The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” story is based on a long list of misunderstandings and apples to oranges comparisons. Somehow, people seem to believe that our economy of 7.5 billion people can get along with a very short list of energy supplies. This short list will not include fossil fuels. Some would exclude nuclear, as well. Without these energy types, we find ourselves with a short list of types of energy — what BP calls Hydroelectric, Geobiomass (geothermal, wood, wood waste, and other miscellaneous types; also liquid fuels from plants), Wind, and Solar.
Unfortunately, a transition to such a short list of fuels can’t really work. These are a few of the problems we encounter:
[1] Wind and solar are making extremely slow progress in helping the world move away from fossil fuel dependence.
In 2015, fossil fuels accounted for 86% of the world’s energy consumption, and nuclear added another 4%, based on data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Thus, the world’s “preferred fuels” made up only 10% of the total. Wind and solar together accounted for a little less than 2% of world energy consumption.
Figure 1. World energy consumption based on data from BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Our progress in getting away from fossil fuels has not been very fast, either. Going back to 1985, fossil fuels made up 89% of the total, and wind and solar were both insignificant. As indicated above, fossil fuels today comprise 86% of total energy consumption. Thus, in 30 years, we have managed to reduce fossil fuel consumption by 3% (=89% – 86%). Growth in wind and solar contributed 2% of this 3% reduction. At the rate of a 3% reduction every 30 years (or 1% reduction every ten years), it will take 860 years, or until the year 2877 to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels. And the “improvement” made to date was made with huge subsidies for wind and solar.
Figure 2. World electricity generation by source based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
The situation is a little less bad when looking at the electricity portion alone (Figure 2). In this case, wind amounts to 3.5% of electricity generated in 2015, and solar amounts to 1.1%, making a total of 4.6%. Fossil fuels account for “only” 66% of the total, so this portion seems to be the place where changes can be made. But replacing all fossil fuels, or all fossil fuels plus nuclear, with preferred fuels seems impossible.
[2] Grid electricity is probably the least sustainable form of energy we have.
If we are to transition to a renewables-based economy, we will need to transition to an electricity-based economy, since most of today’s renewables use electricity. Such an economy will need to depend on the electric grid.
The US electric grid is often called the “World’s Largest Machine.” The American Society of Civil Engineers gives a grade of D+ to America’s energy system. It says,
America relies on an aging electrical grid and pipeline distribution systems, some of which originated in the 1880s. Investment in power transmission has increased since 2005, but ongoing permitting issues, weather events, and limited maintenance have contributed to an increasing number of failures and power interruptions.
Simply maintaining the electric grid is difficult. One author writes about the challenges of replacing aging steel structures holding up power lines. Another writes about the need to replace transformers, before they fail catastrophically and interrupt services. The technology to maintain and repair the transmission lines demands that fossil fuels remain available. For one thing, helicopters are sometimes needed to install or repair transmission lines. Even if repairs are done by truck, oil products are needed to operate the trucks, and to keep the roads in good repair.
Electricity and, in fact, electricity dispensed by an electric grid, is in some sense the high point in our ability to create an energy product that “does more” than fossil fuels. Grid electricity allows electric machines of all types to work. It allows industrial users to create very high temperatures, and to hold them as needed. It allows computerization of processes. It is not surprising that people who are concerned about energy consumption in the future would want to keep heading in the same direction as we have been heading in the past. Unfortunately, this is the expensive, hard-to-maintain direction. Storms often cause electrical outages. We have a never-ending battle trying to keep the system operating.
[3] Our big need for energy is in the winter, when the sun doesn’t shine as much, and we can’t count on the wind blowing.
Clearly, we use a lot of electricity for air conditioning. It is difficult to imagine that air conditioning will be a major energy use for the long-term, however, if we are headed for an energy bottleneck. There is always the possibility of using fans instead, and living with higher indoor temperatures.
In parts of the world where it gets cold, it seems likely that a large share of future energy use will be to heat homes and businesses in winter. To illustrate the kind of seasonality that can result from the use of fuels for heating, Figure 3 shows a chart of US natural gas consumption by month. US natural gas is used for some (but not all) home heating. Natural gas is also used for electricity and industrial uses.
Figure 3. US natural gas consumption by month, based on US Energy Information Administration.
Clearly, natural gas consumption shows great variability, with peaks in usage during the winter. The challenge is to provide electrical supply that varies in a similar fashion, without using a lot of fossil fuels.
[4] If a family burns coal or natural gas directly for winter heat, but then switches to electric heat that is produced using the same fuel, the cost is likely to be higher. If there is a second change to a higher-cost type of electricity, the cost of heat will be even greater.
There is a loss of energy when fossil fuels or biomass are burned and transformed into electricity. BP tries to correct for this in its data, by showing the amount of fuel that would need to be burned to produce this amount of electricity, assuming a conversion efficiency of 38%. Thus, the energy amounts shown by BP for nuclear, hydro, wind and solar don’t represent the amount of heat that they could make, if used to heat apartments or to cook food. Instead, they reflect an amount 2.6 times as much (=1/38%), which is the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be burned in order to produce this electricity.
As a result, if a household changes from heat based on burning coal directly, to heat from coal-based electricity, the change tends to be very expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports, Beijing’s Plan for Cleaner Heat Leaves Villagers Cold:
Despite electricity subsidies for residential consumers, villagers interviewed about their state-supplied heaters said their overall costs had risen substantially. Several said it costs around $300 to heat their homes for the winter, compared with about $200 with coal.
The underlying problem is that burning coal in a power plant produces a better, but more expensive, product. If this electricity is used for a process that coal cannot perform directly, such as allowing a new automobile production plant, then this higher cost is easily absorbed by the economy. But if this higher-cost product simply provides a previously available service (heating) in a more expensive manner, it becomes a difficult cost for the economy to “digest.” It becomes a very expensive fix for China’s smog problem. It should be noted that this change works in the wrong direction from a CO2 perspective, because ultimately, more coal must be burned for heating because of the inefficiency of converting coal to electricity, and then using that electricity for heating.
How about later substituting wind electricity for coal-based electricity? China has a large number of wind turbines in the north of China standing idle. One problem is the high cost of erecting transmission lines that would transport this electricity to urban centers such as Beijing. Also, if these wind turbines were put in place, existing coal plants would operate fewer hours, causing financial difficulties for these coal generating units. If these companies need subsidies in order to continue paying their ongoing expenses (including payroll and debt repayment), this would create a second additional cost. Electricity prices would need to be higher, to cover these costs as well. A family who had difficulty affording heat with coal-based electricity would have an even greater problem affording wind-based electricity.
Heat for cooking and heat for creating hot water are similar to heat for keeping an apartment warm. It is less expensive (both in energy terms and in cost to the consumer) if coal or natural gas is burned directly to produce the heat, than if electricity is used instead. This again, has to do with the conversion efficiency of turning fossil fuels to electricity.
[5] Low energy prices for the consumer are very important. Unfortunately, many analyses of the benefit of wind or of solar give a misleading impression of their true cost, when added to the electric grid.
How should the cost of wind and solar be valued? Is it simply the cost of installing the wind turbines or solar panels? Or does it include all of the additional costs that an electricity delivery system must incur, if it is actually to incorporate this intermittent electricity into the electric grid system, and deliver it to customers where it is needed?
The standard answer, probably because it is easiest to compute, is that the cost is simply the cost (or energy cost) of the wind turbines or the solar panels themselves, plus perhaps an inverter. On this basis, wind and solar appear to be quite inexpensive. Many people have come to the conclusion that a transition to wind and solar might be helpful, based on this type of limited analysis.
Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated. Perhaps, the first few wind turbines and solar panels will not disturb the existing electrical grid system very much. But as more and more wind turbines or solar panels are added, there get to be additional costs. These include long distance transmission, electricity storage, and subsidies needed to keep backup electricity-generation in operation. When these costs are included, the actual total installed cost of delivering electricity gets to be far higher than the cost of the solar panels or wind turbines alone would suggest.
Energy researchers talk about the evaluation problem as being a “boundary issue.” What costs really need to be considered, when a decision is made as to whether it makes sense to add wind turbines or solar panels? Several other researchers and I feel that much broader boundaries are needed than are currently being used in most published analyses. We are making plans to write an academic article, explaining that current Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) calculations cannot really be compared to fossil fuel EROEIs, because of boundary issues. Instead, “Point of Use” EROEIs are needed. For wind and solar, Point of Use EROEIs will vary with the particular application, depending on the extent of the changes required to accommodate wind or solar electricity. In general, they are likely to be far lower than currently published wind and solar EROEIs. In fact, for some applications, they may be less than 1:1.
A related topic is return on human labor. Return on human labor is equivalent to how much a typical worker can afford to buy with his wages. In [4], we saw a situation where the cost of heating a home seems to increase, as a transition is made from (a) burning coal for direct use in heating, to (b) using electricity created by burning coal, to (c) using electricity created by wind turbines. This pattern is eroding the buying power of workers. This direction ultimately leads to collapse; it is not the direction that an economy would generally intentionally follow. If wind and solar are truly to be helpful, they need to be inexpensive enough that they allow workers to buy more, rather than less, with their wages.
[6] If we want heat in the winter, and we are trying to use solar and wind, we need to somehow figure out a way to store electricity from summer to winter. Otherwise, we need to operate a double system at high cost.
Energy storage for electricity is often discussed, but this is generally with the idea of storing relatively small amounts of electricity, for relatively short periods, such as a few hours or few days. If our real need is to store electricity from summer to winter, this will not be nearly long enough.
In theory, it would be possible to greatly overbuild the wind and solar system relative to summer electricity needs, and then build a huge amount of batteries in order to store electricity created during the summer for use in the winter. This approach would no doubt be very expensive. There would likely be considerable energy loss in the stored batteries, besides the cost of the batteries themselves. We would also run the risk of exhausting resources needed for solar panels, wind turbines, and/or batteries.
A much more workable approach would be to burn fossil fuels for heat during the winter, because they can easily be stored. Biomass, such as wood, can also be stored until needed. But it is hard to find enough biomass for the whole world to burn for heating homes and for cooking, without cutting down an excessively large share of the world’s trees. This is a major reason why moving away from fossil fuels is likely to be very difficult.
[7] There are a few countries that use an unusually large share of electricity in their energy mixes today. These countries seem to be special cases that would be hard for other countries to emulate.
Data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy indicates that the following countries have the highest proportion of electricity in their energy mixes.
- Sweden – 72.7%
- Norway – 69.5%
- Finland – 59.9%
- Switzerland – 57.5%
These are all countries that have low population and a significant hydroelectric supply. I would expect that the hydroelectric power is very inexpensive to produce, especially if the dams were built years ago, and are now fully paid for. Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland also have electricity from nuclear providing about a third of each of their electricity supplies. This nuclear electricity was built long ago, and thus is now paid for as well. The geography of countries may also reduce the use of traffic by cars, thus reducing the portion of gasoline in their energy mixes. It would be difficult for other countries to create equivalently inexpensive large supplies of electricity.
In general, rich countries have higher electricity shares than poorer countries:
- OECD Total – (Rich countries) – 2015 – 44.5%
- Non- OECD (Less rich countries) – 2015 – 39.3%
China is an interesting example. Its share of energy use from electricity changed as follows from 1985 to 2015:
- China – 1985 – 17.5%
- China – 2015 – 43.6%
In 1985, China seems to have used most of its coal directly, rather than converting it for use as electricity. This was likely not difficult to do, because coal is easy to transport, and it can be used for many heating needs simply by burning it. Later, industrialization allowed for much more use of electricity. This explains the rise in its electricity ratio to 43.6% in 2015, which is almost as high as the rich country ratio of 44.5%. If the electricity ratio rises further, it will likely be because electricity is being put to use in ways where it has less of a cost advantage, or even has a cost disadvantage, such as for heating and cooking.
[8] Hydroelectric power is great for balancing wind and solar, but it is available in limited quantities. It too has intermittency problems, limiting how much it can be counted on.
If we look at month-to-month hydroelectric generation in the US, we see that it too has intermittency problems. Its high month is May or June, when snow melts and sends hydroelectric output higher. It tends to be low in the fall and winter, so is not very helpful for filling the large gap in needed electricity in the winter.
Figure 4. US hydroelectric power by month, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
It also has a problem with not being very large relative to our energy needs. Figure 5 shows how US hydro, or the combination of hydro plus solar plus wind (hydro+S+W), matches up with current natural gas consumption.
Figure 5. US consumption of natural gas compared to hydroelectric power and compared to hydro plus wind plus solar (hydro+W+S), based on US Energy Information Administration data.
Of course, the electricity amounts (hydro and hydro+S+W) are “grossed up” amounts, showing how much fossil fuel energy would be required to make those quantities of electricity. If we want to use the electricity for heating homes and offices, or for cooking, then we should compare the heat energy of natural gas with that of hydro and hydro+S+W. In that case, the hydro and hydro+S+W amounts would be lower, amounting to only 38% of the amounts shown.
This example shows how limited our consumption of hydro, solar, and wind is compared to our current consumption of natural gas. If we also want to replace oil and coal, we have an even bigger problem.
[9] If we need to get along without fossil fuels for electricity generation, we would have to depend greatly on hydroelectric power. Hydro tends to have considerable variability from year to year, making it hard to depend on.
Nature varies not just a little, but a lot, from year to year. Hydro looks like a big stable piece of the total in Figures 1 and 2 that might be used for balancing wind and solar’s intermittency, but when a person looks at the year by year data, it is clear that the hydro amounts are quite variable at the country level.
Figure 6. Electricity generated by hydroelectric for six large European countries based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In fact, hydroelectric power is even variable for larger groupings, such as the six countries in Figure 6 combined, and some larger countries with higher total hydroelectric generation.
Figure 7. Hydroelectricity generated by some larger countries, and by the six European countries in Figure 6 combined, based on BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
What we learn from Figures 6 and 7 is that even if a great deal of long distance transmission is used, hydro will be variable from year to year. In fact, the variability will be greater than shown on these charts, because the quantity of hydro available tends to be highest in the spring, and is often much lower during the rest of the year. (See Figure 4 for US hydro.) So, if a country wants to depend on hydro as its primary source of electricity, that country must set its expectations quite low in terms of what it can really count on.
And, of course, Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern countries don’t have any hydroelectric power at all. Middle Eastern countries tend not to have biomass, either. So if these countries choose to use wind and solar to assist in electrical generation, and want to balance their intermittency with something else, they pretty much need to use something that is locally available, such as natural gas. Other countries with very low amounts of hydro (or none at all) include Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, Netherlands, and South Africa.
These issues provide further reasons why countries will want to continue using fossil fuels, and perhaps nuclear, if they can.
[10] There has been a misunderstanding regarding the nature of our energy problem. Many people believe that we will “run out” of fossil fuels, or that the price of oil and other fuels will rise very high. In fact, our problem seems to be one of affordability: energy prices don’t rise high enough to cover the rising cost of producing electricity and other energy products. Adding wind and solar tends to make the problem of low commodity prices worse.
Ultimately, consumers can purchase only what their wages will allow them to purchase. Rising debt can help as well, for a while, but this has limits. As a result, lack of wage growth translates to a lack of growth in commodity prices, even if the cost of producing these commodities is rising. This is the opposite of what most people expect; most people have never considered the possibility that peak energy will come from low prices for all types of energy products, including uranium. Thus, we seem to be facing peak energy demand (represented as low prices), arising from a lack of affordability.
We can see the problem in the example of the Beijing family with a rising cost of heating its apartment. Economists would like to think that rising costs translate to rising wages, but this is not the case. If rising costs are the result of diminishing returns (for example, coal is from deeper, thinner coal seams), the impact is similar to growing inefficiency. The inefficient sector needs more workers and more resources, leaving fewer resources and workers for other more efficient sectors. The result is an economy that tends to contract because of growing inefficiency.
If we want to operate a double system, using wind and solar when it is available, and using fossil fuels at other times, the cost will be very high. The problem arises because the fossil fuel system has many fixed costs. For example, coal mines and natural gas companies need to continue to pay interest on their loans, or they will default. Pipelines need to operate 365 days per year, regardless of whether they are actually full. The question is how to get enough funding for this double system.
One pricing system for electricity that doesn’t work well is the “market pricing system” based on each producer’s marginal costs of production. Wind and solar are subsidized, so they tend to have negative marginal costs of production. It is impossible for any other type of electricity producer to compete in this system. It is well known that this system does not produce enough revenue to maintain the whole system.
Sometimes, additional “capacity payments” are auctioned off, to try to fix the problem of inadequate total wholesale electricity prices. If we believe the World Nuclear Organization, even these charges are not enough. Several US nuclear power plants are scheduled for closing, indirectly because this pricing methodology is making older nuclear power plants unprofitable. Natural gas prices have also been too low for producers in recent years. This electricity pricing methodology is one of the reasons for this problem as well, in my opinion.
A different pricing system that works much better in our current situation is the utility pricing system, or “cost plus” pricing. In this system, prices are determined by regulators, based on a review of all necessary costs, including appropriate profit margins for producers. In the case of a double system, it allows prices to be high enough to cover all the needed costs, including the extra long distance transmission lines, plus all of the high fixed costs of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, operating for fewer hours per year.
Of course, these much higher electricity rates eventually will become unaffordable for the consumer, leading to a cutback in purchases. If enough of these cutbacks in purchases occur, the result will be recession. But at least the electricity system doesn’t fail at an early date because of inadequate profits for its producers.
Conclusion
The possibility of making a transition to an all-renewables system seems virtually impossible, for the reasons I have outlined above. I have outlined many other issues in previous posts:
- Intermittent Renewables Can’t Favorably Transform Grid Electricity
- Ten Reasons Intermittent Renewables (Wind and Solar PV) are a Problem
- EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading
- Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy
- Eight Pitfalls in Evaluating Green Energy Solutions
- Eight Energy Myths Explained
- Scientific American’s Path to Sustainability: Let’s Think about the Details
- The real oil limits story; what other researchers missed
The topic doesn’t seem to go away, because it is appealing to have a “solution” to what seems to be a predicament with no solution. In a way, wind and solar are like a high-cost placebo. If we give these to the economy, at least people will think we are treating the problem, and maybe our climate problem will get a little better.
Meanwhile, we find more and more real life problems with intermittent renewables. Australia has had a series of blackouts. A several-hour blackout in South Australia was tied partly to the high level of intermittent energy on the grid. The ways of reducing future recurrences appear to be very expensive.
Antonio Turiel has written about the problems that Spain is encountering. Spain added large amounts of wind and solar, but these have not been available during a recent cold spell. It added gas by pipeline from Algeria, but now Algeria has cut back on the amount it is supplying. It has added transmission lines north to France. Now, Turiel is concerned that Spain’s electricity prices will be persistently higher, because he believes that France has not taken sufficient preparations to meet its own electricity needs. If there were little interconnectivity between countries, France’s electricity problems would stay in France, rather than adversely affecting its neighbors. A person begins to wonder: Can transmission lines have an adverse impact on new electricity supply? If a country can hope that “the market” will supply electricity from elsewhere, does that country take adequate steps to provide its own electricity?
In my opinion, the time has come to move away from believing that everything that is called “renewable” is helpful to the system. We now have real information on how expensive wind and solar are, when indirect costs are included. Unfortunately, in the real world, high-cost is ultimately a deal killer, because wages don’t rise at the same time. We need to understand where we really are, not live in a fairy tale world produced by politicians who would like us to believe that the situation is under control.
Sometimes something not only seems wrong, but encapulates something of global significance. This is one of those things.
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/the-end-of-a-people-amazon-dam-destroys-sacred-munduruku-heaven/
“According to Prosecutor Boaventura, the root of the problem is that the Brazilian authorities have always adopted a colonial mentality towards the Amazon: “I would say that Amazonia hasn’t been seen as a territory to be conquered. Rather, it’s been seen as a territory to be plundered. Predation is the norm.”
Its what we do.
I applaud your concern.
Yes, it might take another 20 years or so but Limits to Growth is correct. And, as Gail has pointed out repeatedly, there just isn’t a way to transition to another energy source without some type of economic collapse. My favorite summation of all this:
Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum was responsible for the transformation of Dubai from a small cluster of settlements near the Dubai Creek to a modern port city and commercial hub. His famous line, “My grandfather rode a Camel, my father rode a Camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a Camel,” reflected his concern that Dubai’s oil, which was discovered in 1966 and which began production in 1969, would run out within a few generations.
Possibly some day, but it hasn’t run out in a few generations. The world is still well supplied by oil. In fact, every effort to reduce dependency on FF is occurring due to GW, however the result is more oil than ever is being used. And in spite of suggestions of sudden collapse, what is actually happening is a slow degradation due to a net energy decline. People need to start thinking about the current situation as comparable to burning a very long wick.
Whack-a-Mole…….
The people that think FF’s can be used until the very last drop is limitless. Here is a classic example of the thinking…..An anology of a burning candle, is there anything more naive than that.
“The world is still well supplied by oil.”
Perhaps for now, but in the near future? Possibly not if the current environment of low prices causes reserves to not be replaced.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-09-30/big-oil-reserve-replacement-price-gains-won-t-help-much
Perhaps this is the trigger point? Prices stay low, everyone pumps what they have to try and make a buck, but when cumlative oil depletion arrives, not enough reserves to supply even a depressed global economy? At that point, it will be too late to quickly find some more stuff and bring it online at any cost. Problem?
our only hope is to avoid any conflict when the total collapse occurs people will be protesting in their droves blaming the government and violent clashes will occur between protesters and the military or the police do not get involved even if family members or friends join the protests and encourage you to join. the main thing we can all do now is to talk about what’s coming to family and friends unfortunately you will treated like a ‘jonah’ but maybe some of them might finally get it. food and shelter and self – defence are priorities so hoard as much long life food [rice,canned goods ,portable butane cooker, with lots and lots of cannisters ,water[ install a rainwater tank , plant fruit trees and anything thats good for self-defence if you live in suburbia linstall a high fence mine are ten feet high don’t worry about going into debt they will never be payed off once the monetary system implodes . make sure you stock up in lots of hard spirits scotch vodka bourbon they will be perfect for bartering and medicinal uses learn how to grow food
The period where society transitions from where we are now, to where we should sustainably be, will probably be short. But, I fear it will be the most horrific transition period humans have ever witnessed.
I don’t agree with you on short. Consider the war in Syria, how many years now?. “Horrific” certainly describes that one.
This assumes a reset…. when the rice and cans run out…. there will be nothing.
To be realistic ‘The 20 Foot Container’ just delays the inevitable … for a few months at best.
And probably not at all if anyone is aware that you have a container full of food.
tsk tsk Eddy
no VP appointment for you
too much reality
not enough alternative fact
Alternative fact; the “fake news” of the doomsters!
I need to drink more Round Up….
They don’t have 40 ft containers in NZ?
We had difficulty getting the 20ft unit up our long winding drive ….
I am considering bringing in a few dozen and building a wall around our house stacking them to get some nice height to shoot at the hungry neighbours when they approach in search of food….
I’ve been combing Trademe for large used cauldrons for boiling tar and fat to dump on the more desperate women and children who refuse to take no when they beg for food…
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There was not a single reaction to Gail’s post few pages back, which reposted after a while this important graph (especially the colored left one). It drags people’z attention to make other historical connotations about cycles:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/carey-king_percent-of-england-gdp-spent-on-energy-1300-2008.png
No takers yet, I’ll chip in.
We take here UK as a proxy for the entire Europe/industrialized world, which is not 100% correct or precise obviously, but the trends were so powerful it should not skew the UK data form the rest that much. The colonies went online in-terms of real cargo moved (not just luxuries), way later, since late mid 18th century onward. But there were contributing factors before that like “potatoes agri technology” etc.
That intro cleared aside, now for the core message, for example, we can look at the graph and notice (“bust” the curve goes up):
The late Medieval period boom, the bust of the 15th century wars, the Renaissance gains even fighting the solar minimum of the mid late 16th, culminating in the carnage/reshuffle of the early-mid 17th century wars.
Then immediately follows almost uninterrupted longish boom phase through Baroque and Enlightenment till the French Revolution and its war/reshuffle period. Followed by mega trend since ~1830/50 of coal, industrial (heat), large cargo transport, and the 1970s stall, very partial boom and bust again..
Plus many peculiar, noticeable items too look after, like the post WWII big spike in frivolous passenger transportation.
Also interesting is the relatively modest contribution of coal switch into an oil era, which is a bit of fallacy, since it was additive, contributing change, nevertheless interesting on the graph to watch as almost non event or can kicking contribution to mega trend.
This is a huge mirror into the past as well possibly into the future one can ever wish for.
It maybe that these charts are a bit hard to absorb fully. The appearance is the past was larger then the present. What this is actually depicting is that cheap energy has been the real growth driver. The less it costs the stronger economic growth becomes. The chart concludes at the pinochle of UKs oil production then we see the cost escalate. GDP growth is the inverse of the cost of energy increase. So for 15 years the U.K. has substituted growth with debt as has every other country. The system has finally cracked as demonstrated by recent election results.
Yep.
Plus I forgot to add one delimitation, especially for the oil era, all the imported manufactured stuff, which has hidden some of the embodied energy, but this would be still a minor change on the graph post WWII/1970s anyway.
Also there could be some GDP computations shenanigans, notably since 1970/1980s again skewing the results, but this would be marginal as the overall graph patterns are super unveiling the core message.
The way an economy grows is by energy consumption becoming cheaper and cheaper over time, as a percentage of total spending. This concept is hard to understand, after a person has read all of the EROEI stuff.
There are several things going on: (1) The mix of fuels is changing toward cheaper fuels. Oil may be more expensive, but people have substituted away from it in many ways. (2) There is a shift between current energy use and embedded energy use. The chart only shows current energy use. Embedded energy use would include more expensive fuel efficient cars; more expensive fuel efficient homes, wind and solar generation instead of natural gas or coal. These don’t “look like” energy consumption, but they really are. Embedded energy use is funded by debt, so it has more possibility of growing, at least for a while, since debt acts like a subsidy.
I think depreciation should also be included. The more stuff that you have the more you have to spend just to stand still. Red Queen affect. The more energy is required to stimulate growth. It’s likely this is the reason for the exponential growth in debt with the decline in GDP stimulation. This is a powerful feedback loop that few are recognizing. Alice Friedman posted this today. It’s a good example of deferred maintenance and the result thereof.
http://www.goobingdetroit.com/
I posted the following elsewhere after looking at the link:
http://www.goobingdetroit.com/
Detroit Google-map photos over a decade. Presented by Alice Friedman. I glanced at the pictures and a quick takeaway id that efforts to refurbish Detroit places went around in a circle, in some cases ending up worse than ever. It seems that money was thrown at these sites with no or negative results.
I would suggest not throwing money at these places. Just wire them back together, use tape, glue–take an art rather than a carpentry approach–and use the money to help poor people live in them.
This is excellent reasoning for our predicament as of now, thanks.
However, my take is at certain point in future time, most (all) of modern infrastructure won’t be looked upon as salvageable burden for the mad up keep race, but perhaps only as scavenging area on case by case basis, some areas will be no go zone, forbidden due to hazards. The global pop will be fraction of today ~1/20 – 1/50th, and the “natural” common sense pre techno civilization technologies like ~90% eff. accu brick wood fired stoves, only used in few m3 of habitable home space, also heated with cattle under the same roof etc, ~ will be back in some form and fashion again.
This assumes, however, that the near – mid term future is not an uniform extinction level per se, “only a civilization and population culling” event, rebound to somewhat solid plateau is definitively question of centuries or at least few 4th turnings run aka ~110yrs multiples, the path there is absolutely uncharted. Understandably, nobody alive today would see it. Nevertheless, despite all of it, actually it does matter what we show and teach our (grand-)children about the world of today and tomorrow.
Speaking of depreciation and deferred maintenance, I was interested to read that Germany of all nations has a terrible problem with crumbling infrastructure:
“Crumbling bridges and traffic jams are staining Germany’s global reputation for efficiency. The infrastructure in Europe’s largest economy — as in the United States — has been slowly deteriorating from a lack of investment over the past few decades. ”
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/14/germany-has-a-crumbling-infrastructure-problem.html
this fits exactly with my thinking on saudi and the gulf
they know they oil is going to run out, so their genius financial advisors tell them to build towers in the desert to provide ongoing revenue streams post oil.
no one mentions that without oil, there will be no purpose for them to be there
and without oil to provide revenue for maintenance , they will fall over
Actually, many of us here must have ongoing-worsening problems with crumbling infrastructure in our immediate space, which “we tend to control” – I hope I’m not the only one, lolz. Hence also the keen interest in collapso – studies.
One way to deal with it, perhaps the preferred one, and not going completely mad is some sort of prioritization or triage, which has not been a popular term here. In practice though, it is what it is, in such predicament one of the tools, avenues open forward is simply sort of prioritized collapse. So, for example if all parts of my property constantly scream to me, seek attention, in the final analysis I have to focus limited resources/energies only on the top priorities. It’s not easy, it’s not funny, it sometimes blows back because of unseen dependencies-complexities, but it is a bit liberating after all than other options..
The worst aspect of it is that you know from certain threshold, you can’t cut anymore or the consequences are about to worsen via multiplied effect – blow back.
Well, it is not that unique position even pre global collapse, there is a plethora of historical literature on decay and personal/family slump processes just in few generations or faster, even though on the backbone of enlarging economies in the aggregate.
Is it because if their focus on renewable subsidies? The energy had to be taken from some other piece of the pie.
Most likely, but there are also deeper, longer traits than that. They overshot some of the pursued goals vs. actual realities, that’s what happened in other countries as well, namely the US. But while US was able to import lot of lower wage labor, in Germany and with their export oriented economy model it was on smaller scale, and with larger demographic slump of the ageing domestic workers.
Moreover, they overshot it in 1990s again, taking over millions of stay put workers inside CEE as subcontractors, again jumping exports of finished goods (“Made in DE”), but now with almost fully vendor financed model for insolvent customers in the PIIGS area of the EU. As we know trillions went into this black hole..
The last nail is the chapter of 2000s with renewables buildup, 2-3x more expensive electricity and so on. And not sure how to call the very last act of inviting millions of unemployable migrants (DE’s industrialist word) – another long term expense.
So, in summary, DE as exporting juggernaut lost most of its savings and reserves in circle logic of ever increasing export capacity to overdebted customers as well as became the favorite lamb for global fin sharks and casinos, the domestic infrastructure is massively overdone way beyond what will be ever needed post EU/PIIGS crash, therefore un-maintainable in its sheer size. The domestic population has been robbed of their savings and future resembling Germany of past centuries.
I ran into this article about US Navy war planes being grounded because of a lack of maintenance.
http://www.defensenews.com/articles/grounded-nearly-two-thirds-of-us-navys-strike-fighters-cant-fly
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I’m satisfied that the “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” meme is indeed a delusion. The same goes for any supply-side technology, or any combination of them. Like many who read Gail’s blog, I’m satisfied (well not really satisfied!) that humanity faces an inevitable disruption that will change life rather dramatically.
Ok, as more and more people come to this realisation the begging question then becomes: If none of these supply-side options (or even demand side for that matter) can save us what does the sensible person or politician do about energy policy? Arguing in favour of nothing = living with fossil fuels. Advocating for renewables and / or nuclear has no purpose if we are about to hit a wall and they can’t save us anyway.
I’m making this point because society has become so conditioned to duality that most citizens reading the title of this article will come to the instant conclusion that Gail is arguing for the status quo. Then there’s the small question with what we do with the rest of our lives, other than put comments on this very fine blog?
I can see why so many people champion things with earnest zeal, even knowing that their efforts will all be to no avail. If I tell them to stop they will ask: Ok, tell me what to do? I’m not one for hoarding food and guns to try to hold out when hard times come our way.
Chris-
At this point, do whatever makes you happy. It really is too late to do anything on a societal level.
What is the meaning of XXX will save us? Save us from what? We have to be honest with ourselves. What we are trying to save ourselves from is returning back to the normal state of human existence on this planet. Which is a grinding and very difficult existence. Cheap energy made life good for us. Energy is no longer cheap. So things are going to return back to normal again. All these folks prepping to hold them over until things return to normal are in for a rude awakening when they discover what normal really is.
Enjoy the time you have left. How would you spend your time, if you had been told that you had an incurable disease? I know people in hospice programs spend their time renewing ties with friends and family. Or visit interesting places that you always wanted to see.
If you think that there is a possibility of a religious solution, you might share this view with your friends as well.
I am not sure that telling the story of our predicament widely is really helpful, if fixing it is impossible. It begins to look more and more like the climate change story. Interesting, but basically unfixable by us.
“Enjoy the time you have left”. Playing this?
https://tabletopia.com/games/peak-oil
These are not popular thoughts. Most of my good colleagues are keenly pursuing the dream of covering the planet with solar panels and wind turbines. Some, even nuclear power stations. The environmental movement is underpinned by a philosophy of engendering hope and ‘yes-we-can’ optimism. It would be unkind of me to undermine their unbridled enthusiasm, because they are all well meaning.
I also take it seriously when Gail say she is unsure if it’s helpful to be talking up disruption – because what’s the point if there’s nothing much people can do about this diabolical predicament. But I stop short of faking optimism because I’ve come to a conclusion that that’s not helpful either. It just energises citizens and corporations to drive ‘alternatives’ that will even worsen the global predicament and push civilisation into an ever tighter corner in our eagerness to keep industrial society on the rails.
For the most part I don’t do either. I don’t talk up the crunch – except amongst the few people who can handle the news and not lose their heads. This site has become a space for those isolated people to share their thoughts. I don’t fake optimism either. But I’m acutely aware that many people are mentally very fragile and they are quick to suffer depression or can lose their heads altogether if given fatalistic messages.
This leaves the only space left. Talk about the good things in life – art and music and nature and physical challenges – and actively engage in enjoyable communal activities that are not harmful. Just maybe this may assist with building up the resilience that people will need when they become really challenged.
(One last thing…. I won’t resort to to praying.)
“I don’t fake optimism either.”
Men can’t fake optimism!
“(One last thing…. I won’t resort to to praying.)”
There will be plenty of resorting before this ends.
There is a slight problem. Every time we give money to so called renewables we take away purchasing power from others. Same goes for MIL spending and stock market gains. At this point we’re close to zero sum.
Industrial civilization and the period of the last 60 years has been a period where we have felt like we have some semblance of control. Unexpected deaths are rare. I would guess that the nuclear superpowers holding guns to each others heads can not last forever ala reservoir dogs. Understanding that our energy situation and what it provides is finite is very unsettling. We have no control. Cherish your time with what you love. Time is short. But is that not the case anyway? Perhaps it is better not to love but life seems empty without it. The promises we make to our loved ones can not be kept. Is it worth the pain? I dont know.
It’s actually not a very stressful situation if one had realized this day was coming and decided not to breed on that basis……
I can imagine having the knowledge that one’s offspring will suffer and die as BAU folds is what prevents the majority from acknowledging the facts.
This is certainly challenging time to be a parent.
unfortunately the same thing arises as a grandparent
Even if the gov does not set up an incentive system for having fewer kids my guess is that this will happen anyway when people realize the situation. But it will probably be too little too late.
On being a parent, there is that other argument that human being have never been secure. A thousand years ago our tribe could be ransacked by the tribe of the hill. 200 years ago and terrible plagues knocked out millions of humans. Forty years ago and we felt threatened by the prospect of all out nuclear warfare. Now it’s climate change and resource depletion. The one demonstrable thing that has changed is that of scale. Instead of my village being incredibly vulnerable, now the whole world community of 7 billion is in that space.
The present scene feels risky because we have the technology and know-how to analyse our predicament, plus the global scale of the problem plus the lack of escape routes. That, and the unavoidability of the threat. We are confronting hard limits that can’t be magicked away, try as we may.
Live fully every day. Have enjoyable relationships. Maybe learn things you always have wanted to.
On a political level, knowing that energy supplies will shrink, the thing that sensibly should be argued for is energy saving and austerity. But turning the lights/heat down won’t collect many votes, you get the big man with the big promises instead. Democracy doesn’t work in our best interest so maybe better to ignore big politics… focusing on your local community instead might be more fruitful.
It’s a ponzi in the sense that the first to pay in to the system are retiring comfortably where as the ones how are just starting to pay in will get nothing.
Hard to do if you don’t have enough food to avoid hunger. Which is a reality for many even in the US today.
As an individual really nothing …. as a civilization we need to very quickly jettison all alternative energy initiatives now — and instead rely on coal and other fossil fuels – burning them directly
The pretense of renewable energy is damaging BAU because it drives up the price of electricity….
In other words… throw more coal on the fire.
Now.
Seems that is what Trump has been told to do
It would seem that the only hope is for a disruptive technological breakthrough is our only hope. E.g. Molten salt Thorium nuclear, significantly lower cost graphene solar power and battery storage, fusion… but probably too late to stop a major economic disaster and ….
Increasing complexity doesn’t help. There is no techno-fix to what we face. We don’t need a technological breakthrough to suck up more energy. What we need is a direct simple, cheap liquid fuel replacement for crude oil. Be nice if it made plastics too. that is what we need. We needed it 10 years ago already.
The time frame for implementing a new technology is many years, once it is completely figured out. At one point, the oil industry estimated that once a new technology had been discovered, it took 17 years on average to implement it. I expect it could be longer than this, because we don’t yet have the technology discovered.
‘because we don’t yet have the technology discovered’
That is — a slight problem.
Not a problem at all just ask a unicorn They got the inside info on everything.
OH and glad you are back
I was hearing the same time frame 20 years ago.
There are no commercially scaling Thorium electricity production at this time.
10 years a go, a physicist friend from Marin was on his way to India, assuring me it was eminent.
I’m still waiting.
“There are no commercially scaling Thorium electricity production at this time.
10 years a go, a physicist friend from Marin was on his way to India, assuring me it was eminent. I’m still waiting.”
A pretty good rule of thumb is that, if there isn’t any spending to research something, it won’t progress. The Chinese are (finally) spending a decent amount on thorium reactor research:
700 engineers studying it…nice, but certainly no Manhattan or Apollo Program
Let’s say collapse is baked into the cake, is there enough time/energy to move/process/throw all the spent fuel into inert glass/ceramic blanks and toss those into the nearest subduction zone or geologically stable abyssal plain? I understand it would be difficult to convince everyone of the need, but given that, is it feasible? Then we could collapse Mad Max style and perhaps recover into a world made by hand? I would hate to think of all the preppers and doomsters efforts going to waste…
Any chance the human race could band together in its moment of need to save itself from self-extermination?
Heck, at least maybe separate the new “hot” waste from the old “cold” waste? Would that be enough to defuse the spent fuel pond doomsday scenario? Or at least minimize it so it is not an ELE(extinction level event).
How many tons of this stuff is there? Hundreds of tons? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
I know its a lot, just wondering if there is too much to even make a dent in trying to defuse it.
Fukushima alone has 2000 tons in ponds or so they say…I think one blew up smart of them to put the ponds on the roof
“…significantly lower cost graphene solar power…”
“One word for you Benjamin: ‘plastics.’ No, sorry, that wasn’t the word. It’s ‘perovskites’.”
Perovskite photovoltaics…the next YUGE thing*
*P.S. Too bad the Trump administration and Congress are highly unlikely to throw a few billion dollars into perovskite photovoltaics research. Sad!
Fusion has been underfunded from the start, yet the field is still making exponential gains. The fusion researchers are talking seriously about feasibility. I think we should too.
Yeah there is money to be made. How much have you invested in research?
Technology is what got us into the predicament we are in. More technology will make the situation worse. Even if fusion power was simple and cheap (which it isn’t) we would still have limits in other areas like metals, rare earth elements and pollution. The title of Gai’s article should be: “The Technology Will Save Us Delusion”.
Fusion is a constant, like the speed of light.
No matter when observed (1950 or 2017) it is always 20 years away.
Where’s that Mark guy? He needs more charts and stuff. I’m sure he’s got a phd in Econ. I guess I’m wondering if he will pay me off in 2017 dollars or 2020 dollars? By the way Mark, it’s a chaotic system so predictions either way are a bit silly.
Planetizen.com had these posted today:
Spare the Air: Beijing to Drastically Reduce Coal Use
Beijing promises “extraordinary” measures to reduce pollution in the infamously smoggy city.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/91075/spare-air-beijing-drastically-reduce-coal-use
———-
California Stuck With an Expensive Overabundance of Energy Facilities
The Los Angeles Times uncovers a state with a lot more energy that it needs, which has regulators explaining their decisions residents and businesses opening their wallets.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/91066/california-stuck-expensive-overabundance-energy-facilities
————–
Oklahoma Gas Tax Hike Faces Multiple Hurdles
Oklahoma is among a number of Republican-controlled states considering gas tax legislation, particularly since it faces a budget gap of $900 million. Bills to hike the tax are expected to be proposed this month, but they face formidable challenges.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/91059/oklahoma-gas-tax-hike-faces-multiple-hurdles
RE: California Stuck With an Expensive Overabundance of Energy Facilities
https://www.planetizen.com/node/91066/california-stuck-expensive-overabundance-energy-facilities
All the beautiful promises about wind and solar didn’t come true, and so now the Los Angeles Times — which is undoubtedly one of the leading purveyors of fake news in the United States — has gone on a quest for scapegoats.
The cause of California’s economic malaise — Californians are paying almost double what Texans are paying for electric power and California’s economic growth has all but ground to a halt — certainly can’t have anything to do with the vast amounts of money California has spent on its sweeping, grandiose wind and solar experiment.
Instead, we are told, “The Los Angeles Times uncovers a state with a lot more energy that it needs, which has regulators explaining their decisions residents and businesses opening their wallets,”
“California has a big — and growing — glut of power, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times has found.”
The spin doctors at the LA Times are in dire need of a reality check.
Thanks for the links!
One of the problems is that once there is long distance transmission in place, things get confused. Do you give priority to your locally produced electricity, or do you give priority to cheap electricity from afar? Relying on cheap electricity from afar is a good way to permanently get you into problems, when everyone else does the same. Europe is running into this as well!
Things also get confused by a mixture of “utility” type pricing and competitive pricing. Competitive pricing is now producing prices that are way too low for natural gas, nuclear, and coal, thanks to the subsidies given by wind. It is hard to compete with unsupportably low prices.
Also, the LA Times article shows a graph of rising electricity generation infrastructure, without labeling it as such, makes it clear that it does not understand that what we are putting in place now is a very expensive double system. Intermittent renewables add a huge amount of costs, but provide very little benefit.
I am not convinced that there is a way we can make intermittent renewables work. In theory, it would be possible to go to a national system of electricity generation, with prices on a cost plus basis, and someone overseeing the whole mess, including long distance transmission lines. In practice, I can’t imagine that this would work. We are dependent on having (1) either a small enough size unit, so regulators can match up available resources with needs for an area, or (2) prices set competitively. With subsidies for wind and solar, competitive pricing simply cannot work. In fact, I am not convinced that they really work otherwise, because sending electricity long-distance has a significant cost to it. There is an additional problem of regulators not understanding that we cannot have a nationwide system depending solely on natural gas. For one thing, we don’t have the pipelines to make this happen. For another, we cannot get the natural gas price up high enough to actually extract the amount such a system would require.
Not the brightest porch lights on the block?
Report: Trump team baffled by White House light switches
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Report-Trump-team-baffled-by-White-House-light-10911729.php
The people who want to build a wall between the United States and Mexico can’t figure out how to turn on the lights at the White House, according to the New York Times…
Odds are if it is reported by the NYT or CNN…. it is fake news….
The best thing about Donald Trump being elected is the exposure of the absolute and utter hypocrisy of the Western world. “You think our countries so innocent?” Not a politician in the world with balls big enough to say that obvious truth.
The politicians of the world are more scared of this guy because he will say something truthful than they are his lies.
The climate scientists got caught cooking the data. Again.
Given that, and our new POTUS, can we just stick a fork in them?
A whistleblower challenges NOAA’s climate data
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/02/06/john-bates-blows-whistle-on-noaa-climate-data/#more-102220
No. He’s only raising a methodological question. Let’s see how his peers respond.
I don’t think the way climate “science” was conducted in the past is going to work with the new POTUS.
If you don’t believe it, watch what Newt Gingrich has to say beginning at minute 00:38:50 in this video:
http://www.heritage.org/conservatism/event/understanding-trump-and-trumpism-part-six
“All the academic world develops a philosophy and then warps the facts to fit their philosophy,” says Gingrich.
The promise of money has lured climate scientists into the safe, orderly, predictable environment of the scientific zoo. True, life outsid is riskier; for some it presents a remorseless universe of tooth and claw. But science has survived for longer without government intervention than with subsidies. Scientists work their magic because they must, and they work best in the wild. It is time to turn the animals loose.
Recurring post: Heard scientists push the needle to make warming increase? Results are opposite: we reduce warming seen in raw data.
https://twitter.com/DekeArndt/status/819680239706116098
Sorry, wrong again:
No, U.S. climate scientists didn’t trick the world into adopting the Paris deal
http://mashable.com/2017/02/05/noaa-global-warming-hiatus-story/?utm_cid=mash-prod-nav-sub-st#jhtV8v1k6iq8
Anyone notice this in the news today ?
http://yournewswire.com/japan-fukushima-reactor-crisis/
Yep—
They seem to be losing control.
Insane number 530 sieverts.
Fukushima China Syndrome… Now and Forever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdOYeiyrNmk
On the positive side…. at least they are still able to pour water onto the reactor cores….
And the spent fuel ponds have not been breached….
‘800 tonnes of water per day is being pumped onto the cores’
Using diesel or electric pumps of course….
Besides the operational complexity (and massive cost) of building sub-sea pipelines to take the huge new natural gas finds in the eastern Mediterean to market in Europe, there is also a great deal of political complexity, as this article discusses.
It looks to me like the least costly route (by far) would be a land pipeline up the eastern Mediteranean coast — across Syria.
Oh well, maybe it’s time to double down on regime change in Syria. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, along with most Democrats, should be very happy to find new justifications for war.
https://s24.postimg.org/jor1gzayt/Captura_de_pantalla_592.png
Huge Gas Finds Can Keep Europe Warm If the Arguing Stops
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-06/huge-gas-finds-can-keep-europe-warm-if-their-owners-stop-arguing
Yes it has been peeking into the headlines on some sites as the radiation levels reach record lethal levels of about 530 sieverts. I think 8 sieverts is lethal. Apparently a robot detected a 1 square meter hole in the floor of the containment vessel adding to the fears that the radioactive fuel has leaked out in a classic “China Syndrome”. What is interesting is how many robots have failed to get a view of the hole as radiation levels destroyed the robots before they could get close enough to capture images.
Good thing that hole is on the other side of the globe!
Oh wait…
Thank you for taking the time to prepare these blogs; I find them informative and thought-provoking. I think there might be another viewpoint to the latest one. In essence, you talked about the existing situation, which is we invented some efficient continuously-producing power plants and then an energy distribution network to match them. When a new, variably-producing power concept came along, we found it did not match the old energy distribution network so well. No surprise, it was invented for something different. Onsite energy storage, perhaps as hydrogen, would have to be added to the concept to match the old grid, or a whole new distribution system would have to be gradually introduced. This is the alternative to discouraging variable power sources, but it doesn’t seem to receiving more that a tiny fraction of the expense of the power plants themselves.
Some mild blabbering about that, in an absolutely different context, is on my blog: http://stanericksonsblog.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-fluid-fuels-might-power-alien.html
Touch base with Keith…. he has similar sorts of ideas
We have a very difficult time maintaining the current system, because it is so expensive. Adding a second system to deal with intermittent electricity will almost certainly add further costs. Hydrogen in an energy carrier, but is problematic to use. For one thing, it is very bulky. It also tends to leak out easily.
What we need is really inexpensive energy substitutes, that would work in current applications. We don’t have any of these.
Enjoying this blog and the discussions here. Want to mention that I don’t see much discussion of reduction in use. We have so much waste in our energy usage: street lights and buildings illuminated all night, washing clothes after one wearing, and on and on. As long as electricity is cheap and available 24/7 i tend to avail myself of it, even though I try to conserve as much as possible.
We could make big stepdowns in our living standards and keep the whole show going a bit longer, maybe. Or not? I’m not enough of an economist to know.
Reduction in use of fossil fuels would reduce demand, and thus price. It would make the situation worse rather than better. Go buy a SUV!
https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article161831272/Die-Dunkelflaute-bringt-Deutschlands-Stromversorgung-ans-Limit.html
A clear illustration how renewable energies’ contribute to practically zero when the weather in winter remains dark for weeks (“Dunkelflaute”).
Thanks very much for a very fine reference. The BDEW is now thinking about paying fossil fuel plants for their services, so that they can afford stay in business.
Well, whaddayaknow – turns out people aren’t all that nice to each other when law and order break down:
“Looting, rape and murders have been reported on the streets of Brazil after the military police in Espírito Santo went on strike.
“With officers staging a walk-out over conditions, thugs are running riot in Brazil, with people running rampant with guns and machetes, shops being robbed, buses set on fire and dead bodies are left lying in the street.
“The harrowing scenes are being reported from all around the state, and one resident told Political Outsource: ‘The thugs are randomly shooting at anyone who passes the street in Espírito Santo…
“‘I won’t even leave my house today,’ one Brazilian resident in Espirato Santo told Political Outsource. Things are absolutely crazy, there are people running around with guns in pretty populated areas, dozens of people stealing from malls, even dead bodies on streets.’
“The governor of Vitoria in eastern Brazil called Monday for federal troops to come to the rescue after police went on strike, leaving the city at the mercy of criminals.
“The acting governor of Espirito Santo state, Cesar Colnago, asked President Michel Temer ‘to send the National Force and the army to safeguard the security of citizens,’ a statement on the governor’s website said.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4195318/Thugs-randomly-shooting-passes.html
and when the policies of your new supremo begin to bite, and civil order breaks down
the same will happen in the usa—a state of emergency will be declared, the military are sent in and in no time at all you have a fascist dictatorship.
Now let’s imagine what that looks like when the power goes off – permanently — and the grocery stores close…
We are going to see people do things that they would not have imagined…
And by this I mean previously law-abiding … polite people…
And for those smugly settled in their rural doomsteads believing the country folk are superior — lose the delusion.
I am in a rural area — we’ve got maybe a dozen homes all with a few hectares of land — so no crowding — and although generally there are no conflicts there is bad blood at times…
All but our place has gravity fed water from a spring up the hill — and some of the neighbours have been at each other because some use too much to irrigate — leaving nothing for those at the end of the line….
Profanities have been screamed over fences because someone’s goats have gotten into an orchard and destroyed avocado trees….
The tensions are simmering ….
The flame will be turned up to high when the grocery stores close — and then people will really have good reason to have a go at each other…
I can hear it now — you have a big garden — we have nothing — it is only fair that you share!!!
You can’t share because you don’t have enough — bullshit — and the gloves will come off — with no police to step in …. the thieving starts…. the high powered rifles come out of the cabinets….
And the madness begins….
Resource scarcity always brings out the worst in humans — this time will be no different — in fact it will be worse — because there are way too many people — and there will be very little food ….
In the cities… and in the countryside….
Your examples reminds me of the Twilight Zone “fallout shelter” episode where friends were gathered around the dinner table and after they are alerted over the radio that a nuclear bomb is headed their way, they quickly become enemies and threaten each other with violence. A tale of the haves and have nots.
Fast-
Are the people around you from NZ or from away? Fights over territory happen here over things like lobster fishing, but if some guy from Toronto came and bought a licence, heads would explode in the right situation.
I guess I’m just curious as to how people react in NZ to come from aways. People here accept them no problem for the most part but I think if resources become more scarce they will have to have earned an awful lot of goodwill to fit in.
Europeans, and to a lesser extent, Americans, have no issue with pointing out our faults. Some Brits I know are real good at it. I’m very glad they live here but I do fear for them when things go south.
The issues have involved both locals vs locals and locals vs refugees – although I have not had a run in with anyone.
I do not see these encounters as anti-foreigner — the foreigners living in this area are all white — mainly UK, Canada… same tribe – different branches.
The issue is usually resource-related — water — crops — however there have been flareups over use of shared roads including upkeep (resources again) or driving too quickly… there have been problems with people refusing to cut trees that are blocking sun or views….
Simple things can easily turn into wars… fortunately there are repercussions of actually going to war —- as in police, courts and jail…. post BAU the veneer of civilization will be stripped off….
Again – imagine when less simple things are involved — like starvation.
Thanks Fast. All that stuff can happen even among a family. I just wondered if you noticed an acceleration of it with people from all over the place. We had a fisherman kill a guy recently for poaching his traps and they grew up in the same place.
Good point — family feuds can be vicious… insert hunger and brotherly love can be no more
Bait?
“All but our place has gravity fed water from a spring up the hill — and some of the neighbours have been at each other because some use too much to irrigate — leaving nothing for those at the end of the line….”
It reminds me about the newest ploy by Gulfies/US deep state/bank cartel coalition, how to punish Egypt for their renewed Russian overtures and the Syrian debacle. A cunning plan (as always) has been proposed to support build up of big hydro near Egyptian southern borders in Ethiopia I guess. That way the Nile watershed gets lower water levels crippling all the existing Egyptian downstream infrastructure, as we know the Nile is everything (energy, food, ..) for them..
Another ME/Gulf war brewing.. ?
War is brewing everywhere. Ukraine is getting hot again. If you have lost everything and there is a rifle you pick it up. Why not?
It’s very US focused, as evidenced by the weird attention to coal, and discussion of their yerrible failing grid which is argument only for correcting longvtwrm. underinvestment that would fit well with adapting to renewables (& explaining neglect of tidal – probably THE most promising source for the UK long term). Natural gas can spin up and drop much faster, helping smooth renewables. After raising biomass at the top, that is totally neglected, along with winters usually being windier, and modern solar collecting fine in winter. No mention is made of the importance of energy efficiency and better insulation from cold and hot – despite things like New York’s landmark laws on new roofing to reduce their urban heat island effect. No mention of better localised tools, like ground source & air source heat pumps, or combined heat & power (especially well suited to northern USA). Section 4 is just garbage, completely failing to provide quantitative or in fact meaningful analysis, with a jumble of ad hoc statements clearly intended to point to preformed conclusions, that coal must be in a long term energy mix (lol!). Health issues are totally ignored, of heatwaves flooding and increased hurricane power, nor of smog, nor of vehicle fumes – 40,000 premature deaths from car fumes is probably a lot higher as ration in the US with gas guzzling cars and bigger cities. Car/house batteries are not efficient solutiins in themselves, but can help a lot to manage localised energy production. The only important point, which this article fsils to make clearly, is that there is a gap in the power mix for a baseload and smoothing to correct for wind and solar fluctuations. Fracking and nuclear have recieved mind bending amounts of subsidy. Throw a fraction if those at tidal, power storage, and energy efficiency tools, and return on investment would be provably much higher. The biggrst most crucial shift imho, is to follow the Germans, in giving local communities a stake in locally produced energy. But you know, there aren’t going to be slick highly paid lobbyists for that. Only the record of one of the most dramatic and succesful energy transformations, in a country that cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant niche. Over all the article argues against innovation and optimism based on a global record of failure. A self-defeating circular argument, which sadly has dominated the debate in the UK and US for three decades. We seem to take pride in being shit at infrastructure investment and strategic planning. China, is not.
?? Are you by any chance visiting for the first time over here..
Tidal is possibly the worst source to be synchronized with baseload grid.
Lot of serious discussion and links to papers available here at euanmearns.com
Large and even distributed power storage in batteries is both tech and economic nonsense. Thermal storage is possible, it has been linked recently in the Hunts example, but not everybody is brave/crazy enough to put miles of pipe into basement and plastic screen sheets over their houses with ~10yrs expectancy for all that work, not mentioning the un-aesthetics of it (for current spoiled pop).
Heat pumps, great stuff, took a while to explain it to Gail, that gains of 4-5x are normal today, but still this is expensive hitec (as opposed to basic 2-3x stuff), anyway this needs to be frontloaded by credit as not everybody is willing to fork $20k cash for house sized installation, also you still need the baseload grid to use this leverage in the first place, or steady renewables which don’t exist. This should/could have been done easily in the 1970-1980s + large nuclear buildup, but people got other silly priorities.. this would be nice can kicking program.
Don’t follow the Germans, their IV Reich is now visibly shaking, and will likely implode in a decade and with that most of the madness. They des-stabilized the grid around Europe for yet another crazy ideology, the case with their sheer oversupply from wind, CH + AUT + Nordic countries and few others must take huge swings of ~10GW, and they don’t have the hydro capacity for it anymore, it’s expensive to maintain cycle, ..
Why is tidal the worst source to be synchronized to a baseload grid?
Tidal tests have been ongoing here. Feed in tariff is $.35 a kilowatt! Giant underwater windmills that cost a fortune. However, they are no problem to sync to the grid and have predictable generation.
Not true, refer to studies on large scale projects.
We are talking GWs installed, not some proof of concept PR toyz..
You raise a lot of points. You seem to think that Germany is the model for success. Yet another poster just posted a link explaining how poorly wind and solar worked during the month of January for Germany.
https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article161831272/Die-Dunkelflaute-bringt-Deutschlands-Stromversorgung-ans-Limit.html
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.welt.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Farticle161831272%2FDie-Dunkelflaute-bringt-Deutschlands-Stromversorgung-ans-Limit.html&edit-text=
Tidal is not something that is working well. It certainly has not scaled to the point that there is any data on it at all. The salt water and constant motion is very hard on metal parts. It will be interesting to see how long these installations will last.
Increasing biomass consumption is not much of a source or growth, except for Europeans who want to import wood pellets from the US. This is hardly a sustainable source of energy supply. If there is a problem, your imports will likely disappear.
The problem with Tidal are the very sharp on off spikes, hard to efficiently cover even by the most modern on reserve natgas and coal powerplants, also the investment per real energy return is rather gigantic, details and hard data modeling as mentioned are provided in several recent post series at Euan’s site.
Biomass consumption, I’m afraid the major part of it at least in EU context are various biogas schemes, when you are in effect burning gas from fermenting “unnecessary” biomass from agriculture, which should have been left in the soil (and/or cycling via animals) in the first place!
The wood pellets are a lesser part, although I agree with Gail it is madness in itself, the price skyrocketed recently, as many affluent countries subsidized purchase of these burners, because in fact it’s seemingly the most user convenient burner on par with natgas or better, it’s very smooth operation, not smelly, almost no waste and attention, which is easily compost recyclable anyway, much cleaner to operate in contrast to coal, oil burners etc. It has become basically hot must have bourgeois item in recent years, the preferred home heating setup for say the top 5-10 richest European countries, that drives the prices up as the early “wood waste” domestic source are long gone, obviously quality wood material is sold for other purposes..
As I linked it already numerous times, you can watch the electricity situation in detail, brakedown on the various modes: wind, coal, .. export/import ..
energy-charts.de/power.htm
Tim Morgan has a new blog post out. He mentions the super-rich fleeing to New Zealand and the threat of unrest from us plebs.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/86-in-pursuit-of-safety/
Enjoyed the article. Thanks.
I also noticed, “Today’s policymakers seem to be being lulled into similar complacency by economic data flattered out of all reality by the practice of mortgaging the future in order to inflate the present.”
Thanks1
I don’t think it is possible to flee what is coming. It is global this time around.
I realized exactly that about 6 months after I fled to New Zealand.
But then I was bored with the tropics and needed a change….
These uber wealthy characters are not really any different than the average prepper – at least in terms of mindset — they are hunkering down to ride out the storm — with the expectation of blue skies ahead.
It would be priceless to see the looks on their botoxed faces as the realization kicks in … and the waves of fear roll over them…..
How ironic — the self-styled ‘Masters of the Universe…. Smartest Guys in the Rooms’ — with all their massive wealth and power…. starving to death.
Is what we are doing financially (borrowing from the future) similar to a wave in the ocean? When limits are far away the wave is barely perceptible. As the wave approaches the shore line it begins to build. Then an an odd thing happens, the front of the wave shortens and the wave reaches peak height. Then the wave breaks apart and slams to the ground in an violent uncontrolled crash.
If we keep borrowing from the future we will front load our economy so much that a seneca cliff collapse will look mild in comparison to the collapse we will get. The really bad thing is this will be global when it breaks.
+++++
Agreed Greg but we are most definitely not “borrowing” from the future. I doubt there is an intention or any consideration given to returning the favour, so we are either simply taking if it’s ignorance or stealing if it’s malicious. That’s why our collective behaviour is psychopathic.
Reblogged this on citizenpoweralliance.
Thanks!
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-03/utah-bill-sets-stage-state-gold-depository-further-encourages-use-metals-money
The tension between the federal government and state governments grows. Who does what?
Gail, what do you mean whit Who does what?
In the United States, we have multiple levels of government, each with their own taxing authority. There is the Federal Government, that issues money. Here the State of Utah wants to enable the use of gold and silver for transactions as well. Normally decisions on money are Federal Government.
There is a fair amount of conflict regarding who should be handling what. For example, schools tend to be local, but the Federal Government would like to mandate standards for them (usually without money to go with them). States each have their own unemployment programs. In times of recession, the Federal Government puts adds a “top layer” to the level of benefits available.
The Republicans, now in power, would like power for most things moved back to the states.
Ok, it’s not really different here. But it’s absolutely impossible a province would bet on bullion; I suppose it’s also quite bizare in the US
http://www.fasteddieracewear.com/
http://www.fasteddieracewear.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/fast-eddie-apparel.jpg
That’s hilarious. Thanks for posting that banner ad. It jogged my memory. I always had a nagging feeling that your handle sounded familiar.
“Fast Eddie” McCardle was a racer here in Port Royal and was track champion at the local oval. He also ran a drag strip that I went to on Sundays in my youth.
http://portroyalspeedway.com/index.php/2015/03/eddie-mccardle-1921-2015/
‘The aggregate of all oil these days is under 30-1. Below that number, you’ve got to shed some activities in our complex economy (or they just get too expensive to support) — things like high-paying labor jobs, medical care, tourism, college, commuting, heating 2500 square foot homes…). Oddly the way it’s actually working out is that America is simply shedding its whole middle class and all its accustomed habits and luxuries.” from Kunstler
Basically, Kunstler restated Gail’s recent graph (and similar used by several other authors) showing that drop in real income (and participation on the wealth distribution) since 1970s for the so-called middle class.
Now what comes next? Insta collapse, triage among the wealthier nations first or still confined mostly to the periphery, totalitarian command economies, some temporary mix of the above, who knows..
ZH ran today some new info on Germany as DE finmin Schauble openly blamed ECB for depreciating EUR policy to support German’s export, this is obviously another “Johnny come lately” type of not sincere revelation, but I’m mentioning it more because of some brewing connotations inside their upper management in Germany, as Schauble hinted he kept this info for himself for long time, hah. They are evidently trying to front run some of those US salvos on that “massive manipulation-devaluation of currencies by EU&China” front.
Anyway, should all the coming up elections (FR, IT, NL, DE, ..) in the end favor EU appeasing candidates, the cat is already out of the bag, pop is getting restless, it’s just matter of time before France or Italy demands substantial changes to the dis-union, which it won’t survive as a coherent lap dog player for the global order. I’m wondering who takes the initiative, yes there are still crazies even now wanting much closer union asap, including single taxes, code and government. It could split into some nucleus around Germany aka the NordEUR bloc, but the chaos (blowback on DE’s public savings) would be epic from any FR/IT substantial move, so I doubt it.
+ http://www.expertise-asia.com/2017/02/ecb-lunacy.html
“…shedding its whole middle class and all its accustomed habits and luxuries.” from Kunstler
There are graphs that show the change in distribution of US wealth over the past several decades, sorry no link but I have seen them, in which a healthy bell curve on the left part of the monetary scale indicates a big middle class, then over the past few decades it shifts right and arcs upward at the far right almost like a wave deforming against a wall. The people with money helped elect people that worked in their best interest and the middle class lost out. Never underestimate the American people’s willingness to vote against their own best interest.
“..into a glide-path leading toward neo-medievalism — what I call the World Made By Hand..”
Kunstler in that blog post spilled the beans, I thought he positioned it a bit on higher complexity tree ala 16-17th century.
Kunstler, like the late Walt Disney, has always been in love with 1890s America. That’s the period he hopes we’ll all end up reliving again. Won’t happen, or not for long, though.
James want dem people to call him massah….
Medieval certainly doesn’t equal 1890s by a long shot, unless you meant it that Kunstler hopes for reaching ~medieval level complexity post crash and slowly crawling back to 1890s. Which I doubt very much recalling some hazy details from his relevant books on the topic, I’d claim Greer is a bit closer to such line. Anyway, by that time, end of 19th century, it was already not World made by hand in many respects anymore as various forms of factory-unification/mass production took place..
Although, that being said, it’s true, there was a brief period, sort of golden age around that time, well I expect many of you go crazy to dispute on that one, in which the leverage human’s applied for instance on agriculture were sort of still with sane boundaries. Namely, the era in which simple gear driven implements (repairable by local blacksmith) + few horses (oxen) power allowed for relatively large productivity per person/acreage, decent farm living. It was a brief period because the other trends of the same time (railways, steam ocean cargo, medicine, telegraph, ..) allowed for the same improvements to be implemented in swift fashion across the globe with resulting deflation at the time of continuous exponential rise of population. Was it only a dream/mirage? Well just a few happy years at the beginning of it.. Then came the first combustion engine, upgraded global fin cartel and WWI, and it was all gone..
Infant mortality was high, average lifespan at a guess was about 40 maybe less. 90% of able bodied people worked in or in related agriculture. Life was very hard for the vast majority even if they were not a slave. Hours of work were long and dangerous. If you got sick and could afford a doctor, they would probably bleed you.
There were capital offences ranging from witchcraft to blasphemy to theft. The vast majority of people never in their life, ventured more than twenty miles from their birth place? Slaves are another story. In a nutshell, life for most was very hard, the middle class was small. The upper class was the place to be, and nowadays that is how the rank and file believes everyone lived.
Assume you write there about the Medieval period, in general I’m not going to dispute it.
Only add this term itself is also very broad brush as it spans several centuries and many sub layers. And the very late stages just before the Renaissance spring were much more bearable even for the little people in comparison what has taken place before.. And obviously again location, location, ..
The take-away …. have a look at the lower tiers of the 3rd world… places like Somalia…. and imagine things being 1000x worse…. at least Somalia has some penetration of electricity…. tools… petrol….
That’s a good take on it. It was a brief interlude period, before population pressure and industrialization took their toll. I recall King Hubbert in testimony before Congress showed graphs that indicated peak iron ore production (the easy stuff) came in about 1911. No one saw it coming, but he had the graphs to prove it.
I’ve had many encounters with people on the Internet preaching that the global economy is about to collapse. So far, in every single case, I have found the people making the claim to be not merely misinformed, but actually dishonest. I think that’s the situation here. And one way I determine that people preaching the global economy is about to collapse are actually dishonest, rather than merely misinformed, is that they are not willing to make any falsifiable predictions or to bet against predictions of future prosperity, even given very favorable odds.
This bet is open to “Fast Eddy” and up to 5 other people who have made comments on this post claiming that the end is nigh.
I bet $200 against your $10 (i.e. 20-to-1 odds) that the global per capita GDP in 2020 will be greater than it was in 2010. If you lose, you have the option of renewing the bet for 2025. That is, if you lose, I will bet you $200 against your $10 that the global per-capita GDP in 2025 will be greater than it was in 2015. If you continue to lose, I will extend the bet every 5 years until one of us dies.
If anyone *really* thinks that the global economy is going to collapse in the next 2-3 decades, he or she should view the 20-to-1 odds I’m offering as easy money.
P.S. I propose to use purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, as calculated by the World Bank and reported on Wikipedia. But I’m open to some other mutually-agreed-upon value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
no economic doomster can put a date on the future—that is the fact we have to live by, or with. That appears to be the pivotal point of your bet. Google Julian Simon—he made the same bet years ago.
So your bet appears to say that we will go on forever, enjoying the lifestyle that we have, with no constraints whatsoever.
Things could go on till 2025…further than that?—probably not. But I want to be wrong too.
If you don’t think a ‘downturn’ will affect the economic balance, check what happened in 07/08.
We’ve established the”facts” on your side of the bet.
So let’s examine the facts on the ‘dishonest’ side:
(feel free to point out any major points of dishonesty below btw)
the means by which we drive our functioning economy is by the use of heat (in one form or another) to create marketable goods (of one sort or another) to service a theoretically infinite monetary debt.
Our money supply depends on heat supply, because nothing can be manufactured or marketed in the context of civilized existence without it.
So we live in an energy economy, not a money economy.
For that debt to be constantly serviced, we must have an infinite amount of heat input to drive the “system” we have created for ourselves..
We have to burn stuff to hold up our current infrastructure.
Right now the ecomonies of the world are running on debt—which is another word for “empty”—we are freewheeling.
But the ‘fact’ remains that our heat sources are finite. (no precise date is possible).
That said, your prediction (as the only viable alternative), is that the global economy will go on forever; (renewing the bet every 5 years etc) because we can live work and generally exist within your version of an economy that is made functional by the exchange of bits of coloured paper and plastic, heat input being unnecessary.
ie we exchange energy tokens, not energy itself.
Which means that the bet is between:
a—the ‘fact’ that the driving force of our infrastructure (oil coal and gas) is finite. (which we know to be so, but not dated)
or b—the ‘fact’ that we can go on printing infinite amounts of money with no form of real energy resource to back it up.
The global per capita GDP is meaningless, when a dozen people in the world own as much capital as half of the worlds population. That reflects global wealth imbalance to an obscene degree.
The critical factor is the energy available per capita—namely oil.
This was at its maximum around the 1980s.
Hi,
You write, “…the means by which we drive our functioning economy is by the use of heat (in one form or another) to create marketable goods (of one sort or another)…”
Yes, we use heat/electricity. But we use water, too. And we all need food to eat. That doesn’t mean somehow economies are near collapse. For example, in the U.S., this is the approximate breakdown for fuels for electricity:
• Coal = 33%
• Natural gas = 33%
• Nuclear = 20%
• Hydropower = 6%
• Other renewables = 7%
Let’s say we knew for a fact that 30 years for now, coal, natural gas, and nuclear would not be available. Well, we could get *every single kilowatt-hour* of electricity in the U.S. from photovoltaics, backed up by batteries (either lithium-ion or otherwise). The only real deterrent is that our retail electricity prices would probably increase by a factor of 1.5 to 3 times.
You also write, “The critical factor is the energy available per capita—namely oil.”
No, that’s not correct. We could also power 100% of our automobiles by electricity from those photovoltaics. The only real impact would be that the cost/mile traveled might go up.
The key to economic growth has always been and always will be free human minds.
“No, that’s not correct. We could also power 100% of our automobiles by electricity from those photovoltaics. The only real impact would be that the cost/mile traveled might go up.”
Photovoltaics are close to a net energy sink. Your switch from energy to cost is a common one used to hife the reality of net energy sinks. Money only exists because of surplus energy. The illogic of your statement is revealed by keeping the statement you made without its detach to cost. It would read.
We could also power 100% of our automobiles by electricity from net energy sinks. The only real impact would be that the more surplus energy would be needed.
“The key to economic growth has always been and always will be free human minds.”
The idea of economy as it is commonly viewed is a complete falsehood. I find it ironic that you feel it appropriate to place it in a sentence together with the idea of a “free human mind”. Quite humorous really.
“Photovoltaics are close to a net energy sink.”
What is your source for this?
“The idea of economy as it is commonly viewed is a complete falsehood.”
Do you mean as commonly viewed by the economics profession (e.g. analysts in the U.S. government and at the World Bank)? If so, what is your source tor *that*?
“I find it ironic that you feel it appropriate to place it in a sentence together with the idea of a “free human mind”. Quite humorous really.”
I’m curious…what’s your background that you think entitles you to write so derisively?
Mark you are obviously here to sabotage. You are know atempting to distract by demanding sources and credentials. You can not engage in a civil debate as your positions are ludicrous so you demand credentials and sources. What you will not address is your technique of discussing energy and switching to $ as a solution. What you will not discuss is that money is energy and that your switch is deceitful. Instead of accountability for your positions the positions and behavior you demand sources and credentials.
Everyone can have unlimited energy all it takes is a little money.
Everyone can have a big house and a car all it takes is a little money.
Everyone can live to 150 all it takes is a little money.
People understand the world is finite. Generally they will disregard it if it serves to allow them to acess more resources.
“”Photovoltaics are close to a net energy sink.””
What is your source for this?
There are many sources showing photovoltaics to be pretty close to a net energy sink.
Spains report on their “disatrous” investment in PV is one.
““The idea of economy as it is commonly viewed is a complete falsehood.””
“Do you mean as commonly viewed by the economics profession (e.g. analysts in the U.S. government and at the World Bank)? If so, what is your source tor *that*?”
Common economics assume infinite high eroi energy. None of them address limits to growth that is dictated by a finite world. They actually need infinite growth for the model to work. Economics is presented as if it is a physical science but it disregards the laws of physics. Economics pretends there is infinite resources available but its pretending can not create resources any more than the tooth fairy. An example is the Qaudrillions of debt that have been created. There is no physical backing for that debt. It has no counterpart in the physical world.
““I find it ironic that you feel it appropriate to place it in a sentence together with the idea of a “free human mind”. Quite humorous really.””
“I’m curious…what’s your background that you think entitles you to write so derisively?”
How am I derisive Mark? I have kept to the subject you have brought forth and have been polite. Yes I find this statement incredibly humorous;
“The key to economic growth has always been and always will be free human minds.”
If you are a advocate of free human minds why do you use techniques designed to distract from free discussion? Must one have a “background” to engage in discussion and have a “free human mind”? The techniques you use are indeed derisive. The positions you postulate are indeed humorous. I have been polite and I assure you I intend no derisiveness toward your positions. Nor have i resorted to the derisive tactics you use. I have no need logic supports my positions.
Mark, allow me to try. I had 2300 watts of solar panels on my roof but I know what I really have is about 20 tons of Chinese lignite coal. The panels are cleaner and I hope they give me a few KW per day for the next 20 years. The 20 tons of coal is from the mining of the raw material ( especial the aluminum a real energy pig) the silicon and the amazing journey these panels were on before they were finally installed. They journeyed from china to Ottawa then out to Victoria then finally up and down our island where I live while I was trying to decide what house to put the panels on. Make no mistake those panels represent lots of oil, coal and probably some nuclear energy. Without those energy sources they would not exist. Prove me wrong just find a solar powered village with solar powered factories that use solar power for resource extraction and of course a solar powered ship etc etc.
With oil we live – without it we’re dead!
Hi Frieda,
“There are many sources showing photovoltaics to be pretty close to a net energy sink.”
Yes, and there are many sources showing that the World Trade Center towers came down as a result of a controlled demolition. That doesn’t mean that the WTC towers came down as a result of a controlled demolition.
Here’s a source that estimates that the Energy Return Ratios (ERR) for photovoltaics modules ranges from 15-1 to 60-1, assuming a lifetime of 30 years, and various locations and photovoltaics module technologies. (Note: This is a 2012 source, and ERR continue to improve for photovoltaics.) If you have a source that disputes that source, provide me a link, and we can talk about it.
https://www.bnl.gov/pv/files/pdf/236_PE_Magazine_Fthenakis_2_10_12.pdf
“How am I derisive Mark? I have kept to the subject you have brought forth and have been polite. Yes I find this statement incredibly humorous;’ The key to economic growth has always been and always will be free human minds.”
In the context, I thought it was an attack on my mind. Perhaps I simply read it too close in time to statements like: “You are going even deeper into DelusiSTAN…. It would be easier to explain this to a retarded 8 year old …”
Best wishes,
Mark
Unfortunately, even a rapid energy payback period or a high EROEI doesn’t get you very far with PV. The output is intermittent. A little of such output can be used by the grid without too much damage, but as more and more of it is used, it requires greater and greater workarounds. These workarounds are not reflected in the calculations you see. If they were, the ratio would be very much lower–quite likely in the EROI=1 range. The subsidies provided to wind and solar also damage the returns for other types of electricity. This further damages the system.
“These workarounds are not reflected in the calculations you see. If they were, the ratio would be very much lower–quite likely in the EROI=1 range.”
Yes, the values I provided are for the PV alone, not any backup power. But what is your source for the estimate that with backup the value would be “quite likely in the EROI=1 range”? I ask because it that seems very surprising. The backup would be with natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) or natural gas combustion turbines (NGCT). I wouldn’t expect those to be net energy sinks.
One estimate is simply looking at what happens when batteries are added as backup to solar panels. This doesn’t account for the vast overbuilding a person would need to provide solar energy in winter, when it is needed. This is a slide I made, using a graphic from Graham Palmer’s book:
I also don’t know the extent to which he has included an inverter, and the energy that the inverter drains, even when the sun isn’t shining. I would guess it is not included.
Recent information seems to say that in practice, solar panels have not actually lasted as long as claimed. 30 years is a stretch. There is clearly no energy cost associated with keeping them clean, either.
You are going even deeper into DelusiSTAN…. It would be easier to explain this to a retarded 8 year old …. Let me take a shot
‘The only real deterrent is that our retail electricity prices would probably increase by a factor of 1.5 to 3 times’
If the cost of energy – in this case electricity – were to increase — then that takes money out of people’s pockets — directly when they pay their power bills — but it also would result in every single thing they purchase increasing dramatically in price —- because the factories that make the goods would have to pass on higher costs — the refineries that use massive amounts of power would have to increase prices of metals and so on….
This would result in people consuming less…. which would mean layoffs …. which would mean more layoffs because unemployed people consume less… which would result in more layoffs…
This would eventually lead to epic bankruptcies as corporations do not shrink well… this would collapse the financial system as corporations and individuals would default on loans.
The mother of all deflationary death spirals would start with a shift to your solar and lithium powered world — and this would be the stupidest decision in the history of the world.
That’s two clubs you head up now — The 50 Buck Club — and – The Deflationary Death Spiral Club.
That makes you the Jester of Finite World. That is how we refer to someone who thinks they are so clever — because they read ‘the news’ —- when really they are nothing more than pretentious laughing stock for the core.
“That makes you the Jester of Finite World. That is how we refer to someone who thinks they are so clever — because they read ‘the news’ —- when really they are nothing more than pretentious laughing stock for the core.”
You mean “the core” such as yourself? (And Frieda Millet?)
What’s your background? What degree(s) do you have? During pursuit of your degree(s) did you take any courses related to energy systems or economics? If so, what were they?
What types of companies have you been involved with…for example, any companies related to energy/fuel production? What has been your job function(s) with them?
I have no high level degrees — I have not worked for energy companies — in fact I have never worked for any company except when I was in school (since then I have been an entrepreneur and semi-retired at 40 something)
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
So you see — I see it as an advantage that I do not have a PeeHdee… I would think it would be extremely difficult to see the truth if I were a cog in an energy company….
What I have is curiousity + common sense.
You may be curious — but you are completely lacking common sense. That or you are afraid of the truth
The core has rubbed your face in the truth over and over — yet you refuse to see it
An average mind asks the questions you do. Great minds are unburdened by indoctrination found in the corporate college system. If you have an exceptional degree you’ll likely never understand this site.
The core is diverse, and less important than their backgrounds/degrees/employment history, is what they believe, which I will attempt to summerize below.
This site is free from logical fallacies, especially the Appeal to Authority. We deal with facts, not alt-facts. You can bring your own opinion, but you can’t bring your own facts.
Feel free to watch this Ted talk video if you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZT6YpCsapg.
Paul thinks we can solve this monster crisis, many here think that this is an unsolvable problem, given our abilities and limitations as individuals/speicis.
Nate Hagens goes into more detail, of both the economic and human mental issues that have brought us to were we are today, and our most likely future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ055LzK86Q
I’ll give you the TL;DR – Too many people, not enough stuff, and bad things are enroute.
If you truly want to get edumacated, FE has a zillion links on all sorts of depressing facts. I used to be like you(well maybe not like you but i’m generalizing here), I thought solar and wind would save the day, we would turn off the FF tap and power our future tech society with new tech goodness. I thought we could battle global warming. Then I found sites like this, did the math, and tried to find a flaw in the logic/reasoning. So far I haven’t. Everyone one i’ve talked to (some of them very smart people in many other ways) that says this is nonsense, is unable to backup that argument. I’m told economies of scale, we have always found new sources of energy in the past, peak oilers have claimed peak is is here before and been wrong, effeciencies will improve, there is hundreds or thousands of years of energy left, we’ll just keep diggin it up. That is the problem.
The cost of getting the energy we need to continue keeps getting more and more expensive, when you look at the full system cost (EROEI). And when it gets too expensive our system (that requires huge amounts of energy to function, apparently it cannot be run in “limp” or “powersaver” mode) will start to wobble, then breakdown. Exactly where we are in this process is hard to say, but it seems we might be at the end of the begining. Or maybe the begining of the end?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI
The effeciency parodox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If you have the time, I would recommend reading all of Gails past articles, or at least the past 1 to 2 years(starting with 2016). I would recommend to read all the comments as well, but that takes a very long time. I didn’t quite understand all these issues when I first visited this site, going through the back articles and reading the comments really helped bring me upt to speed, and understand this is a thermodynamic / chemistry issue, not a politcal / resource allocation issue like I first thought it was. We have a technical problem, not enough enegry for our future plans, not a polictial problem of should we build yellow or red ticky tacky boxes.
Unlike many here, I have done the FE challenge, if you could call it that, but I never want to do it again. It was only 3 days, it was in the summer in the mountains, and I hiked in supplied but I had no idea, I thought it would be fun, worst case a bit of hard work, but it was, or was just a step above, torture. You are constantly dirty/dishvelved, You have no energy, you don’t want to do anything even though you are hungry starving. I was with others, and much of the time was spent sleeping/napping/sitting/lyingdown(low energy states), arguing about the best way to catch/get/cook food, for the most part then failing to do that, then daydreaming, thinking talking about what everyone would do when we got back to civlisation. What was gonna be your first meal. Some people had some elaborate plans. There was talk of abadoning the situation and go raiding(2nd day). In the end, it can be made a go of, but it is a pitiful existance. Without proper facilities, cooking is barbaric, and lack of spices and tools makes preparing even the most basic meal a huge effort and then it tastes horrible, and you barely get anything (have to share with the group(it was a group effort but you could solo if you wanted, noone did though, people love complaing too much it seems to make it solo), even the people that did no work). We had to bring out own water handling supplies, but whatever you went with (iodine, bleach, super filter), it can run out/break, boiling is simple, but again takes energy. Looking at a fresh flowing stream and being very thristy, but knowing if you drink it you might get really sick, is a very strange experience. I don’t think many understand what a true miracle being able to turn a spigot and safely take a drink from a garden hose truly is.
My point is you may not fully understand the huge amount of invisible energy that goes into keeping you in your current situation. All the materials, your evironment, food, water, all takes a huge amount of processing and steps that count on other steps. We need energy to maintain the roads, and all the transport equipment. Buildings, drinkable water, glass, metals, the list is endless. Take away the energy? We are a bunch of squeking monkeeys sitting dirty in the forest picking bugs off ourselves and our companions. We need high density energy sources to keep this going. I like to think positive and hope boeing will invent a Mr. Fusion soon, but as great as I think the boeing skunkworks is, I think they have meet thier match this time.
If you would like anything in particular explained or in more detail, just ask. Not everyone is as caustic as FE, but, he suffers from PASD (Pre Apocylpse Stress Disorder) from all his excellent and time consuming reserach into spent fuel ponds. I used to think we could at least collapse into a nice Mad Max documentary, but even that will be denied us. When the grid goes down, the sieverts go up. how ironic is that, we end up causing our own specisis destruction because we didn’t properly take our high tech civilizations trash out. Maybe BAU will last longer (or BAU lite) to dump all that waste into a subduction zone(encased in aglass/ceramic it might not irradiate the ocean?), but I doubt it at this point, there is just too much of it.
Here is some google engineers giving up on renewables:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
You should too 🙂
Nicely said.
When the electricity goes off – and people begin to understand that it is a permanent condition — the grim reality will sink in — the bravado and normalcy bias will vapourize…. I can imagine a great many people will just go into a state of shock — given the biggest inconvenience they have ever faced is a late pizza delivery — or being unable to get to Facebook for over an hour….
‘Take away the energy? We are a bunch of squeking monkeeys sitting dirty in the forest picking bugs off ourselves and our companions’
Very much so.
Mr. ItBegins,
You’ve pretty much got it! Welcome to the 0.01%!
There are several problems of ‘getting it’. One is, you’re going to be pretty alone in this epiphany. Not much peer support available, except of course here on FW.
How are you handling the facts? How are you’re close ones about You ‘getting it’?.
Just speaking out of experience. I’m the most successfull out of my close family, most are MDs, PHDs etc. and outer family members as PMs CEOs and such, I’m supposed to be a role model or something for the family, but the rest simply don’t get it..
How about you?
Here is some google engineers giving up on renewables:
The link you provided wasn’t to the Google engineers’ paper. It was instead to a person who “summarized” the Google engineers’ paper and adding a bunch of things they never said in their IEEE paper. Here’s their IEEE paper:
Google engineers’ IEEE paper
The Google engineers’ paper actually says…….that renewables cannot *reverse* climate change! They make it seem like they’re discovering something new, but everyone has known that for a long, long time. They also say that Google didn’t come up with something cheaper than coal (to generate electricity) between 2007 and 2011. Well, no surprise there, either. It’s pretty ridiculous for Google to think they could spend only four years and come up with something. I wonder what they spent? My guess is that it was only in the millions of dollars.
The paper was written in 2014, but only two years later, Lazard company estimates that that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from new utility photovoltaics plants is lower than not only new coal plants, but also equal to or lower than new natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) plants. Welcome to 2017!
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis – 10.0
This would appear to support the Google engineers report… feel free to keep banging your head against the wall like a donkey….
Replacement of oil by alternative sources
While oil has many other important uses (lubrication, plastics, roadways, roofing) this section considers only its use as an energy source. The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources. SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms.[13] Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.
Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:
4 Three Gorges Dams,[14] developed each year for 50 years, or
52 nuclear power plants,[15] developed each year for 50 years, or
104 coal-fired power plants,[16] developed each year for 50 years, or
32,850 wind turbines,[17][18] developed each year for 50 years, or
91,250,000 rooftop solar photovoltaic panels[19] developed each year for 50 years
The world consumes approximately 3 CMO annually from all sources. The table [10] shows the small contribution from alternative energies in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
That is a good IEEE paper that you linked!
The LCOE prices are a real problem. They do not recognize the costs that renewables impose through the need to have a double system, operating far below capacity. They don’t recognize the need to add huge amounts of transmission and storage. They are likely based on the assumption that renewables will get better and better, and that we will not continue to have problems with them. They don’t recognize that competition of subsidized intermittent renewables tends to drive other types of generation off the grid, even though it is needed for generation.
If you check the fine print it says:
‘These findings are based on the assumption that at some point there will no longer be night on earth — and that the skies will always be clear and the sun shining brightly around the clock’
I’ll give you the Google paper is old, and perhaps things have changed.
Can you show me anywhere a large solar installation is proftiable? Or even breakeven? Everywhere I have read, southern California, Spain, Germany, Australia, has some sort of horror story (costs higher than expected, energy output lower than expected, unexpected costs, effeciency issues, grid issues, etc, etc). In no place it seems is solar, or any other renewable, saving the day. In fact, anyplace they are installed seems to just have more problems then before. How long do we have to wait into the future before the renewable dream is considered over?
Surely if costs are down and solar can be profitable now, or close to natgas prices, we should see solar plants/installs popping up all over?
You may not be getting the full picture on renewables, but apparently, when full system costs are plugged in, and how the intermittent enegery is used/effects the system, it doesn’t work and is actually worse than doing nothing. Apparently you need to have backup coal/gas/nuke for the days when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, so now your just threw any savings you have out the window. And the “low” prices of subsideised renewables cause needed baseload plants to close/not be built.
Perhaps you missed it, but earlier in this thread (or maybe it was the previous article) there was talk of a aluminum smelting plant in southern australia that got destroyed by renewables (half a billion to mostly fix it), an inter-grid link went down due to tornado, and the isolated grid, which had a lot of renewable/solar on it, could not support itself, so it shutdown/blacked out, and the aluminum plant went off line and the aluminum froze, apparently wrecking the plant.
It seems more so than just dollars/watts per hour, solar and other renewables need to be integrated into the grid system. Its not just the AMOUNT of electricty, but the QUALITY.
We need cheap power yes, but it also has to be 24/7/365, the sine wave has to be right, and we need to be able to turn it up/down on demand.
Could such a system be built with renewables in mind? Probably, but again it would cost more. Apparently, even if affordable on a per watt cost, slapping solar installs or wind farms onto/into the grid just makes the situation worse.
Can you calculate the cost, in materials and dollars, to convert 10% of the worlds energy needs by wind/solar? Do it, you will shock yourself. It will break the piggy bank in the amount of energy it will consume and we will run out of rare earths.
Renewables may have a place, but at the moment they are not a solution, they are a problem. Perhaps this will change with better tech in the future, or integrated power systems/solultions, but for the moment, if we have to rebuild the world to save it, we don’t have the energy/resources.
stephen hawking insists that humankind will populate the galaxy—and he has a brain as big as a planet to start with—far in excess of the PhDs etc you mention above
what that brain fails to grasp is that no new means has yet been discovered to lift us clear of the gravitational field of the planet were on. let alone travel between them.
We still use the same lift system as the Chinese did around 1200 CE
In addition, we cannot manufacture such a system (assuming such a thing is possible) without our existing industrial infrastructure, and as things are going, we will not have that available to us for more than the next 10 years—20 absolute tops.
Hawking’s brain has been stretched to its limit, yet is unlimited in imagination. (just like mine)
Even Without Hawking’s intellect, I too can imagine space travel—that part is easy, but unless we discover how to make warp drive work in the next ten years, we are going to be as close to space travel as the ape throwing a bone in the air in the opening sequence of “2001 a Space Odyssey”)
They don’t recognize that competition of subsidized intermittent renewables tends to drive other types of generation off the grid, even though it is needed for generation.
This is a variant of Gresham’s Law: the tendency for money of lower intrinsic value to circulate more freely than money of higher intrinsic and equal nominal value (often expressed as ‘Bad money drives out good’).
It’S a quality issue. In today’s world, we can observe the same sort of “bad driving out good” phenomenon in fields as disparate as TV programming, building materials, tissue paper, apparel, political discourse—it goes without saying…..
Better redress it for a 7 year old. You may have overshot the audience.
Better redress it for a 7 year old.
At least I’m old enough to know “Better redress it for a 7 year old” is wrong.
Next time I will bring it down to the level of a donkey
https://janamcg.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/heehaw-donkey.jpg
“Next time I will bring it down to the level of a donkey.”
If you’re interested in me ever responding to anything you ever write again, you should apologize.
Sincerely,
Mark
Mark – you don’t seem to understand how this works.
The Rules:
– Delusional commentators are tolerated — at least initially – all of the core were delusional at one point
– the core will attempt to politely help those who are suffering delusions — facts and logic will be presented to the DelusiSTANI
– if the DelusiSTANI refuses to learn – refuses to understand that they are wrong…. then the core will turn on them like a pack of wild dogs — it would appear that Norman and I are designated co-pack leaders
– apologize? what does that mean?
The thing is — we are on FW because we want to avoid delusional people — there are so few people in the world who are not delusional — and most of them are on FW. We protect our turf aggressively
“We need high density energy sources to keep this going. I like to think positive and hope boeing will invent a Mr. Fusion soon, but as great as I think the boeing skunkworks is, I think they have meet thier match this time.”
They have indeed met their match, as they are pursuing containment fusion, which is a blind alley. I have a colleague that is pursuing a concentric, radial accelerator fusion device. To make a true “Mr. Fusion” device, you need hyper-pure hydrogen fuel (free of any HD isotope) so that the reaction is aneutronic (no pesky neutrons) and you have to surround the reactor with a material that converts the gamma radiation into heat, plus electrical current. He has a prototype in mind and has a proposal pending with the MacArthur Foundation. Let’s all wish him luck.
“Maybe BAU will last longer (or BAU lite) to dump all that waste into a subduction zone(encased in aglass/ceramic it might not irradiate the ocean?), but I doubt it at this point, there is just too much of it.”
Humm, subduction zones recycle volatiles into arc volcanoes, so the long-lived radionuclides might eventually pop up in eruption clouds. Maybe a better place would be disposal into deep mines in granite plutons in stable cratonic areas, like the Canadian Shield. You could then digg it up again, if you found a way to use it later, like nuclear transmutation. Also, the stuff generates heat, which might come in handy in an energy-starved world.
unless it’s one of my official procrastination days—let’s say I decide to dig my garden.
To do that, I require food intake, sufficient calories to offset my intended workload.
That calorie intake (food) is heat input, which has been delivered to my plate, at a cost of 10 cal of energy for every 1 of actual food
so if my meal is 500cal, 5000 cal has been used to deliver it
the 5000cal is almost entirely derived from a combination oil coal and gas.
a glass of water has no calorific heat value, but requires energy to reach my glass.
But let’s imagine procrastination gets the better of me—(highly likely)
I decide to jump in my nice new Tesla, and go for a drive
Then i find some fiendish realist has, by some unknown means, removed all the components of the car that had been manufactured using oil coal and gas.
I find myself sitting on the ground surrounded by….nothing.
Not even the lithium in the battery—no wiring, no plastic no tyres nothing.
i get very annoyed—naturally—-so I call Mr Musk to complain that having just ”electricity” doesn’t seem to be working very well today.
Except theres a space in my pocket where my phone used to be—that’s gone too!!!!
So I go back into my house to get another phone, then—without oil coal and gas—I find I don’t have a house either. Just a plot of earth.
It’s then the neighbours point out that I’m buck nekkid—the oil coal and gas thief has taken all my clothes as well.
And it’s winter!!!!—Not nice.
Especially as the same thief has removed the road outside my house and left the original dirt track that was there in 1800.
But not to worry—I shall order a windturbine and a few solar panels and have everything back to normal
tomorrow
Or I would do if I didn’t hear the alarm siren going off at the nuclear power plant a few miles away—the coal oil and gas input thief has been there today as well.
Then i find some fiendish realist has, by some unknown means, removed all the components of the car that had been manufactured using oil coal and gas.
Great post 😂 Love it.
“Then i find some fiendish realist has, by some unknown means, removed all the components of the car that had been manufactured using oil coal and gas.”
I’m not really interested in dystopian science fiction, unless it’s on a movie screen.
Your scenario has nothing to do with my comments that, even if the U.S. stopped using natural gas, coal, and nuclear to generate electricity 30 years from now, we could supply every single kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. using photovoltaics backed by batteries.
Mark – you are again ignoring facts … Norman’s…. and mine regarding the deflationary death spiral that would result if we had to pay higher electricity prices.
This is an interesting phenomenon that we have not see on FW before — no denial — just completely ignore facts as if they don’t exist
Is this a new DelusiSTANI strategy?
no use Eddy
even the wall you reserve just for headbangers couldnt absorb the vibration on that Richter scale level
http://www.gifmania.co.uk/Objects-Animated-Gifs/Animated-Tools/Jackhammers/3d-Jackhammer-Worker-90579.gif
even if the U.S. stopped using natural gas, coal, and nuclear to generate electricity 30 years from now, we could supply every single kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. using photovoltaics backed by batteries.
End users in the United States consume approximately 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year. It is doubtful that photovoltaics are providing even 1% of that electricity at present. According to the EIA (Energy Information Administration), it was 0.6% in 2015.
But we could supply that other 99.4% using photovoltaics within 30 years, couldn’t we?
Yeah, we could. We could also go the whole hog and switch to bicycles. A typical bike generator can produce 100 watts. If you pedal for an hour a day, 30 days a month, that’s (30 x 100=) 3000 watt-hours, or 3 kWh. That’s less than 0.3% of what a typical family uses in a month (920 kWH). So a family of four each peddling ten hours a day could produce 12% of current needs. And if we banned all other sources of electricity except bike generators, we could indeed supply every single kilowatt-hour of electricity that would be used in the U.S. using only bike generators. As an extra benefit, obesity would plummet!
Let’s run the numbers.
Four bottom lines up front:
• It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totaling the area of Indiana. Or:
• It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totaling the area of West Virginia. Or:
• We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totaling a few square miles. Or:
• We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.
The bottom line
The only way we’re going to power the nation—let alone the planet—on carbon-free energy is with nuclear power. And the sooner we all realize that, the better.
http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
hich is why—every year when i renew my gym membership—i insist that they should be paying me to join
is there something you’re not telling us?
There is a rumour going round OFW that you’re one of Donnies technical advisors
Don Stewart reincarnated?
comments are getting disjointed….comment above was @ Mark
everything within an electric car is based on fossil fuels
the infrastructure that allows it to function is derived from fossil fuels
the factory in which it is manufactured is dependent on fossil fuels.
All of the above can be applied to any aspect of our civilised infrastructure
every aspect of photovoltaic usage is itself is derived from fossil fuels
would you mind very much if we—the ignorant proletariat— took advantage of your undoubted MIT degree levels of physics, economics (and I must assume theology as well) to obtain the relevant definitive information as to the “science fiction” component of the above?
When we have those sources, we will inform Ms Tverberg that the title of this blog must be changed forthwith to “Our Infinite World” as “Our Finite world” is no longer applicable
When you have a moment to spare from your advisory position in Donnie’s scientific cabinet, maybe you could let us have the relevant details?
Thanks—much appreciated
btw—don’t mention wind turbines—the Don hates wind turbines.
I’d hate for you to wake up one morning with a horse’s head in your bed.
I am confused as to why someone who believes the world is infinite….. is posting on Our Finite World.
that worries me too
a plant obviously
“Let’s run the numbers.”
OK, let’s run the numbers.
“• It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms,…”
Those aren’t the numbers I get. The total amount of electricity consumed in the U.S. in 2015 was approximately 4 trillion kWh.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3
That’s 456 gigawatts continuously. Or 456 million kilowatts continuously. So we need 228 million kilowatts continuously with solar (assume photovoltaics, aka PV) and 228 million kilowatts continuously with wind.
A reasonable capacity factor for utility PV in good locations is 25 percent, and a reasonable capacity factor for a new wind turbine in a good location is 40 percent. So we’re talking about 912 million kilowatts peak capacity for PV, and 570 million kilowatts peak capacity for wind.
Utility solar is about $2000 per kilowatt of capacity now, so that 1.82 trillion. Wind is about $1700 per kilowatt of capacity now, so that’s about 969 billion. Total cost is $2.8 trillion. So your number is $29 trillion, and I mine is $2.8 trillion. Now mine doesn’t include all the new power lines to get the power around. So I’d be willing to add another $1 or $2 trillion, to make $3.8 to $4.8 trillion. That’s still way different from your $29 trillion. How did you get your $29 trillion?
P.S. Note that my numbers are for TODAY’S costs. Cost would come way, way down, especially for PV, if we generated 50% of our electrical energy from PV.
@Mark—-ok ok
i finally had a revelation of truth, you are right, and Eddy, myself and all the other doomsters on here are wrong.
It was a sudden dawning, of our fundamental error, and it hit me in a flash.
We have been dealing in reality, whereas you have been countering that reality with alternative facts.
And of course that is where we have been going wrong.
Reality is so very limiting, whereas alternative facts can be altered to suit any circumstance as required. New facts can be created at will, where existing facts based on reality are inconvenient—then after a short while, the old facts are overwritten by fresh ones.
(people have such short memories —even my goldfish has to remind me which day it is)
I accept now that all this is perfectly reasonable, and having absorbed the methodology of factism, (you heard factism here first folks–I just created a new word) I shall continue to use it to run my life from now on.
In fact, I have an appointment with my bank manager tomorrow—and when he stabs his finger at my accounts—and makes some comment about ”unpleasant facts”—I will counter his complaint by presenting him with a set of ”alternative facts”.
my life is going to be much simpler, creating an alternative fact whenever I need one.
I think I might go into politics, Eddy can be my VP if he wants the job—and if he swears to stop this reality nonsense
Does the VP job come with a private jet and allow for unlimited personal use? What about a salary of USD20,000,000 per year + expenses? I will hold for 364 days a year vacation as well.
I already know what the answer is. I get whatever I can imagine.
I accept!
The Private Jet and $20m a year are listed under alternative facts
so the answer is yes Eddy
We keep finding real costs are very high as we implement intermittent renewables. In Europe, these costs actually get back to consumers (unlike the US, where they are buried in tax credits). I suppose we could forecast this out, with even more generation.
How to bankrupt a country? Keep adding ‘renewable’ energy to the grid… eventually you reach a tipping point where your costs are so high that they drive businesses off to places that use coal to generate electricity….
And the Green Groupies dreams will come true —- pure blue skies —- air so clean it squeaks — and people bitching because they haven’t got two red pennies to rub together
“We have been dealing in reality, whereas you have been countering that reality with alternative facts.”
Are you referring to Tim Groves’ estimated cost of >$29 trillion for a 50/50 solar/wind baseload power supply in the U.S. as being the “reality”? How do you know his value of >$29 trillion is “reality”?
hang on
i’ve already accepted your alternative facts as the new reality
what more do you want—you can’t start arguing with alternative facts after they’ve subverted reality.
otherwise youll find yourself going round in ever decreasing circles
and we all know where that ends
“I’ve already accepted your alternative facts as the new reality.”
The aren’t the “new reality.” The $29 trillion estimate was never reality. (Well, it might have been reality 15-20 years ago, when photovoltaics and wind were much, much more expensive. But it wasn’t in 2015 when Mike Conley and Tim Maloney made their estimate.)
Utility solar is about $2000 per kilowatt of capacity now, so that 1.82 trillion. Wind is about $1700 per kilowatt of capacity now, so that’s about 969 billion. Total cost is $2.8 trillion. So your number is $29 trillion, and I mine is $2.8 trillion. Now mine doesn’t include all the new power lines to get the power around. So I’d be willing to add another $1 or $2 trillion, to make $3.8 to $4.8 trillion. That’s still way different from your $29 trillion. How did you get your $29 trillion?
The $29 trillion isn’t my number, Mark. It comes from Mike Conley & Tim Maloney at The Energy Reality Project. Why the discrepancy? They are obviously running different numbers to the ones you are running. They have calculated the cost of completing the plan envisaged by the Solutions Project. I haven’t seen their detailed calculation, but they factor in things like the cost of land required, the cost of battery storage and replacement of infrastructure over a 60-year period, plus the cost of all those jobs created in the solar panel dusting and wind turbine frost removal industries. According to some people, the actual battery costs would be astronomical, which would make their estimate way too low.
I assume you are envisioning a system that works 24-7-365 and which pays its way and doesn’t result in a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid bills. It would be interesting to compare your detailed calculations against theirs, although I haven’t seen either set, and to see what assumptions have been made and what factors left out. For instance, in your plan, are you going to have batteries for storage, Mark? Or do you envision using excess generation to pump water uphill, raise a huge granite block, or twist the world’s largest elastic band round and round and round?
But the bottom line is, if the US could build and run a renewable system that works reliably at the price you are quoting—less than $5 trillion in Federal Reserve Monopoly Money— then it would be done and everyone would be saved and satisfied. Even Fast Eddy would raise a smile.
http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solutions_Project
crrrrrrkkkkk…..Ground control to Major Glenn…. are you receiving this Major Glenn…. hit O then K if you are unable to speak…. Ground Control over….
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
Eloquent Norman, it’s a gift.
The key to economic growth is cheap-to-produce energy supplies. We are having trouble making them cheap enough to produce. The share of our incomes we spend on energy has to be decreasing, to keep the growth cycle increasing. Intermittent electricity supply makes electricity too expensive to produce, when all costs are counted.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/carey-king_percent-of-england-gdp-spent-on-energy-1300-2008.png
If the cost per mile to travel goes up, that is a problem. We need to increasingly stay at home, to get decreasing costs.
Mark – the thing is …. I only limited time remaining on the earth … and I have budgeted at least enough to live out this time reasonably large… so I don’t need the money…
And of course there is the thing that if I win —- if growth does stop — how would a dead man collect on a bet from another dead man?
Humour me …. what’s your take on this —- does it not concern you?
HIGH PRICED OIL DESTROYS GROWTH
According to the OECD Economics Department and the International Monetary Fund Research Department, a sustained $10 per barrel increase in oil prices from $25 to $35 would result in the OECD as a whole losing 0.4% of GDP in the first and second years of higher prices.
http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/high_oil04sum.pdf
OIL PRODUCERS NEED $100+ OIL
Steven Kopits from Douglas-Westwood said the productivity of new capital spending has fallen by a factor of five since 2000. “The vast majority of public oil and gas companies require oil prices of over $100 to achieve positive free cash flow under current capex and dividend programmes. Nearly half of the industry needs more than $120,” he said
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11024845/Oil-and-gas-company-debt-soars-to-danger-levels-to-cover-shortfall-in-cash.html
I’ll take that bet.
I’m really liking my chances.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?start=2010
“I’m really liking my chances.”
That’s the spirit! 🙂 One question I have is whether the values on the website to which you’ve provided reference are purchasing power parity (PPP) values, or market exchange rate (MER) values.
Per the Wikipedia website I originally referenced, it has the World Bank value of GDP per capita (in PPP international dollars) as being $15,546.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
The broken window fallacy was first expressed by the great French economist, Frederic Bastiat. Bastiat used the parable of a broken window to point out why destruction doesn’t benefit the economy.
In Bastiat’s tale, a man’s son breaks a pane of glass, meaning the man will have to pay to replace it. The onlookers consider the situation and decide that the boy has actually done the community a service because his father will have to pay the glazier (window repair man) to replace the broken pane. The glazier will then presumably spend the extra money on something else, jump-starting the local economy. (For related reading, see Economics Basics.)
The onlookers come to believe that breaking windows stimulates the economy, but Bastiat points out that further analysis exposes the fallacy. By breaking the window, the man’s son has reduced his father’s disposable income, meaning his father will not be able purchase new shoes or some other luxury good. Thus, the broken window might help the glazier, but at the same time, it robs other industries and reduces the amount being spent on other goods. Moreover, replacing something that has already been purchased is a maintenance cost, rather than a purchase of truly new goods, and maintenance doesn’t stimulate production. In short, Bastiat suggests that destruction – and its costs – don’t pay in an economic sense.
The broken window fallacy is often used to discredit the idea that going to war stimulates a country’s economy. As with the broken window, war causes resources and capital to be funneled out of industries that produce goods to industries that destroy things, leading to even more costs. According to this line of reasoning, the rebuilding that occurs after war is primarily maintenance costs, meaning that countries would be much better off not fighting at all.
The broken window fallacy also demonstrates the faulty conclusions of the onlookers; by only taking into consideration the man with the broken window and the glazier who must replace it, the crowd forgets about the missing third party (such as the shoe maker). In this sense, the fallacy comes from making a decision by looking only at the parties directly involved in the short term, rather than looking at all parties (directly and indirectly) involved in the short and long term.
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp
Does this help you to understand why GDP is not a very useful data point in determining how close total collapse is?
Look into how much health care contributes to US GDP – then strip that ‘broken window’ out …. and see what GDP looks like….
Then think about how many other broken windows there are ….
Good point!
I suppose the argument that payments for insurance claims stimulating the economy is based on the fact that the premiums have already been paid. If this community gets the “benefit” of a hurricane, this community will get to replace existing degraded infrastructure with new infrastructure, thanks indirectly to the insurance premiums.
One thing that does act to greatly ramp up consumption is more debt, especially if increases in debt can be made to continue to happen. I first ran across this when I looked at how the US economy behaved, as it went into WWII. There was a huge increase in employment quite a bit of it women going to work outside the home for the first time. These wages were indirectly paid for by debt. As long as more debt could keep being added after the war, the bubble effect could continue. Nothing really needed to be destroyed, to start the cycle.
Thanks FE I was about to burn my house down to increase my GDP.
http://cliparts.co/cliparts/kT8/nK8/kT8nK8Mxc.jpg
You said pick a chart, any chart. Ha ha. That’s why it’s so stupid.
“You said pick a chart, any chart.”
You need to read more carefully! I wrote, “I propose to use purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, as calculated by the World Bank and reported on Wikipedia. But I’m open to some other mutually-agreed-upon value.”
“Mutually-agreed-upon value” means…mutually-agreed-upon value. In other words, both sides of the bet would agree upon the value chosen. It appears that the chart to which you linked:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?start=2010
…contains “Market Exchange Rate (MER)” values.
Here is the World Bank link for “Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)” values:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD
I think it’s much more appropriate to use PPP values, because I think PPP values much better reflect actual changes in people’s material well-being. For example, suppose a person in Malawi has an inflation-adjusted income that increases by a factor of two, and is therefore able to buy twice as much stuff in Malawi. It doesn’t much matter to that person if the Malawian Kwacha loses 50 percent of its value relative to the U.S. dollar, because that person is buying mostly goods and services made in Malawi.
So I would propose to stick with purchasing power parity (PPP) values, as I first suggested. But if you think market exchange rate (MER) values should be used, I would be willing to compromise, and use the average of the two values for 2010 and 2020. So, for example, the values for 2010 would be:
PPP = $12,854
MER = $9.482
AVERAGE OF PER AND MER = $11,168
How about it? Is PPP, as I originally proposed, acceptable to you? Or do you prefer the average of PPP and MER?
PS. Note that the MER numbers look favorable to you right now, but they could easily flip by 2020, depending on the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies…
Do you regard GDP as a reasonable measure of human prosperity or even of true growth? After all, doesn’t it include all money created and spent by governments?
We could all be dying in the streets and GDP could still be positive. It is a worthless measure, especially when the idea of money-value is such a rubbery concept.
There are much better measures of whether the world economy is in fact growing. Perhaps the bet should be whether energy consumption per head had increased or fallen over a certain period, or total global; energy consumption.
+++++++
GDP grows when debt grows. A more apt bet might be on world population? Would Mr. Mark Bahner take 20-1 on world population exceeding todays number of 7.5 billion in 10 years? If so, put me down for $10!
You could well hold onto your money purely via the destruction of its actual value. I have no doubt the GDP of Zimbabwe went orbital towards the end, but guess what, that ain’t wealth. Its wealth per capita that is/will disappearing/disappear. GDP per capita in the USA is now measured with a fiat that is 3-5% (I believe) of its 1913 value. Elastic rulers a measure do not give!!
Collapse is such a cancerous process, and GDP ain’t the measure that will count.
Mark your full of hopium. GDP is a function of debt. Do a little more reading.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com
Tim Morgan’s latest exposes that fact. So remove the debt and take the bet?
😎
Nah. Even more debt won’t help at this point. It takes energy to make food and, ya know, STUFF. Less energy, less stuff. More debt just makes the rich people even richer. It doesn’t actually change GDP because the poor people can’t afford to buy all the stuff.
Current debt-levels alone are sufficient to make the system non-viable, even before you factor in energy and resource constraints. Depending on who you listen to, non-financial debt is somewhere around 300% global GDP. We would need global growth at unprecedented 6% p/a to even service that, let alone start paying off the principal.
Here’s a nice quote from Roger Arnold, Chief Economist for ALM Advisors:
“Because of the growth in global debt since the Lehman era crisis, real growth in economic activity is no longer possible. The reason for this is that the majority of the capital created by way of debt issuance by sovereigns, municipalities, corporations and individuals has been consumed. The result is that all future income in net globally is required to service the claims against existing debt, and the result of that is that it
precludes growth of world real GDP per capita in perpetuity.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-stockman-youd-be-a-fool-to-hold-anything-but-cash-now-2012-3
Hi All,
Omigoodness! A guy goes to watch the Super Bowl (pretty amazing, though I feel a bit sorry for the Falcons) and comes back to almost uncountable comments. 😉
I will try to address *all* comments (or nearly all), but it could take literally days. My first response is to Kurt, who I saw was willing to bet. I’ll set up something on my own blog so that we have a record of the bet that’s easy to track. But it could be several days, so please be patient. (Since we have until 2020 for the results, I figure a few days shouldn’t matter.)
If there are others who are willing to bet, I’ll try to address them later. BTW…I thought I saw someone else wanting to bet on *population* of all things! I’ll take that bet, certainly, but that will take even more days to set up.
I see many people referring to Tim Morgan…if y’all can get him to bet me, that would be super. I figure he’s too smart to bet.
Best wishes,
Mark
one rarely gets the chance to bet on established fact
i’ve outlined the honest and dishonest, and set things out in reasonably precise detail about what we know at this moment.
——-that one one side there are those who ”bet” on infinite money supply being our salvation. ie we print energy.
———and then those who bet that it won’t—ie that surplus energy underpins all money, and with energy in depletion, money and all the moves on the perceived value of it, will cease to be.
Those are the only options open to us. One of them is honest—one is fantasy.
Which?
I would be delighted to have my ‘facts” shown to be dishonest—if only for the sake of my grandchildren,
But I expect rationality, not flat earthism please, or futures written by mirror gazing.
We have fake news….
And we have fake athletes… more like Frankensteins….
The dark side: The secret world of sports doping
Al Jazeera investigation raises questions about whether sports heroes are linked to performance-enhancing drugs.
Prominent athletes including Peyton Manning implicated in extensive Human Growth Hormone drug ring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJRPxmTuxoI
Must be eating a lot of tuna fish…
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l2CE8y_rZio/hqdefault.jpg
Tim Morgan is one of the most thoughtful commentators in this space…. the author of this http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
And you …. with your moronic betting challenges…. are an embarrassment to FW.
Grow up.
Eddy
please desist from spoiling my target practice
Perhaps I should let up a little…. hate to drive off this DelusiSTAN…. what would we do for amusement…..
Heck, that’s why I took the bet. Win or lose, $10 is cheap entertainment for the next 4 years. That PPP thing is a crock. So much junk gets thrown into gdp these days it really doesn’t mean much. Just walk around any small town in the U.S. , or better yet take a trip to Venezuela or Greece. Oh yes, things just keep getting better!
Exactly give them a little breathing room.
only if they breathe renewable breath
their own
If one leaves today, tomorrow there will be 3 more replacements eager to enlighten us all.
99.999% of the internet is a playground for green energy unicorns and techno-fix rainbows; I wish they would quit mucking up this little 0.001% of the internet with silliness.
@Mark – Brilliant troll!!! And the bet is really tempting, but biased too much in your favour.
It’s interesting how much text is expended in reposting old irrelevancies instead of actually looking at the numbers.
Very well done!
Just send him your name. bank account#, and times and routes your daughter goes to school so he can pay off.
GDP will probably be greater Mark. As will be global debt. Let’s say, for every $ in GDP, $15 in debt by 2020?
I suspect when collapse hits — the stock market will be hitting record highs.
We just busted a new record — with corporate profits declining for 2+ years now….
Question — if corporate earnings collapse — and the central banks just feed them free money to stay in operation —- can BAU continue?
That would be a perpetual economic motion machine….
More like an exponential motion machine. We’re close to another round of QE, or a bail in after French, Dutch and German elections. Can kicking of course.
Gross: “Without QE From ECB And BOJ, The U.S. Economy Would Sink Into Recession”
“The ECB and BOJ are buying $150 billion a month of their own bonds and much of that money then flows from 10 basis points JGB’s and 45 basis point Bunds into 2.45% U.S. Treasuries…. I would venture a guess that without QE from the ECB and BOJ that 10-year U.S. Treasuries would rather quickly rise to 3.5% and the U.S. economy would sink into recession.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-06/gross-without-qe-ecb-and-boj-us-economy-would-sink-recession
Pingback: Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2 | Peak Energy & Resources, Climate Change, and the Preservation of Knowledge
It’s curious Bacigalupi doesn’t mention Russia. Cold War bias?
Orlov got his ideas on track! Almost exactly:
“They suggest cooperation of about 200-300 people, ”
https://www.rt.com/business/341892-far-east-land-infrastructure/
There has been ~20-25% pop free fall since mid 1980s for the Russian Far East territories. Looking at new born babies vs. elderly deaths today, it’s still net negative, .. therefore such resettling initiative makes sense, under Putin they have already diversified some of the jewels out there in mil-space and other key industries, to keep people there.
The first wave of this “free land” program was aimed at Russians and Ukrainians, now they came up with an effort attracting westerns as well. Historically, it’s not first such scheme, they have done it couple of times at least since mid 18th century with mixed results. That being incoming Germans usually rocketed in couple of generations into new bourgeois nobility, that had its dire consequences later (one faction of them became hard core commies another hard core plutocrats of the pre WWI and civil war era)..
Well, now the problem part, as RU gov seems to grants only two free acres of land (per family or person?) it is nothing glorious or even necessary minimum in the sense of how westerner feel is needed about such schemes. And there is a good reason, RU is clearly aiming at some organised / cohesive action, i.e. creating – forcing communities, they don’t want import US/South American/ex UK colonies style of mega ranches, while most of the Russian live there in apartment-project blocks in the string of major cities.
So, this is “sadly” a major bummer for most of the wannabees.
Still, if I was a Russian in the bracket of potentially interested, I’d not hesitate for a minute, great stuff.
Two acres of land might work in India, with two crops a year, and a lot of solar energy. In Siberia, not so much.
Far East is not Siberia..
Still not a great place to grow food
https://www.yr.no/stasjon/wmo/32540/graf/temperatur.eng.png
Again, as always on forums, participants are kindly advised to read provided links first before urge to shoot fast reactions. This gov program is not focused on Kamchatka.. most of it is focused on better climate areas in the Far East Territories..
I read this story long before it was posted on FW…. and I recall Kamchatka being mentioned… lo and behold….
Claims can be registered on the official website: https://надальнийвосток.рф/.
The areas include Yakutia, Kamchatka, Chukotka, Primorye, Khabarovsk, Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin, and the Jewish Autonomous Regions.
https://www.rt.com/business/376318-free-land-russia-far-east/
It’s all shit land — otherwise people would already be farming it
It’s an hectare per person, so 8 hectares for a “replacement” family. But I’m not sure this is important, because I suppose you can move a herd all around bc there is a lot of unused land. If I was a Russian, I wouldn’t hesitate neither; it’s free
Thanks for the update, I don’t have the full details in this respect, but I’m afraid this gov scheme won’t allow approach like lets settle here on “our new ~10ha family farm” and also pasture surrounding 100-500ha of additional “free land” like in BC and other areas of very different history of settling..
Because it has all the usual signs they want to instead push the settlers into intentional space (con-)de/fined smallish communities, it’s Russia afterall.
They specifically talk about sort of prepared plots with minimum infrastructure to be already waiting for the settlers. That sounds like as prepared grid capacity for the designated area, rough surface road etc. This is more like suburbanite/city outskirts farming community development Russian style, i.e. some level of self sufficiency is understood.. So you return from factory day job and either hobby farm it afternoons/weekends or you go completely full time into small scale farming career there..
I don’t think they are big enough for Russia’s climate, though.
i may have missed something here
but communities living in warm climate get sun heat for free
people who try to live in predominately cold climate are forced to appropriate their heat energy from other sources, which means plant and animal life, or alternatively have heat trucked in regularly.
200 people will need a lot of heat brought it, especially magnified 000s of times as Trump seems to be saying.
Yes, as I tried to explain already, it seems as a scheme to stop the decades ongoing demographic implosion in that strategic and mineral rich location of Russia. It’s a subsidy plan of sorts that counts on some continuous form of BAU, i.e. trains/jets/boats still coming from inside of Russia (+int maritime commerce) .. and by that I don’t mean they don’t produce any food or energy there..
Surprise, Surprise! Roundup found in non GMO foods and even in organic processed grocery items…
http://www.organicauthority.com/gmo-free-cheerios-test-positive-for-monsantos-roundup-herbicide/
GMO-Free Cheerios Test Positive for Monsanto’s Roundup Weedkiller
Testing commissioned by consumer advocacy group Food Democracy Now! found detectable levels of glyphosate—the active ingredient in Monsanto’s popular herbicide marketed as Roundup—in popular U.S. foods.
Glyphosate levels were detected in numerous products including Cheerios, the best-selling breakfast cereal and snack for young children marketed by General Mills as being free of genetically modified ingredients, which are commonly treated with glyphosate.
The Detox Project research arm of Food Democracy Now! tested 29 popular processed foods including Kashi cookies, Ritz Crackers, Kellogg’s Special K cereal, and Triscuit Crackers. Whole Foods Market’s private label 365 Crackers also made the list despite being a certified organic product, which as USDA organic certification implies, should be free of herbicides like Roundup.
“Popular foods tested for glyphosate measured between 289.47 ppb and at levels as high as 1,125.3 ppb,” reads the report.
While the EPA sets a “maximum residue limit” for pesticide residues on food commodities (like corn and soybeans), the limits vary on finished foods—those containing multiple ingredients.
The EPA does set recommended limits of no more than 1.75 milligrams of glyphosate per kilogram of body weight per day, but the European Union, which has stricter policies on glyphosate and the genetically modified crops often treated with it, recommends no more than 0.3 milligrams per kilo per day.
Roundup has been linked to cancer and liver disease.
This is one of my minor worries, along with getting brain cancer from cellphone radiation and choking on peanuts. Roundup us used widely as a pre-harvest desiccant, allowing cereal crops to dry in the field before harvest and saving the producers a bomb on tumble drying. But the downside is some of the herbicide will remain in the grain and ingested by whoever eats that grain.
I love my Quaker Oats, and I don’t know if Roundup is cancer- or illness-causing, but ever since I heard about this, I’ve been cutting down on my consumption of oats, and as I am a part-time rice grower, I have tried to use my home-grown rice as an alternative. Now I’ve largely switched over to roasted whole-grain rice steeped in hot water in a thermos pot.
Also, I wasn’t particularly reassured about the safety of Roundup when I watched the video of Dr. Patrick Moore refusing to drink a quart of the stuff.
https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM
Minor worry to those that are not inflicted as yet… Here we are spending BILLIONS on cancer research.???
Also, Tom, you may have missed my post on the weed resistant Monsanto Roundup
that are evolving! Gail replied that apparently they are smarter than we are!😼.
But you don’t worry about it…once the Roundup is gone, so are the crops of soy beans, corn ect …There is always front lawn grass..oops
I see your point. Once you’re sick, it’s no longer academic.
We’re certainly seeing a lot more cancer in the modern world, and we’ve been fighting the war on cancer for nearly half a century since it was declared by President Nixon. Perhaps we should bring some new strategies or perspectives to bear on it.
Anyway, I hate herbicides and pesticides and I manage to plant and harvest without using Roundup, so the weeds and the bees are pretty happy around here. But we’d never feed 7 or 8 billion people by doing things my way.
However, I must confess to using a single application of a herbicide in the paddy field that doesn’t affect growing plants but prevents seeds from germinating in the mud for 2 weeks after rice planting. This gives the rice seedlings a chance to get a good head start over the competition and effectively eliminates the need for mechanical weeding. I know it’s sinful but you wouldn’t want me to end up like a hunchback, would you?
Meaningful highly beneficial “strategies or perspectives” have long been around to actually win the fake “war on cancer” but the criminal cancer industry isn’t interested in those because they make huge profits from having a large steady supply of cancer patients that they can mostly TREAT unsuccessfully with their lucrative toxic therapies that kill more patients than they save.
The official mainstream “war on cancer” has been an unofficial “war” on the unsuspecting public: to keep them misinformed and misguided about the real truth of this “war.” The “moonshot” program is an extension or reincarnation of the enduring deep racket.
The orthodox cancer establishment has been saying a cure for cancer “is just around the corner” and “we’re winning the war on cancer” for decades. It’s all hype and lies (read Guy Faguet’s ‘War on cancer” or Sam Epstein’s work).
Since the war on cancer began orthodox medicine hasn’t progressed in their basic highly profitable therapies: it still uses only highly toxic, deadly things like radiation, chemo, surgery, and drugs that have killed millions of people instead of the disease.
As long as the official “war on cancer” is a HUGE BUSINESS based on expensive TREATMENTS/INTERVENTIONS of a disease instead of its PREVENTION, logically, they will never find a cure for cancer. The upcoming moonshot-war on cancer inventions, too, will include industry-profitable gene therapies of cancer treatment. The lucrative game of the medical business is to endlessly “look for” a cure but not “find” a cure. Practically all resources in the phony ‘war on cancer’ are poured into treating cancer but almost none in the prevention of the disease. It’s proof positive that big money and a total lack of ethics rule the official medical establishment.
At the same time, this same orthodox cancer cartel has been suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches. You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia’s lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.
If the public were to scrutinize what the medical industry and its government pawns are telling them about the ‘war on cancer’ instead of blindly believing what they’re saying, they’d find that the cancer industry and the cancer charities have been dismissing, ignoring, and obfuscating the true causes of cancer while mostly putting the blame for cancer on the individual, denying or dismissing the serious harms from orthodox cancer treatments, and resorting to deceptive cancer statistics to “educate” (think: mislead) the public that their way of treatment is actually successful (read the well referenced epilogue of a scholarly article if you google “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by Rolf Hefti or go to http://www.supplements-and-health.com/mammogram.html and scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent ‘war on cancer’).
What the medical establishment “informs” the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.
Do you really think it’s a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the ‘war on cancer’ a fraud? If you look closer you’ll come to the same conclusion. But…politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large.
Here’s a revolutionary cure for cancer – well a way to prevent it at least:
– don’t smoke
– don’t drink alcohol or drink minimal amounts
– don’t eat processed foods
– eat organic foods – or wash fruit and veg thoroughly
– eat a wide variety of healthy foods
– limit your intake of meat
– avoid drinking water from the tap
– exercise regularly
– reduce stress
– get enough sleep
– don’t live in China
I suspect that if a person follows the above — the odds of getting cancer are extremely low
@FE
I do all of them…. plus no animal products, lots of sprouted things, lots of broccoli and the like. It certainly has improved my general health, skin, etc. pp. The effects come quite quick – its never to late to start. Only alcohol I drink is Guinness – and that only in company on less than 8-10 occasions a year.
Every enemy we declare war on seems to be an enemy we created–the drug war–the war on terror, and the war on cancer. “We” or government agencies supposedly acting in our best interest created the drug cartels, created terrorists, and used carcinogenic substances.
Speaking of how we created the drug cartels, there’s been a fair amount of research on this……….
https://s30.postimg.org/wu0ku405t/Captura_de_pantalla_598.png
https://s27.postimg.org/a7qy6cm6r/Captura_de_pantalla_597.png
https://s28.postimg.org/44w5r96vh/Captura_de_pantalla_599.png
Now here is a gal with some cojones.
She is standing up to both the neocons of the right and the liberal internationalists of the left.
The conflict in Syria has energy politics written all over it. When the U.S. failed in its attempts to stabilize Iraq, a pipeline across Syria became a second option to bring gas from the Gulf States up to Europe.
https://s28.postimg.org/48e3719n1/Captura_de_pantalla_1575.png
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Returns From Syria with Renewed Calls: End Regime Change War in Syria Now
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/congresswoman-tulsi-gabbard-returns-syria-renewed-calls-end-regime-change-war
VIDEO: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Urges Support For Stop Arming Terrorists Act
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/video-rep-tulsi-gabbard-urges-support-stop-arming-terrorists-act
Rep. Gabbard on meeting with Assad
I still say, why not go Saudi -> Jordan -> Israel? Or even Saudi -> Egypt?
That way the pipe-dreamers can avoid the problematic Shiite lands altogether.
It seems like Donald Trump may not be as captive to the old economy as his critics allege.
In his $137.5 billion infrastructure spending plan, there’s more spending proposed for renewable energy and public transportation ($72.93 billion) than there is for the old fossil fuel/private automobile economy.
This is hardly the face of Donald Trump that his enemies have painted.
TRUMP’s “Priority List: Emergency and National Security Projects”
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3409546-Emergency-NatSec50Projects-121416-1-Reduced.html
https://s24.postimg.org/4klrk3811/Captura_de_pantalla_574.png
https://s27.postimg.org/psl27hl2r/Captura_de_pantalla_570.png
https://s30.postimg.org/eooyeokzl/Captura_de_pantalla_571.png
“…there’s more spending proposed for renewable energy and public transportation…”
However…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-20/20-trillion-debt-where-are-fitch-moodys-standard-and-poors-video
Oh well, as Richard Nixon so blithely declared back in 1970, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
I do think Trump is cleverer than the liberal media and their hysterical acolytes give him credit for.
Nevertheless, he is old and I think he is applying old strategies to a new game. He might buy some time, stabilize the American system for another 4 years perhaps. But I think the timeline of American empire being finished in a few decades at most is still intact.
That is, unless the liberals decide to go for civil war now.
The Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim had a news conference the other day in which he said essentially the same thing you’re saying. He said that Trump “represents a return to the past.”
Slim, on to the contrary, lauds what he calls the “new civilization.”
Repeating one of the talking points from the Clinton campaign, he claims the U.S. economy is “healthy and solid.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb51Jh-11xE
Most Americans, however, know this not to be true, at least not for them. The “new civilizaiton” may indeed have been the best thing since sliced bread for the Carlos Slims of the world (who made his money in telecommunications, part of the new economy). But for the vast majority of Americans, the “new civilization” has ushered in a major rollback in their material prosperity and economic wellbeing.
The poster child for the “new economy” is California, and the economic plight of California seems to belie Slim’s glowing praise of the “new civilization.”
https://s23.postimg.org/3ynysf4h7/Captura_de_pantalla_535.png
There is a certain trait to Trump, which is often overlooked. As most of the rich he is well traveled, but here comes the distinction, it’s one thing to be jet set en route to posh conference or beach resorts only, but it’s a very different thing to have family and property connections for decades abroad (Scotland). So, in essence he has been continuously exposed to real stuff, US vs. other places comparisons. And we know this is objectively lacking as one of the major limitations for most Americans. Also he personally lived through and witnessed the US fall from grace since the 1970s in terms of quality of manuf. goods, services etc.
He mentioned it even before the hot period of the campaign, afterwards as well. You have to give him the credit, that running populist campaign in the US with the motto how decrepit are some things in comparison to abroad, has been pretty bold decision and strategy to make.
Despite all of it, my working hypothesis is that such late changing of horses, while the power faction he represents, might be served for a while, but the overall effect could be quite analogue to Gorbi, i.e. preside over the final dissolution of the wreck.
Plus forget to mentioned both of his spouses are Slavic, children are bilingual..
But all suffer from a Nature Deficiency Disorder.
They have lived in very small boxes, and haven’t a clue how things actually work on a biophysical level.
They are living in a subset of a larger reality.
A Trump statement is valid as long as the sound waves are still vibrating. Remember how he was going to fight high drug prices. That lasted until he meet with big pharma.
Joseph Davidson,
Well I don’t know.
It looks like Japan has decided it wants to play the Trump game, potentially repatriating some of its FOREX to invest in the United States:
It would also provide an opportunity for more US debt, buying all of this stuff.
Hm, people way above my pay grade have predicted this, ditching (old NAFTA) Mexico out, forming closer alliance with UK, Canada, Japan and few others.. And it’s actually happening now, amazing.
It amazes me how Mr. Abe is always complaining how hard up his government is, yet he always manages to find another few trillion yen in a good cause.
Moreover, the Americans should be reassured that they are going to be riding in safe, comfortable and dependable Japanese high speed trains rather than the inferior Chinese ones.
No.17 gives me an opportunity to introduce one of my favorite country & western/folk performers, Kate MacLeod, singing “Return to Rawlins”.
I tried to leave it
My truck stop on the highway
My pit stop for the hungry
That high lonesome snow
But I was born here
Beneath the skies of heaven
In a mile markin’
Carbon County home
https://youtu.be/NkPMP46PaUQ
On the question of fertility and population, once again we see that it’s nearly impossible to get the balance right.
With high fertility, you have a plentiful supply of able bodied young labor for your nation and national economy. But, you also have the problem of housing/feeding them, keeping them satisfied, criminality, etc.
With low fertility, you get the short term benefits of not having the problem of a population surge. And if you have some immigration, you can keep labor in supply to keep the businesses happy. The current western model. But, in the long run, your people will lose out to higher fertility groups.
So, we see here that once again there’s simply no winning. Higher fertility + expansionist war (the Hitler gamble) is a possibility, but you could lose, and even this has its limits. There are not that many open spaces left, and all of humanity is armed.
There is scheduled fertility gap even for the lower wealth tier of the industrialized/ing world (Asia) after ~2030, perhaps a bit sooner. And given the likelyhood of overall contraction discussed here, so not very likely boost for places like Africa as well, unless somehow someone continues to subsidize them.
Gail, how did you come up with the proportions of electricity in the energy mixes? From the statistical review, it looks like electricity use is less than 20% of primary energy use, though much primary energy is used to generate electricity, so how did you figure out how much of that primary energy is either electricity (e.g. hydro) or is used to create electricity? I’d always thought that the figure was about 20% but now I’m not so sure.
BP shows two numbers for electricity. One is a kWh figure. The other is a Metric Tons of Oil Equivalent (MTOE) number, based on the amount of fossil fuel that would need to be burned, to produce this electricity. I consider this the “high” valuation for electricity. What I did was take the MTOE for electricity that BP gives for a country, and divide that by the total energy consumption for the country, also in MTOE. This give the percentage electricity using the high valuation for electricity.
A person can calculate a low electricity valuation based on the amount of heat that this electricity can actually produce if used in resistance heating. This approach would produce an amount only 38% as much heat value as the BP “high valuation” method. My impression is that the IEA uses the low value (38% of the high value) for electricity, in their calculations. The total amount of energy consumption would then be lower as well. This is how they can get something like 20% of so of primary energy consumption as coming from electricity.
I might note that the US Energy Information Administration uses the “high” approach for valuing electricity, similar to the BP approach. This is what I always use. The IEA low method strikes me as strange.
I might note that there is also considerable confusion regarding how electricity should be valued in EROEI calculations. Some feel that it is a high-value good, so somehow it should be worth three times as much as its heat value would indicate, so indicated EROEI should be multiplied by 3 if the output is electricity. Some feel that everything needs to be converted back to “primary heat equivalent,” and calculations made only on that basis.
A slightly different problem arises when EROEI calculations use electricity as both input and output, without a “quality” adjustment. The catch is that all too often the input is intermittent electricity (output of solar panels or wind turbines) and the output is high quality grid electricity. This doesn’t really match up well either. There are very different kinds of energy, and they have different values to the consumer. EROEI ratios really need some “quality” adjustments.
Thanks, Gail. So what is your feel for what energy would be left to convert if all electricity came from renewable resources? Of course, even some of that electricity would consume fossil fuels for infrastructure and raw materials production. I don’t, for a moment, think that all energy use could come from electricity, so, to my mind, this relentless drive for renewable energy is really not a solution to climate change, at best only slowing (possibly) climate change.
“all energy use could come from electricity”
I can’t think of any physical/chemical reason why it could not. Electricity, water and CO2 out of the ail will make all the hydrocarbons you can afford. It takes a real effort to get the cost of the power down to where gasoline and diesel made this way is cheap enough. A bbl of oil takes about 2 MWh of electric power to make the hydrogen. So if power is $10/MWh, then synthetic fuel will cost about $20 plus $10/bbl for the capital equipment.
However, it’s not easy to make power at that cheap.
Yeah henson, we could, “Could” make unlimited electricity from fission, fusion, fossil fuels, windmills, solar, geothermal or belief….belief can move mountains they say. Belief can bring Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny into reality. We COULD have a world wide nuclear war, we COULD have an world wide economic breakdown, we COULD inflict a world wide incurable pathogen on humans. What we COULD NOT do is ever, ever act collectively in our own best interest. It has never happened, most reasonable people understand that it will never happen.
So your thesis would be disproved if I can think of a single collective act that is in people’s best interest?
Actually, bandits and Keith are in broad agreement. In theory, we could make unlimited electricity from various processes, but given our history and the practical difficulties involved, we probably won’t.
But the fact that not all people are reasonable is the wild card that ensures there is always a chance of some kind of progress—not that I’m holding my breath for a solution to our overall predicament. According to Shaw, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The need for very cheap power is part of the problem. So is the cost and energy required to build the plants to make liquid fuels using electricity. We really need precisely the correct liquid fuels for each kind of current usage. (Gasoline in various grades, diesel, jet fuel, lubricating oil, etc.) If we don’t have the correct fuels, we need more time and expense (and energy) to convert our current fleet to the new fuel. As a practical matter, this probably cannot happen until vehicles reach the end of their normal lifetimes, and needed to be replaced. Thus, it would be a very slow process.
I am not sure I quite understand your question. Renewable electricity worldwide amounts to about 23% of today’s total electricity. Of this 23%, 16.4% is hydroelectric, and 6.7% is wind+solar+geothermal+wood+all of the other little stuff. I didn’t include nuclear, which would be another 10.7% of total electricity.
We can compare the heat energy of this renewable electricity (the “low” 38% number), with the heat energy of the fossil fuels that are currently used for purposes other than electricity, to see what share of fossil fuels this electricity currently replaces. This calculation shows that the heat energy from electric renewables amounts to only about 6% of the heat energy of fossil fuels used for purposes other than electricity production. No matter how much we ramp renewables up, and no matter how much more efficient electricity is than fossil fuels burned directly, this leaves a huge gap.
And of course, in order to ramp up renewables sufficiently and to keep it ramped up, we would need to invest a lot of fossil fuel energy into building renewable infrastructure for an indefinite period.
Sorry, Gail, the question wasn’t put very well. Let me put it another way. Suppose all electricity we currently use was generated from renewables, of some sort. What is your feeling for how much fossil fuel energy, used by our societies, would then remain? From your post and your previous comment, one might imagine that we’d still be left with somewhere between 60% and 70% of our energy use coming from fossil fuels. But this might not include fossil fuels needed for the mining/refining/production of materials used in constructing (and, thus, maintaining/renewing) the renewables infrastructure itself. I’m still trying to get a feeling for how little of the emissions problem is supposedly “solved” by converting electricity used to renewables. As I’ve said, I’ve previously been under the impression that it would only account for 20% of our energy use at that time, but now I’m unsure about that.
Replacement of oil by alternative sources
While oil has many other important uses (lubrication, plastics, roadways, roofing) this section considers only its use as an energy source. The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources. SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms.[13] Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.
Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:
4 Three Gorges Dams,[14] developed each year for 50 years, or
52 nuclear power plants,[15] developed each year for 50 years, or
104 coal-fired power plants,[16] developed each year for 50 years, or
32,850 wind turbines,[17][18] developed each year for 50 years, or
91,250,000 rooftop solar photovoltaic panels[19] developed each year for 50 years
The world consumes approximately 3 CMO annually from all sources. The table [10] shows the small contribution from alternative energies in 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
There is really no way that all of the electricity generated today could be generated by renewables of some sort.
If we were to try to do that, we would first have to build factories to build all of the renewables, and then build the renewables themselves, so it would be a very slow process. We would have to greatly ramp up debt to pay for all of this stuff. These things would by themselves put an end to the possibility. Also, there would need to be a huge use of fossil fuels to actually build these devices. This would be in addition to current “regular” demand, pushing up prices.
How this would theoretically work out, if it could be done, would take more time to model than it is worth doing.
Yeah, I agree. It’s just that I often come across the optimists who seem to think that moving electricity to renewables would be a fantastic start (obviously, if it could be done, which is questionable). My response is that even if it could be done, it would still leave an awful lot of emissions from fossil fuel energy since renewable electricity would still leave us with [enter figure here]% of energy use coming from fossil fuels. However, it appears impossible for many environmentalists (in the classic use of that word) to understand that renewables is not a solution that would leave our way of life intact.
Yep Mike, your last sentence is what it’s all about. Having wondered about this for years I conclude that environmental groups do indeed understand that: “…renewables is not a solution that would leave our way of life intact”. But what they detect is that the first part (renewable energy) is a sellable message to consumer society but the second part (radical change to our way of life) is much less sellable. So… pragmatically, the sellable part is sold hard and the unpalatable part is not mentioned too much – because it’s a turn-off.
I could side with this pragmatic strategy on the grounds that the second part will come to meet us later anyway, so we can argue that that part doesn’t need to be sold too hard. I don’t go too far down that track myself for three reasons:
1) Pretending that we can have our cake and eat it too is a dishonest message.
2) It results in a massive effort in infrastructure development that is not in tune with reality.
3) Many inside and outside the environmental community tend to get sucked in by their own rhetoric, to the extent that many who once believed there were limits-to-growth now champion renewable energy as a grand solution to the human predicament.
This is all done on the pretext of being optimistic (everyone believes in optimism). Unfortunately, this sales pitch leads to its own delusion. I think it’s better to be optimistic about having much simpler lifestyles, if we need to send out positive and cheerful messages.
Yes, but it’s hard to be optimistic about simpler lifestyles, too, because society is unlikely to tolerate (or at least make it easier) to have such a lifestyle. The really determined can do it, but with adverse personal consequences. However, simpler isn’t necessarily sustainable either, in this world of limits. Sadly, we lost the skills and temperament for simple lifestyles a long time ago. But you never know; in any case, simpler is definitely better.
“There is really no way that all of the electricity generated today could be generated by renewables of some sort. ”
Do you count power satellites as renewable?
Dont go there Keith….
More Oxygen Could Make Giant Bugs
http://www.livescience.com/1083-oxygen-giant-bugs.html
“Roughly 300 million years ago, giant insects scuttled around and fluttered over the planet, with dragonflies bearing wingspans comparable to hawks at two-and-a-half feet. Back then, oxygen made up 35 percent of the air, compared to the 21 percent we breathe now.”
If there is a lower content of oxygen in the air, the cars and all fossil fuel burning looses its efficiency. It is not possible to burn the fossil fuels so fast…
Giant Bugs => More Food. Go O2 levels!
Let’s slay that dragon!
The concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is often cited as a possible contributor to large-scale evolutionary phenomena, such as the origin of the multicellular Ediacara biota, the Cambrian explosion, trends in animal body size, and other extinction and diversification events.
The large size of insects and amphibians in the Carboniferous period, when the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere reached 35%, has been attributed to the limiting role of diffusion in these organisms’ metabolism. But Haldane’s essay points out that it would only apply to insects. However, the biological basis for this correlation is not firm, and many lines of evidence show that oxygen concentration is not size-limiting in modern insects.There is no significant correlation between atmospheric oxygen and maximum body size elsewhere in the geological record. Ecological constraints can better explain the diminutive size of post-Carboniferous dragonflies – for instance, the appearance of flying competitors such as pterosaurs, birds and bats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
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Did you lot see the HSBC report that projects the risk of a major global oil supply shock around 2018 that will trigger another financial crisis?
The report is now online here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view
I will quote the introduction and give some snippets from the following summary/ commentary.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/economic-oil-crash-around-corner
A report by HSBC shows that contrary to industry mythology, even amidst the glut of unconventional oil and gas, the vast bulk of the world’s oil production has already peaked and is now in decline, while European government scientists show that the value of energy produced by oil has declined by half within the first 15 years of the 21st century.
The upshot? Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil—unless we choose a fundamentally different path.
Last September, a few outlets were reporting the counterintuitive findings of a new HSBC research report on global oil supply. Unfortunately, the true implications of the HSBC report were largely misunderstood.
New scientific research suggests that the world faces an imminent oil crunch, which will trigger another financial crisis.
The HSBC research note — prepared for clients of the global bank — found that contrary to concerns about too much oil supply and insufficient demand, the situation was opposite: global oil supply in coming years will be insufficient to sustain rising demand.
Yet the full, striking import of the report, concerning the world’s permanent entry into a new age of global oil decline, was never really explained. The report didn’t just go against the grain of the industry’s hype about “peak demand”: it vindicated what is routinely lambasted by the industry as a myth: peak oil , the concurrent peak and decline of global oil production.
The HSBC report you need to read
Insurge Intelligence obtained a copy of the report in December 2016, and for the first time we are exclusively publishing the entire report in the public interest. Read and/or download the full HSBC report.
Headquartered in London, HSBC is the world’s sixth largest bank, holding assets of $2.67 trillion. So when it produces a research report for its clients, we should listen. Among the report’s most shocking findings is that, “81% of the world’s total liquids production is already in decline.”
Between 2016 and 2020, non-OPEC production will be flat due to declines in conventional oil production, even though OPEC will continue to increase production modestly. This means that by 2017, deliverable spare capacity could be as little as 1% of global oil demand.
This heightens the risk of a major global oil supply shock around 2018 which could “significantly affect oil prices.”
[…]
The HSBC report examines two main datasets from the International Energy Agency and the University of Uppsala’s Global Energy Systems Program in Sweden.
The latter has consistently advocated a global peak oil scenario for many years — the HSBC report confirms the accuracy of this scenario, and shows that the IEA’s data supports it.
[…]
But the HSBC report’s specific forecasts of global oil supply and demand are part of a wider story of global net energy decline.
A new scientific research paper authored by a team of European government scientists, published on Cornell University’s Arxiv website in October 2016, warns that the global economy has entered a new era of slow and declining growth. This is because the value of energy that can be produced from the world’s fossil fuel resource base is declining inexorably.
[…]
According to HSBC, oil prices are likely to rise and stabilize for some time around the $75 per barrel mark. But the Italian scientists find that this is still too high to avoid destabilizing recessionary effects on the economy.
[…]
Data from the past 40 years shows that during economic recessions, the oil price tops $60 per barrel, but during economic growth remains below $40 a barrel. This means that prices above $60 will inevitably induce recession.
[…]
But even so, the paper finds that the world is experiencing: “declining average EROIs [Energy Return on Investment] for all fossil fuels; with the EROI of oil having likely halved in the short course of the first 15 years of the 21st century.”
[…]
On a business-as-usual trajectory then, the economy can quite literally never recover — unless it transitions to a truly viable new energy source which can substitute for oil.
“In order to avoid the [oil] price affordable by the global economy falling below the extraction cost, debt piling (borrowing from the future) becomes a necessity, yet it is a mere trick to gain some time while hoping for something positive to happen,” said Meneguzzo. “The reality is that debt, basically as a substitute for oil, does not work to produce real wealth, as apparent for example from the decline of the industry value added as a percentage of GDP.”
[…]
What will this mean? One possible scenario is that by 2018 or shortly thereafter, the world will face a similar convergence of global crises that occurred a decade earlier.
In this scenario, oil price hikes would have a recessionary affect that destabilizes the global debt bubble, which for some years has been higher than pre-2008 crash levels, now at a record $152 trillion.
[…]
2018 is likely to be crunch year for another reason. Jan. 1, 2018 is the date when a host of new regulations are set to come in force, which will “constrain lending ability and prompt banks to only advance money to the best borrowers, which could accelerate bankruptcies worldwide,” according to Bloomberg. Other rules to come in play will require banks to stop using their own international risk assessment measures for derivatives trading.
[…]
And the audience goes silent. That was a good analysis from HSBC. I’ve used it with other dreamers to try to wake them up.
How do the HSBC predictions I have highlighted in yellow below square with the economic predictions promoted by this blog?
The HSBC prediciton is for a long-term oil price of $75. This is not too far from my long-term prediction of $60 to $70, and is still well below $100. Why do you believe HSBC is not predicting a return to $100 oil?
https://s24.postimg.org/qsc8ibdut/Captura_de_pantalla_584.png
https://s27.postimg.org/z6yw7lnlv/Captura_de_pantalla_585.png
You are joking right? I could trot out 50,000 or so predictions from banks that were wrong… but let’s just focus on one….
An Oracle of Oil Predicts $200-a-Barrel Crude MAY 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/business/21oil.html
And then we have the uncomfortable facts:
According to the OECD Economics Department and the International Monetary Fund Research Department, a sustained $10 per barrel increase in oil prices from $25 to $35 would result in the OECD as a whole losing 0.4% of GDP in the first and second years of higher prices. http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/high_oil04sum.pdf
Glenn – can you get back to me on that question ….
Let me refresh you…
Oil Majors are losing billions every quarter because they are losing money on every barrel of conventional oil they pump… with oil at 50 Bucks.
Should they abandon conventional oil and focus on shale … because as you have stated — shale plays make money at 50 Bucks.
It’s a simple question.
Stop hiding away Glenn. Let’s have an answer.
Steven Kopits from Douglas-Westwood said the productivity of new capital spending has fallen by a factor of five since 2000. “The vast majority of public oil and gas companies require oil prices of over $100 to achieve positive free cash flow under current capex and dividend programmes. Nearly half of the industry needs more than $120,” he said
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11024845/Oil-and-gas-company-debt-soars-to-danger-levels-to-cover-shortfall-in-cash.html
Oil Majors are losing billions every quarter because they are losing money on every barrel of conventional oil they pump… with oil at 50 Bucks.”
What were Exxon-Mobil’s quarterly losses in Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 of 2016?
I knew that was coming….
For a comprehensive analysis of Exxon’s position please click here
https://srsroccoreport.com/end-of-the-u-s-major-oil-industry-era-big-trouble-at-exxonmobil/
ExxonMobil’s U.S. pumping arm suffers 7th straight loss
ExxonMobil’s U.S. production business lost $477 million in the third quarter, the seventh straight quarter in the red, the company said on Friday. Exxon, which has been under pressure from authorities over its accounting tactics, also warned it may need to write down the value of some of its less profitable oil and gas assets.
The timing of the warning will raise eyebrows. Just last month, the New York Attorney General and the SEC launched separate investigations into whether Exxon violated accounting rules by failing to lower the value of its oil and gas supplies amid declining prices. Many other energy companies have taken such writedowns.
The cheap oil environment has left Exxon under financial pressure. The oil giant has been forced to borrow money to cover massive drilling costs and its generous dividend payouts. Exxon’s long-term debt has more than quadrupled to $46 billion and the company recently scrapped shareholder-friendly stock buybacks.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/28/investing/exxonmobil-earnings-stock-oil/
“I knew that was coming…”
So you didn’t answer it. That seems typical of you. Well, no matter…I’ve found the answer to my question. Profits in 2016 totaled $7.88 billion:
Q4 = $1.68B
Q3 = $2.7B.
Q2 = $1.7B
Q1 = $1.8B
I also found info for Exxon-Mobil profits in previous years (all values in billions of dollars):
2015 = 16.15
2014 = 32.52
2013 = 32.58
2012 = 44.88
2011 = 41.06
2010 = 30.46
2009 = 19.28
2008 = 45.22
2007 = 40.61
That’s the right question FE. Hold his feet to the fire. If shale is soooo profitable why don’t they switch all production to shale?
Mark Bahner- please address the material shown in FE link. It shows the XOM profit numbers you post to be total sham You accuse others of being dishonest but it would seem you wish to deceive.
I too would like a answer from Glenn about the $50 model FE poses. He doesn’t answer it because he know the truth to which it leads. Oil extraction is occurring only because of debt being accumulated that will never be repaid.
The HSBC predictions are basically peak oil predictions, assuming price doesn’t rise too much. As a result, extraction can’t rise very much. So they pretty much agree with what I am saying for oil. They haven’t looked at coal, or natural gas, or uranium, though. They all have problems as well.
Unsuccessfully
I don’t think we need the global money laundry for drug lords to point out the obvious…
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/330781-drug-smuggling-hsbc-crimes/
Oil producers need 120 Bucks+ to break even on oil.
Oil cannot be priced at that level for any sustainable level without collapsing the economy.
Oil producers are losing billions each quarter with oil at 50 Bucks
Oil producers are slashing capex to the bone and barely even bothering to look for new oil
Oil producers are borrowing billions from the central banks in order to buy back shares and to remain in business.
The end of the world is imminent.
“If we assumed a decline rate of 5%pa [per year] on global post-peak supply of 74mbd — which is by no means aggressive in our view — it would imply a fall in post-peak supply of c.38mbd by 2030 and c.52mbd out to 2040. In other words, the world would need to find over four times the size of Saudi Arabia just to keep supply flat, before demand growth is taken into account.”
So HSBC believes in BAU Lite….. epic ignorance/stupidity…
In the immortal words of Nicholas Taleb … if you have 10,000 bankers making predictions … a few of them are going to get something right some of the time …. and those few will be heralded as geniuses…
Case in point: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/02/07/more-detail-on-how-john-paulson-made-5-billion-in-one-year/
And since then:
2011: -51%
2012: -19%
2013:+32
2014: -36%
2015: -3%
2016 YTD: -15%
Seriously, HSBC projects that global oil production will fall to 38 mbpd by 2030 and they reckon that BAU will continue? Wow. Production was last at that level in 1968 when the global population was 3.5 B. http://don.geddis.org/bets/peakoil/eia-doe-1960-2006.html Now it is 7.5 B so that would mean half as much oil per person as in 1968 (4.6/ 2.3). Per person that would take us back to about 1960. http://futurist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452455969e201538f9a0bdf970b-320wi
I find it hard to believe that the global economy / finance / living standards will transition back to 1960 in an orderly fashion and that it will then progress back up to 52 mbpd in 2040. It seems more likely that the entire system will collapse into utter chaos and never recover on anything like the same scale.
Seriously, HSBC projects that oil production will fall back to 38 mbpd by 2030 and that BAU will continue?
Oil production was last at that level in 1968.
The global population was 3.5 B back then. Now it is 7.5 B.
That would mean half as much as oil per person as in 1968, which takes us back to about 1960.
The idea that the global economy/ finance/ living standards could revert back to 1960 and then progress back to 52 mbpd by 2040 in an orderly fasion seems pretty bizarre.
More like the entire system will collapse into utter chaos and it will never recover on any such scale.
(Third try to post this comment, links now removed, Gail pls delete any diplicates.)
Sorry, I try to approve the posts when I see that they have been accidentally caught.
••••The author of the Alternet article, Nafeez Ahmed, said:
“Unless we choose a fundamentally different path?”
I wonder what silver bullet Ahmed has in mind to slay the energy vampire.
••••The author of the Alternet article, Nafeez Ahmed, said:
The oil industry’s “hype” about “peak demand”? What on earth is Ahmed talking about?
This graph from the HSBC report Ahmed cites shows the predictions of BP, ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia — and it doesn’t get any oiler than that — and they all show inexorable growth in oil demand through 2035:
https://s30.postimg.org/jl047kl7l/Captura_de_pantalla_587.png
And here’s a graph from the BP Energy Outlook, and it certainly predicts significant growth in oil demand through 2035:
https://s27.postimg.org/iuyd0r2wj/Captura_de_pantalla_586.png
Where on earth is all of this demand growth going to come from?! China has just piled debt on top of more debt in 2016 to stave off the inevitable implosion of their debt-fuelled boom. All of the commodity producing nations that were being pulled along in China’s wake (Brazil, Congo, Australia etc etc) are already coming unstuck as China slows. Needless to say, they’ll be in even more trouble when China start going backwards. All of the bubbles that the Chinese have blown around the world will deflate (think Canadian real estate).
India has its own issues with debt and has just committed economic seppuku via aggressive demonetisation. The emerging markets are sitting on trillions in $ denominated debt with service costs rising.The EU is about to break up in chaotic and acrimonious fashion.
Most oil producing nations will be suffering even with oil at $75 as their breakeven needs are already in excess of that and constantly rising. Where will Venezuela or Nigeria or even Saudi be by 2020, let alone 2035? This is a far from exhaustive list but I am on my phone, tapping away in irritated fashion with one finger, lol. Ridiculous(!) to assert that oil demand growth will magically continue for another two decades when we are already this debt-saturated and energy-constrained, to say nothing of our rapidly changing climate.
Harry Gibbs,
I think that you and Gail put forth a very plausible argument.
The point I was trying to make, however, is that there is no “hype” about “peak demand” coming from the oil industry.
That is, of course, unless you and Gail are secrectly in the employ of ExxonMobil.
I suppose to acknowledge any risk of demand peaking would be self-defeating in that it would undermine investor confidence and negatively impact the value of shares, reserves, shale acreage and so forth.
ExxonMobil are cruelly neglecting to include me on their secret payroll, alas.
I see your point btw. Not sure what Nafeez Ahmed is on about there.
This is the article in question by Nafeez Ahmed.
http://observer.com/2017/01/brace-for-the-oil-food-and-financial-crash-of-2018/
In some ways he is on the same page as Gail. But with some very major differences.
Nafeez, or Dr. Ahmed as his mates insist we call him, has a habit of taking reports made for governments, corporations, NGOs and think tanks and mining them for info while awarding them authoritative status. To judge by the level of earnest concern he projects, it would never occur to him that any of the information placed in a report produced for or released by The Pentagon, Exon, Greenpeace of HSBC might be wrong, let alone consciously deceptive.
He gets it that the world’s in crisis, and that energy is a big part of the problem. But he thinks an oil crunch caused by lack of supply in the face of rising demand will trigger a new financial crisis, like the one that occurred in 2008. This may be a quibble on my part, but he doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the very real potential for a collapse in demand due to the inability of lower income earners to keep consuming at current rates, which could bring the system down without demand ever pushing up against a limited supply. Although he does mention this scenario:
There’s another possibility, which could mean that prices don’t rise as HSBC forecasts. In this scenario, the economy remains too weak to afford an oil price hike. Demand for oil stays low because economic activity remains tepid, while consumers and investors continue to seek out alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. In that case, the very inertia of a weakening economy would pre-empt the HSBC scenario, and the industry would continue to slowly crush itself out of the market due to declining profitability.
A more important disagreement between Nafeez—sorry— Dr. Ahmed and Gail is that he offers up a solution to all our woes! Quoting the paper’s co-author, Francesco Meneguzzo, he says:
Is there a way out? Not within the current trajectory: “Unless that debt is immediately used to exploit renewable sources on a massive scale, along with ‘accessories’ such as storage making them as qualified as oil, social and political derangements, even before an economic crash, look to be unavoidable.”
Apt word, “derangements”. I thought it was a psychological term describing the sort of thoughts that characteristically welled up in the minds of DelusiSTANis, but apparently, according to Wikipedia:
In combinatorial mathematics, a derangement is a permutation of the elements of a set, such that no element appears in its original position. The number of derangements of a set of size n, usually written Dn, dn, or !n, is called the “derangement number” or “de Montmort number”.
So, according to Ahmed, the only thing needed to slay the energy vampire is more political will so that we can “exploit renewable sources on a massive scale”?
Does Ahmed really believe that existing renewable technology offers a way out?
California, Spain and Germany tried Ahmed’s “solution.” There was certainly no lack of political will in these political entities, and untold amounts of money were thrown at the problem. And how has that turned out?
A revolutionary breakthrough in energy techology is possible, but throwing untold amounts of money at the problem hasn’t worked, at least not so far.
Ahmed seems to be quite the fan of Positivist thinking, or is it just rank demagoguery?
It is always helpful to have a happy ever after ending.
I think Ahmed’s a member of what Myron Ebell recently referred to as “the Climate Industrial Complex”. 🙂 They aren’t actually particularly interested in or knowledgable about climate, but it seems they are working hard to destroy the capitalist system and impoverish the proletariat of the industrialized nations. As the climate scare is no longer working very well as a motivation to make the transfer from fossil fuels to unreliable capricious energy sources, they may be opening up a second front by launching a scarcity scare. (The climate scare may well be genuine, but the fact the public is reacting to it like Bart Simpson, sarcastically saying “Are we scared yet?” while Trump is opposed 180 degrees to Obama’s and the UN’s energy policy, so they may feel they need to change tack.)
I have never met Ahmed in person. There are a bunch of things he doesn’t seem to understand.
Tim – you have discovered a new province of DelusiSTAN —- very remote — very secretive,… DerangiSTAN
when my visa comes through im emigrating to derangistan—my kinda place
But the Italian scientists find that this is still too high to avoid destabilizing recessionary effects on the economy.
[…]
Data from the past 40 years shows that during economic recessions, the oil price tops $60 per barrel, but during economic growth remains below $40 a barrel. This means that prices above $60 will inevitably induce recession.
In the interest of belaboring a point because the 50 Buck Club has a learning disability:
HIGH PRICED OIL DESTROYS GROWTH
According to the OECD Economics Department and the International Monetary Fund Research Department, a sustained $10 per barrel increase in oil prices from $25 to $35 would result in the OECD as a whole losing 0.4% of GDP in the first and second years of higher prices.
http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/high_oil04sum.pdf
OIL PRODUCERS NEED $100+ OIL
Steven Kopits from Douglas-Westwood said the productivity of new capital spending has fallen by a factor of five since 2000. “The vast majority of public oil and gas companies require oil prices of over $100 to achieve positive free cash flow under current capex and dividend programmes. Nearly half of the industry needs more than $120,” he said
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11024845/Oil-and-gas-company-debt-soars-to-danger-levels-to-cover-shortfall-in-cash.html
Gail Tverberg says:
November 30, 2016 at 11:11 am
“The earth and its biosphere is a dissipative structure. It will be a cold, dead planet, long before the sun stops shining.”
How did Gail comes to this conclusion? I thought the Earth would get baked when the sun gradually turns into a red giant during the next four billion years.
” Earth would get baked when the sun gradually turns into a red giant”
Not necessarily. It depends. If there is a technically capable race around and they don’t get hung up wailing about their fate (like some here) they can drag the Earth back from the fire.
Eric Drexler worked out two ways to do this decades ago.
Instead of wailing about our fate.. please Keith, give us the Plan, how do we BAU for 40 more years
The hour for the old engineer to act, is now.
Dr. Tim Morgan:
“In Britain, for example, average wages rose by 25% from 2005 to 2015. Inflation was 27%, so real wages were essentially flat. But the cost of power and light rose by 90% over those years, water charges went up by 47%, travel costs rose by 70% and food went up by 39%. So the money left after essentials declined – making the person poorer. Globally, we’ve been countering this by spending borrowed money. World GDP grew by 1.8% annually between 2000 and 2015. Take out the spending of borrowed money, however, and “real” (non-borrowed) growth was only 0.6%. More recently it’s down to 0.3% – so allowing for population growth, = Total GDP per person is now shrinking..”
Tims numbers can only lead to more and more debt. Untill at some point in the near term future, when everything just collapses
So, please Keith, what’s The Plan?
These sort of back tracking calculations are shaping up as very interesting quasi validation tool. First they tend to confirm the model of Limits to Growth. Also, these calculations sort of help predict the ins and outs of the mid/larger cycles, which come of passing the span of ~9generations. When applying back tracking on given trend, although it’s a rough tool, it perhaps provides some predicting value into the future as well.
So far, I don’t need to change my humble personal estimation prognosis, namely no later than by ~2025 reset of the dominant legacy global order, abrupt shift to more regional clusters of trade relations (incl. long distance energy routes), very evident demographic shift by late 2020s calls for different (re-/non)distribution, ~2035-45 very likely window for irreversible fall from bumpy plateau onto much lower complexity level, among all the top industrialized countries. Obviously, what’s going on the semi-/periphery in the meanwhile will be likely more turbulent and usually preceding the stages of development in the more affluent/key systemic areas.
I am going to take your request seriously even though I doubt you are being serious.
http://www.exoplatz.org/Space_Based_Solar_Power
This is still draft material, but the main economic elements are there.
If the goal is to undercut coal, the maximum capital investment can’t exceed ~$2400/kW.
Of that, it looks like $1100/kW for the parts, labor and the ground rectenna. For a specific mass of 6.5 kg/kW, then the maximum cost to lift the parts to GEO is $200/kg. That’s not easy, but a combination of Skylon at high flight rates and arcjet propulsion above LEO looks like it will get the cost to $200/kg. It’s a huge project, a flight rate upwards of half a million Skylon flights per year.
Keith – I understand the Bread and Circus is about to begin in Ah-Merica….
Your plan is like me coming up with a plan on how I will spend the next 6 months planning to be a starting quarterback in next year’s Super Bowl — if there is a Super Bowl next year….
I’d worry more about a supper bowl then Super Bowl right now.
++++
Those HGH-juiced Frankensteins are going to lose a lot of weight… very soon….
No, he didn’t. What’s holding us back is not a lack of will
it’s that we don’t have any means of living away from Earth.
Just stop lying.
“No, he didn’t.”
I was there when it happened. It’s been published, in one of my articles and several other places and both methods have been reinvented a few times. Go here: https://www.hackcanada.com/blackcrawl/elctrnic/megascal.txt and go down to “A long enough lever . . .” where the two methods are discussed.
“we don’t have any means of living away from Earth.”
Don’t tell the guys living on the ISS.
The ISS…….Do you call that living? They are alive, existing and working and would die in short order without life support and their Earth connection. The longest stay has been 437 days and he was ill when brought home, he had to do a great deal of exercise while on board and took years to recover on return to Earth.
I don’t know what your agenda is or even what you expect to achieve but if you were to converse truthfully you could (barely) be tolerated. You quite obviously know and understand limitations but continually present hypotheses as realistic, achievable facts. If everyone here presented their sci-fi future scenarios of if’s could’s and should’s as you do, there would be nothing to say to each other. Humans cannot “live” in zero gravity. If….IF Mars or Venus were “Earth like” then maybe, colonisation would have recently begun. IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF, IF IF.
http://gizmodo.com/how-long-humans-can-live-in-space-and-what-happens-if-w-1632091719
https://www.quora.com/How-long-can-humans-live-in-space-and-what-is-the-worst-case-scenario-for-someone-who-lives-too-long-in-space
“Humans cannot “live” in zero gravity.”
Agreed, and they almost certainly can’t raise children in zero g or in the radiation you get from cosmic rays. But if they can live for a year in zero g, it seems likely they could spend perhaps half of working time in zero g.
So if you need workers in space (which is not entirely clear) then you have to provide a shielded, spinning habitat. This may change, but the shielding alone costs about $9 B to lift to a six hour construction orbit. On the other hand, the delay for the shielding in starting to sell power satellites is only a couple of months.
“your agenda”
No mystery there. It’s very similar to Eric Drexler.
“K. Eric Drexler was strongly influenced by ideas on Limits to Growth in the early 1970s. During his first year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he sought out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Gerard K. O’Neill of Princeton University, a physicist famous for his work on storage rings for particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization.” (Wikipedia)
or you can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
Limits to Growth was a major motivating factor for many of the people who were connected to space colonization in those days.
I am not an expert on what the sun will do. This article sayss
It also says,
So probably the correct order is:
1. The earth and its biosphere is a dissipative structure. This dissipative structure will collapse, bringing an end to current live on the planet. It will be a lifeless dead planet.
2. It is possible that the earth may be able to gain a new biosphere, and go through one or more growth and collapse phases, because dissipative structures are often replaced by new similar dissipative structures.
3. The earth will become too hot for any further life, long before the red giant star stage.
4. Red giant start stage.
So Step 1 will happen, long before the sun becomes a red giant.
Although irrelevant to the topic of this blog, I find the idea of Earth’s ecosystems being dissipative structures to be profound. It looks like even if the Sun keeps shining, the Earth’s ecosystems will collapse on their own due to forces related to entropy.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of published material that I could find on the idea of Earth’s ecosystems being dissipative structures so I am still curious as to how you and others came to this conclusion. If there’s some literature you could point to, to help me understand this concept, that’d be great.
P.S. Let’s say the Singularity actually happened. Would autonomous technology also be dissipative structures?
Look, we’ve pretty much heard all these comments before. Say something funny, say it quickly, or just don’t say anything at all.
The Vampire Squid Is Back
Thanks. According to the author,
“[2] Grid electricity is probably the least sustainable form of energy we have.”
If the US grid needs major upgrades to handle increasing electricity use we always have our massive military budget to tap into. Maybe we can even make the necessary changes to allow the military to build the lines, since it would probably be easier than trying to get Congress to divert the budget.
“we always have our massive military budget to tap into”. So says you. You assume the grid will be the only problem. Wall Street might get all the money first, or the shale oil industry, or motor vehicle industry, maybe even the poor banks might need bailing out. The list is practically endless.
It is legitimate that if we were to start trying to divert out military budget that it would have multiple suitors. But I was taking a non-collapse point of view – that we would be going like we are now. However, Trump wants to get rid of Dodd-Frank, which was already too weak to keep the banks from shenanigans, so we would be looking at another bailout in the future.
The military can’t fix the economic problems underlying why the grid has not been maintained or upgraded (expanded) . I suspect that wars are cheaper than fixing the U.S. infrastructure–which is probably some of the world’s most expensive infrastructure due to its sheer scale.
Even if a war is somehow cheaper than fixing the electricity infrastructure, you would need to have a working infrastructure regardless of whether or not you waged a war.
The military might be too busy trying to save their own energy bacon (net energy zero goal for all military/other bases/facilities they self-generate what they use, no need for grid ties) to help the civilians…
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/office_eere/pdfs/48876.pdf
” wind and solar will save us?” My experience tells me Gail is correct BUT solar still might have it’s uses. When I installed my solar system in my doomstead I didn’t bother with a grid tie for a couple of reasons namely I would never recover the costs and I didn’t really need the money anyway. It wouldn’t even pay for the distilled water my batteries use each month. The only benefits I see are the ability to use pumps, turn on lights and the luxury of using the washing machine now and again. In a collapse scenario those are big benefits!
I’m hoping my research pays off and my choice of charge controllers and inverter will last a decade or 2 but for a few thousand $$ I can and probably should double up on those vital components. Of course all this hopium is based on my location on an island in the Pacific Northwest is sufficiency distanced from all those spent fuel cooling ponds. The closest reactor, the Hanford is several hundred miles away and upwind.. don’t get me wrong I know FE is correct but in case the melt down is not as catastrophic as his research shows and life is possible. When you have 4 grandsons hopium can be very consoling.
My plan is to blunder on until I notice the local trees start getting a red tinge and my chickens wattles turn black ( signs that FE was correct and the radiation is here) but the real trick is how to prepare without everyone thinking you’re bat shit crazy!
Yup, Jarvis, we all think you are bat shit crazy..
But take heart.. I’ll bet I’m one grade more bat shit crazy than you.
(and please, lets not mention at which level of bat shit crazy Norman actually is)
Good stuff, look around at country/world, as many (most) people tend to blow resources on utter consumerist crap at far higher rate then you do with your small backup systems.
Gail’s message is mostly about the overall political/social/econ chimeric claim, that renewables supposedly could be incorporated into the legacy infrastructure system of ours be it the grid, transportation etc. No, they can’t it’s either back up (and distributed) operation of far lower capacity. Or stacking renewables up on the existing power industries (not displacing), actually making everything running in worse efficiency, poor reliability, higher costs.
I can’t speak for her, but after the years, by little snippets in comments here and there it’s evident she expects rather swift outcome to finish current system, and if it comes on case by case basis to perhaps some way lower plateau being temporarily secured in very draconian type of societies only anyhow..
” No, they can’t ”
I agree. But that does not mean there are no solutions.
If there are solutions, why aren’t they being implemented?
“why aren’t they being implemented?”
I can’t say much about the other concepts, but the power satellite approach didn’t have a viable economic analysis till about a year ago.
It’s a real effort to spread new ideas around. The deluded ones think the problem is under control, the ones who do understand are like fast eddy. Neither are of much use in getting things done.
What about you Henson, what would you be.
I’m standing by for the announcement Keith….. any day now right?
The solution would be to stop having babies. Possibility of that is zero.
“The solution would be to stop having babies.”
A low birthrate would not solve our resource related problems ,, by itself, since a low birthrate seems to lead to too many old people, and depends on the availability of resource-hungry lifestyles to provide surrogate activities for child-rearing.
Yep – see Japan for what happens when population drops….
I can understand a few doomsteaders using solar off grid. My real objection is trying to add this stuff in quantity to the grid, and not charge enough for grid to be properly maintained, with all of its new peripherals. The result may be losing the grid more quickly than we would otherwise lose it.
I share this objection. The stability, security and viability of the grid are being undermined and compromised by having to accommodate and adjust to yet another variable, that of intermittent sources of electricity, and by the utilities having to pay for the inconvenience of accepting this low-quality electricity. Added to diurnal, weekday/weekend, and weather-seasonally-driven variations in power consumption plus changes in the cost of fuels and the opening up of the existing grid for use by competitors in the electricity generating business, they now have to juggle with large and rapid changes in renewable output from small-scale producers which is dependent on the vagaries of the weather. It’s an additional complication and an extra burden for the utilities that seems likely to diminish their ability to maintain the grid.
Hi Tim, yours is an oft repeated mantra and it goes without saying that utilities have no choice now but to rise to this challenge. Many would interpret from what you are saying that the utilities should keep relying on coal (and perhaps nuclear)? But maybe that’s not your message?
For many people the “going off-grid’ movement is a way of visibly expressing their disapproval of the big system, even if it comes at a cost. This impulse is not too far different from the anti-system sentiment that got Trump elected. Or those who supported Sanders, for that matter. We live in the cult of the individual. There’s a whole lot of people out their analysing why this is so. It seem systems have become so big and complex, whilst not delivering much, that they are driving people to madness.
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Just to put the domestic winter heating issue in context, it’s possible to build a design that only requires heating when no-one is in the building for a few days. There are some problems with this: The building can’t be very big, or additional ventilation is necessary; it can’t be small, or the heat losses will be too great; and the occupation has to be within about ten percent of the optimal design capacity.
The real problems stem from the legacy estate that will be there for perhaps the next 30 years, and from our general inability to either manage or forecast the price of energy and acceptable lifestyles.
I don’t think your getting it. No one has 30 years. The people who had 30 years lived 30 years ago. The banquet of consequences has begun.
A more realistic scenario will be your trading some of your last antibiotics to the tribe in the next valley for spear points and women.
Domestic winter heating – as always the math in nature is not negotiating.
You either don’t invest in almost anything just the simplest tools and then harvest
the resource, the efficiency is low, it’s a drudgery, but it works almost everywhere for everybody (a lot of diverse sources to burn), till the moment you reach the net potential of such resource or environment rupture etc.
Or instead you front load the process, invest decades of work of many other skilled people, use lots of “hitec”, then just sit pretty comfy for decades while the machine (multitude of technologies/fuel sources) is still operable or you also hit the resource limits.
Basically, in simplification: poor and low tier of organization/low complexity/ poor peoplez & countries follow the first example. While rich and complex societies (incl. debt driven) do the second thing.
In terms of practicalities of the above it’s the same, as you can heat your home for almost no upfront expense, but you will be dirty, exhausted. Or you can front load “the problem” with savings (or fraudulent debt-credit), buy and install the complex machine/s next day, and be very comfy as long as it lasts..
I don’t think we as a society can front-load the problem with savings. I think it turns out always to be debt, or “equity investment” which is very much like debt, because it requires dividends, and the ability to resell the stock later.
Whenever we make a capital device, we end up using more resources (such as coal and metals) to make a device now, that is hoped to have a benefit in the future. This benefit is paid for by debt or some debt-like instrument.
Well, that’s exactly what I’ve written as well. We have evidently used the front loading mechanism beyond any imaginable boundaries, people are using complex infrastructure and tools, machines directly in their homes as well as complex machines outside (grid, pipelines, healthcare, extractive industries…). The math is very simple, the amount of energy and personal service slaves (on credit) even “poor/average” people use in industrial countries is breath taking, comparing with ancestors just few decades ago. The discrepant ratio of what we have/command now and what we “are returning to” is mind boggling.
We are very likely at the end of the road for both of those simplified modes of operation in my description. I just applied it on the example of home heating. Now he still can use the more complex option of front loading the problem and pray it doesn’t malfunction prematurely, but it’s unlikely this will be possible action in 2-3decades, as the complex system unravels.
“complex machines”
It’s worth keeping in mind that occasionally a complex machine can be simplified.
The form factor for microswitches has not changed since WW II. I took one apart from that era many years ago. It had maybe 20 moving parts in the switch. Compare with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_snap-action_switch
At the other end of the scale, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(grinding)#Ball_mill in copper mining have largely been replaced with leaching and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowinning
“II. I took one apart from that era many years ago. It had maybe 20 moving parts in the switch.”
Just because something has less moving parts doesn’t mean it’s less complex, or longer-lasting. Non-moving parts fail, too.
“This benefit is paid for by debt”
Assuming that it is technically feasible (likely, but not certain at this point) what would it be worth to build a replacement for fossil fuels? Reason I ask is that the peak funding model for a power satellite construction facility and transport infrastructure has gone up to around $100 B. Solved one problem, ozone damage from NOx and another one crops up, long term radiation hazard for workers.
What you seem to be talking about would seem to be something like an igloo, or a small hut heated only by body heat.
We indeed have a whole lot of built housing.
Our problem with prices of energy is that we can’t get them high enough. The result is that the expected quantity of this energy goes to zero.
RE : sustainability of the Electricity Grid. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not seeing this kind of investment in North America.
“The four German power transmission system operators (TSOs) have published draft development plans through 2030 and 2035, estimating total investment costs at €34-36bn by 2030, assuming that the DC-1, DC-3 and DC-5 HVDC transmission lines, with a cumulated capacity of 8 GW, are built as underground cables and including €6bn for the start up of the network.
German TSOs plans to reinforce between 7,600 km and 8,500 km of existing cables and to build 3,800 km of new lines, including approximately 2,600 km of HVDC lines and around 1,200 km of AC lines. Around 330 km of direct current connections to Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Sweden should be built, with a total transmission capacity of 8 GW.
Where offshore grid is concerned, nearly 2,800 km of offshore lines could be developed by 2030 (3,700 km by 2035), with a planned network capacity ranging from 7.4 GW in 2030 to 11.4 GW in 2035. Total investments would then near €16bn by 2030 and €22bn by 2035.”
The US is using a whole lot less intermittent renewables proportionately than Europe, so we have less need for long distance transportation.
Europe also has a lot of population density it needs to work around. It is possible to put in a cable between west Texas and east Texas quite cheaply, because few people live there to object to the cable. In a highly dense area, like Germany, they need to be buried as underground cables. One article I read comparing the cost of a German cable above ground and buried underground seemed to come out about three times as high.
Building all of this transmission seems to be the European workaround for not really creating enough electric generation of some kind, to replace aging French nuclear plants and closing German nuclear plants. Somehow, there is the hope that “the market” will actually provide some electricity to put on this expensive grid.
FE and NP I think we should take a lesson from this article. It’s obvious that if you squeeze the bunny too hard his eyes pop out.
http://peakoil.com/geology/how-i-came-to-realize-i-was-wrong-about-peak-oil-f-william-engdahl
It’s interesting to note that Stalin ordered the study being referenced . His intent was to prove energy self sufficiency.
Let me see in 1950s Russia if Joseph Stalin commissioned me to scientifically prove that resources are infinite might I be a little bias in my research?
Anyway the best thing is this article proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the unlimited nature of oil. This will comfort all the audience that has been disturbed by their brush with reality.
Lordy! Lordy!
The geology of the Dnieper-Donets Basin is about as conventional as one can get.
http://assets.geoexpro.com/uploads/7444eac0-5c58-47b1-acaa-8dcb98f95364/Fig3_donetsk_transect_final.jpg
So why is Russia engaging in this sort of propaganda? My guess is that the objective is to sow civil unrest in the West. As Hannah Arendt noted in On Revolution:
Why? Easy answer follows, because in the pecking order of the global capital-debt scheme as it exists at least since ~1910 (and its formative proto-stages few centuries earlier) they have not been and still are not allowed the membership of very top tier players. They have to work very hard for everything, rebuilding the country each time after yet another scorch earth invasions here and now..
Remind you, it took almost two decades to rebuild the state structures to some working order, kick out the worst oligarchic vampires, and tame/yoke some of the moderate ones to work/contribute at least partly for the benefit of the country. Simply, they desperately need each and every additional day, month, year. And still they are confined in chopped state borders, way smaller prior the late Czarist period. They are the reascending underdog.
Chances are they will ride the turbulent years of near collapse plateau with dignity and better than most. Also they have got very good chances to have something quasi viable from the carnage after that and I’m not saying at what loose organizational level and at what horrific fraction of pop such entity could be..
These are Russian authors, but I’m not sure the russian state is engaging in anything
Not exclusively speaking about this specific article, that’s why I was interested.
But Russian officialdom and science has been acting very strangely about all of it. I guess they know/closing in on the score, there was rather a panic in mid/late 2000s about the conventional peak oil, as a response they kept revamping their nuclear industries (also because big hydro maintenance probs), but now after reaching many of the stated goals, world’s latest gen of reactors ready, first export deals for them ongoing, they suddenly curtailed the number of brand new domestic reactor orders/NPPs upgrades, including the large fleet of breeders now smaller, but kept the projects of the small arctic barge NPP platforms to support arctic drilling and shipping routes. They are working on improving their domestic shale’s skillz too.
In summary, seems such chess moves are definitely not about money/budget only, I’d read it as they expect some trajectory ala bumpy plateau downhill for the mid term future in which they need to slowly replace only some of the aging smaller < 1GW reactor NPPs, so that in effect keeps the grid at same level or perhaps only bit smaller capacity with the new large one units, plus ramping up shales for liquids etc. Well, from history we know what such reshuffle preparatory movement usually signify. As you prolly know Western Siberia, Caspian and other old plays near existing infrastructure are mostly done for.
Cool
Ahh.. whew.. good to know
The U.S. is still the worlds biggest exporter of oil. Saudi fortunes are a scam, because the U.S. Dallas oil moguls perpetually had more and more oil. The North Sea oil fields were a huge scam also. Who the -ell would go out to sea to pump oil if it was always plentifull in the same oil fields in the U.S. good to know real wages have not been dropping. Debts are not at record breaking highs. The economy is doing juuuust fine
Whew.. kinda had me worried there for a minute
This guy lives in a parallel universe — where anti-logic rules
You might find the the new El Supremo in the USA will order the same research
and order the researchers to come up with the same results
Maybe he’ll just buy it from Putin.
Abiotic Oil…WE.ARE.SAVED!!!!!
https://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011205_no_free_pt2.shtml abiotic oil no evidence exists study done in sweden cost a fortune and found nothing oil is finite
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xv1pRYB7kH0/VzQwXkEFw3I/AAAAAAAAIUU/XitnAYMNQ6EwfoCMzSJperFOODpQrT5gQCLcB/s640/Path_of_exhaustion4.png
My reading of this graph is that new technology offers us various ways of squeezing more out of the sponge, but we still have the same sponge, so although we may get a bit more out of it than if we’d stuck to old technology, the end result will be to squeeze the sponge dry that much sooner.
No doubt about it, oil and natural gas extraction is on a pathway of diminishing returns: more energy in, less energy out.
What did it cost to extract a barrel of oil from the East Texas Field back in the 30s in today’s dollars? $1.00? $2.00?
That’s a heck of a lot less than the $30 or $40 currently required to extract a barrel of oil from the Permian shale in the best parts of the field using the latest, state of the art technology.
The EROEI to extract a barrel of oil from the East Texas Field in the 30s was probably in excess of 100. What’s the EROEI to extract a barrel of oil from the Permian shale in the best parts of the field using the latest, state of the art technology? 10?
But one must ask the question: Where would we be without all the new drilling and fracking technology? Surely, the apocalypse would already be upon us.
“new technology” is just technobabble for what it really is:
Running faster and faster to stand still.
The current situation of humankind is like that of, say, an African herdsman.
His tribe cuts wood for heat and cooking, maybe 100 yards distant, over decades, centuries. Then folks show up and cure all his ailments. The resulting ‘population growth’ means that every person
needs more wood, and the circle spreads ever outwards–until the nearest firewood is 5 miles away
but still the cutting goes on, until there comes a point where cutting and carrying wood (energy invested) cancels out the benefits (Energy returned)
The African herdsman cant work that out mathematically, on paper or in real time, but there comes a point when he sees the surrounding land has been turned to desert, and the trees are 5–or more miles away.
Is he prepared to walk 5 miles for wood (or water for that matter)–maybe,
But I would suggest 10 miles is too far, so somewhere between 5 and 10 miles he reaches zero sum energy return.
Impossible to pin down exactly. But that should be population cutoff point again.
Then he acquires a 2 wheel handtruck. (new technology) That extends his woodcutting range, and allows him to cut more wood and bring it back. He is happy. It’s BAU for him. Even with a 10 mile range. He probably sells surplus wood to his truckless neighbours. He builds a mini timber empire on the energy invested in his hand truck, everyone begins to utilise timber products, using heat to make things—Its BAU for everybody. He conveniently ingores the fact the handtrucks do not grow trees
But he has a couple more kids on the basis of his wood prosperity, (as does everybody else) and so needs more resources to support them.
But the trees are even further away, and the wheels of his truck are coming off. There is no wood at all within human carrying range .
So instead of having worktime to make ‘stuff’, people have to start building more trucks to fetch wood. But the trees can’t grow fast enough to meet demand, especially as the forest is getting more distant.
Soon carrying time begins to exceed production time. The tribe is consuming its ultimate energy resource (themselves) to sustain an external energy resource, (wood carrying) and getting a negative return in their investment (time/muscle output)
So the business of the tribe becomes energy production as an end in itself. (renewables)They must go on making more and more things with the sole purpose of production of energy.
We are in that same situation, we just think ourselves as civilized and beyond the primitive now.
50 years ago we didn’t have to worry about getting hold of enough energy—it was readily available.
Up to 1970 is was the “Universal Dream” Now the constant concern is finding new ways to sustain ‘growth’.
Humankind is certain that energy per se in the form of more and more new devices will sustain our level of ongoing prosperity. Forever.
Assurances are given that $900bn oil is “in the ground”. No mention is made that it will require $1.4Trn to get hold of it. But it is voted for nevertheless.
To see where are, we must hypothetically stand back and look at the 250 year span of industrial civilization as a whole. (about 10 generations)
Measure that against the 2 m years of our evolution (about 500,000 generations) and it becomes clear that we are in the process of snuffing ourselves out as surely (and insignificantly) as pinching a candle flame between moistened fingertips.
Great description.
By the way, as mentioned before ~9 generations cycle is a historic rhyming pattern of partial reset/renewal, very broadly it has something to do with 3x (grand dad – grand kid wiring overhaul), basically if conditions are right people drop/eject/loose previously gathered knowledge – wisdom. Sometimes it does coincide with longer cycles aka very disruptive version of collapse, nowadays that being of industrial civilization and its direct/indirect support structure for ~7B pop, in short very high probability for this one soon..
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr did an outstanding job of responding to your dismal and foreboding pessimism.
“The optimism of pure naturalism,” Niebuhr observed, has degenerated
dismal or not
i merely set out what happens when human kind adopts technology as a support/growth system
i would be happy to be shown my error…i dont like it either.
If you don’t mind me asking how on earth has a resource driven debate devolved into a philosophical quasi religious conversion. Has someone run out of material? I guess when science fails to extend the argument we turn to eastern philosophy?
the reason is—i think—that our predicament is critically influenced by a range of interlocked factors, covering science, economics, politics and –yes–religion–and those factors subdivide into sub categories.
you cannot solve one and ignore the others, any one of the problems can kill us off
despite that, the various factions that govern our understanding of the problem concentrate on one factor while ignoring the others.
No one tries to offer solutions in a broad sense—mainly because there isnt one.
yet if you read well known commenters—they offer ”solutions’ as if theirs is the ultimate answer.
this is why i use the term wish politics, wish economics and wish science
for those relying on prayer—i offer wish religion for those who expect a returning messiah to clean up the mess we’ve made. (remember that 46% of Americans believe the Earth is less than 10k years old)
wish politics is a strong driving force— millions vote for the biggest liar who asserts that climate change is hoax—that level of stupidity cannot be ignored because it can lead to violent unrest when promises are not met.
yet idiots form the majority, and sincerly believe that prosperity can be voted into office.
this is why discussing the various outputs of solar panels is interesting but ultimately irrelevant, when you have a new POTUS about to cut out the EPA…and others who assert that we cannot do anything about climate change becuase it will “damage the economy” (wish economics)
my thinking on this is based on established facts, as they stand right now
The insane politics of the last 2 weeks might well be seen as the sideswipe that finished off humankind, looking back 100 years from now. (I think that that is my only real guess here.)
Norman Pagett,
The point is that our own beliefs are informed by a belief system. This belief system didn’t come out of nowhere. It has a long history, having slowly evolved over centuries.
We all believe that our own personal belief system is superior to other belief systems. But the person sitting next to you may have a totally different belief system, and he also believes that his belief system is superior to all others.
I don’t believe my belief system is superior — I do not have a belief system
Belief systems are for idjits. I believe in Santa Claus. I believe in the Tooth Fairy. I cannot prove they exist but just believing in them (strongly) is enough.
Beliefs are like imagined fairies. Or delusions.
I have a fact and logic system — and I am 100% certain that it infinitely superior to any belief system. But of course those who have belief systems will have none of it. They do not require facts or logic.
belief systems evolved as humankind gained the time to stop and think of past present and future.
awareness of self and close kin, burial of dead and so on
Explanations were demanded for lightning and volcanoes etc, and origins of people.
Storytellers sprang up as speech developed—the rest as they say is history…..literally.
This is why so many godmyths have a common central theme.
Obviously it has always been a good survival strategy for those of a certain belief system to group and act together.
thus a group of 100 is a cult, whereas a group of 10 m becomes an accredited religion, even though theres no discernible difference in nutty belief systems.
even in our own time—scientology is only 60 years old, jwitnesses about 150 years, mormons the same, plus any number of fringe derangements, all certain that only they are the messengers from god —there must be 000s going back to JCs time, and 000s before that.
give me odds on which is the godwinner there folks.
For one to look at the current situation and not be pessimistic — is to be delusional at best — stupid at worst
JT Roberts,
If you take a look around, you will observe that pretty much everyone claims the banner of “science” these days.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argued that “though metaphysics is an illusion from the point of science, science in turn becomes but another stage of illusion as far as absolute truth is concerned.”
The “theoretic man,” Nietzche continues, pursues truth in the delusion that reality can be fathomed by rational thought and applications. But faith in the omnipotnce of reason shatters, for the courageously persistent thinker, not only on the fact that science can never complete its work but chiefly on the positive apprehension that reality is irrational.
“We are illogical and therefore unjust beings from the first, and can know this: that is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence,” Nietzsche writes.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Antonio Damasio, Frans de Waal, John Bargh, Michael Gazzaniga, Josh Greene, E.O. Wilson and Jonathan Haidt, but there’s been a great deal of research recently that indicates that Nietzsche was onto something, and that the Enlightenment notion of “rational man” is a lot more fiction than fact.
Sorry that line of reasoning is to flatter men’s ego. It is the same as Greek philosophy. Why not throw Plato and Socrates in. Truth must be discovered it is absolute and definitive. Once we break out of reality we might as well believe perpetual motion will save us. Thank you however for expressing your core beliefs now we understand why you stubbornly hold to the belief in shale being profitable at $50.00 per barrel. Perhaps you also subscribe to Abiotic Oil. I have a friend who thinks like you and is a risk assessment officer at a major bank. He believes that there is no risk in an economic collapse because the Fed can print all the money we need. This is the delusion that people who are unhinged from science believe. It is also the effect of being unable to face reality. Limits are real Glenn.
Glenn — you are at a funeral…. act accordingly…..
I have cited Frans de Waal, Michael Gazzaniga and E.O. Wilson in various papers over the last 30 years or so.
“the Enlightenment notion of “rational man” is a lot more fiction than fact.”
That’s certainly the case for anyone who is into evolutionary psychology. The weirdest thing that came out of the work I did on the subject was to find that under some relatively uncommon but repeating conditions _irrational_ behavior, awful as it is on average for the people turns out from the viewpoint of genes to be the best strategy. It’s something else when your genes induce you to act irrationally.
Glenn your pattern is quite established, You put forth an argument . Others bring forth logical facts that show your arguments flaws and illogic without malice but you are unable to find a flaw in the logical facts so you assault the character instead.
Still waiting for Glenn to answer the question re: is shale oil cheaper to produce than conventional…
His approach appears to be to remain silent when the facts and logic are against him
Perhaps I am too hard on Glenn. As others have pointed out his writing is very eloquent (far more eloquent than mine) and displays considerable knowledge. I am probably too quick to become adversarial. I apologize.
Vera Green,
The question is why humans, for the most part, don’t do factual reality.
And scientists don’t seem to have any special immunities: They take grand departures from factual reality too. For instance, as this article documents, it was the scientists who thought up the Holocaust:
German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust
http://www.fasebj.org/content/22/2/332.full
The only reason that science has any cachet at all is because applied science has managed to produce some pretty significant fruits in the human comfort and prosperity department. What’s going to happen to science’s standing if those fruits disappear, or if scientists begin to argue that the punch bowl should be taken away, as climate scientists do?
The cartoonist Scott Adams has written a great deal about human irrationality on his blog. As he has noted, humans don’t do factual reality. What they do are these “little movies” that they play over and over and over in their minds. He’s come to the same conclusion that Nietzsche and lot of researchers have, though through a different path.
Here’s Adam’s latest missive on the subject:
The Persuasion Advantage and Climate Science
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156804833096/the-persuasion-advantage-and-climate-science
It’s pretty obvious that the climate scientists have lost in the courtroom of public opinion. Most people don’t challenge them, but just tune them out, despite all their gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
As Adams notes, “it’s hard to understand why their side is so unpersuasive.”
https://s29.postimg.org/4jtx5mkif/Captura_de_pantalla_256.png
Here you go Glenn:
BP reports worst annual loss in 20 years
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/02/bp-q4-underlying-rc-profit-196m-vs-2239b-in-q4-2014.html
Chevron Just Had Its Largest Quarterly Loss in 15 Years
http://fortune.com/2016/07/29/chevron-second-quarter-loss/
Big Oil Gobbles Up Record Debt
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iyFXD_kql5_Q/v2/800x-1.png
BREAKING NEWS!
It was announced today that all oil majors are phasing out their conventional oil fields because the cost of extraction is prohibitive and driving them into bankruptcy.
A spokesman said ‘a fellow named Glenn rang us up and informed us that shale oil is profitable at $50 — we were completely unaware of that because we are stupid and generally uninformed — our big boss when informed of this immediately issued orders to buy up all the shale properties we can get our hands on — guidance for 2017 has been revised and we expect record profits across the industry’
As evidence of this epiphany analysts upgraded the value of Exxon’s 2009 purchase of XTO from 0 to 250 billion dollars — a 6 fold increase on the original purchase price
Copyright The DelusiSTAN Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from DT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
All life is based on EROI. Humans have added technology and complexity, right from the time the first hand axe was chipped. Semantics can be argued by demanding precise evaluation and measurements but all that is required to be understood, is that as EROI declines so do the support structures (governments, financial institutions, trade, consumerism) and life. Humans have not defeated the laws of thermodynamics. Along with high EROI populations increase and if it is very high, they increase exponentially, we are perfect examples.
I would argue that it is the amount of energy (or perhaps net energy) and not the EROI that is important. In fact, it is energy per capita that is important.
The focus on EROI is on just one piece of the problem. Population and total resources are equally or more important.
Yes net EROI. I assumed it was understood. Of course we can and are declining from high EROI. For now it’s managed mainly with debt, some efficiency gains, kicking the can (stealing from the future). Supplements like ethanol, unconventional oil and the so called renewables require debt but it’s all about EROI, that’s the bottom line, it can be called diminishing returns but to me it is exactly the same thing or the diminishing returns have a root cause of declining net EROI.
There is no need to measure it to prove the premise, it’s too complicated. EROI cannot rise forever, I would hope everyone would understand. The trick is realising that economic growth, sustained population growth and the overall wellbeing of the human race (in the relative short term) is dependent on the EROI not declining. In the relative long term though the unsustainable use of high EROI fossil fuels has allowed the overshoot predicament we are now experiencing.
“No doubt about it, oil and natural gas extraction is on a pathway of diminishing returns: more energy in, less energy out.”
I doubt that’s true for natural gas. I expect extraction of methane from hydrates in the ocean to increase or at least maintain energy output per unit of energy input for centuries. (Not that we’ll need them for centuries.)
“But one must ask the question: Where would we be without all the new drilling and fracking technology? Surely, the apocalypse would already be upon us.”
No, my answer to that would be that electric vehicles would be far, far more common, ride sharing would be far, far more common, and vehicles would get much better gas mileage.
i have to repeat myself
albeit briefly
for electric vehicles to be viable
1—you need a hydrocarbon based infrastructure
2—-you need a purpose for your journey
running around on wheels does not make humankind prosperous—if it did we would have evolved circular feet
I had to chuckle, too true. Imagine few winters without proper repair and there is not only no purpose for distant travel for most but the route is also no longer a place for faster than walk/tow animal purposes anyway..
Although Mark has a point about the natgas bridge to (nowhere or lower temporary plateau). That’s the same abyss all over again most of us here sooner or later tend to divide upon on. Instantaneous collapse for such a globalized fast pump interaction society seems very logical. On the other hand some of the historical precedents (of complex societies cohabiting space like ClubMed area 5-7th century) is more nuanced, i.e. split into clusters managing on lower complexity for a while, some peripheries jettisoned and or imploding (experience true rapid collapse).
Seriously, we would probably get some transitory periods again at least for some clustering regions. For example, skyrocketing elderly deaths (mid 2020s huge demo shift), for a while managed children care yet elevated losses there as well, abrupt stop in trade of frivolous crap (most of consumer electronics), but you as an individual will get a generic spare part of after a while of waiting (prioritized industries/state), like a bulb. Basically, command style economies in most respects. I get that is not popular vision for holly/bolly – wood indoctrinated fast acting westerners at all, hence that insta collapse dogma as sort of protective play.
Most importantly, does it make a difference to event bother with such distinction, miserable life? Well, on certain level people lived under horrendous conditions during war periods, in many respects the psycho-logic and material deprivation would be similar, time horizon haziness more difficult to bear, that’s for sure.
“for electric vehicles to be viable
1—you need a hydrocarbon based infrastructure…”
“Hydrocarbon based infrastructure?”
Cement? Not made with hydrocarbons. Steel? Not made with hydrocarbons. Houses? Not made with hydrocarbons. Buildings? Made with cement and steel…so not made with hydrocarbons.
“running around on wheels does not make humankind prosperous”
Yes, exactly. People who talk about a collapse of civilization (except where caused by global thermonuclear war or a major asteroid strike) really don’t know what makes humankind prosperous.
Free human minds are what made humankind prosperous. There are more free human minds now than in any time in history. Ergo, there’s no evidence that humans–as a whole, not various fractions–will become less prosperous (absent global thermonuclear war, a major asteroid strike, or takeover by Terminators).
“Cement? Not made with hydrocarbons. Steel? Not made with hydrocarbons. Houses? Not made with hydrocarbons. Buildings? Made with cement and steel…so not made with hydrocarbons. ”
Are you for real? Steel and cement have the 2nd and 3rd largest embodied energies of common building materials, Glass is the first. What do you think provides that energy?
Many materials use much more hydrocarbons in their manufacture than materials actually derived directly from hydrocarbons, A example would be steel roofing panels compared to composition shingles. Not a single modern building material would exist without fossil fuels.
when discussions get on this thread—I often point out to dissenters that if everything within a house with an oil coal or gas constituent was removed, they would be sitting naked on bare earth, starving to death.
Hydrocarbon free steel making….hmmm. Mark, look up “blast furnace” and think about how that thing is going to function without the energy of hydrocarbons.
” look up “blast furnace” ”
Blast furnaces were widely used before 1800. Oil didn’t come into the picture until 1850.
Oops. I see now that you wrote that our infrastructure was *hydrocarbon* based. I had a brain freeze and thought you were saying “petrocarbon” based. Hydrocarbons are used to manufacture cement and steel, but that’s completely irrelevant to human prosperity. The estimated resource for methane in hydrates is on the order of 400 MILLION trillion cubic feet. That’s enough energy to meet *all* human energy needs for many centuries.
There is no hydrocarbon availability constraint on long-term human prosperity.
http://smapp.rand.org/ise/ourfuture/GameChangers/fireice.html
wouldn’t the release of all that methane kinda warm the place up a bit?
There have been blast furnaces around for centuries. Why don’t you look at the output at the time and compare it to what came after the introduction of hydrocarbons.
“There have been blast furnaces around for centuries. Why don’t you look at the output at the time and compare it to what came after the introduction of hydrocarbons.”
Once again, I misread the original comment as that infrastructure was based on “petrocarbons” rather than what was actually said, which was “hydrocarbons.” My bad.
But it’s completely irrelevant whether blast furnaces use hydrocarbons in the production of steel, because:
1) We have enough natural gas in the form of methane hydrates to supply every single Joule of the world’s energy for centuries (or even millenia).
2) Blast furnaces are a dying technology. The most modern steel-making produces direct reduced iron using natural gas, and then uses electric arc furnaces to produce steel.
Natural gas has the same problem that oil and coal has: the prices are too low. We may be counting on natural gas, but if we can’t get the prices up higher, we can’t really get it out.
There indeed seem to be a lot of methane hydrates. The catch is getting them out for a price that will allow them to sell for today’s selling price for natural gas. If natural gas price could/would rise arbitrarily high, we would have no problem. This is also true for oil, coal, and uranium.
Mark-
I’m not going to get into semantics about the year blast furnaces were developed or newer tech that replaces them. Needless to say making steel requires enormous amounts of energy and right now hydrocarbons are it.
Read any piece on methane hydrates and it sounds like the same hype as all the other sources of energy that are supposed to save us. Go ahead and believe it if you like but you have a hard sell ahead of you here.
“Needless to say making steel requires enormous amounts of energy and right now hydrocarbons are it..”
“Enormous amounts” is relative and imprecise to the point of being useless. Per the U.S.G.S., the U.S. produced 81 million tons of steel in 2015, 63 percent via electric arc furnaces, and 37 percent via blast furnaces/basic oxygen furnaces.
How many tons of coal and how many cubic feet of natural gas were required to produce that steel? And what percentage are those of total U.S. coal and natural gas production?
The elites are not stupid. They are buying up all the houses and are now financializating the rent, making sure they won’t go under even if some renters default. The rent-based securities will bring them income, and if everything comes to worst they cant get funding from the financial institution for virtually zero % interest rate.
What is happening is the biggies, including Exxon and other supposedly troubled oil giants, will be given bailouts for very low rates, and will use these helicopter money to buy out smaller, healthier companies and price everything out of reach of ordinary people.
Eventually, I expect the current problems would be mitigated by literally kicking out the renters to the barren wilderness where they will die, and limit the consumption to the 2-3% of the pop which drive the world, the rentiers.
All the infrastructure will not be maintained since there is no need to do so.
Wind and solar are to maintain tech civilization after oil runs out, not to maintain BAU.
https://shirahvollmermd.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/delusional.gif
i think ww3 is a distinct possibility now with trump in charge which should bring on collapse much faster along with numerous contaminated radiation zones spread out all over the world after ‘on the beach] scenario plays out.radiation sickness will be everywhere lets enjoy what little time we have left
I am still waiting to 50 Buck Club to respond to my various questions including — is shale more cost effective to extract than conventional oil?
No one claims getting oil by pumping in water and chemicals to fracture rock is more cost effective than pumping it out.
Glenn is.
Yoo hoo Glenn — I will not let this go. I’ve scented blood…
http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Great-White-Shark-2.jpg
http://yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/u/ss/fQYSUbVfts-T7pS2VP2wnKyN8wxywmXtY0-Fwsgxo7n03hLEB84A7N_B4XSYIgYNVaflGmTS-phlTqsKsT90/
I know someone that claims this. They think fracking (since it uses TECHNOLOGY) is MORE effecient at getting oil out of the ground than conventional drilling. They cite car engine milage improvements as proof that fracking uses less energy than conventional drilling. Since engines in the 70’s got 150 hp out of a gallon of gas and now you can get 300 hp (or something like that) todays drilling is super – duper effecient and beats the pants off those old school roughnecks. They won’t believe the MSM about anything, except when it says oil companies can make fat stacks @ $50 oil. Why would oil companies lie about making a profit?
They think since you can drill 3 or 4 wells from a wellhead now, at different layers and different directions, that having to drill more wells isn’t that big a deal (pack up, move, drilling a new well, so what?). And if they can make a profit @ $50, since they will get even MORE EFFECIENT every year, they will be able to make a profit @ $40 next year. All the oil majors slowly/quickly going bankrupt as we watch? Not a big deal, the market will bounce back, and all the money that was sitting on the sidelines will now enter the market because a few requlations were rolled back and people feel better about things.
And since people have predicited peak oil in the past and been wrong, that proves it is not possible for peak oil to be happening now. When asked to explain the “weird” economic marketplace, its all bubbles, house-price collapse (caused by freddie and fanny), greed, bag feelings due to the last president. And of course the economy doesn’t run on energy, thats just silly, it runs on money and the belief in money, and sinced we can print/make as much as we want, no worries.
I asked, if the oil companies are making money at $50, surely it would be possible to show me one energy company in the shale oil that is making a profit? So far the only company I was sent is eating 250 million a quarter. But I guess after a decade of losing a billion dollars a year, they will pump out enough oil to make a profit?
They also think, rather than mining resoucre depeltion, mining is also getting cheaper, cuase bigger trucks and again, more effecient engines and economies of scale and new TECHNOLOGY. So that is why commodity prices are collapsing, its not the economy falling apart, its they can now sell the stuff cheaper, cause they can get it out of the ground so much cheaper.
But I have been told, if the new buisness man president doesn’t fix things after slashing regulations and throwing billions around, I might be onto something, since we are just at the bottom of a normal buisness cycle, things will rebound shortly.
They are out there, they exist, and they won’t listen to logic/reason/common sense. Some people can be so smart they are dumb sometimes. They know a little science and think they have everythign figured out.
This person has a lot of company
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-only-two-things-are-infinite-the-universe-and-human-stupidity-and-i-m-not-sure-about-the-former-albert-einstein-56412.jpg