Cute metaphor and glad to see someone else is woke, awakened to reality. However, animal crowding researchers actually did these experiments with rodents starting in the late 1940's and through the 1960's into the 1970's. Search John Calhoun's mouse utopias, Charles Southwick, and J. J. Christian. All covered in my 2018 e-book "Stress R Us", available as a free PDF download out at Stanford, or a PB at Amazon. You can see Calhoun at work in his "universe"/"utopia" in the youtube video, "Critical Mass", for the modest $0.99. Also, we higher animals have long evolved gene based population regulation mechanisms, "population density stress". So, yes, Malthus was right, as is Ehrlich, and Catton, and the proof in the pudding can be easily observed in the remaining migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands and pastoralists, who have none of our myriad "stress diseases". They will be found in "marginal" lands unfit for "development". Today, we "modern" urban/suburban human populations harbor 3,000 times more of us than our ancestral clans/bands 10kya, and fit your overshoot antopolis metaphor to a "t". HAVE A HAPPY HOLIDAY!
Well done again, whoever you are. If only Malthus had said it so well. But Man doesn't listen because the Western way of life is all about consumption of energy and matter. Materialsim. Building up man's order destroys natural thermodynamic order even more. It's the Second Law.
Great metaphor. Unlike the ants, we have the power to plan for our future and “avoid the sugar”. The challenge lies in acting now, rather than waiting till our “Day 80” for our downfall. Given humanity’s history, however, we have always waited till the last second before attempting to create change. This may come to hurt us in the near future.
Great metaphor. Unlike the ants, we have the power to plan for our future and “avoid the sugar”. The challenge lies in acting now, rather than waiting till our “Day 80” for our downfall. Given humanity’s history, however, we have always waited till the last second before attempting to create change. This may come to hurt us in the near future.
"Let me remind you: nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy all require fossil fuels and raw materials to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure."
Everyone points this out, but I'm not sure if this is correct in regard to fossil fuels. If all the industrial processes, the production lines, and machines and transportation systems are all electrified, where would fossil fuels come into the play?
There are some things that just don't work that way. Electricity is not fungible with liquid fuels in many applications, especially because the energy density of diesel fuel is about two orders of magnitude greater than that of batteries.
The world still runs on diesel for mining, long-haul transportation, and agriculture. None of these have an electrical solution on the horizon.
You may have heard of electric ships; they have a range of a couple hundred kilometres — between port cities on the same continent. An ocean-spanning electric ship would use up all its carrying capacity in batteries, just to make the trip — no additional room for cargo! And you can't stop in the middle of the ocean and plug into a handy recharging station. Even if you covered every square inch of the ship's surface with solar panels, you'd do no better than less than 1% of what is needed.
The situation with long-distance trucking is only slightly less dire. For a truck to cross the US, it would have to devote 3/4ths of the truck's hauling capacity to batteries, causing the cost of shipping the cargo it could haul to increase by 400%. You may have heard of Musk's electric semi-tractors. Their trial was a hundred-mile trip carrying bags filled with air — potato chips! They carried only 25% of their normal load, and it was not refrigerated — which takes even more diesel fuel!
We all eat for a living. What few understand is that we've become a race of detritivores, subsisting off of 250-million-year-old dead things. Each calorie you eat came to you at the cost of ten calories of fossil sunlight. Half the nitrogen found in your body can be isotopically-traced to the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer.
These are but the direct examples. Four crucial materials necessary for so-called "renewable" energy are totally dependent on fossil sunlight: cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. The first three's contribution to solar panels and wind turbines are obvious. The last is necessary for food production, as well as being a feedstock for chemical production.
As if that were not enough, there is not enough raw materials available to replace our current transportation fleet. Known stocks of rare-earth minerals, lithium, cobalt, and even ubiquitous copper will be exhausted long before we reach even half the current transportation fleet. And many of these materials are inadequately recycled for the replacement fleet that will be needed in ~10-20 years.
I hope this is helpful. It should at least provide you with some places to look for solid numbers.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Surely lots of stuff to ponder about.
However, I'm not entirely convinced this is analysis will stand the test of time.
I'm old enough to remember how similar claims were made three-four decades ago about solar and wind: Never ever could it contribute to more than 10-20% of the electric energy generation. Now we know that such projections were overly pessimistic and too heavily based on the present state of the art, and didn't expect the costs dropping by a factor 10 and the efficiency increasing by a similar factor as well. When you say "None of these have an electrical solution on the horizon," I feel this is a bit overly pessimistic as well. Your analysis on electric ships or long distance trucking is based on present technologies (and only on batteries while it seems to give for guaranteed that no other tech, such as hydrogen, fuel cells, and who knows what?, could change the rules of the game, especially if nuclear fusion may become available.) Will those numbers you cite be the same in the coming decades? Certainly not, because we will have much better energy storage systems (not only batteries), and much more efficient electric energy generation. Of course, the question remains whether this will be enough. Maybe not. But we can't answer these questions focusing only on the present state of the art.
And, my original inquiry was motivated precisely by the question of why cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia can't be produced resorting to electric energy? Currently, this isn't a viable option, but on the long term I would not give it for so guaranteed this being impossible.
The only point where I also can't see a way out is the use of natural gas to produce fertilizer. But here also, I wouldn't be so self-assured this being an insoluble issue.
So, overall, yes... the situation is dire, but I wouldn't say that the last word has been said and that there isn't any hope to replace fossil fuels. I see much more resistance on the social and political level, but am more optimistic with regard to technological developments.
I've been studying this for a long time (decades), in great detail. I download and read a half-dozen or more peer-reviewed, scientific papers on these topics each month.
By that, I'm not trying to say, "So just trust me!" Rather, I want you to understand that I once believed as you do, that somehow, someone would "figure something out".
But evidence is different than belief. I've spent a lot of time and effort gathering evidence, and watched my hopeful beliefs shatter, one by one.
The 800 kilogram gorilla in the centre of the room is this: fossil sunlight is irrevocably entering its terminal decline. It's arguably already started, and it will begin accelerating in the next year or so.
It's funny, not many people talk about this, but the stock market knows it: despite claims of "advanced recovery" any day now, it's getting more and more difficult for the oil industry to raise money. It took many bankruptcies and haircuts to get fracking to it's current, rather tenuous production levels.
The stock market is no longer buying it, and wildcatters are having trouble financing new development solely on current revenue — their energy return on investment (ERoEI) is just not there.
When fossil sunlight's decline — arguably, already started — steepens to 3% a year, the economy will necessarily follow. A growing economy *requires* growing energy. Art Berman taught us that the economy and fossil sunlight production have never been more than 3% apart for very long!
What this means is that we don't have "the coming decades" to develop new technology.
The late ecologist Howard Odum rather conclusively demonstrated that complexity, and thus technology, is simply a form of embedded energy, or "emergy". He designed a rigorous system (and even a graphical language) for quantifying this. Current oil production does not pass his tests for even short-term sustainability.
As difficult as it is to believe after seeing all the graphs go up and to the right endlessly for your entire life, this means that technology will necessarily follow the decline of fossil sunlight.
If we're lucky, we can maintain some of what we've got. But I expect "technology" may only be ox-carts within many of our lives.
The Mayans had an incredible time-keeping technology, measured by structures that precisely measured the sun and moon. After the Mayan collapse, they were no longer maintained, with many of them re-assembled improperly — they lost this technology!
That can happen to us! Do you know how to maintain a smart phone network? Or the Internet? Or even a single computer?
The problem is not just that we cannot maintain growth. We are way over-drawn at the bank. William Catton taught us about "overshoot" and Bill Rees has shown us that we are using the resources of six planets. What could go wrong with that?
In the coming fossil sunlight decline, efficiency must decline as well. We are seated upon a peak of efficiency, supported only by excess energy.
Two of the twelve basic principles of Permaculture says that you need multiple elements to support each function, and that each function supports multiple elements — redundancy.
Redundancy is the opposite of efficiency, but it is resilient, whereas efficiency is fragile and brittle.
As to why the basic four materials of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) won't continue without fossil sunlight, I'll refer you to University of Manitoba scientist Vaclav Smil, who has quite decisively figured all this out. The main difficulty is different for each one, but is linked to things that are simple with fossil sunlight, but difficult with electricity. Each of these materials would go up in price by an order of magnitude if they were made only with electricity!
Like you, I held out the hope for a long time that these things could be addressed — and it might have been so, if we had started on this when MIT warned us it was coming in their 1972 study, "Limits to Growth".
But we're out of time. We've been constrained by Odum's "Maximum Power Principle" and focused our efforts in dissipating as much power as quickly as we could. Now, the "low hanging fruit" is all gone, and when it takes a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, the game is over. (We're getting closer to that!)
If something cannot continue, it will not continue. We're out of time.
I have gone through the first link. That's all right, but this misses the point of my initial question. I didn't express doubts about the decline of fossil fuels. I was asking why "nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy all require [forever!] fossil fuels to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure." In principle, electrification could replace it. However, as I understand it, your point is that we haven't any time left to make such transition happen in the first place because the fossil fuels will deplete before we get there. Right?
While Smil states in this article (https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/): "Eventually, new processes will take over— but currently there are no alternatives that could be deployed immediately to displace large shares of existing global capacities: their development will take time. Synthesis of ammonia and smelting of steel could both be based on hydrogen rather than on natural gas and coke. We know how to do that—but it will take some time before we could produce hundreds of million tons of green hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water by using wind or solar electricity (virtually all of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and coal). The best forecast is that green hydrogen would supply 2% of the world’s energy consumption by 2030, far below the hundreds of million tons that will eventually be needed to decarbonize ammonia and steel production. In contrast, decarbonization of cement production can only go so far by using waste materials and biomass, and new processes have to developed and be commercialized to make cement CO2-free. Similarly, there is no simple way to decarbonize plastic production, and the measures will range from plant feedstocks to more recycling and to substitutions by other materials." - "And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials."
So, yes, we trapped ourselves in an (almost) bottomless pit, but I wouldn't say that this is a final verdict. What I have learned by reading peer-reviewed scientific papers over the years, is that the human mind isn't that good at predicting the future.
When you see a bullet coming at you, you duck — you don't say, "Maybe technology will improve so that I'm impervious to bullets."
Sure. There's always hope, which I define as an irrational belief that something you don't like won't happen because of a small possibility that something you don't understand will happen instead.
I prefer to take action based on the most likely case.
Thanks for actually clicking the links I included. I don't see anything in your Smil quote that contradicts my view.
"Eventually, new processes will take over…"
Or, perhaps old processes will take over. I have seen the future, and it is powered the same way it almost always has been — by current photosynthesis.
I'm just not sure I see any humans in that future.
Cute metaphor and glad to see someone else is woke, awakened to reality. However, animal crowding researchers actually did these experiments with rodents starting in the late 1940's and through the 1960's into the 1970's. Search John Calhoun's mouse utopias, Charles Southwick, and J. J. Christian. All covered in my 2018 e-book "Stress R Us", available as a free PDF download out at Stanford, or a PB at Amazon. You can see Calhoun at work in his "universe"/"utopia" in the youtube video, "Critical Mass", for the modest $0.99. Also, we higher animals have long evolved gene based population regulation mechanisms, "population density stress". So, yes, Malthus was right, as is Ehrlich, and Catton, and the proof in the pudding can be easily observed in the remaining migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands and pastoralists, who have none of our myriad "stress diseases". They will be found in "marginal" lands unfit for "development". Today, we "modern" urban/suburban human populations harbor 3,000 times more of us than our ancestral clans/bands 10kya, and fit your overshoot antopolis metaphor to a "t". HAVE A HAPPY HOLIDAY!
Well done again, whoever you are. If only Malthus had said it so well. But Man doesn't listen because the Western way of life is all about consumption of energy and matter. Materialsim. Building up man's order destroys natural thermodynamic order even more. It's the Second Law.
Great metaphor. Unlike the ants, we have the power to plan for our future and “avoid the sugar”. The challenge lies in acting now, rather than waiting till our “Day 80” for our downfall. Given humanity’s history, however, we have always waited till the last second before attempting to create change. This may come to hurt us in the near future.
We don't see enough about the planetary boundaries work from Sweden. Thank you; I hope many will chase it down & spread the word.
Good job!
Curious who is behind this article….
Try to move blame from Fossil Fuels for posterity? JFC get a life.....
Great metaphor. You’re doing an excellent job spelling the situation out for people 🙌🏻
Great metaphor. Unlike the ants, we have the power to plan for our future and “avoid the sugar”. The challenge lies in acting now, rather than waiting till our “Day 80” for our downfall. Given humanity’s history, however, we have always waited till the last second before attempting to create change. This may come to hurt us in the near future.
"Let me remind you: nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy all require fossil fuels and raw materials to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure."
Everyone points this out, but I'm not sure if this is correct in regard to fossil fuels. If all the industrial processes, the production lines, and machines and transportation systems are all electrified, where would fossil fuels come into the play?
There are some things that just don't work that way. Electricity is not fungible with liquid fuels in many applications, especially because the energy density of diesel fuel is about two orders of magnitude greater than that of batteries.
The world still runs on diesel for mining, long-haul transportation, and agriculture. None of these have an electrical solution on the horizon.
You may have heard of electric ships; they have a range of a couple hundred kilometres — between port cities on the same continent. An ocean-spanning electric ship would use up all its carrying capacity in batteries, just to make the trip — no additional room for cargo! And you can't stop in the middle of the ocean and plug into a handy recharging station. Even if you covered every square inch of the ship's surface with solar panels, you'd do no better than less than 1% of what is needed.
The situation with long-distance trucking is only slightly less dire. For a truck to cross the US, it would have to devote 3/4ths of the truck's hauling capacity to batteries, causing the cost of shipping the cargo it could haul to increase by 400%. You may have heard of Musk's electric semi-tractors. Their trial was a hundred-mile trip carrying bags filled with air — potato chips! They carried only 25% of their normal load, and it was not refrigerated — which takes even more diesel fuel!
We all eat for a living. What few understand is that we've become a race of detritivores, subsisting off of 250-million-year-old dead things. Each calorie you eat came to you at the cost of ten calories of fossil sunlight. Half the nitrogen found in your body can be isotopically-traced to the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilizer.
These are but the direct examples. Four crucial materials necessary for so-called "renewable" energy are totally dependent on fossil sunlight: cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. The first three's contribution to solar panels and wind turbines are obvious. The last is necessary for food production, as well as being a feedstock for chemical production.
As if that were not enough, there is not enough raw materials available to replace our current transportation fleet. Known stocks of rare-earth minerals, lithium, cobalt, and even ubiquitous copper will be exhausted long before we reach even half the current transportation fleet. And many of these materials are inadequately recycled for the replacement fleet that will be needed in ~10-20 years.
I hope this is helpful. It should at least provide you with some places to look for solid numbers.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Surely lots of stuff to ponder about.
However, I'm not entirely convinced this is analysis will stand the test of time.
I'm old enough to remember how similar claims were made three-four decades ago about solar and wind: Never ever could it contribute to more than 10-20% of the electric energy generation. Now we know that such projections were overly pessimistic and too heavily based on the present state of the art, and didn't expect the costs dropping by a factor 10 and the efficiency increasing by a similar factor as well. When you say "None of these have an electrical solution on the horizon," I feel this is a bit overly pessimistic as well. Your analysis on electric ships or long distance trucking is based on present technologies (and only on batteries while it seems to give for guaranteed that no other tech, such as hydrogen, fuel cells, and who knows what?, could change the rules of the game, especially if nuclear fusion may become available.) Will those numbers you cite be the same in the coming decades? Certainly not, because we will have much better energy storage systems (not only batteries), and much more efficient electric energy generation. Of course, the question remains whether this will be enough. Maybe not. But we can't answer these questions focusing only on the present state of the art.
And, my original inquiry was motivated precisely by the question of why cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia can't be produced resorting to electric energy? Currently, this isn't a viable option, but on the long term I would not give it for so guaranteed this being impossible.
The only point where I also can't see a way out is the use of natural gas to produce fertilizer. But here also, I wouldn't be so self-assured this being an insoluble issue.
So, overall, yes... the situation is dire, but I wouldn't say that the last word has been said and that there isn't any hope to replace fossil fuels. I see much more resistance on the social and political level, but am more optimistic with regard to technological developments.
I've been studying this for a long time (decades), in great detail. I download and read a half-dozen or more peer-reviewed, scientific papers on these topics each month.
By that, I'm not trying to say, "So just trust me!" Rather, I want you to understand that I once believed as you do, that somehow, someone would "figure something out".
But evidence is different than belief. I've spent a lot of time and effort gathering evidence, and watched my hopeful beliefs shatter, one by one.
The 800 kilogram gorilla in the centre of the room is this: fossil sunlight is irrevocably entering its terminal decline. It's arguably already started, and it will begin accelerating in the next year or so.
It's funny, not many people talk about this, but the stock market knows it: despite claims of "advanced recovery" any day now, it's getting more and more difficult for the oil industry to raise money. It took many bankruptcies and haircuts to get fracking to it's current, rather tenuous production levels.
The stock market is no longer buying it, and wildcatters are having trouble financing new development solely on current revenue — their energy return on investment (ERoEI) is just not there.
Here's one of the best summaries I've read: https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox . These guys are contrarian and non-mainstream, but they appear to be doing careful work.
When fossil sunlight's decline — arguably, already started — steepens to 3% a year, the economy will necessarily follow. A growing economy *requires* growing energy. Art Berman taught us that the economy and fossil sunlight production have never been more than 3% apart for very long!
What this means is that we don't have "the coming decades" to develop new technology.
The late ecologist Howard Odum rather conclusively demonstrated that complexity, and thus technology, is simply a form of embedded energy, or "emergy". He designed a rigorous system (and even a graphical language) for quantifying this. Current oil production does not pass his tests for even short-term sustainability.
As difficult as it is to believe after seeing all the graphs go up and to the right endlessly for your entire life, this means that technology will necessarily follow the decline of fossil sunlight.
If we're lucky, we can maintain some of what we've got. But I expect "technology" may only be ox-carts within many of our lives.
I refer you to Joseph Tainter (https://archive.org/details/joseph-tainter-the-collapse-of-complex-societies-new-studies-in-archaeology-camb) who taught us that civilization becomes more and more complex until the maintenance of that complexity takes so much of that civilization's resources that there is scant little left to support its citizens.
The Mayans had an incredible time-keeping technology, measured by structures that precisely measured the sun and moon. After the Mayan collapse, they were no longer maintained, with many of them re-assembled improperly — they lost this technology!
That can happen to us! Do you know how to maintain a smart phone network? Or the Internet? Or even a single computer?
The problem is not just that we cannot maintain growth. We are way over-drawn at the bank. William Catton taught us about "overshoot" and Bill Rees has shown us that we are using the resources of six planets. What could go wrong with that?
In the coming fossil sunlight decline, efficiency must decline as well. We are seated upon a peak of efficiency, supported only by excess energy.
Two of the twelve basic principles of Permaculture says that you need multiple elements to support each function, and that each function supports multiple elements — redundancy.
Redundancy is the opposite of efficiency, but it is resilient, whereas efficiency is fragile and brittle.
As to why the basic four materials of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) won't continue without fossil sunlight, I'll refer you to University of Manitoba scientist Vaclav Smil, who has quite decisively figured all this out. The main difficulty is different for each one, but is linked to things that are simple with fossil sunlight, but difficult with electricity. Each of these materials would go up in price by an order of magnitude if they were made only with electricity!
Like you, I held out the hope for a long time that these things could be addressed — and it might have been so, if we had started on this when MIT warned us it was coming in their 1972 study, "Limits to Growth".
But we're out of time. We've been constrained by Odum's "Maximum Power Principle" and focused our efforts in dissipating as much power as quickly as we could. Now, the "low hanging fruit" is all gone, and when it takes a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, the game is over. (We're getting closer to that!)
If something cannot continue, it will not continue. We're out of time.
I hope you'll take some time to review the references I've given you. Tom Murphy also has some good references on this site at: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/07/a-reading-journey/
I have gone through the first link. That's all right, but this misses the point of my initial question. I didn't express doubts about the decline of fossil fuels. I was asking why "nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy all require [forever!] fossil fuels to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure." In principle, electrification could replace it. However, as I understand it, your point is that we haven't any time left to make such transition happen in the first place because the fossil fuels will deplete before we get there. Right?
While Smil states in this article (https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/): "Eventually, new processes will take over— but currently there are no alternatives that could be deployed immediately to displace large shares of existing global capacities: their development will take time. Synthesis of ammonia and smelting of steel could both be based on hydrogen rather than on natural gas and coke. We know how to do that—but it will take some time before we could produce hundreds of million tons of green hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water by using wind or solar electricity (virtually all of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and coal). The best forecast is that green hydrogen would supply 2% of the world’s energy consumption by 2030, far below the hundreds of million tons that will eventually be needed to decarbonize ammonia and steel production. In contrast, decarbonization of cement production can only go so far by using waste materials and biomass, and new processes have to developed and be commercialized to make cement CO2-free. Similarly, there is no simple way to decarbonize plastic production, and the measures will range from plant feedstocks to more recycling and to substitutions by other materials." - "And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials."
So, yes, we trapped ourselves in an (almost) bottomless pit, but I wouldn't say that this is a final verdict. What I have learned by reading peer-reviewed scientific papers over the years, is that the human mind isn't that good at predicting the future.
When you see a bullet coming at you, you duck — you don't say, "Maybe technology will improve so that I'm impervious to bullets."
Sure. There's always hope, which I define as an irrational belief that something you don't like won't happen because of a small possibility that something you don't understand will happen instead.
I prefer to take action based on the most likely case.
Thanks for actually clicking the links I included. I don't see anything in your Smil quote that contradicts my view.
"Eventually, new processes will take over…"
Or, perhaps old processes will take over. I have seen the future, and it is powered the same way it almost always has been — by current photosynthesis.
I'm just not sure I see any humans in that future.