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Posted on April 26, 2025 | 66 Comments
Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there’s going to be a smooth transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables that can rescue the existing high-energy global economy in anything like its present form comes courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his 2024 book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. I wrote about the idea of a supposed energy ‘transition’ quite a bit last year (for example, here) and I don’t plan to go over that ground again. But Fressoz’s book is such an informative read that a post about it seems in order. Next up after this is a ‘taking stock’ post where I pick up on a few points raised by commenters previously that I’ve lamentably failed to respond to yet, and then we’ll move into some new territory.
Fressoz is an academic, a historian of science and technology, and he uses his specialism to good effect in his book, as I’ll relate in a moment. By the way, he appeared recently on Rachel Donald’s always informative Planet Critical podcast, where he covers the main points of his book with her – I’d recommend a listen.
Unlike Fressoz I’m not an academic expert on energy, though I’ve long taken an interest in the topic. You don’t really need much expertise to see that no transition out of fossil fuels is currently occurring or is likely anytime soon. Or that various transition clichés in circulation like ‘oil saved the whales and coal saved the forests’ are untrue. Still, Fressoz nails these myths with stimulating scholarly precision in his book. The real question is why do they continue to get so much airplay when they’re so obviously untrue? Largely, I think, because they tell a comforting story that people want to hear.
Fressoz writes:
Let us start by stating the obvious. After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Today, around 2 billion cubic metres of wood are felled each year to be burned, three times more than a century ago. (p.2)
If only it was obvious to more people, perhaps we’d be having better discussions about the choices we now face.
Useful as it is to be reminded that new energy sources have only added to total energy usage and that many of our transition stories are false, these points weren’t exactly news to me. There were other aspects of Fressoz’s book that I found more arresting.
One of them was his many documentations of the point that the real history of energy has been about the “entanglement and symbiotic expansion of all energies” (p.9).
For example, Fressoz discusses the current use of charcoal for cooking in populous cities of Africa like Kinshasa at levels that dwarf past charcoal consumption – “the first time in history that megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants depend on wood for energy” (p.124). This industry combines the energy of wood, human muscle and fossil fuels in the form of the bulldozers that open forests to logging, and the trucks that transport the charcoal to the cities.
Other examples include historic mining and railways that used vast amounts of wood for energy and for construction (sleepers, pit props etc.), transport (four times more wood used in US pallet production in 2000 than in cooperage in 1909) and present-day electric vehicles (half the world’s EVs are in China, where most of the electricity is generated from coal – not to mention the 2.5 tonnes of coal that’s burned in making a car, let alone all the road infrastructure).
And so the eye-popping statistics continue. A key point that emerges from many of these examples is that we shouldn’t think of energy in energy terms alone, but also in terms of its entanglement with materials – plastic, steel, cement, fertilizer and so on. Fressoz writes that technological innovations have never reduced the quantity of raw materials consumed, the only major exception being reduced consumption of sheep’s wool due to synthetic fibres which, he says, “is not good news for the environment” (p.16). This is interesting in view of the negative representation of the sheep industry in relation to climate change. The representation isn’t entirely unwarranted, but the relevant research rarely offsets ovine methane emissions against the carbon sequestered in wool and the costs of its replacement by fossil fuels, quite apart from the other limitations of the argument.
This tendency to forget about the entanglement of energy with materials is a problem in another topic – manufactured food. Again, I’ve written about this previously and won’t dwell too much on it here, but the idea that we can get bacterial protein from ‘thin air’ powered by renewables neglects the fact that the relevant process only gets carbon and nitrogen from ‘thin air’ (via complex, energy-intensive processes), otherwise relying on an awful lot of energy, water and nearly 90kg of added minerals for every tonne of protein produced. It’s easy to get lost in the geeky details of this kind of stuff without appreciating its implausibility from bigger-picture thinking of the kind that our culture and academic institutions seem ill-equipped to provide. All the more reason to salute scholars like Fressoz when they come up with the goods.
Probably the most interesting part of Fressoz’s book is his detailed history of the ‘transition’ concept and associated ideas like the logistic or S-curve. I won’t retell it here, but in essence Fressoz shows that the concept of energy transition arose in the 1970s and was propounded mostly by nuclear energy advocates of a neo-Malthusian bent in the context of the oil crisis at that time – in the context, therefore, of energy scarcity. How it came to be applied a decade or two later to the entirely different context of climate change in a situation of fossil energy abundance is a tangled tale that Fressoz sets out to unravel. He makes the point that earlier historians of energy never talked about ‘transition’ or assumed that new energy sources made older ones obsolete, for the simple reason that there’s no evidence for it – “the idea comes not from an empirical observation of the past, but from anticipation of the future; it comes not from historians, but from futurologists” … it is “a future without a past” (p.10).
Two brief points to make about this. First, I find it interesting that this is relatively recent, mainstream, global history that I and other present generations have lived through, and yet it can still take the detailed analysis of a professional historian to set the record straight. While for my part I’ve long been sceptical of the idea that we’re going through a transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon energy sources, and I’ve even done a bit of historical detective work to disprove some of the more questionable transition talking points, nevertheless I’ve still used the concept of ‘transition’ quite uncritically as if it’s a historically neutral and well-grounded concept. The power of our stories to mislead!
Second, in various occasionally illuminating but often frustrating discussions with transition-philes, I’ve found that my scepticism toward transition easily gets represented as implicitly supportive of fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry. Fressoz neatly flips this – industrialists, says Fressoz, quickly understood the advantage they could draw from the “dubious futurology” of the transition concept “to postpone the climate constraint into the future and into technological progress” (p.187). On this reading, the notion of transition is a subterfuge of fossil-fuelled business as usual.
Anyway, I believe that Fressoz’s book, along with Brett Christophers’ book The Price Is Wrong – and along with basically just reading the news and smelling the coffee – finally puts the transition concept out of its misery. Where to go from there may seem harder to discern, but I haven’t been banging on about small farm and local futures all these years for no reason. As I see it, people need to stop talking about transition and instead focus conversations around three other things. First, we can still welcome technologies like renewables, but we need to stop hailing them as saviour technologies that will rescue the high-energy business-as-usual world. Second, we need to start talking about energy priorities – what people need, rather than what they might like to have. This in turn means talking about global fairness, about how the energy pie is divided up, rather than talking airily about transitions to an abundant low-carbon, high-energy future promising prosperity for the present global poor. Any genuine concern for fairness has to be as much or more about lowering the wealthy than lifting the poor. Third, it means talking about adaptation to climate breakdown and other forces likely to upend the familiar contours of the present world, because a transition isn’t on the cards. Ultimately, I think those conversations lead to agrarian localism and a small farm future.
David Graeber Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (I’m catching up with the late, great Graeber’s back catalogue – I wish I’d read this before finishing my new book!)
Musa al-Gharbi We Have Never Been Woke
Jeffrey Hadler Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism
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That’s very interesting indeed about wool production, especially given that in general people have a lot more clothing than they used to!
I wonder if the reduction in wool production is also related to:
– easier access to cotton
– warmer homes due to central heating
– less working outdoors
(If anyone knows a good remedy for clothes moths I’m all ears. I don’t want to use synthetic poisons as they’re harmful to cats, humans etc. I can’t ditch the carpet that harbours them, because we rent. My current strategy is to only keep as much wool as I am happy to mend every year…)
In the USA, a contributing factor was the wool subsidy. I had a few sheep when I was in high school in the 1960s and without the wool and mohair subsidy, sheep production would have died in the US in the 1950s. President Clinton repealed this in 1995 after nearly 40 years of subsidies. The wool and mohair lobby even defied Reagan’s attempts at deficit reduction in 1985. I used to shear sheep back in high school for pocket money and there were plenty of us back then. The role of subsidies in channeling agriculture is significant and often underappreciated. I found Willard Cochrane’s The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis – 2nd edition (1993) to be an eye-opener for many reasons, not just the discussion of subsidies. There may be a similar reference for the UK.
As for the clothes moths, our neighbors have a blue light that attracts them and kills them, which they leave on overnight. We put cedar in our blanket storage chests, but that remedy is well known.
You could try sprinkling salt liberally underneath the carpet? No good for clothes though…
If anyone wants a deeper dive into Fressoz’ work, I recommend Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification podcast, number 162 from two months ago. I was deeply disappointed in Fressoz, for a whole bunch of reasons. He has some good ideas, such as wood as a primary source of energy and the plateau concept. {We are on “the bumply plateau” on top of the energy sine wave. The microsopic ups and downs we deal with in the short term are still on the macroscopic plateau of the energy curve.) However, he thinks cement and nuclear power are good things and he decided not to tackle manual labor in his recent book. He also continues to believe we can “somehow” make changes that will save our current level of 8+ billion people from dieoff. In short, an academic siloed and cut off from the day-to-day nuts and bolts. However, if you want a deeper dive into his work, this podcast is worth a listen.
As for transition, I “sort of” joined the Transition Movement in 2008 after I started investigating the peak oil idea. I read Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook but I have had several structural disagreements with the transition aficionados over the years. The ability of large economies to co-opt any and all attempts to change them should not be underrated. The best alternative is still to work locally for change and reduce your energy footprint. And yes, I know that some areas are just unable to accommodate any type of change. But there are glimmers of light here and there.
Yes, Fressoz was also a guest over at NateHagen’s TGS. Two other recent guests, Alexis Zeigler and Peter Strack, describe clearly achievable pathways to a much lower energy intensive lifestyle, a way to stretch out the last of the fossil fuels. Some ways to get used to a less consumptive but adequate lifestyle before the complex technosphere is gone.
Achievable, but unlikely. A ( or the) central puzzle of our time is why the denial and grasping at straws is so persistent in the face of so much evidence. There is multilevel avoidance happening, and the challenge of our time is to see if we can change direction. Currently I’m of the opinion that collectively we will not, and the rational choice for those oddballs that do see the end point is to change personally and locally.
A small farm future as you have been sketching out is one way.
I’m under no delusion that the solar panels I have are part of a grand transition, the solution, or that everyone should or can do it, I’m just lucky that I can take a few steps toward self reliance for a time. What the next step to full sustainability on this land will be is for others after I’m gone. The panels are no more a long term choice than the studge that others still promote. The energy life cycle analysis just doesn’t math out.
Meanwhile, it’s spring. Seeds are sprouting in the sunroom, fruit trees are bursting buds, and lots to do outside.
“…why the denial and grasping at straws is so persistent in the face of so much evidence”
Yes.
My first thought turns toward wondering what the purpose is for the high-energy economy/lifestyle.
We moderns all (mostly) have the idea that it’s about overcoming peasant drudgery and living up to our human potential. Maybe some fear of getting dirty thrown in the mix.
But what if (I think Kathryn said this elsewhere) the energy intensive economy is mostly about sending more wealth to the top of the social pyramid?
Nothing more than our ubiquitous ape social ranking behavior. And the winners have a big incentive to keep it up.
The problem being that most of we urbanites never get the chance to really experience an alternative, so we see the latest array of techno gizmos as essential.
“My first thought turns toward wondering what the purpose is for the high-energy economy/lifestyle”.
The purpose is to keep people alive.
The original motivation for introducing high-energy industrialism everywhere was economic, machines could produce everything cheaper than human labor because exogenous energy was so cheap. Once invented, heat engines rapidly replaced human and animal muscle everywhere.
But once that mechanization step was taken, industrialism became the default way to support a growing population. Also, a side effect of that industrialization was that the growth of population was no longer constrained by everyone having access to land on which they could grow food. Instead, the constraint became access to the energy needed to run the machines.
When energy from its multitude of sources is abundant, unconstrained population growth is possible, possibly inevitable. Energy abundance also supercharges the effect of the maximum power principle on political relations, resulting in a race to create societies that use more and more energy. The end result of all this energy abundance and ubiquitous machinery is modernity.
People once lived without modernity and did just fine. For two years I once lived about as far away from a modern lifestyle as was possible in the twentieth century, and can attest that it seems perfectly normal. But once a society makes the transition from pre-modern to modern, there is no easy way to go back. There are too many people, too few pre-modern skills and a landscape that has been too altered by industrial agriculture to easily accept human (re)occupation.
The modern world is a high-energy world, built primarily on energy sources that are rapidly dwindling and the use of which damages the ecosphere. Modernity has been known to be a self-terminating system for a long time, a dead end, a trap, but there has never been any collective attempt to escape it while energy was still abundant enough to facilitate its deconstruction. Now it’s too late. Peak energy is either here or nearly here.
Modernity is what keeps moderns alive. Without it they will die. Hence the grasping for any energy source available. But modernity is still a trap, it will end and it won’t end well.
“Modernity” isn’t so monolithic, as the total energy consumption per capita in the modern UK is less than half the amount consumed in the modern USA (according to Wikipedia’s latest figures). So the high-energy economy/lifestyle is apparently not just about keeping people alive. It also keeps some people wealthy and powerful.
True, but the difference in energy consumption between the UK and the US is far less than the difference between either of them and a pre-modern society. Per capita average wattage is around 9,200 in the US and 4,000-5,500 in Europe. The per capita wattage in Afghanistan is 77, but this is still mostly non-renewable exogenous energy expended by the parts of Afghanistan that are modern.
The only exogenous energy in a premodern society is the fireplace and the draft animal (plus, perhaps, the water wheel and the mostly wood windmill). Modernity is still pretty monolithic in comparison with pre-fossil-fuel societies.
What Europeans fail to understand is the sheer size of the USA and the way people live here ( it will have to change ) driving 100 miles to work and back six days a week is normal , that’s commuting . Some fly from Dallas to Huston every day . Public transport is near zero , places are just a long way apart . Distance in miles not counted , traveling time is , , 100 miles is some where around 1 hour 15 minutes . Getting people to live closer to work will be a real chore .
The other problem with the sustainable / collapse scenarios is also scale , if Chicago ,Ohare looses 10% of its traffic its losing money , same goes for oil refineries , losing a small percentage of production is the difference between profit and loss . There are rumblings that California is thinking of nationalizing oil refineries as the tax burden and environment compliance has made them unprofitable to the point maintenance has stoped and when they break they close .
Plus there is always incompetence , I have read in the last few weeks that one government Department in the UK wants to build a third runway at Heathrow , another wants to ban all air traffic by 2035 , they are not talking to each other .If you take this as a baseline you can see the chaos that’s developing !
Hmm. I wonder about that “keeping people alive”
Wikipedia, under Industrial Revolution says:
”…Rapid adoption of mechanized textiles spinning occurred in Britain in the 1780s…”
Even if these textiles were made for mass market clothing, I’m failing to see how cheaper clothing is primarily about keeping people alive. Remember the Luddites. They were emphatic about how textile industrialization was oppressing the masses for the benefit of the wealthy few.
Wikipedia continues: “…locomotives, steamboats and steamships, and hot blast iron smelting. …the electrical telegraph, … new steel-making processes, mass production, assembly lines, electrical grid systems, the large-scale manufacture of machine tools…”
I’m still not seeing anything about food production, which I’d consider the bedrock of keeping people alive. But all of those new industrial things were powerful drivers to a concentration of wealth.
What always draws my attention is the fact that the giant German chemical industry pioneer BASF made its original fortune by making textile dyes. Certainly the expenditure of concentrated energy for the purpose of coloring clothing blue had nothing to do with keeping people alive.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century with Haber-Bosch and practical tractor engines that the industrial revolution applied seriously to food production.
Yes, there were steel plow blades before that. But much more of the world’s steel production in the 19th century went to railroads and weapons, not farm implements.
So, yes, at this point many of us rely on modernity to keep us alive. But keeping us alive wasn’t the reason we got to this point.
And another bunch of government agencies failing to communicate with each other .
http://www.ctol.digital/news/uk-government-commits-50-million-controversial-solar-geoengineering-field-trials/
Millions / billions spent on solar panels and then cutting the amount of sunlight . talk about shooting yourself in the. foot .
Westminster has become a circus with no ringmaster !
The development of modernity is basically a function of increased energy use. Increased population is also a very closely correlated with increased energy use. Hence my contention that modernity is instrumental in keeping that increased population alive.
Correlation doesn’t prove causation, nonetheless this graph is striking:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-energy-consumption-growth-vs-the-population-growth-starting-in-1769-when-James_fig2_347658548
It is of course possible for people to live without modernity, as many billions did before modernity existed, but once higher-energy societies developed and became modern, their people became dependent on modern methods of supplying life’s necessities. This process may not have been the intention of Watt and other machine builders, but it is certainly the result.
I think a simple way of understanding the purpose of something is to look at the most important thing it does. To me, the most important thing modernity does is keep the vast majority of 8 billion people alive.
I think it is incumbent on those who think that modernity is irrelevant to the size of the human population to show how the better part of those 8 billion people can transition to a non-modern life and continue living. I don’t think it can be done.
On Joe’s observation “a landscape that has been too altered by industrial agriculture to easily accept human (re)occupation,” I thought it worth mentioning Gareth Lewis’s estimation in his book ‘Twenty-First Century HOE FARMING – an antidote to globalisation’, that dead/dying/inert industrial soils take roughly seven years to return to fertility once industrial farming’s external inputs of NPK and various biocides etc are no longer involved. I believe this is without the use of manure, as the Lewis’ don’t use domestic animals alongside their gardening in Brittany. Differing estimates for industrial soils elsewhere in the world may well exist, nevertheless I thought this a piece of useful and realistic ‘rule of thumb’ information. The book as a whole is well worth a careful read.
I will take a look at the Lewis book. You can speed up the process of re-vitalizing your soil to three years if you can get spoiled hay for free or even at a cheap price. I did this back in Washington and it also raised the soil level. Now I am doing something similar here in France with straw bales, which I get for 3 euros a bale. The same bales in the farm store go for 8 euros. I pay a friend for transport, which brings the cost to less than 3.50 euros. Since I have money capital now, I can put that capital into the land and build for the future. The last two years I spent more on straw mulch than I did on fertilizer. I also use it in a modified Ruth Stout method for planting potatoes.
Throwing large amounts of carbon at otherwise sterile soils can really help. So can modest applications of recently and finely crushed rock. The benefits of manure for soil fertility are obvious. None of these things exist in the quantities needed to remediate a significant area of land now dependent on synthetic fertilizers for fertility. Farmers aren’t dumb, if organic soil amendments were freely available they would already use them.
The Rodale Institute, Gabe Brown and others developing regenerative methods are doing good work. But there is a monetary “band gap” between conventional agriculture and regenerative agriculture that makes widespread adoption difficult for the many farmers who are just one crop failure away from bankruptcy.
The Biden administration was sympathetic to regenerative agriculture and promoted regenerative methods in the US, methods which are now also used on about 15% of the world’s commercial farms. I don’t know what will happen under Trump, but so far it doesn’t look good. The carbon sequestration benefits of regenerative agriculture certainly won’t be important to him.
Joe mentioned the likelihood that support for better farming practices might be cut, and that is in the process of happening.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/federal-funding-freeze-endangers-climate-friendly-agriculture-progress/
USDA faces around a $billion in cuts, with lots of local offices closing. Vast majority of headlines are about the cuts to food aid programs, which is the bulk of the cuts, but the programs that NRCS has been promoting ( modest improvements that they are) looks to get cut also. As with all the ongoing changes, incompetent slash and burn chaos and changes from day to day makes it premature to know the exact impact.
Note that a lot of these programs pay out support only after the farmer has spent the money on the regenerative practice. There is a chance that these frozen contracts won’t be honored. Combine that with the tariff impact on ag exports, and farmers right now in the process of planting, but not knowing what the tariff situation will be at harvest, and they are getting f****d more than usual this year.
I actually feel more sorry for the mainstream commodity farmers on their inescapable treadmill.
So it goes.
There’s another great interview on Rachel’s Planet Critical with Paul Hawken , about his book, Carbon. He talks about the seduction of top down fixes, and suggests that change will/can only happen from the ground up, through local, personal and relational understanding. Its worth a listen.
We work down at a community garden that’s attached to an adventure play ground, grazing our angora rabbits, and everyone is hungry for the connection with land, with animals. The skills are all right there, in all of us.
The state is failing, from the NHS, to schools and youth provisioning, it is working on goodwill and volunteers. This structure of mutual care is the reality and finding increasing form as the state recedes. We will see the commercial absorbed back into the domestic, and the assertion of the community around the home, and this will necessitate the use of land.
Frezzos is clear that he’s just a historiographer of technology and not a guru of the ecological movement, and is clear that degrowth, or moving to lower energy use is the only way out of this. He puts forward, direct democracy and jury assemblies as the structure for decision making on these the issues of how to achieve this. He doesn’t cover these aspects in the Nate Hagen interview.
Chris wrote: “the idea that we can get bacterial protein from ‘thin air’ powered by renewables neglects the fact that the relevant process only gets carbon and nitrogen from ‘thin air’ (via complex, energy-intensive processes), otherwise relying on an awful lot of energy, water and nearly 90kg of added minerals for every tonne of protein produced.”
To be fair, the process also gets hydrogen and oxygen from ‘thin air’, but the nitrogen going into the bioreactors comes in the form of ammonia (NH3), with around 1 ton of ammonia required for every 4 tons of bacterial protein produced!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56364-1/figures/1
In an interview (AgFunderNews, 22.9.23), the CEO of Solar Foods clarified that “…right now, we buy ammonia from the market.”
So when the mineral inputs are added to the ammonia inputs, it results in around 1 ton of these inputs (ammonia plus minerals) required for every 3 tons of bacterial protein produced!
Furthermore, the net water consumption is 25.4 tons of water required for every 1 ton of bacterial protein produced! There are usually some apples-and-bowling-balls comparisons made to the amounts of naturally falling rainwater “consumed” by non-irrigated soybean crops, for example. However, instead of rainwater the bacterial protein process uses municipal tap water followed by municipal wastewater treatment of the bacterial slurry wastes (and these municipal processes have additional entanglements with energy requirements, material inputs and waste flows).
Yes, Chris is right, “the relevant process only gets carbon and nitrogen from ‘thin air’ (via complex, energy-intensive processes)”. I was too easy on Solar Foods regarding their “thin air” claims. And the carbon supply could include purchases of Liquid Carbon Dioxide produced using natural gas (reportedly a crucial feedstock for the liquid CO2 process), while the nitrogen supply could include purchases of ammonia made by various processes (fossil-fueled or otherwise).
The Solar Foods website includes these descriptors for Solein®:
“food out of thin air”
“the world’s first food produced from thin air”
“literally is produced from thin air”.
Closer to the truth would be:
“Food from organisms grown with air, water, minerals, and an energy source.”
But that description also applies to food crops like soybeans (with the sun providing the energy). So how about this, even closer to the truth:
“Bacterial mass (with bioplastic polymer content) used as a new type of food, produced using air, lots of tap water, lots of ammonia, minerals, and huge amounts of grid electricity.” (Grid electricity in Finland, a net importer of electricity, comes from nuclear reactors, burning tree parts, burning peat, burning natural gas and oil, wind turbines, dams, relatively little solar, etc.)
To me, that is much less appealing than:
“Beans used as a proven source of food, grown with air, naturally falling rainwater, small amounts of ammonia-equivalent fertilizer (optional), minerals, and natural sunlight (instead of costly electricity).
According to the CEO of Solar Foods, up to 80-90% of their CO2 inputs are obtained as Liquid Carbon Dioxide from industrial sources (quoted in an article dated 18.7.2024):
“Right now we source liquefied carbon dioxide, which you can get from different industrial sources. But we also source about 10-20% [of the C02 used in the production process] from a direct air capture device…”
https://agfundernews.com/protein-from-air-startup-solar-foods-plans-to-go-public
I wonder how much of their CO2 inputs could be coming from the burning of natural gas to make Liquid Carbon Dioxide, instead of coming from “thin air”?
“Natural gas, a crucial feedstock in Liquid Carbon Dioxide production, is experiencing a rise in price, particularly as European gas supplies face tight conditions.”
https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/liquid-carbon-dioxide-market-faces-price-hikes-beverage-industry-braces-for-impact-34597
TFC – a few thoughts.
I need to try to listen to more podcasts, but I’m surprised to hear Fressoz was so uncritically pro high-energy on Nate’s one. As per Joel’s remarks, he didn’t come across that way to me on Rachel’s.
Anyway, I think I’ve now got enough of what I want from him from his book. I’ve spent way too much of my time over the years arguing with ecomodernist BAU narratives – I don’t want to dwell much more on debating energy futures. But I did find Fressoz’s book informative and interesting.
Talking of podcasts, I’m recording a Doomer Optimism one this week with Jason and Ashley about N.S. Lyons and my previous post.
Concerning the debate about the purpose of modernity & the high-energy economy, I disagree that these are about keeping people alive. It’s worth distinguishing between industrialisation and mechanisation. Agriculture was an early industrialiser but a late mechaniser. Early modernism and early agrarian industrialisation involved chattel slavery, which was not designed to keep people alive – quite the opposite, really – although sugar imported from the Caribbean to England did play a keeping alive role for some in later industrialisation. As I see it, modernity has largely been about interstate political competition, which in turn has long been intimately connected with conjoint private-corporate/state profiteering arrangements. Keeping (some) people alive has figured as a side-effect of that process, but has been gladly abandoned often enough in furtherance of political goals, for example in the unprecedentedly vast famines rocking the world in the mid 20th century.
Nevertheless, figuring out a way of ending modernity does raise the question of keeping people alive, even if keeping them alive was never its purpose. My tuppenceworth there is that it would be far from impossible to do it in principle, but it will be difficult to the point of impossibility of ending modernity without a lot of suffering in practice because of a mix of human traits and cultural narratives that are not serving us well in present times. As most long-term commentators here I think agree, unfortunately modernity and the high-energy economy are going to end anyway, and there will almost certainly be a lot of suffering in that process. The question is what we can do to try to minimise the suffering. Again, I think commentators here generally agree that the answer is not by insisting/hoping/pretending it’s not going to happen. Unfortunately, that does seem to be the most widespread approach presently.
On the manufactured food point, Steve L has a better grasp of the technical details than me, but I thought from the Fahisi et al paper the hydrogen and oxygen was coming mostly from the electrolysis of water?
As someone who is undoubtedly a beneficiary of modernity (even if that benefit is really only a side effect of the enrichment of the rent-seeking class), I feel like one important thing is to recognise that the same systems and structures that give me a certain amount of wealth are the ones that oppress others, and to work to dismantle or counter that where I can: not as a purity test, but as a recognition of the interconnectedness of all creation and in solidarity with all who are harmed by those systems.
Sometimes that might be quite direct (I certainly spend a lot less at supermarkets than I did pre-allotment), sometimes it might be about engaging with political structures (I suspect writing to my MP doesn’t have much effect but it is still better than not writing to my MP), sometimes it is using the trappings of modernity to build refugia or to demonstrate or pre-figure something better than our current system (this gets theological pretty fast).
In all cases, I don’t know what the outcome will be — except that, as usual, there will probably still be oppression around when I die. But if meaning were contingent on guaranteed success there would be nothing in the world worth doing: ours is a provisional and precarious existence, whether or not we acknowledge that to be the case.
I don’t think I can really support the idea that modernity is about keeping people alive, it just seems to do such a bad job at that despite ever more resources. (And it feels hostile to all life)
Not to fall into the trap of looking for technical efficiencies, but here in the US there’s a maddening amount of waste of energy and materials (cars and houses twice as big as they need to be, road construction, empty office buildings, suburban sprawl, lack of good insulation, clothing and food waste) you could support another US in modern comfort with the same resources if that was really a priority of the system.
Transition or tipping point? Usually the boundaries of a transition are fuzzy, while tipping point boundaries are clearly defined. But some popularly established tipping points, like the AMOC slowdown, cannot be pinned down. Perhaps it is just semantics.
I am reflecting this week on my own tipping points. These were triggered by world-wide events instigated by the US Presidency. On April 29, 1970, the US invaded Cambodia and attempted to extend the Vietnam War to a regional conflict. This didn’t work because of the massive uprising in the US, shutting down universities in a general strike and raising hell in a bunch of other ways. One of the “movement lawyers” I knew at the time was of the opinion that the world was on the brink of thermonuclear war, but the massive uprising forestalled this. Certainly, at the time I thought Nixon and Kissinger would have escalated the Vietnam War with limited nuclear strikes against North Vietnam BUT for the Antiwar Movement. I still think so. At that time I made the decision not to follow a revolutionary path and to work on alternatives instead. This started with food co-ops, but I also gave up the career path I was on. The 50-year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War is on April 30th. This is also part of my week of reflection.
With over 50 years of hindsight, we can now see how the Nixon Presidency was a tipping point/transition for the world, especially because of the decision to go off the gold standard in August 1971. This was the starting point of our overshot financialization of debt. And I didn’t make this up! There are plenty of analysts saying the same thing. At the time of the Cambodian Invasion in 1970, many of us could see history in the making. It was clear that we had to jump off the Amerikan train going off the cliff. And of course, hindsight has proven us right. Right now, we are in a similar tipping point/transition moment in the first 100 days of the second Trump Presidency.
It would be to our advantage to see history in the making this time too. The collapse of western civilization is still baked into the cake, but if a person can see the significance of this moment, they will be able to see more clearly what steps to take.
After Frezzo’s stated that he was inspired by David Eggerton’s book ‘Shock of the Old’, I looked him up and found a few pod casts. As a historian looking at the UK, I was surprised to hear that the UK was largely food independent in the 1980s, very much in living memory.
I think the problem here is always context, and as individuals we build frames of reference that reinforce our bias. There is literally mass premature death and unthinkable suffering going on presently that is intimately linked with the illusions and assumptions that drive modernity. In a sense, that suffering and death is due to be distributed more equally.
What we have to be vigilant to is taking those illusions and assumptions forward with us. Living in healthy community with strong links with other functioning communities is the only way to assure we are cognitively vigilant, and anyone who is not at least trying to do that can be approached with a healthy scepticism. Narratives of fear are the stock and trade of our present calamity, they have no real place in a healthy home.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-apocalypse-machine-rolls-on?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Perhaps someone could translate this piece so someone with just a engineering degree and not a perhaps , maybe , could be , gobidly goop degree can understand ?
Then there is the UK working to spray aerosols into the upper atmosphere to lower uv entering the atmosphere . If “science ” convinces them I am fairly certain net zero will go straight out the window !
Some woolly thoughts… firstly, on why and how actual wool is the only material not in greater use now than it once was. The primary reason is its replacement as a clothing and carpet fibre by much cheaper synthetic materials derived from oil. The colonial New Zealand economy was built on sheep, and wool and sheep meat were major exports until the 1960s. Since then the number of sheep has declined dramatically. In the past two decades it has almost halved from c. 40 million to c. 24 million. If the true environmental cost of synthetic fibres were to be calculated and paid, then probably wool would seem like the better choice. That day may come, but until then (tip for Kathryn) I keep the moths away from my woollen clothing using lavender bags filled with home-grown and dried ‘Grosso’ lavender. (Makes them smell nice too!)
I watched Fressoz give this excellent illustrated talk – https://www.youtube.com/live/jGh9r1TeymI – to a Muswell Hill Sustainability Group meeting last month. Worth watching. He mentions David Edgerton’s book The Shock of the Old in that talk – I found a pdf version of it on line here – https://wtf.tw/ref/edgerton.pdf
Regardless of what historians end up recommending or not recommending as ‘solutions’ to the problems they uncover (and Fressoz does support degrowth) I think they are essential reading to gain a perspective on the times we live in, which are essentially the times we have ‘inherited’ – and may be the times we ‘pass on’. For most of human history this consciousness of human existence in time-space and what it means in terms of ecological functioning was understood, and humans were (mostly) not an ecological danger to themselves and other species. Things are very different today, after 10,000 + years of empire building, wealth concentration, the development of dangerous technologies, etc., etc. We can’t get out of it, we have to get through it, and practical advice on living well and growing food is one of the many ways we will do it, so thanks for sharing your tips, folks!
Thanks for the further comments. I just want to pick up briefly on Joe’s points about modernity, energy & population. I hope to write something more about this soonish, but I want to sketch some initial thoughts here in response to Joe.
Joe writes that “The development of modernity is basically a function of increased energy use”, whereas I’d argue that the development of increased energy use was basically a function of modernity. Perhaps it would be interesting to probe those causal directions some more to see where our differences lie.
Joe further writes “I think a simple way of understanding the purpose of something is to look at the most important thing it does. To me, the most important thing modernity does is keep the vast majority of 8 billion people alive.”
I’d have to disagree there – it seems to me a logical (teleological) fallacy to assume that the purpose or intention (and thence the causal prime mover) of an entity can be explained by one of its functions post hoc. It’s true that the material structures of the present human world (global food supply chains etc.) are important for keeping a lot of people alive. It isn’t true that this need was what brought them into being.
This is relevant to Joe’s next claim “I think it is incumbent on those who think that modernity is irrelevant to the size of the human population to show how the better part of those 8 billion people can transition to a non-modern life and continue living. I don’t think it can be done.”
For my part, I don’t think modernity is irrelevant to the size of the human population but, leaving that aside, the danger here is that such positions normalise/make normative modernity as the default for keeping people alive. As I see it, modernity has never fundamentally been about keeping people alive. The modernist impulse has been utterly genocidal often enough in the past and its present headlong dash into fossil-fuelled oblivion prioritises keeping modernity alive over keeping potentially billions of people alive. I think it’s worth keeping this in mind as we seek solutions to the present polycrisis so as to avoid imputing life-saving functions and intentions to present institutions and structures that they lack. It may be reasonable to ask those of us who advocate for a transition to non-modern life how to manage that transition while keeping people alive. Yet I believe there’s a stronger onus on those who advocate for the retention of modern life to explain how it will keep people alive. The claim that the purpose of modernity has been to keep billions alive implicitly places the burden of proof in the wrong place.
Perhaps my differences with Monbiot are relevant: Monbiot describes agrarian localism as ‘a formula for mass death’ while advocating for what Steve aptly describes as “Bacterial mass (with bioplastic polymer content) used as a new type of food, produced using air, lots of tap water, lots of ammonia, minerals, and huge amounts of grid electricity” – I think the pursuit of such approaches as a way of supposedly rescuing modernity while keeping people and other organisms alive is a surer route to mass death.
More broadly on modernity, I’ve found David Graeber’s ‘Fragments for an Anarchist Anthropology’ a fascinating read lately. I’ve invoked the concept of modernity as some qualitatively new thing in human history quite freely in my writing – I’m interested in Graeber’s suggestion that this could be a mistake.
Walter’s personal story/reflections are perhaps also complementary – what do you/can you do when you see that the modern or Amerikan train going off the cliff?
I’m interested of course in further discussing these points but it may be a week or so before I have time to respond significantly– apologies for my sporadic appearances here.
@Chris and Joe. From my perspective I think throwing in capitalism makes it a triad: modernity, fossil energy and capitalism (I guess “individualism is part of “modernity”, if not that is a fourth).
In my analysis, population growth is linked to the three in several ways. But it is modernity and capitalism that break down the previous systems for self-regulation of the size of population. And in almost all countries, population grew earlier and quicker than energy use.
But admittedly, it is hard to disentangle the drivers of emergent systems as there is not single causalities at play. I discuss some of it in this article: https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/markets-more-food-and-more-people
“such positions normalise/make normative modernity as the default for keeping people alive”
They do. But we also know that this “default” cannot be maintained. It depends on a continuous and gigantic flux of energy which is just about to end.
And while there may be “a stronger onus on those who advocate for the retention of modern life to explain how it will keep people alive”, few of us here are those advocates. I certainly am not.
The only logical way to reconcile the fact that modernity will (and should) end with the fact that modernity is keeping billions of people alive (whether that is its original intended purpose or not), is to conclude that billions of lives will end, probably very prematurely.
Whether that process will happen rapidly or slowly is open to dispute, but I think it is unlikely that it will happen slowly enough that ongoing declines in the total fertility rate (TFR) will allow billions of people to reach the natural end of their lives and die of the things that kill the very aged. TFR impacts on global demographics happen over very many decades, enough time that modernity likely cannot be maintained, or if in the unlikely event that it can, enough time that modernity will cause the destruction of even a post-Holocene liveable climate.
This is the logic that underpinned the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, Catton’s “Bottleneck” and “Overshoot”, and numerous other publications by energy experts and ecologists (like William E Rees). This is the logic that terrifies Monbiot, who can only see super-ecomodernism as an escape from the ecosphere-destroying modernity we have now and still keep everyone alive (especially those in cities).
Monbiot is right about agrarian localism. It won’t substitute for modernity in keeping billions of people alive. But nor will anything else. Mass premature death simply cannot be avoided.
This fact is never openly discussed in public by any politician, so nothing is ever proposed to effect even those few marginal mitigations that might be possible, like a program of reruralization and a small farm future. I doubt that anything ever will.
This should not be a surprise. We have been blithely living under the nuclear Sword of Damocles for eighty years with little to show in the way of removing it. The risks of nuclear weapons are so much more easy to mitigate or eliminate than the risks of modernity that our failure regarding nukes is an ominous portent for any program to mitigate the harms of modernity. At this point I think the possibility of a collective response to modernity-driven overshoot is gone.
This means that it is up to individuals and small groups to make their own responses. In my view the very best one is agrarian localism. This has actually been the best response to modernism since forever. (Foraging might be better, but it is very difficult to do now as a way of life without becoming an outlaw).
Here, I do largely agree with you Joe. While I’d argue that agrarian localism could in theory keep most people alive from where we are now if it was implemented with radical speed, that’s clearly not going to happen and I agree that the track record is not good there.
Monbiot is by all accounts terrified of the implications of modernity’s end, but seems to be even more terrified of having the flaws in his cunning plan to save modernity publicly exposed. Perhaps this is just another version of the same modernist problem – when we have to choose between our romantic and self-satisfied modernist hero stories and hard reality, we opt for the hero stories (I discuss this a bit more in the new book). An odd aspect of Monbiot’s modernism is that he’s come to despise farming so much that he wants to replace it as far as possible with manufacturing despite the clear ecological superiority of farmed options, such as the soy that Steve mentions above. Still, I suppose it’s apposite that some of us are spending the last years of modernism counting beans.
“This means that it is up to individuals and small groups to make their own responses” – yes, strongly agree.
“This means that it is up to individuals and small groups to make their own responses” – yes, strongly agree.
Okay, now that at least some of us agree it is “up to individuals and small groups,” what is the next step? After many years of proposing – and demonstrating – alternatives, my latest foray is to show people how to make their own solutions. And just to cover all the bases, solutions are often adaptations and adaptations are often solutions. Chris Martenson is the leading proponent of the false dichotomy of problem vs. predicament (see his Crash Course if you want to read more of his thesis). And he makes quite a bit of money off this bifurcation.
After decades of study, I come back to the same old structural hierarchy:
worldview
paradigm
observation
theory
hypothesis
data collection
testing
conclusion
feedback to the theory
action (this is where most scientists fail)
Worldview is how we look at the world. It is either objective or subjective. Empiricism adjusts our worldview over time based on our life experiences and the experiments we run. But the basic categorization of objective/subjective worldview is immutable. Either anyone can run the experiment or it is dependent on the particular subject.
Paradigms color the way we model the world and they live under the worldview umbrella. Most social scientists are aware of this. But the role of paradigms in proposing solutions or adaptations is not usually addressed. No doubt this is because of the hubris of most scientists, who think they can just point out some inconvenient truth or fact or analysis and OF COURSE someone else will step up and fix it – leaving them to go back to the lab or the field.
Nor do you have to buy off-the-shelf paradigms OR solutions/adaptations. In fact, since you are the only one who really knows your situation, it would be better to build your own paradigms and adopt your own solutions. In fact eschewing off-the-shelf paradigms and solutions in favor of your own custom-built paradigms and solutions will give you an edge. That is why I wrote Paradigms for Adaptation (2024). The idea here is to have a plan and then implement it. But be warned; it means work, the kind Gary Snyder called the real work – the interior work.
Disclaimer: I don’t really care if you buy my book. It is mostly examples of how to do this. If you grasp the concept here in this short description, you can do it on your own. Good luck.
Well I see no one has brought up Spain’s grid collapse so I thought I would , The first grid collapse of the net zero era ! There will be arguments of the what when a d why but it still happened , cities ground to a screaming halt , people learned they have legs again , the vaunted cash free society ceased , Spain found out just how much they rely on grid electricity .
Every time you hear a techno modernist speak Spain will destroy their argument , all their millions of words drivel !
They have become in their own words , ” useless eaters ” .
Good point! This is a perfect example of the underlying fragility of the modern world that most people just take for granted. Just think what would happen if the Spain-Portugal outage lasted for a couple of weeks rather than just a day.
There are three examples of essential infrastructure that can bring modernity to a sudden stop if they fail: the electric grid, the internet and the financial system. The failure of the electric grid takes down everything in its area of operation, the failure of the internet takes down the financial system with it and the failure of the global financial system rapidly shuts down all commerce even if the grid and the internet still function.
The electrical grid is the most robust of the three. It’s been 17 years since I worked at a combined cycle power plant that was part of a small grid, but back then every powerplant was kept isolated from the internet to prevent cyber attacks and every powerplant had blackstart capability (backup generators that could power plant systems and get the whole operation going prior to reconnection with the grid). Our grid failed completely during an earthquake in 2006, but it was back up within a couple of hours.
We still don’t know what happened in Spain, but initial reports tend to deny that it was caused by either a cyber attack or due to instability from renewable energy sources.
The most likely cause, in my opinion, was a sudden load/generation imbalance that caused a frequency and voltage excursion outside the safe operating parameters of some essential generation sources, which caused them to automatically trip offline. This kind of shutdown cascade is the most common cause of a widespread outage. Thirty minutes prior to the main outage in Spain, a high-voltage transmission line between France and Spain was disconnected. That outage in combination with another generation outage might have been enough to start the cascade. We’ll probably find out soon.
I’m more worried about the internet or the financial system. It’s been a few years since the Wannacry malware almost shut down the entire internet, but something similar could happen at any time, especially if state actors with a great deal of cyber capability decide to do it. North Korea might be able to do it. The US, China and probably Russia could shut down internet anytime they so desire.
The financial system is underpinned by a universal confidence that fiat money will always be accepted. If the loss of that confidence were to affect enough people, a tipping point might be reached that would cause a financial crisis large enough to shut down global commerce. The US federal reserve beginning to monetize US government debt might be enough to undermine faith in the dollar and get the ball rolling.
Another financial risk is a prolonged global recession. If economies shrink, as we know they must do in the not-too-distant future, it will become clear that profits will not be enough to repay debts and since government debt as a percentage of GDP will increase as GDP declines, a loss of faith in government debt instruments might spread rapidly. Debt default can start a feedback of more economic shrinkage causing more debt default in an economic death spiral that might well be too big for central banks to control.
In sum, major electric grids are separated from one another, so while North America or Europe or China might each have a massive grid failure, it’s not likely that they will all fail at once. I think grid failure is unlikely to cause a global shutdown of modernity. Secondary effects of regional grid failures might do it, but it’s hard to know.
A sudden failure of modernity is more likely to come from an internet failure or a financial crisis. These could happen very quickly, within hours for an internest failure and within weeks for a financial crisis. If you’re not prepared before these kinds of things happen, you never will be.
I read a very interesting piece on the differences between old fashioned and ” renewables ” its. “Inertia” when a thermal station gets a problem there are several hundred tones of generator that starts to slow down , it can take up to 15 seconds before it trips out giving the grid time to shift the load elsewhere , renewables give no warning they just trip leaving the grid operator flat footed , with no warning or chance of tripping in extra capacity .. Gas turbines can spool up in minutes ,steam systems can take up to a week .
Another article stated that last year the UK grid went into high frequency spike over 500 times causing tripping out over capacity of supply . It must be held at 50 Htz , 51.5kills the system 49.5 also kills the system and every bit of electronic wizardry connected to it . back to the stone age in a split second .
Modernity, within cultural discourse, is characterised by its unifying universal narrative, an overarching global perspective. Post- modernism, in this same theoretical space is the realisation that these ‘truths’ fragment into a myriad of localised perspectives, each announcing there own ‘truth’. I agree with most of the substance of Joe’s analysis and a certainly agree on its conclusion but it is itself modernist, and so I see a modernist criticism of modernism, a sort of doubling down.
We know that not all parts of the world are party to this machine, so already, its reach is diminished. It is operating in particular contexts. There is data to suggest that between 60 to 80% of the world is fed by small and peasant farming, so again there is no universal action in reaction to the failure of modernity. Where ever the food is coming from, it is coming from the land – it maybe augmented, but it is coming through the natural biological systems that are present, still, on every continent. These natural biological processes dont belong to anyone and are the fundament of life on earth. I think the idea that the industrial network we are calling modernism is our life support system is exactly the propaganda of that same structure, where as its more like a gate keeper which has a strangle hold on those fundamental biological resources in particular contexts. This is the where the possibility of mass premature death presents itself, not in the failure but the logical conclusion of modernism in an authoritarian military industrial global complex withholding the fundamental biological needs of life for humans and other animals, to prolong present high energy life ways.
Mass premature death is a big stick and I can see why we might want to wield it, but again, the fear based motivation is straight out of the same structure of power that is causing the said mass premature death (and proven to be less persuasive) . I think Tom Murphy was talking on Crazy Town about modernity being an abusive girlfriend, and like the Paul Simon says, there are least 50 ways to leave your lover.
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. Regardless of where and how food is grown, cities require a suite of modern, high-energy technologies and systems to transport and preserve the food they import. This is also true of a city’s water supply. This means at least half the world’s population is at risk of food and water deprivation from a collapse of those modern systems.
And while the small farmers that produce food for transport into cities might do OK if they can’t export their production, large numbers of them are still dependent on imported nutrients for soil fertility. It’s hard to know exactly how prevalent this dependence is, but it’s not minimal.
I think we all agree that there are many small subsistence farmers, in the Global South especially, who would scarcely notice if modernity disappeared. They have the best chance of surviving the coming population bottleneck. Those of us living in the modern world should be preparing to emulate them.
I agree, as Frezzos says, there are cities in Africa that are powered nearly entirely by wood energy. My understanding is that African cultures still have a functioning village system, that people in the cities retain strong links with their villages, and can ruralise relatively easily. I think the same can be said of India, many parts of South America, even Russia and many Eastern European countries who have had their own collapses (and survived)co
– even Portugal, which was a largely peasant society until the 1970s with the Carnation Revolution. Habitat regeneration through a restoration of the abandoned villages is happening in Spain also.
I think the worst places to be affected are the most invested in the modernist military industrial complex, western Europe and the US and its empire, Japan, uAE. But even within these unthinkable masses of land, the granular detail is far from conclusive.
I think of people like Kathryn in London when thinking about the collapse of high energy life ways in cities, and fellow allotment owners, the various community gardens and grow projects and nurseries, school fields, parks and commons – and the land filleted in between the last part of Greater London (the out skirts of the city) and the ‘green belt’, agricultural land. I can see this quickly becoming pulled into local use for food and fuel.
There is another great podcast on planet critical where peak diesel is discussed (2017ish) and the already crisis unfolding in Columbia and Argentina as prices rise. Its the slow collapse, being called ‘cost of living crises” here in the UK and I see people will turn to the authoritarian but I see the smart ones will turn to the opportunities to grow their livelihood in whatever pockets present themselves.
As I see it its the sheer size of cities that will be a problem , without diesel its one hell of a walk into the centres of any large city , yes there are green spaces that can be used there is not enough , the nearest decent town near to me has 33000 ish people and two supermarkets , HEB and wall mart , they get 7 to 14 semi truck loads between them per day , 20 tonnes each , that’s the logistical scale of a small town .
When the wheels fell off Russia, people relied on their ” dasha” garden for basics they had to employ security guards to stop theft .
I agree, and how much of that 20 tonnes per truck is actual food from the surrounding land, or anything useful?
A lot of Chinese crap and food from California , Mexico , DFW airport from Guatemala , Chile , Brazil , Argentina . its actually easier to say where it don’t come from , Russia , Antarctica , Greenland ………
Thanks for the explanation of how the electrical grid system works and what might have happened to take out Spain and Portugal, Joe. It is the first informed explanation I have seen to date.
I agree with you that, as most countries design back-up and work-around systems as part of their grids, the grid is actually the least vulnerable of the ‘three systems of modernity’ – in normal circumstances. Were the circumstances that took out the grid in the north-east of Turtle Island in August 2003 ‘normal’? What if bad (or maybe good?) actors decide to take out all or part of a grid? (See the excellent 2018 Icelandic-Ukrainian movie ‘Woman at War’ for an example of this.)
The internet runs on electricity, so it is dependent on the grid, and the global financial system runs on the internet, so…
But as Joe says, the grid can’t/won’t go down in all places, everywhere, at once, so the ‘three systems’ will keep charging (or limping) on in most places for many years to come. Even when biophysical reality puts a temporary spanner in the works, like the undersea landslide which took out the 4 submarine cables carrying internet traffic off the coast of West Africa in March 2024 (it took 6 weeks before they were all repaired) or the underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga in January 2023, which left Tonga largely incommunicado for a week.
We readers of Chris’s blog can’t control any of the above, so what can we control? A common thread I see running through the comments on this blog is that the ‘three systems’ on balance have done/are doing more harm than good, so it is wise to reduce one’s personal linkage with them, and/or dependence on them. Further, this does not make our lives less pleasant – on the contrary! We eat better food, breathe fresher air, spend our leisure time with real friends and neighbours rather than toxic bots, etc., etc. And we roll with the contradictions (she says posting this from a rain-sodden valley on Banks Peninsula to a submarine cable that will take it right around the globe).
Interesting comment on toxic AI bots at
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-global-elites-secret-group-chats-gen-zs-lifestyle-subsidy-and-metas-sex-bots/
Modernity and ever expanding consumption seem to be a continuation of Bread and Circus.
What are we (the hoi polloi ) get from AI ? For that matter, what do we get from modernity ? We are spending more of our lives working to have faster transportation, live in uniform comfortable temperatures and have year round access to a varied diet. All the while we have been losing ground economically for the last 50 years. Now of course we live in a world of manufactured desire so we have to keep wanting more and more and more.
Could it be where, IRL, there is a point where you have enough ?
what do we get from modernity ?
Arguably, the only truly great thing is modern medicine – (yes, I know iatrogenic diseases, plus the medical efforts that have to be made to cope with the deleterious effects of other aspects of modernity, such as cheap sugars, but even so, I think it’s a net positive …).
I looked on Google Maps to see where the Banks Peninsula was and noticed extensive road closures on Hwy 75 and flood emergency symbols, all apparently due to the “rain-sodden” soil and weather. But now it looks like the rain has stopped and you’ll get some more sunny weather next week. Best wishes to you and yours.
Back to “Why did the Spanish grid go down (and what are the alternatives?)” I can recommend this article from aplaneta – Historical blackout- https://aplaneta.org/historical-blackout/. Martin Mantxo (who lives in the Basque region of Spain) goes through the various hypotheses currently being advanced. He then situates what happened within the political and economic context of the privatisation of electricity generation and supply in Spain (a topic covered by Brett Christophers in ‘The Price Is Wrong’) and the relentless push to exceed limits to generate more economic growth (as described by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in ‘More and more and more’). Finally, he discusses initiatives to decentralise and democratise energy provision in his region – which is encouraging after all the previous gloom and doom.
Yep privatisation ruined supply , where it went wrong is generators sell power minute too minute instead of contracts to be forced to supply over a 24_hour period ,day to day , wind and solar would be forced to add battery backup .
I don’t have anything to say Chris other then please take a look at what we are doing in Sarawak.
https://linktr.ee/cutcampaign
The indigenous Orang Asal people especially the Penans have been impacted by the sharp end of modernity for 70 years. I don’t want to use the word hope, but my wish is for them to keep going until the system flips, and enough of Malaysia and Indonesia stay rural so that we can relearn their principles
A further musing on energy transition:
Even in my more techno-optimist moods I don’t feel like we can go through ome kind of transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy without drastic changes to the economy as it currently stands!
Part of the issue is how interlinked everything is. I figure there are three big categories of energy is that are difficult to transition to zero carbon emissions:
1) transport
2) manufacturing (esp. manufacturing processes where oil is a material)
3) domestic heating (and, increasingly, cooling).
Getting part of the way there isn’t too hard, but only really kicks the can down the road a decade or so. Heat pumps are great until they can’t actually heat your home and you’re stuck using electric grid backup and the grid doesn’t have enough renewables to deal with that many homes all drawing at the same time. Manufacturing is so varied and interconnected that it’s actually quite difficult to project what something like capturing emissions and putting them in concrete will do to the market. Completely decarbonising transport is not a solved problem, but the “part of the way there, much better energy efficiency” e-assist bicycles are absolutely changing the local economics in London — I see many fewer internal combustion takeaway delivery vehicles now.
I am certainly on team “reducing fossil fuels emissions is not enough, net zero is not enough, true zero is also not enough, we need to be finding ways to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and fast” but my point is that even substantial reductions in emissions on a per-process basis can be economically disruptive.
Till the soil and you change the microbial balance and nutrient availability to favour fast-growing opportunistic plants, also known as annual vegetables if you happened to seed them and weeds if you didn’t. I am now at the point where I can make some predictions about which weeds will turn up in certain places, but not with 100% accuracy: it’s more that the soil at the Far Allotment has a tendency to support goat’s rue and the Near Allotment supports creeping cinquefoil and the back garden supports green alkanet and the Soup Garden has dock and plantain. Bindweed is everywhere, of course.
We cannot interact with the material world without changing it, and anyone who says we can have a full transition to renewables without noticing any changes in our daily lives is as naive as someone who says that if you dig over your vegetable patch and sow carrots, you will only get carrots.
I recommend Zero Carbon Britain by the Centre for Alternative Technology and Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air by David Mackay as good reads about how to overcome those problems. They’re both very good
Here’s a linky: https://cat.org.uk/info-resources/zero-carbon-britain/research-reports/zero-carbon-britain-rising-to-the-climate-emergency/
My point is not that these areas pose insurmountable problems (though I do think 100% transition is likely to be much more difficult than, say, 50% or 80% or even 90%).
My point is that it is probably impossible to carry out such changes without changing global economics to some degree, and therefore changing the way some people live (probably mostly those in the rich west). The story of being able to do a one-for-one swap of fossil fuels to renewable (or rebuildable or whatever) electricity, and hardly noticing the difference in our daily lives, is just that: a story.
I agree, and both Zero Carbon Britain and Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air lay out detailed plans for energy transition based on both powering up alternatives to fossil fuel energy and powering down aka significant reductions in the use of energy by societies. Which as you say will entail sweeping social changes. One- to-one cannot work.
If anyone is interested in the actual nuts and bolts of how this can happen both are a good read
Yes – it’s theoretically possible – but this has been worked out and known about for some time (I’m familiar with both the MacKay book and the CAT work – which are by now ‘old’ by current standards).
But by now I think it’s fair to assume that any political window of opportunity has closed and it simply isn’t going to happen and plan accordingly.
“the last nail in the coffin”
We need more nails! The momentum of nuclear, especially the savior on the horizon of SMRs (small modular reactors), is increasing yearly, even though the technical feasibility stumbles. Here is just one weather vane reading on public sentiment here in Wisconsin:
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2025/related/proposals/sjr7
vote was 27-5, and this is a “purple” state.
Let’s not even talk about fusion.
In the U.S., we are rapidly ending the long standing bans that were put in place after three mile island, as both parties, one with open derision, and the other, with silent, reluctant acknowledgement, are seeing that sun and wind won’t let us keep our current arrangements.
All this and yet the first SMR to get federal design approval and was lined up to start building in Utah died as the cost numbers started honing in on the actual cost. And this was with over a billion in fed assistance.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-agree-terminate-nuclear-project-2023-11-08/
Meanwhile, back on the farm………I binge watched “Kiss the Ground”, and “Common Ground” this weekend. They were a mixed bag, had rather too much Hollywood for me and could easily have been done in one movie, but then, I’m not the target audience.
That said, some good stuff there. Feeding ourselves through industrial ag is central to what has caused so much of the global trauma, and has to change.
The central message of regenerative ag being able to not just reduce emissions and dependence on chemicals, but also result in large carbon drawdown was a good message to promote. The movies also featured a few practitioners of regenerative ag, like Alan Savory and Gabe Brown, so examples of people actually trying to do it differently.
Yeah, I know Savory’s claims are questionable, but the general direction is right. Not sure what science is saying about drawdown capacity of regenerative ag, but if nothing else, we’ll hang on to our remaining soil.
I’m seeing a slow increase in farms here moving to rotational grazing, so every ( hilly, sloped) acre that moves from row crops to pasture is good in my opinion. We might even reverse the insect apocalypse.
Another data point on new nuclear. Heard on LBC yesterday, Size well C nuclear plant costs have been revised from 36 Billion to 46 Billion, and completion from 2025 to 2031. How many nuclear plants can any economy afford at 46 Billion a pop? And from the build out time of conventional nuclear, we are already to late.
As for small modular nuclear, they are not even finished paper plans. And no, the nuclear reactors in nuclear submarines are not the same thing, they work at a low reaction rate, for good reasons, it only has to power one submarine, you don’t want to irradiate the crew, and you don’t want to have to changed to the fuel rods frequently.
Lastly I think Jeavons paradox is going to catch everybody by surprise but in reverse. That is as we learn to do without a technology because it price keeps rising, it’s consumption reduces to a point where it’s economies of
scale in production go away, followed by the price rocketing or that technology just going away. At which point most people shrug and
get on with living.
The recent blackout in Spain and Portugal has dropped out of the news here. Search results bring up stories that are 5-6 days old where the cause is still not known. Has the cause been identified ?
I’m wondering if this is something that we should be prepared for. The electric grid is a complex system and critical to a functioning economy. Is the system very fragile or did some big event cause the problem ?
The end of modernity from a financial perspective – https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Today, a Reuters article says “Authorities are investigating the cause,… the underlying issues have yet to become clear”, while the article’s conclusion is in the headline:
“EU power grid needs trillion-dollar upgrade to avert Spain-style blackouts”
Believers of the renewables transition seem to be mainly saying that the cause of the problem is under-investment in the grid, with the solution being more spending on grid-enhancing technologies.
However, the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute (which published An Ecomodernist Manifesto, and has sparred with Chris Smaje in the past) admits that wind and solar cannot do everything.
“That the Spanish grid collapsed under a bright sun just a half hour past midday fundamentally challenges platitudes that we have already solved the integration challenges of wind and solar power. It is not only okay to admit that wind and solar cannot do everything—it is precisely what this moment needs.”
“It’s Okay to Notice When Solar and Wind Fail”
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/its-okay-to-notice-when-solar-and-wind-fail
So I guess this failure of solar and wind is seen as an opportunity to push for more nuclear energy.
Every grid outage is “caused” by something. Considering that grids must always operate on a knife-edge balance between generation and load, it’s amazing they don’t fail more often.
No generation source, or load, can be made 100% reliable, and they all come with their advantages and disadvantages. Wind and solar are intermittent, but their combined mechanical integrity is far greater than heat engines. Solar panels fail and need maintenance outages, but far less often than steam turbines. At the smallest scale, a household size grid powered by batteries, solar and inverters is far more reliable than one powered solely by diesel generators.
In the case of the Iberian Peninsula outage, it’s not likely that the intermittency of solar was the underlying cause, since the outage occurred in the middle of a sunny day and any battery backup systems were likely to be charging and not fully discharged. There was no area-wide windstorm, solar flare or nuclear blast that could have affected the entire grid. Whatever started the failure was a localized event.
I’ve seen stories that provided data showing a sudden and dramatic drop in solar input to the grid, but that was more likely due to transmission line disconnections than clouds covering all the solar fields at once or failures of all the inverters that convert the DC solar array output to grid input AC. All those solar fields are operating now, so we know they weren’t shut down by multiple equipment failures.
All grids have software and communications systems that monitor all generation and loads. These are dedicated systems, usually with fiberoptic connections, that are not connected to the internet. If a grid loses a generator, other generators are asked to pick up the slack. If that is impossible, loads are disconnected to maintain the delicate balance between generation and load. This happens automatically, within seconds, to keep the grid frequency within limits.
If this process fails, and grid frequency excursions get too large, generators and loads can shut down to protect themselves from being damaged by frequency, voltage and current conditions outside their operating requirements and then cascading outages can expand to take down the entire grid. This is a control failure, a grid management failure, that would otherwise keep outages from propagating and keep the grid stable.
So the reason the entire grid went down is almost certainly a software issue somewhere, or the (unlikely) failure of computers that manage grid balance. What the specific generation/load imbalance that triggered the management failure is still unknown, but whatever it was should not have caused the entire grid to go down.
Some grid management system just didn’t do it’s job and it may be a long time before it is determined exactly what happened. Engineers are right now poring over millisecond by millisecond logs of generation and load data to find out what happened in exactly what sequence. When they finally put it together, there will be a big conference to formulate and authorize code changes in the control software to make sure it doesn’t happen again… until the time something else causes it to happen.
In addition to what Joe has described, the rotational inertia of generators and turbines is not replicated in solar generation. This is not a software issue, but simple physics and electromagnetism. A limitation on the capabilities of “renewable/replaceable” energy sources.
“But as the grid evolves with increasing penetrations of inverter-based resources—e.g., wind, solar photovoltaics (PV), and battery storage—that do not inherently provide inertia, questions have emerged about the need for inertia and its role in the future grid.”
the full article:
https://www2.nrel.gov/news/program/2020/inertia-and-the-power-grid-a-guide-without-the-spin
Wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being part of the explanation.
Perhaps the renewable industry has out teched itself , relying on inverters to create AC current directly from generators , why not use old fashioned lead acid batteries instead of lithium as a buffer they are easy to make the materials are plentiful they do not catch fire and don’t need to move , they can be built out as big as needed .
Then in my young days working in a garage the battery charger was a AC motor driving a dynamo ,it was over fifty years old and still working in 1970 , what’s wrong with having a DC motor driving a AC generator , that automatically gives inertia to the system ?
Hawaii grids have long had to deal with high levels of inverter connection. At times, the Hawaii Island grid approaches being totally powered by distributed solar inverters.
Even household-size inverters can be programmed to provide grid frequency control. But if they are not properly programmed, a system disturbance can cause them to take themselves off line. For those who want to wonk out on this topic:
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/71156.pdf
Nate Hagens has an episode about the power outage in Spain –
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/176-pedro-prieto
Thanks for keeping the discussion going. My input here is going to be a bit patchy over the next few months I fear, but I’ll try to put out a new post soon.