That reasoning is just extremely unconvincing, essentially 100% wrong and backwards.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Other than energy, most other resources—like ores—are trivially recyclable. If New Rome wanted iron and copper and so on they’d just need to head toward the nearest dump, and dig there. Amount of ores we dug out and made trivially accessible is ridiculously greater than what they had available.
Annual iron ore mining for example is 2.4 billion metric tons, or 1 kg per person per day. Annual steel production is 1.49 billion metric tons, or 220 kg per person per year. Every year (OK, some of that steel is from recycled iron). Vast majority of them would be easily extractable if civilization collapsed. If we went back to Roman levels of population, each Roman could easily extract tens or hundreds of tons of usable steel from just the stuff we extracted that their technology couldn’t.
The same applies to every other metal, and most non-metal resources. It doesn’t apply to a few resources like phosphorus and helium, but they’ll figure it out somehow.
And even if civilization “collapsed” it’s not like our scientific and organizational knowledge would have disappeared, making it ridiculously easier to rebuild than it was to build in the first place.
Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is “obviously” true about the territory. taw, you said:
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using[...]
And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I’ve been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.
I’m not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I’d like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I’m asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I’ve seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes’ labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by “solar” since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth’s surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I’m really not arguing here. I’m honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That’s total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Solar is probably easiest to estimate by high school physics. Here’s Wikipedia’s.
Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we’re running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn’t specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There’s no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything—materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
Usual crap likely originating from pro-nuclear activists. The nuclear is the only green energy source which can run out of essential material (zirconium) for real and couldn’t easily substitute anything for zirconium. edit: note. I do see nuclear power as in principle green, but I also seen a plenty of pro nuclear articles which diss all other green energy sources on bs grounds and promote misconceptions.
The solar panels use silicon and very very tiny amounts of anything else. The silicon is everywhere.
There’s similar claim that the wind turbine construction would run out of neodymium (which is used in magnets), never mind that neodymium magnets are not essential and are only used because its relatively cheap, and increases efficiency by couple percent while cutting down on amount of necessary copper and iron. I.e. run out of neodymium, no big deal, the price of wind energy will rise a few percent.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Right, and the energy demands of those societies were substantially lower than those later societies which used oil and coal. The industrial revolution would likely not have been possible without the presence of oil and coal in easily accessible locations. Total energy isn’t all that matters- the efficiency of the energy, ease of transport, and energy density all matter a lot also. In those cases, fossil fuels are substantially better and more versatile.
Just look at how well science, and technology was doing before coal came about.
Even mentioning oil in this context is pretty ridiculous—it only came to importance by about 1950-ish. Cars can be modified to run on wood of all things without much difficulty, and it happened on mass scale in many economies in war conditions.
Most of your analysis seems accurate, but there do seem to be some issues.
While you are correct that the until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, the same article you linked to notes that this was phased out as the major forests were cut down and demand went up. This is not a long-term sustainable process that was converted over to coal simply because it was more efficient. Even if one had forests grow back to pre-industrial levels (a not completely unlikely possibility if most of humanity has been wipe out), you don’t have that much time to use wood on a large scale before you need to switch over.
You also are underestimating the transformation that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. In particular, while it is true that industries operated on water power, the total number of industries, and the energy demands they made were much smaller. Consider for example chip making plants which have massive energy needs. One can’t run a modern economy on water power because there wouldn’t be nearly enough water power to go around. This is connected to how while in the US in the 1870s and 1880s many of the first power plants were hydroelectric, support of a substantial grid required the switch to coal which could both provide more power and could have plants built at the most convenient location. This is discussed in Maggie Koerth-Baker’s book “Before the Lights Go Out” which has a detailed discussion about the history of the US electric grids.
And while it is true that no country had major coal mining before 1790 by modern standards, again the replacement of wood and charcoal occurred to a large extent because they were running out of cheap wood, and because increased industry substantially benefited from the increased energy density. And even well before that, coal was used already in the late Middle Ages for speciaized purposes, such as metal working with metals that required high temperatures. While not a large industry, it was large enough that you had coal regulation in the 1300s, and by the 1620s it was economically practical to have coal mines that included large scale drainage and pumping systems so one could mine coal well below sea level.
Even mentioning oil in this context is pretty ridiculous—it only came to importance by about 1950-ish.
Wood ran out because forests weren’t properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest—and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
We don’t have enough hydropower to cover all our use, but it could cover very large fraction of our needs, definitely enough to jumpstart civilization, and there’s many times more of any of—wind, solar, biomass, or nuclear power than we need—none of them fully available to any new civilization.
The fact that we used something for a certain purpose is no evidence that it was necessary for this purpose, it’s just evidence that we’re not total idiots to leave a resource unused. Many alternatives which would work nearly just as well were available in pretty much every single case.
The key point of economics you are missing here is the price of wood was driven up by increased demand. Wood never ran out, but it did become so expensive that some uses became uneconomical. This allowed substitution of the previously more expensive coal. This did not happen because of poor management of forests. Good management of forests might have encouraged it, by limiting the amount of wood taken for burning.
This is especially true because we are not talking about a modern globalized economy where cheap sugar from Brazil, corn from Kansas, or pine from the Rockies can come into play. We are talking about the 19th century in industrializing Europe. The energy use of England could not have been met by better forestry. All stats from 200 years later are a red herring.
If there were other alternatives that were almost as good, please produce them. Not now, but at the time being discussed.
Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
Would you mind explaining how what I have said is ahistorical nonsense?
Yes, at the end of the 18th century there was transatlantic trade. However, it was not cheap. It was sail powered and relatively expensive compared to modern shipping. Coal was generally not part of this trade. Shipping was too expensive. English industry used English mined coal. Same with American and German industry. If shipping coal was too expensive, why would charcoal be economical? You have jumped from “transportation existed” to “the costs of transportation can be ignored.”
As for why industries weren’t located by sources of wood. I can think of several reasons. First is that they were sometimes located by sources of wood, and that contributed to the deforestation.
The second is that there aren’t sources of wood as geographically concentrated as sources of coal. There is 10 mile square of wood producing district that can provide as much energy consistently over time as a 10 mile square of coal mining district.
Third is that timber was inconveniently located. There were coal producing areas that were better located for shipping and labor than timber producing areas. Are you seriously suggesting that an English owned factory with English labor might have set up in rural Sweden rather than Birmingham as an almost as good alternative?
I thought that we would have been total idiots to leave a resource like coal unused.
And even if civilization “collapsed” it’s not like our scientific and organizational knowledge would have disappeared, making it ridiculously easier to rebuild than it was to build in the first place.
I’m a bit sceptical about that. Compare the technological level of Europe in AD 100 with that of Europe in AD 700.
Which part of “Europe” are you talking about? Western peripheries of Roman Empire got somewhat backwards, and that was after massive demographic collapse of late Antiquity, the rest of Europe didn’t really change all that drastically, or even progressed quite a lot.
That reasoning is just extremely unconvincing, essentially 100% wrong and backwards.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Other than energy, most other resources—like ores—are trivially recyclable. If New Rome wanted iron and copper and so on they’d just need to head toward the nearest dump, and dig there. Amount of ores we dug out and made trivially accessible is ridiculously greater than what they had available.
Annual iron ore mining for example is 2.4 billion metric tons, or 1 kg per person per day. Annual steel production is 1.49 billion metric tons, or 220 kg per person per year. Every year (OK, some of that steel is from recycled iron). Vast majority of them would be easily extractable if civilization collapsed. If we went back to Roman levels of population, each Roman could easily extract tens or hundreds of tons of usable steel from just the stuff we extracted that their technology couldn’t.
The same applies to every other metal, and most non-metal resources. It doesn’t apply to a few resources like phosphorus and helium, but they’ll figure it out somehow.
And even if civilization “collapsed” it’s not like our scientific and organizational knowledge would have disappeared, making it ridiculously easier to rebuild than it was to build in the first place.
Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is “obviously” true about the territory. taw, you said:
And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I’ve been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.
I’m not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I’d like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I’m asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.
They are incorrect. Here’s a helpful diagram of available energy.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I’ve seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes’ labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by “solar” since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth’s surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I’m really not arguing here. I’m honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That’s total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Solar is probably easiest to estimate by high school physics. Here’s Wikipedia’s.
Here are some wind power estimates. This depends quite significantly on our technology (see this for possible next step beyond current technology)
World energy consumption is here
Thank you!
Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we’re running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn’t specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There’s no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything—materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
Usual crap likely originating from pro-nuclear activists. The nuclear is the only green energy source which can run out of essential material (zirconium) for real and couldn’t easily substitute anything for zirconium. edit: note. I do see nuclear power as in principle green, but I also seen a plenty of pro nuclear articles which diss all other green energy sources on bs grounds and promote misconceptions.
The solar panels use silicon and very very tiny amounts of anything else. The silicon is everywhere.
There’s similar claim that the wind turbine construction would run out of neodymium (which is used in magnets), never mind that neodymium magnets are not essential and are only used because its relatively cheap, and increases efficiency by couple percent while cutting down on amount of necessary copper and iron. I.e. run out of neodymium, no big deal, the price of wind energy will rise a few percent.
Right, and the energy demands of those societies were substantially lower than those later societies which used oil and coal. The industrial revolution would likely not have been possible without the presence of oil and coal in easily accessible locations. Total energy isn’t all that matters- the efficiency of the energy, ease of transport, and energy density all matter a lot also. In those cases, fossil fuels are substantially better and more versatile.
This argument is only convincing to people who never bothered to look at timeline of historical events in technology. No country had any significant amount of coal mining before let’s say UK in 1790-ish and forwards, and even there it was primarily to replace wood and charcoal.
Technologies we managed to build by then were absolutely amazing. Until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, canal transport was as important as railroads and was even less dependent on dense fuels, so transportation was perfectly fine.
Entire industries operated on water power just fine for decades before coal or electricity.
Just look at how well science, and technology was doing before coal came about.
Even mentioning oil in this context is pretty ridiculous—it only came to importance by about 1950-ish. Cars can be modified to run on wood of all things without much difficulty, and it happened on mass scale in many economies in war conditions.
Most of your analysis seems accurate, but there do seem to be some issues.
While you are correct that the until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, the same article you linked to notes that this was phased out as the major forests were cut down and demand went up. This is not a long-term sustainable process that was converted over to coal simply because it was more efficient. Even if one had forests grow back to pre-industrial levels (a not completely unlikely possibility if most of humanity has been wipe out), you don’t have that much time to use wood on a large scale before you need to switch over.
You also are underestimating the transformation that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. In particular, while it is true that industries operated on water power, the total number of industries, and the energy demands they made were much smaller. Consider for example chip making plants which have massive energy needs. One can’t run a modern economy on water power because there wouldn’t be nearly enough water power to go around. This is connected to how while in the US in the 1870s and 1880s many of the first power plants were hydroelectric, support of a substantial grid required the switch to coal which could both provide more power and could have plants built at the most convenient location. This is discussed in Maggie Koerth-Baker’s book “Before the Lights Go Out” which has a detailed discussion about the history of the US electric grids.
And while it is true that no country had major coal mining before 1790 by modern standards, again the replacement of wood and charcoal occurred to a large extent because they were running out of cheap wood, and because increased industry substantially benefited from the increased energy density. And even well before that, coal was used already in the late Middle Ages for speciaized purposes, such as metal working with metals that required high temperatures. While not a large industry, it was large enough that you had coal regulation in the 1300s, and by the 1620s it was economically practical to have coal mines that included large scale drainage and pumping systems so one could mine coal well below sea level.
It is relevant in this context in that it became important in part due to the rising price of coal (as easy to access coal had been depleted). It isn’t a coincidence that in World War II, a major goal of the German invasion of Russia was to get access to the Baku oil fields.
Wood ran out because forests weren’t properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest—and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
In 1990 3.5 billion m^3 of wood were harvested. With density of about 0.9kg/cubic meter, and energy of about 15 MJ/kg, that’s about 47 trillion MJ (if we burned it all, which we’re not going to).
All coal produced in 1905 was about 0.9 billion tons, or about 20 trillion MJ.
In 2010 worldwide biofuel production reached 105 billion liters (or 2.4 trillion MJ). But that’s very modest amount—according to the International Energy Agency, biofuels have the potential to meet more than a quarter of world demand for transportation fuels by 2050. And that’s not any new technology, we knew how to extract alcohol from plants thousands of years ago.
We don’t have enough hydropower to cover all our use, but it could cover very large fraction of our needs, definitely enough to jumpstart civilization, and there’s many times more of any of—wind, solar, biomass, or nuclear power than we need—none of them fully available to any new civilization.
The fact that we used something for a certain purpose is no evidence that it was necessary for this purpose, it’s just evidence that we’re not total idiots to leave a resource unused. Many alternatives which would work nearly just as well were available in pretty much every single case.
The key point of economics you are missing here is the price of wood was driven up by increased demand. Wood never ran out, but it did become so expensive that some uses became uneconomical. This allowed substitution of the previously more expensive coal. This did not happen because of poor management of forests. Good management of forests might have encouraged it, by limiting the amount of wood taken for burning.
This is especially true because we are not talking about a modern globalized economy where cheap sugar from Brazil, corn from Kansas, or pine from the Rockies can come into play. We are talking about the 19th century in industrializing Europe. The energy use of England could not have been met by better forestry. All stats from 200 years later are a red herring.
If there were other alternatives that were almost as good, please produce them. Not now, but at the time being discussed.
Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
Would you mind explaining how what I have said is ahistorical nonsense?
Yes, at the end of the 18th century there was transatlantic trade. However, it was not cheap. It was sail powered and relatively expensive compared to modern shipping. Coal was generally not part of this trade. Shipping was too expensive. English industry used English mined coal. Same with American and German industry. If shipping coal was too expensive, why would charcoal be economical? You have jumped from “transportation existed” to “the costs of transportation can be ignored.”
As for why industries weren’t located by sources of wood. I can think of several reasons.
First is that they were sometimes located by sources of wood, and that contributed to the deforestation.
The second is that there aren’t sources of wood as geographically concentrated as sources of coal. There is 10 mile square of wood producing district that can provide as much energy consistently over time as a 10 mile square of coal mining district.
Third is that timber was inconveniently located. There were coal producing areas that were better located for shipping and labor than timber producing areas. Are you seriously suggesting that an English owned factory with English labor might have set up in rural Sweden rather than Birmingham as an almost as good alternative?
I thought that we would have been total idiots to leave a resource like coal unused.
I’m a bit sceptical about that. Compare the technological level of Europe in AD 100 with that of Europe in AD 700.
Which part of “Europe” are you talking about? Western peripheries of Roman Empire got somewhat backwards, and that was after massive demographic collapse of late Antiquity, the rest of Europe didn’t really change all that drastically, or even progressed quite a lot.