The political humorist Frank Reed wrote that a leper is happiest when he knows why his fingers are falling off. Now, my own encounters with adversity aren't that fraught, but they do lead me to suspect that this is true and, assuming that it is, it's an easy corollary that if we're really going to enjoy the end of the world (whatever that means) then we should seek the best insights available into what's happened, what is happening and what is gonna happen.
But we do have a problem, because the world has been ending off and on for almost all of recorded human history. Such insights are already too numerous; one or another version of "the end is nigh" has been a hit with nearly every generation, and each version has brought with it a narrative of what fundamentally is wrong and usually why it can't be fixed. Some people take comfort in the sheer number and historical variety of the prophecies of doom. supposing that if they've been wrong about it up to now (after all, we're still here) then we can probably relax and assume we'll still be here tomorrow. However, this attitude overlooks the frequency with which the end really has arrived - in fact, it always does arrive. Every great and small civilization before our own has ended one way or another, and some of those endings were abrupt and terrifying. It would be simple-minded to assume that we're special.
But the problem remains - we have too many insights into what will cause this civilization to crash. From Malthusian and Millenarians, to climate scientists and political and economic doomsayers, explanations for our present crises and likely ruin lie thick about us. Our first task then is to find a higher vantage; to pull the camera back in a kind of dolly zoom, keeping the subject of collapse near and clear while at the same time broadening our field of view to its natural limit.
We may ask,what is a civilization? how does one come to be? how does it come not to be? are there any general principles we should be aware of? What analogs exist in nature that illustrate these principles? what about examples from history? The most general class of things of which civilizations are an example is termed by scientists "dissipative structures" Other examples of dissipative structures include living things like you and me, organized things like anthills and corporations, and many natural phenomena such as the Sun, forest fire and hurricanes. What each of these things has in common is that they rely on an available flow of useful energy to maintain themselves. Once a flux of useful energies no longer available, self maintenance fails and the dissipative structure dissolves.
The word for self maintenance in this context is "homeostasis", and the word for energy that's available for use by a dissipative structure is "exergy".
For instance, when a fire is sparked in the presence of a fuel source, the fire will grow until it is consuming the fuel as quickly as it can, and it will continue to burn until the fuel is exhausted. At that point, quickly or slowly, the fire dies and ceases to exist. The energy that was contained in the fuel still exists, but it's no longer exergy. As chemical energy it was available to a process the fire used to grow and maintain itself, but that process dissipated. The energy has diffused into heat, and it will never again be used to maintain a dissipative structure. the energy remains but the exergy is gone.
One can view the entire universe as a dissipative structure. In the beginning was the Big Bang, an explosive emergence of pure exergy that created time, space and all the stuff over the last 14 or so billion years. The exergy has been gradually dissipating as the universe expands and cools. Eventually it is believed it will end in heat death - a state in which there remains no exergy at all. The feature that is perhaps most characteristic of dissipative structures, including the universe itself, is their complexity.
Complexity is a puzzling phenomenon - at least it puzzled me, and it often still does in part because it appears to violate the laws of physics, in particular the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, entropy always increases. This principle says that order is never spontaneously produced from disorder, you can shatter the glass but you can't unshatter it. You can't unburn the fuel, You can't unscatter the dandelion seeds, and once humpty dumpty falls there's no putting him back together again.
However, complexity, which is an apparent increase in order, arises spontaneously within dissipative structures. How can this be? It's owing to the fact that energy can only flow in accordance with rules in purely physical processes, like a burning fire. The rules are those of physics and chemistry, things that are called "physical laws". Any dissipative structure is the same in this respect, it dissipates energy from exergy into heat and it does so in a manner that conforms to the laws that govern its nature. Rules give us complexity.
In 1970, mathematician John Conway introduced what he called his "game of life" (it has nothing to do with the Milton Bradley game of the same name). This was an example of a type of mathematical model called cellular automata. It consists of a board laid out on a square grid. One is to imagine that this grid extends indefinitely far in all directions, the squares are called cells, and they may be either empty or colored in. In the simplest version, there's only one color, and a cell that is colored is said to be alive and one that is empty is said to be dead. The rules are simple - if a dead cell has exactly three live neighbours among its eight adjacent squares then, it comes alive in the next turn. A live cell with two or three neighbors stays alive. A live cell with more than three or fewer than two neighbors dies. It is possible to create patterns that repeat - one such example is a pattern that repeats itself every four turns, but which shifts down and to the right as it does so. This is called a "walker", because it moves along the board as if it were walking. A pattern like this in Conway's Game of Life is a dissipative structure. In order for cells to change at each, turn calculations must be made and the board updated this costs extra G. In the case of this particular example, it's in electricity flowing through circuits - no electricity no game - but the reason it's interesting for this discussion is because it illustrates beautifully how complexity arises in dissipative structures. Start off any board with a few randomly colored squares and let it run, and there's no knowing what you might end up with. Most of the time it doesn't do much , in which case the cells either all die, or fall into some repeating pattern, but occasionally something curious happens - Sometimes very intricate patterns are created. Sometimes these patterns grow or move about while maintaining their structure or even reproduce themselves, or procreate other patterns that in turn have interesting properties.
Recently it was learned that a programmable computer can be made as a game of life pattern, and indeed there appears to be no limit to the complexity of systems that can arise all from the bare handful of rules that govern how energy is expressed as it flows through a structure. Watching the patterns emerge gives one the uncanny sense of something actually alive. It should be noted that the amount of exergy required to produce the patterns is not constant.
Efficiently programmed, any given instantiation of the Game of Life makes only as many calculations as are required for each turn. A pattern that grows in size and varies continuously will require an ever greater number of calculations at each stage. These calculations cost exergy, the circuitry of the computer will actually draw more electricity and create more heat in consequence. This is a theme we'll have cause to revisit.
One more note - the large and complex patterns that are sometimes created are almost always exceedingly fragile. Introduce a few live cells in the midst of such a pattern and it will usually fall into pieces, consumed as if by a destroying fire of random interactions. The vulnerability and fragility of homeostasis is another theme.
Let's go into what follows.
So we've noted the following commonalities:
*All dissipative structures consume energy,transforming useful energy (what we've called exergy) into less useful energy heat.
*Basically all dissipative structures give rise to complexity that is there, self-organizing, as an emergent property of the way their inherent rules channel their energy flows.
To these principles we should now add a third - it's been noted that even he universe itself, considered as a dissipative structure, will not go on forever. Eventually it will suffer heat death, at which point there'll be no remaining structure or complexity of any kind. It follows that no dissipative structure is immortal.
The first risk to any dissipative structure is variation in its flux of energy - of course, if the fuel dries up, it's done for. We'll see that for highly complex structures that it may be enough just for the flux to vary too much to cause a loss of homeostasis, but there are other dangers.
Like a match in the wind, every dissipative structure has an external environment that can act upon it, and these actions can produce crises that also threaten homeostasis. The more complex the structure, the more different kinds of crises can occur. Moreover, as complexity increases, the more likely it becomes that a crisis in one aspect of the system will cause cascading crises in other parts of the system. Suppose, for sake of argument, that a dissipative structure doesn't run out of fuel and isn't adversely impacted by any externalities. Can it go on indefinitely? In general, no, because dissipative structures are never static and they never go backwards. No natural process is reversible in itself because entropy always increases, it never spontaneously decreases. The same processes that bring a dissipative structure into being must continue because energy must continue to flow introducing new complexities. Each increase in complexity as a metabolic cost is a maintenance cost that also continues as these costs accumulate. Eventually the system becomes unsustainable on its energy base, and increasingly fragile. At some point a crisis occurs and there's a complexity collapse. If exergy is still available post collapse then it will arise anew, typically with significant variations from the old structure.
The biologist Eugene Odom, who wrote the first American textbook on ecology, described how this process occurs in ecosystems - he termed it "succession", and it's defined by three properties. It's an orderly process of community development. It results from modification of the physical environment by the community, and it culminates in a homeostatic echo system in which maximum biomass and symbiotic function between organisms are maintained (that is, per unit of energy flow). Nature always optimizes to repeat. Self-organization is directed towards achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as possible, within the limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions.
Once homeostasis is achieved, the ecosystem is mature, however eventually the ecosystem succumbs to its own fragility. A small perturbation in climate, or a fire, or the evolution of a disruptive/invasive/parasitic species, and all the intricate specializations that led to optimization of the ecosystem structure become in turn the cause of the system's failure. In the long view this is not a tragedy, but an essential component of the evolutionary process.
It's precisely the story of life on this planet, with its breathtaking diversity, not only across continents but across time. Notice that in Odom's succession, no organism controls or directs the ecosystem's development. Each organism behaves in accordance with its own nature, affecting and affected by the other organisms, yet the result is a tightly integrated system in which each organism depends for its own existence on the system as a whole. When the system fails, the individual organisms mostly die.
Alright, so that's a lot of analogies what about civilizations as dissipative structures. Humans had no civilization until about 20,000 years ago, despite having a rich trove of cultural artifacts dating back at least 50,000 years. Hunter-gatherers have to spend nearly all their energy, everything they can acquire from their environment, on acquiring that very energy. Most animals, prehistoric humans included, spend most of the energy they get from food on the task of acquiring more food. The ratio of the totality of energy acquired to the energy cost of acquiring that energy is called EROI, for energy return on investment.
For living things, it's generally always between 1 and 2. That is the energy they must spend getting energy and it's not a lot more than the energy they get. Less than 1 means, starvation closer to 2 means further growth and development is possible since there's excess energy available for it. The EROI on hunting gathering is between 1 & 2; just high enough to permit maintenance of a kinship group reproduction and the fashioning of a few implements and decorations. The cultural sophistication can be impressive, but the level of social complexity is essentially zero. There's only enough excess energy for the complexity in a small tribe, wit no intermediate levels of authority between the lowest and the highest ranked member. Very little specialization and only limited forms of interaction with other groups occurs.
It wasn't until around 12,000 years ago, when humans first started to domesticate both animals and plants, that their EROI increased sufficiently to allow a burst in social complexity. Population sizes also expanded. In fact, population seems to always closely track energy return on investment. Agricultural communities were able to store and process food in greater quantities, creating enough excess energy that some could be spent on dwellings, complex tools and increasing specialization, including roles not directly involved in food production (that is to say, in energy acquisition).
As farming techniques improved and more productive breeds and plants and of plants and animals were cultivated, EROI rose as high as four or so. Not only were all the present needs met, but there was also plenty to spare. Embodied energy in the form of preserved food and tradable goods could be accumulated.
This development introduced two new wrinkles. First, it was very common for a community to over-exploit an agricultural area, resulting in reduced yields over time, what's called diminishing returns, and that results in a reduced EROI. Second, successful communities were an inviting target for raiders.
These features play a significant role in the next leap in complexity, from agricultural communities to agriculture based empires. Ancient empires were built on centralized control of agricultural regions; control that was acquired through conquest. When one society conquers another, the Conqueror gets a huge boost to their energy return on investment because the accumulated wealth of the conquered society, its excess food and goods, can be pillaged outright, and if the conquered remain conquered they can be taxed. In this way, the ancient empires often grew quite large, and some lasted for many centuries or more. With their excess energy, empires grew socially very complex, with administrative, military, religious, and economic sectors, each with its own hierarchies and technicians. The number of intermediaries between the lowest and highest ranked members of society was large, and the number of social roles exploded. In addition to trading and war, relations between societies could be diplomatic and involve cultural exchange.
However, every ancient Empire suffered a similar fate. Once the surrounding societies are conquered and pillaged, they have to be administered with garrisons that soak up a lot of excess energy. Each new campaign stretches lines of supply and control farther than before, diminishing returns set in, the EROI declines. To compensate for the loss of energy while maintaining homeostasis, taxes are increased, typically in the form of an ever greater share of agricultural output from vassals. This leads inexorably to resource depletion, and finally the weakened empires is itself conquered or simply falls to pieces.
Rome is especially instructive on this. They were very, very good at being an empire, and were able to hold off collapse for a long time, but ultimately every step they took to avoid collapse ensured that when the collapse occurred it would be complete. Rome squeezed its agricultural and human resource base for every drop of energy, with the result being that when the Western Empire finally collapsed in the face of determined attacks from the frontier, the drop in social complexity, in population and in political and cultural stability was extreme and lasted for nearly 500 years. We call it the Dark Ages for a reason, right?
There was no resource-base left in the form of fertile soil, harvestable forests and stable human communities from which to rebuild, so further developments in energy capture were pretty limited before the Industrial Age. There were innovations like the capture of mechanical wind power enabling, for instance, the flourishing of the Dutch Empire in the 16th century along with other seagoing empires, but nothing that increased EROI much above 5 or so.
But, with the invention of the heat engine in the 18th century and a fossil fuels to produce the heat, everything changed. Coal and later oil provided an energy return on investment of up to a hundred.
That's one unit of energy in, 100 units of energy out, making almost limitless energy available to drive social development of every kind. Global per capita energy use rose exponentially, quadrupling by the year 2000, even as the global population increased by more than 7 fold. The result is what we have today - a globalized, industrialized, fully integrated economy with massive energy and information flows, in which the level of connectivity within and between groups is so high that the complexity rivals anything previously imagined or imaginable.
To put our per capita energy use into context, consider that a healthy adult can sustain about 75 watts of work. For eight hours (an eight-hour day), that's about 600 watt hours of work, 0.6 of a kilowatt. If you had 10 slaves, they could perform 6 kilowatt hours of work for you in a workday, rather less than you get from a single gallon of gasoline used in a typical car engine. The gallon of gasoline can propel an automobile 30 miles in 30 minutes. How long would it take you to push your car 30 miles? How many friends would you need to help you? An average American consumer directly and indirectly uses enough energy daily to perform the work of hundreds of slaves. These proverbial energy slaves are what make global industrial civilization possible.
The accumulation of technical and theoretical knowledge up to the 18th century certainly was important - it was a fundamental ingredient in what came after, but the explosion of economic and population growth, technical advancement and social complexity, from 1800 to the present, could not have occurred without the huge excess energy that fossil fuels provided.
With an early return on investment of fifty to a hundred, that energy permitted the overwhelming majority of the population to redirect their activity away from agriculture and energy acquisition to an ever-expanding array of other social specialties, and this in turn accelerated further innovation by orders of magnitude.
Now however, as you're probably aware, we face some challenges. First of all, our civilization is designed for very high energy flows and the quantity of fossil fuel remaining on earth is declining. The less fossil fuel that remains, the more it costs to exploit it. There are no substitutable energy sources that have a similar energy return on investment
I'll unpack substitutable here in just a few minutes. Our non energy resource base minerals - water, arable land, and so on - is also dwindling, and the ecological basis of any future low energy return on investment civilization is being destroyed. In short, we're falling off what's been termed the energy cliff.
An energy return on investment of a hundred means that 99% of the oil our, 99% of the energy accumulated, can be diverted to uses other than getting more energy, and current the EROI of 20 means that 95% is available for use, so there isn't much practical difference between an energy return on investment of a hundred and an EROI of 20, but after that things get worse very quickly. An energy return on investment of five means that only 80% of the energy is available for other uses. When oil was first exploited as a fuel source,the EROI was roughly a hundred. As the oil economy grew both institutional and physical, infrastructures had to be built for it (for example, paved roads) and these metabolic costs decreased the energy return on investment to 30 or so. As the richest and easiest to exploit deposits were exhausted, more had to be spent to exploit deposits that were smaller, harder to reach and of lower quality. By the start of the 21st century, the average and a return energy return on investments of conventional oil had dropped to 20, and the energy return on investment of newly exploited deposits of conventional oil is now 10 or less. Wind and solar are now competitive with oil at the point to generation, but if the electricity they produce has to be stored, the EROI drops to barely more than one. Unconventional oil sources have an EROI of no more than fiv,e possibly much less, and the pace of diminishing returns is much quicker for those than with conventional oil. Biomass has turned out to be a bust from an EROI perspective, and agricultural land is becoming far too precious to waste on it. The difference between an EROI of 20 and 1-5 is more significant than it might appear.
Established economies have a metabolic cost, existing infrastructure has to be serviced and replaced, existing institutions have to be funded, existing populations have to be fed and clothed and housed and transported. A decline of 5% can mean the difference between meeting these costs with enough left over for further development, or not meeting these costs, which means the civilization must cannibalize its reserves. Fragility and eventually collapse ensues.
So how might we avoid falling off the energy cliff?
Here are some ideas that people have:
*We could just start exploiting the existing energy resources at a faster rate right because you know, if you're only getting 80 80 percent back then exploit that much more to make up the difference
*You could try to use the existing resources more efficiently or maybe you can make the existing economic and social orders less energy intensive sothey need less energy
*Of course, you want to try to find new energy sources to replace the existing ones
Unfortunately what we're going to see here is that none of these options is actually available.
Consider exploiting fossil energy at a faster rate. Conventional oil and gas production peaked globally about 10 years ago, in the United States it peaked about 40 years ago and it can't be economically increased because the costs of expanding the drilling and refining increase. Sure to increase throughput that can never be recovered by the value of the remaining oil we could increase coal, but only at a severe environmental cost even before climate change is considered, and that supply too will peak before very long.
Shale oil recovered through fracking already has too low an EROI to make it profitable to extract. This is kind of an open secret in the financial press. I don't know if you've been following, but you know there's a two hundred and fifty billion dollar investment in oil shale and and gas fracking. Although these pipelines are being built, none of these companies has ever made any money. That's just huge debt, and they have a devastating ecological cost of course.
Continuing to release greenhouse gases at our present rate, let alone an accelerating rate, puts the planet on tracked across climate tipping points possibly within a decade that will probably result in near-term global extinction of most life, including us, and carbon capture and sequestration technology and so-called negative emissions technologies not are not only unproven, but also they'll reduce the energy return on investment to one or less if we implement them on a wide scale.
What about increasing efficiency. Well, we've already dramatically increased efficiency already. Buildings are better insulated, lighting and other appliances are more efficient, we're all switching to LEDs, gas and diesel engines are much more efficient. I have a truck it gets 20 miles per gallon on the highway (don't worry, I don't drive it much) but the one that I had, or I should say that my dad had, many years ago got 12 miles to the gallon, so that's a big improvement. But for every efficiency introduced, the rate of consumption has increased, not decreased. This is called the Jevons Paradox, and it's an observable feature of natural economies in the absence of forced rationing. Efficiency always increases rather than decreases, the rate of consumption also increasing efficiency requires the development of new technologies - new kinds of motors and
devices, new lighting technologies - and so new technologies require research and prototyping and then capitalization in the marketplace, and each of these steps demands an energy budget, and there are diminishing returns on innovation so that each new increment of technical progress requires more energy on average than the ones that came before. The rate of increase is exponential.
Think about the inventors in the early 20th century - Edison and Tesla and so on and so forth - they were grabbing the low-hanging fruit. If you look at. Look back in the Patent Office records and you'll see that there were a lot of patents given to individual inventors, individual researchers. That almost never happens anymore because those easy to get innovations have been gotten. Not only has the rate of new patents slowed down, but the size of the teams and their budget that get those new patents has exploded.
It takes a well-researched department of a dozen people to come close to finding a new patentable technology, so that's diminishing returns. What about making the existing economic and social orders less energy intensive? Well, as we noted, efficiency isn't going to do it, and really we can't achieve much beyond the efficiency we've already achieved. More people could insulate their homes, but that's about as good as it gets. Consequently, the only way to make the economy use less energy is to unwind its complexity, and this is impossible to do in a deliberate fashion. I'll explore the reasons why after dealing with alternative energy sources.
There's actually only four primary sources of energy on earth, solar, tidal, nuclear and geothermal. Fossil fuel isn't an energy source, fossil fuel is an energy carrier. Coal and oil is basically a big battery that the Sun charged up over hundreds of millions of years, and which we've now drained. The battery can be recharged but only on geological timescales, so for human purposes once we've drained it that's it.
Geothermal energy has not been exploited up to now in any meaningful way because the engineering challenges are too great to make it economical. Tidal energy, which is caused by the relative motion of the Earth, Moon and Sun has likewise not been exploited for the same reason as nuclear energy - in principle it's ideal and it produces almost unlimited electricity for what ought to be manageable cost, but it hasn't turned out that way. Because of the cost of building and decommissioning nuclear plants, and because of the enormous risks they present, no nuclear plant has ever stood on its own economically - it has always had to rely on subsidies, especially indemnities, and after inevitably disasters occured few nations are pursuing this option anymore. Most plants will go out of commission within a few decades, hopefully in a controlled manner.
Nuclear fusion wouldn't have many of these problems, but that technology has been feasible in just a few years since I was in high school 40 years ago. I wouldn't hold my breath
That leaves all the many manifestations of solar energy, wind generators (the wind is driven by the sun) and the Coriolis effect, photovoltaics and biomass (which of course is the sun's energyvia photosynthesis). Of these, only biomass can be used to create liquid fuels and other hydrocarbons like plastics, and this is our Achilles heel this is it because liquid fuels are not directly substitutable from an economic or engineering standpoint by any quantity of electricity.
Remember that gallon of gas it weighs 6 pounds, it can be carried in a cheap plastic container and it's ready right now. To push your one-ton vehicle 30 miles down the road in 30 minutes, the equivalent amount of electricity can be generated for about the same price but by the time it's gotten into your vehicle and made ready for use, its cost has increased significantly and that's not including the several thousand dollar cost of your several hundred pounds of batteries to store it until you need it.
These are batteries that have to be replaced every few years, those batteries in turn require large amounts of an element lithium, which is at present presently cheap and fairly abundant but which is extremely expensive to recycle. There's about enough of it in known reserves to replace the entire fleet of cars around the world exactly once, and then it will be gone. That's not the worst part though - the weight of batteries needed in a vehicle is a function of the gross weight of the vehicle times the distance it has to travel before recharging. For your car it's a solvable problem, for freight the problem is not tractable for long distances because the further freight has to be carried carried the heavier the batteries that have to be carried along with it, which leaves less and less room for the freight. There will be no long haul trucking or shipping using batteries. In short, haul freight is going to get a lot more expensive. Trains can be converted of course, they're basically already electric, it's just that the generators are fueled by diesel so they basically carry the energy with them. Nobody's yet figured out how to affordably retrofit our 140,000 miles of rail to be electric.
What about hydrogen?
A lot of people have talked about hydrogen. Hydrogen can be isolated from water by electrolysis using electricity, stored, transported and burned in an efficient engine whose only pollutant is water. That's a very nice deal, but hydrogen isn't an energy source, hydrogen is an energy carrier. The conversion of solar to electricity to hydrogen to locomotion is expensive and it has an overall efficiency of only about 30%, but transporting and storing hydrogen is where the real problem lies. Hydrogen is very light -it's a very small molecule - so it's much harder to contain than petroleum. It's also explosive. Most of us aren't old enough to remember the Hindenburg but you should know what happened, if not google it.
At a minimum, after conversion to hydrogen-based transportation, moving stuff and people around is likely to be an order of magnitude more expensive than with liquid fuels, and before that is possible the rate at which electricity is produced from wind and solar has to be increased by a factor of at least 150 over what it is right now just for transportation. The entire infrastructure of petroleum-based transportation has to be replaced, but to replace it with new electricity-based infrastructure the cost would be several times any previous industrial initiative in human history, and we'd have to do it while at the same time reducing our overall energy use.
What about biomass? It's really not worth discussing, its EROI is about one and to produce enough liquid fuel to run the transportation sector we'd have to switch more than 3/4 of available agricultural production to fuel production instead of food. Food, trucks: pick one.
My friends in the Green Party and other supporters of the Green New Deal, which I'm sure you've all heard about by now, are going to be distressed to learn that the situation for grid electricity from renewables isn't a whole lot better. Our civilization is made possible in large part by an electrical system that delivers power on an as-needed basis 24 hours a day, without interruption. The wind doesn't blow and the Sun doesn't shine on our schedule, so electricity generated from these sources isn't dispatchable to maintain the grid without fossil fuels. What's the goal of the Green New Deal? To maintain the grid without fossil fuels, but that means that the generating capacity has to be much higher than the average demand and the excess has to be stored somehow so that it can be fed back into the grid when the Sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Now, there all kinds of technologies being explored to do this, but numerous studies show that it increases the cost per watt of dispatchable electricity by an order of magnitude.
Pause for a minute and think about your electricity bill, in fact just think about your whole utility bill and add to it the gas that you buy. Now put a zero on the end of it. That's your new household budget for energy.
Not really though. It's actually worse than that because embodied energy is in everything we buy. Consider a box of cornflakes, from planting, to growing, to harvesting, to processing, to packaging, to shipping, to point-of-sale and finally to your kitchen cupboard. There are energy inputs at every step, and at least half are from liquid fuels. On average a calorie of food produced in our agricultural system requires at least 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce it and deliver it to your body.
In other words, the energy return on investment of food in this civilization is one-tenth. 10 units of energy in to get one in one unit of energy out. 90% of the energy cost in our food isn't supplied by the food, considering just the increased cost alone, replacing the fossil fuels in our food system with renewable sources puts the price of food out of reach for almost everyone, and what is true of food is likewise true of every other commodity, from the house you live in, to the socks on your feet.
When we say there's no replacing fossil fuels, we don't mean there aren't replacements (there are), there just aren't any for this civilization because the energy capture strategy that built it has failed. That brings us to the final point about energy. Can we go backwards? Can we somehow decomplexify or reconfigure our system to not need fossil fuel anymore? After all, we might not want to party like it's 1899, but can we get back there if we have to, or at least to some neo modern version of the same level of energy consumption? Without collapse of course.
Consider that box of cornflakes. The corn that you eat is not the same corn we grew even 40 years ago. Part of the Green Revolution that doubled food production since 1970 was the development of varietals that put most of their metabolic resources into aspects of the plant that serve our needs. The corn kernels of today's corn are plump and full of sugar, and there's many more ears per acre of corn to achieve this. The plant uses less of its photosynthetic energy on developing roots, on being disease and pest resistant, being drought resistant and so on, and directing it instead to the fruiting parts. The benefit is that the plants produce more human edible food. The cost is that without fossil fuel derived fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides and herbicides, the plant isn't a viable food crop. It can't stand on its own. Indeed, the entire agricultural system across the planet is dependent on fossil fuels in just this way. Subtract the fossil fuels and we have to go back to varietals that are much more robust, but which in consequence produce less food
All of this means widespread famine, even in rich countries. There is a solution in the long term to the agricultural problem - return to small-scale regenerative localized food production. Studies show that really is the way to maximize food production, and it has many other benefits like mitigating climate change, but doing this means reversing generations of previous migration off the land and into the cities. How many of you know how to farm successfully on a small scale with your own hands and the help of a few animals for machinery?
I don't, but I've learned from living on five acres for the last ten years that it's not something you just pick up. It's viscerally challenging to forge a living out of the land without engines and chemicals. In a like manner, getting people out of their private steel chariots and living locally means redesigning all of our communities, urban suburban and rural, upending all of our current transportation and distribution infrastructure. People just don't know how to live that way and you're not going to persuade them to try, which means that these changes won't occur until long after the energy to make those changes is gone. In fact, it's mostly already gone. Like any natural ecosystem, the human-made ecosystem of civilization can't be willfully manipulated by its constituent pieces. It can't go backwards, it can't be disciplined, it's more of a wildwood than a walled garden.
Our only alternative is to accept that we have already seen the climax stage of this civilization. Now we're now headed back down the entropy entropy loop, so when are we supposed to start enjoying this? A person at this point might reasonably ask two things - first, how do we know collapse is really gonna happen? I mean after all, lots of theorizing here, but Dr. Smith do, you really have any evidence of collapse? Secondly when do you think it's gonna happen well?
These are two questions with one answer. The answer to both questions is that the collapse is already underway, and the evidence that this is so is conclusive.
Before we examine that evidence, though, we need to stop for a minute and untangle a misconception. We generally use the word economy equivocally to refer to two things as if they were the same thing. These two things are the material economy, that is sometimes called the real economy, on the one hand, and the financial economy on the other hand. The material economy is the production movement and use of energy, the energy can be so to speak raw in the form of electricity or fuel but it's also embodied energy in the form of extracted raw materials (processed feedstocks like iron ore, lumber, agricultural products, machinery, finished goods and so on), the financial economy is the system of accounting that is used to track and facilitate the material economy. in an economy that's in balance with its energy flows, the financial economy closely parallels the real economy and it provides essential services. These include a standardized medium of exchange, mitigation of risks, rational pricing and so on. One essential service, especially for a growing economy, is capitalization - the provision of excess resources to lay the foundation for increased flows of energy in the real economy, for example building a new factory or new roads or other infrastructure to make growth possible.
When complex civilizations, collapse a universal symptom is the financialization of growth. The energy basis of the real economy is in decline and can no longer support growth capitalization. What's called liquidity is still being provisioned by the financial system but it doesn't translate into real growth, the disparity between real and financial wealth widens as incomes that depend on the real economy start to shrink in real terms. At the same time, incomes from the financial sector increase exponentially as speculative bubbles are created and then burst.
A ratchet effect ensues in which the wealth disparity grows almost without bound, and I think you can see that that is exactly what is happening since 2008. It's interesting that although it's widely reported incomes have actually declined for 90% of Americans, the value of the stock market has. tripled. What does that tell you? There's one big disconnect somewhere.
My socialist friends tend to get taken in by this. They look at the Bill Gates's and the Koch brothers and the Jeff Bezos's of the world ,and they think that if only they weren't stealing it all there'd be enough for everybody. However, that 150,000 dollars per minute that Jeff Bezos makes isn't exactly the same kind of money that we get in our paychecks. Your paycheck represents rent, food, clothes and gas, his income, millions of times what you and I make, doesn't represent millions of times the material flows. He's not eating a million burgers a day, he's not driving a million miles. His wealth correlates to power, not to consumption.
It's reported that just a dozen or so billionaires are as wealthy as the bottom half of humanity, so if you combine that report with a report that just a few dollars a day you start to get people thinking wealth redistribution would solve anything. I'm not against the revolution but it's a mistake to think that will solve world hunger with make-believe monopoly money. That's what it is in real terms - the economies of wealthy countries all went into permanent decline between 1970 and 1990 and the decline is accelerating.
During this period, the so called emerging economies such as China and India fueled very rapid growth on the basis of massive exploitation of coal and demand for manufactured goods from the developed world, who used financialization to increase consumer demand borrowing even as their own productive capacity was shrinking, but now the emerging economies have also peaked and the rod of financialization is sitting in there as well. Financialization, being essentially a shell game, eventually starts to run out of tricks. The first earthquakes were in the 70s and 80s, the biggest up to now in 2007.
Governments responded by inflating their GDP figures. There's a lot of weird stuff in the GDP. It's reported every year that supposedly our economy had grown by 3% last year. They put things in there like imputed rent, which means that if you own your own house and you're not paying mortgage on it. the government imputes how much rent to you would you would pay to yourself for that and they include that in the GDP. It has nothing to do with the material economy, it's just made up. After 2008 they lowered interest rates to less than zero in real terms, in other words giving away money for free to banks to lend out. This has kept a financial economy on life-support by exploding both public and private debt debt, which represents claims on future production that can never be realized by a shrinking real economy. The obligations that total debt in the United States represents, including household debt on mortgage, student debt, government debt and such obligations as Social Security and Medicare, all of those together now, represent nearly 400 percent of reported gross domestic product per year and an even higher multiple of the gross domestic product in the materials economy.
How many of you played Jenga? Fun game, right? It's a beautiful metaphor for financialisation in the economy because it gets higher and higher, but it gets more and more unstable, and as you're as you're watching it you know as it starts to starts to go back and forth a little bit with each new turn. You're just certain it's gonna fall, and then it doesn't which gives you a sense of relief.
This is kind of our metaphor here when the deleveraging of the financial economy hits and the final collapse ensues. Those of us who thought about it are gonna breathe a huge sigh of relief, just like the Jenga stack coming down, and the sooner it happens the greater will be our celebration because what if it didn't happen? In a talk I gave here last year I gave a detailed summary of our impact on the planet, and in the year since we've learned things that make that summary seem almost optimistic compared to what I'd be telling you if I gave the same talk today the ecosystem.
Collapsing fisheries, insects, land vertebrates -all these populations are declining at a rapidly accelerating rate. Populations of vertebrates have declined 60% on average since 1970, and that's that's instantaneous in evolutionary terms. Insect populations have declined by at least 45%, again not a steady rate of loss but accelerating. If pollinators go extinct there's no functioning ecosystem, without that, there's no physical basis for any level of human civilization. Mineral and water resources are being depleted again at an increasing rate, water stress will soon become extreme in the most populated parts of the world, a third of agricultural land around the world is acutely degraded by industrialized agriculture. At this rate all of it will be lost before the end of the century. Essential industrial metals will become unavailable and fossil fuels inaccessible in meaningful quantities at any price, all of which would spell the end of civilization even without climate change.
The science is now crystal clear. We've got at best ten years to wean ourselves off fossil fuels or we'll see at least 4 degrees centigrade of additional warming, possibly as soon as 2040, certainly by 2080 with no means whatever to bring the climate back into equilibrium. All that geoengineering stuff is fantasy. It's now generally believed by that point feedback loops will kick in, driving temperatures as much as 10 degrees higher centigrade no matter what we do. God alone knows if the biosphere will live or die in the aftermath of that event at a minimum the remaining ecosystems will collapse, most species will go extinct and it's questionable whether humanity will survive in any form much beyond the end of the century, and even if it does there will be no resource base from which to make a new civilization possibly for millennia, and we can't change course knowing full well the consequences.
The human system lurches on helplessly, steadily increasing year by year the release of greenhouse gases into the climate system. If this civilization were to continue another 20 years, it would mean omnicide. it's fortunate indeed that it cannot so in the first place.
So, NSG, what do you think about the pretty much inevitable malthusian catastrophe that is going to destroy industrial-technological civilisation over the next few decades?
Have you prepared or do you plan on preparing for it as soon as you can?
What positives can you find in it, along with the avoidance of a great deal of environmental damage, that will help you cope with dealing with the collapse and, most importantly, allow for a constructive attitude that will bear fruit on the other side of the disaster? What do you hope for in the communities that will inevitably be formed by those who make it?
If you do not think the collapse is inevitable, why would this be the case? What non-meme technologies are going to save us?
Personally I don't mind, I've already made threads discussing my agreement with a lot of the points made by a certain mathematician, I also love the sight of trees and the smell of fresh air so the only thing I have to fear is my own death. I am in university currently, so the time I have to work with is definitely pushing it and my relatives are all definitely dead, but maybe I can make it if you give me a bit under 20 years (the financial economy is bones very soon though).
