view that it is impossible to have today’s consumption and wealth with 100% renewable energy.

The global economy will be contracting soon due to depletion of non-renewable energy. Reliable electricity, including electricity from renewable sources, may be one of many casualties.

We would be wise to take control of the impending contraction and steer it in an optimal direction, rather than allowing a chaotic collapse to occur.

We need conservation, austerity, wealth gap reduction, and population reduction now.

Addendum…

Hyperinflation is the end game for a country that refuses to live within its means. Venezuela’s money printing is accelerating.

This Is The End: Venezuela Runs Out Of Money To Print New Money

Hyperinflation destroys the wealth of a country’s middle class which makes them very angry.

Hyperinflation is the reason Hitler got into power and is one of the reasons I advocate conservation and austerity.

It would have been easier for Venezuela had they not allowed their population to grow by more than 6 times from 5 million in 1950 to over 33 million today.

http://mazamascience.com/PopulationDatabrowser/index.html?country=VE&language=en

WASF

There is hope, but not for us - Franz Kafka

One portion of the population doesn’t believe humans are in overshoot and therefore sees no need to change their lifestyles.

Another portion is vaguely aware of a problem but prefers not to think about it nor possible changes to their lifestyles.

Another portion believes overshoot is real but thinks others need to change their lifestyles first.

Another portion thinks we have a problem but it is not caused by humans so there is no need to change.

Another portion thinks everything is in the hands of God so there is no need to change.

Another portion thinks they’ve already done enough by buying a new electric car, recycling, and reusing grocery bags.

Another portion believes renewable energy, carbon capture, and other technologies will solve the problem.

Another portion understands the problem but chooses not to change because they do not believe their sacrifices will make a difference.

The balance of the population thinks it’s too late to do anything and therefore see no need to change.

The only thing everyone agrees on is that there is no need to change.

WASF

Denial of the Inconvenient Truth: Shrink the Economy or Die

Here we have climate change activist and celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio speaking at the United Nations.

We know from the work of Tim Garrett that CO2 is proportional to wealth. This inconvenient truth is the bedrock of climate change that few activists understand nor want to understand.

The only possible way to reduce the threat of climate change is to shrink the economy.

DiCaprio has a net worth of over $200 million. This means he emits over 8,000 times as much CO2 as the average global citizen. If DiCaprio really wants to do something about climate change he should start by burying his $200 million as cash in his back yard. It’s counterintuitive and an inconvenient truth that spending money on philanthropy or “green” initiatives only makes things worse. We have to remove wealth from the system to reduce CO2 emissions.

From Wikipedia we learn that “DiCaprio owns a home in Los Angeles, California and an apartment in Battery Park City, New York. In 2009, he bought an island off mainland Belize, on which he is planning to create an eco-friendly resort. In 2014, he purchased the original Dinah Shore residence designed by mid-century modern architect Donald Wexler in Palm Springs, California.”

From his UN speech we learn that DiCaprio has probably flown more in the last year than most people fly in a lifetime.

DiCaprio demonstrates his commitment to fighting climate change by buying green things. For example, again from Wikipedia, “He drives environment-friendly vehicles, including an electric Tesla Roadster, a Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid, and a Toyota Prius.”

An all-in life cycle analysis of these vehicles would show they create much more CO2 and other pollution than a cheap economy car, or better yet, a used car. And three “green” cars create three times the CO2 of one car. Where do you think the steel and other materials used to build a car come from, you idiot? Green cars are not built with renewable energy, they are built with fossil fuels. If they were built with renewable energy most people could not afford a car. That’s another inconvenient truth.

Like many activists, DiCaprio doesn’t care about facts.

Setting an example of austerity in your personal life is the first and only place to start if you want to take action on climate change.

DiCaprio has not taken this first step so he should shut up.

I’m sure DiCaprio has good intentions and yet his hypocrisy is so huge and common that evolved denial seems to be the only possible explanation.

It’s pretty simple and an inconvenient truth. We shrink the economy or else we die.

By Erik Lindberg: Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

I stumbled on this superb essay by Erik Lindberg.

Initially I intended to highlight a few of Erik’s most insightful comments but quickly realized the whole thing is insightful so here it is in whole.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing then I suggest you skip ahead to the last section: Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

I’m impressed that Erik gets it with a Ph.D. in English rather than Physics or Engineering, and his education no doubt contributes to the high quality of his writing.

I intend to explore more of his work.

http://transitionmilwaukee.org/profiles/blogs/six-myths-about-climate-change-that-liberals-rarely-question

 

Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. [i] At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred. This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees: fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening.

We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life. Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created. And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.

Myth #2: Republicans are Still More to Blame

“Yes, America does face a cliff — not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices [including a carbon cliff] we’ll tumble over because the GOP’s obsession over government’s size and spending has obscured them.” -Robert Reich

It is true that conservative politicians in the United States and Europe have been intent on blocking international climate agreements; but by focusing on these failed agreements, which only require a baby-step in the right direction, liberals obliquely side-step the actual cause of global warming—namely, burning fossil fuels. The denial of climate change isn’t responsible for the fact that we, in the United States, are responsible for about one quarter of all current emissions if you include the industrial products we consume (and an even greater percentage of all emissions over time), even though we make up only 6% of the world’s population. Our high-consumption lifestyles are responsible for this. Republicans do not emit an appreciably larger amount of carbon dioxide than Democrats.

Because pumping gasoline is our most direct connection to the burning of fossil fuels, most Americans overemphasize the significance of what sort of car we drive and many liberals might proudly point to their small economical cars or undersized SUVs. While the transportation sector is responsible for a lot of our emissions, the carbon footprint of any one individual has much more to do with his or her overall levels of consumption of all kinds—the travel (especially on airplanes), the hotels and restaurants, the size and number of homes, the computers and other electronics, the recreational equipment and gear, the food, the clothes, and all the other goods, services, and amenities that accompany an affluent life. It turns out that the best predictor of someone’s carbon footprint is income. This is true whether you are comparing yourself to other Americans or to other people around the world. Middle-class American professionals, academics, and business-people are among the world’s greatest carbon emitters and, as a group, are more responsible than any other single group for global warming, especially if we focus on discretionary consumption. Accepting the fact of climate change, but then jetting off to the tropics, adding another oversized television to the collection, or buying a new Subaru involves a tremendous amount of denial. There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate-change deniers.

Myth #3: Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” –Barack Obama

This is a hugely important point. Everything else hinges on the myth that we might live a lifestyle similar to our current one powered by wind, solar, and biofuels. Like the conservative belief that climate change cannot be happening, liberals believe that renewable energy must be a suitable replacement. Neither view is particularly concerned with the evidence.

Conventional wisdom among American liberals assures us that we would be well on our way to a clean, green, low-carbon, renewable energy future were it not for the lobbying efforts of big oil companies and their Republican allies. The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels. The liberal belief that energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels can replace oil, natural gas, and coal is a mirror image of the conservative denial of climate change: in both cases an overriding belief about the way the world works, or should work, is generally far stronger than any evidence one might present. Denial is the biggest game in town. Denial, as well as a misunderstanding about some fundamental features of energy, is what allows someone like Bill Gates assume that “an energy miracle” will be created with enough R & D. Unfortunately, the lessons of microprocessors do not teach us anything about replacing oil, coal, and natural gas.

It is of course true that solar panels and wind turbines can create electricity, and that ethanol and bio-diesel can power many of our vehicles, and this does lend a good bit of credibility to the claim that a broader transition should be possible—if we can only muster the political will and finance the necessary research. But this view fails to take into account both the limitations of renewable energy and the very specific qualities of the fossil fuels around which we’ve built our way of life. The myth that alternative sources of energy are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels and thus of maintaining our current way of life receives widespread support from our President to leading public intellectuals to most mainstream journalists, and receives additional backing from our self-image as a people so ingenious that there are no limits to what we can accomplish. That fossil fuels have provided us with a one-time burst of unrepeatable energy and affluence (and ecological peril) flies in the face of nearly all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just starting to dispel this myth requires that I go into the issue a bit more deeply and at greater length

Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal. Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor. Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce. Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime. We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal.

A single, small, and easily portable gallon of oil is the product of nearly 100 tons of surface-forming algae (imagine 5 dump trucks full of the stuff), which first collected enormous amounts of solar radiation before it was condensed, distilled, and pressure cooked for a half-billion years—and all at no cost to the humans who have come to depend on this concentrated energy. There is no reason why we should be able to manufacture at a reasonable cost anything comparable. And when we look at the specific qualities of renewable energy with any degree of detail we quickly see that we have not. Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat. The global total is not much higher, despite the much touted efforts in Germany, Spain, and now China. In 2013, 1.1% of the world’s total energy was provided by wind and only 0.2% by solar.[ii] As these low numbers suggest, one of the major limitations of renewable energy has to do with scale, whether we see this as a limitation in renewable energy itself, or remind ourselves that the expectations that fossil fuels have helped establish are unrealistic and unsustainable.

University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has provided detailed calculations about many of the issues of energy scale in his blog, “Do the Math.” With the numbers adding up, we are no longer able to wave the magic wand of our faith in our own ingenuity and declare the solar future would be here, but for those who refuse to give in the funding it is due. Consider a few representative examples: most of us have, for instance, heard at some point the sort of figure telling us that enough sun strikes the Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire world for a year. But this only sounds good if you don’t perform any follow-up calculations. As Murphy puts it,

As reassuring as this picture is, the photovoltaic area [required] represents more than all the paved area in the world. This troubles me. I’ve criss-crossed the country many times now, and believe me, there is a lot of pavement. The paved infrastructure reflects a tremendous investment that took decades to build. And we’re talking about asphalt and concrete here: not high-tech semiconductor. I truly have a hard time grasping the scale such a photovoltaic deployment would represent. And I’m not even addressing storage here.” [iii]

In another post,[iv] Murphy calculates that a battery capable of storing this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown. If you count only the lead that we’ve actually discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project. The number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in the research phase. The same story holds true for just about all the sources that even well-informed people assume are ready to replace fossil fuels, and which pundits will rattle off in an impressively long list with impressive sounding numbers of kilowatt hours produced. Add them all up–even increase the efficiency to unanticipated levels and assume a limitless budget–and you will naturally have some big-sounding numbers; but then compare them to our current energy appetite, and you quickly see that we still run out of space, vital minerals and other raw materials, and in the meantime would probably have strip-mined a great deal of precious farmland, changed the earth’s wind patterns, and have affected the weather or other ecosystems in ways not yet imagined.

But the most significant limitation of fossil fuel’s alleged clean, green replacements has to do with the laws of physics and the way energy, itself, works. A brief review of the way energy does what we want it to do will also help us see why it takes so many solar panels or wind turbines to do the work that a pickup truck full of coal or a small tank of crude oil can currently accomplish without breaking a sweat. When someone tells us of the fantastic amounts of solar radiation that beats down on the Earth each day, we are being given a meaningless fact. Energy doesn’t do work; only concentrated energy does work, and only while it is going from its concentrated state to a diffuse state—sort of like when you let go of a balloon and it flies around the room until its pressurized (or concentrated) air has joined the remaining more diffuse air in the room.

When we build wind turbines and solar panels, or grow plants that can be used for biofuels, we are “manually” concentrating the diffuse energy of the sun or in the wind—a task, not incidentally, that requires a good deal of energy. The reason why these efforts, as impressive as they are, pale in relationship to fossil fuels has to do simply with the fact that we are attempting to do by way of a some clever engineering and manufacturing (and a considerable amount of energy) what the geology of the Earth did for free, but, of course, over a period of half a billion years with the immense pressures of the planet’s shifting tectonic plates or a hundred million years of sedimentation helping us out. The “normal” society all of us have grown up with is a product of this one-time burst of a pre-concentrated, ready-to-burn fuel source. It has provided us with countless wonders; but used without limits, it is threatening all life as we know it.

Myth 4: The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy

“The basic economic resource – the means of production – is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge.” -Peter Drucker

“The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. . . . Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.” -Mark Zuckerberg

A “low energy knowledge economy,” when promised by powerful people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, may still our fears about our current ecological trajectory. At a gut level this vision of the future may match the direct experience of many middle-class American liberals. Your father worked in a smelting factory; you spend your day behind a laptop computer, which can, in fact, be run on a very small amount of electricity. Your carbon footprint must be lower, right? Companies like Apple and Microsoft round out this hopeful fantasy with their clever and inspiring advertisements featuring children in Africa or China joining this global knowledge economy as they crowd cheerfully around a computer in some picturesque straw-hut school room.

But there’s a big problem with this picture. This global economy may seem like it needs little more than an army of creative innovators and entrepreneurs tapping blithely on laptop computers at the local Starbucks. But the real global economy still requires a growing fleet of container ships—and, of course, all the iron and steel used to build them, all the excavators used to mine it, all the asphalt needed to pave more of the world. It needs a bigger and bigger fleet of UPS trucks and Fed Ex airplanes filling the skies with more and more carbon dioxide, it needs more paper, more plastic, more nickel, copper, and lead. It requires food, bottled water, and of course lots and lots of coffee. And more oil, coal, and natural gas. As Juliet Schor reports, each American consumer requires “132,000 pounds of oil, sand, grain, iron ore, coal and wood” to maintain our current lifestyle each year. That adds up to “an eye-popping 362 pounds a day.”[v] And the gleeful African kids that Apple asks us to imagine joining the global economy? They are far more likely to slave away in a gold mine or sift through junk hauled across the Atlantic looking for recyclable materials, than they are to be device-sporting global entrepreneurs. The Microsoft ads are designed for us, not them. Meanwhile, the numbers Schor reports are not going down in the age of “the global knowledge economy,” a term which should be consigned to history’s dustbin of misleading marketing slogans.

The “dematerialized labor” that accounts for the daily toil of the American middle class is, in fact, the clerical, management and promotional sector of an industrial machine that is still as energy-intensive and material-based as it ever was. Only now, much of the sooty and smelly part has been off-shored to places far, far away from the people who talk hopefully about a coming global knowledge economy. We like to pretend that the rest of the world can live like us, and we have certainly done our best to advertise, loan, seduce, and threaten people across the world to adopt our style, our values, and our wants. But someone still has to do the smelting, the welding, the sorting, and run the ceaseless production lines. And, moreover, if everyone lived like we do, took our vacations, drove our cars, ate our food, lived in our houses, filled them with oversized TVs and the endless array of throwaway gadgetry, the world would use four times as much energy and emit nearly four times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. If even half the world’s population were to consume like we do, we would have long since barreled by the ecological point of no-return.

Economists speak reverently of a decoupling between economic growth and carbon emissions, but this decoupling is occurring at a far slower rate than the economy is growing. There has never been any global economic growth that is not also accompanied by increased energy use and carbon emissions. The only yearly decreases in emissions ever recorded have come during massive recessions.

Myth 5: We can Reverse Global Warming Without Changing our Current Lifestyles

“Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. . . . [It] would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth” –Paul Krugman

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.[vi]

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii] But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything. Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live. Both choices are “doing something.” Either you will emit far more CO2 than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level. Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity. Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it. As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.” We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefitted.

Overshoot Awareness: The Pros and Cons

I want to discuss the pros and cons of broad public awareness of our overshoot predicament.

Disadvantages of Overshoot Awareness

Sooner Economic Contraction

Today’s global economy is a massive bubble waiting to pop.

Bubbles are created when many people believe that the price of an asset will go up and use debt to purchase the asset. This creates a self-fulfilling positive feedback loop as purchases bid up the price which increases collateral for more debt to fund more purchases.

Assets inflated by a bubble do not generate sufficient wealth to justify their price. Bubbles are accidents waiting to happen because an unpredictable shift in belief towards realism or pessimism will cause a collapse in price as the market unwinds its debt leverage, usually oscillating below fair value and damaging innocent bystanders in the process.

Bubbles have been common throughout history but today’s bubble differs in that instead of one asset class such as dot-com or tulip mania, all asset classes are inflated and its size relative to GDP, and especially future GDP, is unprecedented.

A few examples:

1) The quantity of government debt and other obligations exceeds the servicing ability of future taxpayers, doubly so when interest rates rise in response to the risk of default. Government economic models assume more growth than is physically possible with depleting fossil energy. This means all currencies are over-valued. Currencies have retained their value because most people still believe what their governments tell them.

2) The quantity of corporate and private debt exceeds the servicing ability of realistic future income. This bubble has not yet popped because governments have held interest rates at near zero for 8 years. When interest rates start to rise, as they must when default risks become impossible to deny, this house of cards will collapse in defaults.

3) Stock prices have been inflated by cheap debt and the majority’s belief in infinite growth. Companies have used debt to buy back stocks to falsely improve their appearance to investors. Speculators have used debt to profit from stocks. Central banks have used debt to manipulate stock prices up to create the facade of economic well-being. A rational analysis of stock prices relative to future earnings, especially in light of declining net energy, and an eventual increase in interest rates, would show that stocks are a massive bubble waiting to pop.

4) Real estate is over priced. In the long run the average price of a home must equal the average income’s ability to obtain and service a mortgage. Incomes are falling and will continue to fall as energy depletes. When interest rates rise, many mortgages will become unaffordable and real estate prices will drop. Furthermore, the availability of mortgages, which are needed to support real estate prices, is dependent on a financial system that can create generous credit, which in turn is dependent on reasonable economic growth, which is not possible with declining energy.

Central banks have done a surprisingly good job over the last 8 years of not permitting the bubbles to collapse. Their ability to continue supporting the bubbles is highly dependent on public sentiment. If the majority loses faith in the central bank’s ability to stimulate growth then it is game over and the economy will experience a large correction.

A disadvantage of overshoot awareness is that it would trigger an economic correction sooner than letting the random vagaries of belief take their course, or letting mathematics and physics force the correction.

The larger a bubble gets the more pain it causes when popped because its deflation usually swings below the mean on the way to reality, and more innocent bystanders get hurt.

It’s best to avoid a bubble in the first place, and although we’re well past that point, the sooner we remove the bandage the better off we’ll be in the long run.

Put more succinctly, there is no free lunch.

Hoarding and Shortages

We live in a very efficient world. Companies use just-in-time delivery to minimize inventory and waste. Citizens no longer have root cellars or put up preserves for winter consumption because grocery stores are so abundant and convenient. Grocery stores have about 3 days stock on hand and depend on a complex network of credit, energy, and technology to operate.

Resilience to shocks is improved by building buffers and redundancies. A probable outcome of broad overshoot awareness would be buffer building induced shortages of important staple goods.

This risk could be mitigated by rationing policies as were used during World War II.

Mental Health Problems

Acknowledging overshoot forces one to question and overturn several hundred years of growth based culture, religion, education, and deeply held beliefs by the majority. The adjustment can be traumatic.

To succeed in today’s society you must contribute to overshoot. An aware person knows they can be happy with less consumption, but choosing a frugal lifestyle often makes you a failure in the eyes of an unaware majority.

There is no “happy” solution to overshoot. The future will be painful for most. The best possible outcome is a lot of hard work to make the future less bad. It is difficult to be motivated with this awareness.

For these reasons a common outcome of overshoot awareness is depression.

Mental health problems perhaps could be minimized if overshoot awareness was accompanied by an understanding that overshoot is a natural outcome of abundant non-renewable energy and evolved human behavior. Perhaps not. A renewed belief in religion is a more likely outcome.

Having the majority and their leaders aware and working together to prepare for a low energy world, rather than individuals working in isolation, offers the best chance of minimizing mental health problems. But this outcome would require the majority to override their inherited denial of reality which makes it improbable.

Relationship Damage

Becoming aware of overshoot before friends and family become aware can damage relationships. The aware person wants to educate and warn those closest to them. Those not aware usually do not want to hear the message because most humans have an evolved tendency to deny reality. This stress can damage families and friendships.

Advantages of Overshoot Awareness

Fewer Despots and Wars

As energy depletes and the climate worsens, incomes, wealth, and abundance will decline. Eventually there will be life threatening shortages of food and other necessities.

Tribes evolved to survive in times of scarcity by fighting other tribes for resources. The most united tribes with the most warriors willing to sacrifice their lives often had the best chance of winning and surviving. This in part explains the evolutionary success of religions.

To fight effectively requires a well-defined enemy. There is thus a natural tendency to blame other groups for hardship.

In the absence of understanding what caused scarcity, the majority will support despots that blame others, and these despots will start wars.

Wars in the past often improved the lives of the winners because the most important resource was land.

Wars in the future will make things worse for both the winners and the losers because the most important resource is energy. Modern wars consume large amounts of energy and will accelerate the depletion of the resource that is being fought over, leaving less energy for everyone when the war ends. This is sometimes referred to as a resource depletion death spiral.

It is of course possible that a despot will decide to eliminate the energy-consuming population of its enemy with nuclear weapons. This scenario will also make everything worse for both the winners and the losers, for obvious reasons.

Humans would therefore be wise to avoid future wars. Awareness that overshoot is causing scarcity, that no one is to blame, and that war will make things worse, is the only reasonable path to avoiding future despots and wars.

It would be much wiser to use the remaining surplus energy to proactively reduce our population, and to create infrastructure required to survive in a low energy world.

But again, as mentioned above, we first need to break through our evolved denial of reality.

More Acceptance and Cooperation

Awareness of the underlying overshoot related causes of problems experienced by individuals would increase the acceptance and cooperation necessary to make a bad situation better.

Most viable mitigation strategies will require broad societal cooperation. These strategies include rationing of scarce resources, proactively shifting economic activity from one sector to another, progressive taxation and wealth redistribution, and generally more government involvement in all aspects of life.

More Preparedness

Although per capita energy is in decline, we still have a considerable amount of surplus energy available to do useful work. The longer we wait the less surplus energy will be available to help us prepare for a low energy world.

Broad awareness of overshoot would accelerate our preparedness for the inevitable, and reduce future pain.

Positive Behavior Changes

Although there is no “happy” solution to overshoot, a broad awareness and voluntary shift in behavior would help. For example, a lower birthrate, reduced luxury consumption, less travel, and more care of the commons would all help.

Avoiding a Chaotic and Dangerous Crash

All of the above advantages to overshoot awareness fall under the umbrella of replacing a chaotic and dangerous crash with a more orderly and planned contraction.

Many of the things that made life pleasant over the last century will be at risk in a chaotic crash. These include democracy, law and order, health care, social safety nets, peaceful trade, environmental protection, and functioning electricity, water, sewer, and communication grids.

We would be wise to preemptively release the pressures that threaten a chaotic crash.

Conclusions

On balance I think the advantages of overshoot awareness outweigh the disadvantages.

A society with its majority understanding overshoot, what caused it, and that no one is to blame, would help make the future less bad.

Unfortunately our evolved denial of reality is a powerful impediment to awareness.

I fear the majority will never understand what is going on.

I wrote more on this issue here.

Denial and Depression: An Informal Survey and Analysis

I belong to a group that discusses human overshoot.

I recently conducted an informal survey of members to see if anything could be learned from the relationship between denial of reality and depression.

I present here a summary of the survey and my analysis.

The survey consisted of 6 statements and participants were asked to check each statement they agreed with:

  1. Humans are in overshoot.
  2. There is no “happy” solution to overshoot.
  3. There is no life after death.
  4. I had above average depression in youth.
  5. I had above average depression before learning of overshoot.
  6. I had above average depression after learning of overshoot.

The first 3 statements were used to estimate the level of denial of reality as follows:

  • If someone disagrees with each of statements 1-3 then they fully deny reality.
  • If someone agrees with each of statements 1-3 then they do not deny reality.
  • If someone agrees with 1 or 2 of the first 3 statements then they partially deny reality.

An analysis of the data showed:

  • 3% of members deny reality.
  • 42% of members partially deny reality.
  • 55% of members do not deny reality.
  • About 95% of members believe that humans are in overshoot and that no happy solution is possible.
  • 55% of members are currently depressed.
  • 15% of members have been depressed throughout life.
  • 33% of members were depressed before believing in overshoot.
  • 27% of members were not depressed until they believed in overshoot.
  • 36% of members are not and have never been depressed, and 50% of these believe in life after death.

To put this data into context:

  • Google says that 8-10% of all citizens are depressed.
  • My observations suggest at least 99% of all citizens are partially or fully in denial.

I drew the following conclusions from this informal survey:

  • Being depressed significantly increases your chance of accepting reality.
  • Accepting reality significantly increases your chance of being depressed.
  • You can significantly reduce your chance of being depressed by believing in life after death.
  • To maximize your chance of happiness you should fully deny reality.

A larger sample size, more and better designed questions, and a better survey method would be required to draw definitive conclusions, but I see evidence here that supports Varki’s theory.

On the Origin of Life

Here are a few fabulous talks on the latest thinking about the origin of life.

By Eric Smith : Inevitable Life? (2007)

 

By Eric Smith: New Theories on the Origin of Life (2015)

 

By Michael Russell and Bill Martin: Origin of Life Animation (2010)

 

By Nick Lane: The Origins of Complex Life (2009)

 

By Nick Lane: Is Complex Life a Freak Accident? (2012)

By Nick Lane: Why is Life the Way it Is? (2015)

 

By Nick Lane: Matter and Energy at the Origins of Life (2016)

 

By Michael Russell: Origin of Life Through Convection and Serpentinization (2013)

 

By Michael Russell: On Life (2012)

 

By Sean Carroll: What is the purpose of life? (2016)

 

By Nick Lane: Why is life the way it is? (2017)

 

By Nick Lane: How Energy Flow Shapes The Evolution of Life (2018)

book review: The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

Nick Lane has long been one of my favorite science writers, setting aside Varki of course who will always have a special place in my heart.

Nick Lane’s last book “Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution” discussed the 10 most important inventions of evolution: the origin of life, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness, and death. I read the book 4 times, was enthralled each time, and no doubt will read it again.

An earlier book by Nick Lane, “Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World” discussed the amazing transformation of our planet by photosynthesis. After reading this book I look at grass with different eyes. And I love to tell the story of oxygen to any soul who will listen.

In his latest book “The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life” Lane has outdone himself.

The book is sweeping in scope, tackles the most cosmic question, as well as some important earthly questions, is beautifully written, and reads like a page turning mystery thriller.

There is so much here, where to begin?

Lane presents the latest science on the origin of life and makes a compelling case that prokaryotic (simple single cell) life is probably common throughout the universe because all that is required is rock, water, CO2 and energy, all of which are found within alkaline hydrothermal vents on geologically active planets, of which there are 40 billion in our galaxy alone, and probably a similar number in each of the other 100 billion galaxies.

Life emerges as a gradual and predictable transition from geochemistry to biochemistry. Life is not some spiritual mystery, but rather a predictable outcome of the fact that the universe abhors an energy gradient, and life is its best mechanism for degrading energy.

This theory elegantly explains why LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all life) and all life that followed is chemiosmotic meaning that it powers itself with a strange highly unintuitive mechanism that pumps protons across a membrane.

The human body, for example, pumps a staggering 10 to the 21st power protons per second of life.

If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest.

Lane then turns his attention to the origin of complex life: the eukaryotic cell. All of the multicellular life on earth that normally interests us such as plants, animals, fungi, and hot girls or guys, have a common eukaryote ancestor, and it appears this ancestor emerged only once on earth about 2 billion years after the emergence of simple life. Lane considers this the black hole of biology. A vital but rarely acknowledged singularity that requires explanation.

Lane presents a theory to explain the emergence of the eukaryote and shows that unlike simple life which is probable and predictable, complex life is improbable and unpredictable. It depended on a rare endosymbiosis (merging) of prokaryotes (simple cells) somewhat analogous to a freak accident. The resulting LECA (Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor), having 2 genomes that needed to cooperate and evolve in harmony, was probably fragile, sickly, and vulnerable to extinction which forced it to evolve many unusual characteristics common to complex life such as the nucleus, sex, two sexes, programmed cell death, germline-soma distinction, and trade-offs between fitness and fertility, adaptability and disease, and ageing and death.

As the endosymbiont (cell within the cell) evolved into mitochondria (the energy powerhouses), eukaryotes were able to break through the energy per gene barrier that constrained the morphological complexity of bacteria and archaea for 2 billion years. Suddenly there was enough energy to power the evolution of complex structure, multi-cellular life, nail salons, and the iPhone.

How lucky that our minds, the most improbable biological machines in the universe, are now a conduit for this restless flow of energy, that we can think about why life is the way it is.

This theory will be particularly satisfying to students of human overshoot who understand that abundant non-renewable energy is the main reason for the size and complexity of today’s human civilization.

The universe, life, and complexity are all about energy.

I am a fan and student of Varki’s theory that human success is the result of a rare simultaneous mutation for denial of reality and an extended theory of mind.

Combining Nick Lane’s theory with Ajit Varki’s theory, and an understanding of our place on the overshoot curve, leads one to an amazing and almost mystical conclusion.

Intelligent life with an extended theory of mind is the result of a rare and unpredictable double mutation, layered on the emergence of complex cells, another rare and unpredictable accident. Intelligent life in the universe is therefore rare and will probably exist for only a short time before its intelligence fueled overshoot, and denial thereof, causes it to go extinct.

The fact that we are alive to witness and understand a very rare peak of intelligent life in the universe is cause for genuine awe.

We should savor it while it lasts.

Here is Nick Lane talking about some of the ideas in his book. I much preferred the book because the subject is too deep to be covered in a 30 minute talk but it’s a taste if you don’t have time for the full meal.

Here is an excerpt from the book’s epilogue.

All life on earth is chemiosmotic, depending on proton gradients across membranes to drive carbon and energy metabolism. We have explored the possible origins and consequences of this peculiar trait. We’ve seen that living requires a continuous driving force, an unceasing chemical reaction that produces reactive intermediates, including molecules like ATP, as by-products. Such molecules drive the energy-demanding reactions that make up cells. This flux of carbon and energy must have been even greater at the origins of life, before the evolution of biological catalysts, which constrained the flow of metabolism within narrow channels. Very few natural environments meet the requirements for life – a continuous, high flux of carbon and usable energy across mineral catalysts, constrained in a naturally microcompartmentalised system, capable of concentrating products and venting waste. While there may be other environments that meet these criteria, alkaline hydrothermal vents most certainly do, and such vents are likely to be common on wet rocky planets across the universe. The shopping list for life in these vents is just rock (olivine), water and CO2, three of the most ubiquitous substances in the universe. Suitable conditions for the origin of life might be present, right now, on some 40 billion planets in the Milky Way alone.

Alkaline hydrothermal vents come with both a problem and a solution: they are rich in H2, but this gas does not react readily with CO2. We have seen that natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting mineral barriers could theoretically drive the formation of organics, and ultimately the emergence of cells, within the pores of the vents. If so, life depended from the very beginning on proton gradients (and iron–sulphur minerals) to break down the kinetic barriers to the reaction of H2 and CO2. To grow on natural proton gradients, these early cells required leaky membranes, capable of retaining the molecules needed for life without cutting themselves off from the energising flux of protons. That, in turn, precluded their escape from the vents, except through the strait gates of a strict succession of events (requiring an antiporter), which enabled the coevolution of active ion pumps and modern phospholipid membranes. Only then could cells leave the vents, and colonise the oceans and rocks of the early earth. We saw that this strict succession of events could explain the paradoxical properties of LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of life, as well as the deep divergence of bacteria and archaea. Not least, these strict requirements can explain why all life on earth is chemiosmotic – why this strange trait is as universal as the genetic code itself.

This scenario – an environment that is common in cosmic terms, but with a strict set of constraints governing outcomes – makes it likely that life elsewhere in the universe will also be chemiosmotic, and so will face parallel opportunities and constraints. Chemiosmotic coupling gives life unlimited metabolic versatility, allowing cells to ‘eat’ and ‘breathe’ practically anything. Just as genes can be passed around by lateral gene transfer, because the genetic code is universal, so too the toolkit for metabolic adaptation to very diverse environments can be passed around, as all cells use a common operating system. I would be amazed if we did not find bacteria right across the universe, including our own solar system, all working in much the same way, powered by redox chemistry and proton gradients across membranes. It’s predictable from first principles.

But if that’s true, then complex life elsewhere in the universe will face exactly the same constraints as eukaryotes on earth – aliens should have mitochondria too. We’ve seen that all eukaryotes share a common ancestor which arose just once, through a rare endosymbiosis between prokaryotes. We know of two such endosymbioses between bacteria (Figure 25) – three, if we include Parakaryon myojinensis – so we know that it is possible for bacteria to get inside bacteria without phagocytosis. Presumably there must have been thousands, perhaps millions, of cases over 4 billion years of evolution. It’s a bottleneck, but not a stringent one. In each case, we would expect to see gene loss from the endosymbionts, and a tendency to greater size and genomic complexity in the host cell – exactly what we do see in Parakaryon myojinensis. But we’d also expect intimate conflict between the host and the endosymbiont – this is the second part of the bottleneck, a double whammy that makes the evolution of complex life genuinely difficult. We saw that the first eukaryotes most likely evolved quickly in small populations; the very fact that the common ancestor of eukaryotes shares so many traits, none of which are found in bacteria, implies a small, unstable, sexual population. If Parakaryon myojinensis is recapitulating eukaryotic evolution, as I suspect, its extremely low population density (just one specimen in 15 years of hunting) is predictable. Its most likely fate is extinction. Perhaps it will die because it has not successfully excluded all its ribosomes from its nuclear compartment, or because it has not yet ‘invented’ sex. Or perhaps, chance in a million, it will succeed, and seed a second coming of eukaryotes on earth.

I think we can reasonably conclude that complex life will be rare in the universe – there is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other form of complex life. It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity. I can’t put a statistical probability on that. The existence of Parakaryon myojinensis might be encouraging for some – multiple origins of complexity on earth means that complex life might be more common elsewhere in the universe. Maybe. What I would argue with more certainty is that, for energetic reasons, the evolution of complex life requires an endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes, and that is a rare random event, disturbingly close to a freak accident, made all the more difficult by the ensuing intimate conflict between cells. After that, we are back to standard natural selection. We’ve seen that many properties shared by eukaryotes, from the nucleus to sex, are predictable from first principles. We can go much further. The evolution of two sexes, the germline–soma distinction, programmed cell death, mosaic mitochondria, and the trade-offs between aerobic fitness and fertility, adaptability and disease, ageing and death, all these traits emerge, predictably, from the starting point that is a cell within a cell. Would it all happen over again? I think that much of it would. Incorporating energy into evolution is long overdue, and begins to lay a more predictive basis to natural selection.

Energy is far less forgiving than genes. Look around you. This wonderful world reflects the power of mutations and recombination, genetic change – the basis for natural selection. You share some of your genes with the tree through the window, but you and that tree parted company very early in eukaryotic evolution, 1.5 billion years ago, each following a different course permitted by different genes, the product of mutations, recombination, and natural selection. You run around, and I hope still climb trees occasionally; they bend gently in the breeze and convert the air into more trees, the magic trick to end them all. All of those differences are written in the genes, genes that derive from your common ancestor but have now mostly diverged beyond recognition. All those changes were permitted, selected, in the long course of evolution. Genes are almost infinitely permissive: anything that can happen will happen.

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 1021 protons per second, every second, without pause. Your mitochondria were passed on from your mother, in her egg cell, her most precious gift, the gift of living that goes back unbroken, unceasing, generation on generation, to the first stirrings of life in hydrothermal vents, 4 billion years ago. Tamper with this reaction at your peril. Cyanide will stem the flow of electrons and protons, and bring your life to an abrupt end. Ageing will do the same, but slowly, gently. Death is the ceasing of electron and proton flux, the settling of membrane potential, the end of that unbroken flame. If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest.

This energy flux is astonishing and unforgiving. Any change over seconds or minutes could bring the whole experiment to an end. Spores can pull it off, descending into metabolic dormancy from which they must feel lucky to emerge. But for the rest of us … we are sustained by the same processes that powered the first living cells. These processes have never changed in a fundamental way; how could they? Life is for the living. Living needs an unceasing flux of energy. It’s hardly surprising that energy flux puts major constraints on the path of evolution, defining what is possible. It’s not surprising that bacteria keep doing what bacteria do, unable to tinker in any serious way with the flame that keeps them growing, dividing, conquering. It’s not surprising that the one accident that did work out, that singular endosymbiosis between prokaryotes, did not tinker with the flame, but ignited it in many copies in each and every eukaryotic cell, finally giving rise to all complex life. It’s not surprising that keeping this flame alive is vital to our physiology and evolution, explaining many quirks of our past and our lives today. How lucky that our minds, the most improbable biological machines in the universe, are now a conduit for this restless flow of energy, that we can think about why life is the way it is. May the proton-motive force be with you!