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Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
Not only can they do it, but solar or nuclear could do it all alone if everything else vanished. Not that it's going to be necessary. What is your basis for saying this? Is it some flimsy extrapolation like: 'Based on current consumption , If we go 100%, we'll run out of some rare mineral in 2 years, or landfill space to put old windblades'.
That's due to safety regulations. If we went back to good old rugged soviet standards, it would be dirt cheap.
Payday comes every month like clockwork. The proven reserves of oil keep increasing, to say nothing of the stuff we haven't learned to harness yet.
Does it bother you that you could have said the same thing every year since at least the industrial revolution, and be wrong every time?
Solar can't do it - solar power is great and you can do a lot with it, but solar energy is not capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels without substantial decreases in energy consumption. You can work this out by looking at how much energy society spends, and then seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply it (the answer is "too much").
Why haven't China or Russia started mass producing nuclear powerplants then? The Chinese give absolutely zero shits about safety/not cutting corners, and yet they continue to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, despite the massive geopolitical gains that would be associated with no longer being reliant on fossil fuels. The "safety regulations" conspiracy that somehow covers the entire globe and lets Greta Thunberg dictate energy policy to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping strikes me as substantially less realistic than current nuclear power technology being largely unprofitable.
Global oil and gas discoveries hit their lowest level for 75 years in 2021. They've since gone up, but 77% of recent oil discoveries have been off-shore (harder to access, more energy investment required to extract). Proven reserves of oil are increasing, but they're not increasing as quickly as consumption is, and that's going to be a problem when those two lines intersect. The stuff we haven't learned to harness yet... we haven't learned to harness yet, so there's no point talking about it. I don't get to claim my financial problems don't exist because the zero point energy in my completely empty wallet would be extremely valuable if I sold it.
No? Hubbert was wrong about the actual peak of conventional oil volume, but he was very close on the timing. Similarly, the world has been tracking the World3 model from the Limits to Growth study fairly well, and that predicts a halt to global GDP growth sometime in the next two decades. If you've got a convincing refutation of that model and the predictions it is making I'd love to read it.
I was under the impression that they are?
I sincerely hope that this has a net profit in terms of energy, though my gut tells me that this is likely to work out similar to the French system. Thank you for giving me information which corrects a mistaken belief I had about the world!
I was similarly under the impression that the French system is a massive subsidy to neighboring countries, as the common market regulations force them to export electricity at the wholesale price they sell it for domestically. If they wanted to take advantage of Germany's insane energy policy they'd have to raise prices for the French, and risk domestic unrest.
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The answer is 10 000-20 000 sq miles(for electricity in the US), which is the size of lake erie. For all the energy in the entire world, it's going to be a small fraction of the sahara.
They are vastly expanding their nuclear capacity as we speak. .
In 1939 the department of the interior projected that oil would last only 13 more years, and again in 1951 it was projected that oil would run out 13 years later. In Limits to growth (1972), Gold was supposed to run out in 1981, silver and mercury 1985, zinc 1990, oil before 1992. In 1992 they published the revised ‘beyond the limits’, where they pushed it all back a few years, as they always do. And 30 years later they’re still doing the same thing, like a broken record – oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now.
I think that this is ignoring the massive infrastructure rollout costs, as well as the dramatically increased power requirements caused by the replacing of petroleum in transportation. This would be a fantastic project and I hope that it goes ahead, but I have my doubts that it would take place before rising energy costs make it infeasible. I'd love to be proved wrong!
I wasn't aware - I was under the impression that they were building more plants, but not that it was going to be such a major endeavour. I hope that their project works out and that they've done all the math, and they won't end up in the same situation France is in.
When it comes to peak oil the calculations that I was interested in, and their sourcing, were the work of M. King Hubbert. He was actually correct in his predictions and managed to call the peak of US conventional oil production fairly accurately (though off on the amount), and he did so in 1956 at least.
Did you even read the link you provided? I mean, I'm open to being convinced if you have a good refutation of Limits to Growth/World3, but...
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You're telling me that they're just constantly editing it and jigging with the numbers to push the collapse another ten years back into the future, and you're linking me an article which says that the original run is "alarmingly consistent" with the collected empirical data. Again, if you've got a really convincing and thorough refutation of Limits to Growth, I'd love to read it - but you've just given me an article whose central claim is that I'm right and the model is robust.
The timing of the peak is the entire prediction! That they were correct about the “growth” part of “limits to growth” does not make them half-right. Boomers say ‘growth, no limit, no peak’. The only contentious, falsifiable part of doomers’ predictions has been repeatedly falsified. If you love being proven wrong, you must love the doomer life.
I honestly have to ask - did you even read the article you posted? I can't understand how you can make a claim like this on the basis of a piece of evidence supporting my point.
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What exactly do you think "alarmingly consistent with the most recently collected empirical data" actually means? You've also done absolutely nothing to engage with the works of the theorist I actually cited (Hubbert), presumably because he has been proven correct on a consistent basis for the past several decades.
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That figure, I think, comes from this report that was linked in your link. Having skimmed it, I can't tell the exact methodology they use, but it seems they take some sort of weighted average of the area/energy/year of the various solar plants in the US and use some basic modeling as it extrapolates up. I see no mention of transmission losses or of attempting to model the geographical and grid locations the next solar plants would actually be built to reach the power production that actually does power all USA households.
Locations aren't fungible in power plants due in part to transmission losses (among other factors), and obviously this is even moreso for solar plants because location directly affects how much sunlight is received and also the weather which is affected by the location. As such, any sort of meaningful estimate of solar plant area we need to power all USA households is necessarily going to involve modeling specific plants in specific locations to match the load that's being drawn at various locations without negatively affecting the grid with congestion and such. Whatever modeling that's being done in that paper doesn't seem to come anywhere near that.
Solar and nuclear together, perhaps those two techs could be all we need for our energy needs; I'd say nuclear would be holding up 99% of the burden in that case, though.
That's before getting into the massive battery (and other energy storage) build up that would happen to account for solar's intermittent uptime if we were to go full 100% solar.
That's a bit nitpicky. Storage is a better objection to this hypothetical than transmission losses (which are well understood and not very important) . But it's a theoretical, order of magnitude discussion . He claimed that just by "seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply the energy", it would seem absurd, and it doesn't. Solar panels are a 'cut-out-the-middleman' form of agriculture, and look how much space that takes up.
But assuming doomers can get past this theoretical argument, I want to highlight just how incredibly extensive their claims are, and how far they are from proving their thesis. Before we run out of food, the oil will have to run out, the coal will run out, all the other fossil fuels will run out, nuclear will fail, solar will fail, all the renewables will fail. And not just ‘oh we couldn’t make it to 100% world energy consumption on just this one thing’, every single one has to fail completely: it’s not just that they each don’t scale, they all somehow don’t work anymore.
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Aside from the question of how long that state would persist if we run out of alternatives, there's also the question of "so what?". Let's imagine that the government will have to subsidize energy production until the end of time, how is that not sustainable?
Generating power at a profit sans subsidies means that it produces energy at a price that society can reasonably pay and continue to support. If the power plant needs government subsidies to continue as a going concern then there's a decent chance that it isn't actually a net positive in terms of energy once you factor in maintenance, having to pay for nuclear scientists etc. The point of stressing profitability is to make sure that you don't have government money disguising what is actually a net energy loss (like encouraging farmers to burn oil growing corn, then turn the corn into a less efficient and less convenient fuel).
Money is not an energy unit, though. Aren't you the guy explaining how energy inefficient modern farming is? But it's perfectly profitable. I see no reason to assume lack of profits means energy inefficiency.
Obviously a financial system can be distorted, but I'm assuming a financial system that's somewhat accurate and not being gamed for the purpose of this exercise. The main reason profit matters here is that a power generation system should be able to support more economic activity than it requires to keep itself running. If you have a powerplant that produces 50 dollars worth of power after you feed it 100 dollars of raw inputs/labour, you're either going to be running it for some other reason (isotopes maybe) or not at all.
Generally I agree that energy efficiency would mean profits, this is why I mentioned that I doubt profitability will remain a problem, once the alternatives are exhausted. That said, it's not impossible that due to some market funkiness the two metrics will become uncorrelated. If it turns out you have to pay everyone in the nuclear industry at least a 7 figure salary, so they don't fuck off to do high-frequency trading, or something else that's short-term profitable, but ultimately pointless, I say bite the bullet, and subsidize their salaries. What you're addressing with that move is income distribution, not energy efficiency.
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Seems way too soon to worry about natural biofuel use being "unsustainable". We have centuries worth of coal left.
I don't think time is a good way of measuring resources like this, because there's so much variability in future patterns of consumption. How much of that stored coal is uneconomical to extract, and how much more of it will be burned to make up for shortfalls elsewhere? Fossil fuel usage also contributes to pollution and environmental damage, and while you can ignore those costs on a corporate balance sheet (or at a country level, for a while) they eventually come home to roost and show up elsewhere. Rising sea levels are going to require an awful lot of energy expenditure to deal with, for example, and they're already starting to show up. The problems and costs associated with fossil fuels aren't far off in the future - they're already here, and they show no sign of going into reverse.
I also wasn't talking about biofuels at all, assuming you're using the term technically as distinct from fossil fuels. Nobody cares about biofuels because they're largely wastes of energy - why burn 13 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food which then gets converted into fuel and hits efficiency again? You can get a bit of return from working with used cooking oil, but that's not exactly the sort of energy base you can power an industrial civilisation with.
I use the term "natural biofuel" for oil, coal, and gas because it's a more accurate term than "fossil fuel". Oil is not fossilised. It's also distinct from e.g. manufactured ethanol because it has been produced by nature - thus, "natural biofuel".
I do think that if you're going to talk about "unsustainability" in terms of "we're going to run out", then I think it's very fair to ask "when?" After all, the sun will run out eventually. That doesn't imply that it's wasteful to use solar energy.
On the other hand if you want to talk about costs vs benefits, that's also fine, but you do need to weigh both sides of the equation. I think the costs of natural biofuels are greatly overstated, but even granting those, they come with the benefit of... feeding 8 billion people. Seems like a very positive cost/benefit ratio to me!
You'll have to forgive me here because I'm actually an environmentalist and these terms have more specific meanings in those discussions - the term biofuel usually gets used for things like biodiesel. Fossil fuels aren't actually fossils, but that's how people generally refer to coal, oil and natural gas, and so in the interest of comprehensibility that's how I use the word as well.
That's a really complicated question. I don't think we're ever going to actually run out, but that's because there's a bunch of fossil fuels that aren't economical to extract, and if it costs 10 units of energy to dredge up 1 unit of oil that's not something you can use to power a society. There are some really nasty fossil fuels out there that just aren't worth extracting, so they probably won't be. Peak conventional oil extraction was in 2005, and peak unconventional oil extraction is forecasted for somewhere in 2030 to the best of my knowledge. If you're asking about when the economic consequences hit... peak conventional domestic oil production in the US came during 1970, and caused major economic troubles. Peak conventional oil happened in 2005, and in 2007 we had a global financial crisis that several metrics are yet to recover from. These problems aren't some issue for future generations to deal with - they're here, now.
I don't disagree with this, although I will point out that the sun was already switched on and burning fuel when we got here.
If you recheck my last post, I don't technically disagree with using that energy to feed 8 billion people - as long as you stretch it out over time. What we've done instead is consume this once-in-a-species windfall of energy and used it to overstretch the natural resources our population and civilisation is based on. My position is not that we should have just not burned fossil fuels and lived in rags building more stonehenges, but that fossil fuel usage should have been much more carefully budgeted and managed in order to allow for that energy to last much longer. Yes, we have 8 billion people now - but we've exceeded the environment's carrying capacity by using a temporary resource. That story happens in nature all the time, and the way it ends is very consistent. I think it would have been better if global population grew at a much slower rate and fossil fuels were conserved to a much greater degree. My argument is essentially that the lottery-win of fossil fuel reserves that our civilisation found in the Earth should have been saved and invested rather than spent in a profligate orgy of consumption. Feeding 8 billion people right now is nice, but feeding 20 billion over a longer time-scale with fewer economic dislocations, less environmental overshoot and more of an energy reserve for dealing with difficult problems seems like it'd be quite a bit nicer to me.
Sure, that's the standard environmentalist usage, but like a lot of environmentalist rhetoric it's somewhere on the spectrum between confusing and misleading. Much like "carbon emissions" which makes people think of particulate pollution or "ocean acidification" which makes it sound like the oceans are becoming acidic.
Sure, oil is in decline. But as I pointed out earlier, coal isn't remotely close to running out. So if you want to argue we should be moving away from oil and towards coal that's a reasonable position. But if you're arguing we should stop using coal because we're using up the oil, that's just nonsense.
For similar reasons, I completely disagree that we've exceeded the environment's carrying capacity, or even come close to doing so. Even when all the oil is gone, we'll still have centuries worth of coal. And even when all the coal is gone we'll still have millennia worth of uranium. It's all good.
I just checked wikipedia and that seems to be the standard usage of the term as well. I'm all for telling society to fuck off and using language your own way, though I think you should be explicit about how you're not using the standard definition when you do.
I can agree that a lot of rhetoric is unclear or potentially misleading - I think global warming and climate change aren't terribly good labels for the phenomenon they're describing either.
Oil and coal are not perfectly interchangeable. Oil has a much higher energy density and is much better suited for large vehicles (like farming equipment). Coal similarly doesn't provide as many of the important byproducts that petroleum does. You can get around this by throwing more energy at the problem, but that makes the exhaustion issue worse. We do have a lot more coal, but coal isn't as useful a fuel, and if you replace an appreciable fraction of oil consumption with coal consumption then those stockpiles aren't going to last nearly as long.
My position is neither of those - we should be moving away from coal AND oil because our current rate of usage is obscenely high, and we're pointlessly wasting vast amounts of both. There's nothing we're currently aware of that will replace them, and I believe that's why we should place a big emphasis on conservation and avoiding wastes of energy. The uranium amount doesn't matter until we can get sustainably profitable nuclear power (i.e. it has an EROEI high enough to justify its existence), which we currently cannot do.
We are burning a non-renewable resource in order to inefficiently generate enough food calories to support current population levels. If we were not burning non-renewable energy sources at a breakneck pace, we would not be able to support the level of population we currently have, which is why I think that we are, by definition, above that carrying capacity. Each extra bit of population increases the rate at which we're burning those fuels as well! That said, I don't think there's enough political will for a real solution here, which is why I'm expecting nature to have her say (and she has a very consistent rejoinder for animals that outgrow the ability of their environment to support them).
Why is climate change not a good descriptor? What would you suggest instead?
I actually don't have a suggestion - this is a big problem and I don't have an answer for it. The reason I don't like climate change is that it doesn't really convey much information about the problem. The climate changes for all sorts of normal, natural reasons through time (it went through plenty of changes before humans even showed up on the scene) - volcanic eruptions, solar activity, floods, etc. When environmentalists talk about global warming and climate change, they're talking about a much more specific phenomenon - human activity releasing greenhouse gases being the biggest. There's a very specific process taking place here that's having consequences on the world which are already starting to arrive, and while climate change does describe what's happening, it also describes things like the Hekla 3 eruption or the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Climate change makes it sound like some inevitable and unavoidable fact of life, and while "climate change" is indeed something that's going to happen no matter what, human activity contributing to the greenhouse effect is something that people can actively take steps in their life to try and reduce.
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You don't think nuclear would become "sustainably profitable" if it was nuclear or starvation?
If I had a "choice" between getting blood from a stone and starving to death, my circumstances wouldn't make the stone any more likely to bleed if I crushed it. If nuclear power can successfully give us electricity too cheap to meter, then great - that'd be a wonderful thing. But that has yet to be demonstrated at scale and I have seen no indications that this is going to change anytime soon. Nuclear power is great in a lot of ways, and it's the best power source we have for nuclear submarines/aircraft carriers, but it doesn't seem like you can profitably and sustainably scale it up to the point that you'd run a modern economy with it.
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