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Posted on June 4, 2023 | 132 Comments
The shape of human civilization in the future will depend a lot on how we manage the global energy economy over the next few decades. I think the most likely scenario is that we’ll carry on using a lot of fossil fuels, which will create climate chaos and therefore civilizational chaos. The likeliest path out of that will be agrarian localism or a small farm future, because in most places most other choices will have been foreclosed. Another possible scenario is that globally we’ll find some way to pull back from the present brink of climate chaos politically, and cut global energy use dramatically. In the absence of cheap and abundant energy I believe that will also lead to agrarian localism. Two possibilities, then – what we might call the hard and soft paths to a small farm future.
Another possibility is that we successfully transition to low carbon energy supplies at roughly similar levels of abundance, price and versatility to the existing fossil energy economy. No small farm future in this eventuality. I think it would lead to other grave problems in the longer term, but from where we currently are they look like nicer problems to have.
So a big question is whether it’s possible to make that low carbon transition. Actually, it’s more than ‘a big question’ – I think it’s the fundamental question of our epoch. It doesn’t augur well that we give so little attention to it in our political culture and that, when we do, so many people seem to assume an affirmative answer is a foregone conclusion.
The question of food futures that I discuss in my forthcoming book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is a sub-category of this larger energy question, albeit a critical one. If we can engineer a step-change in the availability of low-carbon electricity worldwide over the next couple of decades, then it may prove possible to manufacture a lot of food in factories using hydrogen-oxidising bacteria. I’m not sure it would be a great idea for other reasons, but a key technical hurdle to its very possibility would have been overcome.
How big is that if? Well, I’m not an energy expert, but while I was writing my book I spent a while casting around for people who’ve addressed it and came up with names like Simon Michaux and Vaclav Smil, whose answer – to put it technically – is that it’s a pretty darned big if. This influenced my approach in Saying NO.
Since signing off on the manuscript, I’ve come across some critiques of Michaux’s analyses – for example, this one by Nafeez Ahmed (which has the added bonus of showing me I’m not the only person who hurls long, convoluted analyses off into cyberspace). And also some arguments that I came across via Auke Hoekstra on Twitter that transitioning the global energy economy to 100% renewables by 2050, or even by 2035, may be possible – as discussed in this review paper, of which Hoekstra is a co-author.
So maybe I was wrong. Maybe an abundant clean energy, farm-free future awaits.
A read-through of the 100% renewables paper doesn’t convince me of that, though. Now, as I’ve said, I’m not an energy expert and a lot of this paper is pretty techy, but here’s a selection of issues raised in it or in papers it cites where it strikes me that the authors may be downplaying the extent of the challenge:
More on some of those points in future posts, I hope. Two other arguments in the paper that caught my eye were that heating/cooling at the individual building level was inefficient, with district systems being preferred, and that mini/micro offgrid systems would need to be integrated into larger electricity grids to deliver energy growth. I’d be interested in readers’ comments on those points.
Overall, this looks like a young field, still at the stage where a subset of university-based scholars are talking up an emerging field, making a case for more research, modelling possibilities, foreseeing difficulties and juggling with options for overcoming them. Which is all fine, except that if you’re proposing to fully transition the entire global energy infrastructure within twelve or twenty-seven years from now, and you haven’t even agreed the outlines for how in theory you might be able to do it, it makes the prospects for that transition on the ground in the real world seem … questionable.
An important aspect of energy transition is the much-discussed Energy Return on (Energy) Invested (EROI or EROEI). While critics of renewable energy often highlight its low EROEI relative to fossil fuels, the 100% renewables paper pushes back against this in a few ways. On Twitter, Hoekstra is less guarded, describing EROI as an ‘utterly useless’ concept. Maybe so for a mechanical engineer, but not so much for a farmer or a finance minister, I’d suggest. This explainer from Nate Hagens lays out pretty well the contexts in which EROI is and isn’t useless. The important aspects are economic and, ultimately, sociological, more than physical. Hagens argues that the upfront costs (immediate and historic), the high time discount and the intermittency of renewables counts against them in terms of full-system adoption.
That ‘full-system adoption’ phrase is important. A lot of the renewable transition case is implicitly based on marginal costs. In other words, if you’re planning to build some new electricity capacity to add a few more gigawatts to your existing grid, it may well be the case that a renewable option such as wind or solar is the cheapest way to go. But that’s not the same as saying that switching the entire generating capacity to renewables is cheapest. Hagens mentions this paper that shows a global transition to renewable energy over the next thirty years would be costlier in EROI terms than business as usual.
That could be a significant problem from a business point of view in terms of where the smart investment money is going to go. It’s probably an even more significant problem geopolitically. Take the big global players – the USA, Western Europe, Russia, China, India, Japan and a few others – who at best enjoy wary allyship and at worse are only a flashpoint or two away from outright war with each other or with other rivals. Suppose one of them were to tell another that they should take an upfront hit and transition their energy economy to renewables, no matter that its population would feel the economic pain in the near-term and only reap the full dividend long into the future. Tom Murphy has a good post about the economics of this. The answer would be ‘you first’.
Some might think that’s just a matter of ‘soft’ human reality that’s remediable, unlike ‘hard’ physical reality. But that’s where our vaunting of science over society goes wrong. Hoekstra says that “as soon as EROI is much higher than 1 it stops being an issue”. Well, how much higher? An EROI of 1.1 is the equivalent of buying 550 litres of fuel every time you fill the 50 litre tank of a car, and throwing 500 litres away. I imagine that could prove a pretty big issue in a lot of people’s lives. Presently, according to the data Hagens presents, globally we’re at an EROI of about 11, which would likely go down to 3 in a 100% renewables scenario. Hagens doesn’t think society as presently constituted could function at that level. Sounds plausible to me, but I wouldn’t know. I’m just a jobbing social scientist turned homesteader. But if it’s true that at present we’re essentially throwing away one unit of unusable energy for every eleven units of usable energy we get, whereas in future we’ll be throwing away one for every three that we get, that doesn’t sound like useless information to me.
Now, it’s possible that some new tech will emerge that changes the transition picture. Again, I wouldn’t know (jobbing social scientist, homesteader…) So if you told me there’s joyful news and we’re on the point of replacing lithium with sodium-ion batteries which will lower the discount rate on renewable electricity, or whatever, I’d be none the wiser. But I do harbour the suspicion that being none the wiser is partly the point with some of the narratives around this tech. It looks a bit like a bait and switch tactic that diverts attention from grosser human realities and towards tech arcana where it’s easier to nerd out on the possibilities. Or pull the wool.
Let’s look at those grosser human realities. In the graph below I indicate total global energy consumption from 1965 to 2021, split between fossil and non-fossil energy sources, and then project that forward to 2050 on the (generous, I think) assumption that by 2050 we’ll need only 91% of current global energy consumption to keep us happily ticking along, but we’ll need to transition completely to non-fossils between now and then.
Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy
The graph suggests that to achieve a 100% renewables transition by 2050 we’ll need to lose on average 16.9 exajoules of fossil energy consumption from the global energy mix each and every year between now and then. That’s more than the entire fossil energy consumption of the fifth largest energy-using country globally, Japan (15.5 EJ).
Let’s play that out in an imaginary scenario on a country by country basis. The 2022 energy figures haven’t been released yet, but if the graph is going to fit that orange downslope we have to hope that something like 16.9 EJ of fossil fuel consumption will have been swiped out last year. We can start the game gently by taking out the entire fossil fuel consumption of Japan in 2022, although that already puts us a little bit behind the curve.
Next let’s send a delegation to Moscow and ask Mr Putin to eliminate his country’s entire fossil energy use within a period of about 18 months. They’ll need good negotiating skills, but anyway.
Then let’s hop over to the USA and ask the new president, now they’ve bedded in for a bit, to cut 16.9 EJ of fossil energy consumption in their country every year for the rest of their presidential term, with another year on top so their successor can take a bit of the heat (or, in fact, remove it).
After that, India – we’ll give Mr Modi or his successor just over 18 months to cut out all the fossil fuels.
Then the big one. China gets nearly eight years to cut all its fossil energy. Good thing Mr Xi is president for life.
So now it’s 2037, we’ve taken out just the top five fossil fuel using countries and we’re about halfway there. Next year we need to take out another 16.9 EJ of fossil energy – let’s target the entire African continent, giving its governments one year to cut their collective 18 EJ of fossil fuel use, which will help us catch up with what we lost by swiping only Japan in 2022.
After that, we can aggregate various random countries to lose 16.9 EJ each year, every year, for the run up to 2050 by swiping their entire fossil energy consumption. Maybe Canada and Indonesia in 2039. The UK, Turkey and Italy in 2040. And so on until we’ve rounded up the last few stragglers. Job done.
When you frame energy transition technically in terms of things like bringing sodium-ion batteries to commercial scale or optimising inverter-based resources, it all sounds vaguely feasible. When you frame it in terms of taking out roughly the equivalent of the entire fossil energy consumption of the world’s fifth biggest energy consumer every single year for the next thirty years it all sounds vaguely impossible.
And while we’re knocking out all that fossil consumption, we’d have to be building up the renewables consumption – that big area of blue opening up on the right of the graph. Currently renewables account for 7% of total energy consumption and 38% of non-fossil fuel energy consumption, amounting to about 40 EJ of consumption annually. To make the 100% renewables transition, globally we’d have to add the equivalent of nearly half the world’s existing renewables consumption every year from now until 2050. Bear in mind, incidentally, that all this is just to keep global energy use roughly where it is at the moment. Not to transition low-energy and low-income countries to high-energy and high-income ones. And not to find a whole load of extra capacity with which to energise microbial food manufacturing.
You’ll see another downslope in grey on the graph starting in 2012. I picked that year because it was when I started this blog. Back then a few people told me that I was being over-dramatic about a small farm future, because the world would soon be transitioning to clean energy. Sometimes I’ve almost believed that myself. The graph gives a sense of how much that hasn’t happened in the intervening years. Still, that transition, the one that was around the corner in 2012 is now just past history. Or rather past non-history. All that matters now is the transition that’s just around the corner in 2023. Is it possible that will happen, by 2050? Well, we’re taught never to say some future eventuality is impossible. I’m not sure it’s always great advice, but anyway I would say that the transition is all but impossible, yes. And I think it would be better if collectively humanity acknowledged it. Because then all the smart people who are devoting themselves to modelling a 100% transition to renewables and scorning those who say otherwise could redeploy their technical skills towards making the soft path towards a small farm future as soft as it can possibly be.
My fear is that our societies aren’t going to give up on the hope of a 100% renewable transition, meaning – unfortunately – that the likeliest future we face is the hard path to agrarian localism.
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I’m not an expert either, though I did used to tutor an Open University module on sustainable energy, and the broad (but thinly spread) knowledge required by that activity leads me to think that you are exactly right. Admittedly I don’t keep up with the subject these days.
In particular, the dismissal of EROI (tricky to make precise, but a useful idea) strikes me as desperate wishful thinking. As a crude metaphor, think of walking up an escalator that is moving downwards. Easy at first, but as it speeds up …
Oh and the waving away of political/sociological/psychological factors (all the same thing, in a sense?) as somehow weak or trivial to overcome … sheer ignorant-discipline-snobbery.
Strongly recommend this Club of Rome report on energy transition and the possibilities it will release. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ahmed/
I think many people are far too sanguine about the “economics” of renewables leading inevitably to their takeover, given that those economics are inseparable from sociopolitical factors.
Renewables are cheaper (where they are in fact cheaper, which isn’t everywhere and always) in large part because of political regulations making fossil fuels more expensive and subsidizing renewables. These are not iron laws of the physical world. They’re manmade factors.
And right now, at least here in the US, one of our two political parties, which also controls the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future, is intent on rolling back those regulations. They’re actively passing laws to force utilities to burn fossil fuels and to punish financial institutions for funding renewables. Republicans are hurting their own districts, and the people in them, and they don’t care. Energy is wrapped up in the culture war, and they will favor fossil fuels regardless of “economics”. The math changes quite a bit if (when) the Supreme Court rules the EPA cannot use the Clean Air Act to essentially force a transition.
Worth a read on the Nevada solar boom aka “the Saudi of solar”, bit of a cluster but the potential is extraordinary.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/boomtown-beatty-nevada-solar-farms-death-valley/
EROEI is like GDP, I guess: easy to fudge and are a badly-drawn map, not the territory.
Can a solar panels output, in its functional lifetime, make two solar panels? One as a replacement and one to be used elsewhere?
Nope. Next question please.
All these fantasies need a global authoritarian governance structure to even start working.
Cobbett while trotting past Cambridge thought of the drones contained therein, and the wasps it sends forth. Wonder what he’d say today…
Do small farms work with unpredictable and extreme weather, like what we are just beginning to get? Hasn’t rained here in Herefordshire for weeks and my water tanks are nearly empty already. El Nino year, so probably hotter than last summer, with a colder winter coming up….
I’m also seeing in the same county that the soil’s too dry. It’s barely June and my rainwater storage is also lower than it should be.
However, such water shortage has happened once before in my lifetime. As far as I understand, very roughly …
1) 1975-76 had 17 successive months of below-average rainfall, a really severe drought although I wasn’t much of a gardener then.
2) 2022-23 had maybe 12 dryer-than-normal months
March and April 2023 were a bit wet (good)
Then a dry May 2023 … and the problem seems to have returned.
My soil is near-ideal for most crops (grade 2) assuming near-average rainfall (700 mm/y). I’m not keen on more 1976s *or* 2022s.
However, weather variability was with us the whole 20th.C, and before that, hence for example …
The heatwave of 1921
the freeze-up of 1947 (both before my time)
the very long summer of 1959
the savage winter of 1962-63
the flooding of spring 1968
the frozen loft plumbing across N.E. England in winter 1995-96
et al.
The MSM ignore normal weather as not newsworthy. Electronic data makes it much easier to find a new record. I currently don’t think either side is being honest when debating ‘climate change’.
Do small farms work with unpredictable and extreme weather, like what we are just beginning to get?
I mean, compared to what? Over-financialised industrial monoculture farms that are only possible because of subsidies and cheap fossil fuels?
I do think small farms can work better than large farms in an unstable climate, for several reasons:
1) If you’re doing most of the labour manually and you’re trying to provision for your own household first and grow cash/trade crops second, you’ll probably want to have a fairly wide diversity of crops, not least so you don’t get bored of eating your staple foods. That diversity is also a form of weather insurance. Sure, a bad drought or bad flood can wipe out the entire crop of even the most diverse smallholding, but… well, I’ve noticed that in wet, cool years my peas do better, and in hot, dry years my beans do better. This past winter my soft neck garlic basically gave up (though I did get a bit, which I might save simply to select for cold hardiness), but the hardneck has been fantastic.
2) If you’re doing most of the labour manually and on a small scale, you’re in a better position to dig a drainage ditch, add more water storage, or similar earthworks and infrastructure stuff as needed. A drainage ditch for a ten acre field is a very different beast than one for a quarter of an acre. While quantity does often have a quality all its own, economies of scale do not always favour the largest scale possible.
3) If you’re doing most of the labour manually and on a small scale, then in the dry years, that bit of your plot that’s sortof boggy in “normal” years and rather easily waterlogged is suddenly a great spot to grow something that isn’t as drought resilient as the rest of your crops. In wet years, the converse is true. Extending this further, it was not unheard of, if I understand correctly, for indigenous Andean farmers (for example) to have several planting sites which they would visit regularly. I am doing something a bit similar in allotment terms, with 1.5 plots on one site, 0.5 on another rather further away (though I’ve just tentatively taken on the very derelict half plot next door with a view to practising some woodland management on a micro scale and probably getting some mushroom logs going), the back garden (best for salads and anything else that wilts in a bike pannier), and the Soup Garden at church (what it sounds like: we grow veg and herbs for the soup kitchen). Each has a different microclimate and each requires a different approach, not least because the further-away sites aren’t ones I can visit as often as I would like to.
4) If you’re doing most of the labour manually and on a small scale, your response to e.g. novel pests (which will come with changing temperatures) is probably to do more work rather than to buy an expensive spray. (I’ve had a new-to-me pest on peas at the allotment and the Soup Garden this year in the form of Closterotomus trivialis — the “trivial plant bug” — and have been doing my bit to, er, select the population for ability to evade humans, by catching as many of them as I can and drowning them in soapy water.)
5) Smaller farms that are focused on producing food and other locally useful goods rather than producing profit on an industrial scale lend themselves to having some “amenity” space — a woodlot or orchard with space for a hammock, for example — and these spaces in turn can provide supplemental food sources. I expect them to change substantially with changing climate, but… well. This afternoon I foraged 1.5kg of Pleurotus cornucopiae on my way home from church, despite the lack of recent rain here, and while last summer’s drought meant a poor year for many fungi, I did manage some of the biggest puffballs I’ve ever had, as well as several really very decent bracket fungi. In terms of the plant kingdom, the Soup Garden has lots and lots of three-cornered garlic, and while I am trying to stop it spreading much further, it’s great to be able to go out and pick handfuls of it for the kitchen. But Allium triquetrum isn’t native here at all, and is designated as invasive. Not all opportunistic species taking advantage of a changing climate will be so tasty, of course, but I think there’s better scope to eat the ones that are edible on a small scale than on a larger, industrial scale.
Caveat: I am an allotment gardener, very much a hobbyist rather than a professional. A small farm that doesn’t have any flexibility at all in labour is going to have a much harder time with tricksy weather, novel pests and diseases, and other environmental factors than one with a bit of surplus labour available. I’m at the edge of what I’m capable of doing now, so I’m experimenting with some lower-labour horticultural approaches — essentially, crops that my grandfather might have grown as field crops.
There is an argument that nomadic pastoralism might work even better. I know even less about that, though.
I’ve also heard/read that mixing in biochar to the soil is great at locking in nutrients and water.
Still kicking myself for not collecting some of the charcoal after last summer’s fires in London, tbh.
Charcoal is £3.50 a bag at Proper Job. (Lumpwood. No added chemicals to get it to light easily)
I think Proper Job may only be a West Country thing though?
John
I don’t think there’s a branch of Proper Job anywhere near me, no. Lumpwood charcoal is available, but I would want to be pretty finicky about sourcing if I were purchasing it.
@Kathryn
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=making+biochar+in+a+barrel&mobile=1&view=detail&mid=9EB29F2FFC23939962029EB29F2FFC2393996202&&FORM=VDRVRV&PC=XIBA&ssp=1&safesearch=moderate&setlang=en-gb&cc=GB
If you have the wood you could always make your own biochar on the allotment. Are you allowed fires?
John
I have made biochar on the allotment.
We aren’t allowed fires to burn any kind of waste, but we are allowed a BBQ. Mine just happens to be a top-lit updraft wood gasifier barrel.
Still, it’s a lot of work compared to just picking it up off the ground!
If I remember right, biochar is different from charcoal, in that it’s created in a relatively oxygen deprived environment. Is this right? It’s somehow got different properties than charcoal.
‘You first’ points to hard path to a SFF unless a 100% renewable (are solar panels renewable ?) energy future is happens.
The energetic and material problems have been discussed before. Just because some people say it possible doesn’t mean that it is or that they have considered any of the externalized costs. Corn ethanol was supposed to be renewable fuel salvation. Except that it’s not. It could even be an EROI loser. Beyond that, something that was not taken into account was the amount of water needed to convert corn into fuel. That is a problem in drought years.
I have to get out and hoe some tomatoes and peppers before it gets too hot so I did not carefully read the paper reviewing the literature on a 100% RE future. I did not see any explanation on how the process would work. Does the energy to make the solar panels come from renewable sources ? Does the wafer fab process use a lot of water ? Does it create toxic wastes ? Do they use minerals and metals that are in short supply or are mined under brutal conditions ? Like I said, I didn’t read it too carefully.
Also, what happens in 2050 when the RE systems installed today start to fail ?
It should also be noted that the energy ‘thrown away’ in EROI heats up the planet.
Simpler systems and energy conservation are bad for GDP growth. We can’t have that. See ‘You First’.
Greg wrote “I did not see any explanation on how the process would work. Does the energy to make the solar panels come from renewable sources ?…”
That paper hems and haws, but it admits that the Renewable Energy infrastructure cannot be constructed without fossil fuels, potentially requiring more fossil fuels than are available (which would make the transition impossible).
‘More research is required’ (but ‘some’ ‘initial studies’ ‘indicate’ that the transition is indeed ‘possible’ if ‘larger investments’ are made).
From page 78189:
“…a fraction of the energy supply from fossil fuels needs to be used for the construction of the RE infrastructure that will replace fossil fuels… Evidently, if the results were that the fraction of fossil energy invested is larger than the energy currently supplied, the transition would not be feasible. Instead, some initial studies [191], [274] indicate that the transition is indeed possible, and that it can be fast enough to reduce the impact on climate change below the limits set by the Paris Agreement, although doing so would require larger investments than currently dedicated to RE. More research is required… The lack of more detailed EROI analyses for the entire energy system transition constitutes a research gap that needs to be closed soon.”
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9837910
EROI (or if you prefer ECoE. Energy costs of energy) is indeed a difficult thing to calculate but I would suggest that the energy inputs into any industrial process can never be fully known.
Take Tar Sands up in North Canada.
The energy inputs aren’t just the process to turning tar into oil.
It’s the energy required to maintain the equipment.
It’s also the energy required to fly the workers up there.
The energy to maintain those airplanes.
The energy to build those airplanes.
The energy to mine the raw materials for those airplanes.
The energy to building and maintaining the accomodation for the workers.
The energy costs in educating the workers.
And on it goes……….
Some of these energy costs may be irrelevant to an accountant when looking at financing a project and monetary profit, but………they still exist!!!
And in future they will all need to be met without fossil fuels.
It would be very difficult for an activity like mining to go 100% electric.
So any ECoE will be an underestimate and any EROI will be an over estimate.
It is not fossil fuels that’s the real problem the problem is the materials to make replacements for fossil energy , if you look at how much material it’s mind boggling , there is simply not enough to replace today’s consumption of energy , rare earth metals for wind turbine magnets for a start , if we tear the planet apart there’s enough for around 2% of today’s consumption of electricity , at the other end of the scale they are digging one ton of rock for two pounds of copper using vast quantities of diesel to dig it and coke to smelt it , the whole idea is complete and totally ridiculous .
Here in TX right now there is a shortage of steel cable for overhead high voltage lines , New housing is having to wait to be connected to the failing grid !
I think both are real problems. We can have more than one serious problem at a time, even if we prefer to only think about one at a time.
“Our global reserves of copper amounts to some 880 million tons, however, a transition to an energy system powered by a combination of “renewables”, nuclear and hydro would require us to mine 4575 million tons — some five times the amount we have located so far”
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-copper-conundrum
A nice PDF link in the article for your perusal
“Although less electricity capacity is usually needed for a given job than via the fossil route….”
When you factor in losses in some of the renewables chains such as renewable electricity to hydrogen and hydrogen to electricity the efficiency is quite as bas as the fossil route. And as you point out, the efficiency of the whole system may be low. In Sweden, the grid itself has 10% losses already and they will seamingly increase with sea based wind power and new storage demand.
‘Renewable’ energy in Europe is mostly obtained from burning wood. When wood pellets are burned to generate electricity, the inefficiencies due to conversion losses are similar to those for fossil fuels.
“The main source of renewable energy in 2019 was biomass (57.4% of gross energy consumption). In particular, wood is the leading source of renewable energy in Europe, far ahead of solar and wind.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union
That is indeed true. Even more inefficient is when that wood is imported from the coalburning US…
And they are cutting our functional southeastern woodlands! https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/our-work/wood-pellet-biomass/
The wood pellet “renewable” thing is a total scam. A lot of those wood pellets are actually shipped to Europe from the USA! I saw a documentary film on this.
People, generally, are almost completely ignorant about what “renewable” actually means in practice. They think not in terms of practices but in terms of stuff — e.g., fish, trees. The ignorant think “Well, fish and trees are renewable resources”. And that’s as far as their thinking goes. But, of course, fish and trees are only truly ‘renewable’ within a renewable approach to practices, as in especially rates of use / extraction.
Wood pellets may be said to be “renewable” only when they are comprised of what would be wood waste products (e.g., sawdust, construction waste, milling waste … trimmings from sustainably done tree thinning…). But even then you’d have to calculate all of the energy costs — including transport — in the entire process to compare with other energy sources. The companies which profit on wood pellets don’t consider any of these things. None. It’s a scam, plain and simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_resource
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/climate/wood-pellet-industry-climate.html
Did you ever dig into Tim Mortons SEEDS model? It seems to have some similarilties with the EROEI concept but being more economically oriented. https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ I follow what he writes but I can’t make up my mind how smart his model is.
@Gunnar Lundgren
You beat me to it!!!!
I was going to link to Surplus Energy Economics.
It’s well worth a read for those interested in this topic.
I don’t think there can be an energy transition that replaces current (never mind growth) fossil energy demand with renewables.
I do think we could probably, if we were very lucky and very strategic, build enough renewables to have things like decent medical care safe water supplies and telecommunications, while completely abandoning the use of fossil fuels for transport, travel, heating, and food production. It would be a sort of small farm future plus some of the best of the technological age (vaccines, water treatment, diagnostic imaging and testing, some of the better drugs, reliable refrigeration, some kind of distributed digital communications as I’ve talked about before). But… political will for this is absent, because the changes in GDP/standard of living/lifestyle/whatever that would be required to give up fossil fuel use for even one of transport, travel, heating or food production would be catastrophic for any ruling party that suggests them, and certainly counter to the financial underpinnings of the corporations that wield so much power (and sure, that’s probably roughly the same problem).
I mean, come on. We don’t even have decent medical care and telecommunications for the entire world now, despite having more energy available than throughout all of human history. (I haven’t checked how that lines up with energy availability per person; I’ve seen the statistic thrown around that we currently use enough fossil fuels that doing it with human labour would require 500 billion people, though, and as there are still only around 8 billion of us I think that means we each use the same energy as 62.5 billion people.) It’s hard to see how we could pull off a congenial future for all with even less energy.
I could almost welcome a hard transition, if I thought it would be a great leveller of inequality. Sometimes I think it might be, since we cannot, after all, eat money; perhaps without their 62.5 billion (or whatever) energy slaves, the rentier class will realise just how beholden they are to the labour of others. But most of the time, I’m far more cynical, and think that we will proceed as humanity so often has: the very rich will be mostly okay as usual (for some value of “okay” which will be justified in whatever is left of the press), the poor will get it in the neck as usual (though at least some of them are already used to it I guess), and the default direction of social mobility will be down, not up, so if you aren’t already very rich, you can expect to get poorer. I can’t welcome that, simply because of the scale of suffering involved. But all I can do about it is what I’m already doing: learning and teaching skills, building community, asking questions, and growing as much of our own food as is plausible in my current context.
worth a read, from club of rome, on what the best outcome could be..
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ahmed/
In the category of ‘renewable’ energy, there’s still a lot of fuel being burned (adding to the atmospheric pollution) and energy being wasted.
According to the UK Government, if you add up the total combined energy output produced by Solar PV, Wind, Wave & Tidal, and Hydroelectric generation in the UK, it doesn’t even surpass the amount of wasted energy that’s lost (as heat) when converting ‘renewable’ fuels (mostly wood pellets from North American forests) to electricity in the UK.
Total electricity output from Solar PV, Wind, Wave & Tidal, and Hydroelectric generation (combined) = 7,077
Conversion losses from power stations burning ‘renewable’ fuels = 7,538 (>7,077)
Electricity output from power stations burning ‘renewable’ fuels = 3,821
(from Renewable Energy Flow Chart 2021, page 40)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1130496/DUKES_2022_Chapter_6.pdf
When what’s labeled ‘renewable energy’ might not be renewable:
“Drax: UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada”
“Burning wood produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal. The electricity is classed as renewable because new trees are planted to replace the old ones and these new trees should recapture the carbon emitted by burning wood pellets. But recapturing the carbon takes decades and the off-setting can only work if the pellets are made with wood from sustainable sources.”
“Primary forests, which have never been logged before and store vast quantities of carbon, are not considered a sustainable source. It is highly unlikely that replanted trees will ever hold as much carbon as the old forest.”
“Drax: UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63089348
I would add that more likely there will be a big push to reduce the emissions of fossil fuel, rather than them being phased out by 2035 or 2050. Myles Allen has some good lectures on this. What I would find interesting to explore is the potential for small farms to store carbon and the difference between biological and geological drawdown, perhaps there is a role for biochar, as most small farms don’t have a fossil fuel reserve under them.
Chris
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
This article by Tom Murphy is well worth a read. It can be downloaded for free.
It’s pretty long and technical in places but goes through all the available energy sources available to us. Explains how they work and their pros and cons.
Thanks for comments. I’ll try to reply more expansively soon. Meanwhile (1) Chris, I’d be interested if you have any links to the Myles Allen lectures, (2) interesting figures from Steve L, which appear somewhat discrepant with my source so it’d be good to dig into this a little somehow. For energy figures, I usually use (as here) the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, downloadable as Excel files from here: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/downloads.html
The BP data for primary energy consumption in the UK in 2021 is as follows (all in exajoules):
Fossils – 5.48
Nuclear – 0.41
Hydro – 0.05
Renewables – 1.24
The renewables further decompose as follows:
Solar – 0.12
Wind – 0.61
Geothermal, biomass – 0.46
Biofuels – 0.06
…which doesn’t quite add up, and is also quite discrepant from Steve’s more detailed source.
I assumed ‘consumption’ would include biomass imported from abroad to fuel power stations like Drax under the ‘Geothermal, biomass’ figure, but maybe not. It’d be good to figure this out.
Here’s a Myles Allen TED talk. The crux of the argument seems to be “building a carbon dioxide disposal industry comparable in size to today’s oil and gas industry.”
https://www.ted.com/talks/myles_allen_fossil_fuel_companies_know_how_to_stop_global_warming_why_don_t_they/transcript
… and a rather more full fat version (i.e a series of one hour lectures, going through the carbon cycle etc etc) :
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/net-zero
Wow – Lots of comments! I didn’t read them all (by a long shot), so maybe this topic has been addressed (?).
A quote from the article:
“An EROI of 1.1 is the equivalent of buying 550 litres of fuel every time you fill the 50 litre tank of a car, and throwing 500 litres away.”
I’m very confused!
What does this notation: 1.1 represent?
I’ve seen EROI expressed as a ratio, as in Wikipedia’s article on the topic which says, “To be considered viable as a prominent fuel or energy source a fuel or energy must have an EROI ratio of at least 3:1.”
Chris, was your decimal meant to be a colon (:)? — designating a ratio? Or what?
1:1 EROI is, of course, non-viable in any sense — energetic or economic. The reason for this seems to me obvious — there is no net gain. Zero net gain. What’s the point?
Anyway, I couldn’t make sense of your statement (in quotes) as the math made no sense to me whatsoever.
Help?
Yes, the EROI is a ratio. So if it’s 1 then you get 500 energy units out for every 500 you put in. If it’s 2 you get 1000 out for 500 in. If it’s 1.1 you get 550 out for 500 in…
Hmm. Chris, somehow I misread what you had written. Now it makes perfect sense.
the higher the ratio the more surplus energy is being produced.
this is a good paper to read it uses EROI as benchmark.
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ahmed/
Hmmm….
“An EROI of 1.1 is the equivalent of buying 550 litres of fuel every time you fill the 50 litre tank of a car, and throwing 500 litres away. I imagine that could prove a pretty big issue in a lot of people’s lives. Presently, according to the data Hagens presents, globally we’re at an EROI of about 11”
___________
Okay, let me guess, expressed as a ratio a 1.1 EROI would be
1.1:1 ?
And an EROI of 11 would be expressed as 11:1 ?
@James R Martin
The way I understand EROI is that the ratio is energy in-surplus energy out.
Back in the 1950’s, Oil was giving a ratio of over 1:100.
That’s, one barrel of oil consumed in the extraction process would give 100 barrels of surplus energy!!!!! I think it’s now 1:20 or less.
Energy Cost of Energy ECoE goes the other way. What percentage of energy is used in the extraction process.
So the EROI above of 1:100 gives an ECoE of 1%.
Chris.
I think your article sums up the improbability of transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The other big elephant in the room is that the (present) economy has to keep expanding to function.
Banking/finance will collapse without constant expansion. Interest bearing loans are the bedrock of the economy but are impossible to all pay back unless the economy expands.
So, the energy requirements that renewables are going to have to supply will need to expand.
In other words, renewables won’t need to just replace existing levels of fossil fuel consumption. They will need to keep expanding to keep the show on the road.
Just one further thought.
Suppose we discover a new, abundant, cheap energy source……would it be a good thing?
Ecological destruction on the present scale is only possible because of fossil fuels. Try cutting down the Amazon with a steel axe, or an obsidian hand axe for that matter.
New sources of cheap abundant energy is the last thing the planet needs!
What to do with the remains of the one time windfall of millions of years of stored sunlight?
Build nukes! Yes, while it only delays the inevitable, and saddles us with yet more dangerous waste that no now wants to be steward of, it looks like nuclear is getting its mojo back. While Russia, India, China have been full bore for a while ( 53 units under construction world wide as of 2022) the buzz and federal funding of SMRs has been growing as a desperate, “all of the above” mentality is coming back in style. The IRA (inflation reduction act) was a nice blip, but the overall trend I predict will be one of hanging on to current lifestyles, rest of the world be damned.
No one seems to mention serious reduction of use, as “the American way of life is not up for negotiation” (circa 1992, G.H.W. Bush) ummm, physics, thermodynamics?
For many years, the public sentiment in the U.S. about nuclear was negative, and Fukushima reinforced that concern, but not in the corporate boardrooms. Persistent and steady lobbying and think tank output to the corridors of power are slowly shifting the mood here. It’s also been low key, off the headlines stuff, but probably not for too much longer.
The transition will be complicated and unpredictable, but my guess is that the path to the SFF will be the hard one.
This is also an interesting take on energy.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/06/01/why-just-stop-oil-will-win/
The importance of Michaux’s contribution is not so much the numbers, which he admits are rough and by no means complete. It is in the questions, how and from what, where? The fact is there is no robust plan for transition any where, which his work reveals. That he is currently working with governments on transition plans is a stronger foundation for his premise than any of his critics. Ahmed invokes ‘meta analysis’ and strange ratios and examples which shift and change across the argument. There is no discussion of actual mining, its present and future effects and there is even the invocation of technology ‘just around the corner ‘.
I agree Chris, the analysis is deliberately ersatz. This is the squeal of ecomidernists when you pull back the curtain.
Michaux doesn’t so much question transition but places solar and wind alongside fossil fuels and low energy small farm futures. This has clearly got them mad!
“I agree Chris, the analysis is deliberately ersatz. This is the squeal of ecomidernists when you pull back the curtain.
Michaux doesn’t so much question transition but places solar and wind alongside fossil fuels and low energy small farm futures. This has clearly got them mad!”
While I’ve not read any of Michaux’s reports, I’ve listened to many of his interviews and presentations. What he mainly does is ask how much of various rare and semi-rare metals and minerals would be required for what I call a “full replacement” energy transition scenario — which is to say a full replacement of current energy use with renewables exclusively. Then he examines the existing metal and mineral reserves to see if we have these. And it turns out we don’t have anything close to these in reserve. Then he asks if it would be possible to ramp up the reserves to meet this demand, and concludes that this is so unlikely that it should be regarded as impossible. He also examines the energy inputs required for mining, processing and smelting of these metals and minerals, which is far, far higher by way of ratio than it was just decades ago, and points out that making these metals and minerals available in the required amounts would require more energy than is available for such use.
In short, he has debunked the conventional “full replacement” model of “energy transition”.
When I look at Michaux’s work in relation to Richard Heinberg’s explanation, sometimes called “the Heinberg pulse,” (in which Heinberg explains that it is very likely that a “rapid energy transition” would result in an increase in fossil fuel consumption over the years in which we most need a decline in energy use (since 84% of world energy use is currently fossil energy), I can only conclude that what the world regards as “energy transition” is a false narrative. It almost certainly cannot happen as advertised.
I should also point out that what Michaux is saying — directly or indirectly — is ALSO an explanation for why the full replacement energy transition narrative is false on the basis of economics. It’s not an economically viable agenda. The price of the scarce and rare minerals and metals will increase in pursuit of full replacement, as demand will far outstrip productive capacity, and the energy costs are also impossibly high in terms of being able to provide all of that energy in “transition”.
I take the mainstream energy transition narrative to be a deliberate bit of disinformation. It’s just not honest or realistic at all, as I see it. It has the feel of a scam to me.
yes.
it’s worth listening to Michaux and Ahmed’s recent collegial conversation on Planet Critical pod, and Ahmed’s Earth4All/Club of Rome paper. I found him more convincing than Michaux, but it won’t happen without some hardcore lobbying.
I am no engineer or farmer, BUT I just dont see how the sort of per capita energy consumption fossil fuels makes possible can be replicated by renewables, the quantity, irregular supply and the raw materials needed for the transition just are not there.
See
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-06-04/on-the-emerging-copper-shortfall-mainstream-media-notices/
As a ‘for example’
“We don’t have a plan ! ”
Those words could be the epitaph of our civilization .
So – thanks for the comments. I fear the next 2-3 months are going to be quite hectic for me so I may not be able to respond to comments here as fully as I’d like, but do please keep them coming.
The ‘energy cannibalism’ point raised by Greg and addressed by Steve is an important one I missed. Generally, the 100% renewables article touches on many of the difficulties people here have raised, but arguably it pretty much glosses over them.
Thanks also for the defences of Michaux – interesting points. And for the various links and articles. I will try to follow up – especially on the Allen stuff. Reducing FF emissions relative to use seems on the face of it like more prevarication. Peter Zeihan’s point I mentioned recently about the likelihood of a return to dirty coal is thought-provoking in that context.
I have looked at Tim Morton’s stuff before, but not in depth so I’ll try to add to the reading list. Obviously I have numerous disagreements with the ‘consciousness of sheep’ post!
I agree with John that new sources of cheap energy aren’t particularly a good thing, which was kind of my point above relating to ‘other grave problems in the longer term’.
I’m still interested in digging into the data discrepancies around UK biomass consumption. And in any thoughts about the district heat/offgrid question I raised above. But I’ll have to say ciao for now – apologies for not engaging in greater depth.
In regards to a new source of abundant, cheap energy: There are several constants in physics. The speed of light, The charge of the electron, The mass of a proton and The number of years until fusion becomes a reality.
Ooops. Emojis don’t seem to show up.
It is possible to do pretty good lower-tech heating without using electricity. One option is some kind of large composting facility with hot water pipes; I can see this working on a district level, probably. Certainly I’ve done catsitting in a block of (ex-)council flats in London where the heating (for hot water and radiators) was done on a whole-building level, much more efficiently than a boiler in each flat would have been; I think it did use electricity rather than convection to move the hot water around, but converting that type of system to a Jean Pain style compost-based heating system seems at least plausible. Doing that with separate reactors for individual houses would probably be harder, so I think there’s a good argument for block-level heating, at least. (Best would be to combine it with sewage treatment, since removing sewage from a densely-populated block of flats is almost the same infrastructure problem in reverse.)
But there are also lots of smaller scale heating options. Another is an external solar collector made of something dark and uneven behind glass, which will convect warm air into an indoor space when the sun shines on it. I’m planning on making one of these with tin cans for a solar dehydrator, since just chucking things into net bags isn’t quite reliable enough in our climate.
The latter can also be used for cooling, sortof, or at least air circulation, if you put the air intake up high. Our loft space functions similarly in summer, heating up during the day when we keep the loft hatch closed, then acting as a sort of solar chimney in the evening when we open the hatch and all the downstairs windows and it draws cooler air into the house. (All we need is bugscreens on the windows…. sigh.)
I also really like Trombe walls, which with appropriate manipulation of air intake/outflow can be used for heating or cooling as appropriate. The difference between a Trombe wall and the tin can arrangement I mentioned above is that a Trombe wall usually also has considerable thermal mass, meaning it will stay warm much longer at night. Still not much use in the depths of a British winter, but potentially useful in parts of spring and autumn. I think I would want something like a rocket mass heater for winter.
And, of course, a lot of the time you can heat the person rather than the space. I do love my hot water bottle, but my asthma does get markedly worse if it’s below around 16°C in the room I sleep in, sigh; we caved and put the heating on last December after I woke up coughing uncontrollably several times at 13°C. Maybe without the cars this would be less of an issue (though too much woodsmoke won’t do my lungs any favours either, I’m sure.)
The thing about all these small-scale direct measures like solar chimneys, Trombe walls and rocket mass heaters is that they aren’t going to show up very well in energy transition statistics, and they aren’t profitable for the big energy companies. A shift to centralised renewables (wind and solar farms etc) is a lot easier to measure and model, and that in turn makes it easier to make arguments about what will be profitable.
Similarly, the 1.5kg of oyster mushrooms I foraged on Sunday don’t turn up in food production stats, and probably my allotment produce is only very crudely measured; our grocery bills have gone down rather than up since my first growing season in 2020 so I guess I am doing something right, but to an economist who can only measure the numbers, it just looks like our household is consuming less, rather than producing more of our own, and the resulting reduction in fossil fuel use is also invisible or illegible.
I’m not sure at what point in all this the less centralised production methods of heat, electricity or food calories become more than statistical noise. I am sure that it will contribute to household economics before then.
@Kathryn
Are you familiar with this website?
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/obsolete-technology.html
It’s got some fun ideas/solutions for our low energy futures.
My favourite is the Trompe pump followed closely by the Chinese wheelbarrow.
I am; it’s an excellent site.
Yes.
I’m also not 100% in agreement with Consciousness of Sheep.
But…..then again, when am I with anyone:)?
@Chris
You mentioned/link to Tom Murphy in your blog.
Sorry for repeating myself but this pdf of his, is a really good assessment of energy possibilities.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
any thoughts about the district heat/offgrid question”
my not very useful comment, is that I thought that district heating was pretty much accepted as a good thing – but problematic to put into practice in the UK for cultural reasons. One of the many small-to-medium-sized steps that will be necessary (as long as enough of them are taken).
As regards the offgrid-integration with bigger systems, I have a vague recollection, possibly from Walt Patterson’s keeping the lights on, that this is also going to be needed.
Not very helpful I know – other than that these are not new ideas.
……..and in 25 years time all those solar panels and wind turbines will need replacing!
Calling them “renewables” is a bit misleading. Not like a tree anyway.
How often do parts for gas, coal and oil-fueled power plants need replacement or maintenance, though? It seems to me that they do get decommissioned from time to time, and new ones built. Further, a gas power plant that runs longer than it should is actively dangerous and speed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every kilowatt generated, while older, lower-efficiency solar panels may be less efficient than when first built, but they require basically no inputs and have no more outputs than they would if they were brand new; all of the inputs are front-loaded, and the outputs don’t get worse while the panels age. (I have no idea how this applies with wind turbines, sea-based hydro, or whatever). And needing total replacement on average every 25 years (or whatever) could still mean some systems last 20 years, some last 30, and some outliers last 50: it’s not like every solar panel built today will definitely fail 25 years after installation.
I think it’s possible to make properly recyclable solar panels or wind turbines, though I would certainly like to see more emphasis on fully circular supply chains when designing and building them. But if electricity only currently powers 20% of human activity, “things wear out” seems like a smaller problem than “80% of current energy demand isn’t for electricity in the first place.”
Let’s imagine, optimistically, that we could replace our existing electricity supply with a combination of renewables. We might even, due to distributed microgeneration, end up with a more resilient electricity system than we currently have. That imaginary best-case scenario is still going to be a huge, de-stabilising, potentially unmanageable change for agriculture, transport, travel, manufacturing, and a number of other key industries.
But… change in our energy use is coming, whether or not we build the renewables. I suppose then the question is whether we would rather weather that transition with the benefit of a pared-down, mixed-source (both on and off grid), renewable-powered electrical system, or without it. Given that fossil fuels that aren’t used for building renewable energy will definitely be used for something else, I think there’s a strong argument for installing quite a bit as fast as we can. It might even slow “flatten the curve” a bit on carbon emissions if we can outpace our current use of fossil fuels for electricity generation — though I do think this is a highly optimistic scenario.
But we should not expect an electricity transition, no matter how effective or efficient, to let us avoid considering the other 80% of our energy use. We still need to figure out how to manage agriculture, transport, travel, and indeed manufacturing in a world with zero fossil inputs, sooner rather than later. We cannot possibly pivot all of that over onto electricity; so we need zero-fossil solutions (including, but not necessarily limited to, a small farm future) for all of those areas.
@Kathryn
I’m not against renewables and think that we should make as many as we can.
But I am sceptical if, in 25 years time, they will be replaceable using renewables. The existing solar/wind generators have been manufactured using fossil fuels.
Renewables haven’t replaced/reduced any fossil fuel usage. They have just added to total energy consumed.
And as you point out, electricity only accounts for 20% of outr total energy use.
With regard to fossil fuels.
As is pointed out here (https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/) a lot, we have gone beyond peak oil.
New deposits of oil are becoming too energy intensive to extract and the existing oil field yeilds are starting to fall. There aren’t any big, easily extracted oil feilds out there. What is left is becoming more and more difficult to get at.
The Energy Costs of Energy (ECoE) is rising. There isn’t going to be as much surplus oil available to the fuel the economy.
Growth has reach its max and we are at the beginning of de-growth. Discretionary economic activity is going to start to contract with all the job losses and social consequences to follow.
What level of energy will be available to humanity in 30 years time is anyone’s guess????
I think it will be at pre-industrial levels. Photosynthesis being the primary energy source with the sun also chipping in a bit of wind/hydro as well.
I think this is a good place to start with looking at what a SFF might look like. If there is some tech/energy available then it is a bonus and will increase what is possible, but not necessarily probable.
Actually, I think in 30 years time we will still be using fossil fuels but the economy will a lot smaller. Pre-industrial levels will take some time to reach.
I agree that we should be laying the groundwork for a small farm future and then if there happens to still be some electricity, great.
I did buy a battery-powered chainsaw this year. It’s a lot slower and smaller than most chainsaws, but much, much faster than the pruning saw I was using before. But I’m definitely not throwing away the pruning saw!
A clockwork chainsaw. Now that would be a thing!!!!
John
A treadle-operated saw is a beautiful thing but I haven’t seen one that would cut down trees.
Kathryn hit the nail on the head with 80% of energy used is not electricity , to go carbon free and keep the economy we are used to that will need replacing , which of course is a non starter , transportation is the canary in the coal mine , substitutes for diesel agricultural machines will have to be found even on small farms , then trucks , personal transport ain’t going to happen apart from some trains and buses , air travel will be over .
Ideas like 15 minute cities are pie in the sky , think of all the shops that will have to be built and delivery vehicles to service those stores , where I used to live the nearest grocers was 15 minutes by car ,(40 minutes by bus and only one bus an hour ) here it’s 45 minutes , the logistics are terrifying !
The Edwardian farm (BBC ) gives an idea of how Britain moved from localised supply to national via the rail network , well worth watching .
Thanks for further comments.
Just to clarify, the claim of the 100% renewables folks isn’t restricted to replacing fossil electricity generation, but to replacing the entire energy system with renewables (often in relation to the trickier things to energise like vehicles in the form of electricity-to-hydrogen or related ideas, which of course is also the route for manufactured food).
However, I agree with the collective view here that it seems quite implausible.
But it’s interesting that it’s being talked up all of a sudden, with commentators like David Wallace-Wells and Nafeez Ahmed who previously were quite doomy about climate change suddenly getting behind the 100% renewables idea.
Ahmed has recently pushed back against the Nate Hagens piece I linked above: https://ageoftransformation.org/greatoversimplification/
I’m not massively convinced by his critique in the main, but as ever I’m interested in comments.
Certainly, solar electricity installation is on the up. But, as noted above, it’s not enough just to increase renewables. We also have to decrease fossils. It’s a bit like the land sparing debate in that respect!
I watched the short piece by Myles Allen that Simon linked. Allen has clearly reached the same conclusion as many of us here that cutting fossils to zero isn’t feasible. But I was surprised at how upbeat he was about CCS possibilities. Few other people I’ve read have been. I suspect the young engineers working for the energy companies he mentioned may be upbeat about the possibilities in the same way that the authors of the 100% renewables paper I mentioned are, and that their bosses may have a clearer view. Possible in theory isn’t the same as doable in practice.
CCS!!!!!!!!!
How much energy will be required to make the kit and run it? How many units will need to be made to do the job?
What’s wrong with trees? They are a proven technology and are capable of self-replication.
Turn wood into biochar and the carbon is captured.
https://www.activevista.com.au/product/the-biochar-solution-albert-bates/
The problem with using trees is that your growth rate of forests is fixed at 2.5% per year (I think — I may be misremembering.) As soon as you turn the trees into biochar, sure, that carbon is now captured — but that tree just stopped growing and won’t be contributing to any further carbon capture.
Maybe coppicing has better returns? I don’t know enough to say.
@Kathryn
https://youtu.be/zUiS4kFZRPA
It doesn’t need to be just trees.
Albert Bates is very upbeat about biochar’s potential
You said trees so I replied about trees!
I need to actually go to bed but will check out the video in due course.
@Kathryn
Fair point!
I should have said “trees….
but other biomass is available “. 🙂
I read that article by Ahmed and my first thought was “OK, if you’re going to need solar and wind capacity of 3 to 5 times the expected demand in order to have the fewest batteries, take your EROI and divide it by 5.”
My second thought was that there’s no point using the “extra” capacity for energy-intensuve manufacturing (like the way aluminium smelting is usually done near power stations) if you can’t reasonably economically transport the materials there and the finished product out.
The vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-household concept is kindof neat — charge up your car from the grid when it’s got lots of power, then when the grid has less to offer, either run your house off your car battery, or sell the energy back to the grid. But it’s not really sensible unless people are driving much less, and if people are driving much less, they probably don’t need cars, and bike batteries are much smaller and lighter.
I don’t think Ahmed really addressed the agriculture question. I suspect the only viable electric farming would actually need to be on a much smaller scale than financialised industrial monoculture fossil-fueled tractor stuff. I’m interested in how things like FarmBot might — if made simple enough -: fit into a small farm future. But I don’t think they’re there yet, and in the grimmer projections for the next few decades, I can’t see how they’ll get there. And that’s not looking at topsoil loss, the end of the Haber-Bosch process, or soil salinity issues.
I do like the general concept of a “phase shift” from fossil to renewable energy sources, but… all the previous times we’ve gone through such shifts (say, from not using fire to cooking our food, or from biomass to fossil fuels), our total energy use has also gone up. I may be misremembering stars but I think I recall that we burn more wood as fuel now than we did before we started using coal. And while those previous shifts were indeed wide-ranging and all-encompassing in their effects, my impression is that they were more incremental and less inventive than we like to think. Did the steam engine or telegraph change the face of the planet? Yes, absolutely. Are LED lights a game-changer? Sure, I wouldn’t light my bicycle with an incandescent now, it would just be silly. But these things weren’t made up out of nowhere, they were developed from experimenting with technology people already had lying around. I don’t know how much time we have left for the experiments we would need for a 100% transition to renewables, but I strongly suspect it isn’t enough, and as previously noted, I’m not sure there is the political will even to get to the best-case, replace-fossil-electrics-with-renewables scenario.
I’ve asked for a scythe for my birthday, despite not really having much suitable grass to use it on. If I do get one, maybe I’ll go to the adjacent rich borough and hire myself out as a low-carbon lawncare service: no noisy leafblowers or polluting lawnmowers, no nasty poisons, I’ll just come scythe your lawn and rake your leaves and take them away to be composted. And I’ll be sorted for Halloween costumes for the rest of my life!
Further re: phase shift: we also have the knowledge required, and most of the resources, to not only get rid of most cases of COVID, but also hugely reduce incidence of other airborne illness (‘flu, measles in areas with insufficient vaccination rates, RSV, probably others), but we…. haven’t done it. Instead we threw resources at vaccines that are only partly useful and have since decided to pretend COVID doesn’t exist, because actually doing the things necessary to reduce transmission is bad for the economy.
My neighbour had it for the first time a few months ago, having been told by his doctor that a face visor would keep him safe (that is not how aerosol transmission works), and he is still walking with a stick.
I suppose it isn’t the first time that public health ideas have been slow to catch on, though. I usually turn to cholera and putting the handle back on the Broad Street pump as an example, but I’m also reminded of how much doctors resisted the idea of washing their hands before assisting with childbirth or performing surgery. In both of those examples we got there in the end. I just don’t know that we have time, with energy, to get to “there” from here.
@Kathryn
“(like the way aluminium smelting is usually done near power stations) if you can’t reasonably economically transport the materials there and the finished product out.”
Yes. And mining the ore in the first place!
Sorry, I’m obviously pensive and talkative this evening…
I think the other thing that makes me think “we’re not going to be able to make that transition in time” is that I have spend the last decade or so seeing fewer resources available in many areas. I do believe many of the problems of the NHS at the moment are due to deliberate ideological decisions to under-fund it, but when I compare the care I got in, say, 2007 to my problems accessing similar care now, the difference is stark. I have watched friends in a whole variety of jobs experience the disappearance of anything like career progression; as a musician I saw this early, perhaps, noting in the mid-noughties that the people teaching me, a generation older than me, who a few decades ago would have been financially fairly comfortable, were still basically chasing the same gigs I was. I’ve seen it in my voluntary work, where the shrinking of the middle class and increase in precarity means we have fewer volunteers with stable income and housing who can devote time to keeping things running, and more people needing support. It’s sobering when someone dies of malnutrition (yes, that’s what was on the death certificate; and while that case was complex, it is perhaps more sobering that I wasn’t particularly surprised. Sad and angry, yes; but not surprised.)
It’s difficult, from where I am, to tell how much of this general decline in available real resources is due to an increase in the usual rent-seeking behaviour of the very rich. But… if the economy were actually growing, rather than just getting shifted into rent-friendly sectors like property, the rent-seeking wouldn’t be necessary to make money.
I’ve spoken before about collapse or disaster being unevenly distributed, and I am aware of my own privilege in having a roof over my head and a spouse with a decently-paid job so I can do various bits of voluntary work. But at this point, I don’t buy the idea that we are in any kind of temporary recession. I think the actually productive economy has been in decline since at least 2008, maybe longer (given that the 2008 crash was partly caused by a lending crisis in housing), and at this point what I see just looks like a permanent downward trajectory.
@Kathryn
There is a direct corallation between prosperity and growth.
Here in the UK the economy stopped growing in 2008.
So what you describe is no surprise with this in mind.
The slowdown in growth is due to energy constraints.
(I can’t find the graph at the moment)
@Kathryn.
Come to the Green Scythe Fair this weekend.
We could sit and talk about biochar over a pint of rough cider (an acquired taste!)
Thanks for the invitation John, but I can’t — Saturday is my allotment day, and Sunday I have voluntary responsibilities that I won’t be able to get out of at short notice. And then there’s the issue of transport!
Maybe next time.
I’ll let you know if it’s worth the journey!
Vehicle to grid is not going to be that useful.
A typical EV has a 40kWh battery, and there are about 40.7million cars in the UK.
If all were EVs, that gives a total if fully charged of about 1.6GWh.
Currently on the 9th June 23 at 1345BST we have an electricity demand of 24.1GW.
So all those vehicles would provide about 4 minutes.
In the harsh light of day, one further thought about the “100% renewables” camp: have they realised simultaneously that a) this is impossible and b) people are very, very bad at being told to change their lifestyles? Could they be arguing for 100% replacement as a sort of “aim high, land somewhere half-acceptable” measure? It certainly seems to me that if our goal is only to replace our electricity with renewables, we might not pull it off, and we might not find alternatives for some of the other things we use fossil fuels for. If we actually try to replace everything then we will definitely fail, but maybe someone will invent a solar-powered coffee roaster (or whatever) that’s actually economical to use. Maybe we’ll also preserve some of the existing power relationships in society; this isn’t necessarily something I believe would be good (rentiers having too much economic power is part of the problem, though not the whole problem), but it might be more stable. And there’s the whole thing where it’s hard for people to believe one thing if their livelihood depends on them believing another, I can’t remember who I’m misquoting here but the dude wasn’t wrong.
The flaw in this strategy is, well, b): permanent, intentional lifestyle change is hard for most people, and it won’t get any easier if people have been told they can keep on largely as normal. That, plus even people like me with a mostly intuitive grasp of thermodynamics and politics (rather than taking time to crunch the numbers) can see the implausibility.
Ahmed’s push back involves a bit of an attack on Nate Hagen’s credentials.
It’s a case of “playing the man, not the ball”.
These spats, I find a bit pointless.
Reality will prevail.
Monbiot can have his opinion. I don’t agree with it but I’m not too bothered about trying to get him to change his mind.
Perhaps he doesn’t like the idea of his comfortable “western” lifestyle coming to an end and is desperate to find solutions to maintain the status quo?
I go back to this.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
Read and draw your own conclusions.
“Perhaps he doesn’t like the idea of his comfortable “western” lifestyle coming to an end and is desperate to find solutions to maintain the status quo?”
No. Monbiot’s proposed solutions may be suspect, but his motivations are anything but. I’d definitely agree that he’s driven by desperation, but that desperation is fueled by his desire to preserve some sort of livable future for life on this planet.
@Ernie
I haven’t really got a problem with Monbiot’s motives. I just don’t think his solutions are realistic. He’s still hopeful/delusional that tech will save us.
I’ve been on that journey myself. I used to think that all we needed to do was build massive over capacity of renewables and use any surplus energy to create hydrogen. But then, after reading around, I realised that it’s just not viable.
Let’s be honest, who, in reality, really wants to live a Small Farm Future compared to their lives now?????
Long dark winter nights with candles to give a bit of light (if that)
Living within a very small geographical location most of the time.
Food insecurity and a restricted diet (no avocados!!!!)
Limited health/dental care.
No machines to do the “heavy lifting” and most of the work.
I’d rather go surfing!!!
But, there isn’t going to be the choice. 🙁
There are definitely avocado trees in London, though not very many (the varieties that do well here aren’t the ones that are usually imported for food). I think there’s someone growing some on an allotment somewhere around, too.
But yes — in general, a more restricted diet, especially for people who cannot grow their own.
This is an interesting extrapolation of the work that Tim Morgan is doing at Surplus Energy Economics
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/the-everything-bubble-the-end-of
Has the Supesedure State begun?
Chris asked for clarifications about the ‘data discrepancies around UK biomass consumption’. The main reason for the discrepancies is that the numbers he listed above are for *consumption* (in exajoules), while my numbers are for *generation*.
The units for the renewable electricity generation numbers I listed above were not specified in the UK GOV source document I linked (DUKES 2022 Chapter 6), but a related spreadsheet (DUKES 6.1) revealed the units are ktoe (kilotonnes of oil equivalent).
Another UK GOV spreadsheet (DUKES 6.2) gives the renewable electricity generation data in the more conventional units of TWh (terawatt hours).
Links to those UK GOV documents can be found at this page:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/renewable-sources-of-energy-chapter-6-digest-of-united-kingdom-energy-statistics-dukes
Below I list and compare the UK GOV data for renewable electricity generation (for 2021) with the corresponding BP report data. The numbers match up fairly well.
UK GOV data (TWh)
Wind 64.7
Solar 12.1
Other 39.9
( = Biogas 7.6 + Biomass 27.7 + Wave & Tidal 0.005 + Waste 4.6)
Subtotal Renewables 116.7
Hydro 5.5
Total Renewables 122.2
BP report data (TWh)
Wind 64.5
Solar 12.4
Other 40.0
Total Renewables 116.9
Hydro 5.0
Total Renewables + Hydro 121.9
Note that the BP report doesn’t include Hydro in their Renewables total.
Now, these numbers I’ve listed are the Generation (not Consumption) numbers. The biomass component of the renewable electricity *generation* is listed above as 27.7 TWh, but this represents only the resulting electricity output, not the energy *consumption* required to generate this electricity.
The BP report assumes the efficiency of electricity generation from biomass burning is 32%, which means that two-thirds of the energy content of the wood pellets is lost or wasted when burning them to generate electricity. The amount of energy consumed is thus 3 times the amount generated.
To calculate the energy consumption to generate that electricity, you’d need to divide the electricity output by 0.32 (which means to get 1 unit of energy output, 3 units of energy inputs are required).
(From page 54 of the BP report: ‘In this edition, we assume a constant efficiency of 32% for biomass power to better reflect the actual efficiency of biomass power plants.’)
[micro review:] just had a quick look at the Tom Murphy book mentioned in an earlier comment (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m). It looks excellent – esp. if you haven’t read the old David Mackay “…without the hot air” book.
@Martin
The David Mackay book does look similar.
The thing I like about the Tom Murphy book is that he doesn’t really give opinions. He just gives the maths and science and let’s the reader come up with their own conclusions.
… and he also gives a very good practical appendix with remedial maths. I remember doing ‘the sums’ for myself for the first time and how enlightening it can be.
It’s a course textbook which seems (on my short glance) to be of the best sort.
@Martin
It’s been a while since I read it and had forgotten about the maths questions at the end of each chapter.
Needless to say, I skipped those bits. 🙂
@Chris
On a blog technical query.
The “Notify me of followup comments via email” tick box never seems to work for me?
Is it a problem for anyone else?
John, the “Notify me of followup comments via email” option stopped working for me at least a year ago.
@Steve L.
Ah. OK. It’s not just me then.
Thanks for letting me know.
It has never once worked for me.
What concerns me is we could have a collapse far quicker than anyone accept a few engineers think .
Everyone will remember the bad TX winter of a few years ago , it was a near disaster , just 2 Mw from failure .
A ice storm shut in most of the wind turbines , the knock on was that gas coal and nuclear went full out , problem was that because of new environmental standards the gas pumps were converted from diesel engines to electric motors to drive them , ( diesel generators were hurriedly installed ) , the electricity nearly failed , the knock on would be even less gas for the generators , grid collapse and the wholesale close down of industry, , refineries would close plus the LNG plants that feed Europe .
2 Mw , it was that close to affecting millions of people !
@Diogenese10
A quick collapse is a possibility that has crossed my mind, but………….it’s probably not healthy to dwell on it too long.
It’s not like I can do anything fundamental to stop it anyway.
Quick responses to a few points:
Regarding technical glitches on this site, as I’ll relate in my next post I’m about to switch to a new platform for it. Once it’s online, please have a look around it and let me know about any problems or improvements you’d like to suggest. It should be easier to change and upgrade things once the new arrangement is in place.
Regarding renewable grid oversupply, obviously this gets to be more of a problem the more you’re relying on renewable electricity – I think Kathryn’s comments about the EROI are to the point here. Tiding over for a day or two is one thing, but the seasonal mismatch mentioned above is a big issue. I haven’t looked into it in terms of the 100% crowd, but on a domestic level my offgrid PV can pull several kilowatts on a sunny midsummer day, but barely 100W on a cloudy midwinter one, so we’d be talking about maybe a fiftyfold oversizing – not practical economically. There are ways around it, but maybe not completely convincing ones at scale.
Thanks Steve for the energy figure clarifications. I will study them when I get a chance!
Regarding the discussion about Monbiot, while I agree with Ernie that his motivations are in good faith, there’s a lot of dissing of other perspectives of the ‘bucolic idyll’ sort that suggest either ignorance of the field or bad faith on his part, and more importantly I think there is a strange consumerist framing to his analysis. He tends to assume a future world where an intact urban consumerism continues to drive society – a strange assumption IMO given the kind of crises he’s diagnosing.
Hope you enjoy yourself at the scythe fair, John. I’m tempted to go myself but … well, I have a lot of scything to do! Trying to get as much hay in as I can before this endless heat shrivels the grass. Strange weather we’re having – anyone would think the climate is changing…
I do like the scythe fair, though. It seems to bring out all these types who you think must have gone extinct but are still there waiting in the wings – horse loggers, traditional blacksmiths, green woodworkers and so on. Gives me slightly more hope for the future.
I think in electricity supply, as in vegetables, diversity is good. I don’t know what small-scale wind options are out there, but I am thinking about it, especially as we have about as much solar now as we practically can have without going completely off-grid (and likely also annoying the landlord).
If I come away from the Scythe Fair with both my feet still attached to the rest of my body, I’ll consider it a success!
It’s hard to hurt yourself with a scythe while you’re mowing. Whereas hurting somebody else is another matter. So chances are you’ll come away with two attached feet. The thing to watch out for is if you’re accompanied by a third, unattached one…
I’m doing the course with a friend and he very clumsy!!!
It seems that there is at least one significant discrepancy in the Nafeez Ahmed essay, unless I’m misunderstanding something. It seems that he first argues that we’d need 70% less primary energy generation capability with renewables as compared to fossil fuels, due to better conversion rates, etc.; but later on, he argues that we should get around the majority of battery storage by overbuilding generation capability by 3 to 5 times over. These two arguments cancel one another out; if we do the second, we are back to the original Michaux figures for generating capacity (or more), though not for the amount of batteries.
Does that seem relevant?
Though in any case, I do get a feeling that Michaux is overstating some of the difficulties as a sort of “worst-case scenario”. Nobody is really planning to build many week’s worth of lithium-ion battery storage, as far as I can tell. My non-expert guess would be that something between the Michaux position and the Ahmed position is the correct one.
Thanks for that Malcolm. I’ll take a closer look at his essay, I only skimmed it. Sounds plausible. My feeling is that the ‘overbuilding’ narrative is over optimistic, for several reasons. Interested in other views, of course.
Alternatives to tripe…
A diversion from the subject of this post, folks – but sort of related. After reading Monbiot’s latest work of fiction in the Guardian Weekly I just composed and sent the letter below. Will let you know when/if it gets printed.
———————————————————————
George Monbiot [2 June 2023] doesn’t want people to eat tripe. Fair enough. But it seems he’s happy for them to read it, and then can’t understand why so many people call it out. He even accuses his critics of having deficient deep-rooted metaphors. Ouch! Whereas someone who wants to perpetuate the model of industrial food production for the profit of a few (albeit using mythical non-polluting, energy-saving factories instead of land, and presumably sending the ultra-processed products around the world in hot air balloons instead of fossil-fuelled ships and planes), doesn’t have a deficient deep-rooted metaphor? So perhaps they lack a grasp of reality. Luckily, in the real world in which I live, there are lots of examples of non-industrial, non-polluting, Earth-friendly, nutritious and equitable food production and distribution systems already operating. They don’t look anything like Transylvania, and they never have and never will look like factories. Monbiot seems not to know that the world does not have a food quantity problem. What it has are food quality and sharing problems. More factories would make those problems worse, not better. I look forward to The Guardian publishing stories on current good food producing and sharing practices from around the world, to inspire others with what is possible today – and tomorrow.
P.S. Two New Zealand examples of current good food producing and sharing practices happening in a city now are Kaicycle – https://kaicycle.org.nz/ – and Common Unity – https://www.commonunityproject.org.nz/
The ARC2020 website has heaps of examples from the EU ( https://www.arc2020.eu/). Asian, African and N and S American examples are also legion…
Good point Malcolm, Ahmed had me scratching my head there.
Thinking about energy transition possibilities brought to mind a post of Gunnar’s others might enjoy, ‘The peasant and the washing machine’. It raises thought-provoking angles related to energy, work, global consumption, living within planetary boundaries, overshoot…
Heard the one about the gene-edited potato designed to reduce cooking time and thus save energy? I hadn’t either until listening to yesterday’s Farming Today. Yet another move from tech and food processors, purportedly to address global warming, improve health etc. A further report involved Rothamsted Research’s successful field trial of a gene-edited wheat that reduces, by around half, the amount of a potential carcinogen, the amino acid acrylamide, that I for one didn’t know humans had been eating for thousands of years. Interesting times.
Potatoes don’t even take that long! Argh.
I’ve been half-considering saving seed from my potato fruits this year; I understand they don’t breed true, though, and I’m growing a number of different varieties with different characteristics. I guess that just means I’d have reasonable genetic diversity in my seedstock, though — which is exactly what I would want, honestly, if I were in a position where I couldn’t buy tubers. (Saving them is a bad idea on an allotment site with nearly 200 plots, we get every pest and disease going, though I might try it with some of the blight-resistant ones.)
Might be of interest, Kathryn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SqQbHlg51o&ab_channel=LandraceGardening
(Growing potatoes from seed)
I’ve not yet tried sowing potatoes from seed but did collect seed from a crop last year. I’ve read that there’s a greater chance that potatoes will develop seeds in very warm years, and that they must be harvested green and allowed to ripen afterwards. The seeds within the fruit can be dried, then sown indoors like tomato seeds, pricked out, then planted out when they’re around 4-6 inches tall (May time). The harvest in the autumn will form the seed potatoes for the following year… Given the space, I’d like to try this with a bunch of varieties. It seems the most nutritious varieties are the deeply coloured ones, so I look forward to seeing my children’s faces when I dish up dirty blue mashed potatoes.
You will get a wild selection of potatoes, something like planting apple seeds. I forget the exact numbers but the UofM plants out 5000 potatoes from true seed, finds about 10 that are worth pursuing and end up with 3 that are truely worthwhile.
Other people are working on this too
https://modernfarmer.com/2023/01/true-potato-seed/
I’m fishing for a co-author for a handbook for folks searching for land … and for folks interested in getting involved in the politics of land access and use. You can learn more about my project here:
https://rword.substack.com/p/handbook-landbook-collaborator-wanted
Looks interesting! I’m in the UK so wouldn’t be much help.
Some people might be interested in what the ‘oligarchs’ envisage:
https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2023/June/PDF/plandemic-3-the-great-awakening-pdf.pdf
(Mercola has consistently been censored by TPTB)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb801wdRULM&ab_channel=NateHagens (Michaux knows what they’re planning but is trying to make people aware of the resource problems.)
As well as Surplus Energy Economics (run by an ex-oil and gas analyst) I think people ought to read Our Finite World (run by an ex-actuary). Tim Morgan has recently allowed topics to be discussed that he didn’t want before. Gail Tverberg always seems to have allowed near-total free speech, including COVID’ and ‘Ukraine’. It gets rather dark at times but better to face reality than remain oblivious to it.
When I read the Mercola piece I saw an interesting mix of observation and paranoia.
Communism is undefined but bad, a thought stopper (after JMG).
Stand for Freedom. Freedom from corporate control of your life ? Government control ? Freedom to ? Not defined either.
All scary stuff, and this guy has the TRUTH about what to do to be free. Nice. Sounds like he has a plan.
I found this talk by Mark Mills quite sobering…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Gi0vObVSo
Hi Chris, I spent a couple of hours last night reading your blog and was interested to see you’d come across some of the same energy researchers but have drawn different conclusions, in that I think there is a possibility for an abundant clean energy and farm-full future, as I type this on solar powered satellite internet from a ‘tiny-barn’ I’ve built on a few acres of abandoned pasture (future tiny farm) half way up a mountain in the Catskills, NY.
I recommend this paper Nafeez Ahmed wrote for the Club of Rome, with EROI as the comparative benchmark, https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ahmed/ and the collegial conversation he recently had with Michaux on the Planet Critical pod, following his critique. Their key point of difference is Michaux ran a 1:1 replacement of global ICE fleet with EV’s, and Ahmed says this simply will not be necessary, that an abundance of clean energy will release cascading possibilities through society’s key sectors. How do we get abundance? By overbuilding capacity. Is that possible? Technically and ecologically, absolutely, that’s what Ahmed’s paper is about, but the politics is pretty tricky, as this article on building out solar in Nevada illustrates, and why we simply cannot leave this to investors. https://harpers.org/archive/2023/01/boomtown-beatty-nevada-solar-farms-death-valley/
I’d very much like to hear Hagens and Ahmed in conversation, they would disagree on costs and intermittency, Ahmed’s paper has aggregated a number of studies that prove a global transition 24/7 year round clean energy is much cheaper than b-u-a. He simply sees the technology and market forces that have made solar cheap will out compete fossil fuels. However, it won’t just happen, we will need to stop oil starting with cutting all subsidies. His data entirely contradicts Hagen’s, and convincingly argues the fossil fuel EROI is miscalculated and over valued, I’ve no idea how Hagen think’s 100% clean energy would lead to an EROI of 3, Ahmed would argue the possibility is more like 30! Even conservatively, significantly more than the current system.
Similarly, I follow Hoekstra, (although I don’t follow his EROI argument) and was curious about the dispute because its was so stark, Michaux thinks a 100% clean energy system needs a month plus buffer, clean energy academia thinks we need around 12 hours. They’re peer-reviewed, Michaux is not. Well “peer-review” people will cry, and ok, not without its issues and there’s a hint of academia not wanting to engage with Michaux until he’s passed muster, in their eyes, while he thinks commercial interests are putting a thumb on the academic scale. Hoekstra did say that they’ve asked Michaux a bunch of questions which he hasn’t responded to, and when Michaux says “I’m happy to be proved wrong” their response is “we have”.
As for the geopoltics, who knows, I think there’s going to be money and markets and its seems feasible to me that the US could do it alone simply through the forces of finance capital. Hanging on to the tail of that particular dragon will be challenging, bear in mind the rural America, i.e. most of it, was originally electrified by local electricity coops this knowledge is in the collective unconscious, this transition doesn’t have to mean yet more oligopoly.
Thanks for that Rupert. I’m short of time for this right now, but I’ll be interested to come back to it when I can and read the material you mention. I’m unconvinced as it stands by the paper Hoekstra co-authored, but let me see. If humanity does succeed in creating a clean energy-abundant future, then I think we can kiss goodbye to the prospect of a small farm future, and most of the world’s remaining wildlife too.
I haven’t read the Hoekstra paper, that said, he’s one of nearly 1000 papers modeling 100% RE systems. I’m really not seeing the correlation btwn clean energy and extinction, how do you get there?
Basically because if the climate change/existing energy limit is removed without other changes to the expansionary & commodifying economy then I see the human footprint or resource take enlarging commensurately. Although it’s possible that ‘without other changes’ is unlikely.
My sense is that there are a lot of papers *modeling* 100% RE – albeit mostly only for rich countries – but at this stage we need to be a lot further down the road than modeling it. I’d prefer to be seeing models of 100% RE at, say, 50% or less of existing global energy use, with a more equitable global distribution. But perhaps I should reserve my scepticism. Genuinely interested to look into this a bit more and hope to do so soon.
The Nafeez Ahmed Simon Michaux pod is worth a listen. If the amount of solar required to match current global energy demand is equal to the surface area of Nye County, NV. (according to the Harper’s article) then it seems reasonable to think there could be a surplus of energy if we chose to build it, in a socially and ecologically just way, and globally, which is Ahmed’s point. Michaux accepts the resources are there but doesn’t think the mining industry can deliver in time. Then of course there is the politics of building the hi volt grids.
As Tim Jackson has said even if you sort out energy there’s still material throughput, not untrue, but the ecological left doesn’t appear to consider the processes and systems of manufacturing would completely change, with an abundance of zero marginal cost clean energy the circular economy could be a reality, starting with recycling the fossil fuel infrastructure. I’ve no idea how generating less of anything and expecting more equitable distribution would work, or why less is even necessary. I’ve been struck how *one* paper by Hickel/Kallis on the impossibility of green growth gets reeled off by everyone, when Rockstrom himself has co-authored a paper on equitable green growth within resource boundaries. Jackson, Kallis’s etc research made sense a decade ago, but I think there’s evidence now to show decoupling is possible, while also acknowledging we haven’t seen any decoupling of significance, and seeing corporate sustainability-as-usual current claims for what they are.
“I’ve been struck how *one* paper by Hickel/Kallis on the impossibility of green growth gets reeled off by everyone, when Rockstrom himself has co-authored a paper on equitable green growth within resource boundaries.”
Timothée Parrique, in many places, has indicated that many papers, not just one, reveal green growth / absolute decoupling as a wishful thinking fantasy without any evidence to support it.
https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/timothee-parrique/
Rupert:
” …. Their key point of difference is Michaux ran a 1:1 replacement of global ICE fleet with EV’s, and Ahmed says this simply will not be necessary, that an abundance of clean energy will release cascading possibilities through society’s key sectors. How do we get abundance? By overbuilding capacity. Is that possible? Technically and ecologically, absolutely,….”
I think you’re going to have to explain why Richard Heinberg’s “pulse” of GHG emissions doesn’t happen with a massive increase in ‘renewable’ energy production — e.g., mining, smelting, manufacturing, distribution, installation, etc. This includes wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and etc.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-05/the-heinberg-pulse/
Also, the increase in levels of mining for this “energy transition” will obviously have a lot of harmful effects on ecosystems of all kinds. What about that?
Yes, I have read some of TP’s blog and watched his pres at the beyond growth conference, as I understand it, decoupling to date has been anemic, which it will be until we stop burning fossil fuels, I don’t understand why degrowthers don’t factor in decoupling with a clean energy system.
The mining associated with building clean energy is a fraction of the current fossil fuel carbon and ecological footprint, see Hannah Ritchie, Nafeez Ahmed, Rethinkx or Auke Hoekstra for evidence. Yes, it will require a lot of fossil fuels to build it, but then it’s done, bar maintenance, for ~50 yrs, when it will have to be done again. Nafeez Ahmed has run the numbers on this, published by The Club of Rome, https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-ahmed/
“The mining associated with building clean energy is a fraction of the current fossil fuel carbon and ecological footprint….”
First of all, you really need to stop calling renewable energy production systems “clean”. Whether they are cleaner than oil, coal and gas systems we can discuss. But to call them “clean” is just not accurate.
Then we have to examine not only the mining for the minerals, metals, etc., but also the manufacturing, distribution, installation, etc. — and even then, it will not do to simply to compare energy costs (both financial and ecological), but the total relative harmful impacts. And these have to be explored in relation to “carbon budget” considerations, among other things. Can we actually afford — economically and ecologically — to build all of this so-called ‘renewable” (‘clean’) energy infrastructure, all of those electric cars…? I’d say that we cannot, as already the climate system has destabilized very significantly, and what we must do in response to our situation is NOT to have a “Heinberg Pulse” — or a pulse of increased greenhouse gases over the next decade or two. This is the time for shrinking our GHG emissions, not pulsing them.
Ok, renewable energy is cleaner than fossil fuel energy because it harvests sunlight or wind, does not emit ghg to produce electricity, and we only have to dig stuff up to build it. The empirical evidence I cited from energy researchers compares the footprint of both systems so take it up with them. All of the research I’ve read is full LCA analysis. Can we afford it? Well, there’s the old Keynes line, ‘we can afford whatever we can do’, then there’s the consideration that once built its near zero marginal cost, then if you bother to read the stuff I cited you see systems analysts look at how 100% clean renewable energy will transform foundational sectors of the economy, for example, we don’t need to replace 1 for 1 ICE vehicles with EV’s.
Yes, we do need to reduce GHG urgently, HotorCool’s “1.5 degree lifestyles” report is a good analysis of what and how, by geography and economy; it’s not possible without electrification.
Thanks Rupert & James for renewing this discussion. I hope to come back to this on the blog within the next month or two