The Long Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy
Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 7, 2012 - 6:23pm
The tie between energy supply, population, and the economy goes back to the hunter-gatherer period. Hunter-gatherers managed to multiply their population at least 4-fold, and perhaps by as much as 25-fold, by using energy techniques which allowed them to expand their territory from central Africa to virtually the whole world, including the Americas and Australia.
The agricultural revolution starting about 7,000 or 8,000 BCE was the next big change, multiplying population more than 50-fold. The big breakthrough here was the domestication of grains, which allowed food to be stored for winter, and transported more easily.
The next major breakthrough was the industrial revolution using coal. Even before this, there were major energy advances, particularly using peat in Netherlands and early use of coal in England. These advances allowed the world’s population to grow more than four-fold between the year 1 CE and 1820 CE. Between 1820 and the present, population has grown approximately seven-fold.
When we look at the situation on a year-by-year basis (Table 1), we see that on a yearly average basis, growth has been by far the greatest since 1820, which is the time since the widespread use of fossil fuels. We also see that economic growth seems to proceed only slightly faster than population growth up until 1820. After 1820, there is a much wider “gap” between energy growth and GDP growth, suggesting that the widespread use of fossil fuels has allowed a rising standard of living.
The rise in population growth and GDP growth is significantly higher in the period since World War II than it was in the period prior to that time. This is the period during which growth in which oil consumption had a significant impact on the economy. Oil greatly improved transportation and also enabled much greater agricultural output. An indirect result was more world trade, which enabled production of goods needing inputs around the world, such as computers.
When a person looks back over history, the impression one gets is that the economy is a system that transforms resources, especially energy, into food and other goods that people need. As these goods become available, population grows. The more energy is consumed, the more the economy grows, and the faster world population grows. When little energy is added, economic growth proceeds slowly, and population growth is low.
Economists seem to be of the view that GDP growth gives rise to growth in energy products, and not the other way around. This is a rather strange view, in light of the long tie between energy and the economy, and in light of the apparent causal relationship. With a sufficiently narrow, short-term view, perhaps the view of economists can be supported, but over the longer run it is hard to see how this view can be maintained.
Energy and the Hunter-Gatherer Period
Humans, (or more accurately, predecessor species to humans), first arose in central Africa, a place where energy from the sun is greatest, water is abundant, and biological diversity is among the greatest. This setting allowed predecessor species a wide range of food supplies, easy access to water, and little worry about being cold. Originally, predecessor species most likely had fur, lived in trees, and ate a primarily vegetarian diet, like most primates today. The total population varied, but with the limited area in which pre-humans lived, probably did not exceed 1,000,000, and may have been as little as 70,000 (McEvedy).
Man’s main source of energy is of course food. In order to expand man’s range, it was necessary to find ways to obtain adequate food supply in less hospitable environments. These same techniques would also be helpful in countering changing climate and in mitigating deficiencies of man’s evolution, such as lack of hair to keep warm, limited transportation possibilities, and poor ability to attack large predators. The way man seems to have tackled all of these other issues is by figuring out ways to harness outside energy for his own use. See also my previous post, Humans Seem to Need External Energy.
The earliest breakthrough seems to be the development of man’s ability to control fire, at least 1 million years ago (Berna). The ability to cook food came a very long time ago as well, although the exact date remains uncertain. A diet that includes cook food has a number of advantages: it reduces chewing time from roughly half of daily activities to as little as 5% of daily activities, freeing up time for other activities (Organ); it allows a wider range of foods, since some foods must be cooked; it allows better absorption of nutrients of food that is eaten; it allows smaller tooth and gut sizes, freeing up energy that could be used for brain development (Wrangham).
There were other advantages of fire besides the ability to cook: it also allowed early humans to keep warm, expanding their range in that way; it gave them an advantage in warding off predators, since humans could hurl fiery logs at them; and it extended day into night, since fire brought with it light. The wood or leaves with which early man made fire could be considered man’s first external source of energy.
As man began to have additional time available that was not devoted to gathering food and eating, he could put more of his own energy into other projects, such as hunting animals for food, making more advanced tools, and creating clothing. We talk about objects such as tools and clothing that are created using energy (any type of energy, from humans or from fuel), as having embedded energy in them, since the energy used to make them has long-term benefit. One surprising early use of embedded energy appears to have been making seaworthy boats that allowed humans to populate Australia over 40,000 years ago (Diamond).
The use of dogs for hunting in Europe at least 32,000 years ago was another way early humans were able to extend their range (Shipman). Neanderthal populations, living in the same area in close to the same time-period did not use dogs, and died out.
With the expanded territory, the number of humans increased to 4 million (McEvedy) by the beginning of agriculture (about 7,000 or 8,000 BCE). If population reached 4 million, this would represent roughly a 25-fold increase, assuming a base population of 150,000. Such an increase might be expected simply based on the expanded habitat of humans. This growth likely took place over more than 500,000 years, so was less than 0.01% per year.
Beginning of Agriculture – 7,000 BCE to 1 CE
Relative to the slow growth in the hunter-gatherer period, populations grew much more quickly (0.06% per year according to Table 1) during the Beginning of Agriculture.
One key problem that was solved with the beginning of the agricultural was, How can you store food until you need it? This was partly solved by the domestication of grains, which stored very well, and was “energy dense” so it could be transported well. If food were limited to green produce, like cabbage and spinach, it would not keep well, and a huge volume would be required if it were to be transported.
The domestication of animals was another way that food could be stored until it was needed, this time “on the hoof”. With the storage issue solved, it was possible to live in settled communities, rather than needing to keep moving to locations where food happened to be available, season by season. The domestication of animals had other benefits, including being able to use animals to transport goods, and being able to use them to plow fields.
The ability to grow animals and crops of one’s own choosing permitted a vast increase the amount of food (and thus energy for people) that would grow on a given plot of land. According to David Montgomery in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization, the amount of land needed to feed one person was
- Hunting and gathering: 20 to 100 hectares (50 to 250 acres) per person
- Slash and burn agriculture: 2 to 10 hectares (5 to 25 acres) per person
- Mesopotamian floodplain farming: 0.5 to 1.5 hectares (1.2 to 3.7 acres) per person
Thus, a shift to agriculture would seem to allow a something like a 50-fold increase in population, and would pretty much explain the 56-fold increase that took place between from 4 million in 7,000 BCE, to 226 million at 1 CE.
Other energy advances during this period included the use of irrigation, wind-powered ships, metal coins, and the early use of iron of tools (Diamond) (Ponting). With these advances, trade was possible, and this trade enabled the creation of goods that could not be made without trade. For example, copper and tin are not generally mined in the same location, but with the use of trade, they could be combined to form bronze.
In spite of these advances, the standard of living declined when man moved to agriculture. Hunter-gatherers were already running into limits because they had killed off some of the game species (McGlone) (Diamond). While agriculture allowed a larger population, the health of individual members was much worse. The average height of men dropped by 6.2 inches, and the median life span of men dropped from 35.4 years to 33.1 years, according to Spencer Wells in Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.
Deforestation rapidly became a common occurrence, as population expanded. Chew lists 40 areas around the world showing deforestation before the year 1, many as early as 4000 BCE. Montgomery notes that when the Israelites reached the promised land, the better cropland in the valleys was already occupied. In Joshua 17:14-18, Joshua instructs descendants of Joseph to clear as much of the forested land in the hill country as they wish, so they will have a place for their families to live.
Energy, Population, and GDP: Year 1 to 1820
Table 1 shows that during the period 1 to 1000, both population and economic output were very low (population, 0.02% per year; GDP, 0.01% per year). During this period, and as well as in the early agricultural period (between 7,000 BCE and 1 CE), there was a tendency of civilizations that had been expanding to collapse, holding the world’s overall population growth level down. There were several reasons for collapses of well-established societies, including (1) soil erosion and other loss of soil fertility, as people cut down trees for agriculture and for use in metal-making, tilled soil, and used irrigation (Montgomery) (Chew), (2) increasingly complex societies needed increasing energy to support themselves, but such energy tended not to be available (Tainter), (3) contagious diseases, often caught from farm animals, passed from person to person because to population density (Diamond), and (4) there were repeated instances of climate change and natural disturbances, such as volcanoes (Chew).
Even after 1000 CE, growth was limited, due to continued influence of the above types of factors. In most countries, the vast majority of the population continued to live on the edge of starvation up until the last two centuries (Ponting). Most growth came from expanded acreage for farming.
There were exceptions, however, and these were where growth of population and GDP was greatest.
Netherlands. Kris De Decker writes about the growing use of peat for energy in Netherlands starting in the 1100s and continuing until 1700. Peat is partially carbonized plant material that forms in bogs over hundreds of years. It can be mined and burned for processes that require heat energy, such as making glass or ceramics and for baking bread. Because it takes hundreds of years to be formed, mining exhausts it. Mining also causes ecological damage. The availability of peat for fuel was important, however, because there was a serious shortage of wood at that time, because of deforestation due to the pressures of agriculture and the making of metals.
Wind was also important in Holland during the same period. It produced primarily a different kind of energy than peat; it produced kinetic (or mechanical) energy. This energy was used for a variety of processes, including polishing glass, sawing wood, and paper production (De Decker). Measured as heat energy (which is the way energy comparisons are usually made), wind output would have been considerably less than the heat energy from peat during this time period.
Maddison shows population in Netherlands growing from 300,000 in the year 1000 to 950,000 in 1500; 1,500,000 in 1600 and 1,900,000 in 1700, implying average annual population growth rates of 0.23%, 0.46%, and 0.24% during the three periods, compared to world average annual increases of 0.10%, 0.24%, and 0.08% during the same three periods. Netherlands’ GDP increased at more than double the world rates during these three periods (Netherlands: 0.35%, 1.06%, and 0.67%; world: 0.14%, 0.29%, and 0.11%.)
England. We also have information on early fuel use in England (Wigley).
Here, we see that coal use began as early as 1561. To a significant extent coal replaced fire wood, since wood was in short supply due to deforestation. Coal was used to provide heat energy, until after the invention of the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712 (Wikipedia), after which it could provide either heat or mechanical energy. Wind and water were also used to provide mechanical energy, but their quantities remain very small compared to coal energy, draft animal energy, and even energy consumed in the form of food by humans.
Maddison shows population and GDP statistics for the United Kingdom (not England by itself). Again, we see a pattern similar to Netherlands, with UK population and GDP growth surpassing world population and GDP growth, since it was a world leader in adopting coal technology. (For the three periods 1500-1600, 1600-1700, and 1700-1820, the corresponding numbers are Population UK: 0.45%, 0.33%, 0.76%; Population World: 0.24%, 0.08%, 0.46%; GDP UK: 0.76%, 0.58%, 1.02%; GDP World: 0.29%, 0.11%, 0.52%.)
Growth “Lull” during 1600s. Table 1 shows that both population growth and GDP growth were lower during the 1600s. This period matches up with some views of when the Little Ice Age (a period with colder weather) had the greatest impact.
If the weather was colder, crops would likely not have grown as well. More wood would be needed for fuel, leaving less for other purposes, such as making metals. Countries might even been more vulnerable to outside invaders, if they were poorer and could not properly pay and feed a large army.
Coal Age for the World – 1820 to 1920 (and continuing)
When the age of coal arrived, the world had two major needs:
- A heat-producing fuel, so that there would not be such a problem with deforestation, if people wanted to keep warm, create metal products, and make other products that required heat, such as glass.
- As a transportation fuel, so that walking, using horses, and boats would not be the major choices. This severely limited trade.
When coal arrived, it was rapidly accepted, because it helped greatly with the first of these–the need for a heat-producing fuel. People were willing to put up with the fact that it was polluting, especially in the highly populated parts of the world where wood shortages were a problem. With the availability of coal, it became possible to greatly increase the amount of metal produced, making possible the production of consumer goods of many kinds.
Between 1820 and 1920, which is the period when coal came into widespread use, the world’s use of energy approximately tripled (Figure 3). The large increases in other fuels later dwarf this increase, but the use of coal was very significant for the economy. Table 1 at the top of this post shows a fairly consistent rise in GDP growth as coal was added to the energy mix in the 1820 to 1920 period.
With the invention of first commercially successful steam engine in 1712 (Wikipedia), coal could also be used for processes that required mechanical energy, such as milling grain, running a cotton gin, or weaving cloth. It also helped as a transportation fuel, in that it could power a railroad train or steam boat. Thus, it did help with the second major energy need noted above. It was not very suitable for airplanes or for private passenger cars, though.
One invention that was made possible by the availability of coal was the widespread use of electricity. Without coal (or oil), it would never have been possible to make all of the transmission lines. Hydroelectric power of the type we use today was also made possible by the availability of coal, since it was possible to create and transport the metal parts needed. It was also possible to heat limestone to make Portland cement in large quantity. The first meaningful amounts of hydroelectric power appeared between 1870 and 1880, according to the data used in Figure 3.
Agriculture was helped by the availability of coal, mostly through the indirect impacts of more/better metal being available, more ease in working with metals, improved transportation, and later, the availability of electricity. According to a document of the US Department of Census, changes were made which allowed more work to be done by horses instead of humans. New devices such as steel plows and reapers and hay rakes were manufactured, which could be pulled by horses. Later, many devices run by electricity were added, such as milking machines. Barbed-wire fence allowed the West to become cropland, instead one large unfenced range.
Between 1850 and 1930, the percentage of workers in agriculture in the US dropped from about 65% of the workforce to about 22%. With such a large drop in agricultural workers, rising employment in other parts of the economy became possible, assuming there were enough jobs available. If not, it is easy to see how the Depression might have originated.
If we look at the coal data included in Figure 3 by itself, we see that the use of coal use has never stopped growing. In fact, its use has been growing more rapidly in recent years:
The big reason for the growth is coal consumption is that it is cheap, especially compared to oil and in most countries, natural gas. China and other developing countries have been using coal for electricity production, to smelt iron, and to make fertilizer and other chemicals. Coal is very polluting, both from a carbon dioxide perspective, and from the point of view of pollutants mixed with the coal. For many buyers, however, “cheap” trumps “good for the environment”.
A look at detail underlying China’s coal consumption makes it look as though the recent big increase in coal consumption began immediately after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, in December 2001. With more trade with the rest of the world, China had more need for coal to manufacture goods for export, and to build up its own internal infrastructure. The ultimate consumers, in the US and Europe, didn’t realize that it was their demand for cheap products from abroad that was fueling the rise in world coal consumption.
Addition of Oil to World Energy Mix
Oil was added to the energy mix in very small amounts, starting in the 1860s and 1870s. The amount added gradually increased though the years, with the really big increases coming after World War II. Oil filled several niches:
- It was the first really good transportation fuel. It could be poured, so it was easy to put into a gas tank. It enabled door-to-door transportation, with automobiles, trucks, tractors for the farm, aircraft, and much construction equipment.
- It (and the natural gas often associated with it) provided chemical fertilizer which could be used to cover up the huge soil deficiencies that had developed over the years. Hydrocarbons from oil also provide herbicides and insecticides. Oil also enabled the door-to-door transport of mineral additions to the soil mix, enhancing fertility.
- Oil is very easy to transport in a can or truck, so it works well with devices like portable electric generators and irrigation pumps. It can be used where other fuels are hard to transport, such as small islands, with minimal equipment to make it usable.
- With the huge change in transport enabled by oil, much greater international trade became possible. It became possible to regularly make complex goods, such as computers, with imports from many nations. It also became possible to import necessities, rather than using trade primarily for a few high-value goods.
- Hydrocarbons could be made into medicines, enabling defeat of many of the germs that had in the past caused epidemics.
- Hydrocarbons could be used to make plastics and fabrics, so that wood and crops grown to make fabrics (such as cotton and flax) would not be in such huge demand, allowing land to be used for other purposes.
- Hydrocarbons could provide asphalt for roads, lubrication for machines, and many other hard-to-replace specialty products.
- The labor-saving nature of machines powered by oil freed up time for workers to work elsewhere (or viewed less positively, sometimes left them unemployed).
- The fact that tractors and other farm equipment took over the role of horses and mules after 1920 meant that more land was available for human food, since feed no longer needed to be grown for horses.
If we look at oil by itself (Figure 5, below), we see much more of a curved figure than for coal (Figure 4, above).
My interpretation of this is that oil supply is more constrained than coal supply. Coal is cheap, and demand keeps growing. Oil has been rising in price in recent years, and the higher prices mean that consumers cut back on their purchases, to keep their budgets close to balanced. They can’t afford as many vacations and can’t afford to pave as many roads with asphalt. Oil is still the largest source of energy in the world, but coal is working on surpassing it. In a year or two, coal will likely be the world’s largest source of energy. Together, they comprise about 60 percent of today’s energy use.
If we look at per capita fuel consumption based on the same data as in Figure 3, this is what we see:
Figure 6 indicates that there was a real increase in total per capita energy consumption after World War II, about the time that oil consumption was being added in significant quantity. What happened was that coal consumption did not decrease (except to some extent on a per capita basis); oil was added on top of it.
If we look at world population growth for the same time period, we see a very distinct bend in the line immediately after World War II, as population rose as the same time as oil consumption.
Clearly, the arrival of oil had a huge impact on agriculture. Unfortunately, the chemical fix for our long-standing soil problems is not a permanent ones. Soils need to be viewed as part of an ecological system, with biological organisms aiding in fertility. Soils also need an adequate amount of humus, if they are to hold water well in droughts. There are natural things that can be done to maintain soil fertility (add manure, terrace land, use perennial crops rather than annual crops, don’t till the land). Unfortunately, using big machines dependent on oil, plus lots of chemical sprays, tends to operate in the opposite direction of building up the natural soil systems.
Our Energy Niche Problem
There are other fuels as well, including nuclear, wind energy, solar PV, solar thermal, biofuels, and natural gas. The production of all of these are enabled by the production of oil and coal, because of the large amount of metals involved in their production, and because of the need transport the new devices to a final location.
All of these other fuels tend have their own niches; it is hard for them to fill the big coal-oil niche on the current landscape. Solar thermal and natural gas are both directly heat-producing, and play a role that way. But it is hard to see how adequate metals production would continue with these fuels alone. Of course, with enough electricity, we could create the heat needed for metal production. The catch would be creating enough electricity.
“Cheap” is a very important characteristic of fuels to buyers. Coal is clearly beating out oil now in the area of “cheap”. Natural gas is the only one of the other energy sources that is close to cheap, at least in the United States. The catch with US natural gas is that producers can’t really produce it cheaply, so its long-run prospects as a cheap fuel aren’t good. Perhaps if the pricing issues can be worked out, US natural gas production can increase somewhat, but it is not likely to be the cheapest fuel.
One of the issues related to finding a replacement for oil and coal is that we already have a great deal of equipment (cars, trains, airplanes, farm equipment, construction equipment) that use oil, and we have many chemical processes that use oil or coal as an input. It would be very costly to make a change to another fuel, before the end of the normal lives of the equipment.
Wrapping Up
Over the long haul, energy sources have played a very large and varied role in the economy. In general, increases in the energy supply seem to correspond to increases in GDP and population. Necessary characteristics of energy supply are not always obvious. We don’t think of low-cost as an important characteristic of energy products, but in the real world, this becomes an important issue.
As we move forward, we face challenges of many types. The world’s population is still growing, and needs to be housed, clothed, and fed. None of the energy sources that is available is perfect. Our long history of using the land to produce annual crops has left the world with much degraded soil. The way forward is not entirely clear.
I will look at some related issues in upcoming posts.
This post originally appeared on Our Finite World.
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Thanks for the article.
However I cannot see the foundation for this argument:
'Coal is clearly beating out oil now in the area of “cheap”. Natural gas is the only one of the other energy sources that is close to cheap, at least in the United States.'
Not according to any levelised costs I have seen which are not from avowedly anti-nuclear organisations.
They all give nuclear costs as pretty much level pegging with the others.
Here are figures based on the EIA,for instance:
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/ia-total-2016-nuclear-leveliz...
Other sources give comparable figures.
It should be borne in mind that these organisations are significantly more optimistic than most here on TOD would be regarding medium-term prices for gas, which many of us feel are at present significantly below production costs, and hence nuclear costs are likely to be even more competitive going forward if we are correct about this.
Costs in the nuclear industry also do not fully reflect those over the lifetime of the plant, as what financiers are interested in is the first two or three decades over which capital is amortised.
For nuclear plants for much of their lifetime they are likely to be turning out power at around their marginal cost including decommissioning, waste disposal etc of around 2 cents/kwh.
There would not seem to me to be any numerical basis for the notion that electricity will cost significantly more due to technological as opposed to political reasons.
DaveW wrote:
? When you say "for much of their lifetime", do you mean after design and construction, such as after stranded costs are shunted over to ratepayers? 2 cents/kwh does not reflect the full nuclear lifecycle cost, at least in the US and most other OECD countries.
http://www.nesl.edu/userfiles/file/lawreview/vol33/2/KENLAST.PDF
DaveW, your data is also suspect, as the graphic you provide is from IER, not the IEA.
When examining EIA data, we get a drastically different picture;
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
Resources, 2017 (3-percentage point increase assumed for GHG capture capital costs)
$/megawatthour) for Plants Entering Service in 2017
A marginal cost of 2 cents/kwh matches what I've heard elsewhere. No, that's not total amortized cost. Stronger argument for not shutting down existing plants than for building new ones.
It's one thing to 'hear' a data point 'elsewhere', and another thing to support it with a substantive cite.
Mindstalk, I see you've been a TOD member for a little over a day now, and are fitting in like an old hand. How did you hear about TOD?
Yes, it is. If I'd had a cite I'd have given one; instead I accurately signaled that my hearsay was hearsay.
But a quick search finds http://www.theenergywatch.com/2010/06/14/cost-of-nuclear-power-myth/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Estimates
The latter is for "advanced nuclear" coming online in 2017, but is at least consistent. And it's not like a secret that nuclear power has high capital costs but cheap fuel.
We can check. Uranium U308, I assume unenriched, is $135/kg, or $158 per kg of actual uranium atoms. $23,000 per kg of U-235, containing 1e14 Joules, which leads to 0.08 cents per kilowatt-hour. Not $0.08, .08 cents.
Coal is about $60/shortton, 24e6 J/kg, comes out to 1 cent per kWh. 12x factor difference. Both numbers are thermal, not the cost of electricity, but that's irrelevant; point is the nuclear fuel is so much cheaper that it can absorb a lot of higher safety costs, and be plausibly cheaper as marginal cost.
"How did you hear about TOD?"
Aww, is it witch-hunt time already? I have no idea idea how I heard, I've known about it for years, and read off and on. You don't need an account to read. But yesterday I got fed up at something and felt like commenting.
Should I parade my ideological ties too? I'm a social democrat who thinks global warming is real, peak oil probably a problem, public transit is awesome, we should have a stiff fee-and-dividend carbon tax, solar or nuclear can probably sustain civilization if we're not stupid, and if it can't then almost everyone here is going to be part of the pile of skulls in the background, not a Mad Max survivor.
Also "he who does not do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" and that there's nothing virtuous about being part of a doomy doom circlejerk, feeling good about how one shares the true knowledge of inevitable Doom unlike the unwashed masses. Point of predicting a dark future is to avoid it; if one can't then go out and enjoy life while you can.
The EnergyWatch.com site provides no numbers, just a bit of chattiness from a geography professor. The WP estimates refer directly to the EIA figures I gave above.
Trying to estimate the levelized cost of energy based on fuel costs might get one in the ballpark with a low capital cost generation facility, but with nuclear, the NRE and capital costs are the main drivers.
"The EnergyWatch.com site provides no numbers"
Uh: "Nuclear power has lower operating costs—about 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour—than fossil fuel power plants in the U.S."
And yeah, I later noticed you'd already posted the same numbers. Which still support the claim about marginal cost: look at "Variable O&M (incuding fuel)"
I note even on levelized cost, the EIA nuclear numbers are competitive with coal, especially with CCS coal. Not so much with natural gas, though I'm sure a change in gas prices would change that.
Oh, BTW, I found in my notes the original place I "heard" that marginal cost was 2 cents/kWh: right here on the Oil Drum.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9419
"Nuclear power plants for which the capital costs are already “sunk” are very inexpensive to operate, with operating costs estimated at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh)." Right there in the main post by Gail the Actuary.
It's worth noting that you actually agree with each other regarding the marginal cost of nuclear energy being 2c/kWh.
Please address the argument, not the speaker.
This started with DaveW stating "Not according to any levelised costs I have seen..."
So in order to count apples to apples (we can't ignore "the first two or three decades over which capital is amortised"), when I convert the Total System Levelized Cost of advanced nuclear power at $111.4/MWh to cents/kWh, I get 11.14c/kWh.
Perhaps nuclear energy produced in ways far different from the US approach might qualify as cheap. The reactors would need much different designs (fewer safety features) and people working for Chinese wages. I think it would have to be pretty heavily qualified to be included in the list.
"The reactors would need much different designs (fewer safety features) and people working for Chinese wages. "
Lose the regulations and you only need about 9 people a shift to run a nuclear plant. Operations labor is not a significant cost. It's the support functions that add up fast, and those are directly proportional to the regulatory load.
Do not extrapolate from this that I am in favor of removing all the regulations, because I am not. They do have a significant cost, and where the cost-benefit ratio should be cut off is very negotiable.
I would argue that we currently do not have a model that allows us to compare the utility of fuels. Right now, we just look at $/btu and thermal efficiency. Oil is easily transported and stored. This confers additional value upon it (which market participants have clearly realized). Perhaps if we were to look at the lifecycle costs of converting coal/ng into liquid fuels we could then accurately compare them to oil but even this is inadequate as not all energy has to (or is) used in mobile applications.
If increasing energy use drove population, then one would expect that population would be increasing fastest in countries with high energy use per capita. This does not seem to be the case.
The bulk of energy that is used for travel, transportation, lighting, heat, and even tillage has little to do with population growth. Indeed, it may discourage population growth.
What matters is the energy that is used for production of medicines, vaccines, clean water, sanitation, herbicides, insecticides, fertilizer, etc., all of which suppress mortality rates. Also, the use of charcoal and then coke for smelting iron ore is key in supplying the relatively simple tools needed for bringing more land into cultivation and cultivating that more intensely.
There has been a cascade of food resources besides the grains domesticated in the Middle East. Rice may have been domesticated before wheat and millet. A good example of the importance of crop varieties is the growth of Asian population after the introduction of rice that yielded two crops per year. However, figs may have been domesticated even earlier than rice. Domesticated fruits undoubtedly played a large role in the growth of population in subtropical climates. Fruits can be dried and preserved. Domestication of the sheep, goat, pig, cow, horse, buffalo and other animals also played large part in expanding the food supply and extending it through the winter through fresh meat and through dairying, as well as providing energy for wagons and plows. The more recent rise in population is also coincident with the introduction of many new agricultural species from the Americas, with the spread of agricultural plants such as bananas between subtropical regions, and the introduction of better varieties of plants such as cabbages and beets within Central and Eastern Europe.
So the increased population is due as much to the doctors of medicine, the metallurgists and chemists, and the plant and animal scientists as to the geologists and the mining and petroleum engineers. The critical use of energy is iron oxide + carbon -> iron + carbon dioxide. It is also essential to making drill pipe, where the iron is placed back into the earth.
Trying to find some figures to support this, I believe energy use per capita is increasing faster in countries with incresaing populations. But you have to take into account the baselines, as an extreme exmple think of a country A whose population uses (these are wild exaggerations of course) 100,000 btu per person per year in another country B they use 1000 btu per person per year. The next year country A uses 101,000 btu and country B uses 2000 btu. The actual physical energy use increae is the same, however Country B doubled thier per capita use while country A only uses 1% more. In this scenario the smart money is on country B having the expanding population. I will see what I can find to back this guess up.
The British India census of 1881 gave a population of 254 million. The current population (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) is 1556 million. Energy use per capita is 6.76 GJ per person per annum for Bangladesh, 21.52 for India, and 19.18 for Pakistan, none of which are very high. Population history is unknown before 1872, but is thought to have been fairly stable at 100 million during the first millenium.
China is, of course, the other major case to consider, as well as Southeast Asia.
You don't need to heat your house in India
Thailand uses 59.04 GJ per person per annum. They need that much more heating in Thailand than India?
In parts of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, ... temperatures go below freezing in the winter.
"Going below freezing" is not much of a threshold. In Atlanta, temperatures quite often go below freezing during the winter, and it is one of the milder cities in the US. I don't think that getting along without heating/cooling would be a huge problem here (except for the potential problem with water pipes breaking.)
The problem is dropping far below freezing and staying there for months on end. Much of Russia, most of Canada, and large parts of the US have this difficulty.
"I believe energy use per capita is increasing faster in countries with incresaing populations."
Seriously? I rather suspect it's plummeting in most cases. Total use increasing, sure, but declining energy per capita, largely due to overpopulation, pretty much is *the* problem at hand...
Desert
Apart from the bottom billion(TM), most countries are actually growing economically. That's GDP/capita, not GDP. Which implies either more energy use per capita or a lot of cleverness.
What declining energy per capita? It keeps increasing.
The decline in energy per capita is pretty much across the board in the industrial (OECD) countries. The increase you see above world wide is coming from the developing world, most of it from China.
Ah, good. Desertrat was even more wrong, then.
Declining slowly over the last decade or two that is.
I agree with BadgerB--it is growth in energy supplies that correlates positively with population growth not absolute external energy use.
I think a big part of the issue is that the impact of solar energy is fairly different in different parts of the world. In some parts of the world, solar energy needs practically no supplement. In such areas, people hardly need to wear clothes, buildings can be built in a flimsy manner, bicycles can be used for transportation almost year around, and wages can be low. These are the countries that are "eating our lunch" today, when it comes to industrial production, now that many fuel costs are high. These same countries tend to use coal as a fuel, also keeping their total costs low. They didn't use up their coal earlier, either, so that is a positive for them.
In the early days, the northern countries were the first ones to cut down their trees, and became desperate for an alternative to using trees as fuel. They found coal, which was a miracle cure for loss of trees. Because they were the first to ramp up the use of coal, they were able to use it to industrialize as well, which is why industry started there, and not in warmer countries.
"the northern countries were the first ones to cut down their trees"
Not sure about that one (or depends where you put the north south limit), the Phoenicians cut all the trees in Lebanon a long time ago (for building boats a lot), deforestation also happened in Italy and France quite early (only primary forest patch in Europe meant to be in Poland I think)
Also in many Chinese regions the climate is quite harsh (hot summers, cold winters)
Besides the US for instance still use a lot of coal as fuel (even if not directly for heating)
Anyway nice summary, as always !
First of all, thank you Gail.
The Mediterranean basin was losing forests from very early on. As is mentioned, the Phonecians cut timber for ships and building, and the Greeks and finally the Romans were avid fellers. Don't forget that most Roman building was of brick, and those bricks were fired by timber.
The Emperor Caraccala was proud of his huge bathing complex in Rome, but his greatest pride was in the arrangements taken to feed the furnaces used to heat the water. The forests around Rome were denuded at an early date.
The pressure was relieved somewhat by the fall in population towards the end of the empire, caused by many factors, including chronic plague, and after about AD400 most new building tended anyway to reuse brick from abandoned buildings.
The Anglo saxons appear to have been larger and healthier than later medieval populations in Britain, and this decrease in stature and health (measured from burials) is attributed to, amongst other factors, the increasing population in the early medieval warm period putting pressure on the crop growing capacity of the land. Deforestation carried on apace, both for building and fuel, to the extent that by the early seventeenth century an ordanance was made banning the use of wood burning in domestic grates. There is a large house near my home, finished in 1619, which has coal burning grates even though the coal had to be shipped down the coast from two hundred miles away. Indeed, there is more woodland in England today than there was a hundrd years ago. And don't forget that timber was needed for ships and charcoal, which fed the iron industry. Coal, and then oil, helped save the timber, and imported cheap food from the fresh lands of the new world and Australia allowed the population to grow. Industral use of coal enabled the increasing population to derive an income from industrial production. What luck! And exactly what were the carts and what the horses in all this I don't dare to speculate.
In Bangladesh and large parts of Asia and Africa deforestation to produce fuel for cooking carries on apace, and there is no cheaper fuel to substitute, or serious industry to provide income.
It's never THAT simple of course, but lucky coincidence, proximity of the right raw materials and populations, with those having already achieved the appropriate educational, legal and social structures, have enabled the world population to reach seven billion.
What now I wonder?
Thanks for your thought.
As they say, history is written by the survivors. We were the lucky ones. I often think that Northern Europe used coal first because they had the greatest need for a substitute for wood. Once they had figured it out for home heating, it wasn't difficult to use for other things.
I wish I had a favorable answer for "what now"?
well it might not exactly be construed as a favorable answer but
the summer Arctic Ocean sure looks to be opening up...more and more for longer and longer...
and granted the arctic coal below is hypothetical resource-but that classification is due mostly to its not being economical due to transport to market costs
I've not seen any similar info on potential arctic region coal resources in Russia or Canada so I don't know whether Alaska's coal deposits north of the Brooks Range are typical of the rest of the lands above the arctic circle or not.
But taking the above graphics together and adding in the assumption that Alaska's coal resource is fairly typical rather than atypical for the arctic landmass and one can certainly see how coal use could keep increasing into the next century if a wiser direction is not 'chosen.'
Merrill, you are just not thinking this through. Energy is used for everything. Fossil energy replaced human and draft animal energy enabling an explosion in food production. It enabled one farmer to produce the food it once took one hundred to produce. Fossil energy is used to power industry. It enabled manufacturers to produce many times what they once could with only human labor.
Underdeveloped countries benefit greatly from fossil energy. China uses two and one half times the fertilizer per hectare as does the USA. This fertilizer is produced and delivered by fossil energy and much of it is even made with fossil fuel. The green revolution was powered almost entirely by fossil fuel.
Also, all those medical marvels that enable us to live longer were, to a very large extent, made possible by the energy provided by fossil fuel. And certainly they are produced in factories powered by fossil fuel and delivered by fossil fuel.
You cannot measure population growth today by the amount of fossil energy used today. The industrial revolution was driven by fossil energy and the population in countries that have very little population growth today had a population explosion in the past, all enabled by the massive amount of food produced with the aid of fossil fuel.
If you were to overlay a world population growth chart over a chart showing world growth in fossil fuel use it would be hard to tell which was which because they both increased almost in lock step.
Ron P.
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia about 1-2% of world energy use goes to making nitrogen fertilizers from the Haber process. I want to look into this more.
"3–5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply)."
This is actually a good example of the relationship between energy and agriculture. The Wikipedia article says Fertilizer generated from ammonia produced by the Haber process is estimated to be responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population.[6] It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process; the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea.[7]
Here we have methane + air -> ammonia + carbon dioxide in the presence of catalysts. The methane provides both energy and hydrogen for the process. However, only a small percentage of the methane supply is used to generate enough nitrogen fertilizer to sustain one-third of the population.
So energy is an essential factor in agricultural production. However, only a small part of current energy production is used by agriculture and the production and distribution of food. This is evident since the majority of the world's population lives in countries with low per capita energy consumption.
Other factors besides energy are important and may be the controlling factors in population growth -- either in enabling it or in limiting it.
An example of limitation would be Ireland, which went from 3 million in the early 1700s to about 8.2 million by 1840, and dropped to just over 4.2 million by 1926. When your diet is enhance by the introduction of potatoes, the sudden collapse of the potato harvest reduces population. Meanwhile, global energy production presumably increased during this time.
"However, only a small part of current energy production is used by agriculture and the production and distribution of food."
According to FAO, about 1/5th of global energy use is for the purpose of producing, storing, processing, and distributing food. (95 EJ out of 491 EJ).
Page 11.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2454e/i2454e00.pdf
One fifth, that's a lot. But that is not the whole story. Fossil energy powers industry as well as agriculture. Modern day industry provides the jobs and income that enable billions of people to buy food, clothing and shelter in order to stay alive.
Anyway you slice it fossil energy is responsible for at least six of the seven billion people who are alive today.
Ron P.
That's a lot. But consider that if energy becomes scarcer (and food more expensive), there is enormous potential in making this more efficient. Less meat, throwing less food away, less exotic foods from far away, more foods that demands less storage energy and so on.
Also, agriculture can supply much of its own energy.
But of course. My dad was a farmer and we had an oil patch and a small refinery on the lower forty.
But seriously, the decline will not be static, reaching a lower level then stopping there. Once oil and oil products start to decline, they will decline... forever.
Ron P.
Oil is a hydrocarbon. We can supply carbon from biomass or atmospheric scrubbing of CO2. We can supply hydrogen from splitting water using inexhaustible breeder nuclear power or wind power. We can combine these into hydrocarbons such as gasoline and diesel. It can be done at price points that does not threaten our societies with being unable to produce enough.
Peak oil doom is possible if it is sudden enough. If it is slower, humanity will do the above and live to see another day.
We are going to create oil from air and water. Jeppen, CO2, and water vapor, are what you get when you burn hydrocarbons. It takes more energy to separate the carbon from the oxygen than you gain from burning it. And you still have to spend even more energy to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in water.
Your scheme would work if they ever overturn the laws of thermodynamics. Write your congressman today and demand that these silly laws be overturned.
Ron P.
Edit: I know you can, with electricity, separate hydrogen from oxygen in water. But is there a way to separate the carbon from the oxygen in CO2? In other words is there a way to "un-burn" hydrocarbons so you can just keep using them over and over? Now wouldn't that be a trick?
It doesn't require us to overturn the laws of thermodynamics, because the synthesized hydrocarbons is NOT the energy source, just an energy carrier. Wind and nuclear is the energy sources. We just waste some of that energy to get portable liquid energy.
Of course there is! It's called the Fischer-Tropsch process. The whole process of scrubbing CO2, splitting water and creating hydrocarbons is part of the Green Freedom project.
"It takes more energy to separate the carbon from the oxygen than you gain from burning it."
I'd bet good money jeppen knows that. The energy input to the system is the breeder reactors or wind (or solar) power; the synthesized oil is an energy carrier for applications that need it, like planes and ships and off-grid vehicles, or for making plastics and stuff (a far smaller need than the oil we currently burn for transportation.) It's like the "hydrogen economy" except we already knows how to sling oil around. No repeal of thermodynamics required.
"But is there a way to separate the carbon from the oxygen in CO2?"
Good god, yes, it's the reverse water gas shift reaction. CO2 + H2 -> CO + H2O. And CO + H2 are the feedstocks for all sorts of other reactions, like Sabatier (to make CH4) or Bosch (to make solid C) or Fischer-Tropsch (to make liquid hydrocarbons).
Okay guys, Jeppen and Mindstalk, how about doing the math. If you take the energy required to split get the hydrogen from the water, enough hydrogen to make one gallon of gasoline, then take the energy required split the carbon out of the CO2, enough to make one gallon of gasoline, how many BTU would that take? Now combine the hydrogen and the carbon to make gasoline, how much energy would that take?
And what kinds of plans are there underway to create artificial gasoline or artificial diesel from air and water? Are there are plans already underway? Of course I am joking. The whole idea of making liquid fuel from air, and water is science fiction. I suppose you could, in your lab, create a few polymer strings but to run the liquid fuel part of our economy on oil created from air and water is stuff for the comic books.
Of course there is massive amounts of methane on Titan, a moon of Saturn. That's another good science fiction source of energy. Why haven't you guys thought of that? ;-)
Ron P.
I googled and found this article on reducing CO2 to usable fuels for Mars colonization. I'm not up enough on my chemistry to comment on it right now but maybe someone can fish out what that efficiency would be.
http://www2.potsdam.edu/exochemistry/electrorednco2.pdf
I also found this
http://www.brighthub.com/environment/renewable-energy/articles/78303.aspx
Please read the Green Freedom link I gave you. It gives the answers you are looking for. There are no plans to do it, since oil is still a bit cheaper, but it's perfectly sound and viable.
How much energy? In the ideal case, as much energy as is released by burning the fuel in oxygen atmosphere later. With real processes, I don't know, I've never found a solid efficiency statement. Part of the problem is that we've never needed to do this, what with cheap fossil fuels around, so it's not a top research priority. But people are certainly looking at it, such as Green Freedom from Los Alamos
http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf
or MIT's research into "artificial photosynthesis".
Green Freedom claims ability to profitably make oil at $5/gallon, maybe down to $3.90 with work, though I think that depended on what now seems like really cheap nuclear power plant costs. Marginal cost of $1.60/gallon but capital is high. They also claim 50% efficiency of converting electricity into gasoline. But this is a paper, not a working plant, so I don't know how solid that number is.
And of course making synfuel from coal or methane has been done commercially by several countries, like Nazi Germany, South Africa, or Gulf states. Making fuel from syngas is reality, not science fiction, and there's no particular reason why making syngas from water and atmospheric CO2 and electricity should be science fiction. But again, without carbon taxes driving up the price of fossil fuels ahead of time, there's not going to be any commercial push until the fuels get sufficiently expensive. But "not as cheap" is not the same as "not possible".
Titan: that actually *would* be stupid, given the gravity wells and expensive access to space.
Of course coal to liquids is not science fiction. I never said it was. I said, and still claim, that making enough gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products from air and water to replace what we get now from crude oil is science fiction.
We are not talking about getting the carbon from coal or gas, other fossil fuels, but from air and water. I assume you would have to sequester the CO2 from the atmosphere, else you are talking about getting it from capturing it from burning other fossil fuel.
But making enough on Mars, to colonize the planet, not that might be a very sound plan. ;-)
Ron P.
I assume by "science fiction" here you mean "impossible". Why do you think that? What's your model supporting your claim?
Green Freedom claims $5 billion for a plant making 18,000 barrels/day, so you'd need $5 trillion to supply all of US usage. With 30 year lifetimes that'd be $166 billion/year in plant maintenance and replacement, and to build up the stock of plants over 30 years; more if you want a rush job. A bit over 1% of US GDP. Of course a smart society would shift away from cars and thus needing so much gasoline.
These green folks are almost totally dependent on nuclear power to do all this work. And I am not sure their figures are accurate. If it is all that economical then how come no one is doing it, just a few greenies talking about it.
I just don't believe it. I don't believe we would ever build enough nuclear power plants to generate all that electricity. And it would take decades to plan and build all that stuff. We don't have decades.
It just ain't gonna happen.
Ron P.
They claim it could produce gasoline at $5/gallon. Is gasoline $5/gallon, before fuel taxes? No. So why would anyone be doing it?
Los Alamos National Laboratory is not what one usually thinks of as "greenies".
And they're not dependent on nuclear power. They used a nuclear plant in their plan, because they thought that was cheapest, and they might be using heat for cogeneration in the process. But all it really needs is power; solar and wind would do just as well.
"I don't believe we would ever build enough nuclear power plants to generate all that electricity" Why not?
"It just ain't gonna happen."
I get the impression that you don't want it to happen, that if someone tomorrow demonstrated cheap clean cold fusion and a cheap synfuel catalyst then you'd be disappointed that all the emotional investment you've put into being Doomed! would go to waste.
Well if you are talking about "The Green Freedom" but insist that they are not "greenies" then I am at a loss as to what they are. Perhaps the Green Freedom Project is not green at all. Is that what you are implying?
Is that the best you can do, attack me rather than my argument? Why am I not surprised? No, I do not believe they will build the thousand or so nuclear plants that this program would require. No, it just ain't gonna happen. That is my argument, just too damn many nuclear plants would be required to be practical. Now attack my person instead of my argument if you wish. And I will not be surprised again.
But now that you bring the subject up, no I am not in favor of at least a thousand nuclear power plants around the country in order that business as usual can continue. I was once a nuclear power advocate, insisting that it was safe. And I still believe it is safe but believe if those power plants were ever abandoned they would then become terribly unsafe.
If we have a collapse, like I think is very likely, then those thousand or so nuclear plants will be abandoned, just sitting there to overheat, meltdown and poison the earth with their radiation. Well now you know the rest of the story.
Ron P.
Green is just an advertising thing. That Los Alamos use it is not surprising, but it doesn't make them greenies. Greenies are people with alarmist attitudes and various dogma, such as being anti-nuclear.
I think this amount of nuclear will be built, but when they start is very unclear. India and China, btw, is planning (or at least envisioning) 400-700 GWe each for 2050. Long term, I think we are headed for a nuclear society.
"Just a few greenies", your words, sound rather dismissive, for what are physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, major site of both nuclear and renewable energy research.
"Is that the best you can do, attack me rather than my argument?"
You would have to make an argument before I could attack it. You asked for math and were given references, and your only response was to say "I just don't believe it." You have no substantive reply. You didn't even know we can separate carbon from CO2. You ridicule reasonable ideas as mere "science fiction", again without presenting any reason for doing so, just your raw emotional disbelief.
The best I can do was to present numbers and citations. The best you can do is reply "nuh-uh! science fiction!"
"just too damn many nuclear plants would be required to be practical."
Why would that be impractical? We have hundreds of coal and gas plants.
And, as I mentioned, you don't actually need nuclear plants for this, just power from some source.
It's also rather odd to rule out nuclear plants out of fear of collapse, when the point of the plants would be to prevent that collapse.
No, you are the one without an argument. The idea that we are going to build a thousand, or thousands of nuclear plants across the nation and get all the oil we need from air and water is absurd beyond belief.
Ron P.
You're trying hard to not be taken seriously, aren't you?
My argument: $5/gallon synthetic gasoline, for a capital cost of under $200 billion a year (and that displaces what we spend on fossil oil currently, it's not added on top), via whatever source of electricity and process heat we use.
Your "argument": "It's absurd beyond belief." Without any reason for believing that a thousand nuclear plants is absurd, and without acknowledging that we don't even *need* nuclear plants. I have numbers, you have a childish "nuh-uh!" empty of support or logic.
As Alice said, things are getting "curiouser and curiouser". Now you are going to oil, gasoline and diesel out of air and water with what? A few million wind generators perhaps? Or perhaps a few hundred square miles of solar panels?
Yet you guys are talking about like it is really likely to happen. Are you serious? Is it on the drawing boards... anywhere? How long after it hit the drawing boards would it likely come to fruition, until we actually start to generate a few million barrels per day?
This whole idea is a joke. Were it something serious we would see articles in the news about it every day instead of one PDF file published many years ago. There should be articles every day headlining:
We will never hit Peak Oil because we can produce all the oil we will ever need from nothing but air and water!
But you don't see them. You know why? Because it is science fiction. Possible in theory but not in reality. Science fiction. Get over it.
Ron P.
By your same epistemology, we can dismiss Peak Oil itself. "Were it something serious we sould see articles in the news about it every day" saying Peak Oil is coming! Peak Oil is coming! Obviously this is absurd.
No one says air synthesis of fuel is competitive with e.g. coal to liquids. As I said, absent political will to take fossil fuels off the table, this sort of stuff won't happen until we start running out of everything.
But once again, you have no counter-argument, other than an apparent inability to imagine large numbers.
Just read between the lines a little and peak oil and peak resources are all over the news. The systemic effects of austerity, debt bubbles, bailouts, food crises, banking crises, unemployment, underemployment, and student loan debt are all symptoms. There are plenty more examples.
Can't agree at all. Oil is a problem but it's not the single problem underlying everything, and most of the items on your list have nothing to do with oil. Food crises, maybe. The rest? No. *Student loan debt*? That's ridiculous. The problem of austerity policies is austerity policies, they're just bad policies in a recession. Banking systems have bank runs due to the nature of fractional reserve banking. Keynes explains liquidity trap unemployment.
Almost everything on your list is a matter of social organization, not of resources. Abundant oil won't help if you have a crappy society, as many failed oil states have proved, while even poor conditions can be ameliorated by an egalitarian high-public investment society.
Modern jobs require modern energy inputs and modern resource inputs. To pay back student loan debt you need a modern job, usually of the skilled and specialty nature. Those jobs are in very short supply which imply the energy and resources are in short supply. Without a modern job your economic basis is closer to being Amish or practically unskilled labor and the going rate for USL is minimum wage ish. So student loan debt problem causation can be tied to constraints in the resource base.
Neither the cost of college education, nor the necessity of having student loans, nor the compensation of the typical job, are fixed numbers. In many rich countries college is free or very cheap, for example, while median income is probably higher than in the US.
As for short supply of modern jobs... programmers seem to still be snapped up pretty readily, and there's plenty of jobs for doctors; the US uses artificial shortages to keep the supply low and the income high. In general, skilled labor commands a premium, indicating that it's the supply which is in shortage, not the jobs.
Of course, some skills are more valued than others; majoring in literary criticism is taking a big gamble.
Even though the costs are not fixed numbers, the student loan debt already in place is a known quantity and it is huge and very problematic.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/so-much-benefits-college-americas-new-normal
And this http://dollarcollapse.com/welcome-to-the-third-world/welcome-to-the-thir...
Google Peak Oil and see how many hits you get. Yes we do see peak oil articles every day. News Google "peak oil" and you will get about 20 news articles since August 15, about half of them denying peak oil and the other half explaining why peak oil is a fact.
"peak oil"
Sort by date and you will get 10 in the last 4 days.
"peak oil"
Ron P.
A few years ago, I remember TOD had these very frequent updates on oil supply, stating that it didn't grow. I've noticed that that kind of report has since ceased, and their demise may have coincided with oil supply starting to inch upwards again. Going back through the archives, the most recent one that detailed the global supply was an article by Gail in early April. It states "World oil supply is not growing very much".
To me, it seems peak oil is dead for now, i.e. the PO party of 2005-2010 is over. It has been replaced by the realization that oil supplies are increasing and by the promise of abundant shale oil. Whether the optimism is warranted or not remains to be seen.
Okay you are dodging the point Mindstalk made that I was replying to. He implied that peak oil was no more in the news than oil from air and water was. Clearly I showed he was mistaken, in spades!
But to your point, "To me, it seems peak oil is dead for now". Well no, it's not. Crude + Condensate production this year is about 1.4 mb/d above the peak in 2005. That comes to 1.9 percent in 7 years or 3 tenths of one percent increase per year.
Also many prognosticators, including Robert Hirsch, are predicting the decline to start in one to 4 years. Peak oil is alive and well.
And with shale oil you are confusing the USA with the world. Shale oil is increasing the oil supply in the USA but doing squat for the world.
Ron P.
Shale oil is subduing the meme of PO, regardless of whether shale oil helps or not. But it also does help - remember the export-land-model. That the US has shrunk oil imports from 60% to 40% (IIRC) should be significant.
Yes but only a small portion of that is due to increased oil production. The lions share of that is demand destruction. While production is up less than one million barrels per day net oil imports are down about 5 million barrels per day. The high price of oil, due to almost no increase in oil production in the last seven years has hit consumers hard. This is peak oil in action.
International Energy Stastics Net Oil Imports.
US Net Oil Imports in thousand barrels per day. the last data point is April 2012.
Ron P.
Perhaps you should look at Rune Likvern's recent work in drumbeat before you count on that too much..
That is precisely why resources are becoming more expensive everywhere and the problem is going to accelerate.
How much of this is made up of the increase in ethanol production, at the expense of world food production, while the rest is made up of declining economic performance?? Actual C+C production has not risen much if at all in the US.
Mindstalker broke it down for you. 30 years means 1/30th of US consumption added per year. If I remember correctly, 20 mbpd, right? So 2 mbpd production capacity added every 3 years. Add a start-up phase of 4 years.
The cost breakdowns says it IS possible in reality. There is no other measure for what is possible than cost. Please pay attention.
Why on earth not?
http://www.dotyenergy.com/
There is one aspect that the proponents of such schemes overlook. Creating a demand for the 'waste' CO2 from coal burners will give them another source of income. Therefore the coal can be mined and burnt at a higher cost, meaning that more stranded coal becomes economic.
Instead of being carbon neutral, this would be a disaster in the longer term.
You may have a point, but standing against it is the economic value a scheme like WindFuels adds to otherwise marginal intermittent renewable energy investment. With a dispatchable demand ready to take at a decent positive price any and all excess off-peak production, enough intermittent generation could be overbuilt to cover 95% of electric demand in any existing market with the physical potential to do so. I can't see anyone investing in currently "stranded" coal mines against such a regime.
There's no inherent reason that CO2 purchased by such an industry need be derived from coal or any other fossil source. Breweries, fuel ethanol distilleries, biogas and biomass burners are all perfectly good "carbon neutral" sources of CO2, as is CO2 captured directly from the atmosphere.
The WindFuels idea and comparable schemes elsewhere are proposals to address the liquid fuels shortage and permit deep penetration of low-cost, intermittent renewable energy into electricity networks. Further reductions of direct fossil fuel consumption (and/or the ultimate atmospheric release of CO2 derived from fossil fuel consumption) are a matter for regulation entirely independently of specific carbon inputs to electricity-to-fuels industries.
He has provided a research paper from one of the premiere research institutions in the world which directly supports his argument and directly contradicts yours; you have provided nothing more than your repeated insistence that it's "science fiction".
From a neutral third party's perspective, you come off looking deeply foolish.
Moreover, if you can't see that you're the one sorely lacking in supporting evidence, you make it clear that you lack perspective so badly that your opinions can't be trusted on anything you feel strongly about. Just FYI.
The absurdity in all of this is using more resources than currently to do the proposed buildout. This implies growth which uses up more resources, a catch 22 in a declining liquid fuel world. Some of the proposed costings in this thread bear no resemblance to reality. To spend $166b a year just on the air to liquid fuel is just PART of the cost. You then have the cost of the nuclear or windplants that supply the energy, plus the transmission lines etc.
The latest nuclear plants in Finland, are costing something like $5.5b for 1.6Gw IIRC. If a bbl of oil equivalent is 1700 Kwh in stored energy and the manufacturing process was 50% efficient, then every bbl would need 3400 Kwh of energy to produce. 18,000 bbl/day would require 61,200 Mwh/day. A 1.6Gw plant running for 24 hrs/day will produce 38,400 Mwh, so you will need 2 of them.
So the real costing before transmission lines is $11b for the nucs, plus $5b for the plant, or $16b for 18,000 bbls/day. 18,000/day = 6.5m/yr. If the cost of money was 5%, then interest alone will work out at $123/bbl. Your depreciation over a 30 year period works out at another $77/bbl. That's $5/g right there with lots of costs to go.
Also anyone who thinks you could build 33 of these combinations per year without escalating the cost is dreaming. Just work out how much steel, concrete, copper, stainless etc that would be needed above current requirements to make it happen. Then where do you get the experts to put it all together from?
Ron is 100% correct, this is science fiction and just aint going to happen.
It does not imply growth. It implies devoting 1% of GDP, just as Mindstalk said. Why would this be a problem?
No, you're not paying attention. The cost includes nuclear power! Transmission you won't need in the traditional sense, since the nuclear plant and the fuel plant would be the same. Of course, if you use wind, then costs would rise and transmission costs would appear.
First-of-a-kind reactor with unusual cost overruns.
Instead of looking it up, you do your own calculations. What you overlook is that the 1.6 GWe nuclear reactor actually produce some 4 GWt, and much of the energy requirements in the process are for thermal power. (That's another reason nuclear is much cheaper than wind for this process.) Of course, the 18,000 bbl/day figure is not chosen out of thin air, it is the amount you get using the power from a single gen3+ PWR.
Again, not a problem. The requirements of nuclear power is very low - look up some LCA. (Look at the "Material and Resource Use" slide.)
Your assumptions was faulty and your conclusion has not been shown. Green Freedom still seems fully viable. Please try again.
Of course I didn't think humanity could be stupid enough to put a huge fuel dump right in a nuclear plant!!
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?? Have the nuclear proponents learned nothing from Fukushima??
Which government in a democracy is going to deliberately make a nuclear plant less safe by putting a potential fuel bomb in the midst of it?? I agree with Ron, absurd!!
Considering the conversation was about nuclear OR/AND wind then there is transmission involved.
Plus about 6 years in time overrun. Can you cite an recently built Nuke power plant that has not had time and cost overruns?? The finland reactors were originally meant to cost ~3B euro, the $5.5 is conservative for 1.6Gw.
Of course if you don't like those figures, then how about these...
from here...
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/09/lithuania-russia-energy-idUKL5E...
In the real world the figures I provided are accurate, probably even conservative, not some wishful thinking science fiction.
Baseless panic is no substitute for valid arguments.
In the Green Freedom concept, there is nuclear and no transmission. (At least no transmission that are excluded from the costs given.)
Time is money.
AFAIK, most reactors are built on time and on budget. Take a list of the last 10 reactors and check their costs and schedules and present your findings here. But I don't find $5 billion unreasonable for a large nuke until you get economies of scale going.
You obviously didn't bother to read the concept, nor understand it. You didn't understand that much of the nuclear heat energy would be used directly. Still, you find your calculations, based on faulty assumptions, better than the calculations of the Los Alamos researchers'? That's a bit rich. Read the concept and pose a challenge based on understanding and real numbers. Otherwise, you might just as well shut up.
A couple of points on cost. Although the number which are being tossed around are large, both for nuke costs as well as for oil costs one should keep in mind that cost=revenue. If a US nuke is 100% US built the wealth of the country does not change. If anything, instead of having an unsecured deposit at a bank the utility now has an asset which produces something (power). Every dollar spent by one person is a dollar earned by somebody else.
Regarding oil therefore it may more sense to look at the net cost of imports rather than the cost in aggregate. A significant chunk of the oil bill goes to US companies (and there for is a bit left pocket - right pocket in nature) rather than leaving the country. And even the dollars leaving the country don't really leave the country - they simply are put into US bank accounts owned by non US entities.
Lastly, to some extend the US imports crude and exports product, and that ought to be netted out also in order to come up with more representative numbers.
Rgds
WP
See, this is an actual counter-argument. Flawed, but much better than Ron's "absurd!"
As jeppen says, the costs actually include the nuclear power (also, the interest). That said, I myself pointed out that that cost seemed low compared to new US nuclear power -- though it's on the order of new Chinese nuclear. Maybe we'd end up importing oil from China.
IIRC, they were assuming $1/watt, and the cost of 2 GWe plants being half the $5 billion cost of a plant. Your number is $3.43/Watt, giving a plant cost of 2.5*3.43+2.5 = $11 billion. This would turn my $166 billion/year into $365/billion for annual capital costs, and (naively, should be lower given the operating cost component) the $5 gas into $11/gallon gas. Painful for the US, but demonstrably doable for a First World country.
By comparison, the US today is spending over $500 billion on 6 billion barrels of oil, or not quite $500 billion on 3 billion barrels of gasoline. I'm afraid of double-counting if I add those numbers together, plus I simply multiplied the amount used by standard and retail prices, but point is, we're spending hundreds of billions on gasoline as is.
As for massive building escalating costs, yes, that might be a factor. OTOH, it might displace other construction, and fuel expansion of the supply chain. Experts can be trained.
Plus, as I noted, you don't actually need nuclear. You could use solar. And if intermittency is a problem, you could even build extra plants and have them lie idle overnight, which probably gets you into the area of tripling costs again.
Pitt, please see Hide Away's comments above. Again, the idea of building thousands of nuclear plants and thousands of plants to make oil from air and water, and using far more energy in the process than you will ever get out of it is truly absurd if an absurd idea ever existed.
Thanks Hide Away for putting the thing in true perspective.
Ron P.
Did you read my refutation of Hideaways comment? Again, saying something is absurd doesn't cut it. Pumping up 90 mbpd of oil is absurd, yet we do it. Green Freedom is very close in absurdity and doability.
Not one of you has yet given a shred of solid argument that refutes the concept; why it wouldn't work and supply us with reasonably priced (lower than after-tax European prices) synthetic gasoline.
Jeppen, you Mindstalk and Pitt are the only people on this list that think oil from air and water just might happen. Perhaps there are one or two more but you get my point. And other than that 5 year old article you posted I had never heard of it before.
There are no articles anywhere in the news in the last few years proposing this solution to peak oil. There are no plans on the drawing board that I can ascertain anywhere. None even by cornucopians who do not believe in peak oil. Nothing, zip, nada.
So one must conclude that this is a pipe dream, posited 5 years ago, and perhaps lately by a few on the fringe, but with no real prospects of it ever coming to fruition.
Thanks for the hearty debate.
Ron P.
Google [synthetic fuel from air] and [artificial photosynthesis]. People are certainly working on making fuel from air. You'll find articles from this year, companies with demonstrator units and researchers at MIT.
"I had never heard of it before."
You'd also never heard of being able to separate carbon from CO2, which is basic chemistry, so you're clearly not the most informed person on the subject.
Most of the world isn't even worried yet about peak oil; naturally they won't be seeking solutions to it much. And when oil is still relatively cheap, and coal and methane even cheaper, making fuel from air is going to be a quixotic quest financially. That doesn't mean it's impossible, or even uneconomic in energy terms, it just means it's uncompetitive with sucking fuel out of the ground. It's reasonable to be skeptical of random white papers, but your *certainty* that it's absurd science fiction is completely irrational, like someone ridiculing flight or rockets.
Ron,
I always enjoy your smackdown realism. However, it is worth thinking about alternatives like this and probably even trying them out on a pilot scale. Maybe the best comparison would be synthetic gasoline or diesel and IC engines versus batteries for electric cars (with equal subsidies). On the electrical energy front, thorium molten salt reactors or some other advanced reactors could turn out to be something very expandable on a large scale without excessive risk. Heck, deep water drilling is probably getting just as complex or more complex than advanced reactors. Wind and solar keep getting better and are also starting to add up.
Where you could very well be right is that we probably don't have a lot of time to ramp something else up unless we become a lot more frugal in our current energy usage and carbon footprint. Therefore we need to jump on some of these alternatives to see how well they work or don't work instead of just writing them off out of hand.
Hide Away's comment was flawed, as jepppen and I have pointed out, but look, they tried to actually engage with the numbers, and give opposing data. That's an argument, unlike any of your comments.
Just to jump in here, all of these numbers are essentially academic, and this discussion hinges more on one's world-view than realism. If one believes that continuing demand, in an ongoing, highly functional global economy will spur human ingenuity and resourcefulness, and that their is profit to be had, then I agree; some of the decline in liquid fossil fuels can be offset using various processes (we're already doing that), but nowhere near the many millions of barrels per day that will be required. It's a problem of scale.
If one believes that most of humanity's problems are, indeed, predicaments, deeply systemic, not being addressed systematically, and that civilization will need to dramatically and quickly alter its course to avoid collapsing most of its essential systems, one then realizes that the sorts of incremental changes being proposed here are pipe dreams. I've seen assertions that fresh water availability can be increased using nuclear power, that nuclear power will help us control/reduce global warming, that nuclear power will allow us to increase our use of electricity, supplanting other sources such as coal and natural gas, and so on. How many nuclear power plants do folks think we'll need to accomplish these things, vs. how many can possibly be constructed?
Considering our deep investment in current infrastructure, increasing resource constraints, ongoing depletion of our environmental base on a massive scale, economies undergoing total paradigm shifts worldwide, political and social opposition to new nuclear, and, perhaps most importantly, the majority's ignorance, lack of awareness or concern, and our overwhelming talent for collectively deluding ourselves, any ideas that our technical prowess and spirit of cooperation will bale us out of the fix we've gotten ourselves into is just another story we tell ourselves. Suggest folks get out of the bubbles they occupy and seek some clarity.
We don't need more energy. We need far fewer humans. Emotionalize and rationalize this all you want, but there it is...
Damn, why didn't I say that? ;-)
Actually I know very well why I didn't say that. I am just not as articulate in my old age as I was when I was a younger man. :-( But thank goodness I have not yet lost my ability to logically reason or use my common sense. Well, not yet anyway.
Ron P.
Gosh, Ron, you just enjoy the
argumentdiscussion a bit more than I do ;-)It's easy to see those here who clearly live contained, secure lives, confident in, and devoted to perpetuating, the highly complex, specialized systems they are so dependent upon. There's little room in their thinking for Tainteresque projections or Korowiczian analyses. It's hard to spot the house of cards when you're living in it, totally invested.
Then again, those who've suddenly been displaced, hungry, or near death understand how fragile things are, and how quickly things can change.
"We don't need more energy. We need far fewer humans."
So how do you propose getting fewer humans?
The statement doesn't even make sense. Fewer humans will still need energy, and have fewer humans to build it with. Unless the existing population is to build for a smaller one. Or unless civilization is to collapse.
"How many nuclear power plants do folks think we'll need to accomplish these things, vs. how many can possibly be constructed? "
How many nuclear power plants do you think can be constructed? The answer is obviously more than one, since they're being built. Ron thinks 1000 is absurd. So how many are reasonable, and why?
And why the obsession with nuclear power? Solar and wind work. How much power can we produce via those? I've proposed 1e14 Watts for solar; why is that wrong?
Mindstalk,
100 Tw capacity of solar. In what time frame? say 30 years?. That means 3.33 Tw of capacity built/year.
At 15% efficiency we get ~150w/m2. This equals 150Mw/km2 or 22,200km2 per year.
Glass for these panels @ ~7kg/m2 = ~155M tonnes. Current world production of flat glass is about a third of that.
You are in catch 22 territory. To have production ramped up to that level requires a huge increase in growth which uses more energy, therefore the original number is wrong as the produced panels don't provide for enough energy.
Solar PV is extremely inefficient compared to nuclear and even to wind, but you argument is fallacious anyway. You don't compare to how much resources you save when you don't need to go after difficult oil. You don't compare the increased glass production to what is possible with moderate diversion of resources from other uses. You simply have no basis for you assertion that this ramping needs growth.
jeppin,
This is where the cornucopians concepts fall down in a big way. We need more resources to do the build out claimed in the next few decades, right when resources are becoming harder to obtain. If we had another 50 years of unrestricted availability of liquid fuels, then some of the prices for resources may be possible. However we don't have 50 years, we don't have 1. We are already experiencing much higher cost for liquid fuels, which makes every other resource more expensive.
Who is going to miss out on their resources to make your pipe dream possible? The cost of large infrastructure projects around the world have been going up faster than inflation for over a decade now because of resource constraints.
What if you look it as an allocation problem rather than an incremental money/resource problem? To move towards a more sustainable society large investments in certain sectors of the economy will have to be made but that does not necessitate an incrementally larger pie. If society chooses to reallocate resources from other investments to those which enable a more sustainable society the total (resource) expenditure does not have to change.
The problem is a political and social one, not a resource one.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
You're just asserting that it can't be done. To me, the industrial capabilities and resource availabilities of the world are simply staggering. And of course, everybody will have a little bit less resources if we need to invest heavily. Less vacations, not buying a new car as often, a few less car miles, waiting a decade more for a new sports arena...
Seems like many people are already having a little bit less resources. There are so many countries in the news in ways reflecting less resources and more debt and unemployment. This trend of "less" is not coming about as part of some larger nobler effort as far as I can tell. More "less" will be a very hard sell.
Globally, there has been strong growth since the plateau set in. US and southern EU woes are not that significant in the big picture. You don't have to sell "less", btw. People will do their best with what they have. If investments in synthetic oil is the best you can do, money will get diverted to that.
Not to mention that the more "less" of today will have to be offered at a much higher premium than the just plain "less" of yesterday.
Paging all salesmen who sell ice to Eskimoes. Please report to the front desk immediately!
That is incorrect. I am simply stating that it is a choice society can make.
Rgds
WP
Nice stab, but you've made the wrong assumptions. Recall where the 1e14 W came from: 1e4 W/person for 10 billion people. The point there is to show it's possible to have a US level of energy use for the world, even a bigger world population than ours. (Actually, *better* than US level, because that's 1e4 W of electricity, not 2e3 W electricity and car motion and a bunch of heat.)
If you're aiming for solarizing actual world use, on a 30 year timescale, then the target at the moment is about 15 TW, so divide all those number by 6. Still a lot, but more doable, and at a level where e.g. flat glass consumption may displace current production, rather than needing new factories. Or a mix of both.
You can't have it both ways. It was your comment I quoted, YOUR assumption that that much was possible. I merely proved that the figure was ludicrous, yet you have the temerity to call my numbers flawed.
I said it was possible. I didn't say it was possible, or needed, *in 30 years*. You imposed that constraint out of the blue. If you want to talk about 1e14 watts, talk about a timescale on which we have 10 billion people using 1e4 Watts of electricity each. If you want to talk about what's needed in the next 30 years, talk about something actually related to what's needed in the next 30 years -- which will be a lot less.
"So how do you propose getting fewer humans?
The statement doesn't even make sense."
Yeah, I was pretty sure you and jep wouldn't be able to make sense of it. You guys seem to be locked into the idea that everything is a problem that is solvable. As for "getting to fewer humans", we seem to be on the right track.
of course all our crystal balls are none too foolproof
I just finished watching the women's final of the US Open in NYC. My watching that milliseconds from live on crystal clear flat screen a half day's walk into the hills north of an unlikely but still happening turn of the century (1901) subarctic gold town would have been just as much as a whowouldathoughtit ever possible thing to the miners scrambling around what is now my yard as would have been who I watched win it.
certainly no argument against things going way south way fast but just as certainly testimony to the fact that you have to play the game to see how it turns out
Mindstalk,
Neither of you have come up with real world numbers, my comment is clearly not flawed. The Green Freedom document is clearly flawed and full of statements like....
AP1000 are Gen III reactors they were thinking of. Here is some more costing...
"On February 16, 2010, President Obama announced $8.33 billion dollars in federal loan guarantees to construct the two AP1000 units at the Vogtle plant.[32] The cost of building the two reactors is expected to be $14 billion."
They also only produce ~1150 Mw. The numbers provided by Green Freedom do not add up.
You and jeppin appear to want to base the future on unproven technology with dodgy figures. How much more science fiction can you get??
What is the problems with the statements you cite? Of course there are estimates in a paper like this!
Just for illustration, a wikipedia quote regarding costs of AP1000:
"if built within 18 months of each other, the cost for the first would be $5144 per kilowatt and the second $3376/kW - total $9.4 billion."
So, the cost of the first few AP1000 (especially the first), given the US regulatory framework, will be high, of course. How about assuming some learning effects and economies of scale for nuclear, and not only for wind and solar?
The Chinese seems to be building AP1000 reactors for $2 billion a piece. Who said the reactors should be in the US? Perhaps China will be the Saudi Arabia of synthetic gasoline? I agree the US likely isn't up to it.
A question for both jeppin and Mindstalk.
If this concept really was as cheap as claimed, and the greatest energy was coming from the waste heat of nuclear reactors with only 30% coming from actual electricity, then why are there no plans to retrofit any existing Nukes with a trial plant?? Especially those that are already being asked to power down when the wind blows?
Considering there are no operating plants of this design to work out if it is possible at all (I'm talking any commercial scale, not laboratory), then the whole concept has to remain as unproven. To spend hundreds of billions would require years of proven testing before initiated.
At the minimum this is decades away, we don't have decades.
I don't know any more about it than is in those papers, so I don't know. My first response would be to say that $5/gallon is still too expensive, but I suppose you're saying an already built plant could be retrofitted for much less.
But the nuke was only half their capital cost; you're still talking $1 billion just for the fuel-producing half of an AP1000 powered plant, plus possible retrofitting cost, plus regulator scrutiny cost, for something that will be in operation only intermittently (since producing retail electricity will still be the main goal) rather than the dedicated production of their plan. Without running the numbers, this sounds like a rather large and poor investment, to be done by... whom? For what purpose? Commercial companies will be looking at coal or gas to liquids, not air to liquids, and the government doesn't hand out billion dollar research grants on an everyday basis.
So really, your question isn't at all reasonable.
Your doubt is certainly reasonable; history is littered with brash technological claims. OTOH, it's also encrusted with technologies that have come true; certainty that this technology is impossible is warranted no more than certainty that it is.
Absolutely not from waste heat, but from heat that would otherwise be converted to electricity (at 30% efficiency or so).
As Mindstalk says - it doesn't make economic sense. Or put in other words: because there is an abundance of fossil fuels.
I didn't know that even happened. And even if it did, it would still make no sense to make such a capital investment for producing very seldomly.
What part is it you find as unproven? Fischer-Tropsch has been used in industrial scale. Water electrolysis too. Scrubbing CO2 out of air has not, but that's a well known chemical reaction with well-known properties and inputs.
This is a really strange statement. It isn't done because of the abundance of fossils. Therefore there is no rush, even no interest, by market actors, but you, hide_away on TOD, knows for sure we don't have time?
I find it interesting, that for all the people here who believe $5 oil from air and water is possible, the only reason that it hasn't happened is because the cost was uncompetitive. What you are actually saying is that as a species, all of the CO2 we dumped into the atmosphere with all the negative affects we are now seeing globally, all of the rain forest cut down to provide farmland to grow biofuels, all of the oil spills, all of the rampant corruption and loss of biodiversity, it was all just because we kept $5 oil from air and water uncompetitive. Maybe you believe all of this could have been avoided by charging a tax on the use of oil?
But of course jeppen is one of the biggest free marketeers on the site, who as a group are normally very much against taxation. So where do you stand on this point?
And now you want to ignore all negative externalities associated with nuclear because you have decided that it is OK, and you couldn't possibly have made another catastrophic mistake. Like whole countries becoming uninhabitable if the wind blows the wrong direction when greedy, lazy profit maximising humans are left in charge of any technology capable of such outcomes.
If high enough, perhaps.
I'm strongly in favor of carbon taxes and particulate taxes that internalize external costs of fossils. (I would also be in favor of a radioactivity tax that internalizes any external costs from radioactive releases into the biosphere. However, I think such a tax during normal plant operation would be almost zero, and then what's the point?)
The deeply felt skepticism, resentfulness even, towards fellow humans and their motives seems to be THE defining trait of peakers and doomsters. Your view of humanity is as almost as exaggerated and one-sided as your view of the perils of nuclear power. Countries need be very small to make them uninhabitable by nuclear accidents.
"The deeply felt skepticism, resentfulness even, towards fellow humans and their motives seems to be THE defining trait of peakers and doomsters."
My 'deeply felt skepticism' is based purely on performance so far...
Your wide sweeping generalization and very weak attempt to label peakers as being somehow resentful or having less than honorable views of humanity seems like a pretty unfair characterization. The impression I get when I read most materials here on TOD is that very intelligent people are trying to prevent and soften a "train wreck" as best they can for individuals and larger groups alike. There is no glee or schadenfreude in their presentation of materials that are designed to educate and prepare people for the types of changes that may be occurring soon and that most people are unaware of but will be impacted by.
What I mentioned is simply my view of the comments sections here. I can see that you have a different take.
How many mainstream economists do you know that share your view? How likely do you think it is we will see those taxes applied while the levers of power are controlled by the same people who profit so much from exploiting those resources while passing the costs onto others?
For the record, I am very much in favour of those same taxes, as well as subsidies to attempt to internalise positive externalities. I don't think they would preserve BAU for ever, however I think they help make life much easier for people like Alan, who is doing incredible things, and would help make his transport solutions that much more competitive, and in many cases cheaper by a wide margin.
Does it make you sad to think of all the human misery that could have been spared if only humans were not so greedy and selfish as to have pooled resources to out campaign and affectively avoid many attempts at negative externality taxes thus far?
My view of humanity is far from one sided. It should be clear to everybody that there are good people and bad people, and that being lazy and greedy - for even part of the time - is a basic human trait that can be seen in literally billions of people around the world. If you haven't planned for some of the people in positions of authority in the future being lazy and greedy I think there is a huge hole in your plan.
Share what view, exactly? That large enough increased costs cause investments in alternatives and substitutes? Well, all of them.
A number of countries have carbon taxes. European countries and many other countries have doubled the price of gasoline by taxes. I think the US federal system and public mindset makes it harder for the US to follow suit, but I don't buy into the shift of blame from the ordinary consumer/voter to some kind of fossil lobby.
Not really, since I don't explain the failure to internalize that way. But it makes me sad to think of all the human misery that could have been avoided if journalists weren't so intent on drama that nuclear is all but impossible to go ahead with in much of the democratic world.
Laziness and greed. Or efficient and ambitious? Perhaps the winner gets to decide which is which? I don't think basic human traits are good or bad like that.
As I've explained many times here, I think the ideas that nuclear power should be absolutely safe or that nuclear accidents are uniquely unacceptable are irrational. We should count the beans. Coal particulates and oil fumes are the big killers. The odd nuclear meltdown is nothing in comparison.
(Did I mention that synthetic gasoline should be much, much cleaner to burn, much less cancerogenous?)
"that for all the people here who believe $5 oil from air and water is possible, the only reason that it hasn't happened is because the cost was uncompetitive"
Why would that be odd? Cost is everything for markets.
"all of this could have been avoided by charging a tax on the use of oil?"
Not all of those things. A global high tax on fossil fuels would have meant more demand for biofuels, i.e. "wood". OTOH we wouldn't have the huge car-centered economy, so less demand for biofuels in that sense, yes.
Also, when's the tax supposed to have gone into place? The alternatives are nuclear, wind, and solar after all. Nuclear only became feasible mid-century, and wind and solar have gotten much cheaper in the last decade or two, using (especially for solar PV) advanced material science. So if oil had always been $200/barrel, it's hardly the case that we'd be building nuclear or PV Green Freedom plants in 1930, even if the chemistry was otherwise known.
"now you want to ignore all negative externalities associated with nuclear"
YOU DON'T NEED NUCLEAR. YOU JUST NEED POWER.
Also, the externalities are pretty low for the power produced, they just tend to show up in one horrifying burst, rather than being spread across time and space as business as usual. And nuclear has to pay for its waste disposal far more than any other industry.
What you're implicitly are talking about is EROEI. I wrote something about that.
http://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2012/07/test-post.html
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Quite a bit of nitrogen fertilizer is now made in China using coal.
http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/articles/v14n2_2.pdf
Also China 2010-2011 Nitrogen Report
Merrill,
I agree with your challenge to the thesis of this article. Today, there is an inverse relationship between population and economic growth. This is a glimmer of good news, beautifully explained in Hans Rosling's wonderful TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
I'll have a look at that talk after work but in a previous talk a few years ago (http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/) he points out how improving infant mortality and standard of living life leads to a decrease in population growth. The notable oversight in that talk, however, especially evident when he predicts that Tanzania will drop in population growth rate over the next few decades as it too modernizes, is a discussion of the the amount of resources required to enable this modernization, and whether that can continue to be provided, and then what will happen to Tanzania's, and every other country's, population growth rate as they are thrown back into poverty from energy scarcity.
The ecological footprint of a country can be thought to be a product of: per capita resource consumption X population. As countries "develop", population growth rate slows (with a few exceptions like religious theocracies like Saudi Arabia )which would tend to slow the increase in gross ecological footprint. But this is only enabled by the increase in per capita resource consumption, so the planet is in no better shape after countries "develop", in fact it's worse, because then everyone's addicted to non-renewable fossil fuels.
The other issue is that I take exception to the economic growth rates accepted by the mainstream since WWII. They seem to be overstated as a result of "financial repression", or in other worlds, theft from savers. The level of inflation is understated so that inflation is counted as GDP growth when it's merely inflation. So this would tend to support the correlation between GDP and population growth.
http://www.imf.org/external/np/seminars/eng/2011/res2/pdf/crbs.pdf
Also there are counter examples to the inverse relationship between standaad of living and population growth, and these seem to be societies in which women suffer excessive patriachal control over their lives. Egypt is a post child at present for this. Uncontrolled population growth in spite of (until recently) secular government and legal equality for women. Public mob attacks on lone women (even those in full Islamic dress) in broad daylight have risen dramatically in the last year as the Islamists regain control over the secular mindset. (This is not specificly a criticism of Islam, but of the cultural view of women as vassels ).
First, your view of Egypt is exaggerated. Second, if you don't have information on Egyptian total fertility rate changing in the last year, it is quite low and dropping fast. It was 5.4 in 1980, 4.4 in 1990, 3.3 in 2000 and 2.7 in 2010.
Yes, but that is far from the full story.
The fallacy in his talk is that he doesn't understand or perhaps chooses to ignore the relationship between resource limits ecological overshoot and overpopulation.
He glibly states that the world will without a doubt support 10 billion humans and that this will happen as soon as we educate women, provide them with access to family planning and include them in the labor force.
To be clear I am very much in favor of all of those things. However I highly doubt that this planet can support our present population without significant die off, let alone 10 billion soon to be affluent consumers aspiring to the kind of resource intensive lifestyles enjoyed by some of us today.
Perhaps we need to reexamine our current paradigm first, let's talk about how to considerably lower the ecological footprints of all 7 billion humans already alive today before we add the next two billion!
http://paulgilding.com/pauls-blog/my-talk-at-ted-2012-now-available.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB2ND8qkqTc
The UN publishes the World Population Prospects - The 2010 Revision - Highlights and Advance Tables. The words "food", "energy" and "trade" do not appear in the document. Full documentation is at http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/publications.htm
I doubt that we will get to 10 billion as projected by their medium estimate. If you look at the per country tables you see that many African countries double to triple their population. Malawi, for example, is projected to go from 15 million currently to 49 million by 2050 and 109 million by 2100. It's not at all clear where the African countries get the food to support the population figures. I don't think that the supply of arable land or water is available to make that happen, regardless of how much energy they have available. The traditional combination of war, famine, and pestilence will increase the death rate. Strains of tuberculosis and malaria are developing resistance to our current medicines, for example.
I agree it is a great Ted Talk but the 10 billion population will only happen if we have business as usual. And the chart shows the population leveling out at 10 billion well past 2100. Naw, that is not going to happen. The age of oil will be over long before that date and even the age of natural gas will be well past by then. There may be a little coal left but...
No one knows the future but I would bet that the population in 2100 will be a lot closer to 1 billion than 10 billion.
Ron P.
Ron,
The UN low fertility scenario suggests 6 billion by 2100 and it could continue ramping down from there. If the curve is symmetrical we could be back to 2.5 billion by 2130. see
http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2010_Highlights.pdf
(figure 1 page xvi).
If we see a managable decline in oil output of 1 to 2 % after 2020, maybe collapse will be gradual and actions will be taken to mitigate the energy shortage.
It will hopefully wake people up as it did in the early eighties, maybe we won't be lulled into inaction this time.
Maybe we won't think "coal will never peak" and will move to more sustainable sources of energy. Maybe we will learn from history...
...sorry, just dreaming.
DC
http://oilpeakclimate.blogspot.com/
Rosling does indeed describe a re-examination of our current paradigm. He suggests a net lowering of ecological footprint via technological, lifestyle and demographic changes. He clearly states that smarter, "green" technologies should supplant present day tools, global population growth will stop, and fewer will lead the resource intensive lifestyles common in present day North America. These sweeping changes are all happening, although not in the most rapid, perfect or equitable fashion.
There is room for debate about what constitutes a green technology. Based on my training as a nuclear engineer and physicist, the nuclear electric bicycle is one of the smartest transportation tools we have.
Couldn't agree more! Assuming of course that the nuclear is fusion happening about 150 million kilometers from the earth. As for the electric part it happens when photons impinge on a semiconductor material and electrons are knocked loose from its atoms. Then if electrical conductors are attached to the positive and negative sides, it forms an electrical circuit which is then used to charge the battery, right?
BTW, most photosynthesis happens in the red and blue spectrum and green is reflected because it is useless, which is kinda how I feel about the word 'GREEN' when referring to technology! I much prefer 'Sustainable' technology >;-)
LFTR for the win?
CycleMotor. Thanks for the TED link, what a great presentation, really good graphics and all wrapped with a Hollywood comedy 'Cherman' accent.
Quite an optimistic take on world population too.... Still could be overshoot though.
Locally inverse realationship maybe, but suspect at the system level (planet) that it's not inverse.
I wonder what percentage of the total energy pie goes into food production and distribution, taking into account fertilizers and externals. Pushin dirt (tractors), harvest, and pushin product takes a lot of energy.
And it seems like there should be a direct relationship between food production and population.
"direct relationship between food production and population"
Recall that a lot of current production is feed for dairy and meat animals. The population of livestock has exploded, but the humans are just eating tastier (if not healthier) and more expensive food.
This makes me think that it would be interesting to consider the combined population growth of homo sapiens plus all of its attendant domesticated animals (perhaps focusing only on ruminants) in these energy and economic growth studies.
Without anything but a casual acquaintance with these population figures, I still might hypothesize that we would see a better correspondence between growth in consumption of energy and growth in the overall supported population (OSP).
If so, it might better predict what a tightening in energy supplies might mean for that OSP, in particular that the corresponding population reduction might exhibit first in the nonhuman portion of that population.
Yeah. We're seeing that with the US drought and beef herd cutbacks.
Though of course there's potentially room for people elsewhere to starve because they can't pay more for food than farmers buying feed to make meat for rich people.
But yeah, the inefficient commercial meat farming does mean we have a big buffer before Americans actually dying.
It has not been the case in more recent decades, but it was much more so the case at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Populations in Europe grew in concert with a rise in energy use, and this did not happen in other parts of the world until they became connected to the global industrial economy later, or until they industrialized themselves. Then, as the economy became more globalized in the 20th century, many countries experienced population booms that could probably in part be attributed to industrial production in other countries (notably of health care products). By the late 20th century it may not be so sensible to use country-by-country comparisons in any argument about this subject.
There is, furthermore, the dynamics of the so-called Demographic Transition to consider.
All in all, it seems inadvisable to consider the relationship between energy and population to be a one-way causal relationship in either direction. It is a feedback loop, or probably more than one. However I think Gail is generally correct in charging economists with ignoring the role of energy in population and economic growth.
There are other correlations with growing European population. For example Britain's annual per capita consumption of sugar was 4lbs in 1704, 18lbs in 1800, 90lbs in 1901 - a 22-fold increase to the point where Britons had the highest sugar intake in Europe. Consumption of tea, coffee, rum, tobacco, and chocolate also increase during the period. There are substantial improvements in British agriculure through better farming methods during the 1800s, a period when all farming was still done by draft animals and hand work. In the late 1800s British agriculture went into a depression because it could not compete with grain imports from the US and Russia, and later with imports of refrigerated meats and dairy from Argentina and Australia. These imports depended on steamships and railroads, but the production was not based on fossil fuels.
"There is, furthermore, the dynamics of the so-called Demographic Transition to consider.
All in all, it seems inadvisable to consider the relationship between energy and population to be a one-way causal relationship in either direction."
I think when some societies reach a certain level of wealth, a 'comfort zone', other things become surrogates for the messy inconvenience of having a lot of children. There have been cultures where one's status was determined by the number of slaves one owned more than the number of children one produced. In modern, developed societies, it may be the number of vacations one is able to take, the number of homes one owns, cars, financial status; all safer, more convenient than having a mess of kids. It also seems that more secular societies are less likely to have large families. Religion often correlates with having many children. As Europe and the US have become more secular, the birthrates have dropped.
" Give me that old-time religion
And I'll have lots of kids"
I agree, and it will likely work like this for a number of generations. However, in the longer term, evolution won't stand for surrogates. It will select for a number of genes that increase the likelihood of having many children. So in the really long term, I think we will need population control (or gene control).
I agree. They are tied but the relationship is not as causal as the author suggests. Increased energy use such as in R&D of pharma, crop research etc helps support additional population but it's not an A->B relationship.
The medicines and the equipment used is all petroleum based, energy intensive or both. Metallurgy is incredibly energy intensive. The Green Revolution in Agriculture is based on fossil fuel based fertilizer and pumping up water from aquifers. Industrial ranching of animals in feed lots and fish aquaculture utilizes copious antibiotics derived from pretroleum.
Maintaining current population size is extraordinarily energy intensive, and the overall overshoot problem is a direct outcome of increasing per capita energy. Decreasing per capita energy decreases global carrying capacity. This is very straightforward math.
RE
Doomstead Diner
"The medicines and the equipment used is all petroleum based, energy intensive or both"
BS, I'm pretty sure. Metallurgy may be energy-intensive but the amount of metal involved for medicine is pretty small. Actual drugs are minuscule. If some get based on oil as a currently cheapest feedstock, no big deal. Chemical engineers are as inventive as mechanical ones, and the cost of even a cheap generic drug is several orders of magnitude more than the cost of its mass in oil.
And with a GDP/capita of maybe $2500, Cuba can't afford much of even cheap oil, yet they have First World life expectancy. Oil and cheap energy are important, but they aren't everything, and you discredit your own cause by Chicken Littleing everything. "Doom!" is no substitute for critical thinking.
Production of medicines and medical equipment is quite energy intensive by the fact that they require large amounts of people to do the research, make/package/distribute, and use the same in hospital and clinical envoronment. If you doubt this I suggest you visit Lilly drug company in Indianapolis, IN, USA. That complex covers several blocks and employs thousands of people, all using energy in their work and homes.
And another thing about Cuba, they import 80% of their food, one reason for their low per capita energy consumption.
Do you have a citation for this?
There is considerable dispute about just how much of Cuba's food is imported:
The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture
But food is not the only thing Cuba must import. Cuba imports oil, chemicals and virtually all of their machinery and farm equipment.
Ron P.
I know they import a lot of stuff. It's 84% of the ration that was imported in this timeframe.
Monthly ration was 6 lbs of rice, 20 ounces of beans, 6 lbs of sugar, one dozen eggs, and 15 lbs of potatoes or bananas. Children under 7 yrs additionally got a litre of milk.
The oft repeated claim that they import 80% of their food I think mostly comes from a misreading of this CNN article.
Oil and cheap energy are important only if you wish to feed seven billion people. Perhaps one half to one billion people could survive without the aid of fossil energy.
I said earlier, if you were to overlay a graph of world population growth over a graph of fossil energy use, they would track each other almost exactly. Both look like a hockey stick. World population growth was in the fractions of one percent for thousands of years. Then came cheap fossil energy and the population began to skyrocket. Then will come the decline of fossil energy. The population curve will track it back down just like it tracked it up.
Wishful thinking is no substitute for critical thinking.
Ron P.
Yes, but food is not medicine. I was responding to a claim about medicine, not claiming oil was unimportant. Nuance!
Does their statistics function work in the Department of Communist Propaganda, perhaps?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy#List_b..., the United Nations lists Cuba as 37th in life expectancy, at an overall expectancy of 78.3 years (with the U.S. at 38th, 78.2 years), and the CIA World Factbook lists Cuba 57th, at 77.7 years (with the U.S. 51st, 78.37 years). I would expect public health measures (clean water, proper waste disposal, pest control, vaccinations, education, etc.) to be responsible for most of high life expectancy. All of that can be accomplished at relatively low cost. The kinds of medical procedures that drive costs so high in the U.S., while making a big difference for some individuals, have little effect on the overall life expectancy of the population.
That's true - a poor country can provide basic health care to all its people relatively cheaply, particularly if can get its doctors to work cheaply. One of the most important measures is pre-natal care - if a country can keep the babies healthy, it can avoid a lot of expensive medical care later in life.
Many of the more expensive procedures like heart bypasses don't add much, if anything, to life expectancy. There is reason to believe that American doctors are actually increasing the death rate by over-treating patients.
The reason many third-world countries have poor health care systems is that they just don't care about their poor, and leave them on their own. Cuba provides basic but universal health care and that is the key to their low death rate.
That being said, there is no reason for Cuba to be poor in the first place, other than its Communist government and its half-baked economic policies.
These countries are also "late to the party" and they are using that energy to create cheap items for other countries. So the link between energy and population growth will not probably not be as strong as in the past.
Thanks for that Merrill - it's important that we recognize that the increased population growth wasn't just because farmers had more time to spend with their wives! The old line, that population increased with oil, is too often unsupported with reasoning such as what you present above.
Matt, no one has said the population increased with just oil, it increased with fossil fuel. That included coal, which fired blast furnaces that made metal plows, reapers and other farm equipment possible. The very huge population increase started with the industrial revolution. And that is supported with facts, logic and common sense.
Some increase in the past was because of the opening up of new lands but that increase was slow and limited. I find it astonishing that anyone would deny the role of fossil fuel played in supplying the energy and equipment that enabled the population to explode. How in God's name is that even deniable?
Ron P.
Ron,
The meteoric rise in the World population began with the use of fossil fuels, we can see that - however it's never explained just how that is - and why, really, would fossil fuels make any difference? Last I checked, people aren't smart enough to not procreate when there's not enough food around, for example. "Honey, let's not do it this rhythm because we won't be able to feed the babies!"
So, how exactly did fossil fuels assist the population increase? I think Merrill did a fine job explaining how it was the suppression of mortality rates coupled together with the ability to accommodate the suppressed mortality rate that enabled the population increase. I think many of us do not comprehend that for infant mortality, ignoring childhood mortality, the death rate was nearly 25% in most parts of the world as recently as the 1800s to what it is now, just a few percent - and those are generally babies who are too frail to live, anyway.
It's not logic and common sense, in other words - it's a coincidence.
You're serious aren't you. Matt, just tell me this. How could the population increase before the age of fossil fuel when there was not enough food to feed them? When the food became available then the population naturally increased right along with the increase in food supply. It works that way with all species.
For thousands of years the food supply limited population growth. The population grew, very slowly, mostly due to the expansion of territory occupied by Homo sapiens but always limited by the food available. Then about 250 years ago, the food supply started to increase, slowly at first then it took off. The population, about 250 years ago, started to increase, slowly at first then it took off.
I find it unbelievable that you would claim that the population increasing almost in lock step with fossil energy, and therefore the food supply, is a coincidence. Gracious man, do you really believe that? What kind of ideological blinders could you be wearing that would make you believe such a silly thing?
Ron P.
Ok, humans were very callous and just didn't feed their babies if there wasn't any food around - but until fossil fuels were widely available that was the standard operating procedure. Makes sense, I suppose ...
Matt, read that sentence you wrote... very slowly... Now does it make any sense? It was not callousness that kept humans from feeding their babies if there wasn't any food around. It was because there wasn't any food around!
[edit] Ron P.
That's another sentence that makes no sense. Is it that you still don't understand how fossil fuel managed to increase the food supply? Or is that you don't understand how a massive increase in food supply enabled the population to increase?
Which is it, I am puzzled?
That was what kept the population down before the industrial revolution, disease and hunger.
Ron P.
Ron,
I'm not being ignorant on purpose ... really. It's easy to see how the food supply increased due to fossil fuels. It's more difficult, for me anyway, to correlate how that an increase in food availability leads to a larger population where before there wasn't the increased amount of food - I hope you get my drift - as if the food supply magically increased right along with the need.
Ultimately, Ron, I do get your point. I suppose I should consider times of plenty vs. famine, the population may increase and decrease, but with fossil fuels there's no famine. Every mouth to feed isn't a burden because, with fossil fuels, there's always more land to quickly convert to farms.
PS Your George Huppert quote was interesting - reminds me of a book from my college days, "The Swindler" - a picaresque tale of a young man who's perpetually hungry and forced to lie cheat and steal to stay alive. Those times were tough.
To quote Thomas Robert Malthus:
That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,
That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice [birth control].
The need, the biological imperative to "go forth and multiply", is always there. Population is held in check by limits to food supply (population growth may be temporarily checked by disease, war, etc., but it always grows back to the limit of available subsistence). Birth control has the potential to keep the population from exceeding the available food supply, but we ain't there, yet. There is nothing magical about the relationship between increased food supply and increased population. We have been able for the last few centuries to increase food supply for most of the world fast enough to stay ahead of population growth. Most of us in here understand that is coming to an end.
"Birth control has the potential to keep the population from exceeding the available food supply, but we ain't there, yet."
Populations are still growing out of inertia, but total fertility rate is collapsing just about everywhere. Even in countries like Iran. And in a way it's not that new a phenomenon; the Spartan citizen population shrank, and IIRC Augustus worried about the Roman citizen population. At any rate, these days giving women education and choice and child medicine and birth control = low birth rate.
Maybe natural selection will rule and the Amish and Orthodox will take up the slack, but that'll take them a while. Meanwhile projections are for a peak of 9 billion and then population decline.
This (http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300fin...) 2004 report says:
In these projections, world population peaks at
9.22 billion in 2075. Population therefore grows
slightly beyond the level of 8.92 billion projected
for 2050 in the 2002 Revision, on which these projections
are based. However, after reaching its
maximum, world population declines slightly and
then resumes increasing, slowly, to reach a level
of 8.97 billion by 2300, not much different from
the projected 2050 figure.
Can we increase food production to support that peak of 9.22 billion? And continue to support almost 9 billion indefinitely? And ensure adequate distribution? How sure are we that world population will indeed level off at 9 billion? Food stocks are currently declining. Weather is becoming less reliable. We expect supplies of petroleum-based fuels and chemicals to become more expensive and less available, which will have an adverse effect on food production. There is a lot of fat in the global food supply, but moving to a more equal distribution of calories to the world population will be slow and painful, and likely will not proceed fast enough, and may not be able to proceed far enough, to stave off regional famines. There is a lot of latency built into population growth. There are a lot of very populous countries with very pronounced youth bulges. Even if all of those youth reproduce at only a replacement level, the populations will still grow rapidly for many years.
Before the industrial revolution the population always pushed against the availability of the food supply. Malthus explained that in his thesis. There was always hunger in the population. The population always expanded or shrank according to the availability of food. Of course there was often other things that caused the population to shrink but it would always expand again until it hit the limits of the food supply.
No there wasn't and that's exactly what kept the population from growing further.
No, no, no it did not. The need was always there. There was never a point in history where the population did not feel a need for more food. And the food supply never magically increased. It increased only when farmers were able to produce more food.
No, there is still famine today. Just Google it and see. One billion people will go to bed hungry tonight, one in seven. And twice that many more do not get an adequate diet. Just because there is enough food in the world does not mean that that everyone gets their fair share. Most of the world's population is poor, very poor. They have no land to convert to cropland. They have no plows or animals to pull them.
The Huppert book is a history book. I am sorry it reminded you of a book of fiction. It showed how most of the world lived in the years after the black death. Read this passage, it is very important:
"Malnutrition was the norm. One third of the babies died in the first year and only one third reached adulthood. Most couples had only one or two children before their marriage was broken by the death of one parent. 'Yet, for all that, Sennely was not badly off when compared to other villages."
It was like that all over Europe and Asia. The population was kept in check by a simple lack of food. When the food became available because of the industrial revolution that check was removed and the population exploded.
Ron P.
Strange. I'm almost 40 and has never felt a need for a larger food supply. But perhaps my years aren't part of history, or I'm not part of the population.
Also strange then that when food supply absolutely, definitely ceased to be a problem in different countries, total fertility rates just dropped and dropped until below replacement rate.
I agree with the previous commenter that postulated food supply expands with population. To my mind, the increase in population has more to do with modern medicine and sanitation than energy or even food. We are more people now because we survive more.
I was speaking of the world as a whole, not individuals. I really thought that was quite obvious.
The food supply has never ceased to be a problem in any country. To make that claim you would have to be saying that there is no hunger in the world. There are over one billion people in the world today who are hungry and far more than that who are malnourished.
Yes the population growth rate is slowing down today for other reasons, but there is still hunger.
No, the population expands with the food supply. What kept the population from exploding in the dark ages like it did in the last 250 years? Why did the population in China, in India, in Europe and everywhere else in the world stay almost static. The population growth throughout most of human history has increased by far less than one tenth of one percent. Then the industrial revolution brought on a virtual population explosion.
I find it rather quaint that you, or anyone for that matter, would believe that population growth led food supply growth rather than vise versa. Why did that not happen 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 1500 years ago. Or why did that not happen in Europe in the 15th century after the black death, the period documented in my quote above.
One more puzzle for you. Surely you know that the food supply limits population growth in the animal world. If so then why do you think, historically, before the industrial revolution, that was not the case in the human population?
Ron P.
What? It has not been a problem in developed countries for at least 60 years or so.
Due to poverty and conflict, i.e. too little market economy and industrialization for these people.
It did, didn't it? More land was cleared for farming, people moved to pristine lands and so on.
Disease and predators also limits population growth. Food is a big factor, but not the only factor.
Nonsense! I can show you children in Mississippi, Alabama and several other states that go to bed hungry every night. Go tell them that the food supply is not a problem. Their food supply is most definitely a problem. And you can find such cases in every country.
Does it matter? You are just making excuses for why so many people are hungry.
I wrote: that population growth led food supply growth rather than vise versa. Why did that not happen 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 1500 years ago. You replied:
No it did not! People did clear more land and move to unoccupied places on the planet... because they were hungry, because they wanted a better life and because they wanted to produce more food to feed their hunger and be able to feed their families.
The population grew only at a snail's pace before the industrial revolution. On the other hand the population exploded after the industrial revolution. Why no population explosion before that? The very obvious answer is, as Malthus pointed out, it was because the food supply was limited.
For goodness sake Jeppen, read a little history. Throughout most of human history, before the industrial revolution, malnutrition was the norm as was so aptly stated in the book I quoted from: After the Black Death. Of course Malthus observed that this was the case. That's why he thought there would always the population would always be limited by the food supply just as it was during his lifetime.
Disease kills both predator and prey alike. And lack of prey limits the population of predator. As prey animals increase the number of predators increase until they cull the prey back down. Then with less prey means more predators die off. But more food supply for the prey will increase their numbers, therefore the numbers of predators will increase. So it is the food supply that drives the population of both predator and prey.
Ron P.
I thought you had food stamps in the US? Poor people in the US seems more fat than underweight, btw.'
Cases, yes, but that's a micro problem, not a macro problem. You can't argue that this has a significant impact on US population size?
Well, yes? Did that in any way counter what I said? More population -> more food.
The fallacy is called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc".
Good lord, you have no idea what is happening right now in your own country. You must have led a sheltered life indeed. I grew up the son of a sharecropper, I know what hunger is. Not that my dad did not keep food on the table but many of my neighbors were truly hungry an awful lot. And it is still happening today.
Hunger in America: 2012 United States Hunger and Poverty Facts
Okay, let's get one thing straight, I have never claimed that the food supply has kept the population in check since the industrial revolution began. It is a very serious problem because there are one billion hungry people in the world. But that has not kept the population from continuing to grow. Indeed it is the availability of massive amounts of food available since the industrial revolution that has allowed the population to explode. However one billion hungry people in the worldcan in no way be called a micro problem.
You actually believe that the food supply was never a check on world population growth. You have indeed led a sheltered life. Read a little history. Read Malthus. No one has questioned Malthus' take on history, they have only questioned his vision of the future because he did not anticipate the industrial revolution, nor the green revolution.
Again, you show your almost total lack of knowledge of history. Not only that but you show a total lack of knowledge about common biology. Every species increases it numbers to the limit of its food supply. The very idea that the population could have exploded in the Dark Ages, or at any time in history, had the people simply decided to have more children is truly absurd. It is beyond belief that anyone today would hold that point of view.
I truly cannot continue a discussion with anyone with anyone who holds such a simplistic view. It just blows my mind how any person can believe that the availability of food has never been the primary check in human population growth.
Ron P.
I tried to provoke you into making a single valid argument, but I fail. You seem to think your incredulity proves anything and everything.
I'm not American, btw. Just one of your many false assumptions regarding me and what I have said. I'll let it rest with that.
Not sure what your point is. The US has a lot of food insecurity, or outright hunger, but it's not because there's not enough food to go around. Globally I think that's true of the hungry billion, too; there's food, but we feed it to cows.
I agree that ultimately food supply is a limit, but right now ability to produce food isn't really the problem. (Partly because we've diverted excess grain to a population explosion of livestock, rather than of humans.) Distribution, yes...
Darwinian,
thanks for keeping up the good fight! Unfortunately I think in this case you have no chance to convince jeppen and mindstalk. I think Ghung above pegged them correctly: they are just sheltered first-worlders.
Sorry if this seems a personal attack - it's not! I had conversations with people like them and it's impossible to get through to them. Anyway to provide some backing for my characterization, Jeppen's reply when I mentioned radioactive food after Chernobyl was: "all food is radioactive".
The reason for my reply is just to tell you that as a daily reader of TOD, I appreciate your contribution and passion even when we disagree. It's an unfair debate though when one side will deny the connection between food availability and growth of animal populations (which is to my mind akin to denying evolution). But I guess this is no worse than denying the effects of Chernobyl or Fukushima.
"deny the connection between food availability and growth of animal populations" doesn't apply to me. I'm not sure it fairly applies to jeppen, but I wasn't following this subthread that closely.
Obviously the superior production of food fed (literally) the boom in human population. My only main dispute here would be that the food boom wasn't *entirely* due to fossil fuels. In large part, yes, but not entirely. I also noted that hunger in the US is not due to the US failing to produce enough food, which should be obvious given our exporting food and feeing millions of cattle.
I wonder if it'll be possible for this to get through to you.
It's really, really easy to convince guys like mindstalk and me. You see, we are engineering types who have done the math. Just show us that our math or assumptions are wrong, and we'll change instantly. However, incredulity and passionate doomerism is not showing our assumptions wrong.
When I say to you "all food is radioactive", I mean you should present some quantitative measures on how food has become more dangerous after Chernobyl. (Of course some foods in the Chernobyl fallout area has been off-limits and some continue to be, but how much?) Measuring trace amounts is very, very easy, but they don't matter.
However, can you imagine me and mindstalk convincing Darwinian to change his mind in something substantive? Seriously? He thought a method of getting fuel from air was science fiction and violating the laws of entropy. We showed it was not so, but he moved the goal posts and still talks about science fiction.
(Btw, I have not denied a connection between animal populations and food availability. I just said humans are a bit different and that the demographic gap has much to do with medicine and sanitation, and I tried to provoke some quantification out of Darwinian by questioning his hyberbole a little bit. It didn't work.)
The food supply has never ceased to be a problem in any country.
Excuse me? (raising hand). I live in a country (Canada) which has never had any problem producing more than enough food to feed its population. In fact the main problem has been finding enough people to consume all the food that it could produce. During WWII it fed not only its own people, but a large percentage of the British population, and after the War a lot of other Europeans as well. German POW's who were sent to Canada were startled to find that they ate far better as Canadian prisoners than they had as German soldiers, and after the War most of them applied to immigrate to Canada.
During the dust bowl days of the Depression (these are my parents' observations), the Atlantic Provinces shipped dried cod fish to the Prairie Provinces to feed the poor farmers who had lost their crops. They completely misunderstood the situation - the farmers were eating nothing but T-bone steaks because they couldn't sell their cattle and couldn't afford to buy grain to feed them. The steaks they couldn't eat they threw to the dogs.
They didn't know what to do with the dried cod fish, so they shingled their roofs with them because they couldn't afford to buy shingles. They would have appreciated some new work boots and coveralls, but more food was the last thing they needed.
Notwithstanding worries about the global food supply, the global situation has become similar. The bigger problem, even in third world countries, is now obesity rather than starvation.
What kept the population from exploding in the dark ages like it did in the last 250 years?
Having just finished a book on the Black Death, I can suggest that disease might have had a lot to do with it. The population of Europe had increased a lot during the Medieval Warm Period, and food supply was becoming a problem, but then the Black Death went sweeping across Europe and killed a third to a half of the population. As a result, there was a surplus of food and a shortage of workers, so the cost of food went down and wages went up. It was a great time to be a peasant (if you lived) but less good to be a landlord.
The Black Death went sweeping across Europe time after time over the next few centuries, and certainly went a long toward keeping the population down. Europe had a lot of farmland sitting idle just because there was nobody left alive to farm it, and a lot of enslaved peasants became landowners because their landlords died with no surviving heirs. They just took over as much vacant land as they could farm and let the rest go to grass and weeds.
China and India were similar - regular plagues were the main reason the population stayed low.
Okay RMG, there are no hungry people in Canada. I guess I learn something new every day. I dearly wish there were no hungry people in the USA but unfortunately... But of course I was speaking of before the industrial revolution, sorry I did not make that clear.
I am glad you just finished reading a book on the Black Death. But please, please, read my quote from the book "After The Black Death".
Throughout all history, prior to the industrial revolution, the food supply has always been the primary limiter of population growth.
Ron P.
Okay RMG, there are no hungry people in Canada. I guess I learn something new every day.
Sarcasm aside, it is true that there are fewer food-deprived people in Canada than the US. The Canadian social safety net has fewer holes in it than the American one. But the reality is that there are far more overfed people in both countries than underfed ones, and in the US states you cited elsewhere, the number of grossly obese people is just mind-boggling.
When I fly back from some third-world country full of slim and fit people who spend all day running up and down mountains, and land at a Southern US airport, my first reaction is, "MAN! Are these people ever FAT!" The reality is that the majority of Americans could benefit from eating a lot less food.
I once trekked over a 5000 metre (16,500 foot) pass in Peru after not having eaten for three days due to some 3rd-world intestinal bug, and at the end of the trek, I was a much slimmer and fitter person than when I started. Sometimes a little starvation is good for you.
Population and resources are more-or-less in balance because of the poor health of the residents: they tended to be stunted, bent over, and of a yellowish complexion. By the time children were ten or twelve, they assumed the generally unpleasant appearance of their elders: they moved slowly, had poor teeth, and distended bellies.
Well, after the Black Death the population did build up again, and Europeans outran their food supplies again. However, when North America was settled, the differences between the two continents were startling. Some of the early settlers in New France now have 250,000 direct descendants because they could feed as many kinds as they felt like having. It continued until relatively recently, and I know several people of French Canadian descent who have about 28 brothers and sisters (I don't know why the number 28 is popular, maybe it's some kind of biological limit). Things have changed and the average woman in Quebec now has about 1.5 children, but at one time the sky was the limit.
In the case of my own family I traced the family tree back to the 1500's. One thing that struck me was the number of children they used to have. A dozen of them seemed to be routine. They didn't seem to be "stunted, bent over, and of a yellowish complexion", they tended to be tall, blond, and could swing a mean ax. Of course, eventually they somewhat outran the potential of Scandinavia so most of them migrated to North America, where being tall, blond, and having good ax-swinging talents were an advantage, and they did relatively well.
The death rate was pretty darn high, though, and they needed to have a dozen children to make sure that six of them survived. It gets very confusing because if one son died, they'd give the next son the same name. There was no point in wasting a good name - if Ole died, they'd name the next son Ole, too. Sometimes they would have two Ole's in one generation and three Ole's in the next.
Many countries where malnutrition was rampant are vastly different now. The Dutch, people from an overpopulated country who once were short, bandy-legged people with bad teeth are now the tallest people in the world, overtopping even the Scandinavians. It's all a result of better nutrition.
Things have changed. I don't believe that food is nearly the problem in the world that it once was, and I don't expect shortages are going to become a global problem any time soon. It's all a result of modern technology and economic management.
Okay, for Orwellian doublespeak, that has to be the winner. You get the prize RMG. ;-)
Ron P.
In what sense is it Orwellian double speak? I chose the words deliberately. A food-deprived person is one who is not getting enough food to eat. Someone who suffers from malnutrition may just be making bad food choices, which just means they are short of intelligence, not short of calories. I'm thinking particularly of people who eat all their meals at fast-food restaurants. What's your point?
Fast-food restaurants are notorious for putting way too many calories in their food, not too few. Fat and sugar is their usual fare, lots of calories. People who eat in fast-food restaurants are in no stretch of the imagination getting too few calories.
My point is "food-deprived people" is a poor choice for "malnourished people". Obesity may be the result of poor food choices or intelligence but not malnourishment. Perhaps one could imply that obesity is also malnourished but that is not the normal use of the word. Normally malnourishment is caused by getting too few calories. Calling malnourishment "food deprived" is nothing more than a way to try to soften the impact. You cannot soften the impact of hungry children by saying they are "food-deprived". No, just tell it like it is and say they are chronically hungry because they don't have enough food.
Ron P.
This discussion comes close to violating the TOD commenting guidelines . . . I've come close to intervening or deleting comments several times. Let's avoid making the arguments personal, shall we?
Best to all,
K.
Great article! This is perhaps the most important topic we humans should be talking about and should be the the basis for our current and future activities.
We all talk about economics, politics, technology, fossil fuels, etc. but rarely do we take on the taboo subject of population as a reason for any of our problems. More, precisely, over population.
Due to social issues and uncomfortable consequences experienced from past attempts to manage population levels (China's One Child rule), we humans have decided to simply ignore the issue and let things just happen naturally.
If we look at the population numbers of humans as we moved up the energy burn curve, we can clearly see that fossil fuels are what made it possible to have enough net energy to build and maintain our current energy intensive infrastuctures like huge cities and mechanized personal transportation.
If we just look at the energy requirements and Earth's ability to provide resources in equilibrium, it is clear that a human population of less than 1 billion people will need to be maintained to have any chance at ecological balance.
Even if this topic is taboo to talk about or not politically correct, it follows sound thermodynamic laws and shows us the limits to what resources we have here on this finite planet with the only resource coming in is the solar radiation produced by our sun. Nothing else.
Until we humans grasp this most basic of truths and finally come to terms with the necessity of managing our resources to achieve sustained use of desired technology we will simple be victims of painful economic bubbles and busts - expanding until limits are reached and then suffering through the inevitable declines, dying off until there is enough excess to repeat the process.
Perhaps we humans are not evolved enough to escape this way of life and are not advanced enough to manage, on a global basic, such complexity. If that is the case, just enjoy the roller coaster ride.
"Perhaps"?? There's no perhaps about it.
While I agree with everything you just said, your average Fox Newser would read this (or more accurately, *not* read it and let his favorite right-wing propagandist "translate" for him), then derive these talking points:
Tankingthinker is a socialist doomer who hates my freedom and wants to institute Godless one-child-per-couple Chinese Communism.
Tankingthinker wants to destroy my Way of Life (unfettered capitalism and consumerism), which patriots like Mr. Cheney have bravely stated is non-negotiable.
Tankingthinker clearly must be in favor of mass murder in order to get the population down what he considers an "acceptable" level, as there's no other way.
Cue the NewsMax black helicopters and get Alex Jones on line one. Where's my ammo and tinfoil?
I wrote another article as well, which hits harder on the population issue: Humans seem to need external energy
Tankingthinker, I agree. I wonder what percentage of people would guess that the long-term carrying capacity of the Earth without fossil fuels might be near a billion?
Not sure about a billion, but certainly far less than the current level.
Great article. As to how many people realize the world is in fact overpopulated? Not very many. In fact, against all logic, many people seem to believe the world's population is now shrinking! The media tends to grossly exaggerates the effects of the world's average declining fertility, to the point where many are now worried about a "birth dearth". I'm incredulous at this. This is so bizarre I'm inclined to think its something to do with evolution, that our brains are tricking us into ignoring overpopulation.
Canada and many similar western countries have a negative replacement rate and only have population growth from immigration.
There are a handful of countries, Japan and some in Europe I believe, where death rate exceeds birth rate. Given that those countries, like the entire world, are considerably overpopulated this is probably a good thing in the long run.
However Canada is not one of those countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada
Birth rate: 11.1 births/1,000 population (2011 est.)
Death rate: 7.74 deaths/1,000 population (2009 est.)
The key indicator is the Fertility Rate, which is the number of children born per woman. A developed country needs a Fertility Rate of at least 2.1 children per woman to maintain the country's population (allowing for infant mortality).
While the Fertility Rate in the US is about 2.1, which is just about the replacement rate, in Canada it is only 1.6, which is well below the replacement rate and comparable to Russia, which is suffering population decline.
The only reason Canada has more births than deaths is because of immigration. The immigrants are young and fertile and are not only providing most of the new citizens, but are also producing the next generation of new citizens.
This has serious implications for the future, because the country needs taxpayers to fund its fairly lavish pension and medical care systems. Without immigration it would find itself in the same position as Italy and Greece with too many pensioners and not enough taxpayers to fund them. Somebody has to pay taxes, and pensioners like me aren't much help at all. I have a comfortable lifestyle, but I don't pay any income tax at all because I paid all the taxes on my earnings years ago. The government is highly aware of the demographics, which is why it is encouraging immigration.
Shortage of resources is not a problem for Canada. It is bigger than the United States or Europe (excluding Russia) but has fewer people than California or Spain. There are natural resources lying around all over the place that are not being consumed because there are not enough people to consume them. (That's different than most countries, I realize).
Given sensible posts like that one coming out of Canada, along with a sensible PM, I seriously doubt the country will find itself in the same position as Greece.
Population momentum. It is native born Canadians who are mostly responsible for the excess of births over deaths, even allowing for the low average fertility. After any population boom it takes decades for the population to stop growing, even without any immigration. This is why rapid growth is so dangerous. Population is easy to increase but very, very slow to decrease.
But anyhow given that the entire world is overpopulated we need sub-replacement fertility. The alternatives are worse. If "lavish" pension and medical care systems were rationalized a comfortable, if more austere, life could be provided for everyone. But you'll find Canada isn't quite as empty as you think, given that most of it is arctic or sub-arctic. Empty space is not the same as resources. If that were the case, we could claim that Antarctica is underpopulated for example.
It is native born Canadians who are mostly responsible for the excess of births over deaths, even allowing for the low average fertility.
Two-thirds of Canadian population growth now results from immigration rather than births, and the proportion of births is falling. The fertility rate is just too low to produce enough taxpayers to fund the pensions being received by old geezers such as me, so the thinking is that the government will have to step up the already-high immigration rate in the next few years.
The rest of the world may be overpopulated, but Canada and Australia are two countries that are underpopulated in comparison to their resource bases. They both have vast resources and not enough people to produce them efficiently, never mind consume them.
But you'll find Canada isn't quite as empty as you think, given that most of it is arctic or sub-arctic.
No, I have actually looked at much of it, and found that most of Canada is really as empty as I think it is. Most of Canada is actually not Arctic or Sub-Arctic, it is Boreal Forest. If we had the population density of Europe to feed, we might well clear the northern forests and plant crops, as they did centuries ago in Europe. However, the vast Canadian Prairies will suffice to feed the population of Canada, and people in a lot of other countries, for the foreseeable future.
Most of Canada is empty space with a lot of resources. You don't get a good feel for it until you go and look at it.
Er, depends what you mean by resources. For Australia at least, I've seen estimates that they have rainfall to support 10 million people... vs. a population of 22 million. They have lots of land, yes, and solar power could mean desalination and fertilization of that land (it's pretty old and abused even in its natural state) but via conventional means it's arguably quite overpopulated.
Canada probably has more give, though in its case the land is largely cold and wintry. Most of Canada is north of a latitude line above which is the UK, norther Germany, and Scandinavia -- but the UK basks in ocean currents, and Scandinavia isn't that populated either. Russia's above that line too, but Russia's also "underpopulated" for its land. Permafrost and long winters aren't that nice or cheap to live in, and as a Canadian friend noted, most Canadians are huddled up against the US for warmth.
Plenty of water, but not as much good soil as it looks, and lots of land that's expensive to build on, or to.
Australia currently produces food enough for 60 million, and like Canada could produce much more (by putting food crops where there are now cotton farms, pasture and forests, and by growing food for people rather than fodder for animals). Of course, since the population is only 23 million, and some foodstuffs are imported also, most of the production is exported.
60 million? Citation?
And this doesn't address my point about the rainfall. They're mining aquifers. What happens when the aquifers run out?
The long term carrying capacity is dependent on what paths we take forward. Assuming no replacement for fossil fuels then our carrying capacity is probably less than a billion. The planet sequesters 22 cubic miles of oil equivalent energy in biomass per year. This is 10% less than before the rise of humanity (despite the Green Revolution). Humanity currently appropriates a quarter of that (12% loss to degradation, 12% direct harvest). Humanity uses about 5.5 cubic miles of oil equivalent total energy per year, with half coming from fossil fuels and the other half coming from biomass harvest, and a bit extra from nuclear, hydro and wind. There is no way the planet could replace even a portion of that fossil fuel energy with biofuels, and the only reason the planets's total Net Primary Production hasn't crashed even further beyond a 10% reduction is because we artificially maintain it using fossil fuel inputs to agriculture. Without fossil fuels or an equivalent replacement then the whole thing comes crashing down, we'd probably die off to a few hundred million or less. Fortunately, fossil fuels aren't going to run out all at once.
We could actually maintain several billion people "indefinitely" (even 10 billion of us, quite easily) using a solar infrastructure. We could use solar power (which is greatest in the low latitude deserts) to desalinate water and irrigate those same low latitude barren deserts, as well as to continue manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers (phosphorus supply will present a greater problem). The energy to do this is there; the problem is the amount of time we have available to develop this infrastructure. However, it seems that the world may have quite a bit more coal than many estimate so this may provide a lifeline.
Maybe the entire concept of long term carrying capacity is a false hope.
I suspect that no matter what anyone does in the current era, that human population will do yet another set of global and regional cycles of growth/collapse/loop, until the earth can no longer sustain any humans (if that ever happens within the next few million years).
It seems that is what history teaches us, as best that we can infer from looking at now vacant population sites, fossil records, and such.
Sure, possibly there is a steady state number that can be determined for MAX(human kind), but I do not think it is humanly possible to ever sustain such a thing.
We also seem to destroy our own previous documents (like the library at Alexandria), so I also do not think future generations will ever get to know the details of exactly what derailed this era's cycle, once a few hundreds of years have passed.
I have to agree with your "false hope" concept. Asking the human species to manage their resources in a practical way that maintains equilibrium on a global basis may be like asking a group of chimpanzees to design and build a skyscraper. It just may not be possible for us to accomplish. Our brains may not be evolved enough. Certainly our ability to program our brains is not yet up to the task. If we somehow vastly improve our educational systems for the majority we may be able to reduce many of our critical problems to mere inconveniences. Yet, humans still don't even value education enough to even work on that.
We use our most advanced technology for every BUT improving our education systems. How screwed up is that? We have advanced games, music apps, online stores, communications, weapons yet where is the facebook, Google search, Skype, Xbox, iTunes, Netflix, amazon.com version of learning? Nowhere! Why? Most companies are convinced there is no way to monetize that directly. We have 7 billion supercomputers running around the planet and no manual!
Even if we do finally figure all that out, will we be able to work around our primal emotions like jealousy, greed, lust, anger, etc? Will people be able to accept other's good fortune and not want to bring them down? Who knows. The next scheduled extinction event is about 65 million years from now. Maybe we will learn to live outside of Earth, maybe we won't. There are then about 20 or so more tries before the Sun consumes this beautiful globe.
How small we really are...
A billion is optimistic.
To have a quality of life that my elite interests need- (wilderness, intact ecosystems, biodiversity, oceans with recovering fish), 400 million would probably work, and one would still have access to a vibrant culture.
The rat cage we are currently living in is not acceptable.
So who should die so that you can have your parks?
No parks- that is a industrial concept.
I don't know the answer.
No one does at this point, but we better be prepared to make other arrangements.
I think the better question is - who should be denied their primal desire to give birth so that the masses can live in comfortable equilibrium?
This will be a question that future civilizations will have to address, if they want to have any basic technologies like fresh running water, flushing toilets and basic medical care.
We don't even have to guess at what overpopulation does, there are numerous examples all over the world. This depressing situation happens despite our massive net energy resources and mature technology base.
Do we know how to cure most childhood diseases? build great infrastructure for fresh water and clean sanitation? Of course! Why don't we do it? Because we don't have the resources. If you just multiply the amount of energy the average American at the poverty level consumes by 7 billion people you quickly discover that even that low (relatively speaking) standard of living is an impossible goal to reach with even the best technology almost running in our most prestigious laboratories.
These calculations and conclusions are so easy to reach that it is a true testament to the massive brain power of humans that we are able to ignore it so completely.
"Do we know how to cure most childhood diseases? build great infrastructure for fresh water and clean sanitation? Of course! Why don't we do it? Because we don't have the resources"
Not obvious that's true. Curing diseases is a matter of distributed skill and knowledge, not material wealth. Water and sanitation are a matter of social organization as much as anything else; many big city sewer systems were built by countries in what would now be Third World conditions.
"These calculations and conclusions are so easy to reach that it is a true testament to the massive brain power of humans that we are able to ignore it so completely."
So walk me through the calculations, then. Because mine differ.
While you are at it, show the calculations you have that differ.
1e10 people (above stable population projections) at 1e4 Watts/person (US energy use) = 1e14 Watts. At 100 W/m2 solar power that's 1e12 m2, or 1e6 km2, or 1/150th of Earth's land. If you think 30 W/m2 is more realistic, that's 2% of Earth's land. Low-density (sub)urban housing would mean 1000 m2 per person, or 1e13 m2, 3x as much land devoted to roads and buildings as to low-power solar panels.
Plus you don't need 1e4 Watts for a First World lifestyle. About 1/3 of that is thermal energy wasted in making electricity, which solar power generates directly. 1/4 is thermal energy from cars, when much cheaper transportation exists. The rest is heating, which can be electrified as heat pumps rather than resistive heating. Reducing energy use by 2/3 while keeping the exact same lifestyle, apart from electric car/mass transit substitution for oil cars, is only slightly optimistic. Not to mention possible savings from people moving to better climates.
"so easy to reach that it is a true testament to the massive brain power of humans that we are able to ignore it so completely", someone was saying?
I really like that you put my quote at the end, as if you just proved how right you are and how silly my quote is. Great! lol.
It reminds me when people say that there are still 2 trillion barrels of oil in the ground and thus that proves that we will be able to grow for thousands of years, or whatever they spew.
They don't understand about EROEI. They don't understand that when the EROEI drops below 1:1 that the resource will then only be extracted for it's ability to be used in mobile energy systems (oil transports wonderfully and may be worth the negative net energy in some applications - like driving kings around in their retro Hummers) or for the high value products that can be produced by that beautiful black gold.
They don't understand about embedded energy, the energy needed to maintain vast supply chains, nor the amount of energy needed for the complete life-cycle of a complex energy infrastructure (cost of building, operating, maintaining, decommissioning and recycling and, in the case of nuclear energy, disposing of the generated radioactive waste - hey, so what if future generations run into our radioactive waste like Cambodian children often run into our old unexploded bombs and land mines - we never talk about that or why we think we have the right to do such things to the environment or to future generations).
I also love those solar land area calculations that show how just a few square kilometers of land can power the whole world forever with no problems or issues at all. They forget all of the above. They forget how most of the resources needed to maintain such a global system are mined and transformed using our good old high EROEI fossil fuels. They forget about transmission lines or efficiency and they never ask why, if it is so easy and such a perfect solution, is it that nobody is building such a perfect system. If it was easy, we would be building it right now! Japan is dying for a solution that makes economical sense. They only have two of their 53 nuclear reactors up and running and the people want them ALL shut down. There again, the nuclear lovers don't even ponder that or that Germany is also going to shut down all of their reactors. Hey, these two countries are only the two most technologically advanced economies in the world, what do they know, say the nuclear lovers. Once again, reality is staring them right in the face. Of course, it is all just a conspiracy to them.
The fact is, fossil fuels provided us that massive net energy needed to build our wasteful civilization and put Earth into deep overshoot and even suspended the reality that we must live in balance on a finite world.
Of course, this situation cannot go on forever, even if we do manage to pump out more energy. We cannot continue to increase our population which requires us to increase our resource extraction because physics and math tell us so - exponential growth in a finite system is impossible in perpetuity.
Deny all you want, but that denial does not change our reality.
Balance will be achieved.
Reality is also that Germany is massively investing in solar power and wind, as if they think those can underly a new economy. Somebody *is* building a new system, just what you say isn't happening. For its part, China's going toward both solar and nuclear.
"We cannot continue to increase our population which requires us to increase our resource extraction because physics and math tell us so - exponential growth in a finite system is impossible in perpetuity.
Deny all you want, but that denial does not change our reality."
But no one here was saying exponential growth can continue in perpetuity. As I noted, 1e10 people is above the projections for stable population, which are more like a peak of 9 billion and then decline.
"Of course, it is all just a conspiracy to them."
Who's mentioned a conspiracy? You're making up straw men to argue against.
Do you have the latest opinion polls? Do they matter?
Yes, they are going to keep lignite and Russian gas, while they are going to use renewables to phase out nuclear. Do you think that decision is permanent?
What reality? That nuclear isn't that popular? Sure. But the reality is also that it's a very, very good solution. Technocratic governments realize that. We'll see which reality prevails.
Yes, your argument makes good sense. We may be able to support 1 billion people living like the poorest people in Africa now live or about 100 million living like the average American. It all depends on the net energy and how that energy is spent transforming the resources.
Our current technology requires vast supply chains to supply and that requires more net energy because more human specialists are needed. Complex technology requires huge net energy resources.
One day we may be able to manipulate matter at the nano scale and have full command of DNA to create powerful and useful technology that does not require such massive supply chains but that is hundreds if not thousands of years of uninterrupted technological advances away. Still, it is fun to work on such technology while enjoying our current net energy bounty. It has never been better and may never be this good again. Enjoy!
Its clear that a society can have a very good standard of living using much less energy than the average American. Even less energy( in BTU terms ) is needed to replace most of present FF use by electricity, and there are more than adequate resources of solar, wind and the materials needed to convert them into electricity. While 1-2 Billion may be desirable of other reasons the availability of renewable energy is not one of them.
This is where I diverge from the "Alternative Energy Will Save the Day" crowd.
Is there enough solar power shinning on Earth to equal our current demands? Yes, of course!
Now, let's talk about the infrastructure required to build, maintain and complete the full life cycle of such technology. What is the EROEI to sustain such technology? What is the practical amount of energy we can capture and divert to needed areas? These questions have never been worked out due to the complexity of doing so on a global scale in equilibrium. At our current state of technology, it looks like it will be far less than what we can sustain using the very high EROEI provided by pre-cooked fossil fuels. It should be clear to most people that even that wonderfully high EROEI resource cannot keep things rolling for much longer, especially since the EROEI for our remaining fossil fuels is now in terminal decline. What day do you predict that the EROEI will fall to below 1:1? I put a check on the calendar for about 150 years from now (plus or minus 100 years or so).
Finally, let's admit that our problems are not just energy resources. Do readers here really think that if we were to maintain our 150 year trend of yearly energy growth that things would fine? Do people understand that we have used fossil fuels to put our resource extraction and transformation activities to a severe point of over-shoot? How much faster can we take fish out of the oceans without causing the populations to continue to decline? It just does not compute! How much faster can rip down the forests so that we can increase our wood, paper and other products to ever growing human populations?
Energy is just one of the issues and more of it will not change what is coming - balance with nature.
Maybe in the future when we are far more advanced technologically we might be able to not only maintain billions of humans but also be great stewards to the rest of the life on Earth. Maybe it will be Christmas every day. As of now, we are not even close to that level.
"if we were to maintain our 150 year trend of yearly energy growth"
What's the 30 year trend in US per-capita energy use? What are the numbers in net deforestation?
400 million we had around the year 1200. And most of these were living in Asia, Africa and Europe, almost none in South and North America and Oceania. A billion we had around year 1800, and still almost no people in America/Oceania (and not very many in Africa either).
I don't really care about your elite interests, but is seems quite clear that the Earth can carry a billion poor humans without tech or non-renewable energy. Probably two billion.
"almost none in South and North America"
That's highly disputable. See Charles Mann's _1491_, or http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/2445/
It doesn't matter for the Earth's carrying capacity. If the numbers on these continents were higher in the year 1200, then the 400 million point simply happened much earlier.
Perhaps but there is no doubt that overshoot will lead to undershoot.
When we kill all the animals for food, cut all the trees down for fuel, deplete the ocean fisheries and deplete the topsoil, the earth will likely support even fewer than 400 million.
Ron P.
That's a valid argument. Long-term, the transient should converge on the carrying capacity, but that's a small comfort during undershoot.
"If we just look at the energy requirements and Earth's ability to provide resources in equilibrium, it is clear that a human population of less than 1 billion people will need to be maintained to have any chance at ecological balance.
it follows sound thermodynamic laws and shows us the limits to what resources we have here on this finite planet with the only resource coming in is the solar radiation produced by our sun."
This is clearly wrong. There's more than enough solar energy to power civilization -- you need about 1% of the land -- thus plenty to replace the 1% of current energy use that's used to make fertilizer. Water desalination via reverse osmosis would be a bigger hit, taking up to 3% of American levels of energy use but is still doable.
I calculate that to desalinate enough seawater to fully make up for all of the current groundwater we use (which is what is in decline) would require about 2% of current world energy use. Add this to 1% for nitrogen fertilizer manufacture (actually let's double that as we'd be using electricity to manufacture fertilizer instead of natural gas which is therefore less efficient) and we're talking about 4% of current world energy supply to convert our currently unsustainable agriculture over to "sustainable" (yes, I know it's not really sustainable in the true sense of the word since there are many other aspects of agriculture that are not sustainable, but it could last for a few centuries probably). That's really not very much.
http://markbc.net/can-solar-powered-desalination-save-the-world/
I think the greater challenge will be providing enough energy to support the rest of society and the 1/5th of current energy we use to distribute, process and store that food, as well as to do everything else that keeps society functioning and allows us to continue manufacturing desalination plants instead of killing each other in nuclear wars, in which case we won't be desalinating much water!
Will we power this desalination with coal (in which case we die) or with solar energy (in which case we may survive).
That's great and all, but where is the money coming from for this also staggering growth needed for solar, especially when capitalism is dying and fossil fuels will be strained?
I don't see solar build-out going up like the sunny analysts expect, especially given It's reliant on a stable economy and fossil fuel inputs. Since when has anything grown that consistently for so long to fill such a gap as even that fraction of oil/coal replacement?
It boils down further than money. The real question to ponder is where will the surplus energy and surplus resource minerals come from when so much is already spoken for and dedicated elsewhere.
A good article. However the section "Addition of oil to world energy mix" is slightly too dismissive of what might have been achieved in oil's absence. For example:
In point 1 it is probably true that oil "enabled" aviation - it is hard to see very much being achieved there without it. However for the other transport modes, oil's role was not to make things possible, but to make them easier. Door to door transport was possible before the First World War using coal fired steam lorries, and on the farm and in construction, there were traction engines and road rollers. Battery electric vehicles also existed at the dawn of the motor car age. If there had been no oil, these things would out of necessity have been much further developed. Oil and the internal combustion engine merely provided transport options that were cheaper and more convenient.
Point 4 seems to be greatly over-stating the case. There was a large expansion of international trade during the 19th century using coal-powered steamships (and, indeed, sailing ships). Not all this trade was for "high value goods". For example, nations without coal resources of their own started to import it. Using coal powered shipping would have been no barrier to making complex goods requiring imports from many nations.
Oil enabling transportation here means that it gets the cost down to a point where it can be done widely. Certainly, there are work-arounds with coal. It is possible to use street cars and horses. Battery cars were available then, and didn't work then. They still don't work very well. You saw Tom Murphy's recent post, Battery Performance Deficit Disorder. You may also have read Ugo Bardi's post The Dark Side of Coal: Some Historical Insights on Energy and the Economy.
Maybe there is a better description than "high valued goods" for the role trade played in earlier times. Certainly, the goods had to have sufficient value to society to justify the expense of shipping the goods long distance, including the transit at the end of the passage. Coal is not high value in today's economy, but it allowed the economy at that time to multiply the "energy slaves" available to it, and thus was of very high value to society at that time.
In my view oil was not always essential to "get the cost down to a point where it [i.e. door to door transport] could be done widely". In Britain, a dense network of local railways existed before the end of the 19th century and lasted until the 1950s. Nearly all stations had a goods yard. Goods were delivered there by steam train (though by the 1920s, electrification of some lines had started and in the absence of oil, would have progressed further and faster). The final door to door delivery of goods delivered to station goods yard was carried out by horse and cart until motor lorries began to be used from the 1920s onwards.
This rail-based and coal powered system was less convenient and slower than present day methods of goods distribution; but it operated widely and (at least in small, densely populated countries like Britain) it worked.
If oil and the internal combustion engine did not exist, the 19th century methods of goods distribution would have been adapted and improved. A system based on electrified railway transport to local depots and final delivery by battery-electric vehicle could have been made to work reasonably well.
Tom Murphy's valuable post on battery performance mainly makes the point that battery electric vehicles are unlikely to be able to substitute for our large fleets of oil powered vehicles with their high speeds and enormous range. For a more limited role, taking small deliveries of goods the last few miles, EVs would have been feasible. Until fairly recently Britain had large numbers of milk floats (with lead/acid batteries) doing just this kind of work, making short, slow local journeys for door to door deliveries of bottled milk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_milk_float.
These are only small comments which do not detract from the main point of the original article, which was good. I am just suggesting that to be maximally persuasive, it is important to make everything said as accurate as possible.
Thanks for the article... Well-researched and well-written. One of the advantages of taking a long view like this is that a number of mega-trends become clear:
1. New energy technologies take decades to gain a significant share of the mix.
2. New energy technologies tend to add to the existing ones, rather than replacing them.
3. Shortages of critical energy sources sometimes lead to societal collapse, but other times to rapid development of alternatives. Societal collapse was common up to around 1000 AD; shifts to alternatives have been more common since.
In particular, for point 2, use of biofuels and coal kept growing, even as oil came along. Use of oil kept growing as nuclear came along and so on. The implications for wind-turbines, solar thermal, solar PV seem fairly similar. Yes they are growing very rapidly in % terms, but it will still take decades for them to achieve dominance, and we are still likely to be burning a lot of fossil fuels as well even when they've achieved dominance.
Implications for climate look very bleak unfortunately, with continued use of fossil fuels well into the century and immediate collapse of society unlikely to happen first (see point 3).
A disadvantage is that you zoom out so much that you can miss the fact that trends have broken down. For instance, energy and population is utterly decoupled.
New energy technologies does tend to displace existing ones, but this, as well, isn't visible when you zoom out that much, since the population hasn't stopped increasing and since energy use isn't saturated in much of the world. For instance, without nuclear power, the world would use 0.5-1 billion tonnes of coal extra per year.
I agree AGW implications does look bad.
>A disadvantage is that you zoom out so much that you can miss the fact that trends have broken down. For instance, energy and population is utterly decoupled.
I'm sure the trends have broken down many times before over periods of decades or even centuries. Population declines after the Black Death weren't triggered by large declines in energy use, and (to my knowledge) weren't accompanied by them either. Again one of the advantages of a "high-level" view is that it should make us less excited about shorter-term trend breakdowns.
Also, I'm not sure I would agree that "energy and population is utterly decoupled". Energy usage in Europe appears to be stable (or recently declining) while population is stable or declining. Energy usage in India and China are rising while population is also rising. Yes, the relationship is a lot more complicated than that, but not "utterly decoupled".
I agree. Ideally, one should have both views, and then try to find out or make up ones mind on whether the short-term trend breakdowns are permanent or at least permanent enough to make the long-term trend irrelevant for now. However, my experience is the presentations here are one-sided.
The future population growth/decline of different countries are long term determined by total fertility rates of women (assuming the average life span ends up fairly stable.) Many countries awash in energy, such as Norway, Iceland, Iran, USA, Canada, Russia are all at or below replacement rate. The highest fertility rates are found in hellholes with almost no energy.
I thought it was fairly established that if you look into this, you find that the total fertility rate declines we see all over the world are fairly exclusively explained by urbanization and emancipation of women. If you load Gapminder and plot TFR agains energy per capita, you see that increased energy per person correlates with drops in TFR. That populations keeps increasing is a result of the temporary effect that more energy per capita also correlates with increased longevity - the famous "demographic transition".
I would argue that societal collapse still happens after 1000 AD. The collapse of the Soviet Union was tied to reduced oil supply. We see Egypt today, which has moved away from being an oil exporter, and into being a perennial political problem state. We see the European Union on the verge of collapse.
We figured out a way around resource limits for a while. It is not clear that we can do this indefinitely.
"The collapse of the Soviet Union was tied to reduced oil supply. "
More to reduced oil revenues than supply (through the counter oil shock initiated by Reagan with the Saudis), even if this was more the last blow that brought the thing down.
>I would argue that societal collapse still happens after 1000 AD. The collapse of the Soviet Union was tied to reduced oil supply
Well to my mind, the break-up of the Soviet Union into a collection of still-functioning (albeit poorer) nation states bears very little relationship to the fall of Rome, or the collapse of Maya civilization. So there is "collapse" and there is COLLAPSE!
On Egypt and the European Union it's a bit too early to say really. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the EU splits up in a way resembling the Soviet Union (with a set of core countries remaining inside and playing the role of Russia). Debt write-offs, currency changes, inflation to get rid of remaining debts and a general economic stagnation for a decade or so are plausible. Widespread economic hardship and "shock" therapy in the Mediterranean countries (similar to ex-Soviet countries or some of the Eastern European satellites) are also on the cards. Greece is heading that way already, and Egypt and Syria are even worse. But it's not exactly barbarians at the gates across Europe.
Importantly, I can't see energy and fossil fuel usage declining by more than ~10-20% over the next decades (which would again match the Soviet case). Even very dramatic economic declines don't seem to knock energy consumption down more than a percent or two per year. So the implications for climate change look pretty minimal, which was my main point. No silver lining on the cloud.
Society (civilization?) in the former Soviet Union did not collapse; the totalitarian political system collapsed.
The eurozone is at risk of breaking up, due to flaws in the euro (mismatch of monetary and fiscal union); that's not the same as the EU being on the verge of breaking up, which wouldn't be the same as European societies collapsing, and has nothing to do with energy prices.
You're arguing against a strawman Gail; Dr Nick said that societal collapse because less common after 1000AD, not that it disappeared. There may be some merit to his assertion, although the concept of societal collapse is too subjective to really nail it down one way or the other.
The Soviet Union is nearly the worst example I can think of regarding a post 1000AD 'societal collapse'. (One might say everything there collapsed exceptsociety.)
Here are some better candidates, IMHO:
China in 1911 (took 38 years to restore unity and fight off foreign occupation)
Russia in 1917 (took five years to do same)
The French Revolution (at least a few years, depending where you end it)
Germany during the Thirty Years War
England during the Wars of the Roses
Some areas victimized by the Black Death
...in prehistoric America...
The Mound Cultures of Missippippi (disappeared between 1250 and 1500)
Southwestern cultures (Anasazi, etc) 12th and 13th centuries
...and on a smaller scale
Sigilmasa
Easter Island
This is ignoring (as far as we know) examples of societies that were rather straightforwardly destroyed by invaders, such as the various victims of the Mongols. It is probably true that post 1000AD there are more examples of that with regard to large scale societies, although again the collapse or destruction of a 'society' is a fairly subjective determination.
Pre Colombian societies societal collapses are also post 1000 AD examples (and not always clear about the internal versus invasion reasons). Also the case for some African societies.
Okay, but what factor explains the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent explosion in energy use? It wasn't just a slow accretion of knowledge. It was capitalism and its inherent drive for maximum commodification/energy use. We now see how crazy (and also partially fruitful) that effort was/is. If we ever hope to redress over-population in a civilized way, we need to talk about how, like so many other elementary things, that possibility is incompatible with our existing money-first economic institutions and the upward flows they exist to create and protect. The answer to poverty is radical downward redistribution and general adoption of social safety nets and civil rights within genuinely green economic activity. Merely acknowledging that booming energy use unleashes booming population is too secondary and vague a diagnosis of the disease, true as it is.
Regardless of how we slice it, dice it, enculturate it, complexify it, some things are clear, and have changed little:
Food is energy, it's most essential form.
Other forms of energy are food energy multipliers.
Competition for food energy or its multipliers (other forms of energy) supersedes conservation. We are driven to utilize whatever available energy sources to gain a competitive advantage. All other forms of energy use, even discretionary and wasteful uses, are related to the above. Even the accumulation of wealth, fiat or other forms, is analogous to having a secure supply of food energy. Whether in reality or perception, superfluous uses of energy are a display of our confidence in our food energy sources, little different from hunter-gatherers displaying claims on territories.
Though agriculture and the industrial revolution changed our relationship to our acquisition and utilization of food energy, our instinctual need to compete has changed little.
I agree. You said that well.
Humans have hierarchical behavior, just like dogs and many other mammals. Showing off by buying more stuff is part of it. That, and the Maximum Power Principle, in which organisms of any sort tend to utilize any energy source that is available, tends to keep resource consumption maxed out.
Our long history of using the land to produce annual crops has left the world with much degraded soil. The way forward is not entirely clear.
If one diverts all possible organics into soil building you have Edo period 'night soil' and the green manure plant stripping associated with China during the great leap forward.
Odds are no one will be willingly signing up for those 2.
One can consider the position of the pro rock dusters as expressed by http://remineralize.org/ - remineralize the Earth. Or one could swing the other way of the Jacob Mittleider gardening method - http://www.growfood.com/ and treat the land like it was a hydroponic setup. Both avoid the issues of trying to get enough organic material.
http://www.magicsoil.com/success/History.htm points out how 'hard' it is to have aerobic composting and what it takes to do such. http://www.magicsoil.com/MSREV2/Oxygen_Depletion.gif shows how quickly things get anaerobic.
An excellent book on this topic (and more) which I am almost done reading is "Too Smart for Our own Good" by Craig Dilworth.
http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/B007MXBNGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie...
He makes a good point that necessity is the mother of invention, but invention is also the mother of necessity. The two are inter-related in a way that is a positive feedback loop. More importantly is his treatment of humans and prior hominids always responding to population pressure until they eventually have to get into horticulture and then agriculture. People's health and lives didn't worsen despite the advantages of agriculture. Once population pressures got high enough, and the hunter-gatherer humans had covered the world something had to give. Only then did some turn to horticulture and its more complex, labor intensive, and actually worse life. The alternative was simply less life.
Once technology becomes important to survival as well as vital needs of food, shelter, water and breeding opportunities, the technology creates additional needs. They become genuine needs. Eventually that isn't enough and you need more tech, with more needs due to the tech. From there it simply escalates over time. Ratcheting up in complexity, required effort by humans, and energy intensity. Even horticulture and early agriculture didn't have as favorable an energy out vs energy in relationship as hunter-gather bands had.
Esldude, do you mean "didn't improve" where you typed "didn't worsen"?
Meanwhile, it does look very interesting, though I have to wonder how it's possible he doesn't cite or mention Marvin Harris, who made the very same argument, sans the now apparently de rigueur reduction to sociobiology/genetic determinism and the fatalistic conclusion, in 1977.
Yes, good catch Dawson. I meant didn't improve.
The book is highly footnoted. Not long commentary in footnotes either, just basic source information. I seem to recall a few references to Marvin Harris among many others. It is a very similar idea. He too talks about the genetics and selective effects various times had on humans. Sometimes genetics doesn't change yet the manifestation does. Like canines. Same basic genetics, but with some breeding different variations optimized for different purposes manifest themselves.
As an example early hominids used mostly heavy sticks, later tipped. But it was mostly run up to large game and stab them with the lance. Frames were manifested in a heavier, broader fashion. Later with thrown spears, and spear throwing with Atatls a taller, thinner physique allowed more speed and effectiveness with such tools. Later still a bit of a change for farming vs hunter-gathering existence.
The guy takes something of a systems approach (as in the approach of people of the Club of Rome that authored the Limits to Growth). His ideas are quite thorough and put together very well.
The throwing spears, darts, and arrows in the Upper Paleolithic tool kit are not only superior for killing game, but they likely provided a great advantage in human conflict.
I mention some of Dilworth's ideas in a couple of posts:
Human Population Overshoot-What Went Wrong?
Humans seem to need external energy
The complexity part sounds quite a bit like Tainter.
This article underlines something I've been thinking about recently - the foundation for our industrial societies is still the same as long ago:
Coal.
This and the seeming massive amounts of coal available suggest that what we will likely see in the future, whether we like it or not, is a return to reliance on coal (along with gas) for most of our energy needs. Oil has been perfect for transportation, but there is always CTL and GTL if things get desperate and we "need" liquid fuels. In any case, the implications of our world running on coal are not pretty. It is still the most polluting fuel source. But it is hard to see the world reducing the use of it in the long run. All the people that exist now need food, transport, and electricity to some extent. If oil starts failing in its role, it seems obvious that cheap and abundant coal could end up being substituted in. The end result is a sort of rougher, dirtier version of current industrial society, but all in all it could be that BAU of a sort could perhaps be maintained by coal. The transition back to a coal economy would be rough, but it seems possible.
What do you guys think? I would like to believe that we all get bicycles, windmills and solar panels, am more prone to believe that BAU will decline quickly when oil production declines, but now I think coal will remain the foundation and industrial society will continue. We might still get bicycles and solar panels, but coal (and to a lesser extent, gas) will be holding it all up. This will lead to a dynamic where coal and gas are used up faster and peak earlier, but still pushes the most radical changes back several decades, and makes it possible to slow the decline. Ultimately this makes me think the environment will be much more severely degraded once industrial society truly peters out.
Ultimately, this hinges on transportation and how central oil is to society today. Could this scenario happen?
The high energy anthracite coal has been economically exhausted more or less. The bitumen, sub-bitumen and ligate coal which we have lots of (my backyard, Montana and Wyoming) are mainly in areas with thick overburdens requiring heavy earth moving machineries to mine. I don't see a lot of these resources being economical if entire operation is coal powered (however it is done, i don't know). Ultimately, these resources require diesel to mine. I think a lot of us don't appreciate the magnitude and power of diesel, especially those who don't live near industrial sites. A roughneck with large diesel earth mover can do the work of 1000s of men, without breaking a sweat!
Don't be so sure about that.
http://www.railpictures.net/showphotos.php?city=Pingzhuang&country=China
I would tend to go with your scenario Adam but I don't know what to think about how much coal is left, you hear such widely varying numbers and I don't think a Hubbert linearization is highly accurate considering that much coal use has simply been substituted by oil. Obviously we are running out of oil -- just look at the production history vs. price, but coal just keeps going up and up with no end in sight.
If we do have lots more coal left then I wonder how society will interpret Peak Oil. Will we collectively say, "look, we ran out of oil just like Hubbert predicted. We are currently being given one last chance to move onto renewable energy using our remaining coal reserves which we can either 1) convert to oil via CTL and burn in our SUV's until we die, or 2) allocate enough of that remaining coal to build out renewable energy infrastructure because, like oil, coal will eventually run out too and there is no other high-EROEI fossil fuel left besides NG which will likely run out before coal anyways".
Or will we say, "look, we ran out of oil but another fossil fuel came to the rescue via CTL. The doomers failed to account for energy substitutions. When coal runs out we'll have another energy source come to ou rescue. Supply and demand will solve all energy "production" issues".
Or will we say, "look, we ran out of oil but another fossil fuel came to the rescue via CTL. The doomers failed to account for energy substitutions. When coal runs out we'll have another energy source come to our rescue."
You, I and most every other poster here knows this is exactly what will happen.
Most folks, including most folks on this site, seem to seriously underestimate the variety of ways that mechanical engineers have to make a shaft turn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_engine
Fuels like coal and naptha most certainly can be used to power heat engines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine_locomotive#Coal-firing
It doesn't have to be a turbine either; every heat engine cycle can also be implimented with pistons. The technical difficulties regarding slag and ash will be overcome.
However, by the time we get to that point I expect the evidence about global warming will be brutally indisputable. So I don't think coal powered vehicles will be allowed to make a big impact in the area of private vehicles. But for critical mining and transportation equipment, it's quite feasible without any scientific breakthroughs required.
I do expect to see coal powered locomotives and excavators. They haven't been developed yet only because of cost issues. But that calculation can give different results when costs change.
I don't think most here underestimate the ingenuity of engineers. After all coal was mined well before diesel machineries were invented. I think what most engineers seem to forget or underestimate is EROEI or ROI. Oh, we can mine coal with coal powered machineries alright. We can also do with just a bunch of hands with axes. Of course, we will never be able to mine it at any measurable scale like we do today, but you already know that.
This is an article I saw recently:
New Eco Car Runs on Coal
That looks a lot like The Onion.
IOW, that article is a parody.
"I do expect to see coal powered locomotives and excavators."
In the form of coal to liquids products, I do too. The convenience of diesel (including the longer engine life that follows from low ash and low sulfur) is worth the 25% loss in net energy of the conversion process. And unless you are going to go with supercritical steam, the higher efficiency of diesel compared to say a Scotch boiler driven steam system offsets some of that CTL loss as well.
My guess is that there will be areas of the world that are able to keep up coal production. I expect this production will occur especially in areas of the world where relatively primitive mines are in existence, so it is not too difficult to keep the equipment in repair. Overall coal production will drop, though, as mines find themselves with equipment breaking that they cannot get parts to fix. (This is assuming that trade breakdowns affect obtaining parts, and also affect making replacement parts, unless parts can be made simply and cheaply locally.)
"I expect this production will occur especially in areas of the world where relatively primitive mines are in existence,..."
We usually think of coal mining only occurring on a massive scale these days, carried out by mega-corporations and state run enterprizes, but there are still areas where stranded coal, and other resources, exist in considerable quantities. NE India has coal seams that haven't been exploited at scale due to lack of transportation infrastructure, etc...
CSE workshops on illegal mining and rat hole mining in Meghalaya
...and these illegal/marginal mines, many unpermitted and unregulated, can be quite dangerous:
15 miners feared dead in Meghalaya coal mine flood
Much of this coal is sold in the gray and black markets, a secondary economy that is certain to outlast the global system that many take for granted and consider permanent.. People will be crawling into these 'rat holes' long after mass scale extraction becomes unprofitable and unsupportable, looking for concentrated energy sources to sell or burn. It's what we do.
Isn't all coal by definition sold in the gray/black market...? And the term 'rat hole' seems very appropriate, as I've long said that is what industrial civilization is chasing itself down...
Pakistan, for example, has 186 billion tonnes, one of the highest coal reserves in the world. This appears to have been discovered recently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Coal_Mines_and_Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country
Well, that would be another nail in the coffin of attempts to control global CO2 emissions, as if China and India weren't bad enough.
You can't seriously expect Pakistan to leave that coal in the ground given their huge population (bigger than Russia now!), rapid population growth, and electricity supply problems.
Until now, Pakistan was my first candidate for largest failure by a nation. It is still the first candidate, but now I think that the probability is that air pollution will kill them before lack of food does.
I "remember reading" about how Pakistan currently runs mostly off natural gas so this coal could substitute for that nicely.
Nice article and comments but strikes me a bit like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
The bubble is humanity. That much is clear. Whether energy use came first or population growth came first is irrelevant.
It takes a particularly stoic and perhaps even morbid mind to appreciate that humanity itself is the last bubble to pop. Not many seem able to.
I agree it's irrelevant to the question of whether humanity is a bubble. It is not, however, irrelevant to the question of how that bubble will pop.
If higher energy use causes population growth, then a decline in available energy would seemingly cause population to drop.
If, on the other hand, population growth causes a rise in energy use, then we would be likely to see a much more ruthless exploitation of energy resources until there is literally no ability to grow additional food sources.
Payden & Rygel has been running the following ad on CNBC for some time, noting that nearly a quarter of all goods & service produced in all of human history have been produced in just the past 10 years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-qqkF6Ork&list=PL848F15B913CBF0EA&featu...
Payden & Rygel:
Of course, roughly a quarter (about 23%) of all crude oil ever consumed globally was consumed in just the past 10 years.
And then we have the net export situation.
GNE/CNI Vs. Total Global Public Debt
Oil importing OECD countries are trying desperately to maintain their "Wants" based economies, when a more likely scenario in my opinion is that we will be lucky to maintain a "Needs" based economy. Note that from 2002 to 2011, the absolute value of the rate of increase in Total Global Public Debt (8.5%/year) is about the same as absolute value of the rate of decline in the ratio of Global Net Exports of oil (GNE) to Chindia’s Net Imports (CNI), 8.1%/year.
If the GNE to CNI ratio were to hit 1.0, China & India would theoretically consume 100% of Global Net Exports of oil, and at the 2005 to 2011 rate of decline, the GNE/CNI ratio would hit 1.0 around 2030. Of course, I don’t think that will actually happen, and there is already evidence of a slowing demand from the Chindia region or at least a decline in the rate of increase in consumption, but the trend through 2011 is pretty clear, and the rate of decline in the GNE/CNI ratio accelerated from 2008 to 2011 (to 9.5%/year), versus 2005 to 2008 (7.9%/year).
The decline in the GNE/CNI ratio, which is an indication of the percentage of GNE that will be available to importers other than China & India, will of course make it increasingly difficult, and probably impossible, to repay, at least with currencies of close to current values, the debts incurred trying to keep some semblance of Business As Usual going in oil importing OECD countries.
Following is a graph of the GNE/CNI ratio versus total global public debt:
GNE = Global Net Oil Exports*
CNI = Chindia's Combined Net Oil Imports
*Top 33 net oil exporters in 2005, total petroleum liquids, BP Data + Minor EIA data
Debt Data:
http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock
Since I rarely watch TV, never watch CNBC, and avoid commercials like the plague that they are, I simply couldn't wrap my head around the skewed logic of this one.
"...investment and economic activity are still in their infancy."
I expect a near 100% chance of infant mortality in this case. Oh sure, investment and economic activity to continue, but more on the level of trading a chicken for a sack of potatoes.
Gail,
Great article
I would like to come at it from a different POV. (very simple first draft)
My thesis is that there have been several models of social / economic relationships throughout history, and these have been driven by availability of food and energy.
1. Ancient Roman Empire was based on the Army, which conquered, then looted / taxed and brought treasure back to Rome.
Expansion/growth was based on the relative cost of the Army vs the money they could bring back. Romans were happy with bread and circuses. People they governed/taxed were content with good protection. The source of energy was human/animal, and the source of wealth was the army. Growth based on the Armys ability to constantly conquer/expand. Eventually the costs outweighed the benefits and Rome collapsed (Tainter)
2. Feudal system
Again human and animal energy. Lord has land, and peasants work the land. They generate sufficient surplus for lord to maintain the castle and armed guards for protection.
3. Early capitalist (early industrial revolution). Fits with your model of the emergence of England and Holland, with coal. England becomes workshop for the world. Army conquers countries. People in countries mine/grow raw materials, which are shipped to England, which creates finished products, which are then shipped back and sold to locals. Create jobs and wealth in England. Also creates end user demand in England, and rising discretionary incomes in England become part of the virtuous circle of growth. Works based on Army/Navy, and inequality of energy using infrastructure between England and ROW. (you could also call this Imperialism I) Driver is Coal.
4. Imperialism II or late capitalist, is exemplified by US after WW2
A virtual empire based on US infrastructure after WW2, technology lead, military lead, dollar hegemony AND US cheap oil. Inequality between US and ROW.
The key thing is the emergence of a consumer society, with increasing amounts of disposable, discretionary income. Becauase of the superiority of oil, food and energy shrink as a percentage of the cost of living to perhaps 10% or 15%. For the first time there is a relatively huge % of income left over, which is used to drive the economy. Housing, cars, computers, healthcare, entertainment and Govt social services can grow dramatically. Its no accident that INCOME TAX becomes the major source of revenue. Growth in discretionary income drives economic growth. Again, inequality of energy use between US and ROW. Oil is primary driver as opposed to coal in earlier model.
5. Tertiary capitalism (or the end of imperialism)
Other countries catch up in terms of technology and energy use.
Then, when energy (and food) goes up as a percentage of income, discretionary income shrinks, demand shrinks, and the whole model shrinks and stops. Consumer behavior changes. Tax base shrinks. Govt has trouble funding programs and deficits increase.
They are trying to recreate growth, but growth is gone.
So Govts turn to banks. In the fifties it was the military industrial complex, now its the banking/govt complex. Its a symbiosis based on creation of, and need for, money. Money divorced from anything else (warning opinion coming ) Fiat Money is a derivative. It derives its value from the strength and productivity of the manufacturing / trading sector. If people cannot buy the products of that sector (because of reduced discretionary income) then there will be a collapse, and a new model of social / economic relations will emerge
6. Whats next? Very Bumpy Transition...
Some thoughts (all with big question marks):
- Much reduced govt
- Much reduced services of all kinds
- New model of money and finance
- Rise of collectivism – people sharing houses and cars that become too expensive for an individual
- Resurgence of the farm
- Greater inequality
- More military in everyday life
The role that community--people living and working closely together to meet common needs-- plays in any attempt to feed, clothe or fuel ourselves in a post fossil-fuel world seems too often over looked. Yes, we need to figure out the technical, the details, on an ecosystem by ecosystem basis. But survival through such a transition involves working together in small groups to meet our needs. Something not as trivial as many people make it out to be.
Here is a link to my fuller response to this post as well as the one back in July about Woody Agriculture. http://biomass2methanol.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/the-role-of-woody-agric...
I encourage you to check out the rest of the biomass2methanol site. There is some good fodder there for how the Windward community is making real some of the solutions to the very pressing challenges we face.
I look forward to more discussion,
Lindsay
Gail,
I will try to be civil but I must admit that I believe your perspective is far too narrow.
"Over the long haul, energy sources have played a very large and varied role in the economy. In general, increases in the energy supply seem to correspond to increases in GDP and population. Necessary characteristics of energy supply are not always obvious. We don’t think of low-cost as an important characteristic of energy products, but in the real world, this becomes an important issue."
Energy sources, energy products, GDP relation to population and cost in the "real world" cover a LOT of territory. The "real world" you are alluding to is the political world with it's fiat currencies and economics definitions of GDP. Those are manmade, and therefore subject to manipulation an mendacity. I don't question the reliability of the GDP figures you have studied; I question, as should you, the causal relationship between an economics construct and a physical reality (population size).
Correlation can be causation but it often is NOT. In order to prove causation you need a scientifically factual processs that can't be gamed by economics formulas. You attempt to be factual by discussing energy sources, products and cost. Every energy source use is a political decision. It does not necessarily follow that choosing this source or that has an equal effect on population above the Hunter Gatherer stage.
Why? Because energy sources is a means to an end. That end is to transfer enery FROM the source TO the human population.
Any discussion of energy transfer must, in order to be scientifically valid (i.e causative in affecting population growth or any other predicted effect), be measured using ALL the laws of themodynamics, not just the law of conservation of energy to determine enthalpy.
Your view that agriculture grew populations is accurate but the accelerated energy transfer that occurred from growing grains and monocropping had an entropic effect on the biosphere that you have neglected in your anthropomorphic, and therefore flawed, overview of biosphere effects from energy product use. As the population was going up, so was disease from concentrated populations while wildlife diversity was going down.
The biosphere is a closed system of complex energy transfer mechanisms called life forms. Energy certainly can and is being transferred from rapid oxidation and or fission but any discussion of their cost must FIRST be studied scientifically in terms of entropy and poisons generated in the thermodynamic tradeoff.
To pretend, because a government or an industry says so, that there is no other "cost" but the energy required to grow the crop, burn the hydrocarbon or fission the nuclear reaction is NOT science. Just because you have the physical power to avoid a "cost" in pollution and environmental degradation that humans with less political power must bear does not mean that "cost" isn't there! There is only one REAL world, the biosphere. The euphemism for power politics from the establishment of cities to the present corporate hierarchy can be referred to as the "real world" as a type of gallows humour code but the terms "energy source", "energy products" and "energy product cost" do not fit in the same sentence.
"As we move forward, we face challenges of many types. The world’s population is still growing, and needs to be housed, clothed, and fed. None of the energy sources that is available is perfect. Our long history of using the land to produce annual crops has left the world with much degraded soil. The way forward is not entirely clear.
I will look at some related issues in upcoming posts."
I address the issue of energy use, carbon footprint and our future in a politics free manner (not "real world" from your point of view but quite accurate from a scientific view of energy use) in the following articles.
Learn what a proper formulation of the EROI should be composed of free from propaganda, politics and the petroleum profit motive.
Renewables, why they work and fossil and nuclear fuels never did
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/07/17/hope-for-a-viable-biospher...
Carbon Footprint and how the 1% skew the per capita numbers in the USA (Joe 6 pack uses much less energy than is claimed) is discussed, among other subjects of interest to Oil Drum readers, here:
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/08/13/sexual-dimorphism-powerstr...
Latest article hot off the presses:
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/09/06/high-energy-love-the-short...
Unlike most sites, the comments on these article do not get shelved or disappeared into dusty archives. The thread is preserved and you can read through the whole thing. You can tear the articles to pieces and use profanity if you wish to accentuate your prose. As long as you don't conflate opinion with facts and vice versa, you will be listened to. Come one, come all and show us your debating skills.
That is one of the most obviously true statements that I have ever read in my life. Sometimes just plain old common sense will tell us when a statement is true or false. If you were to overlay a graph of world population growth over a graph of world fossil energy use, they would track each other, not quite in lock step but almost.
Okay, let's go over this step by step. Fossil energy led to an increase in incomes, heating homes, transportation, and the food supply. One farmer could produce what once took many to produce. People were able to move off the farm and be employed in jobs powered by fossil energy. They could now buy food, clothing and shelter. As a result people lived a lot longer, were fed much better and had far more children survive to reproduce themselves. This led to a both an increase in population and GDP.
My God, it's a no brainer!
Ron P.
But it's not *just* fossil energy. Mechanization (horse-drawn reapers) was improving farm productivity even before oil, as do better crop rotation systems and crop varieties. Longer lifespan has a lot to do with vaccines and sewers and clean water supplies, plus more advanced medicine and dental care. We invented the bicycle and streetcars and electric lighting. Even if fossil fuels ran out fast, we'd still be wealthier than we were in 1850.
And perhaps you think the metal to build those reapers, plows and pipes for clean water was forged in a wood fired blast furnace? No, the furnaces that started and powered the industrial revolution were fired with coal, a fossil energy. And medical research was made possible, in no small part, by cheap fossil energy.
If fossil energy were to disappear we would cut down all the trees in a year or two. There would be no coal fired blast furnaces to produce even the farm equipment we had in 1850. Of course we will still have wind and solar power until the equipment breaks or wears out. Then no more.
Of course coal will be the last fossil fuel to go. However the collapse will start when liquid fuel begins to seriously decline. Then the increase in coal use will exacerbate the climate change problem. But the real early problem will be massive unemployment and starvation.
No, we will not be nearly as wealthy as we were in 1850 because the collapse will be horrible, too horrible to even contemplate.
Ron P.
"Of course we will still have wind and solar power until the equipment breaks or wears out. Then no more."
Because for some reason you can't use wind and solar power to make new such equipment.
"No, we will not be nearly as wealthy as we were in 1850 because the collapse will be horrible, too horrible to even contemplate."
So what do you propose doing about it? Or do you think it's inevitable and you just enjoy contemplating our oncoming doom?
You take that as a given but there is actually serious debate on the subject. Can electricity from a wind generator be used to mine ore, transport it to an electric blast furnace and create all the parts for another wind generator? And how about all the plastics, fiberglass and other parts? I seriously doubt it.
Don't be absurd Mindstalk, try just thinking this thing through. No, there is nothing we can do to save the world. But there is a lot you can do to save your own butt. There is a lot you can do to prepare yourself and your family for the coming collapse and all the horror that will come with it.
If you spend time, energy and resources in an effort to try to be among the survivors then it will be well spent. Of course there are no guarantees but you could definitely improve your chances of being among the survivors. But if you spend your time, energy and resources trying to save the entire world instead then it will be totally wasted.
Ron P.
"If you spend time, energy and resources in an effort to try to be among the survivors then it will be well spent. Of course there are no guarantees but you could definitely improve your chances of being among the survivors."
And shot for your supplies, or your land, or enslaved to work that land by some gang. If there's general collapse, anyone not equivalent to a Mexican drug lord is likely f-cked. Probably them too, but they're at least the sort of people who come out on top in such things.
We can transform electicity to hydrocarbons.
"Can electricity from a wind generator be used to mine ore, transport it to an electric blast furnace and create all the parts for another wind generator? And how about all the plastics, fiberglass and other parts? I seriously doubt it.Can electricity from a wind generator be used to mine ore, transport it to an electric blast furnace and create all the parts for another wind generator? And how about all the plastics, fiberglass and other parts? I seriously doubt it."
What do you mean by 'can'? Can electricity be used to do all those things, or to power machines doing all those things? Yes, obviously. Does the turbine make enough electricity to replicate itself and the tools needed to build it? That's the more relevant question, to which I don't have a citable answer.
Back-of-an-envelope: A 3 MW wind turbine can generate 9 GWh/year, or 180 GWh during its lifetime. Oil has a heating value of some 10 kWh/litre, so the electricity corresponds to 18 million litres, or 110,000 barrels with a value of $11 million or so. The lifetime cost of the wind turbine should be substantially less, and only part of the wind turbine's cost should be due to fuel. Also, electricity is worth some 2-3 times more than heat.
So I conclude we can replicate and get a significant surplus.
Don't forget that the wind turbine is made of fiberglass and that would have to be synthesized from electricity which is a significant efficiency hit. Plus electricity is priced at a dramatic discount to oil on a BTU basis so you have to be careful just going back and forth between those energy forms. But without pulling out my calculator to go over your numbers I would think that a wind turbineor solar panel could produce more than enough energy over their lifetimes to make babies.
Edit:
Actually I just checked and oil is only slightly more expensive than electricity on a BTU basis, I boobooed.
And I didn't use electricity price, but wind turbine cost. Big difference. Reasonably, the upper limit of the oil consumed to construct a wind turbine is the amount of oil you can buy for the same price as the turbine.
Not sure what you mean by efficiency hit, or dramatic discount.
But the heat of formation of various chemicals tends to be similar, and in fact SiO2 seems to be 15 megajoules per kilogram, vs. around 40 megajoules for oil. Jeppen's numbers suggest the windmill can make about 18 million kilograms of oil in its lifetime, or of other substances, or 18 thousand tons. 6 thousand tons if there's only 33% efficiency. How much does a 3 MW windmill mass?
http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2007/03/how_big_is_an_industrial_wind.html says 164 tons for a 1.5 MW windmill. We can get up to 600 tons while staying within the 10% envelope.
"Can electricity from a wind generator be used to mine ore, transport it to an electric blast furnace and create all the parts for another wind generator? "
Yes. The big power shovels are electric. Electric trains are well documented. Electric arc furnaces are also electric. You do need a carbon source for reduction of the metal oxides, but charcoal will do fine, and if you are only using it for the chemical reduction part of the process instead of the heat, you need a lot less.
Plastics can be made from biological sources. Glass is from mining (see above). So yes. Fossil fuels are easier and cheaper, but not essential.
I was once at the steel mill in Mo i Rana, in Northern Norway, quite close to the Arctic Circle. Norway doesn't have any coal reserves (other than on Svalbard, an island up in the Arctic Ocean) and 99% of Norway's electricity is hydro.
The electric blast furnaces at Mo i Rana used as much electricity as the capital city of Oslo, but it was, they claimed, the biggest steel mill in Northern Europe.
The iron mines were next door in Sweden, and I didn't get to see them, but I'm sure the trains hauling the ore were electric, and most likely the power shovels were, too. Sweden's electricity is 50% hydro, 50% nuclear.
We wouldn't be wealthier than we were in 1850 because there are way more people now, and way more degraded ecosystems needed to support them.
I think the issue with renewables like wind and solar is that in order to maintain a functioning manufacturing sector (so that more solar panels can be made) a certain critical threshold of energy supply has to be achieved by them. If we don't achieve that before fossil fuels run out then we may miss the boat, society falls apart and instead of devoting our resources to developing renewable energy we end up killing each other.
I think there is still a possibility we could pull it off, from a technical and ecological standpoint. I am less optimistic that we will do this from a social and economic perspective because we collectively behave incredibly dumb.
"Or do you think it's inevitable and you just enjoy contemplating our oncoming doom?"
Yeah, mindstalk, we get that sometimes. It's a bit like asking a doctor if he enjoys telling patients they have a terminal or chronically debilitating illness, and has no bearing at all on the reality of humanity's grossly unprecedented overshoot condition.
It's been argued, here and elsewhere, that most of the gains you mentioned occurred in economies experiencing significant net energy gains. Farm machinery was improved using cheaper, more abundant materials, available largely due to cheaper, more abundant and concentrated energy sources. Same with sewers; more/better bricks and other materials, and labor set free from the fields. Medical and dental advances were accelerated by an environment of more available energy. We could get into something of a chicken/egg argument, but energy gets my chicken vote. It's been a complex set of circumstances getting from there to here, but without abundant, more concentrated and affordable energy sources freeing more people to do things besides manual labor, things would have played out quite differently, IMO. As I said above, it boils down to fossil energy being a food energy multiplier.
Yes, they happened in economies experiencing energy gain. But that doesn't mean they all actually required energy gain to discover, or to maintain. Knowledge accumulates. If we run out of oil we'll still know about inoculation and vaccination and the germ theory and washing your hands and not pooping in your water supply and flossing/brushing your teeth. Farm machinery used better materials but it also used better knowledge of how to put simple machines together. Sewers may be cheaper with better bricks but they're as old as civilization, Harappa not to mention Rome.
It isn't just having the knowledge, it's about being able to implement, utilize, and grow it at scale. This is what most folks ignore; the scale of growth and the energy required to maintain things, especially in an increasingly resource constrained world. Most of the minerals/materials that are required to do so are now found in increasingly lower concentrations. In the same way that fossil energy has been a food energy multiplier, it has allowed us to concentrate other resources with far lower human input. At this point, it's all about scale, and the energy that enables it. It's not something we can easily adapt to or back out of. We've reached the inflection point of diminishing returns.
BTW, we still poop in our water supplies. We just use massive amounts of energy to make it 'potable' again, and Harappa and Rome didn't have 7+ billion people.
A picture is worth....
[ http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html ]
Shear coincidence?
Thanks Ghung. However I think if you added coal to oil, especially coal but natural gas also, it would be a lot closer fit.
Ron P.
It's pretty clear where coal kicked in on the population curve, about 1800, and some of the scientific/medical/technological advancements surely contributed. It's clear to me, if not to some others, that the availability of increasing amounts of concentrated energy was the game changer. Those who insist that it was primarily the ingenuity of humans display a hubris I don't share. It was the gift of fire, part deux.
Well, what are the various factors?
Three-field crop rotation, bringing green manure to what were fallow fields
New World crops like the potato, sweet potato, corn, and cassava (these are huge)
Use of a different 'fossil fuel', Peruvian guano as fertilizer
Use of early pesticides, like straight arsenic
Medical advances greatly lowering child mortality, leading to a temporary huge boom in population
Horse drawn farm machinery, segueing into oil-driven tractors
Bringing new or marginal or deforested land into cultivation (sometimes helped by New World crops).
Later guano would be replaced by fossil-driven fertilizer synthesis. But I'm not sure how you turn coal or even oil into food and people for most of the 19th century, especially the first half. They weren't synthesizing fertilizer or driving farm machinery in 1810. How does coal cause population uptick in 1810? I know how New World crops and guano caused a population uptick.
"But I'm not sure how you turn coal or even oil into food and people for most of the 19th century,..."
If you look at Gail's graph...
http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/per-capita-consumption...
...they were using it for something in increasing amounts until some coal use was displaced by petroleum. Heating and cooking come to mind, and offset calories that have to come from somewhere. People with abundant coal generally don't freeze to death. Smelting ores and producing products that have greater utility also adds an incremental advantage. As I said, coal and other fossil fuels are food energy multipliers.
The Industrial Revolution
The forging of farm farm machinery made possible by coal fired blast furnaces made it possible for farmers to produce far more food per farmer than was ever possible before.
Ron P.
Some improvements in agriculture preceded to the introduction of mass produced metal machinery. http://www.bayjournal.com/article/plows_helped_to_turn_the_tide_for_agri...
There were incremental improvements in plows in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. The moldboard plow was one such improvement. Adding iron sheathing to the moldboard plow in 1720 made it more efficient, and led to cast iron plows (the Chinese had already been using iron plows for a couple millenia). Cast iron breaks, so steel plows were the next step. Everything before steel plows had no need for the Industrial Revolution or even fossil fuels. Blacksmiths and cottage iron works used charcoal long before coal came into common use. Of course, making charcoal uses up a lot of wood, and becomes environmentally and economically more expensive as population density grows.
Yes, ironclad wooden plows were common in the years before the industrial revolution. But the plows were still wood. And wagon wheels were rimmed with iron. But the reapers, plows and other all metal farming tools only came with the discovery of the coal fired blast furnace. Without those iron farm implements there would have been no agricultural revolution and no food explosion, and no population explosion.
Ron P.
The agricultural revolution in England started before the industrial revolution. The introduction of steel tools and large machinery may have accelerated the agricultural revolution, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution#Maximizing_... has an interesting chart. The column on the right in the table Crop Yield net of Seed shows 'Average annual growth rate of agricultural output ... per agricultural worker.' There were spurts in productivity in the second halves of the 14th and 15th centuries, but in the rest of the 400 years from 1250 to 1650, productivity per agricultural worker was stagnant or actually dropped. Sustained increase in agricultural productivity started in 1650. Unfortunately, the chart stops at 1850, so it does not show what effect the later industrial revolution had on agricultural productivity, although the average annual increase in productivity in 1800-1850 is comparable to that in 1650-1750. I suspect, however, that the industrial revolution, as such, had less effect on agricultural productivity than did the widespread availability of liquid fuels in the 20th century.
The moldboard plow was key to the expansion of population into Northern Europe by enabling farmers to grow crops there. Prior to that time it was just dark forests full of barbarians. The Romans didn't have moldboard plows and were never able to turn the vast forests of Northern Europe into the farmland it is today. They had to rely on North Africa as their breadbasket.
The steel plow was key to farming the vast Canadian prairies. One of the reasons it was settled relatively late was that earlier plows couldn't break the tough prairie sods. With steel plows it was quite easy to break the soil and plant it to crops. Tractors, combines, and trucks were not necessary and the pioneers didn't have them - but a steel plow behind a team of horses was mandatory. Homesteading your 160 acres of free land wasn't something you could do successfully with a hoe and a rake.
We have pictures of our pioneering forefathers harvesting the crops, and there is nary a tractor nor a truck in sight - but there sure are a lot of men and horses because these were big farms even back then. There are steam-powered threshing machines in the pictures, but they could and did run on straw from the crops. They weren't totally necessary either, but they did save a lot of flailing.
And was the steel used to make those threshing machines forged in charcoal furnaces or did they use coal to smelt the ore into iron and the iron into steel?
True, they were only necessary if you wished to produce a lot more than you could by hand threshing. That's the whole point. Fossil fuel enabled farmers to produce so much more than they could with wooden ironclad plows, hand harvesting and hand threshing. And all that extra food, and extra labor that moved from farms into the cities to work in factories, enabled the population to multiply many fold.
Ron P.
And was the steel used to make those threshing machines forged in charcoal furnaces or did they use coal to smelt the ore into iron and the iron into steel?
This was after the time they used up the forests of Europe making steel, and before the time they introduced electric blast furnaces, so yes most likely the steel was produced using coal.
However, as I commented elsewhere, I have been at the biggest steel mill in Northern Europe, in Norway - which has few coal reserves, but a lot of hydroelectricity, so it used electric blast furnaces. I believe there was still a small amount of coal involved, but given Norway's large forests they could have used charcoal instead.
Here in Canada we could do the same, and it would eliminate most of the pollution caused by the high-sulfur coal the steel mills in Ontario import from the US because Ontario has no coal of its own. However, they would have to move the steel mills to other provinces that have surplus hydro power, and that would go over badly in Ontario.
And all that extra food, and extra labor that moved from farms into the cities to work in factories, enabled the population to multiply many fold.
The farms could produce as much food, they just required more people to produce it. The rural areas have been depopulated because there are no longer farm jobs for people there, not because they wanted to move to the cities. It was the automation of the farms that caused the migration.
This, however, caused the growth of cities and produced a surplus of workers for the factories. It enabled the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Canada was settled after the Industrial Revolution, so it just depopulated the rural areas and moved the people to the cities. The immigrants come anyway, it is just their destination that has changed.
"The farms could produce as much food, they just required more people to produce it."
Those people required far more calories to remain healthy as well. Industrialization, automation, mass production (substituting labor calories with fossil fuel calories to do work) began happening on a mass scale, so not only were farms becoming more productive, the food they produced was going farther to feed the masses (and not their own human laborers) The average cost of food also would be dropping during these periods. Incremental changes can have large cumulative effects.
It's clear that increasing energy inputs also increases wealth, and investment in things that improve the population's health and reduce risks over time. Farming has always been a dangerous, physically stressful business. Working in a shoe or textile factory, probably not so much. It was the wealth that allowed other advancements; investment in sanitation, education, research, transportation, nutritional variety, leisure time, social mobility, diversification; all drivers of population growth enabled by increasing net energy inputs. As we can see from the graphs, the knock-on effects of what began as slow incremental changes eventually resulted in exponential growth, all underwritten by, and demanding, increasing energy.
Well, I don't know about that. None of these exponential curves are really exponential curves. They are really sigmoid curves - They only appear to be exponential curves because we have only seen the first part. After the inflection point they look completely different.
Farmland is never really a fixed resource, but in agricultural production, after a certain point the law of diminishing returns sets in, and each additional worker or each addition acre of land produces less food than the previous one. After a while, each additional worker produces less food than he consumes, so it starts to get problematic. Eventually, it gets to the point where the average worker doesn't produce as much food as he consumes, and the surplus population starves.
Europe used to get to that point on occasion, but more commonly some kind of plague would sweep through and reduce the population to the point where they were more short of workers than food. At that point each additional worker would produce more food than he could consume, and they would repeat the process.
The reality is that North America has never reached the point where each farm worker consumed more food than he produced. It has always been possible to expand production. Back when my ancestors were pioneering, they were never short of food, only of markets to sell it in. Each additional worker could produce more food than he could consume, but there was no point in producing more food because there was nowhere to sell it. It would have been nice to sell it to Europe or Asia, but people there couldn't afford to buy it.
During the Depression, my parents lived mostly on steak because farmers couldn't sell their cattle. At the same time, people in the cities were hungry because they couldn't afford to buy meat. The constraint was a shortage of money rather than a shortage of food.
Farm women made dresses out of flour sacks because they couldn't afford to buy clothes, fishermen shingled their roofs with cod fish because they couldn't afford to buy wood shingles, people hitched horses to their car because they couldn't afford to buy gas, but food was never a problem. It got to the point where farmers were throwing steaks to the dogs because they couldn't eat all the meat themselves.
On the Canadian prairies, food was never a constraint, but during the Depression, money certainly was - and that was a completely artificial constraint caused by an incompetent government.
In the modern world, starvation has been identified as an economic problem rather than a resource problem, and the only reason people starve now in third world countries is because of wars and revolutions. There is not a global lack of food because underpopulated countries like Canada and Australia could produce far more than they do now if there were people who could buy it.
I like to offer the example of China, which feeds 1.3 billion people despite the fact it has less farmland than the US, and much of it is more badly degraded than US farmland. They just have to farm it more intensively. It helps to reduce the number of farm workers because the marginal farm worker consumes more food than he produces. China has been pushing workers into the cities and factories because it is counterproductive to have them working on the farms.
I didn't look up Norway specifically but according to the World Coal Association 29% of steel is produced in electric arc furnaces. The association goes on to say much of the electricity for those electric arc furnaces is produced by coal fired power plants, which of course is not a requirement but does indicate what is economical today when externalities still have most of their costs shoved into the future--but that future may be a lot closer to now than many realize.
Threshing machines were made of wood (with the only iron parts being studs set in the threshing cylinder and bolts holding the wooden frame together) until the 20th century.
http://agriculture.technomuses.ca/english/collections_research/threshing...
Even the metal threshing machines introduced in 1904 used sheet metal on angle-iron frames.
Speaking of wood I seen the new Timber Towers made for wind turbines.The company claims the timber towers are 20% cheaper,cheaper to maintain,can be erected to taller heights vs steel towers,are not a logistics nightmare as the steel towers are,much easier to transport,timber is from renewable sources etc.
Website- http://www.timbertower.de/index.php?id=1&L=1
Video: http://www.timbertower.de/en/product/info-video-4-2010/
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The concept that more people use more energy is hardly a revelation, but the assertion that GDP Growth and population growth must always result in the consumption of more energy is wrong.
If you take the figures for the US over the last 5 years we can see a population growth from 299million in 2007 to 312million in 2011 a sizable increase of 13 Million people.
So did US energy consumption increase over this period of time?
BP statistical review measures consumption of all types of energy in Barrels of oil equivalent.
Total oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro and renewables in 2007 was 2370 million tonnes of oil equivalent, in 2011 it was 2267 million tonnes of oil equivalent.
A reduction of 103 million tonnes of oil equivalent, despite an increasing population.
Nominal GDP went from $13.2 trillion to $15 trillion
Real GDP went from £13.2 trillion to $13.3 trillion so and increase either way.
US trade balance(imported energy) was -$827 Billion in 2007 and -$727 Billion is 2011, considerably less.
SO population and GDP can increase while energy consumption is reduced.
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/re...
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/re...
http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php
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I posted this text originally on Our Finite World many days ago, but it never showed up in the comments. I think it bears going on the record before comments are closed here too.
Gail,
That last chart (fig. 11) indicates that prior to 1820, GDP was a limiting factor for population. As GDP grew, population grew to match. But with the aid of fossil fuel energy post-1820, GDP has grown faster than population. This indicates that other limiting factors besides GDP and energy have come into play. A very obvious limiting factor is personal preference -- most people do not choose to raise large families any more, and they have ready means to achieve this without interfering with their enjoyment of recreational sex, which prior to 1800 they did not.
Prior to crises of peak oil and global warming, the only incentive to improve the energy efficiency of GDP has been the cost of energy, which has rarely been a limiting factor in the economy at large. Since the mid-1970s however, with the North American oil peak and the environmentalist movement, powerful new incentives have emerged. In the last decades these incentives have moved from matters of conscience and security to matters of government policy and raw economics.
I note with amusement your exclusion of the two outlier decades 1980-2000 in the regression linking GDP to energy consumption (fig 5 vs fig 6). Yet any chart of energy consumption by nation or by energy source shows very clearly that there was a surge in consumption of coal, in China, in the decade 2000-2010. It is the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturing aided by a suppressed currency price and accelerated depletion of that country's coal resource which is anomalous and unsustainable, not the improvement in GDP per unit energy observed everywhere else since the 1970s.
The world has benefited on paper from cheap Chinese energy and labour, but the real cost, as the Chinese leadership and all economists are aware, is much higher than the rest of the world has been paying. One way or another the coal-fired surge of 2000-2010 must evaporate, by the yuan rising to a realistic exchange value (revealing the true scale in dollar terms of the Chinese economy as a whole), by various internal Chinese market bubbles bursting, or by the leadership succeeding in its ambitions to double energy efficiency. Or, of course, a combination of all three.
Subsequent decades in a later re-run of your figure 5 will show a clear knee at 1980, with the decade 2000-2010 an anomaly in the post-1980 regime of accelerating improvement of GDP return on energy investment.
As for your concerns regarding the superiority and essential nature of oil underpinning other energy technologies, rest assured that a huge portion of oil use today is still very much a matter of discretionary consumption (single-occupier-vehicle commutes and short shopping trips), and another large fraction (stationary energy and chemical feedstocks) is readily supplied by other resources such as electricity, coal, gas, or biomass. The few things for which crude oil may appear essential (lubrication, emergency and maintenance vehicles, freight and non-discretionary personal transportation) can sustain a much higher oil price while already-existing substitutes such as electric transportation and synthetic oils are deployed on an increasing scale.
Renewable energy technology is more than capable of sustaining itself. We use some fossil inputs today because they remain less expensive than the renewable alternatives, but this will not remain permanently the case.
A TED video that touches on designs that allow for more people to live in cities without the negatives such as increased pollution,increased energy use,transportation nightmares etc.I guess the question is will these ideas along with others be implemented?
http://www.ted.com/talks/kent_larson_brilliant_designs_to_fit_more_peopl...