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If the fuel is something that humans have processed and worked in order to make it useful, yes.
No, because I don't believe in that kind of inevitability. All that matters is energy returned on energy invested - we didn't invest anything to turn the sun on, and so we don't account for it in calculating EREOEI. We do, however, have to build solar panels - so the EROEI on an individual solar panel is actually a relevant and useful question.
Consumption rates could factor into this, but the process of oil/fossil fuel generation is so slow that it really doesn't matter. Our existing fossil fuel deposits took many times longer to accrue than humanity has even existed, and so proposing that we wait another several million years for new oil deposits to form isn't really going to help us deal with any problems that we have right now.
We have a rough estimate of how oil discovery rates will go, but if you mean in terms of discovering a new energy source... that's one approach, in the sense that if you are rapidly burning your lottery win to support an unsustainable lifestyle "hope you win the lottery again" is a strategy that someone might pick. But the consequences of getting that wrong are incredibly severe - and what if it turns out that the discovery we make requires an infrastructure investment that we can no longer afford to make because we spent all that oil growing vast quantities of corn and making artificial islands in the Middle East?
You could do that - and it is taken into account in the sense that we haven't done that. EROEI is a method for working out whether or not those ventures are actually productive, and in most cases the answer is that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
When I said adjustment there, I meant taking steps to prepare for a future with less available energy and more climate disruptions. That means making your home and lifestyle more energy efficient, using less energy and reducing your reliance on large supply chains. Living a lifestyle with less free energy has some challenges, and you're much better off facing those challenges when you still have access to those global supply chains and massive amounts of energy. You'll also, in some way, contribute to fighting the problem by reducing energy expenditure and pollution creation as a result.
There's nothing vague about these predictions - they're based on the technical analysis done for Limits to Growth. To the best of my knowledge we're still following the World3 projections fairly accurately. We're on track for growth to go into reverse in about ten years, give or take, and I haven't seen any really robust criticism of the Limits to Growth studies. They were shockingly accurate for 1972.
I'm confused again. Does "built a solar panel to process and work the energy from nuclear fusion" count as processing/working to make it useful?
We also didn't have to invest anything to create fossil fuels, so...?
How?
I prefer "invest the proceeds of my previously productive business venture into a new productive business venture". If it's argument by analogy, then I don't see why this analogy isn't just as valid.
I mean, is it? That's kind of the question I started with. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Or are other human values involved in some way?
Got it. You just define adjustments at the type that you like. But the good news is that market prices will cause people to take those steps anyway. Sounds like we're all good here.
Whelp, let's not talk about any of the theoretical problems with this work... or the failed price predictions. Let's just bask in the update. Oh Figure 3, how glorious you are. We were apparently wildly off on our estimate of how many resources there were (again, ignoring the theoretical problem with definitions here), but surely, we're right on tract to get exactly back in line with the old predictions... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future. So what if pollution hasn't taken off like predicted? It'll surely surely happen in the future, but now it looks significantly decoupled from the rest of the subsystems, so what the hell is the point of that again? Population might be coming to a peak; we'll see. And so what if we've done better at industrial output and food production; they're also surely to suddenly and precipitously collapse.... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future.
In the 70s, maybe this wasn't all that bettable (except for the bets that were made and were lost by the degrowthers). But now, this chart is suuuuuuper bettable. It's predicting sharp and rapid collapses from peaks that are pre-2025. Certainly, the data will be in to confirm this by, say, 2030. You should formalize the predictions from this model and put them on a popular prediction market. At least if society is going to collapse, you can make some money to mitigate the individual pain.
Solar panels do not appear out of the ether, fully formed. They are physically made, by people, out of raw materials and processed parts. You have to do useful work and invest energy into a solar panel in order for it to then return usable energy to you. We only care about the energy cost of building the solar panel, because that's what it takes to actually use it. To go back to fuel, we don't care about the energy that went into making uranium ore in the ground, but we do care about the energy investment required to turn a mountain with uranium in it to a bunch of usable fuel pellets for a nuclear reactor.
Wrong. Petroleum products go through substantial refining processes, and we have to build large facilities to extract and export those fossil fuels. There's a substantial amount of human labour that has gone into the petroleum that fuels a modern combustion engine, even if nature has already done most of the real work of creating living beings and then compressing them over millions of years.
If we dramatically lower our consumption rates, the resources we do have will last longer.
It is valid. You can invest the proceeds of your previously productive business venture into a new one. But that's exactly what I am advocating for and we aren't doing! Your analogy is valid in the sense that it is a perfectly good approach to the problems we're facing - it just isn't what we're actually doing. We're spending those resources on military conflicts, poll numbers (see Biden draining the SPR), happy meal toys, artificial islands in the shape of a sheik pissing money away and making as many Americans as obese as possible for as long as possible. Did you know that modern industrial farming techniques require 13 calories of energy to create 1 calorie of food? THAT is the kind of investment we're making - and I don't think I'd call an investment productive if it had a -92% return.
You get more out of it than you put in. If I build a powerplant for 100 dollars, and it generates 90 dollars of power before needing to be scrapped, I would have been better off not building it.
Calories is a convenient and easily understandable way to measure energy - I'm not sure how much more basic I can get here.
No? People could easily make bad adjustments and use energy even more wastefully if they want - but I was talking about potential adjustments people could make to try and solve the problem.
Are you for real? The market absolutely will not cause people to take those steps, and even a cursory look at the state of the world (let alone history) makes it exceedingly obvious that market prices and forces are not capable of preventing financial crashes, collapses and recessions that result from human malinvestment/bad budgeting decisions. The process that market forces actually inflict on societies in these conditions is called "catabolic collapse" and we've seen it play out multiple times in history. Homo sapiens is not homo economicus, and every single prediction made on the basis that they are has failed. You can play whatever games you want with financial numbers - if there's no more economically/energetically viable oil to extract, no amount of money will be capable of conjuring more of it out of the ether.
Did you actually go and read the article you posted? Here's a section which I think you might have missed.
Thank you for posting this great evidence in favour of my own argument - "alarmingly consistent with the most recently collected empirical data" isn't really the sort of thing you would say about an inaccurate prediction! As an aside, this is actually the second time someone has posted this exact link to me in a conversation about this topic on the motte - https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/167149?context=8#context
You're losing track of the thread.
I had asked:
You had responded:
Then, I asked:
Now, here, you say:
But this doesn't make sense, especially in contrast to how you seem to still think in the subsequent paragraph that we do count the energy content of fossil fuels, because we do work on it.
You need to choose one or the other option. We do work on both things to make them usable. Either we only count the work we do on it, and we do not count the energy content of the fuel, itself... or we do count the energy content of the fuel, itself, because we do work on it. Please clearly pick one standard to apply evenly.
The second point you've made also lost the thread. I had asked:
You responded:
I then asked:
Your current response doesn't tell me anything about how I go through the process of factoring in consumption rates. When I'm determining whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans", I need to do some math on some numbers, and one of the variables I have is, possibly, consumption rates. How does that variable fit in?
I could make an even longer list of things I don't like about the world, but I don't see how any of these things are really relevant to the questions at hand. In fact, why didn't you just start with that in the first place? Just start with saying that we're totally ruined because we're squandering resources on all these things, then we don't even have to get into any tricky questions about how to measure real things.
That tells me a lot about the relative value of those forms of calories. Which also tells me that, unlike in one's personal diet, a calorie is not just a calorie, so it's surprising and weird that you want to make the measure be about unlabeled calories.
Ok. Do you think modern farmers are getting less money than they put in?
You can tell me, in basic terms, why energy is the fundamental unit of investment. You didn't seem to think that it was just one sentence ago. You seemed to think it was dollars for some reason. So I ask again. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Is it dollars? Or are other human values involved in some way?
Yes, I am for real. If your predictions are correct, the price of certain resources will rise, and we have very clear results about price elasticity. Do you think price elasticity is bullshit, fake science? Short term financial crises/recessions are in a completely different category on completely different timescales.
I did. But rather than just trust the words that potentially-motivated authors wrote to describe their own interpretations of the data, I actually went and looked at the data myself and drew my own conclusions. Did you actually go look at the data or even bother to read my alternate interpretation, then think about the data that you've seen and consider how to judge the differing interpretations? Or is the standard literally, "One author wrote one sentence of interpretation in a published article, so therefore it is revealed truth"? If so, I'll need a few minutes, but we can find some, uh, alternate revealed truth that might make you uncomfortable.
Sort of hilariously, just yesterday, Practical Engineering took a little run at one of the slew of modern myths about us running out of this or that resource. Focus special attention on his discussion of adaptation. And no, just because sometimes, there are fuck-ups and some bridge collapses somewhere or something, that does not mean that it is impossible for price changes to drive adaptation.
Energy returned on energy invested. I don't know how much simpler I can make this! We care about fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable. We don't care about supplying the fuel required for the sun to burn, but we do care about the fuel required to build and install a solar panel. We don't care about the energy required to make uranium during the formation of the earth, but we do care about the energy required to dig it out of the ground and process it into fuel pellets. The dividing line is just the amount of energy that we actually invested.
When it comes to fossil fuels like petroleum and coal, the answer is simply that if we have some kind of horrific catastrophe that dramatically cuts population and destroys the economy, the problem will get pushed forward a few hundred years. A Carrington event, nuclear war, some other novel WMD (a biological weapon that reduces global population by 95% would qualify), a supervolcano erupting, a megatsunami, a meteorite impact... there are a lot of potential events that could cause a decrease in consumption rates enough to matter.
But in order for new fossil fuels to form it will require several million years - many multiple times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed on earth. The USA currently has issues with plans longer than 4 years - I don't trust them to accurately plan for something multiple millions of years in the future.
Energy is the fundamental unit of investment because the measure under discussion is ENERGY RETURNED ON ENERGY INVESTED. That's an appropriate measure to use when discussing sources of energy! We are talking about energy, but finance makes for a good metaphor that's easy to understand. If it makes it easier to think about, then picture an incredibly tiny power plant which costs 100 calories to build and fuel, which then generates 90 calories worth of usable power as a result.
In many cases, modern farmers actually are getting less money than they put in and are under significant financial stress. But the actual answer is that we're talking about energy rather than money, and so they don't care that modern fossil-fuel based farming practices are inefficient at the level of energy because they are much more efficient at the economic level. Financial and social pressure means that we are converting this energy to food in an incredibly inefficient way due to the immense surplus of energy that we currently have access to, but in a real-world financial sense they're doing what's rational for people in their position. I don't just think that this is a bad idea, but I think that it is a bad idea that is already bringing forth nasty consequences.
As I mentioned, I already went through that article 9 months ago. I quoted the authors because I agree with their understanding of their own results - agreeing with something doesn't mean that I just scanned through for a sentence I agree with.
So do you count the energy content of fossil fuels? Honestly, I don't know how much clearer I could make the difficulty in your current statements than I did in my last comment. You're really going to need to show at least an indicia of engaging with the question or I'll probably just have to write you off as non-responsive and give up.
I don't think your latest response actually gave me anything to go on here. I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
Ah yes, ipse dixet. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not really trying to engage.
I mean, are we? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why is energy the real topic when we're talking about agriculture?
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
Why? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why are you talking about energy rather than money or any of the other things that could be involved in the discussion?
In that case, you could probably say something relevant concerning my remarks on the data contained therein, rather than simply resting on one of their quotes.
We care about the energy content of fossil fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable. The actual energy content of the fuel is immaterial, because what matters is the usable energy we can extract from it, minus the costs of extracting that energy and converting it into a useful form. Not all fossil fuels are created equally - there are differing grades of oil, and the extraction methods required to harness them are different too. The kind of light sweet crude that burst out of the ground in the early days of America was a substantially better and more useful fuel than the output of shale fracking or deep-sea oil platforms.
I suppose this means the ultimate answer to that question is "Yes, but it is complicated." The raw energy content of a given fuel is obviously relevant when working out how much usable energy you get out of it, but it isn't the whole story. I'm not going to go to a financial metaphor because that seems to have just caused confusion, but imagine that there's a town with two oil wells. Both of them produce completely identical oil - but one of those oil wells requires complex machinery, expert knowledge and significant electrical expenditure to extract that oil, while the other well is so pressurised that it simply bursts out of the ground with so much force it costs nothing at all. Both of those oil wells are producing a fossil fuel with the same energy content, but the energy we invest to actually make it usable in each case is different.
The caloric content of food is generally considered extremely relevant information, to the point that listing it on the label is required in all first world countries. Calories are the unit we use to measure the energy required for human bodies to stay alive - and I think you're going to have your work cut out for you if you want to talk about food, diet and agriculture without bringing up calories.
Why? I agreed with their position and from where I was standing it argued against your own interpretation. It looked to me like you had simply found an article with datapoints that ostensibly supported your position rather than reading through the entire article to see what was actually being communicated - sorry if I was wrong and you actually seriously engaged with the article and interrogated the claims within seriously. I actually still agree with their conclusion - global population growth is starting to slow down, and I can look out the window right now to see the impacts of pollution on the environment.
I think there are absolutely things in these predictions worth betting on, but the problem is that the short term can be extremely noisy - a major war or climate disaster could shift the precise dates around by a few years, for instance. If you actually do want to bet on those figures, the shape of the curves in question can only really be worked out sometime around 2040, but if you don't have anything else you'll need to spend the money on in the next 16 years I'm down.
Your response is trying so hard to be unclear. My best interpretation of your "yes, but" is that you really mean, "No, we do not count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy In." And we don't really count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy Out, either; we just count something about what we've been able to harvest from the fuel. Do you disagree? I'm not sure why it's so hard to get an answer for something that you're saying is super simple and easy.
For some purposes, yes. But acknowledging that something is relevant for some purposes does not mean that it is basically The Only thing. For many folks, the protein content of food is considered extremely important, but no one would say that Protein In/Protein Out is The Metric.
Global population growth is one correct out of many. Conversely, levels of pollution in developed countries is going down significantly, and it's plausible that this will come to developing countries as they develop. The latest update pushed the pollution people significantly into the future (magically, btw, being one of the biggest differences from past predictions).
The peaks in those images are clearly pre-2025. The drops are precipitous. Why would you need another fifteen years to see the drop?
I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
I don't know how much clearer I can be given that the question doesn't have a yes/no answer. I'm not sure how communication broke down totally like this because I have never encountered anyone who hasn't been able to grasp the concept like this before. Energy returned on energy invested is just so straightforward that I don't understand how I can make it any clearer. To use solar as an example: we only account for the energy invested in creating and installing the solar panel, because we don't invest anything to make the sun keep burning and hence don't care about the energy content of the fuel (in this case sunlight). If you are putting oil into your car, you care about the energy of the fuel because that's on the "energy invested" side of the equation.
Calories are extremely relevant when determining whether or not a food source can sustain a human population, which is the purpose that matters here. If you can find someone who stays alive without any calories, please let the world know.
They changed their accounting method for pollution - the statistic they're tracking is different, which is why the curve is different. They focused much more on carbon in the atmosphere, both because that's going to be one of the most significant sources of pollution-related economic damage and because fossil fuel usage is decently correlated with activities that produce other types of pollution (plastic, nitrogen fertiliser runoff, fracking, chemical processing etc).
First of all, this particular data can be pretty noisy. Sharp spikes up and down in various numbers can happen for a variety of reasons without actually changing the longer-term trends that underlie them. There's a chance I'm extremely wrong and what we're seeing is a small dip before those curves turn back up and go exponential as humanity metastasizes across the stars - or we could get something more negative. The Middle East is currently on the verge of a large regional war, and if that war breaks out at least one side has said that their planned military strategy is to completely destroy all petroleum-related infrastructure that isn't theirs, and there's a decent chance they could actually achieve this. While it would be immensely destructive and bad for the global economy, it would have a massive impact on the depletion curve for a lot of those resources (petroleum is used in the extraction of almost all other resources and a rise in its price will have dramatic flow-on effects).
Ok here's the easy version - if it takes longer than a million years to renew itself, it isn't relevant to modern humans.
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