Tags
Biophysical Economics, Charles Hall, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Empire, Energy and the Wealth of Nations, Environmental Collapse, EROEI, Joseph Tainter, Neoclassical Economics, Peak Oil, The Elite 1%
The above video is a discussion with Dr. Charles Hall of the Dept. of the SUNY-Environmental and Forest Biology. He is the primary creator behind the concept of EROEI in the field of biophysical economics. He also cowrote the new book “Energy and the Wealth of Nations“. I just heard about this book, but from the reviews I have read it appears to be essential reading for those concerned about a world faced with depleting energy sources and an economic system ill-suited to deal with this crisis.
Throughout the history of civilizations, economies have been based on energy inputs, whether by human slaves or oil energy slaves. The bits of paper and metal we receive for our work are only tokens representing muscle or brain output. Money is simply a token of energy exchange and has no intrinsic value of its own. Without the constant input of primary energy, a civilization’s economy ceases to function as it once did. The following comment by an engineer illustrates my point:
…Consider: A fit human being has a maximum productive energy output of about 100 watts. Such a person working for 10 hours provides 1000 watt-hours of energy, which is to say, 1 kWh. In other words, by working quite literally like a slave, a person can produce about 1kWh per day. For this we pay $0.05 to $0.25 in most parts of this country. Granted, that’s provided as electrical, not mechanical energy but my point is to illustrate the enormous gap between the energy intensity that was historically possible, and the energy intensity that we take for granted now. The extreme cheapness that makes this energy intensity possible is a product of the fact that we are using up a one-time endowment of fossilized sunlight. It is not something that can be duplicated with a renewable source.
Nor is it something that we can continue to obtain from fossil fuels for very much longer, even if we don’t care about climate change or ecosystem health. The cheapest of fuels, coal, comes with a set of fairly immediate externalized costs – if we pursue a coal-based energy system, those externalized costs will accumulate quickly enough to drag us down in fairly short order (through e.g. medical expenses). The current, temporary glut of cheap natural gas notwithstanding, other fossil fuels will not fill this need either. There may be “plenty” of oil at $100/bbl, but that abundance will not be sustained at a lower price point – again, a function of declining EROEI…
The less energy you get back from the energy you invested, the worse off you are. If a civilization is expending all its energy and resources and only getting enough fuel back to function at its current state, then it is just subsisting and cannot grow and expand in complexity. With a population that is constantly increasing, this means intractable unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and social unrest. As Joseph Tainter has explained, a complex society such as ours gets to the point where more energy is required simply to maintain the infrastructure it’s come to depend on. Forget growing or replacing, but just maintaining the present infrastructure requires more energy than was originally spent to build it. To make matters worse, a corrupt government and myopic ruling elite don’t recognize the realities of biophysical economics. Indeed, our entire economic system operates in a make-believe world that tries to impose neoclassical theorems on finite natural systems. Just as Rome imploded from the inability to maintain its over-extended reach through its limited energy resources, so too will the U.S. repeat this mistake of depleting returns on supporting a far-flung empire built from cheap fossil fuels.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
A video of Joseph Tainter, the author of ‘Collapse of Complex Societies’, that I forgot to link to in my blog post:
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Industrial civilization is doing quite well. I suggest you try to bring perspective instead of fear mongering to the table …
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I allowed this comment as an example of the vast majority of the population’s close-mindedness to the issues that this site raises. For the few who are aware of the serious problems bearing down on modern civilization, you might also find Roderick’s comment humorous.
”The general population doesn’t know what is happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.” – Noam Chomsky
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[comment moved below by author so that a response can be made]
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I am not a huge fan of Tainter. IMO he doesn’t actually give a very good mechanism for what happens. Goldstone and Turchin are both much more useful.
The problem with your link to the Roman collapse is that it ignores all the history that doesn’t fit in with its theories. Clearly the constant infiting over succession has to be included within the discussion. Rome’s worst enemy was often itself. It also doesn’t address the issue of why only half the empire collapsed very well.
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Almost forgot. Thank you for the heads up on the book. It looks very interesting. I hunted up some reviews online. It seems to be getting some thoughtful reviews.
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The main thrust of the post is that energy flows underpin all the functions of a civilization. This is the prism through which biophysical economics sees the world. Infighting within the Roman Empire was not a cause of its decline, but a result of the root cause of stifled energy flows. The key parts of the linked essay on Rome’s decline are the following:
And the accompanying ‘Graph of the Population of Rome Through History’ is telling as well. By the way, the primary source of energy for the Roman Empire, supported of course by food production, was human slavery.
In my household I notice that when wealth runs freely(my paycheck from my labor), things run smoothly and there is very little discord. The number one reason for divorce is financial problems. I believe the same basic premise holds true in the larger society. When there was abundant cheap energy, i.e. oil, the middle class blossomed and the social fabric was relatively strong. Nowadays not so much.
From ‘Middle Class? Here’s What’s Destroying Your Future’:
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You can restate Tainer’s argements, but it does not make them true. And you still have no actual mechanism that would be useful for your collapse. It is a shell/circular theory. Did the Mayans fall apart because they conquered too much? What about the collapse of the Entire Mediteranian – Indian cultured civilazation around 1200BC? Did the Egyptians, Dark Age Greeks, Cypriots, Mesopotamian, Indus River Valley, plus a few more all simultaneously expand too much?
Tainter is very selective in both the collapses he chooses and what he discusses about those collapses.
You cannot show that the Roman collapse coincided with the extant of their Empire, because no good data exists. It is argued endlessly. Likely the Romans collapsed for a number of reasons, one of would have been a cascading collapse that started with weakness at the edges of their Empire. But note, the Eastern half, the wealthier and more useful half at the time, did not collapse. The Byzantines were called Romans, by the people of their time.
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You are making energy into a God – a single source explanation of everything. It is damn right silly. There is no one to one relationship between energy consumption and anything else. We can substitute away from energy towards other inputs. German consumption of energy per dollar of real GDP is about 50% of the American level.
It is not at clear to me how to put EROEI into an economic model. An economic model may or may not show a relationship between EROEI and economic cost.
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EROEI is the iron law of nature, applying to single organisms as well as complex societies. You can call energy a God if you like, but it is not a single source explanation for everything; it is simply the Causa Prima.
From ‘Averting Collapse: 6 Steps’ –
Civilizations always think they’re immortal, [David] Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving “nothing but runes and scattered genetics.”…
“Try not to run out of energy.” When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues.
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[comment moved below by author so that a response can be made]
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Well most people who believe in the physical world and its constraints naturally believe that Energy is a GOD. Everything has energy in it, without it life couldn’t happen. All species of animal and plant has to consume energy long enough to produce their own offspring. Food doesn’t magically appear on your table for you to consume so you can live. Someone had grow it first, with some good help from our sun which is constantly providing us with free energy. But the point here is that the energy used to get that food on your table is way more than the sun provided during the foodstuffs lifetime. We are using “stored sunlight” in the form of fossil fuels to fast forward the energy trade so that you get food on your table cheaply and without much effort from yourself. Without cheap energy, our society can’t exist at all. Without cheap energy you can’t create complex technology, even the ones that can directly capture sunlight.
Most deniers (or wishful thinkers), will get a serious wakeup call during the next 30 years when the clear effects of depletion in everything from oil, water, minerals hit us in the face. I don’t think people are fully aware of the crisis we are in right now with the oil supply dwindling and how it will affect our lives.
It’s about time people select leaders that fully understand civilisations dependence on cheap energy, and motivate the people to change to less consumption, less globalism, less population. Its really the only sustainable alternative for us. If we continue like we do now, we will surely see a catastrophic end of current civilisation.
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Brilliantly said John! By the way, my 2 boys are Minecraft fanatics.
Another very recent article by Professor George Mobus is relevant to this conversation:
Watching the Global Economic System
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You are still missing the point. All resources are essential: capital, labor, energy, other raw materials. Without labor and capital oil in the ground cannot be transformed into fuel.. Secondly, we don’t use energy and other resources in fixed combinations, we can use different combinations to achieve the same output. Take the US, China, and Germany, All producing the same products and services using radically amounts of energy in the form of oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc.
This is why the collapse of industrial civilization is so unlikely. We can reduce energy consumption and still produce the same products and services as today. Today I amrenovating apartments in the historic center of Budapest and these apartments will use approximately 60% less energy for heating and water.
I believe in Peak Oil, but it doesn’t imply Apocalypse.
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I don’t really believe in Apocalypse. I believe in serious downscaling which is also what you are implying. We are producing vast amounts of unnecessary stuff due to free market capitalism, protection of rights, little control and standardisation. I seriously don’t see the world going more towards socialism which is required to control peoples consumption in any rate. In fact the world seems to go the opposite way with huge corporations competing to sell junk at a faster rate than ever.
But the downscaling will naturally occur as we get limited access to energy. People have to plan their travels more, use public transportation more, relocate closer to work, many will naturally loose their work and move into new occupations, most probably a lot into agriculture as food is the most important commodity. Back to basics in many ways. The question is how much of our current technology we can bring with us into the lower energy world. Who will make it? And at what cost? There is certainly going to be less “stuff” around.
“Upgrading” to lower energy usage is naturally an important step to take, but its still too much an individual’s choice when it should be enforced by politics. People are still allowed to buy gas guzzling cars even though people could be driving cars using a fraction of the energy. Why, we even found out that smoking isn’t good for you, so we have almost banned smoking with very strict laws (here in Norway it’s not even allowed to advertise for cigarettes, and not alcohol either). Well, what keeps us from also stopping sales of SUV’s? Because the world is owned by corporations still forming the rules of what’s “socially acceptable behaviour”. And a money system built on top of the foundation of capitalism will always preach “consume consume consume” until it all collapses.
Some serious revolution will have to happen in order for humans to get their act together in this regard. I can’t really see enough movement for anything like that to happen any time soon. So many will be going into this kicking and screaming, pointing fingers on who to blame, never realising that it all comes down to our choices and a bit of lateral thinking. It seems human behaviour for most is not really fit to think ahead much longer than a few days, which is again why we cant see the risks of pumping all the CO2 in the atmosphere too. An intelligent species would probably allow current statistics around consumption, species extinction, energy use, depletion and peak oil to at least make them stop and think: “Hey maybe this isn’t such a smart idea?”. Atm, I feel we are more like lemmings running off the cliff, or as Gotye say it in his song: “We walk the plank with our eyes wide open.”
So, no there wont be an all round Apocalypse, the human species will quite likely survive anything as we are masters of adaption. But it won’t be the civilisation we see around us today that is the results of our short energy boom blip on the timeline of history. I agree with you that it’s possible for us to transition into this future, and it’s very possible to cut your energy use to 1/10 with some thinking and making smart choices. Some of these will be buying and travelling less, which essentially takes away much of the foundation of current capitalism and globalism. Perhaps going back to a world with a more intrinsic value of goods and labour for trade? Who knows?
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Should it be enforced? I think you have hit on the fundamental crisis of humanity. We value freedom rightly so, but that freedom can come with a terrible cost as we see with climate change and resource depletion.
I am of the mind that it should not be enforced. We should let our industrial way of life go to the wayside and flutter out of existence on it’s own accord. As this happens, people who have a mind to take care of the earth will do so, creating a sustainable paradigm. While those that long for the industrial life and care not for the natural systems, will either evolve or perish.
Evolution is always at work.
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I agree with you that Evolution is always at work even in the form of adapting to new rules of society. But its important that people voice their opinions once they get the “aha notion” that our society and civilization is built upon a premise of cheap fossil fuel that wont last for much longer. It is possible to influence decision makers so that society “evolves” to new forms better adapted to a lower energy future. Most likely there are a lot that can be done about teaching people that “getting stuff” isnt necessary the recipe to happiness, and that minimalism and “I have enough” might make you feel better about yourself in the long run.
If you know that we aren’t really making the right decisions but still choose to “take the ride full out” – I guess you got a secret death wish. 🙂 – I guess people are different, but I am the kind of guy that goes “whoa look out” when I see a tree about to fall over someone, rather than laugh at the comic expression on his face as he is squashed by it.
But a part of me knows that we wont change anything in time also, so in a way whenever I talk about these things to friends it probably sounds more like a classic doomsday prediction than trying to influence them to take action now and choose a different life. Heck I haven’t really figured out what I should do with mine. 🙂
Most likely we will be too late to stop serious climate change at least since we are so occupied saving economic growth, and will be over the next decade. But as the liquid energy sources get scarcer and the cost to clean up after climate havoc (including the cost of rising food prices and necessary steps to save whatever we can there) – we are in for a “double whammy” as it comes crashing down. Generally we have created such a complex society that relies on it all being kept to a certain degree of operation to work. Any break in the chain will give way for entropy to do its work – just like you can see in many ghost industry towns today. If we are to have any chance of any calm transition we need to swap out as many of our high complexity systems with low energy easy to maintain systems as soon as possible.
Time will tell… 🙂
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My article was published at PeakOil.com with the following worthwhile comments thus far:
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Show me your iron law in a physics book – you can’t.
And the comment about Rome falling due to energy scarcity makes little sense. The real question is why Rome lasted so long. Not why it ended.
And different kinds of energy have different prices and hence there is no single energy return on energy expended for any given project.
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Roderick Beck said:
“And different kinds of energy have different prices and hence there is no single energy return on energy expended for any given project.”
Yes that is a given. That is why we have the concept of EROEI to quantify such things for different sources of energy.
Roderick Beck said:
“Show me your iron law in a physics book – you can’t.”
Of course EROEI is an indisputable law of physics:
“In physics, energy economics and ecological energetics, energy returned on energy invested (EROEI or ERoEI); or energy return on investment (EROI), is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource.[1][2] When the EROEI of a resource is less than or equal to one, that energy source becomes an “energy sink”, and can no longer be used as a primary source of energy.”
Read more about it here:
What is the Minimum EROI that a Sustainable Society Must Have?
Roderick Beck said:
And the comment about Rome falling due to energy scarcity makes little sense. The real question is why Rome lasted so long. Not why it ended.
The idea of Rome falling from an energy crisis is not new…
“Growth and decline, overshoot and collapse, are not novel to capitalist economies. A few archaeologists postulate that empires rise and fall based on energy return on energy invested (EROEI). For example, the Roman Empire grew by capturing land and slaves to feed Rome until it became a metropolis. Its primary energy came from humans, animals, and land (nature) – much of it wasted on glorification and infighting. As long supply lines became harder to defend, EROEI declined, and the empire faded. The Chinese Empire similarly grew and receded periodically over 5000 years.” – source
Have you read the book ‘The Upside of Down’?
“In the dominant narrative of The Upside of Down, Homer-Dixon describes himself sitting among the ruins of ancient Rome, studying the Colosseum and contemplating the staggering amount of energy required to operate an empire. To sustain growth, he realizes, the Roman Empire had to expand farther and search out more sources of energy, which led to an ever decreasing energy return on investment (EROI). The fall of the Roman Empire, then, was the result of a scarcity of the high quality energy sources. It is no surprise that Homer-Dixon uses ancient Rome as an analogy for the United States, the world’s contemporary empire. It is even less surprising that this comparison leads him to conclude that America’s economic growth impulse, fuelled by high quality energy (oil), is responsible for many of the stresses in the world today.
Within this narrative framework, Homer-Dixon is able to identify five dominant tectonic stresses – “population imbalances, energy shortages, environmental damage, global warming and widening gaps between rich and poor” – and provide copious evidence to support his claims.” – source
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Global real GDP growth will be 3% or higher this year. So where is your collapse, Big Guy?
It is not a question of close-mindedness. Peak oil does not imply the end of the world or the collapse of industrial civilization.
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Roderick,
The Law of Diminishing Returns tells me you’re wasting my time. Read Darbikrash’s comment below – ’nuff said.
I’m not going to publish your last two comments because they don’t add anything to the conversation. You’re welcome to post here if you have anything worthwhile to say, but my patience is running thin.
Yes, EROEI is not a law in physics, but it is a concept used in physics, whose laws do apply. Check the reference that DK gave you – Tom Murphy’s ‘Do the Math’.
And this: Thermodynamics for Economists
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You can lead a horse to water…
If people can’t see the smoke and realize there is fire, there is not much sense in wasting precious oxygen trying to convince them of the flames.
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There is plenty of hard physics to contradict a continued expansion of growth due to energy constraints. The website at “Do the Math” has plenty of calcs supporting these contentions, it’s pretty much settled law as far as I’m concerned.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
The more realistic and relevant threat is not energy, due to the lengthy timelines to realize catastrophe from this modality, consider this quote from Zizek and subsequent critique by Thomas Riggins:
Zizek:
…………… the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.
Riggins:
(…) the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations of the same fundamental contradiction underpinning the entire capitalist system; namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.
And that about says it all.
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At the end of the day summing up comes back to simplicity: The sun is the mother of all primary energy, generously pouring more energy to our planet during one hour than we globally consume in the year. Harnessing, storing and handling this energy we need only three elements: C, H and O. They are for ever sustainable if C is recycled, CCR, Carbon Capture and Recycling. CO2+3H2->CH3OH+H2O. Methanol is an eminent fuel for current transportation sector as well as coming EVs propelled by DMFC. The chemical industry can also from methanol make all the hydrocarbons we hitherto got from fossils. A hydrogen economy we cannot handle, with carbon atoms as hydrogen carrier we can. It is George Olah’s Methanol Economy.
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For a little more info on what Jan-Gerhard is talking about, I found this blog from a chemistry graduate sankirnam informative:
June 12, 2012
On sustainable energy and the Methanol Economy
In a previous post, I said that I would go into more detail on the “Methanol Economy”. This is a concept developed by Nobel Laureate Prof. George Olah, and is recently gaining traction throughout the world. The core idea is very simple. Since we are running out of fossil fuel reserves (estimates on the rate of depletion and the amount left will vary from person to person depending on their agenda), it behooves us to find alternate sources of energy. Modern civilization has been built on the foundation of cheap, plentiful energy, and in order to ensure the continued growth and progress of our species, this must continue. Fossil fuels are a gift left to us by nature; they took billions of years to form and literally represent the most raw form of chemical energy (fossil fuels in this case refers to deposits of coal, crude petroleum, or natural gas). To put it another way, the situation with fossil fuels is like taking free energy out of the ground. The components of these fossil fuels are hydrocarbons; they are also valuable as feedstocks for chemical synthesis. In fact, Mendeleev’s oft-repeated statement that “to use petroleum as a fuel is like firing a furnace with banknotes” still rings true today. Since we have become used to using hydrocarbons as a source of energy, we need to look within that class for an alternate, sustainable energy source. C1 and C2 (hydrocarbons with 1 or 2 carbons, respectively) compounds are the ideal candidates, since they can be made with minimum effort through current technologies. However, ethanol (the prototype C2 compound) met with dismal failure after government experiments with promoting “bio-based” ethanol. Diverting food crops for other purposes is never a good idea. Thus, out of the C1 compounds, methanol is the most promising, if not the best.
Methanol is a liquid at ambient temperature and pressure, and has a convenient boiling point (65 deg C). Existing infrastructure for the transportation of alkane hydrocarbons can be used for methanol with little modifications. In fact, for a long time, California used a blend of methanol and gasoline for cars (this was discontinued in the 80′s for some reason); this was called “M85″. Methanol has a very good energy density, although not nearly as high as octane-based gasoline. For those interested in hydrogen fuels, methanol also has a much higher density of hydrogen than liquid hydrogen! This is simply due to the extremely low density of liquid hydrogen, and the fact that 1 mole of methanol contains 4 moles of hydrogen.
Critics of the methanol economy often cite the toxicity of methanol as a potential issue. However, this is offset by other factors, such as it’s ready biodegradation in the environment, and the fact that methanol fires can be extinguished with plain water. Also, methanol is miscible with water in all proportions, making it a lot easier to handle. In fact, methanol is used as the fuel of choice in the Indianapolis 500 for these safety reasons. It burns with an invisible flame, thus posing less problems to drivers from visible obstruction due to the smoke and fire.
Of course, there are challenges to get this system off the ground. The most ideal, renewable feedstock for the synthesis of methanol (a C1 compound) is carbon dioxide (another C1 compound). CO2 levels have been rising lately (from 350 ppm in the 1950′s to 400+ ppm now), and this has major implications for global warming and climate change. Using CO2 as a carbon feedstock would go a long way to mitigating this situation. Of course, the selective reduction of CO2 to methanol is very difficult (usually mixtures of C1 compounds – such as formic acid, formaldehyde, methanol, and methane result), just as the selective oxidation of methane to methanol is very difficult. In fact, on a side note, one of the few proven experimental conditions for the selective oxidation of methane to methanol is in superacid media! The methanol, once formed, gets immediately protonated in the medium to form the methyloxonium ion, preventing further oxidation. Of course, this remains a subject of academic curiosity, since handling large amounts of highly corrosive acids on scale is not trivial. There are other groups continuing this line of research, including that of Roy Periana at Scripps Florida, but success has largely been very limited.
Even though we always hear about continuously rising CO2 levels, we have to keep in mind that CO2 is still a trace gas in our atmosphere! 400 ppm is only 0.04%, after all. For those who don’t know, Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1% (credit to wikipedia). The cheap, large-scale separation of carbon dioxide, a trace gas in the atmosphere, is still a major challenge. Currently, CO2 is separated from air through cryogenic means, although this is still rather expensive if one wants to consider CO2 as a starting material for chemical synthesis. Some people in our group have made promising steps in this direction, coming up with cheaper adsorbents for the selective separation of carbon dioxide from air – see this paper.
This is just a small overview of the methanol economy. I’m not an expert in this area, but I have some knowledge of this field since I have read a lot about it and work with people who are doing research in this area. Those who are interested and wish to read more should first check out this paper, and if they have further interest, this book.
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Thanks to xraymike79 for introducing sankirnam!
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People talk about downsizing our way of life and getting rid of our consumer driven economy but fail to suggest what then do the hundreds of millions in North America alone, do for a living?
If people aren’t producing and buying goods what exactly are they suppose to be doing? What kind of living? No one ever talks about this.
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It’s called Permaculture and it will be the defining lifestyle of the future.
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