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Peak Oil, Peak Debt, and the Concentration of Power
Posted by aeberman on September 9, 2011 - 12:06pm
This is a guest post by Charles Eisenstein, an author and faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont.
When theorists approach the peak oil problem from the perspective of finding a substitute that will allow us to maintain our present energy infrastructure, their conclusion is one of despair. There may be many substitutes for oil as a concentrated form of storable energy, but none of them are nearly as good as oil itself. Those invested in the status quo would, quite understandably, like to maintain it, but it is becoming apparent even to the most highly invested that the status quo is doomed; that it can be maintained only temporarily, and at a rapidly accelerating environmental cost. The transition before us is not merely a transition in fuel types. It is also a transition in the whole energy infrastructure, both physical and psychological; a transition away from big power plants, distribution lines, and metered consumers; away from capital-intensive drilling, refining, distribution, and consumer fueling stations. More broadly, it is a transition away from centralization, concentration, and all the social institutions that go along with it.
Both the energy system and the money system are based on accumulation and the concentration of power. Not only our energy infrastructure, but our dominant yet invisible way of thinking about energy, presupposes a centralized system of distribution based on a highly concentrated energy source. Many alternative energy technologies have made little headway, not because they are technologically unfeasible, but because they don't fit into our present physical, financial, and psychological infrastructure.
There is a causal as well as a metaphorical parallel between the concentration of power in oil and in money. A concentrated power source that can be stored allows social and political power to concentrate in the hands of those who control it. It generates very different social dynamics from an energy source that is universally distributed and constantly renewed. For one thing, the profit potential of the latter is intrinsically less. Once you have sold the geothermal pump or the PV array, the buyer is self-sufficient, unlike the electrical power consumer who has to pay the metered rate in perpetuity. Energy dependency and economic dependency are closely linked.
A similar pattern holds in other fields as well. In medicine, for instance, the universal, endogenous medical knowledge of several centuries ago that employed common weeds as medicine has given way to a system in which both knowledge and pharmaceutical medicines have been purified, abstracted, and concentrated in an exclusive domain. There is little profit potential in dandelion or burdock, nor did the village herbalist or country doctor of yesteryear make much money. We might apply the same analysis to the migration of legal power from informal community-based mechanisms of dispute resolution to the centralized, codified, and therefore in a sense concentrated mechanisms of the law. So also for education, entertainment, and news.
In all these realms though, the trend toward increasing concentration is nearing its peak, or has peaked already. The peak manifests in many different ways. In some areas it reflects resource depletion; in others, demand saturation; in others, it is due to technology. For example, thanks in large part to the Internet, a tide of decentralization and disintermediation is erasing the producer/consumer divide in the areas of news and entertainment. That more and more of our time is spent watching "content" produced by amateurs suggests that we are approaching "peak Hollywood," in parallel with peak healthcare, peak pollution, peak advertising, peak fisheries, and peak oil.
It should not be surprising, since the profit motive has been the primary driver towards these peaks, that we should be approaching a peak in the realm of money as well, a peak that we might call "peak debt." The crisis in money is ineluctably related to the crisis in everything else, because the viability of our money system depends on growth: the conversion of nature into goods, and relationships into services. This conversion cannot proceed much farther, due to resource depletion and the inability of society and biosphere to sustain more damage. While one may dispute that economic growth depends on petroleum, it does depend on increasing consumption of something. For decades or centuries, we have maintained growth first by meeting needs, then by creating new needs, then by bringing non-monetized cultures and non-monetized domains of our lives into the money domain. Community, for example, can be stripmined just as coal can: turn the functions of story-telling, dispute resolution, child care, elderly care, recreation, entertainment, into paid services. But in either case, material or social, this process is reaching its limit. We are indeed entering a time of Peak Everything.
The crisis in money is related to the crisis in energy, the environment, and everything else. The difficulty in finding a substitute for oil, for example, is born of economics. Imagine what we could have accomplished if the millions of scientific careers and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been devoted to petroleum and nuclear power over the last fifty years had gone instead into developing "alternative" energy technologies. Imagine if, at the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1960s, we had launched a global scientific effort exceeding that devoted to the space race to create a pollution-free society. It did not happen, and with good reason: there was no money in it (given the kind of money system we have had). Compared to the technologies of Big Energy, there is little profit to be made in the alternatives. The alternatives are not conducive to economic growth, and will never flourish in a money system that compels and depends on growth.
Sunlight, wind, conservation, geothermal energy, and more controversial technologies like cold fusion, Bedini/Bearden devices, and so forth share an important characteristic in common. Their energy source is more or less ubiquitous, so that users needn't be dependent on an ongoing supply of scarce fuel. They are, in an important sense, abundant. This feature puts them at odds with our money system, which depends on the creation and maintenance of scarcity. To profit from something, say energy, it must be scarce: high-tech pharmaceuticals, for example, rather than ubiquitous weeds and folk medicine.
The same is true of information; hence the strenuous efforts of music, book, and film publishers to create artificial scarcity in digital content through copy protections and intellectual property law. They are fighting a losing battle: when the marginal cost of production for any product approaches zero, the natural price point tends toward zero as well. The first copy of Microsoft Word costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but each subsequent copy costs virtually nothing.
Alternative energy sources are similar: the initial cost may (or may not) be high, but once the installation is complete, ongoing costs are extremely low or zero. By returning energy to a non-monetary realm, they actually contribute to economic de-growth. Think about that next time you read economic arguments about how to "stimulate demand" and "reignite economic growth." In the present system, in the absence of growth, unemployment, poverty, and the polarization of wealth intensify. In the present system, economic well-being is incompatible with post-carbon energy technologies.
A cynical observer, looking at the history of the suppression of alternative energy technologies, might conclude the same attempt to create artificial scarcity is happening in energy as it has in digital content. However, there is no need to resort to conspiracy theories to explain it; mere economics will suffice. Let's consider an example.
It is not too difficult to build houses that require almost no external power source for heating and cooling. By using construction materials of large thermal mass, geothermal wells, and passive solar principles, a house could, with sufficient PV (photo voltaic) power, be comfortably independent of the energy grid. Why aren't they being built this way?
One reason is certainly the habits and culture of the building industry, but the main reasons are financial. (1) For starters, future energy savings are generally not fully capitalized in a real estate value appraisal. (2) But even if they were, our interest-based system, with discounting of future cash flows, only motivates the initial investment if it generates savings above the rate of interest. (3) Finally, the existing energy system enjoys a high level of hidden subsidy due to the externalization of its environmental and social costs.
The first point is easy to explain: assuming a 2.5% interest rate, the net present value (NPV) of $1,000 in annual electricity savings is $40,000. Rarely, however, does that modest level of energy efficiency contribute nearly that much to a house's value.
As for the second point, what is more economically rational: to buy a house for $200,000 and pay $2,000 a year for power, or to buy a house for $300,000 and pay $200 a year for power? Assuming your mortgage loan is at 5% interest, it is much more rational to pay $2,000 a year for power, forever and ever. Even if you don't need to borrow, you can earn more than 2% interest on that extra $100,000.
Thirdly, the price of gasoline, oil, electrical power is artificially cheap. The costs of pollution, war, oil spills, nuclear accidents, and so forth are not reflected in the price of a gallon of gasoline or a KWH of electricity. They are offloaded onto society and future generations. For example, because the government will have to pay the costs of any truly catastrophic oil spill or nuclear accident, the companies are operating with free insurance. It is no coincidence that massive risks accompany centralized energy installations. Big Energy comes with big risks, as well as the political power to socialize the costs of those risks. People complain that solar and wind power are only competitive because of subsidies, but conventional energy enjoys far greater subsidies.
These subsidies are not the result of mere political influence. They are built into our money system. Unless and until we have a money system that forces the internalization of costs and eliminates the discounting of future cash flows, Big Energy will always enjoy an advantage. That advantage can be mitigated through moral suasion and various kinds of subsidies, but wouldn't it be better to align the money system with the kind of energy system we would like to see, and indeed the kind of planet we would like to see, so that goodness and profit need not be opposed?
What would a money system like this look like? Perhaps it would model the common feature of alternative energy systems that I have described. Rather than originating at a monopoly source, perhaps it would be universally distributed in its genesis. Rather than being storable in concentrated form, maybe it would require constant regeneration. Rather than requiring payment for its continuing supply (i.e. via interest), maybe it would be generated at no cost.
In fact, money systems bearing some or all of these features have been proposed, and if implemented, they would create conditions far more salubrious than at present for the development of a new energy infrastructure. These systems internalize social and environmental costs, restore the commons, build community, reverse the discounting of future cash flows, are compatible with a steady-state or de-growth economy, eliminate economic rents, and systemically discourage the concentration of wealth.
My book, Sacred Economics, lays out one such system, or rather a synthesis of several of them. The key ideas are not new, however, and are even slowly making inroads into the mainstream dialog as the inescapability of Peak Debt becomes undeniable. A central idea is negative interest (also known as demurrage), which discourages accumulation, allows money to circulate in the absence of growth, and encourages long-term thinking.
Other important pieces of the puzzle include commons-backed currency, local and bioregional currency, mutual credit and P2P banking, gift economics, shifting taxation away from income and onto resource and pollution, and a social dividend. Today, most of these proposals seem very radical, although they are entering the public discourse in covert forms. Interest rates, for example, are nearing zero and look to stay there for the foreseeable future, making investments with very long payback periods more feasible. Some economists, among them Willem Buiter, Greg Mankiw, and Robert Hall, have even dared propose taking rates (namely the Fed Funds Rate) negative.
As old certainties break down, what was once radical becomes common sense. However dogged our denial, the present energy infrastructure is doomed to obsolescence. The same is true of our financial infrastructure; indeed, the two are inextricably linked. They will fail together, yet on the other hand, while they remain, each props up the other. The money system exerts an irresistible pressure to convert everything and anything into money – for example, the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, the Alberta tar sands, the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb waste – and with each successful conversion, the money system gets a brief reprieve. By the same token, any bit of nature that we can protect from exploitation hastens the demise of the money machine.
This is why efforts to reform the energy system must go hand in hand with efforts at financial reform. Neither is prior to the other; each, rather, is a different facet of the same thing. The collapse of each is part of the collapse of an entire mode of civilization, and an entire way of being that underlies it, clearing the way for the emergence of a new, in accordance with universal dynamics of birth, death, and transcendence.
We might call this way of being, this mode of civilization, the "Ascent of Humanity." It was an age of growth, of domination, of taming the wild and expanding the human realm; of becoming the lords and possessors of nature. That age is ending, and a new era of co-creative partnership with nature is beginning, in which we understand that we are interdependent, not separate. The energy system, and money system, of the future must embody this new relationship.
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Interesting article, but a little light on information. I would have preferred an in depth description of one of the monetary systems you think would be in improvement over what we currently have.
Agreed. While the general risk themes are part and parcel of the peak oil 'movement', this came off as almost a teaser for the book. As this is an important subject wrt PO, perhaps a series on this would be appropriate.
That is a good idea. I am interested in hearing more about political and economic systems that would promote a sustainable existence. Often times discussions seem to be focused on the technical side of environmental problems. Such discussions give technical solutions along with moral imperatives of why the solutions should be implemented, but they ignore the realities of our current social, political and economic system. If people are going to change their life style then people will likely need to change more then just the technology they use. I would like to hear discussions about the actual nuts and bolts of how a sustainable society would function.
One may have to read here:
http://complementarycurrency.org/materials.php
along with the path already traveled by Howard Odum and M. King Hubbard (Map of path here http://www.technocracy.org/ may not be to scale and feature pictures of "here be monsters")
These people may be right:
http://mises.org/
but its more of "do this thing like in the past".
Thanks for the links. I've been looking into what they say.
Due to length considerations it is impossible to both state the context of the problem and describe the solution(s) with any thoroughness, and this site is devoted to discussion of energy, not money. I didn't intend it as a teaser though. The book is being published on line (http://www.realitysandwich.com/homepage_sacred_economics) as well as in print, and will be available in its entirety by year's end. If there is sufficient interest though, perhaps I could write a follow-up article.
Imagine... had we believed there were limits to growth and instituted an Agrarian based - low tech, sustainable society.
cf: Medieval Europe
Now we have the potato
cf: Ireland circa 1850
I agree.
Then you get Michele Bachmann touting $2 a gallon gasoline once she gets elected. She proclaims that our $3.50 per gallon gas is too expensive.
"It is not too difficult to build houses that require almost no external power source for heating and cooling. By using construction materials of large thermal mass, geothermal wells, and passive solar principles, a house could, with sufficient PV (photo voltaic) power, be comfortably independent of the energy grid. Why aren't they being built this way?"
Except for passive solar once installed all of these energies - use lots of fossil fuels and non fuel minerals in their manufacture, some in their operation and all in their parts replacement (batteries, control boards, etc.) They are not green and not sustainable.
Hopeful but misleading.
Solar and Wind are not renewable. The energy from solar and from wind is of course renewable but the devices used to capture the energy of the sun and wind is not renewable. Nor are they green or sustainable.
An oak tree is renewable. A horse is renewable. They reproduce themselves. The human-made equipment used to capture solar energy or wind energy is not renewable. There is considerable fossil fuel energy embedded in this equipment. The many components used in devices to capture solar energy, wind energy, tidal energy and biomass energy – aluminum, glass, copper, rare metals, petroleum in many forms to name a few – are fossil fuel dependent.
Wind used by sailing ships and old style “dutch” wind machines is renewable and sustainable.
From: Energy in the Real World with pictures of proof.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html
I'd like to see a dicussion of the energy required during manufacture of these devices (solar, wind, etc.) The article you link asserts so many things that it is not clear to me that the energy of manufacture issue is addressed adequately.
Do they require more energy to manufacture then they will ever produce? Does that manufacturing energy have to come from fossil fuels?
Energy payback for silicon solar panels is roughly two years. Less than one year for thin film solar panels. Afterwards you're looking at decades of output.
I can't give you a payback time for wind turbines, but if it wasn't reasonable they wouldn't be able to produce electricity at $0.05/kWh. The energy input would make them too expensive.
I suspect that there is little in the manufacture of either panels or turbines that can only be done with fossil fuel. Concrete for footings might be the exception.
These days we smelt ores in electric furnaces. We could excavate for ores with electric machinery if we needed to. I doubt any factories run on oil or coal.
The electricity that flows from turbines and panels is identical to the electricity created by burning stuff....
show me the wind turbine that produces power for .05 kwh without government subsidizes.
http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/139
As far as I understand, the energy issue asserted by the article in the sunweber link is not well founded assuming the discussion here is accurate. Manufacture of these devices is not incumbent on the use of fossil fuels, and manufacturing energy is returned within a small fraction of the lifetime of these devices.
Hopefully for renewables this is true, and the sunweber document is unfounded on the issue of energy of manufacture.
Sorry, but the last thread got closed in the middle of the discussion. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8322#comment-836227 ... We can't PM here?
Your last post was:
I can't see why the surface of a turbine does bring the capacity factor up, unless the turbine is higher or is using differents wind speeds. Namely, if you use 3 m/s to 20 m/s wind speeds, your total capacity is likely to be lower and that would bring the capacity factor up. However, you are likely to catch more energy using wind speeds from 3 m/s to 25 m/s, albeit at a lower capacity factor.
The power is also a function of the formula you showed before.
Power = 1/2 m . (1/t) . v^2 = 1/2 (A . v . ρ) v^2
Therefore the power should go exactly on par with the energy produced regarding area modifications.
PPAs are out there for wind-electricity at $0.03/kWh. That price is made possible by the $0.022 PTC. Add them up and you get just over a nickle per kWh and that number includes profit for the wind farm owner.
(Duke just signed a three cent contract in Kansas, IIRC.)
that for a wind site that is generating power 30% of the time?
You are confusing output capacity with hours of production.
Wind farms produce power a lot of hours, on average their output is ~30% (higher offshore) than what they would produce if the wind blew very strong 100% of the time.
Wind farms connected over a moderate distance produce power 85% of the time.
I do not buy the two wind turbines connected at distance being counted as online more. your capital and operating expenses are double.
And your output is doubled.
Consider how wind and storms move across the face of the Earth. One farm may be lulled while another is cranking and a third running a moderate speed. Some time later that relationship will change. Tie them together and things get smoothed out.
You asked to be shown a .05 price. Is .0522 "good enough"?
show me as in where is the link.
This is not the report which I read. The other report was much more detailed and stated $0.03kWh. And a 20 year contract.
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/power_city/2011/05/duke-buys-s...
Here's another one I stumbled across. In Texas for a bit more...
http://www.sustainablebusinessoregon.com/national/2011/08/duke-energys-p...
Prices are going to vary based on availability of wind, cost of transmission, etc. The important thing, IMO, is that Duke is able to construct and operate a windmill and sell that power for around a nickel per kWh. Add 2.2 cents PTC to the <3.5 cents. And remember that profits are included.
Also, resources such as metal ores are, like fossil fuel energy, artificially cheap as the result of hidden subsidies. Part of an ecological economy involves a shift in taxation away from income and onto resources and any use of the commons. It would then probably be cheaper to "mine" landfills and recycle existing metals than to mine new ore and smelt it. If we used it carefully, we could run a civilization on scrap metal for tens of thousands of years I bet.
R. Buckminster Fuller was pretty sure of this as well, claiming that recycling of scrap would be sufficient, since with improving technology, we are able to do much more with less material. On the other hand, some technologies require mining of previously unused elements (rare earths come to mind). Also, I don't wholly agree that recycling scrap is also more energy efficient than minng; some products have such a large mix of elements, it's hard to know what's in them, and the sorting alone comes with a large energy cost.
Sorting metal and recycling -- more expensive than mining and no references at all to your assertions. Should we take this at your word? I mean the entire mode of producing skyscraper steel is unfounded. Sure it is
http://www.nucorbuildingsystems.com/green/green.html
There read something.
Thank you for your suggestion to read something.
No, I don't except you to take me at my word, I expect that if what I say doesn't add up, people will do some research. I think that sorting and recycling is more expensive due, again, to hidden subsidies for mining and resource extraction. For example, the awful environmental costs are internalized. Land is leased to mining companies at very low prices. The energy used for smelting is highly subsidized. And so on.
Huh? I actually work in the metals recycling business, we specialize in non ferrous metals, most of the metals we buy are pretty high grade and presorted by by the people who bring them to us, It is amazing how quickly even semi literate individuals learn to do triage based on price incentive, (btw, some of them come by bicycle), we then do an even better grading and selection process before we send them to our buyers who in turn have even more sophisticated systems for separating special alloys before sending them to the smelters.
To be frank I don't have data on the full cost accounting comparing energy inputs of mining vs. metals recycling but I highly doubt that recycling is more expensive in terms of energy and environmental costs than mining. If someone has such data I'd love see it!
Cheers!
Fred
It seems to me that recycling will get less expensive as the labor component becomes cheaper, too.
We are just coming out the tail end of a period (Greer calls it Abundance Industrialism) in which resources were cheap and labor was expensive. This is going to flip around: labor is going to become super cheap and resources are going to be expensive. Greer calls it Scarcity Industrialism but the term can be misleading. The one thing that will not be scarce, under almost any circumstances, is labor. We are going to have a glut of it from now on as the economy contracts.
When labor is cheap, all sorts of menial jobs become economic, just like these ship breakers, who use practically no fossil fuel aided tools:
Labor is being automated out of some recycling streams. There are already robots who are plucking items from municipal waste conveyor belts.
With the cost of landfills and the residual value of materials discarded we should see sorting plants taking the place of trash dumps and incinerators. The first generation of robots will be somewhat expensive, but prices will fall. They are nothing but digital cameras and computers with an arm and fingers.
Robots can't go out and identify or collect recyclable metal. There will always be a place for some automation but a large part of the metals recycling business will always depend on manual labor.
Perhaps you are thinking of the waste stream from municipal household garbage collection in municipalities where there hasn't yet been a serious educational campaign and incentive program by carrot and stick to promote triage in the home...
Yes, I am talking about municipal waste streams. I believe that it turning out to be cheaper to collect in one waste stream and then sort than to force household/workplace sorting.
At least that is what the City of San Francisco is doing. They are sorting all and sending little or nothing to the landfill.
Watching what happens at our recycling center, there is a certain amount of sorting that has to happen even after people deliver their pre-sorted recyclables. Different types of plastic, different types of metals, etc. With automation might be cheaper to just run one pickup truck and run one sorting belt.
"Always" is a very strong word. If labor weren't so cheap in Bangladesh we might see laser-wielding robots taking those ships apart.
I suspect that within a couple decades the push towards robots will have reversed since humans will be so plentiful and their labor so cheap. For some highly technical tasks robots will probably always be used but I expect their prevalence to decrease over time.
"Robots can't go out and identify or collect recyclable metal. "
Why not? People already have to use a XRF gun.
http://www.environmental-expert.com/products/x-met-versatile-portable-me...
It's a matter of getting the computer in the gun to talk to the computer running the mechanical gripper. And note an old fashioned magnet sorts the magnetic stuff already. so that leaves you with two streams and two guns. one to sort the various nonmagnetic stainlesses and copper alloys into the right bins, and one to sort the plain carbon steel from the magnetic stainless steels.
I think that sorting and recycling is more expensive due, again, to hidden subsidies for mining and resource extraction.
The "money" system is one distortion piled on top of another. Fiat money that can expand and under Austrian defintions, becomes "worth" less each time a new fiat unit is created. The tax code. The ability to 'capture' regulators or use regulators VS your competitors. Things like the legal dumping of chemicals at Love Canal that later became an external cost once its figured out that the past methods were not good enough.
A whole lot of this discussion is no better than trying to figure out how many pinheads go out dancing and eating angelfood cake:-) An attempt to normalize to energy has been modeled - eMergy. (But then you get to spend time trying to figure out the eMergy value of knowledge so the counting of the dance floor can continue)
"Energy payback for silicon solar panels is roughly two years."
already obsolete.
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2011/09/08/rec-unveils-pv-panel-with-...
That's a great piece of info. Thanks.
And there's this from the article...
A Vattenfall study in 1999 found PV had a 50g/kWh footprint. This is a significant cut over a decade. Seems like that 18-22 g/kWh brings solar into the same range as nuclear (lifetime emission).
So from here on out the answer is "One to two years for silicon PV, less than a year for thin film". And its carbon footprint is shrinking.
From the article:
"The report says there is a potential for a further 50 percent reduction in the cost of producing solar electricity."
So that would get it to 1/2 year payback!!??
If we can get there, and come up with plug-in-ready systems, this should really be a turning point for solar.
Thermal mass is pretty green I think. That's why those old houses in southern Italy are so cool in the summer. Thick walls. Plus they last for centuries.
It is true that current solar and wind technology require natural resources to produce and maintain. It will take a while to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, though if there is the political will to do so, it needn't take as long as most people think.
Sailing ships are an amazing technology that I suspect will enjoy a renaissance. But to be clear, I am not anti-technology, though I started out deeply immersed in the writings of Quinn, Zerzan, and Jensen. Nor, however, do I imagine that technology will save us. We have, and have always had, the technology to live beautifully on this planet; it is a matter of how it is applied. Today, most of our enormous efforts to produce and consume don't even serve human happiness.
Charles
Perhaps, but with 7 billion people?
DD
Not forever, no. It's just a guess, but I'd say that real sustainability will come at a population of 1-2 billion. 7 billion is sustainable for many centuries though, if we reduce our global per-capita ecological footprint to that of, say, India circa 1990.
Do you know what cultivated plant species covers the largest area in the United States? Lawn grass.
Aren't you forgetting phosphorus?
Peak phosphorus: Quoted reserves vs. production history
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4624
The first chart in the link you provided looks to me as though it is already stratified into two different production curves, one higher and one lower.. Is this just a coincidence?
The top curve is annual production with its axis on the right. The bottom curve is cumulative production with its axis on the left.
The author asserts that Figure 2 is probably closer to reality since the curve fit is much better. In that case, we are at Peak Phosphorus roughly about now, not in 2033 like the USGS URR suggests is possible.
The author is being a bit theoretical.
So, theoretically, why can't phosphorus be recycled?
Isn't peak phosphorus dead yet?
The latest US geological survey (page 119) has the world phosphorus reserves at 65 billion tonnes. That will last us 369 years at current consumption levels, and we are getting better at using phosphorus, decreasing its leakage and increasing its reuse.
Please note that the 65 billion tonnes isn't all there is. It's just the amount that we have catalogued today, and deemed extractable at a fairly low price. If we need more, we'll pay a little more and go out and find more (and use it better and recycle better).
Forget about PP!
If their estimate is anything like their coal estimate, I wouldn't trust their numbers. After years of study, generally I don't trust their numbers.
Sunweb, you say:
Right...but the machines that use the wind are not renewable/sustainable per se. No wood. etc. and it doesn't matter what the wind does or can do.
Look, I'm really into sustainability but I am reaching the point where I am fed up with the term. I would argue that it is time to aim for "Pretty Damn Good." By PDG I mean, how about systems and structures that will last, without further input, say, 150 years. Further, I don't care if they/it were energy sinks because we waste energy like it's going out of style (a pun). The fact that these things that last are energy sinks is a straw man. They are, in fact, energy banks.
The fact that there is not one, zero, nada culture extant today that comes to us unchanged from the past (and I'm thinking of at least a thousand years) indicates that beating our heads on the "sustainability anvil" is a waste of time. Let's aim for PDG.
Todd
150 years? That's a mere drop in the ocean of time.
Pretty Damned Bad!!!!
Ok Phil,
"That's a mere drop in the ocean of time. Pretty Damned Bad!!!!"
What time frame do you want? Name it and tell me how you are going to pull it off with the exception that we all go back to hunter/gatherers. If you know anything about H/Gs you must know that there are specific conditions that make it possible. I'm not being snarky here. Homo sapiens are a mere drop in the ocean of time.
Todd
Todd,
I believe you are correct as far as you go, but I would postulate that whether we humans live in an "energy sustainable" way is largely irrelevant, at least as the term is used here. If you think about it, logically, our purpose on earth must be to increase entropy. Since we cannot exist without increasing entropy, if the actual enterprise of increasing enterprise is not our purpose, then at least the increase in entropy must be a necessary support function for whatever our true purpose might be. Therefore, we are logically and morally free to consume entirely whatever energy source we choose, without regard to its renewable characteristics. The only constraints we must observe are those which which might affect human sustainability in the long term.
Cosmic wisdom. You guys do not get it. No one cares about the Cosmos or entropy. We care about fixing the broken corporate model that is failing as we speak. The Cosmo stuff is not germane.
I'm reminded of that saying about the difference between the UK and US. The English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time.
We're a young country. A hundred years is a long time for us. But as Mike Hearn and others have pointed out, it was common for past societies to think in the long term. (Mike Hearn is now active in Bitcoin, BTW.)
So true!
Perhaps I'm influenced by the view from my window of Worcester Cathedral, whose construction began in 1084.
About forty years ago I lived in Denmark. A forest used for both recreation and timber lay a couple of blocks away, and I often walked in it.
Within the forest were signs indicating when trees, or groups of trees were planted. Several stands of large beech and oak trees had dates in the 18th century. Occasionally, one of these trees would be felled.
Let's aim for PDG.
PDG would be a major step forward and should buy us some breathing room while we invent something Pretty Damn Better.
I'd even be satisfied with just a few more ideas like this...
http://challenge.bfi.org/2011Semi_Finalist_ThePortableLightProject
To be clear, what I'm really fed up with, is what currently passes for 'American culture'
Who the hell do we think we're kidding?!
Someone needs to tell the American people that the party is over and their Empire is butt naked!
These people are pretty close to unchanged for 60,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_people
Although they do use scavenged metal for tools.
Let's hope they survive another 60,000
I love ideas like the Portable Light Project. I would like to underscore, however, that such ideas are inimical to economic growth. They make people in what would otherwise be "emerging markets" less vulnerable, not more, to the global commodity economy.
The conservatives are right about one thing: ultimately, it WILL cost jobs to, say, prohibit drilling in the ANWR. More generally, any movement that reduces our consumption (of monetized goods and services) will hurt economic growth and job growth. Ultimately, part of the transition has to be a transition in the nature of work, and in the way that money flows in the economy. Today it only goes (to overgeneralize a bit) to those who produce salable goods and services.
It is indeed a paradox that at every point in the last centuries of the development of labor-saving technology, we have always chosen to consume more rather than to work less. That choice is in fact dictated by our money system; specifically, by the nature of money that originates as interest-bearing debt.
Over here in Sweden were a significnat part of these efficiency gains traded for long vacations and generous times for both parents to take care of their infant children. I am sure this has been very good for our well being.
I like to distribute d.lights and I do recognize that there is a lot less employment in this solution for lighting then the concrete poles, copper wire, breaker boxes that would solve the problem.
But that doesn't mean that the people don't buy something else, from personal service from their neighbors, to some education. I don't remember seeing any studies to your economic point
from the 80's and 90's investments by USAID in Africa to deploy cellular networks and skip copper landlines.
Typically, these kinds of things are distributed in economies that are not highly monetized. Therefore, the standard economic arguments that you are implicitly applying here (e.g. the broken window fallacy) do not apply. It doesn't free up money to be spent elsewhere; it makes their economy less dependent on money altogether.
I don't know of any studies either regarding your second point. I would like to observe, however, that when USAID or the World Bank measures the success of a project, jobs created and GDP generated count as pluses. But what is actually happening is that subsistence agriculture and traditional non-monetized systems of reciprocity and exchange are being dismantled, cultures atomized, and people shunted into the global money system.
The conservatives are right about one thing: ultimately, it WILL cost jobs to, say, prohibit drilling in the ANWR
Wasn't the purpose of ANWR to provide energy to the military?
Is 'being a soldier' now nothing more than "a job" at this time?
we have always chosen to consume more rather than to work less. That choice is in fact dictated by our money system; specifically, by the nature of money that originates as interest-bearing debt.
Could you elaborate on that? It doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that the choice to consume more is dictated more by a desire for a better life combined with confusion about how to achieve it (i.e., consuming more goods versus better services and more leisure).
Except for passive solar once installed all of these energies - use lots of fossil fuels and non fuel minerals in their manufacture, some in their operation and all in their parts replacement (batteries, control boards, etc.) They are not green and not sustainable.
Interesting claim.
Can you prove it?
Because the PassiveHaus people claim 10% additional "cost" to go from standard to passive. I've seen as high as 25%.
Not sure how you get "lots" or what "lots" means.
So do clarify.
Sunweb
While I agree with your comments concerning the embodied energy contained in PV arrays and wind turbines, I think you will find that there is no difference between these devices and the sailing ships and "dutch" windmills that you state are renewable/sustainable.
Therefore, we should not even try? We should just continue to build houses out of chipboard and brick and composite shingles, with large expanses of glass? (south-facing in the sunbelt, north-facing in Canada)
Look, this pile of *%^$ I live in cost way too much. For about ten or twenty percent of that, I could have a PV array on the roof that would supply almost all my electric needs (during the day). For a bit more, I could have a battery farm for the night. With reasonable feed-in tariffs, I wouldn't need the battery farm. (I live in the sunbelt)
What is unsustainable is exponential growth forever.
If you are truly a "DIYer", then I highly recommend installing your own PV system. Panel prices are really cheap these days such that more than half the cost of a solar system comes from the installer. You can install a ~3KW system for about $15K in parts (panels, inverter, racks, and misc.) If you can do electrical work, it is pretty easy to install a PV system. (Of course do NOT do it if you lack the skills & knowledge!) I self-installed a PV system at my previous house.
The hardest thing about it is dealing with the permits . . . but most permit offices will help you out and tell you what you need. And you can look at the plans of other systems installed in your area and see what they did.
$15k for 3kW is high.
Try less than $6k plus rack, wire and permits.
http://www.sunelec.com/index.php?main_page=pv_systems&id=1234&type=GT
Nice cheap stuff . . . but it is thin-film. If you have a massive amount of area to work with and don't need much power, that would be great. But for a typical residential roof, you are much better off going with silicon IMHO and getting more watts per area.
And you need to add the racks.
Evergreen Solar manufacturers...
"A range of polycrystalline silicon panels/modules with outputs of 180 - 210 watts, using cells manufactured by the company's own low cost silicon wafer method."
Kyocera manufactures...
"A range of polycrystalline panels/modules with outputs upto 210 watts with an efficiency of upto 16%."
Racks are not expensive. Certainly not thousands of dollars, and we started with a $15k price tag for 3kW of panels.
Solar and Wind are not renewable. The energy from solar and from wind is of course renewable but the devices used to capture the energy of the sun and wind is not renewable. Nor are they green or sustainable.
Many of the materials used to make wind and solar equipment are reusable.
With a little effort we can probably figure out how to make the rest of out either highly abundant (silicon, carbon) materials or other sustainable materials (plant oil for lubrication).
There is no need for embedded fossil fuel in either wind or solar once we build enough to power the factors that make the first generation. (We've already done that.)
There is nothing in the manufacture of turbines or panels which cannot be done with electricity. After the first generation (which does have a fossil fuel input) we build new equipment with electricity gleaned from wind and solar already on line.
even the sailing ships had steel and iron parts. as well they carried coal to cook with.
There was a time when the energy payback argument against PV held a lot of water. That time has passed. The energy payback for traditional silicon modules has fallen into the 2-3 year range. For newer thin film technologies, energy payback is best measured in months, not years.
Saying that renewable energy products require fossil fuel energy is redundant: you're simply pointing out the fact that our current energy mixture is dominated by fossil fuels. That's why we're manufacturing renewable energy products in the first place. We're trying to change that.
Things like aluminum and copper are smelted with electric furnaces. That electricity could come from renewable resources. Most of the mass of a PV module is in the glass, which is made from Si02 -- sand. It may not be "renewable", but it makes up 25% of the crust and it's infinitely recyclable. Aluminum and copper can also be recycled at the end of the module life cycle. The decades of no-cost energy that comes out of the module leaves more than enough net energy to do this.
Pointing out that things like insulation for wire and plastic components are made from fossil hydrocarbons misses two points: First, that there are non-fossil alternatives to making these materials, and secondly, that non-fuel uses of petroleum are a tiny fraction of oil consumption. The overwhelming majority of oil burned to release heat. If we used oil exclusively as a raw material for manufacturing, the earth's reserves could stretch into a couple thousand years.
Not to mention that plastic and other hydrocarbons can be reycled. Heck, hydrocarbons can be synthesized from air, water and electricity right now - it's just not competitive price-wise with FF.
Excellent article on this subject. Congratulation. If people want more indepth info, analysis, and suggestions then read his book Sacred Economics
I'm only part way through the (hard copy edition of the) book, and it is excellent.
One of the things I've been (t)wittering on about for a while, how money alienates us from nature and other human beings, is one of the themes covered in this book.
I'd never seen that idea mentioned before, and it's great to see Charles addressing it.
You may not agree with all that he says, but this is intelligent and erudite brain-food.
And kudos to Charles for publishing the book under a Creative Commons licence.
This is a very pertinent topic that I think will get more press as economic problems unfold. The current money system is broken and needs to be amended or replaced. How to accomplish that while retaining an effective automatic feedback system such as that inherent in capitalism is the challenge. I am looking forward to reading Charles' book.
It would help if you guys posted a link to what you're talking about.
With that said, the trailer to the book makes it seem to be a religious tome rather than a scientific work.
But hey, whatever floats your boat as long as we get there somehow (to the point where :money" is no longer de-coupled from the real world).
_______________________
edit: another video here
basic google search here
The concentration of wealth and power was happening long before humanity moved to fossil fuels. For example, the Renaissance was a period where more and more power was consolidated by regional monarchs at the expense of the lords. When talking about concentrated power in medicine, education, entertainment, etc., what we're really talking about is greater specialization made possible by advances in technology.
The contrast between a fossil fuel-powered utility and a solar panel is also a poor example. In both cases, private companies are charging us for a supply of energy - there's still a power relationship in that I must surrender my wealth to a company to get my energy. It's just convention that utilities choose to charge by the KWh and that solar panels are sold in lump sum fees. A solar panel company could charge per KWh if they desired.
Of course, concentration of power did not begin with fossil fuels. They were part of an intensification of a trend that goes back to the beginning of agriculture.
As for your second point, while it is true that a company COULD charge per KWh for solar panels, it doesn't have to, unlike power transmitted from a large power plant. Nor does a metering model lend itself naturally to solar panels. It would be like a car manufacturer selling you a car and then charging you per mile driven.
While it is true that many of the new energy technologies would still require a hardware purchase, once that is made there is no (or less) ongoing dependency. It is no accident that when the World Bank funds energy projects in Third World countries, it prefers big, grid-based projects, and not projects that create energy independence on the village or household level. Only the former allows a positive return on investment.
I think thats becoming a more popular arrangement. Lots of people don't have the capital, but outfits are willing to put the panels on their roof, and quarantee a price per KWh lower then their current utility. I suspect this sort of arrangement will become more and more common, as panels progress beyond the wealthy towards those who couldn't raise the capital themselves.
I expect we're going to see companies emerge who contract for the south-facing rear roofs in new subdivisions. They will install a 100% power-producing roof at the optimal angle for the location. (Rear roofs = no visual 'blight' from the street side.)
The buyer will purchase the house and with it get a life-of-house contract which will maintain the array, give them free electricity, and pay them a monthly fee not unlike what farmers and ranchers get for letting others install wind turbines on their property.
As Marvin Harris used to say, "on average, it's been downhill since the Neolithic."
Actually, both of these are business models being used.
Lots of solar installers are no 'solar services businesses' where they install a system on a residence and own it but they lease it to the homeowner. (The lease payment being proportional to the KWH size of the system.) It makes it so people can get a solar system for zero money down. I wouldn't use that model but it is apparently quite popular these days.
http://solarcity.com/residential/purchase-options.aspx
http://solarcity.com/residential/solar-lease.aspx
And entire business model of Better Place is to sell subsidized EVs and then charge per mile driven. They analogize their business models to cellphones where people buy subsidized smartphones and then pay for minutes.
http://www.betterplace.com/
Again, not a business model I would participate in, but people are trying different things.
the World Bank funds energy projects in Third World countries, it prefers big, grid-based projects, and not projects that create energy independence on the village or household level. Only the former allows a positive return on investment.
Could you elaborate? Why can't selling PV to households generate ROI?
And some do.
http://solarflowenergy.com/
Yes, that's all fine and dandy, but... the elephant in the room that is still being ignored is the fact that as long as the population of humans on a finite planet is allowed, nay, encouraged, to continue growing until it slams head on into the hard wall of natural limits, everything else is moot!
Population growth is slowing, and I think we will reach peak population within 30 years of the time we reach peak oil. Maybe the peaks will even coincide. I think it is likely that, even without major catastrophes, world population will be lower in 2100 than it was in 2000.
This is far from certain. The U.N.'s own projections present three scenarios --low, medium & high, and only the low estimate gives us a 2100 world population below 2000.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300fin...
And even if this somehow comes to pass, this is cold comfort, given that the world is already overpopulated far beyond its sustainable carrying capacity. As so many here have already documented ad nauseum, we are entering a period of post-peak just about everything. The remainder of this century very likely will not be a fun time for most of the non-oligarchs living on the planet.
Funny, I think it's virtually guaranteed that population will be lower by 2100. I think the assumptions the UN report uses are incorrect and thus they get what will, I believe, turn out to be grossly incorrect projections — mostly because they do not factor in the decline of resources well at all, especially oil. I classify their report the same way I classify the sales projections put out by Boeing and Airbus for the coming century: all of them go in the "have not the slightest clue" pile.
The Limits to Growth team showed the various ways population can reach its carrying capacity:
Then they ran their program and discovered that it behaved closest to option d).
This is consistent with other biological scenarios, like bacteria living within a constrained environment with limited food and pollution sinks:
Even doubling the resource availability (either by adding more resource or, through technology, make the existing resource last longer) doesn't help. In fact, it makes the decline rate steeper. (Sound familiar? Hint: tertiary recovery)
Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss) wrote more on this topic here:
Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot: Population, the Elephant in the Room
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2516
Tony put this together back in 2009 to demonstrate how population decline could look given oil's decline:
Now, it's clearly incorrect (we'll likely pass 7.3B before the decline begins given our current growth rate of 80M people per year) but I think it will prove to be a lot closer than the UN projections.
The folks over at CASSE have an image for our future:
Obviously we are not on the "wrong track".
We are simply on the "only" track we ever could have been on.
We are on the tract that was "sold" as "the best". Look at the effectiveness of the propaganda in this thread - The Free Market talk as an example.
There are other tracks one can take.
I display similar charts in my book for how population can approach steady-state. I think we still have a chance for it to be "C" rather than "D" -- a bumpy transition, but not a crash. I think we missed the chance for a smooth transition in the 1960s. Now we have a second chance; if we miss it, then it will be "D". That is why the work of activists is so important.
I think the population will level off and fall even faster than the "low" projection of the U.N., because there are factors that it doesn't consider, for example:
- The awful decline in health caused by eating industrialized food
- The decline in sperm counts and overall fertility, due in part to (1) above, and in part to other kinds of pollution
- A shift toward a more ecological consciousness
As you are probably aware, most industrialized countries now have a birth rate below replacement rate.
As for whether we are above carrying capacity, and how far above, the question depends a lot on how we are living. I contend that without any real sacrifices, we could live at a much much lower footprint just by making changes that add to, and do not detract from, true well-being. Like, no more electronic billboards. Like more sharing of cars and things. Like having gardens instead of lawns. You can grow an amazing amount of food on a quarter-acre lot in the eastern U.S. It is labor intensive, but not energy-intensive. Did you know that when done properly, organic agriculture is 2-3 times more productive (per acre, not per unit labor) than conventional agriculture? (see Rodale Institute for citations) Did you know that in 19th century Chinese peasants supported whole clans of 40 or 50 people on landholdings of just a few acres? (see King's 1911 book, _Farmers of Forty Centuries_).
I agree Charles. The problem is many people in China and India are using more than in the past which would likely offset any cutbacks in other developed countries.
True, although it is also true that a lot of China and India's industrial production goes to the West to feed our consumption. Environmental awareness is growing in these countries too though, and they may go through the industrial phase faster than we did.
I lived most of my 20s in Taiwan. The first time I went, in 1987, the pollution was appalling and there was no hint of environmental consciousness. "Environmental protection" wasn't even in the lexicon. Mounds of plastic bags were everywhere. That was 25 years ago. In that time, the country has surpassed the United States. Once the land of the plastic bag, Taipei, last I heard, had made them illegal, and I am told residents sort out food scraps from their trash, which go to feed the city pigs. Last time I was there I saw organic food stores on nearly every corner. This is just an anecdote, but it gave me reason to hope that the newly industrialized countries will wake up faster than we are.
You may be right, but there is a significant percentage of humanity driving the train who will do everything they can to keep it chugging as long as possible, and this leads inevitably to the "Seneca cliff" recently discussed in another TOD post.
I admire your optimism, but as you can see from my handle I don't share it. I have really tried. But an understanding of Western history and human nature tells me that we will have the cliff to contend with.
DD
I too have my doubts about 7+ billion people on the planet. But let's assume that it's possible (ignore climate change for the moment and concentrate on just resource depletion).
The question still remains: how do we get there from here in a least-harm way? It seems, as others have pointed out, that human nature is going to make that process much more difficult than it needs to be.
We get there by coming up with adequate replacements. As the cost of fuel rises it increases the profits which can be made by inventing and manufacturing alternatives.
Take air travel, for example. Fuel costs will drive up the cost to fly. Drive them up just a bit and it will be cheaper to build and ride high speed rail powered by electricity for moderate length trips.
Or personal travel. Right now, with gas at $4/gallon an EV selling for about $26,000 would cost about the same to drive as a $20,000 30MPG ICEV. For the first five years until the loan is paid. Then the EV would be a few hundred dollars less per month.
We're entering the age of the LED bulb. A $15 LED will give you the same light as a $0.59 incandescent, but use 1/4th the electricity and last years and years longer. We cut our need for electricity while saving money.
We have to take each thing to be replaced one at a time. Some we can deal with right now and by doing so we stretch out our oil supply while we work on the rest of the problems.
We are entering a time where we cannot afford the costs to replace the infrastructure destroyed by natural catastrophes. And.... we might not have the manufacturing capacity/knowledge to replace it.
That's a very strange claim.
We could rebuild storm-destroyed infrastructure with what we spend on bottled water and pizzas.
And I don't think we had some strange virus surge through the population and wipe out our skills....
Bob, you are looking very near-term. enicar might be referring to a period a little further into the future.
I've had extensive conversations with Greer until I came around to his point of view that we are very likely to enter another Dark Age. Now, I don't think we'll necessarily lose the knowledge to rebuild sewers and bridges anytime soon but we will start to perform triage with whatever, overbuilt infrastructure we have. Detroit is already doing it by shutting services to entire neighborhoods because they don't have the money to keep the infrastructure maintained. I expect we'll see a lot of that in the coming decades as increasingly scarce money must be allocated to an ever increasing list of failing pieces of infrastructure.
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
I do believe our future will be much like this graph Greer and I made based on his model of Technic Societies:
Once we descend the fossil fuel curve appreciably and the credit bubble we are currently in pops, it will be a whole new world, in my view, and our ability to perform routine maintenance of our infrastructure will be seriously challenged.
Detroit has lost population. People have moved away. Detroit has too much infrastructure for the number of people living there. Detroit is downsizing. It's not a predictor.
I am very, no, extremely unwilling to play the "We are absolutely going to crash" game. That's like assuming that the boat is going to sink when you've got a bucket for bailing and shore is not all that far away.
Crashing is one option. And IMHO a rather low probability event.
Here is another option. We ramp up the rate we build wind, solar and other renewable electricity generation. There are no roadblocks to building enough to replace all our current energy inputs for electricity, heat and transportation.
We focus on electricity powered transportation - light rail, subways, high speed rail and electric cars.
We lean very heavily on efficiency.
Hard work, yes. Impossible? No.
Will we choose to transform our economies from oil to electricity? I think so. We've got a lot of fossil fuel left, it just gets more expensive to extract and process as time goes along. As the price of oil goes up alternatives become more competitive.
We essentially turn over our car fleet in about 12 years. Right now a $32,300 Nissan Leaf is cheaper to own and operate over a 12 year lifetime than is a $20,000 30 MPG ICEV. If the oil supply tightens up we build EVs (and some PHEVs for those who must drive longer distances). That frees up oil for things like long distance flights.
Once we have a good alternative for an existing technology we switch fairly rapidly. We switched from horses to cars in about 20 years.
Still trying to keep the current car-centric paradigm going, I see. It took me a while to see that this paradigm was going away once the credit bubble bursts and resources become much, much more expensive in real terms. We lived in a wonderful period when many of us were rich enough to own such amazing machines.
However, after one of the upcoming GFCs (global financial crisis), the central banks will make money available but the confidence will be lost so it will not get into the system like it did last time. The whole mess collapses and credit is no longer available. At that point, it doesn't matter how good/efficient/electric your car is because no almost no one will be buying: 90% of cars are bought on credit and if credit disappears, so do the car sales. Most car companies, which will see their car sales plummet once again, will need another round of bailouts. However, the next time they are far less likely to get them. And if they do, once again they will not have the products appropriate for the new economic paradigm. What percent of the 14 or so million cars currently being sold are electric right now? 0.00001%? No, electric cars will not save this system.
I see a radical shift in the context of our economy coming that is unavoidable. You see the current system continuing sufficiently along the same lines as now but I think you are neglecting to incorporate the impact of the impending popping of the worldwide credit bubble in your thinking.
You seem to think this magical period we lived in has solid enough foundations to continue in some form. I believe over-abundant credit is fooling you:
I've co-authored a paper that it appears Energy Policy will be publishing soon that pulls together the various threads I'm mentioning. I'll try to post it here if I can.
How can prosperity be an illusion? I know that I have my car in the back yard, it is not an illusion. Someone has produced it, and the capacity to produce more such cars remains. We may have red ink somewhere, but we cannot borrow a car or the means to produce it from the future. In a very real, physical sense, the car has to be produced before it can be owned and used.
If the red ink is bothering us, for some reason, I guess we'll try to fix it with minimal harm to our very real, physical wealth and production capacity. Why couldn't we? Why would the red ink (mostly in the 20% of the global economy that is the US) make us stop working like we always have? I think you give colored ink way too much importance.
Yeah, and I think the peak debt idea is another "peak" bandwagon that peak oilers like to jump onto because it gets less and less plausible that PO alone can cause doom, and doom is important to PO-ers.
I would prefer to have less doom. :-/
Sure you can! You can do it by using up more non renewable resources now and thereby creating a situation where future humans generations will have to without, thanks to our shortsightedness!
That is kind of indirect borrowing, and it does not invalidate the point I was making: That we (with credit as a way to expand money supply) created wealth and production systems that we should be able to create regardless.
Credit bubbles are known to distort economies, often leading to over production capacity that must then be reset (factories shut down, massive unemployment) once the bubble has run its course. We are in a giant, worldwide credit bubble. You are taking the word "illusion" too literally, btw.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overproduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
Agreed that bubbles cause overproduction, but only in specific sectors. We don't have an overall overcapacity, since people's needs aren't fully satisfied - we just have a misallocation of resources. If the US is overconsuming by credit, then the Chinese are underconsuming, and if the financial sector is too big, perhaps the medical sector is too small. And so on. The adjustment may be a bit painful, but its not the end of the world and it's not the case that our wealth is an illusion. It may just change in composition a bit, and US citizens may need to tighten their belts a few years to unwind credit, but others will let out their belts and consume the goods that the US doesn't.
One of the roles of the new Consumers Protection Agency is to watch for forming bubbles and raise warning flags.
That might not stop bubbles, but it might make them deflate in a more orderly fashion rather than getting huge and burst.
I don't think that's the case, myself, because the planet is living beyond its means. Thus every sector is in over production.
Besides, oil and related fossil fuels have created over production, too. The combination of oil and credit has made our industrial society one big bubble.
How can prosperity be an illusion?
I think the way this is meant is best illustrated by considering a sustainable society, where resources are used at a rate no greater than their rate of replenishment, and where the environment one lives in is not damaged over time. Whatever prosperity can be had by living in that way is "real".
On the other hand, a society living unsustainably steadily erodes its environment, until, over time, nothing is left and it is extinguished. You could say that they were prosperous, and then they steadily became more impoverished, or that their prosperity was an illusion created by, in effect, the theft of resources from their own future.
Maybe a simpler way is to imagine that you were paid once a year, instead of once every couple of weeks like most people. You could start out the year living the high life, spending freely, the envy of all those around you. As the year went on, suddenly you would have to cut back drastically, and probably end up living like a pauper, depending on the kindness of strangers to fend off starvation...now, were you really rich, or was that an illusion?
Borrowing from the future is a defining feature of "overshoot".
LOL
The Lemmings have been burrowing their way to prosperity for a long time.
Too much burrowing leads to colony collapse ... [ i.mage.+]
That is one way to see it, yes, and it would be interesting to quantify how much of prosperity is unsustainable, and how much of the unsustainable prosperity that could be made sustainable. Then we'd know how much of our wealth that is an "illusion" in that sense.
However, what I was replying to was that our wealth is an illusion created by credit, or the borrowing of money. That is "illusion" in quite another sense, and I don't agree that our wealth, on a global scale, is an illusion in that sense.
"That's a very strange claim.
We could rebuild storm-destroyed infrastructure with what we spend on bottled water and pizzas.
And I don't think we had some strange virus surge through the population and wipe out our skills...."
I agree on the skills - there is an abundance of skill to do whatever is necessary, but the thing that is missing from many arguments of this kind is resources; it doesn't matter how much skills you have, or how much labor you have ready to go, if you don't have the resources at hand.
That's why the current situation is different from prior ones. If you look at the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake, within years everything was rebuilt bigger and better. The costs and constraints of resources is a big issue now, as is working with the level of complexity that our technology has reached to support our numbers, as well as the secondary environmental problems anything we do causes due to our absolute scale.
Money fixes none of those with any ease or certainty.
What resource(s) are we lacking that would prevent us from cobbling together a renewable energy grid and an electricity 'fueled' transportation system?
Resources have costs based on their availability. It could be done, of course, but we would have to take the money from something else, which means taking resources of some sort from somewhere else in the economy. That its not even on the table, in spite of being obviously needed for years now, suggests that it would entail sacrifice most are unwilling to make.
So the lack of credit and the lack of spending money - whether for individuals or governments - is something of a stand-in for the actual constraints of resources on economic growth and development.
We spend a huge amount on coal and for the health and environmental damages of coal. As we replace coal that money is freed.
We have to replace existing plants as they age out. We can replace them with renewables rather than building new fossil fuel plants.
We constantly replace our transportation system. Just build different.
In sunny areas solar is already cheaper than retail grid power for end users. Use money which would have been used for utility bills to pay off a solar system. (And then enjoy almost free electricity for a few decades.)
That will take care of much of the need for financial resources - spend what we would have spent anyway, just spend it differently.
Then: I don't think anyone here argues that fossil fuels are not limited. With electricity or transportation we reach a point with rising fuel costs where renewables are cheaper. The electricity for EVs is already a small fraction of what gas for a traditional car costs.
Finally: Spend or crash? Is that not the choice?
(Lack of credit. An internet myth.)
The US could reduce oil consumption by 25% in weeks with drastic carpooling, and everyone would still get to work.
Carpooling...the horror.
Good points. But at the same time that people are getting savings on lighting, everyone is getting boxes on their TVs or cable boxes that are sucking up more watts than their refrigerators.
One step forward, ten steps backward.
I think most people have been very surprised to find that TV recording systems are so energy hungry.
Almost certainly there are people working on that problem. I'm not sure why a lot of energy is needed to pull down a signal and store it on a hard drive. It's not like it's necessary to boil water or some other high energy-hungry activity while waiting for the Seinfield rerun to play.
I don't think this is a case of a step backward, but only a misstep that we will correct.
Efficiency costs a tiny bit more and very few consumers think about it. So, consumer electronics/appliances tend to start out energy inefficient, until competition, consumer awareness or regulation intervene.
Regulated efficiency standards work best.
One of the things I learned early on in my study of this topic is that more efficient replacements of existing technologies simply allow the growth to continue until we are further into overshoot.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom-Brookes_postulate
Without a simultaneous decline in population, more efficient technologies simply push off the day of reckoning until we have even more people dependent on ever-dwindling resources. The resource usage per person declines but there are many, many more people using it. And, somewhat surprisingly to people new to the topic, overall resource use goes up, not down.
Which brings us back to human nature and our inability to consciously reduce our population. Have you ever tried to talk to anyone about limiting their production of children? Try it sometime. I have. Most times the person will become indignant ("you can't tell me how many children I can have!") and very, very angry because bearing children is almost universally viewed as an "inalienable human right."
In my view, all the technological fixes in the world won't do more than kick the can down the road until we can also responsibly lower our population.
Give any woman the right to control her own reproductive life, especially when this is linked with education and some possibility of seeing her kids grow to adulthood securely, and nearly all of them will choose not to have more than two or three kids.
I agree with you that there is no technological solution. Population growth and consumption patterns need to change rapidly and dramatically to even have a whiff of a chance of averting catastrophic collapse and mass death. And that is only if CC doesn't take off the way it seems to be about to.
But the way to lower birth rates is not to yell at people about not having kids. It is to insure that women have rights, education, and political power. These are spreading around the world, as is urbanization, and I do believe these two forces will put a powerful downward pressure on birthrates, along with other forces mentioned by others. Birth rates dropped from about 20/1000/year to about 19/1000/year over the last two years.
Meanwhile, it looks as though death rates have stalled out above 8/1000/year. Unfortunatly, famine will likely start moving death rates upward before they would have otherwise done so just from demographic bulges--boomers coming into their dotage...
So if these recent trends continue--birth rates falling from 19 by one every two years or so; death rates not falling and perhaps starting to rise slightly, mostly from demographic factors--you could have zero population growth well within two decades. That would mean staying below 9 B and probably not too far above 8B.
But, as I mentioned, if dozens of Gts of methane are spewing from the Arctic as we speak, all bets are off.
I don't yell at anyone about any of my views.
I'm all for giving women education and political power but we again must look at the bigger picture. On the way down the decline curve, education will no longer be the ticket out of poverty that it once was. And political power is a nice thing to give people, too, but we are very likely all about to lose it since, in my view, democracy is in its last days for our civilization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis
1. Monarchy
2. Kingship
3. Tyranny
4. Aristocracy
5. Oligarchy
6. Democracy
7. Ochlocracy ("mob rule")
Pretty soon many people will be demanding that we give up "inefficient democracy" because they will view the speed at which decisions can be made for pressing problems as too slow. As our civilization unravels and crime increases, people will demand a hardline ruler. No, this is not guaranteed but I do believe that most countries will follow this trajectory. As Friedrichs points out, we can go down the path of predatory militarism (pre-WWII Japan), totalitarian retrenchment (North Korea), or socioeconomic adaptation (Cuba) — and the Cuban model is far from assured.
Global energy crunch: how different parts of the world would react to a peak oil scenario (Energy Policy 38)
http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/pdf/pdf-research/Global%20Energy%20Crunch.pdf
The U.S. spends almost as much as the rest of the countries of the world combined on weapons and its military. I seriously doubt its military will stay idle; I already believe that Iraq was essentially a war over oil and that the evidence was completely trumped up to justify the invasion.
I present a short overview of the topic in the talk I gave at the World Oil Conference last year. It's only eight minutes long.
http://postpeakliving.com/aspo-2010-talk
For the longer version, watch the full 50 minute video:
http://postpeakliving.com/preparing-post-peak-life
Well, some of the folks that are in the forefront of postpeak world have been famously rejecting the totalitarian regimes they've been living under. Of course, we have yet to see what forms are put in their place.
I fear Somalia may end up being the 'model' for many areas, as countries cease to be able to function.
Thanks for the links. I'll look at them when I have time later this morning.
This is a relevant link and supports your claim that the US spends almost as much as the rest of the world does on military.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/sep/13/america-achilles/
Here are the data I use:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
http://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2011
See Chapter 4, Military Expenditure.
There are indirect expenditures on the U.S. military that don't get into that top line number, which raise it by another $150B or so.
I agree with you, on the scale of perhaps ten to thirty generations or so. More than that, people with genetics that override such concerns and make them have larger families, will start dominating the population. In the current societies, they don't really need much education to get by and keep multiplying. Evolution is a powerful force, and we have just changed our environment a lot without the time to adapt. We will, eventually. However, we need not worry about that now.
If you look at the data you will realize that it can take only one generation.
New immigrants to the US typically have above average birth rates. Their children, raised in the US, do not.
Or go back to my grandparent's generation. Largely farm people who had lots of children. In general, their children did not.
Large families went out of style in the US very quickly. We went from where the not-unusual dozen kids in my father's family would was unusual by the time he and his peers had families. By the time you get to my generation having 8, 10 12 children is an oddity.
You misinterpreted. I was claiming that this effect (low fertility rates due to a modern life) will only hold for a number of generations. Then genetics will override.
Actually I misread. Soooory.
That said, I disagree. I could be convinced that many years down the line genetics will toss us back into large families if you could show a body of evidence. I really doubt that evidence exists.
Taking care of kids is both expensive and hard work. Unless society wants to pay people to be large family breeders in order to avoid population crash I doubt we ever return to large families.
Large families occur mainly because people like sex and don't have a way to prevent pregnancy and because high rates of childhood death (lack of access to modern medicine) can eat away 'old age security'. Have a lot of kids so that a couple will be around to take care of you when you're old.
With awareness and methodology for birth control, access to good medical care, and old age safety nets there will be no reason to return to large families.
Actually, it suffices that we provide free schooling, free medicine and enough welfare to have them survive. And the trend in current societies is overwhelmingly that we go toward such welfare states. I absolutely live in one (Sweden). I can't imagine us going back to "let them starve if they can't provide for themselves" or "if you can't pay for school, then no school for you".
Genetics with a high drive/propensity for getting kids due to other reasons will swiftly emerge.
No reason except for the fact that those who do have larger families will steadily increase their proportion.
You assume that there is some sort of 'large family' gene.
Where do you find evidence for that assumption?
I don't. I just assume that empathy, intelligence, extroversion, aggressiveness, status seeking, impulse control and such parameters can be tuned and mixed in ways that will much increase the likelyhood that a person breeds many children in the new environment that is our modern society and welfare states. Evolution will do that tuning and mixing, of course.
This is, however, not a short-term problem, so we need not agree. If I'm right, the problem can be fixed by the Star Trek community of 2250 by instituting a 3 child limit or something. If I'm wrong, there is nothing to fix.
I'm not convinced that we will see famine causing as many deaths in the future as it has in the past. Our communication and transportation systems are very well developed.
It's not like when 20 and 43 million people died of starvation in China in the late 1950s and the outside world was barely aware.
Now we are constantly monitoring food supplies and weather over the entire world. We have the ability to move people to where the food is or food to where the people are. Aside from famines which happen in the middle of wars, the events we have now are more commonly food crises. Periods during which we have to step in and help for a while.
I'm not saying that famine won't occur or that some people won't starve to death. I'm just suggesting that the numbers will never get as extreme as they have been in the past.
Even in the most closed-off country, North Korea, we know how people are fairing and we get food to most of them by hook or crook.
That's fine...we can certainly disagree on this point. When political systems start failing in country after country and climate change makes growing an adequate quantity of food difficult, and oil shortages and credit upheavals send farmers out of business in droves, I believe there will not be enough food grown for the current population.
I live in a country on a declining population. And Japan has been early in the starting-to-collapse process (preceded by a giant bubble), so maybe my experiences of living in a country with a birthrate of 1.3 and a population whose decline is accelerating will be of interest to you.
First of all, young people (who can have kids the easiest) cannot afford them....they look worried, distracted, absorbed in other things like clothes, cell phones, their jobs. So it is rare to see young mothers (here at least).
Middle aged mothers are more common. They also look like they are thinking about money---distracted, in a hurry. Maybe only one child. So private and public daycare centers here are full and have waiting lists.
It is rare to see the relaxed young mothers of 13-14 years ago strolling without a care with 2-3 kids in tow. That is when I was a young mother and I was one of them.
There is a huge reliance on using a car if you have a child (it is commonly held notion that it is impossible to raise a child without owning a car here). So that expense effectively delays or prevents a lot of people from having a child. They seem to also use that as a safe excuse not to have a child.
Now with Fukushima, there is an existential fear of a terrible future, so many people don't feel positive about having kids, or they are worried about radiation affecting the fetus. My friend near Tokyo decided not to have another child because of the stress of Fukushima.
Little by little people lose faith in their ability to provide for a child (even providing for themselves is hard enough) and they give up on reproduction or it becomes a token "one" or at the most two. Maybe you will see that in other countries in the future. It is disheartening----but it is also authentic. It does feel real and I understand it and it is a good response in a way.
We're in a transition. Just because we haven't worked out the way for people who want a child or two to do so with some degree of comfort does not mean that we won't.
Getting our populations down is a very good thing, IMO. But once we are down to a more reasonable level then we probably will start looking at ways to maintain a reasonable level. A simple solution would be to give child-rearing families a stipend and to fully fund education and health care.
Japan is already looking for ways to encourage more births. They might have to sweeten the pot a bit to get things rolling. (I'd rather they accepted in people from other countries to take off some pressure, but they've got a problem with outsiders.)
Aangel wrote: "I too have my doubts about 7+ billion people on the planet. But let's assume that it's possible..."
Ummmm, you do know that we are essentially at 7+ billion now. Yes, the official date is Oct.31st, but the margin of error for these calculations means that we may well be there now.
It's hard to talk about these things in the abstract. I think there are particular places that will be looking at/are now in the midst of facing very hard crises--especially of water and food. The horn of Africa is just a glimpse of what may be looming for much of MENA and South Asia. There may be a few other places that may be facing this kind of crisis, especially islands such as Java in Indonesia, and perhaps Japan and England. But I don't see any major crisis looming in most of the Americas or the rest of Eurasia. China may seem like it's in trouble, and it could well be, but its demographic pyramid is much less top heavy than that of most MENA countries.
But that assessment is based on a relatively stable climate over the next few decades. There is certainly no guarantee of that.
With rapid climate change (or climate chaos, or climate collapse...take your pick), essentially every location becomes more difficult/impossiible to live in, raise crops reliably in, and makes long term plans around.
Yes, I do. And I don't think that it will stay at that level anywhere near as long as the UN projections assert.
Almost any way one looks at it, we are in overshoot. With respect to climate change, our atmosphere, which we have been using as a carbon dioxide "pollution sink" is so into overshoot that the worldwide temperature has already increased significantly (~0.75 degrees C) and approximately another 1 degree C is in the pipeline even if we were to stop emitting CO2 this second.
As you point out, growing food is also going to be a challenge and I expect this list of failed nations to expand as widespread hunger destabilizes governments:
Failed State Index
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/failedstates
Yep, many schemes to support 7-8B for a while might have worked were it not for CC, particularly if things are proceeding as rapidly as they seem to be.
Besides your degree in the pipeline, there may be two already here but for the aerosols spewing from Chinese and Indian coal plants. As they clean these up, we could have a rather rude and sudden jump. As the oceans warm, also, it will not be absorbing half of our CO2 output as it has in the past.
And then there is the issue of the big burp apparently going on in the Arctic that all those scientists rushed up to study. Extra Gts of methane is the last thing we need. (Though perhaps it is time for that quick clathrate gun to the temple to put us all out of our misery.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
Exactly. I didn't mention Global Dimming, which seems to be suppressing heat gain temporarily. Once the world economy begins to contract significantly, there is a good chance that the atmosphere will absorb even more heat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
A perfect storm is brewing: a credit bubble popping, declining oil production and catastrophic climate change.
In my view, anyone who thinks the current paradigm can continue anything like it is operating now hasn't done enough research, or as Hirsch puts it, is "still early in their understanding of the situation."
I attended a lecture on the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis not too long ago. If I recall correctly, it is the generally accepted view that this could cause a rapid climate see-saw (alternating between very cool temperatures do to smoke and very warm as greenhouse gases accumulate). This occurence would happen fairly quickly and the results become apparent in 1-2 human lifetimes and would lead to 10,000 years or so of ocean anoxia. .
They made a announcement the other day that we will pass the 7 billion mark anywhere from sept 5-6 to mid October. we will reach 7.3 billion LONG before 2020, in fact i would not be surprised if population starts to drop before then.
Those predictions assume that there is no adequate replacement for oil.
That's not an assumption I'm willing to make.
"Those predictions assume that there is no adequate replacement for oil.
That's not an assumption I'm willing to make."
That's not likely to win you a lot of support on this site.
Popularity has little to do with the quality of one's thinking. Except for his occasional confusion with just another Harvard lawyer being the smartest President we've ever had, I would venture that Bob's scenario for the electrification of all sorts of things is spot on, as well as how fast it can happen, and our time and resources available. Electricity is good, we have plenty of ways to make it, and until someone starts claiming that peak hydrogen on the sun is about to happen, we've got enough of the most important input around to outlive the next Gondwanaland.
When the credit stops flowing, so does the transition to the next generation of technologies. You seem to be omitting that from your thinking.
Unlikely. More likely that I do not assign the same level of importance, or consequence, to credit that you do.
Well, then you are plainly ignoring recent history, in my view, and don't yet understand the role of credit in our economy. I suggest that you begin reading some Steve Keen (http://debunkingeconomics.com).
Besides, we don't have to speculate at all because we already know what happens when credit gets cut off. The car companies in the U.S. required bailouts for two primary reasons, both of which depressed sales below what they needed to remain ongoing concerns: a) people bought fewer cars because they got nervous about the future and b) many people who wanted to buy cars couldn't because they were refused financing. Perhaps you didn't notice that we just went through a credit freeze?
Financing is — currently — the lifeblood of our economy. Almost all homes and cars are purchased with it. Cut off credit and housing prices collapse leading to an asset-deflation depression. Cut off credit and the cars companies go bankrupt again since 90% of cars are purchases via credit.
Omit credit from your thinking and it's like omitting the role of electrons in a computer chip.
Perhaps I do not. But I certainly have been using credit regularly for decades, and my recent experience with it is no different today than it was a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, pre-Katrina, or any time before about 1980 or so. You ask to borrow money, someone says okay, we'll charge you some interest, you sign some papers, you pay back what you borrowed. Does that about cover the basics?
People said this about oil as well. After peak oil came and went, other things started getting all the attention. Post fall-2008, they are, unsurprisingly, fiscally related.
Correct me if I am wrong, but are you implying that regular working people like me aren't getting credit? And that this is more of a "lifeblood" than my job? Because to be honest, I can do without credit pretty darn easily, but doing without employment is more difficult. Perhaps jobs are the actual lifeblood of our economy, and credit is just one of those things banksters want you to think is important?
Yes, I'm saying that exactly that happened at the height of the GFC and to a great extent is still happening now. If you want a personal anecdote, I have excellent credit and two of my credit lines were cut by 35% each in the past two years
On a macro scale, the major indicators show that we are still undergoing deleveraging.
If the central banks hadn't stepped in to prop up the banks, the economy truly would have ground to a halt, no matter what some commentators who are angry at the bank for getting a bailout think.
In the world of business any project of virtually any size in this economy requires project financing i.e. the banks must be willing to lend the owners money or the project doesn't go ahead. Your background may not be business so you may not be aware of that fact.
You will have a great deal of trouble pointing me to any project (building, bridge, solar installation, house, whatever) that was built without some sort of financing (i.e. credit) being used.
So, yes, credit is the lifeblood of the economy. No one disputes this except for, perhaps, you.
And that is still true, too. Oil is still being pumped at ~86mb/d. The blood is still, for the moment, flowing.
Once you lost this "lifeblood" did something bad happen to you? Were you not able to eat? Pay your mortgage? Did any of your children lack for a life saving procedure because of this credit reduction? Or did you simply have less credit around, which you may not even have been using previously? It seems to me that for something to be a "lifeblood", it really has to matter.
My own anecdotal story goes like this. The wife, who does not have excellent credit, and hasn't used much credit in years, applied for 3 cards in the span of a month and was approved at what I consider to be outrageous levels, with excellent rates. I don't know why or how, but the current lending environment doesn't look all that restricted from my point of view.
Based on the silly things people have done with over-leveraging, I would say this is a good thing. Not a bad thing at all.
Certainly credit is used to grease the skids of various processes, and as Bob has pointed out, it isn't going to go away because someone will always be trying to use their surplus to make money for them, rather than hiding it in their mattress. And 3 immediate relatives of mine built their houses using an American Express card. For the air miles of course. That was all the credit they needed, so while businesses might not like having to maintain the cash reserves to make payroll and whatnot (a skill common workers have apparently mastered), or saving to build a bridge, they certainly are completely capable of doing so.
As for oil, peak oil, before it became plateau oil, has never been about running out, just doing at least as much work with it as before, maybe even more. Bob's scenario of electrification of personal transport fits into this quite nicely I might add.
Lets make a bet, when I go to buy a Volt or Leaf, will I be able to do it with credit?
That was a bad anecdote on my part. I did not attempt to get additional credit at that time. What I was showing was that deleveraging is occuring.
No, it doesn't just grease the skids — it makes the projects possible. Without credit most of the projects would not be completed and certainly none of the big ones that require financing from multiple financial institutions because they are too large for just one institution to handle.
Sure, but most credit isn't made from "surplus." Overwhelmingly debt is issued by banks out of thin air (something on the order of 99%). If we are reduced to using only "surplus" money to finance the operations of our economy, we would crash to a halt.
Plus, if you are interested in the details, I think Steve Keen has demonstrated quite conclusively that the banks issue the debt first, THEN they go looking for the reserves.
Sure, when the next credit crisis occurs like 2008, go attempt to buy a Volt or Leaf on credit and let me know how that goes. Then show me the millions of others doing the same thing. BTW, you'll have to wait a while because production of those vehicles won't get well into the millions until something like 2025 (see Alternative Powertrain Strategies And Fleet Turnover In The 21st Century).
But their projections are, to my thinking, completely out of touch, just like the United Nations population projections and the aircraft manufacturer projections because they do not correctly model the decline of oil production.
Peak oilers do not correctly model the decline of oil production, so it doesn't seem fair to bash others for the same thing.
SpockLives,
Could you please correctly model the decline of oil production?
How does the 'correct model' line up with ANE (Available Net Exports)?
That is the entire point, nobody has done a bang up job of it. Depending on the size of your error bar being the qualifier for that statement I suppose, recently Rockman tried to convince me that a 20-25% error bar around the maximum consisted of a "plateau", but I'm not buying that one.
You can't find anyone's model you agree with?
http://www.trendlines.ca/free/peakoil/PeakScenario2500/PeakScenario2500.htm
The problem Bob is pointing out is that the pessimistic models have been badly inaccurate.
Volt or Leaf...you'll have to wait a while because production of those vehicles won't get well into the millions until something like 2025 (see Alternative Powertrain Strategies And Fleet Turnover In The 21st Century).
If you look at page 25, you'll see that their "Moderately aggressive" model shows 49% penetration of "Alternative powertrains/fuel" by 2020. Given that the light vehicle fleet is about 234M-250M, we're talking about quite a bit more than just "millions".
I can do without credit pretty darn easily, but doing without employment is more difficult.
And what about the credit your employer uses? The customers who are using credit to buy from the employer?
Like it or not, the parasite class of bankers are "too big to fail".
It's a strange assumption, that credit would quit flowing.
Some people will always have a bit more than they need and others will be happy to pay a bit for the privilege of using their surplus for a while.
Certainly there will be local and wide spread disruptions of credit markets from time to time. That's the history of banking and financing. We have yet to evolve the system for smooth running, but we've done a decent job of recovery.
Credit may never stop completely, but it could easily decrease by 90% or more. That's why the central banks had to rush in to provide liquidity in 2008, after all, because the private sources of credit got scared and mostly stopped lending.
The difference between 100% and 90% loss of credit is probably not significant for this thought experiment. Either one means a very different economic environment while the deleveraging continues.
Sure, there are disruptions. And lots of turbulence at times. But it's always possible to borrow if you can demonstrate ability to repay.
Sometimes interest rates get so high that your nose bleeds when you sign the line, but there's always been money to be borrowed. I bought a commercial property at huge interest rates because rates had sent property values tumbling. Did just fine when rates fell and I refinanced.
The real problem is on the other end when people lack the ability to pay back loans and can't get start up money. That's where we are now. That's a big reason why one can borrow money for almost nothing, few people are in a position to borrow.
Were I younger I'd be buying me some rental properties and locking in these low single digit interest rates. Property values and interest rates low at the same time. That is a rare occurrence and big opportunity. Rent 'em out for whatever they would bring and scrape up the negative. But I've been there, done that, cashed out before the bubble got too fat....
No, it's not always possible. You are so immersed in this paradigm you can't imagine any other. Plus, you are clearly omitting the experience of people who, with full time jobs, were unable to purchase cars on credit in 2009.
Have you read "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly"??
"Reinhart and Rogoff have compiled an impressive database, which covers eight centuries of government debt defaults from around the world. They have also collected statistics on inflation rates from every country where information is available and on banking crises and international capital flows over the past couple of centuries. This lengthy historical study gives what they call a 'panoramic view' of the unending cycle of boom and bust, showing how claims that 'this time is different' are invariably proven wrong. . . . This Time Is Different doesn't simply explain what went wrong in our most recent crisis. This book also provides a roadmap of how things are likely to pan out in the years to come. . . . This Time Is Different is an important addition to the literature of financial history. "
I've read their condensed version, available on the web.
They demonstrate that, during the growth period of our species and its economy, debt growth and collapse is cyclical. But it's crucial to note that the past eight centuries were on the upslope of our civilization.
It may very well be that we have some minor bubbles on the downslope, but systemically it seems quite obvious to me that resource and other constraints are going to make the kind of credit bubbles we have seen in the last few centuries very, very difficult to achieve in the future — if not impossible.
So, again, it's not really credit problems you're concerned about, it's physical resource limits.
I'm really baffled as to what those would be. I agree that we have serious ecological problems (primarily CC), but that's different. One has to really distort the idea of a resource (by calling the ability of the environment to deal with pollution a resource in the form of a "sink") to frame ecological problems that way.
Energy is clearly not limited, not when we have high E-ROI resources like wind, solar and nuclear.
Yes, I know, one can argue that credit problems will get in the way of implementing them, but history doesn't support that: investment continued in the Great Depression of the 1930's, the Long Depression of the 1870's, etc.
Except that I don't think that our president is the smartest president we've ever had. (Just somewhere up in the top third.)
He is, that said, smart enough to push our transition away from fossil fuel in all sorts of ways. He used stimulus money to aid renewable energy. He used money tagged to save US car manufacturers to both get inefficient cars off the road and to spur the development of EVs. Under the current Commander in Chief the US military just initiated an immense rooftop solar program which will double the amount now installed in the entire country.
Were we to give him a cooperative Congress, one that worked to solve our problems rather than spending their energy in making Obama a one term president, we'd be moving a lot faster than we are.
If we fail and melt ourselves down it will be because some prevented the transition, not because we did not have the methodology.
I am forced to agree with you. I have arrived at his conclusion from a different angle perhaps, but the answer is the same.
I don't think it's this cut-and-dried because I think we will find, if not in this decade then the next, that accumulating problems are soon going to "run away from us." The environmental problems, the overfishing, the drained aquifers, the climate change reducing crop yields, the soil erosion and salination, etc., will become insurmountable. Why? Because we are already in overshoot and we are not rapidly shrinking our footprint like we should be doing.
There will come a point when the system just breaks, in my view.
Seems reasonable. Some might argue it almost broke back in 2008. Or did break. And was then fixed. Certainly it could break like that again I suppose.
I think any decrease in credit, because as Bob has pointed out it certainly won't go away. Might not be as relevant to the working guy as it is to banksters and the like. I am quite happy at the rate my credit union reinvests our deposits, and does something constructive with our money rather than just charging someone a fee for shuffling it around between accounts.
Correct, it was "fixed" — except that the fix just kicked the can down the road. We should be getting ready to shrink our economy as oil production declines, not burden it with even more unpayable debt.
We need to fix it by bursting the bubble of the valuation of fossil fuel companies that is based on what reserves they have, rather than on what reserves they have which can be burned without catastrophic climate change.
I think this can be done by forcing rating agencies, CEOs and stock analysts (under pain of Sorbanes-Oxley) to actually include what the effects of climate change are going to do to fuel prices. Fuel prices (paid to the fossil fuel companies) won't go up as oil runs out, those prices will go down as CO2 is prohibited from being released.
I have been paying my debt quite nicely, thank you very much. I can only hope to pay it all before the government decides to pay it's debt by taking more of my money to do it with. Mooching off those who handle their business appropriately is a time honored American political tradition which shows no signs of stopping.
As far as being unpayable, has the government recently defaulted on a debt somewhere which hasn't been reported in the papers? I would also not underestimate the power of the printing press, which pretty much guarantees that all government debt is payable. Everything might cost 2X or 3X what it does now, but that is also a time honored tradition in the American economy.
You are not paying your ecological debt if you are living in any of the western industrialized societies of the world.
If you still don't understand that all economies are a subset of the global ecosystem, then you need to educate yourself.
BTW, money is a fiction and it isn't what makes the world go round...
Nature can be a bitch and she will call in our debt sooner or later!
Cheers!
Fred
Regarding your graph, what I have seen from footprint reports is that carbon emissions weigh them down. Sans those, we (the world) actually lives within our means. And that's not very strange, as we cannot extend past our means in many areas where our time-to-feedback is much faster.
Nuclear power, for instance, could put our footprints on the right track again, by doing away with much of the carbon emissions.
Not even close. We've covered this a billion times here. Overfishing, soil depletion, draining fossil aquifers, ocean acidification, etc.
It's truly astonishing how you can repeatedly ignore all the problems we have.
You should bring that up with the footprint index authors. Their calculations indicates, last time I looked, that we live within the carrying capacity of the Earth, sans carbon emissions (which covers the issue of ocean acidification, btw). Naturally, we overuse some resources, but could OTOH use others more without depleting them. The generalization of crop rotation should yield a possibility to carry on indefinitely even though we, intermittently, overuse some resources.
Also, of course, if do something intrusive, we can always do stuff in an alternative and less intrusive way, like we did when we reversed ozone layer depletion.
Ok, I will:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
Yes, CO2 makes up a large part of their biocapacity assessment, as it should, but that doesn't mean the other items aren't also a problem.
Also, their latest methodology puts us into overshoot earlier than the one from 2008:
Again, if you look at the numbers from the very site you link to, you see this fascinating time series of global footprint per capita, in hectares (I've subtraced the carbon part.):
Today, total biocapacity per capita is 1.8. If we go from 7 billion to a population peak of 10 billion, we end up with a total biocapacity 1.8*7/10 ~= 1.3, which is equal to the current footprint, which we should be able to shrink further without much problem.
So, if we can solve the carbon problem, we should be able to, quite easily, manage the rest, according to footprint studies. Agreeing on national carbon taxes with a gradual rate increase plan would do the trick.
In other words, while global GDP per capita has increased three-fold, the per-capita footprint (excluding carbon emissions) has almost halved! We live well within our means (excluding CO2) and population growth is slowly flattening. If these stats does not give you hope, then you don't want hope.
Well, population isn't flattening that quickly at 80 million people per year. That's a billion people in around 13 years! (I'll be generous and give you 15 years if you think it will slow more quickly.)
Also, carbon dioxide emissions are not easy to solve as we have seen over the past three decades. The remaining issues, like aquifer depletion and soil degradation are not getting any better. All we are doing is getting more efficient, through the use of fossil fuels, in extracting more food from the remaining land base. Take away the fossil fuels to produce food and we are in serious trouble.
Not only that, hundreds of millions of people are aiming to enter the middle class, adding more pressure onto our ecosystems.
If you can't see the trends I'm pointing to, you don't want to see them.
Take away the fossil fuels to produce food and we are in serious trouble.
Farmers are energy exporters: they'll be able to outbid other oil consumers for a long time, and replace fossil fuels well before that time is up.
Yes, 15 years for the next billion, and then 19 years for the next, and then, perhaps counterintuitively, it may not reach the tenth billion at all. The rate has declined from 2.2% in the 60-ies to 1.1% now and the trend is more or less a straight line, percentage-wise.
No, perhaps not, because the per capita footprint has halved but the capitas has more than doubled.
And that lowers our per-capita foot-print considerably, even though we eat more meat and calories.
Of course, a peak oil doom scenario is a possibility, but I was under the impression that you thought that world-wide, we are building up environmental debt that will kill us off regardless. I'm pointing out that we have the carbon problem, and if we can manage that (which will include transitioning to little fossil use), we are in ok shape, according to footprint studies. There will always be issues to handle, but that's life, you know.
Or perhaps it will ease the pressure. At least, more people entering the middle class has the last 50 years coincided with dramatically lowered environmental footprint per capita (again, sans carbon emissions).
Was that the day the voodoo magic stopped?
And we left our chevys in the levy
Cause the levy was oil dry
Bye bye missed economic power pie?
_____________________
real lyrics to Miss American pie: here
Not very relevant post, but certainly humorous. Thank-you
It's amazing that on a site devoted to the peaking and decline of oil production, you find so many people who are not concerned with population growth. Let's see, we have oil peaking NOW, and we should be satisfied that it is predicted that population will level off 30 YEARS FROM NOW. And to make it worse, America is allowing businesses to send millions of jobs to China and India, which in turn increases the oil consumption of the existing world population, even without growth.
Suggested reading: Debt - The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber.
I just finished reading it and I'm going to read it again. And, possibly a third time.
The article is thought provoking, in some cases spot on but in many cases incorrect. The problem comes from lacking a lot of checks and balances on simple estimations, due to which I think that a lot of things are unsubstantiated and in my view wishful thinking. Thereby a specific view on what is the case is imposed on the reader who doesn't read between the lines.
Specific problems that I have related to statements made are:
1) Statement: "A concentrated power source that can be stored allows social and political power to concentrate in the hands of those who control it. It generates very different social dynamics from an energy source that is universally distributed and constantly renewed. or one thing, the profit potential of the latter is intrinsically less. Once you have sold the geothermal pump or the PV array, the buyer is self-sufficient, unlike the electrical power consumer who has to pay the metered rate in perpetuity. Energy dependency and economic dependency are closely linked."
I agree with the outlined logic that a concentrated power source allows for higher social/political power, and that energy dependency and economic dependency are closely linked. However, the profit potential of a universally distributed (but centrally produced) power source is similar to that of a source where both the capital and fuel are centrally produced. It appears as if there is a large difference in terms of power when you have your own solar panel, but at an aggregate scale there is little difference. The difference is the time distribution for a single user in terms of spending.
Say that the cost of natural gas electricity and solar power are similar, and that a consumer chooses for solar power over natural gas. This implies that the consumer spends 95% of the cost at t=0, while otherwise the company would through fuel consumption get the same sum over a longer period of time. For the individual this would appear as if he/she is only dependent at one point in time. However, the company would still be able to reap the same profits (unless marginal costs/cost patterns are different), but the temporal distribution of those profits changes.
The only difference in profit potential that I can see derives from the change in terms of quality. In the present market a lot of profit potential comes in case of oil due to low cost producers (OPEC) being able to sell their oil at high prices as the costs of marginal demand are very high (80+ dollars per barrel). I.E. OPEC producers obtain a 40-60 dollar per barrel profit margin. This is less the case with solar/wind power as there is little difference in the cost pattern between producers. However, this is not intrinsic as it depends on technologies and resources, and in such a centralised case it is still possible to monopolize things.
The check and balance here comes from looking at things from a societal perspective (in which the firm that produces solar/wind power operates) instead of an individual perspective. The case laid out would be true if also the production of the technology would take place locally, but I don't see any argument towards this in the article (and doubt the feasibility of it).
2) Statement: "For example, thanks in large part to the Internet, a tide of decentralization and disintermediation is erasing the producer/consumer divide in the areas of news and entertainment. That more and more of our time is spent watching "content" produced by amateurs suggests that we are approaching "peak Hollywood," in parallel with peak healthcare, peak pollution, peak advertising, peak fisheries, and peak oil. '
The claim made here is not substantiated, at the surface it may appear as if some decentralization has taken place but as far as I can check centralization still rules the day. We need specialization to keep a complex society as this one running (whether that is a good thing is a different discussion). In terms of hollywood/entertainment The "model" has changed slightly in the selection of people as a few talents are now selected to "stardom" via internet websites, but this is actually an enforcement of the centralized model as these go into the same system as before.
3) Statement "For decades or centuries, we have maintained growth first by meeting needs, then by creating new needs, then by bringing non-monetized cultures and non-monetized domains of our lives into the money domain. Community, for example, can be stripmined just as coal can: turn the functions of story-telling, dispute resolution, child care, elderly care, recreation, entertainment, into paid services. But in either case, material or social, this process is reaching its limit. We are indeed entering a time of Peak Everything."
It is claimed here as if growth is maintained by meeting needs, creating new needs and brining non-monetized cultures and non-monetized domains into the money domain. This is difficult to defend as economic growth itself is maintained by extraction and developing resources together with technology which can facilitate the services. Any services can also be brought into a monetary system which does not depend on growth, this is a different issue altogether whether or not that is a good thing or not. I find the conflagration of these issues problematic.
4) Statement: "The difficulty in finding a substitute for oil, for example, is born of economics. Imagine what we could have accomplished if the millions of scientific careers and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been devoted to petroleum and nuclear power over the last fifty years had gone instead into developing "alternative" energy technologies. Imagine if, at the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1960s, we had launched a global scientific effort exceeding that devoted to the space race to create a pollution-free society. It did not happen, and with good reason: there was no money in it (given the kind of money system we have had). Compared to the technologies of Big Energy, there is little profit to be made in the alternatives. The alternatives are not conducive to economic growth, and will never flourish in a money system that compels and depends on growth."
The cause of finding a substitute for oil is put here entirely on the monetary system which we have in place today. Although true there is much more too it, as this is also very much related to humanity itself (and our discount rates) as well as technological differences. There is no look at a metric of welfare (doubtful if the same level could have been sustained with alternatives).
5) Statement: "Sunlight, wind, conservation, geothermal energy, and more controversial technologies like cold fusion, Bedini/Bearden devices, and so forth share an important characteristic in common. Their energy source is more or less ubiquitous, so that users needn't be dependent on an ongoing supply of scarce fuel. They are, in an important sense, abundant. his feature puts them at odds with our money system, which depends on the creation and maintenance of scarcity. To profit from something, say energy, it must be scarce: high-tech pharmaceuticals, for example, rather than ubiquitous weeds and folk medicine. "
To profit from something you need to have a property rights system in place, and have something that people demand, scarcity or abundance is not a relevant metric in this sense. In case of fossil fuels these are abundantly available in today's society because of their low cost. The technologies to covert sunlight and wind and geothermal etc. are not abundantly available (supply is often overbooked by demand and delays in delivery are frequent) because of their high cost, their relative scarcity is high.
The example of high-tech pharmaceuticals versus ubiquitous weeds/folk medicine is difficult as this also involves an aspect of quality, reliability, and the impossibility of mass production. It is an interesting example but difficult to compare with energy.
Etc.
PV is by no means the only way to get solar energy. I have PV, and I love it, and it came from a central source and cost me money, and somebody central made money on it. But, as a guy who has played around with solar tech for many decades, I can say with assurance that there are lots of ways for me and my neighbors to get our own solar heat, coolth and power by using things that are very easy to get right here by us, not from some distant big factory. Passive solar is the most obvious, thick walls, Ice balls, and other storage methods are the same, and as for electricity, all the junk IC engines and discarded electric motors lying around over the whole planet can be made into solar heat engine- generators by any number of ways obvious to engineers.
And those same engines could be made to run on biogas generators, thermal gasifiers, and so on. All right here in River City, not in China or Cal.
PV is nice, but it ain't all there is.
I like this article and have sent it to my friends.
PS-"If its all that easy, why haven't you done it yourself, instead of shelling out solid bucks for PV?" Same reason that you didn't - too lazy, have the money, and prefer to just play with half thought out new ideas instead of getting serious. Besides, I have got off propane for hot water with a very simple solar heater, and I'm getting close to a wood fired generator to back up the PV. How about you?
Exactly. This kind of dish
http://www.solare-bruecke.org/
is able to track the sun via a wind up spring motor. (Take that you anti-tech luddites!)
And it can warm your structure, warm water, cook and if Stirling cycle engines ever happen - work with them.
Other solar ideas - Dwane Johnson of Red Rock
http://www.redrok.com
Stirling cycle engines have happened and are happening ...
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/
http://www.whispergen.com/
http://www.precer.com/
In a way I'm sad that low-cost PV has probably undercut stirling engine solar electricity forever. But it's not a really bad outcome.
And yet - other than paying $10,000 for a sub 5 kw fossil fueled WhisperGen - you can't go to the store and buy 'em.
For whatever reason, Stirlings just don't ship en-mass. In the case of using photons for the delta-T, the material science to handle the rapid changes in energy influx is a hard problem.
I just bought some low cost PV and am very pleased with it. I am also moving a stirling engine out from my lab to sit in my workshop and burn wood for heat and recharging the batteries when the PV isn't.
It is sadly true that all the stirling companies I know of are either dead or dying. A lot of them never did run on anything but hot air (npi) and they deserved to die and did. See! the system works.
trouble is, the tech itself is very good indeed, see NASA space stirling engines- but as yet, nobody has stepped up to put the really good stirlings on the commercial market. I thought it was gonna happen about this time last year, but as a result of some totally avoidable goofs, it still is just a maybe.
I will bet a dime for a donut that it will happen--- just about the time I die.
Ah Wimbi, your faith in Stirling engines is touching. Maybe someday, like fusion, it will happen :)
Scientific American has the opposite take. Resource constraints will force more centralization and urbanization.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/cities/
Yes. Scientific American is one of the most enthusiastic articulators of the program of "Ascent" -- the Cartesian program to become the lords and masters of nature. I remember a few years back they had a cover, "Managing planet earth."
Thank you for this detailed response. I won't attempt a thorough response, but rather point to the direction of thinking that meets these concerns.
1. Even if the costs are similar, there are many ways in which control over the fuel source gives ongoing power to the controller. In purely economic terms, note that the costs are only comparable because of the discounting of future cash flows, which is built into the money system through interest. Otherwise, it would be economic to invest in technologies with not a five or ten-year payback time, but even a hundred years.
2. Some examples of disintermediation: The replacement of classified ads with Craigslist (net loss of billions of dollars), news dissemination through bloggers, democratization of music publishing. Check the P2P foundation for lots of research and commentary on this trend.
3. Whenever services migrate from the gift economy to the money economy, it by definition causes economic growth.
4. I am not saying that our oil dependency is caused entirely by the money system. I am saying that both are aspects of a larger pattern, and that one cannot and will not change without the other one changing.
5. My point isn't that there isn't scarcity, it is that the money system depends on creating and maintaining scarcity. It tends to squeeze out the things that lend themselves less to a scarcity-based system (e.g. herbal medicine).
The author has a way of making things sound good, that probably are really pretty awful.
Are humans a part of the new civilization? How much? How much would the homes with the special thermal properties helped, in their current locations, if things collapse?
Well, it's quite simple really. Once the $hit really hits the fan, billions will starve to death, billions more will go to war over the remaining resources, and tens of thousands of species will go extinct (though sadly, probably not the one that *should*) as humanity goes "Easter Island" on whatever is left. Billions will be born into a world with no future, billions more will die an unpleasant death and thereby "transcend" the current exponential growth paradigm. Does this sound bad to you? ;-)
I think you've got a typo.
Where you wrote "Once" shouldn't you have written "If"?
Our future is not fixed. We're crafty little animals. We've got some rat holes we can try crawling through so that the cat doesn't eat us.
In all honesty, I wasn't able to yet read the whole post up top.
Didn't see it.
What do I mean by "DE-coupling of responsibility"?
Well President Obama's jobs speech tonight is a good example.
Somebody stands up and makes all kinds of "promises" and all kinds of "commitments" for SOMEBODY ELSE to fulfill.
"You" do this. "They" will do that. Me? I'm out of here.
That's classic DE-coupling from responsibility.
Here are some examples of DE-coupling taken straight out of the President's speech:
Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.
The American Jobs Act [it and not me] will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows; installing science labs and high-speed internet in classrooms all across this country. It will rehabilitate homes and businesses in communities hit hardest by foreclosures. It will jumpstart thousands of transportation projects across the country.
THIS IS SPARTA !!!
I might applaud the President's speech if it weren't for the fact that:
(a) He's as much in the pocket of the banksters as are Republicans,
(b) $450 billion for these programs represents less than 10% of the $4.7 TRILLION spent to date on bailing out Wall Street (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Total_Wall_Street_Bailout_Cost),
(c) his and Congress's track record on "stimulus" programs translating into actual jobs hasn't been good so far, and
(c) here we are already three years into his Presidency, and he's just NOW realizing that regular people need jobs and infrastructure needs repairing??
I fully expect him to be rolled by the Repubs. Only the least efficient (in terms of job years per incremental dollar of fed debt) proposals will be let through -and of course with no new taxes on the rich to pay for them. So a few months down the road we will have only a few new jobs, and the holy cries, of deficits-deficits-deficits, will be used to claw back even more government spending than was increased by this bill. And these clawbacks will have a higher (jobs per dollar) multiplier than those created by the program. So it will be one step forward, and three steps backwards. But, for a few short days we will be able to celebrate the appearance of bipartisan agreement!
when I get up in the morning I go out and stimulate my car to start going. It goes because it has fuel to go. The economy can not be stimulated if the price of energy remains high or I get a geo metro that use less fuel.
They have got to reduce the drag on the economy. unemployment is a big drag so is people retiring. So is government spending on useless( badly managed) energy solar energy projects that go broke because china undercuts them on costs.
Believe me, US's problem is NOT high fuel costs. Witness every other industrialized nation in the world. It's something else.....
Re-read the article above.....
Especially the title's third heading "Concentration of Power".
The finance oligarchs running the world might have something to say about this. The U.S. is certainly not showing any signs of having "peaked" in terms of concentration of wealth and power, much less beyond that peak. The few influential people who have the temerity even to bring up the subject here (Buffet, Bill Gates Sr., etc.) are quickly and repeatedly denounced in the media as Communists, redistributionists, "class traitors", and accused of fomenting class warfare against those saintly "job creators" (who haven't created any actual jobs in a long time).
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Otherwise, nice post.
HARM. Sadly I am agreement with you. Operation plutocracy-gen is only half finished, "you aint seen nuthin yet".
I think the tumult in the financial markets suggest that the peak IS getting close. It is mathematically impossible for the concentration of wealth to continue too much longer.
I agree that we are witnessing an intensification in the power of the financial elite that is unprecedented. That is what happens before a collapse.
Yes, the collapse is going to happen pretty soon.
The whole financial system is built on the bubble of fossil fuel resources.
http://www.carbontracker.org/carbonbubble
The valuation of the fossil fuel companies is predicated on the value of their reserves, which is predicated on those reserves being sold at market prices which reflect inflation, discount rate, extraction cost. They do not reflect AGW.
There are more reserves of fossil fuel companies than can be burned without unacceptable climate change. It isn't a question of running out, the CO2 in the atmosphere will make the Earth unacceptable.
The market price of fossil fuel companies reflects a bubble in fossil fuel prices that does not reflect the realities of what that much CO2 will do to the climate. If the market price of fossil fuel companies did reflect that reality, they would be worth 80% less. About 20% of their present value.
thanx for this article
growth is natural, all organisms aspire to it, limited resources, predators and other factors keep their numbers in check and for most of history has kept humans in check. but recently we discovered with the help of technology how to utilize fossil fuel as an energy source and inventions and the population have been exponentially expanding ever since and now our own growth is threatening our future destroying ecosystems and the diversity of life polluting water,land and air, our problems have expanded at the same rate as our successes. this is old news, everyone knows this, we can all look on the situation with horror but can do nothing to stop it. living things seem programed for growth, its primal, its all we know how to do. the force and direction of humanity are not in our conscious control. if we aspired to have this control it would begin with regulating our own numbers. if any species had a chance in consciously regulating their own population its us with our advanced concepts of cause and effect, past and future our critical thinking. if humans are to really take hold of there destiny it will begin with this. seems simple enough but to accomplish this would require world wide cooperation. . come to think of it with world wide cooperation there is little humans couldn't achieve but alas this extremely unlikely as were spiritually retarded and don't seem to me to be near any collective break through. i know most here on the oil drum consider the problems of limits of growth and peak oil ext. to be technical ones and i think there important but secondary. imagine all the people
Perhaps it is not that we are retarded, but rather that we haven't learned yet. All beings, organisms as well as ecosystems, typically go through a period of rapid growth before settling in to a complex, homeostatic steady state. Humanity, perhaps, is going through this process. I wrote an article on this for Ode Magazine a while back: Money and the Turning of the Age. http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/68/eisenstein-money/.
Change rarely comes until the old world falls apart. What is true for the addict is also, perhaps, true for humanity collectively.
Good article, maybe one day we will evolve past the Upper Paleolithic stage.
It sounds very empowering of the individual rather than the corporation. Instead of giving one's power away to big business to provide cheap goods at the expense of the wilderness, individuals will be more independent. I like it. Makes me want more than ever to get ourselves set up with solar and growing more of our own organic food.
Yes, though I think really what we are seeing is the rebirth of community, not of the individual. All of the technologies of sustainability work best on the local community level, not the individual level.
Then we need to evolve to become like the bees, or ants - and I haven't seen any evidence of it. Let me know when human nature becomes altruistic.
I enjoyed reading this very much. I enjoyed it so much that I had a look at some of the talks that Charles Eisenstein had given. Also I enjoyed these talks. I was particularly delighted to hear him quote one poem, which was entirely new to me]
The sun never says to the earth "you owe me"
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.
Hafez of Shiraz (14th century Persian poet)
Charles Eisenstein, you are a modern-day Giordano Bruno, with your talk of everything being one, your ability to mystically connect it all, and the way you bring the cosmos into ordinary contact with human consciousness in a way that makes sense. Bravo.
The point is that we won't be able to get through the physical discomfort and hardships we might have to face in an economic collapse unless we develop stronger spiritual ties to each other and the cosmos. Fragmented and alone, we cannot manage to endure our suffering.
Let me add that although Bruno wasn't treated well, I think the world is ready to listen to this message now.
I understand all of this as much as anyone, but I'm not ready for this "message."
Look the only thing that creates genuine progress for humanity is the free market. This is historical and empirical, it's just sort of an unpleasant fact of our existence. It's not a philosophy or belief.
And we don't have a free market now! If we did, the major banks of the world would be bankrupt and shut down. The precious metals would be the global standard, not the dollar or euro or any of the worthless digital nonpaper that governments tell us is money. And much of what is now profitable, such as big agribusiness, would in fact not be, as it, like many other industries, is heavily subsidized.
And yes, many people the world over would die of this or that, but what does this prove? We all have to die of this or that eventually. Again, this is an uncomfortable fact of our existence, we can wish it away, we can have the government pay for ventilators and feeding tubes through debt and punitive taxation, but the fact never goes away.
Marxist and New Age claptrap won't save us. Nothing really will in the short term. In the long term, we need to let the free market operate.
Your definition of 'genuine human progress' is, of course, based on a philosophy, and ideology, really.
That you cannot see this only proves that you are too deep inside the system to see it as a system.
What 'free market' (actually an oxymoron, but we'll get back to that) has been wildly effective at doing, joined with ff driven industrialism, is the kind of reverse alchemy: it has taken precious elements of the natural world and turned them into toxins.
And now the whole system has become toxified, and we have pushed the whole system toward a radically different state that will be hostile to most life currently on the planet.
One doesn't have to see any of the alternatives as wonderful to conclude that industrial capitalism/consumerism is the absolutely worse choice if you want to keep some kind of livable world for your progeny.
I'm not sure I would go as far as you but I would go most of the way: industrialism as it is being practiced now is truly poisoning the planet and gradually making it inhospitable for our species. Biotoxins are accumulating in the food chain, habitat is being destroyed, fresh water is being poisoned, soil is eroding, etc.
Trophic theory says that our (i.e. human) expansion must by definition crowd out other species, too.
The folks at CASSE and the various ecological economists have demonstrated that well, I think.
http://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/CASSE_Brief_TrophicStr...
The Steady State Economy, Habitat Stability, and the Humane Treatment of Wild Animals
http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch8.pdf
Hooked on Growth (new movie about to premiere)
http://www.growthbusters.com
Could you show me some kind of index that clearly shows the direction of this trend. To me, it seems very mixed. In much of the world, lots of rivers and lakes that were once poisoned and dead are now fresh and full of life. Habitats are preserved, poisons are slowly disappearing from our foodchains and so on. Certainly there is still overfishing and more, but I'm not at all sure of the trend here. Can we disprove the Kuznets curve for environmental harm?
A man-made world
Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with
http://www.economist.com/node/18741749
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
These folks track multiple variables, including CO2 in the atmosphere, and have determined that we crossed the point of overshoot sometime in the mid-1980's:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org
This has been going on for quite some time, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even otherwise informed people don't know about it:
World Scientists' Warning To Humanity (1992)
http://deoxy.org/sciwarn.htm
If you are interested in learning more and aren't blinded by all the usual myths (technology will save the day, etc.), there is plenty out there on the topic.
Good point about CO2. At levels that have persisted for millenia--about 280ppm--it is just part of the carbon cycle. But push that up by 10, 20, now 30-some percent, and it becomes a systemic toxin or pollutant.
The poison, after all, is in the portion. Too much of anything can become toxic, and that is what CO2 has become.
Mercury is now everywhere. In Minnesota, people are now strongly discouraged from eating fish caught in our streams and lakes, especially if they are young or pregnant. Yet we continue to spew it into the environment in all sorts of ways.
One I hadn't thought about till recently was crematoria. People do not have their teeth pulled before being cremated. Yet many have mercury-based fillings that become toxic when incinerated and spewed into the atmosphere. This often happens in urban settings with lots of people around to get affected. But you aren't safe from these and other toxins in the country. Pesticides and herbicides have increased cancer rates in various parts of the country.
Economists and those enamored of economic models are generally woefully ignorant of these 'costs' of BAU. If they mention them at all, they are called 'externalities,' as if something in the environment was some how outside of the economy. Do they think the human economy is taking place on Mars?
There is an enormous difference between "technology will save the day" and "technology can save the day". One is not realistic, the other is!
Similarly, there is an enormous difference between "our economy is going to crash due to Peak Everything" and "Resource limits technology will cause us large problems, and create very large risks. One is not realistic, the other is!
Note the language above: "If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society"
Risk. Not a pre-determined future.
Again, look at the footprint model you reference: they say we're consuming natural resources unsustainably, not that we've gone over an irreversible cliff.
Given that virtually every system we've constructed has growth baked into its design, our future is pretty much preordained. Try telling the CEO of a company of any decent size not to grow, or even, as Alfred Bartlett found out with his local government in Colorado, local politicians. Heck, practically everyone thinks growth is good:
http://thepage.time.com/2010/11/11/obama-to-g20-growth-trumps-all/#ixzz1...
What good reason do you have to believe that we will reverse course before we crash? We are very much an out-of-control species and it won't be until we crash that people will have significant evidence that the old paradigm was broken. Even then there will be people who will argue that growth wasn't the problem, it was poor technology distribution or some such thing.
But you are more than welcome to plan for us collectively turning the ship around. Personally, I'm planning for the crash.
virtually every system we've constructed has growth baked into its design
Growth in output, not growth in input. Homeowners don't care where electricity comes from, or whether we use more coal to get it. No one cares if we mine more coal except for the coal companies, and they're just going to have to find something else to do.
What good reason do you have to believe that we will reverse course before we crash?
We're already doing it, albeit not as fast as would be ideal. EVs are being built, wind and solar are growing, etc.
"biotoxins" that accumulate in the body are sometimes called the "chemical body burden" as in -
" Scientists estimate that everyone alive today carries within her or his body at least 700 contaminants, most of which have not been well studied (Onstot and others). This is true whether we live in a rural or isolated area, in the middle of a large city, or near an industrialized area."
http://www.chemicalbodyburden.org/whatisbb.htm
...but then again, its mostly unstudied, there's no definite effects, and there's not much you can do about it anyway. I try to stick to things that tell you what are the good choices, or how to make a positive difference.
One can also measure the increase in man-made radioactive isotopes due to industrial failure of fission reactors.
But radioactivity isn't a problem if you claim its not a problem, or so it seems.
Look the only thing that creates genuine progress for humanity is the free market.
Bull.
What produces progress is communication. From language to the printed word to the ability to store and then examine/process data (SQL databases and tools like matlab) - THAT is what creates progress.
I'd say it's the ability to save information: through verbal ideas passed between people and generations; paper; hard drives.
I'd say that your "free market" never did exist and never "creates genuine progress for humanity".
You're thinking of some ideal market that is a direct and perfect proxy for physical economy. No such thing has ever existed, though some markets have historically been closer than others.
In a perfect world, some nation might come up with this real free market of yours. But there are an infinity of other models, better than the one we have.
... and almost all of them are closer to the free market ideal.
This sounds a lot like the reasoning of the late German politician Hermann Scheer who vigorously promoted an energy revolution towards sustainability and decentralization. He was the driving force behind the German FIT system for renewable energy sources and also argued that vested monopolies won't provide the answers to the problems we need today. His book "energy autonomy" is a worthwhile read and covers several of the points discussed in this article although it's probably less generic being purely focused on sustainable energy solutions and energy-politics.
Hello Charles, one of the most interesting and thought provoking pieces I've read for a long while. I am one of the eds here and when I read your piece yesterday I made a note alongside this statement:
Interesting to note that we seem to be approaching this state in some large economies (mentioned later in text) with the concept of zero and negative interest. So it is interesting to observe that the economic system seems to be responding in a predictable way to the energy crisis. Money is losing its ability to store wealth but may continue as a means of facilitating exchange and trade.
I have for long while "felt" that pensions were a feature of the large amounts of net energy flowing from fossil fuels through society in form of energy slaves. Declining net energy will mean death of pensions as the store of energy wealth depletes. Same arguments apply to social security, health benefits and education - all of which are currently under threat in the UK. I believe you are describing the same phenomenon using the language of economics.
With long term interest rates at zero and stock markets falling, annuities and pensions go up in a puff of smoke.
Interesting point on pensions.
Mine is reasonably generous and is paid direct from government (retd. civil service scientist).
I am coming to see it as a 'family resource', not only for wife and myself.
Just need to stay alive longer?
There is a detailed discussion of how 'pension income' 'divied-up' the increased GDP (latter doubling over recent decades) across Europe. Germany seems very generous for example, though not designed to be redistributive. Scandanavia more egalitarian. In Britain the 'middle-class' are 'good risk' and rely more on 'market mechanisms'; annuities etc. whereas parts of the working class are served by means-tested benefits. Women generally lose out.
http://www.unige.ch/ses/spo/Membres/Enseignants/Oesch-1/Publications/Fin...
(Note that in Europe the meaning of 'middle-class' seems different from in USA: in Europe this class is relatively high-income.)
Market mechanisms? State 'benefits'? Ouch for both! Contractual obligations for my favoured segment of retired Public Sector ... we will see? Won't touch many of the very affluent though, I guess. Astonishing percentage of income is taken by the top 0.1% let alone the 1.0%. Do you see that changing?
Having a good State pension is probably as good as any insurance at present though the value could get sucked into a price resetting vortex. My wife pays into a University superannuation scheme and we are discussing at present the option to discontinue with this on basis that the value of underlying assets may also be reset - better to have income today. I have a self invested pension (SIP) and taking personal control over that was one of the best moves I made about 6 years ago.
Replace "income" with "wealth" and I don't see that changing soon since the very wealthy have much of that tied up in land and real estate. And so assuming no nationalisation of such assets they will remain concentrated in the hands of the very few in the UK.
How long will we continue to tolerate vast income redistribution to bankers caught in a futile struggle to sustain the old system that looks increasingly unsustainable?
Ever since the advent of money in ancient Greece, interest has caused a concentration of wealth. Negative interest would encourage the opposite. The details are complicated, but the idea is simple: that you can no longer make money merely by owning money. The practical proposal I develop in my writings is that the next bailout should be done with negative-interest currency. We avoid massive social disruption, but the banks don't get rewarded for their perfidy. They receive a depreciating asset. This goes along with other forms of elimination of economic rents (i.e. money coming from mere ownership, as opposed to effective use), for example Georgist taxes on land value.
I think we are there already...
-------
Another conversation I had earlier this week in response to Swiss Bank tying SWF to € was that governments may try and tax owning gold. Strikes me as same thing as a land tax - a tax on owning assets as opposed to doing honest work with decreasing amounts of FF energy slaves?
Nate just bought a draft horse!
Yes, we are certainly trending in that direction, as interest rates hug zero. Except for the fact that the banks feel free to make all kinds of risky investments with high returns because they know that if the investment goes bad, the government will bail them out to "save the financial system". As Paul Krugman says, it's "heads they win, tails we lose." This is what is called "moral hazard", and it means that the actual risk-free interest rate (for the big players) is much higher than it appears.
Please explain a little of the practical aspects of negative interest. I cannot understand why anyone would loan money at negative interest, anytime. Regardless of inflation or deflation, one will always be better off just holding the money.
Perhaps you mean a "cash-financial-assets" tax, that would discourage anyone from holding cash or other types of liquid assets. Of course, if such a tax were instituted, it would spur the mother of all hard-asset bubbles.
Yes, it is similar to a tax. It would be implemented as a carry charge on deposits in the Federal Reserve, accompanied perhaps by a depreciation rate built into physical currency. The economics of the idea were first worked out by Silvio Gesell in the early 20th century, and enthusiastically promoted by the prominent American economist Irving Fisher in the 1930s. Keynes also approved of the idea. It was implemented on a local level in scattered locations during the great depression, and worked well until outlawed by central governments. The idea, also known as demurrage, has been resurgent in the last decade. I first read about it in _The Future of Money_ by Bernard Lietaer, who was, ironically enough, one of the architects of the euro. My book goes into the economic details of it; another very insightful treatment is in Jordan Macleod's book, _New Currency_.
As realized by this commenter, the negative interest rate can't be too high, or people will switch to alternative stores of value. The idea is to put a carry cost on money that is roughly equivalent to that of physical goods. Most physical commodities bear significant costs: they are subject to loss through decay, rust, obsolescence, etc. Even gold must be guarded and insured against theft. That is the theory. In practice, I think it would also be necessary to institute controls on speculative transactions, something like a Tobin tax. Finally, certain hard assets should themselves be subject to a holding tax. Land, in particular. Originally, the term "demurrage" referred to a storage charge.
Ah, very insightful. One way of looking at negative-interest currencies is that they provide a way to decouple medium-of-exchange and store-of-value, two of the classic functions of money. The parallel with decoupling energy with fossil fuels is significant.
Pensions today (and all annuities) are essentially funded by interest, it is true. However, the reason they are under threat is that the financial beast, unable to feed its need to grow with new good and services, is stripping existing assets from the economy instead. Say you are a debtor and your payment obligations are growing. Either you can earn more money, liquidate existing assets, or devote more of your income to debt service. On the collective level it is the same. The first corresponds to growing GDP. That's the solution that everyone likes, but it is impossible to sustain. That leaves that latter two. It is called austerity. Looting the pensions is part of it; also privatization, raising taxes, etc.
If only one or a few countries set their interest rates at negative them I don't see how it would work, other than creating a black market economy using some other still interest bearing currency? Resources - commodities - would still be needed and whichever currency gave the best global deal when it came to buying these resources now and in the near future would be favoured. In the long run every country might come round but societies don't, trough choice, make decisions based on a long term perspective.
So my point is who would trust putting all their current wealth into such an idea?
I forgot to mention: even in the absence of interest, there can still be pensions. In any society, people give and receive different things at different times in their lives. In old age, you are suppose to receive material things, food, etc., and give time, attention, stories. Spend time with grandchildren. That's how hunter-gatherer societies worked, and I think our future will learn from them.
Thanks, Charles. With a few speculative caveats, the overall tone of the article is pretty much spot on, IMO.
Some comments have danced around something I discovered after going off grid ~16 years ago. This would be the psycology of "decoupling", for lack of a better term, from the grid, phisically, finacially and mentally.
Physically, I am no longer reliant on the whole, on the ability of a complex organization to maintain its systems, nor on the "man", who can pull the plug if I don't play his way. The "man" doesn't even have the right to enter my property; no easements or legal access. System outages don't affect me (at home), in fact, I usually don't know if the grid has gone down.
Finacially, besides the relief from monthly bills, I am also free from the vagaries of big energy finance, rate changes, and any taxes that may be imposed, now or in the future. I'm also free from income taxes paid on the money I would need to make to pay all of the above. Gosh, I don't even need to make the money to pay all of the above. My choice. Our reliance on debt has dropped to almost nil; more freedom to thumb our noses at usury.
Psycologically, it' a big thing. Firstly, it works, I know it works, and we immediately began looking for other ways to decouple from, what we increasingly recognize as an unsustainable, rather mad, hyper-complex clusterf**k, and there are many things one can do. We are weaning ourselves from the "totally reliant on failing systems" mindset that we now realize infects our society. Our social interconnections become more organic, more pure, in a sense. An exchange of currency is far more sterile than bartering, trading, gifting. That most people see that as an advantage has become troubling to us.
We are, over time, replacing much of our reliance on money with more reliance on relationships and social capital. We also understand that this is necessary to a return to societal sanity. Utter reliance on money begins to reduce our reliance upon each other to a ledger. An exchange of labor can't be taxed to pay for wars of choice. The energy from our PV panels doesn't help support mountaintop removal, mercury in our streams, etc., after their initial energy debt has been paid (long ago).
While I applaud those who have taken the plunge to install grid tied systems, in some ways they may be missing out on the real benefits, the mindset advantage that comes from a higher level of "decoupling". Just some thoughts...
I am an engineer, and with a few acres of land and a modest investment it would be relatively simple for me to rig up equipment to provide me and my family with all the basic necessities of life. I have not done that yet because I can't come up with the answer to one key question.
In my state, nearly 3/4 of the population is concentrated into a handful of urban centers. With few exceptions all those people are doing exactly bupkis to prepare, and in fact most folks still argue against the very idea of peak oil. If there is a widespread collapse of industrialized society, all those millions of people within a few hundred miles of me will be scrabbling for whatever they can get.
What makes you think that you will be allowed to keep what you have built under those circumstances? Even if 95% of all the people remain in place, that still leaves several hundred thousand heavily armed desperados roaming across the land taking what they need by whatever means necessary. I don't think there is anyplace in the U.S. remote enough to escape.
It's not a pretty picture but considering historical examples I expect this is relatively likely. How do you plan for that?
You don't.
You realize that the survivalist dream is just an unrealistic fantasy.
Then you work to see that the worst does not come true. Use your engineering skills to cut our oil use and to find energy alternatives for all of us.
If you're rich enough, you could sign up for one of those apocalypse hideout silos (survival bunkers)
I am planning for various levels of badness. And for any badness short of roaming gangs, a couple acres in the country is the place to be. For badness that does include roaming gangs, you want someplace right in the middle of town near the cop shop.
You're right, the fortress mentality isn't going to work here. I guess the answer is to get the heck out of the way. Take what I can to my relative's place in town and hole up there. Come back after things settle down and see if there's anything left.
As far as where we are headed, I am not under any illusion that I can hold back the tide. Even with the data from this site I can't convince anyone that there is a serious immediate problem. Therefore I am concentrating my design efforts on simple solar power systems that can be fabricated from scrap engines. The information will be there when people are ready to hear it.
Hey, GoodOl-- simple solar power---. I have been over and over that road for decades. Keep coming back to something simple like:
find a weed that grows good without any inputs but sun and air and water- what ever's there.
cut the weed and dry it
stuff the dried weed into a gasifier
stuff the gas into any old IC engine
couple that engine to any old generator
Presto! Electricity
Sell the electricity to the neighbors for whatever they grow, and for a collective promise to make life hell for any roving gang.
And a promise never to have a kid unless somebody dies.
Make that two somebodys.
Yes, after quite a bit of study I have come to much the same conclusion. The best way to store sunlight for short periods is as heat. Heat can also be stored seasonally in most soil types if you are willing and able to excavate 10 feet deep under your house and tear up your entire yard. But the only practical way to store sunlight for transportation is as chemical energy. Why should I build a mini refinery when grass grows by itself around here? Change the engine to burn the available fuel.
A standard piston engine runs like crap on town gas. You also have a problem with tars and crud that must be removed. It's OK for a stationary installation, although the fuel efficiency isn't great. But for a vehicle you're better off with a steam engine or a Brayton cycle engine that uses external combustion. Either approach requires a cylinder head and camshaft conversion, and a heat exchanger, but with a few machine tools it's very doable.
Unfortunately I have become convinced that widespread adoption of this technology would lead to farming practices that amount to strip mining the soil. So it can be a niche player, for example it's a great fit for running farm machinery. But I don't think it will never be enough to let most of us maintain anything like our present energy use.
The whole Doomer genre tends towards unrealistic fantasy.
I like you, Bob Wallace.
Good quality use of a brain, there.
I look at it as building lifeboats. If some million(s) of US each build "lifeboats" that can carry some hundred(s) of US, each, I think we might just make it through some of this.
I believe that millions of "lifeboats" would make a difference, too. I also believe that the chance of millions of them being built before they are needed is extremely remote as to be essentially zero probability. Most people have no clue of the macro trends of the planet and thus will be caught unprepared when an upcoming GFC occurs — the one that the central banks can't "fix." Notice how well SUV sales have rebounded.
Truly, people have no idea of the trends we discuss here.
Remember how Y2K crashed our civilization and we all went back to caves?
There are some subtle differences with Y2K though (from an insider point of view anyway - I spent years fixing the thing).
The problem was localised to one area to do with date manipulation.
It had a very precise cause and an exact "fix by" date.
It was easy to identify what would go wrong by putting the system date forward and running the software, and then doing the same thing to prove that you've fixed it.
Trust me - there was a huge effort in the IT world to fix Y2K and the money spent on it by IT departments worldwide depressed the whole industry for years afterwards. The only reason the banking industry didn't go back to the stone age was due to a huge effort by programmers in the years prior to it.
Y2K was a problem, Bob. It could be solved. The debt situation is a predicament, unsolvable, and will run it's course.
Global warming is baked into the cake. It will take centuries(?) for the planet to rebalance itself and will have to be adapted to.
End of empire will lead who knows where? With the USSR as a recent example, the period of re-stablization will be at least a couple of decades, an unlikely period for massive investment in your dreams. Orlov's essay, Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century is a good place to start.
Exponential, unprecedented growth in human population, enabled by an industrial age brought on by equally unprecedented exploitation of cheap, portable fossil fuels, is here and ongoing, further stressing ecological systems, depleting finite resources at a point when many are in severe decline, resources required to implement your dreams. Your belief that all/most of this resource base, energy, money and time will, or can be suddenly retasked to mitigate our current liabilities is naive, IMO.
International attempts at mitigating climate change, environmental damage, ending starvation, controlling population, and defusing the debt bomb, have been woefully inadequate. Those who benefit the most from current conditions hold most of the cards, and have little interest in your ideas.
The Little Engine That Could, like your belief that all of these issues can be resolved simultaniously, is a great story. The problem is when one does the math; the Little Engine That Could, really couldn't. Not enough traction or horesepower, too much dead weight.
Perhaps you need to devote your time and beliefs to creating a comprehensive plan, one with numbers and actual real world solutions on a global scale, a plan which the pragmatic minds on TOD can really get behind. We're not all Chicken Littles here. "I think we can, I think we can.." doesn't cut it for me. That "we aren't, we aren't" is self evident, because there is no "we",, not the sort of "we" you talk about. But I suppose you envision some sort of Grand Awakening event and can afford to look at the bright side.
I think Bob won't see what we're discussing until it actually happens. He is missing some key fundamentals, like an understanding of the problem of credit, and is minimizing the environmental and population problems. I see this all the time.
I'm going to bow out of this thread now. It think I've made my case about the role of credit in the economy. If Bob can't see it, well, that's just what's so.
I've made my case about the role of credit in the economy.
Well, no: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8350/836723
GoodOldWhatsHisName, gosh...
Folks always impose a "survivalist/fortress mentality" onto the choices we've made when that's absolutely not the case. I could just as dishonestly assume that you haven't adjusted your lifestyle because you think, when TSHTF, you'll go take what you want from folks like me. The whole tone of such a conversation is absurd, and gets old. One could just as well advocate continuing BAU, since we'll all perish in a nuclear war, or get cooked due to global warming.
What it is about is proving that folks can make choices that reduce their participation in a mad, clearly failing way of life. It becomes clear from many comments here that most folks, even the ones who have an awareness of what's happening to our world, are still thinking in unsustainable ways, applying their deeply entrenched biases to those who've gotten their heads around what's really going on.
Making change happen isn't about changing lightbulbs, it's about changing minds. It isn't about survival of the individual, it's about what one does, here and now. It's certainly not about living in a world of grossly misdirected people. It's about living with one's self.
You say: "What makes you think that you will be allowed to keep what you have built under those circumstances? Even if 95% of all the people remain in place, that still leaves several hundred thousand heavily armed desperados roaming across the land taking what they need by whatever means necessary. I don't think there is anyplace in the U.S. remote enough to escape.
It's not a pretty picture but considering historical examples I expect this is relatively likely. How do you plan for that?"
It won't matter if things fall apart to the point that folks will steal my food or solar panels. What matters is that I won't be stealing theirs. That's how I "plan for that".
What makes you think that you will be allowed to keep what you have built under those circumstances?
The Continuity of Government plan says the Government can take stuff. Cuz its important to keep the Government going, don't ya know?
I am very happy about the large scale reinvestments and capacity increases in the Swedish grid and also in our neighbouring countries Norway, Denmark and Finland and even the baltic countries are investing in their grids. It is a very good large scale system to have in top shape and capacity as we enter the post peak oil era since it makes it easy to distribute hydro power, wind power and new nuclear power and numerous small initaitievs can hook up to the grid instead of investing in and maintaining accumulators and it makes it easy to handle a million EV:s or new industries that use electricity instead of oil or natural gas.
Why should we abandon such an efficient and low maintainance infrastructure? It is a lot smarter to build more capacity and redundancy while our economy is strong to give the next three generations more options during the post peak oil era.
When it comes to life sciences/pharmacology, the article is plain wrong. There is a reason why today's medicines are purified and modified, and produced centrally. Take pain medicines for example. The original pain medicine was willow bark. This contains a varying amount of salicylic acid, the active principle. Salicylic acid has strong side effects, it damages the stomach much more than aspirin. Aspirin is an ester of salicylic acid (acetyl-salicylic acid) which has less side effects. Also, the modern pills have the advantage of a defined amount per pill. The traditional remedy could have very much or very little, depending on the willow it came from.
An even more striking example is Aristolochia, or "birthworth". Wikipedia:
The species A. clematitis was highly regarded as a medicinal plant since the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and on to until the Early Modern era; it also plays a minor role in traditional Chinese medicine. Due to its resemblance to the uterus, the doctrine of signatures held that "birthwort" was useful in childbirth." There is only a minor problem with the medicinal use: Aristolochia causes kidney failure and is a carcinogenic. Aristolochia is still used by some Chinese herbalists, so I would not recommend Chinese medicine that much.
Therefore, anybody who believes in "collapse" should include a large cache of modern medicines in her/his storage vault and consider hiring a medicinal chemist if the resources are available...
Dear biologist, I think you have misunderstood the article. As a point of advice it is always best to ask a question than to make a statement such as "the article is plain wrong"
If we could cure heart disease by eating dandelion leaves a large swathe of health care GDP would disappear in an instant. Scarcity creates profit. Ubiquity creates a system where profit is impossible. That is the academic point made here. Your suggestion of hoarding medicines makes many leaps and assumptions.
Can the knowledge be maintained without the financial system which presently exploits it?
Take the Red Yeast Rice that reduces cholesterol and has the same active ingredients exploited by big biotech for BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. It was long known to be a remedy and it is very cheap and easy to take as a supplement. But it is not used since it is not a pill and the Dr. does not give it to his patients.
Now why would the supplement be banned under regulatory restrictions? Who would be behind that little scheme? Gee I wonder. The whole scheme is a joke. Look I am a scientist. We know that some traditional herbals are real, but the industry and its partner (Big G) are making the sheep pay billions for things already invented.
It does work, but is liver toxic to many people.
Use with caution.
University of Pennsylvania conducted a study on 60 persons using FDA-legal RYR (2009) and found that the side-effect of muscle pain was reduced for these patients and of course cholesterol was lowered. Interestingly, this supp is low on lovastatin so other statins are in there, which work pretty darn well. This is despite the numerous Federal court cases and millions upon millions of dollars wasted on litigation to remove traces of Lovastatin from RYR. Ha Ha. And the drug companies still cannot render the ancient Chinese remedy ineffective. Sometimes Nature is smarter than we give her credit.
I respectfully disagree. I have used only herbal medicines (and a lot of Chinese medicine) for twenty years now, and for all my children too. The cases you offer are, in my opinion, the exception not the rule. I have found herbal medicine to be very effective, and, used properly, devoid of serious side effects.
I'm a bit biased though -- my wife is a doctor of oriental medicine. She has seen hundreds, thousands actually, of cases where people who had medically intractable problems be cured with Chinese medicine.
I also have a friend who is a doctor (MD) in a major hospital. Years ago, he said to me one day in frustration, "Half the medicines I use merely palliate symptoms, and the other half are downright toxic." So he went to study medical acupuncture. His colleagues thought he was wasting his time, but then when he started successfully treating patients that had conditions otherwise untreatable, they started secretly referring patients to him. Now he is starting an acupuncture training program for other physicians in the hospital.
Anecdotal, I know...
Medical doctors are generally not scientists... unfortunately!
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/09/traditional_nonsense.php#comments
Tim Minchin sums it all up quite nicely, in Storm the Animated Movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
Accupuncture saved my left kidney. Damaged in a fall when 8, it came back to bite me in my early 30's. Cold and apparently not working right, it hurt and just below my eyes darkened. I felt awful, tired and sick. Regular dr's had no idea what to do, except maybe remove it.
So on a tip from a friend I went to an accupuncturist. It works on an energy basis, that energy needs to move to different body parts and if not, then needles can help create a juncture where energy then starts to move through meridians. Well, it worked! Got the left kidney warming up and after 6 weeks I was back to normal. Then one day I had a sudden urge to urinate, pulled the truck over on a mountain turnout and whizzed. It was a brownish very putrid smelling fluid that gushed out. I think it was the kidney flushing out a bunch of old cells from when it wasn't active. Anyway, really feel like it was a life saver. Now, 23 years later and left kidney is still warm and doing its job.
Hey Peak Earl, I'm glad that your kidney pulled through! However your anecdote is not 'proof' that acupuncture works.
Your body actually has an incredible capacity to heal itself even without any medical intervention whatsoever.
Hope your kidney keeps working for another 23 years!
BTW,
Sorry, you are going to have to do a whole lot better than that for a valid scientific explanation for how this stuff works. That particular explanation just doesn't cut it.
Cheers,
Fred
Agreed!
There is a reason why I take so much flack in my courses by people who try to assert in the forums that homeopathy works: in well-designed studies, success rates are simply no greater than the placebo effect.
They just don't understand all the variables involved, including the capacity of the body to heal itself. Or they try ten different things, often including evidence-based medicine, but attribute the success to the homeopathic treatment. People just aren't very rigorous in their thinking. It takes training to learn to be rigorous because, as Feynman says:
I recommend any of these books to understand why homeopathy and other alternative treatments simply don't produce reliable results:
It's nice to see the flagrant attack on modern medicine in the article has been countered.
I would also point out that a lot of standard medicines are dirt cheap. If you were having to go to the local witch doctor who gives you some leaves to stick up your nose to cure your headache I can assure you of two things. One it wouldn't work, and two he would charge you considerably more than the few cents that an aspirin costs.
I recommend any of these books to understand why homeopathy and other alternative treatments simply don't produce reliable results:
As opposed to the 80% failure rate here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/depression-medication-why_b_...
Sure, some medicines are going to be more effective than others. But, generally, if they don't perform above the placebo rate they aren't considered medicines.
Also, I don't understand the math in that quote: "80% of the people get better with just a placebo." Where did the author get that number? The sentence before says that just 40% of the people do.
I have more faith in science than not, but as far as allopathic medicine goes, I'll take alternatives like homeopathic and acupuncture any day. My children and I have had similar positive experiences to Perk Earl's and others. I suspect that for some people, alternative medical practices work with the body's healing abilities better than pharma-based allopathic medicine does.
Let's face it, we may all respond differently to different treatments.
K.
Yes, you and your children may respond especially well to placebo, which is quite powerful, but if you at one time or another need medicine that actually does something directly to your body, I would hope that you'll use real medicine.
Ha - we use "real" medicine on occasion, but rarely need it, due perhaps to strong attention to diet, exercise, sleep patterns, etc. There's a lot to be said for preventative medicine, lifestyle choices, environment, meditative concentration, etc.
The best doctors (MD or DO) I've come across tend to go this route as well - they seem to use a combination of many approaches, both conventional and those said to be "worthless." I think a little wisdom, discernment, and open-mindedness go a long way when it comes to matters of healing. There's a lot we don't know about consciousness-type energy. If you can stimulate natural healing without too many chemicals, so much the better, usually. If a placebo effect works, it works.
Best to all,
Kate
If you are able to draw placebo effects from homeopathy and other witchcraft, then more power to you, I guess. A sound life style, however, is not voodoo, but very important for health. This is very, very evidence-based and need no "open-mindedness".
Anything you see as medicine will have a placebo effect so standard medicine is best. You get the actual tested effect of the drug, and you get the placebo effect as well.
If you choose to read those books, you'll learn what's going on with you and your children.
The adherents can talk about "water memory" until they are blue in the face but you'll never convince me that a solution that has been diluted down to:
1/100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
and similar levels is anything other than a person with an slick story selling you purified water. Perhaps I'm in the wrong business.
P.S. A better term than "allopathic" is "evidence-based" because the evidence for homeopathic treatments, for instance, just isn't there. It performs exactly at the level of the placebo effect.
From Session 4 of the UnCrash Course:
I have been (and seen friends) on both sides of this debate, 'in real time' as they say.
You have to be right, sorry to say, about homeopathy it seems.
Acupuncture could just be a bit different though - totally different thing than homeopathy.
I think there is a bit of evidence - just about comes down on the plus side perhaps? No idea what the explanation might be, but that is true for a lot of the 'signalling environment' that we call our bodies.
I think we all agree that self-healing is what matters for many conditions.
The latest work on cancers even suggests that the 'body environment' is critical especially in aging for actual expression of some common cancers, and mostly accounts for the huge geographical disparity, where there can be one or two orders of magnitude difference in final incidence. Technical presentation by Jeff Holly for example here http://easd.conference2web.com/content/392 (warning: scary charts). Incidence of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular conditons are similarly promoted or reduced by long term 'body-environment'.
I have also known people on long term 'conventional' medication who 1) did not need it 2) were harmed by it. Never stay on any medication for years without getting a regular check on your condition and the appropriateness of the drug. (Knew one guy treated for decades for wrongly diagnosed diabetes - insulin for g'dness sake - and another who persuaded his medics to let him treat himself, again for decades, by dipping in to a suite of powerful anti-biotics for apparent lung 'infections'.)
On the other hand, if you reach middle-age and find you have a chronic progressive condition, though you can throw serious lifestyle improvement at it, often to great advantage, you need treatment. I have watched all the TCM and acupuncture in the world still leave friends with serious consequences - untreated cancer, cardiovascular events, chronic kidney disease and CVD after a decade of untreated hypertension. Even with the downsides of treatment, the evidence for things like statins for example, is that they seriously tip the balance favorably for most patients with cardiovascular conditions. (I have a long personal story, but not for this comment.)
I like PE's personal story about his kidney. What did he have to lose except a kidney via an operation? I would have tried acupuncture first. Whatever it was; 'self-repair' kicked in.
best wishes for staying healthy
phil
For a fun look at homeopathy, see:
That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
"Right! Get me a bit of blue Ford Mondeo. Put it in water. Shake it. Dilute it. Shake it again. Dilute it again. Do some more shaking. Dilute it some more. Then put three drops on his tongue. If that doesn't cure him, I don't know what will."
If you want to know some of the history of homeopathy see:
http://www.homeowatch.org/
And especially:
Homeopathy's "Law of Similars"
http://www.homeowatch.org/basic/similars.html
Homeopathy's "Law of Infinitesimals"
http://www.homeowatch.org/basic/infinitesimals.html
Acupuncture appears to be no better to me, btw, but like all placebo-based treatments, might fool some people into thinking it is the cause of some sort of healing.
There have been reputable studies with acupuncture that looked positive (placebo controlled).
Can you quote them - and any negative ones?
I do not have time just now to dig them out.
I would hesitate dismissing acupuncture wholesale on just theoretical grounds.
Acupuncture does not deal with underlying conditions like diabetes II, nor hypertension, though acupuncture can look as though it gives temporary improvements for hypertension (anecdotal report).
[EDIT: well... leaving to one side it is not easy to contrive credible 'placebo control' for acupuncture! Better for most purposes to try life-style improvements anyway.]
I personally lost interest in homeopathy a while ago.
AFAIK, acupuncture has been placebo controlled by inserting needles randomly, which yielded the same results as inserting needles according to acupuncture theory.
You can also put sheaths around the needle and the needle either goes in or just touches the skin. The end result is always the same. It doesn't matter where you stick the needle and it doesn't matter how far the needle goes in.
What matters is that the acupuncturist spends quality time with the patient, the patient gets to relax and the patient feels that something is happening. That seems to be why taking a sugar pill has less placebo effect than touchy therapies.
Of course the irony is that once you know this, the placebo effect will be reduced for these treatments.
Please make sure that these studies are:
a) Double blinded. Can be done with a little extra work.
b) Not electro-stimulation. That's not acupuncture, it just uses similar needles.
The literature is full of not-quite acupuncture studies with poor controls. I've also seen people saying "it only works as good as placebo, so therefore there is an effect!!1!, yay positive study!!!".
I've done my research into homeopathy and acupuncture: neither make sense on a theoretical ground and neither have the high-quality studies demonstrating that they are effective.
It's up to the proponents to come up with the proof. There is so much snake oil out there that the only rational ground for a new treatment is "prove it works, then I'll buy it."
Here's a good one I spotted this morning:
"Rubbing an iPhone on your face won't cure acne - FTC"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/12/acne_cure_app/
Don't get me wrong, I actually think many homeopaths and acupuncturists are completely honest people. They just don't know science and how to control variables well and thus are fooled into thinking their treatments work better than the placebo effect.
But in some cases, they seriously need to be reigned in when they make claims about curing cancer and similar diseases. They can cause some serious pain and suffering with those claims.
Dr. Barrett of homeowatch seems to have an agenda to disparage homeopathy no matter what while other respected experts seem to still be debating and discussing the treatment - http://mediasite.uchc.edu/Mediasite41/Viewer/?peid=407916ea-6301-4ede-b0...
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Barrett
"A number of practitioners and supporters of alternative medicine oppose Barrett and Quackwatch for its criticism of alternative medicine.[25][29] Donna Ladd, a journalist with The Village Voice, says Barrett relies mostly on negative research to criticize alternative medicine, rejecting most positive case studies as unreliable due to methodological flaws. She further writes that Barrett insists that most alternative therapies simply should be disregarded without further research. "A lot of things don't need to be tested [because] they simply don't make any sense," he says, pointing to homeopathy, chiropractic, and acupuncture as examples of alternative treatments with no plausible mechanism of action.[25]"
Smart man, he can see that the there is no theoretical underpinning for these treatments. Couple that with no evidence that it works beyond the placebo effect and I would say that he's making a very rational and supportable assertion. Are you going to say that astrology works, too, even though there is no mechanism for that? How about phrenology? Iridology? Reflexology? Martian canals?
Did you even read the link I posted about the Law of Infinitesimals? The science just isn't there. Homeopathic treatments are generally pure distilled water or sugar pills. They are chemically indistinguishable because there often isn't even a single molecule of the original substance in the preparation.
Do you make your coffee sweeter in the morning by putting in more sugar or less sugar? Of course it's more sugar, because that's how chemistry, a branch of physics, works at its most fundamental level.
You are in the grip of a gross misconception because you are ignoring one of the basic principles of physics. Since there is no original substance, homeopathy "works" because of the placebo effect. If you are fine with that, great. But if you at all claim to make decisions on science, explain how distilled water without a single molecule of "medicine" can possibly "work" other than by the placebo effect.
And if you wish to start up with the "water memory" stuff, please don't. That's just replacing one piece of pseudoscience with another.
It's worse than that. If homeopathy were true, then our knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology would have to be completely overturned. Large swathes of what we already know to be true would have to be wrong.
Btw, Roy didn't help the cause. In addition to his talk coming off like a rant, I even caught that there were impurities in the water as I was watching.
Nor did he explain how water memory is supposed to work with the body even if the original substance left behind some sort of structure (which wasn't demonstrated, either).
Yeah, but fortunately it seems to forget all the poo it has had in it...
"Salicylic acid has strong side effects, it damages the stomach much more than aspirin."
You've got your wires crossed there, pal. The opposite is true. Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is MUCH more ulcerogenic than the parent compound.
I learned a new phrase a few days ago, "drop-in fuels." We leave the consuming device the same and concoct a different fuel. The military is looking for a way to fuel jets (tanks, personnel carriers,...) without oil, and Obama is providing the rhetoric to suspend the laws of physics until he gets re-elected. Just as with "shovel ready," we have institutionalized BAU remedies which have no future.
Rebuilding America, fixing our infrastructure, etc., is all about constructing stranded assets -- artifacts which will last 50-100 years longer than there will be fuel to operate them. Pity.
In the current context, incremental change will produce excremental results. When we put solar on our roofs, we must swap out our incandescent bulbs, we must get rid of our cars -- and not put electric motors in them -- any more than we added wheels to our horses.
The car is only about 1% efficient; it (with help from other 2 & 4 wheeled contraptions) kills a million people a year, maiming countless others. We have a unique opportunity in the context of peak oil to redesign, to transform personal transport. First principles: grade separation, automated on fixed guideway, dispatchable not scheduled, solar power, light weight, aerodynamics, less than 100 watt-hours per vehicle-km. Don't know how? Once you jettison oil, you will be able to figure it out. Don't leave it to future generations; be responsible.
"Rebuilding America, fixing our infrastructure, etc., is all about constructing stranded assets -- artifacts which will last 50-100 years longer than there will be fuel to operate them. Pity."
That seems like a rather valid concept.
But this part . . .
"and not put electric motors in them"
Did you mean to imply that all electric motor systems would have to have batteries?
I often see the concept of Electric Car confused or mixed with "Battery Powered Electric Car."
Whole different animal, I suppose you know?
It appears the real immediate problem is fuel choice -- i.e., Oil and other Hydrocarbon based.
Changing the fuel and motor allows advancement away from Oil along a reasonable transition path, just as we transitioned from Horses to (Oil Fuel) cars.
We transitioned away from hauling stuff on horses to using them to pull wheeled vehicles.
Our first cars did not have electric starters, fuel pumps, heaters or windshield wipers. Not even roll up windows or hydraulic brakes.
We'll start out with (we are starting out with) what will be viewed as rather crude devices a couple of decades later. We crawl, then we walk.
We're the most clever of all the primates.
The bonobos, however, do seem to have figured out some social skills that we haven't yet latched onto....
Agree about the bonobos. Offering/obtaining sex as a way of conflict resolution sounds like an evolutionary step forward to me. Make love not war?
Charles, on a different theme, at TOD we have an email list of long standing contributors (about 30 in all) that operates behind the scenes. A point of great frustration for me of late is that we often spend much time holding detailed conversations in private as opposed to on the public board. A recurring theme here, and on the pubic board, is the "value" of wind and other renewable energy sources.
We seem to reach an irreconcilable disagreement between individuals who agree in principle! I am very much a supporter of "sensible" renewable energy, but disagree strongly with those who argue that it will make energy "cheaper" in today's monetary terms.
And so your article has switched lights on for me. Our current system of economy and finance is based on FF and it is difficult to describe the value of alternative energy sources in these terms. I believe what you are saying is that we can have a society based on alternative energy, but it will look and operate very differently to the one we have today - and I'd agree with that.
The challenge now is to transition from old energy / finance system to the new energy / finance system without fatal disruption. Any suggestions?
The first thing you have to do is kill the fossil fuel industry by using generally accepted accounting practices. Fossil fuel companies are valued by the value of their fossil fuel reserves at current market prices. Those fossil fuel reserves can't all be sold at market prices because the Earth's climate would be destroyed. Therefore the pricing of fossil fuel companies is a classic economic bubble, it is based on an inflated price that can never be realized.
Get the financial world to appreciate that, and fossil fuel companies will decrease in value and then realistic solutions to AGW can be considered. Right now, the biggest player is the imaginary value of the fossil fuel reserves of the fossil fuel companies that can never be realized. That valuation is imaginary. Financial markets have to treat it as the imaginary bubble that it is.
Excellent points. I've never heard it articulated quite that way.
Euan, your question came in right after my comment:
> Any suggestions?
I have just participated in Podcar City Conference 5 -- www.podcarcity.org/Stockholm -- and presented (with others) an urban transport system based 100% on solar, today to government officials here. We have allies too in the UK and USA.
The very different urban environment I described is one in which people reclaim the organic plane; our 2 tonne machines are properly downsized (<500 kg) and separated ... placed above the street where their over-arching solar panels provide a rain canopy in the winter and shade in the summer.
Our ancestors lived on a solar budget -- or we wouldn't be here. We know more now. All we have to do is commit to a non-fossil fuel = renewable system and roll up our sleeves. No more whining!
Many here beat the oil drum about the poor economics of solar / wind, never examining the bias intrinsic in an economic system that has been rigged ("gamed") by oil interests. Thankfully, we have come far enough with solar / wind that the physics :: EROEI :: will meet the challenge. For example, our solar transport system's electricity beats gasoline in 4 years with zero subsidy. How? By rethinking the problem. "Point-of-view is worth 80 IQ points."
"I believe what you are saying is that we can have a society based on alternative energy, but it will look and operate very differently to the one we have today"
Yes. As the saying goes, "You cannot change one thing without changing everything."
My basic thesis is that all the crises converging upon us are related at the root, and are a kind of birth crisis propelling us into a new era. My book before Sacred Economics is about that. (The Ascent of Humanity).
The only advantage of oil as a storage medium is its energy density. We don't yet have a way to store as much energy in the same space as with petroleum fuels.
It's not very convenient. We have to extract it, haul it to a refinery, mess with it until we get gasoline, get fuel, etc., haul it to distribution stations where we store it until we load it into vehicles.
It's not cheap if one adds in the costs of climate change, pollution and the need for large armies to maintain supply lines.
And we don't have good ways to burn it efficiently. We waste most of the energy in cast off heat.
Let's look at electricity as a substitute.
It's convenient. We can make it a number of sustainable ways and efficiently ship it to where it's needed over the grid.
Per work performed it's cheap, partly because we can turn it into work so efficiently.
We just need better ways to store electricity. Or find ways to change our use patterns to match our storage systems.
Storage is almost certainly solvable, lots of innovations coming out of the labs are being tested right now. And if it the solution does not appear there are work-arounds....
Bob Wallace -- you are really, really, close . . . excepting this part . . . .
"We just need better ways to store electricity. Or find ways to change our use patterns to match our storage systems."
Drop the storage part out of there, and you would on to something.
Comes out something like "We just need to figure out to change our use patterns . . . to meet the production patterns."
Farmers call the concept -- Making Hay, While The Sun Shines.
Works the same way in Electricity Land. Use the stuff while it is being produced. Then we need No Storage. We could already be there.
I live off the grid, have for a couple of decades.
I use a combination of load-shifting/'use it when you've got it' and storage.
I do heavy draw jobs like laundry and woodworking when the sun provides. I store power in batteries and in the form of water pumped from the well to water tanks high on the ridge above the house.
Without storage (or some amazing mix of sources) you're going to be stubbing your toe as you walk around in the dark.
We know how to build storage, we already have 25GW of pump-up storage in the US and lots of existing dams for conversion. Utility scale batteries are rapidly evolving and starting to be connected to the grid. Storage can be cheaper than generation, both in terms of dollars and CO2 emission.
By installing some storage at remote wind farms we can get away with installing smaller transmission lines. We can store the less frequent high wind generation and late night unneeded power, then feed it out when the winds drop back to normal speed.
By installing some storage at the point of use we can get away with installing smaller transmission line because we can store up power during low demand times and use it to cut peak hour generation demand.
With storage we can build more of the cheapest generation (wind, and soon solar) and then shift some of that power to times when the wind isn't blowing hard and the sun not shining. That's going to be cheaper and cleaner than firing up gas turbines.
Bob,
It sounds as if you have a few acres there. I was wondering if you have an electric tractor and how your own generation of power would cope with the load of such, being off grid.
I have 5kw PV system myself, heat the house with wood, and make biodiesel from used cooking oil for both my tractor and vehicle. When TSHTF with fuel supplies I have over 120 olives growing for fuel/and eating. however none of my preparations have a hope of working for the long term. I rely on replacement parts for things like chainsaws and the vehicles.
I still consider that you have not thought through all the feedback loops that occur when crude becomes very tight in the next few years. My real hope/wish is that you are correct and I am totally wrong.
I am not independent of fossil fuels, and have not worked hard to be. I simply minimize my use of FF and if/when prices rise I'll figure out how to cut back more.
Right now I drive only ~6k miles a year. If gas goes up I can cut back to ~3k or even a bit less by shopping less often. No big deal. I'm used to stocking up for a month from my years of cruising in a sail boat and from the times I now get snowed in for a month.
If fuel gets more expensive I will probably reach a point at which it will make sense to add a wind turbine rather than to buy a few gallons of gas for my generator each year. Or add more panels and batteries. Or just unplug my refrigerator during the middle of winter and use an ice chest and overnight frozen ice.
I garden in raised beds, have no need for a tractor. I might burn a gallon of gas a year hauling in my firewood and no more than two gallons in my chain saw. Let fuel go to $50/gallon and that won't impact my heat.
I do not buy into the supposition that crude will become "very tight in the next few years". I see a gradual, perhaps accelerating, increase in price but along with that price increase I see a corresponding drop in demand which will serve to buffer the increase.
We have a lot of elasticity in our fuel use. Just pack "two people" in commuting cars and cut our transportation use in half. (A bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.) Double our fleet mileage from the low 20s where it is now to 50, which is quite possible. Stick a bunch of our freight on rail rather than running 18-wheelers.
That elasticity gives us time to transition off of fossil fuels.
We could switch 100% of our personal vehicle manufacturing to EV and PHEV in four years.
If we could magically switch 100% of all our personal vehicles to electric we already have enough spare off-peak generation to charge 85% of those vehicles.
Were we to do a quick switch from fuel to electricity (say, 8-10 years for a complete changeover) we could easily stay ahead of that demand by installing wind and solar generation with a WWII type dedication. If we were facing a huge collapse we would find the motivation for that dedication.
I was wondering if you have an electric tractor and how your own generation of power would cope with the load of such, being off grid.
An electric tractor is a non-starter (unless a Mr. Fusion happens.)
Lenin and others wrote about the 20 and 40 HP tractors (40 HP matches the old 40 animal teams used to break the soil for the 1st time) So lets use those numbers as there are historical models for such.
744*20 = 14880 watts
744*40 = 29760 watts
Now you have to either have a cord or storage that can go on such a tractor.
1-2 kilowatts can be used to move an actual drill (to then be used as a seed drill) for 'no till'
Eric,
You are 100% correct in the electric tractor being a non starter. Unlike Bob, you seem to understand.
A typical tractor on Australian grain properties, that are virtually all dryland cropping areas, is ~225 hp. This is ~153 Kw at the PTO. This would use about 40 litres/hr diesel and would operate for many hours a day when in use. On a farm when you need to do things, you need to do them, sometimes around the clock.
For an electric tractor to be able to run 18 hour days, you would need to have storage of 153 Kw X 18 hrs = 2754 Kwh. Remember this is just one day, typically such farms run the machinery for many days in a row, until the job is done, often over thousands of acres.
Using deep cycle batteries like these.....
http://www.solaronline.com.au/raylite-1380ah-4v-deep-cycle-battery.html
You would need about 500 of them for one 18 hour day of work (assuming you could get the Ah out in 18 hours instead of the rated 100 hours). At the price on that site, $735,000 capital cost for one days power.
These batteries also weigh 127 kg each, therefore the tractor would be lugging around an extra 63,500 kg. The batteries would occupy a volume of over 35 cubic metres, with no space between them.
Just to add to the ridiculous situation above, the standard electrical connection in rural areas of Australia is SWER, (Single Wire Earth Return). The largest transformer they will let you have is typically 8kVA with up to 25kVA if you are lucky. If you had the typical transformer of 8kVA and a PF of 100% then the most you could use for recharging in a day would be ~192 KWh (providing no power for anything else).
The people who think electric tractors are going to save us have no idea about the scope of the problem. Without liquid fuels modern agriculture is going to collapse. The build out of infrastructure to make electric based farming even remotely possible would take decades to produce. It would take a large capacity 3 phase power grid to every farm at a cost of many billions of dollars, none of which there is even the slightest of plans for.
What if farms produced their own bio fuels, or what if they used ammonia?
Well maybe it wouldn't make sense for the farms to make it personalty, but it could be produced close to them. In the case of bio-fuel it would probably be best if the use of the fuel was limited to the farms needs. We probably can't produce enough bio fuels to be used by everyone.
Binder,
"What if farms produced their own bio fuels"
For farms to produce their own fuel would take somewhere between 15-20% of the land to do so, if canola. If transport to silos (next to rail) were included the percentage would be higher. Nationally that would lead to a decline of grain production of the same 15-20%. Can the world really afford this?
Given enough time to ramp up on farm fuel production, it is certainly possible, however there is no plan for this on a large scale. Here in Australia it is possible for us to produce enough Biofuel for the whole country, the flip side being there would be no grain exports at all.
I seem to remember reading an article recently about how bio fuels raise food prices, and are thus harmful to people who can barely afford food as it is. Based on that I would say that many people in the world can't afford it. If there is another option that option would probably be better, but if it comes down to growing no food or growing decreased amounts of food I would say growing decreased amounts of food seems better.
Based on what you've said electric farm equipment is not the solution. Looking at the size of modern farm equipment and fields I kind of guessed that might be the case. The ammonia article I linked to seems promising, or not. Betting a lot on unproven technologies might not be a good idea. Australia is a net exporter of natural gas. Perhaps if some of the things that currently use gasoline were switched over to natural gas it might make your reliance on oil less inelastic.
Whatever is done to reduce Australia's reliance on oil will take time, money and other resources. Non of which people will want to spend unless they are first convinced that there is a problem which doesn't seem to be an easy thing to do. I can't really predict how things are going to become in the future. Far to many variables, but I hope things turn out all right.
Ahhh. Talking off grid applications. Got it. Yes, at least some storage when off-grid (or as back-up for on-grid apps) makes good sense.
I do some of that level work, but mostly operate at utility scale tie-ins. Thought that was what you were talking . . .
Ok. That is the part I am saying is "not so much" valid. Grid Level Storage batteries are promoted by . . . [wait for it] . . . the folks who design and sell Grid Level Storage. Whoda figgered? :)
This type mis-promotion happens all across the industry. Baseload Nukes that are not needed. Storage for Solar Thermal. on and on. All industry con-jobs.
Not that practical, as the only time additional power is economical and needed is during Summer Time Peak.
Or match the generation and demand to each other. Much cheaper, faster, and an overall better system. Think back to Make Hay While The Sun Shines.
But if you take a look at the actual grid loads -- same as you would around your farmstead -- you find there is not much demand other than when the Sun is shining.
Utility scale battery storage is already price competitive with gas peaker plants. Large scale batteries are already being installed at wind farms and on the grid in Japan.
We won't install a lot of storage until renewable penetration is much higher than it is today. The Western grid can accept up to 30% wind and 5% solar before it needs to add storage. Adding EVs to the grid will raise those numbers by a nice amount.
There is some interesting work being done with load shifting. One technology is to pair the speed of ventilation systems in commercial buildings to solar panel outputs. By slowing the flow of air as clouds pass over the array loads can be matched to input without noticeably effecting building temperature. Lots of clever stuff like this will emerge as pricing systems create potential profits.
Peak demand hours start before peak solar hours and go well into the hours after the sun sets. Off-peak hours start around 11PM.
What is needed is a system of micropayments, so that there can be real “load matching” to individual households. For a hot water heater, a delay of a few hours (depending on the time usage) may have no impact on functionality, but a few kwhrs shifted a few hours times a million hot water heaters and it starts to add up.
If you do add EVs, they can be used as storage. Off peak price to charge and peak price to discharge, that local storage could be huge. Let the owner program the amount of charge he/she is willing to sell back and there is no loss in functionality for commuting.
Yes, except that would require an inverter to get from car DC to line AC.
Using EVs as a dump for supply spikes may be just as valuable. We hit a ceiling with wind installation because at times the wind blows hard and demand is low. We furl the blades and "curtail" that wind, the farm makes no money.
Put millions of EVs on line with many of them set at 50, 70 or even 90 mile minimum charges and the utility companies suddenly have lots of places (the 50, 30, 10 mile buffers) to stick those spikes and send some profit back to the wind farm.
Now, with extra off-peak profits possible wind farms will attract more investors, raise more towers. Those extra towers will give us more peak hour power, reducing storage needs.
--
Look for not just water heating but also refrigerator defrosting, freezer cycles, pool filters, clothes dryers, dishwashers, and all sorts of home appliances to get smart. The more control over times of use that the utility company has the more renewables we can incorporate onto the grid.
Please see this review for a critical appraisal of Charles Eisenstein. Prokopton is far more restrained than I would be but he's a gentleman and I, most assuredly, am not.
http://www.amazon.com/review/RTDJ10955PD0P/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RTDJ1095...
Wow, that's a pretty harsh review -- I'd hate to see a non-gentlemanly version of this!
Reading it though, I found it hard to believe the reviewer actually read the whole book. So much was taken out of context.
How do you self regulate your resiliency when as a species you have departed through agriculture, industrialization and fossil fuels from the normal checks and balances of living within the constraints of the ecosystems you previously inhabited.
We are the first sentient species on the planet with this conundrum.
Kudzu Ape is who we are.
Who says we have removed ourselves from the checks and balances of nature?
We've overused fossil fuels and now we're getting checked. We'll have to get things back into balance.
We've pushed some of our natural systems to the limit and now we're limiting our take while creating alternative sources. Thinking seafood and wood as a building material here, as examples.
WTF are you talking about?
Seafood?
Have you looked at the status of the major food fish. Their almost all depleted or worse.
And we will be looking to wood to burn to keep our houses warm, to make electricity, and to pull CO2 out of the air.
We will be forced into Grier's scavenger industrialism stage, and eventually there will certainly some new state of 'balance.' But it might look more like Venus than the earth we've known, and we will likely not be part of the 'balance.'
The correlation between money and energy systems is precise. It is an important observation that will stir the public, those outside the concentration of power, who are investing in the “peaking” energy and "peaking" debt.
Regarding the initial cost of sustainable energy, wind power is very expensive to build and only has a lifespan of 20-30yrs. A wind turbine is decommissioned after so many years b/c it’s not cost efficient to maintain. However, there is hope for technology to improve.
Up front costs and life span are not necessarily a good measure of 'expensive'.
While a wind turbine might be costly to build and last only 20-30 years the electricity is sold for $0.05/kWh (no subsidies included) which makes wind a cheap way to produce power.
Great Article! I especially like this way to push alternative energy rather than trying to convince everybody of AGW.