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Posted on February 11, 2024 | 184 Comments
When people look back nowadays to medieval philosophy, they often dismiss it with the derisive remark that it was concerned with debating “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. The sense is of an era whose thinkers engaged in sterile intellectual gymnastics founded on flawed premises. It’s an unfair characterization, which reveals more about the modern people who say it than the medieval objects of their contempt. Still, sometimes I wonder if there are aspects of our contemporary intellectual chitchat that might invoke angels-on-a-pin type dismissals from people in the future.
One candidate could be the notion that our civilization is on the brink of an energy transition from polluting fossil energy to clean renewable energy that will save it from the depredations of climate change, energy descent and other gathering crises. This is relevant to my present blog cycle concerning food synthesized industrially from microbes, because it’s clear that this technology will only be feasible long-term at scale with cheap and clean renewable energy at levels probably an order of magnitude, maybe even more, above existing global energy consumption. The main pushback of substance I’ve had to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is that this era of clean energy abundance indeed is upon us, making manufactured food feasible and confining my arguments for agrarian localism and a small farm future to the dustbin of history.
I doubt that, and in this post I’ll try to elucidate some of those doubts.
To frame the question in wider terms first, there have of course been civilizations before modern times that ultimately fell. It might be wise to learn some lessons from them, and not imagine that our present one is impervious. Our existing global, modern civilization got going around the 15th century, built initially upon intercontinental trade connections, sailboats, slavery, colonial conquest and plantation agriculture. I’ll call this ModCiv 1.0. We’re now living in a successor global modern civilization to ModCiv 1.0 built on fossil fuels, which I’ll call ModCiv 1.1.
The idea of an impending energy transition is that we can now ditch the fossil fuels imperilling our world through climate change and create another successor global modern civilization that looks a lot like ModCiv 1.1, but built on renewable, low-carbon energy – ModCiv 1.2.
Quite simply, I don’t think this is possible. The best hope (and I fear it’s a slender one) is to build a different kind of civilization, a solar civilization, which I’d hope would certainly use renewable forms of electricity generation to tap the sun’s energy, but would be unable to furnish primary energy at the fossil-assisted levels achieved by ModCiv 1.1, and would tap energy mostly via plants. I’ll call this SolarCiv 1.0.
SolarCiv 1.0 would have less energy freely available than we’re accustomed to in our present ModCiv 1.1, at least in the rich parts of it. Therefore, it would be fundamentally an agrarian civilization where production of key energy, soil fertility, food and other material necessities would be locally oriented. In my books A Small Farm Future and Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I’ve tried to start imagining what SolarCiv 1.0 might look like and what kind of problems it would face.
Originally, I’d planned to write a thoroughly researched and quantified analysis of renewable energy futures to substantiate my doubts about the feasibility of ModCiv 1.2. But life is short, and I think my time is better spent addressing myself to the more realistic scenarios of SolarCiv 1.0 than getting trapped into debating ModCiv 1.2 talking points. I’ve spent a lot of time substantiating the energetic implausibility of microbial food quantitatively, only to find people airily ignoring my analysis in favour of vague optimism about ModCiv 1.2 or even personal attacks on me. Maybe this is a clue that the debate isn’t really about numbers and material realities at all, but deeper beliefs about how we wish things to turn out – a question of eschatology more than evidence … or a question of angels and pins.
Anyway, I do provide some quantification in what follows, but I’ve decided to frame this post more in the form of a request. If the renewables proponents for ModCiv 1.2 (or RPs, as I shall call them – an acronym I recall from my rock-climbing days: a handy bit of tech to have in a sticky situation, but not something you’d really want to bet your life on) are sure we’re on the cusp of ModCiv 1.2, presumably they have some solid numbers to back this up, and in this post I’ll be asking to see those numbers and/or other evidence across various dimensions of the issue, not all of which are discussed as much as I believe they should be.
So let’s get started. Figure 1 shows global primary energy consumption (in exajoules) since 1965 by energy type. To move from ModCiv 1.1 to ModCiv 1.2 the thick blue wodge of fossil energy needs to dwindle pretty much to zero in a matter of decades, while the thin slivers of other colours – principally, for various reasons, the yellow solar sliver – needs to expand and more or less take its place.
(Note: the underlying source for these figures and all others in this post is the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review).
As Figure 1 shows, this isn’t happening. People talk about ‘the energy transition’, but as yet it’s a future hope, not a present reality. There are some complications to this that I’ll come to in a moment. But it’s worth just pausing to look at the shape of the graph and contemplate the enormity of what needs to happen.
Since I got interested in this issue about a quarter of a century ago I’ve been watching the global fossil energy consumption climb year on year as shown in Figure 1 (barring the Covid and financial shocks), with people proclaiming all the while that the transition out of fossils and into renewables is eminently feasible and just around the corner. Which leads to my first question:
Q1: Giving reasons, state when you think a global transition out of fossil fuels will begin, and when will it end (transition completed)?
It’s worth noting incidentally that various papers proposing the feasibility of a transition to a completely renewable energy system (like this one and this one) seem to operate with a completion date of around 2100, which might be too late in view of climate and other dynamics. My punt is that at some point in the next few years we’ll probably see fossils plateauing or dropping a little, while the low carbon sources increase, and there will be a lot of cheerleading about the arrival of the energy transition. However, the arrival is less important than the departure of the fossils – if they don’t disappear, fast, year on year, we have a problem.
I said earlier that renewables need to expand to take the place of fossils ‘more or less’. ‘More or less’ because – as RPs like to point out – there’s a lot of waste heat with solid fuels that can be avoided with electrical alternatives (petrol engines vs electric engines, for example). Therefore, a solar civilization may not need to consume as much total energy to do the same work as a fossil-fuelled civilization.
But the problem with electricity is that you can’t store it (except through tricky subterfuges like turning it into chemical energy in batteries or in hydrogen or methanol, which come with their own costs, including energetic ones). Plus, renewable electricity availability fluctuates in the short and long term with the vagaries of wind and sun, meaning that you need to build a lot of energetically-inefficient storage or extra generating capacity which in good times is unnecessary, with energy wasted (‘curtailed’ in the jargon) – probably a bit of both.
Another issue is that while electricity is more efficient than fossils for some uses, for others it can be less efficient – particularly where the fossils act as chemical feedstocks as well as sources of energy. These uses are non-trivial in terms of the global economy, including things like manufacturing metal alloys, cement, plastics, fertilizer and other agrochemicals. And all this is before we’ve even begun to consider the extra electricity that would be required to produce manufactured food, which I calculated in Saying NO… could amount conservatively to about ten times the existing supply of solar electricity just to meet global protein needs, if that’s a route ModCiv1.2 wishes to pursue.
Yet another issue, albeit straying here from energy basics into geopolitics, is the impetus in poor countries with relatively low energy usages to increase their energy use as a means to improve social wellbeing. Not only does this seem ethically right, but if it’s thwarted there’s a good chance it’ll lead to global political instabilities that could challenge the basis of ModCiv 1.1 and its chances of a smooth transition to ModCiv 1.2.
Therefore, if the aim is to preserve a high-energy global civilization of the present kind, but with more evenly distributed energy use (thereby securing political stability), then total global energy use will probably need to be much higher than today’s, where regions like East Africa (primary energy consumption: 4.9 GJ per capita) sit alongside regions like North America (primary energy consumption: 235.6 GJ per capita).
So, putting all this together leads to Question 2:
Q2: In view of the relative electrical efficiencies and inefficiencies involved in a renewables based ModCiv 1.2, and also considering the increased energy demands of poor countries, what do you project as a viable global annual energy consumption in ModCiv 1.2 compared to the present global figure of 604 EJ?
Since I just mentioned geopolitics, let’s consider that some more.
Table 1 lists the world’s ten biggest energy-consuming countries. I also give their proportionate reliance on fossil energy consumption, and their fossil energy production rankings. Between them, these ten countries account for 66% of global energy consumption (the top five account for 56%). To put that another way, the future of global decarbonization pretty much rests in the hands of five governments.
| Total primary energy consumption (EJ) | Fossil fuel consumption as % of all energy use | Oil production (country rank) | Gas production (country rank) | Coal production (country rank) | Solar generation growth rate per annum 2012-22 (%) | |
| China |
159.4 |
82 | 6 | 4 | 1 |
61 |
| USA |
95.9 |
81 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
37 |
| India |
34.5 |
88 | 22 | 23 | 2 |
46 |
| Russian Federation |
28.9 |
86 | 3 | 2 | 6 |
89 |
| Japan |
17.8 |
85 | – | – | 32 |
30 |
| Canada |
14.1 |
64 | 4 | 5 | 12 |
21 |
| Brazil |
13.4 |
50 | 9 | 30 | 25 |
167 |
| South Korea |
12.7 |
83 | – | 33 |
37 |
|
| Germany |
12.3 |
76 | – | 44 | 11 |
9 |
| Iran |
12.2 |
99 | 8 | 3 | – |
100 |
I could write a lot of words about Table 1, but I’d like to hear what other people – particularly RPs – have to say about it. Trying to keep it quantitative, my question is this:
Q3: Given the global balance of political, economic and military power between the largest energy-consuming and energy-producing countries, what are your estimated odds for all of them transitioning to low-carbon energy sources within the next three decades?
No doubt there are different ways of interpreting the fact that most of these countries have increased their production of solar electricity disproportionately compared to the global annual average from 2012-22 of 29%, while the top five in particular have also generally increased their consumption of fossils. One reason could be that these countries are more interested in increasing their energy resilience than any great enthusiasm for transitioning out of fossil fuels as such. Maybe some of the positions taken at the recent COP28 meeting are consistent with this? In 2022, the world increased its solar generation by 29%, but 38% of that global increase occurred in China alone, a country uniquely placed to achieve it and which has some obvious reasons for trying to achieve it that aren’t especially consistent with ModCiv 1.2 goals.
It seems likely to me that there will be some hard geopolitics in the coming years around access to critical resources, energy chief among them. Smaller players in this global scene – like my home country, the UK – will likely be scrabbling for allies, and also for whatever local energy sources they can get their hands on, including any local fossil reserves. So, non-quantitatively –
Q4: What are the grounds for thinking that many countries will not open or re-open local fossil fuel resources in the context of future energy geopolitics?
Almost finally on this topic, a transition to renewables would involve a shift from the geopolitics of fossil energy location to the location of other critical minerals like lithium and copper, which are also unevenly distributed across the world.
Q5: Are there likely to be high costs or supply chain disruptions arising from monopolies in the supply of critical minerals for renewable energy?
Finally finally on this topic, one pushback I’ve had from RPs is that if we fail to transition to ModCiv 1.2 this won’t be because it’s technically unfeasible, but will only be because of political factors. To me, this is suggestive of the techno-determinism our thinking has become mired in. By the same token, Napoleon failed to become world emperor ‘only’ because of political factors. When it comes to the fate of human societies, political factors are the ‘only’ thing there is, pretty much.
Talking of critical minerals as I was, let’s move straight to Q6 –
Q6: What will be the average annual financial and energetic cost in the long-term of furnishing the minerals necessary to transition to ModCiv 1.2 at the level specified in Q2 through mining and extraction of new material and through recycling existing material?
Just to expand on the question briefly, I see a lot of graphics online like this one purporting to show that the mineral requirements for renewables are much less than for fossil fuels, the implication apparently being that minerals are not a limiting factor to a renewable transition.
But that graphic is meaningless. For a start, it doesn’t indicate the absolute quantity of minerals that are available. Nor, assuming that enough minerals are available to support ModCiv 1.2, does it indicate the costs of extraction, smelting and processing them into the final products. A proper answer to Q6 is needed.
Given that ModCiv 1.2 will probably involve an increase in electricity consumption (subject to the answer to Q2) from its current level of 105 EJ to something equivalent or more likely considerably in excess of the current total global energy consumption of 604 EJ, this implies the need to build higher capacity electricity grids. And also probably to extend them into rural areas where the inhabitants previously relied on solid fuels. Either that, or amplify energy inequalities between grid-connected folks and rural off-grid people, which could be interesting politically. Anyway, bigger grids mean higher grid costs in terms of money, energy and materials, albeit offset against lower costs for fossil energy distribution.
The International Energy Agency says: “To achieve countries’ national energy and climate goals …. means adding or refurbishing a total of over 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid …. At least 3 000 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power projects, of which 1 500 GW are in advanced stages, are waiting in grid connection queues – equivalent to five times the amount of solar PV and wind capacity added in 2022. This shows grids are becoming a bottleneck for transitions to net zero emissions.”
Q7: What would be the net costs (financial, energetic and material) of increased grid capacity and penetration, and of overcoming existing grid bottlenecks?
Q8: What would be the social and/or political implications of the geography of grid penetration?
I’d now like to take a closer look at the issue of cost. It’s arisen in several of the questions, and it’s also a favoured talking point of RPs along the lines that the cost of installing renewable generating capacity has plummeted, supposedly making ModCiv 1.2 now economically feasible in a way it previously wasn’t.
It could be unwise to assume that the cost of renewables will continue to fall. Yes, that’s been the case with technical innovations and with increasing supply as the proportion of solar electricity in the energy mix has climbed from a lowly 0.7% back in 2011 to fully 2.5% today. But material, technical and supply limits may kick in as that proportion makes the precipitous rise that will be required over the next few decades if we’re to achieve ModCiv 1.2.
One study estimates that most of the costs of a renewable transition will apply at the higher levels of renewable substitution – 70% of them occur in moving from 60 to 100% renewables. There are also costs involved in the recurrent decommissioning and replacement of old capacity which haven’t yet been fully figured into the relatively young industry. It seems that the rate of decline in the cost of new solar capacity is already beginning to slow and level out, while photovoltaic panel costs are increasing due to the rising price of polysilicon in China. Could these be straws in the wind for longer-term trends?
Q9: Giving reasons, estimate the cost trend for installing new renewable capacity worldwide if the global energy economy greatly increases solar electric capacity over the next few decades.
But what kind of cost? The cost of energy facilities is typically given in the form of a levelized cost, which is basically a version of what economists call ‘marginal costs’. In other words, they address the question of how much it would cost to install another kilowatt or megawatt of renewable generating capacity within the present energy economy. But that’s not the question before us in building ModCiv 1.2. The real question is what is the total cost of building it, or maybe what is the average annual cost of building it over the next few decades that remain available to us to build it.
I’ve already hinted in the previous discussion at many of the considerations that will have to go into that total cost figure. In summary, the total cost of a renewables transition will involve the cost of:
Figures for the levelized or marginal cost of installing new renewable generating capacity really don’t convey much useful information about this task, whereas figures for the total cost do. So:
Q10: Estimate the total cost of creating a mostly renewables based ModCiv 1.2 within a realistic timeframe encompassing all those cost pushes, and any other relevant ones.
A final point. However low the cost of renewable generation is, it’s unlikely ever to approach the cost of plain sunlight, which is zero. This establishes a cost hurdle that I doubt manufactured microbial food will ever surmount in any version of civilization, whether ModCiv 1.1, ModCiv 1.2 or SolarCiv 1.0.
I haven’t seen many convincing efforts to answer Q10 in the energy literature. To be fair, it’s not an easy calculation to make, but it’s hard to take the RP case for ModCiv 1.2 very seriously until somebody has a decent go at it that charts a plausible course from here to there.
One person who’s had a go at it and concluded that there isn’t a plausible course is Simon Michaux, who I cited in my book. Some aspects of his analysis have been questioned, which is fair enough – people make mistakes, and there are almost always grounds for questioning aspects of every analysis. But some of the pushback he’s received – and I’ve received for citing him – strikes me as questionable in itself. Not so much a case of critiquing and refining the analysis as dismissing it so as to duck the awkward reality of Q10.
One of the criticisms of Michaux is that his analysis isn’t peer-reviewed. Now, I’m all in favour of peer review. I’ve both published and refereed peer-reviewed articles myself and I’ve sat on editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals. There’s a lot to be said for communities of scholars holding themselves to account in this way, and a peer-reviewed article does offer some basic level of quality assurance – a bit like buying an organically-certified product in a supermarket.
But the process isn’t magic. The fact that various scholars have opined in peer-reviewed articles that ModCiv 1.2 is possible doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. We have at most a few decades to implement it, in reality and on the ground, with a hell of a lot of photovoltaic panels, copper wiring and heavy industrial infrastructure that needs to be going in right now. After that, the possibility will most likely be out of our hands due to climate change and intractable geopolitics. And we haven’t even started down the road yet. At present, we only seem to be talking about it. I hear lots of talk along the lines that ‘the literature’ says ModCiv 1.2 is possible. But when you consult the literature, you read a lot of this kind of thing:
“All in all, there appears to be reason for moderate optimism that material criticalities will not represent an unsurmountable roadblock towards the transition to 100% RE systems. However, it is also clear that it will be a formidable challenge to ensure the timely availability of resources while simultaneously minimizing the negative impacts of extraction on humans and the environment. This needs to be a focus of upcoming research.”
I don’t particularly mean to criticise this paper but, at this late stage in the game of ModCiv 1.1, if where we’re at is only ‘moderate optimism’ in a whip round of opinion among experts who think formidable challenges are possibly surmountable but there’s a need for more research, then it’s surely plausible to think there are grounds for moderate pessimism about the prospects for ModCiv 1.2 and a need to switch focus to bringing SolarCiv 1.0 into being.
Are we merely imagining our way to the salvation of ModCiv 1.2 through a thicket of peer-reviewed opinion about the theoretical promise of solar electricity? If so, that brings us to:
Q11: How many PV panels can dance on the head of a pin?
Michael Boxwell Solar Electricity Handbook (…appropriately/inappropriately enough)
Jennifer Grayson A Call To Farms
Manda Scott Any Human Power
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I am also, on the whole, not confident that hyper-abundant renewable energy is Right Around The Corner. At best, I would say if I wanted to get there I wouldn’t start from here.
Your SolarCiv 1.0 reminds me of solarpunk fiction, which usually has a lot of overlap with cli-fi. If you want an easy utopian read then Becky Chambers’s monk and robot series is pleasant, if somewhat glossing over various details of how the tech would actually work.
As I do not consider myself an RP I am going to take the liberty of not answering any of your questions; I will be here with the popcorn, watching others make the attempt. I believe we are headed for a lower-energy, higher-labour civilisation whether we like it or not, and the question is really whether we can get there in time to preserve some of our more helpful modcons (I will sure miss this blog if the internet fails). So I think the most pertinent of your questions is whether (and how) renewable energy tech can be used for building more renewable energy tech. Even if the supposed efficiency of this is far lower than using fossil energy to do the same thing, if we can get there before falling off the fossil cliff it means that eventually it will become feasible to have solar panels or windmills or whatever that are made with renewable energy from solar panels or windmills or whatever, because at some point that will become cheaper than using fossil energy to do it. That in turn means we can much more easily create or maintain some kind of higher-technology (but still lower-energy) civilisation: one drastically different from ModCiv 1.2, and probably a lot more like solarpunk. (I use the term windmills here rather turbines because one of the more popular uses of windmills was as actual mills — they didn’t require fossil fuels to build in the high mediaeval period and don’t require it today, though if we’ve made the climate too unstable for grain agriculture we might want to use them for something other than grinding grain.) I think in such a civilisation many things we take for granted now will be unavailable, much labour we currently rely on fossil energy for will be done by humans and animals, and many more things will still exist but be considerably more expensive. And that has potential to be a good change in some areas: throwaway culture is pretty horrific, after all.
I don’t think of the solar energy going into food I grow as free, exactly; it comes bundled as part of the usufruct rights I pay for in my allotment rent, along with the rainfall and the soil. It is, of course, much closer to “free” than any other form of energy, especially on a societal level. But access to sunlight is limited by access to land and this means we also need to consider the opportunity costs of using land for growing energy from food Vs growing energy from fuel Vs generating energy from panels or wind turbines or whatever. Context is important here, of course: I have solar panels on my roof and grow squash at the allotment, not the other way around. But it reminds me of conversations about how much additional land is required for a horse Vs oxen Vs a woodlot, or indeed bioethanol from corn. I do feel like such conversations can become too reductive too quickly: it’s hard to quantify the value of a woodlot with a stream strictly in energy terms when it can also provide, say, fungi with medicinal value, protein and clothing from game and maybe fish, and important habitat for wildlife which maintain watershed resilience over a larger area than a single smallholding could encompass.
Apologies for not answering your questions. I suppose I enjoy thinking about the possibilities afforded by SolarCiv 1.0 rather more than the barriers to achieving ModCiv 1.2.
I situate the debate of how many angels fit on the head of pin to religious scholars in the fall of the holy roman empire, which tracks nicely.
If Michaux got some numbers wrong what’s more important is that he made the attempt, and doing so gave us a view of the process. Like Chris outlines in Saying No, the global supply chain itself is the problem. The mass production of renewables will create the same but different industrial pollution and political upheaval and corporate corruption – it already is.
Mod Civ 1.2 is the mordor economy. Great post, thank you.
The paper quoted by Chris (“there appears to be reason for moderate optimism”) was co-authored by 23 proponents for a renewable transition (from universities in Europe, North America, and Australia), and their abstract includes this:
“Research on 100% renewable energy systems is a relatively recent phenomenon… The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost.”
Those faith-based studies concluding that “100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost” remind me of this cartoon:
Someone is at a blackboard doing a derivation or proof, and among the mathematical notations is the step “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS”. An onlooker points at that step and says, “I think you should be more explicit here”.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Then-a-Miracle-Occurs-Copyrighted-artwork-by-Sydney-Harris-Inc-All-materials-used-with_fig2_302632920
Chris Smaje, with this essay’s ten questions to the renewables proponents, is that onlooker saying “I think you should be more explicit here”.
Later in that paper is this paragraph which seems very telling, on several levels:
“The second half of this century will also be very important for scaling the energy-industry-CDR system toward a truly sustainable system [144], [212], since about 10 billion people will expect standards of living comparable with the most developed countries as of today. This will trigger a formidable additional energy demand that may lead to a doubling of TPED at the end of the century compared to mid-century [402], leading to about 170 TW PV demand as the dominating source of energy as indicated by Goldschmidt et al. [403] and Breyer et al. [212]. The consequences of an “energy for all” strategy on the required energy resources, land-use and material demand for a 100% RE system for a truly sustainable civilization are still poorly understood and not yet discussed.”
On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research
Breyer et al., 2022
A final question you didn’t ask is, how does replacing fossil fuels with electricity help the natural world? Does it? No, it will likely destroy what little remains. We’ve already poisoned the entire planet, dammed most rivers, paved over countless wetlands, destroyed a great deal of the old growth forest, and initiated the sixth mass extinction. Attempting to maintain this ecocidal way of life powered by so-called “renewables” will only exacerbate the problem.
Which leads me to ecological overshoot. It is astonishing to me how many people are simply ignoring it. Why? I’ve tried to get people to talk about it over and over again and …. crickets.
Finally, I recommend this paper by Rees and Seibert, to go along with Michaux: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508, “Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition”.
Thank you Chris!
Ah, the Sidney Harris cartoon- brilliant. As is the title of this piece.
I very much agreed with the guy who suggested in the comments to your last article that you should read James Howard Kunstler. “The Long Emergency” is around 20 years old now and some things have changed but basically it’s hard to imagine that his arguments don’t still stand. Especially when he discusses the energy-dense nature of oil and the far lower and energy-dispersed nature of renewables. We are long past peak oil though its effects were covered up by fracking which is now more than ever on life support. Plus I was more than happy to hear in the last comments that Iberdrola is apparently also on life support: I particularly loathe wind energy because of “the bird thing” as people dismissively call it.
I live in Alaska and I can tell you that the oil industry here is also on government life support, literally. Our governor pushed through a bunch of oil leases a few years ago up on the North Slope and no “real” oil company would even bid on them even with his insanely liberal conditions: he had
to get our state development fund to bid on a couple at our expense, and then even they didn’t
develop the parcels. Of course, this is all quite scary overall. As you point out, there isn’t anything about renewables that doesnt depend on oil, and nothing about our food supply either if you aren’t already a small farmer with his own land. And with the fossil fuel age running down faster than we can do anything about it.
The burning question is can we afford the transition , Germany has been in a ” technical. “( meaning gov fiddled the figures to make it look better ) recession for nine months , companies and corporations are either closing or moving to where energy is cheaper ,
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240210/industrial-megapower-germany-on-edge-of-ruin-thanks-to-energy-war-against-russia-1116714501.html
Europe’s industrial power is leaving , taking with it the taxes and jobs government needs to fund renewables .
Western governments are heading down two dead end roads at the same time !
I’m still reading this article … while also bouncing around doing other things. It’s excellent.
I’m just here to mention that journalist Andrew Nikiforuk has penned some excellent articles on the theme of this article.
I Warned Against the Green Energy ‘Boom.’ It Sparked Debate
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/10/Warning-Against-Green-Energy-Boom-Sparks-Debate/
I’d like to gather together some folks to collaborate on making a website which brings together all of the best and most useful resources on the dubiousness of “energy transition” of the sort which would ostensibly enable growth-oriented industrial civilization to continue without fossil fuels.
These resources would be articles and essays of the sort Chris posted here… and also a compilation of the most useful data relevant to the topic.
Anyone want to help?
Good post and I look forward to reading some real answers.
In the meantime I’ll strike question 11 off the list as clearly the answer is 12 monocrystalline PV panels, as seen here (made in China):
https://www.pvsunflower.com/
In this article there is no mention of the problems that we face from the escalating ecosystems collapse. There is no suggestion that we need to shrink the global economy to return our collective ecological footprint within the available biocapacity of Earth.
Humanity is consuming 1.75 Earths, the carrying capacity is about 0.5 Earths. Therefore we need to shrink the global economy by about 70% to get back within carrying capacity. 100*(1.75-0.5)/1.75
My science paper addresses the necessary mindset shift to embrace equitable economic Degrowth. It is called, A Roadmap to Ecological Justice; and it is available from SSRN.COM
We-ell, there IS a suggestion that we need to shrink the global economy to return to the available biocapacity of the Earth – it’s implicit in my remarks about SolarCiv 1.0. It’s true I don’t say anything in this essay about ecosystems collapse, but there’s plenty about it in my books and on this site. This post is already nearly 4,000 words long and it barely scratches the surface of energy issues. I honestly can’t talk about everything in every post! However, if you look around this site or at my books you’ll find that my position aligns with degrowth and an ecological culture.
The obvious point is that we will need to use much less energy, no SUV’s, Hot Tubs, 100mph cars etc etc & we may have to get used to the idea of intermittency, ie you cant charge the car today
“But material, technical and supply limits may kick in as that proportion makes the precipitous rise that will be required over the next few decades if we’re to achieve ModCiv 1.2.”
Actually, as I see it, what happens more than a decade out really doesn’t matter all that terribly much. It’s what happens over the next five and ten years which will decide whether Earth will be inhabitable in the future. We don’t really have the wiggle room of several decades to turn the world around.
I follow this particular strand of our predicament closely, having worked in the energy industry. In addition to Mr. Michaud, others in this space that are skeptical of the story that a transition can happen are Art Berman, an oil industry analyst, Alice Friedemann, who’s done yeoman’s work at her Energy Skeptic site for years, and Tim Morgan at Surplus Energy Economics.
While your analysis touches on it, and most of the mainstream narrative focus on the cost comparisons, what really matters is EROEI. The calculations are difficult and no standard exists yet, but life cycle energy analysis of all the various options is really what matters, and the monetary cost we tag them with is really only a stand in for the comparison that matters. Too many externalities are usually not included.
And in addition to energy analysis, the true emissions impact of renewable (actually rebuildable) energy is generally underestimated. Cost curves going down? Maybe that’s because China went all in on production, but then they use vast quantities of coal to make these “cheap” panels. Child labor mining in Africa has a cost also. Once solar and wind are made solely with solar and wind, what would the cost (and EROEI) be?
We are in overshoot, and I don’t know what the natural carrying capacity will end up being, but I strongly doubt it is 8+ billion humans.
“We are in overshoot, and I don’t know what the natural carrying capacity will end up being, but I strongly doubt it is 8+ billion humans.”
The evaluation of human carrying capacity is wildly different from the evaluation of carrying capacity for any other animal, for the simple reason that our harmful impacts per capital differ dramatically from one individual to another, which isn’t the case with other animals.
What is in overshoot, for the most part — regards humans — are the myriad harms caused by capitalist-industrial-technological civilization. Some portion of these harms are the result of meeting actual, legitimate human needs. But a very large portion of the harms are caused by excessive demands on energy, materials, land, etc., by those who prefer not to contemplate their role in such excess.
EROEI doesn’t really matter. EROEI only matters when you have consumables like fossil fuels. With renewables that give access to near infinite energy(as far as our civilization is concerned), as long as the EROEI is above 1, that is all that matters
Cost is king
Price goes down with economies of scale and improvements of technology. Even in China, solar is cheaper than coal for energy. Hence why they are putting up way more solar than coal. It isn’t like they suddenly started caring about the environment, it’s the economics in solar’s favor. But like all mass production, you are limited to how much you build out until your production capacity reaches there.
I am also confused about your child mining statement. Child mining of what exactly? Do you by any chance referring to cobalt used in some(not all) lithium ion batteries? It is interesting that people suddenly started caring about where cobalt is mined. No one cared for decades and still doesn’t today when cobalt is used to refine oil. But now that it is used in batteries, people suddenly start caring
@noil
“With renewables that give access to near infinite energy(as far as our civilization is concerned), as long as the EROEI is above 1, that is all that matters
Cost is king”
I disagree.
Renewables DON’T give near infinite energy.
They have to be replaced every 25 years or so at great (energy) cost.
To date, no renewables have been created without the use of fossil fuels. It’s debatable that renewables are possible to create using just renewable generated power at all. Think, mining, transport, smelting, construction, installation, running, dismantling and then disposal. All using just electricity.
Once all of this is factored in the EROEI starts to drop. Or if you prefer the Energy Cost Of Energy (ECoE) starts to rise.
The modern, complex world was built on an initial EROEI of 100+
If it drops to just above 1 as you suggest, there just isn’t enough surplus energy to run a modern complex economy/society.
Hi John,
“To date, no renewables have been created without the use of fossil fuels. It’s debatable that renewables are possible to create using just renewable generated power at all. Think, mining, transport, smelting, construction, installation, running, dismantling and then disposal. All using just electricity.”
I know this comment is from February – but just reminding you that there ARE electric means of doing all these things. It is not “debatable” – it’s a fact. Some are even becoming cheaper than doing them with oil or gas or coal. Others will cost more for a while – until economies of scale bring them down. Just as wind and solar took a while to bring them down.
Remember exponential growth is sneaky. For the longest time nothing appears to be happening. You drop bacteria into a petri dish and know that it doubles every minute. You also know the dish will be full in an hour? When is the dish half full? At 59 minutes! That means it’s been on an exponential doubling curve for something like 54 minutes until you even notice is – then it’s 1/16h of the jar, 1/8th the jar, a quarter of the jar, then half the jar at 59 minutes.
Renewables have been invisible for the last 30 years – and now are just appearing on everyone’s radar. Renewables are at about 56 minutes. A few more doublings and they’ll have taken over the world’s energy supply. EV’s are behind renewables – but they’re also gradually doubling. Electric Semi’s are behind EV’s – but are making inroads. Underground EV mining has been a thing for ages, but now even above ground 240 ton electric mining trucks are doing twice the speed of their old diesel cousins – going up hill while charging on overhead catenary lines! Industrial heating ALREADY has all the different kit for the different heat sectors, from heat pumps through to resistance heating and finally the ultra-high temperatures of electric arc furnaces, plasma torches and even microwaves. Some industries that run on gas will convert soon just to get off the gas price!
Green steel is a fledgling industry that will replace coking coal with hydrogen. Australian energy company Hysata have an alkaline electrolyser which is 20% more efficient – which means 20% LESS electricity cost in making hydrogen. That. Is. Huge. They have $172 million in start up funds and if I were a betting man would put $50 on them dominating green hydrogen in years to come.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-electrolyser-start-up-gets-huge-global-backing-in-countrys-biggest-ever-clean-tech-fund-raising/
It’s all possible. In fact – I’m not even sure hydrogen is the cheapest way to ‘green steel’. Electrowinning could undermine and replace it!
Please – if there’s something I’ve missed in renewables being able to build renewables – get back to me. If I somehow miss your reply (because this wordpress comments section is a little difficult to navigate) email me.
I’d love to know – it will give me a new thing to research.
Hi Eclipse
Do you believe that there are any material constraints on renewable electricity? You write as if there aren’t.
The thing about bacteria in a jar is that they will keep reproducing if and only if they have enough food to do so. Yeasts, too. I can put sugar and fruit and wild yeast and water in a big jar, and whack an airlock on top, and the yeast will do their thing and produce alcohol, which will eventually kill the bacteria… and eventually, one of two things will happen: 1) the yeast runs out of sugar and I have a dry wine or 2) the yeast produces so much alcohol that it cannot continue metabolising the remaining sugar and I have a sweet wine. It might be 1% ABV after the first week, and 2% after the second week, 4% after the third week, 8% after the fourth week… but I think the highest ABV I’ve managed was around 18%. Once fermentation has finished, I can leave it in the demi-john as long as I want, but it isn’t going to get any more alcoholic.
Similarly, I have been maintaining a ginger bug this spring, since it seems a more ecologically sound way to produce fizzy drinks than having them shipped to me in either heavy glass bottles, polluting plastic ones, or energy-intensive metal cans. The ginger bug is a sort of community of wild yeasts and bacteria, and it allows me to make very low alcohol fizzy drinks because the bacteria will “eat” the alcohol from the yeasts (which are fairly low-alcohol ones anyway). But if I don’t feed it often enough, and remove some of the liquid (thereby removing various metabolites), the microbes can get out of balance. Happily it turns out to be pretty easy to start again and “catch” a new microbial community. Similarly, I need to feed my sourdough starter (and remove metabolites by making some sourdough) regularly. I can reduce the frequency of feeding requirements by keeping it in the refrigerator (which I routinely do), and reduce them further still by putting some in the freezer (which I mostly don’t bother with — I can start a new sourdough pretty quickly, and have only needed to do so once since 2018, and I’m perfectly capable of eating soda bread in the meantime), but while these will buy me some time, they don’t entirely remove the necessity of maintenance.
I know that human industry is not exactly the same as some microbes in a jar of ginger bug, sourdough starter or homebrew, but I’m using these as an example because of your own petri dish example. Bacteria in a petri dish are only going to expand as much as the agar plate allows them to, they’re not going to digest the glass as well. To me, just because something has been doubling every week or every year or whatever doesn’t mean it’s going to continue doing so indefinitely.
Personally, I would take your forecast of abundant renewable electricity far more seriously if you were explaining where you think the material limits of that transition will be. Just how big is the petri dish, and what happens when we get to the edge of it?
Instead, it seems like every time someone points out a potential problem, you wave it away as something that can be solved trivially by using some other material, or some as-yet experimental technique. Great, but… technical progress has rarely been entirely straightforward, and some of these substitutions are more complicated than a like-for-like swap. Aluminium (for example) still takes quite a bit more energy to produce than copper does, regardless of where the energy comes from, and your claims of how much electricity we need don’t appear to take that into account.
Hi Kathryn,
Is this your main feedback on my 3 energy posts? You know – transport, electrifying everything, and all that? If so – isn’t this just the old “infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible” with the proverbial petri dish thrown in as well?
If so I’ll refer you to my petri dish – it’s even got a steampunk petri-dish image I cooked up with Bing AI. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/speed-of-growth/
And I’ll refer you to my much shorter, re-written, less cranky version of…
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/infinite-growth/
Also – while we’re speaking of shorter – I know I said there were aspects of your lifestyle and hobbies I admired. But could you please try to stay focussed on the relevant discussion points? Not every post about your renewable energy scepticism needs to be padded with multiple anecdotes about your hobbies – especially when they all go to the one point! One short line about the proverbial petri dish running out of growth medium would have done the job.
Aluminium: takes 13 to 15 MWh per tonne to smelt – and copper only 0.4 to 0.6 MWh to smelt. However recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy. We currently waste a quarter of our aluminium through bad design making it harder to recycle at the end. There are university papers recommending how to fix this.
Finally – no – I see NO global limits to renewable energy supplying all our energy needs for 10 billion. Every limited mineral has a substitute. And while it’s exponential now – it will flatten at the end into an S curve.
Is this really your main answer to the 3 longer posts I submitted?
@Eclipse
If I’m repetitive it is because you seem to bring up the same points, over and over.
I will make it as simple as I can, to see if we can at least identify why we disagree so strongly despite having similar goals.
Growth, in anything, requires inputs.
You say that practical limits on those inputs will not prevent a global energy transition to renewable electricity. That is, you think the flat part of the S-curve won’t happen until sometime after we have enough renewable electricity for 10 billion people to have roughly the same quality of life as lower middle-class do in the West now — not necessarily the same profligate energy expenditure as now, but enough food, housing, transport etc to live a dignified and meaningful life. To support this you have a lot of technical data that refers to current electricity consumption levels, and a lot of potential avenues related to how much more efficient electricity could be for things we currently use fossil fuels for.
I think the flat part of the S-curve will probably happen before then, either because the level of inputs to maintain high levels of exponential growth won’t be there, or because those who hold power will find it more expedient not to make long-term investments, or because the already baked-in climate disruption we face will put too much strain on industrial systems of production. I’m not exactly sure which of these factors will be the strongest limiting factor and I think there will be interplay between them. I don’t know exactly when it will come about. I do actually think building renewable energy capacity and low-energy tech is one of the most important things we should be doing with our remaining fossil energy supplies. Nevertheless, it seems to me imprudent to rely on abundant renewable electricity to secure a future in which everyone has what they need to live a dignified and meaningful life.
I could be wrong, of course. But what I have seen in my own lifetime is a worsening of material conditions for people who live in my community. Sure, I have more solar panels now than I did in 2020 (or, technically, my landlord does), but the food bank has many more guests. I’ve also come to better understand that much of the prosperity we have enjoyed in the last few centuries was based on exploitation that left others worse off. This doesn’t make me think that the top of the renewable electricity S-curve is going to be a great place to live, or even any better than we have now.
I think the issue we may be having is that your statements about renewable electricity don’t only make assertions that I can’t observe in my own work in my local community, but actively contradict the trajectory I see both locally and in global politics. From my perspective, the very best that a transition to renewable electricity can offer will be too little, too late. I’d love to be wrong, but I’m not going to base any major life decisions on promises from tech companies. I want to have another plan. If even ten percent of what you say will happen comes to pass, then great! That would certainly make life a lot better for a lot of people than it would be without that ten percent. I still have to start where I am now, with the resources I have now.
I did respond to some of your other comments, or at least to the one on heating. If you replied, I haven’t seen it, but honestly I’m happy to leave the conversation where it is and let any intrepid future readers sort out their own opinions.
Treating my food production work as a hobby is part of the problem, by the way. Doing the work of producing some of my household’s food is part of what gives me insight into the fragility of our current system, and the scale of labour we have replaced with industrial processes currently based on fossil fuels. It also probably doesn’t appear in your own numbers except possibly in a very estimated way; but it does make a substantial impact on my own household budget. I’ve been putting some numbers on that this year, out of curiosity, but most people who grow as much as I do don’t bother (weighing everything is a lot of extra admin and I don’t get to eat any extra strawberries just because I know I picked 2.4kg Vs 2.2kg).
Finally, thank you for rewriting the infinite growth post; I confess I’ve not read it yet.
“I think the flat part of the S-curve will probably happen before then, either because the level of inputs to maintain high levels of exponential growth won’t be there”
You have no evidence to support this claim – not with regards to renewables. Have a look at how abundant the raw elements for the Energy Transition actually are.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
“or because those who hold power will find it more expedient not to make long-term investments”
There will be a few political hiccups – mostly to do with powerlines because rural people object to them. But those who hold power are allowing this doubling curve to pick up pace! Look at America’s Inflation Reducation Act. (IRA). It’s enormous! So I’m not sure what you are referring to here – other than some general doomer vibe of paranoia?
“or because the already baked-in climate disruption we face will put too much strain on industrial systems of production.”
There may indeed be some climate-super storms that hit GDP etc. But enough to completely wipe out global industrial civilisation? Sorry – the renewables S-curve is going to wipe out the fossil fuel industry before it can get there.
“I’m not exactly sure which of these factors will be the strongest limiting factor and I think there will be interplay between them.”
You’ve asserted 3 things, proved none, and now you’re combining them.
“I do actually think building renewable energy capacity and low-energy tech is one of the most important things we should be doing”
Well I’m glad we agree on that!
“Nevertheless, it seems to me imprudent to rely on abundant renewable electricity to secure a future in which everyone has what they need to live a dignified and meaningful life.”
Well, 99% of the people on the planet have decided they DO like the modern world and it’s conveniences – and are moving full steam ahead to ensure they get to enjoy them!
Also – the UK’s temporary economic conditions now could even worsen in the coming years as Brexit and climate change continue to do their thing. But that does not mean that the improvements in technology coming our way will not also do their thing. I cannot predict which mix of good and bad will hit first, but I’m pretty sure there will be good and bad. But just because you cannot see what I’m talking about in the ENERGY statistics in global POLITICS does not mean it is not there! If you looked at my “Speed of growth” page you would have read the following:
>>
Sometimes exponential growth can feel sneaky – when is the petri-dish full?
Remember the old example of bacteria in a Petri dish? A scientist has placed a bacteria in a petri-dish with heaps of growth medium. Assume you know two things:-
* It will double every minute.
* The dish will be full in one hour.
The question – when is the dish half full?
The answer is in 59 minutes. The bacteria has been almost invisible for 54 minutes then in the last few doublings goes from one-sixteenth the dish to an eighth, a quarter, a half, then full. That is tragic if we’re talking about a nasty virus sweeping through a population – but is amazing news if we’re talking about something positive like renewable energy.
So not all growth is bad…
And even exponential growth does not have to end up being the proverbial “Infinite growth on a finite planet”. Then the page links to… https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/infinite-growth/
<<
"From my perspective, the very best that a transition to renewable electricity can offer will be too little, too late."
Then you simply have not understood either the abundant resources at our disposal (orders of magnitude beyond our needs!), the SPEED of this exponential growth, or the overall EFFICIENCY of electrifying everything that will reduce the overall DEMAND for energy in the first place. You have simply made assertions without any data to back them.
"If even ten percent of what you say will happen comes to pass, then great!" No – not at all! 10% of today's energy use would be quite a challenge – and probably end in catastrophe. I think we'd go full Mad Max – not without DECADES to rebuild everything we do with the full intention of getting down to 10%. But as it is, electrifying everything would get us down to 40% of today's THERMAL energy values while massively increasing the electricity we use.
"It also probably doesn’t appear in your own numbers except possibly in a very estimated way"
Why do you assert stuff without evidence all the time? I thought that was an American post-truth thing. EG: Like when they say "It's my opinion and you've got to respect my opinion that climate change is a conspiracy!" Um, no. In a democratic sense I respect their RIGHT to an opinion – but I do not respect that opinion at all. It's absolute rubbish!
So when you just assert "It seems to me" and then start sneaking in assertions without any evidence, it's just got a bit of a weird feel. The energy figures I quoted refer to TOTAL GLOBAL ENERGY USE across ALL sectors. Just to be clear!
I'm not sure if I read or already responded to your reply on heating. These wordpress comments are difficult to keep track of.
In future posts Chris could create a Subreddit and link future posts to that rather than try to navigate these comments fields. Just an idea.
Hi Eclipse
Just a quick one this time:
I think the Petri dish may be smaller than you think it is. That’s all.
None of this is about whether I like modern life, and telling people how they feel is a bad choice if you want to convince them of things.
Other than that, I suspect the only substantial difference between us is that I am ready to admit that I could be wrong, and to evaluate my actions with that uncertainty in mind. You are certain that your conclusions about the future are correct, and have been unwilling to consider what you might do if you are wrong.
Your ideas about the scale and speed of increase in renewable electricity don’t match either my understanding of how the world works in general, or the observations I make in my everyday life. I’m not going to change how I live and work because of your assertions, no matter how good they look on paper. I’m going to continue with food production, both for my household and embedded in community; I’m going to continue to try to minimise my reliance on fossil fuels; I’m going to continue to save seeds; I’m going to continue to teach others how to grow food where they are; I’m going to continue in my other hobbies, none of which are particularly industrial or particularly fossil-intensive.
But that means if I’m wrong — if the Petri dish is bigger than I think — I will still have built connections with local community, learned and taught productive skills, improved access to nutritious food for some of the poorest people in my city, provided wildlife habitat, maybe made some decent contributions to horticultural genetics with my seed-saving projects, and learned to live with less energy than I grew up with, all while enjoying myself immensely (at least, most of the time). No disaster there. And if I’m right, and the Petri dish is smaller than you think, I will have done those things in a context where they matter for survival. That’s good enough for me.
Kathryn,
“I think the Petri dish may be smaller than you think it is. That’s all.”
You are absolutely correct. That’s what YOU THINK. That is all.
Which of these materials we are ACTUALLY going to run out of? https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
Aluminium is 8% of the earth’s crust. Iron ore is 5%. Silicon is 27%. Fibreglass is renewable glass and resin and they can now recycle the blades. Batteries can be made from the 38.5 quadrillion tons of sodium in the oceans – and agri-waste and aluminium. And there’s 100 TIMES the potential pumped hydro we need. So WHICH of these are we going to run out of?
“my understanding of how the world works in general, or the observations I make in my everyday life.”
This isn’t about everyday life. It’s about adoption curves through history. Like how fast we replaced horses with cars, ice-haulers with fridges, underground mining pit-ponies with diesel drive-trains, radios with TV’s, B&W TV’s with colour, ipods with iphones, etc etc etc! Historic S curves. Look em up. About 80% of the S curve happens in just a decade in some of the cases.
Solar seems a bit like that. Now that it’s visible on the edge of the Petri dish. The full energy transition will take a lot longer, because it’s not one S-curve but many, involving many different industrial processes not just energy. But you’ll see it kicking off soon enough.
Also – where did you GET the idea I was telling YOU how to live? Honestly? All I’m asking is that you inform yourself about how fast the renewable energy transition is actually having so you don’t propagate uninformed Doomer rubbish that makes young people feel like hanging themselves? Remember why I blog? Youth depression and suicide. That’s why. It’s not about you – except in the sense that I wish you would learn the FACTS about renewables and not limit your reading to your favourite echo chamber.
As IF I’m trying to tell you to change your life. If anything – that’s you guys telling me to give up my hope and go build a Doomsday Prepper compound. Seriously!
I’m impressed that you two are still going 🙂
Do try to stay polite Eclipse, old chap. Remember – politeness, anonymity etc.
I won’t engage further here myself for reasons I’ll touch on in an updated post on renewables & the meta-crisis that I hope to publish here soonish.
…but on the subject of a subreddit, perhaps I’ll assemble suggestions of this sort for improving the offer here and consider them in due course. Having incurred quite some costs only recently in upgrading this site that are scarcely covered by my writing income, it might have to be on a pay to play basis but we’ll see
Eclipse,
I’m not sure what you do want from any of us; full agreement seems unlikely and your “iron sharpens iron” justification seems a bit flimsy given how quickly you resort to emotional rhetoric when someone raises any objection to the data projections you have chosen to believe.
It’s also extremely unlikely, if your own arguments are correct, that anything we write here is likely to make any difference at all to the rate of energy transition. Either this blog is a threat to that happening, in which case the transition isn’t such a sure thing as you say, or it isn’t, in which case yelling at us will make no difference.
It’s not the first time I’ve told you this, but it is the last time I will repeat it: none of us on this blog are responsible for your young friend’s tragic suicide, and nothing that we are writing about here is a doctrine of doom and hopelessness. It is incredibly sad that your friend didn’t feel able to reach out and get help instead of taking his own life. I am sure you did all you could for him at the time. I’m no stranger to suicide (both attempted and “successful”), and the impact is absolutely awful. I’m sure the grief is something you will carry for the rest of your life — I know I do. So I guess that’s something else we have in common. It’s not a light burden.
I think it’s probably good if we agree to disagree, though, so I’m going to stop responding to your comments now. I genuinely wish you all the best.
@Eclipse
Have you thought of commenting on this site
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Some of the commenters are good number crunchers.
Some work in the fields of energy/hydrogen etc.
I follow the site so am happy to join in any discussions you might have there.
Be interested to see how your vision stacks up against other opinions.
Regards
John
Hi Kathryn,
Thank you for your being polite – and showing some empathy about some of my experience with what happened. I’m sorry for last night’s tone. I stand by the points I made – but the tone was a bit much. I’ve got a bit going on at the moment – and my worst posts here have been late at night. Hmm, I thought I had that under control. Obviously not! (Chris I’m happy if you delete any post of mine that went too far! Please delete last night’s post.)
Again – I admire the way you value your local community, and your personal hobbies. If we were chatting socially over a pizza I would probably agree with many of your normal observations about the world. We share many concerns. I’m also happy to acknowledge that our conversation has probably run its course, and we can agree to disagree and leave it here.
THIS NEXT BIT IS MORE FOR ANY OTHER READERS visiting this thread later.
Kathryn was very polite and wanted to express her sympathy for what I’ve been through. I have no doubt it was sincere. But there’s an unfortunate side effect to the way that post reads. It could have the effect of being a Bulverism to some future readers. That’s a logical error that basically avoids proving THAT someone is wrong by slightly changing the subject to WHY they are wrong. The facts of the matter shift to the opponent’s motivation and psychological state. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bulverism Again – I have NO DOUBT Kathryn was sincere. I’m not accusing her of intending this – just pointing out the potential effect of the post on some readers.
To be clear – I am not blaming anyone here for a suicide that happened 19 years ago. My concern is what can happen today as a result of the Article above and comments thread below. While THIS blog might be Degrowth – the general vibe of scepticism about renewables and fate of civilisation easily feeds straight into a “peaknik” Doomer vibe. Check the definition on Wikipedia:
“The term “doomer” was reported in 2008 as being used in early internet peaknik communities, as on internet forums where members discussed the theorized point in time when oil extraction would stop due to lack of resources, followed by societal collapse. Doomers of the mid-aughts subscribed to various ideas on how to face this impending collapse, including doomsday prepping, as well as more contemporary feelings of resignation and defeat.[5]
Canadian self-identified doomer Paul Chefurka hosted a website where he encouraged his readers to eat lower on the food chain, modify their homes for the apocalypse, and to consider not having children.[5] Not all “peakniks” subscribed to a fatalist outlook. U.S. Army Ranger Chris Lisle, when writing recommendations on how to survive the societal collapse, suggested that fellow doomers “adopt a positive attitude,” because, as he put it, “Hard times don’t last, hard people do.””
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomer#Peaknik_subculture
But on a closer reading, Chris’s Article repeats many of the arguments I’ve seen in both Degrowth and Doomer forums. They focus on the past ‘failure’ of renewables to replace fossil fuels – ignoring the fact that this is EXACTLY what scaling up a new industry can look like – especially in the first few decades when a large infrastructure item like energy systems are more expensive. It’s also the nature of exponential doubling curves – which take the longest time to really get going – but when they do suddenly take over at the end. Remember – the Petri dish was a quarter full at 58 minutes, half full at 59 minutes, and then full on the hour!
The Article above also focused on one little Italian renewables study which largely ignored many of the principles I see in the broader renewables community. It emphasised hydrogen (when the mantra is ‘electrify everything’) and an Italian grid (when the mantra is about the ENTSO-E super-grid and European interconnectors). A mix of the wrong tech and the wrong strategies, and what do you know? An Italian renewables grid is going to have all these extra costs. It’s a good thing ENTSO-E have various think tanks showing the alternative.
I have highlighted many of these themes on the Collapse Reddit, only to find young people emailing me afterwards, thanking me for my input. Young people considering dropping their university degree to go work on some distant Prepper farm. People generally losing hope – and about to seek counselling for how messed up they feel.
Also, as I have said before, there is evidence that Big Oil are actually sponsoring some of these Doomers because hopelessness destroys activism. (A climatologist explains here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8 ) Why bother when it’s pointless? Why would you bother if you’ve actually come to believe that the answer – renewable energy – is some kind of ‘hopium’ or worse – a corporate con? Renewables scepticism is exactly what Big Oil are after.
But we’ve had a good chat – and I’m nearly done. I’ve got some forest density stuff I’m still researching, as Chris Smaje showed me that the trees per hectare figures I had initially googled were way to high! Thanks for your input on that Chris. I have egg on my face – as given I am known to be ‘enthusiastic’ about these things – I’ve pasted my bad data all over the internet. I’m going to have to offer an apology on my blog – once I can find more verifiable numbers!
There’s also more I’d like to follow up sometime on Precision Fermentation. (Boy I find that name clunky – but Monbiot’s “Ferming” is not going to take off either.) Anyway, bit by bit. We’ll see what time and energy levels permit.
Cheers all.
Hi Chris,
Reddit is free – even to create sub-reddits. (Which would basically be like your own forum.)
It’s a fairly powerful forum – but the main benefit to you might be delegation of moderation. You could end up with a team of people you trust who can chat together about what to do with that troublesome troll. You’d be the boss, and they’d be your 2IC’s. The main thing is probably your time learning how to set it all up – but many youtubers and bloggers turn to Reddit. But the other thing is you’ll have to contend with another advertising ecosystem etc. It’s just another business, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
The other option is your webhost might have one-click installations of various bulletin board forum software you could learn to use. Some of these are great – open source forums that have been running for years. Just suggestions. Cheers.
Hi Steve C,
WIND TURBINES have increased in size and height they’ve gained access to more reliable winds and increased their capacity factor. Kubiszewski et all found an EROEI of 19 to 25, but this was way back in 2010!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222703134_Meta-Analysis_of_Net_Energy_Return_for_Wind_Power_Systems Today’s studies by Vestas show wind to be over 50! https://www.vestas.com/en/sustainability/environment/energy-payback
Excellent! shared here… https://www.facebook.com/groups/2046655862094973
Excellent!
Thanks all. Briefly –
Agree with what you say Kathryn, although when it comes to access to land I think it may be better to keep human demands for it separate from a solar energy price. Maybe land cluttered with solar installations will command lower price in the future…
Maybe a similar point in relation to Steve C, in that I’m not sure EROEI always underlies cost from a human point of view. But I agree that present prices are divorced from real long-term biophysical costs.
I didn’t mention EROEI because I know that some of the RPs scoff at it … foolishly IMO, but I think we can get to the same place through cost. If I were to underscore one key point from the post it’d probably be that marginal cost is not a useful measure, whereas total cost is.
Regarding overshoot, I think James’s point about variation in carrying capacity with respect to people is important. I doubt that the world would have its present population without fossil energy, but that’s not the same as saying that it couldn’t sustain its present population without fossil energy. In theory, I think a radical global mobilisation could do it (mostly a social & agrarian one, not a high-energy techno-fix one). But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Hope lies in there being enough radical local mobilisations to pull something from the fire.
Fair point I suspect also from James about the realistic timescales for this.
Elizabeth, yes agreed I don’t think a renewables transition, even if it were feasible, would address many of the real underlying crises. I was keeping to a narrower brief here though.
Thanks for all the other comments too – appreciated.
I forgot to add my current readings to the original post – now corrected. Even includes a novel!
“But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Hope lies in there being enough radical local mobilisations to pull something from the fire.”
I don’t think it is going to happen either. But doubting that it will happen isn’t sufficient reason not to do everything we can to try and change our odds for the better.
I don’t see nearly enough dialogue (anywhere) concerning the social, cultural and political reasons we’re so horribly off track with the transformational work we should be doing now. I want to see that happening before I die. I’m getting up there in years, and I’ve devoted my whole damned life to this stuff. Ack!
It is too early to dismiss the Guardian and even George Monbiot. Mr Monbiot wrote a very good essay on extrinsic and intrinsic values recently. Too bad he has been such a dick.
Chriss, if you were alive over 100 years ago, you’d be telling Henry Ford that engine cars are impractical because of the inefficiency of making engine powered mechanical horses draw carriages, missing the basic concept of “why not just get rid of the horse altogether and put the engine directly in the carriage?”
First of all, before anything you have to understand what “Primary Energy” actually is. Then learn about “Secondary Energy”, “Final Energy” and “Useful Energy”. Primary energy is pretty useless measurement, because it doesn’t actually count how much work you do, most of that energy is effectively wasted. Fossil fuels are known for having high primary energy, but much lower secondary, final and useful energy. To put it in simple terms, its like counting how many calories it would take you to do cartwheels non-stop to the store, then say it is impossible to get to the store ignoring you can just walk there.
Now to make the chart seem more fair, many use something called the “substitution method”, but that method only artificially adds a multiplier to renewables. But it doesn’t change the fact that it over inflates the amount of energy needed. It also doesn’t account whether or not the work can be done better. For example, heat pumps can go up to 400% efficiency, geothermal heat pumps can even reach up to 600%. EVs are not only much more efficient than ICE cars, they also recover energy back with regenerative braking
Now to address your questions.
Q1. You seem to be under a false pretense that renewable energy civilization will be based on having access to low energy, but it is the opposite. Renewable energy will give us access to super cheap energy and so much of it we wouldn’t know what to do with it all.]
Trying to come up with methods to store it first is flawed. A renewable grid revolves around overgenerating renewables. And during times of overgeneration, you spend the extra energy on things like making fertilizer which isn’t time sensitive like electricity
Storage is the last option, before that you transmit, diversify renewables, demand response and transmission. And storage isn’t limited to batteries, you have pumped hydro, compressed air and thermal storage. Plus new things like iron air
Q2. You seem to be underestimating how quickly production can scale. Reaching 10x of solar is cake walk, you see this in how China was able to put up over 200GW of solar in just 1 year, that is more solar than US put up in our entire lifetime. Poor countries would actually benefit from decentralized renewable energy as they have hard times keeping their grids working. Things like solar can easily connect places to power directly. On top of that, it will be cheaper too. Also, things like agrivoltaics can help a lot increasing crop yields, reducing water usage all while generating solar power
Q3. Other than Russia, all of those would have little issue converting in 3 decades assuming the political will. Solar and Wind has became cheaper then fossil fuels during the last few years, so from this point forward t he cost difference is only going to grow. Of course governments have ways to make things more expensive due to invested interests. This is partly why US has been slower on this front compared to Europe and even China. But at one point the cost advantages become too big to ignore. You can only delay things, the inevitable will happen and at that point it would be a tipping point. For the US, the IRA will probably play a big deciding role of whether we can pull it off or not within the next 3 decades. As more of people’s jobs are tied down to renewables, the harder it is to delay things
Q4. The reason they won’t is simply cost. Try to convince someone to open something that costs 10x, 100x more than the current in the market. Once the flood gates open, there is no going back. Solar and wind only became cheapest option in the last few years, since that tipping point its growth has skyrocketed and as the gap grows the writing is on the wall
Q5. The big reason why fossil fuels are easy to disrupt is because it is a consumable. In the case of things like lithium and copper, all of these are non-consumables. Once you reach your grid reaches where you can get all you need, the necessary new materials you’d need would drop significantly and would only need to facilitate growth. There is also recycling which allows for those who are low on resources to access the same resources for millenniums. That is why the goal isn’t just renewable energy but “sustainability”. On top of that, some of the so called resources have alternatives. While less energy dense than lithium ion, sodium ion is already coming out and is enough for lower range EVs. Many usages of copper is substitutable with aluminum
Q6. When talking about charts like that, the point is generally that less mining would be needed than fossil fuels. The common mistake people make when thinking things like there isn’t enough lithium is going off stuff like lithium reserves. And the problem with reserves is someone has to verify the reserves and certify them for them to count as reserves. Thus most of our current reserves go unverified, and that is why despite increase of lithium usage the reserves ended up growing instead of shrinking as more bother to verify. It’s like you wouldn’t bother verifying how much air is in your house right? Unless you live in space. The really big issue for stuff like lithium isn’t the availability, there is no shortage of the stuff. The problem is, what use does lithium have outside of EVs? Investor worry is that if an alternative battery technology comes out, it would make their investments stranded assets as there would be no market big enough to re-purpose the lithium
Q7. The cost to transistion away from fossil fuels would actually be much cheaper than what we have now. Economics are also tied to utilization. As for bottlenecks, the answer is streamlining. Part of the reason why US has more natural gas pipelines than high power transmission lines despite pipelines costing more is due to natural gas pipelines being managed by FERC while transmission has to go through dozens of agencies
Q8. Politics is a factor of utilization. The more people use something the less contrivertial it gets. Especially the more jobs begin to be dependent on it
Q9. Solar still has a huge amount of room to drop in price, at least 100x cheaper than fossil fuels. Wind can get to about 10x cheaper. Of course getting from 60% to 100% would have a higher cost, but that is only assuming you are limiting energy usage to our current numbers. As you utilize energy on demand for other purposes, it may just pay for itself. The mistake people make is for some weird reason limiting the way to storage only, and only with lithium ion batteries. Not sure why you wouldn’t use multiple methods and multiple technologies of which makes most economic sense
Q10. The total costs doesn’t matter. What you have to look at is what would be the cost and benefit of going with status quo vs cost and benefit of transistioning. Any number can seem large in by itself, but is much smaller when you look at the alternative. There are also other costs not directly factored in but pushed onto society, like health costs and environmental costs
Q11. The difference between angels and solar panels is solar panels is something most people have seen. To date, no one has yet to see an angel. You can debate things and do things in parallel, as long as you aren’t working against it to slow things down
@ noil Re Q1: Get back to me when nuclear power is too cheap to meter.
Nuclear power being too cheap to meter is just a quote from 1 person at a time before US had even a single nuclear reactor connected to the grid. Aka, he was just grasping at straws without anything to really go by. In comparison, many forms of renewable energy have been connected to grids for decades and the technology is well understood to make predictions.
It was the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Agency talking about fusion. The point is that we have heard those claims before. They didn’t pan out.
“For example, heat pumps can go up to 400% efficiency, geothermal heat pumps can even reach up to 600%.”
Noil – Can you please explain how efficiency can be measured in such percentages? I need some means of grasping the basic concept. I’m at a complete loss here.
Because what a heat pump does is move around heat. Thus, your end result is more heat than the amount of energy you put in.
So 100% would be if you use resistive heating where pretty much all the energy you put in is given off as heat. By moving around energy from elsewhere, you can achieve over 100% efficiency in terms of energy put in vs energy you get out.
A better term for measuring it would be COP, were 100% is 1.0
noil –
I had to really work at understanding this concept, and even still I feel I have only an improved, but not yet a complete, understanding of precisely what sort of measurement of efficiency we’re discussing here.
The main difficulty was the difficulty in understanding how such a device as a “heat pump”, in heating a home in winter, is transferring outdoor heat from a colder environment to an already warmer one. It’s pretty “counter-intuitive”. And the fact that it can do so while using less energy than the amount of energy being transferred is rather amazing!
I plan to study the physics of this in more depth over time. Thanks.
I would add that it likely requires a great deal of energy to mine for, smelt for, manufacture, ship and install a heat pump. So the total energy involved has to be measured in relation to these “embodied energy” aspects as well.
Our neighbor had a ground source heat pump installed and needed a new electric service brought in from the highway. It was 10s of thousands of dollars ($50,000 ?). Air source heat pumps are a non starter here. It is just too cold in winter.
I see that the 600% numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m seeing numbers like 250%. Nobody is talking about values over 400%.
@noil
“Renewable energy will give us access to super cheap energy and so much of it we wouldn’t know what to do with it all.”
Let’s say that the above is true (which I think it isn’t) would it actually be a good thing?
We are destroying the natural environment at ever increasing speed exactly because humanity has access to cheap and abundant (fossil fuels) energy.
Access to renewable energy that is super cheap and so abundant, we wouldn’t know what to do with it, could be the final nail in the ecological coffin.
“We wouldn’t know what to do with it all”
I think the history of the last 200 years suggests that we would find plenty of things to do with it all !!!!!!
Thanks for weighing in Noil. But you haven’t (yet) convinced me – you offer quite a bit of the dismissiveness I mentioned, along with unquantified assertions. So as yet my questions remain unanswered. In relation to your Henry Ford analogy, I’d say you’re putting the car before the horse 🙂
Just to pick up on a few of your points, I think the first part of your comment is marred by an overemphasis on efficiency and an underemphasis on cost, whether we’re talking about Henry Ford’s cars or modern heat pumps. Also, primary energy is not a useless measurement at all, but you’re right there’s variation between energy sources in the final or useful energy derivable from a given quantity of primary energy, as I discuss in this post and as is implicit in Q2 – which you haven’t answered.
I don’t make any assumptions in this post about the level of storage vis-à-vis overgeneration or other ways of managing electricity supply. But some way of managing the supply has to be devised, which will have energy and financial costs, as projected in Q2 and Q10 – which you haven’t answered.
You write “Q2. You seem to be underestimating how quickly production can scale.” No, I’m asking for YOUR estimate of total primary energy consumption, while saying nothing here about the pace of implementation. I don’t think your China example here really cuts it though – I think you need to answer Q10 realistically, and globally.
Q3. Okay, so you’re estimating the chances that all the big players apart from Russia will go fully low carbon within 30 years at 100%? Bold! Makes me wonder what COP28 was all about, though.
So it seems your answers to Q4 and Q5 are ‘none’ and ‘no’. I hear your confidence … but I’d like more quantified evidence for it.
Q6. I’m looking for some quantification of energy & financial costs here (another case where final product and inputs need to be carefully distinguished).
Q7. You write: “The cost to transistion away from fossil fuels would actually be much cheaper than what we have now.” Great – show me some numbers & evidence for this.
You write: “Of course getting from 60% to 100% would have a higher cost, but that is only assuming you are limiting energy usage to our current numbers. As you utilize energy on demand for other purposes, it may just pay for itself.” Not sure I follow you there, but I’d like to see some evidence for your assertions in this paragraph.
You write “The total costs doesn’t matter” – so are you arguing that my criticism of levelized costs is misplaced, and if so why? If you’re arguing that humanity can’t afford not to transition out of fossil fuels, I’d agree, and it would be easy to estimate the costs of not doing so as near infinite, making the costs of a renewable energy transition look like a good bet, whatever they were. But what I want to know is whether they’re deliverable by the existing global economy in the near term – so I need a quantified financial cost answer to Q10.
Q11. True, people have seen solar panels, but nobody’s seen the start, let alone the end, of a 100%RE transition, and we often get bamboozled by ultimately misleading premises around efficiency and cost. So it may turn out that the parallel works okay.
What’s wrong with putting the car before the horse? Cars don’t need horses to drive 😉
Primary energy was an okay measurement when you only had fossil fuels, even then since fossil fuels themselves have varying efficiencies it is still questionable. And I definitely disagree with the use of the substitution method to multiply renewables instead of dividing fossil fuels. But I guess that wouldn’t be Primary Energy anymore but Secondary at least. Regardless, using Primary energy to guage the transistion is poinless as it artifically makes the task seem much bigger than reality. I am not saying it is a small task by any means, just Primary Energy gives the illusion of it being much bigger due to not factoring in the actual amount of energy we need due to not factoring in efficiency. Back to my reference of cartwheels, it would be like me telling you the store is 500 cartwheels away instead of telling you it is 1000 steps away. Doing 500 cartwheels can be pretty tough, where as 1000 steps is rather easy in comparison. How something is done and presented matters
You mean COP28 that was ran by the fossil fuel industry? I mean you saw who was hosting them right? All while doing backroom deals. That said, you need to understand something called tipping point. It is when you have a sudden jump in adoption as something enters mainstream. If we follow the technology adoption lifecycle, once you get past the innovators mark, the rate begins to grow rapidly. The tipping point we passed was “cheaper than fossil fuels”. Ever since then we have seen the rate of adoption grow. Of course I am not going to claim anything is 100%, because that is impossible. But I do think the chances that the top countries other than Russia can get to at least over 90% renewable energy in the next 30 years is over 95%. The 2nd tipping point we need is any country big or small reaching that number where their primary energy source isn’t hydro. Once you have a precident, you have a huge influx of demand. You could see that with the lithium ion battery for grid storage how it got a huge jump after it proved itself in Australia
Again, the thing about costs is you have to look at comparative costs. You ask for the cost of “Disinvesting in and decommissioning existing fossil fuel infrastructures”, but you are aware this cost has to be paid anyways right? No infrastructure lasts forever. It is one thing if you break it apart early, but many of the decomissioning happens at end of life or at the very least needs major refurbishment. So since the infrastructure is going to be decomissioned one way or another, the only costs you can add is if it can be left earlier how much money would you make/save if any. And the answer to that can be 0
Total costs is again not what we need, it is a useless metric in by itself. You need the total cost of keeping the status quo and the total cost of transistioning. Only by cross comparing both scenerios can you see the true cost or the oppertunity cost
There are plenty of such studies, for example a Standford study in 2019 shows that transistioning would pay for itself in just 7 years. In 2022, the study was reconducted and the payback dropped to just 6 years. The study pegs the cost at 62 trillion, and savings of 11 trillion a year. I’d venture it’ll be even cheaper as technology improves during the transistion.
The difficulty with the cartwheels Vs steps analogy is that using fossil fuels for transport and shipping, while wildly inefficient in terms of the primary energy , is also very fast and supported by existing infrastructure to a degree that simply isn’t yet plausible with existing renewable technology.
In the areas where it is plausible it is being adopted quite quickly — last-mile delivery is increasingly done with e-assist bicycles, for example, which are indeed much lower consumers of energy than cars or even motorcycles, and I expect that will continue to increase. But I am not seeing electric container ships or air freight, and I am still living in a world where it is almost impossible to participate in society (and indeed write comments on blog posts) without making use of consumer goods that were not manufactured locally. Rail freight could help a lot, as it really is more energy efficient than combustion and electric trains are an established technology, but we’ve just spent the better part of a century destroying rail infrastructure in favour of roads, and the volume of goods traded now far exceeds the amount that was transported at the height of the rail freight era. Restoring and then expanding rail freight networks represents a huge investment of labour, energy and materials just when energy is harder to come by, materials are more expensive to transport, and investment in large infrastructure projects is risky due to climate instability.
A better analogy, I think, would be driving a car Vs pushing a car Vs walking. It’s true that we do not need the primary energy involved in driving a car if we aren’t actually using an internal combustion engine. It’s true that we also don’t need to push the car from point A to point B. But… walking is just slower than driving, even if it takes much less energy; so is using an e-assist bicycle or an electric train or even a barge towed along a canal by a donkey. I expect that switching to these lower energy forms of transport and shipping will have profound effects on the economy, which will then have knock-on effects on our ability to invest in the infrastructure support that would be required to e.g. bring canals back into use. I do hope that we will make this transition, but the idea that it will be a matter of “simply” swapping out electric engines for petrol ones and carrying on as normal strikes me as a dangerous oversimplification.
I’m curious, do you power your own home with renewable energy?
If so, what adjustments hav you needed to make?
If not, why not?
Thanks
The world’s debt is 3.4 times the world’s GDP , there is little to no room to increase that debt . U.S. Debt is $34 trillion and increasing at near $1 trillion a year , interest in that debt is 25% of government income and rising rapidly, the U.S. Has no option but default at sometime in the future taking the world economy with it .
I have two primary concerns about how the Megamachine (See: https://theraven.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-megamachine) uses energy.
1. All energy intensive modes of economy are ecologically destructive, be they fossil fuel sourced or otherwise (e.g., wood fuel, solar, wind, hydro…).
2. I take energy descent to be inevitable under any plausible future scenario, and therefore there is the need for humans to prepare ahead of the inevitable (and near term) phases of energy descent if we are to avert worst case scenarios, such as a type of economic collapse which would eliminate access to basic livelihood to potentially billions of people.
I’m profoundly skeptical of the idea that a growth-dependent and growth-oriented “modern” industrial-technological-capitalist-globalized… mode of economy could continue to exist in a world in which fossil fuels are reduced even by half, much less reduced down to zero. To me, this proposition is preposterous. Ridiculous. Absurd. Nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.
What almost no one is talking about is the fact (to me it is a fact) that there is no longer any “carbon budget”. The “carbon budget” concept originated in relation to “safety”. A spectrum was drawn, way back when the carbon budget concept was coined, and it looked like this:
safe————dangerous————-catastrophic
At that time, atmospheric concentations of CO2 were regarded as safe, but increasing at a frightening pace toward dangerous. The carbon budget concept was invented in order to try and avert reaching dangerous. But in the decades since this budget concept was coined, the world fully entered dangerous, and now we’re rapidly heading toward catastrophic, if indeed we’re not already in catastrophic.
My point is that there is no more carbon budget to spend! And it’s about time we acknowledge this fact.
So any talk of taking multiple decades to slowly, gradually, phase out fossil fuels is a form of madness. Literally. It is insane! It’s omnicidal madness. It’s also not an idea grounded in any reasonable assessment of material reality. There is one ten year period that matters, and that’s the one we’re living in now. What we do beyond that ten year period is irrelevant to the present or the future. We must rapidly phase out fossil fuels immediately.
But, of course, it requires a great deal of fossil fuel energy to build all of the gizmos which are being called “renewable” energy gizmos. So we’re collectively bullshitting ourselves if we think we can both keep our cake and light it on fire.
We must immediately, and steeply, phase out automobiles, mass global tourism (and its jet traffic), and all of the excessive and unnecessary use of fossil fuels for any purpose, including mining the sea floor and blasting the mountains for metals and minerals — later to be hauled, smelted, hauled again, manufactured, shipped and installed.
We are over budget. And we’re living in a mad fantasy rooted in the most absurd ignorance. It’s time to wake the f**k up! We are sleepwalking.
Agreed .
Electricity is a minimal player in the world’s energy economy , the world runs on diesel in mind boggling quantities mining and heavy transport can never run on electricity , he’ll I watched them haul a wind generator in , 2 giant cranes for a start , 24 heavy haulers pulling / pushing the tower and blades , plus one ten axled monster with the generator, on a 40 wheeled trailer it had a 1000 gallon diesel tank , 2 gallons to the mile ! plus trucks carrying men tools , that’s on land , what’s needed for off shore ?
Can’t be done with batteries
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/image0000003-768×497.jpg
China’s co2 emisions
On the EROEI issue, I tend to agree with that it has been overemphasized by some and that it can be fairly irrelevant when the source is abundant. One interesting example is slash and burn/swiddening farming which has a totally horrific energy return, but it has till worked well for thousands of years……
Tim Morton works with the Energy Cost of Energy instead, https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/139-the-surplus-energy-economy/ I haven’t figured out if his model is Energy cost at the point of use or just at the point of extraction/production. This makes quite a difference when it comes to renewables in particular where costs for the “system” will be considerably higher than for the fossil based system, even if cost at the point of “production” is low. The fact that prices for solar and wind electricity regularly are negative in all markets where there is a high penetration is also an indicator that storage and intermittency is a big . and growing – problem.
That cost of the system is only a product of trying to make renewable energy work in a fossil fuel system. But as renewable energy adoption increases, it goes without saying the system will better adopt to reflect the realities of renewable energy to optimize
For example, you want to store when the numbers go into the negative. My question is, why? Why not just do demand response instead? Or repurpose that energy into things that aren’t needed realtime like fertilizer? Storing energy doesn’t create value, thus you can only see it as a cost. But if you use it for other purposes, then you gain more value which would improve its economics
Of course I am not saying storage can’t provide any value services. For example, there is things like FCAS which only batteries can provide due to the fast response time (yes, most grid batteries aren’t going up for storage by FCAS)
Thanks for the interesting discussion. A few points.
Carbon budget: I think James is right to emphasize the extreme urgency of cutting fossil fuels, which I underplayed in the OP. As well as the politics, this brings EROEI into play.
EROEI: A few things to say here. First, I think Gunnar’s example of swiddening is potentially misleading – perhaps we need to invoke system boundaries, or limiting factors in the discussion. From a total energy point of view, the EROEI of swiddening may be poor but that’s not a relevant or limiting factor as far as the swiddeners are concerned – the main energy investment of concern to them is their own labour, in which the swidden EROEI performs well. But if population or environmental costs increase, you have to draw the system boundaries differently.
In the present and near-future global economy, I think EROEI is going to loom large. If a country or a company has access to higher EROEI energy sources, it gives them the opportunity to charge economic rent – hence I think Qs 3-5 come into play. If nobody has access to energy sources with EROEIs as high as is typical today, it raises questions about whether societies can sustain existing political economies based on prices/quantities of final products with higher input costs .
I agree that EROEI becomes less significant when final energy becomes too cheap to meter (unless the source of the energy is unsustainable long-term, in which case we need to rethink system parameters). But it’s not too cheap to meter – and I see no evidence that it will be. So I think Greg’s comment is basically to the point.
In relation to Noil’s points:
Primary energy: Yes, I understand your point about primary energy, but if you’re right about final or useful energy in an RE system this will be reflected in lower primary energy use. So, back to Q2 – what do you estimate that to be, bearing in mind the energy costs across the whole economy and not just the power sector – especially if we’re talking also about manufactured food?
COP: what’s relevant about it IMO is the country commitments. If transition is so easy, why would countries like China and India, or even the USA, not embrace it wholeheartedly, instead of dragging their feet? The argument would have to be that the fossil fuel industry is able to hold the whole world to ransom. I’d be interested to see that substantiated. If nothing else, it would at least prove that the capitalist global economy is not in fact based on efficiency or net present value.
Tipping points: there is no empirically given cost curve of adoption, especially with limited point sources. You accept yourself that costs of transition increase at higher levels of renewable substitution. So I’m looking for empirical estimations of this, not unevidenced assertions about inherently decreasing costs.
Disinvestment and decommissioning: the costs here relate to their prematurity. And also to expected costs of decommissioning and replacement with RE, which aren’t included in marginal cost figures. I’m not arguing that disinvestment and decommissioning shouldn’t happen – the question really is whether they’re feasible within the extant global economy. If not, then we’re looking at SolarCiv 1.0, not ModCiv 1.2.
Total costs: following on from my last point, the key cost comparison is between ModCiv 1.2 and SolarCiv 1.0, not between ModCiv 1.1 and 1.2. Total cost is not a useless metric because it’s … well, the actual cost. Marginal cost, on which most judgments about the low cost of RE seemed to be based, is by contrast fairly useless in my view.
“as renewable energy adoption increases, it goes without saying the system will better adopt to reflect the realities of renewable energy to optimize”: I disagree. This needs to be demonstrated, not assumed. And, as previously discussed, there are reasons to think as adoption increases system costs will increase.
Just wonder what the EROEI of the magnets used in wind generators as you are talking ounces per ton of rock plus the crushing to powder the acid baths the tailing ponds the refining and final production into usable magnets ?
noil wrote: “Renewable energy will give us access to super cheap energy and so much of it we wouldn’t know what to do with it all.”
That level of belief or faith, going beyond mere hopes, seems to resemble cargo cults and other faiths and religions. This line from Chris is spot-on: “Are we merely imagining our way to the salvation of ModCiv 1.2 through a thicket of peer-reviewed opinion about the theoretical promise of solar electricity?”
When cost is thus believed or “known” to not be an issue, then relying on overgeneration (building in more capacity than is needed for much or most of the time) becomes a logical answer. The same logic can be applied to the supply of green hydrogen for making bacterial protein powder — just build in more capacity to cover all the needs, why not?
The trouble is, the underlying premises are faulty, and the logic fails. For example, all that installed capacity still has significant costs, beyond the claimed monetary costs per kWh produced. The externalized costs for PV electricity production have been estimated to be equivalent to US$3.55 per kWh (assuming a 30-year life for PV equipment). This is around two orders of magnitude (100x) higher than the nominal (marginal) cost per kWh for PV production. (And this monetization of externalized costs is itself flawed, since human and environmental damages cannot be totally undone and reversed by spending more money.)
Beyond the billed costs per kWh, society thus indirectly pays an estimated $3.55 for each kWh produced (whether actually consumed or wasted as overgeneration), while the solar farm owners pay a small fraction of this amount for each kWh produced ($0.049/kWh as the global average for the newest solar farms, or around $0.08 or $0.09/kWh for the newest solar farms in less-sunny places like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, before the owners mark up the kWh price to sell to their customers).
Life cycle cost analysis of solar energy via environmental externality monetization
15 January 2023
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969722060090
By the way, a recent report (IRENA) reveals that the electricity generation cost per kWh for new utility-scale solar farms has gone *up* in most of the places being monitored:
“Figure 3.12 examines the weighted average LCOE [levelised cost of electricity] trend for the top 20 utility-scale markets [worldwide countries] between 2021 and 2022. It shows that in 8 of these 20 markets, costs declined [while in 12 of these 20 markets, costs increased]… Meanwhile, six of the eight top European markets saw utility-scale solar PV electricity costs rise between 9% (Netherlands) and 45% (Denmark).” [p. 112]
The global weighted average, mainly reflecting some cost reductions in the Middle East, has declined overall by 3% between 2021 and 2022, but the rate of decline is slowing down (significantly below the prior year’s decline of 13%).
“The global weighted average LCOE of utility-scale PV plants” is USD 0.049/kWh, which is “a 3% year-on-year decline from 2021 (the decline between 2020 and 2021 was 13%).” [p. 108]
The global weighted *average* (of the utility-scale production costs for new solar farms) per kWh may be down to 4.9 cents (US), but this varies greatly by location, for example it’s around 8 or 9 cents (US) in less sunny locations like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands [Fig. 3-12]. And these are the utility generation costs, not the wholesale or retail prices to industrial and commercial customers.
The costs of the PV panels themselves have pretty much stopped dropping dramatically and started levelling off, even increasing in recent years [Figure B3.1a]:
“After a decade of continuous decline, in 2021, solar PV module prices climbed as supply chain disruptions led to higher material costs or lower availability… The reasons for the price uptick that started in 2021 are varied, but a systemic contributor to this increase was the rising price of polysilicon. Challenges related to available polysilicon capacity in China pushed polysilicon prices from around USD 12/kilogram (kg) at the beginning of 2021 to over USD 33/kg towards the end of that year…” [p. 92]
Utility-scale solar PV weighted average LCOE trends in top 20 utility-scale markets, 2021-2022
https://mc-cd8320d4-36a1-40ac-83cc-3389-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2023/Aug/IRENA_Renewable_power_generation_costs_in_2022.pdf
Steve L,
>> “noil wrote: “Renewable energy will give us access to super cheap energy and so much of it we wouldn’t know what to do with it all.”
That level of belief or faith, going beyond mere hopes, seems to resemble cargo cults and other faiths and religions. This line from Chris is spot-on: “Are we merely imagining our way to the salvation of ModCiv 1.2 through a thicket of peer-reviewed opinion about the theoretical promise of solar electricity?” <> When cost is thus believed or “known” to not be an issue, then relying on overgeneration (building in more capacity than is needed for much or most of the time) becomes a logical answer. The same logic can be applied to the supply of green hydrogen for making bacterial protein powder — just build in more capacity to cover all the needs, why not? <<
It's not an issue for us.
"The trouble is, the underlying premises are faulty, and the logic fails. For example, all that installed capacity still has significant costs, beyond the claimed monetary costs per kWh produced. The externalized costs for PV electricity production have been estimated to be equivalent to US$3.55 per kWh"
Here we go again! Requote your favourite paper about potential Chinese externalised costs on the Chinese people. Can you quote the bit of that paper that shows where we experience those costs? Us lucky people in the west that get to buy this cheap solar without the associated risks of poisoning ourselves in the manufacturing process? While you're at it – can you quote the bit where it talks about the Uyghur forced labour making solar in the world's largest concentration camp?
"society thus indirectly pays an estimated $3.55"
Hmm – I think we've been here before. Which society? How do WE pay for it? Please quote that paragraph.
The World Health Organisation says:
"Currently, over seven million people a year die from exposure to air pollution – 1 in 8 of all deaths. Over 90% of people breathe outdoor air with pollution levels exceeding WHO air quality guideline values." They also discuss how globally taxpayers subsidise fossil fuels to about $400 billion US – but that the 'externalised costs' of fossil fuel to health departments works out around $5 TRILLION per year – MORE than all governments worldwide spend on healthcare. So ultimately, the further we progress down this energy transition pathway the more it will pay for itself.
https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/climate-change-and-health/advocacy-partnerships/manifesto/funding-pollution
The IEA estimates we need to spend $4 Trillion a year on the Energy Transition. https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 Basically – the sooner we build out this Energy Transition – the sooner it pays for itself!
…one issue with that being that nobody here favours fossil fuelled BAU over renewables. But given the fossil energy cost of renewable transition, the particulate and other social-environmental costs of that would have to be figured into the renewable projections, in addition to the ongoing costs of ammonia and other industrial products. The relevant alternative comparator is with a lower primary energy future.
Hi Chris,
I’ve shared this report before – but (I think it was Steve L) just ran an ad hominem attack against the corporate modernist imperialist types of people that produced the report. Bulverising them – psychoanalysing WHY they are wrong to direct attention away from the fact that he could not prove THAT they were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
ENERGY TO MINE FOR MORE ENERGY TRANSITION? It will take a lot of energy, but if we convert that into a CO2 figure – it’s only 4.5 to 9 months of today’s annual emissions to stop CO2 emissions from our energy sources forever.
https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition/
While I have you – is there a word count or link count limit on posts? I tried to post a longer comment on the Italian Energy Transition paper you referenced in your article above, but may have breached some settings.
Okay, you are flat out wrong. “to stop CO2 emissions from our energy sources forever.”
Solar panels do not last forever. 25-30 years is the typical lifespan. Wind turbines, 25 years. What happens in 2060 when the panels and wind generators built in the next 10 years fail ? Perpetual motion machines never work out. The carbon pulse from the ‘renewable energy transition’ won’t even be cleared from the atmosphere. Will we do the CO2 pulse all over again ? What problem is this solving ?
Since you claim that we are only going to need 40% of the energy used now for an all electric future, where will the energy come from ? Is it even possible ?
How about a thought experiment ? You can borrow my time machine and go back 250 years and tell people what is happening now, explain the whole poly crisis caused by fossil fuels and problems of capitalist economics. What do you tell them ?
Eclipse
I’ve had a quick scroll through the many comments you’ve left and Steve L’s replies, and couldn’t find any Bulverism in them. Criticising research methodology is not an ad hominem attack; the framing of research questions is a part of research methodology.
Meanwhile, I’ve left you two comments asking about the three big non-electric areas in which we use fossil fuels: 1) agriculture 2) transport and 3) climate control (often heating, but more cooling), and you’ve replied to neither of them.
I don’t think you are changing anyone’s hearts or minds, here, but you seem not to be open to the possibility of your own mind being changed, either, so I’m wondering what your goal is in this dialogue, insofar as not answering people’s questions can be considered a dialogue.
I’m probably going to stop replying to you pretty soon, as a result. We all have better things to do. I’m sure you do too.
Meanwhile, I was listening to a lovely anarchist podcast the other day and the guest said community preparedness is about three things: gear, skills and relationships, and relationships are probably the most important, since nobody can learn all the skills or own all the gear. Wise words.
And so I’ll ask you one more set of questions, because I’m genuinely curious: what are your important relationships? What are the skills you enjoy building? How do you think the gear you use in daily life will change in your proposed future of abundant electricity? (I don’t believe that future is plausible, but I’m still curious about how you think your life will change.) And how do these three areas relate to one another in your life?
I do still recommend you read Chris’s books.
Hi Eclipse
Just to say — I wasn’t trying to make you feel unwelcome here, I was grumpy and tired and should have tempered my words slightly.
I’m quite busy for the next few days so will have to reply to your comments properly when I have some time — just letting you know, so you know I’m not ignoring you!
In general I find the comments here easiest to navigate if, when you run out of the “reply to” button, you instead reply to the lost recent comment in that particular thread of comments that you can (even if it means replying to yourself rather than to the person you’re addressing). You don’t seem to be doing this and it does make it harder to keep track of exactly what you’re responding to! It would be easier if the site had deeper threading, but it doesn’t — and it is primarily a blog rather than a forum.
hi Kathryn,
Even if it’s replying to myself? Interesting.
If Chris was interested there is a wordpress forum that is a one-click install. It might take a little work in figuring out – but could improve ease of discussions here? https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-discussion-board/
“COP: what’s relevant about it IMO is the country commitments. If transition is so easy, why would countries like China and India, or even the USA, not embrace it wholeheartedly, instead of dragging their feet? The argument would have to be that the fossil fuel industry is able to hold the whole world to ransom.”
_________
This is a many layered cake we’re discussing here. To get a bit of a handle on what’s going on we have to understand the major layers of the cake together in relation with one another, as each layer helps explain the others.
My theoretics goes like this at the moment.:
1. Corporations, business, and all that yada yada, co-evolved with the modern state (in cultural evolutionary terms). So the two are as intertwined, and unified (in evolutionary and systems dynamics terms) as pollinators and flowers.
2. This helps explain why the state (governments) always side with business / corporations, not just institutionally and structurally, but also ideologically. There is no significant difference between “the state” and “business” / corporations — which is why “the Megamachine” is such a useful label for what we’re discussing here.
3. Political, economic and military competition between states are roughly the same damned thing. To have a powerful military, one (if one is a state) one must have a powerful economy. This is why the state has always and will always resist degrowth. But it’s not the only reason! There are also all of those retirement funds and pensions, etc. Yada yada. Sigh.
… I could go on describing the layer cake of hegemony, but that’s what it ultimately is — hegemony, or domination, control.
Hegemony is both a local and a distributed phenomenon. And we cannot quite locate the distributed nature of hegemony, because it is literally everywhere at once. But we can locate the localized aspects and features of hegemony in the myriad obvious places where it manifests as name-able nodes in a richly complex network.
Corporations gain their power from the state. The state gains its power from the corporations, or business, more generally. There’s little point in discussing “these two” as if they were really and ultimately two. They are not two. They are a whole. A unity. An amalgam. A monster!
We require a certain kind of collective intelligence which can serve as an (metaphor, analogy) immune system against the monster — the Megamachine.
Only love can serve that role. That is — kindness, generosity, giving, compassion, sharing, cooperating… as an ethos.
All else is foolishness. Our only medicine here is love, generosity, kindness, giving, sharing… as CULTURE.
This is obvious! This is not so obvious. It’s obvious to me. I want it to be obvious to millions, billions!
Only love can undo empire. The Megamachine is the dynamism of empire — which is domination.
That sounds vaguely Christian, doesn’t it? But Christianity, historically, was co-opted by empire. Empire absorbed its enemy in the form of “Christianity”. It was welded as a weapon. It’s an irony as large as twenty pieces of silver.
“There is no significant difference between “the state” and “business” / corporations “—
The definitive description of fachism .
Correction: 30 pieces of silver … was the price for betraying Jesus. 20 pieces would have purchased a slave.
“That cost of the system is only a product of trying to make renewable energy work in a fossil fuel system.” i.e. the real world today.
By My Solitary Hearth addresses Q7 and Q9 from a real world perspective.
https://by-my-solitary-hearth.net/2024/02/05/the-daily-5-february-2024/
Why is it that the comments from RP/modernists dry up when asked for numbers and reasons ? They must have thought through some of this. Haven’t they ? Is it all wishful thinking ?
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/02/13/st-ives-bay-carbon-capture-trial-very-low-risk-report/#more-71793
Not far from you Chris .
So we’ve experimented with altering the chemistry of the atmosphere – it hasn’t gone so well – and now we’re going to experiment with altering the chemistry of the oceans – what could possibly go wrong? My guess is we have no idea.
Watch out with the money cost of things as governments can subsidize or dis-incentivize these numbers very easily. The state can create as much money as it likes in order to provision itself. Money is just a tool to allocate resources, but it is the real resources (materials and labor) that are needed to produce something are the ultimate cost to keep in mind.
Economist Bill Mitchell’s work is also moving towards the degrowth side.
Its simply not to feasible to have a individualistic western middle class lifestyle (e.g. every household an electric car) for the global population.
The question we should be asking is: how can we best meet our needs with a very limited renewable energy budget?
(not: how can we make our current energy consumption renewable?).
Living energy farms in Virginia shows that its possible. For example by not storing electricity in batteries, but using solar powered machines when the sun shines.
I still think so called renewables have their place (materials used to make solar panels and so on are obviously non renewable) – – in the right socioeconomic context, as in putting lights on at night in an African village. Like Wendell Berry said, if there is no regulation how and for what purposes renewable energy is being used it will be just as or even more damaging than fossil fuels. Using scarce and valuable renewable energies to charge mobile phones and watch TV just doesn’t seem useful or appropriate at all to me. In addition oftentimes we forget that wind and solar energy have their own biological purpose ie they are not actually free resources to be harvested without at the same time disturbing intrinsic biological cycles.
Thanks for new comments & links – interesting stuff. And good to get those cost figures from Steve.
Here’s something from Climate Brink: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/cp/141643938
A lot of people – including many climate scientists and climate activists – are quite invested in the notion that transitioning out of fossil fuels isn’t too difficult and the main problem is the political power of the fossil industry. Maybe this fits within the wider notion that a high-energy, urbanized, global civilization is non-negotiable. Hence oceanic experimentation.
I agree with James’s basic scoping of the corporate (private & public) field, and re Diogenes I think it might be useful to think about it in relation to fascism (more on that from me soon). Focusing on a narrower approach to fascism in relation to violent authoritarianism and scapegoating may ultimately miss its target.
Of course, within the corporate-state behemoth there are lots of more specific interest groups jockeying for position, including the fossil industry. But I’m not convinced it quite has the power to sign a global death warrant on behalf of the world’s governments in the way that some allege.
None of which is to disagree with Will that renewables have their place. But nor with Chris that a western-type middle class lifestyle is not feasible for all of humanity. Meaning that it’s not feasible in the west either.
@ Chris Smaje –
As I was re-reading this article ( https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/04/07/Rising-Chorus-Renewable-Energy-Skeptics/ ), and planning to read all articles on this theme and topic by Andrew Nikiforuk, it occurred to me that you may be among the more effective voices (in the form of a book, even if it is a relatively small book) on the topic of Why A Full Replacement Renewable Energy Strategy (FRRES) Is Actually A Pretty Bad Idea.
Personally, I am convinced this FRRES is probably the most dangerously bad idea afoot in our world today, and for plenty of sound reasons. 1. It’s not possible. 2. Attempting it will make a total mess of things. 3. Attempting it will result in delaying voluntary energy descent and the transition to a low energy local agrarian approach to tending to livelihood.
I know you’d probably rather write about small farms and farming, etc. But I think you’re one voice that needs to weigh in on this stuff in book form — even if it is a thin, small book.
If you take it on I will be more than happy to be one of your volunteer research assistants. I’ll also find others to help with this task. I’ll also send you $100 American as a bribe. That’s as much as I can afford.
I think maybe you’ve already started writing another book (?). If so… I have no idea what the topic is.
4. It is a version of eating your seed corn. A FRRES will waste energy and material resources for a short term patch that could be better used in a less energy intensive future.
@ Greg –
Yes, that too. It’s also a criminal level of mass deception, as FRRES would result in what Richard Heinberg called a “pulse” of greenhouse gases (burned fossil fuels) to power all of that mining, manufacturing, shipping, installing, transporting…. So the net result would be precisely the opposite of what FRRES is ostensibly meant to cure: increased fossil fuel consumption. Unfortunately, as Heinberg said in his article about this “pulse” (a search engine will find it if you type in [Heinberg Pulse]) no one has yet actually quantified the amount of energy (and fossil energy) required to build a FRRES. So we can’t just point out the study which has quantified this, unfortunately.
Yesterday evening I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on tv, going in about how the USA should build a “new 21st century electrical grid” as part of the larger FRRES. It was so obvious to me while watching and listening to this that AOC is taking the most politically expedient pathway of the moment. She promised the creation of millions of new jobs, of course — which is to say that the economy will boom, GDP would increase. The streets could be paved in gold.
But all of the best science makes it clear that only a degrowth strategy, and a rather steep one at that (!), could result in significantly lower GHG emissions. Not that our only ecological concerns are such emissions, but we must address emissions among all of the others, all of which require degrowth.
And I’m with Chris Smaje in saying that rural agrarianism is our best bet as the key degrowth strategy. It’s also the best bet for insuring that folks will have access to livelihood in a very low energy intensity economy.
I’m not all that concerned about a pulse of fossil energy being used to build renewable infrastructure, if I’m honest. While fossil fuels are cheap enough to be used at all, people (or at least corporations) are going to use them for something, to try and prop up the current economic system. So we’re going to get that pulse anyway, whether we use it to build solar and wind power infrastructure, or use it to build and power cruise ships, super yachts, tanks and military aircraft.
Given that, and given just how valuable electricity could be (if we used it sensibly) and will be in a post-fossil energy context, I suspect renewable energy infrastructure is one of the best things we could use the remaining fossil energy for. Other things that make the cut for me include medically useful plastics, and climate change mitigation infrastructure (such as flood defences and solar desalination plants). This is very much a gut feeling rather than number-crunching thing for me but as I’m not making the policital decisions and those who do are generally not listening to me, I don’t feel the need to spend much time on quantification.
Similarly, I don’t mind using waste products processed with fossil fuels (woodchips, spent coffee grounds) for soil improvement. The soil improvement will still be there after the fossil fuels go away, and in the meantime I’m growing far more of my own food than I would if I bought it.
“While fossil fuels are cheap enough to be used at all, people (or at least corporations) are going to use them for something, to try and prop up the current economic system.”
If people do as you say they will, using corporations as the source for this supply, then it will be the people doing just that. They cannot blame the corporations for demanding the supply.
I had a visceral response to your words, Kathryn. After all, what we’re discussing here is a crime worse than chattel slavery, worse than tormenting young children for pleasure, worse than any other crime, perhaps. To go ahead and burn the remainder of affordable fossil fuels on the premise that “people will do this” has the most profound moral / ethical significance. To me, it’s almost like saying, “Well, you know, there has always been murder, and people will murder after all, so there’s not much point in trying to prevent murder.
To burn fossil fuels now is to contribute to mass murder, actually. Not just of humans, either. Ecocide involves myriad species, ecosystems — a whole biosphere. It’s all put at risk with every bit of fossil fuels we burn.
If humanity were awake to this we’d have a f**king rebellion. But we’re not awake to it in the slightest. We shrug our shoulders and say, “You know, if I don’t rob my neighbors house, surely someone else will. It may as well be me. And there’s no point in trying to stop a robbery in process.”
James,
I think you might be mistaking my description for approval. I don’t like the idea that we will probably continue to burn fossil fuels until it is simply too difficult or expensive to do so. I do not welcome the resulting destruction. But I try to be realistic in my estimations of what is actually going to happen.
You might want to search on the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” I mean, yes, I buy some of my food produced further away than I can walk, I benefit from fossil transport and heating, I write comments on the internet using computer equipment — and I daresay you do all of those things too. My choices, and yours, are constrained by the wider system. And if I could turn my back on it all, if I could actually ensure that every bit of my own consumption were absolutely regenerative rather than destructive — well, I might have some moral high ground in an unrealistic purity contest, but the rest of the system would still keep operating without me and do about the same amount of damage that it would. That doesn’t mean I give up out of despair and stop thinking about the ways that my own actions contribute to destruction. It means I actively try to build the alternatives that don’t exist yet, the systems and ecological relationships that cannot come into being without my imagination and my practical work and my collaboration with others.
If you have a realistic and workable plan for rapidly curtailing fossil fuel use I would love to hear it, but so far I don’t see that happening. I do think we are headed for a low-energy future one way or another. But I still maintain that solar and wind are a better use of remaining fossil resources than either cruise ships or military aircraft — or more fossil fuel electricity generation plants, for that matter.
Hi – I apologise to Steve L if I misatributed the comments to him – it may have been Greg and this is not my normal online forum where I can easily skip back up the chronological page of comments to check things. The layout is a bit all over the place in wordpress comments.
PERSONAL NOTE: I APPRECIATE YOUR LIFESTYLE AND HOBBIES
Basicallly if my family were transplanted into Middle-Earth – we’d be hobbits. I’d be the bookish sort of hobbit, my wife would be the flowers and farming hobbit, and my son would operate any machinery down at the mill and my daughter would be an artist. I admire your lifestyle and hobbies that you described to me in one of our last exchanges.
I’m sorry you feel I didn’t answer your questions – but I have repeated these same themes SO many times here I feel like I’m trolling! Basically I’m looking for holes in my knowledge. Blind spots. I know discussions like this change minds because they’ve changed my mind before – 180 degrees on important subjects. But the fact that you ask me such basic questions like transport and thermal comfort in buildings means you’re not briefed on the basics of the energy transition. This is real 101 stuff. The same with Greg today basically admitting he thinks we’ll need more oil and coal and gas to build the second generation of renewables around 2060 – because every wind turbine was mined with a diesel truck, smelted in a coal furnace and trucked into place with diesel.
So I’ll start with transport, then do heating and cooling and then do agriculture last. This might have to be in a few posts.
TRANSPORT: Clean energy is only half the energy transition. The other half is clean production. AKA – “Electrify Everything”.
Electric cars are taking over so fast the IEA predicts we’ll have an oil GLUT by 2028. Trucking is about a decade behind family cars – but the first adopter vehicles can already drive further than most drivers are legally allowed to drive in a shift – IF they time their lunch break around charging for that half hour. That’s the Tesla semi model. But Australia has the world’s largest trucks – and even a huge bank of batteries would not do the job for our huge 80 to 100 ton trucks. So Janus started a battery swap program. A guy on a forklift does it in a few minutes. Old diesel trucks need a very expensive engine rebuild every 7 years or so. Converting the truck to electric with Janus pays for itself in a year. There’s no engine to service – and the battery swap is 1/3 the cost of diesel. Solar on the warehouse roof takes care of 10 trucks, and in remote areas the warehouse could build a local solar farm for an off-grid solution. Avoiding fast-charging like Tesla’s “Mega-charger” means less stress on the batteries and local grid. Today’s batteries do 400 km – and then a toilet break with a few minutes for a battery swap – and off you go again! Regenerative breaking recharges the battery and avoids wear on the brake pads. See the latest truck conversions here https://www.januselectric.com.au/
HEATING: What about heating buildings? Forget individual buildings for a minute – I’m into energy efficient cities or “Eco-cities”. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/ Basically – while there’s no technical reason the world can’t have billions of cars – I don’t like cars. I want a better city with a village green. Built to the best passive solar standards to be as energy efficient as possible. The cheapest energy is the energy you do without – the NEGA-Watts of power. (Amory Lovins).
Once a passive solar home is built, install a few heat pumps (aka reverse cycle air conditioners) and they’ll run on the upgraded super-grid that’s coming in the energy transition. There are heat pumps that run at below zero – still extracting calories from the outside air and concentrating them inside the house. Finally – if the outside is somewhere minus 20 or 30 like in Canada – these heat pumps can be hybrid for super-cold regions and have bar-heaters installed in the middle of them as well. Some extra electricity on truly freezing days is OK if the overall efficiency of the civilisation is good. The batteries or pumped hydro sites 1000 km away might go down a bit. Oh well. Sunnier days will fill them up again.
OR if we have true super-grids – don’t forget that HVDC powerlines are now so good they only lose 1.6% per 1000km. That means a solar farm LITERALLY on the equator could power a hypothetical base at the North or South Pole 10,000km away and only lose 16% of the power! Storage is one of the more expensive parts of the energy transition – so overbuilding renewables capacity across a wide geographic area – a continent wide grid – is a great strategy for cutting costs. Basically – HVDC makes super-grids viable – and super-grids make electric heating in colder northern winters more viable.
If you want to read about industrial heating or watch video’s on it – like how we’re going to to ‘green steel’ and all that, try here: https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/thermal-batteries/
Next post – agriculture.
AGRICULTURE is an enormous subject. There are huge changes coming – and I guess the imporovements will be implemented according to what is more appropriate for each culture. Unlike Chris – I do not think energy is a concern for Precision Fermentation. If there’s an issue scaling it cheap enough, it’s probably in the fermenting process itself. Biological systems might not scale the same way industrial systems do. So we’ll see. But it could feed the world.
FERTILISER: Over half the energy in agriculture is in running the Haber Bosch system for nitrogen fertiliser. This can be replaced with renewables – even peak oiler Richard Heinberg admitted that in one of his books (Party’s Over? Powerdown? I read them both back in the day.)
REGENERATIVE FARMING is helping farmers store more carbon in their soils, spend less on fertiliser, and increase profits. It’s a range of practices like low-till or no-till farming, less poisons, or even little robots that roam around micro-poisoning the individual weeds – some that even lazer or microwave them!
I imagine harvesters can run on a battery swap system the way Janus trucks do. There are companies trying to build fully electric harvesters. https://linttas.com/ I’ve even seen some running industrial thick power-cord spools 3km long hanging off the side of the harvester – I kid you not! They’re automated and the AI makes sure it does not drive over the power cord.
Or there’s always synthetic e-diesel or hydrogen – which I will not rule out as Australia just invented a new way of splitting water that’s 20% more efficient. This hydrogen plant is being scaled up this year with some serious money!
(This may have possibilities for airlines – but I’m not that fussed if the energy transition doesn’t quite work out utterly convenient for everyone. It seems probable that airlines might be more expensive in the future. I don’t care if global flight goes down 20% or 40% – maybe we can use Zoom meetings more! We’re getting a bit too precious and entitled these days. I basically don’t worry about airlines in my energy transition thinking – as that’s not a threat to civilisation – just convenience – and some tourist economies.)
SEAWEED TO SAVE THE OCEANS: Important scientists (like Sir David King) are saying we can grow super-abundant seaweed and shellfish farms that could feed the world while saving the oceans from fishing and local acidity! Seaweed can be dried into a high protein powder that can go in everything from protein bars to dairy to bread. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000302
Even when dried into a powder, because it grows 30 times faster than any land based plant, the protein yield per hectare is 2.5 to 7.5 times higher than wheat or legumes! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7221823/
JUST 2% OF THE OCEANS COULD FEED 12 BILLION PEOPLE! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/01/sea-forest-better-name-seaweed-un-food-adviser
They also grow shellfish like oysters, scallops, and muscles in baskets under the seaweed lines. It use no fresh water, energy intense fertiliser, or arable land – and only needs a little electric boat.
POLITICAL AND GEOPOLITICAL PROBLEMS WITH SMALL SCALE FARMING:-
But given most of the world’s arable land is thousands of kilometres away from where most of the world’s people are housed – large numbers in other countries no less – I just don’t see BILLIONS volunteering to suddenly go out into the country side and just try their hand at farming! The logistics would not just be one of the largest emergency mobilisations of the population by government since wartime economies – possibly larger – but there’s GEOPOLITCIAL ramifications when we’re talking about tens or hundreds of millions needing to move between nations just to feed themselves.
PERSONAL QUESTIONS: I’m married with 2 young adult children, and they are the world to me. I’m what my friends call a ‘career carnie’ – as in Circus Carnival – travelling from one thing to another. So I’ve been in the Australian army, then did a few years Social Sciences and ended up in Child Protection. Then youth work, admin, running my wife’s graphic design business, and now work a 9 to 5 junior admin role because I don’t want to go back into welfare. (The stress was killing me – actual heart-racing panic attacks on a Sunday night before work.)
I enjoy reading and blogging and in my blogging – compiling various technologies together and asking technical experts online how advances in this area here might relate to and improve on that sector over there. The future of civilisation is like a jigsaw puzzle to me – and unless someone throws us into nuclear war – I think we can make it. IF we have enough activists supporting the right things. There is no reason we cannot have abundant renewable energy and solve climate change and eat good food and still have nature thrive.
I’m cranky about western political economy getting too neo-lib – and am probably left of many in the Labor party. I don’t like Corporations being legally accountable to maximise profits and growth for shareholders – that’s growth at all costs like a cancer cell. I think I prefer Worker’s Co-ops that are trying to meet the more local needs of their cities and nations. At least the CEO can’t earn more than 8 times what the cleaner earns! And they can afford to think for the long term – like plan for a quarter century – not that financial quarter’s profits! The sheer staff TURNOVER in the corporation I work for is eye-watering! There isn’t much stability.
Finally – the bit where you said you basically didn’t want to converse any more? That would be sad. But it had this tone to it that if I’m not here to sit like a disciple and take in everything you all say like you are my guru’s – then what am I doing here? You implied I was wasting my time.
I’m here basically because if I’m not in a debate like this that forces me to study important stuff – I’ll get lazy. Unmotivated. Watch too much junk TV. Iron sharpens iron. I like debate – and people that disagree with me checking my blind spots for me. Challenging me to think and see the world differently. We should all be open to having our blind spots checked. So the question is – why are you uncomfortable with me challenging your thinking? Do you want this comments section to be an echo-chamber that just echoes your thoughts back to you in a non-confrontational way – confirming how sensible you are? I can see why that would be attractive. But I’m not sure how much closer to reality it gets anyone.
Thanks for the research you’ve put into this – it was shared with me the day after I heard Nate Hagens’s interview with economist historian Steve Keen entitled “On the Origins of Energy Blindness” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrMWSkzrMYg) in which he points out that the special place of Energy has always been overlooked by economists since Adam Smith. Given the astonishing impact of the advent of fossil energy, I think I’d call your successor to ModCiv 1.0 built on fossil fuels, “ModCiv 2.0”, the beginnings of renewables “ModCiv 2.1” and your ModCiv 1.2 I’d call ModCiv 3.0 maybe.
+ + +
As we write and read today, NATO warmongers are urging an ever escalating fossil fuel and mineral dependent arms race to build up what most governments and propagandists call our “defences”, even though their use is always destructive (e.g. this: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/14/nato-chief-concedes-spending-criticism-as-allies-up-defense-budget.html). So factor in reconstruction, and the mining and machinery required. And apart from the deliberate destruction there’s the ridiculously short life of anything manufactured – every PV panel with a long 25 year life will need replacing 4x a century.
Oil and gas infrastructure also needs replacing periodically. I think some modern photovoltaic solar is made with recycling in mind; I’m pretty sure building wind turbines in ways that encourage repair and re-use of parts is possible, though I’m not sure how much standardisation of parts there is within the industry.
Efficient insulation in housing is probably a better long-term investment, if the embodied energy is low enough. I think houses (and their insulation) generally last longer than power plants, but perhaps that’s just survivorship bias. The house I live in isn’t particularly well insulated but it is over 100 years old. The ones built even more cheaply at the same time have mostly fallen down by now.
Burning fossil fuels isn’t a moral / ethical crime … if there is no alternative to it.
A “rapid transition” to “renewables” is NOT such an alternative, for reasons explained above.
But there *is* an alternative, apart from the fantasy of a rapid renewable energy “transition”, and that’s a rapid transition to a very low energy economy, as contrasted with the very high energy economy of the “developed world” today.
Therefore, we’re making a choice. We’re choosing ecocide.
Yes, I just used the “royal” we. I’m speaking mostly to those in the Global North, rich world, “developed world” here. We’re deciding the fate of Earth’s ecosystems and the biosphere. We are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNltbSH0EbM&t=378s
Thanks for your book suggestion, James. Madman that I am, I’m thinking of starting a new book project soon, but the exact focus isn’t yet settled. I asked folks on here for ideas a while back – maybe I’ll piggyback on your suggestion to ask again.
I’m not wild about writing another ‘this technofix isn’t going to work’ book, but maybe I should embrace the need to do so? I don’t want to write about farming in detail (no ‘farm’ or ‘future’ in the next book title!) – I guess I’d most like to write about the politics and practicalities of a transition to low-energy agrarian localism. And maybe to riff from one of George Monbiot’s tweets aimed at me along the lines that we should do everything possible to prevent collapse. Well, what if everything possible isn’t enough, shouldn’t we be thinking about that?
But in my current notepad phase I’m genuinely interested in any suggestions for another book. And in view of the maelstrom we’re now entering perhaps also thinking that what I’d like to write is less important than what I can best give of my puny powers of penmanship to help meet the challenges of our times.
@Chris –
I’m quite uncertain how much (what proportion) of the fact that we’re not doing the things we ought to be doing in response to the overall unfolding calamity is a result of plain ignorance among the people as to what we ought to be doing, and why.
I’m also unclear what proportion is due to people suspecting that the system is so entrenched with inertia that it’s pointless to try and shift it out of its course of momentum.
To what extent is it about the widespread sense of having no agency in the world, when it comes to things political?
To what extent… a lack of ability to imagine viable alternatives…?
There are so many questions, but it seems few are asking them, exploring them, considering them, dialoguing about them.
I strongly suspect that what we need most is such dialogue.
What you have to offer isn’t just a skill in putting words together, but a pretty well established record of saying unpopular things which tend to make good sense, and challenging standard issue premises of the dominant culture.
Were I to write the book I think we need, It’d not likely even get published. If it got published, it would likely have a tiny audience.
If you were to write the book, you could help trigger the dialogue we so desperately need now.
I think writing about what you are for is more productive in the long term than reacting to what you are against. It will also probably get you less attention in the short term, which is always a mixed blessing when trying to sell books. I don’t particularly want to see you dragged over the coals the way you have been after the publication of “Saying No…”; I don’t know if that is simply the price of making a big enough noise to make any difference, or whether it is an indication that you are trying to teach pigs to sing, exhausting yourself and annoying the pigs. And I am mindful that you’re not far out from the death of your mother and passing on to others of your market garden, and that many spiritual traditions caution against taking major decisions while in a state of grief or desolation or disorientation. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, though, and such advice sometimes strikes me as unrealistic for those of us without the luxury of a fully spiritually-integrated life who must also attend to material conditions. But perhaps that is merely part of our current wider predicament… what I am attempting to say here is to try and ensure you have adequate rest, if you can, after a rather trying time.
So if writing a book is the next thing, I still like the idea of a book on why we should all get involved in local production, maybe with some models or case studies of how that can work politically, ecologically and economically (…but I repeat myself).
To the vast majority of people I encounter, my gardening is seen more as a weird hobby that gets me dirty and tired than as a meaningful part of household and community resilience in the face of unstable climate, economics and politics. It certainly isn’t seen as a substantial contribution to our food intake, and part of my motivation for keeping a spreadsheet this year was to counter that in my own mind.
You’ve already written about why a small farm future is likely the most congenial future, and about the many challenges that are on the horizon in trying to get there from here. But for people who think gardening is just a weird hobby it might not be obvious how agrarian localism applies to them, how to make the first halting steps from here to there.
Of course, horticulture is not the only piece of that puzzle; some people might choose to pursue making clothing or becoming an excellent chef or forest management or soil hydrology or composting toilets or willow basketry… there are any number of productive skills that will be necessary in the future and are enjoyable and meaningful now. I suspect the act of producing something — almost anything — for one’s own use or consumption is probably more important than whether it is food, fuel or fibre, or music, poetry or sculpture for that matter.
The difficulty in me making these suggestions, of course, is that I am not someone who needs to be convinced that growing my own veg is a good idea. I’ve always enjoyed making things, and at this stage doing without garden space of some kind is pretty much unthinkable. I am happy to contribute to conversations here, but I feel we rarely disagree on fundamental principles (though I like to think that batting around some minor disagreements allows us all to clarify our thinking). So I wonder what book Noil would have you write, or Mike Daw, or Sarah Taber, or even George Monbiot — and how to reconcile the possibilities there with my opening advice to write about what you are for rather than react to your opponents, thereby letting them set the terms of any dialogue. I suppose the reality is that our context is always determined to some degree by those who hold power, and this is as true with writing books as it is with access to land.
The other concept that comes to mind is, again, the idea of refugia. I’ve seen a few “prepper” books that give vague instructions for rebuilding civilisation after some sort of catastrophe, but nothing that engages with creating and nurturing refugia now for an agrarian localist future, nothing that gives the details of what kinds of things to load onto a metaphorical ark if what we want to do is not to replicate ModCiv 1.0 or 1.1 but instead construct SolarCiv 1.0. And the things we’re going to need aren’t just two of every kind of animal (and seven pairs of the ones we eat) but skills of governance, skills of relating to and finding our proper place within the more than human world, spiritual practices, philosophical tools, critical thinking… we’ll need to manage commons and we’ll need to sing work songs while we get the harvest in. We’ll need to welcome the stranger and the refugee and also defend against enclosure and extraction. We’ll need to be good neighbours and learn how to cope with bad ones. We’ll need to observe what actually works with honest eyes and adjust our course with loving hearts. We’ll need to remember how to live well within limits and how to die well. And this is true whether we have a little renewable electricity available, or a lot, or none at all. It’s true whether we draw out our remaining stores of fossil fuels or draw them down. It’s true whether climate instability is better or worse than our current predictions and it’s true whether we as a species have a hundred years left or ten thousand centuries. And writing about this from the perspective of tending land, of sowing seeds and raising livestock and building soil and creating habitat while also providing for your own needs and those of the wider community, could be a rich endeavour indeed. Having laid out what we need, where do you see refugia within our current society? Where can we build on that work, or start new pockets of resilience and resistance? Maybe your farm is such a refuge. In my better moments I think the Soup Garden is too, meagre though it is. We need both. There are other case studies available.
Maybe this is the book I should write, not the one you should — but I think if you and I both made the attempt, we would come up with very different results. Mine would probably be more grounded in Christian theology; yours would probably be more scholarly, with a better understanding of philosophical traditions. I have very little livestock experience, but also a perspective on attempting all of this in an ever-declining urban context without a scrap of land to truly call my own. And I don’t particularly want to write a book right now; I need another project like I need a leaky boot.
Also, this almost goes without saying, but… you are a better writer, by far, than I will ever be.
@Kathryn –
My main point was that as many of us as possible ought to do everything necessary to put an end to the cultural habit of treating the burning of fossil fuels as simply inevitable, unavoidable… and therefore morally and ethically neutral.
It isn’t neutral. It’s criminal. And it’s up to us to find ways to get free of it.
I’m sure as hell not involved in some sort of purity contest. That’s all very much beside the point, and irrelevant to my point.
PS –
Kathryn –
For many years I had (and continue to have) a profound interest in what is called ecological design. The study of ecological design (and then, later, Integrative design — which goes even further than ecological design in embedding ethical principles into design practice — helped me to understand that we don’t need to use half as much fossil fuels as we do in order to meet our legitimate needs, such as food, shelter, clothing, water, etc.
I came to understand that overwhelmingly most people don’t share this knowledge with me. What’s worse is that they don’t seem to even care. Instead, they want “green growth”. And they are promised that they can both have their cake and eat it too. So who gives a sh*t about ecological design? We don’t need that. What we need (they say is electric cars, a newfangled electric grid … and a hundred billion solar panels and wind turbines, etc.
Those who say otherwise aren’t being heard. Their message, however soundly argued, never reaches the people or the political process. And we’re all responsible for this failing of culture. And I say culture because the essence of culture is social learning. Even non-human animals have social learning. But humans my be the only animal which has deliberate teaching. I’m not sure about that. It’s an open question. But we humans do and can teach. And we’re failing to teach what really matters.
And teaching isn’t all about schooling, nor colleges and universities. It’s also how we talk between us, whether in “the media” or at the local cafe, coffee shop, hiking trail. or pub.
They’re at it again https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/14/lab-grown-beef-rice-could-offer-more-sustainable-protein-source-say-creators
“What if everything possible isn’t enough” – this brought to mind Jem Bendell and deep adaptation – I guess he was thinking of the physics of our predicaments but the politics of them are just as interesting – what constrains ‘the possible’ – i guess that’s sort of the road Paul Kingsnorth went down but it’s a discussion that deserves much wider attention – no idea how any of this translates into a book – but I can’t help feeling if, 30 or 40 years ago, we’d been able to collectively approach climate change, ecological breakdown etc from a cultural perspective first and a technological one second we might be in a very different place. Maybe that sort of alternate history needs a novel
45-50 years ago, some people *were* well aware of the problem. In 1977 or -78 the Labour government funded three environmental groups to do long-term UK scenarios in which energy efficiency improvements and renewables figured quite highly. It may have helped that the Energy Secretary was a man called Tony Benn.
The policies followed from about 1974 to -81 reduced US and UK oil consumption by about 15%. Then they abruptly reversed. From the early or mid 1980s the UK and USA began pumping oil out of the North Sea and Alaska fields as fast as possible. That’s one reason we’re up ****creek without a paddle.
Dr. Simon Michaux’s concerns about mineral shortages, first expressed 2021, seem to have been corroborated by Prof. Richard Herrington’s team at the Natural History Museum. Their work was issued in 2019.
Going back much further, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy was aware in the 1950s of peak oil. I was alerted to this by Gail Tverberg, a retired actuary whose blog is ‘Our Finite World’. She gave a link to one of Rickover’s talks. So I think we had almost a lifetime’s warning but only a tiny minority have ever worried about the availability of oil in particular, and energy in general, peaking in the early 21st.C and then falling again.
In the last discussion I saw between Michaux and Hagens they seemed to think that the world might achieve ~25% of today’s energy consumption if it has to rely just on solar and wind. That suggests a simpler way of life to put it mildly.
Hi David,
I became a peak oiler about 20 years ago when my 5 year old boy had cancer. Renewables were vastly too expensive to Overbuild back then, and I was in a bad, bad place. I went a little manic trying to save my kid from cancer and then wondering if I also had to save him from Mad Max – and basically become a doomsday prepper. Now I have nothing against the permaculture lifestyle recommended on this blog! There is a lot to admire about that lifestyle. My main point in raising this is that I get it – the world’s resources are finite and so is the biosphere – and climate change could exacerbate any and all of these negative trends.
BUT!
20 years is a long time. Now that renewables have finally scaled Overbuild is financially feasible. Everything changes when one realises most renewable plans are arguing for enormous super-grids that create their own ‘geographic smoothing.’ That is – if winter halves your electricity supply, either double your wind and solar capacity – or build a HVDC line closer to the “Sunshine Belt” where 3/4 of the human race live anyway – and your nation will not have an issue!
Simon ignored this in his paper. There are many AWFUL examples of cherry-picking of data that Simon engages in – and some downright untruths. They might be things he missed – I know I certainly missed some of them for decades! But a quick summary of why I – with a mere social sciences background – and sure Simon is wrong on minerals.
COLD GERMAN WINTERS – OR WHERE MOST PEOPLE LIVE – NEARER THE EQUATOR? Simon Michaux cherry-picked a dark, isolated German winter to get his 4 weeks storage requirements. But 75% of us live in regions that barely have winter. In fact – with HVDC lines now only losing 1.6% power per 1000 km – anywhere on earth can enjoy solar from these areas. Germany can! They’re part of the ENTSO super-grid and will mix northern wind and southern solar across 535 MILLION customers and 35 countries to even out supply. That’s how you do it – Overbuild capacity across a vast area to almost eliminate storage. There are MANY studies into this. 4 weeks is a complete MYTH – even for Germany – and ignores the majority of peer-reviewed studies. The last time I saw cherry-picking this bad was from a climate denier or flat earther! Plenty of Overbuild studies here- including Scientific American from 2015 which puts Overbuild in public culture – not just peer-review. An energy ‘expert’ like Michaux should have modelled this. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/overbuild/
GRID STORAGE OR LUXURY CAR STORAGE? Can Michaux make up his mind what he is trying to do here? He insisted that GRID storage must be from the “Rolls Royce” of batteries – the NMC batteries found mainly in upmarket EVs! Even the EV industry is moving away from NMC due to cost. Instead – because they’re 30% cheaper and can be made from sea-salt and other plentiful stuff – the economics will probably move utilities to sodium batteries over time.
For a few hours only. Then they’ll turn on the pumped hydro. The world has 100 TIMES the potential OFF-river pumped hydro we could need. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
ALTERNATIVES ABUNDANT: The energy transition has brands in every technology that are moving to plentiful plainer cheaper stuff. It’s a myth that the energy transition NEEDS rare-earths and critical minerals – every brand of EV, electric motor, and even the permanent magnets in the wind turbines have alternative brands that are either already deploying at scale – or just about to commercialise a whole new array of cheaper tech. It’s the cost! Rare earth’s are just too expensive, and alternatives ARE feasible.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
MICHAUX’S OWN PAPER SHOWS WE HAVE ENOUGH! If we just swap Michaux’s NMC for a few hours sodium batteries and a few days pumped hydro – even Simon Michaux’s OWN PAPER shows we have more than enough minerals. I did the (primary school) maths here. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux-sans-batteries
I’m NOT saying this will be smooth – and that there will not be periods of higher prices and desperate scrambles as the market sorts this out. I also fear what some neo-colonial corporations might be up to in Africa and South America. Indigenous rights and local environmental issues are paramount. What I am saying is the resources are there, and the whole things seems technically viable. Michaux’s bombastic “This is JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!” is so much smoke and mirrors.
OTHER CRITIQUES OF MICHAUX:-
Michael Barnard: an actual renewables engineer with experience in the industry.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/04/how-many-things-must-one-analyst-get-wrong-in-order-to-proclaim-a-convenient-decarbonization-minerals-shortage/
Nafeez M Ahmed: investigative journalist and tech writer
https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/
OTHERS THAT KNOW BETTER:
International Energy Agency: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions
Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/minerals-for-electricity
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
“Engineering with Rosie” is now covering this subject. She has “a PhD in mechanical engineering and 18 years of experience working as a professional engineer developing new energy technologies.”
https://youtu.be/nBotCbgLlt0?si=LrDEi_Q6nfv_tRL-
Hi, Eclipse.
I’m sorry to hear about your son’s cancer; that sort of serious illness in a child is always world-changing. You don’t say whether he survived; I hope that he did, but if not, I’m sorry for your loss.
The thing about all this stuff about abundant renewable energy is… well, I’ll believe it’s going to happen when, and only when, I actually see it happening. A lot of the technologies you mention do have some promise, but they had some promise twenty years ago and we may well be in the land of “too little, too late”. My trust in governments, corporations and institutions to actually deliver the changes people need is at an all-time low after seeing how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled and how many people I know died a lot earlier than they otherwise would have due to extremely inconsistent public health messaging and repeated prioritisation of short-term economic impacts over human safety.
I’m also quite sceptical of super-grid scenarios. All that infrastructure requires a lot of maintenance, and it’s not like the West has been maintaining infrastructure all that well since the onset of neoliberal politics in the late 1970s. Better, I think, to have distributed microgeneration: produce the energy at the point where it’s needed, rather than moving it around. Store it where it’s needed, rather than have backup batteries for a grid.
I personally don’t think we’re going to end up with a world completely devoid of electricity. But I also am not at all certain we’re going to replace current fossil fuel use with renewable electricity.
As I understand it, our largest uses of fossil fuels are in:
– transport (and batteries are seriously heavy by comparison, so it takes more energy to move a comparably-sized vehicle simply because of the weight of the batteries), including personal transport, transport of consumer goods like food, and military transport. But (as I wrote to Noil above) I am not seeing electric container ships or electric air freight, and I am still living in a world where it is almost impossible to participate in society (and indeed write comments on blog posts) without making use of consumer goods that were not manufactured locally. Rail freight could help a lot, as it really is more energy efficient than combustion and electric trains are an established technology, but we’ve just spent the better part of a century destroying rail infrastructure in favour of roads, and the volume of goods traded now far exceeds the amount that was transported at the height of the rail freight era. Even replacing current personal transport with electric would probably have strongly adverse effects on road infrastructure because of the weight of the batteries. There is a lot of last-mile and short-haul delivery that is increasingly done by e-assist bicycle, and that seems like a much better bet, but we still haven’t really addressed long-distance shipping.
– climate control in homes and workplaces (increasingly, that 75% of people who don’t experience “real” winter are going to need air conditioning in order to not die; meanwhile, where I live, many people can’t afford to heat their homes in winter despite a temperate climate). It makes a lot of sense to invest in insulation here before we get too excited, but retro-fitting 120-year-old homes is not a joke and I don’t see much of it happening where I live, largely because landlords aren’t the ones paying the energy bills. Not everywhere is suitable for retrofitted ground source heat pumps; air source heat pumps aren’t great in extreme temperatures (I don’t think our rooftop solar panels on this house could use an air source heat pump to heat our hot water and radiators in winter, and our temperatures aren’t even extreme, they might manage to keep it cool-ish in summer but we mostly achieve that by opening the loft hatch and the downstairs windows at night.)
Additionally, we spend about 10 kilojoules of fossil energy for every 1 kilojoule of food energy we produce (I don’t know offhand if that figure includes the energy that goes into ammonium nitrate fertiliser production). You could argue that precision fermentation will solve this, but… well, Chris has actually written a book on why that won’t work. I suggest you read it; I’m not going to rehearse the arguments here.
But even without getting into the gritty details of any of this, we can look at what the downsides are of each approach.
If you are wrong about what is feasible with abundant renewable energy, but we stay on the current trajectory of increasing energy use every year and trusting that it’ll all work out somehow, we are going to be in pretty deep trouble.
If Chris is wrong, but we switch to agrarian localism for meeting most of our daily needs, get off of fossil fuels entirely and reduce our energy use otherwise, and it turns out we have the renewables capacity to support a highly-industrialised lifestyle? Well, then we’ll have a much more congenial world, plus all the modcons.
If reality will be somewhere in between those two extremes, then again, we stand to lose very little by shifting to more local production of our daily needs.
More of the politics https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/12/litigation-terrorism-how-corporations-are-winning-billions-from-governments
Future fiction. Set the SFF in, take your pick, 2050, 2075. You wouldn’t actually have to pick a specific date. There are all kinds of interesting things that could be happening at any point in the future. Like next year, when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks off. Or… It’s fiction.
Is a wish list for green hydrogen .
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen.
Natural gas produced hydrogen , somewhere above $3 per kg , renewable energy electrolytic hydrogen somewhere above $7 per kg .
Cost effective ? Nope .
Nope is kind of an understatement.
Let’s say that a kg of H2 has 131 Mj (120-42 is the range) or energy or 124,000 BTUs. That is $3 for fossil fueled or $7 for green H. That averages out to $5.
Natural gas has just a touch over 1,000,000 BTUs per 1000 standard cubic feet. In November 1000 scf of natural gas delivered to a home owner was $14. So, $5 would get you 200,000 BTUs of gas. That $5 includes taxes and a mark up for the gas company.
The industrial price for gas is about $5 for 1000 scf. If I’m reading it right, the cost is $1.53 at the Henry Hub.
Hydrogen ?
The costs for making hydrogen, like the costs to produce gasoline, are significantly lower than the prices paid by consumers.
An article from 5 months ago:
“California’s largest H2 fuel retailer, True Zero, which operates 37 of the 53 hydrogen filling stations in the state, recently hiked the price of H2 at all its pumps to $36/kg, up from around $30/kg.”
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/analysis-it-is-now-almost-14-times-more-expensive-to-drive-a-toyota-hydrogen-car-in-california-than-a-comparable-tesla-ev/2-1-1519315
I got the math wrong. At $14 per Mscf, $5 would get you about 350,000 BTUs of natural gas.
Regarding hydrogen, below are some interesting numbers from a conservative think tank. The EROI for hydrogen (from electrolysis) was calculated to be in the range of 0.51 to 0.64 which means that about a third to a half of the energy in the PV solar farm electricity is lost when it’s used to produce compressed hydrogen.
Not mentioned is that if the hydrogen is later used in a fuel cell, transforming it back into electrical energy (to power a car, for example), there are additional losses: about 40% of the energy in the hydrogen is lost due to the fuel cell efficiency being around 60%.
===============
“One kilogram of hydrogen (approximately 2.2 pounds) contains the equivalent energy of just under 40 kWh of electricity, although some of that energy is lost when hydrogen is combusted. This is known as the “higher heating value” (HHV),[18] and it measures the maximum theoretical amount of energy that can be captured when hydrogen is combusted. However, manufacturing hydrogen entails additional energy losses. Hydrogen proponents claim that electrolyzers, which split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, will use electricity supplied by surplus wind and solar generation to produce zero-emissions hydrogen. But electrolyzers are, at most, 80% efficient, meaning that at least 20% of the energy, i.e., the electricity, used is lost in the manufacturing process.[19]
At 80% efficiency, it takes at least 49 kWh of delivered electricity to produce 1 kg of hydrogen.[20] (At 70% efficiency, an electrolyzer would require 57 kWh/kg.) Electric transmission and distribution system losses, such as from distant wind and solar facilities to hydrogen manufacturing facilities, mean that another 3%–5% more electricity must be generated, depending on transmission distance. After hydrogen is manufactured, it must be compressed, so that it can be stored and transported. Typically, hydrogen is pressurized to 350 or 700 bar (a metric measure of pressure; 1 bar is slightly less than normal atmospheric pressure) or liquefied. Compression to 700 bar, for example, requires between 5% and 15% of hydrogen’s HHV, or between 2 kWh/kg and 6 kWh/kg.[21]
Hence—ignoring the energy required to manufacture the materials needed for an electrolyzer plant itself, as well as the energy used to construct and maintain an electrolysis facility, including compressors—a simple and conservative EROI value can be derived (Table 1).
As shown in Table 1, the useful energy contained in hydrogen that is produced via electrolysis is, at best, just over 60% of the energy required to manufacture it. This contrasts with other dispatchable fossil fuels and nuclear power, which all have EROIs greater than one, even after including the energy consumed to manufacture the materials and construct the facilities (Figure 1). 22 (The hydrogen produced by electrolysis also has a much lower EROI than the electricity generated by non-dispatchable wind and solar energy.)”
===============
Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/green-hydrogen-a-multibillion-dollar-energy-boondoggle.pdf
Unfortunately;
There is as yet an agreed life cycle cost analysis approach that accounts for all the embedded energy ( energy, the proposed , all the impact of the waste and externalities, so until that happens, I assume all such studies are biased and not enough to make decisions on.
Not holding my breath, as the calculations are messy, and everyone has an agenda.
The scientists are still trying to settle on a reasonable method.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1470160X20302417
The Manhattan Institute study is promoting nuclear, but other studies I’ve seen show much lower EROEI for nuclear.
H2 is a loser, but so is everything that tries to take more than our fair share of the annual bioharvested solar energy.
For now, I’m going with common sense.
posted too quickly.
“( energy, the proposed , all the impact of the waste and externalities,”
should have read: “(emergy, the proposed all in energy accounting concept proposed by H.T. Odum, that includes embedded energy) and all the impact of the waste and externalities,”
@Chris
To map out what the future may or may not look like.
A good starting point would be to figure out how much available surplus energy there will be. And in what form.
Not an easy task in itself but all political, social, economic possibilities start from energy availability.
Whether that is energy in the form of food, animals, slaves, windmills, water wheels, wood, coal, oil, gas, nuclear, solar.
Perhaps that would make for a good book?
To extrapolate……….
If it will be possible to continue to generate small amounts of electricity, in a SFF, what would/should the electricity be used to prioritise??????
For me, keeping the lights on would by high up on my list.
But how feasible would it be to continue to manufacture LED light bulbs WITHOUT the present global supply chains???? Is it possible create them on a local level? (Raw materials etc)
And the electricity. How to generate and transmit it??? Will it be possible to maintain the existing grid network or would a more localised generation system be preferable???
And how to generate the electricity ???? Solar, wind, hydro, other???? Can any of these systems be maintained and replaced (when obsolete ) without existing global supply chains?????
If non of the above is possible, then what are the implications for society? A return to candles? Or lamp oil from whales?
Those long winter nights may start to feel a whole lot longer.
A book looking at all the issues relating to (fossil fuel) energy decline, would shed light on what is possible and what is not. People could then start to plan/assess accordingly.
My own working assumptions (admittedly based more on gut feeling than data, but also my gut has stood me in good stead so far):
Almost everything we had by, say, the 1950s, and quite a bit of what has been developed since, may still be possible to have. But it will be something like an order of magnitude more expensive, or maybe two, which means that the vast majority of people will be doing without. But catastrophe has a tendency toward uneven distribution, so it’s difficult to predict which failures might cascade into disaster and which will be limited in how much damage they do. A lot of that depends on context that isn’t always easy to figure out beforehand.
You’ve been reading and commenting here for a while so I suggest if you haven’t already started some process of assessment and planning for the future already, you might like to get a wiggle on! Personally I would split my time between “passion projects” and ensuring that I have some resilience in meeting the basic needs of myself and my neighbours (whoever those neighbours might happen to be). For me, spinning yarn from nettles is a passion project; growing food is a serious contribution to the resilience of my community.
I think it’s a good idea for nearly everyone to do at least a bit of each item on the following list:
– learn to grow some nutritious food, including seed-saving
– learn to cook and store said food, preferably without electrical appliances
– mend or alter some of your clothing instead of replacing it
– learn basic first aid
– learn basic childcare if you don’t already know it
– know how you will deal with sewage if you don’t have mains water
– know how you will deal with getting enough water for drinking, cooking, and adequate hygiene if you don’t have mains water — potentially in a context where other people are not being sensible re: sewage.
– know how you will manage heating and cooling in the event of grid intermittency or grid failure
– plan how you will communicate with key people in your family and community in the event of telecoms outages; practice it regularly
– plan how you will travel to places you need to get to if you cannot get fuel for your vehicle; practice regularly
– find at least one other household within walking distance where people have interest in some of these skills
All of this stuff is stuff you can practice now, most of it is fun, and quite a bit of it will allay some of the anxiety and overwhelm. Best to start small and then figure out what you are really into than to take on two allotments, a composting toilet project, several thousand litres of rainwater catchment and a biochar factory all at once.
Bonus areas for consideration:
– learn how to make tools of some description
– learn some basic electronics and how to cobble things together from bits of different devices
– learn some herbal medicine appropriate to your region or neighbouring regions (remembering that the climate is chaotic right now)
– learn to build houses, safely, from scratch
– learn some counselling, pastoral or community leadership skills
– homebrew
– weaving
– working with draught animals
– ham radio stuff
– other things too numerous to list here
@Kathryn
That’s quite a list!!!!
I’m chipping away at it bit by bit.
Got my black ICB at last. £50 and not filed with toxic goo (I hope!!!)
On the lookout for an MSR water filter at a reasonable price.
Solar dehydrater bits purchased. Waiting till spring to construct.
Cracked the fermentation process. Eggs, cabbage, beetroot (delicious!), kale etc etc. Big thumbs up there.
Got some kefir grains on order from eBay. Hopefully arriving this week and production to follow soon after.
Read/purchased Jo Jenkins book and understand the process. Might have to wait on that one, till I put theory into practice .
Rocket Stove now running on twigs/wood chips. Few more improvements to be made but the basics work. Might upload a video of it in action to YouTube to share.
TEG/wood burner powered LED light system ready for “field trials” but…… keep getting distracted by carving kuksas. Very addictive.
Radios may be a technology too far for me. Perhaps pigeons instead???
Thanks for the further comments, book-writing remarks, and – Kathryn – the self-care counsel 🙂
It’d be fun to write a novel, but I’d have to spend a lot of time polishing my craft (and probably trying and failing to find a publisher), so I’m not sure. It feels like time is pressing too hard. Maybe as a retirement project … if I get the chance to retire.
Anyway, I’ll let you know how this develops.
My vote for Chris’s next book is for him to cover something he’s actually itching to write about, hopefully a topic he’s well-positioned to address by virtue of related experience and/or education. Perhaps a topic involving the overlap between farming and social sciences, such as the politics and practicalities of a transition to low-energy agrarian localism.
Oh wait, Chris already said “I guess I’d most like to write about the politics and practicalities of a transition to low-energy agrarian localism.” Sounds good to me.
: )
Perhaps Chris Smaje and Gunnar Rundgren would be interested in collaborating on a book? Their combined backgrounds could be synergetic. Gunnar’s latest blog post talks about agrarian politics in the EU and beyond, and “a new social contract for farming”.
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/how-to-save-europes-farmers
I think that’s a great idea, Steve (don’t know why I didn’t have it sooner!):)… yes, a Smaje-Rundgren concept album double LP with full liner notes. One can always hope.
Thanks for confidence in me Steve – and Simon. For sure Chris and I have sufficient similar positions and sufficient different perspective to complement each other in such a project. Having said that it is also a challenge to write books together with other persons, and even more so a person you never met!
I am pondering myself over what my next book project would be. The two latest ones have been in Swedish and written together with my wife, Ann-Helen. The first, 2020, was about cows in a very wide perspective, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-planet-of-cows and the latest one, 2023, is about the eternal question about humanity, nature and culture, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-living-the-boundless-relation. My latest book in English was Global Eating Disorder 2016, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/global-eating-disorder. It is availble at A**zon.
@ Chris, You are too modest by half. Have you read Saying No ? It is a good read.
Consider populating your next book with characters. People are drawn to stories. Stories are easier to relate than logical arguments. Although, I can see the attraction to jousting with easy targets.
I’ll stick by my earlier proposal that you write a (at least a little) book on why the full replacement “energy transition” notion isn’t going to work, and how it is working to prevent us from taking seriously the real, viable alternatives to it.
HOWEVER, Chris, if this feels just too daunting I propose a Plan B, in which you (or you and I) edit and complete a collection of essays on this same topic and theme.
PS – Just to be clear, the collection of essays I have in mind would be written by yourself, myself, and a number of other writers and thinkers on these matters. The usual suspects as well as some others less well-known.
“The American historian George Katsiaficas called it The Eros Effect.
In a blink there is a total values shift. ‘Instead of patriotism, hierarchy or competition being the dominant values, people construct new values of solidarity, humanity, of love for each other.’
Mainstream sociologists consider these cultural heaves a kind of mass hysteria, bursts of madness. And yet, as Katsiaficas put it, ‘when we look at them from the bottom, from the perspective of ordinary people, these are moments of freedom. Leaders are unable to control the love of people for each other.’”
– Kalle Lasn, My political Awakening – https://www.adbusters.org/full-articles/awakening
I remember Douglas Rushkoff on Nate Hagens podcast saying he wishes every town could have a pack containing a ‘how to’ on commoning. Is that kind of what your imagining with a book on SolarCiv 1.0? It is a great idea to start collating, social, mechanical and environmental technologies around SolarCiv 1.0, and a more positive form of activism. I’m sure you would find solidarity among Michaux and some more informed folk among the degrowth movement to help research and build it out.
I think the 2 projects are not mutually exclusive, in that a well articulated exposition of the facts of renewable transition (ModCiv 1.2) can preface the need for the gathering of knowledge for SolarCiv 1.0.
I imagine a book with both graphic communication and text but perhaps like, A Small Farm Future, it can be tailored specifically to the British Isles.
Or at least use the UK as its model, I think its good to be specific. Agree with comments above that a sharing out of voices and a getting the band together around your more practical position is an exciting proposition.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/17/wind-power-output-in-texas-is-trending-down-even-as-wind-generation-capacity-increases/
Considering you can fit the UK into TX at least 5 times yet an area as large as TX has falling output because the wind don’t blow at the right time the future is going to a might short of electricity .
A random thought, as I dig bramble roots out of raised beds full of heavy clay in a community garden:
Engaging in labour that is not mediated by exogenous fossil energy and not in service of a globalist extractive economy gives me a starting point for grasping the scale to which current civilisation is dependent on fossil energy and global economic growth. It also gives me a sense of agency in terms of my ability to survive whatever comes next. Not that I think my chances are particularly high — most people survive most catastrophic events, but we all die eventually anyway and there are no guarantees — but if what will be required to live a good life is some hard work and some familial and community relationships, well, I will do some hard work and build some familial and community relationships. Exactly what that looks like in ten years or thirty is up in the air (and I will be very blessed indeed if I last another fifty before I shuffle off this mortal coil), but there is a level on which I don’t expect these meaningful aspects of my life to change all that much, even if the details change. Hard work might or might not be physical labour but developing an appetite for throwing myself into a job is no bad thing. Community and familial relationships might be formal or informal, loose or tight, legally recognised or not, with humans or the more-than-human inhabitants of creation, but they are a joy all the same (and sometimes a heartache too — that’s how love is.)
There are people who have neither hard work nor fellowship with others, and yet think they are living a good life. This hollowness seems to me to be a tragedy of enclosure, though perhaps I am not doing a good job of articulating how. I’m wary, too, of the way rhetoric around the “dignity of hard work” and “sanctity of family values” can be co-opted by those who would blame the commoner for the enclosure of the common. I’m not quite sure how to claim them back.
Thanks for the further comments – and thanks for that excellent list Kathryn. A bit of extra homework for me there on certain items.
“Have you read Saying No ? It is a good read.” Ha ha, very good – only about fifteen times! But I confess not since well before it was published. But I appreciate the praise Greg, and will bear in mind you and everyone else’s thoughts as I ponder the next project.
I’m still a bit short on time for commenting here, but hope to be back soon with more comments & content.
Would be great if your future book could include something or other on the importance of good cooking skills. I don’t recall you bringing up this subject matter in your latest books. Lots of things to explore as in “alternative” fuel sources that we could be using — wood-fired kilns to make biochar for the homestead garden for instance; the drive to more and more processed and prepared foods in the absence of said cooking skills; the role of restaurants in a small farm future…
@Ella
I’m finding the fermentation process really useful.
Any old veg that is on “the turn”, I’m fermenting.
It’s super tasty and without any need for cooking.
Saves energy and time.
It’s surprising how much cabbaged can be packed into a kilner jar.
@Ella
P.S……….
I’ve made a biochar retort from two oil drums. One inside the other. Like in this video
https://youtu.be/svNg5w7WY0k?si=md_6ij7nwSPoYR1n
It works really well. Doesn’t need monitoring once lit. Just does it’s thing and the inner barrel is full of biochar when it has all cooled down.
Just to come back to this video that I have posted before……
https://youtu.be/A6s8QlIGanA?si=DZYm3IBCOcUUBMaU
Regarding the video in the context of “the commons”. If the predictions/forecasts/trends for population numbers plays out, like in the video, then there will be much more scope for reclaiming “commons”.
A larger reduction in population will free up a lot of land. It all depends if the “freed up” land can be wrestled away from a few wealthy land owners????
I went on a 50 mile cycle round trip yesterday to see a man about a seminar in Shaftesbury, and haven’t quite recovered yet, so forgive my delay while I try to summon up more content. I’d seen that Shaftesbury was a Saxon hill fort, but didn’t quite put two and two together.
One thing I noticed on my journey was the surprising number of high voltage power lines that I rode under or close to, humming and buzzing loudly to themselves around their giant steel pylons. Which is another way of saying that I think primary energy and not final or useful energy is the right measure to use.
I also noticed a lot of sour and over-fertilized fields. Not blaming the farmers, but ditto.
When I got home my daughter showed me a video of a musical dressage freestyle competition, and the thought occurred to me that (some of) humanity just has too much final energy to play with.
It’s complicated…
I know you’re partial to tricycles, Chris… a velomobile would save you energy, which you would appreciate on those longer rides, though your first thought might be how the hell do you pedal them uphill (they are slightly slower uphill but faster overall – or less exerting for the same average speed – owing to their aerodynamic advantage). Just a thought, and probably an extravagant one if one doesn’t cycle often. They do appear most popular in flatter countries with smooth bike paths. Anyway, excuse me, I’m just a proponent of optimising human power – and well done on your hilly half-century, Sir!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1bU5SIVq6k
Ha ha, thanks Simon. Love that video – that guy has real comic skills. Not sure I’ll be trading my FX2 for one of those things, though
I get you. But at the risk of sounding so last century, just think of the advertising potential! 🙂
The trick with hills is to cycle down them. (Kindof like the cure for seasickness is sitting under a tree.) Nevertheless I daresay making the journey under your own steam without the bicycle would have taken considerably longer!
One of the good things about the allotment being in the valley of the next river over from where I live is that although I do have to go uphill to get there and uphill to get home, the final part of either journey is downhill. It was also so completely sodden when I was there yesterday that I decided I had better take a rest day today, something I have slipped into the habit of neglecting. Meanwhile at the community garden I have found a source of the heaviest clay I’ve ever tried to dig bramble roots out of.
Yes, it is complicated.
Very.
I’ve been exploring the history and present of Rojava. You’ve probably heard of it. The Kurds and all of that.
It is complicated indeed. And their situation and ours are intertwined, are they not?
https://unherd.com/2023/03/is-rojava-a-socialist-utopia/
Just back from the 35th annual Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference. It is 200 freeway miles, one way, so I drove.
The Friday roundtable on Channeling Energy towards a Small Farm Future was standing room only. The session went long and got booted out into the hall way because of the interest. The moderator, A. M. ( I’m not sure she is a commenter so for the moment she shall remain anonymous) introduced ~70 people to the SFF book.
It was a great discussion. John Ikred was in the crowd and had a succinct explanation of what when wrong with industrial agriculture and the cheap food policy. Despite all their good intentions, they reduced everything economics and forgot about the community.
I am only an hour away, but did not go this year. Would have been fun to meet another SFF follower.
With the weird warm weather, I was pruning old apple trees and mulching young ones.
Could I ask if anyone commenting on this blog has read and understood the latest IPCC report? The report, even when using the most extreme of its climate models (note that models are not “the science”) RCP8.5 – which many physicists whose minds have not been catastrophised or politicised by the climate change lobby would distance themselves from – is not suggesting the apocalypse is due any time soon. Thus we have time for some degrowth, some adaptation, and more renewables. Prof. Mike Hulme, a Cambridge Climate Scientist who has worked on IPCC reports has recently published a book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything- Liberating Climate Politics From Alarmism.
PS George has moved into my town! I look forward to discussing Chris’ book with him if the opportunity presents itself.
Thanks for that Paul, and apologies for my slowness to approve your comment – I missed it in the moderation queue.
Really, I’m looking for answers to my questions in this post – once I have them it becomes easier to have meaningful discussion about whether we have time for degrowth, adaptation & more renewables or not … and whether we’re likely to use such time as we have for said actions.
Mike Hulme is a strange outlier, but indeed there are surprisingly many climate scientists (and scientists writing about climate) on the anti-alarmist end of the spectrum. I hope to write about this soon, as I find it quite odd in various ways. One element of the story is that they aren’t social scientists. Then there’s the politics of the IPCC … and the fact that some of its reports are in fact quite alarming. And then we come to issues like AMOC breakdown, where some studies suggest the apocalypse might well be due any time soon. So, a lot to unpick
As to costs, One man, one ten acre working farm. All farm equipment, tractors , tillers, water pumps , refrigeration powered by solar/ battery but connected to grid tied net metering. Zero gas or diesel powered tools in use on farm.
My costs , yes after subsidies
E Tractor $12,000, small electric wheelhoe $1,200
Solar 5.8kW $12,000, batteries $12,000
Total electric cost for one year which includes water pumping costs, freezers, and A/C home energy costs. $500 from grid supply and meter fees.
I have transitioned from diesel tractors and large walk behind rototillers.
Yes it is also important to measure outputs . One man farming ten acres is rarely profitable in the US. I think it is possible to easily feed your family and produce enough extra for local sales. With more hands several families could feed themselves. How productive you can make ten flat acres with good riparian water is more about soil health and access to markets than it is about constraints of off the shelf available electric farm tools or what they cost. Labor and transportation costs can make the whole project untenable but if we are talking how to walk back our personal reliance on fossil fuels and feed ourselves then the cost of going solar is very minimal compared to land costs.
There is much more to the project of maintaining soil fertility without using conventional NPK fertilizer using local sources. This too an electric tractor can assist.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3AziUmJzuik
Interesting from the UK , Colchester council watch .
Thanks for that, D10 – a fascinating snapshot of goings on beyond my immediate horizon. I take it you’re probably a doubter of the role of CO2 in climate change/global warming? (I’m personally a vacillator about it, sometimes on the fence, sometimes horrified of the vast incomprehensibility of it all, but moreover drawn to the role of water vapour and the small water cycle, probably because it’s something I feel I can be more physically involved with than constantly trying to look for ways to reduce my personal carbon footprint as a homebody).
I tend to read widely on the climate issue ,( NOT using Google as a search engine )
It is really not that long ago that most of the UK and USA were under a mile of ice . Dogger land now under the North sea connected the UK to mainland Europe , there have been many peaks and troughs of temperature during humans history , we weathered them all and will continue to do so .
I published the below “article” at Deep Transformation Network today. I’m considering sending it to the editors of Resilience.org, but would appreciate comments and suggestions for improvement before doing so. I removed some hot links so this doesn’t go into a waiting list for checking before posting.
___________________
carbon budget – “a prescription for disaster”
In 2011, NASA climate scientist James Hansen said that the then popular 2-degree global warming target is a “prescription for disaster”. Hansen said that the dangerous level of global warming is lower than previously thought, and that the 2-degree target would be a long-term disaster. Hansen, along with other climate scientists, have been repeating this claim ever since. Very small temperature rises above pre-industrial global averages have serious and harmful impacts in our world, as we’ve been learning over very recent years.
Decades ago, climate scientists invented the term “carbon budget” to describe how much anthropogenic greenhouse gases the world could emit within the boundaries of “safety”, and the IPCC, along with other entities and agencies, has been speaking of a fast approaching time in which the world would exceed its carbon budget.
In October of 2023, The Guardian newspaper reported “The carbon budget remaining to limit the climate crisis to 1.5C of global heating is now “tiny”, according to an analysis, sending a “dire” message about the adequacy of climate action.”
The Latest Annual Average Anomaly, according to NASA (2023) is 1.17 °C. At times the global average temperature has risen well above this 1.17 °C. mark, but climate scientists are interested in planetary climate, not so much planetary weather. Very temporary events are weather, not climate. So the 1.17 °C represents an average over a span of multiple years. As you can imagine, taking this planet’s temperature is tricky!
The phrase climate sensitivity refers to the relationship between a change in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (usually expressed as a doubling of CO2 concentrations) and the resulting equilibrium change in global average temperature. It quantifies how much the Earth’s temperature will increase in response to a given increase in greenhouse gases. Typically, it’s expressed in terms of degrees Celsius of warming per doubling of CO2 concentrations, and it encompasses various feedback dynamics in the Earth’s climate system.
A key fact about climate science is that the climate system is known to be nonlinear. What this means is that feedback dynamics play a very significant role in the total system. This sounds terribly technical, but it’s actually rather easy to understand accurately. Take the Arctic Sea Ice Albedo Feedback an an easily comprehended dynamic. As Arctic sea ice melts due to warming temperatures, it exposes darker ocean water, which absorbs more solar radiation than ice and snow, leading to further warming and more ice melt.
Have you ever walked barefoot on asphalt in summer? The black asphalt absorbs far more solar radiation than, say, a much less dark patch of concrete sidewalk. (It’s good to keep this in mind when walking a dog on asphalt in summer, which can result in severe burns to the dog’s feet!) Blue water, likewise, absorbs more heat than snow and ice. When the Arctic sea heats up, more ice melts. Pretty simple.
Here are some other important feedback dynamics present within the climate system.:
Permafrost Thawing Feedback: Thawing of permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide, potent greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere, which amplifies global warming, leading to more permafrost thawing.
Vegetation Loss Feedback: Deforestation and other forms of vegetation loss reduce the Earth’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to increased greenhouse gas concentrations and further warming. Increased global heating is among the contributors to vegetation loss.
Methane Hydrate Feedback: Warming temperatures can destabilize methane hydrates (methane trapped in ice-like structures beneath the ocean floor), releasing methane into the atmosphere, which is a potent greenhouse gas, further contributing to warming.
Ice-Albedo Feedback on Glaciers and Ice Sheets: As glaciers and ice sheets melt, they expose darker surfaces (rock or water) that absorb more solar radiation than ice, accelerating melting and further ice loss.
Boreal Forest Feedback: Warmer temperatures increase the likelihood of wildfires in boreal forests, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and reducing the forest’s capacity to sequester carbon, leading to further warming.
Carbon Cycle Feedback: Warming temperatures can lead to changes in the carbon cycle, such as decreased carbon uptake by oceans and terrestrial ecosystems, resulting in more carbon dioxide remaining in the atmosphere, further exacerbating global warming.
Cloud Feedback: Changes in temperature and moisture can influence cloud formation and properties, affecting the Earth’s energy balance. While the net feedback is uncertain, certain cloud types may amplify warming by trapping more heat.
So the heat forcing effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases can really only be understood in relation to these other heat forcing factors, all of which amplify the effects of one another.
It is my view that climate scientists have generally underestimated the danger and risks associated with these feedback dynamics, perhaps especially within the IPCC reports. I say this in part because it is rather obvious that relatively small changes in global average temperature rise have already resulted in much more harmful climate impacts than was imagined they would by the climate science community in the not-so-distant past. Earth systems, and human systems, are more sensitive to small changes than it was once supposed. And I say this because the amplifying effects of positive feedbacks are many and mutually reinforcing.
For these reasons, I believe we should put an end to the habit of speaking in terms of our having a “carbon budget” to spend (in the form of burning fossil fuels. I believe it is foolish to believe we haven’t spent whatever carbon budget we once had.
This is of crucial importance to the future of Earth systems, and of human systems of every kind.
All of this is important in relation to what is often called “climate action”. It is my belief that the entire world is generally misled about what “climate action” would actually entail. That’s because the popular narrative of climate action very strongly emphasizes the proposition that we need to rapidly replace fossil energy with “renewable” energy — while maintaining a material culture and economy of fundamentally the same shape as the one we now have. That is, “energy transition” is defined by most everyone as a replacement of internal combustion cars with electric cars, building millions of wind turbines and billions of solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and the like. What this message does is it results in misdirection. Cambridge Dictionary defines misdirection as “the action of sending something [or someone] to the wrong place or aiming something [or someone] in the wrong direction.”
Politicians, political parties, news media, schools, universities, print publications, radio, television, etc. are generally misdirecting the public by defining energy transition as mainly a replacement of one source of energy with another — fossil energy with “renewables”. They are doing this in concert with one another — indeed as a kind of complex web of positive feedback dynamics. Each of these domains contribute to the dynamic pattern in the others, because telling the truth about what energy transition would really be — a steep reduction in energy consumption known as energy descent — is deeply uncomfortable. We want to be more upbeat than that, more “optimistic”. Politicians who say we require degrowth don’t get re-elected. The truth is very unpopular! You’ve heard the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Apart from the fear of appearing dimwitted, mad or incompetent in declaring the emperor naked, there also happens to be a great deal more money behind the narrative of the emperor’s magnificent new clothing. The renewable energy industry is booming! There is big money to be made. But there is no powerful industry in reducing materials and energy consumption.
There is only so much “renewable” energy infrastructure and devices which we can mine for, manufacture, distribute and install within our “carbon budget”. And it’s far, far less than we’re being told by the mainstream narrative on “energy transition”.
Richard Heinberg has gently pointed out the nakedness of the emperor. I suggest we all begin to tell the truth on this. The time has come to be bold.
“There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude.“Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.” (Source: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-07/is-the-energy-transition-taking-off-or-hitting-a-wall/
“Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.” (Source: removed)
If we are honest, we’ll know (together) that the real energy transition we must make is to a much less energy intensive material culture and economy. Then we can begin to create that culture and economy. But not until we get real and honest about the world we’re actually living in.
“One study estimates that most of the costs of a renewable transition will apply at the higher levels of renewable substitution – 70% of them occur in moving from 60 to 100% renewables.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261923018615
You cited Daneli et-al 2024 about the last part of the energy transition costing the most energy. It might be a good paper – as far as analysing any individual European nation goes. But I have a few issues.
IT IGNORED SUPERGRIDS: But that’s the problem in my books. It increases both the energy and financial storage costs when European nations do NOT have to try to set up their own independent grids. But the EU belongs to a super-grid bigger than the EU itself. They understand that super-grids reduce storage costs. EG: Alexander Roth et al 2023 concluded that just linking up the core 12 European countries would reduce storage 30%. ENTSO-E is across 35. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223011513
The bigger the grid – the less storage is required. Australia could get down to 5 hours storage for the nation! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/overbuild/
IT IGNORED OFF-RIVER PUMPED HYDRO: Professor Blakers satellite atlas famously debunked Simon Michaux’s claim that there was not enough pumped hydro sites in the world to backup a renewable grid. Even with larger conservative estimates of how much storage might be required, Blakers says his OFF-river pumped hydro atlas shows the world has 100 TIMES the potential storage. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/ So why oh why is this Italian paper talking about excessive renewable gas storage mechanisms? A few hours of sodium batteries and a few days of off-river pumped hydro should do the job instead!
IT IGNORED EXTREME ELECTRIFICATION IN INDUSTRY: They kept over-emphasising the need to produce renewable gases for extra heat in industrial purposes. This is rubbish. Sure – some might choose to use hydrogen as a reductant to flush oxygen ‘rust’ out of iron ore in making steel. But that’s hydrogen as an INGREDIENT – not a heat source. Most industrial purposes can go fully electric. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/10/sexy-unsexy-practical-impractical-residential-commercial-industrial-heat-is-serious-business/
IT IGNORED THE POTENTIAL OF ELECTRIC TRUCKING: Honestly – who seriously talks about hydrogen any more – other than old fossil fuel companies trying to push their product? https://www.januselectric.com.au/ has a battery swap program for the big 100 TONNE Aussie road-trains – and can swap the battery over in a few minutes. So it doesn’t matter if you have to stop for 2 battery swaps on your trip – it’s not as long as a recharge and gentler on the batteries and gentler on the local grid.
IT IGNORES THE BENEFITS OF GOING 100% CLEAN ENERGY: WHO estimates fossil fuel pollution costs us an EXTRA $5 TRILLION a year in health costs. https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/climate-change-and-health/advocacy-partnerships/manifesto/funding-pollution
The IEA estimates we need to spend $4 Trillion a year on the Energy Transition. https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
The sooner we get this done, the sooner it starts to pay for itself! And that’s not even costing the extra natural disasters and geo-political stressors from Petro-Dictators pushing their weight around as they invade other countries, nor climate change, etc.
IT INCLUDED AIRLINES: Seeing a 100% renewable clean industrial grid and ground transport system is one thing: throwing in airlines as well just muddies the discussion. I may even agree with them that future airline travel might be more expensive and the industry somewhat reduced. But smuggling that whole discussion into whether or not renewables can run Precision Fermentation strikes me as a little sneaky.
SUMMARY: It ignored the potential of the ENTSO-E super-grid to radically reduce storage costs, ignored sodium batteries and pumped hydro storage, ignored the extreme electrification of both industrial heating purposes and road transport that is happening before our eyes – and included way too much renewably produced gas as a backup and transport solution. In a discussion about renewable grids and whether they can run a Precision Fermentation industry, it’s also quite unhelpful to include the airlines as well. Your renewables scepticism needs more work – and is not justified by reference to that one paper.
One more comment: your Figure 1 graphic on global energy consumption is stuck in the past and does not reflect today’s industry realities. Of COURSE we all know the modern world was built on fossil fuels. But does that graph reflect the fact that solar just started a doubling trend of EVERY 3 YEARS!? Compare that to oil’s fastest doubling period, which was every decade during the 20th century. Solar is growing 3 times FASTER than that! That graphic casts scepticism on renewable energy by reflecting on what was, not showing what IS. That is – what is happening right now!? From Professor Andrew Blakers:-
– “80% of new generation in 2023 was wind and solar, with solar installations reaching more than 350 GW
– Cumulative global solar installed capacity passed 1.4 TW, and cumulative production reached 1.7 TW, which is more than tenfold larger than ten years ago, and it is doubling every 3 years.
– If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
Globally only about 50 GW new coal was built last year. Solar built SEVEN TIMES MORE than that. On it’s current growth rates, in another 3 years that will be 700 GW – or 14 times as much coal was built last year! By 2030 it could be well over 1 TW a year – probably closer to 2 TW or higher! And there is no physical resource reason it cannot stop growing until the adoption S curve stabilises as meets all human requirements for energy. Wind has had a complicated few years (covid, growing sizes = less standardisation, inflation etc.) But it will bounce back. These are geopolitical and economic reasons – and they’re not permanent.
I just don’t understand energy transition scepticism.
That’s great. Thanks for sharing.
I notice that Professor Blakers says ” If this growth rate continues,…” . Does he offer an assessment of the probability of that exponential growth actually happening ?
If you used absolute rather than relative figures it might help explain why some of us are less amazed by the transition. And also if you looked at the geographical distribution. Movement on renewables is overwhelmingly happening in China, a bit in Europe and not much in most other places. In Australia, the increase in fossil fuel consumption from 2021-22 was greater than the increase in renewable consumption.
Still, if you turn out to be right, that could be good news. My question then is why the big deal about manufactured food, alt meat, urbanism, afforestation etc and the further pushing of limits entailed? Why not PV-enabled agrarian localism?
Meanwhile, ongoing investments in fossil fuels are vast, perhaps for the reasons suggested by Brett Christophers. It’s not about prices, it’s about profits.
So…I’ll believe in a transition when I see it. Not straws in the wind but widespread, systemic, fossil fuel ending transition. Hopefully people will then be wise enough to learn the lessons of the fossil fuel era and embrace local agroecologies.
Anyway, no doubt I’ll write a bit more about this soon. Thanks for prompting more discussion.
“If you used absolute rather than relative figures it might help explain why some of us are less amazed by the transition.”
I did use the real numbers. Did you not see? 50 GW new coal – 350 new solar. They are real numbers. Then over time what happens? That huge blue fossil fuel mountain in your graph contains a LOT of old power stations. I know because a number of them are breaking down in NSW – regularly. Many are due to be retired. Indeed – with a 30 or 40 year lifespan – a huge part of your fossil fuel graph is due to retire soon.
What happens if solar and wind remain 80% of the new energy build over time?
What happens when they become 100% and a lot of those older coal stations start to retire?
What happens as the global EV fleet rises and oil demand peaks in 2028?
Would a peak in global oil demand convince you? That’s 4 years.
What about a peak in fossil fuel demand? That’s 2030. You don’t have to wait long.
The blue in your graph will dip down, and the wind and solar portions expand exponentially to fill the gap.
“Why not PV-enabled agrarian localism?”
Because we can grow food other ways with less labour and more people able to devote more time to other interests and pursuits and jobs. Why not do that? Why not expand the range of human potential and experience and pursuits? It’s like you are avoiding the data to sell an agrarian manifesto. The agrarian manifesto is the solution to a series of problems with renewable energy we simply do not have.
Sure – we need to reform agriculture, tweak it, regenerate the soils and biosphere and all that. That’s coming. Change is in the air, with no till and other regenerative practices coming. Better water management. Oh – and seaweed protein powder. Oh – and Precision Fermentation based on abundant cheap energy and of course that Australian 20% more efficient hydrogen I was talking about. These advances just seem to keep on coming.
Hannah Ritchie from Our World In Data says: “For more than four decades, the price of solar panels declined by 20% with each doubling of global cumulative capacity.” https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve
If the doubling in solar production really has dropped to 3 years – does that mean it will be 20% cheaper in 3 years? What does THAT look like? Then just for fun – do it again! And then again for in 9 years!
All that.
But you want us to uproot our lives and careers and families in the city? Head back to some imaginary farm somewhere?
It’s just not happening. Look at the trends! People are moving to where the jobs are.
https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
Go down to the graphic under “How many people will live in urban areas in the future?” They’re moving OFF the land into the city. They’re going the wrong way.
You haven’t answered Monbiot’s main geographic points. Billions would have to change country to produce their own food. There are a few main bread baskets in the world – and many in today’s super-sized cities would have to abandon not only the city, but change country and culture, REBUILD 3 or 4 billion homes (or whatever the mystery number actually is) and start a job they know nothing about in a country they’re not used to.
The people there already own the farmland. Why are they giving it up? Who’s paying for all this – especially when we’re losing the City Size Bonus to the economy because everyone is so spread out – and especially as this would be massively disruptive to normal economic process and relationships and we’d be lucky if the lack of a certain widget did not suddenly plunge society into more chaos.
How much CO2 will this avoid? By when? How many people? How many homes must be built? From what? What’s the CO2 budget for all that? How much farmland do all these new rural homes consume? How are we going to build all this without fossil fuels? I thought you said we couldn’t do industrial scale stuff without fossil fuels? How much CO2 is your plan going to emit?
Who has signed onto it? What UN plan or department is there? Where is the IPCC brief on moving half, 3/4, whatever – back to the land?
In terms of the sheer human and cultural disruption, it makes my vast renewable + seaweed + PF + extra Conservation areas Solarpunk world seem trite in comparison. Jobs and technologies evolve over time. But you’re telling them to give up one of the most economically and technologically efficient inventions since agriculture itself – you’re talking about giving up the CITY! I want to make the city better, more community and communally focussed – on smaller plots of land. Over time. Rezoning around ecocity processes over generations. Natural attrition of old homes and all that. I’d LOVE to see all the NEW cities required as people move OFF the land be built right the first time. Not as suburban traffic jams – but around more English village green town squares.
The reality is most people are just trying to get through their day, do their job, wonder if they’ve got to transition into a slightly different office job in their neighbourhood or the next neighbourhood or city centre.
You’re talking about such a massive change to so many people, when it’s just not on the radar of most.
The climate would have had to become a feral beast, and most of the best farmland turned to desert, and civilisation itself be collapsing before the average city dweller will look to the land to feed them. And by then it will be too late – the farmland won’t be there.
You call cities “industrial feedlot cities”. But many people love them – and just wish there was a bit of tinkering in some areas to fix it. I’m in for a WHOLE LOT of tinkering – but over time. The main thing? Clean up our energy, and our land management. They’re working on it. I’m more confident in the energy solutions than I am the agricultural ones. But if PF really can scale – then that’s a miracle as grand and unexpected as me dropping nuclear power and embracing renewables. If PF can scale – the habitats that will let us regrow have vast potential. So I don’t know if PF can scale. I hope it can – and that these micro-organisms don’t betray us the way so many ‘algae to oil’ schemes have. It seems to be a very different scheme. We shall see.
A problem I have with this discussion is that you write as if it’s certain there will be an adequate energy transition within a few years. But it will have to be an order of magnitude greater than present trends – more if it encompasses microbial food manufacture – and among other things you ignore the political economy and geopolitics of global energy and climate change. You also take with a rosy view of urbanisation and capitalist development, which again ignores the political economy and geopolitics involved. What seems certain to you looks wildly implausible to me.
So it’s difficult to find a basis for worthwhile discussion. If we did continue the discussion, maybe it would help to frame it in the terms used by Mike Albert in his book that I recently discussed here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/05/c-wrecked-agrarian-transition-as-politics-part-1/. Your analysis seems to land on what he calls stable techno-leviathan or perhaps ecomodernist socialism. To me, those scenarios don’t seem likely politically, even if they’re feasible technologically. Maybe that could help frame a discussion.
Given the starting point of a roughly even balance between rural and urban populations, and given there are more farmers worldwide than any other occupation, I don’t consider I particularly owe anybody an explanation of how agrarianism could proceed – certainly no more than those who seemingly want to expropriate the existing mass of global farmers and deal with the consequences of that somehow (how?) in favour of grand afforestation projects. For sure, the kind of questions you’re asking about agrarian transitions are worth asking, as are the equally or more problematic ones attending the regenesis narrative. My argument is that they require serious attention from governments, policymakers and within public debate of a kind they’re not getting, largely I think because of the pull of techno-salvationist narratives like yours and Monbiot’s, which are untethered from a serious political economy. So I think agrarian localism will largely arise out of crisis, and the usual drivers of social change, namely people seeking peace and prosperity where they can. I wish it were otherwise and there was some sensible politics happening to prepare the ground for it and make the transition less traumatic, but there we are. Even going beyond empirically shaky clichés of urbanism as social progress would be something.
I think I’m Ecomodernist Social-Liberal. I think we need to fight climate change with the most geopolitically and culturally and technically and economically feasible tools we have to hand. You just assert away the inconvenient reality that wind and solar are now cheaper than coal – and that the energy transition involves electrifying everything which will make them VASTLY more efficient than burning stuff for energy.
“largely I think because of the pull of techno-salvationist narratives like yours and Monbiot’s, which are untethered from a serious political economy.”
It’s the political economy that’s driving them! Why else do you think only 50 GW of new coal was built last year in a world that is still starving for more energy – and 7 times that was built in solar? Why else is solar on a 3 year doubling curve? Why else are so many solar factories opening in the next few years that we can be pretty sure we’ll be SMASHING the Paris agreement goals for solar deployment by 2030? Have you even bothered to TRACK any of this – and actually READ what’s happening out there? If my tone is a little agitated, it’s because I’m replying to what feels like a magician’s handwaving dressed up in sociologist verbosity. Call the energy transition nasty words – and act like commanding everyone to go back to the farm is the only answer! It’s just not going to happen.
“So I think agrarian localism will largely arise out of crisis”
So you admit it’s not happening. You admit people in the developed world are not flooding out of the cities to the country to do this. You’ve basically admitted nothing in your plan will happen until the crisis hits. Sadly, with this one, that means it will be too late.
“I wish it were otherwise ”
Wish away. Local agrarianism seems to be your hopium. Peer-reviewed engineering papers on the Energy Transition and Regenerative Agriculture and Precision Fermentation and Bren Smith’s Seaweed protein powder farming that could feed a world of 12 billion all the protein they want from 2% of our oceans are MY hopium. I’m sad to write like this – because there’s actually a lot I admire about the hobbity-kind of lifestyle you write about. I just read one of your articles on whether or not to go Vegan – and the place of cows on small scale farms vs large industrial feedlots. What a creative and nuanced discussion! I’d like to visit these places sometime. It’s probably that ‘authentic bucolic’ tourist thing Monbiot writes about – and I’d probably like a comfy hotel to sleep in afterwards. (I get the irony.)
But really – if nothing’s going to happen until the crisis hits – because people are too bound up in their capitalist city lives – then you actually have no hope of solving climate change. And when the climate crisis hits – it’s too late. There may not be anywhere near as much farmland to go farm! Have you read where the agricultural zones will move to under the various projections?
In developed economies we find it hard to imagine relying on something as arbitrary as the weather for your income. Only 4% of the workforce is on the land, growing stuff for their income. For their food, and ours.
But in developing nations that can be up to 50% of the population. They’re in small scale farming, feeding their family and maybe having a little left over for sale. These farms are only possible in certain temperature and weather zones – certain micro-climate bands across the planet. As the global climate heats up and the weather patterns change, those bands are going to shift. Profoundly. More than they have in 10,000 years.
So based on these climate bands, how many people might be on the move by 2100?
Xu et al (May 2020) says that under IPPC models (RCP’s – Representative Concentration Pathways) by 2100 we would have the following refugee numbers:
RCP 2.6 scenario (2 degrees) – around **1.5 billion**.
RCP 8.5 scenario (or “business as usual” – 4.3 degrees by 2100) – around 3.5 billion people!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
That many agricultural workers in the developing world will be on the move.
Do you REALLY want us to join them?
Eclipse,
Chris has never said that he wants a traumatic disruption to the lives of millions. That is an accusation you and others have levelled against him, repeatedly, but observing that a thing might happen and wanting it to be true are simply not the same thing. I’ve also never seen Chris command anyone to do anything.
It seems to me like you are hoping we can have infinite exponential economic growth, so that nobody in the developed world has to seriously change their lives: electrification of everything so that people can drive their electric SUV vehicles to supermarkets where they will purchase ultra-processed precision fermented food out of packets… the same supermarkets where they currently buy CAFO meat and ultra-processed junk food snacks. (I like a good junk food snack myself from time to time, but the more of my own fruit and veg I grow, the less of that kind of thing I feel a need to purchase.)
But infinite growth isn’t viable on a planet with finite resources. Renewable electricity capacity cannot expand forever, any more than coal or gas or forestry could. So the exponential increase you are seeing now cannot continue indefinitely.
Maybe the sharp upswing we’re seeing now will be enough to salvage some aspects of our current economy. Maybe it won’t.
I personally think it’s extremely unlikely that we can build enough renewable electricity capacity to increase the standard of living of the whole world up to, say, lower-middle-class Western levels. And maintaining the standard of living in the West while leaving the developing world to its own devices is clearly both unjust and a recipe for geopolitical instability.
Part of the reason for my skepticism is the poverty that I see where I live (an urban area, mind you). Things are getting worse rather than better for the urban poor. I am seeing people being scapegoated and turned into outgroups in order to bolster political power. I am seeing food get more and more expensive for most people, not less, despite the alleged increased productivity of all the high-tech stuff. I am seeing people every week who cannot afford to buy food and also pay their energy bills (in tiny subdivided flats in tower blocks in a temperate climate) because energy is also getting more expensive, despite the expansion of renewable generation facilities. I am seeing people who cannot afford new shoes and clothing, even amid an abundance of textile overproduction and “fast fashion”. I am seeing reductions in social and public health services provided by the government, and charities struggling more and more to take up the slack. I personally know (well, knew) people who have died of malnutrition. So the promise of abundant electricity doesn’t, in my mind, translate to that abundance being distributed equitably. If the very rich continue to increase the amount of energy they use, and the rest of us continue to get poorer and poorer, then all the solar panels in the world won’t improve my life one bit. And I know that the poverty I see is only the tip of the iceberg — that there are many, many people in the world in much more dire straits than our soup kitchen and food bank guests.
I am also seeing people I know — at least, those who can afford it — buy land outside of the cities, and many more yearn to do the same. I am seeing people who don’t really have much space at all start to grow some of their own food or create wildlife habitat in a previously-cemented-over garden. I am seeing people who can manage to do so choose to stay in smaller cities and towns because the cost of living in the big cities is just too high. So your claims about the trajectory of ever-increasing urbanism smell like something else, to me. Enclosure, maybe? It could be that what I see here is more noise than signal, of course. I don’t think cities are going to go away entirely (and I don’t think Chris is saying they will), but I do think it’s pretty likely that having 96% (or whatever) of people live in places like London and Tokyo isn’t going to work very well forever.
You seem a little confused about which temperature and weather zones can support a small farm existence. I can guarantee you that small farms were and are viable at 51ºN and indeed quite a bit further north than that. I’ve eaten fresh cherries, picked locally that morning, at 57ºN, in an area with a strong history of crofting. Was the population density lower that far north? Yes, though not as low, in rural areas, as it is now… and rural areas in the UK are positively heaving with humanity in comparison to rural Australia or Canada.
It’s true that the amount of climate change already “baked in” to current models will disrupt huge amounts of farming; even traditional small-scale farmers will need to learn new skills and techniques to keep up with the changes in pest pressure, drought, flooding, and so on. This is probably easier to do on a small farm with lots of manual labour than a big one with lots of machinery, simply because growing a diverse range of crops is a lot more feasible if you don’t have to re-tool your machinery for every crop. Diversity is the best insurance against climate instability. Being responsive to problems is also much easier if you are inspecting your crops regularly (for weeding or similar purposes). “The best fertiliser is the farmer’s boot”. If I go to my own allotment every day, I can notice there is a slug salad bar situation going on before all my celeriac plants are devoured, and decide what to do about it — erecting copper or wool barriers, putting out beer traps, or just hanging out with a headlamp and a pair of scissors. (I didn’t manage that during a particularly damp week this spring, and now I am re-sowing some celeriac, which won’t get as big as the old ones would have, but will still be better than no celeriac. Sigh.)
What climate change probably won’t do is change the number of daylight hours received by a particular region; so if we can protect against frost (and flood and drought and so on), there’s not a lot of reason we can’t have locally-grown fresh greens in most areas, at least, and probably for a lot less energy expenditure than electrifying the entire long-distance transport network. I grow microgreens indoors on my windowsill most weeks of the winter (and yes, I grow at least some of the seed for those microgreens myself, these days).
Staple crops are more difficult; soya beans, for example, are daylength-sensitive and won’t grow well if the daylight hours are too long, though good old-fashioned selective breeding does show some promise in this. Corn can be spoiled by drought and late frosts; wheat needs enough water at the right time but not too much; potatoes don’t keep forever. So the bread basket regions of the world remain quite necessary. All of them used to be composed of small farms.
I will say that there is huge potential for smaller cities to grow quite a bit more food than they currently do using low-tech methods; it’s just that right now, there isn’t an economic incentive to do it.
That said — if the climate changes so much that current bread basket regions are unable to grow grain (whether through land mines, drought, or a shortage of fossil fuels to power the tractors, make the pesticides and fertilisers and dessicant pre-harvest sprays, and run the grain drying machines), a small farm future seems even more likely. A lot of the talk of precision fermentation, seaweed powders and so on is focused on protein, and this is understandable as people do need a certain amount of protein to survive and in the current situation most of us are getting more than enough calories; it is also because CAFO meat production is environmentally and ethically disastrous. But we also need actual calories, and we need to be able to store them. Currently the vast majority of shelf-stable calories come from cereal grains (such as wheat, maize, rice and oats) and oilseed crops (such as rapeseed, sunflower and safflower), but these field crops are selected for, and generally require, quite a stable and predictable climate. A lot of the selective breeding work that has been done has been in the realm of reducing genetic diversity and increasing yields in the context of certain pesticides or fertilisers, which means these crops are more vulnerable to crop failure when those inputs are no longer available.
But again: if you are wrong, and the electrification of everything and full transition to renewable electricity cannot meet continually-increasing energy demands, then at least I will have some potatoes. At least I will have spent some of my time teaching other people how to grow food. At least I will know how to mend my clothes. At least I will have a local community that has some idea how to navigate a world where corporations are not coming to save us. I will have to make some big lifestyle changes, to be sure. So will all of us, including Chris; it’s just that some of us have a bit of a head start. What is your plan if you are wrong?
If Chris is wrong and we do pull off some near-miraculous transformation to hyperabundant renewable electricity, or even just enough electricity to stop the economy from crashing (which it does quite enough with things like housing markets, never mind the fossil fuels)… then honestly I plan to keep growing a lot of my own food, because frankly once you’ve eaten your own homegrown potatoes for several months, the shop potatoes are just not very nice. I will keep purchasing what I can’t grow, especially any dairy, meat and eggs, from local producers who are able to focus on quality and sustainability. I will probably even keep treating things like citrus and bananas, which do not grow very well in my climate, as a special (and seasonal) treat rather than a weekly routine, because carbon emissions aside there are issues with importing water from areas of the world that have serious drought problems. I will continue to work to feed people who do not have the means to feed themselves.
I take it your plan if Chris is wrong is also to do not much differently than you are doing now, so I suppose we have that in common.
Kathryn you keep saying IF I’m wrong – but didn’t seem to take on board the credibility of the information I supplied to you in 3 posts to answer your 3 questions. Did you really ask questions – or were you just posting objections? What did you think of all the articles I replied with? What questions do you have?
Seriously – this “infinite growth” accusation is a trite meme Degrowthers throw at the Bright Green. It usually reveals the accuser may not have thought through the subtle nuances in their movement’s own history – especially around the Overpopulation formula I=PAT
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/infinite-growth/
Eclipse
I honestly don’t think you’re taking seriously any of our objections to your pushing of renewable electricity. You come across as mostly crowing about how terrible we are for “wanting” things that we don’t, in fact, want.
You’ve linked to a piece in which you equate degrowth with wanting mass death, and blame doomers for suicide. You accuse people who point out the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet of not engaging with the reality of poverty, which is honestly pretty rude if you’re levelling it at me, considering what I’ve already told you about the poverty I see and the community work I do to attempt to mitigate some of it. That’s emotionally resonant, for sure, but that doesn’t make it helpful, and I don’t see why I should do a point-by-point takedown of it here.
I think you should drop that kind of emotional rhetoric if you want people on this blog to take you seriously.
I also think you should seriously consider the possibility that you may be wrong about energy. You don’t show any evidence of having done so, which is why I asked what your plans are. “Consider what life might be like if you are wrong” is not an assertion that I am right, or that Chris is. It is, however, prudent life advice. If thinking that you might be wrong about energy is terrifying, then you might want to examine whether that influences the conclusions you draw.
Maybe you don’t want my advice; that’s fair enough. But if the corporation-led eco-modernist transition is really going to happen, it’s going to work with or without small-time voices like Chris Smaje’s books (sorry, Chris, I do think you’re doing good, impactful and valuable work, but I also think that if Eclipse is right, it will turn out to be marginal — but that is a pretty big if) or, er, my blog comments. And if it doesn’t happen, I’ll still have my potatoes, probably. Nothing I am doing in my daily life is stopping energy companies from buildling more renewable electricity capacity.
I did promise to respond to your answers to my questions; I’ll do one response today, and the others when I have time again. I’m sorry not to be quicker; at the moment I am sowing and transplanting and weeding just about as fast as I can, which means my time in front of a computer screen is limited, and your comments are mostly too long and complex to respond to well using a phone while I sit down and take a tea break. I think I might do more winter wheat over the 2024/25 year just because those beds will be occupied for longer during this silly busy time of year! Or maybe more soup peas, they are looking fantastic at the moment and the pods make pretty good mange-tout when they’re young.
I think that we are getting a bunch of electrons excited for nuthin’ trying to discuss this with Eclipse.
“In developed economies we find it hard to imagine relying on something as arbitrary as the weather for your income. Only 4% of the workforce is on the land, growing stuff for their income. For their food, and ours.”
I wonder where he is getting his food now ? Today, all the people in developed economies depend on reasonable weather for all their food. Really.
How can that be so hard to imagine ? Why can that be so hard to imagine ? Reality is tough…
Given that Coal = 44,000 TWh, Oil = 53,000 TWH and Gas = 39,000TWh of primary energy. Solar = 1,300 TWh (Our World in Data 2022 numbers). Let’s see the plan for cutting fossil fuel use by 60%, in 10 years (20?), without triggering an economic and political crisis.
Mindless growth and consumption (they go together) got us into this problem. Obviously, the only solution is exponential growth (and consumption) !
Et cetera.
I did a few numbers.
Let’s say that TWiD numbers are real- Solar produced 1300TWh of primary power in 2022. And let”s assume Eclipse’s numbers are real, production doubles every three years and at some point 350 GW of new solar was produced in one year.
The series looks like this:
350 GW year 0
700 yr 3
1400 yr 6
2800 yr 9
5600 yr 12
11200 yr 15
22400 yr 18
Totaling those up equals 44,450 GW.
giga = 10^9
tera = 10^12
In 18 years of production doubling every 3 years an additional 44.5 TW of solar will have been built.
We get about 6 peak solar hours per day on average, about 2200 per year (I’ll let someone else come up with a global average – show your work!). 44.5 TW X 2200 hours = 97,900 TWh
Add that to the preexisting 1300 TWh of solar for a grand total of 99,200 TWh in 2040. Compare that 136,000 TWh produced by fossil fuels in 2022.
It takes 200kWh to produce a 100 W worth of solar panel, so I suppose that should be subtracted from the 44.5 TW number.
I don’t think I’m getting my flying car…
@Greg
Your comment with the numbers is good, but presumably we would also need to include the production figures for year 1, year 2, year 4, year 5 etc.
Another thing that comes up from people championing ecomodernism is a comment that electrifying everything will mean less energy used in total, so we don’t “have to” replace fossil fuels Wh for Wh. But… I’m not aware of this being true in high-speed transport unless we actually rebuild (and massively expand) rail infrastructure. For road transport, well, batteries are really heavy and you can’t use them for power unless you carry them around. Even the increased wear and tear on roads from electric vehicles is substantial.
(When I am God-Ruler of the Universe, all train tracks will be required to have public cycling and walking paths directly adjacent. It would make cycling medium distances much, much more accessible for a lot of people, especially in hilly areas, and the land is already there anyway.)
In the first world – an individual farmer’s income relies on good weather in his area.
Our collective ability to eat relies on a secure nation state with good transport infrastructure – NOT the local weather.
Here’s the fastest, most user friendly introduction to “Electrify Everything” I have found – and it’s by Deutsche Welle news. It covers the Sankey Flowchart.
This is the reason 1 unit of renewables can replace 2 units of fossil fuels.
It’s just a fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
As to growth, I’m not blind to the dangers. There are limits. But I’m convinced we can supply everyone with everything they need and then get through the Global Demographic Transition when the number of consumers will finally start to decline – maybe down to 8 or 7 or 6 billion by 2100 if we get the welfare settings right.
Hi Greg, if your fossil fuel values were from their mined thermal value, you ignored the Sankey Flowchart and cheated.
Also don’t forget wind was 110ish GW last year – double new coal deployment – and is also rising in production. (Although wind had some challenges with their standards constantly changing. They didn’t hit economies of scale with ever larger turbines every few years. But they will recover.)
Hi Greg,
The Sankey Flowchart is an energy map that can be made from the energy data used in each nation. Bottom line? Burning stuff like cavemen to produce electricity or forward motion in a car is just incredibly wasteful. Due to the second law of thermodynamics, only a third (or even less!) of the energy becomes the desired outcome. But when we Electrify Everything in transport and industry, we eliminate the caveman step. So it’s NOT that renewables must replace every THERMAL unit of coal and oil and gas, but that they replace fossil fuel “hot showers and cold beer” (Amory Lovins) with renewable electric equivalents of the same. And because these things can be done with heat pumps, we get a 1 to 4 ratio in some circumstances. As a general rule, as we Electrify Everything we’ll see that 1 unit of renewable energy can replace 2 units of fossil fuels.
I really like this article from Deutsche Welle news – only 10 minutes and a good introduction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
Then there’s Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
And just yesterday Rocky Mountain Institute published this – talk about timing!
https://rmi.org/the-incredible-inefficiency-of-the-fossil-energy-system/
Say it with me: as we Electrify Everything – 1 unit of renewables can replace 2 units of fossil fuels.
Kathryn is right, I made a math error.
The larger question remains. Is it worth dumping dumping 8.6 X 10^10 metric tons of additional CO2 into the atmosphere (just for the solar panels) to allow the big AI players to build and fuel data centers ? There is no reduction in fossil fuel use.
This does not count all the new infrastructure, rebuilding existing infrastructure, building new cities, replacing every car with an EV (flying cars !), retrofitting every semi with battery power, building the swap out stations, building the batteries, building twice as many PV factories every 3 years, rebuilding the food system, etc., digging up half the planet to feed resources into a modernist fever dream future that shows exactly no signs of happening according to newspapers / real old school media, not pie in the sky academic papers. All in the next 6-7 years.
Most of what I see is that new PV plants are not coming on line as predicted. And here a 15 mile electric light rail system is $2,700,000,000 (2X projected cost) over budget and 10 years behind schedule.
And then there is the issue of the 0.8 EROI for solar, just like ‘green’ hydrogen (thank God it is not 0.6, right ?).
The forth law of thermodynamics is There is no free lunch.
As a society we have to face the facts. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet with our high energy, consumer lifestyle. It is not comfortable or convenient. It just is.
Hi Greg,
I may have misled you on another thread as I’ve talked about the 350 GW per year in a few places now – and I may have said that was what doubles. Apologies for the confusion.
Let’s check this in power, not Twh – but TW capacity.
Coal seems to be 2,130 GW supply – 2.13 TW.
https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/boom-and-bust-coal-2024/
Indeed – TOTAL human energy use is ‘only’ 17.7 TW – and electricity is meant to be about 20% of that.
https://www.carboncollective.co/sustainable-investing/terawatt-hour-twh
Global electricity consumption is 29,000 TWh per year. Divide by 8760 (hours per year) is 3.31 TW – so that sort of checks out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Now here comes the twist to our story. According to Blakers – it’s NOT the 350 GW that’s doubling.
It’s the ACCUMULATED POWER!
We’ve hamstrung the math by starting WAY too low. Read it again:
“Cumulative global solar installed capacity passed 1.4 TW, and cumulative production reached 1.7 TW, which is more than tenfold larger than ten years ago, and it is doubling every 3 years.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
That’s 3.4 TW in 3 years if all the extra solar panel factories he (and others I have listed) know about.
That’s more than all other forms of electricity combined because it’s more than today’s total global use of electricity!
And that’s JUST solar. What about wind? ‘Only’ 110 GW growth last year – what about next year? The year after? What will it’s doubling curve end up being?
How do we calculate that electricity is only 20% of our energy and we still have to replace thermal transport, industrial heat (32% of all energy) – and other non-electric sources of residential and office gas and oil heating that all need to convert? Let alone the airlines.
If that TOTAL energy of 17.7 TW includes all the thermal energy waste – then we can safely halve that to say 9 TW as our “Electrify Everything” goal. But even this is not enough as the world has not fully developed yet.
But if solar slows back to doubling every 4 years from 3.4 TW – you can see the Energy Transition is not impossible – not impossible at all!
Thanks for this ongoing little debate. The idea that electrification can halve energy use is beyond optimistic. The IEA gives a figure of around a 10% reduction, as I recall. But there are numerous doubts about this in terms of curtailment, hard to abate sectors and so on, not to mention the geopolitics.
Don’t think I’ve ever suggested that a mass agrarian transition is currently underway. Nor is there current evidence of an energy transition – certainly not one of sufficient scale. I don’t think my formulation of the issues can be described as ‘hopium’ though, because I’m not construing some future techno-fix to rescue the status quo.
Regarding that status quo, Eclipse seems to regard present economic and geographic patterns through a neoclassical lens as if they’re revealed preference or something, rather than outcomes of structural power. There’s plenty of aspirational agrarianism and complex rural-urban articulations geared to commitments to the small farm in the world which pass under the radar of global futures narratives, but they’re often thwarted by those structural realities. Hence I don’t think Eclipse is really taking a political economy approach – he deals too much with short-run economics and not enough with politics … or longer-run economics.
I’d be delighted if there was a fast renewables transition that junked fossil energy and delivered us out of the jaws of climate breakdown. But if it merely delivers techno-leviathan, in Mike Albert’s terms, then I think it’ll be a pyrrhic victory which will quickly unravel due to sociopolitical and other biophysical drivers, and that is ultimately what I think will happen unless it’s accompanied by a political transformation out of a growth-based ‘fourth industrial revolution’. If Eclipse is confident in a renewable transition, why not lobby for a world of lower energy localism with more even global energy distribution? Maybe because there aren’t really any promising politics around that at the moment? But as I see it the long-term prospects of existing geopolitics are dismal – Mike’s volatile techno-leviathan or neofeudalism, ultimately leading to breakdown. So I think the two visions end up in more or less the same place, with Eclipse’s enjoying a brief stay of execution. In both cases, the best thing to do seems to be working on the politics of localism and limits, but it’s a long shot.
I disagree with Eclipse’s takes on the geography of small farms. As I see it, farm scale is fundamentally political, and not geographical. The comments about the weather don’t make much sense to me.
Moving on now. Thanks for the debate.
Actually, one more thing. Part of the original critique here was about peer-reviewing our way to catastrophe. Engineers are famously cautious in the way they design safety margins into the things they actually build, but they seem to let their hair down when they write journal articles about energy futures – some of the assumptions I’ve seen in such articles are positively heroic. This gets amplified in wider commentaries emphasising the technical credentials and scorning socio-political analysis. Somebody on here even said that if we fail to transition to renewables it would ‘only’ be for political reasons. Such a lot of weight on that ‘only’! It brings to mind J.M. Keynes: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
Hi Chris,
first I need to apologise if I characterised you ‘wanting’ people to have to flee the cities as they crash and burn in chaos and mass death and collapse. Kathryn thought I meant that – but instead I was explaining that your policy preference is for people to decant from the cities into whatever small scale agrarian societies they can form BEFORE climate change hits. But as they are not, in your worldview we are doomed, and I was just extrapolating from this scenario that – as Monbiot rightly points out – if supply lines were threatened by climate change and our cities started to malfunction – there might not be much countryside by the time we got out there. It would simply be too late. Vast wheat-baskets would have started to dry up, causing people to migrate. More and more people!
You of all people should be aware of the climate impacts on agriculture? Instead you say… “As I see it, farm scale is fundamentally political, and not geographical.”
The physics of climate change disagrees. This is not a matter of your socilogical political opinion, but of complex climate models, a lack of rainfall, the utter ruin of many small scale farm geographies, and being pushed to the limits of what the human body can endure (and beyond if a Wet Bulb Heatwave hits too soon!)
“present economic and geographic patterns through a neoclassical lens”
I’m not sure. Economics is a vast and complex discipline – and it might be about to shift in subtle ways with Modern Monetary Theory giving us a few new levers to help manipulate power structures and redress some imbalances through some tricky accounting and money supply shenanigans. All without ‘taxing the rich’ – while we tax the rich. It’s an interesting revolution, but life is short.
While I’m a passionate supporter of the Energy Transition and Solarpunk Ecocities, I’m also highly sceptical of Corporations legally bound to increase their shareholder’s proflit – and therefore are also legally bound to consider growth opportunities. It’s part of the whole growth culture – and I’m NOT into endlessly exploiting the environment (as Degrowthers immediately pour on the accusations when they see “exponential growth in renewables.” It’s like they can’t visualise an S curve developing as they complete their job in about 20 something years.) I’m not asking for a massive communist revolution or reversion to Amish living. I’d like to see us try less Corporations, and far more Democratic Worker’s Co-ops. That would be a start. And Universal healthcare properly funded. I hear the NHS is in trouble? Our Medicare is not too far behind. We’ve got to protect the basics. But I don’t know what resources and money there would be for these things if 70% of us went Amish? (Again – I have to guess at what you’re REALLY thinking about what fraction of society needs to flee the cities.)
“The IEA gives a figure of around a 10% reduction, as I recall.”
(Sighs). Google Sankey Flowchart. Then you’ll see what I’m saying.
Thanks for that. But sorry no the physics of climate change has nothing to say about farm scale, and nothing you say above changes that. Climate change is not ruining small farm geographies while leaving large farm geographies intact – not least because there is no such thing as a ‘small farm geography’. If your point is that it may get too hot for people to be outside doing any farming, well that may prove true. In that scenario, it’s also likely to be too hot for people to be inside expecting nourishment to turn up from somewhere. Monbiot’s speculations on this point look to me like unusually pollyanna-ish sci-fi.
Regarding the Sankey Flowchart, it’s my turn to sigh. I understand the difference between primary and final energy. The higher efficiency of some electrical applications is already included. But you do also have to take into account the lower efficiencies involved in the hard to abate sectors, curtailment etc. Estimates vary and nobody knows how it’ll play out (one of the papers featured in the video you linked correctly describes itself as a thought experiment) – especially when you take into account the extremely uneven geopolitics involved, which you keep avoiding.
Been a bit reluctant to get involved with this particular debate but well…….here I come!!!!!
A SFF terrifies me, as I think it does Eclipse. But just because I don’t want it to happen doesn’t mean that it won’t.
I think Eclipse is “playing the man and not the ball”. I’m not sure Chris is pushing any particular agenda. Just looking at the situation and drawing conclusions.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is such an obvious non starter that I tend to switch off when people say that it is possible (or even desirable).
Electrification of the world energy supply!!!! Good luck with that one!!!!
Have you seen the size of those dumper trucks at Chuquicamata????!!!!! They gonna run on batteries? I think not.
It’s diesel that does all the heavy lifting in the global economy.
The global economy has already peak and degrowth has set in. We are at the “slack water” between the tides.
Total fossil fuel energy has peaked. We are on the downward slop. The economy is really all about available energy rather than money.
Lots of jobs in discretionary industries are about to go.
This is the uncomfortable truth. Tech can’t save us. It’s part of the problem.
But………I’m not wishing any of this to happen. I will miss modernity in ways that I can’t even imagine, when it’s gone.
Thanks John, appreciated – good points (likewise re Kathryn’s earlier comment). I hope to say a bit more about agendas & conclusions from the situation soon!
Hi Chris,
Hi Chris,
Of course climate change does not discriminate between industrial and small-scale farming. I was using geography in the broadest sense – including the politics. “the study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these, including the distribution of populations and resources and political and economic activities.”
The fact is many small-scale farming economies have not developed, do not have the big cities and wealth to compete super-powers like the USA on the global grain market. If first world nations (who largely caused this problem!) have issues – they can buy in from other nations. But small scale farming countries simply do not have the money to do that. We saw that when biofuel demand coupled grain prices with fuel prices, which largely led to the “Arab Spring” disaster. Of course (and you probably know more about this than me) this will hurt small scale farmers across the African continent which has contributed least to this problem – but may suffer the most. Small scale farming is also scattered across many of the poorer nations across Asia, and poorer regions of India, Central America and South America.
GEOPOLITICS: Yes, the fossil fuel corporations are oozing with money and power. The sooner we do this, the sooner they lose power. As the Rocky Mountain Institute says➖
“Fossil Fuels are a Commodity-based system, Renewables are a Technology-based system.
FF have no learning curve (or decreasing returns) while R have a learning curve (with increasing returns).
FF are geographically concentrated, R are everywhere!
FF are finite, R are abundant.
FF have continuous material flows required, R have a circular economy.
FF have a falling EROEI, R have a rising EROEI
FF are heavy, R are light
FF have fiery molecules, R have obedient electrons
FF are low efficiency, R have high efficiency
FF have pervasive negative externalities – R have a much lower impact on nature
FF give trillions of dollars of rent for oligarchs, but R give no superprofits
FF concentrate power, R distribute power.”
From page 8
https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/06/rmi_renewable_revolution.pdf
The concept of “State Capture” is everywhere – and people are acting.
https://theconversation.com/saving-humanity-heres-a-radical-approach-to-building-a-sustainable-and-just-society-205566
CULTURE: Global warming science is being gossiped, changing the culture. Young people care. People are taking it to the streets, to the politicians, to the courts.
LAW: Government “Duty of care” cases are making their way to the Supreme Courts of the world’s nations – bit by bit. Victory by victory. It’s getting constitutional – a human rights issue. Which of course it is.
NEWS: Climate scientists are documenting the subversion to our very democracies. https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/fossil-fuels-are-shredding-our-democracy
MONEY: Activists are pressuring their banks and corporations to divest from fossil fuel investments. It’s gradually building pressure. From page 9 of the RMI report above:
“Capital flows are therefore flooding into clean energy solutions. In 2023 they will be over 60% of the total. While capital flows into the fossil fuel system are stagnant, and mainly directed at maintenance. Half of fossil fuel cash flows are now being repaid, suggesting the sector is approaching rundown. Nearly 90% of capital flows in the electricity sector in 2023 will be into renewables. The solar industry is investing over $1B a day and has overtaken oil capex.”
ONLINE ECHO-CHAMBERS: Climatologists used to mainly debate Climate Deniers. Now they spend half their time fighting Climate Doomers as well! But why would they do that? Isn’t it better to have people TOO cautious rather than not cautious enough?
Sadly it seems becoming a climate Doomer creates a hopelessness that can quickly kill motivation to even try. “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” In fact it is such a well understood phenomenon that Big Oil are sponsoring Climate Doomers! Atmospheric Physicist and youtuber Simon Clark explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
Which leads me to asking – what are you doing to combat climate Doom and scepticism of renewables? Or are you spreading misinformation about renewables – like quoting that one little study into Italian renewables and basically proclaiming “Sorry all – that’s the LAST WORD on renewable energy! Oh – and here’s Simon Michaux as well! Boom!”
With your general tone about renewables, do you think big oil would consider you a friend or foe? Because I know which side Simon Clark would put you on.
A bit too much ad hominem, bad faith and bad science in your comment for me to really engage. I consider your position much friendlier to big oil than mine. If you can understand why it will suggest that perhaps you’ve been listening more carefully to other people’s ideas than I thought and I might engage again in future if you can drop the derisive tone. Regarding echo chambers, I’d suggest you too could do with a more rounded view beyond your go-to boosters. I’ll probably take a closer look at renewable energy in a forthcoming post, but I’m more interested now in making the case for renewable political economies than holding out for what strikes me as a doom scenario of purportedly renewalbe solar capitalism/techno-leviathan.
John Adams,
“Infinite growth on a finite planet is such an obvious non starter that I tend to switch off when people say that it is possible (or even desirable).”
Then if you can quote where I said it IS possible – I’ll buy you lunch! As it is – you’re just joining the pile on – but when you get up and dust yourself off, you’ll see you’ve been attacking a strawman you just assumed into existence. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/infinite-growth/
And you tell ME I’m playing the man not the ball? (Sighs)
“It’s diesel that does all the heavy lifting in the global economy.”
Tell me – when the first few hundred iPhones were sold, did everyone owning a Blackberry have to suddenly throw theirs in the bin? Was it a law or something? Or is there allowed to be a bit of adoption time as the traditional adoption S curve of the new thing kicks in, gradually replacing the old thing?
“The global economy has already peak and degrowth has set in.”
It’s been a rough few years on the world stage with Covid and Russia invading Ukraine, that’s for sure. But Degrowth? I think you must be quoting some guru. Tell me, is it Richard Heinberg? (I once helped organise a tour of Australia for him. But I think our views have now parted ways!) Nate Hagens? William Rees? Simon Michaux? Just whisper in my ear where you heard THIS WAS IT! This time – it truly wooly is! Just like it was in 2008, I mean 2012, I mean 2015, I mean….
“Total fossil fuel energy has peaked. We are on the downward slop.”
That is correct – but it’s not the geology it’s the demand. The IEA says we are 4 years away from an oil GLUT! 2028. Put it in your diary. There will be 4 mbd excess oil – because there will be too many EV’s.
Oh – and total fossil fuel peak demand around 2030 give or take a few years.
“The economy is really all about available energy rather than money.” And sunlight, and predictable rainfall for all those Small Farmers across the equatorial belt, and trade, and avoiding war, and avoiding extinctions by being active conservationist and not just reading Doomer sites all day, and ….
“Lots of jobs in discretionary industries are about to go.” That’s been the case since the Industrial Revolution started this whole thing. The Neolibs call it “creative destruction.” I’m just glad one of the discretionary jobs will be oil driller, gas driver, coal miner….
“This is the uncomfortable truth. Tech can’t save us. It’s part of the problem.”
(Yawn). Let me guess. Bad EROEI? Not enough Minerals? Intermittency unsolvable? Not-enough batteries? Not enough pumped-hydro sites? Can’t mine without oil? Can’t do industrial heating without coal? Can’t smelt iron ore into steel without coking coal? Can’t do shipping without bunker fuel?
All myths.
@Eclipse – this comment reveals more clearly to me than previously your lack of credibility on this topic. But more importantly the plain rudeness of it is not okay with me. I’m not up for commenters on my website to address other ones with this level of sarcasm and derisiveness, and I’ve already explained that I hold people who won’t use their real names to a higher standard of politeness. If you want to, you can rewrite this comment politely and post it within the next 24 hrs. I will then delete this one and we move on. If you don’t want to, then you’ll become the second person in 12 years I’ll have banned from commenting on here, the other one incidentally also being pseudonymous. Thank you.
@Eclipse
“Let me guess. Bad EROEI? Not enough Minerals? Intermittency unsolvable? Not-enough batteries? Not enough pumped-hydro sites? Can’t mine without oil? Can’t do industrial heating without coal? Can’t smelt iron ore into steel without coking coal? Can’t do shipping without bunker fuel?”
Yeap. All of the above.
No renewables, to date, have been made without using fossil fuels. It’s yet to be proven that renewables can be created at scale, with just electricity.
Plus renewables aren’t “fit and forget”. They will need replacing every 25 years.
25 years comes around quickly as I am finding out with my own PV panels. (I’m surprised that the inverter hasn’t packed up by now……but it will !!)
Try the Surplus Energy Economics blog for all things degrowth, stagnation, energy, MMT, etc.
Or The Consciousness of Sheep. Bit more caustic but funny as well.
Enjoy.
Hi John Adams,
apologies for last night’s post. I have 20 years of baggage in this – and that’s not your fault. I saw something tragic happen in a group many years ago – but that’s not your fault either. If you want the story is here.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/eclipse/
I get it. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If you read the link above you’ll see that I’m quite aware that our biosphere has a number of planetary boundaries we are close to breaching.
If you saw me talking about exponential growth – I was only doing so in the sense that we are at the start of a very exciting S – curve. It’s exponential growth of the new thing as the old thing gets replaced – but of course it flattens out into an S shape as the late adopters finally buy their new wind farm or solar panels or EV’s. The world is finite – and the exponential adoption of the clean energy revolution will easily fall within those parameters – using maybe 0.1% of the land. On the other hand eating meat uses 30% of the non-ice land on earth – which has 300 times the impact.
If you want to see a graphic of it, a good S-curve is here courtesy of IEEFA.
https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2021-05-05-IEEFA-Renewables-S-curve-v2.jpg
How an all-renewable grid will work is a huge topic. I can’t analyse the materials science and the maths of it all myself – because – like Chris Smaje – I come from a Social Sciences background. (Probably not as deeply studied as Chris’s.) But after reading about peak oil and sharing many of your concerns from 20 years ago, I have a general understanding of how plans for this new era work, and can refer sceptics to the answers if you’re interested.
Hi Chris,
you can delete my previous comment to yourself. I sometimes have trouble telling when I’m crossing the line – moving from being challenging to downright rude. However, I’m not aware of ‘Bad faith’ arguments – as I sincerely feel the issues I raised are important. To win this thing we need the energy of young people that can engage with older wiser minds – and scepticism that renewables can maintain the modern world is part of that ‘doomer’ picture that destroyed that young man I talk about on my blog.
On the other hand, I would be interested in your thoughts – sometime after considering it and maybe doing a full blog post on it – about what the political and campaigning priorities should be if renewables CAN replace fossil fuels? What kinds of farming might be less disastrous – if only we could reform today’s agriculture? Blue sky stuff around industrial scaled permaculture principles, if we had say well intentioned WDC’s running it.
And then – what would be the priorities if we actually managed to get Precision Fermentation up and running? Because as you know, climate change is only one of the major planetary boundaries the biosphere is facing. We have so many other things to clean up both for the environment, and for a little justice. If you had the time – this might be a useful thought experiment. One day. No rush. Cheers!
@Eclipse
I read your link and hear your passion.
It’s just that I don’t come to the same conclusions as you.
I think that using terms like “Doomers” to describe people that don’t share your views, problematic. It creates a “binary world” of “us and them”. “You’re with me, or your against me”.
I don’t consider myself a “Doomers”. I just don’t see the full electrification of global energy (using renewables) as viable/feasible.
Not that this should be a reason for us not to try. I’m not anti renewables. (I have PV at home here) (Though there is a debate out there that using the remaining fossil fuels to create renewables, may not be the best use for those fossil fuels)
These debates have got me think philosophically about “beliefs”.
I read the data presented by the likes of Tim Morgan, Tom Murphy and others, and formulate an opinion based on them (as you do with The Heritage Foundation) but………….I have no real way of checking the data.
Ultimately, I have to take a leap of faith.
We humans do this all the time in order to make sense of the world.
I’ve never done the calculations/observations to confirm that the world is round. I just weigh up the arguments and then formulate an opinion.
Or that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way round.
Or there are 9 planets in the solar system. I’ve never seen them, so have to take it “on faith” what other people tell me.
All these beliefs are pretty benign, but others are not.
People have been burnt at the stake for having the “wrong” beliefs.
Or that Germany lost WW1, not because they were out gunned/resourced, but because the nation was “stabbed in the back”. We all know where that belief ended up!
I worry that your belief in a renewable transition may become a binary one.
That if/when the renewable transition doesn’t materialise, you will believe that it was because of the Oil Barons and dark political forces, and not because it was just no feasible in the first place.
On degrowth……….. If you believe that
“infinite growth on a finite planet” is indeed, not possible. Then it’s just a matter of disagreeing on when that point will arrived.
I see degrowth as inevitable. The implications are massive. The economy needs growth or the the debt based financial system will collapse with huge social ramifications.
But…….this is probably a debate for a different blog site.
Hi John,
*** TOM MURPHY ***
Many of Tom Murphy’s beliefs have dated and become irrelevant. I know, because I used to hold the same opinions! But Tom needs to run some of his older calculations again – because we now CAN afford to Overbuild renewables capacity across a vast geographic area. We now CAN reduce storage by Overbuilding to get through winter. Modern HVDC only loses 1.6% power per 1000 km. That means a base at the north pole could hypothetically draw power from solar farms at the equator and only lose 16% of the power. And with solar farms SO cheap to build now – there’s no economic or technical reason any northern nation needs to have their renewables experience ‘winter’ – because they can afford to share with other nations in super-grids. Storage is one of the potentially more expensive parts of the energy transition, but the bigger the grid, the lower the storage. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/overbuild/
But what storage? Well, sodium batteries can be built from super-abundant materials – and that’s only for a few hours. The world has 100 times more potential OFF-river pumped hydro sites than it could use. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/phes/
Some very, very technically smart people have responded to the Tom Murphy’s over the years – and I’m convinced his arguments are now invalid. I mean – I checked some of his latest blog posts and it’s the same tired old mantra! EG: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/distilled-disintegration/#more-5727
“1. Electricity is not obviously able to satisfy modernity’s demands in agricultural, manufacturing, and transportation domains.
2. The ecologically-destructive materials treadmill required by diffuse forms of energy would never be renewable/sustainable.
3. Most importantly: what we use energy to do on this planet is itself fundamentally unsustainable. A “win” in technology/energy is a loss for life and humanity.”
1. is rubbish as 95% of industrial and transport tasks are going electric (even some flight. International airlines on long haul trips may need to burn hydrogen – an expensive prospect so that industry will probably cost more.)
2. Our mining will reduce when we’ve finished the Energy Transition – and our recycling rates are getting much better than Tom admits. Also – we can substitute COPPER for aluminium for 90% of coppers tasks – and there’s more aluminium in the earth’s crust than iron ore! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
3. I kind of agree – if we’re talking about grazing livestock across over 30% of the planet, pollute with the wrong chemicals, over-fish the oceans, etc etc etc. But so many of these problems can be fixed when we clean up our energy systems and then learn to eat ‘clean food’. Even if Precision Fermentation does NOT work out, have you looked at seaweed?
SEAWEED FARMS COULD FEED THE WORLD WHILE SAVING THE OCEANS! Dr David King was the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and Dr Tim Flannery held the same position down in Australia. Both have done lots of work on how 3d seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world WHILE ALSO restoring the ocean! Seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant – and does not use any arable land, fresh water, or fertiliser – or the embodied energy in delivering and maintaining all that.
JUST 2% OF THE OCEANS COULD FEED 12 BILLION PEOPLE while repairing the oceans.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/01/sea-forest-better-name-seaweed-un-food-adviser
The seaweed powder can be a food supplement that goes in everything from dairy to bread. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000302
The dried seaweed protein yield per area (in the ocean) is 2.5 to 7.5 times higher than wheat or legumes (on land). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7221823/ They also grow shellfish like oysters, scallops, and muscles in baskets under the seaweed lines.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS FOR THE KEEN:- 6 minute Youtube summary – the big ocean conservation groups sponsoring research into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZW72i0DVqE
FREAKANOMICS interview seaweed pioneer Bren Smith: June 2021 – 43 minutes https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-future-of-farming-in-the-ocean-ep-467/
FARM EVEN THE NUTRIENT POOR OPEN OCEAN: Solar or wave powered floating barges could pump nutrient rich water up from 500 m down.
https://theconversation.com/how-farming-giant-seaweed-can-feed-fish-and-fix-the-climate-81761
20% OF THE SEAWEED BREAKS OFF AND GETS SEQUESTERED kilometres deep, trapping carbon for a thousand years. The more food we grow, the more carbon we sequester. https://www.jwu.edu/news/stories/magazine/2022/fall/sustainable-cuisine/index.html
Here’s the thing. I used to think much the way Tom does. I was pro-nuclear for about 15 years there. But now – as I explain in this post – so much of Tom’s thinking is just plain irrelevant and outdated.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2023/02/02/tom-murphys-paper-reveals-something-i-also-fell-for-back-in-the-day/
*** TIM MORGAN ***
Tim Morgan is an economist. He seems to be pushing the ‘exponential loans require growth in a finite planet’ = collapse myth. But why is debt based on future growth? The interest? If someone takes out a loan, they agree to pay that amount + interest back to the bank over 20 years or whatever. In a sense, “labour” is a renewable resource. I get up and go to work and pay that thing back over time. The bank uses my money and the interest to pay staff, pay rent, pay utilities, etc. The money goes back into the economy. Where’s the growth? Oh – the interest. But just as they’re earning interest, we live in a world structured to have money slightly losing value over time. So that offsets a lot of it. The rest goes into the money supply.
What you’re really interested in is Monetary Policy – and that beast is so complex and starting to be reinterpreted by some fairly important economists – that I’m hesitant to even go there. But basically, money supply is a separate thing to economic growth. You can tighten it IF the economy is growing, and loosen it back out again if it’s stagnant. If growth is even the goal!
Also, the next quote is a bit right wing for me – as if Corporations do NOT need transforming into DWC’s (Democratic Worker’s Co-ops) to avoid the constant appearance of growth to hype the share values Corporations are always ruled by. But it is an interesting perspective on the economics of growth from a capitalist – almost NeoLib perspective. (I’m not as relaxes about the ‘free market’ as he is, I think it needs quite significant regulatory and structural reform.)
“But it is important to distinguish these challenges from the sweeping claims made originally by Sweezy, Magdoff, and Foster and repeated today by prominent intellectuals and activists such as Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that both neoclassical growth theory and empirical evidence suggest that capitalist economies do not require endless growth but are rather much more likely to evolve toward a steady state once consumption demands of the global population have been satisfied. Those demands demonstrably saturate once economies achieve a certain level of affluence. For these reasons, a capitalist economy is as likely as any other to see stable and declining demands on natural resources and ecological services. Indeed, with the right policies and institutions, capitalist economies are more likely to achieve high living standards and low environmental impacts than just about any other economic system.”
https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-6/does-capitalism-require-endless-growth
There’s also this article is from Christopher Kent, Assistant Governor (Financial Markets) of the Reserve Bank of Australia. He shows how credit can be one mild indicator test for near term economic growth – but is not the cause of that growth. https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2018/sp-ag-2018-09-19.html
But as I’m social liberal I’m more prone to arguments from the left about maybe NOT leaving so much of the money creation to commercial banks, but maybe an independent branch of government responsible for eco-economic management? (It cannot be the parliament of the day or they might be tempted to print as much money as they want.) https://neweconomics.org/2012/12/where-does-money-come-from
Not ALL economists are crazed growthists. Try these?
The wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
Doughnut economics
https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
Here is what a dear old mate wrote to me decades ago when I was troubled by this subject.
Okay, I want to quote Wikipedia at you. Whoever wrote the opening paragraph to the “Steady State” article got it in one. It’s really important that you read it:
“The steady state is a condition of the economy in which output per worker (productivity of labour) and capital per worker (capital intensity) do not change over time. This is due to the rate of new capital production from invested savings exactly equaling the rate of existing capital depreciation. Exogenous growth models show how economies will naturally tend to a steady-state. The steady-state is generally associated with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, who created the Solow Model in 1956.”
Look at this sentence again:
“This is due to the rate of new capital production from invested savings exactly equaling the rate of existing capital depreciation.”
The phrase “new capital production” refers to businesses borrowing money to invest in growth-producing economic activity. But note that this equals “existing capital depreciation” – in other words, investment in a profit-making enterprise is balanced out by NON-INVESTMENT. This seems to be a really hard concept for scientific non-economists to grasp, but indulge me.
Let’s pretend we are in our steady state economy. Within this economy there are businesses who are investing in order to profit and grow. Yet at the same time there are businesses that are decaying and closing down. The profit of the new businesses ends up being matched by the losses of the old businesses. (Steady state doesn’t imply that the economy is static. It’s still
dynamic, but the losses end up balancing out the profits)
So what’s happening to money at this point? With the fractional banking system in place, the commercial banks are lending out money to the profitable businesses. Money circulates around.
But at the same time, commercial banks are NOT lending money to the businesses that are decaying.
Now this might confuse everyone. So let’s add numbers to it.
Let’s say that the amount the commercial banks lend out to the growing, profitable businesses is $1 million. So what we have is $1 million that needs to be paid back in interest later on. Let’s say the final figure ends up being $2 million coming back by the time the debts are paid off.
So. We have to find an extra $1 million in the economy. Where does it come from? This is the problem that seems to confuse people. So. Profitable business = needs $1 million added to money supply.
But now let’s go to the decaying and shrinking businesses. What’s up with them? What are they doing? Actually the important thing is what they’re NOT doing. They’re NOT borrowing and they’re NOT spending.
And with all this NOT borrowing and NOT spending going on, their capital deteriorates.
But what about money? If these businesses aren’t doing anything with it, then they’re not adding to the money supply are they? That’s true, sort of.
And now for the whammy:
Profitable business = needs $1 million added to money supply.
Non-profitable business = adds zero money to money supply.
Therefore we have inflation of $1 million. Right? No. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The real equation is: Profitable business = needs $1 million added to money supply.
Non-profitable business = causes $1 million to be subtracted from money
supply.
And that’s how it works.
Money is created by the actions of central banks and commercial banks.
Commercial banks create most of the economy’s money, but whenever a bank decides to NOT lend it out they are NOT having a neutral effect on the money supply but a NEGATIVE effect. Holding money and doing nothing with it CAUSES THE MONEY SUPPLY TO SHRINK.
IN a steady state system, therefore, any lending to businesses at an interest rate ends up being balanced out by the effects of NOT lending.
Here’s an adage I made up – if money is loaned into existence, then logically it can be saved out of existence.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/steady-state-money/
Hi John,
aaargh I just saw the worst typo! Please go easy on me – I’m quite burned out and tired – if last night’s rant didn’t indicate that already! 😉
“substitute COPPER for aluminium”
Sorry – that should have been 180 degrees the other way around. This all comes from my year of researching Simon Michaux’s claims. Aluminium can be substituted for copper in most applications. There is 1200 times more aluminium than there is copper – it’s 8% of the earth’s crust – iron ore is only 5%!
Try here. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/
@Eclipse.
You do realise at all the tech fixes you quote don’t actually exist at scale and have not been proven to work?
If any one of them is not possible, then the whole “project” will fail.
It reminds me of a friend, a while back, who got very excited about Aquaponics. (Closed loop)
Fair play to him.
He didn’t just talk the talk.
He bought a poly tunnel and all the kit, watched all the YouTube videos and had a go.
Needless to say, he couldn’t get it to work.
Words are cheap.
Making claims of feeding 18 billion with seaweed is easy. But it misses the point. Humans need a balanced and varied diet.
One staple isn’t enough. I don’t live on just wheat.
Seaweed isn’t going to feed the world but it might be part of our diets.
Renewables will need replacing three times in an average human lifetime.
One thing I don’t understand is your “beef” with Chris for having a different opinion to yours?
If what you claim comes to fruition, then what’s the problem? Happy days. You were right and Chris was wrong and we all live happily ever after.
Hi John,
The seaweed farming is still to scale up – but dried seaweed has already been eating for centuries. The ‘tech fixes’ of the Energy Transition DO work. Electric mining trucks in Canada ARE right now mining – TWICE as fast as older diesel trucks. EVERY industrial heating electric variety I was talking about is ALREADY used in industry. The only thing missing is ‘green hydrogen’ for the ‘green steel’ – but the recent innovation in hydrogen catalysts in Australia that makes the process 20% more energy efficient will help bring the cost of that down.
But otherwise – heat pumps for the home and a third of industrial heating, resistance heating, electric arcs, industrial microwaves, are all bog standard. EV’s are bog standard now – and boy are those standards improving! As are batteries. Did you know large cargo ships going up and down 1000’s of km of Chinese rivers are electric? They use grid-scale battery packs in some of the cargo containers – and just swap them at the next port!
“Making claims of feeding 18 billion with seaweed is easy.” – Well it was 12 billion, and in other posts I have been quite clear that I would prefer the “Earth 4 all” demographics of only 6 billion by 2100 via good welfare and education and empowerment for women programs. But I see your point. Remember this protein powder is a filler – basically replacing land grown soy – in everything from dairy to bread to pies. And while someone might not live by just eating wheat – how many different products have we turned wheat into again? Bread, cakes, pastry, pasta, etc etc etc. So it’s not replacing ALL our food – that’s an ‘all or nothing’ strawman. But what a supplement! I wonder if it could go in protein shakes, ice creams, etc?
@ Eclipse,
That sounds great. Now, tell us about all the externalities associated with making your vision of the future happen.
This related quote from Chris should help clear up what seems so readily misconstrued or misunderstood about his views:
“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 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.”
https://chrissmaje.com/2023/06/can-there-be-an-energy-transition/
@Chris
On, yet another, slight tangent……
Have you ever visited St Werburghs City Farm in Bristol?
I haven’t been for 25 years or more.
I watch the latest series of The Outlaws last night and some scenes were filmed there.
It looks much more developed these days. An example of what might be possible in an urban setting?
Just wondered if you knew anything about how it is run/organised.
Might have to include it on my tour of West Country market gardens!!???
I went to a meeting there once but didn’t really get to see the farm or find out about its organisation. Interested to hear if you discover anything!
Regarding S-curves, this study talks about the overconfidence which can result from not adequately accounting for uncertainties, and relying on a single model and numerous assumptions.
The study looked closely at the renewables transition in Switzerland, where the transition has a large amount of government and public support (backed by national referendums). Still, the study found that, when using more realistic S-curve modelling, “the net-zero emissions target would be missed by 2050 with high certainty”.
~~~~~~~~~~
“In contrast to larger energy technologies, granular energy technologies with smaller, more modular capacities per unit, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), heat pumps, or battery electric vehicles (BEVs), show faster diffusion and learning and have more equitable access than less granular technologies (5). Realistic projections of granular energy technology diffusion would be useful to support decision-making on transition policies by contrasting the long-term target against the most likely expected pathway that the energy system is currently on (1, 6, 7). However, existing projections often have three major limitations. First, projections are often deterministic scenarios and do not account for uncertainties (8–10), thereby inducing overconfidence (9). If shown, uncertainties are often so broad that the projections become meaningless without information about what is more or less likely (11, 12)… Second, projections often have a low spatial resolution (7, 19), which limits their relevance.. Third, projections mostly rely on a single model with numerous input assumptions (21, 23, 24), even if projections of different models can vary significantly (7, 23, 24) and can consequently cause overconfidence if the studies omit alternative models.”
Probabilistic projections of granular energy technology diffusion at subnational level
Nik Zielonka, Xin Wen, Evelina Trutnevyte, Probabilistic projections of granular energy technology diffusion at subnational level, PNAS Nexus, Volume 2, Issue 10, October 2023, pgad321,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad321
Hi Steve,
PNAS Nexus seems to be a good journal. These seem to be good engineers. But I don’t understand why they’re going through various mathematical probabilistic mumbo-jumbo based on the WRONG ASSUMPTIONS.
“Most projections of energy technology diffusion, such as solar photovoltaics, heat pumps, and battery electric vehicles, are deterministic and hide future uncertainties. We provide a method that uses historical time series data of the diffusion of granular energy technologies to create probabilistic projections at subnational level. We find that there is no single best model of technology diffusion that outperforms the others in terms of accuracy and uncertainty. Thus, we demonstrate how multiple models could be weighted and combined. Projections from our approach inform policymakers not only about the future trends of granular technology diffusion but also about the likelihood of these trends.”
Yes, Switzerland is famously independent – and still not a member of the EU. (But is a member of the Schengen area.) But modelling Switzerland’s grid as an independent grid – and each municipality – is a mistake. Switzerland is in the process of joining ENTSO-E – the world’s largest electricity grid – and the wiki already includes them.
Again – if your wind and solar are intermittent – build MORE, and build WIDE.
Also – I don’t have time to read EVERY negative study ever published. But why are they modelling the rate of change from past decades when it took government subsidies to sell this stuff back then? The rate of change is now accelerating because wind and solar and batteries are now CHEAPER than coal. The R&D is intense!
EG: 2024 update – AI designed an new magnet that avoids rare earths. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a61147476/ai-developed-magnet-free-of-rare-earth-metals/ This is a new approach by yet another company – every car major is already designing EV’s and electric motors and magnets and batteries that use less and less critical minerals and rare earths for more abundant stuff. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/materials/#2024-update-ai-designed-an-new-magnet-that-avoids-rare-earths The point? As they wean off these rare earths and critical minerals that take so much more energy to mine and refine, not only does the supply of raw materials increase, but guess what else happens? They become cheaper! MORE desirable. Companies start to sense an opportunity cost in NOT having them! Especially as worldwide gas prices are so high right now.
So I don’t understand modelling down at the sub-national level when the future is super-grids, and I don’t understand modelling from historical data back when renewables were too expensive – and now they’re so cheap we CAN afford to Overbuild them across a wide geographic area to drastically lower storage requirements and cost.
Finally – a side note. I noticed that of course that BREXIT dropped the UK out of ENTSO-E. So I looked up that old plan to get solar from Morocco. It’s now been declared a “Project of National Significance” and so they’re building this massive HVDC line down to Morocco to supply about 8% of UK electricity from wind and solar that does not experience winter outages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project
That’s a 4000km powerline.
The bigger the grid – the less storage is required.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/