That we run out of easily usable cheap energy sources and our civilization reverts to a kind of permanent static feudal / subsistence structure at best, if not outright collapse.
I think this is ignored for a number of reasons.
On the right, there is an assumption that fossil fuels are not going to run out, that fuel for nuclear reactors is basically infinite, etc. So no problem other than the “hoax” of global warming. I think this is wrong because a) GW is not a hoax, according to several months I spent looking into the issue, b) fossil fuels are going to run out fairly soon in terms of fuels that take less energy to extract than they produce, c) nuclear fuels would run out about as fast as fossil fuels if used at scale. The only exception being we could last a couple hundred years using breeder reactors but who wants 5,000 nuclear bomb raw material makers spread around the planet. And the faith in technology progress is overdone; nuclear fusion still seems a long way away, and the state of the art in batteries has only been getting better at about 7% per year.
On the left there is the belief that renewables will solve the problem. I have so far spent a couple of months trying to put together a picture of what a renewable economy would look like. So far it does not look like it adds up. The fundamental problems are 3-fold 1) the low density of renewables making the infrastructure extremely resource, energy and cost intensive 2) Batteries are nowhere near good enough for many key requirements (air travel, shipping, heavy transport and seasonal energy storage) 3) We don’t have a solution for others (concrete, steel manufacture). There are a lot of unproven ideas but if you try to put together a solution from proven technologies it does not add up so far.
It is very difficult to impossible even to match existing economic output with renewables, but when you take into account locked in population growth and assume the rest of the world catches up to first world living standards then energy consumption becomes a huge multiple of current levels and it becomes absurdly out of reach.
Most proposed solutions have as a vital step “then a miracle occurs*”. Out whole civilization is based on cheap energy. Without that, all our cleverness is in vain.
*As one example I was recently informed that my analysis had not taken into account the ability to mine uranium from asteroids and was thus faulty.
I’ve run into people arguing this a few times, but so far no one continues the conversation when I start pulling out papers with recent EROEI of solar and the like (e.g. https://sci-hub.do/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106726 which is the most recent relevant paper I could find, and says “EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing.”).
Perhaps you will break the streak!
I am curious about the details of your model and the sources you’re drawing from.
In particular, my understanding points at the curves of solar improvement being very positive, and already at a stage where they can provide enough energy to keep civilisation running, though it will require a large investment. Batteries also seem to be within reach of being viable, with a big push which will come as the grid becomes less stable and there is economic pressure to smooth out power.
I have not looked into it in detail, but Musk seems to think electric planes are possible in the near future. If that’s the case, I imagine shipping would also be possible? Maybe significantly more expensive because batteries cost more, but I don’t think civilisation collapses if you bring shipping costs up by some moderately large but not extreme factor?
Looking over the cement manufacturing process, it seems that energy is just needed for heat? If that’s the case, what would stop electricity replacing fossil fuels as the energy source?
and assume the rest of the world catches up to first world living standards
This seems like an unreasonable assumption? It is probably correct that we can’t bring everyone up to USA level consumption, but that does not mean that civilisation will collapse, just that we won’t be able to fix inequality at current technology levels.
So many people have pointed me at that article that I am thinking about doing a copypasta.
tl;dr Overall, they are talking about solving a small part of the problem, in places that are unusually well favoured, using unrealistic assumptions.
Problem #1 is that it is almost entirely focused on electricity which is only roughly 25% of the problem.
Problem #2 is that it fails to take into account in its calculations the total system cost of delivering energy across the whole economy. It is not just a matter of solar cells. You need all the infrastructure, transmission lines (including for all that redundancy you need now), storage, etc.
Problem #3 is that it makes unrealistic assumptions. For example the use of pumped hydro for seasonal storage is just ludicrous. Do the math.
Problem #4 is that it only considers the problem for regions that are especially favoured: “regions with high solar and/or high wind resources”.
I have done a ppt but I am revising it over the next weeks in response to comments. I will post it here when done.
The issue is that the process emits lots of CO2. For a renewable solution you need to expend large amounts of energy removing the CO2 from the air and finding a way to store it. There are ideas of how to store it but none that are proven at this scale (billions of tons)
> assume the rest of the world catches up to first world living standards
I briefly outlined two scenarios above. The first being to match existing energy use. The second taking into account growth in population and economic growth, which is happening, in LDCs. The first is very difficult at best, the second seems not at all possible barring a miracle. I do not see how you are going to stop the locked in population growth. and economic growth in LDCs is proceeding apace.
Multiplying the factors of population, reduced disparities, and modest growth in more developed countries results in an increase of 10-209 fold in energy consumption. Some people try to argue that we can have high economic growth without more energy but cross sectionally and temporally this would be very novel. Living standards and energy use are highly correlated. The one apparent exception, first world countries recently is just a result of outsourcing manufacturing to LDCs. When you take into account the energy embedded in imports, the richer countries are continuing to grow energy use rapidly (and effective CO2 emissions as well).
I have not looked into it in detail, but Musk seems to think electric planes are possible in the near future. If that’s the case, I imagine shipping would also be possible?
A plane has to be able to produce enough energy with batteries for a few hours while an ocean tanker needs enough fuel for weeks.
Hydrogen fuel cells seem to be the better solution for ships.
It is probably correct that we can’t bring everyone up to USA level consumption
Do you mean USA levels of consumption in the economic sense or just energy consumption? If the former, this seems like a really big deal to me. But I’m guessing it’s not the case. Right now we do many things in energy inefficient ways, because energy is so inexpensive right now.
> USA levels of consumption in the economic sense or just energy consumption?
Basically this is a false distinction. ( I did say first world originally not the US, which does seem to be somewhat profligate as a result of lower prices in the US, others tend to have high taxes on oil and coal).
Copied from my comment above:
> Some people try to argue that we can have high economic growth without more energy but cross sectionally and temporally this would be very novel. Living standards and energy use are highly correlated. The one apparent exception, first world countries recently is just a result of outsourcing manufacturing to LDCs. When you take into account the energy embedded in imports, the richer countries are continuing to grow energy use rapidly (and effective CO2 emissions as well).
The standards of life abruptly stop correlating with economic growth after a certain point. The whole first world has been far past that point from a while by now, economic growth only correlates with standard of life when it suddenly tanks hard in an economic crisis. Also Europe has the same living standards of the USA and a pro-capita carbon footprint that’s about 1⁄4. Part of it might be due to Europe moving a lot of polluting industries outside it’s borders, but it doesn’t seem even close to explain all the gap.
I mean for former, in terms of general economic wellbeing. It is a big deal and obviously bad if we can’t bring everyone up to a decent level of economic prosperity, but it is not fatal to civilisation. We are already at current levels of inequality, and we still have a civilisation.
The arguments for a possible collapse [I am on the fence] are roughly
1. Many civilizations in the past collapsed when deprived of their source of energy. A smooth transition to a lower level of energy use is not the norm though it has happened e.g. Byzantium.
2. Complex systems tend to be operating close to optimum, which makes for fragility. Turn the electricity off in NYC for two weeks and see what happens for example. More on this in books like “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph A. Tainter.
3. Our civilization is global thus the collapse would likely be global.
It is plausible to me that this would be fatal to our civilization, in the long run. Eventually we need to stop being biological humans living on the surface of Earth. It is not clear to me that we can move past that without much higher productivity than present day US.
I agree that if technological development productivity was held at a low level indefinitely that could be fatal, but that is a fairly different claim from the one waveman is making—which is that in the nearish term we will be unable to maintain our civilisation.
I am also hopeful that we can reach technological escape velocity with current or even fewer people with reasonable economic wellbeing.
I don’t really think you can make an argument that a renewable economy is viable based on hopium type arguments. As with the Club of Rome work, you would have to assume a massive increase in the rate of progress for this to work. In reality the problem seems to be the reverse—productivity increases seem to have slowed considerably.
c) nuclear fuels would run out about as fast as fossil fuels if used at scale.
A decade ago everyone talked about peak oil and we are now at a moment of time where increased oil production seriously reduced oil prices so that faciliities get shut down.
There are possibilities to extract uranium from seawater and if there would be a higher demand for uranium there would be a lot of funding going into making that process efficient.
What about Thorium? A back of the envelope calculation suggests thorium reactors could supply us with energy 100-500 years. I got this from a few sources. First used the figure of the 170 GW days produced per metric tonne of fuel (Fort St Vrain HTR) and the availability of fuel (500-2500 ktonnes according to Wikipedia) to estimate 10-50 years out of Thorium reactors if we keep using 15TW of energy. And that’s not even accounting for breeding reactors, which can produce their own fuel. So if we do go with the theoretical maximum, then we should multiply this figure by 50. I’m basing that estimate of the (probably peak) fuel efficiency of Thorium from what Carlo Rubia of Cern said (see Wikipedia article above). That is, 1 tonne can provide 200 times more power than 1 tonne of Uranium. Since Uranium produces ~45 GW days per metric tonne of fuel, we get the estimae of 50 times. Then we get the figure of 500-2500 15TW years.
Supposing that we really need four or five times the amount of energy we actually use, leaves us with an upper bound of ten times the naive estimate. So I’d estimate thorium could provide 100-500 75TW years.
That we run out of easily usable cheap energy sources and our civilization reverts to a kind of permanent static feudal / subsistence structure at best, if not outright collapse.
I think this is ignored for a number of reasons.
On the right, there is an assumption that fossil fuels are not going to run out, that fuel for nuclear reactors is basically infinite, etc. So no problem other than the “hoax” of global warming. I think this is wrong because a) GW is not a hoax, according to several months I spent looking into the issue, b) fossil fuels are going to run out fairly soon in terms of fuels that take less energy to extract than they produce, c) nuclear fuels would run out about as fast as fossil fuels if used at scale. The only exception being we could last a couple hundred years using breeder reactors but who wants 5,000 nuclear bomb raw material makers spread around the planet. And the faith in technology progress is overdone; nuclear fusion still seems a long way away, and the state of the art in batteries has only been getting better at about 7% per year.
On the left there is the belief that renewables will solve the problem. I have so far spent a couple of months trying to put together a picture of what a renewable economy would look like. So far it does not look like it adds up. The fundamental problems are 3-fold 1) the low density of renewables making the infrastructure extremely resource, energy and cost intensive 2) Batteries are nowhere near good enough for many key requirements (air travel, shipping, heavy transport and seasonal energy storage) 3) We don’t have a solution for others (concrete, steel manufacture). There are a lot of unproven ideas but if you try to put together a solution from proven technologies it does not add up so far.
It is very difficult to impossible even to match existing economic output with renewables, but when you take into account locked in population growth and assume the rest of the world catches up to first world living standards then energy consumption becomes a huge multiple of current levels and it becomes absurdly out of reach.
Most proposed solutions have as a vital step “then a miracle occurs*”. Out whole civilization is based on cheap energy. Without that, all our cleverness is in vain.
*As one example I was recently informed that my analysis had not taken into account the ability to mine uranium from asteroids and was thus faulty.
I’ve run into people arguing this a few times, but so far no one continues the conversation when I start pulling out papers with recent EROEI of solar and the like (e.g. https://sci-hub.do/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106726 which is the most recent relevant paper I could find, and says “EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing.”).
Perhaps you will break the streak!
I am curious about the details of your model and the sources you’re drawing from.
In particular, my understanding points at the curves of solar improvement being very positive, and already at a stage where they can provide enough energy to keep civilisation running, though it will require a large investment. Batteries also seem to be within reach of being viable, with a big push which will come as the grid becomes less stable and there is economic pressure to smooth out power.
I have not looked into it in detail, but Musk seems to think electric planes are possible in the near future. If that’s the case, I imagine shipping would also be possible? Maybe significantly more expensive because batteries cost more, but I don’t think civilisation collapses if you bring shipping costs up by some moderately large but not extreme factor?
Looking over the cement manufacturing process, it seems that energy is just needed for heat? If that’s the case, what would stop electricity replacing fossil fuels as the energy source?
This seems like an unreasonable assumption? It is probably correct that we can’t bring everyone up to USA level consumption, but that does not mean that civilisation will collapse, just that we won’t be able to fix inequality at current technology levels.
So many people have pointed me at that article that I am thinking about doing a copypasta.
tl;dr Overall, they are talking about solving a small part of the problem, in places that are unusually well favoured, using unrealistic assumptions.
Problem #1 is that it is almost entirely focused on electricity which is only roughly 25% of the problem.
Problem #2 is that it fails to take into account in its calculations the total system cost of delivering energy across the whole economy. It is not just a matter of solar cells. You need all the infrastructure, transmission lines (including for all that redundancy you need now), storage, etc.
Problem #3 is that it makes unrealistic assumptions. For example the use of pumped hydro for seasonal storage is just ludicrous. Do the math.
Problem #4 is that it only considers the problem for regions that are especially favoured: “regions with high solar and/or high wind resources”.
I have done a ppt but I am revising it over the next weeks in response to comments. I will post it here when done.
> Musk seems to think
Argument from authority. In my ppt I only go with proven technologies, This rules out this kind of thing.
> the cement manufacturing process
The issue is that the process emits lots of CO2. For a renewable solution you need to expend large amounts of energy removing the CO2 from the air and finding a way to store it. There are ideas of how to store it but none that are proven at this scale (billions of tons)
> assume the rest of the world catches up to first world living standards
I briefly outlined two scenarios above. The first being to match existing energy use. The second taking into account growth in population and economic growth, which is happening, in LDCs. The first is very difficult at best, the second seems not at all possible barring a miracle. I do not see how you are going to stop the locked in population growth. and economic growth in LDCs is proceeding apace.
Multiplying the factors of population, reduced disparities, and modest growth in more developed countries results in an increase of 10-209 fold in energy consumption. Some people try to argue that we can have high economic growth without more energy but cross sectionally and temporally this would be very novel. Living standards and energy use are highly correlated. The one apparent exception, first world countries recently is just a result of outsourcing manufacturing to LDCs. When you take into account the energy embedded in imports, the richer countries are continuing to grow energy use rapidly (and effective CO2 emissions as well).
What is the other 75% of the problem which can’t be solved with electricity?
Can see this raising the cost substantially, but given that only 8-9% of GDP is spent on energy, we can maybe eat that and survive?
That does sound like a bad assumption, and lowers my opinion of any paper which makes it.
Looking forward to it.
If the point of renewables is to stop climate change, yes. If the point is to keep civilisation running at all, no, you can just eat the CO2.
Population growth, agreed. But, if energy costs start seriously rising, economic growth will naturally slow or reverse, no?
A plane has to be able to produce enough energy with batteries for a few hours while an ocean tanker needs enough fuel for weeks.
Hydrogen fuel cells seem to be the better solution for ships.
Do you mean USA levels of consumption in the economic sense or just energy consumption? If the former, this seems like a really big deal to me. But I’m guessing it’s not the case. Right now we do many things in energy inefficient ways, because energy is so inexpensive right now.
> USA levels of consumption in the economic sense or just energy consumption?
Basically this is a false distinction. ( I did say first world originally not the US, which does seem to be somewhat profligate as a result of lower prices in the US, others tend to have high taxes on oil and coal).
Copied from my comment above:
> Some people try to argue that we can have high economic growth without more energy but cross sectionally and temporally this would be very novel. Living standards and energy use are highly correlated. The one apparent exception, first world countries recently is just a result of outsourcing manufacturing to LDCs. When you take into account the energy embedded in imports, the richer countries are continuing to grow energy use rapidly (and effective CO2 emissions as well).
The standards of life abruptly stop correlating with economic growth after a certain point. The whole first world has been far past that point from a while by now, economic growth only correlates with standard of life when it suddenly tanks hard in an economic crisis. Also Europe has the same living standards of the USA and a pro-capita carbon footprint that’s about 1⁄4. Part of it might be due to Europe moving a lot of polluting industries outside it’s borders, but it doesn’t seem even close to explain all the gap.
I mean for former, in terms of general economic wellbeing. It is a big deal and obviously bad if we can’t bring everyone up to a decent level of economic prosperity, but it is not fatal to civilisation. We are already at current levels of inequality, and we still have a civilisation.
The arguments for a possible collapse [I am on the fence] are roughly
1. Many civilizations in the past collapsed when deprived of their source of energy. A smooth transition to a lower level of energy use is not the norm though it has happened e.g. Byzantium.
2. Complex systems tend to be operating close to optimum, which makes for fragility. Turn the electricity off in NYC for two weeks and see what happens for example. More on this in books like “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph A. Tainter.
3. Our civilization is global thus the collapse would likely be global.
It is plausible to me that this would be fatal to our civilization, in the long run. Eventually we need to stop being biological humans living on the surface of Earth. It is not clear to me that we can move past that without much higher productivity than present day US.
I agree that if technological development productivity was held at a low level indefinitely that could be fatal, but that is a fairly different claim from the one waveman is making—which is that in the nearish term we will be unable to maintain our civilisation.
I am also hopeful that we can reach technological escape velocity with current or even fewer people with reasonable economic wellbeing.
I don’t really think you can make an argument that a renewable economy is viable based on hopium type arguments. As with the Club of Rome work, you would have to assume a massive increase in the rate of progress for this to work. In reality the problem seems to be the reverse—productivity increases seem to have slowed considerably.
There is a whole discussion about this both in the popular press and among economists https://time.com/4464743/productivity-decline/ https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2017/number/1/article/the-global-productivity-slowdown-diagnosis-causes-and-remedies.html
It is one thing even to assume present rates of improvement will continue, it is another to assume a dramatic turnaround against the current trend.
I do not mean technological development productivity, I mean economic productivity (how much stuff we’re making, how many services we’re providing).
A decade ago everyone talked about peak oil and we are now at a moment of time where increased oil production seriously reduced oil prices so that faciliities get shut down.
There are possibilities to extract uranium from seawater and if there would be a higher demand for uranium there would be a lot of funding going into making that process efficient.
What about Thorium? A back of the envelope calculation suggests thorium reactors could supply us with energy 100-500 years. I got this from a few sources. First used the figure of the 170 GW days produced per metric tonne of fuel (Fort St Vrain HTR) and the availability of fuel (500-2500 ktonnes according to Wikipedia) to estimate 10-50 years out of Thorium reactors if we keep using 15TW of energy. And that’s not even accounting for breeding reactors, which can produce their own fuel. So if we do go with the theoretical maximum, then we should multiply this figure by 50. I’m basing that estimate of the (probably peak) fuel efficiency of Thorium from what Carlo Rubia of Cern said (see Wikipedia article above). That is, 1 tonne can provide 200 times more power than 1 tonne of Uranium. Since Uranium produces ~45 GW days per metric tonne of fuel, we get the estimae of 50 times. Then we get the figure of 500-2500 15TW years.
Supposing that we really need four or five times the amount of energy we actually use, leaves us with an upper bound of ten times the naive estimate. So I’d estimate thorium could provide 100-500 75TW years.