Comments not related to Oil or Natural Gas production in this thread please. Thank you.
189 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, Oct 12, 2023”
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Comments not related to Oil or Natural Gas production in this thread please. Thank you.
Comments are closed.
Finally, something energy related worth commenting on from my neck of the woods!
Wind, solar, hydro push
It appears that the electricity utility may have canned plans to build a new NG fueled plant at it’s Hunt’s Bay facility, outlined in red in the image below, located next door to the island’s petroleum refinery.
Carnot said:
Many people despise the petrochemical industry and those that work in it. We are victims of our own success. We have enabled a modern vibrant economy that is totally dependent on our products. The snag is no-one ever considered the end of life issue, which really has to be done at the design stage – design to recycle.
So true!
End of life for fossil fuels is CO2 and particulates and maybe carcinogens.
End of life for plastics is burning (see above) or a very low chance of being recycled.
Can’t we humans design better than this?
Carnot said:
Many people despise the petrochemical industry and those that work in it.
John Norris said:
So true!
No, not true! Having an opinion about fossil fuels and the industry does not mean “to despise.” And why would having an opinion about what’s happening in the world mean we despise those who are only trying to live out their lives as best they can. Despising those who are only following their nature, to survive in an uncertain world, is only what an ignorant person would do.
There are many members of this blog who think fossil fuels are causing climate change. But I would bet not one of them despise those who work in the industry. You’re just trying to play the victim.
There is enough hate in the world that is brought on by religions that call for the death of all infidels as well as ignorant MAGA politicians preaching their hate filled rhetoric. We don’t need to hate those who are just trying to live out their lives with as little misery as possible.
It is ignorance that causes hate. But no one should hate the ignorant. They can only follow the flawed and ignorant idealism they were indoctrinated into.
Ron, I should have been more specific:
We have enabled a modern vibrant economy that is totally dependent on our products. The snag is no-one ever considered the end of life issue, which really has to be done at the design stage – design to recycle
This I believe to be true…
Ron, Maybe you should read some of the vitriol that is aimed at me, some just by association. I have been accused, on this (your) blog, of being a lacky of the hydrocarbon industry for merely not agreeing with the wilder side of climate change. Some have insulted acquaintances of mine. I am not trying to play the victim. I do not need to do that, because for most on this blog, I know more about the hydrocarbon business than the so called (internet) experts that preach on your blog, most of whom have never worked on a drilling rig, a refinery or a steam cracker. I can tick all those boxes and I am well known in the business and speak at conferences.
I do not need to play the victim. I just wish to add balance and an ubiased opinion the the argument, which at times is frequently lacking on this blog and is marred by cognitive bias and groupthink.
Carnot, no one can blame you for working in the hydrocarbon industry. Denying climate change is another thing altogether. The two are not related whatsoever. You cannot blamed for working in the industry that gives you a living wage. I would do exactly the same if I were in your shoes. But denying the very obvious facts of climate change has nothing to do with what you do to supply a living wage for you and your family.
I once worked for the oil industry myself. I was a roustabout, for all of 30 days, in Odessia, Texas in 1959. A very short time indeed, but nevertheless I have nothing but compassion for those who still work in the industry. But all this has nothing to do with climate change. Don’t confuse the two. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. People who worked in the buggy manufacturing industry in 1900 most likely hated the idea that horses would soon be replaced by the internal combustion engine. But it happened.
No one blames you for what is happening in the fossil fuel industry or the fact of climate change. It has nothing to do with you so why on earth would one despise you for what is happening to the world’s climate. You had not a damn thing to do with it. No one despises you for climate change. You are just imagining things. Or as I called it “playing the victim.” Carnot, no one blames you for climate change. No one despises you for what is happening to the world’s climate. Get over it.
He’s got reading comprehension issues. Also, it’s hard to be credible when you argue against thermometers.
I know a lot too, from my copy of webhubbletelescope’s oil conundrum. Just noticed the original stuff was bought out and now costs money. Glad I kept my copy around.
Ron, yes, many people do despise those that work in the oil and gas industry. Part of my job in world scale liquefaction and gas tranission projects is permitting of new Capex. When you apply for FERC or PHMSA permitting it becomes a matter of public record. Many times there are public hearings prerequisite to the projects, as there should be.
The amount of public ignorance on display during many of these hearings is appaling. People perform mental gymnastics that would humble even the most seasoned Olympic gymnast. On most projects during the drive from the laydown area to the site you can expect people to flip you off, honk at you or throw rocks at your car. Yes, on any given morning on the way to work. They absolutely despise you and blame you for any given problem they’re dealing with in life. Normally on a project team we have poster boards of individuals who you need to keep a watch out for to make sure you stay safe and keep away from them. I purposely drive my shitty 20yo car most days just so the locals won’t recognize me and vandalize my car while out to eat for a dinner with my wife on any given Friday.
But they all love their lights and HVAC in July or January, and of course the local tax dollars that fund entire annual county budgets. So you just keep your head down and roll on.
I’m assuming that overbuilding solar panels is reasonable since it’s the lowest cost by current metrics.
It seems more effective than solar mirrors & wind.
And better to have alternatives in place in case of an oil crisis.
But life with less oil is not something to look forward to.
Maybe we can drill baby a bit longer.sigh.
Iron Law of Power Density which says: the lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Just to gloat a little bit, in the Nordics we´ve had negative electric prices for quite a few days the last month, even the public radio acknowledged that it was due to wind blowing and more windturbines had been errected. But we also had quite some rain in Sweden and Norway (for some strange reason…) so the hydro plants are running more or less full tilt not to overflow the dams.
So there´s possibilities for others to take advantage of the development.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/#/nordic/table
If you have negative price of electricity then use it to make carbon dioxide air capture and sequester it somewhere in the ground like in Iceland. Or product hydrogen with the high temperature electrolyser of GENVIA. There are some steel factories in Scandinavia which could have the need for it to produce steel with hydrogen.
Laplander
No crisis this autumn in Northern Europe so far. There is a lot of capacity built up now when it comes to interconnector lines and the (on paper unprofitable some places it seems) wind power build out. Robustness was tested last year and it seems it is a long grind towards a deteriorating situation.
In the Nordic nations there are a lot of energy resources compared to population. But we getting so many immigrants (most of them are contribute a lot) and we are also reliant on the outside world for a lot of things. It seems like Russia is the the nation with the most potential to “go alone” in the world, but the Nordic nations could in theory be a close second. (Norway only has about 3% areable land with a lot of marine potential, but still we are borderline overpopulated now with 5.5 million inhabitants. So the “open” economy is pretty much given just like in the UK).
Originally the Nordic was borderline uninhabitable. In the Viking area (about 1000 ad) there was a population of 100 000 – 150 000 in Norway and the double of that in Sweden and Denmark.
Healthy climb for CO2 as it continues its upward trajectory:
Oct. 12, 2023 = 418.93 ppm
Oct. 12, 2022 = 415.33 ppm
1 Year Change 3.60 ppm (0.87%)
Is the target still 350 ppm? I stopped paying attention to that when I realized it would never happen voluntarily.
I think this is what James Hansen said??
Has the science been updated on this?
honest question…
ANDRE THE GIANT —
Holding CO2 at no more than 430 ppm should allow the world to avoid overshooting the 1.5-degree goal. At current rates, though, that level of atmospheric carbon is just a few years away.
Thanks Doug!
And the positive feedback loops have kicked in….so there is no way that can happen without some geo engineering miracle.
I’ll go back to figuring out how to get my family thru peak oil.
Damned if we do, longer term, and damned if we don’t, shorter term. This says just about everything that can be be said about fossil fuels.
Time is short, and the odds are very much against us, but it’s at least theoretically possible to solve some of the problems associated with fossil fuels.
We are far enough along with renewable electricity and electric vehicles that we can potentially build out these industries fast enough to offset the depletion of oil and gas…… and nobody in this forum needs reminding that oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization.
All the other problems, from forced climate change on down, could be solved, at least in theory, if we were to get our collective act together.
Unfortunately the odds of that happening ” approach zero”.
OFM, you are well aware of the limited future, yet continue to hold ‘hope’. The direction we are going in is totally wrong, including investment into renewables, that all require fossil fuels for their mining, processing, manufacture and deployment.
If anyone anywhere could be bothered to show the calculations that it is possible to build renewables with electricity only, in a net energy positive way, then maybe we could start. But nobody bothers, because we just don’t have these electrical processes operating anywhere, because it’s cheaper to do it all with fossil fuels…
This bit of yours… “we can potentially build out these industries fast enough to offset the depletion of oil and gas”, ….. is the bit that is contrary. Building of renewables requires the use of MORE oil, gas and coal to build!! We rely on fossil fuels for every stage of this building!!
From a new report from the CEC here in Australia, that is all for renewable future growth, but notices the following..
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.cleanenergycouncil.org.au%2Fdocuments%2FClean-Energy-Council-Power-Playbook.pdf%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0tFIaeu03yBX3Kn3yp4ujrg7qegYlxaD_MigjbdWnjij6he6MdJZWS5WI&h=AT0GJxF1dCP2yeVWHS6zvY_ctDWopZ0Gz1m3M79gPyC1zC2qFYrB9YzuWElqPPF-oLgD3MrwRpAfxRhGTLZSu14XErO8t5V1u-SMIdcVrKsPlKabTPqs3ooWzTF48Up_8VVJ&__tn__=-UK-R&c%5B0%5D=AT3gaHpFqZkSIx9_6jSeD-oRFgwIX52gTDbR0QGvlFUh3OeYTion_H8ttUDlBrIBIRdZsW1TEOmdGaE-kpwYtVJBrMgsJJrv6Tu0ecmqK60ucfvUsXWdGQ6RJzXHBfNbLvQ_sNo467S8i9p67fS16mfUimydrK10_hy9nvdDXPtVWw8GWXHEmCA6USyEVHDvu8MzFZInDg
” the CEC is concerned that financial investment commitments and construction starts for new large-scale projects are in a state of steady decline. The 12-month rolling average for financial investment commitments is now at 40 per cent of the peak seen in the last quarter of 2018, and we have seen just ~350 MW of new large-scale generation capacity committed in the first six months of the 2023 calendar year.”
Investment into large renewable projects is clearly falling in Australia, because we built so much that wholesale prices for electricity when the sun shines and the wind blows are negative. There is no incentive to build more as it would be an economically losing proposition.
At the same time we need to keep coal and gas generators operating for when the wind doesn’t blow nor does the sun shine, and the buildout of storage is in the Mwh range by large corporations when we need it in the Gwh range to be effective. A couple of months ago we had a period in the middle of winter when the combined output of solar and wind was less than 10% for over 60 hours in a row, in a grid that needs an average of over 5,000Mw.(the local Victorian grid) The storage necessary to cover this period would have been around 300Gwh, which would cost approx $A300B!!!!
In an environment of using LESS fossil fuels for environmental reasons, and/or depletion reasons, every plan that starts or includes “we must build more…..” is a totally flawed argument. In a contraction of energy use we can only build LESS of everything, especially as we will need more energy for every mineral that is mined as the grades continue to get lower.
We live in a highly complex system where everything is related, more here means less there, or a lot of growth. More growth means using more fossil fuels as that is the history of the last 200 years. Oil is used extensively in the acquisition of coal and gas, so less oil available means less of every other type of energy. People will only realise the vast problem of overshoot we are in, when oil availability contracts with a vengeance as depletion really kicks in.
I disagree. It will take only a relatively small amount of current fossil energy consumption to build large net amount of energy production capacity from solar wind nuclear [SWN]
If we are going to burn any fossil fuel, then using it to build out a big SWN compliment is as good as a use as any.
This really comes down to a choice of allocation of financial resources in the various utility regions and industrial sectors of the world. How much funding goes to the overall energy sector, and how much goes to future oil and gas E&P, and how much goes to SWN generation build-out, and how much goes toward electrification/efficiency mechanisms?
Since depletion and global warming are the big deal, the decisions to go big and go long on SWN and efficiency isn’t as difficult as some would like to make it.
A big part of this story, as I see it, is the need to move into downsizing mode no matter what decisions are made about energy funding. Nobody in the world is ready to digest the implications of this.
I can think of several discrete reasons for being opposed to attempted energy transition away from such heavy reliance (over 80% of primary energy) on the fossil fuel sector
-your perceive your vested interest or occupation as threatened by competition or innovation
-you have partisan allegiance (Republican in the US) that has long ago picked non-fossil energy adaptation mechanisms as being the province of the other party (‘the socialists’). Its simply hard to admit being so wrong for so long on any particular issue.
-you would like to see a sudden halt to industrialized civilization that parallels fossil fuel depletion. A quick decline. You savor the onset of rapid and profound energy poverty, and all that comes from that.
-you do not accept the notion of fossil fuel depletion
-you simply are not able to imagine change. You still don’t have a computer or a cell phone. Your TV is black and white with rabbit ears.
tell me if I’m missing something here
@Hickory, yes you are missing a lot…
Take this bit of your attack on the man instead of the argument…
“you would like to see a sudden halt to industrialized civilization that parallels fossil fuel depletion. A quick decline. You savor the onset of rapid and profound energy poverty, and all that comes from that.”
No I don’t want to see that at all, but it is where we are clearly heading. SWN (nice acronym BTW) do not provide anywhere near the energy returns that have been used and touted. It’s all smoke and mirrors the studies that refer to the great returns as I’ve stated previously, keep calling out and never get proper replies about.
With the EROEI calculations that so many go by, no-one wants to show the EI bit, the energy invested bit accurately. For example a Nuclear power plant, the nuclear industry uses the energy component of making xxx tonnes of steel, yyy tonnes of concrete, zzz tonnes of aluminium etc, etc to get their 100/1 returns on energy invested.
They do not include any energy cost for the building of the factories that make all the components, nor the mines that mine all the minerals, nor the education, experience and life any of the workers inside any of the factories.
Take the say 10* nuclear physicists that might be involved in designing and running a NPP. (* I have no idea of the exact number , just an example)..
You don’t take a random 10 kids off the street and train them in nuclear physics, then let them loose to design and run a NPP. The 10 physicists probably all have doctorates in the subject, and were chosen from hundreds or thousands of university physics graduates to go further in their education. From the thousands that did university physics, they came from tens of thousands of high school physics students doing the subject physics in the first place. These tens of thousands came from hundreds of thousands of normal school kids who chose what subjects they were good at and interested in to continue their studies.
In other words it took a whole background system to get the experts needed to build and operate the NPP, and there is a steep energy cost in operating and maintaining this system. Fossil fuels have had sufficient excess energy to allow us to develop to where we are. They have allowed the modern unbelievably complex modern civilization to flourish because they provided for the entire background system to grow while taking only small amounts of the energy they produced to gain more.
There is absolutely zero evidence we can do it all with SWN. They are all just additives to the fossil fuel system. Here in Australia SW allows us to use a little less FFs and feel good about being green, but only provided China uses massive amounts of FFs to build all the machines we use. We don’t make any of it with just electricity.
So we have another reason added to the list
-SWN can’t be 100% viable as an energy replacement for fossil fuels, so why even bother to get some of the job done
I’m surprised to see you give that as your reason for be opposed to a transition attempt toward SWN. I see it pretty simply. Those energy importing regions that can get a chunk of the job done will be a lot better off, while they round the peak of population and start to head lower.
Humanity will give the effort a big push.
On your insistence about EROI, look at the 30yr price/kWh of current contracts filled by SWN projects and you get a rough guide as to net energy surplus they generate. This is not a complicated concept. Utilities of the world are rapidly adding these forms of generation. They don’t make these longterm decisions as fools. They are all making similar decisions, depending on the particulars of their geography.
I grimace at the attachment of nuclear power to the list of sustainable energy sources. I spent eight years in the nuclear energy industry in the 1970s. I look back on that experience as somewhat hallucinogenic. A lot of really smart people were doing what they were trained to do and mostly I saw really high quality work but on phrase I learned there on a small scale seemed to be the best description of the overall endeavor:
“wrong on the first page”
Two example come to mind. First was a pair of documents called Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) and Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR). These were documents required by the Nuclear Regulatory Comission (NRC, already you can see the acronyms associated with massive beaurocratic situations). Each report, in a cluster of binders, took up about three feet of shelf space and was the output of a specialized department with more than a dozen employees and, as you might imagine, lacking the prestige of the highly specialized design and analysis organizations did not employ the most highly qualified staff. The first real safety incident that the program encountered wasn’t remotely convered in either document but was fortunately resolved without catastrophe. A common joke among the design staff, of which I was part, was that we could have generated as much energy by just burning the paper created by the endeavor as we were likely to generate with the reactors. That reminds me that we had an entire building of three floors filled with drafters creating thousands of engineering drawings.
The second and more personal example involved a conversation between myself and the manager of a department called Reactor Physics, a person who I had known for some time as a highly intelligent professional and I had a great deal of respect for him. I had become concerned about the generation of nuclear waste and thought there must be some method of reducing the danger of the material before dumping it into the enviroment. His response to the concern was that as far as he knew neutralizing the radioactivity would likely demand as much energy as the reactor created but it really wasn’t his problem.
I left the business in 1979 completely disillusioned with the concept of nuclear power and nothing I have seen since has softened my opposition.
JJHman,
I share your concerns. But we don’t get a vote. It looks like the industry will get a renewed push, But it will be very slow to ramp up, and will be very expensive.
Maybe some geothermal too.
@Hickory, you just don’t get it. None of the papers ever bother to lay out in detail the energy cost of building renewables. I keep challenging people to put up any research that goes into detail about the Energy Invested bit of EROEI. no one ever does because ALL the papers showing the bright future leave out great slabs of the inputted energy.
The real EROEI numbers don’t exist, instead we have made up fantasies of papers referring to other papers that have ‘nice’ EROEI numbers, but none get into the background energy of the system that needs to keep going in a normal way.
Why attempt to do something that is non viable?? Why not work out the real prospects of something working first?? You sound like you are firmly in the camp of “something will turn up” or some uninvented technology will save us because humans are smart.
In your belief of technology, just remember that average human brain size in the modern world is about 10% smaller than the hunter gatherer homo sapiens of 100,000 years ago……
Hideaway
When you purchase a steel pipe the price includes all of the energy cost it took to mine to the iron ore, smelt the rock, manufacture, and transport the pipe. The energy cost is passed on to you the customer., Also included in the cost is all of the energy that the companies involved have paid for the energy to build and run their equipment and their factories.
The end product, whether it is steel pipe, a uranium fuel rod, a wind turbine tower, an oil tank, a solar cell, a catalytic convertor, or a cellphone, all have the embedded energy included in the price of the product. No one gives you their energy expenditure for free!
This is just flat out common sense.
ERoI across all energy production modalities ‘comes out in wash’ of price.
It is true that in sunny areas (where a big portion of the worlds population lives) the cost/kWh of photovoltaic energy has dropped low in the past 7 years. This is due in large part to mass manufacturing that has lowered the energy input required per panel.
In the end, ERoI means nothing on a practical basis. Utilities don’t sit around and bargain with suppliers over ERoI. Its price. Price per kWh on a longterm contract.
@Hickory, thanks. Finally you get to what I’ve been saying for a long time.
It’s the total capital, operating and maintenance cost that is the best indication of the total energy input. All we can use are today’s numbers. No-one in the renewable nor nuclear industry wants to use these numbers because SWN come out very poorly in a direct comparison to most fossil fuels.
What’s also forgotten by most is that Sunshine, Wind, Falling water, Coal, Gas, Oil, Waves, Underground heat are all free to humanity. We build machines to turn these energy sources into convenient energy forms and products (plastics etc).
A coal fired power plant, with the coal pit right next door is how we built the system. We can still build a 1Gw plant for around $1B that provides power 24/7 with a capacity factor of over 95% and lasts for 60 years, like those we have in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria. All the transmission lines exist as they were paid for by the long term energy surplus of prior electricity plants in the same location.
Now replicate the power output and availability by using solar and explain to me how it is cheaper, because people keep telling me it is, but are never able to show it in numbers, as in dollar cost that you have mentioned. Sunshine hours at the same location are about 4hrs/d on average throughout the year.
The coal fired power station will produce approximately 500,000,000Mwh of electricity over 60 years. Capital cost ~$A1B, operating cost around $14/Mwh.(this is what the state’s Aluminium smelter pays for uninterrupted power, and as near I could find for actual operating costs).
Building solar at the same location, where transmission lines exist would take at least 7Gw of solar (allowing for losses into and out of storage) and about a months worth of batteries 672,000Mwh… The cost of the batteries would run into hundreds of billions of dollars, the solar would cost over $7B, but no extra transmission would be needed.
Or the solar panels could be placed a couple of thousand km away, new transmission lines built, plus possibly less batteries in the sunnier location.
Please explain how this is cheaper than the coal fired power plant?? I cannot find a way that it is close.
I’m not an advocate for coal, just pointing out the realities of replacing what built the modern world around us. I’m sure that adding lots of scrubbers and CCUS could add billions to the cost of the coal power plant and make solar look better, but it means a much lower powered future compared to the past and present.
From the above at the same site, solar with batteries will cost more to operate than the simple coal plant, the batteries will have to be replaced around 4 times to make up the 60 years life of the coal plant and the original solar plant will have to be replaced once (at 30 years).
No-one wants to compare like with like. Solar is only cheaper if we only count the power when the sun shines and make no allowance for the other 80%+ of the time when power is needed.
On an EROEI basis, 2 lots of solar (7Gw to equal 1Gw of coal) and 4 lots of batteries,(672,000Mwh X 4) is so totally stupidly expensive that it would be a highly negative net energy return based on the capital, operating and maintenance costs, while coal is not that special at only around 3.75/1. (based on average oil price for 2022)..
Then what??
The full build out of renewables, including all the transmission lines and batteries for everything electric, plus green hydrogen and synthetic fuel plants for plastics etc is mind blowingly expensive and incredibly energy intensive. There may be enough fossil fuels to do it once, then what??
The world’s environment will be raped and pillaged to a much greater extent than present, climate gone wild with vast extra quantities of CO2 plus a lot of other polluting gasses, all to provide for a growing population of humans over the next 30 years, while all insects and mammals continue their rapid decline.
Then what?? are you one of those believers in “something will turn up”?? or perhaps a “technology will save us” person with blind hope that fusion will work out so we can continue to devastate the environment with heat pollution??
The plan is full steam ahead with environment destruction but calling it green by using renewables and nuclear to power the future, all without any type of plan to see if it’s possible, viable or sustainable in any way.
As I keep harping on about, we don’t have a clue if it’s possible to build any of it with just electricity, because no-one anywhere wants to do the feasibility study..
Funnily though, if a company finds a deposit of any mineral, a very robust feasibility of whether the operation is viable is always done before funding. Often there is a sequence of feasibility studies, that include environmental impact assessments as well as price projections and conservative cost and return estimates, before it gets funding from institutions or lenders to go ahead..
Yet no-one wants to do the same for the ‘renewables’ future. We are in deep, deep overshoot, with the only plan being more of the same but calling it green while we destroy the living environment around ourselves, so we can continue living an alien type lifestyle among the ruins of every other species.
It’s not clear to me from your posts in this stream what direction you think modern industrial society should take from this point. Your posts seem to demonstrate antipathy towards both fossil fuels and all of the alternatives currently being pursued. I share your dislike of nuclear, as you can see above, and I’m pretty sure that the future does not include for any sizeable population the kind of energy consumption gluttony that we experience in the “advanced” nations today. But the consumption of energy at levels higher than was possible before the beginning of the fossil era is very likely possible with a technologically based use of solar, wind and geothermal energy without the destruction of the ecosystem as you describe. Yes, the start up of such as system will entail the use of fossil fuel just as the start up of coal mining used mules, horses and ponies to extract the coal. There are still mules, horses and ponies doing work in the world but the streets of our cities no longer requir legions of “dustmen” to sweep up the offal.
My worry is not of the technological shortcomings of future sustainable energy sources but the fundamental shortcomings of humans to pursue an intelligent path forward.
Hi @JJHMAN …
In all likelihood we humans have way overshot our carrying capacity and damaged the planet beyond repair for any type of sustainable environment suitable for humans.
What we need is a population of around 1% or less than current, a re wilding of most agricultural lands, ban fishing for over a century allowing oceans to repair, ban many/most chemicals we spread through the environment to control ‘pests’ ( plant, animal and fungal).
How to get there? No idea, but it’s a concept that would be rejected by most.
At a minimum we would need to be a tribe of one. Humans developed in small tribes of 30-200 according to anthropologists, in hunter gatherer days, but after agriculture we were able to become larger tribes of thousands, then tens of thousands due to religion binding people of common beliefs (IMHO). Then these ‘tribes’ grew as humans developed written word and education that could spread to hundreds of thousands to a few million. Now in the modern world we have ‘tribes’ the size of USA, Russia, China that have common binds between all the people in the different parts of vast territories because of modern communications.
All tribes have formed in competition with each other, so until we are a tribe of one IMHO there is no hope of anything but collapse of civilization itself.
Only the leaders of a tribe of one could make the huge decisions necessary to depopulate the world and rewild vast tracks of agricultural land, stop the massive pollution of the environment etc. it would still take decades and look like collapse to most people anyway, as even the most humane method of massive population reduction, like a type of ballot system to have a child would leave an aging population with no-one available to look after older people. (See Jack Alpert’s plan).
The odds of becoming a tribe of one and allowing a massive degrowth plan to eventuate are effectively zero. Instead we will go down the time honored path of fighting over the last resources, when oil in particular hits large decline rates and eventually make the environment mostly unhabitable due to nuclear war, burning every last tonne of coal, eating every last plant and animal we can stomach, while burning every stick of wood a population of billions comes across, trying to keep warm during the nuclear winter..
The entire nuclear, solar and wind industries are about keeping the fairy tale of sustainability in peoples minds, when none of it is possible on a thermodynamic basis. I keep harping on about how it’s all built and maintained with fossil fuels and no-one has bothered to do any calculations about building any of it with just electricity, simply because the numbers would show it’s not a viable path. (the real numbers!!)
It’s basically about trying to get people to open their eyes that infinite growth on a finite planet has always been a stupid concept, so something different should have been done generations ago when there was much more of the wild world in existence and human population was much lower.
I completely agree with @George Kaplans assessment of where we are headed…
Perhaps you have failed to notice that I’ve consistently predicted that a substantial percentage of the human race will die hard before this century is out….. possibly as many as ninety percent , or even more, of us.
We’re deep into overshoot, absolutely no question, and Mother Nature will take care of this problem in her usual utterly indifferent fashion.
But there’s still a hell of a lot of oil and gas, etc, in the ground.
The electrification of the personal transportation industry is pretty much a sure thing now. There won’t be a hell of a lot of ICE cars and light trucks for sale at new car dealers within ten years. This alone means that as oil and gas production peak and gradually decline, there’s a strong likelihood of adequate supply to keep the wheels of industry running for another couple of decades.
And keep in mind that governments world wide will do whatever is necessary to keep critical industries up and producing……. and in most of the more modern, better educated and governed countries, whatever is necessary will be done before it’s too late. Trucks displaced trains last century……. this century trains will displace trucks, except for local work.
There’s near zero doubt in my own mind that in terms of constant money, renewable energy is getting cheaper at a rather impressive rate, with the actual ” turn key” price of batteries, wind and solar electricity falling year after year, in constant money.
I was a hard core doomer myself ten or fifteen years ago. But I’ve lived to see farmers go from horses and mules to tractors that can actually operate autonomously, at least for demonstration purposes.
Things from cell phones to computers to electric cars to heart transplants that were science fiction back when I was a kid are perfectly commonplace realities now.
There’s a shitload of opposition to renewable energy, mandated efficiency regulations, environmental protection regulations, etc, with most of it coming either from people and companies with skin in the game, or people who just hate liberals and Democrats, and therefore reflexively oppose anything supported by the liberals, and support anything the right wingers aka Republicans want.
But renewable energy and efficiency have advanced as technologies to the point that they WILL be cheaper all around while getting the job done well enough to shoulder the load as fossil fuels eventually run short.
They’re ALREADY cheaper in some situations….. quite a few situations, actually.
I know people today who will be able to own two electric cars,and leave one of them on charge on their personally owned pv systems, and pay for their pv system with their savings on purchased electricity, gasoline and maintenance expenses. And incidentally, most of the people I know own two cars already.
Most industry observers expect electric cars to hit price parity with conventional cars within five to ten years, max.
Hey….. like it or lump it, you’re going to see wind farms and solar farms built out the ying yang pretty much all over the world for a long time to come, except in places in the USA controlled by hard core right wing politicians…….. Even in Texas, a dark red state, the wind and solar industries are growing by leaps and bounds.
The PENCIL rules. The SPREADSHEET rules. Renewables are getting cheaper as fossil fuels inevitably get to be more expensive. Depletion never sleeps.
There will come a time when we DO have enough renewable energy to run heavy industries at essential levels of production. There will come a time when new houses built to mandatory codes here in the USA will need a fourth of the energy they need today……. and a hell of a lot of them will be producing an excess.
I used to work in a mine, usually referred to as a quarry, where the stone was crushed into gravel. This mine was eighty percent electrified forty years ago. Mining underground is virtually one hundred percent electrified already.
There will be fuel taxes high enough to force people to drive compact cars rather than three ton pickup trucks, and or regulations that mean you can’t use such a vehicle except for commercial purposes.
You think these things won’t come to pass. Think about this.
When the shit hits the fan, Uncle Sam CALLS YOU UP, and puts you in uniform, and puts a gun in your hands, and sends you where ever it suits him to kill or be killed. Do you really think the government will allow things to simply fall apart?
I DO expect things to fall apart in a LOT of countries, but not everywhere. I expect things to get pretty bad here in the states before the necessary policies are enacted to stave off economic collapse.
There are no guarantees of course. But on the other hand, some of us in some places have a shot at pulling thru with the lights on and the water and sewer working, food in the stores, etc.
If you take a good look at a modern supermarket, ninety percent of what’s for sale on the food aisles is apt to make you sick. Most of the rest is throwaway junk. My point is that we can live without such stuff, and live BETTER, in terms of our personal health, etc.
The packaging and advertising for such stuff typically costs as much as the ingredients.
When we have to, and we WILL have to, we can live without the packaging and advertisements.
@RE …
“There’s near zero doubt in my own mind that in terms of constant money, renewable energy is getting cheaper at a rather impressive rate, with the actual ” turn key” price of batteries, wind and solar electricity falling year after year, in constant money.”
Because something has happened over the last 20 years, people think it will happen indefinitely, yet over those last 2 decades we have reached economies of scale for solar, wind and batteries. Now wind, offshore wind in particular is going back up in price, just look at the recent failed UK offshore auction of wind sites as an example. Here in Australia the forward planned solar farm are falling well short of expected, plus existing facilities, both wind and solar are often turned off due to too much electricity in the grid and the wholesale price being negative.
A close by wind farm was touted to have a 37% capacity factor when built, but actual performance over the first 6 years of operation has been around 24%, mostly because they turn it off during negative power price times. The planned next stage has been cancelled..
Solar and wind can be built out up to a point, then they become a drag on the grid and not profitable for operators, hence future planned development falls unless governments subsidise it so much that it can run at a loss.
Does anyone make solar panels from just electricity? Nope
Does anyone make wind turbines from just electricity? Nope
Does anyone make a nuclear power plant and all components from just electricity? Nope
Does anyone anywhere have any plans to do the above from just electricity? Nope
Does anyone have any plans to replace nitrogen fertilizer with electricity? Nope
Does anyone have any plans to replace the plastic insulation on all wires with something made from electricity? Nope
Meanwhile after 30 years of COPS, climate conferences and promises the Keeling curve continues to rise at an accelerating rate, the fish stocks are decimated, we mine much lower grades of all ores requiring an accelerating use of energy to do so, mammal mass apart from humans and domesticated stock are now down to 4% of the total, insect populations have fallen by 75% around the world and various other disasters accelerate towards us.
Yet the plan is to dig more, build more, get the other 80% of the world’s population up to a ‘decent’ (western?) standard of living, while our ability to keep ourselves in modern comfort rapidly diminishes because of lower EROEI, but telling ourselves fairy tales of how easy it is to build everything with electricity, but never doing the proper calculations, because that would be a whoops moment….
So…….. they turn it off when electricity prices go negative.
I have a HARD time taking you seriously when you fail to get your head around this very fact…. and it IS a fact.
There will be plenty of opportunities to keep this wind farm running at full capacity, making as much juice as possible, because there will be new industries, new technologies, new building and construction methods, etc, to make good use of dirt cheap otherwise surplus electricity.
It’s easy to add thermal mass and insulation, etc, to any new construction, and with plenty of thermal mass, a building can actually serve as a defacto battery for days at a time, because you need less heat on colder days. You store up heat when juice is cheap, and use it when it’s expensive.
Electric vehicles are going to cut very sharply into demand for oil….. which is why I say we’ll have plenty of oil for ESSENTIAL purposes for at least another decade or two, and probably longer.
Lots of existing businesses can make good use of any really cheap energy coming their way via the grid. I used to work in a factory heated by burning coal or sawdust, the waste from making wooden furniture. The large suite of corporate offices there have been converted to heat pumps. That means a lot of sawdust is available to make particle board…….. a very useful building material.
And it occurs to me that maybe you don’t appreciate the realities of energy prices. As demand increases, prices skyrocket unless production increases in sync.
The GENERAL historical trend for fossil fuel prices is and will always be to go up, due to depletion, production, and distribution costs. If we generate half of our electricity using wind and solar power, we will save gazillions of bucks on the PURCHASE PRICE of gas and coal needed to generate electricity.
@OFM
The wind farm has a ‘life’ of around 25 years. They are planning major maintenance at 8 years and 16 years for replacement of main bearings, which involves the use of giant diesel powered cranes to bring the nasceles to the ground, then reinstalling them. The blades ‘life’ are estimated at 25 years.
They are already 6 years into the life of the project and when they expected a capacity factor of 37% when planning to build it, actual performance is 24%. This destroys the economics of such projects.
They will only sign contracts for wind power that show them a profit, not run the operation below costs. The life of the units is 25 years whether they operate or not. They age standing still in the weather!!
The fact that there are operations like this that have to turn off the power due to negative prices, means many other projects that were proposed have been postponed
or cancelled.
Because the returns are so spread out over time, just the increasing interest rates are also having a devastating effect on the ‘green growth’ story as well. At zero official rates of interest wind farm and solar made sense, at 5% not so much .
Australia’s AEMO grid is the first to reach worrying levels of renewables penetration, where many large plants are being turned off during sunny and windy conditions. The negative wholesale prices are not attracting new businesses as new businesses want long term contracts with prices locked in. There is no certainty of what tomorrows prices will be as it depends on the amount of sun and wind in the system.
Retail power prices are high, with 25-30% increases over each of the last 2 years, because there are extra costs with new transmission lines being built all over the place to accommodate renewables, though the ‘blame’ in the media always goes to high gas prices. Gas has contributed 1% of the power over the last 12 months in Victoria (from AEMO fuel mix page on their web site), but of course that reality would not fit the renewable narrative….
Renewables, solar in particular make perfect sense for an individual household or business to set up for their own use, in this country. The cost is highly subsidised and it offsets very high retail electricity rates (can be up to 60c/Kwh during peak times). But businesses that are high power users, over the full 24 hours per day need consistently low prices, not prices that can go from negative some of the time to $15/Kwh in times of heavy use when the sun’s not shining and the wind is not blowing!!
The only aluminium smelter in the state pays 1.4c/Kwh and was set up decades ago to use the cheap brown coal power (the transmission lines, paid for by the state, go over 500km). Without a price and reliability guarantee from the govt, they would close the smelter.
No talk of them paying billions for renewables and huge batteries to keep operating on cheap renewables. They want cheap, reliable coal power or they will close…
Can you identify any aluminium smelter anywhere in the world that operates off their own set up of renewable power and batteries?? I don’t think there are any, but if solar and wind were cheaper than fossil fuels as everyone keeps saying, they would be everywhere.
IMHO the entire Nuclear, Solar, Wind and EV Batteries industries are all about keeping growth going by a new means for another decade or so, but it will all collapse into disrepair fairly quickly when fossil fuels have accelerating declines. They all totally rely on fossil fuels for their mining, manufacture, operating and maintenance.
“for another decade or so, but it will all collapse into disrepair fairly quickly when fossil fuels have accelerating declines. They all totally rely on fossil fuels for their mining, manufacture, operating and maintenance.”
Countries will prioritize fossil fuel use to important uses, much more so as depletion sets in. Less important uses will become priced out. Energy production is one of those important uses. So is agriculture. In fortunate countries there will plenty of fossil fuel for those purposes for a long time.
btw- you sound like you are unaware that mining and manufacturing industries have a big and growing electrical equipment component. The electricity can come from anyway. In WW2 “Grand Coulee [hydroelectric] played an important role in America’s amazing rollout of warplanes and ships. Coulee powered the Boeing Aircraft Works near Seattle and shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. Airplanes required aluminum, and by war’s end, Grand Coulee was playing a huge part in a Pacific Northwest that produced more than one-third of the nation’s aluminum.” And the manufacture of the air fleet.
Hideaway, actually the Porjus hydro plant built in northern Sweden in the early 1900s was built initially from the idea to power an aluminium smelter, but it was eventually used to power the electric (the horror…) railway from Kiruna to Narvik in Norway and Luleå in Sweden for iron ore export instead.
Side note, Churhill wanted to bomb Kiruna to stop export to Germany in the 40s but never did, however there is a Lancaster in a bog close to Porjus from a bombing run against Tirpitz.
I think the Island smelters currently use geothermal?
Pardon me for jumping in. I haven’t researched the basis for ths statement :
“ Most industry observers expect electric cars to hit price parity with conventional cars within five to ten years, max.”.
My initial sense is that price parity will be kind of moot if car ownership becomes more expensive. Presently gasoline is undertaxed to keep up with inflation and undertaxed for a few other important things like reducing GHG and transitioning to a world of declining oil production. It’s political suicide to raise fuel taxes so the policy is letting the grandkids figure it out.
I think this commentator is more optimistic than me.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/13/opinions/house-speaker-solution-democrat-support-avlon/index.html
It is a sad state of affairs in the US House of Representatives at present.
It could maybe work the other way. Dems could propose a conservative member and find five centrist Republicans who are completely fed up with the process to date
El Nino Fizzles. Planet Earth Sizzles. Why?
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy, and Leon Simons
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/ElNinoFizzles.13October2023.pdf
SURVIVALIST —
Interesting paper but I don’t agree El Nino is fizzling. The figures I’ve seen suggest there is a 80 percent chance it will be a strong event.
Too early to tell if this el nino will be a strong one,
and far too early for its presence to explain ‘this extreme September anomaly’.
The headline of the article doesn’t match the content. The content never mention el nino ‘fizzle’. Weird.
The paper doesn’t really address the contribution to additional warming from changes to albedo, which is at least of the same order of magnitude as GHG and aerosols. It just uses a factor of 0.3 in determining insolation. In fact the albedo has been falling since 1980, with a noticeable acceleration after 2015, probably from loss of Antarctic sea ice, and another drop likely to be seen this year once the data is in. Which doesn’t change the fact that Hansen’s temperature predictions have been closer than any others, but even they may turn out to be conservative.
I do not intend to open a discussion on politics, religion, or terrorism here. The overlapping tragedies are immense and I have strong preference to not get into that here, and ask that you please respect that aversion.
Rather, I bring up Gaza as a topic of human population ecology. It is a great example of the human condition…magnified. In 1950 Gaza was about 200,000 people and was ruled by Egypt. Over the past seventy years the intrinsic population growth has been over 10-fold, despite having sent hundreds of thousands (?) overseas in gradual migration. The current 2 million plus people living in Gaza are one of the most heavily populated territories in the world, and is not anything close to sustainable by any measure. The population growth has been enabled by external subsidy payments and other aid in the billions (‘more than $40 billion between 1994 and 2020’).
And if you look across the western border to Egypt you see a country that is also grossly overpopulated with 113 million people, and with about 9 million refugees from other African countries currently hosted there. And Egypt is a huge food importer. Egypt is not open for Palestinian immigration.
Across the eastern and southern border Israel is also heavily overpopulated, with water being in severe shortage. The Jordan river supply is shared among Lebanon, Jordan, West Bank and Israel. Israel generally supplies about 10% of the Gaza overall supply. Israel is not open for Palestinian immigration.
Both Egypt and Israel work hard to maintain a strict border with Gaza. It is a prime example of border walls being constructed to keep crowded, thirsty and poor populations from flooding their neighbors. India, as another example, has a 2,545 mile complete wall at its border with Bangladesh, also constructed with economic and religious (Hindu-Moslem) tensions as the motivation. (https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/4/battle-of-identities-at-the-india-bangladesh-border/)
If the global population had grown as fast as Gaza over the last 70 years, the earth would now be host to over 25 Billion people! Gaza currently has 65% of its population under age 24.
Clearly, all this is recipe for disaster simply based on gross Overshoot of the basic ingredients of human life such as regional food, fresh water, basic materials, and domestic energy.…even without the specifics of history and culture in this case.
I mourn the condition and prospects of all of the civilians in these countries.
@Hickory, I agree entirely with your assessment.
Consider back in 1950 when Gaza had 200,000 and The newly formed Israel had 1,2000,000 people. It was vastly over populated back then with neither area able feed their populations without great external help.
Realistically the whole area can support a few hundred to a couple of thousand goat herders in the natural environment. Luckily the whole planet cannot get into this extreme overpopulation situation, there will be mass starvation and environment collapse well before then…
Hickory is dead center in the ten ring.
Israel has an area of about 22 000 square kilometers or 22 billion square meters, as a square kilometer is a million square meters.. The country receives about 550 mm of rain a year. That is 550 liters of water per square meter.
Call it 20 billion square meters and 500 liters of rainfall per meter. That’a 10 trillion liters of water a year. In cubic meters, it’s half a cubic meter per square meter, or 10 billion cubic meters.
These numbers are easy to check.
The country consumes about 2 billion cubic meters of water a year.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/israel/water-production-and-consumption/water-consumption
There is about five times as much rainfall as there is water consumption. The region is a desert because the land is highly degraded and can’t absorb the abundant water that falls on it.
Tel Aviv is currently suffering from flash flooding, which is slowing down the country’s attacks on Gaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZGOghLUHQ&ab_channel=CityWeather
There was also serious flooding earlier this year in Southern Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiUOoDH0zq4&ab_channel=i24NEWSEnglish
If Middle Eastern countries would focus more on restoring their degraded land and less on killing each other, their water problem would go away.
This endless whining about how nothing can be done in light of the obvious solutions is just stupid. As they say in Ethiopia, “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty”.
From your comments on arid zones it is clear that you have never had any real world experience in desert or arid zones with plant growing, living, or managing water.
Hickory
If ad hominem arguments are the best arguments you have, you don’t have any arguments.
Anyway, claiming farmers know better is weak at best. If the farming practices of the last few millennia are “doing it right” then explain the disastrous outcomes we are witnessing worldwide. Farming is totally broken.
The bottom line is that Israel gets about as much rain as California. Israel a desert because the rain isn’t caught. A century ago California was green. Cutting down the forests, wiping out the beavers, paving the rivers to speed up runoff and idiotic farming practices are rapidly turning it into a desert. Neither region suffers at all from a lack of rainfall.
I come from East Tennessee, where there is a saying “he good lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise”, My wife comes from Kitakyushu. The creek rises and floods the rice fields all over the village on a precise plan decided on by the farmer’s coop months in advance. The are Shinto priests around doing ceremonies, but nobody thinks that hydrology is controlled by supernatural beings. That is why Appalachia faced an ecological crisis less than a century after European settlement, but Japanese farming is doing fine after 2300 years or so of wet rice cultivation.
California has areas that get over a hundred inches of rain, and others that get less than ten.
The eastern med countries are much closer to the low end of that scale.
There is no magic to plant geography. Yes, my undergraduate degree was plant and soil science from the Univ of Calif.
Understanding comes from intimate knowledge of a place (living, growing food, observing), and has a foundation based on science.
Not armchair conjecture.
It hasn’t occurred to Alimbiquated that the direct costs of collecting all that rain water would be astronomical…… not even a country as rich as the USA could afford such an endeavor.
And if it WERE to be collected, the entire region would turn into something along the lines of the driest parts of the Sahara.
There’s only one way out of the overshoot cluster fuck. Some very substantial portion of us will be dying hard within the easily foreseeable future.
It wouldn’t be impossible for some super rich individual or corporation, or a government, to create a disease that would render a man sterile, or a woman sterile after she has one kid.
And if it were HIGHLY transmissable, if it didn’t produce any symptoms for a couple of years,incurable…….
Well, maybe somebody will make a movie using this as the plot, lol.
OFM,
Beavers would do the job for free. But releasing beavers into the wild is illegal in California.
Restoring the paved riverbeds would make California cities much more liveable, as would tearing up the millions of empty parking spaces that prevent water from soaking in to the ground.
The reason California is so dry is that water is actively kept out of the ground and washed into the sea or evaporated.
The change came in the last century. People have long forgotten that until the 1920s there was a huge lake in Southern California, and that the natives of the area used to live from fishing.
It’s such a weird American trait to claim the country is too poor not to do stupid stuff. The real problem is the lack of political will to fix things.
Just look at the insane amount of money California wastes on expanding their road network, despite stagnating population. Maybe they should stop building new roads and focus on solving real world problems for a change.
Another idea is simply charging landowners for runoff, as they do here in Germany. The so called “rain tax” is calculated based on the area of sealed surface. This would provide an incentive to allow rainwater to seep into the ground.
IT’S THE WARMEST SEPTEMBER ON RECORD
This summer’s record-breaking heat has extended to September. A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, found that September 2023 was the hottest in its 174 years of climate records. The striking thing was just how abnormally hot September was, says Ellen Bartow-Gillies, a NOAA climatologist and the lead author of the report. “This was the warmest September on record, but it also beat out the previous record September, which was in 2020, by 0.46 degrees Celsius, or 0.83 degrees Fahrenheit,” Bartow-Gillies says. “A pretty significant jump.”
https://www.noaa.gov/news/topping-charts-september-2023-was-earths-warmest-september-in-174-year-record
These temperatures make one wonder if we have passed one or more climate tipping points. If so, future conversations will be far different, in my opinion.
Middle of October, and here in southern England the leaves on trees are still bright green not autumn gold, and it has not been a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. There are intrmittent periods of warm cloudy weather separated by spells bright sunny days, men of all ages still wearing shorts and single shirts and women likewise dressing for warm temperatures. September was the warmest on record, and looks like October will be likewise. Over northern Europe, tempertures continue mild, and snowfall on the ski slopes in the Alps promises to be non-existent.
Temperature measurements so far would suggest October isn’t going to be much better, and with more relative warming likely before the highest El Nino months to come next year. A mitigation may be the tailing off of northern tropical cyclones as a mechanism for transferring heat from oceans to atmosphere.
What’s this RE and my last comment a minute ago “awaiting moderation”?
Is this something new?
‘RE’ is OFM. Something odd going on behind the scenes with his access.
We are not having “fall” in northern New England. The year is just kind of petering out. The color is shit. Some maples have just shriveled to putty colors and shed their leaves. Very mild frost October 13. It’s weird.
I am looking forward to “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky arriving next week. I expect it will be mostly about individual and tribal behaviour but I hope he covers some big history issues along the way. In the meantime this is how I think the lack of free will and such things have led to our present, objectively enthralling but subjectively increasingly scary, predicament.
The growth and collapse of a global civilisation has been inevitable since evolution chanced upon the particular set of adaptive traits of modern humans, on a planet rich in latent resources and with an extended period of unique climate clemency and stability. Something clicked in our brains and culturally about 50,000 years ago and we became dangerously co-operative, collectively cleverer, better at abstract thought, able to pass and enhance knowledge through generations. Once we were unleashed on the comparative paradise of the holocene there was only ever going to be one result. We’d fill every niche, deplete every resource as fast as possible and pollute at will, all according to the maximum power principle, and with a notable acceleration after we’d discovered the fossil fuel bounties. Evolution optimises us for near term reproductive success, not to care for the environment or think great thoughts about the far future.
The exact causes and progression of the collapse may differ geographically and temporally but it cannot be stopped globally or locally. Economic and political collapse have already created many failed states, few if any will recover, most will degenerate further as resource shortages bite, and more nations and regions will be sucked in. Climate change and other pollution effects will have accelerating non-linear impacts. I think biodiversity loss is the ultimate threat, not least because collapse of the human footprint is the only way to stop it, and will eventually finish civilisation off everywhere, whatever the depredation, mitigated or otherwise, from the others issues.
The human exceptionalist Polly Annas who think we are somehow temporarily blinded to our stupidity or insensitivity and just need to be “shown the way” completely misunderstand evolution. Such a mind set is tied up with some kind of fuzzy and unstated humanist eschatology that just isn’t going to happen .The first people to show concern for the wider world will be the first ones to have their gene lines snuffed out, and with them any propensity to “rein it in”. We have killed the holocene, civilisation is next, and humanity might be sometime later. We are in such severe overshoot that a deep undershoot must follow; if it’s deep enough to hit zero then whatever the final equilibrium planetary carrying capacity we won’t be around to find out.
Agree with your long term perspective, although I consider zero improbable. It takes a lot of energy to maintain any sizeable country, I expect countries to disappear relatively early in the descent except for fanciful lines on the map.
More likely, small military organizations will take ownership of long lived electrical power generators ( hydro, geothermal, relatively new nuclear plants), and trade electrical power or products made from that power for food and other essentials. Might be able to hang on until undershoot has played out.
That might work for a couple of generations but then what? What about by, say, 5000CE? 3000 years ago the main difference with now was the technology. The climate was the holocene, there was agriculture, civilisations structured much like today’s, accessible surface minerals and rich and diverse biomes all around. 3000 years from now we will likely be in a hot house, agriculture will be impossible, scavengeable metals will have been exhausted in a century or so and deep ores will be out of reach. Will our sperm counts have recovered? Will the oceans be stratified? Will our gene pool be so bottlenecked that any novel pathogen will be deadly? Will there be any large prey animals? Will there be any fish or shellfish? Will tropical rainforests have recovered from a savannah state? Will there be much firewood left?
I have no idea what human society will look like in thousands of years, but within a couple of decades human driven emissions of carbon dioxide will be significantly and irreversibly declining. Erosion of igneous rocks will continue to slowly lock away carbon dioxide permenantly ( as it has been doing from time immemorial) . Temperatures will have stabilized and started to decrease within the 3000 year time frame . Some locations like Iceland and extreme northern locales will be habitable, possibly even more hospitable than at present.
Maximum undershoot will be the critical point, can significant technological knowledge be preserved through that event? Will humanity have the wisdom to avoid another boom/bust cycle?
One thing is sure, individuals surviving to the maximum undershoot will be those with superior high temperature survival capabilities.
I don’t even know what the world will look like in a couple of decades but I do worry about that specifc period of time because I have two children that I expect to live for another 40 or 50 years. I think it’s good that I have no grandchildren because I don’t think that the
“human condition” will be very pleasant for the major part of whatever population is still around in the last decades of this century.
Climate is certainly a concern. The current trajectory is not good, I wish I had your optimism about stabilization of temperatures. Stabilization will not quickly reform Antarctic glaciers or any others that are now disappearing. That’s bad news for coastal real estate and drinking water. Coral reefs will continue to die from current high water temperatures, reducing fish habitat and protection from storms for coastal populations. The fish in the ocean will continue to deplete from over-fishing, many species going extinct. Multiple countries obtain the majority of their protein from ocean fish. Top soil will continue to erode and wash to the sea, affecting crop yields. Rainforests will continue to disappear in favor of McDonald’s hamburgers and recreational drugs. Biodiversity and oxygen balance in the atmosphere will suffer. Plastic in the oceans will continue to strangle fish and drown marine mammals.
Probably the worst scenario though, we can see happening today and that is the migration of humans from the worst environments, both physical and social to places that increasingly cannont handle higher populations nor want them.
This is all taking place in a world where industrial society, driven exclusively by capitalism, is reverting to it’s earliest and meanest format. That entails the funneling of the major part of societal wealth to the already wealthy and leaving growing segments of the population moving towards subsistance while expectations still include two cars, three bedrooms, two baths and regular vacations.
I’ll be 80 next month. My generation of working class white males, born between WW2 and 1955, has lived at the very best of times for non-elites, at least those of us who missed Viet Nam. It’s been better for others but my cohort really got the gold ring, both relatively and in fact. We’ve had much more than the life our parents strived for and, compared to any humans at any time past or future, we’ve been wealthy beyond reason. Historians of economics that I have read date the beginning of the decline the year I obtained my BS degree, 1971. I cannot imagine any societal or technological changes that can bring any positive improvements to future generations but, paraphrasing Neils Bohr, “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”.
JJHMAN
We are the same age, and I completely agree we have lived in the most privileged period of human history , and in the richest geography on the world. The way we measure GDP and well being will not be surpassed, but I have the advantage of extensive time spent in very poor countries and have personally seen very poor people ( by our metrics) who laugh, love, tell jokes, plan for their children’s futures and enjoy the closeness of extended families. The old are cared for by the family instead of being warehoused with strangers, and the old help with raising the young.
The future will be tough and most people will die before their time, but when the overshoot bottoms out, humans will reestablish civil societies and try to optimize their circumstances.
I have two grandchildren, one is just finishing a veterinary doctorate, the other works in construction and I am comfortable thinking they both are developing skills that will give them a better than average skill set for the times that are coming.
During the pandemic, I wrote up some guidelines about how I see risks developing, with the hope that as things develop they will spot the patterns and be able to act a little bit ahead of the general public. They have both taken it seriously, but without panic , i think young people generally recognize the world is sliding down.
Cannot think of any other way to help them
Old Chemist- I’ve got my own thoughts on what to try to share with my children on avoiding the worst of the ongoing decline, but wondered if you might share what you came up with?
My original post was meant to show that we don’t have the free will to control how our societies develop but the phrase “Will humanity have the wisdom to avoid another boom/bust cycle” means I’ve completely failed. But at least Sapolsky’s new book arrives here in a few hours.
Great rant George, I agree with every word.
Humans are by ourselves going to answer the question of the Fermi paradox, we created then destroyed our own civilization in a short period of time. We just haven’t finished yet…
I agree as well, regarding the fermi paradox, division and conflict seem to be an ingrained part of the complex evolutionary process and i’d go as far as saying a universal law.
The “thing that clicked in our brains and culturally about 50,000 years ago” was an extended theory of mind enabled by a mutation to deny mortality which had an unfortunate side effect that we tend to deny everything that is unpleasant. This explains why the majority is unable to see overshoot and why we do not even try to use our impressive intelligence to override the Maximum Power Principle.
Hi Rob,
I’ve read and enjoyed your blog for many years. Maybe a decade, though not sure how long it’s been up if I’m being honest. Thanks for what you’ve done and nice to see you commenting here.
Cheers.
Maybe, but I doubt if was a single issue like that. Leland’s studies reported in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony give a good overvies of how things may have evolved.
My take on it is the development of language. It got to the point where a family group could tell each other a coherent story, and the story of group identity was then extended to other families. The birth of a small tribe…held together by a common story of identity and interest.
It enabled a degree of deliberate group decision making and action, and way to communicate the results of trial and error beyond just the individual who had the experience.
Language ‘weaponized’ the human capability.
Excellent. I would only add that this goes back beyond 50,000 years: Homo erectus spread from Africa to Eurasia and Southeast Asia, made Acheulean tool kits, hunted large game, built boats, and passed on this knowledge for over a million years. That means they must–must–have had language, which is the SEED of all human cultures and civilizations.
But there was a sep change about 50,000 years ago, see Darwin’s unfinished symphony and a couple of other books that I’m having trouble remembering the titles of, something about a cathedral in one maybe. Without those changes I think we have stayed as widespread hunter gatherers like homo erectus, no bad thing maybe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbqQeooSVu4
This video is about what’s probably the last working rod line oil field pump. It’s been kept in operation by the owner for the same reason my family kept a couple of horses and mules for two generations past the time went with tractors….. old time’s sake.
Anybody with hands on experience with machinery, especially with old machinery, will enjoy watching it.
Thanks OFM. Attached is a picture of the Central Power, a mechanism for operating multiple horizontal rods in all directions.
https://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/pages/Central%20Power/centralpower.html
SCIENTISTS COUNT HUGE MELTS IN MANY PROTECTIVE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELVES. TRILLIONS OF TONS OF ICE LOST.
“Four dozen Antarctic ice shelves have shrunk by at least 30% since 1997 and 28 of those have lost more than half of their ice in that time, reports a new study that surveyed these crucial “gatekeepers” between the frozen continent’s massive glaciers and open ocean. Of the continent’s 162 ice shelves, 68 show significant shrinking between 1997 and 2021, while 29 grew, 62 didn’t change and three lost mass but not in a way scientists can say shows a significant trend, according to a study in Thursday’s Science Advances. All told, Antarctic ice shelves lost about 8.3 trillion tons (7.5 trillion metric tons) of ice in the 25-year period, the study found. That amounts to around 330 billion tons (300 billion metric tons) a year and is similar to previous studies. But the overall total is not the real story, said study lead author Benjamin Davison, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. What’s most important, he said, are the patterns of individual shelf loss. The new study shows the deep losses, with four glaciers losing more than a trillion tons on the continent’s peninsula and western side. The biggest loss of all is in the Thwaites ice shelf, holding back the glacier nicknamed Doomsday because it is melting so fast and is so big. The shelf has lost 70% of its mass since 1997—about 4.1 trillion tons (3.7 trillion metric tons)—into the Amundsen Sea.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientists-huge-antarctic-ice-shelves.html
I have no idea what human society will look like in thousands of years, but within a couple of decades human driven emissions of carbon dioxide will be significantly and irreversibly declining. Erosion of igneous rocks will continue to slowly lock away carbon dioxide permenantly ( as it has been doing from time immemorial) . Temperatures will have stabilized and started to decrease within the 3000 year time frame . Some locations like Iceland and extreme northern locales will be habitable, possibly even more hospitable than at present.
Maximum undershoot will be the critical point, can significant technological knowledge be preserved through that event? Will humanity have the wisdom to avoid another boom/bust cycle?
One thing is sure, individuals surviving to the maximum undershoot will be those with superior high temperature survival capabilities.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35821511/
Interesting
I’ve never been all that impressed with the Fermi Paradox.
I do believe that the odds are for all practical purposes one hundred percent that there’s life in the universe in countless places, and that intelligent life is out there…….. someplace……. in lots of places.
But look at it from an old country boy’s pov, extrapolating from personal observations. There’s coal around….. but none much closer than about seventy five miles. There’s lots of streams……. with fish.But I’ve found that ninety percent of the fish are to be caught in only ten percent of the waters of any given stream. There are long stretches where it’s just about guaranteed you won’t catch a fish at all.
There’s no oil, no gas, nothing much at all worth digging or drilling for in this area.
The indigenous people who lived here a few hundred years back could have developed a written language. They were really good at some things. They had permanent dwellings, they had crops, they had community and local level government, they had weapons….. but their chance of developing an industrial civilization was poor at best…… because they didn’t have local metal ores sufficient to enable them to start metal working industries.
( They did have some metal such as copper obtained by trading over fairly long distances.)
Potentially habitable planets are relatively few, probably not more than one out of every hundred so far discovered, maybe not more than one out of a thousand.
And there’s only a pittance of stars within a hundred light years of Earth. Any farther away, and the odds are extremely high any possible inhabitants aren’t broadcasting any signals powerful enough to detect them, and in any case, we’ve had the technology to detect such signals for only a few decades.
So……. the odds of intelligent life NEARBY, in astronomical terms, are very likely thousands to one against. Compare this to the odds of one of your neighbors willing the big lottery. Somebody does win, of course, but only because millions of tickets are sold.
So there’s no good reason to believe we’re alone in the universe, as far as I can see. But the odds are pretty high that intelligent live isn’t all that common. There might be thousands of planets with intelligent inhabitants, even millions of such planets.
But considering the size of the universe even a million would be countless light years apart. A hundred such worlds evenly distributed in our own galaxy would be hundreds of light years apart.
An intelligent species without mineral resources available is extremely unlikely to ever industrialize to the point it could self destruct. The Romans had a civilization, and some of the most respected philosophers and scientists in all history lived in preindustrial times here on Earth.
I can’t imagine Roman level technology ever rendering the entire Earth uninhabitable .
And intelligent life capable of broadcasting over interstellar distances may well have been involved in numerous wars, on the home planet, and potentially with invasive species from ANOTHER planet.
It could be policy that you don’t ADVERTISE your address, lol, if you’ve had such experiences.
And any aggressive or simply curious species out there that might be looking for us would have to be within a hundred light years to detect even our earliest radio transmissions, etc.
Maybe really good alien astronomers could figure out that the Earth is a wet world with moderate climate due to the size of it, and it’s orbit, and that it has an oxygen atmosphere, etc, even if we didn’t exist.
So…… if such a nosy neighbor wanted to pay us a visit……. how likely is it that he, she, or it has the technology and the resources to make the trip? A spaceship with nuclear engines might make the trip in a thousand years, one way.
And while it’s possible that we WILL force our own extinction, it’s my personal belief that the only way that will happen is if we go all out CNBC WWIII.
So long as the atmosphere doesn’t go anoxic, or otherwise turn outright poisonous for some reason, a few naked apes are going to make it, someplace in high mountains, or in the far north or far south, or even living a few meters underground, and coming out only during the night to forage for food, just as many animals do today in hot desert environments, etc etc.
And we don’t NEED an industrial civilization to survive and thrive. As a matter of fact, we were doing VERY WELL indeed, using stone age technologies, with our kind gradually spreading out to occupy just about the entire Earth, excepting some isolated islands and Antarctica.
There will come a time, if we’re still around, when we have no choice except to move off planet, to head for the outer planets or the stars……. but that time is one hell of a long way down the road.
That’s not impossible……. at least in theory.
@OFM, my reference to resolving the Fermi paradox was about where humans are headed, back to a hunter gatherer society eventually, if we survive that long…
At a distance of around 500 light years in all directions there are over 200,000 known stars. With recent discoveries of multiple planets around most of the stars we’ve bothered to investigate, I also believe that there is much life in the universe, and probably a lot of intelligent life.
Here on Earth we have had intelligent life for millions of years, in the form of Dolphins, Whales and Elephants before man (all with larger brains than us!!)
It’s not brain size that led by itself to human dominance of planet Earth. It’s brain, ability to co-operate, and out compete, plus opposable thumbs that allow us the dexterity to change our environment. I suspect similar would be needed wherever life exists to produce a species capable of leaving it’s natural environment even temporarily, like humans have done with space flight and submarines.
So far humans have acted with no more intelligence than yeast in a bucket of sugar water, using up every known resource while polluting our environment. Maybe intelligence only gets us so far, with the priorities of maximum power principal, reproduction and denial of bad outcomes delineating our path. Again I would expect similar wherever in the universe intelligent life develops.
As with humans, using up all resources would eventually lead species on other planets, even if they obtained a modern civilization capable of radio and space flight, to overuse resources, fight among themselves for the last of the resources, pollute their planet and disappear back to a hunter gathering existence all in a short period of time, hence we don’t detect any signals because they last only a short period of time, just like our modern civilization.
Long term civilization based on metals is not possible as metals all corrode, rust of iron and steel, galvanized fence wire deteriorating over time etc, so a full recycling is never possible (what percentage of original zinc comes from old rusted fence wire when recycled??), so eventually all easy to obtain metals become unavailable. I would expect the energy to mine the metal (FFs) to disappear before the last recycling effort from charcoal. After our fossil fuels are exhausted mining will cease, because the grades in mines of all metals will become too low, so old metals from abandoned cities will be all that’s available for reworking with charcoal, but eventually the metals all dissipate. The same laws of chemistry and physics apply everywhere, so civilizations that develop elsewhere in the galaxy would fail for exactly the same reasons.
Hideaway
Long term a civilisation based on metals is not only possible, but also warranted. The doom day scenario is looming in the background, but meanwhile generations of people will pass.
I don’t know what you are talking about – it takes a lot of energy to recycle metals and fortunately a lot of electricity can be utilised in for example electric arc furnaces. We have key metals like copper, aluminum and steel that all can be recycled. If I am not knowledgeable enough on that subject, I would like to get lectured.
There is no reason why conservation in addition to adding renewable energy to the energy mix is not a good pathway going forward. But, I guess I need to be lectured when it comes to that too.
Because of entropy and dissipation, it is impossible to recycle 100% of any metal. Today recycled copper makes up 15-17% of annual production and has been at that level for around 40 years.
Even if we were able to recycle 90% of copper used, after 22 generations of recycling we would have less than 10% of the original left. We are nowhere near 90% recycling.
How would any civilization be able to continue using metals for the long term (millions of years?) using metals by recycling??
When we get to the low energy future, we will have already mined all the easy to get and high grade deposits, we simply wont have the energy to get very low grade deep underground concentrations, so what’s on surface will be all there is..
Even if we were able to get to 95% recycling of any metal, eventually we will have no more metals without mining. It’s a huge flaw in the circular economy models that some like to use. They ignore the reality that we can’t recycle 100% of anything, as it’s a physical impossibility..
The zinc used for galvanizing fence wire is the perfect fast example. When the wire rusts and is returned for recycling, most of the zinc has dissipated from the original wire, so it takes newly mined zinc to remake the galvanized wire.
Your comment seems mostly to have something to say about the Drake equation rather than the Fermi paradox, which asks why aren’t we bathed in radio transmissions from advanced civilisations all over the galaxy. Most likely answer is because they only last a couple of hundred years, and we are about to be added to the list of those in that category.
It has been awfully quiet out there.
WHY should we take the Drake equation seriously?
Go out in the world ocean, picking random spots, and drop in a baited hood, and you will find that fish are few and far between indeed, although they’re plentiful in certain spots.
The odds seem to me to be extremely high that although there are intelligent creatures with industry in many places in the universe, they’re equally high that none of them, as a matter of random chance, would be anywhere nearby…….
And WHY would such intelligent creatures be BROADCASTING signals capable of being picked up at distances measured in thousands and tens of thousands, or even millions of light years?
Prey species, not knowing any better, would fall to predators with the capability to travel interstellar distances, and predator species would know better than to advertise their presence.
AND don’t forget the Romans, etc. They had great civilizations without heavy industry. Intelligent life may exist on thousands of planets without sufficient material resources enabling them to advance much past the Roman level.
Europe is planning to tax the carbon on imported goods.
https://www.wired.com/story/eu-carbon-tax/
It is called CBAM ( carbon border adjustment mechanism). Like most EU legislation it is complex and will result in further de-industrialization and the offshoring of manufacturing. The petchem industry, along with steel, cement and construction will be hard hit. Consumers will see massive price hikes and stagflation.
Only a group of cretins could think up such plan. Worse even than paying subsidies for so called renewable unreliable energy.
Another part of the EU net zero nonsense, which is what your wages will be after you have paid for all the subsidies.
The EU is a big paper shuffler office. And most people here are brainwashed enough by watching too much state TV.
The thinking the state will do anything right – they only need to issue a new law and everything works, while capitalism is evil because it only wants profit and exploits all people. Have seen this in too much of my colleges.
So we get this behemoth. Big companies have already departments of 100s of clerks to fill out EU forms, smaller companies have already big problems because they often can’t give the costs of this to their customers.
Yes, paying subsidies for a limited time would be much much better. Subsidies are everywhere – for example a new initiative to replace all the coal belchers with nuclear would need subsidies, too, because nobody would risk the 100th billions. In the right scenario subsidies can improve things.
Some subsidies are even only in the form of credit guarantees which are never paid out most times, so projects can be financed cheap.
Went to Spain earlier this year on a EU-funded project meeting (so in essence paid by myself, through taxes going to our exorbiant EU funding) It was nice but it just reinforced my opinion on the EU project in the grand scheme, a beautiful, idealistic idea but not working…
Might try to emigrate to Hungary if things escalate.
CARNOT
The tax is on companies attempting to doge carbon pricing by producing outside the EU.
It is a hypocritical of form of protectionism : some European industrialists are fed up with Chinese state subsidies to its companies in different sectors. Of course, I approve at 100%. Finally, the liberalists of the EU Commission are beginning burying their ideological whims which did so much harm to the European economy by exposing it to unfair competition from countries like China.
Coal is dead you think.
GLOBAL DEMAND FOR COAL
Even this year the coal curve will not start to fall. The most polluting fossil sources are located on a plateau created by two opposite tendencies that are neutralized. On the one hand, the continued growth of consumption in Asia. On the other, reductions in Europe and North America. Thus, global demand for coal is expected to close by 2023 at virtually the same levels as in 2022. That is the highest levels ever. And, “In 2024, we expect world demand for coal to remain stable (-0.1%) at around 8.38 Gt, which remains a level never reached before 2022,” the Paris-based body predicts.
https://www.sustainabilityenvironment.com/2023/08/02/global-demand-for-coal-will-also-record-in-2023-and-2024/#:~:text=Global%20demand%20for%20coal%20will%20remain%20high%20even%20in%202024&text=%E2%80%9CIn%202024%2C%20we%20expect%20world,the%20Paris%2Dbased%20body%20predicts.
Not surprisingly, CO2 maintains it upward climb.
Oct. 15, 2023 = 419.81 ppm
Oct. 15, 2022 = 415.85 ppm
1 Year Change 3.96 ppm (0.95%)
Unfortunately Doug is dead right, pun intended, about coal, at least in the near to mid term, for the next couple of decades at least and maybe even three or four decades.
But when somebody asks what China is planning to do with a gazillion megawatt hours of renewable electricity…… which will be a reality assuming China lasts another couple of decades….. you have the answer.
I’m reading that China runs new coal plants at only about fifty percent of capacity. The fairly obvious intent is to get to the point they will need only a very modest ( relatively speaking ) amount of coal fired juice. They’ll have the HVDC transmission lines, they’ll build pumped hydro, they’ll put dozens, hundreds, of little tricks to use to load shift electricity demand, for instance making new construction serve as de facto batteries.
( You can for instance combine lots of insulation with lots of thermal mass in new construction so that you can store off peak and thus dirt cheap wind and solar juice directly as heat… so that you can heat a building nearly all the time without burning any EXPENSIVE fossil fuel for that purpose. )
How well they’ll succeed in doing these things is anybody’s guess, but I’m personally of the opinion that despite the corruption, cronyism, etc, they’ll succeed to a substantial extent. The Chinese seem to have more in the way of FORESIGHT than just about any other country, in terms of their economic and industrial policies.
This is NOT to say they haven’t made some stupendous mistakes, for instance building too much new housing too fast.
Some years ago I read that just more people than not in positions involving serious responsibilities touching on hard science and engineering had solid technical education. There were PLENTY of engineers and not enough work for them, and so they took lower level positions in government. As they have risen thru the ranks, and the older guys retire, they’ve been able to steer Chinese industrial policy towards LONG term goals….. such as for instance dominating the renewable electricity industry, dominating the electric car industry, leading or at least being highly competitive in basic research, etc.
I can’t say for sure how well this comment reflects reality, but it matches up reasonably well with most of what I read about China.
The production of coal is also on a plateau : how long will it last?
In case you were wondering about methane.
Atmospheric methane, which is far less abundant but much more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, increased to an average of 1,911.9 parts per billion (ppb). The 2022 methane increase was 14.0 ppb, the fourth-largest annual increase recorded since NOAA’s systematic measurements began in 1983, and follows record growth in 2020 and 2021. Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than two and a half times their pre-industrial level.
The numbers get worse on a continuing basis and changes continue to be thwarted.
It’s likely that nothing will really change until the pain to virtually all of those in power is so severe, and the cause so blatent, that their own lives are in imminent danger.
More on methane release, with Dr. Euan Nisbet. Scary shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDwxFS0KeQY
STEVE C
Glad to share with you if you can get Dennis to send me your email address.
Well, I’m only an occasional commenter, and don’t know who Dennis is, but if he sees this, yes, send my email address to Old Chemist.
With Steve C’s permission, I have sent Old Chemist his email address.
Ron
Its seems to me that we are so very close to crossing a line beyond which is world at war.
Hi
I certainly do not hope so. I still think the theory of self optimising behaviour will make sure any abrupt destabilising factor will make sure that some of the decision makers abide at least.
pax Americana seems to have had its day even if Trump doesn’t get back in.
Possibly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQFI66E12sU
I fear Hickory is right.
The so called “thin blue line” describes reality very well. Police are absolutely essential to a civilized society, but their numbers are necessarily limited, and conventional policing only works insofar as the large, even vast majority of the people are inclined to obey existing laws and behave according to existing society wide social norms.
Once a large enough subset of people come to disregard the law, crime can and does run rampant. Murder for instance actually IS a relatively rare crime, even in the USA where just about anybody can get a gun. There’s a strong social consensus that murder is verboten.
Even people into dealing drugs for a living seldom ever actually kill anybody, considering their numbers. But millions of people use illegal drugs without even a twinge of conscience as far as the law is concerned, and millions more won’t lift a finger to help the police with this problem.
So…… things have gone down hill, globally, to the point that there are lots of places where police don’t show their faces except in teams, and the rot has eaten deeply into the law enforcement profession as well.
Now STEP BACK from this regional or national forest, in which we’re taking a look at the trees, in a manner of speaking, and envision the entire world from the same perspective.
Here and there, just about any where you look, you will see various two bit dictators, religious factions, racial factions, mega rich individuals, who are able, ready and EAGER to grab whatever they can, anyway they can…… because now they’re looking around and see that times are such that their chances of getting away with rape, robbery, murder, and the actual occupation of enemy territory look pretty good to them.
Uncle Sam and his friends have more on their plates than they can deal with already.
So…….. times and circumstances have deteriorated to the point that ” the world’s policemen” have to ignore problems that would formerly have been attended to, and let them slide. The would be perps wouldn’t be trying now, except for the fact that they think the time is right to get away with it.
Here in my community, you would get a ticket pretty damned quick if you were to throw trash out of your car inside the city limits of the nearest town. There are cops enough in town, and the people there are QUICK to call them if you’re trashing their street.
But if you dump a truckload in the edge of the woods out in the country side……. well, the sheriff has said that he doesn’t have the men and money to investigate such crimes. His deputies will charge any violators they catch in the act, but they’re just not going to put any time into finding out who dumped that load of trash.
There are dozens of hot trouble spots scattered all over the world, and any one of them could morph into a local war that could spread to the point that the major powers are shooting at each other directly, rather than thru proxies such as the Ukrainians, who are doing our fighting for us stopping Putin from going on an expansionary war beyond Ukraine.
I used to see lots of commentary from people who don’t like the USA for one reason or another about China being a PEACEFUL country. I don’t hear much of that lately, considering that now that China is industrialized, the Chinese obviously intend to have a military establishment adequate to allow them to do pretty much as they please, at least in their own backyard, so to speak.
Global sea ice extent anomalies are setting all time record lows, beating the autumn 2016 low levels, after setting daily records for most of this year.
Indeed George, and research has shown that ocean heat is likely playing an important role in slowing cold season ice growth and enhancing warm season melting. Record-low extent so far in 2023 is a continuation of a downward trend in Antarctic sea ice that started after a record high in 2014. Prior to 2014, ice surrounding the continent was increasing slightly by about 1% per decade. And, as you’ve mentioned before, sea ice melting at both poles reinforces warming because of a cycle called “ice-albedo feedback.” While bright sea ice reflects most of the Sun’s energy back to space, open ocean water absorbs 90% of it. With greater areas of the ocean exposed to solar energy, more heat can be absorbed, which warms the ocean waters and further delays sea ice growth.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/arctic-sea-ice-6th-lowest-on-record-antarctic-sees-record-low-growth/#:~:text=New%20research%20has%20shown%20that,a%20record%20high%20in%202014.
https://jalopnik.com/toyota-says-this-butt-plug-will-allow-it-to-build-900-m-1850929505
The folks who wrote this piece are skeptical, to put it mildly, about Toyota pulling it off and having solid state battery cars in production with such long ranges within four or five years.
So am I, but I guess it’s at least possible.
Hoping to hear the opinion of some of the regulars here.
I’ve been seeing these headlines too. Seems far too good to be true, although these claims do come directly from Toyota. As far as I know they don’t have a history of hype.
I doubt it will happen on that timeline. But Toyota does seem to have turned a corner on accepting EVs as the future. Remember this is what the Japanese and especially Toyota did to amazing effect in the late 70s and 80s – take an existing technology and take it to the next level in terms of quality and affordability. I don’t know if they will win the race but I’m glad they’re in it finally.
Here is some commentary on Toyotas solid state battery announcements/motivation…essentially a stalling tactic to make up for being late to the party.
“The next thing Toyota did was roll out yet another announcement about solid-state batteries. Obviously, EVs are better, right? So, why not wait a few more years for better battery technology that gives almost unimaginable range and longevity? Toyota’s done this enough times in recent years that EV fans just don’t believe it anymore, seeing it as a stalling tactic instead of a real business strategy.”
I hope this is just negative thinking…a new jump in battery capability would be a game changer.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
Marc Andreessen
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
On energy: no mention of green. Fission waste has never been solved. A planet of 50billion, wow.
We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission.
We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.
On AI: (well it will used first for war)
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.
This blog has optimists (a good thing)so there’s this:
Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism
In case you were wondering.
EL NIÑO TO BE STRONG THIS WINTER, NEW NOAA FORECAST SAYS.
Officials declared that El Niño had begun in June and the weather phenomenon has gained strength ever since. NOAA forecasters predict a 75-85% chance of a strong El Niño from November through January. There is an 80% chance El Niño will last through spring. There is also a 3-in-10 chance that this El Niño could become “historically strong” and rival 2015-16 and 1997-98 events, NOAA adds.
Strange to say but…I hope so.
It seems that it getting hot enough that even some republican voters here in the US are begrudgingly acknowledging global warming, even if it so painful to admit your party ideology has been wrong for so many decades about such a big issue.
The sooner a majority of the population gets on with realizing the problem, the sooner some measures to change will be adopted.
I know- too late, but there is still about 1/3rd of total fossil fuel yet to burn.
Whether we burn all of that, or half of that, makes a significant difference to those who will be living in the second half of the century, and to the other species still planning to live on earth.
Global warming from fossil fuel combustion is very inconvenient.
So is plate tectonics…I hate plate tectonics, and virology.
But we don’t get to choose which science to accept or ignore.
Careful what you wish for. Yes, El Niño could give us a preview of life at 1.5C of warming. BUT, 1.5 degrees is about the level of warming that scientists say would be more likely to start setting off irreversible feedback loops, such as the disintegration of ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the abrupt thawing of permafrost in the Arctic, or the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream current.
It looks to me like we are all set to blow past 1.5 degree.
Will a quicker global realization of that (via strong el nino) change the heating trajectory at all?
Well, I’m not a climate scientist but it seems to me, reading papers by those who study such things, once irreversible feedback loops kick in, we, and most everything living on Earth, are in truly serious trouble. I expect blowing past 1.5 degrees would make life for our children, grandchildren, plus most other flora and fauna, pretty grim. I’d bet those pesky tardigrades won’t be much concerned by it all though!
The step change in temperatures this year, beyond anything El Nino should have done, indicates to me we’ve likely gone over some important threshold. I think it’s almost certainly got something to do with the southern ocean circulation, the 40% slowing of which came as a surprise to everyone a few months ago, and is also tied to the ice loss in Antarctica. Everything has always gone faster than expected but this has been exceptional. Add in the methane growth in the Arctic, which is all over the place – maybe 40 points higher – also never been seen before, the inevitable loss of the Amazon (note when they have talked about the tipping point there they have assumed artificial burning has been stopped, the actual tipping date will consequently be far earlier), and the fact we have shot by 6 of 9 planetary boundaries and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much trouble we are in.
As I have tried to say, we do not have the free will to allow agency to do anything about it, never mind that there aren’t any practical solutions anywhere near the scale and timeline needed. Every year will be worse, some much worse, than the one before. I really wish I could conclude differently.
Paul Beckwith et al predict next year 2024 (starting March) will be the first year which averages at or above 1.5C pre-industrial, due to El Nino. Beyond that, once the El Nino recedes, it seems the tipping points – phase shifts issue is critical to whether we drop back below 1.5C after that. We’ve already had 4 months this year, so that’s exciting.
https://berkeleyearth.org/september-2023-temperature-update/#:~:text=Global%20Summary&text=This%20is%20the%2014th,July%2C%20and%20August%20of%202023.
I have next to nothing in the way of formal training in physics, higher mathematics, and climate science… just what undergrads get in a typical technical field…. the abc’s of physics and math, and in my case, a lot of material touching in climate.
But I’m a voracious reader, and I’ve read a ton of books that brought tipping points, and runaway change into formerly stable situations. One such tipping point was the assassination that lit the fuse to the powder keg that blew up into WWI. Others have involved long slow smoldering fires that suddenly burst into flames, illnesses that went from seemingly mild to fatal over the course of a day or two, stories like the one about the war that was lost for lack of a horseshoe nail that prevented the messenger from reaching his destination, etc.
And I’ve read a number of books such as ” The Black Swan”……. books about the unexpected coming out of nowhere to not just upset the apple cart, but potentially smash it to bits.
The climate science establishment is telling us, in basic terms, two things……… one, what to expect, and I’m a believer in what they’re telling us, from a to z, drought flood, killer high temperatures, sea level rise, extinction of most species of plants and animals, the whole works.
The other thing, the time frame or scale, I’m not at all sure about, given that we’re pretty much in uncharted territory, and that every year climate models need tweaking because new formerly unknown data needs be incorporated.
So…. I understand that there’s a rough consensus that sea levels will rise so much in so many years, that the temperature will rise at some estimated rate for so many years into the future…. etc.
But since we don’t know, as far as I know, just where the KNOWN tipping points lie, never mind about ( currently) UNKNOWN tipping points………
Maybe things will go to hell far faster than the consensus worst case estimates. The odds of this happening may be low, but they’re certainly not zero. Maybe it’s actually impossible to even come up with a good estimate of these odds…… because of unknown tipping points that could result in a fast cascade of change.
I’m all ears if anybody has a strong opinion about this scenario, or links to credible individuals or organizations that are taking this possibility seriously.
OFM, sea level rise has been linear for the last 30 years at about 3.3 mm (just over 1/8 inch) per year. But agreed, as George also points out, it’s all about the tipping points…
Paul tends to do video’s breaking down the latest scientific papers on the topic.
There’s linear change, exponential change, and then I forget the term but it implies sudden massive change, associated with tipping points. For example: Sea level goes up 1 mm/year – linear. Sea level rises at an increasing rate (exponential), or sea level goes up 10 meters in 10 years – sudden catastrophic change. Humans don’t do well predicting the 3rd one.
https://youtu.be/6BN1_TekAN8?si=h7X1gO5zaIzVrpiy
I think, from my college math that “sudden massive change” is called a step change.
https://electrek.co/2023/09/29/us-solar-is-booming-heres-the-newly-released-data/
By 2027 Photovoltaic power output in the US will be greater than Coal is now.
That is a big deal…a huge 15 year shift.
Coal had been #1 electricity source for over 70 years
And still, solar is in its infancy in terms of deployment potential.
First inning.
https://fee.org/articles/the-incandescent-ban-and-the-lie-of-led-efficiency/
Just about every other word in this piece is either an outright lie or a serious distortion of reality, but there are still millions of people out there who lap up this sort of shit like a cat does cream.
I know a couple of them, one of whom has a large closet packed full of incandescent bulbs, enough to last him until he dies, and then some.
When he visits me, he doesn’t even notice that my home and shop lights are one hundred percent LED, lol.
I do have to admit I laid in a dozen of the biggest ones I could find, two hundred and three hundred watters, with clear rather than frosted glass, to use in a couple of places in an old barn…. where the biggest LED’s I could find locally just don’t get it done in terms of really lighting it up nice and bright all the way back into the corners. But on the other hand, I typically use them only an hour or so a couple of times a month. So I’ve got my own lifetime supply as well, lol.
That is probably the most dishonest “technical article” I can recall reading so I looked up FEE the author’s home base:
“FEE’s mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.
These principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government.”
That is just about 100% ultra right wing boilerplate.
Greed is good?
We are not all Repugs
Are solid state batteries just around the corner? Maybe so given the hype below. Why wait til 2028 for Toyotas 900 m range?
This is more useful:
https://m.arenaev.com/dongfeng_nammi_01__first_ev_with_sodium_solid_state_battery-news-2310.php
Dongfeng Nammi 01 – first EV with sodium solid state battery
MAX MCDEE, 24 AUGUST 2023
Nammi 01 boasts a sodium solid-state battery that promises a charging capacity of 124 miles in just 8 minutes.
Debut late 2023? Oh really?
It will be interesting to see how well it works in the real world. Even if it’s a lemon I’d have to say lemonade doesn’t seem far away(unless the hype machine is in overdrive)
Especially for the EV fans and particularly those who rave about Tesla.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/10/19/edinburgh-couple-fume-as-they-are-handed-17k-bill-by-tesla-as-they-drove-in-rain/#more-68107
I call this not fit for purpose. Who would buy a vehicle that does not work when it rains.
I’ve read something about this. The owners may have driven into water due to heavy rain that was deep enough in the street to flood the battery.
Tesla denied warranty coverage and charged the owner for a new battery.
This is apparently a problem that happens only very rarely. Thousands of Tesla cars, and other makes as well, are driven quite frequently during hard rain storms. This is the first time I’ve read about this PARTICULAR cause of a Tesla battery failure.
I’m a great believer in Tesla as a company, for putting the electric car revolution on the road.
But for now, if you have a problem, you’re probably at the mercy of the company, and Tesla repairs, if you need a repair, are said to make owning a Beemer or Mercedes look cheap.
It’s going to be quite some time before there’s much in the way of aftermarket parts available. And your favorite local shop mechanic has near zero electric car drive train training and experience.
The EIA announces:
EIA will delay its scheduled data releases November 8-10, 2023, to complete a planned systems upgrade. We will continue collecting energy data from survey respondents and will resume our regular publishing schedule on November 13. See our latest press release for more details.
Another sign that this year isn’t like other years – snow cover in North America several standard deviations too low and declining when it should be rapidly increasing; and hence albedo dropping and EEI increasing.
Hi George, yes, it really seems like the world we are used to is starting to unravel.
What’s the legend for this? I can’t interpret it.
Green – Europe, grey – Asia, red – North America, blue – Greenland snow cover. Shaded areas are 2D about (O think) 1979-2000 mean.
ps one of the books I was trying to think of is The Prehistory of the Mind, though it’s 25 years old now, and another was probably one of Prof Stringer’s (or maybe E. O. Wilson).
Thank you!
Don’t know if the money guys and gals think this is a problem, or not, but this statement was in todays NYT paper. It’s behind a paywall of course: “Federal borrowing costs have climbed in recent weeks and stoked new concerns about interest payments — and larger deficits — in the years to come. In May, the budget office predicted interest costs alone would total $10.5 trillion over the next decade.” Seems like a problem to me. Last time I looked the US national debt was over 33 trillion and counting.
I’ve been watching this too.
Trying to step back and look at picture from the standpoint of Overshoot,
it seems that stagflation with high interest rates is to be expected in early stages of involuntarily
‘putting the brakes on’.
At some point this will be a big enough and unrelenting force to the extent that contraction
begins to be the constant theme.
Maybe we are already getting there.
The loss of US currency global reserve status, with no effective replacement, will be strong signal that the process is solidly underway.
Imagine when we get to the point that interest on debt is the biggest budget item and national savings have dwindled.
I think the game of kick the can down the road can end very suddenly.
Here’s one of the wisest pieces I’ve read about the energy transition. Good technical arguments against the nay sayers. I’m especially appreciative of #7.
https://rmi.org/the-eight-deadly-sins-of-analyzing-the-energy-transition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=spark&utm_content=spark&utm_campaign=2023_10_19&utm_term=title-1
This year, solar installations worldwide are projected to be nearly a gigawatt a day. Meanwhile this thread (and many others like it) is half full of people saying “solar is impossible”.
Some are predicting that 700 GW will be installed in 2025. That’s nearly 2 GW a day. The party has just begun.
Jim Baerg
I read most of it. There are very viable arguments to electrify the economy to do work and at the same time limit the fossil fuel dependency when it comes to heating. There are so many bright people at work on this, and it could work. Getting the work done by using electric motors is in the front of this in the industry. And getting electricity to heat homes is additionally benifical.
A slowly deteriorating economy due to less energy is probably the base case globally. And there was some comments about metals above, and it works in the same direction. I would think a slow grind towards a deteriorating situation is a fitting description still, given all the layers there is to peel of the onion of the living standards a lot of places. At least in the western societies as of today. A question that could arise is that our globally dependent economy is too complex. Probably true, but the way it would get less complex could mean a disciplined focus to the core. Meaning less of everything unless it contributes in the most significant way. Cut to the core…. maybe rationing is a fair way to put it. Does not mean it have to happen soon.
How the globally dependent economy is going to cope with increased rivalry is beyond my pay grade. We had a scenario in the 1930’s with global trade reduced to about 1/3rd, and some leaders thinking they could have it all. Maybe we are there again. I understand the concerns, but I don’t think it is right for me to comment too much about it.
Thanks Jim. I liked this from the article’s point 6:
What lies at the heart of the energy transition is a shift from an expensive, inefficient, volatile, scarce, commodity-based fossil system to cheaper, cleaner, leaner technologies that offer continuously falling costs and are available everywhere.
We are moving from heavy, fiery molecules to light, obedient electrons; from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun. The renewable revolution continues the long arc of energy history: efficiency beats waste, technologies beat commodities, and economics beats ideology.
Jim
AT 8pm on the 25th September, the 77Gw of installed solar is producing nothing and the 70Gw of wind power is producing 4.4Gw out of a required 60Gw
https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&week=39&source=total
Germany has one of the highest amounts of wind power per capita and one of the highest electricity prices to pay for the massive building of new powerlines to cope and to pay for backup power.
How would you power the hospital, trains and everything else. Even if Germany tripled it’s wind power you would still be 45Gw short at the worst period and how would you charge all those electric cars?
What would it cost?
Thanks for the FUD.
To quote your source, 20 years ago electricity generation in Germany was about 8.6% renewable. So far this year it’s been 60.1%.
It’s happening.
I’m not saying it should happen. I’m not saying it will happen. I’m just talking about the real numbers we are seeing today.
To quote Solzhenitsyn: Blow the dust off the clock. Throw open your cherished heavy curtains. You do not suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
Using the same dipshit “cost” arguments against a technology whose price has fallen 99% is more a sign of senility than anything else. I’m no spring chicken myself, but I try to keep up.
Ali
You are dipshit.
Cost is real, it is what people struggle with when everything else is increasing in cost.
It is what forces many people to Endure cold house and then end up in hospital with pneumonia and other conditions due to being so drained.
https://www.spcr.nihr.ac.uk/research/projects/deaths-and-hospital-admissions-during-cold-weather-derivation-and-validation-of-a-tool-to-help-primary-care-identify-vulnerable-people
Makes me sick that people like you think you are good when in fact you are the opposite.
You are also too dim to understand that China is booming because they now burns the coal to make the things we used to.
China will burn this year 4.4 billion tonnes of coal. China has made sure the world will go well above 3c increase and nothing we will stop that.
Cheap energy is a piss poor form of welfare, mostly because rich people hog all the energy.
Direct payments to the poor is the way to go.
Also reducing car dependency is extremely important. Cars are not only a massive waste of energy, they are also a massive waste of capital, and a prison for the poor.
Anyway I’m happy with the idea of direct means based payments to help the poor. But it’s clear you didn’t understand my post. Let me reiterate my statement:
I’m not saying it should happen.
So your claim that I “think it is good” is not based on anything I wrote.
It is happening right now. That’s what I’m saying. Solar is being installed at a rate of a gigawatt a day.
As for China consider this: Coal powered generation has been basically flat in China since 2013. However, since 2013 China’s economy has grown about 80%. So it’s a bit hard to argue that coal is fueling economic growth there.
Charles needs somebody to help him out of the deep water and back into the kiddie corner of the pool, lol.
Thanks Alim, Germany is a leader. UK elec this week has been 49.7% renewables, last 12 months 39.0%. Hardly anyone in the UK knows this but they remember old numbers and so think renewables are about 10%…
Someday there will be another hot war, and the tankers will either be sitting on the bottom of the sea, or tied up in port…… and they may be bombed even in port.
Then people who can’t see any farther ahead than next month’s electricity bill just might possibly come to understand that depending on imported energy is a potentially fatal mistake.
This report and group suffer from the lack of lateral thinking they claim applies to others.
The underlying assumptions of growth in renewables replacing everything from fossil fuels is that all ‘normal’ conditions of the background economy persist, just like they have over the last 200 years while we have massively increased fossil fuel use.
They obviously assume there is a lot more fossil fuels to mine, process and build out all the renewables, EVs, heat pumps, hydrogen electrolysers etc FOR ALL..
There mission statement… “Transforming the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future FOR ALL.”
So could someone please show where they display the copper needed, where it will come from and at what energy cost for a world of high modern lifestyle (their FOR ALL bit) for 9B+ people in 20 – 30 years time?? Anyone??
It is such linear thinking that something that has grown from 0.2% amount to 3% amount over 20 years will continue to grow out at a fast rate to 100%, even all the heavy lifting is in the future. All the heavy fossil fuel use to make it happen is in the future, just as we pass the peak in possible oil production.
The lack of systemic thinking is easily exposed by copper mining. We have mined all the easy to get copper with the grades falling on average around the world. These days we use flotation to extract about 90% of all copper produced from mines. Flotation is used on sulphide ores, whereas leaching is used on oxide ores. In the flotation process xanthates are used as the reagent to bind the tiny metal particles to bubbles of air and they float to the top of large vats. The froth is collected, separated and dried to give us a metal concentrate.
Xanthates are made up of 2 main elements, an alcohol and carbon disulphide. Carbon disulphide production totally relies on fossil fuels. The carbon comes from coal or more likely gas these days, while the sulphur comes from refineries that refine sour oil and gas.
So how are we going to mine multiples of today’s copper mining to do this great build out ‘FOR ALL’, all with lower grades of copper, in deeper more remote mines and eventually without the needed chemicals for flotation ?? No there is nothing in the statement about where anything is going to come from, apparently it’s all going to magically appear..
We can use the USGS documents about copper reserves, stating 890M tonnes, looks a lot. However these numbers are not accurate, they have Australia down for 97M tonnes of copper reserves, but these do not exist. They include mostly deep low grade copper resources from the BHP Olympic Dam deposit, that are way too expensive for anyone to ever mine, probably also include the Oak Dam deposit of low grade over 1300 metre deep copper that will also never be mined (both in remote locations!!). The average grade of Olympic Dam is 0.62% copper with average depth of over 800m. They currently mine around 2.0% copper, from the small high grade areas via underground mining, and have made an overall loss at Olympic Dam over the last dozen years (from BHP’s own annual reports, I’ve been tracking it!!).
So BHP are making a loss from mining 2% copper ore grade, yet somehow the USGS expect the 0.6% overall grade, that’s declining as they continue to high grade what they mine, will somehow be profitable to mine in the future. I call BS on these USGS reports!! Reserves mean something is economic to mine under current conditions, yet the low grade stuff at Olympic Dam are totally uneconomic!! How much more of USGS reserves are really just known uneconomic resources??
The usual argument I get from people when I point out flaw after flaw in the documentation of how exactly we get to this renewable future, the last comments I usually get from people that just haven’t done the research is along the lines of “someone will think of something”, or ‘technology will solve that’ (as in some new ‘something’ that no-one has thought of, like a totally new source of energy not known about.
You can’t argue with stupid.
The sheer stupidity of thinking all the raw materials needed will just magically appear without doing the necessary calculations on the energy needed to build many new copper mines, all based on very low grades, their associated processing plants, the amount of waste material that needs to be moved to get access to the low grade stuff is mind numbing. Especially in an environment of falling fossil fuel availability that we all expect sometime very soon.
It’s the falling fossil fuel availability, that has to happen for environmental reasons, even if we found another trillion barrels of oil, that is totally different to the last 200 years. What we have is a lot of arm waving and denial about a low energy future, plus a belief in magical thinking that we can build a lot more with a lot less…
Here is some news for you.
Even though your paper napkin projections for copper point to limitations,
humans are still going to go after what they can on a grand scale for many decades.
They aren’t going to just stop because it doesn’t look like they might not achieve enough to build a full 15 billion person civilization based on fusion power.
The energy system will probably end up being less than that, maybe enough for a few billion for a while.
I don’t doubt that companies/countries will go after some of the seabed metals, whether or not anyone here likes the idea.
@Hickory … “humans are still going to go after what they can on a grand scale for many decades.”
I have no doubt you are correct about this, which is why we are headed straight for a collapse of civilization when it becomes not physically possible, or climate/environment damage becomes overwhelming or a combination of both.
By people believing delusional stories of never ending growth on a finite planet, by green or any other means, doesn’t change the outcome. Perhaps if people had acted on the impossibility of unlimited growth many decades ago, humanity could have worked out a way to live a semi modern lifestyle, with much lower population than now exists, and dragged most humans to a decent level of living, while preserving most of the natural world. Alas it didn’t happen.
Instead people want to have it all, grow their wealth and trinkets, use energy as fast as possible, all supported by governments based on economic theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny in the long term. (see Prof Tom Murphy ‘Do the Math’ website, especially the Galactic Scale Energy post from over a decade ago).
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Modern economics is based on unlimited growth. Unlimited growth is not physically possible, even if we assume humans expand into space and colonise the galaxy. (a terrible assumption for a number of reasons!!)
Saying collapse is imminent because infinite growth is impossible is a fallacy because the economy isn’t close to being infinitely large… and never will be.
Words like “infinite and “limitless” are easy enough to throw around, but the logic is tricky to understand. No economic theory postulates an infinite grow rate, so no economic theory predicts that the economy will grow to be be infinitely large in a finite period.
If you think we are approaching a limit, you have to state what that limit is and how you know it, not just toss around fancy math terms whose meanings are hard to understand.
Saying that economics ignores the problem of scarcity is also nonsense. In fact the American Economic Association defines economics as “the study of scarcity”. You say “Instead people want to have it all”. The AEA goes on to describe economics as “the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making”.
Economics never assumes that people get what they want. They never have and they never will. But that doesn’t mean the sky is falling.
Hideaway,
Thank you for your latest posts. You are spot on. Many on thi sblog are in denial of reality, and cite sources of information that are just plain fantasy. The real viability of renewables will become all to apparent by the end of this decade. Wind turbines are a mass consumer of raw materials – metals, concrete, polymers. The per GW demand for raw materials for wind and solar is 1-2 powers of ten more than fossil fuel plants. Wind turbines are egrerious coonsumers of materiel that has been produced by use of fossil fuels and that will not change any time soon. EROI will be the determining factor.
The world will continue to require huge amounts of petrochemicals all of which currently come from fossil fuels. The idea that carbon dioxide can be captured and re-used to make fuels and chemical feedstocks is fanciful. Look at the thermodynamics. The bio-equivalent for carbon recycling is photosynthesis. Do the maths on the thermodynamics and you will see a very low conversion. It works beeter with high carbon dioxide concentrations.
The energy transitions link from RMI- the eight deadly sins – can only be described as being written a clueless fantasist.
We have gotten to the stage of a standard of living that cannot be sustained. The billion or so that enjoy the highest standard have benefited by all the reserach and dvelopment that only a large population can provide. Once collapse starts, all the R&D will be scaled back. Producing companies will go bust and spare parts will be come unobtainable, and many materials will simply disappear. There is no steady state to go after. All those data centres storing a vast wealth of information will fail and the knowledge will be lost, and slowly the world population will be de-skilled.
The west is on a suicide path, all because of decarbonisation. Investment in petrochemicals and oil refining is falling. Oil resources are of declining quality. Potable water sources are under extreme stress, and yet we continue to 80 + million to the population each and every year.
The four horsemen beckon, because there is no palatable way out.
Bottom line is that humanity will continue to deploy mechanisms to produce and to consume as much energy as they can afford to, individually and en masse.
All of the stuff that goes into this endeavor, whether it is copper or uranium or methane, will get funded and produced for as long as the billions of us keep breathing.
A few caveats on this
-even though there is still enough oil to go around for awhile the price is getting high compared to electricity and people are waking up to the idea that wasting petrol on light transport is stupid considering other uses that are harder to replace
-countries are working to retire thermal coal given the melting and roasting of the world. Some will be left in the ground voluntarily.
-more and more of the worlds purchasing power will be diverted to the energy sector every decade. Whether we do nothing or do a lot on energy, its going to cost more.
Hideaway makes a very powerful argument.
For the most part, I have to agree with him, until I consider my hoped for scenario.
The renewable future I envision is not for everybody….. probably not even ten percent of today’s EVERYBODY.
The population, world wide, is going to crash anywhere from maybe a quarter to ninety percent or more, before this century is out.
We WILL learn to get by on a per capita basis with a rather minor amount of materials such as copper.
Aluminum can be substituted. Sure it doesn’t work nearly as well as a conductor, but it does work, and we can make up the loss of efficiency in transmission, motors, etc, by conservation or simply doing without, if necessary.
We can and will build new houses in the not so distant future that will need only a quarter, or even less, of the energy needed today for heating and cooling, etc. Today’s housing can be renovated to this level of efficiency for a rather minor fraction of the cost of building new.
We can and will, if OMBAU stays on his feet, have low, narrow, bullet shaped two seat fore and aft cars that will suffice, that everybody will get used to, which need only a fifth or less of the materials needed to make the batteries and motors used in today’s four and six passenger electric cars.
If you have two such cars, and an average sized pv system of your own, you might well be able to drive them on alternate days without buying more than a few dollars worth of juice to charge them from one year to the next.
We’ll be eating down the ladder, eating damned little beef, substituting pork, and then substituting chicken for pork, and then having chicken for a treat once a week.
And the ones of us, or more accurately, the countries with the power to do so will hog whatever natural resources are still available.
The throw away economy itself will wind up in the landfill of history. The cost of packaging and refrigeration frozen french fries exceeds the cost of the potatoes in the package by a factor of two or three. Potatoes will be sold in fifty pound bags , and the bags will have a deposit on them. If you want five pounds, you will be reusing your own personal produce bag.
There may well be a time coming when there will be a local one horse bakery within a five minute walk of any densely populated city or town, or even village……..
In times gone by, it was far cheaper and easier for a family to simply buy fresh baked bread every morning……. because the baker made a hundred loaves using only a VERY SMALL amount of fuel per loaf…….
I get by with a third of the fuel I used to use to heat my house, except in really cold weather, not because I can’t afford it, but because it’s easier to just dress warmly and keep the house in the fifties and sixties than it is to deal with so much firewood.
I was once educated by a wine lover as to why a particular wine was usually served at room temperature in upper class English homes, but chilled a little in American homes……. the upper classes there habitually wore warmer clothing during the heating season, even though they were rich….
People will double up, and get used to it.
The transition is going to be hell on Earth, for the people who live thru the worst of it, but with some luck a substantial number of people will pull thru and they have at least a potential shot at living reasonably well, in historical terms. They have a shot at having water and sewer, electric lights, cops on the street.
No guarantees of course.
https://copperalliance.org/resource/copper-recycling/
So, almost a third of the copper used between 2009 and 2018 came from recycling.
With LEDs replacing incandescents in many buildings current requirements should be going down by about 80%. If the need ever arises, I suspect there will be initiatives to haul existing wiring formerly used to provide power for incandescent bulbs out of buildings and replace the wiring with much less copper. I also suspect that electrical contractors are still using 15 Ampere circuits for lighting as if incandescent bulbs were still being used. A three amp circuit could provide the same amount of lighting or a 15 amp circuit could provide five times as much lighting when switching from incandescent to LED fixtures. (The difference between LEDs and fluorescents is negligible).
Switching from low voltage (48V) to high voltage (300V) for renewable energy storage could save a lot of copper. Have you ever seen the size of the cables used for low voltage batteries in off grid solar installations?
We still have a lot of “fat” we can trim.
Yes the copper alliance talks up the prospects for copper. The USGS has total refined copper at 26M tonnes in 2021 with mines providing 5M tonnes. Last I looked 5M divided by 26M was a lot less than 32%. Statistica agrees with the USGS.
(Though I’ll admit I have not a great deal of respect/faith for the USGS numbers because their reserves numbers are way out compared to actual reserves!!)
Copper alliance number for recycling seems to be from Europe in 2012…
This eight deadly sin piece is the best single piece, well written, to the point, that I’ve seen so far. It includes everything of any real importance I’ve seen so far in terms of how well advancing technology MIGHT ( or not) enable us to turn the corner on overshoot without reverting to a preindustrial era economy…… assuming of course the climate going nuts or WWIII, etc, don’t push us all the way back to the early days of agriculture, or wipe us out altogether.
. I usually remember to add that there’s no guarantee when I post something indicating some of us may manage to survive overshoot with water, sewer, grocery stores, cops, etc.
Just giving up is no way to go. The longer we hang on, the better the opportunity for one or more technical breakthroughs to at least allow our own children and grandchildren to live out their lives with the lights on.
The one thing that should always be added, when passing this piece on, is that we now have every reason to believe that our population world wide, and especially in the richer western countries, will be peaking within the easily foreseeable future.
And it’s not necessarily that long a long shot to consider the possibility that the inevitable ecological and economic crash headed our way within a couple of generations will wipe out a substantial portion of us in various countries, thereby taking a lot of pressure of the resource depletion problem and possibly even the forced climate change problem as well.
Dead people don’t use coal, fertilizer, or oil.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67174576
I’m thinking we’re at a turning point in history in more ways than one.
You can’t fix stupid, but hopefully there are enough red voters in the USA who at least open their eyes once in a while who will either stay home or actually vote blue in 2024 to keep control of the WH and Senate and maybe even win the House as well.
This in turn could mean the weight of our government will be pushing the renewables transition, and helping hold the line on aggressive wars in various places.
All the cards may be on the table, and the course of history may well be determined within the next decade or so.
For anyone interested facts as opposed to arm waving.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO ACCELERATING ATMOSPHERIC CO2 GROWTH FROM ECONOMIC ACTIVITY, CARBON INTENSITY, AND EFFICIENCY OF NATURAL SINKS
Abstract — The growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), the largest human contributor to human-induced climate change, is increasing rapidly. Three processes contribute to this rapid increase. Two of these processes concern emissions. Recent growth of the world economy combined with an increase in its carbon intensity have led to rapid growth in fossil fuel CO2 emissions since 2000: comparing the 1990s with 2000–2006, the emissions growth rate increased from 1.3% to 3.3% y−1. The third process is indicated by increasing evidence (P = 0.89) for a long-term (50-year) increase in the airborne fraction (AF) of CO2 emissions, implying a decline in the efficiency of CO2 sinks on land and oceans in absorbing anthropogenic emissions. Since 2000, the contributions of these three factors to the increase in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate have been ≈65 ± 16% from increasing global economic activity, 17 ± 6% from the increasing carbon intensity of the global economy, and 18 ± 15% from the increase in AF. An increasing AF is consistent with results of climate–carbon cycle models, but the magnitude of the observed signal appears larger than that estimated by models. All of these changes characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0702737104
Living in the countryside, I’m witnessing the drying up of the land and, notably (and for the first time?) the growing number of dead, dying and fried (heat stressed) trees. Add to that all the forests around the globe that have burned plus the loss of thousands of trees from the ice storm last year… me thinks this planet is gonna get a lot hotter a lot sooner than anyone thinks… ok, maybe Guy P 🥵
Here in central Texas, mid to high 90s and the mosquitoes are back. The new fall…
Hi Doug, your paper is from 2007 and the data are from 2006. Global CO2 emissions are still increasing, but the rate is not accelerating (I admit my quick google search didn’t uncover a breakdown for economic activity, carbon intensity and efficiency of natural sinks). Chart from https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/ Global emissions did accelerate rapidly from 2000-2006 in this chart too (China boom?) but slowed a lot in the 2010’s. A peak oiler might even look at this graph and say they hit a plateau 😀
Maybe, hopefully, while emissions are still growing the rate is now at least decelerating.
Cheers, Phil
The bad news is that emissions may be flattening but carbon dioxide and, especially, methane concentrations are accelerating, which means it may now be out of our hands and the discussions on possibly failing sinks in the paper are very relevant.
The other news (good, bad or indifferent) is that the flattening is not so much because of renewables but because global GDP growth is trending towards zero sometime in the thirties.
PHIL S —
Is this recent enough for you?
GREENHOUSE GASES CONTINUED TO INCREASE RAPIDLY IN 2022
“Levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide, the three greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to climate change, continued their historically high rates of growth in the atmosphere during 2022, according to NOAA scientists.”
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/greenhouse-gases-continued-to-increase-rapidly-in-2022
There’s no question that Doug is right. The global climate may go entirely to hell even within the lifetime of old geezers such as myself and most of the other regulars here.
But there’s at least some chance some of us will be ok in terms of the climate. How bad will it get in places like the southern portions of Canada for instance? People living there may be able to adapt their agricultural practices to produce at least a food supply ample for their own needs.
We don’t have to figure out the answers for people five, ten, or fifty generations down the road. The short to medium term trumps the long term in this respect.
True, but a billion humans getting crushed up against the border walls is the greatest hell unleashed. Chaos will not respect borders.
And then there is all the other species of the planet. For example, since 2018 over 11 billion (90%) of snow crabs off Alaska have vanished… vanished due to warm ocean, study says. “The crabs starved to death en masse because the change in water temperature increased their caloric needs, according to the NOAA”
The overshoot crash and the hopeful transition to a sustainable economy will truly be hell on Earth for those of us who live thru it.
Thanks Doug, that article is full of current data that shows the really bad news 17 years ago is still really bad news. Since on this blog we are all amateur chartists and prediction makers, I’m interested in people’s opinions where the 2020-2030 black line will lie on this chart. I’m sorry if I sound flippant about a dire situation, but I can imagine Dennis fitting a straight line to the centre points of the decade averages from 1965 to 2015 and predicting a small increase for 2025. Ovi would fit a straight line to the annual averages from 1990 to 2015 and get a much greater slope, looking like his prediction would be bigger than Dennis, but then add a second line from 2015 to 2022 showing maybe things have changed, we need a few more data points to tell. (Apologies to Dennis and Ovi if they find these cartoon caricatures offensive, I really appreciate the work you do here)
Cheers, Phil
Straight line projection only makes sense if there is good reason to expect the underlying physical processes to be linear, otherwise it is meaningless or, worse, misleading just like extrapolation of any curve fit unless the fit is constrained to a model with real process information (e.g. Hubbert can be pretty good because it is based on a birth-death model). Climate models have millions of lines of code and run on computers using more power than some countries and are not linear (even then they are still to coarse to catch some non-linear nuances and can tend to produce endless drizzle instead of localised storms, for example). Anyway what would such an estimate provide, it is apparent from this year that marginal temperature changes are coming from aerosols, albedo and methane, with CO2 only giving a multi decadal background trend, and the overall positive level of emissions is more important than changes in the rate of increase..
Welcome to new world.
HURRICANES ARE NOW TWICE AS LIKELY TO ZIP FROM MINOR TO WHOPPER THAN DECADES AGO
“With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic, a study said Thursday.
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-hurricanes-minor-whopper-decades.html
From IEA coal update.
A MAJOR RESHUFFLING OF TRADE FLOWS IN 2022
“Elevated global demand for thermal coal imports is projected to be predominantly covered by Indonesian exports, expected to rise by 12% to about 525 Mt for the full year. Similarly, the elevated demand for metallurgical coal is anticipated to be mainly covered by additional exports from Mongolia, more than doubling to well over 40 Mt. Total exports of thermal coal are expected to increase to 1 099 Mt ( 5.2%), while metallurgical coal exports are forecast to reach 340 Mt ( 11%) in 2023, with total coal trade expected to approach the record volumes seen in 2019.”
So, according to the IEA, GLOBAL COAL DEMAND SET TO REMAIN AT RECORD LEVELS IN 2023
https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-market-update-july-2023/trade
And of course CO2 maintains its climb.
Oct. 21, 2023 = 418.90 ppm
Oct. 22, 2022 = 416.01 ppm
1 Year Change 2.89 ppm (0.69%)
Get off fossil fuels you say.
GLOBAL OIL DEMAND SURGES TO RECORD HIGH IN 2023
“Driven by emerging countries, more than 102 million barrels per day are expected to be consumed on average worldwide this year.”
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/06/29/global-oil-demand-surges-to-record-high-in-2023_6039249_19.html
But I thought supply peaked in 2018? Confusing . . .
INCREASED WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET MELTING ‘UNAVOIDABLE.’
Lead author Dr. Kaitlin Naughten, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey says, “It looks like we’ve lost control of melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago. The bright side is that by recognizing this situation in advance, the world will have more time to adapt to the sea level rise that’s coming. If you need to abandon or substantially re-engineer a coastal region, having 50 years lead time is going to make all the difference.”
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-unavoidable.html
One for the renewable fans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOrtGQykLVw
G&R have numerous interesting views on many subjects. There is a good shale video too.
Is The UK Giving Up on Solar Power?
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Is-The-UK-Giving-Up-On-Solar-Power.html
I don’t think the UK should deploy any domestic photovoltaics. Seriously.
Any financial resources going to the energy sector would be far better spent elsewhere, for them.
Solar is weak there. The best locations in the UK are worse than any location in the lower 48 states.
And Ireland even a little worse.
In fact most of the northern tier of European countries would do better spending their money elsewhere.
This is not the case for over 150 other countries, where the vast population of the worlds people live.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map
That is true when it comes to PV power in the UK. You could argue that small scale adoption in for example a farm or a home with a suitable rooftop makes sense, but the amount of clouded weather combined with less sun in the winter time makes it ok when prices for panels have been really low now for a period, but not when inflation takes hold like right now.
The prospects of offshore wind power is not getting cheaper with the current inflation, but each project still depends very much on local wind prospects and sea depths. The main thing that can be said about offshore wind and UK, is that the total energy potential from offshore wind is so much greater than any other renewable source (also inland wind), that the effort is a volume winner. And that electric energy is very valuable until you get to certain tresholds and limits, and for UK I guess the 2030,2040 and 2050 plans laid for energy probably makes sense for the current pace of build out. Too much wind power will adjust the system and investments anyway. (Look at South Australia, they have already built out wind power to the “max” and are exploring all options further to make the system robust and large enough (or larger) including hydrogen, battery parks, interconnector lines, pumped hydro etc).
Agree.
In Australia, renewable energy continues to confound the skeptics. From reneweconomy.com.au
Australia’s main grid averages more than 50 pct renewables over 24 hours for first time
Australia’s electricity market “most volatile” in world, as clunky coal clashes with solar
South Australia potential wind and solar reaches record 264 pct of demand on Saturday
Here in Australia, where everything appears chocolates and roses in regards to renewable electricity, our power is out again for the fourth time this week. We average power outages of over 20-30 per year, which is a magnitude higher than 30 years ago.
All the negative wholesale pricing of electricity has done is stop a lot of future plans to build both solar and wind turbines, with lots of talk about batteries and storage. The storage needed to turn off the coal plants is in the hundreds of Gwh, just for this state alone. If we included the entire AEM grid then probably over a Twh of storage would be needed. What’s being built and planned is in the Mwh range!! (50 here, 100Mwh there etc).
Storage to replace coal would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and mean a magnitude increase in prices for consumers in today’s dollars.
All the new builds are talked about in terms of homes supplied by politicians and the media, whereas what’s important is commercial and industrial uses.
Industrial users of electricity cannot cope with constant power failures, or lack of cheap power, just look at the de-industrialization that’s happening in Germany right now, as businesses look to move industrial processes to either the USA or China where they get consistent cheap power.
The concept of using hydrogen electrolysers on an intermittent basis is totally ridiculous. Electrolysers have a limited life because the hydrogen embrittles the metal, so using it 24/7 gets the maximum production over the life of the unit. The ‘water’ (usually a weak potassium hydroxide solution) used in the electrolysers is kept at around 60-80 degrees Celsius, for maximum or most efficient hydrogen production.
It would be totally uneconomic to run a large hydrogen electrolyser for 4-6 hours a day during summer and an hour or 2 here and there during winter. When do the employees turn up to operate the electrolyser? Do they sit at home twiddling their thumbs waiting to be called, or are they being paid to sit around at work when the electrolyser is not operating?
Hydrogen is a lot more expensive from electrolysers than the steam-methane reforming, when it runs 24/7, so somehow knobbling it even more by running it intermittently seems a good idea to some (providing they get huge subsidies from the govt so don’t have to pay for it when it fails!!).
Every little thing like running hydrolysers intermittently, is part of the overall lack of systemic thinking about the future. Lots of intermittently running electrolysers means a lot more built to get the same amount of hydrogen as for those running 24/7, which means lots more nickel and chromium need to be mined to build the electrolysers (huge amounts of stainless steel used!!), lots more concrete for all the extra foundations, lots more steel, lots more roads to all the extra needed electrolysers, and so on and on. All with lower grades of everything we need to mine, meaning more energy to gain access to the metals!!
And the power is back on, that outage was only 30 minutes…
We built our modern world on cheap energy and efficiencies of operations that run 24/7, especially industries. Expecting we can have any type of high complexity, like using and relying on hydrogen electrolysers for back up and long distance use of energy, based on intermittent power, much lower grades of ores in mining, plus much lower overall energy use is a belief in fairy tales.
New posts are up
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-upate-october-2023-and-eia-international-energy-outlook-2023/
and
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-october-23-2023/