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Our Energy Predicament in Charts
Posted by Gail the Actuary on March 27, 2013 - 11:48am
A friend asked me to put together a presentation on our energy predicament. I am not certain all of the charts in this post will go into it, but I thought others might be interested in a not-so-difficult version of the story of the energy predicament we are reaching.
My friend also asked what characteristics a new fuel would need to have to solve our energy predicament. Because of this, I have included a section at the end on this subject, rather than the traditional, “How do we respond?” section. Given the timing involved, and the combination of limits we are reaching, it is not clear that a fuel suitable for mitigation is really feasible, however.
ENERGY BASICS
Energy makes the world go around
Energy literally makes the world turn on its axis and rotate around the sun.
Energy is what allows us to transform a set of raw materials into a finished product.
Energy is also what allows an us to transport goods (or ourselves) from one location to another. Services of any type require energy–for example, energy to light an office building, energy to create a computer, and human energy to make the computer operate. Without energy of many types, we wouldn’t have an economy.
Increased energy use is associated with increasing prosperity.
Figure 3. World growth in energy use, oil use, and GDP (three-year averages). Oil and energy use based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy. GDP growth based on USDA Economic Research data.
Energy use and oil use have risen more or less in tandem with GDP increases. Oil is expensive and in short supply, so its increases have tended to be somewhat smaller than total energy increases. This happens because businesses are constantly seeking ways to substitute away from oil use.
Figure 4. China’s energy consumption by source, based on BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy data.
China is an example of a country with very high growth in energy use. China’s energy use started growing rapidly immediately after it joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. China’s energy use is mostly coal.
Figure 5. Per capita oil consumption in countries with recent bank bailouts, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
European countries with bank bailouts show declining oil consumption.
Increased fuel use is also associated with rising population growth.
Figure 6. World population from US Census Bureau, overlaid with fossil fuel use (red) by Vaclav Smil from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects.
On Figure 6 above, the fuel use and population growth rise very rapidly, after fossil fuels were added about 1800. In fact, the lines overlay each other, so it is not possible to see both. Adding fossil fuels allowed much better food supply, sanitation, and medical care, all leading to huge population growth.
World population is still growing rapidly, especially outside of the developed countries. The countries with the most population growth (blue) are only now beginning to obtain goods and services that the developed world takes for granted, like better medical services, cars, and electricity for every home. Their fuel use is growing rapidly.
There are many sources of usable energy.
Figure 8 illustrates a few sources of usable energy. Clearly, there are great differences among them, both in terms of how the energy they provide is created, and in terms of the types of energy services they can most easily provide. Businesses will substitute a cheaper source of energy whenever they can. Businesses especially seek ways to substitute away from human energy, since it is the most expensive type. One approach is automation. This substitutes machines (running on electricity or oil) for human labor. Another approach is outsourcing the manufacturing of goods to countries that have lower-cost labor.
One factor that limits fuel switching from oil to electricity is the amount of machinery currently using oil. Robert Hirsch says
Worldwide machinery operating on oil is valued at $50 to $100 trillion (Automobiles, airplanes, tractors, trucks, ships, buses, etc.)
There is also a huge investment in roads, bridges, refineries, and pipelines. Past transitions have taken more than 30 years, because it usually makes economic sense to wait for current machinery to reach the end of its economic life before replacing it.
LIMITS WE ARE REACHING
Unfortunately, we live in a finite world. At some point we start reaching limits.
One limit we are reaching is how many people the world will support, without unduly affecting other species. There are now over 7 billion humans on earth, compared to fewer than 200,000 gorillas and chimpanzees, which are also primates.
The natural order is set up so that each species–including humans–reproduces in far greater numbers than is needed to replace itself. Natural selection chooses which of the many organisms will survive. With the benefit of fossil fuel energy, humans (as well as their cows, pigs, goats, chickens, dogs and cats) have been able to survive in far greater numbers than other species. In fact, paleobiologists tell us that the Sixth Mass Extinction has begun, thanks to humans. At some point, interdependencies are disturbed, and we can expect more population collapses.
Another limit is pollution of many types. This image is of air pollution, but there is also water pollution and CO2 pollution. Even what we think of as renewable energy often poses pollution challenges. For example, battery recycling/disposal can pose pollution challenges. Mining of rare earth minerals, used in electric cars, wind turbines, and many high tech devices is often cited as being very polluting in China.
Another limit is declining soil quality. In the natural order, soil is not disturbed by plowing, and the nutrients animals use are recycled back into the soil, after they use them.
As we disturb this natural order, we find erosion reduces top-soil depth. The amount of organic matter in the soil is reduced, making crops less drought-resistant. Nutrients such as phosphorous and potassium are often depleted, and need to be added as soil amendments, requiring fossil fuel transport. Soils often suffer from salinity related to irrigation. Nitrogen levels also become depleted.
It is possible to mitigate these problems using fossil fuels. However, we discover that our ability to feed 7 billion people becomes increasingly dependent on continued fossil fuel use. If we increase biofuel production, this tends to make the situation worse. Techniques such as regrading of hills to improve rainwater absorption can help the situation, but this too requires energy.
Another limit is imposed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy happens. Things fall apart. All of the “stuff” humans have produced (including roads, bridges, pipelines, electricity transmission equipment, cars, and computers) keeps degrading, and eventually needs to be replaced. If we intend to continue to have roads, we need to keep repairing them and building new ones. Using current technology, this requires an increasing amount of fossil fuel energy.
Another limit arises because we extract the cheapest, easiest to extract resources first. (Figure 11) As a result, at some point, the cost of extraction rises, because the cheap resources have already been depleted. Outside observers don’t necessarily notice a difference as the quality of resources drops over time; it always looks as if there is an increasing quantity of reserves available as we move down the resource triangle.
Unfortunately, the apparently increased resources are not really comparable to what was already extracted. The resources lower down in the resource triangle, such as oil and gas that requires “fracking” to extract, require the use of increased energy resources. The speed of extraction is often remarkably slower–light oil flows like milk, while heavy oil can be the consistency of peanut butter. Extracting oil using fracking has been compared to getting oil from the pores of a concrete driveway.
Another example is fresh water. Initially we take it from a local stream, or from a shallow well, where little energy (and cost) is required to obtain it. As this resource depletes, we seek other sources–deeper wells, or water piped from afar, or desalination. All of these approaches use much more energy. If the world’s total energy supply is not growing rapidly, using more energy for water supply is likely to mean less energy is available for other uses. I discuss this issue in Our Investment Sinkhole Problem.
OIL LIMITS
Figure 12. US crude oil production, based on EIA data. 2012 data estimated based on partial year data. Tight oil split is author’s estimate based on state distribution of oil supply increases.
An example of how resource depletion can work is illustrated with US oil supply. US oil production (blue) suddenly began to decline in 1970, despite the oil industry’s best efforts to extract more. By scrambling around quickly, it was possible to add more oil production from Alaska (red), but this soon declined as well.
It wasn’t until oil prices rose in the late 2000s that it made economic sense to use technology which had been developed much earlier to extract tight oil. Tight oil is expensive oil to extract. How much production will rise from current levels depends to a significant extent on how much oil prices are able to increase in the future. The higher that oil prices rise, the greater the recessionary impact that can be expected, but the more oil that can be produced.
World oil supply is now about level, except for the small increase added by US and Canadian oil supply. (Figure 13) One concern with world oil supply as flat as it is, is that at some point, world oil supply will suddenly take a nosedive, just as US oil production did.
Another concern is that the developing world will get the majority of the world oil supply, leaving little for historically large users (Figure 14). US, Europe, and Japan experienced severe recession in the 2007-2009 period, and still are seeing economic headwinds, at the same time that countries that were able to obtain the oil continued to experience economic growth.
I think of our current situation as being like that of a host who gives a party for 10 people. There is enough food to go around, but just barely. The host decides to invite another 50 people to the party. Surprise! Suddenly there is a shortfall. Globalization has its downside!
Figure 15. World oil supply and price, both based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy data. Updates to 2012$ added based on EIA price and supply data and BLS CPI urban.
A third concern is that oil prices will disrupt economies of oil importing nations. Oil prices rose sharply after US oil production dropped in the 1970s. They began rising rapidly again about 2003, as the world became more globalized. In addition, oil resources became increasingly expensive to extract. There is little possibility now that oil prices can decline for long without a drop in oil production.
Oil price spikes lead to recession. Economist James Hamilton has shown that ten out of the most recent 11 US recession were associated with oil price spikes. When oil prices rise, food prices tend to rise at the same time. Consumers cut back on discretionary spending, because fuel for commuting and the price of food are necessities. This cutback in spending leads to layoffs in the discretionary sector and recession.
Figure 16. High oil prices are associated with depressed wages. Oil price through 2011 from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy, updated to 2012 using EIA data and CPI-Urban from BLS. Average wages calculated by dividing Private Industry wages from US BEA Table 2.1 by US population, and bringing to 2012 cost level using CPI-Urban.
High oil prices also seem to lead to depressed wages. (Figure 16. Here, I am dividing total wages for all non-government employees or by the total US population, and then taking this average wage, and adjusting if for inflation.) This is the effect we would expect, if the major substitution caused by high oil prices is a loss of human employment. This shift tends to occur because human energy is very expensive, and because wages tend to be a big share of a company’s costs.
Figure 17. Illustration by author of ways oil price rise could squeeze wages. Amounts illustrative, not based on averages.
Figure 17 shows an illustration of the effect that happens. If oil prices rise, the cost of making goods and transporting them to their destination rises. If the sales prices of goods doesn’t rise, a business’ profits will shrink. (Before and after the oil price rise shown in black box). The company will consider low profits unacceptable.
The company has several ways of fixing its lower profit. Wages tend to be one of the company’s largest costs, so these are a likely target. One approach is automation. This may slightly raise electricity costs, but it will lower wage costs, and raise profits. Another approach is outsourcing production to a low-cost country like China. This will lower wage costs and probably other costs, leading to higher profit for the company.
A third approach is what I call “making a smaller batch.” It involves closing unprofitable offices, or flying fewer jets, so that the quantity produced matches the new lower demand for the product, given the higher required sales’ price, now that the oil price is higher. Any of these approaches reduces the amount of wages paid to US employees.
HOW DOES THIS CONCLUDE?
A person could argue that any of the limits could eventually bring the system down. The pressure on wages is particularly a problem, since a further rise in oil prices would seem likely to lead to more job loss, and further pressure on wages of those who keep their jobs. The large amount of debt outstanding is another issue of concern.
Figure 18. Author’s view of how various limits might work together to produce different symptoms.
My personal view is that the most likely scenario is that the various limits will work together to produce secondary effects, and it is the secondary effects that are likely to bring society down. These secondary effects are Financial (wealth disparity, debt defaults, inability to collect enough taxes), Political (not enough taxes, uprising by the lower classes, government collapse) and Disease Susceptibility (inadequate food, medicine, and sanitation due to inadequate wages and government cutbacks).
These effects are similar to ones experienced in the past when economies started reaching resource limits, based on the research of Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov reported in the book Secular Cycles. In the past, societies seemed to go through about 300 year cycles. The first was Growth, lasting over 100 years. The second was Stagflation, lasting perhaps 50 or 60 years. This third was Crisis, with population decline, lasting up to 50 years (but perhaps a much shorter time). The fourth was Depression/ Intercycle.
If we estimate that today’s complete cycle started in 1800 with the use of coal, and the Stagflation period started about 1970 with the decline in US oil production, then we now seem to be nearing the Crisis stage. Of course, each situation is different. This is the first time we are reaching resource limits on a world-wide basis.
There is considerable evidence that we are already reaching the situation where governments are encountering financial distress of the type shown in Figure 18. With wages being depressing in recent years (Figure 16), it is difficult to collect as much taxes as required. At the same time, expenses are elevated to handle the many issues that arise (such as payments to the unemployed, subsidies for alternative energy, and the higher costs of road repairs due to higher asphalt costs). The big gap between revenue and expense makes it hard to fix our current financial predicament, and increases the likelihood of political problems.
REQUIREMENTS FOR A FUEL TO FIX OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT
Is it possible to fix our current situation? To really fix the situation, we would need to reproduce the situation we had in the post-World War II period–when energy was cheap, and growing very rapidly. Economists have observed that historically, the cost of energy was very low. Given the importance of energy, its low price was an important feature, not a bug. It is what allowed society to have plenty of energy for growth, at minimal cost.
In order for a new alternative fuel to truly fix our current predicament, it would need the following characteristics:
- Abundant – Available in huge quantities, to meet society’s ever-growing needs.
- Direct match for current oil or electricity – Needed to avoid the huge cost of building new infrastructure. Electricity needs to be non-intermittent, to avoid the cost of mitigating intermittency. We also need an oil substitute. This oil substitute theoretically might be generated using electricity to combine carbon dioxide and water to create a liquid fuel. Such substitution would require time and investment, however.
- Non-polluting – No carbon dioxide or air and water pollution.
- Inexpensive – Ideally no more than $20 or $30 barrel for oil equivalent; 4 cents/kWh electricity. Figure 15 shows wage growth has historically occurred primarily below when oil was below $30 barrel.
- Big energy gain in the process, since it is additional energy that society really needs – This generally goes with low price.
- Uses resources very sparingly, since these are depleting.
- Available now or very soon
- Self-financing – Ideally through boot-strapping–that is, generating its own cash flow for future investment because of very favorable economics.
It is interesting that when M. King Hubbert originally made his forecast of the decline of fossil fuels, he made his forecast as if an alternative fuel would become available in huge quantity, by the time of the decline. His original idea (in 1956) was that the new fuel would be nuclear. By 1976, his view was that the new fuel needed to be some version of solar energy.
What kind of solar energy might this be? Solar panels PV located on the ground are heavy users of resources, because they have a low capacity factor (percentage of the time they are actually collecting sunlight), and because they need to be fairly sturdy, to withstand wind, rain, and hail. Space solar theoretically would be much better, because it is much more sparing in its use of resources–it would have over a 99% capacity factor, and the PV film could be much thinner. Timing for space solar would be a big issue, however, assuming financial issues can be worked out.
Also, even if space solar or some other fuel should provide the fuel characteristics we need, we still need to address the population issue. As long as world population keeps rising, humans are an increasing strain on earth’s resources.
This post originally appeared on Our Finite World.
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"Is it possible to fix our current situation?"
Words of wisdom from the Navy:
"...we have concentrated most heavily on energy efficiency because the cleanest and most sustainable BTU—the one not used—is truly our best investment. If you jump to alternative fuels without first optimizing your energy use, all you’re accomplishing is to power your overconsumption......"
Rear Admiral Philip Cullom Director
US Navy Task Force Energy
Energy and Environmental Readiness Division (OPNAV N45)
“…there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.”
“In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.”
“Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.”
“Energy resources and our future” – by Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1957
We were warned by M. King Hubert in 1956 and by Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1957
Now our only chance to find "A FUEL TO FIX OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT"
is to first conserve so as to have more time and EXPEDITE!!
Conservation works best on resources for which there is not a global market--for example, fresh water.
If there are several billion more people trying to get up to western standards, resources left in the global market tend to get used. This is especially true for oil. The supply stays close to the same, regardless of price. If the Navy conserves fuel, it is very helpful to the navy's budget, but it likely doesn't reduce the world's use of fuel at all.
But if your focus is on fixing the Navy's budget problem (and not on reducing world oil use), I agree with you.
Gail, I think you have a fine post here, kind of a refresher post.
No, I am not looking to fix the Navy's budget but I do know that there is a good possibility that the Navy will lead the way past oil.
The only way for the US to become energy independent will be through extreme conservation.
I would agree that the navy is quite aware of the issue.
A few years ago, I was one of about a dozen experts invited to participate in a Symposium at the Naval War Academy in Rhode Island. The Symposium related to new risks the navy might be facing in the years ahead, and the experts were from a variety of areas. I was the only "peak oil" representative. It was clear that the individual in charge was quite peak oil aware. I talked to him for a few minutes before the symposium and then later when we were invited to a reception at his home afterward.
There haven't been any other branches in the service that have asked me about peak oil.
The US Navy of course has priorities based on a range of criteria.
More loosely described as a 'geopolitical security of supply issue' rather than a 'physically declining resource base issue'.
Though they are in effect the same thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/business/military-spending-on-biofuels...
Somewhere on the margin, if one customer reduces its demand, the demand curve shifts downwards. To avoid rhetorical arguments think of demand not as a value but as a function of demand versus price. Any economic player who reduces his demand curve, reduces the global demand curve (which is the sum of all the players demand curves). Then when you equate demand to supply (by adjusting the price), the overall rate of use goes down at least a little (although usually by less than your customer reduced his use). So the net result of the navy conserving is that total world consumption goes down a bit, as does global price.
....and as price goes down consumption........
Well, you point out the net Economic result, which is often 'nuff said for many folks. There remains some question about whether there are other net results for those who have made such shifts.. they don't have to suffer the entire burden of the changes that are averaged over the whole system, even while still IN that system. IE, they've just gotten a few feet farther from the Lion, regardless of the average herd distance from the Lion.
Leanan pointed out in the DB the Elizabeth Warren observation that those making frugal choices have in certain ways thinned out their fat content in such a way that they have become MORE vulnerable, not less.. but I have to wonder about the nuances of this relationship.
I would guess that there are actions that amount to trimming and eradicating your fat, like the JIT inventory moves.. and others that are simply redistributing it away from wasteful pursuits.
This is not true if supply is basically inelastic. Economists have one model in their heads--that of elastic supply. Oil supply has a real problem with elasticity. Even the slightest reduction in price brings many buyers to the market, and supply stays pretty much identical. (Coal and natural gas supply are more elastic.)
See my post, Climate Change: The Standard Fixes Don't Work.
"Words of wisdom from the Navy:"
I know at least one application of the mentioned "wisdom from the Navy":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors
I don't understand how this post got accepted here; it is much too elementary for the TOD audience.
The "REQUIREMENTS FOR A FUEL TO FIX OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT", are a bunch of fantasies.
For example: "Direct match for current oil or electricity – Needed to avoid the huge cost of building new infrastructure." Almost every other energy transition involved the huge cost of building new infrastructure. So why is it that the much poorer United States of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century could afford to build such infrastructures (such as the electrical generating and distribution system and the oil and natural gas drilling, refining and distribution systems) while the much richer and much more technological advanced United States of the 21st century can't?
The Problem is elementary: We are running low on stored energy. The initial solution is also elementary:
Don't waste it. Conservation of the oil (stored energy) that is left in the ground will give us more time to move to “renewable or substitute energy sources.”
We have enough thorium and depleted uranium to power human activity for the next 1000 years. If you only think in terms of coal, oil and natural gas it is a problem.
The problem is that our economic system is based around perpetual exponential growth, which requires a constantly increasing energy supply. Any energy source, no matter how expansive, will be used up sooner rather than later. We need to move more towards a steady state economy - but try telling that to economists and politicians!
I'm with you on the energy potential of thorium and uranium. The political aspect here in the West, however, seems to weigh pretty heavily against their use, at least for now. The East, however, China and India in particular, seem more willing to develop these sources, so we'll see how they do.
So far as the steady state economy, I think that absolutely has to, and will, happen, at some point. Whether we'll have enough time before the climate kicks our backsides all over the map remains to be seen.
All of this energy, currently available or theoretically available in the future, is the great enabler. It enables us to marginalise and degrade the other systems that we also take for granted, especially our bio-economic systems. Until we, as a species, develop the wisdom of culture that promotes sustainability in all things, contraction is the only viable long-term option that doesn't result in our own extinction, and the systematic elimination of countless other species. We're just children playing with fire. It's a bit surreal that so many skip that part. Just another inconvenient truth, it seems. More energy won't solve our overshoot predicament.
This, to me, is the brittle knife edge. To reach a sustainable population level the current exponential growth absolutely has to first slow, and then slow at an increasing rate, until we come into alignment with what the Earth's ecosystems can handle. We don't really know what that magic number is, but we know for sure it ain't where we're headed now.
So we can do this two ways, to my thinking. One makes a somewhat naive assumption, the other portends a catastrophe of epic proportions.
The first entails providing sufficient energy to the existing population to permit the development of a modest standard of living across the globe. Sociologically it appears, at this point, that this might precipitate a trend towards smaller families. This fundamentally requires female empowerment.
The second entails contraction, as you mention. This inherently requires death, most probably by starvation, across a wide spectrum of humanity.
The first assumes people will realize the limits to growth and the benefits of fewer children. The second assumes all those starving folk will just die quietly and not upset the rest of us too much in the process.
Either approach seems fraught with peril. Give people enough energy and, as you say, they will probably just waste it (and all our ecosystems) extravagantly. Give them not enough energy and they will probably just waste us (and all our ecosystems) just as extravagantly.
Knife edge.
World population has not been increasing exponentially for decades.
Look at the yearly population increases; the 80s saw the fastest increases (84M/yr), with a smaller number in the 90s (80M/yr), and a lower number yet in the 00s (78M/yr). The 10s are projected to be lower still (76M/yr).
That's still a lot of people, of course, but it's also a reasonably clear sign of a fundamental shift away from limits-based growth in human population. The most developed nations in the world by and large have stable or declining populations, which is a striking shift away from the historical norm.
which is a striking shift away from the historical norm
Population stability is the historical norm.
There! Fixed that for ya! The above thought enters my mind whenever I see the effects of fire on my little island. Some of the fires are accidental while some are set on purpose to clear land for farming or to rid sugar cane fields of pests (ants etc.) and sharp leaves so that the men cutting the cane have an easier time of it. (Yes, a huge percentage of sugar cane is still cut by manual labour in Jamaica).
Alan from the islands
Even discounting the effects of pollution, the 3%+ p/a economic growth which most politicians and economists now regard as normal and required would rapidly, in historical terms, reach the limits of any energy source. In conventional economic thought this sort of growth is regarded as normal and sustainable indefinitely, as economic growth is ascribed purely to factors such as "labor", "capital" and "technology".
I'm sure most people here have heard of the "Solow Residual", when the great economist Robert Solow tried to analyze the factors behind modern economic growth. He could only make labor and capital add up to about 30%, the remaining 70% he just shrugged off as "technology". He couldn't even see that most of this residual was almost certainly due to fossil fuel energy.
Ahh yes. The infamous Robert Solow, author of the following quote:
"If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources."
This is economist fantasy land, and yet it is taken seriously by many.
"In 1930, debt held by the public stood at $15.05 billion or 16.5% of GDP."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._National_Debt
In 2013 the debt is $16 trillion+ which is 100%+ of the GDP. Maybe that has something to do with it.
That's part of the problem with public debt sure. But in the bigger picture, what most TODers are trying to get at, is that as a species we are deep into overshoot. There is no problem facing humanity today -not just Americans- that in some way is not related to overpopulation and our consumption based economy that requires perpetual exponential growth. Even if we somehow pull off a minor miracle and get Thorium/MSR reactors to be cheap, scalable and safe, there is still all the other problems and negative consequences of endless growth: soil erosion due to factory farming, desertification, habitat destruction, mass extinctions, oceanic dead zones, air, water and ground pollution, growing scarcity and expense of mining raw materials, dropping water tables, etc. Human beings are fouling our own nests at an alarming rate and most people -even educated liberals- just don't seem to connect the dots.
HARM, what will the trigger will be for people to see the light and go about a path of at least eliminating population growth?
Best hopes for everyone in connecting the dots.
I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic that "people" (i.e, the great majority) ever *will* see the light. Most likely as Ghung, Darwinian, etc. believe, we will keep on fouling our nest until we can't. So we either run short of cheap energy, making our growth-based economy impossible, or habitat destruction and pollution leads to a Soylent Green type future and the population collapses due to a spiraling death rate. Unfortunately, taken as a whole, we are not smarter than yeast.
My gloomy outlook is almost entirely population based. With human population overshoot estimates running from 2X to 8X, hoping for a gradual population drop-off to 1/2 or 1/8 our current population simply isn't realistic, especially with global population still increasing, and carrying capacity falling at an accellerating rate. Seven+ billion humans have run out of time. One doesn't need to be a mathematician to figure it out; not enough runway left for a soft landing. Better don your parachute, or sit back and enjoy the ride ;-/
I admit to continually trying to see some way outta this plane. Honestly though, I'm kinda thinking we've not only run outta runway, but we're way too low for the chute to open.
Here's to hoping we can get the nose up. Somehow.
"I admit to continually trying to see some way outta this plane. Honestly though, I'm kinda thinking we've not only run outta runway, but we're way too low for the chute to open."
I believe that technically, there are solutions. We could all admit we have a problem, all power down and move towards low-energy lifestyles, environmental protection, and development of renewable energy systems.
Then, I analyse it from an economic, political, and social perspective. Then I see little hope. We are facing a classic overpopulation crash no different than any other animal species experiences who overshoots its underlying carrying capacity, but the majority who are faced with this fact find ways to deny it. They believe technology will save us. We are taking actions that are the opposite of what we should be doing to prepare for the future. Most think the appropriate response to Peak Oil is to try to pump more oil out of the ground.
Here in BC where we still have relatively abundant resources, supposedly the worldwide shortage of lumber is a good thing, according to the media -- it provides us with a reason to cut down our remaining forests and export them. The shortage of oil in Asia is seen as an opportunity -- it provides justification to dig up and export North America's largest single remaining oil reserve. It's all in the name of "jobs", so the propaganda machine tells us. And a very significant portion of the population actually believes this.
just after WWII the national debt was about 113% of GDP, from the link you provided.
That was a World War, what is our excuse for 100%+ of GDP debt this time around? More trickle down tax breaks for the rich so they can get MUCH richer? Two wars we can not afford with an invasion of Iraq based on lies?
I don't mean to be harsh, but there was NO reason for the tax cuts NOR the wars. Those were unnecessary and damaging to the U.S. but we did them anyway. Next time someone says "let's go to war" remind them of $2 trillion in debt and 5000 killed.
"just after WWII the national debt was about 113% of GDP, from the link you provided."
The US was able to grow its way out of debt back then. Now, it can't. Plus, that's just the government debt. Now, there are additional debts in the system that are much higher than after WWII -- private sector debt, derivatives, etc. National debt is only a portion of total debt.
One entity's debt is another entity's asset.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Until "entity 1" can't make the payments.
Warning: Jewish joke ahead. Disclaimer both my ex wife and son are Jewish so I'm allowed >;-)
Background: Samuel owes a huge business debt to his friend Isaac and it will come due at dawn tomorrow.
There is no way that Samuel will be able to pay it on time!
Samuel is pacing back and forth for hours he can't sleep.
Finally his wife Rachel confronts him and Samuel confesses his predicament to his wife.
Rachel thinks about it for a while and tells Samuel that she has a solution to his problem...
Rachel leaves the room. After a short time Rachel returns and tells Samuel he can relax and go to bed now!
Samuel is incredulous and asks his wife what she did?
Rachel says: Simple I called Isaac and told him that there is no way you can pay your debt!
So now it is HIS problem! He can stay up all night worrying about it and now you can to bed!
Mazel tov!
Military spending was drastically cut at the end of WWII. It was really quite amazing how well the economy transitioned from being heavily focused on military production to production of civilian goods.
However it did "settle" at a much higher level of peacetime military spending than the US had ever accepted before. There was frantic work on missle technology and nuclear weapons. In addition the accumulating expense of veteran's benefits and social security were a part of government spending being a much bigger number than ever before the war.
Yet we were still fantastically wealthy in regard to natural resources and wages were relatively low. In addition after 10 years of depression and four years of war there was hugh pent up demand.
All of these factors helped the economy back to health albiet a slight dip in 1946 ( if memory serves).
My explanation:
"After the Second World War, the US had a debt to GDP ratio similar to what it has now. There were a few reasons it didn’t drown in debt back then: firstly, the US economy has been continually growing as it became the manufacturing and agricultural superpower of the world (everywhere else was destroyed after WWII, opening up lots of opportunities for the US). Secondly, the US economy back then was based much more on “production” than consumption. Thirdly, due to cultural and regulatory advantages, the US was the center for new technological innovations for decades (and in many ways, still is). Fourthly, the world economy was much smaller back then and there was enough energy and resources available to power this growth. Fifth, the US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency which allowed for perpetual budgetary deficits to be printed away to balance trade deficits, which foreign countries could hold as an asset, and this allowed for much more consumption in the US than production.
But economic growth isn’t the only way that debt obligations can be reduced. Another way is through outright default of debt repayment, but this is only an option in times of desperation as a last resort because it is an admission that the system has broken down which makes further future debt issuance more expensive, and it has significant legal and political implications. There is, however, another covert and very successful strategy to lower real debt levels, and that comes from stealth inflation, i.e. by printing more money. If the nominal size of the debt burden is constant, then the actual real-world size of that debt can be reduced by increasing the number of dollars in the system so that the purchasing power of previous dollars decreases (as does the size of previous debts denominated in dollars)."
And of course US oil imports started right after WWII
Source:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9584
I thought wages were low now...relatively speaking...maybe just my wages are low..seems compared to cost of everything else wages have not kept up...back then you could by a house for 15 grand.
My fav is the 30-50 billion we spend on nuclear weapons. Had a hard time trying to find hard numbers for weapons. But we have over 5,000 of the bad boys. One class of nuclear weapons...The strategic version (B61 Mod 7) has four yield options, with a maximum of 340 kilotons. 15kt was the size of the bombs used in Japan during WWII. I read if 10 of these huge nuclear bombs were blown over large cities the planet would go into nuclear winter. I don't know if that is a fact but clearly we could get by with a few hundred vrs. 5,000 and save 10’s of billions.
The U.S. spends $80 billion per year on so called "intelligence". Considering how they fail to see many issues until afterward, I am not sure we get value for our tax dollars.
The transition from wood to coal didn't require ust to stop using wood, the transition from coal to oil didn't require us to stop using coal. All previous so called transitions were actually additions to our energy consumption. Energy consumption has been increasing for every energy source we know of. The snapback is going to vicious.
I often ask myself how all our infrastructure was built with so little technology, and yet today we can't afford to upgrade it or maintain it. I suspect it has a lot to do with low hanging fruit, EROEI and the rising costs of complexity.
Not quite true about wood to coal. We started mining coal because wood was running out, so digging coal was a way to conserve wood. Now oil as just more convenient than coal for many uses, so we converted a lot of usage even when coal was still abundant.
Its not a rule of physics, that our energy consumption must go down as we leave fossil fuels. The theoretical amounts of renewables (mostly sunlight) is at least a thousand times current use. Whether we can/will create enough renewable infrastructure in time is a different issue.
The theoretical amount of renewables is vastly beyond current use, and that energy will carry on with or without out harnessing of it. As such, not really a point for discussion.
I found a good post on renewables via comments on OFE/
http://sunweber.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/machines-making-machines-making.html
Solar and wind capturing devices are not alternative energy sources. They are extensions of the fossil fuel supply. There is an illusion of looking at the trees and not the forest in the “Renewable” energy world. Not seeing the systems, machineries, fossil fuel uses and environmental degradation that create the devices to capture the sun, wind and biofuels allows myopia and false claims.
Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is only a part of the the equation. There is a massive infrastructure of mining, processing, manufacturing, fabricating, installation, transportation and the associated environmental assaults. Each of these processes and machines may only add a miniscule amount of energy to the final component of solar or wind devices. There would be no devices with out this infrastructure.
I beg to differ! I think the greater myopia is not seeing that we have a dwindling reserve of fossil fuels that would give us a much better return on energy invested if we used it to phase out all the machineries that are currently the foundation of what we call BAU. We need to engage in a major paradigm shift. We need to build the foundation of a sustainable energy use based economy, society and civilization. Fossil fuels currently have us on a suicidal path. The only possible hope we still have is to build as much solar, wind, hydro, etc... while we still have some fossil fuel in the tank because sooner rather than later we will have to do without.
To argue that building such systems causes some environmental degradation is to truly miss the forest for the trees. To try to stay on the current path causes immensely more damage. Solar and wind are absolutely not an extension of the fossil fuel supply!
Fred, I agree that a wind turbine is an alternative energy source.
It is interesting to note that 3.5% of the electricity in the United States for 2012 was generated by wind turbines.
Best hopes for more wind turbines.
That is a scope of analysis issue.
http://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2012/12/scope-of-analysis.html
Rgds
WP
Pssst... Ever heard of RECYCLING???
The cost to re-manufacture a solar panel from a 40 year old panel is tiny when compared to manufacturing from virgin material. There will be some material loss to erosion, maybe 5-10%, and replacing those losses will require new inputs. But now we're talking about ERoEI ratios in the several hundred range.
Same goes for the support equipment. Nothing really get's consumed in day to day operation(maybe some grease on the tracker every now and then). All we need is the infrastructure for recycling and distributed re-manufacturing to cut down transportation inputs.
Same thing goes for wind power.. Over build concrete support structures (to last 100-500 years @2x the initial material), recycle/re-manufacture the towers and turbines locally..
..on top of that, we have generated an ungodly amount of other polysilicon based semiconductor material, as well as aluminum products, so the materials base for potential feedstock from which to create a good bit more PV in this case would seem to be quite robust from sources OTHER than just new excavation.
Think of just the fleets of retired Aircraft that are parked in deserts, and the mountains of CRT monitors and desktop PCs that have been tossed onto streetcorners in the last decade now.
If it was actually sooo much cheaper to recycle then manufacture new don't ya think we would have been doin it for ages? You assume people and companies want to spend as much as possible? Based on observed evidence it is cheaper to build massive piles of 'junk' and make more junk from new resources then it is to recycle. It costs me about $10 if I want to 'recycle' my PC. Even though it is full of gold and silver.
"Even though it is full of gold and silver."
I expect a LOT of electronics will be getting recycled when gold and silver get repriced in the near future. Of course, only for gold and silver. The rest of the crap will still probably end up as e-junk in some Indian river.
The massive piles of junk are far more expensive for society - but more profitable for those who would have us purchase it.
My 1940 Ford tractor is far more powerful than a modern tractor of the same horsepower because the power was measured at the plow and at the PTO. It is far, far easier and cheaper to maintain. My father has a large Kubota - a hydraulic problem required the replacement of a circuit board that did not have replaceable components. The repair cost to replace the board was more than the entire purchase cost of my 9N tractor, which was refurbished and looked like new when I got it.
There is no physical reason that all of our cars cannot be as long lasting and as easy to maintain as my tractor. I should be able to pull a pin at each motor mount, pull apart a couple electrical connectors, and drop the whole powertrain. Etc. Etc.
We had an opportunity to use our century of extreme material wealth to build a permanent, low overhead society - Edison and Ford both discussed the temporary nature of fossil fuels. We should already have an electrified rail network, etc.. All our energy problems have been inevitable and predicted since the beginning of the oil age. - Instead our resources were essentially thrown away in order to better maintain a few in positions of extreme privilege. Such a waste.
two words... Critical Mass..
You need enough local source material to make it practical.
Most solar panels have yet to wear out.. (no need to recycle)..
My oldest panel is ~35 years old, and still in use(charging boat bats).
Fifty(50) years from now when a large number of panels need replacement, it will be a different story.
I think Gail's summary is just fine, and needs to be repeated occasionally. Being fairly new here this sort of exposition is helpful.
So far as why we're struggling when our fore-bearers didn't, I think it's right in the post and comments. Back in the day we were going from a low energy state to a high energy state with a huge bank of stored energy. Now we're trying to maintain a high energy state with an ever decreasing stored energy bank, with the added complication of more people all trying to tap into that same account.
The money/debt part of the equation is just a reflection of this energy reality.
The debt could be tax breaks and wars we did not have to do.
That's part of the problem with public debt sure. But in the bigger picture, what most TODers are trying to get at, is that as a species we are deep into overshoot. There is no problem facing humanity today -not just Americans- that in some way is not related to overpopulation and our consumption based economy that requires perpetual exponential growth. Even if we somehow pull off a minor miracle and get Thorium/MSR reactors to be cheap, scalable and safe, there is still all the other problems and negative consequences of endless growth: soil erosion due to factory farming, desertification, habitat destruction, mass extinctions, oceanic dead zones, air, water and ground pollution, growing scarcity and expense of mining raw materials, dropping water tables, etc. Human beings are fouling our own nests at an alarming rate and most people -even educated liberals- just don't seem to connect the dots.
I see few problems that can not be solved, if people take the time to realize them and work towards making it better.
The one problem I see is economies shaking like a bowl of jello after the first tremor, those are not robust economies. We are still seeing the aftershocks of the sub prime melt down more than 5 years ago. This is not exactly a resilient nor adaptive system.
I would say that energy has had a rather subservient role in this equation, actually. Labour automation has been the natural course companies have taken - even China moving very fast in this direction. While sensibly this would be a rather good state of affairs, the current economic system has the horrible combination of on the one hand being based on wages, on the other hand being dependent on economic growth - ever since the 70's, debt has been the tool of choice for dealing with this systematic error. The shortcomings of this tool have become rather obvious lately, though sometimes one has to deal with short-term problems in order to have long-term ones.
It seems like the last 60 years, the U.S. has been based on debt paid for by growth. That works as long as you have growth to pay for the debt, if you do not the debt becomes a problem.
It is what Clinton said about spending versus investment. If you borrow to invest, you have a return to pay the debt, if you borrow to spend you do not. Tax breaks and wars are spending without those expenses being paid. Most credible economists will say never cut taxes in times of war.
This is why I keep bringing up the US Military Expenditure chart in every one of Gail's posts like this.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-02-26/us-military-oil-consumption
That's almost 400,000 barrels of oil per day, paid for by tax dollars, burned that produces no export goods, no durable goods, and no energy return for the US. A complete energy sinkhole.
To expound on the concept further: a McMansion vs. a smaller well-insulated house - a person needs shelter to live but beyond the basic necessities the extra space or under-insulation (long term energy demand) simply represents excess energy usage with no purposeful return. Ditto with an SUV where a smaller fuel efficient car will do. The car at 40 mpg is delivering the same basic service of providing automated transportation as the SUV at 15 mpg. The extra fuel consumption is "sinkholed" and providing no addition "utility" (ironically).
So there's the US, it's culture deeply rooted in three of the biggest energy sinkholes known to mankind: Military adventurism, McMansions, and absurdly inefficient vehicles.
Making changes in our current paradigm is not at all that easy.
Closing down the military leads to huge loss of jobs, not necessarily in the military itself. A friend of mine told me she is being laid off after 28 years at Lockheed, as a result of the Sequester budget cuts.
We could move together into perhaps 25% of the housing that we have today, but that would result in a drop in the resale value of homes/apartments and debt defaults. Construction jobs in the housing industry would drop to zero. Banks would find themselves in serious financial difficulty.
The car at 40 mpg likely has a price tag up with that of the SUV (at least from a few years back). Many buyers cannot afford such an expensive car. US auto makers make their money on SUVs, which is why the government has not discouraged their use.
All of the nice ideas tend to contract the economy. Unfortunately, our debt-based system cannot deal with contraction. In fact, any system in which money is a store of value is doomed to failure, if contraction is a long-term phenomenon.
"Making changes in our current paradigm is not at all that easy."
That's mostly because of vested interests. The people that are making money and in a position of power now are not likely to be the ones in a position of power and making money if things were done better - Koch brothers, Exxon-Mobil, Duke Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, etc.
"Closing down the military leads to huge loss of jobs, not necessarily in the military itself. A friend of mine told me she is being laid off after 28 years at Lockheed, as a result of the Sequester budget cuts."
Lockheed-Martin, home of the $1 TRILLION disaster known as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is a major recipient of tax dollars in the military industrial complex. Large government contractors and corporations that feed into them are the primary recipient of all of these military dollars and much of it makes its way as profit to an exceedingly few number of people...Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop-Grumman, UTC, Honeywell, GE. People losing their job in the MIC should be a feature not a bug. I'm not even talking about a reduction in overall government spending...I'm talking about a re-alignment in priorities. We're already spending the money and resources - let's just not do it so stupidly. Put people to work building and installing PV systems and not building bombs to blow up weddings in MENA. Put them to work installing EV charge stations instead of building $35 Million aircraft (that are no better than the $3 million aircraft they're replacing). Put them to work researching and designing new technology for increasing efficiency. Put them to work rebuilding the railways, building efficient city housing, designing and implementing new transit systems.
We're bankrupting the nation like the Cold War USSR and in the end we'll have a few billionaires, hundreds of millions of serfs, broken machines of war, and a smoldering ruin of a planet to show for it. If we're going to go bankrupt...I'd rather be left with solar panels, a rail system, low-energy places to live, food, and a functioning ecosystem.
+10
Prior to joining TOD I would have assumed the same. If there's one thing TOD has beaten into my thick skull it's the energy cost of everything. So on one level I agree with what you are saying and on another level the energy cost keeps slapping me upside the head.
I think in earlier times the energy cost was just better hidden. Automation has energy costs too. They were just lower back in the day, prior to stored energy depletion and the recent rise of stored energy consumption (China, India, et al). And by stored energy consumption I'm certainly talking about the increased population as well.
The wage/consumption paradigm problem you raise fits into this. We will have to achieve steady state at some point. We don't have a paradigm for that that scales well. Yet.
There is a recursive calculus to energy costs, GDP, inflation and other cause/effect factors. One feeds the other, some offset others, this is why we have Econometric analysis.
One thing that has been masked by growth is spending. In the past Congress could spend and the growth just made up the difference. Now much of the supposed growth is debt, where wages have not kept up and manufacturing leaves for other countries.
I think there are some rather severe limitations to Econometric analysis. That's why I lean towards an Austrian approach.
The issue I have is with the blend of component elements in the calculus. Even using a fairly wide spread for each component somehow the final numbers seem to always miss something. If they didn't we would have come up with the ideal money supply, interest and inflation rates, productivity, resource consumption, and employment ratios. It would all be precise and scientific, and the profit margins would be forced to accede to the overall mathematics. Indeed, they would be part of the mathematics. There might be some variation over time, but the basic formula would be understood by now.
Obviously it doesn't work that way. Further, I think an Econometric analysis always comes up short because as it is being calculated the variables are being changed dynamically. Nothing like trying to hit the dart board when it first spins one way, then another, and then moves upwards, downwards, forwards , and backwards, at random moments.
An economy is inherently a mathematically chaotic system. Best to look at the root drivers (basically greed and fear) and assess their relative roles, and whether, logically, you are doing something to give one component an advantage over the other. The assumption here (open to criticism, naturally) is that these two base components, in relative balance, will give you the best potential, but certainly not the optimal, outcome of a human-driven system of resource (read energy) distribution.
I think our current reserve money system does an absolutely lousy job with this. We always wind up favoring greed over fear, and we always wind up getting kicked in the posterior because of it.
It's a not-so-simple-for-most problem of invoking one's inner sociopath and viewing the problem from a purely physical/biological standpoint. Factor in past collective human behavior and how humanity needs to change its collective behavior, in the time-frame required, the trend becomes quite clear. Ignore the details since they're just noise in this excercise; it's a macro-trendy thing. While the efforts of many are truly remarkable, top-down processes are being overwhelmed by individual choices which, in turn, deny the majority much room to choose at all. Those with the power to change things have little motivation to do so; status quo rules. Some realise that the changes required will be as disruptive as continuing down a path no one really chose to begin with.
Going forward, those who've made an effort to promote bottom-up change will be remembered as the only ones who saw the problem as the predicament it was, changing behavior and minds one body at a time, or locally in small groups. Either way, a big reset is unavoidable, IMO. It's already begun.
Sorry for being so doomy in the morning. Clarity often visits me overnight.
Thats quite succinct. I think one major problem is money. Its the main functional metric for measuring and dealing with problems and it is not fit for purpose. There is an explosion in the size of the administrative class which deals with money especially measuring efficiency[profit]. The odd thing is any attempt to increase efficiency requires a increase in analysis of the flows of money and in turn bogs the whole system down. This is the status quo.
In a way its not dissimilar to how the soviet system became moribund and corrupt...which of course is highly ironic. The very thing the increase in the size, application and spread of the market was suppose to avoid has been its main product. And worryingly in its own terms tends to produces some reading of the situation that is positive.
"will be remembered"?
That is a desire of people, but the fact is that few people will be remembered 50 or 100 years after they die.
Worldwide there are now two cultures: city-life, and country-life. When some agricultural event happens and there is a food shortage. The city-folk will go out and try to take whatever food they can from the country-folk. Look at life in subSaharan africa. Life gets hard for everyone.
yep.
What are the first names of your great grand parents?
(We don't really matter)
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I completely agree. We need to be reminded of the basics from time to time, because as the scientific details of energy extraction and usage are debated we (I) are sometimes at risk of believing that science will carry us into a new sunny upland. I just see more and more worried people around the world scrabbling for scarcer resources. Meanwhile container ships full of manufactured junk arrive in the west from China on a daily basis to fill up our homes with meretricious rubbish that we con ourselves through advertising into believing is a necessity.
In the past homes were built economically and furnished very simply with things that lasted through generations. Even the magnificent furnishingds created for the aristocracies of Europe during the past four centuries were hardly wasteful because for the most part they still exist and fulfil some sort of function. Those precious woods and metals are still working. But now the seven billion of us cut, dig, process, use, junk and move on as if everything was infinite, and we tend not to value anything we gain for very long anyway.
This consumptive waste could be tolerated when energy was cheap, but we haven't yet woken up to the fact that energy is getting expensive. A colleage was complaining only the other day that the price of fuel was too high and the government should cut tax on it, so we can use more of the infinitely available liquid at a lower price. When I tried to talk about the energy situation and the likely future I was responded to as if I was a fool. Perhaps I am, I do wonder sometimes...
You're not being a fool at all, though I certainly understand where you are coming from. It's just not socially acceptable, yet, to discuss these sorts of things. Though I was encouraged by two recent conversations I had with neighbors. We actually talked about it it a bit. Which is much better than the utter silence of previous discussions. I didn't push the issue too much, and made sure to request/supply another round of drinks, but, dammit, it was a start.
To consume - a Merriam-webster definition:
1 : to do away with completely : destroy 2 a : to spend wastefully : squander b : use up 3 a : to eat or drink especially in great quantity ... 5 : to utilize as a customer
intransitive verb
1 : to waste or burn away : perish 2 : to utilize economic goods
Well, modern capitalist society's goal is to sell to consumers, and it looks like we have managed to (by definition) consume most of the resources of the earth, so I guess you could say we won!
I could also say every other species and future generation - lost.
Bryan
Yes, it's been said before but worth saying again that we were probably lost the moment we came to think of all things as disposable and that the purpose of the economy was to create and destroy things at as fast a pace as possible.
"So why is it that the much poorer United States of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century could afford to build such infrastructures while the much richer and much more technological advanced United States of the 21st century can't?"
Our energy supplies were growing quickly back then. Now they aren't, and arguably, in the West, they have plateaued. Plus, we have now taken over about 1/4 of the planet's production, there is nowhere left to expand now (global net primary production has not increased despite all of our burning of fossil fuels). Centuries ago we were only one of many species.
One thing I like to point out is that when the US went to the Moon in the 1960's, and everyone was celebrating our upcoming freedom from our earthly constraints, ironically, our consumption of fossil fuels (in other words, our reliance on ecological productivity) was growing at one of the highest rates in history. Those rockets were powered by burning algae that died hundreds of millions of years ago. Far from escaping our earthly constraints, we were actually increasing our dependence on them.
It takes oil and natural gas and coal to more cars, long-hauls truck, construction equipments, airplanes, and other equipment that needs to be replaced when we change fuels. When it comes to new renewables, they need a lot of inputs as well. If all transportation equipment has to go to plug-in electric, this creates a huge demand for the supplies that go into these new vehicles. Also, there may be bottlenecks, because we do not have ready substitutes for oil powered long-haul trucks and airplanes.
There is also an issue of cost. Believe it or not, our country is getting poorer and poorer. We no longer have low cost (and high EROEI) oil to subsidize the system. This is part of the reason why we are having such a hard time balancing the budget. Subsidizing $40,000 plug-in electric cars for the whole population is probably not going to happen.
"It takes oil and natural gas and coal to [build] more cars...that needs to be replaced when we change fuels."
Gail, at a glance it's hard to disagree with but here's my problem with that...(according to Reuters) the annual sales of cars/trucks/suvs in the US is 15 million. That's 15 million per year that are still being bought and sold - right now. If those were 15 million PHEVs or BEVs that would be 15 million gas vehicles displaced every year.
If those 15 million vehicles were being driven 12,000 mi/yr @ 20 mpg, that would be a reduction of 214 million barrels per year (~0.6 mb/d each year). So after 10 years there would be 150 million vehicles replaced and a reduction of 6 mb/d.
"There is also an issue of cost. Believe it or not, our country is getting poorer and poorer. We no longer have low cost (and high EROEI) oil to subsidize the system. This is part of the reason why we are having such a hard time balancing the budget. Subsidizing $40,000 plug-in electric cars for the whole population is probably not going to happen."
Yes, our country is getting poorer - but it's still rich enough to blow about $1 Trillion a year on the military and even more in tax cuts and loopholes. We still produce a lot of oil domestically, get a lot of oil imported relatively cheaply ($100/bbl is still cheap), and have enough cheap coal to turn the Earth into a smoking ruin. Subsidizing the cars is really a pathetic way to go at this point - there are plenty of early adopters who are willing to pay a premium to drive what is currently unique. For ONE-HALF of ONE year's military budget ($500 Billion) the US could install 50,000,000 EV chargers (yes 50 Million) at a cost of $10,000 each in the rest-areas of the nations interstate highway system. As Tesla believes they can cover the majority of the country with 100 sites and a handful of chargers at each site, this would more than cover the entire automobile transition. Note also that 1/2 of the military budget could also subsidize to the tune of $10,000 per vehicle up to 50 Million vehicles per year. If we diverted the mere $3 Billion/year going towards oil subsidies it would purchase 300,000 EV charge stations per year. If there are approximately 50 rest ares in each state, that would make 2,400 rest areas, so each could receive 125 EV charge stations for just ONE YEAR of oil subsidies.
EV's are likely to get smaller in size as time goes on and the batteries may or may not get much cheaper, but with a smaller more aerodynamic vehicle the size requirement will diminish. I expect to see more vehicles like the Twizy pop up, but expect also to see more practical long-range high-speed ones like the (currently prototype) Honda EVSTER (terrible name) which gets about 150 Wh/mi. Which would only need a 22.5 kWhr battery (about the size of the Nissan Leaf) to go 150 miles. Downsized and aerodynamic...reduced materials, smaller battery required, smaller price.
So what else could 1/2 of the military budget buy? At $3/watt it could buy 166,666,666,666 Watts of installed PV (that's 167 GIGAwatts per year) which would provide something on the order of 243,820 GigaWatt-hours in a year (244 TerraWatt-hours). According to the eia the US Electricity consumption totaled nearly 3,856 billion Kilowatthours (kWh) in 2011. This is 3,856 TerraWatt-hours. So it would take 3,856/244 = 15.8 years to generate all electricity by PV by diverting 1/2 of the military budget every year to buying PV. One could probably displace all daytime peak coal with just 7 years of 1/2 of the military budget. If we'd started at the time of the Iraq war in 2003 we would have been done by 2010.
So let's spend $3 billion that we're giving in oil companies in subsidies and make a nationwide Interstate Electrification of Rest Areas Act, and let's cut our military back dramatically and give $7,000 cash money to anyone who wants to put in a PV system (and signs a non-gouging clause for =<$3/watt), and $3,000 to anyone buying a small EV. We could be half off coal, and down more than a few mb/day in 10 years.
In line 9 of your comment you mention "a reduction of 6 mb/d."
This is the same number that I come up with when I suggest EXTREME conservation.
Conservation of the oil that is left in the ground will give us more time to move to “renewable or substitute energy sources.”
Car pooling #1:
Can reduce cars on the road by greater than 50% = less fuel consumption and less CO2 emissions
Savings at 50% = 6,000,000 barrels per day! (now that’s a good start)
Substrate, thank you for the thought provoking ideas.
In the end we would probably be more secure than spending so much on the military.
I would argue that we do have one ready substitute for long-haul trucks - railroads. Granted, it would take some capital to convert them all to electricity and restore trackage where it has been removed, but it doesn't require such things as large scale exotic battery technology to do it. Electrified freight railroads existed and worked quite well in the Western US (read lots of mountains) in the mid 1900s. The conversion of a large volume of freight from long-haul trucks to railroads, even with the railroads continuing to use fossil fuels, would result in significant fuel conservation, both in the direct transport of goods and in maintenance of the infrastructure.
Pickens and others are getting big rigs on LNG, it is cleaner, domestic and saves money.
.. and will continue to thrash our expensive-to-maintain bridges and highways, while depending on a historically flighty energy source.
Trucking needs to become the exception.
I would like to think moore's law for computers has the same effect for solar, wind, building efficiency and other renewables. As energy becomes more expensive, energy saving tech will grow to scale.
The Wolf You Feed
As part of the New Deal, the Rural Electrification Administration and Rural Electrification Acts were created to promote and expand electric (and telephone infrastructure). Then there's the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways."
In recent times the "Wolf" that the United States has been "feeding" are cheap electricity rates, SUVs, McMansions, poorly constructed roads to everywhere, Tax Cuts, and a globally ever-present military on constant war footing. That leaves nothing for 21st century infrastructure building.
How can we afford ipads if wages revert back to 1970's levels, they didn't even have the internet back then.
Tom Murphy expains some realities of space based solar here.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
It's probably on TOD as well.
I think the biggest cause of declining soil fertility is that we flush all the nutrients out to sea, instead of returning them to land, in particular the same land that was used to grow the food. The English, Chinese and Japanese all used 'night soil' to grow their food. Good luck to anyone today who wants to grow food using human manure as a fertiliser.
I like the way you are tying a lot of the various issues together.
The fact that we plow the land is a big reason for the loss of soil fertility. Then the soil and the fertilizer we put on the soil both wash out to see.
In order to make agriculture truly sustainable, it needs to involve mostly perennial plant, plus creatures from the animal kingdom (bees, birds, squirrels, etc.) involved in pollination and fertilization. This type of agriculture would need to be 100% picked by hand, and the food wouldn't necessarily be very conveniently located. It would need to be a much different system.
I agree, we actually should sto ploughing, and sending sewerage to sea or landfill, as well as recycling all the ash and other deposits from using biomass as an energy source.
These types of solutions don't lend themselves very well to large populations, or specifically concetrated populations like cities or urban areas.
The yeilds from perrenials are sgnificantly down on the yields from annuals. It has to do with the way plants grow. In the grasses family grains like wheat and barley are true annuals and have a very high yeild of seeds, on the other side of the spectrum perennial ryegrasses have a very low yeild of seeds even though they produce it every year. The more 'annual' a ryegrass the larger the seed, the more perennial it is, the smaller and finer the seed is.
A sustainable agriculture withe perennial plants, and creatures from the animal kingdom sounds more like a hunter gatherer system then agriculture. The animal kingdom obviously requires a lot of plants and animals that have no direct benefit to humans. I'd like to live in such a world, but I don't think it is compatible with human 'nature.' Most likely we will just destroy any non beneficial species, destroy all the topsoil, harvest everything that can be given an economic value, untill we cant, just like yeast.
I don't think human nature gets very well represented by just looking at those who have been the Colonizers and the Conquistadors, tho' they have clearly written the definitions, being the victors.. and have thus written them in boldface across the whole planet. We as a race have been on a terrible roll, building up speed with these toys and these power sources.. but I don't believe that this proves we have a bad basic nature, and I have to think that you have met people who have a nature you would make for the race you'd want to be part of.
The victors and their ideologies, Neoliberal Capitalists and NeoEconomic Colonialists look to be teetering at the cliff-edge of their own limited self-definitions.. so it seems there is some quiet space out of their sight to recultivate other ways of living and other philosophies.. one of which might include jettisoning the poisonous old idea that we are inherently evil, a precept which repeatedly has let the notion itself fester into a string of self-fulfilling prophecies.
I think you will find that HT Odum's maximum power principal explains why natural systems tend toward the greatest possible exploitation of all available energy sources. Simple reason being that those who consume more energy have more energy, and since energy is what makes the world go round, they win. Calling this facet of nature bad and evil misses the point of what it means to be a human, that is just another species of animal. Any other species given the chance will behave the same way, even 'non technological yeast.'
Gail, I believe the annual/perennial dichotomy is too simplistic an analysis to sum up the corner we've painted ourselves into with our agricultural technology. No doubt perennial crops offer some real advantages in energy and other areas, but the problem is bigger than that.
Ultimately it comes down to that we have such a large population to support, that we need to cultivate or harvest from the land on an almost continuous basis. Until very recently humans along with other species took only a portion of the land's output, and left large portions of the land fallow or for other species. Native Americans in both hemispheres used an area of land for some number of years and then moved to a new area and left the previous plot to rejuvenate, sometimes for decades. This is possible when your populations needs are a small percentage of the available land output. The migration to the Western US several centuries ago was in no small part driven by fertility depletion along the east coast.
As our population has grown, we have substituted agricultural technology (and energy) for the natural cycles which could restore fertility to the land. It seems normal today to grow two or three crops year after year on the same land, with little or no thought as to what this might be doing to the long term fertility of that soil. Or what we would do if the technological inputs we require to make this agricultural system work were not available.
Perhaps just yet another facet of modern life which is dependent upon available cheap energy and resources. But one with rather dire consequences if the dependencies cannot be met.
[A point in the annual/perennial yield comment: The Land Institute has been working on developing perennial grains and oilseed which have comparable yields to their annual counterparts. While they have been at it a relatively short time, they are already seeing progress. And project that within 75 years or so there will be perennial substitutes for many of the annual crops we now grow. So it nay be that the face of agriculture could be changed for the better. It is technically doable, the real question is will it be done in time.]
This may be a little off topic for this post, but not for this thread. I came across this talk by Allan Savory claiming that we can reverse desertification by instituting rotating grazing. Some of his claims sound a little unbelievable, but it may have merit. Interested to hear what others think of it.
The major reason which gives advantage to perennial agriculture is that trees can tolerate drought and flood significantly better than annual crops.
In the pre-agriculture era, some of those nutrients were returned to the land via fish. Seabirds eat fish, and poop over land. Bears pull Salmon out of streams and poop in the woods, etc. So there is some natural cycling of soluble nutrients back to the land. But, we have overwhelmed the rate many times over. Also if we kill off the fish -or eliminate the birds/bears to avoid competition for the fish, we break the cycle.
Well, assuming that there isn't any fuel alternative, which I think is a rather good assumption to make, the question then becomes: can we do without fuel? While the personal transportation angle will be cause for some concern, it is rather trivial (most people know how to use a bicycle, after all) compared to how commodities are transported. Put simply, there are four modes of transportation today: Plane, ship, train and truck. To do an analysis on those:
Plane: While some cargo is transported by air, the primary function is the long-way transportation of people in a short period of time. While the lack of this option has some serious consequences in the latter sense, not so much in the former. I'd say most on here would agree that the age of the air is past, airplanes are impractical without fuel. While in a better world airships could pick up some slack, they need to be lighter than air, and the two options in that area are unfeasible: hydrogen has a nasty tendency to burn, and helium is too scarce. Let's not even get started on vacuum...
Ship: Here's where it gets dicey. Not only is it the only way to transport commodities across water without planes, ships are also the blood vein of the current system as it's the far and above cheapest way to do it. While canal transportation should still be OK, and in fact very good through cheap systems like electric lines or towing the boats, for transoceanic travel it's much more difficult. Better materials and other technological goodies should make sailing ships much better than in the past, but as anyone even slightly acquainted with boats know, sail power is hopelessly slow compared to the combustion engine. There's also the obvious disadvantage that these ships are not even on the drawing table.
Train: Many rail lines are already electrified, so while already today many commodities travel by train, it should be able to pick up a lot of the slack left by the others. How much it costs to expand the train net will factor into how much it can be expanded, and for some countries which have the shame of not having looked after their train infrastructure very well (looking at you, US...) the cost of upgrading it will also be a factor.
Trucks: While long-distance cargoes by truck will probably be dead, they could be critical for transporting commodities "the last kilometer" as trains and ships will obviously not be able to transport things to exactly where they're needed. Battery-driven trucks are prohibitively expensive, sharing many of the same flaws as their cousin the electric car, and are thus not much of an option. Trolley trucks, though, are a cheap option that will be fast to implement, and are even already used, mostly in the former East Block countries.
All in all I have to wonder if the transportation problem is really super-critical, sure there would be mass death if oil vanished overnight, but even in a small time frame it should possible to institute some sort of alternative, maybe not as good, but an alternative nevertheless. In some other sectors, agriculture and mining being the most obvious ones, the question of no fuel is a bit more worrying, though...
In McLouth, Kansas, every year there's a threshing bee, an event which features old-fashioned steam engines running on agricultural waste, corn stalks and the like. Not only can they harvest crops, they can be used for anything an internal combustion engine can be used for - including pumping water for fighting fires, generating electricity, running machinery, and so forth. See: http://www.mclouththreshingbee.com/
Sometimes you don't need an engine at all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_PDiEjW_E
I agree planes might be mostly dead.
And rail is highly efficient.
I think trucks could do better than you think. See if we designed trucks with a 30 mph top speed and appropriately sized engines to operate 30 mph and below you could do your hauling on about one third the energy we do now. It just would take longer.
Same could be said for cars. Most cars currently get their top mpg at 45-50 mph. Going 40 mph and slower is actually worse. The reason is IC engines get really inefficient at lower loadings. If cars were designed with engines giving only 40 mph top speeds and operate more slowly, they too could more triple the energy efficiency. Things just happen slower.
That also would make electrics more competitive. If operated at slower speeds, you get quite reasonable ranges. And they don't loose much efficiency when operated at low percentages of the motor's output. A Chevy Volt engineer once gave the example of living in New Orleans and leaving due to a hurricane. He showed how with no gas, only a full charge and loaded with the family, you could get from New Orleans to Mobile with range to spare. The Volt is rated for 40 mile range on the batteries. The secret to extending it was you would need to drive at 15 mph.
So we could keep much of our modern conveniences at far lower energy cost if we accepted such slow downs. It would behoove the developing world to look at this. They could have cars, transport, cargo delivery and everything else without developing anywhere near the developed world's energy appetite if they just legislated low speeds for it all. You could live a very modern life only a bit slower and somewhat more local. Unfortunately I don't see that a happening. You can imagine how it would go over if the US gov't said starting a decade from now no vehicle could be designed with the capability to exceed on level ground 30 mph or even 40 mph.
If you accept slow-downs, it will take many more vehicles and many more drivers to get a given amount of goods from Point A to Point B. This means that transportation costs in total will have to be much higher.The cost of all of the additional trucks (and the energy needed to build them) needs to be a part of the analysis as well. The truck probably will last a very long time, but once oil is not available for them any more, they will not be of much use.
Your statement is only correct if the trucks/trains/ships are 100% used, this is in reality not the case. Slowing down in combination with higher load factor can give the desired result.
However, my basic issue with your arguement is that you only think about the symptom not the cause: We should as first step analyse whether the transport is really necessary, how much of the stuff on our roads is there because transport was in contrast to local production too affaordable.
Our greed for speed is so overwhelming that slowing down is unthinkable. That says a lot about our sick culture. But given the current culture we can't sell going slower, except for transport of bulk cargo.
BTW, the turboprop planes, which are slower than modern jets, got about twice the fuel economy. But you can only can so much efficiency in heavier than air flight -you gotta expend energy generating lift, and the longer you are airborne the more lift energy you must spend. I don't see air travel as vanishing, but becoming more expensive and less common than today. We can still create liquid aviation fuel, either from energy plus water plus CO2, -or via biofuels. But, it won't come cheap or in huge quantities.
enemy of state, do you see a move back to turboprops?
Canals were built in a day when our population was much lower than today, and less material was transported long-distance. While they can perhaps be revived, I doubt that canals could take over a very big share of today's transport.
One of the problems with sailing ships, besides being slow, was that scheduling was very difficult. If a person knew for certain that a trip would take 60 days, it would be possible to plan for such a trip. But if a trip sometimes takes 45 days and sometimes takes 120 days, it becomes much harder to plan. Sailboats also have been known to get shipwrecked.
I think the average lifetime of a sailing vessel was only a few years, due to wrecks. I suspect modern redesigned sail ships could be made much safer. It is also possible to augment sail power with solar and/or wave power. And of course you can add a limited amount of fuel for maneuvering in port, and when becalmed. I think this would increase the predictability of trip times, although we clearly have to change the paradigm to accommodate variable travel times. Just as with a renewables powered grid, we will have to incorporate some elements of demand response.
But a sailing ship built today would be a different animal than the ones of 150 years ago. Primarily, they would certainly have backup power, or be essentially hybrids.. and the level of communications and data control both for climatology and for tracking and inventory planning could make the logistical requirements much more manageable.
We would very likely still have to make a number of adjustments to our expectations of delivery speeds and consistency, as a trade-off with how much fuel we'd be willing to burn to bring a shipment in faster, but that doesn't seem to be something that a market couldn't 'decide' on the fingers of one invisible hand...
I don't dispute your main point, that we are in an almighty pinch.. but I think I'm a little less worried about the viability of aspects that you tend to describe as if they were deal-killers. Our electronic control, manipulation and sensing tools, as well as newer materials can make the process of sailing freight much less flighty than it was in its storied days.. I think that technologies like these computerized kite-assists could be very rapidly deployed to many existing ships and modified to do more of the traction of shipping once the need became dire or at least commercially acknowledged. It and rail electrification, while not altogether 'easy', are at least known and replicable on a broad scale, and they open the door for bringing themselves and other needed products overseas and overland as a primary push to enable a transition.
Dunno what planet you live on, but the canal systems of the USA, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Belgium,
Holland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Serbia, Egypt, Panama, and Greece carry enormous volumes of freight.
Last year's drought seriously impacted waterborne freight operations in the central US.
Historically, the Erie Canal, linking the Hudson with Lake Erie, was itself responsible for cutting freight costs between
the midwest and the eastern seaboard by 99%.
Now, to sailing ships. I know something about such things, since I circumnavigated the earth as master of a sailing vessel.
Pegasus and I visited nearly 100 countries, during our 15 year circumnavigation, transiting all 5 oceans, 9 seas, numerous Gulfs,
Bays, and Estuaries.
The high point of long distance ocean freight under sail was not the clipper ships, it was the 120 meter LOA four masted Barque.
Such ships carried freight in direct competition with steam and motor ships into the 60's, with the last ones owned by
Finnish Companies. For any given length, the Barque devoted more internal volume to cargo, than any powered ship.
Routeing such ships was a combination of art and science. With today's 2 week forecasts, routeing is much easier and more certain
than during the heyday of freight under sail.
Modern materials, particularly, sailcloth and line, greatly improve the reliability, and reduce the maintenance requirements
of such ships. The steel hulled barques lasted in many cases more than 60 years, eventually outliving crews with sufficient
experience to man them. To this day, dozens of countries train their naval and merchant sailors under sail. The USCG Eagle, is
but one such ship.
Regardless, the demise of liquid fuels during the coming century, will make a mockery of foot dragging. Like it or not,
sail will be the only alternative available. The only question is when the transition occurs.
INDY
I couldn't agree more!
Either I phrased my support for it very poorly, or you intended to reply to Gail.. but I think we're on very much the same planet and page.
I'm also intrigued by canals, and concerned about the water/climate issues that will either drive them, or drive them nuts.
"Sailboats also have been known to get shipwrecked."
All boats have been knows to get shipwrecked. Coal, oil, wind, nuclear; they all can and do sink.
Why would GDP be used as a measure of "prosperity"?
Global prosperity index is in it's sixth year, and includes such variables as: economy, governance, health, personal freedom, entrepreneurship & opportunity, education, safety and security, and social capital.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/30/global-prosperity-in...
Norway and Denmark are at the top of the list, and are fairly efficient in their use of energy resources and oil on a per capita basis.
Saudi Arabia has a lot of natural resources, and very high per capita GDP. But is it a "prosperous" place to live for an unmarried woman, or for expatriate Indians (who make up some 7% of population).
Yes, in heavily industrialized nations we can power machines with energy (and this contributes to rising GDP). But finance, services, and information technology seem to be pretty big drivers of economies these days. Should we continue to assume that it's smokestacks that anchor advanced economies, or are we seeing other shifts in global development starting to emerge (where development of natural resources are playing less of a dominant role).
Maybe in the future the most prosperous countries will be those with lots of diversification and efficient use of scarce and non-renewable resources (and stable governments that operate well and efficiently to provide efficient services, education, national security, basic infrastructure needs, and equalize opportunities to the broadest segment of the population).
Norway uses more energy per capita than the United States. This is partly because it has a big oil and gas industry, which uses a lot of oil and gas, itself. The other countries are less industrialized.
When I look at Gross National Income per capita, from the World Bank, it gives a fairly similar result as the Global Prosperity Index. According to the Global Prosperity Index, the top countries are
GPI-Country-GNI per capita
1 Norway 88,890
2 Denmark 60,120
3 Sweden 53,150
4 Australia 49,130
All of these countries are very rich by world standards--richer than the United States. This is also true on a GDP per capita based. The corresponding GNI per capita for the US is $48,620. The US GDP per capita is $48,112.
If you go to a poor country like India, GNI per capita is $1,410. GDP per capita is $1,489. With this little income, it is very hard to have good schools, health care and governance. There are some exceptions (Qatar rates high in GPI/GPD per capita, but not on the GPI.) But it is hard to have very low GDP or GDP per capita, and have a good score on GNI.
By the way, Norway uses more energy per capita than the United States. I am fairly sure this is mostly because of its oil and gas industry. Private citizens don't use much oil for driving.
Gail,
first thanks for a great post!
Norway is a considerable energy exporter, primarily oil and natural gas. In addition Norway has a huge hydroelectric power capability and roughly 70% of all Norwegian energy consumption is from hydro electricity. Norway has one of the world's highest specific electricity consumption.
Despite being a big exporter of oil, Norway has one of the highest priced gasoline/diesel in the world, this is due to taxation.
The interesting thing about energy taxation is that it appears to encourage more efficient use of energy. But then again more efficient use of energy could encourage increased energy consumption, ref Jevon's paradox.
Apparently there is a delicate balance between taxation of energy consumption and its overall effects on the economy.
Have you any thoughts about how an increased taxation (like Norway) of energy consumption in US would turn out?
US is above 80% self sufficient for its present total energy consumption.
- Rune
A good deal depends on whether the new tax is a tax increase, or a reallocation of existing taxes in such a way that more is tax on gasoline. Right now, the economy is being held together by taxes that are way too low, relative to the amount of benefits paid. Any tax increase that tries to correct this problem will send the economy further into a tailspin. So adding a big tax on gasoline without reducing other taxes would likely lead to considerable job loss and more recession. (The US has much lower average wages than Norway, and many people who are only making minimum wage, or a little above it, unlike Norway's more even wage distribution.)
Assuming the tax is a reallocation of taxes toward gasoline and away from other types of taxes, then it would tend to encourage buying more efficient cars. US oil consumption would tend to fall further. SInce world oil supply is constrained, I don't see that as "leaving more oil in the ground." Instead, China and India would get more, helping their economic position. The US would look closer to energy-selef-sufficiency, but the economy would still be buoyed up by artificially low interest rates and lots of deficit spending. If the latter disappear, the system would still implode, energy self-sufficient or not, because there are too many other dependencies on international trade, even within the oil, gas and coal industries.
"Right now, the economy is being held together by taxes that are way too low..."
This could be why the national debt has gone from less than $1 trillion to more than $16 trillion in about 30 years. Corporations used to pay 40% of the national budget, now it is 7%.
"Corporations used to pay 40% of the national budget, now it is 7%."
Corporations used to collect 40% of the taxes, not pay it. The taxes came from either lower wages to workers, lower dividends to shareholder/owners, higher prices, or any combination of the above.
Whether corporate taxes are an efficient way to collect revenue or not is another topic open for discussion. And whether CEO's have skimmed off to large a share of the profits is certainly open to discussion, (though I think that one is pretty well settled.)
When you buy something, the company becomes the tax collector of sales tax. That has worked, it funds many city fire, police and teacher services along with county roads, bridges and sheriffs.
Saying we all pay for corporate taxes is misleading. If I am a corporation and I have to pay income taxes with no loopholes, so does the other corporation. We both have to compete for efficiency, so we can provide the lowest prices with the best services and products.
One company can just pass the taxes down to the customer, but his competitor is finding a more efficient way to provide better goods and services at lower prices. Who to you think will win? Do you still think all corporate taxes are just passed down to the customer, or is this a way of making businesses more efficient?
40% of US fossil energy use heats/cools buildings.
Over 100,000 buildings world wide are heated/cooled using renewable sources totally. Nearly half of these either use net
zero energy, or generate surplus energy. Advances in equipment and technologies now permit construction of
such buildings, including apt buildings in the Bronx for the same or less than conventional buildings.
50% of US fossil energy use is for transportation.
Only 2% of US fossil energy use powers the rail system.
If the US had a rail system like that of China/Japan/France no location east of the Mississippi would be more than 20 miles
from a train station, and west of the Mississippi, more than 50 miles from a train station.
With such a rail network, folks could walk/bicycle to the train ala France in the east US, and take electric trams/busses to the
train in the west.
The combination of these two proven technologies could cut US petroleum consumption by > 80%.
So, when do we stop hand wringing?
If that's not enough insult to your injury, consider that today, Sun Electric of Miami will sell you a container of 16% efficient
mono-crystalline solar panels for $0.32/watt, and with BOP for a system with 3 hrs storage at $1.70, total system installed cost is
< $2/watt and LEC for the power is < $0.08/kwh.
Now, when do we begin?
INDY
When someone is rich enough to afford all of this stuff. Governments cannot afford current programs and can't raise taxes by much. Individuals are not building all that many new buildings--with slow or negative economic growth, there is little need for new buildings.
So glad to see population growth get mentioned. Population growth is a subject that normally unites everyone. The religious, non-religious, Republicans, Democrats, Peak Oilers and Cornucopians all see it as something that doesn't have to be dealt with, even though a tiny minority may see it as a problem. Either in the world, or the United States. The United States government expects another 100 million people in the country by 2060. Another 100 million people should make things a lot worse at that time. But we are headed on that course full steam ahead. And with US birth rates apparently at essentially replacement levels or below, since 1976, that population growth will come entirely from immigrants and their offspring. But at this point, "immigration reform" is not a code word for less immigration, it is a code word for another amnesty for illegal immigrants. So instead of limiting legal immigrants, we are continuing that at the highest amounts ever, and doing our best to change illegals to legals, but keeping everything in place such that a new group of illegals can take the jobs we prefer illegals to do.
Immigrants do not exist ex nihilio, they're emigrating from some other country. Given that the United States is a net exporter of food, it should be a fairly uncontroversial process when a global perspective to overpopulation is applied.
As a Mexican immigrant said: "If you have a car and a two bedroom apartment in Mexico, you are doing well. In America, everyone has that." Not many people in India driving cars. Not many Indian immigrants to America not driving cars. When people come from the poorer countries to the United States they begin using resources at much higher rates. On a world basis, from climate change and resource depletion, that is bad. It is not just a transfer of people. It's only good if you say those people will now live a happier life than in their home country and that justifies the negatives. And if that is the justification - to make people in poor countries happier - why not take hundreds of millions in each decade to make so many more people happier? I also saw a claim that data shows immigrant mothers have higher birth rates than the women of their home country.
But for America it is even worse. Our balance of payments is directly impacted by more money going out for oil. Our coal and natural gas is depleted faster and/or becomes more expensive and/or has less available for export, as more power plants burn it at increasing rates.
Population growth in the US drives up land prices as it becomes scarce. More money buys you less and less over time in terms of housing. The idea of having a yard (where you could grow food) starts to disappear as new development has to go to multi-unit and towards the sky.
US population growth is costly to existing residents. People justify more population growth in the United States based on what they saw out the airplane window over Kansas. Are we building any new cities in Kansas for immigrants? No. That would be hugely expensive - for existing residents. The people moving to them couldn't pay for a new city and all it's infrastructure, so we would have to use federal taxes for a city the people being taxed weren't gonna live in. So we go with the alternative, crowding more and more people into existing areas, with the marginal cost of new people rising. Cities, with their high density, should be more expensive for rent or mortgage, but theoretically cheaper for taxes. But they don't have less taxes. They don't have lower sales taxes, if anything the city sales tax will be higher than the suburbs. They don't have lower property tax rates despite the fact that they get so much more per square foot. New York even got to the point of instituting a city income tax, on top of the state income tax. Eventually, there will be many more city income taxes, because there will be many more New Yorks. Population growth is expensive. People coming in don't just cut down trees and build a cabin anymore.
And then there is jobs. We are a jobs exporting nation. Which means we don't need more workers. More workers makes it harder for those existing residents. Some will struggle to get jobs their entire lives, others have to take downgrades as they get older, others will just drop out of the labor force sooner. All due to a never ending flow of workers coming into the country.
The source countries for U.S. immigration are themselves below replacement. http://www.theglobalmail.org/mobile/feature/the-global-economy-is-a-gian...
I keep bringing the topic up, but as you say, it is not a popular one.
If we are very close to collapse for financial reasons, we may not have enough time for it to make any difference at all. If there is a longer period of time, it could make more difference than, say, energy efficiency improvements.
I find population growth depressing with regard to efficiency improvements. "New houses are now 30% more energy efficient" doesn't sound anywhere near as good when you realize that they aren't replacing old houses, but being built for a growing population. Even if it is "houses are being retrofitted to be 30% more efficient" still loses luster if you are looking at a continual increase in houses - with no end in sight. No plan for an end. Not even talk of an end. As someone suggested in another thread, population growth is probably looked at as a way to sustain the financial system built on partial reserve loans.
I agree that the pop. numbers are a critical factor in this issue, but I don't know that it's one that can be directly 'managed'.. so I find all the talk over it to be fairly empty.
I really believe population is a function of both the overall energy supply.. and we know where THAT'S heading.. combined with the broadest cultural factors driving all our countries.
It seems completely useful to take on Women's political empowerment and education, to take on all the vestiges of colonialism that have my USA and other Owner-class nations continue to distort the cultural growth of 'our servant nations' (as the colonial mentality looks at them).. I think these are all directly, functionally tied to population and our civilizational health.
I just don't see a way to approach Population head on without the predictable blow-back effects that we've turned over and over chewing on this issue.
I don't think women's political empowerment and education applies to the United States population growth. The United States isn't Africa or Latin America where there are high birth rates. Someone recently tried to poo poo US population growth and provided a link to US government statistics that show US fertility rates at or below replacement level since 1976. With one or two years in exception, the rest of the years from 1976 to 2010 were at or below the alleged 2.1 replacement rate. And yet the US population has soared in that time frame. So if it isn't coming internally via birth rate, we have to look to immigrants and the offspring of immigrants (compounding) as the main problem (I think birth rates pre-1976 also factor in). So we currently only have to talk about ending immigration to stop US population growth. Of course, that single task will be near impossible, but it won't be any easier if we don't talk about it. Immigration is the most sacred of sacred cows. It is romanticized and mythicized beyond belief by the elite who benefit from it and their praise has influenced huge numbers of those who are hurt by it to support it wholeheartedly. Anyone who speaks against it is demonized. It is likely to continue several decades into Peak Oil. It will probably still be listed as a solution for at least a decade into Peak Oil. Add another decade where it will be listed in a third column titled "scapegoats". Hopefully it will ultimately be listed as a problem.
When we're talking about global consumption and the effect of humanity on the biosphere, it doesn't do much good to simply look to placing better barriers for where those populations can travel.
I don't have a problem with our country or others working to have reasonable immigration policies.. but think about what you're saying for a second. If education and cultural programs were able to help moderate distressed populations abroad, both in birthrate and in resulting social consequences like hunger, impoverishment and resource wars, what do you think would happen to migration factors as a result?
Now, as far as 'that's why we need to talk about it' goes, immigration seems to be the topic of a nearly constant stream of discussion in the US.. what do you feel isn't being discussed within that dialog? Those who want to 'shut the gates' get to stand in line next to those who want to fill their open, low-wage job slots.. which don't look as 'low' to many foreigners as they do to us.
'Fight Gravity!' (Visit the off-world colonies, Start a New Life!)
Hey Bob, I hereby cordially extend an invitation to you, if you should like a glimpse of what the off-world colonies look like... Come on down to Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'll personally give you a tour of the entire state.
Oh, I hope you like soccer, samba and rain, I've been down here for a month now and barely seen the sun, though everyone assures me it will come out soon. First week I was down here I built a little solar fruit dehydrator and dried some bananas, haven't been able to do it since >;-)
I disagree completely. When someone comes from the third world to the United States they use resources at a much higher rate. The effect of humanity on the biosphere is worse. It is only insignificantly worse when one comes, but when millions after millions after millions come - you have a huge affect. What is the stat - the United States has 6% of the population and 25% of the resource usage?
It will take more than education and cultural programs to stop people in India, China, Mexico, Phillipines, Vietnam, and elsewhere to not want to come to the United States or any of the developed countries. It will take a standard of living in the same order of magnitude. As happened with southern Europe. But the problem is, those countries are so poor, and so overpopulated, and we just don't have enough jobs to export to them to get us anywhere near parity. The only way we hit parity is if Peak Oil sends us to their level. So I can't see a voluntary stoppage of migration short of economic collapse here. Otherwise, if you let them, they will come. By the hundreds of millions (I once read that China 80 or 100 million people who's occupation is "migrant worker"). And, as it turns out, for most people that is just fine. It makes things worse, but it makes things worse at a slow enough rate that people are oblivious to the damage.
Regardless, that's building castles in the sand. Uneven pressures will 'resolve themselves'.. Immigration policy is a band aid, not a solution. It's simple physics at that level.. and yes, we will be coming down, just as much as 'they' are eager to come up.
Immigration is not the same as air moving around the atmosphere. It is completely controlled by government laws. Even illegal immigration is easily stopped by laws on employers which are enforced. We choose to allow illegal immigration, and occasionally even legalize all those who came here illegally.
There are hundreds of millions of people who would immediately try and "resolve the pressure" by "migrating" to the United States if we had open borders. We only let in a small percentage of those who want out of their poor countries and into a rich nation. The current migration is not some natural flow, it is only the maximum currently allowed by laws but still. And illegal immigration is also a part of that. We could easily stop it with strict employer penalties, but we choose to limit the laws against hiring illegals (a candidate for a Clinton cabinet position was once given a pass because although she had hired an illegal in her household, it was claimed that she made social security payments for that person), limit the enforcement of those laws, and limit the penalties for breaking them.
But even though we are taking a fraction of those who want to come here, addition works against us. The US government predicts we will grow in population by 100 million people in the next 50 years. A 25% rise in population. That doesn't sound like a band aid to me. If things are going to be bad from a lack of energy, more people will just mean even lower amounts of energy per capita.
"There are hundreds of millions of people who would immediately try and "resolve the pressure" by "migrating" to the United States if we had open borders."
Subtract out the US trade deficit and the US isn't much better off than many of the countries supplying the immigration. When the US trade deficit ends (i.e. when the US dollar dies), then I don't think there will be too much immigration pressure anymore. Americans will then be forced to live like the rest of the world.
"When the US trade deficit ends (i.e. when the US dollar dies), then I don't think there will be too much immigration pressure anymore. Americans will then be forced to live like the rest of the world."
Depends on what part of the rest of the world you're talking about. Every SUV or Truck that comes off the production line and every McMansion and leaky house built digs the hole just that much deeper...when the oil stops flowing the US is likely to be worse off than many other places because what we've chosen to build has such a high carrying cost.
Yesterday I watched a documentary called "American Winter" - it's a preview into the future of the US. Whenever I see something like this I always view it through the prism of energy balance. The film took place in Portland, OR. One thing that always jumps out at me is what they drive. So many times the families I see in poverty drive SUVs or trucks...there were 8 families in the film, two of them had Chevy Suburbans, one had an older Bronco, only one appeared to have an actual car (and it still notes "Completely demoralized, Mike finds he can’t even afford gas to go and look for a job."), one of the families had apparently lost the car - based on appearances and the kid's name "Gunner" I'm going to have to assume it too was an SUV. One of them had a hobby farm - didn't see what he drove but I think it's safe to assume he had a truck for that reason.
At the end they had a quick blurb about one family that had been forced to move (most had been displaced) but they moved from a trailer to a apartment - and it said their electricity bills were actually lower. I'm thinking the trailer had electric resistance heating - which sounds almost criminal these days.
Perhaps it's a character flaw but I always feel significantly less sympathy for someone when I learn they drive an SUV or live in a McMansion (none of these folks did). I can't help but think how much better off they'd be if they were driving a car that got 40 mpg instead of 15 mpg, or if their house only cost $50/mo for heating/cooling/electric instead of $300/mo.
The group was probably selected based on them having children (better to arouse sympathy) - but it did remind me of Leanan's link the other day regarding Elizabeth Warren's "Two Income Trap." Every single one had a child, one of them was directly sunk by one of their children getting sick (and our broken medical system), one has a child with Downs Syndrome, there was a family of two, of three, and of five. Again, maybe another character flaw, but my sympathy disappears once they cross the two-child threshold. Most of these children have no future but more poverty.
Perhaps it's a character flaw but I always feel significantly less sympathy for someone when I learn they drive an SUV
I know what you mean. OTOH, when the culture shames people who choose an efficient car, and makes them feel like a failure, it's going to be a hard choice.
...even though a tiny minority may see it as a problem.
FiniteQuantity, its is one of those things the sooner the problem gets address, the smaller the problem is to solve. It would be interesting if the Pope would address this in a positive way.
Best hopes for lower populations.
I currently am wading through a National Academy of Sciences publication "Transitions To Alternative Vehicles And Fuels"
It is a dense 395 page report. Like many establishment reports it doesn't think outside the box.
For example, it writes off modern diesel engines, despite their superior efficiency, as an alternative. It prefers
to devote chapters to hydrogen fuel cells, batteries that don't exist yet, biofuels with EROEI's of 0.8:1,
and petrol fueled Otto engines whose technologies don't yet exist.
Ignored is the Elsbett 45% efficient SVO fueled Diesel Engine, oil cooled, operating at higher combustion chamber temperatures,
with state of the art fuel introduction.
Granted, the report does give credence to lightweighting, but not much. All the efforts of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Amory
Lovins might as well not exist.
Granted, also, the report does give credence to improved tires, improved bearings, and improved aerodynamics.
Ignored are proven technologies like a three tier electrified rail network powered by renewables, designed and operating
in similar fashion to the current French system, where folks walk, bicycle(pedal powered), or use public transport ( trams, busses)
to the station, where electric lorries carry freight to/from the station to destinations within a 20 mile radius.
Unless we begin to think outside the box, tolerate other nations experiments in economic organization, we run the risk of
imposing a failed system on humanity, with all the angst that entails.
Don't forget tight oil/gas production will peak in 2016.. . then what???
INDY
"...we run the risk of imposing a failed system on humanity, with all the angst that entails."
Ya think? Seems that is currently being done on a global scale. Many things look good on paper, until one considers what it
willwould have taken to divert the human juggernaugt from it's disasterous course. I'm sure that many of your suggestions will be implemented, but it's scale that matters now. Angst, indeed...I don't think the establishment has any idea how little time we have to fix the problem. I remember Steve Chu was at one point talking about improving on the amount of energy that photosynthesis captured. While it is an interesting research subject (and one which nature has been addressing for eons), it hardly is something that we can expect to fix a very current problem.
I'm approaching five and a half years visiting here and still no sign that conversations discussed on TOD - those of a general nature - will ever seriously be part of mainstream thinking. Finite planet, limits to growth, scale of solutions are beyond the scope of far too many (not that I embrace a simpler life all that well myself - installed a hand-me-down spa last weekend).
Broken record, so it seems, for some time to come... Did ya hear about, did ya hear about, did ya hear about, did ya hear about, did ya hear about... Where's the blasted OFF switch?
Cheers, Matt
Here is one possible cure, don't go on blog pages.
Matt, don't despair. In the US, we're still having to argue about contraceptives, while the TV's banter on about catching a glimpse of 'sideboob' or seeing some new pair of stars smooching. Welcome to Junior High School-land!
At least the folks here are clued in enough. I hope they're not all waiting for mainstream buy-in to get them to start doing something about it in their own lives. Most of the big gang is devoted to following the followers..
I would say we don't necessarily require a liquid fuel. What we require is energy storage with high specific energy and energy density permitting easy portability.
Also, if we had all the things in your list we would still be doomed. We can't continue growing the human population forever. We need to learn to adapt a steady state economy with a smaller steady state population.
We likely won't.
My general impression on the odd times I bother to watch the news the 3 major issues of the future are in no particular order:
#Who will wipe Grandpa/Grandma's butt, aka care for the elderly/baby boomers.
#How will the 20-50 year-olds save/pay for their retirement.
#Who will foot the bill for the enormous debt.
Climate change is of course given some attention but nowhere near the level of the above 3 as being treated as a 'crisis'. In reality I think what really matters here is the relationship between human fictions; money/debt, retirement and services for populations in light of realities such as energy, resource depletion and climate change.
The ironic thing is that the instant the truth is really understood the whole system breaks down. Why would I in the middle east for instance trade oil for pages of Harry Potter books (money is effectively equivalent) when I can make better use of the resources at home? In a world which is growing long on people and short on resources I would bet on those who have their hands physically on resources or the ability to enforce their particular brand of 'fiction'.
Ironically the English and Spanish/Portuguese speaking colonies have a better chance than the 'old worlds' of Asia and Europe. Africa's history has proved their resources are always likely going to belong to someone else. The countries with the lowest population densities/largest resources are the Americas and Australia and New Zealand.
Your last remark on Colonies reminded me of the idea that you never actually own anything, but due to the psychic link you create with such 'possessions'.. it is they that own you.
Worth considering..
Very good point. I think people are more owned by ideas than they are by possessions however. Sometimes I think we live in the Russian Gulag 2.0. We're told we're free and we don't see the fences. It feels strange to realise that if you're dispossessed then it isn't possessions which kills but the idea that 'you work or you die'.
The problem I see with predicting the future is whatever circumstances arise people will act as if it was always going to happen. People are better at accepting consequences, like the drunk accepts his hangovers, than dealing with the actual problem. The world is a very complex place and strangely enough we live between contrasting forces. On the one hand we have the kind of situation that Gail very eloquently describes and on the other we have a system which seems to have more resiliency than it is given credit for. In many ways the system itself is the invisible hand that Adam Smith describes; only the hand pushes people or countries, like Syria, in front of the lion so that the others can escape. The lion is always hungry I guess but so far this invisible hand has kept the majority safe. I guess we'll see what happens when that lion gets hungry again.
Interesting observation.
I have been riding the subway system in Sao Paulo, Brazil recently. The masses of people riding the system amaze me no end! What has been really striking, given that I'm almost sixty and have been a long time resident of South Florida, is that there are almost no middle aged people to be seen. This is a very young country demographically speaking. Unfortunately that means there is a very large group of people in their prime reproductive years. Most of these people have bought into the growth and consumer society paradigm... In my opinion that does not bode well for their future.
There is a big rivalry between Brazilians and Argentinians and there had been some hope of a Brazilian pope, this is after all a Catholic country. Catholics, BTW are not big on birth control...
Anyways, to put things into perspective a bit. When the Argentine pope was announced the Brazilian reaction was: Not to worry because: "GOD IS BRAZILIAN!"
To make matters worse these masses of young Brazilian very much believe that their time has come and Brazil, for all intents and purposes, has infinite resources and can therefore continue to grow, pretty much forever >:-(
The future of our planet should be very interesting, in a Chinese curse, sort of way.
The good news is that their fertility rate is supposedly below replacement and their population won't peak much higher than it is already.
The future I guess will be a return to the bad old days I guess. Why take the hit domestically if there is someone else who can take the hit?
Further data for analysis are available in a Gapminder DB I developped called PE$CO2 shared here http://tinyurl.com/c3q5gz7
“Given the timing involved, and the combination of limits we are reaching, it is not clear that a fuel suitable for mitigation is really feasible, however.”
Wasn’t that what they were saying about whale oil a couple of centuries ago?
“Energy use and oil use have risen more or less in tandem with GDP increases. Oil is expensive and in short supply, so its increases have tended to be somewhat smaller than total energy increases. This happens because businesses are constantly seeking ways to substitute away from oil use.”
Oil is “expensive and in short supply” now, but it wasn’t always. We’ve built an awful lot of infrastructure on cheap energy, and have a lot of incentives built into the system to use energy inefficiently, so it’s not surprising that energy use correlates pretty well with economic growth. That doesn’t make it a law of nature. In one of the few concessions to basic economics, the author recognizes that it’s possible to substitute other goods for oil. Too bad she doesn’t recognize that fact in the rest of the article.
“European countries with bank bailouts show declining oil consumption.”
Correlation is not identical to causation.
“Adding fossil fuels allowed much better food supply, sanitation, and medical care, all leading to huge population growth.”
Correlation is not identical to causation.
“Businesses especially seek ways to substitute away from human energy, since it is the most expensive type.”
“Human labor,” in first-world economies, is not people providing energy as prime movers, so other sources of energy don’t substitute for human labor. Electric power plants were never powered by people on treadmills.
“Past transitions have taken more than 30 years, because it usually makes economic sense to wait for current machinery to reach the end of its economic life before replacing it.”
It all depends on relative cost and how quickly it shifts from favoring one source of energy for another. In a market economy, participants are very good at making such transitions quickly when it’s in their interests to do so.
Airlines, for example, are dumping aircraft far younger than 30 years for newer and more efficient models, because fuel costs are a much bigger component of total costs than is the cost of ownership - which increasingly is outsourced to leasing companies anyway.
“For example, battery recycling/disposal can pose pollution challenges. Mining of rare earth minerals, used in electric cars, wind turbines, and many high tech devices is often cited as being very polluting in China.”
Anything can cause “pollution challenges.” The answer is to properly price pollution so that the market can respond appropriately. The idea that electric cars and wind turbines are not really “green” because they cause pollution is a favorite meme on the Right. It’s one dependent on completely forgetting that innovation caused by mass production invariably cause a lowering in the unit price (and usually pollution caused per unit of production) of the goods in question.
“Another limit is imposed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy happens. Things fall apart. All of the “stuff” humans have produced (including roads, bridges, pipelines, electricity transmission equipment, cars, and computers) keeps degrading, and eventually needs to be replaced. If we intend to continue to have roads, we need to keep repairing them and building new ones. Using current technology, this requires an increasing amount of fossil fuel energy.”
“Using current technology,” that’s correct. But current technology often works economically because of lousy pricing signals. Using the second law as an economic principle is very sloppy thinking. Something that “falls apart” in two years has very different economic implications for long-term energy use than something that lasts for a century or so.
“Another limit arises because we extract the cheapest, easiest to extract resources first.” Cheapest according to who? What would the energy market look like now if we hadn’t been favoring certain forms of energy by government subsidies and favorable tax treatment for the past 150 years or so? Not identical to what we have now, I’ll bet.
“The higher that oil prices rise, the greater the recessionary impact that can be expected, but the more oil that can be produced.”
Yes, an increase in oil prices over the short term negatively impacts growth, depending on the increase and how fast it happens. But it’s far from the only factor, and it’s not clear that it’s the most important factor. Certainly the Great Recession was not caused by rising oil prices, and we seem to be recovering despite historically high oil prices.
And, of course, the higher the price of oil, the more substitution of other sources for oil becomes economically viable. And, of course, that requires the production of all kinds of things, which is growth-friendly.
“US, Europe, and Japan experienced severe recession in the 2007-2009 period, and still are seeing economic headwinds, at the same time that countries that were able to obtain the oil continued to experience economic growth.”
I seem to recall the collapse of a financial bubble as being the cause of that recession. Does the author not know that the market for oil is world-wide, or understand the implications of that for oil prices?
“Oil prices rose sharply after US oil production dropped in the 1970s. They began rising rapidly again about 2003, as the world became more globalized.”
The market for oil prices has been “globalized” for far longer than the past 10 years. Oil prices rose in the 70s because of OPEC, as I recall.
“Economist James Hamilton has shown that ten out of the most recent 11 US recession were associated with oil price spikes.”
And were all oil price hikes associated with recessions? Correlation is not identical to causation.
“This is the effect we would expect, if the major substitution caused by high oil prices is a loss of human employment. This shift tends to occur because human energy is very expensive, and because wages tend to be a big share of a company’s costs.”
This is economically illiterate. And the evidence over the past thirty years is not that personal income in the US has been “depressed”; the evidence is that it’s been unequally distributed.
“Wages tend to be one of the company’s largest costs, so these are a likely target. One approach is automation.”
Another illiterate statement. Automation is about productivity, and enterprises in a market economy will always seek productivity increases. That has nothing to do with the cost of energy.
“My personal view is that the most likely scenario is that the various limits will work together to produce secondary effects, and it is the secondary effects that are likely to bring society down. These secondary effects are Financial (wealth disparity, debt defaults, inability to collect enough taxes), Political (not enough taxes, uprising by the lower classes, government collapse) and Disease Susceptibility (inadequate food, medicine, and sanitation due to inadequate wages and government cutbacks).”
Buy gold now.
“Electricity needs to be non-intermittent, to avoid the cost of mitigating intermittency. “
No it doesn’t. All that needs to happen is that the cost of producing intermittent electricity (which, in general, is less intermittent than usually assumed) plus the cost of grid storage other sources of electricity generation that can be brought online quickly, is comparable to producing electricity the old-fashioned way.
“Solar panels PV located on the ground are heavy users of resources...” A meaningless statement. What matters is the cost, of PV, as that reflects, among other things, the resources used in PV production. PV lifetime also matters, of course.
We can make synthetic fuels using natural gas with bio synthetic fuels using biomass. Now that oil is expensive and natural gas is cheap, this is the time to do it. Shell Pearl is a $20 billion GTL plant making fuels.
Subject: Our energy predicament... March 27, 13'
Hi Gail:
I have enjoyed your essays on TOD for several years. Your entry on 27 March, mentions that you are not aware of a proper or
successful alternative that can serve to replace fossil fuels, or for that matter all hydrocarbon fuels, be they green or fossil. There is one...
I, and Dr. Grannell, have studied this problem for over a decade now. A thorough investigation of the endless combinations of hydro-carbon and hydro-nitrogen compounds reveals there is but one fuel that can meet the requirements you may ask of a substitute for all carbon based fuels, regardless of their derivation. This fuel is anhydrous ammonia, (NH3).
Somehow, in spite of there being an annual international conference on Ammonia as and Alternative Fuel, (now in it 9th year, hosted by the University of Iowa, and chaired by Dr. John Holbrook), the concept of ammonia as a fuel simply has not caught on.
In fact, it is so poorly reported, (in spite of turning out more then a hundred gray beards for a typical annual meeting), that knowledgeable persons such as yourself are not aware of it. I will appreciate your review of this remarkable alternative fuel
and a report in TOD on its merits. I will be pleased to send you bundle of info on the topic, if you are interested in what I tell
you, here. It is informative to view the website; NH3car.com. The vehicle in pictured and discussed on this site is the
basis for Dr. Grannell's PhD thesis. Dr. Grannell received his doctorate from the University of Michigan's Dept. of Applied Physics, in conjunction with the Mechanical Engineering Departments Automotive Laboratory.
In short, NH3 may be quite closely thought of as being Propane, but with a smell. NH3 has nearly the same density, pressure/temperature relationship, and energy density based on either volume or mass as, as that of Propane. The only negative property of of the compound is it is a powerful tearing agent, and asphyxiant. It is reported to be toxic in the NSDS advisories, and the general literature, but this patently incorrect. NH3 has no toxic qualities, and is indeed made in small quantities in our bodies by metabolism. A toxic substance is, perhaps, most readily represented by Carbon Monoxide, (CO). You get a whiff today, another tomorrow, and so on, and then you get another and it kills you. In short, toxic materials are those that are retained in the body to deleterious effect. NH3 does not poison, nor is it retained by the body. Moreover, it is tolerated by long exposures at ~200 ppm. Not a happy experience I gather, but certainly not toxic.
These days, our technology and materials science has advanced to the point that securing the moderate pressure that contains NH3 is well within our grasp. The trick of doing so is no more severe than that of containing Propane, and we are quite good at that. The implications of the use of Ammonia as an alternative fuel go far beyond that which I have spoken to, here. But, that is
the stuff of further communications.
You may find one of our early patents on dual fueled, i.e., ammonia-petrol fueled engines of interest. The USPTO patent number is; 7,574,993.
Please do drop me a short note so I will know that you have, indeed, received my message. I am not too sure of this link?
Thank you,
Don Gillespie
eldonlaser@aol.com
This reminds me...anyone know what happened to Neil/Stranded Wind of years ago? Ammonia was his thing.
Todd
There is a sick joke about Canadian figure skater Karen Magnussen. A couple years ago she happened to be walking by an ammonia leak at her skating rink. She took a breath and the local news reported that she was unharmed. A few later stories followed reporting her progressively worsening health. Today, several years later, she is still experiencing major respiratory ailments. The joke is that she may well die from this eventually, or at least prematurely, and that the media initially reported that she was "unharmed"...
http://www.nsnews.com/health/Karen+Magnussen+still+hurting+from+leak/599...
Regarding ammonia use as a fuel, according to Wikipedia, modern ammonia is produced by the Haber Bosch process which uses elemental hydrogen and nitrogen over an iron based catalyst, under high pressure (1400 psi) and high temperature (450 C). Since nitrogen is freely available from the atmosphere, and hydrogen could be produced relatively easily from electrolysis, this may very well be a viable fuel source, even using intermittent electricity supply from solar and wind. It shouldn't be too hard to ramp these production facilities up and down quickly.
However, ammonia is not safe; it is a dangerous substance, but I don't see this precluding its use; special precautions would just need to be maintained.
(Ref: Null Hypothesis):
It is a sad comment that Ms. Magnussen has suffered poor health. Whether her continued distress is a result of, as you say, taking a breath of ammonia is anyone's guess. The initial reports are likely true. She wasn't harmed in a way that led to her progressive respiratory problems. It is unlikely that such a simple exposure would lead to this sort of medical problem. Years ago, when such tests on animals was common place, guinea pigs were exposed to 180 ppm from 8 to 5, five days a week for months. When their lung tissue was inspected, months later, it was found there was no observable tissue damage. Other reports state that 2,000 ppm is a dangerous level.
You state in your closing line that ...ammonia is not safe; it is a dangerous substance.... Indeed, it is not safe to breath in concentration. However, it is uncommonly safe by other measures. There are sporadic reports of explosions attributed to ammonia leaks over the years. But, it is reported in parts of the literature as being non-flammable and non-explosive. They have a hard time with this one as, under the right but rare conditions, explosion can happen. Ammonia, as one might judge, is ignitable only close to a stoichiometric mixture, and only with a large flame kernel. The flame speed of the mixture is very slow, being only a few feet per second. However, and quite important, it ignites and burns well when mixed with a small amount of flame speed promoter; most any hydocarbon fuel.
The importance of what I report here is there is an alternative to fossil fuels that contains no carbon and is in the true sense a synfuel. Indeed, it is only available as a synfuel as it is not present in any recoverable quantity in nature. As stated by a reader, an advantage of ammonia is it is a ready means of storing the "stranded energy" from wind farms or remote hydro plants. Also, it is easily stored and transported. Moreover, cutting edge technology, only recently reported, makes it possible to reform NH3 to H2 + N2 at an amazing 97.2% thermal conversion efficiency. As it is a true synfuel, it can be manufactured in any amount desired, and is dependent only on the energy available. Part of the beauty of this remarkable fuel is the fact that it can be made from any energy source; wind, solar, geothermal, atomic, and hydro.
It is clear to see that anhydrous ammonia is the likely candidate to supplement petroleum based fuels, as the later become more expensive and more difficult to find. Ammonia as an ICE fuel is economically competitive with petrol at a pump price of $4.00. This is predicated on a natgas price of $3.00/MBTU. Currently, ammonia is made from hydrogen secured from the steam reformation of natgas, and the Haber-Bosch process.
eldonlaser
This comment got caught in moderation, I think because of a link (which I removed when I reposted below) for "real GDP" at http://www.measuringworth dot com/growth/index.php
So I removed the duplicated stuff...
Maybe I'm just naive and should believe that China can continue to grow at 8% forever by building residential and commercial sky-rises all across the country that are predominantly unoccupied. China has 30 billion square feet of commercial office space in the country, compared to the U.S. around 23 billion even though the US is twice as large of an economy.
This transition in China to a consumer-led economy is not going to go smoothly. Oil prices won't last above $100/bbl for long considering that this fixed investment boom in China is largely speculative in nature. Materials and energy commodity prices need to adjust to reflect the portion of China's economic growth over the last decade that was artificial. Look at iron ore prices -- they are collapsing. Copper has already begun to turn...crude oil will be next.
Is our economic model based on cheap energy?
Not really.
First, both the US and other developed countries got that way with "moderately expensive" energy, not cheap energy. Oil and electricity have been cheap in the US in the post-WWII period, but energy was rather higher in years before that: coal and electricity cost much more, adjusted for inflation. The US, and other countries, succeeded quite well in growing strongly even when energy was much more expensive, whether it was coal or oil.
Wind power is quite affordable (if perhaps not quite as dirt cheap as US post-WWII oil and electricity prices), scalable, high-E-ROI, etc, etc. So are nuclear, and solar even if they aren't quite as cheap at the moment (coal is also plentiful and cheap, unfortunately), so I see no reason to expect energy to ever be more than "moderately expensive".
The fact that energy pre-WWII was a much higher portion of GDP means that it was a much heavier burden on the economy. If wind and solar are a little more expensive, that means that the wind/solar sector has to be a little larger than otherwise to power the rest of the economy. This analysis suggests that this is not a big deal: that sector would still be a much smaller portion of the economy than pre-WWII.
Second, fossil fuels aren't nearly as cheap as they seem. Pollution is an unrecognized, external cost. So are the military costs we're seeing currently of roughly $500B per year. Those pollution costs aren't sustainable (especially CO2), but unfortunately the military costs probably are (in fact, many corporate interests are quite comfortable with them...). Moving away from oil and other fossil fuels will actually be much cheaper in the long-run than BAU.
Finally, let's assume that Business As Usual involved spending about 5% of our economic activity (perhaps measured by GDP) acquiring energy. If the cost of acquiring energy doubles, then we have to dedicate another 5% to that activity. GDP might go down by 5% quickly, in case we'd have a deep recession. Or, it might happen over time - if it took 10 years, then we'd see a reduction in economic growth of .5% per year, for 10 years. After that transition was complete, economic growth would continue. So, a reduction in "net energy" has a significant impact, but it's not TEOTWAWKI.
Does unusually strong growth since 1945 show the value of cheap energy in that period?
No, US growth was faster before 1945, using moderately expensive, non-oil energy:
1800-1900: 4.13%
1900-1945: 3.53%
1945-2000: 3.17%
This should probably be pretty obvious, but growth by percentage is much less impressive when starting from a low level. If, say, 10 chocolate bars increase by 10%, you have 11 chocolate bars, and then 12.1 given an extra 10% increase, etc. A 3% increase from 2000 to 2001 is ridiculously far more impressive by absolute terms than a 3% increase from 1800 to 1801. Basic math, but it seems you got a bit confused about that.
growth by percentage is much less impressive when starting from a low level.
Using absolute numbers would be a very odd way to measure economic growth. An 1880 economy would have to grow at a percentage level that was 5x as large as an 1980 economy to be judged equally successful. The current world economy (with high oil prices!) would be judged to be growing much faster than the 1960 world economy.
The point: Gail argues that "cheap energy" is needed for high economic growth - and that's not realistic.
Nick, US growth had a number of other earlier advantages apart from the energy that got so much cheaper during the oil age, such as a continent ripe for vast amounts of resource gobbling, and beyond that, you have to really be fair in evaluating how the early advances of the industrial revolution were making possible huge leaps in productivity beyond what had been the norm beforehand.
Perhaps Gail focused a little too closely on cheap energy for that particular analysis, but the point remains that we can't necessarily count on either (great techn. leaps OR cheap volumes of energy) for that sort of a Growth Event in the next decades, and very likely should make our next advances by learning how to retreat safely from the edges of the resource cliffs to which we've pushed ourselves. It's essential to remember that finding a way now to simply fill all the empty cupboards that are out there is NOT a reasonable way forward. We DO have to manage the number of mouths to feed, or it will simply be managed for us in much more ugly (for us) ways..
Your point about the external costs of FF uses counts, I think AGAINST your argument, since it seems very likely that we'll be having to PAY for these unclaimed bills after the cheap gains have long since been splurged away and when we are powered and paid only with much meaner and leaner energy supplies. As you mention Nuclear, I think we'll have no choice but to witness the very high costs of maintaining Nuclear Power and it's protein-rich support systems, once we have to help the remaining reactors through their dotage, after the shine has rubbed off of the back edge of the oil century..
I don't think that ALL is lost, but I take serious exception to your casual shrug at the changes ahead of us. "I see no reason to expect energy to ever be more than "moderately expensive"."
The reason is that we're still backed up by enormous volumes of the real 'Energy Drink', and are cozily immersed in the Legacy infrastructure that it built over the last century. You can still live pretty OK in the big house with the proud, lumpy furniture that Grampa bought and built.. it won't be the same when you have to replace it, and don't have the fortified surroundings that he was working within.
As C3PO said, "Between you and me, I believe master Luke is in considerable danger!"
First off, I should say that I think Climate Change is an enormous challenge, and there's no room for complacency: we face a real risk of runaway positive feedback, and we need to change our energy systems/GHG emissions ASAP.
On the other hand, we have all the technology, and affordable & clean energy availability, that we need to address Climate Change. Gail's pessimism only gets in the way of addressing CC, and aids the legacy industries' blind resistance to change.
Now, on to details:
US growth had a number of other earlier advantages
Sure - economic growth is complex, and energy is only one of those factors. That's kind've my point - as long as energy is reasonably priced and scalable, it's not a "bottleneck" (aka leibig's minimum). That's been the case for quite some time for energy in general, and oil until around 2005. It will be remain so, as renewables scale up.
we can't necessarily count on ...great techn
We don't need to. We already have all the tech we need, though it would certainly be convenient to keep improving it. Wind and solar are scalable, high E-ROI, affordable, clean, etc, etc.
should make our next advances by learning how to retreat safely from the edges of the resource cliffs
I agree, though I wouldn't put it those terms. Dealing with CC risks demands aggressive reductions in FF consumption, and that's best done with efficiency and conservation.
Just reading through the comments section, it is easy to understand why collapse is the only likely scenario. There are many comments, especially latter ones, showing the typical cornucopian approach.
The, 'easy to do NH3', or if we, 'did a ww2 effort into renewables over 10 years' in this forum where all the evidence is laid out about an energy constrained future, cleary shows that mainstream world will not know there is a problem until it hits them.
The sheer size of the energy used, 150,000 Twh/a, and growing at 2% pa, puts us at 200,000 Twh/a by 2030. For perspective the growth, just the growth, averages 3,000 Twh/a at present, mostly from coal and gas. Solar additions in 2012 were about 30 Gw producing ~32 Twh/a. At that rate of solar additions it would take 100 years to equal the growth of energy use of 2012.
The increase of resources needed to make a meaningful dent on current energy consumption with renewables is so large that it would require a great increase of energy use to make it happen, catch 22. Vast new factories just to make the glass for the PV panels would be required, in the order of several hundred percent of existing production. Likewise for many other needed inputs to production.
The growth rate of both solar and wind is currently declining, yet we need it to accelerate.
In a world with our existing economic reality, it is simply not going to happen.
The cornucopian approach ignores economic reality. What we have and where we are heading is the economic reality, lip service to the climate while we deplete the needed resources, until it is too late.
At that rate of solar additions it would take 100 years to equal the growth of energy use of 2012.
Those newfangled cell phones will never take away market share from land lines...
The increase of resources needed to make a meaningful dent on current energy consumption with renewables is so large that it would require a great increase of energy use to make it happen, catch 22.
Nah. Wind has an E-ROI of 50:1 - that's a positive net energy in roughly 6 months.
Hi Nick; Much is said and has been said relating to wind and solar power. For years the two have been ruminated in the manner of a cow's cud. Chewed up, swallowed and thought gone, only to be chucked up again,... wash, rinse, repeat. The whole, painful and simple truth of these sources of power is, da'sun don't shine in da' night, and de' wind blows from time to time. Or, to be more generous the sun shines at best four hours a day in a profitable way. And, the wind blows from time to time or hardly at all at the times it is needed most, sunrise and sunset.
Moreover, the electrical energy from these sources is, like all electricity, non-entropic, and as such must be usefully used at the virtual instant it is generated or it must be wasted. This is a madding circumstance as there has been until now, no way of storing the surplus of energy when the wind gusts, or taking it from storage when the wind fails; similar issues plague solar.
If the energy of wind and solar is used to produce hydrogen, and the hydrogen is converted to NH3, the problems that plague these sources of power may be greatly mitigated.
I think it time to introduce the "Ammonia Economy." Ammonia will be, by design or default, the ubiquitous, storeable, and portable fuel of the near future and forever on. The hydrogen and fuel cell economy was a bust because both the storage and transport of the energy source,
hydrogen, and the means of recovering the stored energy to electricity, the fuel cell, were simply to expensive and too burdensome to employ, and could not be made otherwise with any expenditure of funds, (the god's know they tried as several $billion has been spent on the concept).
Most are not aware that liquid ammonia is pumped at moderate pressure from the petrochemical plants in New Orleans North along the length of the Mississippi to branches that splay out (just short of Chicago), Eastward to the Ohio Valley and westward to the corn and wheat plains of Iowa, Nebraska, etc.. Other such lines exist for other parts of the country. In short, ammonia is already here and is distributed with no problem at weights of hundreds of Million of tons/hr.
It is important to note that the hydrogen feed stock required to make ammonia can be efficiently produced by nuclear power and the Sulfur-Iodine process, so there is, unlike the steam conversion of natgas, no carbon dioxide contribution to the atmosphere. And, nuclear power will with high energy density and 24/7 operation at 100% of design capacity, is well suited to this application.
Toyota has released for sale in Europe the fist consumer vehicle that runs on either petrol or ammonia. This is the next wave of the direction of energy in the worlds energy port folio.
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Nick, I am a bit taken back that the EROI of wind is claimed to be 50:1 and amortizes the cost of an installation of a turbine in six months? I am especially so set back because of the inability of wind to support itself at any level when the government subsidies for it are withdrawn. Wind has had a profit/bankruptcy cycle tied to it over the years that matches the subsidies that it receives. Most who are in the know recognize wind would fail as a profitable way of generating electricity if the subsidies are withdrawn and the turbines must earn their keep when the deck is not not stacked so obviously in their favor.
eldonlaser
We currently have excess capacity to make PV panels but if we start installing more of them, we can easily ramp up more factories. There are plenty of people that could use the jobs. I think cheap natural gas is slowing people right now.
Also, we could use some more policy tweaks. And I'm not asking for any more subsidies . . . how about if every mortgage payer is allowed to automatically add $10K to $15K to their current mortgage as long is it is over $200K in order to pay for a solar PV system. There is no real need to test if they person can pay for it since the energy savings alone will provide that person the money to pay for it. And it increases the value of the home.
Such an automatic loan would make it easy for people to add PV even if they don't currently have the cash.
Why aren't people doing this? Because we really don't have an electricity problem at all. We have plenty of cheap electricity in the USA. We really only have an oil problem. (And hence why I constantly bring up EVs.)
Hawaii is fascinating - they generate power with oil, so power costs around $.36/kWh.
PV is clearly cheaper, so it's taking off - 70% of permits are for PV. The utility is getting freaked...
Nick,
Strawman argument, because the real numbers hurt your argument.
That is the propaganda put out by the wind industry, nothing to do with reality which shows less than 7:1 when you work out the actual figures of smelting hundreds of tonnes of metals in each turbine and tower. As the metals bring it back to 7:1 by themselves when everything else is added it is probably less than 5:1.
Renewables run on FF for there production, take away the FF and you cant make and install them.