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Posted on August 12, 2024 | 86 Comments
I’ve made a case in my writings that, to oversimplify, the future is likely to devolve into low energy-input local societies based around widespread agrarianism in one of two main ways:
But critics have objected that I’ve neglected a third possibility:
I’ve explained in previous writings why I think (3.) is unlikely, and why even a low-carbon, high-energy civilization is likely to devolve to a low-energy small farm future eventually. But I haven’t given an especially detailed account of why a transition to a low-carbon, high-energy urban-industrial civilization (what I’ve called Modern Civilization version 1.2) is unlikely. Regular readers of this site are probably aware of some pushbacks I’ve received on this front – rather lengthy pushbacks in one case – which centre on the possibility for renewable energy, particularly photovoltaic (PV) panels, to step into the breach left by the supposedly departing fossil fuels.
I don’t find these pushbacks convincing, but nor do I think their authors will be swayed from their conviction of an imminent renewables transition, certainly by anything I might say. So it’s probably best for me just to bid farewell to these renewable transition advocates and devote myself to working as best I can towards the most realistic hopeful vision of the future, namely proposition (2.). Still, I think it’s worth pausing to consider the points at issue before moving on, which is the purpose of this essay. These points are, after all, important in relation to the case I make for a small farm future.
Ideally, I’d have spent more time following this up and presenting my analysis in greater empirical detail – although this essay is already plenty long enough (sorry!). But I’m just a lone-handed writer/farmer, and even this cursory survey of the field reveals to my mind the overwhelming unlikelihood of (3.) In this essay, I’ll explain my reasoning behind this. And then that will probably be that from me for the time being on the matter of energy transition, unless I receive plausible counterarguments that seem worth engaging with.
In an earlier essay I defined my position against what I called ‘renewables proponents’ or RPs … which appealed partly because it enabled me to make an obscure mountaineering-themed joke. But on reflection I think it’s the wrong term. There’s nothing wrong with propounding for renewables. What’s problematic is propounding for a like-for-like transition of the existing fossil-based global growth economy to a future renewables-based one. A renewables-based transition to a lower-energy, more equitable, local and agrarian economy could be a wonderful thing. So it’s a case of being a sceptic towards rather than a proponent for the idea that there can be a sufficiently rapid transition from high-carbon to low-carbon sources of energy that’s able to sustain the high-energy, growth-oriented global economy in more or less its present form. I can’t quite kick the silly acronym habit, so with no disrespect intended I’m going to call people who take this position banoffees – business as nearly ordinary feasibly-fast (and) future-proofed energy-transition enthusiasts. Okay, it’s a stretch. Anyway, I believe that what these folks serve up may look sweet, but it’ll leave a sickly aftertaste.
In his fine book Navigating the Polycrisis, Mike Albert mentions “the philosophy known as ecomodernism, which can be considered the dominant approach to environmental policymaking across the world-system” (p.26). I think that’s true – truer now than it was a few years ago. Thinkers across the spectrum of mainstream politics are pivoting with increasing enthusiasm (or desperation, depending upon one’s perspective) toward putatively apolitical techno-fixes like photovoltaics (and other technologies that photovoltaics supposedly enable, like microbial food), as climate change and other threats to the present world-system they’re anxious to save ramp up.
The result for the would-be analyst of energy futures is that there’s an awful lot of breathless media commentary about the Next Big Energy Breakthrough that’ll save the world to wade through in trying to make sense of things. Much of this can be easily disregarded, but there are also more serious analyses and organisations offering some nuggets of truth among the banoffee. I’ll say more later about a couple of these organisation. As an essentially amateur energy analyst wading through a veritable tide of banoffee, it’s possible I’ve made mistakes in what follows. Of course, I’m open to correction. But just as it’s wise to be cautious of what amateurs have to say, so it’s also wise to be cautious of professional opinion, especially on matters where professional futures depend on it. Cui bono.
Though an amateur, one thing in which I have a little experience is being a micro-scale consumer of renewable energy, having lived off grid for a decade using mostly PV electricity, with a little wind-power. I’ll come back to that too.
The casual reader could be forgiven for thinking from the tone of much energy transition literature that fossil fuel use is crashing, and a fully renewable future is hoving into view. The reality is that 81 percent of primary energy use worldwide in 2023 came from fossil fuels. By way of comparison, the corresponding figure back in the year 2000 was 86 percent. So not a whole lot of change, though a little better proportionately. The bad news is that we used 1.5 times more fossil energy in 2023 than in 2000.
Banoffees like to emphasise that such primary energy figures can be misleading, because fossil fuels extracted as primary energy are typically less efficient at getting a job done (final energy) than electricity (secondary energy), essentially because they usually emit a lot of waste heat. So we can often achieve a given job using less electrical energy than would be the case with a fossil-fuelled approach. This is certainly true, albeit with some caveats – one of which is that much of this advantage is lost if we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity. I’ll come to some other caveats shortly. Anyway, we can get around this objection if we look only at generated electricity, while bearing in mind that currently this is quite a small part of total global energy use (getting electricity use mixed up with total energy use is a common mistake in the media).
Figure 1 shows global electricity generation by energy source in terawatt-hours from 2013 to 2023.
Figure 1: Global electricity generation, 2013-23
(Note: the source of these data is the 2024 Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy database. This is also the source for all other data in this essay, except where otherwise stated).
The figure shows the rapid growth in renewables over that period – nearly threefold for wind, and nearly elevenfold for solar. And that, basically, is what banoffees are excited about. The problem is, the figure also shows an increase in fossil fuel generation. At 14 percent, it’s not as spectacular – but that’s only to be expected given that fossil fuels remain the dominant source of electricity generation, comprising 60 percent of electricity generation in 2023. In absolute terms, fossil fuel generation has increased more than any other single source, or about 70% of the combined increase in solar and wind. Its persisting dominance of the industry is a big problem in view of the rapid transition that’s needed, as the graph palpably demonstrates.
The main point, though, is that growth in renewables is all well and good, but in itself it’s not relevant to transitioning out of fossil fuels. Transitioning out of fossil fuels implies using less of them, and this isn’t happening.
In fact, “using less of them” greatly understates what needs to happen. We need to be using essentially none of them as soon as possible to avoid potentially catastrophic global heating – including no new coal power stations at all from now on. This isn’t the trend we’re currently on, and this failure feeds into a larger global failure even to meet current inadequate pledges to cut emissions. In the words of one analyst we “are not being ambitious enough in our objectives for cutting emissions … [and] we are not currently doing enough to make the achievement of these inadequate objectives credible. We are, in other words, utterly failing”1.
When I’ve made such points in my discussions with banoffees their response has usually just been to return attention to that thin, but undeniably growing, purple wodge of solar generation at the top of Figure 1. Can I not see how much it’s grown? Yes I can. And it’s irrelevant – you simply cannot credibly infer a transition from Figure 1, or talk only about the trends in renewables without addressing the trends in fossils. Even if there was a decrement in fossils to match the increment in renewables it would be something. But there isn’t.
The smart money among forecasters seems to be that fossil fuel use will, finally, peak in the 2030s, followed by a slow decline. That will be too little, too late. But others are still articulating the possibilities for full transition – for example, the report Net Zero By 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA used to be thought of as largely a mouthpiece for the fossil industry, but in keeping with the ecomodernist turn it’s transitioned into an ardent cheerleader for renewables, based on what strikes me (and not only me) as some pretty demanding assumptions.
Total electricity generation, the report says, has to increase nearly threefold between now and 2050. The number of coal and gas plants equipped with carbon capture utilisation and storage technology has to increase about 330-fold. On these assumptions, global renewables capacity has to more than triple to 2030 and increase ninefold to 2050, and most of this has to happen in ‘the emerging market and developing economies’. Global electricity networks “that took over 130 years to build need to more than double in total length by 2040 and increase by another 25% by 2050”. Total grid investment needs to rise to $820 billion by 2030 and $1 trillion in 20402.
Progress in the first few years of the IEA’s timeline generally hasn’t matched those projections, and the majority of what’s been achieved hasn’t occurred in the ‘emerging market and developing economies’ but in just two, albeit important, countries – China and the USA. True, China is often defined as an ‘emerging economy’, but given that it has the second largest economy in the world that seems to me somewhat misleading. ‘Emerging global power’ is closer to the mark, and more to the point in relation to energy dynamics (see Section 8).
But the available data inevitably refer to the past. Another plank of the banoffee case is that the past is just so much old news. We’re on the cusp, the argument runs, of a vast impending acceleration in renewables, and a crash in fossils. The concept of the S-curve is often invoked in this instance – an initially slow increase in the replacement of an old technology with a new one (the bottom of the S, where allegedly we currently are), followed by a rapid take-off (the middle of the S), and then a slowing when the transition is nearly complete (the top of the S). The example of iPhones replacing Blackberries is often given as an analogy for how renewables will replace fossils.
The advantage of appeals to rapid future change is that nobody can prove for sure they won’t happen. We certainly need fast abandonment of fossil fuels, but there are reasons to think it won’t happen, as I’ll explain in the sections to follow. The Blackberry to iPhone example is misleading. When a cheaper, better global product comes along, yes sometimes there’s an S-curve replacement pattern. My guess is that it’s relatively rare as a proportion of all new products, and far from some law of nature in the commercial jungle. For every iPhone I suspect there are numerous Sinclair C5s.
Anyway, here we come to an important part of the renewable transition argument. Nobody doubts that renewably generated electricity is environmentally preferable to fossil energy (albeit environmentally worse than no or less energy), but banoffees take the view that since electricity is just electricity however it’s generated and renewable electricity is now generally cheaper than fossil electricity, the path for renewables replacing fossils is assured.
Neither of those propositions are true.
This section draws heavily on Brett Christophers’ book The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet – a near 400-page deep dive into the economics of electricity markets. I can scarcely do it justice here, but here’s my attempt to parse Christophers’ argument:
I’ll come back to these considerations in a moment. But more broadly on the ‘real cost of renewables’ front, while there’s undeniably an efficiency advantage of renewably generated electricity over fossil-generated electricity where a lot of energy in the latter case is lost as heat, there’s also undeniably an efficiency disadvantage to renewables in respect of various industrial processes. This applies essentially to processes where high heat isn’t an efficiency loss but is absolutely necessary, or where fossil fuels provide chemical feedstocks as well as energy. It encompasses such things as agrochemicals, steelmaking, plastics and cement – in other words, the material fundamentals of modern, urban, non-agrarian life.
Electricity’s share of industrial energy use remains low for this reason – typically 10-20 percent4. So there is a transition problem with these key industrial hard-to-abate sectors, which cannot decarbonise as easily or quickly as electricity generation. The IEA’s net zero in 2050 scenario projects around 10 percent less primary energy use in 2050 compared to the present. Maybe this gives a sense of how electrical efficiency vs hard-to-abate industrial sectors might balance out, although it’s based on what seem to me implausibly optimistic assumptions. We’re not, to reiterate, anywhere even close to a net zero pathway at present.
In some cases, it may be possible to tip the balance back toward renewables in these hard-to-abate industrial sectors by improving recycling and the circular economy. But this has its limits, except in steady state scenarios where new demand exactly matches scrapping/recycling. Again, this isn’t the trajectory of our present world. For example, 60 percent of steel is recycled, while recycled steel constitutes 40 percent of the total steel produced. Concrete probably poses a harder challenge, and the mid-21st century world will be facing “unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal and removal”5. So there are some profound challenges ahead in these hard-to-abate sectors.
Many of the economic impediments to renewables adoption I mentioned in the previous section relate to the unbundled and marketized nature of the electricity supply chain. This, of course, isn’t a fact of nature any more than S-curve adoption is. In most places it’s a relatively recent outcome of global neoliberal economic policies. Would the transition be eased if governments nationalised their entire electricity sectors and created integrated, monopoly supply chains?
The short answer to that is yes. One piece of evidence is the fact that China is far and away the largest user and quickest adopter of renewables. There are other reasons behind that too, and China does have many market aspects to its electricity supply chain, but there’s no doubt that state dirigisme has helped the push.
Still, there are some complications to an ‘electrify everything, nationalise everything’ narrative.
For one thing, there are brute physical realities that assert themselves regardless of who’s running the show. Hard-to-abate sectors will remain hard to abate. The sun and the wind do their thing regardless of politics. Material and energy movements impose costs whoever is paying them. The fundamental problems of matching demand with supply remain much the same.
Second, nationalising electricity sectors is no small thing, even with unanimous support. The governmental skills, the institutional structures and the economic instruments can’t just be magicked up overnight. To go down this route would involve effecting a difficult political and bureaucratic transition as well as two difficult technical ones (electricity grid and industry). Three transitions in one – the job just got harder.
Third, far from there being unanimous support, there’s no political impetus for it in most countries – not from the architects of global neoliberalism who sit behind the throne of most governments, not from the private financial sector, and not much from the general public either. Although I dislike easy contrasts between ‘progressive’ and ‘populist’ politics, I’ve done enough podcasts with climate change sceptics who sense the hand of big government behind every utterance of the phrase ‘net zero’ to suspect that this just won’t play politically in many countries. Even the little-bit-leftish-if-that’s-okay-with-you kind of governments that manage to get elected such as we now have in the UK are nowhere near on board with this, and are seemingly more intent on taxing the often non-existent profits of the private electricity sector.
Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more nationalisation. And/or a bit more market discipline in this area for libertarian-minded folks – you can have resilient grid power on tap or you can have a private electricity sector, but not both. Still, that’s not where politics are generally at in the Global North. The same is basically true in much of the Global South, as governments pursue market neoliberalism to promote the ‘emergence’ of their economies. Let’s be clear about this: as well as a lot of actual rewiring, serious governmental forcing of a renewables transition would involve a complete political rewiring of the global economy in ways that are simply not on the table at the moment.
In practice, what governments have done instead is a lot of fiddling with market incentives and subsidies. Most of the growth in renewables shown in Figure 1 is attributable to such fiddling (of course, they also fiddle with the fossil energy sector). But it clearly hasn’t been nearly successful enough. One way in which it often hasn’t been successful is in creating renewables ‘gold rushes’ that create oversupply, government retreat and starved new investment – short booms, and long busts6. So, just when it seems like the S-curve is really taking off, it starts reversing. More of an omega-curve.
In summary, and going back to my opening propositions, critics of mine have suggested that I can offer no plausible politics to show how my proposition (2.) is going to manifest. They’ve got a point (though see Section 10). But there don’t seem to be any plausible politics to show how proposition (3.) is going to manifest either.
For all the talk of romantic fantasies levelled at agrarian localists like me for supposedly wanting to turn the clock back to a simpler time, there’s a kind of Keynesian happy place entertained by such critics which itself involves social-democratic fantasies of turning the clock back to the simpler politics of the early 1970s, when governments had control of energy systems and national finances, before the rot of neoliberal globalization set in. For sure, neoliberal globalization needs to end – but that’s not going to bring the Keynesian happy place back. There’s too much debt, and too little real growth.
A big technical advantage that fossil fuels have over renewables is that you can pretty much turn them on and off as you please. They come, as it were, with their own switch and battery. Whereas to replicate that advantage with renewables you need to add in actual batteries as extras.
My domestic renewable system comes with batteries to see us through for a while when the sun and wind desert us – massive, clunking lead-acid things that cost about half the entire setup. There’s an almost endless trumpeting of better, new, grid-scale forms of electrical energy storage in the literature promising to send batteries like mine the way of the Blackberry.
Good news, no doubt. But making it work at grid scale over the next couple of decades from a more or less standing start represents a fourth massively challenging transition that we’re potentially facing. Of course, the efficiency loss of energy conversion and the cost of the batteries themselves would have to be added to the renewables costs. Along with the costs of prematurely junking and safely decommissioning older storage technologies.
I’m afraid my head is too dizzied by all these proliferating urgent transitions implied by a renewables transition to try to get into those costs here. But I’d be interested to see analyses that consider them. Not analyses that enthuse about the abundance of sodium in the Earth’s crust to ‘prove’ that the transition to sodium batteries is easy, but analyses that fully cost out a global transition to constant and adequate renewable grid power, including their full life-cycle costs as appropriate.
It’s widely accepted that a transition to renewables will involve a huge increase in the mining of the numerous minerals needed to build the relevant infrastructures, with concerns about reserves, quality of ores and costs. Opinions vary as to how feasible this will prove to be. I only touched on the issue briefly in my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, citing among others Simon Michaux’s doubts on this score, which occasioned some pushback from critics who dispute his analysis.
I have no expertise on this issue, but let me cite another couple of views. One is from a paper that advocates bullishly for the possibility of a 100 percent renewables transition. The paper states:
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 research7
Reason for moderate optimism against unsurmountable roadblocks along with formidable challenges doesn’t suggest an altogether smooth path, especially in a state of the art banoffee opinion-piece. And surely the challenge of accessing adequate resources while minimizing negative impacts needs to be more a focus of immediate resolution than of upcoming research?
Another view comes from Mike Albert, based on IEA and other studies:
In the context of rapidly rising RE demand, there would most likely be no easy or quick solution for mineral bottlenecks, and this could plausibly, in conjunction with other obstacles, derail the transition or at least slow it down considerably8
One of those other obstacles could be the declining availability and energy returns from the fossil fuels needed to fund the transition energetically, as suggested by the IEA among others, preventing a renewables transition that can’t bootstrap itself.
So, who knows? But as things stand it seems to me that the scepticism I expressed about the mineral basis of a renewables transition in Saying NO… remains justified.
Another aspect of mineral mining is the ‘green sacrifice zones’ of poisoned places and potentially poisoned people caused by mineral mining. Banoffees often point to the ‘black sacrifice zones’ of fossil fuel extraction by way of exculpation. Certainly, if you set the bar as low as ‘not as bad as fossil fuels’ then a lot of things can jump over it.
Let’s now turn to energy return on energy invested or energy return on investment (EROEI or EROI). This refers to the fact that to obtain useful energy you first have to expend some energy – constructing a coal mine, building a PV panel or whatever. If the EROI ratio is one or less, you’re spending as much or more energy than you’re getting back, which defeats the object. Typically, EROIs for renewables are lower than those for fossil fuels, but fossil EROIs are declining.
I’ve seen some renewables proponents dismiss EROI as an irrelevant concept, a position I find unfathomable. But the fact that renewable EROIs are typically lower than fossil ones doesn’t in itself rule out a transition from the latter to the former. The real problem is transitioning from a higher to a lower EROI source in a competitive global economy geared to economic growth, especially where the costs of the lower source fall mainly upfront, as is the case with renewables.
I’ll briefly lay that out via the concepts of energy cliffs and energy traps. Energy cliff refers to the idea that declining net energy (net energy is similar to EROI: total energy extracted minus the energy needed for extraction) is non-linear – as the EROI of an energy source decreases the net availability of energy to do useful work in the economy decreases relatively more. This is a problem in a competitive economy built around the need for continually expanding the work that’s done, and where expansion is coupled to energy use. It’s particularly a problem when the energy investment required of the new energy source is loaded upfront. This creates a big economic incentive to delay switching, creating in turn a negative feedback where the possibility for switching in the future becomes progressively bleaker. This is what’s known as the energy trap, explained further here. Perhaps the resolutely non-transitioning electricity sector shown in Figure 1 stems in part from such a trap. Anyway, a plausible case for a renewables transition has to involve an analysis of the economics of the transition that shows how it will surmount the chill economic winds of declining fossil EROIs and energy traps.
If the global economy wasn’t built around competitive growth, then a renewables transition would look more feasible. So maybe the price – or benefit – of transition would be the end of global capitalism and the degrowth of the global economy. Going back to my three opening propositions, that means proposition (3.) is untenable. A renewables transition would involve smaller, inevitably more local, steady state economies. More like the small farm future of proposition (2.) But that takes us back to the charge of implausible politics I mentioned in Section 4 that some of my critics level at me. It looks like the same charge might rebound on them.
Anyway, let’s say a bit more about politics.
Unfortunately, the renewables transition toward smaller and more local economies that I and (implicitly) some of my critics seek doesn’t seem likely given the political shape of the present world. I’ll try to illustrate that in this section with a few points about wider global geopolitics, and a point about national politics.
Our present fossil-fuelled geopolitics is a story written mostly by the USA in the aftermath of World War II. The US was the only global military superpower, facing off with the Soviet bloc and building a trade-based global pax Americana reliant on its military sea power and fossil energy mostly from its own and from Gulf reserves.
The Soviet bloc has now gone, although Russia has morphed into a different threat. The US remains for now the only global military superpower, but the trade-based pax Americana is waning. A more multilateral scene is emerging, particularly around China, and also India and a few other regional power centres. The global balance of power is becoming increasingly volatile.
In this context, energy security looms larger and renewables have a significant role in it. Few countries are self-sufficient in fossil fuels, and this makes them vulnerable to outside political designs. Renewables are a safer bet – nobody can cut off a country’s sun and wind. A large part of the impetus toward renewables in countries like China and India has been about building their energy security.
On the face of it, this may look like good news from a climate change point of view. So long as a country is building its renewable capacity, does it matter whether the motivation is ethical commitment to decarbonisation or more self-serving concerns about energy security?
Unfortunately, the answer to that is probably yes. Decarbonization, remember, means replacing fossil fuels with low-carbon energy. And this isn’t really happening in the main strategic countries whose decisions in the coming years will make or break the climate. What these countries mainly seem to be doing is diversifying their energy mix for security reasons with more renewables, which isn’t the same thing at all. Instead, the pursuit of economic growth, energy security and geostrategic power is likely to drive increases – or at least retrenchment – in all forms of energy, including fossils. And this is pretty much what seems to be happening.
It’s possible that decarbonisation may even reverse in the future as countries seek energy security and strategic advantage. Coal is more widely distributed than the less carbon-intensive oil and gas, and it’s possible that economic and strategic drivers will push countries to ramp up the use of local coal resources. Militaries in general and military conflict in particular are notoriously high greenhouse gas emitters (at least 5.5 percent of worldwide emissions can be attributed to militaries9) and – notwithstanding that ‘climate-friendly warfare’ sticks in the throat – represent another hard to abate sector. Despite the fact that US global power is declining (or maybe because of it), it seems unlikely that the USA will give up its fossil-fuelled control of its oceanic trade empire without a fight – in Amitav Ghosh’s words “the world’s most “advanced” countries [have] a strategic interest in perpetuating the global fossil-fuel regime”10.
On the home front, governments are anxious to maintain constant grid power as part of the implicit compact that keeps them in favour with their citizenries, and therefore ultimately in government. As discussed earlier, constant power can be achieved with renewables, at a cost that’s neglected in standard presentations of their cheapness. But it’s a risky punt, and in practice most governments prefer to use fossil generation as first-choice backup to meet peak demand.
Such efforts to maintain the grid don’t always work. Here’s the opening of a chapter called ‘Electric Nightmares’ from Brett Christophers’ book, which indeed seems like a nightmare portent of the future:
In the summer of 2022, much of the Indian subcontinent was roiled by a deepening electricity crisis. The crux of the crisis was insufficient power generation. In parts of Bangladesh, where the government battled to dampen demand through measures such as controls on the use of air conditioning, rolling power blackouts of five, nine or even twelve hours a day were reported …
The proximate causes of the crisis were easy to identify … India, for instance, recorded its warmest weather in over a century, causing peak electricity demand – driven by tens of millions of air conditioning units …. Partly the problem was a simple shortfall of generating capacity, and, in particular, of capacity located close to where demand was concentrated … But more than that, the problem was fuel shortages. All three countries still rely predominantly on fossil fuels to produce power … and all three were faced with acute fuel deficits ….
In Bangladesh … the authorities hurried to ready new coal-fired power plants10
This raises several noteworthy points. One of them is the dread prospect of positive feedback loops in relation to climate heating: heating → increased air conditioning use → increased electricity demand → increased fossil power generation → increased climate heating. Another is the likelihood that electricity generation and grids won’t be able to cope with existing demands let alone with the new and higher demands imposed by renewable transitions and climate change (not to mention manufactured food…) A third is potential political breakdown.
Another part of this story is that a similar crisis, with different causes, blew up in Europe at around the same time as the South Asia crisis, which European governments mitigated by buying gas on global markets – driving up prices to levels they could afford, but poorer countries such as those in South Asia couldn’t. So, constant grid supply at a price for the rich, power blackouts for the poor, and everybody scrambling to source fossil energy. This could well be a portent for deepening global supply chain crises likely to stymie any potential rollout of renewables.
Currently, many large, populous and relatively poor countries rely largely on fossils, particularly coal, for their electricity. Indonesia, for example, is the world’s fourth most populous country and eleventh largest energy user: 81 percent of its electricity comes from fossils and 11 percent from renewables. In Africa as a whole, 74 percent of electricity comes from fossils and 6 percent from renewables. Generally, these are places that need more energy. For a worldwide renewables transition to happen, something very, very different needs to happen than occurred in the 2022 electricity crisis. Essentially, it would be a massive transfer of technology and local generating capacity from the richer to the poorer countries – a fifth challenging transition to add to our list.
Ultimately this transition wouldn’t be about technology, but justice. Amitav Ghosh:
It is largely in affluent countries … and mainly among the more privileged, that climate change is perceived as a techno-economic concern oriented toward the future; for the have-nots of the world, in rich and poor countries alike, it is primarily a matter of justice, rooted in histories of race, class and geopolitics11
In this way, the renewables transition depends upon yet another transition, a justice transition – another transition that’s not currently happening.
One criticism that comes the way of we localist transition sceptics is that, wittingly or otherwise, we’re giving Big Oil a helping hand with our scorn for renewables. I’d argue on the contrary that fossil interests – and Big Capital generally – has a much poorer fit with our arguments for quitting fossil fuels and localising the economy than with the banoffee transition narrative.
For sure, fossil energy companies have engaged in outrageous foot-dragging and misinformation about climate change in pursuit of their agenda, but ultimately that agenda is to make money, not to sell hydrocarbons for fun. Some oil companies have tried to pivot to renewables, but then beat a hasty retreat when the profit and loss account came in. As large and wealthy transnational corporations, they’re well placed to pivot back again if those accounts start to tell a different story. The lack of interest in renewables from the fossil industry says something about their true cost.
So again, profitability is the bottom line. Christophers mentions that the focus of BP’s ‘climate friendly’ portfolio is not in renewables generation but in more profitable activities such as low-carbon gases and electric vehicle charging networks. This seems to be borne out in my neck of the woods.
As is generally the way in modern capitalism, the spoils fall not to the content creators but to the big beasts who can monopolise circulation.
It’s interesting to see this playing out. The Rocky Mountain Institute is the brainchild of Amory Lovins, a hipster renewables guy in the sense that he’s been advocating for them since long before they were cool. In the 1970s, he came up with the idea of soft energy paths, which has affinities with localism – mixed, low-impact energy technologies scaled to people’s social ends, with an emphasis on micro grids and decentralized networks. According to Influence Watch, the RMI had an annual revenue of $9.9 million in 2010, while total annual revenue had risen to $115.1 million by 2022.
The rise in revenue seems to have gone hand in hand with declining commitment to soft energy paths, and the RMI has pivoted towards advocacy and policy analysis geared to full, on-grid, hard energy path renewable transition compatible with existing patterns of power and geopolitics. This recalls Amitav Ghosh’s point about climate change as a “techno-economic concern oriented toward the future” for the privileged. There’s a sense here of the more strategic-thinking sections of the capitalist business class pivoting to renewables, in good faith no doubt, kind of as the last chance to save, well, the business class and the capitalist status quo, with outfits like the RMI as their vehicle.
Talking of pivoting as I have been, it brings to mind a nice story from Dougald Hine’s fine book At Work In The Ruins. Dougald says he was contacted by a former policy analyst who’d then gone into the startup world with a healthcare focus and was now “looking to pivot to climate change (with a hybrid policy and entrepreneurial bent”.
Dougald writes:
I saw two things at once. First, I had nothing to say to this guy …. second, I saw that climate change now belonged to guys like him: that once they ‘pivoted’ in to save the day, theirs would be the terms in which we all had to talk if we wanted to sound serious. (p.22)
Sounding serious is the strong suit of techno-fix narratives. But for the reasons I’ve outlined above, whether they actually are serious solutions to the present meta-crisis is more questionable.
One of the ways they sound serious is in their pro-poor, economic development vibe. As I suggested in Saying NO… this has long been a tactic of technical progress arguments, used with greater or lesser degrees of cynicism – our new trick is better for the poor, and anyone who says otherwise is a naïve romantic or a cruel fantasist. The new trick rarely does turn out better for the poor, but it does often succeed in breaking up old lifeways and solidarities, and better assimilating poor people, indigenous people and people who have otherwise managed to wrest some autonomy from the ever-advancing logic of capital creation back into the next cycle of that process.
Brett Christophers touches on this in relation to the pastoralists of northern Scandinavia, where:
The development of wind farms has increasingly interfered with Sámi reindeer-herding grounds, threatening at once community livelihoods, ancestral traditions and wildlife itself. What, people are led to ask, takes precedence? The global climate fight? A (post)colonial nation’s quest for energy security? Or the repeatedly violated rights of a minority people? And who ultimately decides?12
I wrote along similar lines in relation to indigenous hunting, pastoralism and farming in Saying NO… in the context of the push for manufactured microbial food, a technology that’s completely reliant on a switch to renewable energy at probably an order of magnitude greater than our present energy economy (p.121).
Who, indeed, gets to decide? Ecomodernist, techno-fix narratives brush such questions aside, invoking technology as a substitute for politics. Once we’re all gridded up – heat pumps instead of woodburners, microbial food instead of meat or beans, nature reserves and carbon offsets instead of farms and so on – we can still be ‘political’, but we’ll have no autonomy of livelihood action from which to articulate a politics. Seriously, let’s stop talking about sodium batteries, seaweed, insects or a trillion trees and start talking about local politics instead.
So I’m planning to head off-grid in a deeper sense than the mere technicalities of my own electricity supply. I don’t think renewables transitions are a serious likelihood for most people worldwide, but I don’t expect to be taken seriously by those who think otherwise. As I said in a recent post, I’m (almost) done trying to have serious discussions with them, because they so rarely bear fruit.
I’m planning instead to adopt the (serious) roles of the jester and the mystic in future writing, using them to plot a course as best I can to my opening proposition (2.) to help steer away from our present collision course with proposition (1.)
I don’t see this particularly as a counsel of despair. The story of (1.) and (2.) hasn’t been written yet, and the more we can get off-grid, use soft-energy paths and agroecology, and build local communities, the more we can avoid getting wrecked by the siren song of the banoffees. The main impediment is the lingering commitment of our politics to proposition (3.) which will further snare us in the energy trap and make the positive possibilities of proposition (2.) that much harder to achieve. As I see it, the blandishments of the banoffee transition and proposition (3.) is the real counsel of despair. Ultimately, we’re in the grip of systemic meta-crisis, not bad choices over energy supply.
For sure, there isn’t a ‘serious’ mainstream politics of agrarian transition in most places currently, in large part because there’s a lot of work among ‘serious’ political actors and commentators to ensure that remains so. But if you look to what a lot of ordinary people are doing and thinking around localism and land use, you get a different picture. The times are a-changing and I haven’t given up hope that versions of proposition 2. may get established in some places. As ever, renewal comes from the margins, not from the centre.
The neighbour who I failed to ask for an electricity wayleave has moved on. But I’m used to living off grid now and don’t really want to change. Friendlier folk have moved in, and started a small market garden. That’s a whole other story. But what I mean to say is that off-grid doesn’t have to mean isolation or survivalism. There’s a world of localism to be won.
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It’ll be option 1 and catastrophic collapse. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it. You’ve neglected human psychology in your analysis and presumed humans to be rational actors. But that’s not how large crowds of humans operate.
It might not be how large crowds of humans operate, Harry, but it feasibly can be how smaller groups in communities, villages, towns… operate.
I agree that future 1. is a certainty and suspect Chris thinks it highly likely, given that he’s labelled it no.1(!). Future 2. is an impossibility. Here are two quotes from the late Patrick Noble:
– My husbandry can swing the balance one way or the other. Humanity as a whole is choosing to swing the balance towards a lifeless planet.
– The future is impossible. So why not choose the very best – the loveliest impossible route?
I don’t feel like we currently have a politics with much of a commitment to your option (3). What we have is quite a bit more opportunistic and short term-ist than that. Perhaps I am too cynical. We certainly have a banoffee narrative, but… fine words butter no parsnips.
I don’t know that there is a serious commitment even to replace current electricity generation with renewables. If that were the goal, leaving it to corporate investment would be unthinkable for all the reasons you’ve listed.
I do think the narrative of option (3) is being used to justify some pretty serious corporate consolidation and enclosure of land and other resources, though.
I really do think distributed microgeneration is the way to go with renewable electricity while the capacity to produce the equipment is available, and I still think this is a better use of our remaining fossil fuels than just burning them directly so we can move around in metal boxes or heat our homes. This has the advantages of getting people off of paying rents to large electric grids, as well as encouraging appropriate use, awareness of intermittency, and so on. And for smaller-scale stuff it isn’t even that expensive at the moment (externalities and embedded energy notwithstanding); my bicycle lights run off of a hub dynamo, and lots of small convenience gizmos (smartphones, e-readers, headlamps) that already have a battery anyway can be charged quite adequately off of a pretty small solar panel. The bike lights are going to exist whether I charge them from the grid or run them direct off a dynamo (and are arguably more efficient in their dynamo form); the other gizmos, similarly, would exist whether I charged them from a solar panel or not. I would like to get a suitable adapter to charge the Bosch 18V garden appliance batteries from solar or wind, though, or my bicycle battery; in the summer these charge off of the house solar panels but in the winter there isn’t enough light for that, and I don’t have the patience to try and figure out when the wind is blowing and charge my bicycle then. But I suspect that heating contributes a lot more to my fossil carbon footprint, in any case, and I’ve written before here about there not being enough coppice in Epping Forest for everyone in the area to run a wood burner.
That brings me to a pet peeve about “off-grid” when used to refer to… running appliances off of diesel or petrol or propane instead. That’s still a consumable that relies on a distribution network, it’s just more easily portable at the consumer end than electrons are. The beauty of solar panels and wind turbines is that you really can get years and years of energy from them before having to start replacing parts or feed them anything that comes from anywhere else. But for heating, your woodlot would knock them out of the park both in terms of useful energy produced for a given area of land and in terms of being able to make your own oven or fireplace or similar out of mud, if you absolutely have to, whereas I would be hard pressed to build a solar panel (I might be able to manage a wind turbine with the right materials to salvage — like, say, an old hard drive or some dead electric motors — but finding magnets in the wild is non-trivial). So I’m happy to call my cute little solar panel off-grid and I’m happy to call your woodburner off-grid but if I have to purchase firewood from trees I’ve never seen in order to run my woodburner, it is decidedly on grid.
Designing for distributed microgeneration to power whole households, on a society-wide level, would take some doing, especially for people with complex medical needs. As usual, it isn’t as if the current system provides everyone with what they need to survive, either… nevertheless, it would be an enormous change in attitude for, say, hospitals to be relying on solar panels or local wind turbines or even a CHP plant to run dialysis machines and ventilators or the lights in surgical operating rooms. So at present I tend to think of distributed microgeneration of electricity in a similar way to the way I think of power tools: useful for building refugia, useful for reducing my own fossil fuel consumption, useful for surviving with one foot in an agrarian localist future and the other in an industrial technologist present, useful to have “lying around” as concepts to be improved on, but not actually the end goal and definitely not something I would like to guarantee will continue to exist.
Speaking of parsnips, I had a very bad spring and early summer for them at both allotments and we have one (1) plant that has survived. I am trying to decide whether to eat it for Christmas, or leave it well alone and save the seeds from it in 2025.
Yes to all you said – especially the ratio of wood that is growing to the number of people who might want to burn it.
And congratulations on your bike hub dynamos! The gizmo of the future.
As for salvaging generators, that is easy on a small scale. Any DC (permanent magnet) motor will do – auto windshield wiper motors, for instance.
Put 12 volts in and you get (usually) 2,000 rpm. Put 2,000 rpm in and you get 12 volts.
But 2,000 rpm is a 40:1 step up ratio from bike pedaling, and much faster than any wind turbine rotation.
Thankfully bicycles also have gears…
Most hub dynamos are about 5V I think, which is also coincidentally what most USB cables use. So there are really quite a lot of gizmos available!
When I was working on the spec for my bike (custom frame with e-assist, much much cheaper than a car, and honestly I paid less for it than I should have because the shop that built and designed it for me is a ten minute walk away and very enthusiastic about local community stuff) I was very clear that I wanted the lights to run off a hub dynamo and not off the battery. I think most people would find this a little weird but from my perspective it’s just obvious: hub dynamos have been around for decades, they’re nearly indestructible, and batteries are heavy. I can easily imagine wanting to do a quick trip without the battery in winter and still needing the lights.
@Kathryn.
Does your hub dynamo work with LEDs? More lumins for all your peddle effort.
I would struggle to find a bike light without LEDs, even the cheapest battery ones these days don’t use incandescent bulbs.
Sorry, Chris — reading this again I see I’ve referred to “your option (3)” when I meant “your critics’ option (3)”. Hopefully this was clear enough from context…
Proposition 3 is being half-heartedly attempted, but will fail. Proposition 2 isn’t even being considered, but if it were, stopping fossil fuels would kill almost all city folk (Monbiot’s worry). So proposition 1 it is. As you worry, I suspect a big return to coal is just around the corner.
We can only hope that the collapse is very soon and so rapid as to skip right by the geopolitcal tension phase that could ignite WW3 with nukes. If collapse happens right away, the survivors will probably have a halfway decent climate to live in, so it won’t be so bad for them, but there will be far fewer of them than if rational preparations were made.
PS Your analysis of the global energy situation is spot on. At one point I thought you might miss the importance of dispatchable capacity, but you worked it in. Well done.
You have been busy. I like it.
Reading towards the end of section 1. I was reminded of a sign on the wall of a bar in Wisconsin. It reads “Free Beer Tomorrow”. Which ties into the second to last paragraph. There is no serious mainstream discussion of using less energy.
“There is no serious mainstream discussion of using less energy.”
Or methane ! Kill the cows so industry can keep on polluting !
Nice writeup Chris,
The banoffees best shot, (if they or others would get serious about it) is enhanced geothermal. Enhanced geothermal, as being pioneered by Fervo, is one of the few straight-forward bright spots for renewals in the coming decade.
It avoids many (not all) of the pitfalls of renewables, as you have articulated. Minimal mineral inputs. Practically no impact on surrounding or wider ecologies. Tiny land footprint. 24 hour, baseload energy (not quite dispatchable). It will be geographically constrained (the ‘enhanced’ part of the title is directly related to the expanded geographical possibilities of the technology). I would estimate that not every bioregion would have the right geomorphology but its very likely one of their neighboring regions would.
I don’t share about geothermal for the sake of the banoffees vision; but because I think the technology has the potential to contribute to a regenerative way of existing. I am curious to see if it can be a transformative impact in the coming decade, without pretending that it would mitigate current civilizational weaknesses with over-consumption and fossil fuel dependence.
Thomas,
Geothermal will not be able to provide enough energy and would require continued drilling and infrastructure, which is not sustainable even if the source of the energy is.
Professor Tom Murphy’s excellent textbook “Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet” goes into detail on these points in chapter 16.1, link here:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
The whole point of the innovation in enhanced geothermal is that the change in capability is significant enough to radically change existing assumptions about geothermal-as-a-whole. So an article/book from 2021 based on prior understanding of geothermal-as-a-whole has limited things to say about significant unexpected advancements by enhanced geothermal that have happened in the years after 2021.
The use of ‘enhanced’ here denotes a specific category of geothermal, just to clarify. The reference specifically refers to the old-school geothermal, which practically needs to be directly on top of a surface thermal vent. That old school technology has no growth opportunity because its basically already fully utilised in the limited places its available. I’m just making sure you are clear that enhanced geothermal is a separate beast and that you have to evaluate it separately.
This is a good quality explainer of the spread of geothermal interventions from 2020: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
Since that 2020 article, enhance geothermal has made much faster progress than even its biggest advocates had hoped.
@Thomas
That sounds really good but it seems a bit pie in the sky at this point.
Some questions:
How much AGS is currently installed ?
How long will it take to roll it out at scale ?
What does the AGS hardware cost ?
What does it cost to drill a 10 km deep hole (or two plus the 2 km of lateral drilling)?
How do regular home owners afford it, i.e. how does it get paid for ?
How will it work when it is -20F outside with a 20 mph wind ( a 95,000 BTU furnace won’t keep up)?
It looks like the 10 km deep hole only produces 150C temperatures here. How much power will it draw in the above situation ?
Are the system components rebuildable / repairable ?
Is it applicable in rural situations where houses are a mile or more apart ?
Some questions:
How much AGS is currently installed ?
AGS is different from EGS. I don’t know if any AGS is installed. EGS has one demo plant. Notice my initial comment is talking about ‘the coming decade’, aka the potential, now that the demo plant has gone so well.
How long will it take to roll it out at scale ?
How long is a piece of string? If the right countries were serious about it, it could reshape their power situations in less than a decade.
What does the AGS hardware cost ?
How much do you want?
What does it cost to drill a 10 km deep hole (or two plus the 2 km of lateral drilling)?
The demo plant is getting about 191C at 2.5 kilometers deep in Utah. They have been rapidly reducing the drill time on their wells, which continues to bring the price down. The first commercial plant plan is planned to come online in 2026 and be full-scale in 2028. They could get a lot more power out of that plant if the transmission infrastructure was upgraded.
Some details about the first commercial plant
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2024/03/09/fracking-heat-utah-could-become/
Details about the demo plant:
https://www.seequent.com/fervo-energys-pioneering-enhanced-geothermal-technologies/
How do regular home owners afford it, i.e. how does it get paid for ?
This is technology for power plants, not punters.
How will it work when it is -20F outside with a 20 mph wind ( a 95,000 BTU furnace won’t keep up)?
This is technology for power plants, not punters.
It looks like the 10 km deep hole only produces 150C temperatures here. How much power will it draw in the above situation ?
200C is the rough benchmark for commercial viability. Maybe it don’t work for your bioregion. Nothing is magic and/or a silvet bullet
Are the system components rebuildable / repairable ?
Not for a punter. Otherwise once setup, its basically a steam turbine and friends, which is the core mechanism almost all power plants use
Is it applicable in rural situations where houses are a mile or more apart ?
Again, this is for power plants, not punters. Think at a bioregional level, not neighbor level.
@Thomas
Okay. So what does it cost to build an AGS or EGS power plant ?
What kind of output do they have ?
Lots of technologies have been promised to breakthrough in 10 (or 50) years. Most of them never happen. CCS comes to mind as a recent example. The payoff isn’t worth the cost.
A study published last month by the journal Nature “investigated the techno-economic feasibility and power supply potential of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) across the contiguous United States”.
For the entire area of the United States, only 0.65 GW of EGS capacity potential for electricity generation was found to be more cost-effective than solar PV. “We estimated total EGS resource capacities of 0.65 GW were economically feasible compared to the marginal LCOE [levelized cost of electricity] of solar PV, but no EGS resources were found viable compared to onshore wind in terms of LCOE.” (With special techniques during operation, such as wellhead throttling and power plant bypass, the 0.65 GW potential increased to 45 GW).
Compare this to the current total installed capacity of solar PV in the US, around 200 GW, and the total US generation capacity of 1,300 GW (for 2023).
“We found that for 89.3% of the United States areal extent, LCOE was minimized by drilling to the deepest point, i.e., 7 km. Meanwhile, drilling to depths of ≤ 4 km was found optimal only across 0.27% of the United States areal extent, mainly around Western United States.”
This line seems like an understatement: “With drilling costs increasing parabolically with depth, EGS development at scale could be CAPEX-intensive.” (CAPEX = capital expenditure)
Power supply characterization of baseload and flexible enhanced geothermal systems
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68580-8
The criticisms raised in Professor Murphy’s textbook still apply to “enhanced” geothermal — the energy is far too diffuse and it would still require continued drilling, which is not sustainable.
Mate, just say you didn’t bother to read anything about enhanced geothermal and don’t care about learning about it. That’s fine, just don’t fool yourself into thinking what you are saying is factual.
I really recommend reading Tom Murphy’s book, linked above. Chapter 16.1 is only 5 pages long, and really puts the resource into context. Tom calculates 44 TW of geothermal power. The Vox article, linked later in the comments, is actually more pessimistic, stating “The heat is continuously replenished … at a flow rate of roughly 30 terawatts, almost double all human energy consumption.”
Tom’s book puts human energy needs at 18 TW today (p. 175, published in 2021). So again, general agreement.
The issue is *extracting* that flow rate for human needs. To understand the limits, one needs to use the theoretical efficiency of a heat engine (equation 16.1, p. 286 of Tom’s book). This is alluded to in the Vox article, stating “To make electricity, higher minimum heats are required.” (Heat delta, really.)
The upshot is that extracting anything but a tiny fraction of the 30 TW (according to Vox) or 44 TW (Tom’s book), will be very difficult, physically.
That heat is distributed evenly across the globe. You would need to drill holes across the *entire* globe to collect it. Land mass is about 29% of the globe, so maybe target 44 * .3 = 13 TW? And drill holes across the entire land mass, evenly spaced. Average heat engine efficiency is 35% (1). So 13 * .35 = 4.6. We get further and further away from the 18 TW.
Geothermal, even if “enhanced”, will remain a niche player for electricity supply, unless demand shrinks to a very small number compared to today.
(1) Here’s another quote from Tom’s book: “A typical temperature gradient in the earth’s crust is 25C per km. … A heat engine constructed to operate between the surface (288 K average) and 1 km down (313 K) could expect a maximum thermodynamic efficiency of 8 %.”
I can only see Geothermal being potentially useful for heating buildings.
I can’t see it smelting iron or running a transport system.
Perhaps it could be used to generate electricity, but electricity only accounts for 20% of energy consumption. So geothermal’s contribution would be limited.
Ground source heat pumps do also cool buildings in summer.
However, they require electricity to work…
To echo my above comment;
Just so you are aware how enhanced geothermal is distinguished from the geothermal applications you are referring, this 2020 explainer is a great introduction: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
Whether geothermal provides a solution depends on what the question is. If the question is “Is there a sustainable way to power current technological civilization?” then the answer may be yes – I really don’t know. The problem for me is that that’s not a very useful question because it’s definition of sustainable is too narrow. If one asks if such a civilization, relying as it does on a wide range of non renewable resources and the extraction of renewable resources at unsustainable rates (soils, aquifers, fisheries, forests, other species) and come to the conclusion that it’s not then finding a sustainable way to power said civilization is oxymoronic
Thanks for the analysis Chris – you’re preaching to the converted here.
I’ve recently been reading Tom Murphy’s blog ‘Do the Math’. He covers much of the ground your essay covers but with the perspective of a physicist – he was a professor of astrophysics at University of California, San Diego. What really interested me was his journey.
He started in the early 2000s being asked to teach a course on energy – which led him to the conclusion that peak oil was a serious problem which society wasn’t really engaged with. That led him to looking seriously at renewables, energy use and reducing use etc etc. The more he looked the more that transition began to look unrealistic and he begins taking the possibility of civilisational collapse seriously (not easy for someone embedded in the scientific establishment). From there its a short step to looking at a whole range of drivers of such a collapse – ecosystem collapse, freshwater shortages, desertification of agricultural land etc etc. Roll forward 20 years and he’s describing himself as a ‘recovering astrophysicist’, has given up his academic career, has become deeply sceptical about the utility of science or at least of its priviledged position in our society and our collective understanding of the world, and he’s writing about the problem of modernity and the need to give up our human supremacist world view. It’s quite a journey.
But if a hard look at the figures (evidence) leads there I don’t find it that hard to understand why most people would rather talk vaguely about human ingenuity and the wonders of technology – much more comfortable – until of course its not.
Personally I think fossil fuel use will begin to drop in the nearish future – once the declines associated with peak oil really kick in they’re going to be far harder to manage than people think – in the UK North sea production fell 60% between 2003 and 2023 – globally decline rates might be mitigated by some new production but its still going to break the economy and given the utility of liquid fuels I wonder how much sense using our limited supply to ramp up coal production will make – of course the same problem will apply to trying to roll out renewables.
I think at this point any predictions about the future are pretty worthless because the likely discontinuities, be that climate change, energy descent, ecosystem collapse, are so enormous. And with that in mind trying to build the future one would like to see outside of existing structures makes as much sense as anything and certainly more sense than trying to persuade Banoffees that they need to look a little harder at the numbers.
Chris and all;
I think it will be #1. The control levers of our global economy have been taken over by the financial super organism, so near term profit, at whatever externalized cost, will likely be the driver of events till it can’t. Even if some significant fraction of global leaders “gets it”, it will not be able to shift the trajectory.
I see money desperately looking for the best returns, but as EROEI of the real economy declines, it’s getting harder by the day. Add on the need to jump on fads to pump and dump, or take on a veneer of green, and we get things like this:
https://www.lpm.org/investigate/2023-11-16/a-celebrated-startup-promised-kentuckians-green-jobs-it-gave-them-a-grueling-hell-on-earth
It will continue, and the studge you have cautioned about is just another example. I appreciate your efforts to at least explore #2, but I’m not hopeful. You and many others have given prodigious evidence that #3 is right out.
Here is a guest essay ( BTW- I’m no writer!) I did at a collapse blog which mostly focusses (obsessively sometimes) on the psychological underpinnings of our predicament. I will say there is a massive amount of denial in the world, so the point is valid. Exact mechanisms are to me still unclear.
Essentially, I argued that creation of small, local “lifeboat communities”, ( essentially one form of your supecedure response), is the best step forward for those that can.
https://un-denial.com/2024/03/19/by-steve-carrow-what-would-a-wise-community-do/
A good overview of one strategy, Steve; thanks for sharing it here.
I don’t like the connotations of the term “lifeboat” — a lifeboat is a strictly temporary measure to help people escape a short-term disaster (the sinking of a ship at sea) and get them to shore and safety. It contains a bit of food and water and first aid stuff and hopefully a radio or similar, and maybe if you’re lucky, equipment for fishing and cooking. A lifeboat isn’t designed to be lived in for more than a couple of weeks, and the shorter the time you spend in it the better.
We will all need to make use of what resources we have to weather the short-term disasters that happen in our local areas, of course. But I think the escape route of reaching a “safe” shore where we can proceed with business as usual is long-gone.
An ark might be a better image, if we’re talking about human-made efforts; so might ecological refugia, which don’t just allow their inhabitants to survive but end up becoming the means by which a devastated landscape is re-enlivened. Refugia might be created by humans, but they might also be found — by chance or by searching.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/08/13/land-grab-leftist-uk-govt-hopes-to-take-private-land-without-paying-full-market-price/
Looks like a new way of funding local authorities without money from Westminster , ” legally “confiscate agricultural land then sell it with planing permission , as few people are affected ( just the odd peasant farmer ) protest would be minimal .
I’m not sure the article really paints a complete picture – one of the issues in the UK is the planning permission required to build houses massively increases the value of land with planning – so lots of land is bought speculatively – on the edge of the village I live in there are a few parcels of land which sold for inflated prices – they sit just outside the area of the village designated for house building but those boundaries are revisited every 10 years or so – if the land goes for building at a future date the profits are huge – 10 to 12 houses per acre. Currently those plots haven’t been used productively for maybe 3 years – one has horses on it – not sure that counts as productive
Here in the village it’s individuals buying land but big house building companies do it on a much bigger scale and make big money both from land speculation and the control over housing supply that it gives them.
My understanding is that the proposals the article refers to are a sort of land value tax – it takes back the unearned increment that planning permission currently bestows thereby making speculation a poor bet and hopefully removing one of the distortions from the market in land in the UK. One of those plots on the edge of the village went for £25k + an acre – prices that distort the market and have no reference to agricultural returns
Apologies for typos I’m writing on my phone
Thanks for this clarification, Bruce.
Calling the current Labour party “leftist” is hilarious. It’s interesting to see that Breitbart presents the current housing crunch as driven by mass migration rather than property speculation, too. Or, for that matter, the way the councils which sold their council housing to tenants under “right to buy” weren’t allowed to use that money to build more housing.
Meanwhile, I have more access to nature on my doorstep in East London than I would if I lived in most parts of the countryside, so the assertion that green belt land is crucial for city people to have access to green spaces is clearly not true.
However, I would much rather see green belt land used for villages and market gardens than for whatever property developers are going to do with it.
Brevard looks at things thru from an American standpoint the USA has had 10 million immigrants ( that we know about ) in the last 3 years , they have swamped the system , sanctuary cities are on the verge of bancrupsy , hospital’s are also very badly hit , it is unsustainable .
The UK has thousands of miles of footpaths that the population has a right to use and the green belt makes it near to where they live plus the planners believe in keeping farm land and unsuitable from being built
over , Planets were overruled around Tewkesbury , houses were built on the water meadows and every time it rains they complain of flooded houses and climate change .
IMHO every acre built on means a acre of somewhere else is pressed into service .
No surprise that I agree with much of what you say Chris.
On thing you did fail to mention is that electricity accounts for only 20% of total final energy consumption.
So the situation is actually much worse.
We aren’t even close to replacing electricity generated from fossil fuels with renewables, never mind replacing ALL fossil fuel use with renewables.
I’m not sure that electricity (green or not) alone, can run modernity?
With this in mind, I think that Future Option #1 is the most likely. Well…..the bit about the continuation of fossil fuel use.
Modernity collapses without them and no politician is going to be the one that implements policies that brings on the collapse.
One chink of light I have going forward is…….that global population demographics are shifting fast. Pretty much every area of the world is below a birth rate of 2.1.
It’s going to take a while for the “oldies” (I include myself in that category) to work out way through the system, but once we do shuffle off, things will change fast.
Spent last summer on Harris and Lewis. Very strange place. Because most young folk leave the island, there are loads of abandoned houses. A sign of things to come.
Regarding your off-grid set up at Vallis Veg. Are all your appliances DC?
Fridge, TV, Computer, lights etc.
Or do you use an inverter?
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024/executive-summary
This is an interesting link on population demographics.
I might have posted it sometime before.
Apologies if so.
https://youtu.be/A6s8QlIGanA?si=Vr-l5XdUDpPyVsSD
Well done. One thing that is often forgotten is the environmental effects of using/appyling energy. In my view that is often as problematic as the “production” of energy (i.e. making an energy source available for use). So we make fossil free nitrogen fertilizers, but apart from less CO2 emissions the N20, ammonia etc. will remain the same. We use electric cars, but the highways, the parking garages, the accidents etc. will remain the same. We make fossil free steel, but all that steel is in turn used for industrial production, construction, transport etc. Apart from direct heating almost all energy USE has a huge ecological footprint.
Replacing fossil with renewables will only be a one-to-one (taking into consideration differences in efficiency), if the price at use will be the same. If renewable energy is cheaper then use will increase. It is already noted with electric cars: they are expensive to buy but actually much cheaper to drive if you just count the marginal costs. I hear many taking the car instead of the train…..If energy costs will be higher – which I think they will, less energy will be used in the economy – it works like a tax but has no real benefficiaries.
@Gunnar
Yes. Jevon’s Paradox.
The worst thing we humans could do would be to find a source of almost infinite, cheap energy. Our distraction of the environment would then know no bounds.
“destruction” not distraction 🙂
I’m pasting in here a couple of interesting comments on this piece from Substack.
First, from Elisabeth:
One thing that people who compare fossil fuels mined to other metals and minerals mined for so-called renewables (actually rebuildables) do to obfuscate the devastating impacts of moving from a fossil fuel-intensive energy system to a materials-intensive energy system is to compare the end product of metals and minerals and not the total amount of ore moved or the areas devastated by tailings.
While steel can indeed be recycled, for a full build out of rebuildables to fully replace fossil fuel used for electricity generation, it would require massive amounts of new steel (since most steel remains in use for a long time), which requires a Carbon atom from somewhere, usually coal. Plus of course tremendous heat.
Same with silicon, and solar panels are MUCH harder to recycle. Silica to silicon requires not just high heat, multiple times at various steps in the process, but also a Carbon atom, usually supplied by wood and coal.
And of course the machines that mine the materials that go into wind turbines, solar panels, grid lines, substations; the machines to build these things, install them, and maintain them; the factories; the tailings dams; the biodiversity loss and carbon loss from overburden destruction, etc. rarely get acknowledged much less factored into the impacts of these industrial technologies.
Batteries are a toxic destructive nightmare from start to finish.
I like your “banoffees” but I think “bright greens” is the best descriptor I’ve seen so far (from the book Bright Green Lies). No matter what we call them, the bright green utopia promised by these people is just a fantasy.
And as Bill Rees (Ecological Overshoot guy) says: “The only thing worse than the failure of the energy transition would be the success of the energy transition … Business as usual is destroying the planet. Business as usual by alternative means is still destroying the planet.”
Low energy and local are the future. We are unlikely to get there easily as you point out here; the geopolitical impediments are just too great, as is human addiction to high-energy lifestyles. I’d prefer the entirety of humanity to recognize the value in nature and the right of non-humans and ecosystems to exist for their own sake and not just FOR US, and follow a plan for 2. I am 99.99999% sure that won’t happen, and thus we’ll get 1. Probably sooner than later.
And second, from Bob:
That was a fascinating article. I am curious though, why you seem to overlook nuclear power as an option? Fission has a higher energy return on investment than anything else practical. Thorium, fuel recycling, and breeder reactors are all ways to greatly extend fuel supplies, and do so for a fraction of the economic and environmental costs of renewables such as solar and wind. There is a rather intensive push in technocratic circles to reform and deregulate fission to allow for smaller and cheaper reactors. I think if we’re in your first scenario of catastrophic climate crisis, or in some kind of peak oil scenario where EROI is declining massively, the political push for nuclear power will accelerate dramatically. I think the main issue with this approach is that it is fantastic for electricity and shipping, but unlikely to be able to decarbonize the particularly resistant sectors unless battery technology improves well above projected levels. I would expect virtually any country given the choice of “lose geostrategic power” or “accept the political and environmental risks of nuclear power” to go with swallowing the nuclear pill much more quickly than they would try to end fossil fuel use. I really have trouble imagining say, four American election cycles of declining energy based living standards without a very serious effort at a nuclear build out even if the costs were net negative due to environmental concerns and security issues.
I would also note that if practical power devolved locally, as you seem to think is likely without major technological changes, this actually increases the chance of nuclear power build out dramatically. Without American power projection to stop shipment of nuclear materials against their will, national or international regulations for safety on the issue, this would greatly increase the variance of governing structures and policy. Even assuming the improvements in nuclear power since the 1970s are overblown, which is possible given the marketing incentives and national pride issues with the current advances projects, by far the biggest costs to nuclear power are based on regulation and activism, which would both become much weaker factors in your projection.
Thanks for the comments. I’ll address some of them briefly here. I’m going to be frequently offline (not least because I still have almost no internet access at home … the collapse has started!) & busy with various other things over the next few weeks so please forgive me if I’m unresponsive. Comments here remain welcome and appreciated, as ever!
To try to summarise and respond to some overarching themes in the responses:
1. IT’S WORSE THAN THAT! Various people pointed out ways in which my post neglects, understates or glosses over the true gravity of the situation. Yes, all good points. The approach I took in this piece was to concede ground to various banoffee positions that are questionable at best, and yet still show the overall implausibility of their position. Happy for the rest of you to bang more nails in. Gunnar makes a good point about the damaging consequences of high energy applications, regardless of the energy source. This is basically what I was referring to when I wrote “even a low-carbon, high-energy civilization is likely to devolve to a low-energy small farm future eventually”.
2. THE ANSWER IS (1.)! The overall balance of opinion here seems to favour my opening proposition (1.) as the most likely course of world history. I agree, and I don’t think I wrote much in the essay to suggest otherwise, apart perhaps from indulging myself in a moment of glass-half-fullness at the end. But even given (1.), it’ll manifest in different ways in different places and I don’t see the downsides of trying to prepare for the best low-energy, local, agrarian futures that we can. I liked Eliot’s Patrick Noble quote about “the loveliest impossible future”. If only the banoffees would articulate their vision as a lovely impossible future rather than as some hard-bitten reality they’re engineering for the rest of us, then these debates might be more fruitful. Re Harry’s points, I’m not sure I’ve presumed humans to be rational actors in totality, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess. Possibly the mess is a result of human psychology, but I prefer to frame it as a result of human politics. Recourse to ‘psychology’ often involves implicitly accepting the ‘you’ve never had it so good’ self-representation of modernity. Greg’s ‘Free beer tomorrow’ joke is relevant. It’s funny because we know it’s a con. Our present civilization’s offer is also a con, albeit not quite such an obvious one – its lack of obviousness IMO is better seen as political than psychological.
3. THE ANSWER IS (2.)! As I said just now, I don’t see the downsides of trying to prepare for the best low-energy, local, agrarian futures that we can. So in terms of practical politics the answer is (2.), even if the answer in human history is (1.). I probably shouldn’t rise to the bait, but in response to Joe’s remark about ‘Monbiot’s worry’ in relation to (2.), I’d say that Monbiot is not worried about any mass death associated with (2.) – he’s merely worried about how best to rhetorically dismiss arguments that challenge (3.) As I see it, his ‘counter-agricultural revolution’ vision of (3.) will be far more deathly. It would have been good to have had a real debate with him about the respective difficulties of (2.) and (3.), but that’s not really what he’s interested in.
Joe himself is a much worthier debating partner, so a word on his remarks here: https://chrissmaje.com/2024/08/newsflash-no-1/#comment-263935 And also, from a while ago, here: https://chrissmaje.com/2022/01/warre-and-peace-of-gifts-government-and-men-with-guns/#comment-245342. My view is that it IS important to try to define the goals of good politics, even in the context of chaotic breakdown. Partly this is because it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between short-term practicalities and larger desiderata – e.g. anti-patriarchal political organising around women’s access to land might prove highly consequential to keeping a community fed in the short term. But also I’m personally interested in the longer-term political cycles of civilizational rise and fall, an understanding of which I think is relevant to making the current downward trajectory more bearable, albeit not in obvious how-to-fill-the-larder-today ways. Anyway, that’s what you’re going to get if you come to this site! But I appreciate Joe’s admonitions to keep it real.
4. THE ANSWER IS GEOTHERMAL/NUCLEAR! Thanks for your contributions here Thomas and Bob. I don’t know much about geothermal, except that it’s currently a tiny proportion of global primary energy. I did watch my neighbours installing a ground source heat pump and thought it seemed like a hell of a big fossil energy input, but there we are. On nuclear, I’m opposed to it on numerous grounds but most relevantly to the issues at hand I think it has enormously long implementation lead times which aren’t entirely attributable to regulatory burdens, and is only feasible for countries with a lot of spare capital and either a very good or a very bad relationship with the USA. That said, I think Bob’s future scenarios around nuclear look quite plausible. Small farm futures for those who can’t make themselves clients of declining nuclear metropolises?
5. THE ANSWER IS NOT UPFRONT FOSSIL ENERGY INPUT! Thanks to Elisabeth for further thoughts on minerals/manufacturing. This is one of the areas in which I probably gave too much leeway to banoffee arguments. The energy requirements around mining, recycling, rebuilding etc etc of their case do look pretty fanciful, but to get further into that empirically is too much of a rabbit hole for me in relation to my present interests
6. LAND VALUES. Thanks Diogenes for linking that piece. Agree with Bruce and Kathryn on some of its mistakes. Land markets don’t work in the same way as normal commodity markets in terms of supply and demand – high land prices in the UK result among other things from way too much global capital and from landowner-friendly politics, and it would be a good thing if prices reduced and existing landowners (like me!) didn’t get so much of a red carpet, provided this was accompanied by other policies to encourage wise farming and economic localism. Unfortunately, I’ve got no confidence in this government (or any other political party likely to form one) to make good on that ‘provided…’. So we have a problem.
7. OFF GRID. John, we have AC appliances and an inverter. All worryingly high tech. Although I believe I’d be deluding myself to think that a more robust DC system would see me through the troubles to come. So, back to politics…
Talking of off grid, I want to come back to that in relation to the debate with Cameron about urbanism/ruralism. But it may be a while before I get that post out.
@Chris
You probably know this already but if you ditch the inverter and have DC appliances, you’ll get more out of you PV/batteries.
This is interesting coming from the BBC.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0021tt7/can-degrowth-save-the-world?at_mid=ol3rFLM3Og&at_campaign=Can_Degrowth_Save_the_World?&at_medium=display_ad&at_campaign_type=owned&at_audience_id=SS&at_product=iplayer&at_brand=m0021tt7&at_ptr_name=bbc&at_ptr_type=media&at_format=image&at_objective=consumption&at_link_title=Can_Degrowth_Save_the_World?&at_bbc_team=BBC
Thanks for the note Chris, and of course, offline always takes precedence!
Just to follow up; I’m suffering the curse of jargon here when using ‘enhanced geothermal’. Its a jargon term that doesn’t help folks distinguish it from other geothermal technologies, and I should have better anticipated that. I understand how it is distinguished from (for example) the heat pump you reference, probably in large part due to this good quality explainer https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical
To touch on the weak points of enhanced geothermal, from the Smajeian frame ;P
– yes, it has an industrial supply chain for creation (drilling technology, ironically pioneered by the fracking industry) and sustainment (turbines wear out)
– Although, as long as those technologies are maintained, the material and energy inputs are relatively minimal as from as industrial processes go (aka, its much better than the lifecycle of solar, wind turbines and/batteries, electric cars etc)
– While not at the scale of centralizing infrastructure as a nuclear or coal fired power plant, enhanced geothermal would still largely be a on-grid, centralized power source. And as such, the powers-that-be would still gatekeep them
– As such, they’d still require transmission infrastructure (although its unclear how much change would be needed to accommodate eGt) and the attendent industrial outcomes of that
– Of course, it still would be ‘adjacent’ to the high-electrification model of the banoffees, aka people still want to drive cars (which typically have serious material and energy input costs). If everyone switched to e-bikes or similar light-weight e-vehicles, and otherwise got a lot more sensible about building quality/design, etc…. well, we’d need less of the stuff (electricity) in the first place
Enjoy your time in reality 😉
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the link to the piece on what “enhanced geothermal” actually is, and for your repeated explanations that it is not a small-scale technology.
If we can’t electrify long-distance freight and human transport, our options are to move to where the food i grown, grow the food where the people are (impossible in an awful lot of modern cities), or keep using fossilf uels. E-assist bicycles and delivery vans are certainly taking over for “last mile” transport of both people and goods in London, and as someone who has to breathe the air here I welcome this wholeheartedly (and my own e-assist bicycle helps an awful lot with getting up the hill from the allotment with several kilos of produce), but the sheer scale of the flow of goods and services by cargo ship and air freight is quite staggering. Better rail (and even canal) infrastructure would help combat that, but we’ve just spent several decades running the existing rail infrastructure into the ground, and it’s hard to see how we can possibly maintain the current volume and speed of international shipping without fossil fuels.
Similarly, it’s going to be mighty difficult to electrify current domestic heating systems. Using biomass (i.e. wood) is pretty viable for heating on a small scale — I understand Chris’s woodlot has grown rather than shrunk over the years despite him cutting firewood every year — but it’s not viable to do that where I live in East London, at least not if it’s populated as densely as it is now. Even improving insulation is non-trivial in some places.
This means we’re still going to end up in a small farm future where people are distributed over the landscape quite a bit more than they are today: think villages and towns, but many, many more of them, with cities probably still existing but likely on a smaller scale than they are today (though some commenters here disagree with me on the resilience of cities). I think it’s fair to say that this dispersal is a key part of a Smajean framework.
If people are going to move to where the food is grown, then you’re looking not only at replacing existing bits of the energy grid (which, like most other infrastructure, is generally not in great shape right now), but quite possibly at building out lots of new grid. That in turn is prohibitively expensive. So in a future where a lot more people are living in smaller settlements, I’m not sure something as centralised as enhanced geothermal will be a major provider of energy. More distributed models like mini-grids or neighbourhood-level generation might well be possible, but a lot depends on how the economics shake out.
For lower-power, higher-impact systems like lighting, I think it makes a lot of sense to have both AC and DC options available, so that if one bites the dust you aren’t reduced to rationing candles between All Souls’ Day and Candlemas. Another example of resilience in redundancy.
For me what this looks like is that I have a pretty decent headlamp (as does my spouse, as a spare), and a couple of okay-ish table lamps, that have integral batteries and charge from USB, which means I can power them with my small solar panels. I use the headlamp pretty regularly in winter because I’m terrible at leaving the allotment before dark, so I’m somewhat accustomed to keeping track of how often it needs charging; even in winter, the small solar panel can charge tiny gizmos like that. If we didn’t have mains lighting due to electricity loss then I would definitely have to ration the use of the headlamp but it would look something like “use the headlamp when chopping vegetables and cooking, switch to candlelight to eat the meal” rather than “go to bed at 4.30pm because I can’t see anything anyway”. (I, er, have a large drawer full of candle stubs and assorted small candles, due to someone at a previous church insisting on throwing away the part-burned votives; I couldn’t bear to see them go to landfill, but I don’t actually use candles very much in my daily life. In a situation of grid intermittency I would distribute some to neighbours, so we would potentially still be looking at quite early winter bedtimes. I’d like to grow a wax myrtle but haven’t gotten around to it yet… I could rig up various types of oil lamp if I had to, but I would honestly rather not.)
This very lightweight set-up that is already in use is sufficient for my needs partly because long-term electric grid failure in London, while possible, is not something that I would necessarily be planning to stay in London for. For you, a more robust DC lighting system might be more appropriate — or you may not even use AC lighting enough to justify having such a replacement.
But having, say, both an AC and DC chest freezer would probably be silly. I accept that my freezer is a single point of failure and so I don’t use it for all my food storage, though being a chest freezer, it can get through a day or two (longer in winter) before things start to thaw…. if we had a long power outage then we’d also be having one heck of a neighbourhood BBQ. Indeed, one of my criteria for the woodpile at the allotment is roughly “Would this allow us to cook the entire contents of the chest freezer? Twice, because I know some neighbours have freezers and no fuel?” — if not, I need more woodpile. A big branch fell off an ash tree in a park near the allotment a few weeks ago and hasn’t yet been cleared, and I keep eyeing it and thinking about the chainsaw. Again, a grid outage long enough to cook all that food and eat it… is another order of magnitude of Problem. I do think that it will happen someday, but it’s not something I can fully prepare for anyway, and it starts to be the sort of thing where community resilience is more important than household preparedness. In that frame, what I lack most is a truly local group of people with whom to make contingency plans for particular types of infrastructure failure. Instead I have a loose network of mostly-local people who I know I could call on for particular skills, but who may not be expecting to use them.
@Kathryn
Regarding Chris’s set up……
If he is completely disconnected from the grid then AC only make sense if you have a mobile generator.
When converting DC PV/battery power into AC, via an inverter, there is energy loss in the conversion.
Some Motor Home/caravan fridges work off AC, DC or bottled gas!!! Most bases covered.
You’ve probably read this before, but if not…it might be of interest?
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
All your talk of lighting has got me thinking about it again.
Does the brightness of the LED on the bike change depending on how fast you are going?
Like the old filament bulbs used to.
Can you charge batteries off of the dynamo? A head torch for example?
I think lighting is the first priority for me.
It must have been such a game changer, when gas lights first made an appearance.
But then again, it ment that factory owners could squeeze even more labour out of there employees.
(The telling of history is always political !!!! 🙂 My new catchphrase)
On your fuel for cooking conundrum. Fermented foods store well and don’t need cooking.
Think that’s the way I will go.
Resilience and efficiency are often at odds with one another, yes.
One reason for choosing an AC system may be that the appliances can be a lot easier to come by (especially second hand). An awful lot of the DC refrigerators meant for narrowboat or campervan use are very small, for example, and I’ve certainly never met a narrowboat with a substantial chest freezer in it, but if you slaughter a sheep you need to have somewhere to put quite a bit of lamb (or mutton or hogget or whatever) in a bit of a hurry. This relative lack of availability might not matter too much for a refrigerator (I’m not sure if the efficiency gains are good enough to just have two or three, if you actually need that much refrigeration, which could depend on all kinds of things) but it might matter a lot for more specialist equipment. Not everyone has a high level of skill and confidence with re-wiring things (and the time for all that messing around). I’m certainly not in a position to decide which system is best for Chris, beyond “using what you have is almost always less embedded energy than fully replacing a system that works”. I do think having an auxiliary lighting system can be a good idea, but that really can be fairly small solar panel (mine is a little smaller than an A4 sheet of paper) and a headlamp.
Regarding bike lights — LED brightness and dimming don’t really work the same way as in incandescent filament bulbs, but I would have to look up the details. All the dynamo-driven bike lights I’ve ever used have had a thing called a “standlight” in the front light, which is a small battery or capacitor (I can’t remember which and they’re very similar) so that when you’re stopped, the light stays on for about four minutes. This means I don’t become invisible at an unlit junction or harder to see at one with traffic lights, and it is (in my opinion) a pretty important safety feature, at least while there are cars on the roads. The first five or ten seconds from a longer stop, the light is not as bright, and the full standlight function doesn’t kick in until after a couple of minutes of riding. But when I’m just riding around, going faster doesn’t make the light any brighter.
Yes, you can charge USB things from a hub dynamo, but you need to either do some fancy wiring or buy a gizmo. The gizmos aren’t generally cheap, but that’s partly a function of “this bit of electronics needs to be very waterproof and also deal with being bounced around a lot” — any bike gizmo that doesn’t fall apart after a few months of daily use on a bicycle has the same problem. My understanding is that the gizmo will also harvest the “excess” energy when you’re riding fast enough to generate more power than the lighting system can actualy use, but it might depend on the make and model. I have not personally invested in such a gizmo, partly because I can charge my small USB stuff from solar panels anyway, and partly because I don’t want another gizmo on my bicycle handlebars, which already have a brake lever, controller for the motor, water bottle carrier, bell, and gear shifter.
A much lower-tech and cheaper (but also much lower power) option for bicycle lighting in particular is using the magnetic field created by the turning motion of the bicycle rims to power a small light. The Reelight “NoVa” is the best one I know of, and what I used on my previous bicycle. If you have steel rims (most bikes these days do not, you can test it by tryign to stick a fridge magnet to one), they won’t work, and you’ll have to get a different model where you attach something to the spokes. The light created is really more for visibility than for lighting your path, though the front light was bright enough to do that in unlit areas as long as I wasn’t going too fast. There’s no real reason you couldn’t hook up some kind of single-crank doohicky to use a light like this for indoor domestic purposes, but you would need one hand to turn the wheel, and it seems pretty bothersome to me compared to just wearing a headlamp or using a candle. Maybe on a spinning wheel to provide a bit of task lighting it would make sense. And yes — widespread availability of cheap lighting was a huge game-changer. Just try taping over the light switch in your bathroom (if your bathroom has a window) to get a sense of trying to do daily life without it, and how different this would be in winter than summer.
Regarding cooking the contents of my freezer in the event of a sufficiently long electric grid failure: I do some lacto-fermentation with my allotment produce, but I am not going to be fermenting diced pork or chicken hearts anytime soon, that sounds terrible. Currently the freezer does contain quite a bit of fruit, it’s been a good year for some of the soft fruit but too hot in recent weeks for jam-making and I already have Enough Wine.
https://uniqueappliances.com/products/unique-265-litre-white-12-24-dc-chest-freezer
John
Just because something exists for purchase on the internet today (in USD, with no information on delivery to the UK) does not mean it will be readily available in the future.
In some kind of bad decline scenario I could easily see myself in a situation where, say, my refrigerator or chest freezer breaks, but I bought a second hand one off my nearest neighbour when they moved elsewhere, so I have a backup. In a worse decline scenario I could see scavenging old appliances from abandoned, empty houses. None of those are going to run on DC though. See what I mean about resilience?
In more present-oriented terms, when we moved into the house we now rent, we needed to purchase a refrigerator and chest freezer because it didn’t come with them. We didn’t buy them new: we went to the British Heart Foundation up the road and got what we could afford. (The refrigerator did eventually get replaced with one that actually has a thermostat in it; the chest freezer is still going strong twelve years on.) I don’t know Chris’s circumstances, but my general impression is that the process of purchasing land and setting up a farm on it is not cheap, and it could easily have been the case that he also needed to get second hand appliances at the time. As long as he does in fact have enough electricity to meet his household needs, I’m not sure there’s a problem with the relative electrical inefficiency of a system that uses an inverter.
I’m sure DC is better, for certain contexts, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most resilient choice in all contexts.
Yes, Kathryn is correct, LED bike lights are either on or off, depending on whether there is sufficient voltage to pass the PN junction.
Also, modern hub dynamos have many poles. Mine have 72, I think. What this means is that you get 72 pulses of electricity per revolution of your wheel. If you are riding slow, or have a very large wheel that makes fewer RPMs per velocity, what happens is the LED light blinks whenever a dynamo magnet passes a winding pole. This happens to me a lot when I’m riding my cargo bike.
Thanks Eric.
Think I’ll stick to my “LED head torch with a spare in my pocket” set up.
Hub dynamos seem light a lot of phaff for little gain for the amount of nocturnal cycling that I do.
@Eric F
After some more contemplating over bike lights/hub dynamos……
I wonder if it is possible to manufacture a rechargeable battery that lasts a very long time? 100 years or more?
Most battery tech is about squeezing as much energy into a battery as possible.
But if longevity was the goal rather than weight/size/capacity/recharge speed, I wonder what could be achieved?
I’m thinking LED DC indoor lighting, rather than for a bike.
@John
I think nickel-iron batteries last on the order of decades. Wikipedia has a comparison table, because of course they do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_commercial_battery_types
Chris, you should do a profile on the DC microgrids approach developed by Alexis Ziegler et al at Living Energy Farm. We did a Doomer Optimism podcast with him earlier this year.
Farm land values used to be linked to what the land could earn , banks would loan up to a limit of five years profit per acre , grade 1 land was far higher than grades 3 or 4 , I have seen land sold in the UK that will take a century of profits to pay for , that is speculators not farmers .
Agreed!
True in most places. Also forest land in Sweden is rediculously expensive compared to the value of commercial production. I estimate that you need the net income from two full harvest cycles of clearcut forestry, not counting any cost for planting or management in between, to get back what you paid for the land. Two cycles in Sweden is 120 years in the South and 240 years in the North….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur99QXcrecc&t=4s
this one talks of the octopus of urban sprawl and the inherent small c conservative farmers .
One of a series of videos by the same guy ,
https://m.youtube.com/@farmingexplained.
Worth a look ,
Chris,
Two questions.
1. Looks like you read Tom Murphy. He has recently made a compelling case for the likelihood of a demographic driven significant reduction in global population this century. Not the UN medium variant of 10B+, but a relatively small fraction of that. Is that baked into your logic?
2. Second one also relates to some of Tom Murphy’s commentary that seems (to me) a little less well supported. I take Murphy as NOT enthusiastic about sustainability of agriculture. I’m working through A. Duncan Brown’s “Feed or Feedback” now to better understand some of the underling basic science. Looking for your thoughts on the topic and best references you might suggest.
@T Hill
Can you please provide a link to Tom Murphy’s article on demographic population decline.
I’ve had a quick look on Do The Math but can’t find it.
Thanks
He has a series of post on the topic that need to be taken together. Start with his 5/28 post.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/05/watching-population-bomb/
Thanks.
@T Hill
Just read the article. Very interesting and in a strange way encouraging.
I think the demographic “bomb” is a blessing to humanity (and the rest of the planet!)
Re: the potential for “a demographic driven significant reduction in global population this century”
Some of Chris Smaje’s critics have pointed to Tokyo, the world’s most populous megacity, as an example of why A Small Farm Future would be impossible. However, history and demographic trends suggest that small-scale farming in Japan could indeed be able to feed Tokyo and the rest of Japan.
Japan is a small-farm nation, with an average farm size of 3 hectares (according to the Financial Times). In 1960, when Tokyo’s population was around 17 million, Japan was largely self-sufficient with its food production!
“In 1960, Japan covered most of its domestic consumption by itself – the rate was 102 percent for rice, 100 percent for fruits and vegetables, and 91 percent for meats.”
https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/
Japan’s currently declining population (at least half a million less people per year) could eventually bring the numbers down to levels similar to 1960, when Tokyo was a megacity with a population of 17 million.
In 1960, Japan’s population was 94 million, and today it’s 123 million, but the population is now decreasing by at least a half million per year. This reduction in population could accelerate if birth rates decline further, while local food production efforts could be increased, resulting in less food imports and eventually self-sufficiency for Japan.
Self-sufficiency for Japan’s food production will likely be achieved sooner than the world’s transition to 100% renewables, IMHO. (Apologies for the recycled comment content.)
@Steve L
https://www.waterstones.com/book/just-enough/azby-brown/9781611720778
Don’t know if you have read this but it looks at Edo Japan period?
Totally self sufficient society for around 200 years. (Though very authoritarian)
One more thought. I’ve just picked up your book too and have just started that as well 🙂
Out of interest, does anyone know if a PV panel would last longer if it was covered whilst not in use?
John, I think it’s not a bad idea to have the panels within easy reach for perhaps angling toward the sun but also for sweeping snow off and maybe even throwing a cover over them if monster hail is on the horizon (whenever I consider going up on the roof, I always think of sad fate of Rod Hull, which coincidentally also made him funny long after his passing).
You might find something of interest on the Living Energy Farm webshop site.
https://livingenergylights.com/product/sunstar-direct-drive-8-cuft-chest-style-refrigerator-freezer/
Closer to home there’s a French company that sells ‘daylight drive’ solar fridges, but they are all pretty similar it seems.
@Simon H
Thanks for the link. I wonder if the compressor on the freezer pump still works on a trickle from the PV panels or if it needs a constant voltage?
Regarding covering PV panels…… I was wondering if it’s the effects of UV that eventually caused the panels to break down? If so, covering them, when the energy is not needed, would increase their lifespan????
Not familiar with the Rod Hull story?
John, here’s a helpful link re panel degradation. It seems some loss of chemical potency, along with other factors, would reduce PV efficiency over decades, but the regularly quoted 80 per cent efficiency after a couple of decades ain’t bad – one can learn a lot about lower energy behaviour in that time.
https://www.paradisesolarenergy.com/blog/solar-panel-degradation-and-the-lifespan-of-solar-panels
The folks ar Living Energy Farm, who run circular saws and the like on DC ‘daylight drive’, report that DC motors cope with cloudy spells by simply slowing down according to the sunlight available. Maybe the fridge compressors do the same? I seem to recall that some DC solar fridges have a small battery fitted, while others are so well insulated they can get through a night without losing much coolth.
Entertainer Rod Hull died after falling off a roof while trying to adjust his TV aerial to get better reception for a football game. Apparently his friend, former MP Gyles Brandreth, encouraged him to do it. Just be careful out there.
@Simon H
Thanks for the warning. My TV aerial does need tweaking but I’ve been putting it off. Nothing worth watching on the telly anyway. 🙂
On fridges………… Low Tech Magazine made a good point. A fridge with a lid is better than one with a door. As cold air is heavier than hot, a chest fridge keeps the cold in better than a “front loader” when you open it.
Not that I’ve ever seen a chest fridge? Perhaps a freezer set high (or low depending on how you look at it!) would do?
@Simon H
Thanks for the link to Living Energy Farm.
I think I’ve found “my people”!!!!!
Chest freezers can be converted to refrigerators fairly easily. Some of them already have temperature controls which can be turned down/up to refrigerator temperatures. Or you can use an external thermostat, which can be purchased for around US$50, as described here:
https://off-grid.net/freezer-to-fridge-conversion/
I’ve also seen instructions online for replacing the freezer’s thermostat with one meant for a refrigerator.
@ John Adams, that book you mentioned, ‘Just Enough’ by Azby Brown, looks pretty interesting.
@Steve L
Thanks for the fridge/freezer conversion link.
Super simple. I’m guessing the unit runs off of AC though?
I got my copy of Just Enough on eBay, I think.
Well worth a read.
I want to live in one of those farm houses!!!!!
https://sdn.unl.edu/article/nebraska-weighs-cattle-emission-conversation-research-focuses-cattle-greenhouse-gas#:~:text=Optimizing%20Grazing%20Systems%20Leads%20to%20Best%20Results&text=%E2%80%9COptimizing%20grazing%20systems%20is%20the,to%20slaughter%2C%E2%80%9D%20Erickson%20said.
Looks like cattle are not as much of a problem as thought
Chris you are taking the crooked road to becoming a Christian. Keep going!
Thanks for the further comments. I’m still mostly offline atm but just to answer T Hill’s questions briefly. In relation to population, as I see it the main driver of energy use is profit/economic growth rather than population per se (per capita energy use has increased in addition to absolute energy use) and in theory there’s plenty of potential to increase energy use within existing (projected) populations, even in the face of longer term secular decline – eg. currently low energy consuming populations in sub-Saharan Africa (where population in fact is still increasing). Or in package holidays to the moon for all, or whatever. In practice though, I think the demographic change will be another factor driving the collapse of the existing global political economy – possibly in a good way ultimately, but not in such a way that the present energy economy maintains much of its shape.
Regarding the future of farming, it may be that it will prove a grand historical diversion from the foraging way of life in the long term. In the short term, there’s a lot to be said for shifting from ‘agriculture’ to ‘farming’ in the sense of developing more local, diverse, ecologically embedded forms of food and fibre production which will delay the grand historical moment of reckoning. The dividing line between foraging and farming is less clearcut than is sometimes supposed, involving something of a continuum of ‘tending the wild’. Still, I think it’s good to keep in mind the difficult long-term juggling act involved in farming. The problem is when people proceed from there to ecomodernist-type manufactured or high-tech food alternatives, where IMO the juggling act becomes all the more improbable.
Tangential as usual, but recently I’ve been thinking about tending the land and the way that the land, in turn, tends me… sometimes it’s just that I feel best when I spend a lot of time outside, but I had a few very stressful weeks in the spring and then suddenly there was lemon balm everywhere at church. After trying for years to establish various wildflowers in the back garden, this year suddenly borage, primulas, and some things I haven’t identified yet have turned up, presumably helped along by the cool damp weather in May and June; the shiso I failed to germinate indoors this year self-seeded out there, too, and it looks like it should get to producing seed again in time to do the same. I am still (after walking in this area for 20 years, living in this area for 15 years, and this house for nearly 12 now) finding new-to-me things to forage, or things I know but hadn’t seen in this place.
I don’t mean to romanticise any of this. Turning compost is hard work and so is staying on the right side of the allotment committee. Rats or deer (but probably rats) have been at the sweetcorn and I harvested a watermelon too early and got to eat “like cucumber but inferior” for dessert that night. After a pretty decent harvest of hazelnuts last year, this year there aren’t many at all. And I’ve just spent eight hours in the kitchen processing apples, Cornelian cherries, tomatoes, etc, they certainly don’t preserve themselves and my housemate has started get tetchy about how much food there is in the house (zeroth world problems as far as I’m concerned, but it is a lot of work to keep on top of the harvest at this time of year).
I suppose what I am saying is that I am ever more acutely aware that every bit of matter that nourishes and sustains me comes from the earth, and there’s something about participating in that in a direct and very local way, and with a posture of gratitude, which is spiritually nourishing as well.
@Chris
I see the demographic “bomb” as a good thing.
But not in relation to available energy.
I don’t think that a population decline will allow those left to keep hold of modernity.
I see population decline as a positive because it increases the land available in proportion to the amount of mouths that will need feeding.
Regarding the Do The Math link that T Hill provided above. The line that really jumped out at me was…..
“I hope we can see our way to acceptance that death is natural—not an evil to be defeated—and a fair price for the privilege of living in a biodiverse, ecologically sustainable “paradise” in an otherwise empty and hostile space.”
Too true. We are all very lucky and privileged to experience this crazy, special place called Earth!
Thank you Chris.
I agree that the simple I=PAT concept makes at least some sense as a framework to look at the world, if not as a sufficient framework for solid quantification all by itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT
I’m largely on board with your thoughts on a shift to “farming” and have at least a healthy skepticism about manufactured food alternatives. We’re in the NE US and have been slowly working to improve soil and grow some food. 100 mixed fruit/nut tree at various stages, 1/4 acre garden and another acre on the way to enough improvement to grow too. Many, many failures on the way have been humbling and enough to keep me at the day job.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/08/20/from-agrarianism-to-transhumanism-the-long-march-to-dystopia/
It seems the major corporations are hell bent on feeding the world goop , where they will get their feed stock and energy from is never mentioned , it is to be hoped that the wheels fall off their trolley before they have destroyed natural farming .
I noticed Monbiot had written another piece attacking livestock in favour of lab grown meat – a response to this perhaps. My worry is that the pushback against lab grown meat will be used to defend some of worst current practice – clear cutting forests for grazing or to grow soy to feed to cattle etc. it feels like neither side in the debate is able to accept a sensible middle path – something along the lines outlined by Simon Farlie in ‘A Benign Extravagance’ – or to accept that sensible responses to our predicaments need to be embedded in local ecologies rather than global scale ‘solutions’. Nothing there that’s not been said here multiple times but it’s frustrating watching the same debate played out over and over again when from the outside it looks less like an attempt to solve problems and more an argument about who gets the money
Thanks Chris for this. A good framework. The lack of reception of Christopher’s book (vs, say, Hannah Ritchie’s recent one) is very disturbing and an indication of how the contradictions of 3. will be concealed for a long time. I find this video useful for thinking about how people will react to it and how to help guide them (although I need to guide myself first) https://youtu.be/VPrimu4zP0o?feature=shared
Thanks for the various interesting comments here. Pressure of time has prevented me from engaging with them all, but as always I appreciate people taking the time to engage with my writing and respond.
Banofees is an inspired term. Thank you for a clear round up of the lay of the land on this area. No treasure at the end of the rainbow, the porridge pot is just a porridge pot.