“Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security”, according to a new report published by Nature. The technical jargon here references a “meandering jet stream” but, for non-specialists, what this means is that we can no longer rely on worse-than-average crop conditions in some places being cancelled out by better-than-average conditions in others.
Commenting on this in The Guardian, George Monbiot says that only five stories about this have appeared in the global media, which he contrasts with “more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague”.
“In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk”, says Monbiot.
This is a conundrum that affects issues beyond climate change, critically important though this obviously is. We can imagine busy people, with lives to lead and issues to confront, switching off in droves when the media turns to economics.
Moreover, they’re right to do this, if all that’s being presented to them is an outdated, fallacious doctrine which promises infinite growth on a finite planet, and claims that there’s a financial fix for every economic ill.
If it’s difficult for people to find time to think about a real issue like climate change, how can we expect them to take an interest in nonsense about infinite growth and the cure-all characteristics of money?
To be candid about it, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do next, but I can tell you my immediate plan.
This is the first of two planned articles to appear here. The second will try to sum up what I think we now know about the economy, understood as an energy system.
Here, I’m going to reflect on some of the implications that we can draw from what we know about the economy.
Of reality and perception
There are, of course, two ways in which we might explain the disparity of coverage between hard and important scientific news and the doings of people in the “mediaworld”. One is that ‘the powers that be’ who control the world’s media don’t want us to hear about – or worry and get angry about – threats to global food security.
The other is that the general public is simply more interested in stories about ‘slebs’ than in the complicated science and gloomy prognostications of the experts, and the media have a commercial interest in covering those stories which attract the greatest attention.
As I’m writing this, Southern Europe is in the grip of a searing heatwave, with similar conditions occurring in the United States and China. The media have a choice about how they present this news. They can show images of people suffering from extreme heat in Rome, Athens or Malaga, or they can delve into the back-story of climate change. Some media opt for the latter, but far more choose the former.
Climate science does at least have aspects that can interest the general public, who are able to experience heatwaves and flooding at first-hand, as well as seeing images of these and other phenomena.
Economics has no such appeal. The so-called “gloomy science” is indeed gloomy more often than not, but it can’t remotely be called a “science”. Once we understand the concept of two economies – the “real economy” of products and services, and the parallel “financial economy” of money and credit – it becomes apparent that the so-called “laws” of economics are no more than behavioural observations about the human artefact of money, and are in no way analogous to the laws of science.
Orthodox economics has always promised infinite growth, an absurdity which, at least until recently, has appeared to be true, simply because we’ve been continually ramping up the use of fossil fuels. Last year, we consumed 42% more oil, natural gas and coal – and 50% more primary energy in total – than we did back in 2002. No wonder economic output has increased over that period (though a real-terms tripling of debt between those same years ought to give us serious pause for thought).
The general public seems to have been becoming aware that meaningful improvement in their own economic conditions has petered out, a process characterised, for many of them, by worsening insecurity, ever-growing burdens of debt and other commitments and, latterly, the combination of surging inflation and sharply rising interest rates.
Yet officialdom, supported by economists and reported in the media, keeps insisting that “growth” is continuing.
For many, the understandable suspicion is that, in reality, growth may indeed be continuing as the experts claim, but that they’re not benefiting because a greedy, unprincipled minority is cornering all and more of the growth in which ‘ordinary’ people do not participate. Inequality statistics strongly reinforce such suspicions.
Small wonder, then, that, in a recent British opinion poll, 38% agreed that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”, outnumbering the 33% who disagreed. It seems a reasonable supposition that such suspicions are by no means unique to the United Kingdom, and would have been far less pronounced, there or elsewhere, had equivalent polling been conducted thirty, twenty or even ten years ago.
We cannot know whether these suspicions are well grounded, and it’s worth remembering that different elites in different countries could respond to the same issues in the same ways without a necessity for co-ordination. Moreover, if this un-co-ordinated process did happen, its effects on the experiences of ordinary people would be much the same as if central plotting did exist.
We can’t, then, know whether the conspiracy theorists are right or not – but we can conclude that ever-increasing numbers of people suspect that they are.
At the end of growth
The reality of the situation is both simpler and more disconcerting. The proper target of popular suspicion should be anyone, including but not limited to politicians, who promises them economic growth in perpetuity.
The “hoax” that we’ve been subjected to isn’t climate change, for which there’s compelling scientific evidence, but the continuity of “growth”, which, consciously or not, is being faked.
Simply stated, the fossil fuel dynamic, which has powered economic expansion ever since James Watt unveiled the first really efficient steam engine in 1776, is fading out. Naturally enough, the easiest, most accessible and lowest-cost sources of fossil fuel energy were used first, and are being replaced by ever-costlier alternatives.
This is a surprise only to those – seemingly a majority – who’ve never been prepared to recognize the obvious. The warnings set out in The Limits to Growth (LtG), published back in 1972, have been reinforced by those who have found close correlation between subsequent data and the LtG projections. Kenneth E. Boulding, co-founder of general systems theory, famously pointed out that only “a madman or an economist” would believe in the possibility of infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet.
In recent times, we’ve become aware of the environmental and ecological risks posed by reliance on carbon fuels.
But we have yet to recognize the parallel economic threat, which is that, through relentless rises in energy costs, the fossil-based economy has deteriorated from growth, via stagnation, into contraction.
We’re assured that a solution exists to climate hazard in the form of renewable energy, principally from wind and solar power. We’ve addressed this issue here before, but many critical questions remain unanswered in the wider world.
Here are some of them:
1. If transitioning to renewables is undoubtedly going to be costly – USD 130 trillion seems a reasonable estimate – what are we going to do without in order to pay for it?
2. This sort of money equates to enormous amounts of raw materials, most obviously steel, copper, lithium, cobalt and other minerals – do they even exist in the requisite quantities, and how much environmental damage are we going to cause by mining and processing them?
3. What source of energy are we going to use to access and utilize these raw materials, and, again, what other uses of energy are we going to relinquish in order to make this possible?
The economics of process
The critical issue here is the nature of the material economy itself. Essentially, the economy functions by using energy to extract raw materials and convert them into products, most of which are destined rapidly for landfill. The necessary parallel thermal process involves the conversion of energy from concentrated into diffuse forms, the latter being waste heat.
In short, this dissipative-landfill system relies on the availability, not simply of energy itself, but of dense energy. To replace fossil fuels without suffering economic contraction, alternatives would need to match, not just the quantity of energy sourced from oil, gas and coal, but the density of these fuels as well.
This is something that wind and solar power simply cannot do. Accordingly, a transition to renewables will truncate the dissipative process on which material production depends, the result of which will be a smaller material economy.
This doesn’t for one moment mean that we should scale back the pursuit of sustainability, still less abandon this quest altogether. Barring some wholly new discovery in the field of energy supply, wind and solar are the best options on the table.
The problem, rather, lies with unrealistic expectations. A “sustainable economy” may be feasible, but “sustainable growth” is not. Our lives may become cleaner, and might also become immaterially ‘better’, in a post-carbon, post-consumerist economy, but we’re also likely to be materially poorer.
Can we handle this reality, and stop deluding ourselves that we can ‘fix’ economic contraction? How is the world reacting, or likely to react, to the ending and reversal of “growth”?
And what, come to that, will the future economy look like?
A future unfolds
For large and increasing numbers of people, economic hardship has already arrived. For many, the “cost of living” has been rising more rapidly than incomes. This problem is compounded, not just by rises in the costs of mortgages and rents, but also by the debts and other financial burdens that households already carry.
Promises that conditions will improve if people ‘just hold their nerve’ are ceasing to convince. We’re told that inflation was triggered by war in Eastern Europe, but – quite apart from the fact that inflation took off before the invasion – the immediate effects of the conflict have now dropped out of the year-on-year figures. There’s scant evidence of a wage-price spiral, but plenty of support for the concept of a margin-price effect, a phenomenon known as “greedflation”.
As you’ll read in the companion article when it arrives, we know a great deal about the unfolding energy dynamics of the material economy. Rises in trend ECoEs – the Energy Costs of Energy – are making it ever harder to strike prices which meet the needs of producers and consumers. This makes it likely that the availability of energy will decrease, led downwards by fossil fuels.
Analysis of prior trends makes it clear that the rate of conversion between energy and material economic value is remarkably invariable. This means that, if energy supply decreases, economic output goes into decline. At the same time, rising ECoEs are widening the gap between output and prosperity, the latter being a function of the surplus energy that remains after ECoE has been deducted.
This has two specific consequences. The first is that, just as prosperity declines, the costs of energy-intensive necessities will carry on rising. The world’s average person is, according to the SEEDS model, going to be 10% less prosperous by 2030, and fully 27% worse off by 2040, than he or she was back in 2019.
Rises in the real costs of essentials are likely to mean that the average person’s PXE – Prosperity eXcluding Essentials – will have fallen by 20% by 2030, and 50% by 2040.
The outlook for discretionary (non-essential) products and services, and for those businesses and employees who provide them, is almost unrelievedly grim. The employees affected might be absorbed into a more labour-intensive economy, but this transition will undoubtedly be disruptive. This trend is already emerging, as consumers cut non-essential spending as the costs of necessities rise.
The second implication is that the financial burdens carried by households – including mortgages, rents, credit commitments, staged-purchases and subscriptions – are going to become impossible to sustain as PXE, the equivalent of disposable incomes, contracts. The “real economy” of products and services is already 43% smaller than the “financial economy” of money and credit. We seem to be heading straight towards a cascade of defaults and a crash in asset prices.
Tantrum time?
How is the public, already highly suspicious of the leadership cadres in government and beyond, likely to react to a relentless deterioration in prosperity which is so strikingly at odds with so many promises of “growth”?
I think we can get some idea by imagining a youngster returning home from school to find that all his shiny toys are being dumped into a skip. Unless he’s a remarkably philosophical child, his reactions are likely to be tantrums, outrage, grief and denial.
The adult world seems to behave in much the same way. The ultra-rich are determined, at all costs, to hang on to the trinkets and trappings of wealth and power, irrespective of what that might mean for everyone else, or for the climate.
But ‘ordinary people are likely to react in very similar ways. Anyone doubting this should try standing for election on a platform of ‘saving the planet’ by replacing cars with buses and trams, and restricting or prohibiting overseas flights.
We might, collectively, want to tackle environmental and ecological hazard, but very few, whether wealthy or not, seem willing to make real sacrifices to this end.
This could very easily become a home run, not just for conspiracy theorists but for agitators as well. There are numerous historic examples of economic hardship, particularly when allied to perceptions of unfairness, leading to social unrest.
Governments, whose own resources face relentless compression, could try to tough this out, though history, again, suggests that this won’t work.
A more rational course, it seems to me, would be to find out what the economic outlook is likely to be, and start to prepare the public accordingly.
I decided to run a few numbers on the energy economics of ammonia as a synthetic fuel. Ammonia is produced by the exothermic reaction between hydrogen and nitrogen over an iron oxide catalyst. The reaction takes place at a pressure of at least 60 bar and temperature of 500°C. As the reaction is exothermic, it will drive itself after initial heating.
My first assumption is that hydrogen is produced by electrolysis with an efficiency of 80%. My second assumption is that nitrogen is produced by fractional distilation of air. I will ignore the energy energy cost of producing pure nitrogen, because it is relatively small. The higher heating value of hydrogen is taken to be 141.86MJ (wiki). The energy cost of H2 will be: Q = 141.86/0.8 = 177.325MJ/kg
To produce ammonia: 3H2 + N2 = 2NH3
Which is to say, 6kg H2 + 28kg N2 = 34kg ammonia (NH3).
Diesel engines have efficiency of 30 – 55%. The lower end refers to car engines. The upper end refers to large marine engines operating at constant speed. Round trip electrical-to-mechanical efficiency is therefore:
n = (0.594)(30>55) = 17.8 > 33%
Liquid anhydrous ammonia has an energy density of 11.5MJ/litre. This compares to 38.6MJ/litre for diesel fuel. So an ammonia fuelled truck must carry 3x the volume of liquid fuel or have refuelling stops 3x closer together. How much would it cost (in electricity) to make the energy equivelant of 1 litre of diesel in ammonia? One litre of diesel contains 38.6MJ of chemical energy (10.72kWh). Electricity is converted into chemical energy at 59.4% efficiency. So the cost of a litre of diesel equivelent would be:
Cost/l = (10.72/0.594) x C = 18.05C, where C is cost per kWh of electricity.
In the US at time of writing, diesel is selling for about $1 per litre. Ignoring other costs, how much would input electricity need to cost to produce ammonia that could compete with diesel at $1/litre?
Cost/kWh = 1/18.05 = $0.055/kWh.
This tells us that for ammonia to compete with diesel, the electricity supplying electrolysis must be very cheap. This calculation ignores the capital costs associated with the electrolysis stack, the air liquefaction plant, the haber-bosch ammonia synthesis plant and the ammonia chilling plant. To minimise the marginal costs of this equipment, we must exploit economies of scale and also run all of the equipment at close to 100% capacity factor. To achieve this, we need a electricity source that is carbon free, cheap and able to produce at full power, close to 100% of the time. The two candidates are hydropower and nuclear power.
Efficiency has been demonstrated at 61-67%. So far, tests have been small scale.
Thanks Peter, most helpful.
Ammonia powered buses in WWII
“Diesel engines are designed to work in a temperature range between 80 and 110C”.
But, apparently, the proposed ammonia vehicles would operate at 500C and need compression. So that doesn’t sound like a drop-in solution to a shortage of diesel fuel. I assume it would require a complete replacement of the transportation fleet?
If the notion is that some small amount of ammonia is used to dilute the tar sands so they will pass through a pipeline and refinery, then that is a different idea altogether. The ammonia is serving as a diluent, a role currently performed by light gates of shale oil. So ammonia might keep the tar sands operating in the absence of shale oil.
My understanding is that Russia has a lot of shale oil, which will be exploited when they run out of conventional oil. Whether the ammonia would be competitive, or better than, the shale oil I have no idea.
Don Stewart
Don, ammonia as a fuel could be burned in compression ignition (diesel) engines. It isn’t flammable under standard conditions. Then again, neither is diesel.
Problems with liquid ammonia as a fuel:
(1) Toxicity. It is caustic and the fumes will make your eyes water. It stinks. Ammonia fumes are irritant and annoying. No one wants to cruise around in a car that smells like stale piss.
(2) Relatively low energy density – about one third of diesel. That means a lot more refilling stations needed.
(3) High vapour pressure – about 6 bar at room temperature. Similar to LPG, your fuel tank must be a pressure vessel.
(4) The energy cost of making ammonia. Like hydrogen, it is an energy store, not a source. To be able to make carbon free ammonia at a cost comparable to diesel, electricity needs to be cheap. That means a lot of new nuclear reactors.
(5) In most countries, transportation consumes about 50% more energy than total electricity production. Given that electricity is converted to ammonia with 50% efficiency, converting all liquid fuel use to ammonia, would quadruple electricity demand. As a species, we could only do this in a carbon free way, by massively increasing our use of nuclear power.
Good points. If we stick to current nuclear technology, is there even enough nuclear fuel to make this possible?
@Peter Cassidy
Thanks. I’ll just continue to use ammonia to kill fire ants.
Don Stewart
“michael sweet at 01:09 AM on 12 July, 2022
A new article in Energy Policy reviews current plans to build nuclear reactors and future possible builds. They find that the contribution of nuclear before 2040 will not be significant (less than 5% of all energy). They find that the supply of uranium is too small to support additional reactors. They find breeder reactors to be unreliable and unlikely to be developed before 2050.
The highlights read:
Highlights:
Nuclear power’s contribution to climate change mitigation is and will be very limited.
Currently nuclear power avoids 2–3% of total global GHG emissions per year.
According to current planning this value will decrease even further until 2040.
A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.
Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible. (my emphasis)
They have a good review of the extremely limited supply of uranium and why the WNA article referenced by MacQuigg is incorrect (with references).” ? https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=5202
Postkey, it all depends upon political will. A succesful nuclear build programme needs a trained workforce and developed supply chains for the components. One of the reasons for Hinkley C and Vogtle being expensive and taking so long, is that we are starting an entire industry for building individual powerplants from scratch. All of the people involved in building nuclear powerplants in the 70s and 80s are either dead or retired. The companies that made the components have either ceased to exist or have moved on to other things. Building a reactor now means restarting that entire new build industry. That takes time and is expensive.
The French showed the world how to run a nuclear programme, by building over sixty large pressurised water reactors in just fifteen years. They were individually cheap because the French had economy of scale. They had suppliers who produced components continuously and a workforce that was able to build up its skill levels through continuity. You can’t build nuclear reactors one-off and expect them to be cheap, just as you cannot build cheap cars individually.
The uranium resource issue is an interesting but seperate issue. I will save it for another post.
“A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.
Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible.”
I just finished a job for a retired PUC auditor who knows a retired nuclear control operator from a now decommissioned facility. I shared some of the ideas presented here about scaling up nuclear. He said he doesn’t think nuclear is the answer nor renewables but if you decide to move forward make sure the temperature gauge for your reactor cooling system is placed front and center instead of in a dark corner due (TMI).
I have no clue what the range of projections by the pros for world population for the rest of the century. Let’s assume it trends down. Population growth and economic growth have been inexorably linked since the Energy Industrial revolution. Such that it had been impossible for me to imagine economic growth with a population fall, That’s just a habit of thought however. Could there be ‘growth’ with falling population? Well why not?
Once one starts plugging in a large reductions in human population don’t the surplus energy calculations go whacky?
To the best of my knowledge, the experts expect population numbers to carry on growing, but at a slowing rate, out to mid-century.
This, though, mainly affects prosperity per capita. Only if there was a very big fall in population numbers might lower consumption slow our movement up the ECoE curve.
There is currently a near total correlation between fossil fuel and food production, ten calories of fossil fuel being required to produce each calory of food. The most important components of fossil fuel being diesel for tractors, trucks and shipping; plus natural gas for making artificial fertiliser.
If peak oil, etc is around now then peak food is also around now. There seeems to be a close correlation between food and population, implying that peak population is around now too. Perhaps with a lag of a decade or so of increasing shortages first.
My own wild guess is that oil and food production will initially decline at only a few percent per year. But soon more rapidly as resource wars increase and long distance trade declines, plus food producers begin to give priority to national self interest. (See end of grain exports from Ukraine, recent ban on rice exports by India, etc.)
Unfortunately, western Europe – and especially UK – is a major importer of food and animal feed, as well as energy.
“My own wild guess is that oil and food production will initially decline at only a few percent per year. But soon more rapidly as resource wars increase and long distance trade declines, plus food producers begin to give priority to national self interest”.
That, at least the first part and probably the latter, aligns with my interpretation. The Indian ban on rice exports strikes me as highly significant and, of course, the Indian government must prioritise the supply of rice to its own population.
Using organic no-till agriculture and hand labour, Mr M. Fukuoka (1913-2008) obtained much the same yield as ‘industrial’ farmers ~40-50 years ago. He publicised his methods but Japan is very conformist and by ~1970 its agricultural sector had settled on ‘scientific’ methods.
A US author, Larry Korn, wrote a book on it in 2015. Fukuoka’s own book ‘The One-Straw Revolution’ was published in 1978. I read it recently and don’t know how I missed it earlier.
But – the spread of organic no-till farming or similar practices would have led to 10,000s of starving agrochemical executives and fertiliser company CEOs. We can’t have that.
@DrTimMorgan
As soon as food production starts to decline, population will start to decline as well. Food supply is the independent variable and population is the dependent variable.
In July, Chinese exports fell by 14.5% compared with July last year. This is being ascribed to the effect of increases in “the cost of living” on consumers. If we needed yet more evidence of discretionary compression, this is it.
Chinese working age population is also shrinking. This is now a problem for almost every country in the developed and advanced developing world. Even India is now falling beneath replacement birthrates. It will be a while before Indian working age population shrinks, but it is baked in.
If working age population shrinks, then the workforce and consumer base are shrinking simultaneously. That heralds economic ruin all by itself. It makes government debt and pension liabilities impossible to service without large cuts in other spending. Energy resource depletion is on top of this problem and will make it happen faster.
Food Shortages and Choices
There is no question in my mind that the world cannot feed 8 or 9 billion people the Standard American Diet. I won’t try to describe the exact solution in this post, but I will suggest a direction. First, search on
“twitter Ted Naiman”
Right now the lead off article, after the obligatory picture of a lean and mean middle aged medical doctor, features the repost of a twitter by Hava. Naiman and Hava are closely intertwined.
You will see a brief explanation of the food characteristics which supply us with necessary energy and building blocks for body tissues and also satisfy our hunger. Then you will see several panels which show how different foods fit into each category. For a wealthy person in the US or Europe, ALL of these foods are available at the nearest supermarket. But in the poor sections of the world, whether homeless people in London or desperately poor people in poor countries, the choices are much more restricted. Now, I take it as a corollary to the axiom that all of us are about the get less rich, if not outright poor. Which implies that we are going to have to get smarter about which foods we choose.
I only want to point out one obvious choice: edamame (soy beans) vs. the various meats. Now I have nothing against eating a deer or a cow that has eaten grass all its life. But the reality is that almost all of the beef in your friendly supermarket depends on being fed corn or soybeans after an idyllic childhood eating grass. Because the cows are not designed to eat corn or soybeans, they get fat and sick (just like humans who don’t eat the right foods), while the fat adds a certain taste perception and most assuredly increases the weight.
BUT, generations of Asians ate the soybeans. There is a whole panoply of manufactured derivatives of soybeans, such as tofu and tempeh, in addition to the relatively unprocessed beans themselves. When we eat the soy products, we get high protein and moderate calories (by western standards). And if we count the energy expended to feed a village with soybeans and local industry to make tofu and tempeh and to prepare the edamame, there is no comparison.
If we look at soybean culture, we find that soy beans fix their own nitrogen from the air, avoiding reliance on Haber-Bosch and natural gas and an elaborate industrial system.
If we step back and look at this choice, it is hard to see why it is almost never explained to us in such practical terms. The “conspiracy theory” explanation is detailed in Indi from Sri Lanka’s current post, with references to Caitlin Johnstone and Tom Murphy. (Given all the evidence from current indictments in the US, we shouldn’t just discount conspiracy theories.). But a more fundamental explanation is likely to spring from a few more basic factors:
*Our entire infrastructure in the rich countries is aimed in the opposite direction.
*Identify politics can be used to generate fury against anybody who proposes “meatless Mondays” or changes in the educational system or requirements that people change their role in the economic system.
*It’s easy to demonize anyone proposing such changes as “communists”, as we see on the nightly news.
My own prediction is that, as Churchill said about the Americans, the rich world will finally do the right thing, after having done all the wrong things. But I also suggest that time is of the essence, and we don’t have a lot of time to make all of the possible mistakes.
Don Stewart
“Identify politics can be used to generate fury against anybody who proposes “meatless Mondays” or changes in the educational system or requirements that people change their role in the economic system.”
I have a half dozen bottles of B12 from my grandmother as proof of a vast right wing conspiracy against vegan diets. Libs of Tik Tok are paid actors pretending to gloat about indoctrinating minor children with Marxist ideology. The proposed indictments of the kinder gentler party concerning draining strategic reserves, proxy regime change and collusion with China is all propaganda. Soy based diets are safe and effective nutrition and a key building block of collective action to combat overshoot. Light up the dark red background and summon the Dark Winter.
@Peter Cassidy
The solution to the declining working age population is to extend health span without increasing life span. We do know how to do that. We know that about 92 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. The solutions are obvious to those who study non-pharmaceutical interventions. But our publicly funded medical “help” is firmly aimed at the pharmaceutical and invasive medical procedures. I posted, just above, an analysis of the food situation. I won’t go to the same length here, but the solution is very similar, and the barriers are very similar. Neither “problem” would be very complicated for an AI algorithm. What might very well stump the algorithm is “how to make it happen in the real world?”.
Don Stewart
A note on the debate on whither world population. An impact that hasn’t been referenced is the negative effects of the polycrisis (including environmental degradation, climate calamity, intra and inter nation conflict, etc.) on population. Contrary to mainstream projection of continued population growth is it possible that the destructive impact of these trends will lead to significant decline in world population in the medium if not the immediate term? Here’s a link to a study that assesses the impact of one of these factors, climate change, on human population. While it doesn’t draw conclusions about population growth or decline I think the direction is obvious. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/protecting-people-from-a-changing-climate-the-case-for-resilience
Stephanie Pomboy and Jim Rickards discuss the expected upheaval in international currency markets brought about by a BRICS movement to tie a new currency to a specific weight of gold.
A lot of this is beyond my pay grade. But it seems like a good time to pay attention. The discussion is sober and attentive to facts.
Don Stewart
Indeed a significant development imho. Alastair Macleod over at Goldmoney.com has been writing frequently and in detail about this development.
Regarding uranium scarcity. At present, uranium fuel costs are such a small proportion of overall generating cost, there is little incentive to explore new resources or develop innovative fuel cycles.
It takes about 10kg of 0.71% enriched natural uranium to produce 1kg of 5% enriched low enriched uranium. At a burnup of 40GWd/tonne, a 1000MWe light water reactor needs 30 tonnes of new fuel each year. So reasonably assured resources will last about 60 years at current consumption rate.
Even at this high price, uranium price does very little to drive the cost of nuclear power production. At 40GWd/tonne, each kg of LEU will generate 287,677kWh of electric energy. Some 22.05lb of natural uranium is needed to produce 1kg of LEU. So the uranium feedstock needed to make 1kg of LEU will cost $1235. So uranium adds $0.0043 to the cost of each kWh of electricity. This is a small addition to electricity generating cost. Cost would need to increase 3x more to add a penny to nuclear generating costs. Increased uranium price would allow more marginal deposits from coal ash and phosphate to contribute to uranium supply.
One option for extending uranium resource lifetime is to reprocess fuel. Even with standard light water reactors, this would double the fissile resource by recycling fissile plutonium into fresh fuel. A standard light water reactor has a conversion ratio of 0.6. This means that for every uranium atom fissioned, some 0.6 plutonium atoms are created in the fuel. Using thorium oxide as base fertile material in MOX fuel would increase conversion ratio. The Japanese have also explored the possibility of reduced moderation boiling water reactors. If combined with reprocessing, this would reduce uranium consumption by a factor of 250. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_moderation_water_reactor
All these types of numbers look very impressive, but are always subject to the promoter not quite doing enough research into the topic..
For example the WNA only states there are just over 6M tonnes of uranium resources, with an average grade of 0.2%, not quite the 0.71% the above numbers are based upon.
As they say in the adverts, but wait there’s more…
Australia has 28% of these resources… The number given of 1.684Mt is very wrong. BHP by themselves have 2.5M tonnes in the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia. This mine also holds nearly 10% of USGS world reserves of copper according to their latest report.
(In fine print the USGS states that Measured, Indicated and Inferred JORC resources are counted as reserves in their documentation).
I followed the development of this mine for over a decade, and tried to work out how we could access these resources via renewables only. Even BHP spent billions on studying how to access these resources, via usual means, which was shelved when the price of oil took off in 2007-8.
BHP currently have an underground mine at Olympic Dam mining about 10Mt of ore per annum. It has made a loss overall over the last 13 years that public figures are available. The underground mine averages around 2% copper and .5kg U308, with a recovery of over 90% for copper and about 65% for U308. They have been high grading the mine, but still losing cash on operating it..
The plan to access the low grade ore (av 0.62% Cu and 0.21kg/t U308 (plus a bit of gold and silver)), would require an open cut mine. The ore body is approx 5km long by 3km wide and starts at a depth of 350m and goes to approx 1300m in depth. BHP have already acknowledged it would mean digging the biggest hole in the world..
Just removing the waste rock above the ore body would require a hole 6km long by 4km wide 350m deep, or removal of around 20,000,000,000 tonnes of waste. Over the life of mine it would take removal of approx 57B tonnes of waste and ore at a strip ratio of over 5/1 (5 tonnes of waste to 1 tonne of ore) and leave a hole of 6km long 4km wide and 1300m deep!!
It isn’t ever going to happen because the whole concept relies on cheap energy. With current mining costs of just over $US2/t of material moved for open cut mines (depending on depth, hardness etc of material to be moved), it would cost over $US40B to just get to the top of the ore body via open cut, let alone all the other costs of setting up giant processing plants.
All these projects are getting exponentially more expensive because the price of energy is going up and they rely on the background complex system operating normally for them to proceed. No-one bothers to include the energy cost of the background system operating normally in preparing budgets for large scale projects.
It’s precisely why new nuclear plants cost so much, everyone discounts the cost of energy in the continued operation of the existing system, so never allows for costs to rise (new stuff being built in an already energy constrained system) over the time a large project takes to build. Hence every new nuclear plant being built is well above budget (including India, Egypt, Bangladesh and China, not just US and Europe).
In China, the Shidao Bay 2 NPP were meant to cost $US2,466/kw and take 5 years to build in 2012. They cost over $US5,803/kw and took until 2021 to be commissioned.
BTW, my numbers for a large open cut mine at Olympic Dam, using renewables only with both batteries and pumped hydro storage for storing renewable power plus all the solar and wind needed, plus 4 large processing plants to take the mine to 1Mt/a of copper production, came to over $US110B, and that ridiculous number would blow out from things I missed out, inflation and the time taken to implement, with the underlying energy cost of the background system..
Big hint… It’s not even close to physically possible to continue modern civilization without fossil fuels. Every calculation of EROEI is totally wrong with even FFs only ever delivering an EROEI of 10-15/1!! (not the 100/1 for early oil often quoted!!) No-one in any EROEI calculation considers the background energy cost of having roads, transport, education, food for workers, building the factories that make the equipment used, bridges crossed, ports built, mines that mine the minerals for the equipment in the factories that make the machinery etc, etc in their calculations. The total list is incalculable because of the complexity of the system.
If you didn’t have 100,000 students studying physics at high school, leading to 1,000 studying it at university, leading 10 to go on and do doctorates in nuclear physics, you wouldn’t get 10 expert Phds to plan the next NPP, but no-one wants to count the energy involved in educating the 100,000 to get the final 10 experts as an energy cost!! But of course it is!! Likewise for the engineers needed, Likewise for everything that requires expertise in our system of civilization..
Sorry for the long post again Dr Tim…
@Hideaway
As you say, the real energy costs are impossible to calculate.
But they exist!!!!!!!
@John Adams … The only way we can approximate the energy cost of anything is by counting up the total capital costs, operating and maintenance costs in dollars, then attributing the approximate energy cost in that year.
We have rough costs of energy of around 8% per annum of World GDP, with variations of a couple of percent each way over time. It’s not a perfect method, as cost of energy varies around the world, but it’s better than anything currently used.
Highly complex energy producers like nuclear power plants come with a high energy cost in both capital and O&M terms.
Renewables powering a grid, including a lot more transmission lines plus storage of power for low output times, are a lot more complex than chucking some coal in a furnace to heat a boiler and drive a generator. We have been using the latter for well over 100 years as a simple method of centrally producing electricity.
Just about every EROEI study I’ve read assumes wind and solar are free, while coal, gas, oil and nuclear fuel cost money. This is incorrect on an energy basis. They are all ‘free’ to humanity, it just takes energy to build machines capable of turning any of those forms of energy into useful work for ourselves.
By placing a monetary cost onto fossil fuels and uranium, every EROEI study can come up with whatever returns suits the authors. They almost always come to the conclusion that the cost of XYZ Mwh of electricity production is way cheaper from renewables than other sources (ie no ongoing cost of fuels), therefore the EROEI is much better from renewables.
It’s basically a denial of reality, so people can continue to consume and feel good about it, if they use ‘green energy’ and ignore what’s happening to the planet we live on. When fossil fuel use declines so will overall prosperity.
Even in modern western countries like Australia, where I live, the lower EROEI of all forms of energy is lowering living standards of the median citizen. The young of today pay HECS fees to go to Uni, in my youth it was free. In the late 60’s to early 70’s a man on an average wage which was pretty much the median wage, could afford a median 3 bedroom house, a non working wife, kids, and an annual holiday, easily with house paid off over 10-15 years.
Today both husband and wife need to work to pay for a median priced house even if both have average wages, which is well above median wages. Of course they also have their HECS loans to pay off as well. The principal repayments on median house loans are 10-12 times average wages today compared to 4-6 times median wages decades ago. (median wage in Australia 2022 $A60,000, average wage 2022 $A90,000). Official statistics use both median price, for houses and average for wages or whenever it suits to show a better outcome.
The ‘median’ person in Australia today is way worse off than the same ‘median’ person 50 odd years ago, because of declining EROEI. We have just had a 25% increase in power bills, despite (more likely because of) renewables having an increasing percentage of grid supply. They are touted throughout the media as cheaper than coal as the overall price of power goes up. Everyone wants to deny reality if it suits their agenda.
“Just about every EROEI study I’ve read assumes wind and solar are free” just shows how mistaken such studies are.
In fact, the idea of wind and solar energy being ‘free’, though often stated, is utterly risible. If you stand in the sunlight and enjoy its warmth, that might be ‘free’, but any further application has costs. The statement that renewable energy is ‘free’ is complete and utter nonsense!
They would only be ‘free’ if they could be put to use without solar panels, wind turbines, grids, storage systems and so on, meaning we must have the raw materials to create these things, and the energy needed to extract and process those raw materials.
One might just as well say that oil and gas a ‘free’, since we haven’t had to pay to have them placed beneath the surface of the Earth.
The proportion of GDP spent on energy is of limited usefulness, not least because GDP is a heavily distorted (over-inflated) measure, whilst prices oscillate. It’s information for reference, but it doesn’t correspond to ECoE, certainly not in a single year or as a trend.
Dr Tim…
“The proportion of GDP spent on energy is of limited usefulness, not least because GDP is a heavily distorted (over-inflated) measure, whilst prices oscillate. It’s information for reference, but it doesn’t correspond to ECoE, certainly not in a single year or as a trend.”
I don’t disagree with that at all, but what is a better method?? The interesting aspect is that the cost of energy in any one year doesn’t really matter. It could work out to be $10/Mwh or $50/Mwh or $100/Mwh, the ratio or difference in the different energy costs of energy remain the same..
For example, say a coal mine came out at 10:1 ratio for EROEI using $10/Mwh and a solar plant came out at 2:1 using $10/Mwh it doesn’t make a difference if the price used was $20 or $50/MWH those ratios stay the same, so it’s useful comparing the cost of nuclear, to coal to solar or wind in any one year.
The significant aspect for me is that I get an EROEI of 10-12/1 for fossil fuels on average using this method, but less than 2/1 for nuclear, solar and wind, when taking into account capital and lifetime O&M costs in today’s dollars (from each respective industries own numbers for cost!). To use a price of energy that gets renewables and nuclear to a 10-12/1 EROEI, the same energy price on fossil fuels goes to 100/1 plus EROEI.
Using an actual cost of energy is just a reference point across industries. It’s an average across the world of the approximate cost of energy. It makes no allowance for the different usefulness of the type of energy and of course energy costs different amounts in different places .
But something is better than nothing and the commonly used methods by most studies only look at kwhs to make XXX tonnes of steel, aluminium, glass, silicon wafers etc, etc, then the energy used in the factory to put it all together. So they really are useless as they exclude the complexity of the overall system to build whatever energy production unit, the mines, the factories, roads used, ports, trucks and ships transporting plant etc, etc let alone the education and nourishment of all the people involved.
I’m all ears to a better method of working out the EROEI of all forms of energy so we can compare, but in the absence of a better method, why not use capital and O&M costs over the life of the machines? The actual energy returns in MWhs is fairly easy given the actual known life of the machines and/or expected life from each industry plus known capacity factors.
I use to just accept the EROEI numbers from the different industries, but couldn’t work out why I wasn’t getting costs for building different projects anywhere near what they should be given the industry numbers. It was only when I really looked intensely at EROEI I worked out that every industries numbers are a load of old crock (including the 100/1 often referred to for FF in the past!!)
Another pressing problem is that we mine, move and process all materials using fossil fuels to make NPP, solar and wind installations, with all EROEI numbers using FF as the energy source. No-one anywhere tries to work out the EROEI of making electricity producing units with only electricity as the input, so all the numbers are extra useless going forward into a Fossil Fuel free world that’s expected by 2050.
To me it’s why collapse is inevitable, as no-one wants to really work out if an all electric future is remotely possible. Because of the lack of proper research into the overall topic of EROEI available in the public domain, I can only conclude that people (military?) have worked out the impossibility of keeping 8-9-10 billion humans living in comfort in xx years time without FFs, so don’t really want the conclusions known by the general public. The alternative, of rising fossil fuel use can continue for a few decades, if countries turn to coal to liquids and thus frying the planet leading to collapse anyway..
Your work Dr Tim is the best in the public domain about the problem of declining EROEI and it’s effect on economies, highlighting that we live in an energy civilization and not a monetary civilization. Once overall FFs start declining, either by law or just depletion, the decline in prosperity will accelerate with unrelenting momentum. It wont just stop at discretionary spending either, pretty soon essential spending will also fall as there will just not be the energy available (Sri Lanka et al at present).
@Hideaway.
Totally agree with you.
Any amount of political (or other) wishful thinking isn’t going to change the situation.
(Techno-fantasies are just that. Fantasies. The energy inputs that would go into building stuff in space are huge.)
@John Adams
Somebody should write an article about fantasies. When things begin to look shaky, all sorts of fantasies sprout, bloom, and die…like a desert plant with a little rain:
“Ten of the top bounce-back experts and motivational speakers on the planet will be showing you how to let go of all negativity, end all suffering, heal the past, be happy now, and bounce back higher than ever!”
“The SPAC boom will surely go down in history as one of the biggest stock-market heists ever, made possible by Consensual Hallucination. ”
my third example would be the videos of the supporters of a certain political operator who is being equated with the second coming of Jesus.
Don Stewart
A fantasy is any plan yet to be enacted. Without such plans humanity would never have evolved beyond the hunter gatherer stage. The fantasy of steam driven, iron ships brought us global commerce. The fantasy of flight eventually gave us the 747. The fantasy of atomic energy eventually gave us the nuclear reactor. How pie in the sky all of these things would have been considered in the 18th century. God help men who don’t have fantasies.
Fine line between fantasy and delusion buddy. We all hope your delusion is not, bur most of us are aware it is and many of us suspect your type will waste completely disproportionate amounts of resources on your fantasies
It seems to me that we can now assess potentialities through our knowledge of the laws of science – today, for instance, we wouldn’t (unless we wanted to) fall for the old fantasy of turning base metals into gold. We do carry on falling for lots of fantasies – many in the field of replacing fossil fuel energy 100% plus with renewables – but nowadays we only fall for these things if we choose to be deluded.
i have been contemplating the cornucopian mindset for over a decade now. There are a lot of successful people who fall into this trap; I think a lot of that is tied to optimism being a central characteristic leading to their success, heightened by a 40 year bull market of financialization. I think they tend to see lets say Apple putting a robot in their house as some sort of fulfillment of their childhood sci-fi fantasies. But the reality is that there is very little that has been a categorical improvement which has come about in the last 50 years. Most people will say the cell phone I guess but realistically its just dubious extension of other preexisting technologies. ie the phone, radio, and television. Due to their success in life they tend to stay on the well manicured roads, and still fly off to the well maintained hotels, etc. To them the myth of progress is still virtually their religion they treat practical people who pay attention to these issues we discuss here as virtual heretics. In all my years of talking to people about these things I don’t know a single intelligent and successful person who was capable of leaving their comfort zone and understanding the innate flaws in the cornucopian mindset. The ones who have come close quickly shy away from all discussion on the matter. The fact that largely the optimists and cornucopians generally now run our society along with the even larger population of complete incompetents (https://sonar21.com/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia-so-strong-the-role-of-human-capital-and-western-education/) does not bode well for our future.
Everyone is so gripped by detest for their ancestors lives they won’t consider the fantasy of quaint rural existence with real community. The fantasy is always space mining, zero point energy, room temperature semi-conductors etc. Anything argument against those makes you a doomer heretic to the religion of progress and an ensuing lecture on science and innovation
@Peter Cassidy
But not all fantasies can become reality.
Just because someone thinks of something doesn’t mean that one day it will be possible.
There are limits.
Do you think that a Star Trek style teleport will ever be reality? It’s a neat narrative tool for a story but will it ever become reality and if so, would you want to “travel” in/on one?
For me, the ECoE reality that Hideaway has written about above, trumps fantasy. The energy/resources to create productive industrial infrastructure in earth orbit, the moon or Mars doesn’t exist.
It’s not being negative/pessimistic to see this.
John Adams,
A Startrek teleporter is impossible for reasons that are firmly grounded in quantum physics. It is impossible now and will remain impossible with any technology or energy source that we will ever discover in the future. Quantum mechanics just doesn’t allow the level of determinism that would allow it to function. That is how we know that it will never be possible at any time in the future.
Orbital infrastructure is different. There is nothing physically impossible about it. Indeed, we already use it for many purposes. What Dennis L was discussing is orbital manufacturing using resources from the moon and asteroids. This will indeed be energy intensive to establish. But it has the potential to yield energy through solar power satellites. These can return energy to Earth. There is nothing technically impossible about this. Every part of it is based on sound physics and engineering. We do not know that it is economically possible. And we do not know what the EROI of solar power satellites will be. So we aren’t in a position yet to say whether this is practical in reality or not.
A cheap, reusable heavy lift vehicle is a key technology that must be provided to make this at all possible. Whether or not Elon Musk’s Starship will meet this need is uncertain. But he is building these rockets at a rate that dwarfs the production of any launch vehicle to date. If he succeeds in reducing the cost of access to space from $20,000/kg to $100/kg, then we will be a lot closer to doing what Gerard O’Neill envisaged in 1976.
The stakes could hardly be higher. If solar power satellites can be manufactured in space and demonstrated to efficiently deliver power to receivers on Earth surface, then a renewable energy transition will be a much more realistic prospect. There are too many technological uncertainties at present to know how realistic this is. But a good researcher never jumps to conclusions.
Hideaway, you correctly identify one of the chief criticisms of EROI as a metric. Where does one draw system boundaries? Charles Hall is generally considered to be the father of EROI. And his analyses went further in this respect than most others. His study of the EROI of the Spanish solar sector is definitely worth reading. EROI needs to account for labour expended on a project or technology, because that is productive work that is not available to other parts of the economy and is effectively paid for in goods and services, which represent embodied energy themselves.
Another implication of including labour and capital equipment into EROI, is that EROI has strong scale effects. If a design team and industry are established to build a single powerplant, EROI will be much poorer than it would be if those same fixed expenditure resources are spread over multiple units. We see that problem strongly driving the cost of new nuclear plants in the west. Inefficient regulatory systems that drive up build times also negatively effect EROI, because they involve more labour and resources being tied up for longer. In the renewable energy sector, EROI has presumably improved as scale economies have increased.
Considerations like embodied energy in structures and system lifetime, place a hard upper limit on realistically achievable EROI. These studies often ignore labour costs and tell us what EROI could be with infinite scale economies. Most EROI studies that focus on embodied materials, therefore tell us what the best case EROI is. The EROI of nuclear power was likely higher in the 1970s, before environmental activists made it their mission to ruin the industry.
@Peter Cassidy
A technical question on putting solar panels in space/earth orbit…….
If a solar panel on earth has a 25 years life expectancy, how long will one last in space in direct sunlight 24 hours a day? (No atmosphere to defuse sunlight)
Is the reason a solar panel deteriorates because it eventually breaks down due to UV?
“Other glass coverings, such as fused silica and lead glasses, may reduce this efficiency loss to less than 1% per year.”
“May reduce” isn’t the same as “will reduce”.
If it were possible/feasible, why aren’t solar panels being manufactured here on earth with a 100 years life spans?
And can these panels be manufactured in orbit by robots? Can the robots be manufactured on earth and transported to space? Can the orbital factories be maintained/repaired? Will the repair/maintenance be conducted by more robots or will humans need to do the fixing?
Non of it is proven.
What interests me about this is how solar power, captured in space, can be sent to Earth?
‘What interests me about this is how solar power, captured in space, can be sent to Earth?’
The most commonly proposed solution is to transmit power using microwaves at 2.45GHz. A large SPS producing 5-10GWe would be parked in geostationary orbit. A klystron array ~1km in diameter would transmit power to a receiver station (rectenna) on Earth. The rectenna would be a wire rope net, some ~10km in diameter. Transmission efficiency could exceed 90%, but 60% is considered to be a more realistic target. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/solar-power-satellites
‘“Other glass coverings, such as fused silica and lead glasses, may reduce this efficiency loss to less than 1% per year.”
“May reduce” isn’t the same as “will reduce”.’
Quite true. There are technical unknowns with every step of this process. There are political and environmental problems as well. I am not suggesting that this is ‘definitely’ something we should be rushing into doing. My point is that it is definitely something we should ‘consider’ as part of the overall solution set. Setting up the infrastructure would be a monumental undertaking.
@Peter Cassidy.. ” EROI needs to account for labour expended on a project or technology”
It’s a lot more than just labour. You can’t just drop all the ingredients for a NPP on the side of the runway into a PNG highland village and expect that the local labour would be able to build a NPP. The labour needs to be educated and gain expertise in a whole range of skills, from engineering to physics, to welding, to plumbing, to electrical engineering, to hundreds of other specific skills.
As I mentioned up thread, you need to educate thousands to gain the few who have high level understanding and expertise in a field like nuclear physics, you can’t just take 10 people off the street, educate them over a couple of years and expect them to design and operate a NPP safely. We need to filter out those not competent, which is what our existing system does, but it comes at a high energy cost. The more complex something is, the higher this background energy cost is.
We have built our system on much less complex energy sources, with a much lower background energy cost. Digging coal, crushing it, building a furnace to heat a boiler, putting some pipes together to get water from a nearby river and building and running a generator driven by steam is all simple technology, so has a much lower background energy cost.
Another aspect, that’s never included in EROEI costs is how the raw material energy cost is always rising. Calvo, Mudd et al showed how a 30% increase in copper production between 2003 and 2013 came with a 46% increase in energy used to produce that copper. Average world grades of copper fell by 25% over that period.
A weakness in EROEI calculations for an electrical future assumes everyone will be driving EVs, and using heat pumps, both of which would require much greater use of copper than present. Of course because that is outside the narrow world of energy production, there is no allowance for it, yet all those workers from various professions will need to live in houses heated by heat pumps instead of by gas or coal furnace and drive their EV for all purposes, so their background energy use has risen, which feeds into the EROEI of whatever they are building .
A common misbelief is that we will need less energy if everything is powered by electricity as it’s more efficient than fossil fuels. What gets missed is how inefficient the processes for turning electricity into plastics, or mining in a remote area with just electricity, or long distance travel and trade, or making synthetic fuels/hydrogen for high heat applications, or allowing the 80% of current human population that are currently not enjoying a modern western lifestyle to have equal lifestyles.
On a slightly different note, I’ve been investing for over 4 decades mostly in natural resources, and one aspect I’ve noticed is that for a successful new mine based on a new discovery of whatever mineral you like, there is always a very robust feasibility study, based on very conservative assumptions first. It’s pretty much the same for every business stepping into something new. The unsuccessful ones tend to have feasibility studies with very questionable assumptions regarding both prices and costs. I’ve even seen some mines get funding and built without any feasibility study done, they invariably went bust..
Even governments do feasibility studies on new projects, yet the collective of human civilization has assumed we can solve climate problems by going electrical, without reducing living standards for the 15-20% that enjoy high living standards, raise the rest to equal standards, all without any robust feasibility study to see if it’s remotely possible. The old rhetoric of failing to plan means planning to fail comes to mind…
Three incredibly informative comments Hideaway, thank you.
It is indeed – thanks, Hideaway.
As you may know, I’ve compared underlying or ‘clean’ economic output (C-GDP) with energy consumption and found remarkable correlation between the two over a very long (43-year) period. This raises the question: why haven’t we become more efficient at converting energy use into economic value? I’ve speculated that any gains in energy conversion efficiency have been cancelled out by deterioration (depletion) of the non-energy resource base, copper ore densities being one example. Your reference to falling copper ore grades reinforces this view.
Don Stewart, thank you for this link which I found very informative, especially Jim Rickard’s account of how first Bretton Woods landed inevitably on gold as the sole determinant of monetary value — and which is apparently being followed by the BRICS group — along a similar, Keynesian way.
I joined this forum because of my interest in the concept of ECOE and the repercussions therefrom on growth in a finite planet.I have very much appreciated the work of Dr Morgan.
However,while trawling the internet for related material and noting that fiat currency is of itself destructive of planetary resources I have become intrigued by the developments in the Bitcoin space.
I do agree that Alister Macleod is a veritable guru when gold is being discussed but even he has expressed a ‘fascination’ with Bitcoin .
Just as we talk about transition from fossil fuels to ‘clean energy ‘ I take the view that Bitcoin is the transition from fiat (as exemplified by the petro dollar ) to a sound decentralised international currency. Fiat can be created out of thin air whereas bitcoin’s origins are energy based . Which means that we have a direct connection between energy and the currency. The energy in its creation can be utilised from energy surplus to the immediate requirements of humans. Since there is a finite number of Bitcoin then planetary limits are baked in and in theory smooth degrowth could ensue.
The presentations on Youtube by Michael Saylor, Saifedean Ammous and Jeff Booth are highly informative on ‘digital gold’ and sound money.
Bitcoin is begging for your assets to disappear under the failing of infrastructure. Happy to gobble up the real money with this head fake tho so by all means Go Saylor Go!
I also see Bitcoin as a “commodity” rather than a currency.
The value fluctuates too much for it to be an effective means of exchange.
Perhaps it’s worth an investment punt (like Tulips), but who is going to pay for a coffee with Bitcoin, (or anything ) if it’s value is more tomorrow than it is today? When Bitcoins value is on the rise, it stops being used as a means of exchange and becomes a store of value.
(That value still being measured against fiat currency $$$$$)
@postkey
I did not mention CBDC’s These are just digital fiat and controlled by a central bank.
I had read the Tim Watkins blog but clearly he does do not address the unique property of Bitcoin. It is totally decentralised .
As things stand operating the current fiat system uses enormous amounts of energy.
Decentralized? It is 100% controlled by complex infrastructure. Dubious claim.. show me how it works as energy becomes barely worth harvesting and certainly not distributed to plebes and we can talk
Cryptos are energy-intensive (through the ‘mining’ process) and energy dependent (they rely on data systems not crashing through power outages). There may be fixes for this, but we need to see them.
The energy use of Bitcoin (its proof of work mechanism) is its advantage. It creates fairness and gives it value. What is the point of money if it can be created from nothing? Gold has value precisely because it has an energy cost.
There are alternatives to proof of work that use less energy such as the proof of stake mechanism used by Ethereum, the second largest crypto. Proof of stake reaches consensus based on ownership. Now this approach works well for say stocks e.g. at the AGM the largest shareholders get the most votes. Makes perfect sense. And it is a reason why the SEC views most cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin as centralised unregistered securities.
But would you want proof of stake for a monetary system? Would people be happy in a general election if those with the most money would get the most votes, after all they have the most to lose? Very unlikely.
Arguably proof of stake mirrors the current fiat system as the central banks decide the monetary policy generally for the interests of the financial sector.
What used to be a virtuous cycle of high grade ores extracted by high grade fossil energy in the middle of the 20th century, has slowly reached a screeching halt by 2019. Now, the process has started to morph into a vicious cycle, where we try to extract raw materials (taking an exponentially increasing amount of energy to get) with a rapidly failing energy system.
For those who still think that this is pure hyperbole, and that things cannot be that bad, here are some stark reminders. In 2020 the weight of human made stuff has surpassed the weight of all things living on this planet (here is a great visualization). All of this was mined fairly recently: thanks to exponential growth (a perfect fit for the past century) we were doubling this amount every 20 years, so half of all this simply wasn’t there two decades ago. For the next doubling, this means, that we would need to mine, refine and smelt the same amount of materials as we did during the course of the entire human history. Even a small change in energy demand (due to ever lower resource quality) makes a colossal difference here.
Delusion Comes in Many Flavors
Right at this moment US courts are wrestling with the question of whether the court can actually enforce it’s rulings and procedures in the case of Donald Trump. Prosecutors assemble vast amounts of data and testimony to grand juries and depositions and are required to turn that information over to the defendant so that the defendant can prepare for the trial. But the prosecutor and the defense need to agree on exactly how much of the evidence the defense can make public. Usually a routine meeting between the attorneys leads to an agreement. Trump has made it clear that he will not be bound by the court procedures, because they interfere with his right of free speech. The judge can, in theory, put Trump into custody and restrict his access to the media. But, I suggest, one has to be blind to reality in the form of screaming mobs to think that this is all going to happen according to the subdued and fact driven court room norm.
The US faced a somewhat similar situation in 1832:
President Andrew Jackson, a populist, reacting to a Supreme Court decision that treaties with the Cherokee Nation took precedence over Georgia law and the wishes of the President. Jackson, perhaps apocrophally, “John Marshall [the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court] has made his decision now let him enforce it.” The case revolved around Georgia’s attempt to apply state laws to Cherokee lands. The Court had ruled against Georgia’s authority to do so and Jackson, dedicated to Indian removal, allegedly challenged Marshall.
In reality, both Georgia and Jackson simply ignored the court and we all know what happened to the Cherokee.
Trump is getting enthusiastic support from his crowds with condemnations of government and especially the courts. Recall that Trump has been very popular in many segments of the military and some police. Can the court silence Trump and force him, likely using police and military power, to use the finely crafted methods we have evolved for use during trials?
It seems to me that we are experiencing the poem: “the center cannot hold”. I also suggest that government over-reach during Covid, pervasive propaganda from all sides, and the pressures of a slowly collapsing American Empire, and declining prosperity, are all putting a lot of moving parts into play. Is all that evidence collected by the prosecutors simply as irrelevant as John Marshall’s decision back in 1832?
Stay tuned.
Don Stewart
Interesting, Don, but please let’s remember that party politics are outside our subjects of interest.
Our task, it seems to me, is to explore economics and related issues objectively, and partisanship is inimical to objectivity. In a situation like this, I can appreciate the arguments made by both sides, but the debate is peripheral to, or at least divorced from, the fundamentals of rising ECoEs, decreasing prosperity and a ludicrously over-extended financial system. America won’t fix deteriorating prosperity – or much else – by changing its leadership.
I am a huge admirer of the US Constitution. But any such system is in the hands of fallible individuals.
@Dr. Morgan
The issue I point to is the Rule of Law in the US. Jim Rickards usually starts his talks about the US dollar with the statement that the US is under the Rule of Law…while he claims that Russia and China are not. Be that as it may, it seems to me that the Rule of Law underlays almost all EcoE analysis.
The US, of course, was born in revolt agains the Rule of English Law. Nobody here used to believe that there was any Divine Right of Kings. The Rule of Law was significantly advanced by John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the 1820s and 30s. Andrew Jackson, a populist, rejected the Rule of Law if it stood in the way of accomplishing his goals. The Southern White Secession movement was also a rejection of the rule of law, embodied by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Which led to the bloodiest war the US has ever fought.
The next round of rejection of the rule of law was the Monetary Silver movement of the late 19th century: “you shall not crucify man on a cross of gold”. That revolt failed, but came pretty close to success.
The next notable rejection was Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court during the Depression. That attempt failed.
This time around the details are different, but interesting if we try to read the tea leaves. We now have expensive lawyers concocting schemes to overturn election results…at the risk of their licenses to practice. We have huge crowds cheering on a man you wouldn’t think they would admire at all. That man has also been labeled as a populist, just like Andrew Jackson. The Colt pistol of 1873 was labeled “the equalizer” because it made a small man the equal of a large man…goodbye to fists and hello to bullets and don’t count on the rule of law to help you.
I see our current situation in the US as disillusionment with the Rule of Law. There are reports that Wall Street money has been looking for a Republican they can support who is “moderate”…and not finding anybody with voter appeal. I suggest that we have more than a small chance to see an upheaval which will destroy a lot of monetary assets, as well as social cohesion. Rising ECoE is likely one of the causal factors, and the simple unavailability of high density energy may become the result.
Don Stewart
“But any such system is in the hands of fallible individuals.”
Ah ha, and this doesn’t apply to healthcare or just about everything we do in life? Who coulda knowed?
@Don Stewart
“slowly collapsing American Empire”
I think, when an empire sees it’s best times as being in the past rather than the future, then decline has already set in.
MAGA.
@Dr. Morgan
An example of a failed revolt which nevertheless triggered a compromise. Malcolm X led a revolt against The Rule of Law and proposed instead a separation of black people from white people. He thought that the “majority rules” built into the US system would always disadvantage black people. Martin Luther King, a preacher, thought that religion was a way to bridge the racial gap, and that appealing to the better instincts of the politically dominant white people could result in integration. Ironically, the practical implementation of King’s goals was furthered by the fact that Lyndon Johnson, who was singlehandedly responsible for getting much of the civil rights legislation through Congress, had stolen his initial election in Texas.
Will the Trump revolt result in despotism or a reform which addresses the complaints of the people who feel unrepresented in the current system? Wealthion currently features a speaker who claims that the Wall Street elites are stealing the country blind. So it’s not only angry, gun-toting working class people who are angry. This actually ties in with what you have said on several occasions about the British system.
Don Stewart
Politics aside, the US president is largely a figure head. It isn’t realistic to expect a newly elected president to correct all of nation’s problems, anymore than a bad one could single handedly screw it up. Biden is practically senile, yet the apparatus of government still functions without him. To fix America’s problems would take the coordinated efforts of thousands of people, willing to put politics aside.
That said, I find it absurd that Trump and Biden are the best that their respective parties have to offer for the office of president. I realise that the presidency is bigger than one man. But one of these men is senile, the other is pathologically arrogant. Both are really too old to possess the dynamism needed to overcome the vested interests that control the US government. It just doesn’t look good to the outside world.
Point taken, Peter, but let’s not open the can of worms that is party politics……
“I find it absurd that Trump and Biden are the best that their respective parties have to offer for the office of president”
It is not absurd if you realise that US presidents need to be ‘useful idiots’ that the elites who own and operate the system can control like puppets.
Presidents cannot be free to have minds of their own. Even Obama complained, when asked why he had not been able to achieve his stated agenda across two terms as president, that the real obstacle was that he couldn’t tell the bankers what to do.
The system of government and politics is a sham, a puppet show, a ruse to keep the people powerless and divided.
I can’t remember a time when someone wasn’t ‘stealing the country blind’, and usually it’s the elites. That may very well be happening in the US, and I’m certain that it’s rampant in Britain. It tends to need more than this inequity alone to trigger a revolt – for example, what happened in France in 1789, and Russia in 1917, had a number of additional causes.
I’m a huge admirer of Martin Luther King. Incidentally, wasn’t much of the progress on civil rights achieved by Bobby Kennedy?
@Dr. Morgan
LBJ and Bobby Kennedy
LBJ was a master of the political process. Like Lincoln, he could count the votes and figure out how best to proceed. Lincoln, as the head of the military, rescinded the first emancipation proclamation by the victorious Union General in coastal Georgia…because he needed the votes from the slave states which had not seceded. When Kentucky and Tennessee were firmly in Union hands, he calculated that he could declare an emancipation proclamation and no additional slave states would secede.
Johnson counted the votes he would lose in the South if he passed the Voting Rights Act, and found it a price worth paying. He lost votes, but the Act wasn’t what brought him down…it was VietNam.
Robert Kennedy was not active at that time, to my recollection. I think the Kennedy clan always felt that the plebeian LBJ (born into poverty in Texas) was not in their class.
Don Stewart
LOL
Everyone has a limited understanding of reality.
We are all potentially dangerous in our actions.
Dr Tim, may I offer a quote attributed to Dr King that seems most apposite for the current times: ‘People with good intentions but limited understanding, are more dangerous than people with total ill will’.
As you say, elites have always enriched themselves, which is one of the enduring messages from Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’.
I’d describe our national economic model as consisting of: ‘The Plunder, The Sieve and The Veil’. The Plunder involves two processes. The first is funding the trade gap by selling assets (property, infrastructure and companies) into foreign ownership – and that explains the larger and increasing amounts of dividend income going overseas. The second is funding the fiscal deficit by issuing index-linked debt to foreign entities combined with effective monetisation from the central bank – and that is the reason for larger amounts of interest payments, much of them going abroad. The Sieve is the process of Severe Financial Repression -SFR – featuring continual debasement of the currency, and through inflation stripping incomes of purchasing power while elevating asset prices – and that is one of the reasons that the fall in prosperity is accelerating. The Veil is the policy of maintaining and increasing asset prices, notably housing to create an illusion of wealth – and that is the reason the country is unmoored and totally adrift from sound economic bearings of any kind.
As you have so rightly pointed out there seems to be a genuine belief among the governors, intelligentsia and national commentariat that the nation can: Spend its’ way to prosperity; Borrow its’ way out of a debt problem; and Print its’ way to monetary stability. That’s a great trick – it’s a great pity that it doesn’t work.
Thanks Kevin.
Let me start by saying that we – the collective ‘we’ – now know, or can know, where things are heading. Renewables, being less dense than fossil fuels, can’t ‘fix’ the impoverishment effect of rising ECoEs, and the financial system is predicated on a concept of infinite growth which is fast becoming untenable. These things either are, or could be, known to decision-makers in any country.
So what is the UK doing in this situation? Essentially, making things worse, for short-term financial, sectoral or electoral advantage. If ‘economics is energy’ is becoming self-evident, then the old ‘economics is money’ orthodoxy is failing. That means that economic ‘liberalism’, entirely predicated on ‘economics is money’, is being discredited. Yet the UK remains wedded to an extreme form of financial liberalism. What I still fail to understand is why the voters continue to fall for this self-serving nonsense. Shouldn’t the Truss/Kwarteng episode have persuaded the public that the Conservatives’ extreme economic ideology is both self-serving and intellectually bankrupt?
Here’s a case in point. Once rates started rising, it was obvious that landlords would try to pass increased mortgage costs on to tenants, who are amongst the least-well-off members of society. Seeing this, Spain put a stop to it, by introducing a blanket ban, of unstated duration, on rent rises. It has helped to bring Spanish headline inflation down. The UK could have done this, and it would have reduced the pressure on the BoE for further rate rises.
But no – the UK always seems to favour rentiers
‘People with good intentions but limited understanding, are more dangerous than people with total ill will’.
Well said, there is nothing more dangerous than a do-gooder!
Wheal lives most of the year in Austin, TX, which has been 105 degrees F now for weeks and weeks with little to no rain. Soil temperatures around 125, which is not good for growing one’s own food. Watching the sunrise in the cool mountains tells you why generations of fairly well to do people from Texas migrate like geese to the mountains in the summer. Which suggests something about energy. If one stays in Austin, one “needs” some energy in order to live a modern life in the summer. If one wants to go to the mountains, one needs some energy to live a modern life. And, of course, one needs some energy to move between the two worlds.
Years ago Dmitry Orlov wrote about the potential for homesteading in Russia. There is plenty of land for homesteading, and the government will get you to the land on a river boat with some elementary survival supplies for one winter. Then you are on your own. Just speculatively, how do you think Wheal’s 2000 pounds of propane tanks and a Tesla he can’t use align with what Orlov described?
Our ancestors had, by definition of ancestry, figured out how to survive in many different hard environments and also be prosperous enough to reproduce. [Women need to have a little fat or else their reproductive system just shuts down. Ballerinas need not apply.]. Their definition of baseload was a lot different compared to our definition today.
What would be the EROI of a solar power satellite?
I decided to perform an energy balance assessment for a solar power satellite. This does not constitute a complete EROI analysis, but it does balance the primary energy needed to lift a satellite into orbit, against the electrical energy returned to the grid.
The mass of an SPS is taken to be 6.5kg/kWe produced at source. Transmission of power to an Earth based rectenna is assumed to be 60% efficient. The satellite will be in sunlight for 95% of time. The assumed lifetime of the satellite is 30 years. On this basis, the number of kWh produced by each kg of satellite mass can be calculated.
Q1 = (1/6.5) x 0.6 x 0.95 x 24 x 365.25 x 30 = 23,061kWh = 83,021MJ
I am going to assume that satellite components are lifted from Earth surface to geostationary orbit, 36,000km above Earth. This is inefficient compared to making the components in space, because lifting mass from Earth surface requires roughly 50x as much energy as lifting ores from the surface of the moon. But space manufacturing would require huge investments in space manufacturing and has not been demonstrated.
Elon Musk’s Starship will likely be part of any heavy lift solution, but there is no data at present on its payload capacity to geostationary orbit. The Falcon Heavy carries some 155.8 tonnes of kerosene and 362.6 tonnes of liquid oxygen in both stages. The vehicle has a payload capacity of 26.7 tonnes to GEO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
Using this data, the energy content of the rocket propellant can be calculated:
Q2 = 155,800 x 43 + 362,600 x 0.72 = 6,960,472MJ
The energy cost per kg of payload is:
Q3 = 6,960,472MJ/26,700 = 261MJ/kg
Energy balance = Q1/Q3 = 83,021/261 = 318
This tells us that over the course of a 30 year lifetime, a solar power satellite will return 318 times as much energy as the energy content of the propellant needed to lift it. Presumably, any SPS manufactured in space would enable a much better net energy return, but this would come at the cost of investing in substantial space manufacturing capability.
The energy balance does not constitute an EROI analysis, as a great many energy costs are omitted. The analysis does not take into account the embodied energy of the satellite components, the rocket vehicle itself (assumed reusable) or the rectenna. No attempt has been made to include development costs or based space launch facilities. But the energy balance does demonstrate that the SPS is a potential energy source.
The analysis also tells us something about rockets. A rocket taking off is a dazzling display of fire and smoke and it is easy to assume that the energy involved in lifting materials into orbit must be immense. But the fuel load of the Falcon Heavy at take-off is 155.8 tonnes of kerosene (200,000 litres). This is actually less than the full fuel load of a 747-400 (216,840 litres). https://executiveflyers.com/how-much-fuel-does-a-boeing-747-hold/
Rockets appear large partly because they carry all of the oxygen needed to burn their fuel, whereas aeroplanes draw all oxygen from the air. The 747 will burn its fuel load over many hours, whereas a rocket will accelerate into low Earth orbit in 8 – 10 minutes. So the power output of rocket engines is enormous. But the energy consumed putting a person into orbit is comparable to a long distance flight on Earth.
Civil War in the US?
This discussion features a conversation between a former right-wing young woman and a former FBI agent. The young woman early on says the struggle right at this moment is between the rule of law and acts of violence in support of a man deemed to be God-like (or god?). The courtrooms and the judges and witnesses are requiring special protection.
While the mainstream media describe Trump as deranged, Trump in his rallies says that his critics are deranged…to loud applause from his audiences.
Talking this evening with my wife, both of us expect violence in the streets if Trump is jailed. The FBI has estimates of the number of people in the US who would consider it a privilege to die for him. One of them died today in a shootout with the FBI. He left behind a handicapped son.
What all this reminds me of is Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 film about the Nuremberg rallies by the German Nazis. A very dangerous time for the US. How can the country pull itself back together? Can the physical economy and the financial system just cruise along with BAU? Three years ago military towns voted very heavily for Trump. Can the military, particularly state national guard units, be relied upon to defend the country rather than Trump?
Don Stewart
PS. I call your attention to the FBI man saying that the code of conduct in the FBI gets more strict the higher one’s position. In politics, it is reversed. An attorney chasing accident victims is judged more harshly than the expensive lawyers who helped Trump plan his coup. This series of trials may be a shock to some of those attorneys.
The question of social stability under conditions of economic deterioration is relevant to what we discuss here, but this strays over the line into party politics, I think, which is off-limits. (I mention this before anyone ripostes with Bidens and laptops).
@Dr. Morgan
The question of the causal factors which resulted in the US finding itself in this position would necessarily go into things such as changes in religions, economic deterioration, lost wars, the changes in relationships between the sexes, the role of Rupert Murdoch, social media as a megaphone, the rise of certain races, tensions produced by relationships with China, and so on for a very long list. I certainly don’t claim to be the historian who could put all that stuff together into a coherent narrative (e.g., The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
I’m just pointing out what I see as a very real path to domestic conflict in the US. We already have armed conflict, as mentioned in the discussion. My message is that there is a slippery slope that changes the scattered shootings into very real war. The “ghost guns” (Ikea like guns which evade any gun control laws) are one enabler. There is a firecracker (the legal proceedings with the real possibility of jail terms) and there is plenty of powder.
The counter evidence is that for all the shouting, and occasional shooting, life still goes on with debt piling up and long term bonds being sold.
Don Stewart
That’s fine, Don, but I want us to steer clear of party politics, hard to do once the name of a certain former president appears in a discussion.
@Dr. Morgan
IF the model is correct that powder accumulates over time, but it takes a match to set off the explosion, then the identification of possible matches is part of being prepared. Matches might include:
*the unwillingness of anyone to buy US treasury debt
*a multiple breadbasket failure of the food supply
*somebody pushing the nuclear button (a Nate Hagens’ concern)
*unexpectedly successful implementation of a BRICS currency
*failure, over a short time frame, of the middle grades of petroleum (e.g., diesel, kerosene)
*collapse of the EU project
*hundreds of millions of climate refugees
etc.
and including a military or political coup in a Great Power.
Many of those probabilities are a lot greater than zero. I will note in passing that James Howard Kunstler renamed his blog from “Clusterf**k Nation” to “What’s Up?”. The last entry I read reverted back to the original name.
A kinder and gentler version, but just as damning:
Looking at the USA from over the pond, it strikes me, that both sides think that they are defending democracy from the other.
Each thinking that the other is rigging the system.
I’m not sure where you go from there? Civil unrest seems “baked in”.
If Trump is sent down, then people take to the streets in protest.
If Trump wins the next election and restricts voter rights and consolidates the supreme court. Then people will take to the streets. “Poke the Woke”!
But…….. hasn’t this been playing out since the creation of the USA? Federal v State.
After all, the founding fathers didn’t like “the rule of law” that was on offer at the time and were in a minority.
@John Adams
I agree that conflict has been part of the history of the US. IMHO, we are currently suffering from governments which are NOT reflecting the views of the majority. Take reproductive rights as an example. Well organized and funded groups have persuaded some politicians that extreme abortion laws are “god’s work”. But when the questions get put on the ballot (e.g., Ohio very recently), the majority tends to reject government interference in what they perceive as a family matter. The origins of the imbalance result from winner-take-all voting in jerry-mandered districts. Plus the inordinate influence of small states as compared to diluted influence of large states.
Social media has raised the conflict to many decibels of noise. And some pundits who should know better manipulate their message to appeal to a pretty low common denominator.
Don Stewart
@Don Stewart
“we are currently suffering from governments which are NOT reflecting the views of the majority”
But wasn’t that always the case? The founding fathers, who instigated the split from Britain and declared indipendence, were not in the majority st the time. It was smithing along the lines of 30% in favour, 30% loyalists and 30% not inclined either way? It was never put to the vote.
(Isn’t one of the groups that support Trump named after the fact that the revolutionaries were a minority?)
The suffrage that followed, though better than anything on offer in Europe at the time, was still not universal. Each State decided who could and couldn’t vote. The vote, still tied to property ownership, still being the criteria in many States. 50% of the population were not counted straight off. Those folks picking the cotton as well. Plus the original local inhabitants.
When South Carolina voted to leave the Union, it was just those rich folk in the State assembly that actually got to vote.
Rigging the voting system is nothing new. Plenty of black folk ended up in a tree for trying to exercise their democratic rights.
American democracy has always been a bit of a myth.
What’s playing out now, is nothing new.
It seems to me that one side is trying to fight for the right to vote and the other side is trying to Make America Great Again.
@John Adams
Agree with much of what you say. Governor Desantis of Florida delivered a diatribe about all of Joe Biden’s steps to make it easier to vote during the Pandemic. But, he says, Florida really would like to stay in the Union, but the US government will have to change substantially. I find this rather comical since a ton of people living in Florida are dependent on the US taxpayers and government.
If you visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and do the tour of the building where the Virginia Declaration of Rights (I may have the name wrong) was drafted and signed (the original “all men are created equal”), you find that 90 percent of the people in the room would not have been able to vote. Williamsburg emphasizes it by only allowing 10 percent to sit at the table.
As a student in school, I was always mystified why anybody thought that the Magna Carta was a milestone of democracy. All it did was require the king to discuss things with the barons. So the great advance was a discussion between war lords???
Actually, I guess it was the first crack in the “divine right of kings”. But a lot of people in the US still want to believe that their select politician is a servant of God. That is true in spades of a lot of Trump supporters.
Don Stewart
William Rees on overshoot and collapse. An excellent summary of our current situation and prognosis for the next few decades.
“(4) Efforts to address the human demographic anomaly and resulting eco-crisis without attempting to override innate human behaviours that have become maladaptive are woefully incomplete and doomed to fail.”
that’s the challenge squared, because innate built-in long-ago evolved human behavior will continuously resist any “efforts” at managing degrowth.
thanks for that.
the human story is an amazing fantastic glorious profound wonderment, too bad about the inevitable suffering.
his concluding words:
“… in these circumstances, wide-spread societal collapse cannot be
averted—collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be
endured. Global civilizational collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by a major
human population ‘correction’. In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition
might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its
own predicament.”
so there will be great suffering, it is what it is, the best to hope for is perhaps to be able to avoid the worst of the collapse scenario, which I would guess would apply to many people alive in the 2030s, and probably most people in the 2040s.
ps: I predict depop beginning in 2024.
que sera sera.
“Starting premises… (4) Efforts to address the human demographic anomaly and resulting eco-crisis without attempting to override innate human behaviours that have become maladaptive are woefully incomplete and doomed to fail.”
If you start with that presumption, you are never going to end up anywhere constructive. It is defeatist, by choice. It is not objective, as we are supposedly aiming for here.
An alternative starting premise is that, while humanity is vulnerable to being psychologically manipulated by system propaganda, it is the system itself that is flawed. If those flaws can be identified, then they can be corrected, should the population, the elites, and governments choose to correct them.
It may already be too late, but we can’t know that for certain. Both global market pricing signals and global natural processes have almost infinite combined power to change the behaviour of the economic and political system and the state of the climate.
We humans have leverage over both these powerful forces, so to surrender to chaos without even attempting to exert that leverage would be to voluntarily dive into the abyss.
My personal view is that it is morally wrong to surrender all control over our fate, whether that surrender is a result of ignorance to what is actually possible, or the result of a psychological choice to stop applying cognitive effort towards understanding and debating solutions.
It is the system that has “become maladaptive are woefully incomplete.” If we start there, we retain the power to do something constructive.
“In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its own predicament.”
How might that transition be managed?
How can the world be made un-blind to its own predicament?
Indeed Rees’ article is a cogent review of our collective predicament. Hardly surprising in view of the ongoing quality of his analysis going back to the mid 90’s when he and his associates developed the concept of the ecological foot print. What spoke to me particularly is his explication of the interconnected nature of the smorgasbord of issues we face underlying the term polycrisis, and his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms of an evolving “world culture” based on capitalism, industrialization, etc. I buy his analysis of where to from here although the top end of the range he identifies for the earth’s carrying capacity (3 billion souls) is far too generous imho, in a world with significantly declining energy sources.
“What spoke to me particularly is his explication of the interconnected nature of the smorgasbord of issues we face underlying the term polycrisis, and his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms…”
yes he filled out the idea of the polycrisis with the item by item issues that show that humanity is confronted with much more than any single-issue argument could address.
a highlight to me was that he thoroughly explored this point that it indeed is “evolutionarily derived human nature” that is driving overshoot.
“… his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms…”
it seems that “cultural norms” are preceded by “human nature”, so the problem remains that humans are going to act like humans, and this makes any attempted management of degrowth so much more difficult since it will mostly be resisted by that human nature.
“How might that transition be managed?”
as Rees brilliantly pointed out, this is far beyond any single-issue crisis such as that it’s ALL about CO2 and just CO2.
for starters, the degrowth transition “might” be managed if there are enough people getting on board with the idea that it is a polycrisis that needs to be managed.
if you reread the article (no offense but did you read it closely yet?), perhaps you will pick up on the valid idea that it is a polycrisis that needs to be managed, and rethink and probably drop your agenda that this is a single-issue crisis.
if you align with the brilliant William Rees and the others who think like him, that would be one more person on the way to “enough people getting on board”.
“How can the world be made un-blind to its own predicament?”
do what Rees just did, speak up about the polycrisis, add to the volume, join in as one more voice speaking in their direction.
I think that any attempted degrowth management is doomed to failure, but it appears that you don’t, so sure go for it, dedicate the rest of your life to spreading the message just like Rees just did.
Un-Blinding?
The Dark Horse Podcast was heavily censored during the Pandemic, but it survived. The husband and wife team are evolutionary biologists. This podcast contains an interesting take on Robert Kennedy’s talk to an annual libertarian meeting. Small “l” because not identical to the Libertarian Party. Kennedy said that the solution to pollution is the internalization of all costs. You will find a handy marker below the screen which will take you to that part of the discussion.
I want to add an observation. Given that the Overshoot people from Bill Catton to Bill Rees have pointed to the enormous costs of what humans are doing….IF the costs are internalized, we will of necessity do a lot less production. Let me give one example. Suppose you want to be happy. There are two alternatives: fly to a tropical island and drink Pina coladas on the beach, or go visit with a neighbor and trade stories. The beach option would have a prohibitive cost but talking with the neighbor would cost almost nothing. The monetary system would shrink, the production economy would shrink, wealth would shrink so police and armies would shrink, etc.
Bret Weinstein says that Kennedy got a standing ovation. And he never even used a teleprompter.
It’s easy to see why political heavyweights in the US are trying to kill Kennedy’s campaign by pretending it doesn’t exist. But I suggest that Kennedy is suggesting an approach which has some chance of success for avoiding the catastrophes of overshoot. It’s late in the game, and we would definitely make some mistakes, but can it be worse that BAU?
Don Stewart
I don’t think many people yet comprehend the scale of the changes that are now impending. Think about discretionaries (non-essentials) – the products and services, their commercial and cultural significance, the businesses which supply them, the fortunes founded on them, the numbers of people and the specialisations employed by them – and the coming decline in non-essential affordability is going to have profound consequences.
@Dr. Morgan
The scale of the decline first became graphically clear to me as I read Azby Brown’s book, Just Enough, Lessons from Edo, Japan. Brown takes us through a normal day in the life of a farmer, a tradesman, and a samurai (reduced to mending umbrellas to earn cash).
The way they rationalized infanticide was interesting. We make up reasons explaining why we do things is aligned with the stars in the sky.
“Britain has its back against the wall to an extent unparalleled in its peacetime history. In all the other financial struggles we have faced – the currency crises of 1931, 1949, 1976 and 1992 – we could fight our way out by belt-tightening and devaluing the pound within a structure of secure trading relationships, anchored first by empire and later the EU. (…) None of that is true today. The UK has been living beyond its means in every way. Internationally, we are no longer a creditor nation. We depend on the “kindness of strangers”, in the famous words of former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, to support our currency, as our liabilities to foreigners exceed our assets by 30% of GDP and growing. Our fading industrial base produces permanent current account deficits, which since 2000 cumulatively exceed £1.5tn: rather than belt tighten, we have chosen to run up debt and sell our assets to foreigners in vast quantities to maintain our living standards. Nor do we have empire or the EU anchoring our trade. We are alone.”
Yes, Will Hutton can be very perceptive, as he is here. Obviously I would add a few points from an SEE perspective, but he’s spot on. I’ve been saying for years that the UK has been using asset sales and debt to support a lifestyle way beyond its means.
I have to say, with great regret, that the UK is powering towards a cliff-edge. Somebody recently described the UK economy – I quote from imperfect memory – as ‘an inflated property market with a financial services sector attached’, to which I’d add that most of the country’s service sectors are simply ancillaries to this unsustainably skewed system.
This risks in this are obvious. The markets could downgrade Sterling, driving the costs of imports, and household necessities, sharply upwards, and pushing the BoE into defensive rate rises. Even without this, property prices could fall very far, and might be doing so now were not so many people deterred from selling by the prospect of taking on a new mortgage at rates far higher than the old one. Where debt is concerned, and beyond the national aggregates, we need to look at the burden on households, which includes all sorts of other commitments not strictly defined as ‘debt’.
Yet there seems to be no appetite for change. I say this in a non-partisan sense, because Labour seems very nearly as committed to neoliberal bias and claptrap as the current government.
Hutton makes no mention of UK import of electrical energy which today is 18% of the electrical consumption according to ‘Gridwatch’ dashboard.
So the UK is not even self sufficient in energy in midsummer.
There is also all the export of finance to foreign companies who own and operate a very large proportion of the wind farms surrounding and covering the UK .
Yes, an interesting article, but Will implies that it was the trading relationships in the Empire and the EU that produced Britain’s wealth, but ignores the effect of the industrial revolution based on coal and the boom in the 1980s based on North Sea oil. As usual, the effect of cheap and plentiful indigenous energy – and now the lack of it – is ignored.
I agree, naturally, that the critical importance of energy should have been mentioned. The still-powerful myth of ‘chaos under Labour, recovery under Thatcher’ ignores the oil crises, which were the real cause of hardship in the 70s, and North Sea oil, on which recovery was based. Moreover, North Sea riches were squandered on tax cuts for the better off, and financing unemployment to break the unions.
This said, I take his arguments as being political. The current government is either clueless or wilfully biased. I was musing only today on the Truss-Kwarteng disaster – did they really believe that racking up debt to hand tax cuts to the wealthiest would invigorate the economy? This same blend of self-serving extremism still prevails, and I doubt if it would change much under Labour (unless Mr Starmer plans to get elected as a Tory-lite and then govern rationally, for which I see no evidence). So Will is right, I think, to the extent that the UK is making the worst of a bad situation.
I read that article by Umair Haque. He and many others get overly concerned about climate change (CC). Tom Murphy (on his Do The Math blog) has it right. All the focus on CC diverts attention from other matters. It’s like looking at one small piece of sweetcorn whilst ignoring the rest of the steaming pile…
Ok the FF industry gets huge subsidies – well global civilization is built on it. Without the oil it all comes down, never mind the climate. That’s the truth that is never mentioned in the legacy media. They want to reduce emissions *without* a reduction in consumption (which would affect the economy and their comfortable lives).
Haque writes:
“They tend to downplay risks, in the name of “balance,” while promoting a kind of feel-good optimism. It’s happened time and time again over the last few years, yielding more and more disastrous results. The pandemic, which they tell us is “over.” The rise of fascism, which was presented as a heroic story of intellectuals and brave rebels taking on The System. Is this what’s happening with….climate change?”
Leaving aside that the quotation marks in the third sentence should be around the second word, not the eighth, has he turned on a television lately? There is no lack of coverage about CC, but nothing is ever said against ‘The System’.
Whether or not CC is happening, of course the Groaniad and Bezos Post will publish nonsense. So? If you must read legacy media rags or watch lamestream TV, don’t believe anything they write or broadcast.
Most scientists have no certain conclusions on CC, only the majority of those who do say it is real and man made. The climate warms up, it cools down… there didn’t seem to be such a fuss over it when the going was good though, in the ‘boom’ years. Now it’s fashionable to fret about the climate, while ignoring the big fact: that the System itself is the problem (yet Haque labels those espousing this view fascist LOL).
As for the ‘green tech’ being implemented in Western societies, unfortunately it’s all bollocks, as has been demonstrated in detail (notably by hideaway) on this blog. ‘Renewables’ just don’t have the energy density necessary to maintain industrial civilization (IC).
It benefits the PTB to promote technological fixes to some of the inherent side effects of IC (i.e. pollution, environmental destruction of all kinds etc.) because no politician would dare deny people their Western consumerist lifestyles. To be fair, how could they? There’s no way to turn the machine off, now it’s been built and become what it has. Without all the extraction, production, selling, buying and throwing away, there’s no economy.
Maybe it would be a good idea to start ‘winding down’ the whole thing (IC), but how? The economic model is predicated on keeping everything going, ever faster, and it’s become so complex and interdependent that removing or reducing any one part could make it all implode.
Also, feeding the world can now only be done using FF, and there is no reasonable way to reduce the population. Advise people not to have children? That goes against millions of years of evolution and against nature. The trouble is that the PTB might try to reduce the population in an unreasonable way…
It looks likely then, that some sort of collapse is baked-in even if it’s not planned. While that is nothing to look foward to, people will survive somehow, so there’s no need to cry ‘doom’.
“The climate warms up, it cools down”
The Undesigned Universe – Peter Ward
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
It’s pretty hard to take Will Hutton seriously. Many of the things he describes are true but he has long been a big cheerleader of the very policies which have led to the current situation. In particular those policies of the U living far beyond its means were pursed by Blair and Brown for 13 years. The media obsess about Liz Truss…..who by contrast was in power for about 13 days.
Actually, I think it was 49 days, but point taken. “New” Labour’s policies were rooted in the bizarre notion – endorsed by orthodox economics, but illogical nonetheless – that credit expansion can drive growth to the point at which the debt taken on to create it can be paid off with the proceeds of growth. This was disproved during 2008-09. Truss and Kwarteng tried something not dissimilar, arguing that using debt to fund tax-cuts would be a net win over time.
Thanks Tim. Will Hutton is a regular commentator in the Guardian where it is an article of faith (see Larry Elliott) that the UK has largely unlimited capacity to use fiat money to fund massive public spending. This can apparently be done in a non-inflationary way with no impact on Sterling’s value! There is no sign that Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves disagree with this magical thinking. Indeed they dare not disagree….or their supporters would revolt.
I agree entirely. Mainstream newspapers “talk their books” and Hutton is a “placeman” for Guardian editorial policy; for instance, he is obliged to bring EU membership into his argument, disingenuously conflating it with Britain’s empire.
Britain was at the centre of the Empire, controlling the means of exchange, sucking resources in from all over the world and becoming very wealthy as a result. Germany/Benelux is at the centre of the EU and Britain was a bit-player out on the periphery, so the reverse process resulted, a trade deficit, funded by the very asset sales and fading industrial base he highlights as part of the problems that have arisen.
It is at the centre of any economic entity where power is exercised, economies of scale are instigated, resources are garnered and wealth accumulates. An inspection of Google maps, in layers, will show Britain as a wasteland of derelict industrial sites where production has been abandoned, many as a result of company sales to EU operations. Of course, the process has been ably assisted by the financial and political class in the UK.
As usual, the mainstream news is the last to come to terms with developments. I expect that Hutton has gleaned his information from sites such as SEE. I didn’t notice any suggestion of “belt tightening” in the Guardian after the warning of 2008. No! Instead we had talk of austerity avoidable by applying classic economic theory, the very misguided approach that SEE has identified as being at the root of the predicament.
There will undoubtedly have to be “belt tightening” and the quicker this is admitted openly by the political class and policies are proposed to make sure this is seen to be fair and equitable the better.
I would only add that the UK is structurally biased, favouring a wealthy minority over the interests of the majority, and thereby favouring the old over the young, and London over the rest of the country. What this overlooks, amongst many other things, is that much of the wealth of that minority exists only in paper form.
@Michael McGowan
“UK has largely unlimited capacity to use fiat money to fund massive public spending. This can apparently be done in a non-inflationary way with no impact on Sterling’s value!”
I think the problem isn’t so much that lots of money is created. The problem is that there isn’t the resource to spend it on. Locally sourced resources, that is.
If you have to get your resources from abroad and you no longer control those resources through an Empire, then you have a problem.
Perhaps ultimately, TPTB here in the UK haven’t come to terms with the fact that we no longer have an empire???
@Dr A K Johnson
“There will undoubtedly have to be “belt tightening” and the quicker this is admitted openly by the political class and policies are proposed to make sure this is seen to be fair and equitable the better.”
“Seen” to be fair.
It will need to be actually fair. Perception will not be enough.
Agreed.
From my non-partisan perspective, it seems that the Labour leadership thinks that they can only get elected by adhering to the economic drivel accepted by both parties over the past twenty-five years. They may well be right in this political calculation.
It will take a major shock to steer the electorate away from this neoliberal nonsense. I’m not sure how far off this shock may be, but I’m in no doubt that the British economy is at an advanced state of disintegration.
The breathing space we require to construct a feasible long term plan can only come from the biggest spending sector which is the public sector. Stripping that back to purely core services and dispensing with complexity such as tax and nonsense such as diversity managers and admin careerists is part of that. If you look at the public sector jobs available now in Ceredigion alone there are some utter howlers. These people are light years away from reality. There is precious little to be lost in that scenario unfolding. Quite the opposite. As for the trigger…..
the short answer is yes, I rather agree,
the long answer rather turned into a 2hr stream of consciousness of a few thousand words, I decided against posting it and saved it to wordpad,
but suffice to say, we really need a major reorientation of our approach to everything, so that it comports with the reality we now find ourselves in,
rather like every incremental change we failed to make over the last 50 years, all rolled into one!
I had to give the wordpad document a title and chose; And now for something completely different.
on a blog like this probably quite a lot of the concepts would be favorably received because people would understand the context within which they’re suggested,
but outside in the dreamworld of the mainstream I’d probably sound like a raving lunatic, so much of it is currently unthinkable for the majority.
Explanation for the Emotional Violence in the US and UK???
“Psychologists know how our fear of feeling painful emotions can lead to us suppressing them by directing our anger at people whose existence reminds us of the reason for our painful emotions (they call that response ‘experiential avoidance’). If you disagree or deny that environmental disruption is already so severe and self-reinforcing that the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable, then you may feel more uncomfortable as reality hits home. ” From Jim Bendell.
I’ll leave the UK to UKers. In the US, IMHO, we have two failed narratives at the moment. One narrative is that if we just get more “inclusion” then we can continue on as usual and everything will be OK. The second narrative is that if we just get back to Jesus/ capitalism/ nativism/ global empire etc. we can easily solve all our little problems. A hit song recently is bemoaning “the rich men north of Richmond (VA)”. So there is more than enough “painful emotion” to go around given the fact that neither narrative is working very well.
A few people DO convert suddenly to the opposite narrative. But that isn’t going to do any good. A totally different narrative is called for. But when Bendell put a totally different narrative on X/ Twitter, Musk and his minions decided to ban him with no explanation.
So we are: in the eye of the storm/ up a creek without a paddle/ Wiley Coyote in freefall/ zombies who don’t realize our condition/ …put in your own metaphor.
Don Stewart
“If you disagree or deny that environmental disruption is already so severe and self-reinforcing that the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable, then you may feel more uncomfortable as reality hits home.” From Jim Bendell.
I do disagree with this “scare them with scary stories” narrative.
another narrative is that “the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable” because of declining surplus energy. Yes I will go with that narrative.
I will put in the sorta metaphor of Chicken Little or Henny Penny: the sky is falling!
the 2020s are more than one third in the history books, tempus fugit, there is an inevitable cliff up ahead, very likely in the 2030s.
@davidinamillionyears
I think that the current disillusionment which leads to two conflicting narratives, neither of which is actually worth very much, is not so much about collapse as it is about disappointment that nobody is moving the needle. I think everyone understands the role of debt in keeping the mirage alive, and now has anger that things aren’t working out in terms of creating a new “great leap forward”. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
So, if what I have just described is accurate for the US, it isn’t exactly congruent to what is happening in the UK. As I understand the UK people here, the collapse is much further along in the UK. But the political divide has not happened in the UK as it has happened in the US.
There was a TED talk today “Will the US have a Civil War?”. I didn’t bother to listen to it, because, frankly, I am tired of hearing pundits talk about such stuff, with the inevitable “if we just listen to each other, we can work it out”. My own opinion is that things are going to change radically over the next couple of decades, no matter who holds political power. Politics can make it all a lot worse, but I don’t see much hope for “making it less painful”.
Don Stewart
Politics was once described as a contest “between those who have – to keep what they have got; and those who have not – to get it”. What interests me about unfolding trends is whether inequalities of wealth and income widen or narrow as economic contraction takes hold. Structurally, these inequalities are set to contract, though doubtless numerous expedients will be tried to prevent this from happening.
It seems to me that, with the real economy now far smaller (c 43% smaller) than the financial economy, it’s hard to see how property and stock prices do anything other than slump, with the latter heavily loaded towards discretionaries. A large proportion of the highest-paid jobs are non-essential within a contracting economy, i.e. they exist within the 43% disposable gap between the two economies.
“A large proportion of the highest-paid jobs are non-essential within a contracting economy, i.e. they exist within the 43% disposable gap between the two economies.”
I suggest it is possible that the elites plan the exact opposite outcome, meaning to keep the giant bubble of fictional financial wealth inflated for as long as possible, even if it means the real world goes to crap.
The elites would retreat to whatever islands of safety they have planned, and command the infrastructure of the global surveillance and security system to repress the hordes of unfortunate and desperate humans, and keep them at a safe distance.
There are of course many ways to join the dots of unfolding history, including with unlikely conspiracy theories, but if we look at things like the Wagner group trying to foment a violent anti-colonial movement across Sub-Saharan Africa, and try to explain the geopolitical value behind it, the most plausible conclusions involve apocalypse planning on the global scale.
To the more unhinged of the elites, protecting the illusion of wealth may very well seem far more important than the actual well-being of the majority of humanity.
“I suggest it is possible that the elites plan the exact opposite outcome, meaning to keep the giant bubble of fictional financial wealth inflated for as long as possible, even if it means the real world goes to crap.”
I agree that they may try this, but I can’t see how they’d expect this to succeed. If the material economy contracts, pushing more money into the system simply leads to defaults and/or inflation. As the gap between output and essentials narrows, the only way to prop up discretionaries would be by compelling a large and growing proportion of the population to go without necessities so that others can continue to afford discretionaries.
Something along these lines is already happening, to be sure – most visibly, perhaps, in the UK – but there are limits to how far this can go.
“My own opinion is that things are going to change radically over the next couple of decades, no matter who holds political power. Politics can make it all a lot worse, but I don’t see much hope for “making it less painful”…”
I agree completely.
@Brandon Young
“but if we look at things like the Wagner group trying to foment a violent anti-colonial movement across Sub-Saharan Africa, and try to explain the geopolitical value behind it, the most plausible conclusions involve apocalypse planning on the global scale.”
But aren’t Wagner simply a continuation of The Great Game? It’s not global apocalypse planning. It’s geopolitics.
Through Wagner, Russia can project its power but without using conscripted Russian regular troops.
The US has been using/training private armies in Latin America for decades. (Bay of Pigs, Contras etc etc)
“It’s not global apocalypse planning. It’s geopolitics.”
Yes, of course, but I was trying to provoke people to think about the End Game, what the geopolitical strategies are ultimately trying to achieve.
It is abundantly clear that the powers-that-be are no longer trying to prevent or delay the apocalypse – the crash of the real economy and the cascading failure of global systems, both natural and man-made. It seems the only goal that remains is to win the apocalypse.
@Brandon Young
“It is abundantly clear that the powers-that-be are no longer trying to prevent or delay the apocalypse – the crash of the real economy and the cascading failure of global systems, both natural and man-made. It seems the only goal that remains is to win the apocalypse.”
Isn’t it just about resources control, like it’s always been?
“Isn’t it just about resources control, like it’s always been?”
What resources? As surplus energy disappears, all resources become stranded assets. This is why the End Game is accelerating towards us.
I suppose we could prolong the resource accumulation part of the game for a while yet, by exploiting the vast deposits of coal, oil and gas still in easy reach around the world, but that would only accelerate the climate-change driver of collapse, and bring on the end game anyway.
David Wallace Wells
I hear his name cited as an expert. A short talk by him recently caught my attention. He claimed that everything was going so well on the energy transition….but now we are finding that the models apparently underestimated the severity of climate impacts at any given degree of warming. Without getting into the weeds, just take a look at this chart and tell me if you thing we have CO2 under control:
Looks like an upward bending exponential to me….Don Stewart
PS. But explains a lot about the anger directed at Jem Bendell by the “energy transition/ mainstream climate science” and perhaps “colonize Mars” community.
Don Stewart
well worth reading because it’s all so true,
if you don’t quite agree with all of it, well you’re just not quite there yet.
So, 52 years ago today Nixon closed the gold window and put us all on a debt-
based fiat currency system. They would have known it would only be good for 40 years or so and as it happens they got 37 years out of it.
What to do? How to maintain the supply of Bread and Circuses to keep people busy, what on earth would happen if they couldn’t shop? Well it was kept going for 12 whole years (QE 1,2,3,…,TARP, ZIRP, NIRP, cash for clunkers, subsidies for solar, turbines, evs, heat pumps and other green nonsense) while they put in place their “final solution” to massive population overshoot.
By 1971 I had spent 3 years working for the UK’s management team and to be frank I think all the world’s management teams deserve a pat on the back for keeping the show on the road.
Management Team = the people behind the scenes who know the world runs on surplus energy and have had over 60 years to plan this collapse. Just what on earth did you think the pandemic was for or this “war” in Ukraine?
It seems some surplus energy, line losses on transmission and distribution lines, was associated with the failure of the grid in North America 20 years ago-
Your latest is clear, straightforward, indisputable. Here, at dawn in Washington State, USA, I have already forwarded it to the local Mayor-to-be, who is in this conversation with me, and who is slowly getting it. His term begins January next, and organizing a Community response is my aim.
Surplus Energy Economics 
I decided to run a few numbers on the energy economics of ammonia as a synthetic fuel. Ammonia is produced by the exothermic reaction between hydrogen and nitrogen over an iron oxide catalyst. The reaction takes place at a pressure of at least 60 bar and temperature of 500°C. As the reaction is exothermic, it will drive itself after initial heating.
My first assumption is that hydrogen is produced by electrolysis with an efficiency of 80%. My second assumption is that nitrogen is produced by fractional distilation of air. I will ignore the energy energy cost of producing pure nitrogen, because it is relatively small. The higher heating value of hydrogen is taken to be 141.86MJ (wiki). The energy cost of H2 will be: Q = 141.86/0.8 = 177.325MJ/kg
To produce ammonia: 3H2 + N2 = 2NH3
Which is to say, 6kg H2 + 28kg N2 = 34kg ammonia (NH3).
6kg of hydrogen contains 1063.95MJ and 34kg Ammonia contains 632.4MJ. For energy density values, see wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Storage efficiency = 632.4/1063.95 = 59.4%
Diesel engines have efficiency of 30 – 55%. The lower end refers to car engines. The upper end refers to large marine engines operating at constant speed. Round trip electrical-to-mechanical efficiency is therefore:
n = (0.594)(30>55) = 17.8 > 33%
Liquid anhydrous ammonia has an energy density of 11.5MJ/litre. This compares to 38.6MJ/litre for diesel fuel. So an ammonia fuelled truck must carry 3x the volume of liquid fuel or have refuelling stops 3x closer together. How much would it cost (in electricity) to make the energy equivelant of 1 litre of diesel in ammonia? One litre of diesel contains 38.6MJ of chemical energy (10.72kWh). Electricity is converted into chemical energy at 59.4% efficiency. So the cost of a litre of diesel equivelent would be:
Cost/l = (10.72/0.594) x C = 18.05C, where C is cost per kWh of electricity.
In the US at time of writing, diesel is selling for about $1 per litre. Ignoring other costs, how much would input electricity need to cost to produce ammonia that could compete with diesel at $1/litre?
Cost/kWh = 1/18.05 = $0.055/kWh.
This tells us that for ammonia to compete with diesel, the electricity supplying electrolysis must be very cheap. This calculation ignores the capital costs associated with the electrolysis stack, the air liquefaction plant, the haber-bosch ammonia synthesis plant and the ammonia chilling plant. To minimise the marginal costs of this equipment, we must exploit economies of scale and also run all of the equipment at close to 100% capacity factor. To achieve this, we need a electricity source that is carbon free, cheap and able to produce at full power, close to 100% of the time. The two candidates are hydropower and nuclear power.
This direct ammonia fuel cell could be a promising development.
https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/alma-clean-power-announces-successful-testing-of-direct-ammonia-fuel-cells/
Efficiency has been demonstrated at 61-67%. So far, tests have been small scale.
Thanks Peter, most helpful.
Ammonia powered buses in WWII
“Diesel engines are designed to work in a temperature range between 80 and 110C”.
But, apparently, the proposed ammonia vehicles would operate at 500C and need compression. So that doesn’t sound like a drop-in solution to a shortage of diesel fuel. I assume it would require a complete replacement of the transportation fleet?
If the notion is that some small amount of ammonia is used to dilute the tar sands so they will pass through a pipeline and refinery, then that is a different idea altogether. The ammonia is serving as a diluent, a role currently performed by light gates of shale oil. So ammonia might keep the tar sands operating in the absence of shale oil.
My understanding is that Russia has a lot of shale oil, which will be exploited when they run out of conventional oil. Whether the ammonia would be competitive, or better than, the shale oil I have no idea.
Don Stewart
Don, ammonia as a fuel could be burned in compression ignition (diesel) engines. It isn’t flammable under standard conditions. Then again, neither is diesel.
Problems with liquid ammonia as a fuel:
(1) Toxicity. It is caustic and the fumes will make your eyes water. It stinks. Ammonia fumes are irritant and annoying. No one wants to cruise around in a car that smells like stale piss.
(2) Relatively low energy density – about one third of diesel. That means a lot more refilling stations needed.
(3) High vapour pressure – about 6 bar at room temperature. Similar to LPG, your fuel tank must be a pressure vessel.
(4) The energy cost of making ammonia. Like hydrogen, it is an energy store, not a source. To be able to make carbon free ammonia at a cost comparable to diesel, electricity needs to be cheap. That means a lot of new nuclear reactors.
(5) In most countries, transportation consumes about 50% more energy than total electricity production. Given that electricity is converted to ammonia with 50% efficiency, converting all liquid fuel use to ammonia, would quadruple electricity demand. As a species, we could only do this in a carbon free way, by massively increasing our use of nuclear power.
Good points. If we stick to current nuclear technology, is there even enough nuclear fuel to make this possible?
@Peter Cassidy
Thanks. I’ll just continue to use ammonia to kill fire ants.
Don Stewart
“michael sweet at 01:09 AM on 12 July, 2022
A new article in Energy Policy reviews current plans to build nuclear reactors and future possible builds. They find that the contribution of nuclear before 2040 will not be significant (less than 5% of all energy). They find that the supply of uranium is too small to support additional reactors. They find breeder reactors to be unreliable and unlikely to be developed before 2050.
The highlights read:
Highlights:
Nuclear power’s contribution to climate change mitigation is and will be very limited.
Currently nuclear power avoids 2–3% of total global GHG emissions per year.
According to current planning this value will decrease even further until 2040.
A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.
Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible. (my emphasis)
They have a good review of the extremely limited supply of uranium and why the WNA article referenced by MacQuigg is incorrect (with references).” ?
https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=5202
Postkey, it all depends upon political will. A succesful nuclear build programme needs a trained workforce and developed supply chains for the components. One of the reasons for Hinkley C and Vogtle being expensive and taking so long, is that we are starting an entire industry for building individual powerplants from scratch. All of the people involved in building nuclear powerplants in the 70s and 80s are either dead or retired. The companies that made the components have either ceased to exist or have moved on to other things. Building a reactor now means restarting that entire new build industry. That takes time and is expensive.
The French showed the world how to run a nuclear programme, by building over sixty large pressurised water reactors in just fifteen years. They were individually cheap because the French had economy of scale. They had suppliers who produced components continuously and a workforce that was able to build up its skill levels through continuity. You can’t build nuclear reactors one-off and expect them to be cheap, just as you cannot build cheap cars individually.
The uranium resource issue is an interesting but seperate issue. I will save it for another post.
“A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.
Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible.”
I just finished a job for a retired PUC auditor who knows a retired nuclear control operator from a now decommissioned facility. I shared some of the ideas presented here about scaling up nuclear. He said he doesn’t think nuclear is the answer nor renewables but if you decide to move forward make sure the temperature gauge for your reactor cooling system is placed front and center instead of in a dark corner due (TMI).
I have no clue what the range of projections by the pros for world population for the rest of the century. Let’s assume it trends down. Population growth and economic growth have been inexorably linked since the Energy Industrial revolution. Such that it had been impossible for me to imagine economic growth with a population fall, That’s just a habit of thought however. Could there be ‘growth’ with falling population? Well why not?
Once one starts plugging in a large reductions in human population don’t the surplus energy calculations go whacky?
To the best of my knowledge, the experts expect population numbers to carry on growing, but at a slowing rate, out to mid-century.
This, though, mainly affects prosperity per capita. Only if there was a very big fall in population numbers might lower consumption slow our movement up the ECoE curve.
There is currently a near total correlation between fossil fuel and food production, ten calories of fossil fuel being required to produce each calory of food. The most important components of fossil fuel being diesel for tractors, trucks and shipping; plus natural gas for making artificial fertiliser.
If peak oil, etc is around now then peak food is also around now. There seeems to be a close correlation between food and population, implying that peak population is around now too. Perhaps with a lag of a decade or so of increasing shortages first.
My own wild guess is that oil and food production will initially decline at only a few percent per year. But soon more rapidly as resource wars increase and long distance trade declines, plus food producers begin to give priority to national self interest. (See end of grain exports from Ukraine, recent ban on rice exports by India, etc.)
Unfortunately, western Europe – and especially UK – is a major importer of food and animal feed, as well as energy.
“My own wild guess is that oil and food production will initially decline at only a few percent per year. But soon more rapidly as resource wars increase and long distance trade declines, plus food producers begin to give priority to national self interest”.
That, at least the first part and probably the latter, aligns with my interpretation. The Indian ban on rice exports strikes me as highly significant and, of course, the Indian government must prioritise the supply of rice to its own population.
Using organic no-till agriculture and hand labour, Mr M. Fukuoka (1913-2008) obtained much the same yield as ‘industrial’ farmers ~40-50 years ago. He publicised his methods but Japan is very conformist and by ~1970 its agricultural sector had settled on ‘scientific’ methods.
A US author, Larry Korn, wrote a book on it in 2015. Fukuoka’s own book ‘The One-Straw Revolution’ was published in 1978. I read it recently and don’t know how I missed it earlier.
But – the spread of organic no-till farming or similar practices would have led to 10,000s of starving agrochemical executives and fertiliser company CEOs. We can’t have that.
@DrTimMorgan
As soon as food production starts to decline, population will start to decline as well. Food supply is the independent variable and population is the dependent variable.
In July, Chinese exports fell by 14.5% compared with July last year. This is being ascribed to the effect of increases in “the cost of living” on consumers. If we needed yet more evidence of discretionary compression, this is it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66436582
Chinese working age population is also shrinking. This is now a problem for almost every country in the developed and advanced developing world. Even India is now falling beneath replacement birthrates. It will be a while before Indian working age population shrinks, but it is baked in.
If working age population shrinks, then the workforce and consumer base are shrinking simultaneously. That heralds economic ruin all by itself. It makes government debt and pension liabilities impossible to service without large cuts in other spending. Energy resource depletion is on top of this problem and will make it happen faster.
Food Shortages and Choices
There is no question in my mind that the world cannot feed 8 or 9 billion people the Standard American Diet. I won’t try to describe the exact solution in this post, but I will suggest a direction. First, search on
“twitter Ted Naiman”
Right now the lead off article, after the obligatory picture of a lean and mean middle aged medical doctor, features the repost of a twitter by Hava. Naiman and Hava are closely intertwined.
You will see a brief explanation of the food characteristics which supply us with necessary energy and building blocks for body tissues and also satisfy our hunger. Then you will see several panels which show how different foods fit into each category. For a wealthy person in the US or Europe, ALL of these foods are available at the nearest supermarket. But in the poor sections of the world, whether homeless people in London or desperately poor people in poor countries, the choices are much more restricted. Now, I take it as a corollary to the axiom that all of us are about the get less rich, if not outright poor. Which implies that we are going to have to get smarter about which foods we choose.
I only want to point out one obvious choice: edamame (soy beans) vs. the various meats. Now I have nothing against eating a deer or a cow that has eaten grass all its life. But the reality is that almost all of the beef in your friendly supermarket depends on being fed corn or soybeans after an idyllic childhood eating grass. Because the cows are not designed to eat corn or soybeans, they get fat and sick (just like humans who don’t eat the right foods), while the fat adds a certain taste perception and most assuredly increases the weight.
BUT, generations of Asians ate the soybeans. There is a whole panoply of manufactured derivatives of soybeans, such as tofu and tempeh, in addition to the relatively unprocessed beans themselves. When we eat the soy products, we get high protein and moderate calories (by western standards). And if we count the energy expended to feed a village with soybeans and local industry to make tofu and tempeh and to prepare the edamame, there is no comparison.
If we look at soybean culture, we find that soy beans fix their own nitrogen from the air, avoiding reliance on Haber-Bosch and natural gas and an elaborate industrial system.
If we step back and look at this choice, it is hard to see why it is almost never explained to us in such practical terms. The “conspiracy theory” explanation is detailed in Indi from Sri Lanka’s current post, with references to Caitlin Johnstone and Tom Murphy. (Given all the evidence from current indictments in the US, we shouldn’t just discount conspiracy theories.). But a more fundamental explanation is likely to spring from a few more basic factors:
*Our entire infrastructure in the rich countries is aimed in the opposite direction.
*Identify politics can be used to generate fury against anybody who proposes “meatless Mondays” or changes in the educational system or requirements that people change their role in the economic system.
*It’s easy to demonize anyone proposing such changes as “communists”, as we see on the nightly news.
My own prediction is that, as Churchill said about the Americans, the rich world will finally do the right thing, after having done all the wrong things. But I also suggest that time is of the essence, and we don’t have a lot of time to make all of the possible mistakes.
Don Stewart
“Identify politics can be used to generate fury against anybody who proposes “meatless Mondays” or changes in the educational system or requirements that people change their role in the economic system.”
I have a half dozen bottles of B12 from my grandmother as proof of a vast right wing conspiracy against vegan diets. Libs of Tik Tok are paid actors pretending to gloat about indoctrinating minor children with Marxist ideology. The proposed indictments of the kinder gentler party concerning draining strategic reserves, proxy regime change and collusion with China is all propaganda. Soy based diets are safe and effective nutrition and a key building block of collective action to combat overshoot. Light up the dark red background and summon the Dark Winter.
@Peter Cassidy
The solution to the declining working age population is to extend health span without increasing life span. We do know how to do that. We know that about 92 percent of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. The solutions are obvious to those who study non-pharmaceutical interventions. But our publicly funded medical “help” is firmly aimed at the pharmaceutical and invasive medical procedures. I posted, just above, an analysis of the food situation. I won’t go to the same length here, but the solution is very similar, and the barriers are very similar. Neither “problem” would be very complicated for an AI algorithm. What might very well stump the algorithm is “how to make it happen in the real world?”.
Don Stewart
A note on the debate on whither world population. An impact that hasn’t been referenced is the negative effects of the polycrisis (including environmental degradation, climate calamity, intra and inter nation conflict, etc.) on population. Contrary to mainstream projection of continued population growth is it possible that the destructive impact of these trends will lead to significant decline in world population in the medium if not the immediate term? Here’s a link to a study that assesses the impact of one of these factors, climate change, on human population. While it doesn’t draw conclusions about population growth or decline I think the direction is obvious. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/protecting-people-from-a-changing-climate-the-case-for-resilience
Stephanie Pomboy and Jim Rickards discuss the expected upheaval in international currency markets brought about by a BRICS movement to tie a new currency to a specific weight of gold.
A lot of this is beyond my pay grade. But it seems like a good time to pay attention. The discussion is sober and attentive to facts.
Don Stewart
Indeed a significant development imho. Alastair Macleod over at Goldmoney.com has been writing frequently and in detail about this development.
Regarding uranium scarcity. At present, uranium fuel costs are such a small proportion of overall generating cost, there is little incentive to explore new resources or develop innovative fuel cycles.
Present reasonably assured resources available at <$130/kg are about 8 million tonnes.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx
It takes about 10kg of 0.71% enriched natural uranium to produce 1kg of 5% enriched low enriched uranium. At a burnup of 40GWd/tonne, a 1000MWe light water reactor needs 30 tonnes of new fuel each year. So reasonably assured resources will last about 60 years at current consumption rate.
Uranium spot prices are presently $56/lb, which is the highest for 10 years.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uranium
Even at this high price, uranium price does very little to drive the cost of nuclear power production. At 40GWd/tonne, each kg of LEU will generate 287,677kWh of electric energy. Some 22.05lb of natural uranium is needed to produce 1kg of LEU. So the uranium feedstock needed to make 1kg of LEU will cost $1235. So uranium adds $0.0043 to the cost of each kWh of electricity. This is a small addition to electricity generating cost. Cost would need to increase 3x more to add a penny to nuclear generating costs. Increased uranium price would allow more marginal deposits from coal ash and phosphate to contribute to uranium supply.
One option for extending uranium resource lifetime is to reprocess fuel. Even with standard light water reactors, this would double the fissile resource by recycling fissile plutonium into fresh fuel. A standard light water reactor has a conversion ratio of 0.6. This means that for every uranium atom fissioned, some 0.6 plutonium atoms are created in the fuel. Using thorium oxide as base fertile material in MOX fuel would increase conversion ratio. The Japanese have also explored the possibility of reduced moderation boiling water reactors. If combined with reprocessing, this would reduce uranium consumption by a factor of 250.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_moderation_water_reactor
All these types of numbers look very impressive, but are always subject to the promoter not quite doing enough research into the topic..
For example the WNA only states there are just over 6M tonnes of uranium resources, with an average grade of 0.2%, not quite the 0.71% the above numbers are based upon.
As they say in the adverts, but wait there’s more…
Australia has 28% of these resources… The number given of 1.684Mt is very wrong. BHP by themselves have 2.5M tonnes in the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia. This mine also holds nearly 10% of USGS world reserves of copper according to their latest report.
(In fine print the USGS states that Measured, Indicated and Inferred JORC resources are counted as reserves in their documentation).
I followed the development of this mine for over a decade, and tried to work out how we could access these resources via renewables only. Even BHP spent billions on studying how to access these resources, via usual means, which was shelved when the price of oil took off in 2007-8.
BHP currently have an underground mine at Olympic Dam mining about 10Mt of ore per annum. It has made a loss overall over the last 13 years that public figures are available. The underground mine averages around 2% copper and .5kg U308, with a recovery of over 90% for copper and about 65% for U308. They have been high grading the mine, but still losing cash on operating it..
The plan to access the low grade ore (av 0.62% Cu and 0.21kg/t U308 (plus a bit of gold and silver)), would require an open cut mine. The ore body is approx 5km long by 3km wide and starts at a depth of 350m and goes to approx 1300m in depth. BHP have already acknowledged it would mean digging the biggest hole in the world..
Just removing the waste rock above the ore body would require a hole 6km long by 4km wide 350m deep, or removal of around 20,000,000,000 tonnes of waste. Over the life of mine it would take removal of approx 57B tonnes of waste and ore at a strip ratio of over 5/1 (5 tonnes of waste to 1 tonne of ore) and leave a hole of 6km long 4km wide and 1300m deep!!
It isn’t ever going to happen because the whole concept relies on cheap energy. With current mining costs of just over $US2/t of material moved for open cut mines (depending on depth, hardness etc of material to be moved), it would cost over $US40B to just get to the top of the ore body via open cut, let alone all the other costs of setting up giant processing plants.
All these projects are getting exponentially more expensive because the price of energy is going up and they rely on the background complex system operating normally for them to proceed. No-one bothers to include the energy cost of the background system operating normally in preparing budgets for large scale projects.
It’s precisely why new nuclear plants cost so much, everyone discounts the cost of energy in the continued operation of the existing system, so never allows for costs to rise (new stuff being built in an already energy constrained system) over the time a large project takes to build. Hence every new nuclear plant being built is well above budget (including India, Egypt, Bangladesh and China, not just US and Europe).
In China, the Shidao Bay 2 NPP were meant to cost $US2,466/kw and take 5 years to build in 2012. They cost over $US5,803/kw and took until 2021 to be commissioned.
BTW, my numbers for a large open cut mine at Olympic Dam, using renewables only with both batteries and pumped hydro storage for storing renewable power plus all the solar and wind needed, plus 4 large processing plants to take the mine to 1Mt/a of copper production, came to over $US110B, and that ridiculous number would blow out from things I missed out, inflation and the time taken to implement, with the underlying energy cost of the background system..
Big hint… It’s not even close to physically possible to continue modern civilization without fossil fuels. Every calculation of EROEI is totally wrong with even FFs only ever delivering an EROEI of 10-15/1!! (not the 100/1 for early oil often quoted!!) No-one in any EROEI calculation considers the background energy cost of having roads, transport, education, food for workers, building the factories that make the equipment used, bridges crossed, ports built, mines that mine the minerals for the equipment in the factories that make the machinery etc, etc in their calculations. The total list is incalculable because of the complexity of the system.
If you didn’t have 100,000 students studying physics at high school, leading to 1,000 studying it at university, leading 10 to go on and do doctorates in nuclear physics, you wouldn’t get 10 expert Phds to plan the next NPP, but no-one wants to count the energy involved in educating the 100,000 to get the final 10 experts as an energy cost!! But of course it is!! Likewise for the engineers needed, Likewise for everything that requires expertise in our system of civilization..
Sorry for the long post again Dr Tim…
@Hideaway
As you say, the real energy costs are impossible to calculate.
But they exist!!!!!!!
@John Adams … The only way we can approximate the energy cost of anything is by counting up the total capital costs, operating and maintenance costs in dollars, then attributing the approximate energy cost in that year.
We have rough costs of energy of around 8% per annum of World GDP, with variations of a couple of percent each way over time. It’s not a perfect method, as cost of energy varies around the world, but it’s better than anything currently used.
Highly complex energy producers like nuclear power plants come with a high energy cost in both capital and O&M terms.
Renewables powering a grid, including a lot more transmission lines plus storage of power for low output times, are a lot more complex than chucking some coal in a furnace to heat a boiler and drive a generator. We have been using the latter for well over 100 years as a simple method of centrally producing electricity.
Just about every EROEI study I’ve read assumes wind and solar are free, while coal, gas, oil and nuclear fuel cost money. This is incorrect on an energy basis. They are all ‘free’ to humanity, it just takes energy to build machines capable of turning any of those forms of energy into useful work for ourselves.
By placing a monetary cost onto fossil fuels and uranium, every EROEI study can come up with whatever returns suits the authors. They almost always come to the conclusion that the cost of XYZ Mwh of electricity production is way cheaper from renewables than other sources (ie no ongoing cost of fuels), therefore the EROEI is much better from renewables.
It’s basically a denial of reality, so people can continue to consume and feel good about it, if they use ‘green energy’ and ignore what’s happening to the planet we live on. When fossil fuel use declines so will overall prosperity.
Even in modern western countries like Australia, where I live, the lower EROEI of all forms of energy is lowering living standards of the median citizen. The young of today pay HECS fees to go to Uni, in my youth it was free. In the late 60’s to early 70’s a man on an average wage which was pretty much the median wage, could afford a median 3 bedroom house, a non working wife, kids, and an annual holiday, easily with house paid off over 10-15 years.
Today both husband and wife need to work to pay for a median priced house even if both have average wages, which is well above median wages. Of course they also have their HECS loans to pay off as well. The principal repayments on median house loans are 10-12 times average wages today compared to 4-6 times median wages decades ago. (median wage in Australia 2022 $A60,000, average wage 2022 $A90,000). Official statistics use both median price, for houses and average for wages or whenever it suits to show a better outcome.
The ‘median’ person in Australia today is way worse off than the same ‘median’ person 50 odd years ago, because of declining EROEI. We have just had a 25% increase in power bills, despite (more likely because of) renewables having an increasing percentage of grid supply. They are touted throughout the media as cheaper than coal as the overall price of power goes up. Everyone wants to deny reality if it suits their agenda.
“Just about every EROEI study I’ve read assumes wind and solar are free” just shows how mistaken such studies are.
In fact, the idea of wind and solar energy being ‘free’, though often stated, is utterly risible. If you stand in the sunlight and enjoy its warmth, that might be ‘free’, but any further application has costs. The statement that renewable energy is ‘free’ is complete and utter nonsense!
They would only be ‘free’ if they could be put to use without solar panels, wind turbines, grids, storage systems and so on, meaning we must have the raw materials to create these things, and the energy needed to extract and process those raw materials.
One might just as well say that oil and gas a ‘free’, since we haven’t had to pay to have them placed beneath the surface of the Earth.
The proportion of GDP spent on energy is of limited usefulness, not least because GDP is a heavily distorted (over-inflated) measure, whilst prices oscillate. It’s information for reference, but it doesn’t correspond to ECoE, certainly not in a single year or as a trend.
Dr Tim…
“The proportion of GDP spent on energy is of limited usefulness, not least because GDP is a heavily distorted (over-inflated) measure, whilst prices oscillate. It’s information for reference, but it doesn’t correspond to ECoE, certainly not in a single year or as a trend.”
I don’t disagree with that at all, but what is a better method?? The interesting aspect is that the cost of energy in any one year doesn’t really matter. It could work out to be $10/Mwh or $50/Mwh or $100/Mwh, the ratio or difference in the different energy costs of energy remain the same..
For example, say a coal mine came out at 10:1 ratio for EROEI using $10/Mwh and a solar plant came out at 2:1 using $10/Mwh it doesn’t make a difference if the price used was $20 or $50/MWH those ratios stay the same, so it’s useful comparing the cost of nuclear, to coal to solar or wind in any one year.
The significant aspect for me is that I get an EROEI of 10-12/1 for fossil fuels on average using this method, but less than 2/1 for nuclear, solar and wind, when taking into account capital and lifetime O&M costs in today’s dollars (from each respective industries own numbers for cost!). To use a price of energy that gets renewables and nuclear to a 10-12/1 EROEI, the same energy price on fossil fuels goes to 100/1 plus EROEI.
Using an actual cost of energy is just a reference point across industries. It’s an average across the world of the approximate cost of energy. It makes no allowance for the different usefulness of the type of energy and of course energy costs different amounts in different places .
But something is better than nothing and the commonly used methods by most studies only look at kwhs to make XXX tonnes of steel, aluminium, glass, silicon wafers etc, etc, then the energy used in the factory to put it all together. So they really are useless as they exclude the complexity of the overall system to build whatever energy production unit, the mines, the factories, roads used, ports, trucks and ships transporting plant etc, etc let alone the education and nourishment of all the people involved.
I’m all ears to a better method of working out the EROEI of all forms of energy so we can compare, but in the absence of a better method, why not use capital and O&M costs over the life of the machines? The actual energy returns in MWhs is fairly easy given the actual known life of the machines and/or expected life from each industry plus known capacity factors.
I use to just accept the EROEI numbers from the different industries, but couldn’t work out why I wasn’t getting costs for building different projects anywhere near what they should be given the industry numbers. It was only when I really looked intensely at EROEI I worked out that every industries numbers are a load of old crock (including the 100/1 often referred to for FF in the past!!)
Another pressing problem is that we mine, move and process all materials using fossil fuels to make NPP, solar and wind installations, with all EROEI numbers using FF as the energy source. No-one anywhere tries to work out the EROEI of making electricity producing units with only electricity as the input, so all the numbers are extra useless going forward into a Fossil Fuel free world that’s expected by 2050.
To me it’s why collapse is inevitable, as no-one wants to really work out if an all electric future is remotely possible. Because of the lack of proper research into the overall topic of EROEI available in the public domain, I can only conclude that people (military?) have worked out the impossibility of keeping 8-9-10 billion humans living in comfort in xx years time without FFs, so don’t really want the conclusions known by the general public. The alternative, of rising fossil fuel use can continue for a few decades, if countries turn to coal to liquids and thus frying the planet leading to collapse anyway..
Your work Dr Tim is the best in the public domain about the problem of declining EROEI and it’s effect on economies, highlighting that we live in an energy civilization and not a monetary civilization. Once overall FFs start declining, either by law or just depletion, the decline in prosperity will accelerate with unrelenting momentum. It wont just stop at discretionary spending either, pretty soon essential spending will also fall as there will just not be the energy available (Sri Lanka et al at present).
@Hideaway.
Totally agree with you.
Any amount of political (or other) wishful thinking isn’t going to change the situation.
(Techno-fantasies are just that. Fantasies. The energy inputs that would go into building stuff in space are huge.)
@John Adams
Somebody should write an article about fantasies. When things begin to look shaky, all sorts of fantasies sprout, bloom, and die…like a desert plant with a little rain:
“Ten of the top bounce-back experts and motivational speakers on the planet will be showing you how to let go of all negativity, end all suffering, heal the past, be happy now, and bounce back higher than ever!”
“The SPAC boom will surely go down in history as one of the biggest stock-market heists ever, made possible by Consensual Hallucination. ”
my third example would be the videos of the supporters of a certain political operator who is being equated with the second coming of Jesus.
Don Stewart
A fantasy is any plan yet to be enacted. Without such plans humanity would never have evolved beyond the hunter gatherer stage. The fantasy of steam driven, iron ships brought us global commerce. The fantasy of flight eventually gave us the 747. The fantasy of atomic energy eventually gave us the nuclear reactor. How pie in the sky all of these things would have been considered in the 18th century. God help men who don’t have fantasies.
Fine line between fantasy and delusion buddy. We all hope your delusion is not, bur most of us are aware it is and many of us suspect your type will waste completely disproportionate amounts of resources on your fantasies
It seems to me that we can now assess potentialities through our knowledge of the laws of science – today, for instance, we wouldn’t (unless we wanted to) fall for the old fantasy of turning base metals into gold. We do carry on falling for lots of fantasies – many in the field of replacing fossil fuel energy 100% plus with renewables – but nowadays we only fall for these things if we choose to be deluded.
i have been contemplating the cornucopian mindset for over a decade now. There are a lot of successful people who fall into this trap; I think a lot of that is tied to optimism being a central characteristic leading to their success, heightened by a 40 year bull market of financialization. I think they tend to see lets say Apple putting a robot in their house as some sort of fulfillment of their childhood sci-fi fantasies. But the reality is that there is very little that has been a categorical improvement which has come about in the last 50 years. Most people will say the cell phone I guess but realistically its just dubious extension of other preexisting technologies. ie the phone, radio, and television. Due to their success in life they tend to stay on the well manicured roads, and still fly off to the well maintained hotels, etc. To them the myth of progress is still virtually their religion they treat practical people who pay attention to these issues we discuss here as virtual heretics. In all my years of talking to people about these things I don’t know a single intelligent and successful person who was capable of leaving their comfort zone and understanding the innate flaws in the cornucopian mindset. The ones who have come close quickly shy away from all discussion on the matter. The fact that largely the optimists and cornucopians generally now run our society along with the even larger population of complete incompetents (https://sonar21.com/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia-so-strong-the-role-of-human-capital-and-western-education/) does not bode well for our future.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/desperate-odds/
Everyone is so gripped by detest for their ancestors lives they won’t consider the fantasy of quaint rural existence with real community. The fantasy is always space mining, zero point energy, room temperature semi-conductors etc. Anything argument against those makes you a doomer heretic to the religion of progress and an ensuing lecture on science and innovation
@Peter Cassidy
But not all fantasies can become reality.
Just because someone thinks of something doesn’t mean that one day it will be possible.
There are limits.
Do you think that a Star Trek style teleport will ever be reality? It’s a neat narrative tool for a story but will it ever become reality and if so, would you want to “travel” in/on one?
For me, the ECoE reality that Hideaway has written about above, trumps fantasy. The energy/resources to create productive industrial infrastructure in earth orbit, the moon or Mars doesn’t exist.
It’s not being negative/pessimistic to see this.
John Adams,
A Startrek teleporter is impossible for reasons that are firmly grounded in quantum physics. It is impossible now and will remain impossible with any technology or energy source that we will ever discover in the future. Quantum mechanics just doesn’t allow the level of determinism that would allow it to function. That is how we know that it will never be possible at any time in the future.
Orbital infrastructure is different. There is nothing physically impossible about it. Indeed, we already use it for many purposes. What Dennis L was discussing is orbital manufacturing using resources from the moon and asteroids. This will indeed be energy intensive to establish. But it has the potential to yield energy through solar power satellites. These can return energy to Earth. There is nothing technically impossible about this. Every part of it is based on sound physics and engineering. We do not know that it is economically possible. And we do not know what the EROI of solar power satellites will be. So we aren’t in a position yet to say whether this is practical in reality or not.
A cheap, reusable heavy lift vehicle is a key technology that must be provided to make this at all possible. Whether or not Elon Musk’s Starship will meet this need is uncertain. But he is building these rockets at a rate that dwarfs the production of any launch vehicle to date. If he succeeds in reducing the cost of access to space from $20,000/kg to $100/kg, then we will be a lot closer to doing what Gerard O’Neill envisaged in 1976.
The stakes could hardly be higher. If solar power satellites can be manufactured in space and demonstrated to efficiently deliver power to receivers on Earth surface, then a renewable energy transition will be a much more realistic prospect. There are too many technological uncertainties at present to know how realistic this is. But a good researcher never jumps to conclusions.
Hideaway, you correctly identify one of the chief criticisms of EROI as a metric. Where does one draw system boundaries? Charles Hall is generally considered to be the father of EROI. And his analyses went further in this respect than most others. His study of the EROI of the Spanish solar sector is definitely worth reading. EROI needs to account for labour expended on a project or technology, because that is productive work that is not available to other parts of the economy and is effectively paid for in goods and services, which represent embodied energy themselves.
Another implication of including labour and capital equipment into EROI, is that EROI has strong scale effects. If a design team and industry are established to build a single powerplant, EROI will be much poorer than it would be if those same fixed expenditure resources are spread over multiple units. We see that problem strongly driving the cost of new nuclear plants in the west. Inefficient regulatory systems that drive up build times also negatively effect EROI, because they involve more labour and resources being tied up for longer. In the renewable energy sector, EROI has presumably improved as scale economies have increased.
Considerations like embodied energy in structures and system lifetime, place a hard upper limit on realistically achievable EROI. These studies often ignore labour costs and tell us what EROI could be with infinite scale economies. Most EROI studies that focus on embodied materials, therefore tell us what the best case EROI is. The EROI of nuclear power was likely higher in the 1970s, before environmental activists made it their mission to ruin the industry.
@Peter Cassidy
A technical question on putting solar panels in space/earth orbit…….
If a solar panel on earth has a 25 years life expectancy, how long will one last in space in direct sunlight 24 hours a day? (No atmosphere to defuse sunlight)
Is the reason a solar panel deteriorates because it eventually breaks down due to UV?
John Adams, this gives a partial answer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panels_on_spacecraft#Ionizing_radiation_issues_and_mitigation
@Petet Cassidy
Thanks for the link . Interesting stuff.
“Other glass coverings, such as fused silica and lead glasses, may reduce this efficiency loss to less than 1% per year.”
“May reduce” isn’t the same as “will reduce”.
If it were possible/feasible, why aren’t solar panels being manufactured here on earth with a 100 years life spans?
And can these panels be manufactured in orbit by robots? Can the robots be manufactured on earth and transported to space? Can the orbital factories be maintained/repaired? Will the repair/maintenance be conducted by more robots or will humans need to do the fixing?
Non of it is proven.
What interests me about this is how solar power, captured in space, can be sent to Earth?
‘What interests me about this is how solar power, captured in space, can be sent to Earth?’
The most commonly proposed solution is to transmit power using microwaves at 2.45GHz. A large SPS producing 5-10GWe would be parked in geostationary orbit. A klystron array ~1km in diameter would transmit power to a receiver station (rectenna) on Earth. The rectenna would be a wire rope net, some ~10km in diameter. Transmission efficiency could exceed 90%, but 60% is considered to be a more realistic target.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/solar-power-satellites
‘“Other glass coverings, such as fused silica and lead glasses, may reduce this efficiency loss to less than 1% per year.”
“May reduce” isn’t the same as “will reduce”.’
Quite true. There are technical unknowns with every step of this process. There are political and environmental problems as well. I am not suggesting that this is ‘definitely’ something we should be rushing into doing. My point is that it is definitely something we should ‘consider’ as part of the overall solution set. Setting up the infrastructure would be a monumental undertaking.
@Peter Cassidy.. ” EROI needs to account for labour expended on a project or technology”
It’s a lot more than just labour. You can’t just drop all the ingredients for a NPP on the side of the runway into a PNG highland village and expect that the local labour would be able to build a NPP. The labour needs to be educated and gain expertise in a whole range of skills, from engineering to physics, to welding, to plumbing, to electrical engineering, to hundreds of other specific skills.
As I mentioned up thread, you need to educate thousands to gain the few who have high level understanding and expertise in a field like nuclear physics, you can’t just take 10 people off the street, educate them over a couple of years and expect them to design and operate a NPP safely. We need to filter out those not competent, which is what our existing system does, but it comes at a high energy cost. The more complex something is, the higher this background energy cost is.
We have built our system on much less complex energy sources, with a much lower background energy cost. Digging coal, crushing it, building a furnace to heat a boiler, putting some pipes together to get water from a nearby river and building and running a generator driven by steam is all simple technology, so has a much lower background energy cost.
Another aspect, that’s never included in EROEI costs is how the raw material energy cost is always rising. Calvo, Mudd et al showed how a 30% increase in copper production between 2003 and 2013 came with a 46% increase in energy used to produce that copper. Average world grades of copper fell by 25% over that period.
A weakness in EROEI calculations for an electrical future assumes everyone will be driving EVs, and using heat pumps, both of which would require much greater use of copper than present. Of course because that is outside the narrow world of energy production, there is no allowance for it, yet all those workers from various professions will need to live in houses heated by heat pumps instead of by gas or coal furnace and drive their EV for all purposes, so their background energy use has risen, which feeds into the EROEI of whatever they are building .
A common misbelief is that we will need less energy if everything is powered by electricity as it’s more efficient than fossil fuels. What gets missed is how inefficient the processes for turning electricity into plastics, or mining in a remote area with just electricity, or long distance travel and trade, or making synthetic fuels/hydrogen for high heat applications, or allowing the 80% of current human population that are currently not enjoying a modern western lifestyle to have equal lifestyles.
On a slightly different note, I’ve been investing for over 4 decades mostly in natural resources, and one aspect I’ve noticed is that for a successful new mine based on a new discovery of whatever mineral you like, there is always a very robust feasibility study, based on very conservative assumptions first. It’s pretty much the same for every business stepping into something new. The unsuccessful ones tend to have feasibility studies with very questionable assumptions regarding both prices and costs. I’ve even seen some mines get funding and built without any feasibility study done, they invariably went bust..
Even governments do feasibility studies on new projects, yet the collective of human civilization has assumed we can solve climate problems by going electrical, without reducing living standards for the 15-20% that enjoy high living standards, raise the rest to equal standards, all without any robust feasibility study to see if it’s remotely possible. The old rhetoric of failing to plan means planning to fail comes to mind…
Three incredibly informative comments Hideaway, thank you.
It is indeed – thanks, Hideaway.
As you may know, I’ve compared underlying or ‘clean’ economic output (C-GDP) with energy consumption and found remarkable correlation between the two over a very long (43-year) period. This raises the question: why haven’t we become more efficient at converting energy use into economic value? I’ve speculated that any gains in energy conversion efficiency have been cancelled out by deterioration (depletion) of the non-energy resource base, copper ore densities being one example. Your reference to falling copper ore grades reinforces this view.
Don Stewart, thank you for this link which I found very informative, especially Jim Rickard’s account of how first Bretton Woods landed inevitably on gold as the sole determinant of monetary value — and which is apparently being followed by the BRICS group — along a similar, Keynesian way.
I joined this forum because of my interest in the concept of ECOE and the repercussions therefrom on growth in a finite planet.I have very much appreciated the work of Dr Morgan.
However,while trawling the internet for related material and noting that fiat currency is of itself destructive of planetary resources I have become intrigued by the developments in the Bitcoin space.
I do agree that Alister Macleod is a veritable guru when gold is being discussed but even he has expressed a ‘fascination’ with Bitcoin .
Just as we talk about transition from fossil fuels to ‘clean energy ‘ I take the view that Bitcoin is the transition from fiat (as exemplified by the petro dollar ) to a sound decentralised international currency. Fiat can be created out of thin air whereas bitcoin’s origins are energy based . Which means that we have a direct connection between energy and the currency. The energy in its creation can be utilised from energy surplus to the immediate requirements of humans. Since there is a finite number of Bitcoin then planetary limits are baked in and in theory smooth degrowth could ensue.
The presentations on Youtube by Michael Saylor, Saifedean Ammous and Jeff Booth are highly informative on ‘digital gold’ and sound money.
No ‘CBDC’s’?
“ . . . . That is, instead of the 144TWh per year used by Bitcoin, CBDCs would consume some 7,056TWh – more than three times the UK’s total 2019 energy consumption of 2,185TWh… In an increasingly energy-constrained global economy, it should – but likely won’t – be clear that programmable CBDCs are a non-starter… a solution looking for a problem to solve indeed! “ ?
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/02/08/cbdc-bait-and-switch/?fbclid=IwAR0SiB_yriPZCOiFTmwAn8rv2Fz9IuvxOYTTRF6i2JCun21ow5JQqJQTGig
Bitcoin is begging for your assets to disappear under the failing of infrastructure. Happy to gobble up the real money with this head fake tho so by all means Go Saylor Go!
I also see Bitcoin as a “commodity” rather than a currency.
The value fluctuates too much for it to be an effective means of exchange.
Perhaps it’s worth an investment punt (like Tulips), but who is going to pay for a coffee with Bitcoin, (or anything ) if it’s value is more tomorrow than it is today? When Bitcoins value is on the rise, it stops being used as a means of exchange and becomes a store of value.
(That value still being measured against fiat currency $$$$$)
@postkey
I did not mention CBDC’s These are just digital fiat and controlled by a central bank.
I had read the Tim Watkins blog but clearly he does do not address the unique property of Bitcoin. It is totally decentralised .
As things stand operating the current fiat system uses enormous amounts of energy.
Decentralized? It is 100% controlled by complex infrastructure. Dubious claim.. show me how it works as energy becomes barely worth harvesting and certainly not distributed to plebes and we can talk
Cryptos are energy-intensive (through the ‘mining’ process) and energy dependent (they rely on data systems not crashing through power outages). There may be fixes for this, but we need to see them.
The energy use of Bitcoin (its proof of work mechanism) is its advantage. It creates fairness and gives it value. What is the point of money if it can be created from nothing? Gold has value precisely because it has an energy cost.
There are alternatives to proof of work that use less energy such as the proof of stake mechanism used by Ethereum, the second largest crypto. Proof of stake reaches consensus based on ownership. Now this approach works well for say stocks e.g. at the AGM the largest shareholders get the most votes. Makes perfect sense. And it is a reason why the SEC views most cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin as centralised unregistered securities.
But would you want proof of stake for a monetary system? Would people be happy in a general election if those with the most money would get the most votes, after all they have the most to lose? Very unlikely.
Arguably proof of stake mirrors the current fiat system as the central banks decide the monetary policy generally for the interests of the financial sector.
What used to be a virtuous cycle of high grade ores extracted by high grade fossil energy in the middle of the 20th century, has slowly reached a screeching halt by 2019. Now, the process has started to morph into a vicious cycle, where we try to extract raw materials (taking an exponentially increasing amount of energy to get) with a rapidly failing energy system.
For those who still think that this is pure hyperbole, and that things cannot be that bad, here are some stark reminders. In 2020 the weight of human made stuff has surpassed the weight of all things living on this planet (here is a great visualization). All of this was mined fairly recently: thanks to exponential growth (a perfect fit for the past century) we were doubling this amount every 20 years, so half of all this simply wasn’t there two decades ago. For the next doubling, this means, that we would need to mine, refine and smelt the same amount of materials as we did during the course of the entire human history. Even a small change in energy demand (due to ever lower resource quality) makes a colossal difference here.
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/a-mirage-of-abundance-de45805fa65a
This is why the Green New Deal is misguided even if it has good intentions. Wind turbines, Solar panels and Electric Vehicles all rely on rare minerals. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/23/is-there-enough-metal-to-replace-oil/
Delusion Comes in Many Flavors
Right at this moment US courts are wrestling with the question of whether the court can actually enforce it’s rulings and procedures in the case of Donald Trump. Prosecutors assemble vast amounts of data and testimony to grand juries and depositions and are required to turn that information over to the defendant so that the defendant can prepare for the trial. But the prosecutor and the defense need to agree on exactly how much of the evidence the defense can make public. Usually a routine meeting between the attorneys leads to an agreement. Trump has made it clear that he will not be bound by the court procedures, because they interfere with his right of free speech. The judge can, in theory, put Trump into custody and restrict his access to the media. But, I suggest, one has to be blind to reality in the form of screaming mobs to think that this is all going to happen according to the subdued and fact driven court room norm.
The US faced a somewhat similar situation in 1832:
President Andrew Jackson, a populist, reacting to a Supreme Court decision that treaties with the Cherokee Nation took precedence over Georgia law and the wishes of the President. Jackson, perhaps apocrophally, “John Marshall [the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court] has made his decision now let him enforce it.” The case revolved around Georgia’s attempt to apply state laws to Cherokee lands. The Court had ruled against Georgia’s authority to do so and Jackson, dedicated to Indian removal, allegedly challenged Marshall.
In reality, both Georgia and Jackson simply ignored the court and we all know what happened to the Cherokee.
Trump is getting enthusiastic support from his crowds with condemnations of government and especially the courts. Recall that Trump has been very popular in many segments of the military and some police. Can the court silence Trump and force him, likely using police and military power, to use the finely crafted methods we have evolved for use during trials?
It seems to me that we are experiencing the poem: “the center cannot hold”. I also suggest that government over-reach during Covid, pervasive propaganda from all sides, and the pressures of a slowly collapsing American Empire, and declining prosperity, are all putting a lot of moving parts into play. Is all that evidence collected by the prosecutors simply as irrelevant as John Marshall’s decision back in 1832?
Stay tuned.
Don Stewart
Interesting, Don, but please let’s remember that party politics are outside our subjects of interest.
Our task, it seems to me, is to explore economics and related issues objectively, and partisanship is inimical to objectivity. In a situation like this, I can appreciate the arguments made by both sides, but the debate is peripheral to, or at least divorced from, the fundamentals of rising ECoEs, decreasing prosperity and a ludicrously over-extended financial system. America won’t fix deteriorating prosperity – or much else – by changing its leadership.
I am a huge admirer of the US Constitution. But any such system is in the hands of fallible individuals.
@Dr. Morgan
The issue I point to is the Rule of Law in the US. Jim Rickards usually starts his talks about the US dollar with the statement that the US is under the Rule of Law…while he claims that Russia and China are not. Be that as it may, it seems to me that the Rule of Law underlays almost all EcoE analysis.
The US, of course, was born in revolt agains the Rule of English Law. Nobody here used to believe that there was any Divine Right of Kings. The Rule of Law was significantly advanced by John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the 1820s and 30s. Andrew Jackson, a populist, rejected the Rule of Law if it stood in the way of accomplishing his goals. The Southern White Secession movement was also a rejection of the rule of law, embodied by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Which led to the bloodiest war the US has ever fought.
The next round of rejection of the rule of law was the Monetary Silver movement of the late 19th century: “you shall not crucify man on a cross of gold”. That revolt failed, but came pretty close to success.
The next notable rejection was Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court during the Depression. That attempt failed.
This time around the details are different, but interesting if we try to read the tea leaves. We now have expensive lawyers concocting schemes to overturn election results…at the risk of their licenses to practice. We have huge crowds cheering on a man you wouldn’t think they would admire at all. That man has also been labeled as a populist, just like Andrew Jackson. The Colt pistol of 1873 was labeled “the equalizer” because it made a small man the equal of a large man…goodbye to fists and hello to bullets and don’t count on the rule of law to help you.
I see our current situation in the US as disillusionment with the Rule of Law. There are reports that Wall Street money has been looking for a Republican they can support who is “moderate”…and not finding anybody with voter appeal. I suggest that we have more than a small chance to see an upheaval which will destroy a lot of monetary assets, as well as social cohesion. Rising ECoE is likely one of the causal factors, and the simple unavailability of high density energy may become the result.
Don Stewart
“But any such system is in the hands of fallible individuals.”
Ah ha, and this doesn’t apply to healthcare or just about everything we do in life? Who coulda knowed?
@Don Stewart
“slowly collapsing American Empire”
I think, when an empire sees it’s best times as being in the past rather than the future, then decline has already set in.
MAGA.
@Dr. Morgan
An example of a failed revolt which nevertheless triggered a compromise. Malcolm X led a revolt against The Rule of Law and proposed instead a separation of black people from white people. He thought that the “majority rules” built into the US system would always disadvantage black people. Martin Luther King, a preacher, thought that religion was a way to bridge the racial gap, and that appealing to the better instincts of the politically dominant white people could result in integration. Ironically, the practical implementation of King’s goals was furthered by the fact that Lyndon Johnson, who was singlehandedly responsible for getting much of the civil rights legislation through Congress, had stolen his initial election in Texas.
Will the Trump revolt result in despotism or a reform which addresses the complaints of the people who feel unrepresented in the current system? Wealthion currently features a speaker who claims that the Wall Street elites are stealing the country blind. So it’s not only angry, gun-toting working class people who are angry. This actually ties in with what you have said on several occasions about the British system.
Don Stewart
Politics aside, the US president is largely a figure head. It isn’t realistic to expect a newly elected president to correct all of nation’s problems, anymore than a bad one could single handedly screw it up. Biden is practically senile, yet the apparatus of government still functions without him. To fix America’s problems would take the coordinated efforts of thousands of people, willing to put politics aside.
That said, I find it absurd that Trump and Biden are the best that their respective parties have to offer for the office of president. I realise that the presidency is bigger than one man. But one of these men is senile, the other is pathologically arrogant. Both are really too old to possess the dynamism needed to overcome the vested interests that control the US government. It just doesn’t look good to the outside world.
Point taken, Peter, but let’s not open the can of worms that is party politics……
“I find it absurd that Trump and Biden are the best that their respective parties have to offer for the office of president”
It is not absurd if you realise that US presidents need to be ‘useful idiots’ that the elites who own and operate the system can control like puppets.
Presidents cannot be free to have minds of their own. Even Obama complained, when asked why he had not been able to achieve his stated agenda across two terms as president, that the real obstacle was that he couldn’t tell the bankers what to do.
The system of government and politics is a sham, a puppet show, a ruse to keep the people powerless and divided.
I can’t remember a time when someone wasn’t ‘stealing the country blind’, and usually it’s the elites. That may very well be happening in the US, and I’m certain that it’s rampant in Britain. It tends to need more than this inequity alone to trigger a revolt – for example, what happened in France in 1789, and Russia in 1917, had a number of additional causes.
I’m a huge admirer of Martin Luther King. Incidentally, wasn’t much of the progress on civil rights achieved by Bobby Kennedy?
@Dr. Morgan
LBJ and Bobby Kennedy
LBJ was a master of the political process. Like Lincoln, he could count the votes and figure out how best to proceed. Lincoln, as the head of the military, rescinded the first emancipation proclamation by the victorious Union General in coastal Georgia…because he needed the votes from the slave states which had not seceded. When Kentucky and Tennessee were firmly in Union hands, he calculated that he could declare an emancipation proclamation and no additional slave states would secede.
Johnson counted the votes he would lose in the South if he passed the Voting Rights Act, and found it a price worth paying. He lost votes, but the Act wasn’t what brought him down…it was VietNam.
Robert Kennedy was not active at that time, to my recollection. I think the Kennedy clan always felt that the plebeian LBJ (born into poverty in Texas) was not in their class.
Don Stewart
LOL
Everyone has a limited understanding of reality.
We are all potentially dangerous in our actions.
Dr Tim, may I offer a quote attributed to Dr King that seems most apposite for the current times: ‘People with good intentions but limited understanding, are more dangerous than people with total ill will’.
As you say, elites have always enriched themselves, which is one of the enduring messages from Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’.
I’d describe our national economic model as consisting of: ‘The Plunder, The Sieve and The Veil’. The Plunder involves two processes. The first is funding the trade gap by selling assets (property, infrastructure and companies) into foreign ownership – and that explains the larger and increasing amounts of dividend income going overseas. The second is funding the fiscal deficit by issuing index-linked debt to foreign entities combined with effective monetisation from the central bank – and that is the reason for larger amounts of interest payments, much of them going abroad. The Sieve is the process of Severe Financial Repression -SFR – featuring continual debasement of the currency, and through inflation stripping incomes of purchasing power while elevating asset prices – and that is one of the reasons that the fall in prosperity is accelerating. The Veil is the policy of maintaining and increasing asset prices, notably housing to create an illusion of wealth – and that is the reason the country is unmoored and totally adrift from sound economic bearings of any kind.
As you have so rightly pointed out there seems to be a genuine belief among the governors, intelligentsia and national commentariat that the nation can: Spend its’ way to prosperity; Borrow its’ way out of a debt problem; and Print its’ way to monetary stability. That’s a great trick – it’s a great pity that it doesn’t work.
Thanks Kevin.
Let me start by saying that we – the collective ‘we’ – now know, or can know, where things are heading. Renewables, being less dense than fossil fuels, can’t ‘fix’ the impoverishment effect of rising ECoEs, and the financial system is predicated on a concept of infinite growth which is fast becoming untenable. These things either are, or could be, known to decision-makers in any country.
So what is the UK doing in this situation? Essentially, making things worse, for short-term financial, sectoral or electoral advantage. If ‘economics is energy’ is becoming self-evident, then the old ‘economics is money’ orthodoxy is failing. That means that economic ‘liberalism’, entirely predicated on ‘economics is money’, is being discredited. Yet the UK remains wedded to an extreme form of financial liberalism. What I still fail to understand is why the voters continue to fall for this self-serving nonsense. Shouldn’t the Truss/Kwarteng episode have persuaded the public that the Conservatives’ extreme economic ideology is both self-serving and intellectually bankrupt?
Here’s a case in point. Once rates started rising, it was obvious that landlords would try to pass increased mortgage costs on to tenants, who are amongst the least-well-off members of society. Seeing this, Spain put a stop to it, by introducing a blanket ban, of unstated duration, on rent rises. It has helped to bring Spanish headline inflation down. The UK could have done this, and it would have reduced the pressure on the BoE for further rate rises.
But no – the UK always seems to favour rentiers
‘People with good intentions but limited understanding, are more dangerous than people with total ill will’.
Well said, there is nothing more dangerous than a do-gooder!
https://open.substack.com/pub/jamiewheal/p/five-reasons-why-baseloadings-a-btch?
Wheal lives most of the year in Austin, TX, which has been 105 degrees F now for weeks and weeks with little to no rain. Soil temperatures around 125, which is not good for growing one’s own food. Watching the sunrise in the cool mountains tells you why generations of fairly well to do people from Texas migrate like geese to the mountains in the summer. Which suggests something about energy. If one stays in Austin, one “needs” some energy in order to live a modern life in the summer. If one wants to go to the mountains, one needs some energy to live a modern life. And, of course, one needs some energy to move between the two worlds.
Years ago Dmitry Orlov wrote about the potential for homesteading in Russia. There is plenty of land for homesteading, and the government will get you to the land on a river boat with some elementary survival supplies for one winter. Then you are on your own. Just speculatively, how do you think Wheal’s 2000 pounds of propane tanks and a Tesla he can’t use align with what Orlov described?
Our ancestors had, by definition of ancestry, figured out how to survive in many different hard environments and also be prosperous enough to reproduce. [Women need to have a little fat or else their reproductive system just shuts down. Ballerinas need not apply.]. Their definition of baseload was a lot different compared to our definition today.
It may be a bumpy ride.
Don Stewart
Interesting Dr. Tim.
https://new-normal.com/economic-growth/europes-chemicals-market-highlights-move-into-recession-and-risk-of-future-deflation/
Best,
What would be the EROI of a solar power satellite?
I decided to perform an energy balance assessment for a solar power satellite. This does not constitute a complete EROI analysis, but it does balance the primary energy needed to lift a satellite into orbit, against the electrical energy returned to the grid.
The mass of an SPS is taken to be 6.5kg/kWe produced at source. Transmission of power to an Earth based rectenna is assumed to be 60% efficient. The satellite will be in sunlight for 95% of time. The assumed lifetime of the satellite is 30 years. On this basis, the number of kWh produced by each kg of satellite mass can be calculated.
Q1 = (1/6.5) x 0.6 x 0.95 x 24 x 365.25 x 30 = 23,061kWh = 83,021MJ
I am going to assume that satellite components are lifted from Earth surface to geostationary orbit, 36,000km above Earth. This is inefficient compared to making the components in space, because lifting mass from Earth surface requires roughly 50x as much energy as lifting ores from the surface of the moon. But space manufacturing would require huge investments in space manufacturing and has not been demonstrated.
Elon Musk’s Starship will likely be part of any heavy lift solution, but there is no data at present on its payload capacity to geostationary orbit. The Falcon Heavy carries some 155.8 tonnes of kerosene and 362.6 tonnes of liquid oxygen in both stages. The vehicle has a payload capacity of 26.7 tonnes to GEO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
Kerosene has energy density of 43MJ/kg.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
It took me a while to track down the energy cost of liquid oxygen. This reference puts the energy cost at 200kWh/tonne, which is 0.72MJ/kg.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652621016462
Using this data, the energy content of the rocket propellant can be calculated:
Q2 = 155,800 x 43 + 362,600 x 0.72 = 6,960,472MJ
The energy cost per kg of payload is:
Q3 = 6,960,472MJ/26,700 = 261MJ/kg
Energy balance = Q1/Q3 = 83,021/261 = 318
This tells us that over the course of a 30 year lifetime, a solar power satellite will return 318 times as much energy as the energy content of the propellant needed to lift it. Presumably, any SPS manufactured in space would enable a much better net energy return, but this would come at the cost of investing in substantial space manufacturing capability.
The energy balance does not constitute an EROI analysis, as a great many energy costs are omitted. The analysis does not take into account the embodied energy of the satellite components, the rocket vehicle itself (assumed reusable) or the rectenna. No attempt has been made to include development costs or based space launch facilities. But the energy balance does demonstrate that the SPS is a potential energy source.
The analysis also tells us something about rockets. A rocket taking off is a dazzling display of fire and smoke and it is easy to assume that the energy involved in lifting materials into orbit must be immense. But the fuel load of the Falcon Heavy at take-off is 155.8 tonnes of kerosene (200,000 litres). This is actually less than the full fuel load of a 747-400 (216,840 litres).
https://executiveflyers.com/how-much-fuel-does-a-boeing-747-hold/
Rockets appear large partly because they carry all of the oxygen needed to burn their fuel, whereas aeroplanes draw all oxygen from the air. The 747 will burn its fuel load over many hours, whereas a rocket will accelerate into low Earth orbit in 8 – 10 minutes. So the power output of rocket engines is enormous. But the energy consumed putting a person into orbit is comparable to a long distance flight on Earth.
Civil War in the US?
This discussion features a conversation between a former right-wing young woman and a former FBI agent. The young woman early on says the struggle right at this moment is between the rule of law and acts of violence in support of a man deemed to be God-like (or god?). The courtrooms and the judges and witnesses are requiring special protection.
While the mainstream media describe Trump as deranged, Trump in his rallies says that his critics are deranged…to loud applause from his audiences.
Talking this evening with my wife, both of us expect violence in the streets if Trump is jailed. The FBI has estimates of the number of people in the US who would consider it a privilege to die for him. One of them died today in a shootout with the FBI. He left behind a handicapped son.
What all this reminds me of is Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 film about the Nuremberg rallies by the German Nazis. A very dangerous time for the US. How can the country pull itself back together? Can the physical economy and the financial system just cruise along with BAU? Three years ago military towns voted very heavily for Trump. Can the military, particularly state national guard units, be relied upon to defend the country rather than Trump?
Don Stewart
PS. I call your attention to the FBI man saying that the code of conduct in the FBI gets more strict the higher one’s position. In politics, it is reversed. An attorney chasing accident victims is judged more harshly than the expensive lawyers who helped Trump plan his coup. This series of trials may be a shock to some of those attorneys.
The question of social stability under conditions of economic deterioration is relevant to what we discuss here, but this strays over the line into party politics, I think, which is off-limits. (I mention this before anyone ripostes with Bidens and laptops).
@Dr. Morgan
The question of the causal factors which resulted in the US finding itself in this position would necessarily go into things such as changes in religions, economic deterioration, lost wars, the changes in relationships between the sexes, the role of Rupert Murdoch, social media as a megaphone, the rise of certain races, tensions produced by relationships with China, and so on for a very long list. I certainly don’t claim to be the historian who could put all that stuff together into a coherent narrative (e.g., The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
I’m just pointing out what I see as a very real path to domestic conflict in the US. We already have armed conflict, as mentioned in the discussion. My message is that there is a slippery slope that changes the scattered shootings into very real war. The “ghost guns” (Ikea like guns which evade any gun control laws) are one enabler. There is a firecracker (the legal proceedings with the real possibility of jail terms) and there is plenty of powder.
The counter evidence is that for all the shouting, and occasional shooting, life still goes on with debt piling up and long term bonds being sold.
Don Stewart
That’s fine, Don, but I want us to steer clear of party politics, hard to do once the name of a certain former president appears in a discussion.
@Dr. Morgan
IF the model is correct that powder accumulates over time, but it takes a match to set off the explosion, then the identification of possible matches is part of being prepared. Matches might include:
*the unwillingness of anyone to buy US treasury debt
*a multiple breadbasket failure of the food supply
*somebody pushing the nuclear button (a Nate Hagens’ concern)
*unexpectedly successful implementation of a BRICS currency
*failure, over a short time frame, of the middle grades of petroleum (e.g., diesel, kerosene)
*collapse of the EU project
*hundreds of millions of climate refugees
etc.
and including a military or political coup in a Great Power.
Many of those probabilities are a lot greater than zero. I will note in passing that James Howard Kunstler renamed his blog from “Clusterf**k Nation” to “What’s Up?”. The last entry I read reverted back to the original name.
A kinder and gentler version, but just as damning:
Don Stewart
@Don Stewart
Looking at the USA from over the pond, it strikes me, that both sides think that they are defending democracy from the other.
Each thinking that the other is rigging the system.
I’m not sure where you go from there? Civil unrest seems “baked in”.
If Trump is sent down, then people take to the streets in protest.
If Trump wins the next election and restricts voter rights and consolidates the supreme court. Then people will take to the streets. “Poke the Woke”!
But…….. hasn’t this been playing out since the creation of the USA? Federal v State.
After all, the founding fathers didn’t like “the rule of law” that was on offer at the time and were in a minority.
@John Adams
I agree that conflict has been part of the history of the US. IMHO, we are currently suffering from governments which are NOT reflecting the views of the majority. Take reproductive rights as an example. Well organized and funded groups have persuaded some politicians that extreme abortion laws are “god’s work”. But when the questions get put on the ballot (e.g., Ohio very recently), the majority tends to reject government interference in what they perceive as a family matter. The origins of the imbalance result from winner-take-all voting in jerry-mandered districts. Plus the inordinate influence of small states as compared to diluted influence of large states.
Social media has raised the conflict to many decibels of noise. And some pundits who should know better manipulate their message to appeal to a pretty low common denominator.
Don Stewart
@Don Stewart
“we are currently suffering from governments which are NOT reflecting the views of the majority”
But wasn’t that always the case? The founding fathers, who instigated the split from Britain and declared indipendence, were not in the majority st the time. It was smithing along the lines of 30% in favour, 30% loyalists and 30% not inclined either way? It was never put to the vote.
(Isn’t one of the groups that support Trump named after the fact that the revolutionaries were a minority?)
The suffrage that followed, though better than anything on offer in Europe at the time, was still not universal. Each State decided who could and couldn’t vote. The vote, still tied to property ownership, still being the criteria in many States. 50% of the population were not counted straight off. Those folks picking the cotton as well. Plus the original local inhabitants.
When South Carolina voted to leave the Union, it was just those rich folk in the State assembly that actually got to vote.
Rigging the voting system is nothing new. Plenty of black folk ended up in a tree for trying to exercise their democratic rights.
American democracy has always been a bit of a myth.
What’s playing out now, is nothing new.
It seems to me that one side is trying to fight for the right to vote and the other side is trying to Make America Great Again.
@John Adams
Agree with much of what you say. Governor Desantis of Florida delivered a diatribe about all of Joe Biden’s steps to make it easier to vote during the Pandemic. But, he says, Florida really would like to stay in the Union, but the US government will have to change substantially. I find this rather comical since a ton of people living in Florida are dependent on the US taxpayers and government.
If you visit Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and do the tour of the building where the Virginia Declaration of Rights (I may have the name wrong) was drafted and signed (the original “all men are created equal”), you find that 90 percent of the people in the room would not have been able to vote. Williamsburg emphasizes it by only allowing 10 percent to sit at the table.
As a student in school, I was always mystified why anybody thought that the Magna Carta was a milestone of democracy. All it did was require the king to discuss things with the barons. So the great advance was a discussion between war lords???
Actually, I guess it was the first crack in the “divine right of kings”. But a lot of people in the US still want to believe that their select politician is a servant of God. That is true in spades of a lot of Trump supporters.
Don Stewart
William Rees on overshoot and collapse. An excellent summary of our current situation and prognosis for the next few decades.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32/pdf
from the introduction:
“(4) Efforts to address the human demographic anomaly and resulting eco-crisis without attempting to override innate human behaviours that have become maladaptive are woefully incomplete and doomed to fail.”
that’s the challenge squared, because innate built-in long-ago evolved human behavior will continuously resist any “efforts” at managing degrowth.
thanks for that.
the human story is an amazing fantastic glorious profound wonderment, too bad about the inevitable suffering.
his concluding words:
“… in these circumstances, wide-spread societal collapse cannot be
averted—collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be
endured. Global civilizational collapse will almost certainly be accompanied by a major
human population ‘correction’. In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition
might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its
own predicament.”
so there will be great suffering, it is what it is, the best to hope for is perhaps to be able to avoid the worst of the collapse scenario, which I would guess would apply to many people alive in the 2030s, and probably most people in the 2040s.
ps: I predict depop beginning in 2024.
que sera sera.
“Starting premises… (4) Efforts to address the human demographic anomaly and resulting eco-crisis without attempting to override innate human behaviours that have become maladaptive are woefully incomplete and doomed to fail.”
If you start with that presumption, you are never going to end up anywhere constructive. It is defeatist, by choice. It is not objective, as we are supposedly aiming for here.
An alternative starting premise is that, while humanity is vulnerable to being psychologically manipulated by system propaganda, it is the system itself that is flawed. If those flaws can be identified, then they can be corrected, should the population, the elites, and governments choose to correct them.
It may already be too late, but we can’t know that for certain. Both global market pricing signals and global natural processes have almost infinite combined power to change the behaviour of the economic and political system and the state of the climate.
We humans have leverage over both these powerful forces, so to surrender to chaos without even attempting to exert that leverage would be to voluntarily dive into the abyss.
My personal view is that it is morally wrong to surrender all control over our fate, whether that surrender is a result of ignorance to what is actually possible, or the result of a psychological choice to stop applying cognitive effort towards understanding and debating solutions.
It is the system that has “become maladaptive are woefully incomplete.” If we start there, we retain the power to do something constructive.
“In the best of all possible worlds, the whole transition might actually be managed in ways that prevent unnecessary suffering of millions (billions?) of people, but this is not happening—and cannot happen—in a world blind to its own predicament.”
How might that transition be managed?
How can the world be made un-blind to its own predicament?
Indeed Rees’ article is a cogent review of our collective predicament. Hardly surprising in view of the ongoing quality of his analysis going back to the mid 90’s when he and his associates developed the concept of the ecological foot print. What spoke to me particularly is his explication of the interconnected nature of the smorgasbord of issues we face underlying the term polycrisis, and his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms of an evolving “world culture” based on capitalism, industrialization, etc. I buy his analysis of where to from here although the top end of the range he identifies for the earth’s carrying capacity (3 billion souls) is far too generous imho, in a world with significantly declining energy sources.
“What spoke to me particularly is his explication of the interconnected nature of the smorgasbord of issues we face underlying the term polycrisis, and his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms…”
yes he filled out the idea of the polycrisis with the item by item issues that show that humanity is confronted with much more than any single-issue argument could address.
a highlight to me was that he thoroughly explored this point that it indeed is “evolutionarily derived human nature” that is driving overshoot.
“… his argument that the polycrisis is driven by a combination of evolutionarily derived human nature and cultural norms…”
it seems that “cultural norms” are preceded by “human nature”, so the problem remains that humans are going to act like humans, and this makes any attempted management of degrowth so much more difficult since it will mostly be resisted by that human nature.
“How might that transition be managed?”
as Rees brilliantly pointed out, this is far beyond any single-issue crisis such as that it’s ALL about CO2 and just CO2.
for starters, the degrowth transition “might” be managed if there are enough people getting on board with the idea that it is a polycrisis that needs to be managed.
if you reread the article (no offense but did you read it closely yet?), perhaps you will pick up on the valid idea that it is a polycrisis that needs to be managed, and rethink and probably drop your agenda that this is a single-issue crisis.
if you align with the brilliant William Rees and the others who think like him, that would be one more person on the way to “enough people getting on board”.
“How can the world be made un-blind to its own predicament?”
do what Rees just did, speak up about the polycrisis, add to the volume, join in as one more voice speaking in their direction.
I think that any attempted degrowth management is doomed to failure, but it appears that you don’t, so sure go for it, dedicate the rest of your life to spreading the message just like Rees just did.
Un-Blinding?
The Dark Horse Podcast was heavily censored during the Pandemic, but it survived. The husband and wife team are evolutionary biologists. This podcast contains an interesting take on Robert Kennedy’s talk to an annual libertarian meeting. Small “l” because not identical to the Libertarian Party. Kennedy said that the solution to pollution is the internalization of all costs. You will find a handy marker below the screen which will take you to that part of the discussion.
I want to add an observation. Given that the Overshoot people from Bill Catton to Bill Rees have pointed to the enormous costs of what humans are doing….IF the costs are internalized, we will of necessity do a lot less production. Let me give one example. Suppose you want to be happy. There are two alternatives: fly to a tropical island and drink Pina coladas on the beach, or go visit with a neighbor and trade stories. The beach option would have a prohibitive cost but talking with the neighbor would cost almost nothing. The monetary system would shrink, the production economy would shrink, wealth would shrink so police and armies would shrink, etc.
Bret Weinstein says that Kennedy got a standing ovation. And he never even used a teleprompter.
It’s easy to see why political heavyweights in the US are trying to kill Kennedy’s campaign by pretending it doesn’t exist. But I suggest that Kennedy is suggesting an approach which has some chance of success for avoiding the catastrophes of overshoot. It’s late in the game, and we would definitely make some mistakes, but can it be worse that BAU?
Don Stewart
I don’t think many people yet comprehend the scale of the changes that are now impending. Think about discretionaries (non-essentials) – the products and services, their commercial and cultural significance, the businesses which supply them, the fortunes founded on them, the numbers of people and the specialisations employed by them – and the coming decline in non-essential affordability is going to have profound consequences.
@Dr. Morgan
The scale of the decline first became graphically clear to me as I read Azby Brown’s book, Just Enough, Lessons from Edo, Japan. Brown takes us through a normal day in the life of a farmer, a tradesman, and a samurai (reduced to mending umbrellas to earn cash).
The way they rationalized infanticide was interesting. We make up reasons explaining why we do things is aligned with the stars in the sky.
Don Stewart
A remarkable summary of the situation in the UK:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/13/uk-stop-kidding-ourselves-rich-nation-gone-bust
“Britain has its back against the wall to an extent unparalleled in its peacetime history. In all the other financial struggles we have faced – the currency crises of 1931, 1949, 1976 and 1992 – we could fight our way out by belt-tightening and devaluing the pound within a structure of secure trading relationships, anchored first by empire and later the EU. (…) None of that is true today. The UK has been living beyond its means in every way. Internationally, we are no longer a creditor nation. We depend on the “kindness of strangers”, in the famous words of former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, to support our currency, as our liabilities to foreigners exceed our assets by 30% of GDP and growing. Our fading industrial base produces permanent current account deficits, which since 2000 cumulatively exceed £1.5tn: rather than belt tighten, we have chosen to run up debt and sell our assets to foreigners in vast quantities to maintain our living standards. Nor do we have empire or the EU anchoring our trade. We are alone.”
Yes, Will Hutton can be very perceptive, as he is here. Obviously I would add a few points from an SEE perspective, but he’s spot on. I’ve been saying for years that the UK has been using asset sales and debt to support a lifestyle way beyond its means.
I have to say, with great regret, that the UK is powering towards a cliff-edge. Somebody recently described the UK economy – I quote from imperfect memory – as ‘an inflated property market with a financial services sector attached’, to which I’d add that most of the country’s service sectors are simply ancillaries to this unsustainably skewed system.
This risks in this are obvious. The markets could downgrade Sterling, driving the costs of imports, and household necessities, sharply upwards, and pushing the BoE into defensive rate rises. Even without this, property prices could fall very far, and might be doing so now were not so many people deterred from selling by the prospect of taking on a new mortgage at rates far higher than the old one. Where debt is concerned, and beyond the national aggregates, we need to look at the burden on households, which includes all sorts of other commitments not strictly defined as ‘debt’.
Yet there seems to be no appetite for change. I say this in a non-partisan sense, because Labour seems very nearly as committed to neoliberal bias and claptrap as the current government.
Hutton makes no mention of UK import of electrical energy which today is 18% of the electrical consumption according to ‘Gridwatch’ dashboard.
So the UK is not even self sufficient in energy in midsummer.
There is also all the export of finance to foreign companies who own and operate a very large proportion of the wind farms surrounding and covering the UK .
Yes, an interesting article, but Will implies that it was the trading relationships in the Empire and the EU that produced Britain’s wealth, but ignores the effect of the industrial revolution based on coal and the boom in the 1980s based on North Sea oil. As usual, the effect of cheap and plentiful indigenous energy – and now the lack of it – is ignored.
I agree, naturally, that the critical importance of energy should have been mentioned. The still-powerful myth of ‘chaos under Labour, recovery under Thatcher’ ignores the oil crises, which were the real cause of hardship in the 70s, and North Sea oil, on which recovery was based. Moreover, North Sea riches were squandered on tax cuts for the better off, and financing unemployment to break the unions.
This said, I take his arguments as being political. The current government is either clueless or wilfully biased. I was musing only today on the Truss-Kwarteng disaster – did they really believe that racking up debt to hand tax cuts to the wealthiest would invigorate the economy? This same blend of self-serving extremism still prevails, and I doubt if it would change much under Labour (unless Mr Starmer plans to get elected as a Tory-lite and then govern rationally, for which I see no evidence). So Will is right, I think, to the extent that the UK is making the worst of a bad situation.
Is it doomerism or realism? Without getting into the debate about whether or prognosis for the future is hopeful or hopeless here’s an article that aligns with my thoughts on the doomerism debate ( with thanks to Dave Pollard for the link): https://nypan.org/about/news-and-updates/2023/8/8/the-coming-age-of-climate-despair
I read that article by Umair Haque. He and many others get overly concerned about climate change (CC). Tom Murphy (on his Do The Math blog) has it right. All the focus on CC diverts attention from other matters. It’s like looking at one small piece of sweetcorn whilst ignoring the rest of the steaming pile…
Ok the FF industry gets huge subsidies – well global civilization is built on it. Without the oil it all comes down, never mind the climate. That’s the truth that is never mentioned in the legacy media. They want to reduce emissions *without* a reduction in consumption (which would affect the economy and their comfortable lives).
Haque writes:
“They tend to downplay risks, in the name of “balance,” while promoting a kind of feel-good optimism. It’s happened time and time again over the last few years, yielding more and more disastrous results. The pandemic, which they tell us is “over.” The rise of fascism, which was presented as a heroic story of intellectuals and brave rebels taking on The System. Is this what’s happening with….climate change?”
Leaving aside that the quotation marks in the third sentence should be around the second word, not the eighth, has he turned on a television lately? There is no lack of coverage about CC, but nothing is ever said against ‘The System’.
Whether or not CC is happening, of course the Groaniad and Bezos Post will publish nonsense. So? If you must read legacy media rags or watch lamestream TV, don’t believe anything they write or broadcast.
Most scientists have no certain conclusions on CC, only the majority of those who do say it is real and man made. The climate warms up, it cools down… there didn’t seem to be such a fuss over it when the going was good though, in the ‘boom’ years. Now it’s fashionable to fret about the climate, while ignoring the big fact: that the System itself is the problem (yet Haque labels those espousing this view fascist LOL).
As for the ‘green tech’ being implemented in Western societies, unfortunately it’s all bollocks, as has been demonstrated in detail (notably by hideaway) on this blog. ‘Renewables’ just don’t have the energy density necessary to maintain industrial civilization (IC).
It benefits the PTB to promote technological fixes to some of the inherent side effects of IC (i.e. pollution, environmental destruction of all kinds etc.) because no politician would dare deny people their Western consumerist lifestyles. To be fair, how could they? There’s no way to turn the machine off, now it’s been built and become what it has. Without all the extraction, production, selling, buying and throwing away, there’s no economy.
Maybe it would be a good idea to start ‘winding down’ the whole thing (IC), but how? The economic model is predicated on keeping everything going, ever faster, and it’s become so complex and interdependent that removing or reducing any one part could make it all implode.
Also, feeding the world can now only be done using FF, and there is no reasonable way to reduce the population. Advise people not to have children? That goes against millions of years of evolution and against nature. The trouble is that the PTB might try to reduce the population in an unreasonable way…
It looks likely then, that some sort of collapse is baked-in even if it’s not planned. While that is nothing to look foward to, people will survive somehow, so there’s no need to cry ‘doom’.
“The climate warms up, it cools down”
The Undesigned Universe – Peter Ward
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
It’s pretty hard to take Will Hutton seriously. Many of the things he describes are true but he has long been a big cheerleader of the very policies which have led to the current situation. In particular those policies of the U living far beyond its means were pursed by Blair and Brown for 13 years. The media obsess about Liz Truss…..who by contrast was in power for about 13 days.
Actually, I think it was 49 days, but point taken. “New” Labour’s policies were rooted in the bizarre notion – endorsed by orthodox economics, but illogical nonetheless – that credit expansion can drive growth to the point at which the debt taken on to create it can be paid off with the proceeds of growth. This was disproved during 2008-09. Truss and Kwarteng tried something not dissimilar, arguing that using debt to fund tax-cuts would be a net win over time.
Thanks Tim. Will Hutton is a regular commentator in the Guardian where it is an article of faith (see Larry Elliott) that the UK has largely unlimited capacity to use fiat money to fund massive public spending. This can apparently be done in a non-inflationary way with no impact on Sterling’s value! There is no sign that Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves disagree with this magical thinking. Indeed they dare not disagree….or their supporters would revolt.
I agree entirely. Mainstream newspapers “talk their books” and Hutton is a “placeman” for Guardian editorial policy; for instance, he is obliged to bring EU membership into his argument, disingenuously conflating it with Britain’s empire.
Britain was at the centre of the Empire, controlling the means of exchange, sucking resources in from all over the world and becoming very wealthy as a result. Germany/Benelux is at the centre of the EU and Britain was a bit-player out on the periphery, so the reverse process resulted, a trade deficit, funded by the very asset sales and fading industrial base he highlights as part of the problems that have arisen.
It is at the centre of any economic entity where power is exercised, economies of scale are instigated, resources are garnered and wealth accumulates. An inspection of Google maps, in layers, will show Britain as a wasteland of derelict industrial sites where production has been abandoned, many as a result of company sales to EU operations. Of course, the process has been ably assisted by the financial and political class in the UK.
As usual, the mainstream news is the last to come to terms with developments. I expect that Hutton has gleaned his information from sites such as SEE. I didn’t notice any suggestion of “belt tightening” in the Guardian after the warning of 2008. No! Instead we had talk of austerity avoidable by applying classic economic theory, the very misguided approach that SEE has identified as being at the root of the predicament.
There will undoubtedly have to be “belt tightening” and the quicker this is admitted openly by the political class and policies are proposed to make sure this is seen to be fair and equitable the better.
I would only add that the UK is structurally biased, favouring a wealthy minority over the interests of the majority, and thereby favouring the old over the young, and London over the rest of the country. What this overlooks, amongst many other things, is that much of the wealth of that minority exists only in paper form.
@Michael McGowan
“UK has largely unlimited capacity to use fiat money to fund massive public spending. This can apparently be done in a non-inflationary way with no impact on Sterling’s value!”
I think the problem isn’t so much that lots of money is created. The problem is that there isn’t the resource to spend it on. Locally sourced resources, that is.
If you have to get your resources from abroad and you no longer control those resources through an Empire, then you have a problem.
Perhaps ultimately, TPTB here in the UK haven’t come to terms with the fact that we no longer have an empire???
@Dr A K Johnson
“There will undoubtedly have to be “belt tightening” and the quicker this is admitted openly by the political class and policies are proposed to make sure this is seen to be fair and equitable the better.”
“Seen” to be fair.
It will need to be actually fair. Perception will not be enough.
Agreed.
From my non-partisan perspective, it seems that the Labour leadership thinks that they can only get elected by adhering to the economic drivel accepted by both parties over the past twenty-five years. They may well be right in this political calculation.
It will take a major shock to steer the electorate away from this neoliberal nonsense. I’m not sure how far off this shock may be, but I’m in no doubt that the British economy is at an advanced state of disintegration.
The breathing space we require to construct a feasible long term plan can only come from the biggest spending sector which is the public sector. Stripping that back to purely core services and dispensing with complexity such as tax and nonsense such as diversity managers and admin careerists is part of that. If you look at the public sector jobs available now in Ceredigion alone there are some utter howlers. These people are light years away from reality. There is precious little to be lost in that scenario unfolding. Quite the opposite. As for the trigger…..
the short answer is yes, I rather agree,
the long answer rather turned into a 2hr stream of consciousness of a few thousand words, I decided against posting it and saved it to wordpad,
but suffice to say, we really need a major reorientation of our approach to everything, so that it comports with the reality we now find ourselves in,
rather like every incremental change we failed to make over the last 50 years, all rolled into one!
I had to give the wordpad document a title and chose; And now for something completely different.
on a blog like this probably quite a lot of the concepts would be favorably received because people would understand the context within which they’re suggested,
but outside in the dreamworld of the mainstream I’d probably sound like a raving lunatic, so much of it is currently unthinkable for the majority.
Explanation for the Emotional Violence in the US and UK???
“Psychologists know how our fear of feeling painful emotions can lead to us suppressing them by directing our anger at people whose existence reminds us of the reason for our painful emotions (they call that response ‘experiential avoidance’). If you disagree or deny that environmental disruption is already so severe and self-reinforcing that the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable, then you may feel more uncomfortable as reality hits home. ” From Jim Bendell.
I’ll leave the UK to UKers. In the US, IMHO, we have two failed narratives at the moment. One narrative is that if we just get more “inclusion” then we can continue on as usual and everything will be OK. The second narrative is that if we just get back to Jesus/ capitalism/ nativism/ global empire etc. we can easily solve all our little problems. A hit song recently is bemoaning “the rich men north of Richmond (VA)”. So there is more than enough “painful emotion” to go around given the fact that neither narrative is working very well.
A few people DO convert suddenly to the opposite narrative. But that isn’t going to do any good. A totally different narrative is called for. But when Bendell put a totally different narrative on X/ Twitter, Musk and his minions decided to ban him with no explanation.
So we are: in the eye of the storm/ up a creek without a paddle/ Wiley Coyote in freefall/ zombies who don’t realize our condition/ …put in your own metaphor.
Don Stewart
“If you disagree or deny that environmental disruption is already so severe and self-reinforcing that the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable, then you may feel more uncomfortable as reality hits home.” From Jim Bendell.
I do disagree with this “scare them with scary stories” narrative.
another narrative is that “the breakdown of industrial consumer life is unavoidable” because of declining surplus energy. Yes I will go with that narrative.
I will put in the sorta metaphor of Chicken Little or Henny Penny: the sky is falling!
the 2020s are more than one third in the history books, tempus fugit, there is an inevitable cliff up ahead, very likely in the 2030s.
@davidinamillionyears
I think that the current disillusionment which leads to two conflicting narratives, neither of which is actually worth very much, is not so much about collapse as it is about disappointment that nobody is moving the needle. I think everyone understands the role of debt in keeping the mirage alive, and now has anger that things aren’t working out in terms of creating a new “great leap forward”. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
So, if what I have just described is accurate for the US, it isn’t exactly congruent to what is happening in the UK. As I understand the UK people here, the collapse is much further along in the UK. But the political divide has not happened in the UK as it has happened in the US.
There was a TED talk today “Will the US have a Civil War?”. I didn’t bother to listen to it, because, frankly, I am tired of hearing pundits talk about such stuff, with the inevitable “if we just listen to each other, we can work it out”. My own opinion is that things are going to change radically over the next couple of decades, no matter who holds political power. Politics can make it all a lot worse, but I don’t see much hope for “making it less painful”.
Don Stewart
Politics was once described as a contest “between those who have – to keep what they have got; and those who have not – to get it”. What interests me about unfolding trends is whether inequalities of wealth and income widen or narrow as economic contraction takes hold. Structurally, these inequalities are set to contract, though doubtless numerous expedients will be tried to prevent this from happening.
It seems to me that, with the real economy now far smaller (c 43% smaller) than the financial economy, it’s hard to see how property and stock prices do anything other than slump, with the latter heavily loaded towards discretionaries. A large proportion of the highest-paid jobs are non-essential within a contracting economy, i.e. they exist within the 43% disposable gap between the two economies.
“A large proportion of the highest-paid jobs are non-essential within a contracting economy, i.e. they exist within the 43% disposable gap between the two economies.”
I suggest it is possible that the elites plan the exact opposite outcome, meaning to keep the giant bubble of fictional financial wealth inflated for as long as possible, even if it means the real world goes to crap.
The elites would retreat to whatever islands of safety they have planned, and command the infrastructure of the global surveillance and security system to repress the hordes of unfortunate and desperate humans, and keep them at a safe distance.
There are of course many ways to join the dots of unfolding history, including with unlikely conspiracy theories, but if we look at things like the Wagner group trying to foment a violent anti-colonial movement across Sub-Saharan Africa, and try to explain the geopolitical value behind it, the most plausible conclusions involve apocalypse planning on the global scale.
To the more unhinged of the elites, protecting the illusion of wealth may very well seem far more important than the actual well-being of the majority of humanity.
“I suggest it is possible that the elites plan the exact opposite outcome, meaning to keep the giant bubble of fictional financial wealth inflated for as long as possible, even if it means the real world goes to crap.”
I agree that they may try this, but I can’t see how they’d expect this to succeed. If the material economy contracts, pushing more money into the system simply leads to defaults and/or inflation. As the gap between output and essentials narrows, the only way to prop up discretionaries would be by compelling a large and growing proportion of the population to go without necessities so that others can continue to afford discretionaries.
Something along these lines is already happening, to be sure – most visibly, perhaps, in the UK – but there are limits to how far this can go.
“My own opinion is that things are going to change radically over the next couple of decades, no matter who holds political power. Politics can make it all a lot worse, but I don’t see much hope for “making it less painful”…”
I agree completely.
@Brandon Young
“but if we look at things like the Wagner group trying to foment a violent anti-colonial movement across Sub-Saharan Africa, and try to explain the geopolitical value behind it, the most plausible conclusions involve apocalypse planning on the global scale.”
But aren’t Wagner simply a continuation of The Great Game? It’s not global apocalypse planning. It’s geopolitics.
Through Wagner, Russia can project its power but without using conscripted Russian regular troops.
The US has been using/training private armies in Latin America for decades. (Bay of Pigs, Contras etc etc)
“It’s not global apocalypse planning. It’s geopolitics.”
Yes, of course, but I was trying to provoke people to think about the End Game, what the geopolitical strategies are ultimately trying to achieve.
It is abundantly clear that the powers-that-be are no longer trying to prevent or delay the apocalypse – the crash of the real economy and the cascading failure of global systems, both natural and man-made. It seems the only goal that remains is to win the apocalypse.
@Brandon Young
“It is abundantly clear that the powers-that-be are no longer trying to prevent or delay the apocalypse – the crash of the real economy and the cascading failure of global systems, both natural and man-made. It seems the only goal that remains is to win the apocalypse.”
Isn’t it just about resources control, like it’s always been?
“Isn’t it just about resources control, like it’s always been?”
What resources? As surplus energy disappears, all resources become stranded assets. This is why the End Game is accelerating towards us.
I suppose we could prolong the resource accumulation part of the game for a while yet, by exploiting the vast deposits of coal, oil and gas still in easy reach around the world, but that would only accelerate the climate-change driver of collapse, and bring on the end game anyway.
David Wallace Wells
I hear his name cited as an expert. A short talk by him recently caught my attention. He claimed that everything was going so well on the energy transition….but now we are finding that the models apparently underestimated the severity of climate impacts at any given degree of warming. Without getting into the weeds, just take a look at this chart and tell me if you thing we have CO2 under control:
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
Looks like an upward bending exponential to me….Don Stewart
PS. But explains a lot about the anger directed at Jem Bendell by the “energy transition/ mainstream climate science” and perhaps “colonize Mars” community.
Don Stewart
The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable by William Rees.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
well worth reading because it’s all so true,
if you don’t quite agree with all of it, well you’re just not quite there yet.
So, 52 years ago today Nixon closed the gold window and put us all on a debt-
based fiat currency system. They would have known it would only be good for 40 years or so and as it happens they got 37 years out of it.
What to do? How to maintain the supply of Bread and Circuses to keep people busy, what on earth would happen if they couldn’t shop? Well it was kept going for 12 whole years (QE 1,2,3,…,TARP, ZIRP, NIRP, cash for clunkers, subsidies for solar, turbines, evs, heat pumps and other green nonsense) while they put in place their “final solution” to massive population overshoot.
By 1971 I had spent 3 years working for the UK’s management team and to be frank I think all the world’s management teams deserve a pat on the back for keeping the show on the road.
Management Team = the people behind the scenes who know the world runs on surplus energy and have had over 60 years to plan this collapse. Just what on earth did you think the pandemic was for or this “war” in Ukraine?
Pingback: #259: The way we live next – The Fourth Estate
It seems some surplus energy, line losses on transmission and distribution lines, was associated with the failure of the grid in North America 20 years ago-
https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/2/9/what-really-happened-during-the-2003-blackout
Pingback: #260: Known knowns | Surplus Energy Economics
Tim,
Your latest is clear, straightforward, indisputable. Here, at dawn in Washington State, USA, I have already forwarded it to the local Mayor-to-be, who is in this conversation with me, and who is slowly getting it. His term begins January next, and organizing a Community response is my aim.
Michael