Recently, a Spanish group called “Ecologists in Action” asked me to give them a presentation on what kind of financial crisis we should expect. They wanted to know when it would be and how it would take place.
The answer I had for the group is that we should expect financial collapse quite soon–perhaps as soon as the next few months. Our problem is energy related, but not in the way that most Peak Oil groups describe the problem. It is much more related to the election of President Trump and to the Brexit vote.
I have talked about this subject in various forms before, but not since 2016 energy production and consumption data became available. Most of the slides in this presentation use new BP data, through 2016. A copy of the presentation can be found at this link: The Next Financial Crisis.1
Slide 1
Most people don’t understand how interconnected the world economy is. All they understand is the simple connections that economists make in their models.
Slide 2
Energy is essential to the economy, because energy is what makes objects move, and what provides heat for cooking food and for industrial processes. Energy comes in many forms, including sunlight, human energy, animal energy, and fossil fuels. In today’s world, energy in the form of electricity or petroleum makes possible the many things we think of as technology.
In Slide 2, I illustrate the economy as hollow because we keep adding new layers of the economy on top of the old layers. As new layers (including new products, laws, and consumers) are added, old ones are removed. This is why we can’t necessarily use a prior energy approach. For example, if cars can no longer be used, it would be difficult to transition back to horses. This happens partly because there are few horses today. Also, we do not have the facilities in cities to “park” the horses and to handle the manure, if everyone were to commute using horses. We would have a stinky mess!
Slide 3
In the past, many local civilizations have grown for a while, and then collapsed. In general, after a group finds a way to produce more food (for example, cuts down trees so that citizens have more area to farm) or finds another way to otherwise increase productivity (such as adding irrigation), growth at first continues for a number of generations–until the population reaches the new carrying capacity of the land. Often resources start to degrade as well–for example, soil erosion may become a problem.
At this point, growth flattens out, and wage disparity and growing debt become greater problems. Eventually, unless the group can find a way of increasing the amount of food and other needed goods produced each year (such as finding a way to get food and other materials from territories in other parts of the world, or conquering another local civilization and taking their land), the civilization is headed for collapse. We recently have tried globalization, with exports from China, India, and other Asian nations fueling world economic growth.
At some point, the efforts to keep growing the economy to match rising population become unsuccessful, and collapse sets in. One of the reasons for collapse is that the government cannot collect enough taxes. This happens because with growing wage disparity, many of the workers cannot afford to pay much in taxes. Another problem is greater susceptibility to epidemics, because after-tax income of many workers is not sufficient to afford an adequate diet.
Slide 4
A recent partial collapse of a local civilization was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When this happened, the government of the Soviet Union disappeared, but the governments of the individual states within the Soviet Union remained. The reason I call this a partial collapse is because the rest of the world was still functioning, so nearly all of the population remained, and the cutback in fuel consumption was just partial. Eventually, the individual member countries were able to function on their own.
Notice that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the consumption of coal, oil and gas collapsed at the same time, over a period of years. Oil and coal use have not come back to anywhere near their earlier level. While the Soviet Union had been a major manufacturer and a leader in space technology, it lost those roles and never regained them. Many types of relatively high-paying jobs have been lost, leading to lower energy consumption.
Slide 5
As nearly as I can tell, one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the Soviet Union was low oil prices. The Soviet Union was an oil exporter. As oil prices fell, the government could not collect sufficient taxes. This was a major contributing factor to collapse. The collapse from low oil prices did not happen immediately–it took several years after the drop in oil prices. There was a 10-year gap between the highest oil price (1981) and collapse (1991), and a 5-year gap after oil prices dropped to the low 1986 price level.
Slide 6
Venezuela is often in the news because of its inability to afford to import enough food for its population. Slide 3 shows that on an inflation-adjusted basis, world oil prices hit a high point first in 2008, and again in 2011. Since 2011, oil prices slid slowly for a while, then began to slide more quickly in 2014. It is now nine years since the 2008 peak. It is six years since the 2011 peak, and about three years since the big drop in prices began.
One of the reasons for Venezuela’s problems is that with low oil prices, the country has been unable to collect sufficient tax revenue. Also, the value of the currency has dropped, making it difficult for Venezuela to afford food and other products on international markets.
Note that in both Slides 4 and 6, I am showing the amount of energy consumed in the countries shown. The amount consumed represents the amount of energy products that individual citizens, plus businesses, plus the government, can afford. This is why, in both Slides 4 and 6, the quantity of all types of energy products tends to decline at the same time. Affordability affects many types of energy products at once.
Slide 7
Oil importing countries can have troubles when oil prices rise, similar to the problems that oil exporting countries have when oil prices fall. Greece’s energy consumption peaked in 2007. One of Greece’s major products is tourism, and the cost of tourism depends on the price of oil. When the price of oil was high, it adversely affected tourism. Exported goods also became expensive in the world market. Once oil prices dropped (as they have done, especially since 2014), tourism tended to rebound and the financial situation became less dire. But total energy consumption has still tended to decline (top “stacked” chart on Slide 7), indicating that the country is not yet doing well.
Slide 8
Spain follows a pattern similar to Greece’s. By the mid-2000s, high oil prices made Spain less competitive in the world market, leading to falling job opportunities and less energy consumption. Since 2014, very low oil prices have allowed tourism to rebound. Oil consumption has also rebounded a bit. But Spain is still far below its peak in energy consumption in 2007 (top chart on Slide 8), indicating that job opportunities and spending by its citizens are still low.
Slide 9
We hear much about rising manufacturing in the Far East. This has been made possible by the availability of both inexpensive coal supplies and inexpensive labor. India is an example of a country where manufacturing has risen in recent years. Slide 9 shows how rapidly energy consumption–especially coal–has risen in India.
Slide 10
China’s energy consumption grew very rapidly after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. In 2013, however, China’s coal consumption hit a peak and began to decline. One major contributor was the fact that the cheap-to-consume coal that was available nearby had already been extracted. The severe problems that China has had with pollution from coal may also have played a role.
It might be noted that the charts I am showing (from Mazamascience) do not include renewable energy (including wind and solar, plus burned garbage and other “renewables”) used to produce electricity. (The charts do include ethanol and other biofuels within the “oil” category, however.) The omission of wind and solar does not appear to make a material difference, however. Figure 1 shows a chart I made for China, comparing three totals:
(1) Opt. total (Optimistic total) – Totals on the basis BP computes wind and solar. Intermittent wind and solar electricity is assumed to be equivalent to high quality electricity, available 24/7/365, produced by fossil fuel electricity-generating stations.
(2) Likely totals – Wind and solar are assumed to replace only the fuel that creates high quality electricity. The amount of backup generating capacity required is virtually unchanged. More long distance transmission is needed; other enhancements are also needed to bring the electricity up to grid-quality. The credits given for wind and solar are only 38% as much as those given in the BP methodology.
(3) From chart – Mazamascience totals, omitting renewable sources of electricity, other than hydroelectric.
Figure 1. China energy consumption based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2017.
It is clear from Figure 1 that adding electricity from renewables (primarily wind and solar) does not make much difference for China, no matter how wind and solar are counted. If they are counted in a realistic manner, they truly add little to China’s energy use. This is also true for the world in total.
Slide 11
If we look at the major parts of world energy consumption, we see that oil (including biofuels) is the largest. Recently, it seems to be growing slightly more quickly than other energy consumption, perhaps because of the low oil price. World coal consumption has been declining since 2014. If coal is historically the least expensive fuel, this is likely a problem. I have not shown a chart with total world energy consumption. It is still growing, but it is growing less rapidly than world population.
Slide 12 – Note: Energy growth includes all types of energy. This includes wind and solar, using wind and solar counted using the optimistic BP approach.
Economists have given the false idea that amount of energy consumption is unimportant. It is true that individual countries can experience lower consumption of energy products, if they begin outsourcing major manufacturing to other countries as they did after the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. But it doesn’t change the world’s need for growing energy consumption, if the world economy is to grow. The growth in world energy consumption (blue line) tends to be a little lower than the growth in GDP (red line), because of efficiency gains over time.
If we look closely at Slide 12, we can see that drops in energy consumption tend to precede drops in world GDP; rises in energy consumption tend to precede rises in world GDP. This order of events strongly suggests that rising energy consumption is a major cause of world GDP growth.
We don’t have very good evaluations of GDP amounts for 2015 and 2016. For example, recent world GDP estimates seem to accept without question the very high estimates of economic growth given by China, even though their growth in energy consumption is very much lower in 2014 through 2017. Thus, world economic growth may already be lower than reported amounts.
Slide 13
Most people are not aware of the extreme “power” given by energy products. For example, it is possible for a human to deliver a package, by walking and carrying the package in his hands. Another approach would be to deliver the package using a truck, operated by some form of petroleum. One estimate is that a single gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 500 hours of human labor.
“Energy consumption per capita” is calculated as world energy consumption divided by world population. If this amount is growing, an economy is in some sense becoming more capable of producing goods and services, and thus is becoming wealthier. Workers are likely becoming more productive, because the additional energy per capita allows the use of more and larger machines (including computers) to leverage human labor. The additional productivity allows wages to rise.
With higher incomes, workers can afford to buy an increasing amount of goods and services. Businesses can expand to serve the growing population, and the increasingly wealthy customers. Taxes can rise, so it is possible for governments to provide the services that citizens desire, such as healthcare and pensions. When energy consumption per capita turns negative–even slightly so–these abilities start to disappear. This is the problem we are starting to encounter.
Slide 14 – Note: Energy percentage increases include all energy sources shown by BP. Wind and solar are included using BP’s optimistic approach for counting intermittent renewables, so growth rates for recent years are slightly overstated.
We can look back over the years and see when energy consumption rose and fell. The earliest period shown, 1968 to 1972, had the highest annual growth in energy consumption–over 3% per year–back when oil prices were under $20 per barrel, and thus were quite affordable. (See Slide 5 for a history of inflation-adjusted price levels.) Once prices spiked in the 1973-1974 period, much of the world entered recession, and energy consumption per capita barely rose.
A second drop in consumption (and recession) occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when easy-to-adopt changes were made to cut oil usage and increase efficiency. These included
(a) Closing many electricity-generating plants using oil, and replacing them with other generation.
(b) Replacing many home heating systems operating with oil with systems using other fuels, often more efficiently.
(c) Changing many industrial processes to be powered by electricity instead of burning oil.
(d) Making cars smaller and more fuel-efficient.
Another big drop in world per capita energy consumption occurred with the partial collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This was a somewhat local drop in energy consumption, allowing the rest of the world to continue to grow in its use of energy.
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 was, in some sense, another localized crisis that allowed energy consumption to continue to grow in the rest of the world.
Most people remember the Great Recession in the 2007-2009 period, when world per capita growth in energy consumption briefly became negative. Recent data suggests that we are almost in the same adverse situation now, in terms of growth in world per capita energy consumption, as we were then.
Slide 15
What happens when growth in world per capita energy consumption slows and starts to fall? I have listed some of the problems in Slide 15. We start seeing problems with low wages, particularly for people with low-skilled jobs, and the type of political problems we have been experiencing recently.
Part of the problem is that countries with a high-priced mix of energy products start to find their goods and services uncompetitive in the world marketplace. Thus, demand for goods and services from these countries starts to fall. Greece and Spain are examples of countries using a lot of oil in their energy mix. As a result, they became less competitive in the world market when oil prices rose. China and India were favored because they had a less-expensive energy mix, favoring coal.
Slide 16
Slide 16 shows the kinds of comments we have been hearing in recent years, as prices have recently bounced up and down. It is becoming increasingly clear that no price of oil is now satisfactory for all participants in the economy. Prices are either too high for consumers, or too low for the producers. In fact, prices can be unsatisfactory for both consumers and producers at the same time.
On Slide 16, oil prices show considerable volatility. This happens because it is difficult to keep supply and demand exactly balanced; there are many factors determining needed price level, including both the amount consumers can afford and the costs of producers. The bouncing of prices up and down on Slide 16 is to a significant extent in response to interest rate changes, and resulting changes in currency relativities and debt growth.
We are now reaching a point where no interest rate works for all members of the economy. If interest rates are low, pension plans cannot meet their obligations. If interest rates are high, monthly payments for homes and cars become unaffordable for customers. Also, high interest rates tend to raise needed tax levels for governments.
Slide 17
All of these problems are fairly evident already.
Slide 18
The low level of energy consumption growth is of considerable concern. It is this low growth in energy consumption that we would expect to lead to low wage growth worldwide, especially for the non-elite workers. Our economy needs more rapid growth in energy consumption to provide enough tax revenue for all of our governments and intergovernmental organizations, and to keep the world economy growing quickly enough to prevent large debt defaults.
Slide 19
Economists have confused matters for a long time by their belief that energy prices can and will rise arbitrarily high in inflation-adjusted terms–for example $300 per barrel for oil. If such high prices were really possible, we could extract all of the oil that we have the technical capacity to extract. High-cost renewables would become economically feasible as well.
In fact, affordability is the key issue. When the world economy is stimulated by more debt, only a small part of this additional debt makes its way back to the wages of non-elite workers. With greater global competition in wages, the wages of these workers tend to stay low. The limited demand of these workers tends to keep commodity prices, especially oil prices, from rising very high, for very long.
It is affordability that limits our ability to grow endlessly. While it is possible to argue that more debt might help raise the wages of non-elite workers in a particular country, if one country adds more debt, other currencies around the world can be expected to rebalance. As a result, there would be no real benefit, unless all countries together could add more debt. Even this would be of questionable value, because the whole effort relates to getting oil and other commodity prices to rise to an adequate level for producers; we have already seen that there is no price level that is satisfactory for both producers and consumers.
Slide 20
These symptoms seem to be already beginning to happen.
Note:
[1] This presentation is a little different from the original. The presentation I am showing here is entirely in English. The original presentation included some charts in Spanish from Energy Export Data Browser by Mazama Science. With this database, a person can quickly prepare energy charts for any country in a choice of seven languages. I encourage readers to “look up” their own country, in their preferred language.
In this write-up, I include more discussion than in my original talk. I also added Slides 13 and 14, plus Figure 1.
We have to get out of the BAU rut. We are all agreed change, radical change is coming. It will have to lead to far fewer people.
Sadly true, the problem of declining energy consumption per capita can be adjusted in two ways, increased affordability of energy or decreased world population. It’s heartbreaking to watch this crisis unfold. All hope of managing some kind of controlled decline of our civilization is fast disappearing.
In a perfect world, which this is not, world leaders would anticipate future problems and predicaments. They would take action before slow moving changes in our world lead to catastrophic failure. Our energy affordability crisis has been developing for decades. World population, which represents resource demand, has grown while energy affordability, which represents supply, has declined. Is any of this complicated? This crisis is so slow moving it is easily ignored, by those who choose to do so. But, our leaders have no excuse for there complete negligence.
An unmanaged system will correct itself. The laws of physics will succeed where human leadership has failed. When a car is traveling at high speed and it’s driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, the car will eventually stop. Usually when it hits a concrete wall. Our leaders are asleep at the wheel.
Thank you Gail for another great article. Thanks for staying awake.
You have to consider the possibility the leaders have not your best interests in mind.
WE are their future problem. 🙂
Completely agree. Yet a problem that can be solved. 🙁
Not really a problem, a predicament. It has no solution. If you kill too many people you loose economies of scale and with all complex devices.
“Our energy affordability crisis has been developing for decades. World population, which represents resource demand, has grown while energy affordability, which represents supply, has declined. Is any of this complicated?”
The problem is that above situation changed nowadays as the core consumer age bracket (of world pop) which represents resource demand is plateauing and starts to fall.
The volatility in energy affordability is likely to bounce up and down somewhat, but the general trend is correct, range bound down sloping..
Well, and this mega trend will have its effects in the near/mid term, notably a space-time window opening for attempted “BAU lite” and or “quasi autarky” at selected locations (regions, countries). He who is lucky enough to be there already or is super smart to foresee these trends and forge them into reality in personal space is simply the “next winner” for whatever it is worth. Trending towards reshuffle of dominant order yes, but not overnight – everywhere, that’s silly..
We can use the AIs for a catch, neuter, and release humane solution to overpopulation.
Is everyone is aware that the US tried already to produce shale oil back in the 1980″s. And in 1991 the company producing it went bankrupt and out of business. I found an article from the LA TIMES from 1991
Unocal to Close the Nation’s Last Shale Oil Project
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-27/business/fi-898_1_shale-oil
No sense in going after that junk when conventional was still growing…we always go for the low-hanging fruit first…
it wasn’t growing in the US during that time though. So I assume at the time it might have seemed like a good idea to try if it could take us off of middle eastern oil. especially after what happened in the 1970’s. Better than Bush’s idea of switch grass in the 2000’s?
I meant globally Cliff…no sense in going for that junk when I can import it cheaper from elsewhere…
You can get oil out of roof shingles and asphalt too. Probably more economic than shale oil. Shale oil is old tech. The fact we are going after it now shows the level of desperation out there. Just getting oil isn’t going to “save us” if it costs too much energy to extract. Folks have this illusion that as long as we have black goo , BAU can continue.
I hope that readers understand that “shale oil” is not the same as “oil shale.” It is not the stuff you get out by fracking.
This is the Wikipedia article on shale oil in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_oil_shale_industry_in_the_United_States
Are they not both derivatives of snake oil?
A classic example…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-02/illinois-house-approves-historic-32-tax-increase-governor-vows-veto
Jul 2, 2017 10:05 PM
‘With Illinois, which on Saturday morning entered its third fiscal year without a budget, facing a catastrophic downgrade, late on Sunday evening the Illinois House approved the most controversial element of a budget package, a tax hike which will increase the income tax rate by 32% from 3.75% to 4.95%, and the corporate income tax rate from 5.25% to 7%, to try and end a historic budget impasse. ‘
How can the people pay that increased tax while suffering loss of government services?
increase the income tax rate by 32% from 3.75% to 4.95%
Notice the double speak in the math they used. Zero hedge = Zero Credibility
4.95/3.75=1.32?
1.20/3.75 = 0.32….
This is the math that Big pharma marketing teams use. I read it in a book. What they do is they pitch it to the doctors. “What if I told you about a new drug that could lower your patients blood pressure or chances of heart attack or stroke by 25% better than the company or drug X is currently. Now how this works is you start counting at the original drugs percentage Not from zero like you should and compare the two drugs percentages. Then doctors push to their patients that way. And the drug companies make more money because new drugs have patients on them and take several years before they are forced to become generic and let other companies produce them. So the drug companies get a total exclusive to it. This is one of the biggest reasons Americans pay so much more than other countries for drugs.
Have a good friend… was heading up one of these cholesterol drugs a number of years ago for Big Pharma — he was urging me to take …
I said — but I don’t have high cholesterol — I have a healthy diet — I exercise intensively pretty much every day — why would I take that?
He said — because the lower the better — so even if you dont have a problem you should still take it as a preventative measure…
He actually believed what he was saying ….. madness.
The best one is: ‘Once you start, you can’t stop taking it, ever!’
So your problem is not with the math but that their tax rate were so close to zero so noone should complain?
What if I told you about a new drug that could lower your patients blood pressure or chances of heart attack or stroke by 25% better than the company or drug X is currently.
Slightly off topic, but what if I told you that taking 3 to 400mg of magnesium daily or bathing in epsom salts would lower your blood pressure by 10 to 20 mm Hg, while helping your heart, improving your immune system and strengthening your bones—just like that?
“This is the math that Big pharma marketing teams use”
No. That is the math that anyone who went to school should be able to master.
Some of here didn’t go to school.
I’m not to smart,
The other day my girlfriend told me she’s seeing another man.
I said, “Have you tried rubbing your eyes?”
Then later on, she asked me, “If you could know when and where your going to die, would you want to know?”
I said, “No.”
Then she said, “Oh, never mind”
Indeed; I wouldn’t quote Zero Hedge if one wanted to be considered credible. However, it would be easy to find this info elsewhere, and note that even the ZH article says that the Governor would veto, if it got past the senate.
Zero Hedge has more credibility that FT, Bloomberg, CNBC and the rest of the MSM financial news combined.
Exactly because they’re not corporate shills.
Thank you very much for your concern, Mike!
If and when we want to be considered credible in your eyes, we’ll certainly bear your advice in mind.
The report does give the two percentages, as well as the percentage increase. I don’t really see a problem with it.
I would suppose that someone with income of $100,000 previously paid $3,750 per year. That person would now pay $4,950 per year. That would indeed be a 32% increase. I am not sure what else you would call it.
NY state tax rate max 8.82% so boohoo to 4.95 in Illinois.
It is just a game of paper. No one will or can afford to pay the tax. It will look good (or bad to taxpayers) on paper and kick the can a little farther. Then next year we will read that tax collections in Illinois missed expectations HAHAHAHAHA.
I see the information in the latest article by Gail, and appreciate some of the economic dynamics of what is occurring, but don’t see near term collapse. But then again maybe me and mine are not hanging out with the non-elite workers. Business is booming in our area as well as real estate values jumping up as properties get snatched in a buying frenzy. But maybe California (as much as it’s made fun of by red states) is different or at least farthest from the decaying edge. In any case, we are awaiting company and my wife is driving me crazy with a rising fever of fastidiousness down to the last positioned cushion and particle of inconsistent dust in the way of making the best impression on just plain old relatives. I mean things are so good even a misplaced cheerio on the floor is enough for her in her high heeled finery to bend over and pick it up off the floor. Nothing worse than a guy uncomfortable in his own cave. Just give me a messy area to clack away on computer digits and I’m fine, but oh no, things are going so good we now let relatives invite themselves over and in so doing we are put in the position of cleaning like we are preparing for surgery. Good God, leave a pillow out of place and let’s watch the panhandlers whine over our disheveled digs.
Got distracted by my situation. The long and short of it is I don’t see collapse, at least not here. You know, if it would alter this reality to be more in line with failed states to the extent that I wouldn’t feel like every thread had to be in its place, I might just opt for a bit of collapse. But until that happens, I have to go and get ready. Yikes!
I was just on vacation in coastal northern California. The towns are dead, the businesses are closed. Not to mention the tide pools are sterile.
The coast has always been a difficult place to make a living because it relies on tourism, which is random. I’ve never seen a sterile tide pool in CA, but post a pic or a link if you’ve got it.
I was in Paris 10 days ago – the restaurants looked very busy — the French economic must be kicking ass!!! hahaha
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OPumsKqIeBA
I will agree that if all you look at is some of the outward signs, things look pretty good. Asset prices are held up by low interest rates. And the low price of energy products makes the US economy look better than it really is, at least for a while–until too much bankruptcy causes problems.
If you look further, you can see many problems. Countries dependent on energy exports and exports of metals find their revenue low. This situation can continue for a while, but eventually it causes big problems. And even in this country, we are having a terrible time balancing the federal budget. There was another comment about Illinois’ financial problems. And young people have a hard time affording to start a family, especially if they have college debt. Many mall stores are planning to close in the near future, and restaurants are not doing well right now.
See, the past 40 years or so was setting the stage. 2008-2009 was the great coup, and all of us are just playing out an endgame of various sorts in a corporate neofeudal economy.
How long can this last? My answer: half a generation from the crisis, or late 2030s. That’s when a lot of people are just going to start dropping dead from exhaustion or old age. And there won’t be enough technocrats left to maintain the infrastructure (having been replaced by blacks, immigrants, retards, actors, etc.).
See, we are complaining because it’s too late, and there’s nowhere left to run in the world to create a new system (the last and perhaps only time being the American revolution of late 18th century). Since then no successful challenge has occurred in 200 years, not even nazi germany or soviet union as we know. And there are no utopian mars colonies to escape to.
But that’s ok! We have a lot of foodstuffs and entertainments to enjoy in the meantime.
China never had more than 50,000 mandarins even in late Qing period when it had 300m+ people. We don’t need that many technocrats.
@kulmthestatusquo
Is that you Janet Yellen? We will not see another financial crisis in our Lifetime? Is this what the Fed is down to now, flooding the economy with money is not working anymore so they are sending out an army of sock puppets to convince everyone that we will never have another financial crisis because things are so robust. Our economy is robust in the same way as the financial prospects of a hobo who just found an American Express card with a name on it that matches his own out of pure conincidence. He will be living large till the end of the month.
No, I am not Janet. I am just noticing thigns from history. We are still doing well since we have the world to plunder. As long as there are nations which will accept dollars we will be Ok, although the nations which do not use dollars will have different stories to tell.
A little red wine, vintage record, some Ambien … and magic!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/872260000491593728
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-02/angry-observer-asks-how-elon-musk-still-teslas-ceo
There is a lot of stress involved when one is designated as Jesus 2.0
Or maybe he is just having anxiety attacks knowing how close we are to the edge….
Maybe Elon Ben and John Key have Ambien parties…
It bothers me sooooo much that the folks on ofw don’t understand that Elon is a visionary. You know, he has visions and stuff.
I’m poor so my visions are called hallucinations (and stuff).
I wanted to ask him, “Elon, how CAN you sleep?”
Now we know.
Very stressful having to keep a straight face when he knows he is lying through his teeth every time he speaks…
Elon is an actor. He doesn’t care. He is playing a role and is doing a fair job of it.
DOMINOES BEGIN TO FALL: BHP Chairman Says $20 Billion Shale Investment “MISTAKE”
https://srsroccoreport.com/dominoes-begin-to-fall-bhp-chairman-says-20-billion-shale-investment-mistake/
No it was not a mistake. We need more investors to pour money into tight oil.
Definitely….
Good point!
But the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is probably not the best reference for such a figure, if you want to be taken seriously! 🙂
I doubt Gail cares very much whether or not you take her seriously, Jan. 🙂 Why are you being so picky?
Do you have a more accurate figure or any more authoritative sources that you’d like to share with us?
From personal experience, I use gasoline to power my bush cutter, chainsaw, tractor, and rice planting and harvesting machines. Especially in the case of the the latter three, the work I get out of them with a gallon of gas and a couple of hours concentration would take several hundred hours of human labor to accomplish, and it would be vastly more expensive unless they performed it under the sort of conditions the people building the Burma Railroad labored under.
I’m keenly aware of the dependence of modern agriculture on fossil fuel imports on many levels. If I had to grow rice by hand without mechanical or animal labor, I daresay I could manage, but I wouldn’t have much time or energy over to do much else but nurse my aching back.
Sigh. Don’t take me as seriously as you take yourself.
I just scythed the thistles from a quarter acre. Nice, relaxing work in the cool of the evening. No noise, no fumes. What did you do, watch TV?
No Jan. No TV, not even any YouTube. Why do you ask? And what’s it to you anyway?
There’s no need for crocodile sighs. I promise not to take you as seriously as I take myself, and certainly nowhere near as much as YOU appear to take yourself.
It’s still afternoon here. This morning I walked the dog, dug potatoes by hand, put up a big green net by hand to cover the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and paprikas to protect them from the crows, took a shower, cut some grass with the bush cutter (lots of nice noise! lots of nice fumes!), planted some ornamental shrubs in the back garden, took another shower, then read Gail’s new post and responded to your comment above, followed by lunch.
Scything thistles is all very well. A bit of muscle-powered meadow mowing can be both invigorating and therapeutic. But if you have to remove large areas of tougher vegetation including shrubs, small trees bamboo, you’ll appreciate the help of a chip-saw blade rotating at 5,000 rpm.
And making a rice paddy by hand — even a tiny half acre one — would be tremendous ordeal for all but the fittest people. That’s why in traditional cultures, cows or buffaloes were assigned the task.
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/08/IMG_0604.jpg
As for the rice harvest, once you’ve got a motor bike engine buzzing in your ear, why would you want to do it any other way?
https://youtu.be/5k0jJqqsZsg
Jan is a ‘permaculture afficionado’ — he thinks that when BAU goes down the world transitions to Little House on the Prairie.
It will all be so wonderful when the Malls close down. Utopian even….
The Little House on the Prairie?
I’ll be happy if we manage to go back to Bonanza.
https://youtu.be/U2MG0TE7RS4
It’s all Little House out their in BC…. until Mad Max shows up at the gate —- locked and loaded —- hungry — and in want of wimmin….
http://www.eurooptic.com/images-cache/C8/A0/DFA7/C8A0DFA7821947F8AB909E13C6C9619A58C95D86.jpg
surely you can spare one or two Eddy—we have seen your collection, and we’re sure Mrs Fast would appreciate the lightening of your social burden
Never enough….
I thought Max choked on the fumes from the radiation fires?
Well… yes… that is technically true…. but we have to pretend that the radiation will magically disappear … otherwise there is no make believe conversation is there….
You do not speak for me. I think nothing of the sort. Please go make up stuff about other people.
That’s the impression I get from your posts…. from the Koombaya Kommune over there in BC…
Have you guys got a stockpile of guns and ammo?
Unless a reader os really “tuned in,” the reader will not figure out what the initials “vhemt” stand for: http://www.vhemt.org/humanenergy.htm I know I didn’t.
Most sites go on endlessly about “It could be this, or it could be that, depending on what assumptions a person makes.” The calculation is attributed to David Pimentel, http://vivo.cornell.edu/display/individual5774 who is a well known energy researcher from Cornell.
In other words, half a tank of gas is equivalent to a year’s human labour. Sweated labour.
If a person works 2000 hours a year, then it only takes four gallons of gasoline to be equivalent to a year’s work, if each gallon is equivalent to 500 hours of labor. Half a year would only take two gallons of gasoline. The number of gallons would be a bit higher, if the calculation another reader gives is right, with each gallon being equivalent to “only” 320 hours of human labor.
Yes, when I read that, I felt better about the link.
And yet, the VHEM site seems to largely be a tongue-in-cheek joke. I can never be sure how serious they are. They need to team up with Guy McPherson!
It’s about right. I have not looked at Pimental’s calculations, but assuming one can do roughly 100 kilocalories of labor an hour (sustained remember, can’t let our “slaves” breakdown from exhaustion) I get ~13.5 slave days in a gallon of e10 gasoline or ~320 slave hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent
Dear Gail,
I follow your views with great interest. You unknowingly contribute to hours of discussion around the coffee table.
I spent close to 40 years in the resource sector prior to taking up our current small business nine years ago. I concur with your views and have been positioning my family for the last three years so that we do not have to panic no matter what happens in the world of economics.
I live in an area of NSW, Australia full of self-funded retirees. When we arrived here in 2009 mostly locals purchased our product from our small shop. Then things were great. Interest rates on deposits were 7.2% cf now 2.8%, etc. Now we rely on tourism from Sydney, Canberra and the coastal area as very few locals call in as their discretionary spend has greatly diminished.
Interestingly our big 4 banks, Westpac, ANZ,NAB and CBA were recently downgraded as they are no different to the Irish banks when they collapsed due to their significant exposure to the housing sector.
Interesting times ahead.
Much appreciated for your contrarian insights.
Kind regards
Bruce Robertson
Montrose House & Berry Farm
Ormond Street
Sutton Forest NSW 2577
Ph 48681544
http://www.montroseberryfarm.com.au
Hey Bruce,
Almost literally drove right by your place the other day, was on the way to the pie shop at Robertson! Will have to stop by and introduce myself next time.
Cheers!
Robertson pie shop!!! Best pies in N.S.W.
That whole area is great. I used to do heaps of bushwalking all around there, Jamberoo etc….
Thanks for your thoughts. Glad you find my blog interesting!
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Britain’s decline and fall
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21724395-country-has-not-cut-such-pathetic-figure-global-stage-suez-britains-decline
Britain has a huge cultural legacy left over from the height of empire that the sun never set on. All too often ignored, this cultural legacy is a source of enormous strength, mutually distributed between Brtts and former colonies (including America).
http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21724395-country-has-not-cut-such-pathetic-figure-global-stage-suez-britains-decline
“Enormous” cultural strength? You sound like a Brit friend who explains that they must allow immigration because they need the workers…all this with massive unemployment and disparity in a failing economy. My point is that he is mouthing brainwashed BS.
when we brits had an empire, we had more coal that the saudis have oil
when the coal went, the empire went with it
A cultural worldview is important. Without that, I’m not sure we are functioning as humans All over the world, Britain left behind bridges, roads, programs, educational systems, buildings, etc.that embody a worldview. Britain today seems to have forgotten that. That worldview (minus the hierarchical systems that clearly have failed) strikes me as much more survivable than the lack of a cohesive worldview in former colonies today. The aristocracy still have some of its mojo (culture again) left, but it seems to be besieged.
Then from what I keep learning here, it could be time to burn coal again. Coal IS very damaging to the environment, and that’s one reason (among many) why it shouldn’t be burned for stupid reasons. Like a networked, top-down, global, centralized, capitalist economic system.
the stuff and ideas left around the world by we brits can only be sustained with constant energy input by current generations.
When we burned lots of coal, it was extracted from the ground by virtual slaves to feed the capitialist machines. The death rate was at least 1 man a day, with multiple injuries accepted as normal
We cannot reopen deep mines because we no longer have the skills to do so, even if it was economic—which it isn’t
“he stuff and ideas left around the world by we brits can only be sustained with constant energy input by current generations.”
The energy input that *I* use to arrest decay is largely mental, with some timely, deft physical touches. My only problem is that no one else understands how easy and efficacious such things are to do. The term to remember is “arresting decay,” not repair or restoration; just stopping the downward slide. That would be my approach with all the built infrastructure in the world (not just the Brits’). We have an ample work force but for the fact that education is such a criminally destructive and wasteful enterprise.
And I don’t know how many thousands of times I have to repeat this: networked, capitalist, centralized global governance, having been a wild and unsurvivable system, can’t continue, by this very definition. I’m never ever ever talking about how to keep that system running. However, I do not see industrial activity (discounting its origination and historical uses) as a necessary correlative of that system. I know this tends not to compute on OFW, but people should keep trying to get the point nevertheless.
Norman-
I don’t know how they are able to sell it at a profit but a new underground coal mine is opening here.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2654293/donkin-coal-mine-in-cape-breton-to-open-this-summer-amid-safety-concerns-from-critics/
Here’s Bill Mitchell on Britain “Something rotten in the state of….”
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=36348&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economicoutlook%2FFYvo+%28billy+blog%29
http://greyenlightenment.com/collapse-can-wait/
http://greyenlightenment.com/collapse-can-wait-part-2/
http://greyenlightenment.com/logical-inconsistency-of-collapse-ism/
Sorry, hanuman is correct. The world is too robust, and has too much redundancy to collapse. Dolph is also correct.
I think that the collapse, if any, will drag on for decades, although there will be ‘surges’ which will drop continents from civilization.
If you look at Charles Murray’s “Human Achievements”, most of the achievements took place in a quadrangle connecting London, Paris, Firenze and Koln, which include most of southern England, northern France, Switzerland, northern Italy , the Low Countries and Rhineland. (Berlin was, and is, never that relevant for Civilization)
The rest of the world was, I have to say, not too relevant with civilization.
As long as today’s centers of civilization are continued to be supplied, collapse can wait.
Can you explain how Illinois continues as a viable entity?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-01/horrific-catastrophic-court-ruling-send-illinois-financial-abyss
Some states will be allowed to go bankrupt.
The city of Yubari in Japan went bankrupt.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/aug/15/yubari-japan-city-learns-die-lost-population-detroit
States can go bankrupt, but nations won’t.
There are many countries which do not have control over the entire country, such as Mexico whose control over Chiapas, for example, is not complete (it has been more or less the personal fiefdom of ‘subcommander’ Marcos for years).
USA will slowly give up on many locales, as long as the ‘blue’ states, where most of the wealth is, are fed and supplied. Like Ancient Rome which gradually abandoned its provinces and concentrated in easily defensible Constantinople, or Mustafa Kemal, who abandoned that city (although he later recovered it) and fled into Ankara, in the middle of mountains.
Please explain what happens to all of the nations whose credit rating is terrible. One example is Venezuela. It can issue as much debt as it likes, but it can’t really buy more goods and services for its citizens from outside. There are many oil exporters and former oil exporters that are very close to this category. Think of Nigeria and Yemen. If oil prices remain low, all of the oil exporting countries will end up in this category.
Then there are all of the island countries that are highly dependent on oil. If oil prices rise, they have a terrible problem. For example Cuba, Greece (lots of islands), Barbados, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. Can they just issue more debt?
These countries’ debt will be wanted by no one so they will go bankrupt. However, USA is a different animal. Whether people like it or not they have to buy US debt, for the simple reason that no other nation can replace the dollar. China? Its economy is dependent upon selling junk Americans want, and if the US goes down, China’s economy goes back to the heyday of Mao Tse-tung.
Such situation has been quite unique . When Britain declined USA took the slack. But there is no other nation on earth who will take up USA’s slack, including China. So this situation will go for a long time, like the Holy Roman Empire, which was not holy, not roman and not empire but lasted all the way till 1806, when Napoleon , the new Emperor of France, finally put an end to it.
Illinois is a canary in the coal mine. Greece is another, among many. The fed will have NO OPTION but to step in and not just bail out, but actually take over running the states economies. This is the future. Because so much wealth has been shifted to the 0.1% there’s not enough left for the remaining tasks to be funded. This problem is going to make every state a basket case. Some states are booming, like NSW but it’s just asset inflation [housing] not wealth creation. It will end and then it too will be in dire need. This remedy is only due to our living in a fiat currency economy.
I’ve explained why many times.
The Emperor of Rome moved to Mediolanum, a city we now call Milano, when Rome was no longer that great and abandoned southern Italy. When Milan became less defensible against the Germans (Lombardy is still kind of Germanic to this day), the Emperor moved to Ravenna, then to Constantinople.
I expect several states to disband, or rearranged. After all many states were created in the middle of slavery debates (like Nevada, created so Lincoln could get some more electoral votes), and it is time to redraw the maps. As long as the richer towns are unharmed, not many people will care.
One would assume Illinois is TBTF…. so there will have to be life support extended… perhaps what will happen is that the state will be forced into making huge budget reductions in return for funds to keep the lights on…
Watch more massive cuts in pensions and public services?
I am afraid other states are headed this same direction. It is a fight between the states continuing and the poor within the system getting the benefits that have been promised to them.
I lived in Illinois before moving to Atlanta, and my husband was covered by the Illinois pension plan for college faculty. Perhaps moving out of state was a good idea.
I think that as all money needed to sustain the BAU is printed, it loses real value….eventually becoming worthless. This drive to zero worth is not linear but more exponential I think. You are correct…all the privileged areas, industries and cities will continue to bustle with activity as they are favored with government money and financing. But the edges are fraying. I think there is a lot of momentum. People will continue living like they do until the end, because they are normalized to do so. The drop in energy is the key factor. In five years we have 25%-30% less oil? How long do the favored centers of finance keep BAU without oil. The world economy will crater. I give it 3-5 yrs.
On horses, before oil, I think you’ll find….
The reality is fluid, it’s hard to put firm boundaries on transitions from boom phase to stagnation and fall stage, temporary plateaus or short term rebound intermezzos, especially among wide geo&demographic differences of the world. Today, we have probably lot of evidence to call the periphery vs core multi-speed collapse process (and forced triage) as a correct one and most likely actively managed one.
It might be true, the collapse game-story is so advanced nowadays, the situation in the core is going to snap relatively soon in just matter of years. That however still doesn’t guarantee collapse proper anyway, by which I mean no grid availability for the majority of pop and loss of control inside national boundaries. There is too much fat which still could be trimmed off in heavy austerity and desperate measures oriented gov – proto neofeudal rule..
Collapse can wait for a long, long time.
http://greyenlightenment.com/collapse-can-wait/
http://greyenlightenment.com/collapse-can-wait-part-2/
What is happening is the less important parts of economy are falling apart from the main body. It is called “Creative Destruction”.
A lot of people will be unhappy. However, the economy will work more or less as usual, although less and less people will participate on it.
The truth is nobody wants the economy to fall apart, because the domination of the dollar is complete.
Solari and other people, I don’t really spend too much time on them. I don’t think even they want their dollar-based assets to go to zero.
It is David Stockman talking collapse can wait. He is a denizen of the financial world and as I said elsewhere it is not the same world as the real resource based world. The fiat money world is a fantasy world where money is just infinite numbers in bank accounts. The government [the Federal one] can buy all the debts in the world and wipe them off the books with little consequence for the real economy. They can use this facility to keep the financial economy going and so delay collapse.
Fine, except collapse is ordained now, we just don’t know when.
The financial world is in some sense the “flip side” of the resource-based world. It represents the “information” we receive about the value of these resources. It unfortunately cannot be separated from the resource-based world. We have some limited ability to manipulate debt levels, but it is easy to exaggerate these abilities.
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I Think that the upcoming financial crisis ,that Gail is predicting, will unfold more quickly than many expect. The reason is something that is rarely discussed, but I have observed first hand. The common knowledge is that the most dynamic regions of the U.S. economy are the urban areas on both coasts. But analyzing things here in Portland Or, which is a kind of mini San Francisco, I see a booming but very fragile economy. When people own cars they make their payments to the bitter end, but when they mostly take uber or zip car, transportation spending can collapse quickly. If they are young people who just moved to town and live in an overpriced rental and have a job programing apps to feed pets by remote control ( true) they can pack up and move back to Mom and Dads basement in Des Moine as soon as the lose their job. When this happens, the construction workers, property managers and real estate agents incomes will collapse quickly along with the Yoga studios and Baristas. When the 1000’s of H1b workers at the chip factories get laid off they won’t be hanging around spending severance packages, but will be on the next plane back to India with whatever savings they have in Bitcoin. I think the operative phrase will be, “easy come easy go.”
Nice comment. Interesting perspective.
I agree. Former Bay Area person who left, as it was invaded by bland programmers from out of the area, who brought their pablum flavored culture with them.
I’m in Oregon also– in a boom town (Bend) that can’ go on forever, and things that can’t go on forever, won’t.
End of the year seems like a bold prediction– but we shall see.
Silicon Valley may have passed peak bland programmers from out of the area.
There are parts of Silicon Valley where commercial real estate is still hanging on, and there are parts where it has let go.
In Santa Clara, it has let go. Overall availability of office space in Santa Clara was nearly 19% in the first quarter, according to Savills Studley, up from 14% a year ago. Only two other areas in Silicon Valley – Milpitas and North San Jose – show greater availability at respectively 23% and a harrowing 30%.
The availability problem becomes very real along the Great America Parkway, between Highway 237 and Highway 101. It’s near Levi’s Stadium. Nearby, Yahoo owned 49 acres of land that it acquired in 2006 and on which it had planned to build its new headquarters. It tore down the buildings on it and got the project approved for 3 million square feet of office space. It scuttled these plans in 2014 and turned the land into a parking lot for Levi’s Stadium. In April 2016, Yahoo sold the property for $250 million to LeEco, a Chinese company that had surged out of nowhere.
LeEco was going to get into nearly everything, including electric cars in the US. It was going to build its global headquarters on it and hire 12,000 people. Then came reality. Earlier this year, LeEco in turn scuttled those plans and pulled back from the US, claiming that it had run into a cash crunch. It has since been trying to sell the property. There will be a buyer eventually, as always, but maybe not at $250 million.
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/07/02/silicon-valley-commercial-real-estate-bubble/
You may be right. I know that when the shale boom came to North Dakota, a lot of workers left their families back where they previously lived, and moved into small North Dakota lodging. That way, when layoffs came, They could simply pick up and leave. I am sure some younger ones went back to their parents’ homes.
Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
-Gore Vidal
Succinct
I would only tweak Vidal’s second sentence to:
“The virus WILL die, and there is a chance that it will bring down the host as well”
And what happened to the bacteria mentioned at the beginning?
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“Intermittent wind and solar electricity is assumed to be equivalent to high quality electricity, available 24/7/365, produced by fossil fuel electricity-generating stations.”
Here Gail mentions something that I talk about a lot and is one of the ideas on which my modeling and presentation for the “Stone Mountain Flywheel” is based.
I contend that while at the consumption end the products appear fungible, the intermittent quality of solar PV and wind electricity make them a different and *lower-quality* good than fossil or nuke electricity (it follows that the lower-quality good should be *worth less* than the higher-quality good, but in point of fact people are willing to pay *more* for it). In order to treat intermittent electricity as end-to-end-fungible with continuous electricity, the intermittent generation must be “storage-backed” to whatever degree is necessary to satisfy some fixed proportion of demand over the course of a day or a year under *all* conditions. If you want to increase that proportion – and let’s assume we do if we want to ramp down electricity produced by extractive means – then your generation and your storage must grow together.
I developed the Stone Mountain Flywheel model in order to help people visualize what an electromechanical storage device meant to back a 100-percent solar-PV generation regime would look like if it were sufficient to supply the state of Georgia given a real-world (albeit proxied and therefore a reasonable facsimile) demand curve for an entire year (specifically, 2015). The resulting design was a 1000m-by-760m granite rotor weighing almost half a billion tons. The solar panel farm connected to this flywheel would be almost 1200 square miles. An equivalent battery storage device under contemporary state-of-the-art technology would form a cube over a third of a kilometer on a side and cost roughly 3.5 trillion dollars.
So if you want business-as-usual demand and you want to go all-solar-PV for this one US state, you need land use for panels very roughly comparable to that used for agriculture and a titanic object of some sort – whether it’s all in one place or distributed – to provide the backing storage. I proposed the flywheel as an alternative to battery storage because the bulk of such storage is simply in situ material versus carefully manufactured, refined, and assembled materials for which there would have to be a continuous replacement process and pipeline.
Obviously the Second Law is going to kick your butt, but don’t we already have these?
Scale seems a issue.
Not sure I follow you re the Second Law (of Thermodynamics I assume, not Asimov’s). Of course the flywheel is going to be lossy both inbound and outbound but so would be any other form of storage (one scheme I’ve read of involving compressing and releasing air inside disused mines; it would have a heavy loss just due to losing heat from compression into the surrounding rock). For my dynamic model of the flywheel I assumed a transfer efficiency of 90 percent in both directions – a figure that is not out of line for motor-generators – and with that assumption an oversupply factor of 1.1 was sufficient to keep the flywheel running year-round (min RPM of 2.6; max of 19). I had a math error in my first attempt’s code that gave me an oversupply factor of 12; you’d be able to see that solar farm from the Moon.
I did not model running losses simply because I didn’t have a good handle on how to estimate them but they would drive up that oversupply factor somewhat.
Re scale: it turns out that for a given RPM and shape, the energy stored in a turning flywheel scales as the fifth power of size. I didn’t attempt the engineering associated with determining how fast a flywheel of a given size and shape could turn before it broke apart but assuming that that [or any other] limit isn’t even close to being approached, you can always store more energy by turning the flywheel a little faster – and the RPM goes as the square root of the energy. By contrast, a “batteryscraper” would have a fixed max energy and that’s it, unless you make it bigger or replace the cells with better ones. So actually the flywheel concept scales rather well as long as you have nice solid masses of stone to carve up and play with (and we do!). I proposed Stone Mountain because it’s a (presumably) solid mass to which we have relatively easy access (most of the turning mass would lie beneath the surrounding terrain but the spherical “North Bearing” would be readily visible from many spots in Gwinnett County and elsewhere in metro Atlanta). You wouldn’t have to go very far away to make a second flywheel; Panola Mountain, about 12 miles to the south of Stone Mountain, is a smaller exposed part of a much larger underground formation.
No, we don’t have these already. If we did, each one would have a defense perimeter equipped with anti-aircraft weapon systems all around it. But at the same time, we’d have dismantled our coal and gas power plants long ago.
1200 sqkm = 40km by 30km not bad.
I think that the reason people are willing to pay more for solar energy is because they have been told a false story about its value.
It is true that a small amount of it can be added to the grid, without too many adverse affects. But as more is added, there are adverse affects on the profitability of other producers. The intermittency of solar really has to be gotten rid of, if it is to function on the same basis as “regular” fossil fuel generated electricity. If wind is used, the intermittency must be gotten rid of, and it needs to be transported to the correct place. There may also need to be upgrades to the electricity to make it match grid characteristics–short circuit capacity, rotational inertia, and reserves of reactive power. None of this is free. No one has stopped to compare costs and benefits.
Would love to see an analysis of the cost of the bearings for this thing….and the recurring cost of bearing replacement. Great analysis though!
Hi Gail, are you factoring in energy efficiencies to world energy consumption,? If we are able to get the same amount of goods and services but use less energy to do so, I am wondering if that is considered in your calculations, or even how one would be able to do that .
I don’t mean to speak for Gail, but beyond a certain point, efficiency is a chimera.
Efficiency is a complication that reduces resilience. It makes systems more fragile. Efficiency also hides complexity and embedded energy costs.
HT Odum knew this well, with his “emergy” calculations. Efficiency follows a logistics curve, where increasing efficiency has good results for a while, until you hit a “sweet spot” in the curve, after which, achieving increasing efficiency costs more and more to attain. Achieving 100% efficiency would theoretically consume infinite resource!
It seems clear that all the “low hanging fruit” have been harvested, when it comes to efficiency. High efficiency LEDs (for example) require much more resource to produce than incandescent bulbs. Don’t get me wrong; I love LEDs and use many of them! But they are, at best, a fossil-fuel extender, not a replacement.
LEDs seem pretty simple, but there is a lot of hidden complexity there. A large village or small town can easily come up with the resources needed to make incandescent light bulbs. But it requires a billion-dollar wafer fabrication plant and 400 highly skilled and trained employees to make an LED. This is a major additional complexity in order to make lighting more efficient. The same goes for hydrid cars, solar panels, etc.
As another layer of complexity, increasing efficiency holds great peril. Joseph Tainter’s tour-de-force The Collapse of Complex Societies demonstrates pretty convincingly that civilizations fall when their steadily increasing complexity overwhelms their resource base, until all their resources go into maintaining their complexity, rather than into providing goods and services for their citizens.
Between Odum and Tainter, we’re screwed. Tainter tell us that, to maintain our civilization, we must continually increase complexity until it becomes all-consuming. Odum tells us that anything we do to increase our efficiency is going to add to our complexity.
I have seen the future, and it is powered by photosynthesis. It fits on the efficiency-complexity curve at a very modest 8% (for sugar cane, most other plants are under 1% efficient). It has been “in development” for some 3,500,000,000 years. It is self-perpetuating and self-renewing. It will survive human civilization and indeed, the human species.
Get good at using photosynthesis. Avoid the rush!
Yep, pushing protons through a membrane.
Of course, Redux (Valence Electrons ) are needed.
What a preposterous way of doing things!
But it works.
Good to see this, Jan. In my village, we’re actually walking over coal. Since I’m not mechanical in any way, I keep asking the technical people how to use some of this coal for local uses. I’m actually thinking about how to replace the electric pump for our only community well. Of course, none of them believe the electric grid could ever fail. They say something about steam from the burnt coal–how do you even burn coal these days?–creating the requisite mechanical motion. But to the total novice (like me) such explanations aren’t helpful. Then the smart libs hear me say coal and condescendingly brush it off in favor of solar somethingorother…like I must just not understand simple, obvious truths. Next, I’ll just go for something I’m closer to understanding: Remove a car rear wheels and hook something to the rear axel to create rotary motion to run a pump. .
This all sounds wonderful!
Why don’t you guys give your post BAU utopia a dry run now —- shut off all the BAU inputs — no electricity – no petrol — live off the land…
See how it goes. See if you can set up this pump contraption using parts from an oil truck.
Let’s call it The Little House on the Prairie Project…. (Little Hell on the Prairie more like it)
Bloody f-in hell!!!!!!!! I’m never talking about what to do after BAU collapses. Only about now.
The only smart option in terms of now is to Live Large.
Enjoy the electricity and the food and the petrol and the comfortable home and the medicine and the petrol ….
“The only smart option in terms of now is to Live Large.”
Yes. We should enjoy these things. Two things though. I don’t have the money to “live large.” And it’s a very amusing challenge to try and be comfortable despite the little money. The second thing is that only living large (and nothing else) is resignation to major kinds of near term extinction. It would be a toss up between having a lobotomy and living like that.
Guy McPherson with his climate scenario had this “we’re finished” POV as well. He’s not taken as seriously any more. I never took that message seriously…although climate, being more determinative of extinction than economics–you can do more to escape economics than you can the climate–should have given me more cause to accept NTHE than would economics.
You have electricity and an internet connection — that is living large
Then this just showed up in my email in box…
General info for everyone (I have not verified any of this information.) B-
Car buffs thinking of changing cars, read this.
Just for your information.
I always wondered why we never saw a cost analysis on what it actually
costs to operate an electric car. Now we know why.
At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro
executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He
laughed, then got serious. If you really intend to adopt
electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain
realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla
requires 75 amp service.
The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small
street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure
would be unable to carry more than 3 houses with a single Tesla,
each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the
system would be wildly over-loaded.
This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles; our
residential infrastructure cannot bear the load. So as our
genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we
being urged to buy the damn things and replace our reliable,
cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar
cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery
system. This latter “investment” will not be revealed until
we’re so far down this dead-end road that it will be presented
with an oops and a shrug.
If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are
eco-friendly, just read the following:
Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. Enlightening.
Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General
Motors…and he writes…For four days in a row, the fully
charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to
the reserve gasoline engine. Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg
including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range
including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is
approximately 270 miles.
It will take you 4 1/2 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then
add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip
time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed
(including charging time) would be 20 mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of
electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained
battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is
never mentioned so I looked up what I pay for electricity. I pay
approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16
per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.
$18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to
operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar
size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per
gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car costs about $15,000 while the Volt
costs $46,000. So the American Government wants loyal
Americans not to do the math, but simply pay 3 times as much for
a car, that costs more than 7 times as much to run, and takes 3
times longer to drive across the country.
I think you’re off by a decimal place. The marginal rate in BC is about $0.12 per kWh. Farmers get it for 10.9¢.
Also, some of your other calculations are pessimistic. Most BC residences have a 200 amp service. They are unlikely to all be charging Teslas at the same time, and the 75 amp rate is for the quick charge, not the overnight charge. Also, many places have free charging stations.
It would be better to think in terms of energy, rather than current (amps). I don’t know the specifics of the Tesla or Volt, but most EVs have a pack of about 25-50 kWh. Charging it would be like running your oven and entire stove top, plus your hot water heater, for a couple hours. So the net load is not something that normal households don’t already deal with.
But I do agree that the system is not prepared for a massive EV conversion. The early adopters can do pretty good, but the laggards are going to be paying heavily.
“Many places have free charging stations…”
Care to provide a list?
I didn’t know energy was free.
I wonder how gov will provide free energy to millions of EV cars?
Rubbish
Yea they have them
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/supercharger?redirect=no
I am not a fanboy just some info
https://www.quora.com/How-can-Tesla-afford-to-offer-drivers-free-charging-for-life?share=1
Of course they have a few free charging stations. The idea that this can/will be extended to millions is ridiculous.
On the residential service panel….if you have to add 75A service the. The average home will have to upgrade their breaker sevice, so add $1000-2000 to the cost.
I don’t have a list handy, although there are many in southwest BC. There are three that I know of on our tiny island of 10,000 people: the credit union, one of the two grocery stores, and the public art centre. “Across the water” on Vancouver Island, there are at least ten others. I can go to Victoria (~30 km), plug in for a few hours for a free top-up while walking around downtown, and have plenty of juice to get home.
So perhaps I erred in thinking this was universal. And I certainly don’t think it is sustainable! But it’s good while it lasts. I expect it to go away as EVs become more popular.
Fools and their EVs ….
Artleads commented on The Next Financial Crisis Is Not Far Away.
in response to Jan Steinman:
I don’t mean to speak for Gail, but beyond a certain point, efficiency is a chimera. Efficiency is a complication that reduces resilience. It makes systems more fragile. Efficiency also hides complexity and embedded energy costs. HT Odum knew this well, with his “emergy” calculations. Efficiency follows a logistics curve, where increasing efficiency has good … Continue reading The Next Financial Crisis Is Not Far Away
Then this just showed up in my email in box…
General info for everyone (I have not verified any of this information.) B-
Car buffs thinking of changing cars, read this.
Just for your information.
I always wondered why we never saw a cost analysis on what it actually
costs to operate an electric car. Now we know why.
At a neighborhood BBQ I was talking to a neighbor, a BC Hydro
executive. I asked him how that renewable thing was doing. He
laughed, then got serious. If you really intend to adopt
electric vehicles, he pointed out, you had to face certain
realities. For example, a home charging system for a Tesla
requires 75 amp service.
The average house is equipped with 100 amp service. On our small
street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure
would be unable to carry more than 3 houses with a single Tesla,
each. For even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the
system would be wildly over-loaded.
This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles; our
residential infrastructure cannot bear the load. So as our
genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are we
being urged to buy the damn things and replace our reliable,
cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar
cells, but we will also have to renovate our entire delivery
system. This latter “investment” will not be revealed until
we’re so far down this dead-end road that it will be presented
with an oops and a shrug.
If you want to argue with a green person over cars that are
eco-friendly, just read the following:
Note: If you ARE a green person, read it anyway. Enlightening.
Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General
Motors…and he writes…For four days in a row, the fully
charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to
the reserve gasoline engine. Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg
including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range
including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is
approximately 270 miles.
It will take you 4 1/2 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then
add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip
time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed
(including charging time) would be 20 mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of
electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained
battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is
never mentioned so I looked up what I pay for electricity. I pay
approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16
per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.
$18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to
operate the Volt using the battery. Compare this to a similar
size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg. $3.19 per
gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car costs about $15,000 while the Volt
costs $46,000. So the American Government wants loyal
Americans not to do the math, but simply pay 3 times as much for
a car, that costs more than 7 times as much to run, and takes 3
times longer to drive across the country.
Priceless….
Where’s Pete EV these days…..
It’s like the apparent paradox of the Romans having top-notch fully-armoured cavalry and sophisticated ship-mounted artillery on the Rhine frontier, just at the point of their final collapse: they could do all that, and then………suddenly no more, the soldiers disperse and the fleet becomes scrap timber or sinks.
And then society reverted to the agricultural base, most of the higher layers of complexity having been swept away as unsustainable, except in the Eastern Empire.
Good points. Of course, we cannot keep our current economy operating only on photosynthesis. The economy would have to fall back to a lower level.
Solar power satellites built from lunar materials would work it just has a high capital barrier to entry.
What kind of lower level?
Quite possibly hunting and gathering. Or maybe a little subsistence agriculture mixed in. Nothing of the type we have now, however. We won’t be making batteries for wind turbines.
Nobody knows how to hunt and gather anymore, and so many more people with such diminished wildlife doesn’t auger well in that regard.
Correction: Nobody you know knows how to hunt and gather.
There are actually quite a few people making at least a partial living this way.
I’m viscerally connected to mass culture and what might be possible for it to change into. You have to love it to change it. The prospect of individuals and groups surviving outside of that is a scenario of failure to me.
I grew up in a time where the current mass culture was not “the norm.” I am not sure I could really adapt to it. This is part of the reason we have no television. It doesn’t present what I want to know about the world.
I hunt moose in the fall and gather salmon in the spring. In the summer I supplement with potatoes and chicken eggs. It can be done. But of course I use a modern rifle and super-duper ammunition. Can’t imagine doing it the old fashioned way with pits and traps and spears and bows.
Energy efficiency is a small subset of the much larger matter of energy intensivity (or less-intensivity), which itself is a subset of the larger matter of dematerialization, which is proceeding, it seems, on all fronts. Long story short: we’re getting more (and, eventually, much more) out of less as time goes on: more economic growth, more GDP, more production of everything, etc., out of less and less energy/materials/resources. There’s a ton of literature on this; interesting stuff. If you go searching, use the word “decoupling”; they often speak of “decoupling” of energy/resources from GDP or given outputs.
It is even happening with resources like water; e.g.:
http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/decoupling/files/pdf/Decoupling_Report_English.pdf
P113. “A more remarkable trend can be observed in freshwater (Figure 8.5). For most of the last 10 years, China achieved absolute decoupling between freshwater consumption and economic growth. During 1998-2007, total freshwater consumption varied within a small range between 290.1 and 306.2 billion m3.”
The fact remains that much of what is produced today is overly complex and is junk, designed to fail and then to be replaced. This accounts for much of the “new” production. I bought a fencing tool…it is EXACTLY the same design as was used over 100 yrs ago. My neighbor has the same tool, but easily 60 yrs older, and still is use.
I am always deeply suspicious of such claims. It smacks of wishful thinking.
For one thing, “GDP” includes sales of financial instruments, which increasingly seem to consist primarily of marshmallow fluff.
GDP also includes real estate, which seems to be at least as decoupled from real wealth as they claim energy/resources are. And keep in mind that when there is a disaster that actually destroys wealth, GDP goes up as rebuilding proceeds.
Energy and economy are certainly coupled, but they may be coupled by an elastic band, giving the illusion of decoupling if you pull hard enough. And yet, the elastic eventually snaps back!
Jan: please see the wri.org link that I posted below, and tell me what you think. Are the reported CO2 emissions declines and simultaneous GDP increases “wishful thinking”?
Forgive me for not taking time to look at YAG (Yet Another Graph), but my argument is with using GDP as the denominator.
GDP is a highly complex, easily manipulated indicator that includes many things that do not actually involve real wealth.
Do you have any issues with some of those things that I pointed out? (Finance, real estate, disaster relief.)
In the least, the notion that the money spend rebuilding after an AGW-caused disaster should mean we are “more efficient” with what caused the disaster requires a special sort of irrational non-thinking that I can’t think of any way to address.
There is no “decoupling.” That is all BS!
The only kind of decoupling I’m fixated on is how to use culture to make money. If tourism, and other culture-related programs could circulate money downward (?), so that more could buy higher priced goods… The producers of said good could be enabled to produce them somewhat less harmfully. If I have it right, the latter has been Gail’s point for a long time. Not the tourism/culture bit.
I wrote about decoupling back in 2011. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/11/15/is-it-really-possible-to-decouple-gdp-growth-from-energy-growth/ At that time, my conclusion was that it was not happening.
Also, when we look back, even to 1820, the increase in economic growth due to efficiency gains was a fairly small percentage of the total. There was only a relatively small period, between 1975 and 1995 where we were truly able to ramp up GDP growth, based on efficiency gains. To do this, we had to greatly increase debt, so as to be able to replace equipment before the end of its normal lifetime with more efficient equipment. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/10/11/why-energy-prices-are-ultimately-headed-lower-what-the-imf-missed/
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/world-gdp-growth-divided-between-energy-and-efficiency1.png
If we want to increase efficiency, we must actually replace devices in use currently. This takes energy products. As we approach limits, this becomes more and more difficult to do. If we are a poorer country, we can expect to keep devices a longer time, rather than a shorter time, hampering efficiency gains.
Also, the way we have grown GDP more quickly than energy growth has had to do with moving the economy more toward a service economy. If the economy is poorer, people will not pay others to be their baby sitters, and will cut back on services. The things that will remain is goods-especially food. These goods are the most energy-intense part of the economy.
“If we want to increase efficiency, we must actually replace devices in use currently.”
If you mean “efficiency in doing things that need not and ought not be done”, then you might be right. In a chronically wildly-overconsuming society like the U.S., there are huge energy and resource savings to be had, easily, without any sacrifice of safety, quality of life, or anything else worthwhile.
Further, if I can take “devices” to mean all industrial outputs, then note that many industrial products do not have to be replaced for a very long time — decades or even centuries. Things like houses, and transport and urban infrastructure. As everyone knows, China has been on a building binge over the past decade, using more concrete and other materials in that time than the U.S. used over the previous century. But the kicker is that it is largely a one-off thing: once it is built, it stays built for many decades, perhaps a century or longer. It does not need to be replaced, except incrementally over a long time.
We’re starting to see the (decoupling) results of this development in the aggregate statistics on GDP vis a vis CO2 emissions and other measures of resource use/stress. Once an entire urbanized 21st-century country has been BUILT (China), at great cost in terms of resources and environmental stress, it does not have to be re-built; economic activity can carry on while resource use and environmental stress plateaus or drops. We are just now at the point where we can see some of this plateau-ing; it would not have been evident in the late 20th century or even early 21st, because there was still far too much growth and infrastructure build-out needed to support the rapidly-burgeoning population and bring them up to a decent living standard. Indeed, there still IS a lot of growth and infrastructure build-out needed, across Eurasia and Africa. But a great deal has already been done, and it all adds up; that, combined with falling population growth year on year.
We are entering the ERA of decoupling, you might say; it will run for a century. The era of “coupling”, over the last century or so, was the era of waste, vast waste, because we didn’t know any better and it seemed like there were no limits to anything. Plus, of course, poorly-regulated capitalism busied itself creating new wants unrelated to needs, and overproducing (and aggressively marketing, and even compelling the consumption of) useless artifacts. Per capita energy and resource use zoomed (in the OECD in general and U.S. in particular) far beyond anything actually needed for a becoming life; vast waste became routine. But those days are drawing to a close. The realities of the global situation compel decoupling.
see:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.12005/abstract
J of Industrial Ecology Volume 17, Issue 4 August 2013 Pages 618-629
Decoupling Analysis of Four Selected Countries
China, Russia, Japan, and the United States during 2000-2007
and:
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/09/13/economic-growth-decoupled-carbon-good/
“globally, gross domestic product has decoupled from CO2 emissions for the first time in about 250 years. For the past two years, and likely trending through this year, GDP has been rising, but CO2 emissions have been flat. By itself, this empirical observation invalidates the argument that countries have to emit CO2 in order to get richer. Most countries in the world have become richer, and carbon emissions have stayed flat. The causation has been broken.”
I missed this one, and the numbers are striking. Examples: from 2000-2014, Czech Republic: CO2 emissions down 14%, GDP up 40%; Ireland: CO2 down 16%, GDP up 47%; and so on:
http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/04/roads-decoupling-21-countries-are-reducing-carbon-emissions-while-growing-gdp
The Roads to Decoupling: 21 Countries Are Reducing Carbon Emissions While Growing GDP — by Nate Aden, April 05, 2016
You will note that all the countries mentioned are either developed (first world), or largely-developed (“second-world”, so to say). This is to be expected. These are the places that require relatively little costly investment — costly in terms of environment and resources, I mean. In a previous post, I said “we are just now at the point where we can see some of this [decoupling]”. I was referring to seeing it on a global aggregate basis. As this article (above link) makes clear, it can already be seen on a regional or country basis, restricting the view to relatively-developed countries. Less-developed countries will follow, over time.
Half-built places like China will be joining the list over the next decade or so. Places like India and Africa might appear to need several more decades at least, based on present (poor) levels of development. However, there’s a real possibility that they could develop in a “pre-decoupled” way on account of technical advances. Things like cheap solar PV and cheap cellular phone technology could allow them to leapfrog past much of the terrible environmental/resource stress era — the tragically wasteful “coupled” era — that the now-developed world slogged through (partly because it had no other way forward, technically). Within a decade or so it should be possible to build out whole new modern cities — a la China 1995-2015 — in India or Africa for only a small fraction of the fossil fuel cost formerly required.
Look at world CO@ and GDP numbers, not individual country numbers. It is very easy to offshore manufacturing to coal consuming countries. We end up with hollowed out countries, with few jobs that pay well for their citizens. You are starting to see the reason why the EU is collapsing.
Decoupling is a mask for externalizing the mess to some other part of the world. There is no free lunch.
Two more things:
1. In talking positively about decoupling, I am NOT buying-in to the (discredited, in my view) notion that GDP is a great index of human well-being. It is, in my view, a ROUGH index of human well-being, with much greater predictive power for less-developed countries and for people in the lower quantiles of income/wealth. In other words, though its value has been and still is often over-stated, it does have some value; we can use it, cautiously and with qualification.
2. We’ve been talking about “decoupling” as though it were something we passively witness or wait for; a force of nature that acts when it decides to act. But there can be, and should be, much more human intention/action involved than that. In this regard, an invaluable book is Factor 5: Transforming the Global Economy through 80% Increase in Resource Productivity (Weizsacker, Lovins and Lovins). This book describes in detail how wealth and human well-being can be increased while resource use can be slashed to perhaps one-fifth or less of current rates of use; you might call it “radical decoupling as a conscious political/economic policy”. It involves planning and execution; willed effort; social and political committment. We can choose that — i.e. sanity — or we can choose collapse, chaos and world war.
video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAjXStZbt5I
Ernst von Weizs„cker – Decoupling Wealth from Resource Consumption
Also: important new-ish book (2014) which appears to be picking up where Factor 5 left off:
http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789400757059
Factor X: Policy, Strategies and Instruments for a Sustainable Resource Use
edited by Michael Angrick, Andreas Burger, Harry Lehmann
Springer, 2014
…. unfortunately, this volume is from an academic press and is quite expensive; too rich for my blood. All I can do is read the passages that google books was good enough to post. See interesting discussion on page 106, and pages 115-118:
https://books.google.com/books?id=sxDHBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
what complete bollocks. Infrastructure needs constant maintenance which requires energy. I suggest you look at trying to understand the exponential function. To grow anything requires a doubling of all that was used before it for the next doubling period. At some point the gig is up and the overshoot collapses there is no negotiating with maths. So let me be clear there is no such thing as sustainability only growth and collapse that are subject to the resource limits of the environments of this planet. Believing otherwise means that you have bought you and your family front row seats to oblivion. But then maybe the show is better there than up in the bleachers.
‘Policy, Strategies and Instruments for a Sustainable Resource Use’
Please send me a copy — I need some paper to light the fire….
I am sorry. I don’t agree with you. CO2 emissions are down, primarily because coal consumption is down. I expect that world economic growth is not doing nearly as well as what published reports say that it is. The problem is primarily in the big coal using countries, including China.
In theory, a country can almost stop building new houses, office buildings, factories, trucks, cars, and the like. This gets rid of a huge number of jobs. Productivity of the remaining jobs remains level at best. The amount of goods and services produced by the economy likely drops significantly, because in the past, houses, office buildings, factories, trucks, cars and the like were part of consumption. Diminishing returns of course continues to affect the production of metals, and of water, and of energy products, meaning that we are losing efficiency in these areas. It becomes impossible to repay debt with interest. Commodity prices will drop even lower than they are now. The value of stocks will drop precipitously. The whole system will collapse.
Taking your first post first:
“Look at world CO@ and GDP numbers, not individual country numbers.”
OK. World GDP is increasing at 3-4%/annum:
http://www.isa-world.com/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_Global_GDP_Growth_Rate_8b12cf679b.png
Meanwhile, global CO2 emissions have stalled (see below) and remain flat. We may be “offshoring manufacturing to coal consuming countries”, but the net global effect is flat in terms of CO2. India’s emissions are up the last couple years, but this apparently is offset by declines almost everywhere else.
Also, “coal consuming countries” will be less so with each passing year, from here on out (see greenpeace.org link below). Renewables are becoming so cheap, and attractive in other ways, that it will make little sense to build any more coal power generation capacity within a few years, or even right now. The situation is changing rapidly, before our eyes: https://qz.com/992611/from-coal-to-solar-indias-energy-landscape-is-almost-too-hard-to-keep-up-with/
“India first set a record-low price in February this year [2017] when a kilowatt-hour of solar energy was selling at Rs2.97 ($0.046). This month, the country hit another record low-the price of solar dropped 12% further, currently selling at Rs2.62 ($0.041) per kilowatt-hour…. new solar is 15% cheaper than existing domestic coal. No one, anywhere in the world, was expecting solar to get that cheap for at least a decade…and India just got there this year.” END QUOTE
“We end up with hollowed out countries, with few jobs that pay well for their citizens.”
The questions of inequality, fair pay, full employment vs. mass unemployment, and so on, are very important, but are not necessarily related to this coupling/decoupling phenomenon.
…………..
vis:
https://thinkprogress.org/global-carbon-emissions-flat-three-years-34b4f6b159bd
Nov 14, 2016
Declining coal means flat emissions for a third year running
Thanks, China.
For the third year in a row, global carbon emissions have remained flat, thanks in large part to declining emissions in China.
Carbon emissions from 2016 will only be about 0.2 percent more than in 2015, despite a steady 3 percent growth in the world’s economy, according to a new report from the Global Carbon Project. Before 2014, emissions were increasing at an average rate of 2.3 percent per year.
[…snip…]
Researchers point to declining coal use in China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, as the main driver behind the slowdown in emissions. In 2014, China’s coal use dropped 3 percent. It fell another 5 percent and is on pace this year for another decrease, likely between 2.5 and 3 percent. Regulations to decrease air pollution, a general economic slowdown, and a three-year ban on new coal mines have contributed to the decline of coal use throughout the country.
Overall, China’s emissions fell 0.7 percent a decrease of 77 million tons and are expected to fall another 0.5 percent in 2016. END QUOTE
further:
https://thinkprogress.org/with-millions-of-jobs-up-for-grabs-china-seizes-clean-tech-leadership-from-u-s-a37154d02d0#.h73ri6svf
Feb 28, 2017
China smashes solar energy records, as coal use and CO2 emissions fall once again
[…snip…]
In 2016, Chinese coal consumption fell for the third consecutive year, Beijing reports, while it installed almost twice as many solar panels as it had in 2015, which was also a record-setting year. Beijing projects both trends will continue in 2017. China’s solar installation target for 2020 is likely to be achieved in 2018, which as Greenpeace’s Energy Desk noted in January, is “a pretty impressive feat given that the target was set only a couple of months ago.” All of these policies have helped make China a new global leader in climate action, as their own CO2 emissions have plateaued and declined since 2013. END QUOTE
Regarding this: “China’s solar installation target for 2020 is likely to be achieved in 2018”. This is typical. The Chinese are conservative in thier target-setting, and often exceed their goals. This has happened repeatedly, throughout the era of their 5-year plans.
Important background on China, coal and CO2:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/briefings/climate/2014/The-End-of-Chinas-Coal-Boom.pdf
The End of Chinas Coal Boom: 6 Facts You Should Know
April 2014
A bit more:
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/22/china-shows-renewable-energy-future-not-coal/
China Shows Why Renewable Energy Is The Future, Not Coal
May 22nd, 2017 by Steve Hanley
[…snip…]
But didn’t China build a bunch of new coal fired plants recently? Yes, it did and the American Progress report deals with that issue. “What American observers need to know is that many of those new plants are white elephants that China cannot fully utilize. They represent a blip rather than a trend, and Beijing is already moving to shut down many of these new plants.”
” Renewables are becoming so cheap, and attractive in other ways, that it will make little sense to build any more coal power generation capacity within a few years, or even right now.”
You may think that this is true, but it is complete and utter nonsense. A large part of the cost is buried in subsidies. Some of these subsidies are tax subsidies; others are indirect subsidies by coal, natural gas, and nuclear providers. Adding intermittent renewables tends to drive other electricity producers (needed for backup generation) out of business. It is by no means a sustainable pattern. Read for example, https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/05/05/why-we-should-be-concerned-about-low-oil-prices/ (This post covers more than low oil prices.) Also https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/30/the-wind-and-solar-will-save-us-delusion/ and https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/08/31/intermittent-renewables-cant-favorably-transform-grid-electricity/
Of course, “renewables” are really an extension of our fossil fuel system anyhow. They would not exist without fossil fuel subsidies.
And now your second post:
“CO2 emissions are down, primarily because coal consumption is down.”
True. And your point is? I was responding to your suggestion that we “look at WORLD CO2 and GDP numbers, not individual country numbers”. You were right. We should look at global numbers as well as country or regional numbers. And when we do, we find that CO2 emissions are flat while GDP is rising.
“I expect that world economic growth is not doing nearly as well as what published reports say that it is.”
Well, what can I say? Maybe you’re right. Who is to say?
“The problem is primarily in the big coal using countries, including China.”
The problem, historically, yes, and also the solution, as they accelerate their conversion to renewables.
“In theory, a country can almost stop building new houses, office buildings, factories, trucks, cars, and the like. This gets rid of a huge number of jobs. Productivity of the remaining jobs remains level at best. The amount of goods and services produced by the economy likely drops significantly”
Not necessarily. In China, a sea-change is taking place, characterized by mass urbanization, mass middle class-formation, and mass increase in the service sector:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-exploding-2016-8
China’s middle class is exploding
Kim Iskyan, Aug. 27, 2016
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/chinas-service-sector-projected-to-reach-72-of-economy-by-2030-which-is-about-japans-current-level.html
China’s service sector projected to reach 72% of economy by 2030 which is about Japan’s current level
brian wang | April 7, 2017
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/key-metrics-for-chinas-future-economic-growth-debt-to-gdp-private-consumption.html
Key Metrics for China’s future economic growth- Debt to GDP, Private Consumption
brian wang | April 29, 2017
The world economy is headed toward collapse. Wind and solar add barely anything, if they are counted properly. Conversion to renewables is just plain nonsense.
I have run into Brian Wang of NextBigFuture.com before, when he said that Nuclear would save the world. He isn’t any more correct here.
The “cubic mile of oil” concept explains that pretty well. As individuals we have no idea just how vast is the energy supply we use every year. It’s about 3 CuM: 1+ for oil, 1+ for coal and gas and the rest for other sources. And, with 3+% annual growth we will need 5 or more CuM in just 20 years. and repeat. Renewables are like a coat of paint on the container. Good locally, but that’s it.
This is Fast Eddy reporting from Central Hong Kong China…. otherwise known as the Fake Economy that is going to explode making all of these MOREonic projections look totally ridiculous.
The Chinese Debt Time Bomb
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/07/chinese-debt-time-bomb.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/China-non-financial-sector-debt-660×424-624×401.jpeg
One more thing, just posted, fascinating stuff. The author of this piece, Godfree Roberts, is the proprietor of the inpraiseofchina.com blog, which is well worth reading.
https://www.unz.com/article/chinas-financial-debt-everything-you-know-is-wrong/
China’s Financial Debt: Everything You Know Is Wrong
Godfree Roberts • July 5, 2017
“Pretty much everything our media tells us about China is wrong–or at least one-sided–including its tales of a China ‘debt problem’…”
You have a definite gullible streak!
I don’t know where this will be posted. I had to comb up thread quite far to find a “reply” button. So here goes…
Gail: “The world economy is headed toward collapse.”
You think? I used to think that, but now I’m not so sure. A reset of some sort, yes, but collapse, in the sense of persistent or permanent depression, likely not. We’ll see.
“Wind and solar add barely anything, if they are counted properly. Conversion to renewables is just plain nonsense.”
?!? I don’t know how to square that with the statistics about what is happening, on the ground. And it is happening with incredible speed. Solar PV is doubling every ~2 years, and for good reason: it is so cheap, and clean, with such high EROI, and so easy to install, that there is increasingly little reason to go with anything else. And the costs just keep on collapsing, delightfully so. We appear to be approaching the “solar singularity” that Tam Hunt, Tony Seba, and others have been talking about the last few years.
Does this look like the pattern of a technology that is going nowhere? —
https://dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/GTM_Tam_Graph_2017_Sigularity.png
Or this? —
http://www.the9billion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SEIA-1.jpg
“I have run into Brian Wang of NextBigFuture.com before, when he said that Nuclear would save the world. He isn’t any more correct here.”
Brian Wang’s opinions are of little import, to me. I use his site as a newswire, and it serves well for that. The facts and sources that he cites are not his opinions.
Thanks for your comments.
I’ll stop in every year or two and we’ll see how things are going. Global economic collapse? Sudden cessation of the now-vast renewables buildout? Time will tell!
Alan – you and I live in different universes — your’s is one manufactured by the MSM – they have told you what to think — and like an unthinking donkey — you regurgitate what they tell you.
My universe involves facts — logic — and questioning of everything.
Since you are here — and since you are so deep in DelusiSTAN — and I cannot be bothered to waste time on explaining to you just how profoundly wrong you are…
I suggest you read the last 20 articles of Gail’s – if you time read all of them.
The problem with solar is the damage it does to the electric grid. The price of solar could be zero, and it would not be worthwhile adding it to the system, except perhaps as a tiny proportion of the total. Even that would need to be looked at closely–it only replaces “fuel,” rather than truly adding the kind of electricity we need to the system.
We don’t have any way of dealing with the variability of solar. Batteries are way to expensive. The way solar is priced does not produce nearly a high enough wholesale price for backup producers (coal, natural gas, and nuclear). Adding solar to the electric grid is a way of getting the electric grid to collapse.
I agree that photo-voltaic (PV) solar is not going to help maintain the status quo very much. But solar could prove to be useful in a number of ways.
For example, a large portion of residential electric needs is providing hot water. Solar-thermal uses fairly inexpensive materials, is simple to maintain, and can reduce electric demand cheaper and in a more sustainable manner than PV solar.
Off-grid PV solar could be useful for a long time using yesterday’s technology. Lead-acid batteries use simple, readily available, inexpensive materials and can be easy to maintain. They can be re-manufactured using the resources of a large village or small town.
I agree that PV solar is not going to “save the world” and life as we know it. But it may be useful, post-bottleneck, to supply “lifeboat communities” with electrical power.
In general, I look to technologies that were practical around WWII, and imagine them being used when fossil sunlight is back to similar levels of supply. Diesel engines (non-computer-controlled), running on vegetable oil, could be around for another 50 or more years, for example. I think solar-thermal could easily be around that long, with smaller pockets of PV solar, as well.
What I object to is putting solar electricity on the grid. Solar thermal hot water can be helpful, and off grid solar has some uses.
‘Diesel engines (non-computer-controlled), running on vegetable oil could be around for another 50 or more years’
I am curious — where would you get transmission, hydraulic and brake fluids? Spare parts?
Can you also get back to me re what you think is going to happen when all those spent fuel ponds in Japan are abandoned?
Dear Fast Eddy: I can assure you that my universe also involves facts, logic and questioning of everything, perhaps more profoundly than yours. I was at one time a peak oiler and doomer — 1999-2007 or so. I was steeped in all the literature that you and our host have been steeped in (dieoff.com and all the rest, dozens of sites and books, the original peak oil yahoo groups, etc.). Over the years I read much more than “the last 20 articles of Gails”; more like 1000 of comparable nature. But then I started reading further, outside the collapse-o-sphere (which is a sort of echo-chamber), and I started questioning my own dogmas. What I found was a surprise! I found that things were both better and worst than I imagined, in ways that were different than I had thought. It has been an interesting intellectual journey, that’s for darn sure.
Like I told Gail: I’ll stop in every year or two and we’ll see how things are going. I’ve learned that there’s not much point trying to argue these issues; the only thing left now is to simply wait, observe, and then re-visit things at longish intervals, and see how various predictions have been borne-out in reality. Global collapse? Maybe. We’ll see, won’t we?
PS: in spite of my skepticism about GLOBAL collapse (persistent depression), I do think it more than possible that the U.S. and the West might collapse, for at least some decades. It is hard to say, there are so many factors at play. But it is surely possible, and it would not surprise me.
You are wrong.
We are the gods of doom here — but this is no echo chamber — the gods will turn on each other if they smell weak logic… as you may have noticed with this global warming discussion….
As I have said previously — FW is very much like a high performance sports team — take all the best players out of the UK Premier League and put them on one team — if you perform you stay — if you display any weakness… a muscle pull… a lack of concentration that results in a missed goal… you are on your way out….
This kitchen is always on fire — so I can imagine that you would want to step away from the heat… I see that your hair is already singed…
I will leave you with this this to ponder…..
Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated glob..al war..ming data
The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated glo..bal war…ming
It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on cli..mate ch..ange
America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
The report claimed the pause in glo…bal wa..rming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/climate-change-whistleblower-alleges-noaa-manipula/
I am afraid I am not one who follows the Peak Oil Literature, or for that matter the Economic Literature. Neither of them tell the right story.
Fast Eddy: I defer to the superior wisdom of the Gods of Doom, and I hereby renounce my heretofore misguided acceptance of glo…bal…war…mi…ng.
As I am currently I china I would ask that you follow local etiquette and
http://www.chinasage.info/imgs/KowTow.jpg
Ho – le – f789
Gail: “You have a definite gullible streak!”
Time will tell. We’ll revisit the topic every year or two and see what develops. I am prepared to be proved wrong. Are you?
Historically, it has been the China bears who have displayed the poor judgement. For over a quarter-century, MSM calls for a Chinese “hard landing” have landed hard on the shores of reality…
1990. The Economist. China’s economy has come to a halt.
1996. The Economist. China’s economy to face hard landing
1998. The Economist: China’s economy: dangerous period, sluggish
1999. Bank of Canada: hard landing for the Chinese economy.
2000. Chicago Tribune: China move nails hard landing coffin.
2001. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas: A hard landing in China.
2002. Westchester Univ: China Seeks a Soft Economic Landing
2003. KWR International: How to find a soft landing for China
2004. The Economist: The great fall of China?
2005. Nouriel Roubini: The Risk of a Hard Landing in China
2006. International Econ: Can China Achieve a Soft Landing?
2007. TIME: Can China avoid a hard landing?
2008. Forbes: Hard Landing In China?
2009. Fortune: China’s hard landing.
2010: Nouriel Roubini: Hard landing coming in China.
2011: Business Insider: A Chinese Hard Landing: Close
2012: American Interest: China: A Hard Landing
2013: Zero Hedge: A Hard Landing In China
2014. CNBC: A hard landing in China.
2015. Forbes: You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing
2016. The Economist: Hard landing looms for China
China’s problem is real resources. Definitely not financial.
I would disagree. Financial is the flip side of real resources. They go together. You cannot have one without the other. The amount of debt determines how high the price a commodity will be, and thus the amount of a resource that can be extracted.
When a lot of debt is added, it looks like the economy can grow forever. But when the slowdown comes, debt becomes more and more unpayable. The government may find it impossible to agree on a budget for the next year. Banks start failing. The government finds it difficult to provide promised benefits (pensions and healthcare for the elderly, plus unemployment insurance.
Gail: “A large part of the cost is buried in subsidies.”
Yes, and it is unfortunate that the subsidies are not much larger, to compensate for the much larger subsidies of fossil and nuclear. Renewables are swimming upstream, against a disadvantage in terms of net subsidies — but they are winning, anyway.
“Adding intermittent renewables tends to drive other electricity producers (needed for backup generation) out of business. It is by no means a sustainable pattern. Read for example, https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/05/05/why-we-should-be-concerned-about-low-oil-prices/”
Interesting post. Key phrase: “collapse comes because wages of non-elite workers fall too low”. There might be something to that. The stresses of inequality contribute to impel us toward collapse. This is much more acute in the West than in China, however, where non-elite share of wealth has increased continuously (whereas here, it has stagnated or fallen since the mid-70s). I indicated in an earlier post my pessimism about the West in general and U.S. in particular, which really is vulnerable to collapse. The rest of the world, not so much.
You mention the problem of “driving out energy producers needed for backup”, and cite emergent problems in Australia. That’s amazing. Even with massive subsidies, the conventional energy producers can’t keep the doors open once they have a bit of competition! Maybe it is time to kick them off the gravy-train and go all-renewable.
http://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-intermittent-renewables-will-work-13210 — “we found that the total annualised cost (including capital, operation, maintenance and fuel where relevant) of the least-cost renewable energy system is $7-10 billion per year higher than that of the “efficient” fossil scenario. For comparison, the subsidies to the production and use of all fossil fuels in Australia are at least $10 billion per year. So, if governments shifted the fossil subsidies to renewable electricity, we could easily pay for the latter’s additional costs.”
………………….
Regarding renewables intermittency: This is not a problem, or not much of one. It is a “problem” mostly in the minds of those who have not spent much time reading and digesting the relevant facts.
Here’s a few thoughts and links for starters (incomplete list):
— First, see here: Amory Lovins on intermittency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sOtrGkNLIw
Solar power’s rapid growth and the myth of storage
“breakthrough in storage technology: helpful, but not vital”
— Next, consider that wind and solar are complementary. Wind is strongest during the times of day, and times of year, when solar is weakest, and vice versa. Intermittency is half-solved by this alone, in many locations.
— Large scale storage will not be needed for some years. Wind and solar need to reach penetration of at least 40% before storage becomes a serious limitation; we’re a long way away from that. Still plenty of low-hanging fruit.
— Pumped hydro, in use for a century, is practical and viable, easy to scale up if need be (if battery and other technologies do not supplant the need for it in whole or part)
— Even if pumped hydro did not exist, and even if battery and other technology stalled right now and did not budge ever again, and even if the “choreography” described by Lovins (above) were not viable — three insanely-pessimistic assumptions — the energy from renewables has numerous critical applications unaffected by intermittency. Energy-intensive manufacturing and syntheses, for example, such as hydrogen and synfuels, aluminum, silicon, etc. Solar PV production itself, as well as battery production, are energy-intensive and can well utilize energy regardless of when generated. (Note that using PV power to produce PVs will accelerate the collapse of prices for PVs; there will probably come a point, within a couple or three decades, when PV power is essentially free, as Kurzweil has predicted.) Also desalination, formerly limited by energy cost, will become trivially cheap; this is an extremely important application for reasons it should not be necessary to list. Further important applications for surplus energy will also be readily found, e.g. grow lights for greenhouse agriculture, and for heated aquaculture — the latter being vastly more efficient than terrestrial animal production.
— Longer-term — out past a decade — the move to electric vehicles will have a huge impact, since they are vastly more efficient than fossil-fueled vehicles and coal-burning plants, which release as much as ~80% of energy as waste heat. The extreme efficiency of EVs will reduce net energy demand, or at the very least stabilize it, while cutting deeply into fossil fuel demand. So, in other words, instead of renewables running to catch up with a runaway train, it will be more like jogging to catch up with a stalled train, or perhaps even one moving backwards. This is especially true in light of the other factors mentioned above, particularly regarding “other critical applications”.
………………………
Also, while you’re enjoying Amory Lovins on youtube, do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sOtrGkNLIw
40 years of fossil fuel consequences
at 1:20: “in the eight years starting 1977, the U.S. economy grew 27%, our oil use fell 17%, our oil imports fell by half, and our imports from the Persian gulf fell by 87%.” Dramatic decoupling, brought to an end by benighted “leadership” (Reagan).
‘This is not a problem, or not much of one. It is a “problem” mostly in the minds of those who have not spent much time reading and digesting the relevant facts.’
Germany’s Expensive Gamble on Renewable Energy : Germany’s electricity prices soar to more than double that of the USA because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind does not blow they have to operate and pay for a completely separate back up system that is fueled by lignite coal http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-expensive-gamble-on-renewable-energy-1409106602
Why Germany’s nuclear phaseout is leading to more coal burning
Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany’s existing solar panels and wind turbines combined. Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. At best you could call the recent developments in Germany’s electricity sector contradictory. https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-germanys-nuclear-phaseout-is-leading-to-more-coal-burning/
Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables
Even as Germany adds lots of wind and solar power to the electric grid, the country’s carbon emissions are rising. Will the rest of the world learn from its lesson? After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/euan-mearns-europe-electric-price.png
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
“To provide most of our power through renewables would take hundreds of times the amount of rare earth metals that we are mining today,” according to Thomas Graedel at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. So renewable energy resources like windmills and solar PV can not ever replace fossil fuels, there’s not enough of many essential minerals to scale this technology up. http://energyskeptic.com/2014/high-tech-cannot-last-rare-earth-metals/
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/
Alan – I have given you the facts — I have a policy of doing this once — and only once.
If you continue to ignore the facts —- they I will respond with juvenile mockery. Because when dealing with people who ignore facts and logic — this is really the only way to get their attention
WHOOPS! sorry. I gave the wrong link on the first video, which was supposed to be Lovins on intermittency. Here is the correct link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF9H7aIYAzE
…………………………..
That’s all for now!
I’ll stop in around 2019. We’ll see how it is going — see which predictions are most closely matching reality. It should be fun and interesting and full of surprises!
Alan
Lovins makes his money by saying things that people like to hear about renewables. If you want to believe it, that is your business. I wouldn’t. I didn’t listen to much of the video. I would be willing to bet he doesn’t say a single word about the way wind and solar distort prices for backup electricity generators, driving them out of the market, if intermittent electricity is put on the grid, and priced based on marginal costs.
I agree with Gail, my thinking is that it will happen in a window from October till February. The
Federal Government and the banking system have many tricks to keep BAU going, but the weak spot in the extend and pretend scheme has always been state and local governments. That is why real estate and stock prices have been propped up to keep the tax revenues flowing to the local coffers. One by one the things the Fed Can no longer control keep adding up and piling on to local economies and governments ,so even stock prices and easy money can’t mask things. Failing brick and morter retail, the bursting subprime auto market, a commercial real estate glut, falling restaurant sales, and a moribund job market are taking their toll. I think it will only take one more little push for the house of cards to fall. Will it be failure to raise the debt ceiling? The Italian banking system? a hot war between Qatar and Saudi? I think we are only one of Jim Kunstlers Technicolor Swans away.
Exactly at one point what is happening in the real world will overtake what is happening in the virtual world….papering over what is happening in the real world was always going to be a losing proposition…collapse is awaiting it’s grand and final entrance…
Jim Kunstler wrote in his last blog post.. it all goes down later this year.. and as the JIT economy goes, no more food in the supermarkets..
Guess Jim has been lurking on OFW
Wow I did not know that as I stopped reading him a while back…was he talking about total and utter collapse, or some BAU Lite replacing BAU, like his fiction novels?
This all does look imminent..I have an uneasy feeling that I never had before since I discovered a few years ago that we we’re toast (as it was always a few years away) as there does not seem to be a lot of options left…the collapse will be absolutely horrible..There is no collapse or horror movie ever produced that has even come close to imagining what the collapse of BAU might look like…
This time he wrote it like it will be.. “its all drawing to a close”.. in his words..
But if the plunge protection team wants to postpone the collapse, they can still kick the can a bit furter. Probably
Nothing would make me happier VK 🙂
I also think that collapse will happen later this year. Oil price is too low, and it will only go lower.
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“As nearly as I can tell, one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the Soviet Union was low oil prices.” Those low oil prices were the result of an intentional policy by the Reagan administration. They pointed to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and talked the Saudis into pumping a lot of oil, lowering the price to hurt the Soviets. See: Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Peter Schweizer.
Sound reasonable to this lay person. “Self organizing system” doesn’t mean that human behavior–wise or foolish–doesn’t affect how the system “self” organizes. Everyone is part of the ever self organizing whole, I’d expect.
While increase in energy had slowed, it seems 1974 was peak consumption:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/per-capita-energy-consumption-countries.png
(in the us)
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Kemp: US Shale Producers Are Drilling Themselves into a Hole
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?hpf=1&a_id=150843
According to Harold Hamm,
“Many shale drillers claim they can drill wells profitability even with benchmark WTI prices below $50 as a result of significant cost reductions and improvements in efficiency. But most shale firms were still losing money or at best breaking even in the first quarter of 2017, even before the renewed slump in prices.”
I agree–there is a problem. And the threshold for making money is awfully low. If they are to continue in business, they have to keep reinvesting. They need to pay dividends on their stock. These have to come from profits.
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None of us reading this are going to live to see another financial crisis like 2008.
We will just have steady inflation, capital controls, etc.
Here we see an extreme case of the DelusiSTANI disease….
Wow i hope you are correct, but I suspect you are not.
We all see different factors dominating this descent I guess, and with so many possible flight paths, the final impact and/or landing site is still unknown. Keep up the challenge to the narrative though because it adds to the conversation/energy of the participants here!
Tell us your plan to continue BAU status. I want to know the path for to be honest, I don’t see many. Maybe some kind of partial depopulation / epidemic / wars or by other means and at the same time keeping more and more invigilation / control / militarization of western societies – let’s call it “1984”.
Unless you see miraculous energy revolution quite soon…?
One interesting side note a propos 1984 by Orwell. The book was republished 1984 – most of us probably remember these dreadful times on both sides of Iron Curtain – and the advertising slogan on the back cover was: “maybe not 1984, but there is always 1985”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donald-trump.html
This might sound evil, but I can’t wait for the day when all those smug-ass idiots with their ‘guaranteed’ pensions realize the game is up.
In the recent past:
Me: you do realize where all this is heading?
Them: But my husband has a guaranteed pension!
Soon;
Them: But it is a guaranteed pension, right?
Other them: Yes, and it is still guaranteed, but instead of $15,000/month we can currently only pay $10.
Later:
Them: Hello. Hello. I need some information on my husband’s pension…
Other them: We’re sorry, but the number you have dialed is no longer available..
I have read about the 200k pensions….. and yes… it would be nice to see some of these scum bags eating cat food….
That scenario is only going to happen when the grid goes down. Banking will be kaput.
You have a definite point.
It is mostly older people who have “defined benefit pension plans.” These pension plans have become very much less common in recent years, after actuaries began to figure out how expensive it really was going to be to fund the programs. (Actually, they probably still greatly underestimated the full cost.) It seems like government-related organizations and unions were the only ones to keep “defined benefit plans” in the US.
Instead of getting these supposedly guaranteed pensions, younger workers in the US were forced to go to 401K plans, which are basically tax sheltered plans, based on how much has been contributed to them, and how the securities in them have grown with interest and dividends. The employer may make some contribution, but generally most of the funds come from the employee.
Young people have been having a problem with low wages in recent years. Adding the fact that they don’t have pensions, but many recent retirees do, creates for bad feelings. Retirees generally get the pension plans in addition to Social Security. With this combination, they can often outspend those who have only started out in the work force. It really isn’t fair.
Gail
An interesting essay on the Solari blog- either we enforce the US Constitution or you might as well kiss your money goodbye? https://solari.com/blog/
Wow, I find it hard to believe though that’s it really as simple for Catherine and Congresswoman McKinney as enforcing the Constitution alone? O what one has to wonder would Congresswoman McKinney have to say about a coming oil crash or peak oil in general? Is it just about greed all of the theft and murders over the last 25 years or is it about survival for those few who really see the writing on the wall?
Looking at Katherine Austin Fitts’ latest blog, her major point seems to be shown in this paragraph:
“Now we have reached a fork in the road. We can continue to become an inhuman society in which the law no longer respects or protects the average person and his or her property, or we can try to remain a human society, in which the rule of law protects one and all – including the people in the developing world who have been the target for much longer of the disaster capitalism and lawlessness attacking US and European communities.”
We no longer are creating enough goods and services to truly “go around.” Thus, someone has to be left out. The ones who tend to be left out are at the bottom of the economic ladders. So I really don’t agree with Fitts.
“We no longer are creating enough goods and services to truly “go around.” ”
It is hard to square that with the reality of capitalism’s overproduction of everything, over-full warehouses and vast inventories of un-sold everything from common retail consumer goods to automobiles to commodities to you name it. The problem is not lack of stuff to go around; there’s mountains of everything. The problem, as you said in the OP, is affordability: “affordability is the key issue” — GT.
PS: Affordability, and also creeping dematerialization (as per previous post of mine: getting more and more human needs met using less and less physical stuff).
We will dematerialize until living in a wardrobe, eating microwave food and watching Netflix. And then dematerialize some more.
We dematerialize in the USA as we consume 20 million barrels of petroleum products per day
Not quite 20 million barrels per day anymore…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Dependence_on_imports_1949-2011.jpg
… which is a good thing. Our actual NEED is for some modest fraction of current use. Here’s hoping the descent (this aspect of dematerialization) continues apace, AND that, simultaneously, a social justice-oriented political action can correct or at least ameliorate the “affordability” problem (income and wealth distribution problem) that our host wisely emphasized.
Perhaps I should say, “Sufficient wages are not available to buy all of the goods and services that are being created.” There are a lot of people with money in investments, who plan to let the investments sit there. There are also people with very high wages, who do not use all of their wages to buy goods–some of the income gets put away into 401K plans. When income gets spent, it gets spend on services, like private college tuition. The problem is the non-elite workers don’t have enough wages to buy the goods that we can make. Getting more income to these people would help keep demand up.
Akbar wants to go skiing in Queenstown for a month
Fast Eddy wants to going skiing in Queenstown for a month
Only one of us can go.
Too bad for Akbar – his team lost. Fast Eddy’s team won.
If he makes a fuss — send him a copy of this with my autograph on it… (and tell him his tshirt is in the post)
http://defense-update.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/F35_SOM-J800.jpg
I agree with kurts above comment. I do not think the system will collapse until around 2018-2020 as well. The reason is there are just to many ways to manipulate the markets and the public via the media. Let’s Hope Gail’s predictions are self denying.
Collapse will probably be in Northern hemisphere winter because crowd/population control is likely easier in winter…?
In Britain, the large violent gangs of gypsie’ (‘travellers’) go on their tour from May to October, when they ship the loot back to Ireland.
So, to some extent, that is weather-sensitive: a kind of summer working holiday!
There is an unofficial monitoring system in place in the countryside, as the police are too political now to do anything much about them – ‘gypsies’ have the right to travel and camp…. Otherwise it would be easy to close them down: confiscate their vehicles and give them a good beating when they show their faces, they would soon learn.
The danger season for riots in the inner-city is of course the summer: but in Britain, the weather is on our side there. 🙂
Xabier, the gypsies even make it out here to Islay for a spot of coursing and poaching over the summer.
The conditions are clearly in place for another crash. To see why, we need to distinguish, as I do, between an energy-based “real” economy, and a “financial” economy of money and credit. It is clear that the latter consists of nothing more than “claims” on the former. So, if the gap between these becomes over-extended, some “excess claims” have to be destroyed = a financial crash. These “excess claims” are not simply debt – which we can inflate away, a.k.a. “soft default” – but pension and welfare deficits, and these, too, are ballooning. The gap has become unsustainable.
What we need to identify as well, though, is a catalyst. My analysis shows that the economy of the UK is now in the process of disintegration – debt addiction, serious current account and fiscal imbalances, real wages falling since 2009, inflation rising, growth now minimal, political paralysis, etc etc etc.. This implies an FX crisis. Could this be the catalyst?
The Foreign Exchange rate market for the U.K. U.K. is certainly a place the crisis could start. Derivative markets are closely related. They also could cause an international crisis.
There are clearly many other problems that could start a downward spiral. In the United States, the immediate problem relates to the inability of Congress to pass a budget that is acceptable to enough legislators to pass. In fact, there may even be a problem with even passing a continuing spending resolution. Related to this is a problem raising debt limits. Because of these issues, there is a possibility that we will not be able to pay our bills by the end of October. I am not up to date regarding all of the details, but the inability to get agreement on a substitute for The Affordable Care Act is related to this problem.
Italy also looking like a possible candidate. Interesting to see what happens with the election there…
And then the plunge protection team steps in..
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalbanking140.htm
Inner-club members:
The Fed
The Swiss National Bank
The Bank of Italy
The Bank of Japan
The Bank of England
The inner-club members share a strong preference for pragmatism and flexibility over any ideology, whether that of Lord Keynes or Milton Friedman.
The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments.
A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.
Rather than resorting to rhetoric and invoking principles, the inner club seeks any remedy that will relieve a crisis.
I agree with you about Italy. If Italy votes to leave the EU, I am afraid the EU will head in the direction of dissolving.
with insufficient indigenous energy, Italy must leave the EU.
When every country was buzzing with prosperity, one way or another, the EU worked fine, no energy is getting too expensive to burn to make jobs, is is collapsing
The EU is clearly a failed experiment, ruined by neo-liberal policies. It just clings on for now, but it has too many wounds[self inflicted] to live much longer
If something cannot go on for ever, it will stop….
Something important is going to stop very soon — the Illinois situation also looks very ominous….. even if the state gets some sort of bailout the public is going to see the writing on the wall and that will wreck whatever fragile confidence remains…. everyone will be thinking ‘are we next’
Of course every state will be bailed out by the printing press of D.C./FED and no one will care. I don’t.
There are an awfully lot of pension funds around the nation that need bailing out. It is my impression that some of them are direct obligations of states. Others are guaranteed by the Federal Benefit Guaranty Corporation. https://www.pbgc.gov The FBCG has virtually no money. If the federal government bails all of these out, it would most likely end up with a huge amount more in debt–something that our debt limit does not permit.
After thinking about the situation, I think one likely catalyst is the decision by the US and the EU to start selling securities bought in QE. This is likely to send interest rates up–particularly long term interest rates, not just the short term interest rates that central banks normally try to manipulate. Once long term interest rates go up, the economy will “tank.” In fact, the 2008 crisis seems to have been started by the Federal Reserve trying to raise short term interest rates, in an attempt to put an end to the rise in food and energy prices taking place in the early 2000’s. (Read my article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.) The central bankers have no idea what a problem rising interest rates are.
I don’t think that there is a difference between the energy-based economy and the financial economy. Unfortunately, they are like two sides of a record. The financial system determines the “price” of resources in the energy-based economy. There is a limit to how much this price can be manipulated upward, through rising debt. The problem is that prices must be acceptable to both energy producers and consumers.
It is very easy to be misled by EROEI calculations. These do not distinguish energy quality–using a high quality energy to extract a low quality fuel is no different from the reverse. EROEI calculations also do not reflect timing, and thus interest needs (or other cost of capital). They certainly don’t tell you which fuel is peaking first. Coal peaked first; not oil. We have a huge amount of misinformation being passed around as “fact.” Be very careful in reading peer reviewed literature.
Thanks Gail for another great article. I’m still leaning towards summer of 2020 because of global factors involving the collapse of the oil exporters. However, seeing Illinois, Maine, Connecticut, and New Jersey struggling is interesting and does point to a possible earlier collapse date. I don’t think a couple of months is realistic though.
Even if we take the first steps toward collapse later this year, I could imagine the actual collapse extending over a few years. We really don’t know how this all works out. Perhaps we lose a few countries first, and some other countries later, for example.
I’m currently reading chapter 5 of The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is an analysis of three different civilizational collapses.
The collapse of the Roman Empire took over three hundred years, punctuated by many “mini collapses” along the way. There were over 50 emperors in one 50-year period! In the third century AD, there was a period of near-collapse, followed by re-organization and restructuring and partial recovery. During that crisis, record-keeping fell apart, and there is little documentation until things picked up in the fourth century. The currency was continually debased, until what started out as a pure silver coin had less than 5% silver.
But as Tainter points out, each mini-collapse resulted in more complexity, which sowed the seeds of the next mini-collapse. To better manage things, they split into East an West, each with their own bureaucracy, and then doubled-up on the number of emperors on each side!
Tainter points out that farm labour was a major problem, mostly because excessive taxation sapped farm output to the point where it could no longer support those working it. Land became fallow, further reducing tax income and causing taxes to go up on neighbouring farmland. Military spending shot through the roof, while taxes shifted from the wealthy to the middle class, which subsequently disappeared, leaving only lords and serfs.
Of course, every collapse situation is different, and I don’t claim Rome as evidence that our collapse will be long and prolonged. I certainly don’t see a 300-year collapse, but split the difference, and consider that we could still be “kicking the can” for another 150 years or so.
I know, everyone’s gonna die fairly soon, and then it will collapse. Tainter points out that plagues, malnutrition, and net emigration had reduced the population of the Roman Empire by perhaps as much as 50% a hundred years before it finally fell apart. So don’t count on the non-survival of the least-fit as an indicator that collapse is imminent.
I think the “collapseniks” under-estimate the powerful drive to keep civilization humming. According to Ugo Bardi, Italy is consuming half the petroleum they were at their peak consumption, and it isn’t quite collapsing in a dramatic fashion yet.
It seems to me that collapse will be uneven and not too dramatic. History may well point to the 2008 event as one of the first mini-collapses, and yet, most people I talk to don’t give it much thought — 2008 is already too far away in the public memory!
It’s going to be “boiling frogs,” folks, not “Mad Max.”
the difference between roman times and our times, is that our ”collapse situation” will be truly global, whereas as the romans were limited in their complexity, and their global awareness. Collapse of the Roman empire meant nothing to the chinese or the Inca.
Constanttinople split from rome, and lasted another 700 years, mainly because their prime energy resources were muscle and sail.—which could be utilised anywhere on any scale to ensure survival.
Case in point, the people who became the venetians, escaped to their lagoon to hide from the barbarians—who left them alone because it wasn’t worth the hassle to do anything else. The venetians then grew to one of the most powerful states in the world—but still only used the resource of muscle and sail..
Now we do not possess the means to sustain our society without oil input. You cannot have a population of 7.5 bn and feed them with horse ploughs and sailing ships.
Therefore post oil, our numbers must retract to the level that we can sustain by oil less methods.
Norman-
Nobody puts it better than you. The loss of domestic animals seems to me to be one of the biggest threats to human survival.
All the genetics that took centuries to build hang by a string right now. These animals made our population far higher than it would have been.
So, which ones are you working with?
I must admit, I’m not big into preserving heritage genetic lines. Our goats are all crosses, which seem to often have the best characteristics of both breeds. I played with line breeding, but had a lot of reduced vigor. Nothing serious like birth defects, they just didn’t live as long as my genetically-diverse goats. I’m really liking Saanen-Nubian-Lamancha crosses right now: the volume of the Saanens, the butterfat of the Lamanchas, and the Nubian build and disposition.
I guess I really breed for disposition. I get rid of the crabby goats, no matter how well they produce, and keep the sweet ones. Life is too short for crabby goats.
Our chickens, ducks, and geese are also all mongrels. This year, we’ve been challenged by Darwinian selection. The chickens with Americana/Arucana blood seem to avoid the eagles the best. We’ll hatch their eggs next year.
I quite agree with you about this, Joe. From the standpoint of the desirability of preserving the genetic diversity of domestic/farm animals and plants, industrialized farming has been a dismal failure. A slow collapse that sent more people back to the land might reverse the situation or at least stop the rot; but a fast collapse would make it difficult to save anything from going into the pot.
thanks
problem with domestic work-animals is that they require feed-acreage—something like 2 acres to feed a good plough horse I think. (not an expert there)–draught animals could only take world population so far, before oil took over.
Worldspace is finite, so as humans grew, animal space shrank. We no longer have the spare acreage to feed work animals, and in any event they couldn’t deliver the physical power to support the food intake requirements for 7.5bn people.
This is where the screaming point kicks in, with the downsizers who insist we can all become peasant farmers and cottage gardeners in a downsized society.
The old germanic word “morgen” for ”morning’ was synonymous with the area of land that could be ploughed in a ”morning”.. before the ox team was exhausted (about 2 acres I believe)
Tractors don’t get tired.
I don’t know of anybody who claims “we can all [emphasis mine] become peasant farmers.”
What I claim is that it may come to a choice between being a “peasant farmer” and starvation. Many will be unable or unwilling to make that choice.
By the late third century AD, the Roman Empire had lost between 1/3rd and 1/2 of its inhabitants. As it was then, I expect many (including many on this list) will be unprepared to feed themselves, which will free up resources for those who are preparing. In advance, I thank you! 🙂
if survivors are peasant farmers, and everyone else is dead, that makes us all peasant farmers.
But on a more serious note, over on Resilience for example, Heinberg gives the impression that we’ll all ”downsize” into another lifestyle. (though with electric cars, which I can’t figure out).
That lifestyle can only be self subsistence.
Exactly how is anybody’s guess.
Norman—the Eastern Roman Empire didn’t totally disappear for over a thousand years after the split, and even then it was a passage from one civilization to another. They spent ages and ages declining and falling and only went under when the Ottomans with their long couches moved into Constantinople in 1453. The city had been sacked and sieged a few times prior to that, but the Humpreys and Bernards of the Byzantine bureaucracy kept the Empire running the whole time.
Jan-
I have pigs and chickens but I buy feed so as soon as things go down they are done.
I’m doing my thing as much as possible here but as far as raising animals I’m toast.
I might try rabbits though.
Depending on how much and what kind of property you have, pigs and chickens can get by on forage.
Of course, yield will go down without grain, but some is better than none, no?
Italy does seem to have quite a problem with failing banks, however.
Yea, the more I read about Italy, the more I regret writing “it isn’t quite collapsing in a dramatic fashion yet.” I guess I could hide behind the qualifier “in a dramatic fashion.”
It does seem to me that with Brexit, Russian natgas belligerence, and the continuing PIIGS crisis, Europe is at the forefront of the looming global collapse — at least among industrial nations.
Please explain what “Russian Nathan’s belligerence” is. Do you work for MSM?
I don’t know who “Nathan” is, but Russia has been using natgas as a political tool with Europe for the past couple winters, the last time, threatening to cut off Europe’s winter heat if the EU backed Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Don’t be silly.
Is that the best you got, to accuse anyone you don’t agree with of working for the MSM? Give us some references, some framework, some evidence, to show that Russia was not threatening Europe with curtailing their winter heating fuel.
What about the plant for dealing with the radiation from the Japanese spent fuel ponds?
If you are going to convince people to convert to The Permie Life — you need to answer this.
Japan has 54 nuclear power plants — I understand that these plants generally have more than one spent fuel pond – you are downwind and down water from what will be a Holocaust.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery/map-reveals-status-of-japans-54-nuclear-reactors/
Dammed spellcheck…Natgas
You are obviously misinformed about Russian aggression I Ukraine. You must at least watch or listen to MSM. Let me guess…you are an NPR fan.
Whenever someone states that Russia is the trouble maker in Ukraine — I IMMEDIATELY dismiss that person as a DelusiSTANI.
If an issue so simple as that befuddles them … then imagine how lost they are when it comes to complex issues….
CNN! CNN! CNN!
Neo-Post-Recession? New-Public-Relations? No-Pot-Resmoked?
I don’t know what an “NPR” is.
Jan – you have mentioned the upcoming Great Adventure in the past (i.e. the post BAU world)
What I am wondering — is if you think it will be such a Great Adventure — then why don’t you start the adventure now?
Get rid of your tractor — and your EV — stop buying anything at the shops and live off the land now. No more petrol – no more medicine – no more doctors — no more electricity.
Since you despise BAU so much — divorce her now. Kick her ass out the door — and throw all her clothes into the street….
And get going on the Great Adventure!
Could it be that deep down that in spite of her ugliness… her meanness … her boastfulness… you love your BAU? But you are unwilling to admit it? And you know that when she is gone you will miss her dearly?
http://theboar.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/the-road.jpg
It is “National Public Radio.” It plays a lot of classical music, and has some (often sort of biased) news stories, telling how BAU will continue forever. It is partly government funded.
I haven’t talked to any NPR reporters recently. Back in Oil Drum days, I ran into several NPR reporters. My earliest involvement with NPR seems to have been in 2008. I did an interview with Planet Money back then, talking about what effect a major recession would have on climate change gases.
Jan, I am glad you are back. I enjoy your posts.
Thanks, Ed. I don’t really have time for this, though!
Look… it’s a DelusiSTANI reunion!
Let’s break out the organic oatmeal… plug in the EVs and put on some Baez man…
‘we could still be “kicking the can” for another 150 years or so’
I can imagine you are hoping that is the case — because you know that fast collapse means you die…. you do fear those spent fuel ponds… and the hordes at the gate….
So you force yourself to believe in slow collapse.
“In Slide 2, I illustrate the economy as hollow because we keep adding new layers of the economy on top of the old layers.”
So the economy is like this hollow, old tree: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prague_Praha_2014_Holmstad_old_tree_karlsplassen_Nove_Mesto.jpg
Gail, it’s an interesting article, thanks.
But you might do certainly better by avoiding those minor to the thesis, yet very visible flagrant errors. For instance, nowadays Russian space-tech is supplying rocket engines for NASA, and thanks to its lift capability and proficiency in the sector is the major partner in keeping the Int Space station running (serviced) in the Earth’s Orbit. I’ve already mentioned numerous times their advanced nuclear energy sector in comparison to failed and or failing ones (e.g. US/FR/UK/..) etc.
1990s correction or not, it’s simply a system with different priorities how to distribute and manage resources, prioritize tech development. Which all tends to materialize in uneven development of infrastructure due to peculiar historic and legacy reasons. So, for instance I’d rather have serious car accident in remote EU village than in rural Russia, the chances I’d get into top hospital in European context are simply higher, not only for geographic proximity factor. And so on..
As far as I am concerned, the world race to space has collapsed. How many people have explored the moon? How about Mars? Russia is admittedly playing a significant role in a very scaled back world approach to space. I stand by what I said.
“While the Soviet Union had been a major manufacturer and a leader in space technology, it lost those roles and never regained them”
I’m sorry to read you can’t admit the above is grossly inaccurate statement in the context of comparatively stalled or actually falling space efforts in the US/EU/..
Gail: see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_space_program
Manned exploration of Mars is on the docket, but not for another couple decades.
Many of the dates has already passed, should be easy, for anybody who cares, to evaluate whether they are on track.
… or simply assume that if the tense is past, then Wikipedia has probably vetted the fact satisfactorily; e.g.:
“Chinese Lunar Exploration Program
First phase lunar program (嫦娥-1 工程)—launched in 2007…
Second phase lunar program (嫦娥-2 工程)—launched in 2013…
Chinese exploration of Mars
The Yinghuo-1 orbiter was launched in November 2011…”
etc.
Going forward: the Chinese tend to be conservative with their projections and promises, often exceeding them.
Especially regarding air pollution. 🙂
A lot of things can happen in a couple of decades–some of them worrisome. I understand Elon Musk is planning a shorter timetable. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/17/elon-musk-is-rushing-to-beat-nasa-to-mars-perhaps-during-trump-presidency.html
According to the linked article:
Alan – you believe just about anything — if it is printed by the MSM….
Most of us here work off the understanding that if it is printed in the MSM it is usually a lie.
Yes, low oil prices are worse than peak oil because no PO scenario had such a sharp drop.
But the root cause of it all was the oil price shock in 2008 which was around the time of the conventional oil peak – although the trigger was an extra oil demand for the Olympic Games.
The system then went into overshoot mode – money printing and unconventional tight oil which filled up US inventories – contributing to the oil price drop
8/10/2016
U.S. Storage Filling Up with Unaccounted-For Oil
http://crudeoilpeak.info/u-s-storage-filling-up-with-unaccounted-for-oil
The Middle East may soon implode. On this page
http://crudeoilpeak.info/opec-paper-barrels
I have a graph from the recently published OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin showing by how much the value of petroleum exports has dropped
That is a very nice chart showing the fall in the value of OPEC petroleum exports. I will make note of it.
http://crudeoilpeak.info/wp-content/uploads/OPEC_export_value_1970-2016-1024×495.jpg
The economies collapse, because they can not add new cheap energy of higher quantity or quality to fight the complexity issues connected with the growing population and its genetic deterioration with saving every child or elderly with their accumulating defects.
With the ageing and health deteriorating populations, we need more special extracts and compounds for keeping the population physically and mentally o.k. These extraction and mixing processes require a lot of energy. And, in my opinion, the deterioration of the populations is the main reason why we need either more amount or higher quality of the energy, like after the coal and oil, nuclear had to be added, as the energy of higher quality than coal, oil and water based power plants produce, as logistics of nucelar energy is simple and it is less prone to the situations like lack of cheap miners for coal or the drought in case of hydro. The addition of wind and solar brings no quality addition, it is totally useless, because quality solar and wind energy requires the energy from coal, oil, hydro and nuclear. There are immense amounts of wind and solar around us, but storing and directing this energy is not easy and makes these types of energy costly.
That is why the collapse of the so called highly developed civilizations or countries (i.e. the populations with the high use of energy) is in fact the collapse of the aged and genetically deteriorated populations.
Unfortunately, fairly true. If nothing else, we have moved to parts of the world where we are not genetically adapted. I should live in a more northern latitude, for example.
Atlanta will go back to becoming a agricultural backwater, like in its past history.
I doubt if the population will be above 50,000.
(I like Atlanta- I had a gig there last Sumner and Fall, and enjoyed the people and the culture)
Wind and solar are expensive ways of partially upgrading solar energy in a way that makes it useful. The first part of upgrading is fairly inexpensive, but adjusting for intermittency and other problems is horribly expensive. Too many people have overlooked differences in energy quality.
Some on the ground comments from S. Australia.
“Update…..in response to the in your face evidence that shows we (SA) will have state wide blackouts this summer the incompetent state government have ordered 200MW of diesel generation to be brought in at a cost of $100 odd million (oz dollars).
To think they could have spent 8 million a year to keep playford (540MW) granted this was dearer then the purchase price of the dynamite they used to blow it up.”
Another…
“Variable power pricing means that my local coal unit (Mt Piper NSW) is often put into idle mode when cheaper power from the new Queensland gas fields is on line. It takes thousands of litres of diesel and 72 hours to do a cold start of Piper so they rarely turn it off but keep it warm while producing zero electricity. This defeats the object of the exercise if we are trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. We actually produce more CO2 but if the objective is to cripple Australian business it’s doing a fine job and this I fear, was the globalist objective from the out-set.
Au imagines that it reduces its coal consumption by some squitsy little bit and its green blob pats itself on the back but then we sell gargantuan quantities of coal and gas to Asia where they burn it and release the CO2 into the atmosphere (but that doesn’t matter apparently).
Is this mindless moronics or have I missed something ?”
Jesse-
I work in a coal fired generating station in a province that has installed a lot of wind power. We do hot standby’s and operate in SCADA mode quite a but we have managed to make it work pretty well.
No blackouts for sure but we are probably in a different situation that Au. The other night we we getting over half our power from wind and it dropped off to nothing in the morning. Because we have multiple small coal units that do not need to be base loaded we can deal with that better than the bigger units.
I’m not arguing that wind will save us but what is happening in Australia sounds more like bad planning than the fault of renewables.
200MW of diesel is very pricey power.
Residential rate for power is $0.14 cents a kw in Cad.
http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/about-us/todayspower.aspx
Everyone wants to “look good” according to some outside criterion. Being “green” has been painted as terribly important, and the way to be green is to get rid of coal. No one figures out that getting along without coal doesn’t really work, in some parts of the world. They also don’t figure out that they aren’t necessarily saving CO2, unless they succeed in putting companies out of business. Of course, without businesses, it is hard for citizens to have jobs.
Thanks for the new article
Sorry for being off topic, but I just have to recommend this TV-series to you FE. It has the same type of wacky and cynical sense of humour as you do.
4/10/2010
Russia’s oil peak and the German reunification
http://crudeoilpeak.info/russia%E2%80%99s-oil-peak-and-the-german-reunification
I think that what you are saying goes along with what I am saying. If oil prices had been higher, earlier, I expect that Russia would have made big investments in new oil fields earlier. This would have kept production high, or even raised it, preventing the collapse. Of course, these high prices would have cut back demand from consumers, so it couldn’t have happened.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881503147168071680
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-02/trump-tweets-mock-video-himself-pummeling-fraud-news-cnn-mock-wrestling-match
Thanks for the new post ! Appreciate it very much that you allow us to be here.
Some bread and CIRCUSES for all
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881503147168071680
Awesome!
Don vs HRC and Bill — pay per view
at white house
Losers get guillotined in the Rose Garden?
Eddy-
Sorry about the mix-up in the last thread.
I feel like I came across like this;-)