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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.

is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.

It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.

A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.

I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.

Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.

To them I say:

How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?

And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?

A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.

Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.

Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.

Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.

And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.

The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.

I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was.

It was probably this one from ZeroHPLovecraft, which someone recommended here pretty recently.

That is indeed the one, as much as I might dislike a lot of his politics, I can't deny the man has a consistent ability to churn out bangers. Thank you.

Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.

Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.

It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.

Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.

It's the ultimate sour grapes. We can never have it, so we must convince ourselves that we don't really want it. I do believe sour grapes is a perfectly rational and healthy response to impossible desires, however.

The crux is that there's no reason to assume that immortality (in the sense that you don't die except for external accidents or violence) isn't clearly plausible. At least it is to me based off what I know about biology, assuming only modest advances in biotech. At the very least, aging is almost certainly a curable disease!

When you get into the realm of mind uploads, you can trivially guarantee a form of you making it to Heat Death if you regularly fork and hide copies of yourself all throughout the universe where nobody can get to them.

I wouldn't say that going sour grapes is a good response either, when you can simply say that "yeah, that would be nice but it's not happening so no need to dwell on it".

I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible, but it's also been "30 years away" for much longer than that. I don't think anyone on this forum will be living past 2150. And yes, being able to accept the truth with equanimity would be better than self-delusion, but our powers of self-delusion are very strong, so we may as well get some use out of them.

I mean, I evidently disagree! From my understanding of biology (which ought to be better than average, or I've wasted 7 years of my life), aging doesn't seem fundamentally intractable at all. I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone other than the other doctor here, and perhaps @ChristPrattAlphaRaptor who might know more, though I don't know if gerontology and SENS is anything he's interested in.

If I had to put semi-serious numbers on it, I'd say that most people under 30 have a 70-80% chance of reaching longevity escape velocity (when your life expectancy grows faster than you age), in the counterfactual world where AGI doesn't become a reality.

Now, I sincerely expect AGI to become a thing more likely than not, and within a decade at most, at which point it's a tossup as to whether it gives us immortality and catgirl blowjobs, or kills us all.

At any rate, I have no qualms about claiming that a superhuman AGI should trivially be able to solve the problem, not that I really want to take that risk until I'm already old and doddering haha

I can't see it. Increases in average lifespan haven't translated into increases in maximum lifespan (Aeschylus lived to 92 in ~400 B.C., that's still longer than most American men today). It seems to be no low hanging fruit. Diseases that were easily treatable are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and development of new ones has slowed down. Maybe that will pick up again, maybe it won't. More than immortality, dying of a hyper-MRSA infection after a difficult surgery in late middle age seems a likely outcome to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a biologist.

Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output.

Do you not have enough already?

Of course I am totally opposed to this view of art as a fungible good in the first place - this view that one can simply request "more art" in the way that one might request more bananas or more toothpaste. But even if that is your view of art, I can't see how you would be dissatisfied right now. There's already more art than can fit in one lifetime.

There's more art than I can consume, yet it's not really good, first-rate stuff that appeals to me greatly as opposed to only a little.

Do you not have enough already?

I can think of a few reasons more art is better, even though we already cannot consume all existing art:

  1. More art means more good art. 1000x the art doesn't just 1000x the low-brow stuff but also means 1000 top-quality world-changing pieces for every one which currently exists.

  2. More art means more art in each genre and subgenre. Each teeny tiny hyperspecific subgenre of current art will look like a full genre with its own miniscule subgenres when there is more art. Fantasy will have more books in it than Fiction currently does, Medieval Fantasy will have more books than Fantasy currently does, and so on.

  3. More art means more communication between artists. If there is 1000x the top-notch art out there, people have 1000x the good examples to emulate, which I think adds to the quality of each art piece. The field also presumably evolves faster with all the art coming out.

I'm sure @RandomRanger agrees that it's not just art that would be the output of a grossly larger population, but also science and industry.

That being said, I for one have no qualms about saying that yes, there isn't enough art out there, at least of the quality I enjoy consuming.

There aren't enough good movies and video games, and current discovery mechanisms limit me from finding enough of the kind of literature I like to indefinitely satiate my appetite for such.

I'm sure we can manage without all the additional people if we really have to, because of AI doing cognitive labor in their place. That's replacing quantity for quality to a degree.

I think we're pretty much post-scarcity for high quality artistic imagery as early as Midjourney V4. Not quite there when it comes to novels, movies, games or music, though the last is incipient as AI musicians become prevalent and continue improving. I give 30% odds that GPT-5 can write a novella I would enjoy reading, while 4 can't.

I think we're pretty much post-scarcity for high quality artistic imagery as early as Midjourney V4

My reaction upon reading this is, I assume, the same as the reaction you have when you see "unironic endorsement of degrowth": slack-jawed befuddlement.

The suggestion that not only are we suffering from a paucity of good art (which may be partially true, but it would be true for me in a sense that's different from yours), but that the way to rectify this problem is to ask Midjourney to draw certain representational images, is... really quite remarkable.

In spite of the depth of our disagreement, I do sincerely appreciate you being here to articulate these views, really. I would hate to have to discuss these matters in an echo chamber.

Oh, there's plenty of good art out there (at least, in self_made_human's sense). Midjourney makes it cheaper.

Depends on what you're looking to get out of art? I don't care much about the artist's intentions, only what emotional response it provokes in me.

AI art is certainly capable of being pretty, and right now with proper prompting it can also be compelling, and further when LLMs get even better at prompting, you can cut all the humans out of the loop and still have art that appeals to my sensibilities.

I'm sure you can agree that it's at least pretty and technically competent! Most human art doesn't meet that standard, just look at DeviantArt.

By all means, preach to the choir, they're going to be in attendance by default haha.

It does deeply reassure me that that people like you exist, who I consider fundamentally sane in a manner that makes me willing to tolerate a great deal of discord in other fundamental values when we see eye to eye on the really big ones (not that I'm aware of such differences!)

Decrying immortality is the epitome of luxury beliefs, since nobody really has a glaring example of it that can be shoved in their face. I'd like to see their hypocritical walkbacks when they begin to argue that no, it's different this time, and we didn't actually mean to dunk on immortality now that it's on sale.

I like what you mean by fundamentally sane, it fits a concept I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. There are a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what could be possible visions of the future. I recall an exchange on twitter. Someone like Roko or Alexander Kruel was saying 'oh we could easily fit a trillion people on Earth based on these technical factors' and one of the trad-rightists said something like 'so what, that has nothing to do with the good life, they aren't needed to be squires or knights in the small bands of bodybuilders roaming across the American plains on horseback'.

On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment. I particularly dislike the psychoanalytic tone they take, saying that nuclear power and so on is a cope that people clutch to so they can hold onto their preferred incarnation of decadent modernity. The figures don't bear that out.

Now there are all kinds of formidable technical and socio-political problems in achieving our vision of the good life, sovereignty amongst posthumans. I think it's a very long shot, that there are competitive pressures that lead to autocracy or monopoly of a very few. Yet we can't turn back now and play Cowboys and Indians or Trad Farmers. There is no going back, no unilateral disarmament of industry, wealth and power. Much as I might prefer that AI development be paused for many decades so that we can upgrade ourselves steadily and establish a solid political/technical/social foundation, I recognize that it's not practical to hold back, competition won't allow it.

The bodybuilders on horseback would get pummelled by riflemen circa 1870, let alone the drone swarms of 2070. If their vision of the future doesn't include massively more technology than we have now, they're going to get crushed. Likewise with immortality and massive cognitive enhancements. If they're even on offer, we're doing well.

On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment.

As one of the people who most commonly link to Ecosophia on this site, I don't believe you have an accurate understanding of the claims being made. The first reason is your placing of Ecosophia on the left - where exactly on the left does pro-Trump Burkean conservatism lie? Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).

The same gap in perception afflicts most current efforts to make sense of the future looming up ahead of us. Ever since my original paper on catabolic collapse first found its way onto the internet, I’ve fielded questions fairly regularly from people who want to know whether I think some current or imminent crisis will tip industrial society over into catabolic collapse in some unmistakably catastrophic way. It’s a fair question, but it’s based on a fundamental misreading both of the concept of catabolic collapse and of our present place in the long cycles of rise and fall that define the history of civilizations.

...

That’s catabolic collapse. It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs significantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline that’s traced by the history of so many declining civilizations—half a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-01-20/onset-catabolic-collapse/

JMG has not been talking about the coming zombie apocalypse where a giant cataclysm completely and dramatically upends the existing order of things - the Long Descent lies outside the "apocalypse/star trek" dichotomy that's so prevalent in modern society. And on the topic of technology, here are some of his actual words on the subject.

Technology is a lagging indicator—it’s quite common for a civilization in terminal decline to push its technologies further than ever before, while its economy turns into a hollow shell propped up by fakery and graft, its political system grinds to a halt in bureaucratic paralysis and hopeless incompetence, and its grip on its outlying regions becomes increasingly fictitious. In every way that matters, modern civilization is more than a century into decline, drawing toward the end of one of the eras of relative stability that reliably punctuate the downslope of history.

https://unherd.com/2022/03/we-are-the-authors-of-our-decline/

Look at what happened to the technology of past civilisations that ended up collapsing. Some Roman architecture still stands to this day, and plenty of the advancements that were made during the Empire were preserved and helped make sure that the dark ages afterwards were a bit more tolerable. The collapse of Rome didn't leave humanity doomed to pre-Roman technology for all time, and the collapse of modern Western civilisation won't do the same either. It's highly likely that bicycles and a lot of the other technology we've developed will be used well into the future, assuming that those skills and ideas are preserved through the decline.

More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows. In huge swathes of the US you can just look outside and see exactly what he's talking about. To wit:

The decline and fall of a civilization is not a fast process. Neither is the twilight of an empire, the restructuring of a planet’s climate, or the exhaustion of that same planet’s once-extensive fossil fuel reserves. All of these happen over a scale of multiple lifetimes, and they also happen unevenly. Just as the movement of the tides is obscured in the short term by the ebb and flow of waves, the fall of a civilization is obscured by the ordinary vagaries of politics, economics, and culture. Only now and then, when several crises pile up together and disrupt the ordinary rhythms of business as usual, does it become possible to gauge just how far down the slope we’ve already come.

That is to say, the reality of decline becomes most visible in times like the present.

Look around you, dear reader, as you go about your daily life, and compare what you see now to what you saw a decade or two ago, or longer if your memory reaches that far. Here in the United States, it’s been more than two years since grocery stores have reliably had fully stocked shelves; the same condition, all but unthinkable in the industrial world just a few years back, has spread to Britain and more recently to several European countries as well. If you live in or near a big city, compare how many homeless people there are now to how many there were in the past; compare the state of streets and sidewalks and infrastructure now to their condition in any earlier decade you care to name. Consider the impact of product debasement and the general crapification of the conditions of your life. Notice what civil rights you can actually exercise, as distinct from those you have in some theoretical sense. Notice the general texture of life.

Do I need to state the obvious? This is what decline looks like.

The collapse of Rome was not evenly and equally distributed - the Byzantines kept on going for quite some time, and it is highly likely that parts of the modern west will do the same. On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards. The fall or collapse of a civilisation is not a permanent end to human history, but another iteration of a process that we have an increasingly accurate understanding of.

Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).

I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.

More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows.

This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...

Look at the actual predictions he made from the 2011 link:

The notion that America can drill its way out of crisis would be funny if the situation was not so serious; despite dizzyingly huge government subsidies and the best oil exploration and extraction technology on Earth, US oil production has been in decline since 1972.

That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

neither we nor Britain nor any other of our close allies has a big new petroleum reserve just waiting to be tapped, after all.

And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production. COVID hit and then we had the war in Ukraine which have thrown things out of whack, yet these crises don't stem from energy problems, they stem from human stupidity in geopolitics and biomedical research. The West's leaders have been working around the clock to sabotage the fossil fuel industry, shut down pipelines like Keystone, ban exploration, shut down power plants, impose punitive taxes, engage in lawfare against coal mines.

On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards.

I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope? What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.

Anyway, my primary disagreement with him is that we are not short of energy. There's plenty of uranium and thorium if only we bother to use 50-year old, simple technologies like breeder reactors, if only we get rid of all the red tape that slows down construction. The state-sponsored sabotage of nuclear energy is staggering - see https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

Likewise, sulphate aerosols could reverse climate change in a matter of years, if only we chose to deploy them.

Nuclear energy is actually cheaper than coal for electricity in technical terms, it's just that we choose to make it more expensive. More broadly, all the time we're finding new efficiencies, new sources of power, new ways to accelerate development. Fracking is just one example. Peak oil was supposed to come in 1974, 2006, then 2011, it still hasn't come and it won't mean anything more than 'peak whale oil' ever did when it does come, since we'll be onto gas, nuclear fission and fusion, or solar if it ever becomes economically viable. That is, provided our leaders are wise enough to do their jobs correctly, as opposed to flailing around like children. That's what was going on with Rome and Byzantium, their energy sources were stable but their leadership became incompetent.

I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/

I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject (a good read, in my opinion). Yes, he does care about the environment, but that's not really unexpected for Burkean conservatives and was in fact traditional for conservatism for a large portion of history. He quite literally has a Master Conserver certificate, and Conservation and Conservatism both share a root word after all.

This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...

"If the US decided" - how exactly is that going to happen? The political deadlock and inability of the state to solve these problems ARE collapse! Yes, the US government could just decide to turn around and fix a lot of the problems that society is facing, but this is like saying alcoholism is easy to fix - after all, one just needs to stop drinking and the problem is gone. There's a galaxy of competing interests and power-politics that get in the way of actually resolving the hard problems that face complex societies, and this gridlock is one of the common features of declining empires.

And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production.

Allow me to quote the man himself on the topic:

Then, just as in the 1970s, a flurry of short-term fixes temporarily flooded the market with cheap petroleum and drove prices down again for a while. Those fixes didn’t involve any of the new energy sources that had been brandished around. They involved taking a well-known oil extraction technology called hydrofracturing (“fracking”), using it on well-known shale reserves that weren’t economical to drill and pump, and having the US government cover the costs by printing money at a reckless pace and funneling it to the fracking industry by way of a flurry of dubious financial gimmicks. (That orgy of money-printing is a large part of why we have runaway inflation now, in case you were wondering.) That was never going to be more than a temporary gimmick, and it lasted only a dozen years: the price of oil was already skyrocketing again before the Russo-Ukraine war broke out. The next stage—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Fracking isn't a new technology - when Greer spoke about and evaluated his predictions, he mentioned that he didn't expect the flurry of financial gimmicks that ended up allowing the fracking boom to take place. That said I don't have a citation for this one, and I can't find the evaluation he did because it is on his older, archived blog.

I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope?

He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures. As for deriding nuclear, yes he did... and while I would very much like him to be wrong, I haven't seen any evidence that he is.

The first of the nonsolutions I have in mind was that endlessly rewarmed casserole of twentieth-century fantasies, nuclear power. A few centuries from now, when some future equivalent of Rev. Charles Mackay pens a new version of that durable classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, industrial society’s obsession with nuclear power will rank high among the exhibits. No matter how many times nuclear power plants turn out to be unaffordable without gargantuan government subsidies, some people remain fixated on the notion that some future iteration of nuclear power will finally fulfill the Eisenhower-era delusion of energy too cheap to meter. If one nuclear technology fails, we hear, surely the next one will succeed, or the one after that. It never sinks in that every nuclear technology looks cheap, clean, and reliable until it’s built.

There are good reasons why this should be so. At the heart of our energy conundrum is the neglected reality of net energy—that is to say, how much energy you get out after you subtract all the energy you have to put in. Nuclear fission looks great as long as you don’t think about net energy. True believers gaze on the fuel pellets that provide the energy behind nuclear power and say, “All that energy in so tiny a space!”

What they never seem to notice is that fuel pellets as such don’t occur in nature. They have to be manufactured from one of a small handful of fissionable metals, which can be found only in very, very diffuse form in mineral ores. Behind each of those fuel pellets, in other words, is a gigantic heap of mine tailings, which have to be dug from the ground and subjected to a whole series of processes to get the fissionable material out. All this takes energy—huge amounts of energy. Then, of course, you have to build, maintain, and decommission the nuclear power plant, which also takes a whale of a lot of energy, and the radioactive waste also has to be dealt with, taking more energy still. All this has to be subtracted from the output, for the same reason that a bookkeeper has to subtract expenses from income to determine the profit.

Net energy calculations are fiendishly difficult, since you have to factor in every energy input into every stage of the process, from the raw ore in the ground, raw materials not yet turned into a power plant, and so on. Fortunately there’s a convenient proxy measure, which is the price set by the market. It’s a source of wry amusement to me that so many of the cheerleaders for nuclear power these days think of themselves as conservatives, insist that they favor the free market and oppose government intervention, and then turn around and back a power source that has been weighed repeatedly by the market and found wanting, and only remains in existence today because of gigantic government subsidies.

Nuclear power never pays for itself. That’s the hard lesson of the last three quarters of a century. The writing was already on the wall back in the 1960s, when the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered commercial freighter, was still in service. It was a technological success but an economic flop, which is why it was mothballed as soon as the subsidies ran out. The handful of other nuclear freighters that were built all met the same fate. You can use nuclear power to run naval vessels because navies don’t have to pay for themselves. Commercial shipping does—and on a much broader scale, of course, so does an industrial economy.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/

Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account) and I'll be overjoyed and freely admit that he was wrong. Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.

What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.

The same renewable energy sources that powered every empire before the age of fossil fuel usage and extraction - the sun, human and animal muscle, hydro, wind and a few others. You're right when you say that technological civilizations like ours need more power - which means that when we no longer have that power, we no longer have the technological civilization like ours. Renewable energy is indeed unable to power an incredibly wasteful and environmentally ruinous society like our current one, but being unable to support modern society doesn't mean they're useless. Of course the problem is that in order to achieve a smooth transition to renewables the date we have to start making the change is, iirc, about 1974 - but while we've missed that boat, renewables will definitely play a part in the future.

I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject

I only read a couple of his articles, the ones where he talks about net returns from energy and explains his ideology and predictions. It reads to me more like he's anti-elite than pro-Trump.

He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures.

I meant permanent stagnation in the end - he said we'd never be going to space. A wavy line heading down, then stagnation.

Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account)

Firstly, waste is not even a small problem. There's so little of it that it can just be put in boxes, taken to a warehouse in a desert and left there, perhaps with some guards. It's only the very stupid people in the US government who insist on ridiculous nonsense like spending billions inspecting the geology of Cheyenne mountain to establish whether any waste will leak out over 10,000 years (unironically having legal cases about whether 10,000 years was too short a time span), promising to build a permanent waste dump and then not doing it for decades. In the US today, waste is just stored in boxes next to the nuclear plants because there's so little. In a smarter world, it'd be taken to breeder reactors to be used for fuel, yet nobody bothered to develop that technology because uranium is too cheap.

Anyway, the functioning power plants that generate energy in a sustainably profitable way! See link, see the chart of nuclear power plant construction costs by country: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The nuclear power plants that South Korea has just built for example, cost about $2000 per kilowatt (USD 2010) in capacity. That is to say they'll then produce energy basically for free, because contra Greer, uranium is very cheap because of its insane energy density. 80% of the cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor, nobody even bothered developing breeders because there's no shortage of uranium.

Nuclear power plants in the US were cheap and profitable to produce, then Three Mile Island happened (a massive nothingburger where nobody was hurt, compared to the hundreds of thousands who die from air pollution annually) and the US decided 'let's make it really hard to build nuclear power plants, let's make it take 5-10 years longer, let's refuse to give a single permission for about 30 years so we choke our nuclear industry to death'. See the graph here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-and-Construction-Duration-of-US-Nuclear-Reactors-Color_fig6_292964046

Also, consider this graph: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Cost-Experience-Curve-of-Coal-Power-compared-with-Cost-Experience-Curves-of_fig12_292964046

Nuclear power is roughly comparable to coal power in the cost of plants (slightly more expensive), when it's not grossly mismanaged. But the cost of a nuclear plant contributes much more to the cost of the electricity than with coal. Coal needs trainloads of fuel after all. Nuclear power is cheap as long as the reactors don't cost 3x more than they should because govt regulators invent insane nonsense to pump up those costs:

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained. The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

This is the kind of nonsense that the US government inflicts on the nuclear industry, along with refusing to grant permits for any new plants after Three Mile Island for decades. Meanwhile in Korea they waited ages before shooting themselves in the foot with the renewables meme and built a fair few cheap nuclear plants.

Decommissioning isn't a major problem either. It's because of an irrational phobia of radiation that people even raise this as a problem. A few thousand tonnes of mildly radioactive steel, who cares? That's about 200 truck loads, peanuts in the grand scheme of things. We could put it in another warehouse in a desert. Civilizations produce waste, the planet is big, mining anything creates huge amounts of toxic, often radioactive, waste. We know how to deal with waste.

Furthermore, the onus is on Greer to explain why nuclear power is inherently unprofitable, (and not merely unprofitable but incapable of sustaining technological civilization) he doesn't even provide a single statistic, just cites a first-in-its-class cargo ship. Revolutionary, innovative tech is often uneconomical.

Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.

I can't vaporize the US government but some combination of the PLA and the American people can and will. It's not competitive to have leaders who pursue bad economic/energy policy. The power of competition automatically rewards the wise and punishes the stupid. People are going to realize that renewables don't work, that we can't just build tens of thousands of kilometres more transmission cables, produce more copper than we've produced in the whole of human history in 30 years... People will go back to tech that actually works, coal, gas, oil and nuclear. We can do some more unconventional exploration and unleash the power of the market, end the sabotage campaign. In my country, nuclear power plants are actually illegal! The idiots in government will change their tune very quickly if they face a lynch mob and efficient, energy-rich foreign war machines.

People are going to realize that renewables don't work, that we can't just build tens of thousands of kilometres more transmission cables, produce more copper than we've produced in the whole of human history in 30 years…

Oh no, not you too with the scary extrapolations. It certainly looks like in the last 30 years we have produced more copper than in the whole of human history, or close to it. (and every thirty years before that too: eyeballing it: 400 million tonnes for 1990-2020, 180 for 1960-1990 , 80 for 1930-1960 and then it decreases at the same pace) .

Remember when we had to scrap our plans to put high capacity telephone/internet wires into every home because we ran out of copper, which previously did the job? Not like we switched to fiber optics, which is better in every way.

When will you learn? We’re not going to run out of anything we need.

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I only read a couple of his articles, the ones where he talks about net returns from energy and explains his ideology and predictions. It reads to me more like he's anti-elite than pro-Trump.

Then you did not read enough of his work to form a worthwhile opinion of it. He has been writing essays for the internet since 2006 - and a lot of his work on peak oil and alternative energy sources is in his old, archived blog which he is now selling (you can read it for free in various archive places, but my old links no longer work).

I meant permanent stagnation in the end - he said we'd never be going to space. A wavy line heading down, then stagnation.

This is emphatically not what he has said or predicted, apart from the "never going to space" part. The wavy line heading down is modern western industrial civilisation - eventually it will die and another civilisation will take its place, with its own birth, growth, peak and decline. This process will continue and continue for an awfully long time, but eventually the last human will be born and die. There's no stagnation here - just a continuation of the course of history. Ever heard of the Bronze Age collapse?

Furthermore, the onus is on Greer to explain why nuclear power is inherently unprofitable, (and not merely unprofitable but incapable of sustaining technological civilization) he doesn't even provide a single statistic, just cites a first-in-its-class cargo ship. Revolutionary, innovative tech is often uneconomical.

He has been writing on this subject for close to two decades now, and has had the nuclear energy debate several times. His demand for advocates of nuclear remains the same: demonstrate a nuclear power system that has an EROEI capable of sustaining modern civilisation (i.e. it has to at the very least come close to matching petroleum). "Uneconomical" is actually a death sentence when it comes to energy production in this context.

The assumption all along was that petroleum would eventually run short and have to be replaced by something else, leading to a third technic era. By 1950 nearly everyone assumed that what would replace it was nuclear power. You have to read books from that time to get a sense of just how inevitable the coming nuclear era was thought to be. Even avant-garde ecological thinkers treated nuclear power as the next inevitable thing. Pick up any of the works of Paolo Soleri, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most innovative student, who imagined humanity settling in gigantic city-sized buildings called arcologies so that the natural world could be allowed to thrive elsewhere. Each of his arcologies was supposed to be powered by its own nuclear power plant.

That, in turn, was where the dream ran off the rails, because it turned out that nuclear power doesn’t pay for itself. It’s not economically viable, because its net energy is so low. Thus it wasn’t Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi that brought the nuclear dream to a grinding halt, it was a long series of financial disasters suffered by utilities that got suckered into the nuclear hoopla, above all the bankruptcy of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, unfondly remembered as “Whoops!” by the many thousands who lost money on it).

That caught nearly everybody by surprise, because net energy analysis wasn’t something you saw even in the energy industry—fossil fuels had so much net energy that nobody had to worry about it, and that led to the delusion that net energy didn’t matter more generally. Frantic attempts to evade the consequences followed. Those of my readers who’ve been following energy news long enough will remember any number of attempts to insist that this or that brand new nuclear technology would surely fulfill the fantasies heaped onto Our Friend The Atom. None of them worked, because the underlying problem of inadequate net energy is not being addressed. It can’t be addressed, because it’s hardwired into the laws of physics.

If you're correct, why hasn't a single nation on Earth produced the kind of nuclear power grid you're talking about? Nuclear power makes a lot of sense for some contexts (does a great job powering military submarines) but I have not seen a single example of nuclear power being used or able to support the kind of energy demands required of a modern industrial society. Nuclear power does not provide the EROEI to sustain modern society - and the kind of nuclear power pipedream you've been describing has been just a few years away in the future for longer than I have been alive. I very much hope and wish that I am wrong in this case and too-cheap-to-meter power is just around the corner, but I just haven't been convinced and neither has JMG.

That said, while I'm more than happy to continue this discussion, I'd prefer it if you went and read more of his work. I enjoy having substantial and weighty discussions on contentious topics like this, but JMG is a better writer than I am and more than capable of explaining himself. You're not getting any value at all from simply having me go "No, that's not what he believes, see this essay.".

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My mistake, I found his look at fracking: https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/

The state of the fracking industry bears close examination here, not least because—as I’ve discussed in these essays rather more than once already—it’s one of the places where my predictions, like those of most other peak oil writers, turned out to be wrong. What misled us is easy enough to explain. There are very good reasons why extracting liquid fuels from shales by hydrofracturing is not an economically viable solution to the depletion of conventional petroleum reserves; that remains as true as it has ever been. What everyone in the peak oil scene missed was that this didn’t matter, because politics trumps economics.

Of all people, I should have caught onto this, because I was busy making the same argument in a different context. Longtime readers will recall the flurry of predictions that came out during the oil crisis of 2008-2009, insisting that the global economy was about to grind to a halt, leaving seven billion people to starve. I pointed out then that those predictions all assumed that the only response governments would have to a catastrophic market crisis was to sit on their hands saying in plaintive tones, “Whatever shall we do?” If the global economy had ground to a halt—as of course it never did—the political authorities could have intervened in dozens of effective ways, as they had done in plenty of economic crises over the previous century.

And of course that’s exactly the logic that drove the fracking boom. It’s quite true that extracting liquid fuels from shales by hydrofracturing is a miserably poor option in economic terms, and also in terms of net energy—that’s the equivalent in energy terms of profit, how much energy you have left after you subtract all the energy you had to consume to get it. From the standpoint of short term politics, which is the only kind of politics that matters in America today, those points were entirely irrelevant. All that mattered was that fracking could boost liquid fuel production for a few years and stave off a financial and political crisis, and so gimmicks were found to provide effectively unlimited credit to the fracking industry. If you can borrow as much money as you want and can just keep on rolling over the debts, anything is affordable.

So does that mean that the problem is solved, and no oil crisis will ever again rise up like the Shadow in Tolkien’s fantasies? Of course not. Just as the North Slope and North Sea oilfields depleted steadily once extraction began in earnest, US oil shale reserves are being depleted steadily. Oil is a finite resource, and the faster you pump it, the sooner it runs out. Gandalf had it right: “Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again”—and the ragged upward movements in the price of oil over the last few years is one of the warning signs that the current respite is drawing to a close.

Unironic endorsement of degrowth is something that makes me doubt my own sanity when I read it, because it strikes me as requiring a deeply broken model of the world to not even see how much all of the technology and progress we take for granted is pushed along by an abundance of cheap energy and an ever increasing number of minds who can employ that energy to new tasks.

At least in the case of those who acknowledge the horrors that would result from such activities and then accept them with open eyes, I can see that we simply have fundamental values differences, as much as I think of them irredeemably evil moral mutants from our perspective.

But worse are the OOMs larger number of useful idiots who enable them, the Extinction Rebellion advocates of the world, who think that we can slam the brakes on industry without ruining the QOL of the globe, any hope for a rising tide that raises the boat of the Global South, or even worse, the death of billions from starvation and fighting as the world goes from an iterated positive sum game where, grossly, the average person keeps doing better, to one that's outright negative sum in outlook.

At least the Powers that Be aren't particularly fond of them, for all that they're often bumbling idiots themselves. But you can never rest easy in a democratically run asylum where at any moment the inmates can vote themselves into power.

I wish I could say that the number of people explicitly oriented towards an optimistic vision of the future, like you, me or Kruel, who think that humanity deserves to do better, outnumber the kooks who fervently desire the opposite.

How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?

"How dare you" is not an argument that works if you have no authority or power over those you are using it on. It's just empty rhetorical flourish.

It’s not clear that there’s any way to try to persuade people of your own terminal values outside of rhetorical flourishes.

It is indeed added there as rhetorical flourish, empty or otherwise. I'm not legally obligated to be cold, dispassionate and clinical in my writing.

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