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Posted on February 11, 2024 | 102 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.
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
“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.
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.
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
@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