Why EIA, IEA and Randers' 2052 Energy Forecasts are Wrong
By Gail Tverberg
What is the correct way to model the future course of energy and the economy? There are clearly huge amounts of oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground. With different approaches, researchers can obtain vastly different indications. I will show that the real issue is most researchers are modeling the wrong limit.
Most researchers assume that the limit that they should be concerned with is the amount of oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground. This is the wrong limit. While in theory we will eventually hit this limit, because of the way fossil fuels are integrated into the rest of the economy, we hit financial limits much earlier. These financial limits include lack of investment capital, inability of governments to collect enough taxes to fund their programs, and widespread debt defaults.
One of the things I show in this post is that Economic Growth is a positive feedback loop that is enabled by cheap energy sources. (Economists have postulated that Economic Growth is permanent, and has no connection to energy sources.) Economic Growth turns to economic contraction as the cost of energy extraction (broadly defined) rises. It is the change in this feedback loop that leads to the financial problems mentioned above. These effects tend to lead to collapse over a period of years (perhaps 10 or 20, we really don’t know), rather than a slow decline which is easily mitigated.
If, indeed, most analysts are concerned about the wrong limit, this has huge implications for energy policy: Read More
In Kurt Dahl's science-based thriller The Eden Proposition, the reader is faced with an enigma at first interesting, then improbable, and finally, terrifyingly real. Duval Dixon, a septuagenarian of immense wealth who is committed to solving what he thinks is the primary scourge dragging the world down an apocalyptic path-unsustainable consumption due to overpopulation-believes he has the solution. Atrocious as it may seem, he becomes an impassioned proponent of MPR - Massive Population Reduction. Over a decade, Dixon spends billions creating the ultimate biological agent that could reduce the world's population down to a handful. Then, he must answer a final question - should he do it? Unsure, Dixon calls together eleven great minds and then cuts them off from all contact with the outside world. What happens next will change the course of history. Called riveting, thought provoking, and unique, The Eden Proposition will stay with you, in a troubling way, for months to come.
Good Afternoon Friends:
It is my great pleasure to make you aware of this very special one time offer from AMAZON
As of yesterday, The Eden Proposition is in an Amazon promotion for three days - the download of ebook version is offered for FREE for two more days.
I think several of you have read the book - it's a good fast paced read that is set in the near future and examines the concept of MPR in a thoughtful manner. It is a a thinking person's Inferno (written and published well before Dan Brown's version!) . The purpose of the free offer is simply to make it available to more people, and to get more people to read it and hopefully begin thinking about our future - and then perhaps it can help ignite some important conversations among those who have not yet studied the issue as we have. As all of you know, awareness is the most important first step.
For the first 24 hours almost 1500 copies have been downloaded, a big number for this kind of promotion. But if it can get another push right now it will make it on to Amazon's lists of top sellers, and then it can do an order of magnitude more downloads - into the tens of thousands. This would be a good thing.
So, if you could, please download a copy, and more importantly, pass this information on to other people, lists, etc., that you are a part of - go viral!
This book has been a perfect catalyst for initiating the essential conversation with dozens of my friends - I know it can be an effective first intro into the topic - just read the reviews on Amazon to see what I mean.
Thanks so much for your most recent article. As always, excellent work.
Here are a few of my humble observations and thoughts, adding further despondency to the whole situation.
Aggregating all NNRs from a planetary perspective, thereby creating a single theoretical planetary NNR unit to your lessons, should help clearly convey our grave circumstances, thusly causing even deeper concern amoung readers.
Following from the above, one could point out that it is our traditional economic theory that drove us into this abyss. And it still fails to acknowledge or understand the realities we now face in terms of certain economic collapse, particularly as NNRs diminishing returns will tie directly to the dilution and collapse of all currencies. Few will understand, it seems, until it is much to late, that this is the true and primary cause of ALL Fiscal Cliffs - not our politicians, for sure.
The diminishing returns from the planetary NNR unit are also dramatically accelerated by population growth, climate change and other related concerns. Throw into this mix, the demise of the supporting social, economic and political frameworks, then the dark outcomes of diminishing returns gets much deeper.
So, the only question to ponder now is: Where do we stand? And based on the projected extraction and consumption growth of the global NNR units, all other things being equal;
HOW MUCH LONGER DO WE HAVE; EVEN ON A BEST CASE BASIS?
Foreword by William R. Catton Jr. (Author of “Overshoot”)
“Chris Clugston has pulled together such an array of facts about the path ravenous humanity has trod and the consequences we now confront that no person who fails to read this book should be eligible for election to high office.” – William R. Catton Jr.
Scarcity is a book about humanity’s “predicament”, which can be summarized as follows: the natural resource utilization behavior that enables our current “success”—our industrialized “American” way of life—and which is essential to perpetuating our success, is simultaneously undermining our very existence as a species.
Our industrial lifestyle paradigm is enabled by enormous quantities of nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs)—i.e., the fossil fuels, metals, and nonmetallic minerals that serve as the raw material inputs to our industrialized economies, as the building blocks that comprise our industrialized infrastructure and support systems, and as the primary energy sources that power our industrialized societies.
Ironically, since the inception of our industrial revolution over 200 years ago, we have been eliminating—persistently and increasingly—the finite and non-replenishing NNRs upon which our industrialized way of life and our very existence depend. As a result, most of the earth’s NNRs have become permanently scarce—i.e., there are not enough globally available, economically viable NNR supplies to completely address humanity’s global NNR requirements going forward.
Based upon analyses derived from US Geological Survey (USGS) and US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data pertaining to domestic (US) and global NNR demand, supply, pricing, and utilization; Scarcity provides compelling, if not irrefutable, evidence to support this assertion; in addition to enumerating the causes, implications, and consequences associated with our predicament.
Scarcity is essential reading for those who correctly perceive that the world, especially the industrialized “Western” world, is in a state of decline—decline that cannot possibly be reversed by our incessant barrage of misguided economic and political “fixes”. Scarcity will enable you to make sense of a world that is experiencing the most profound paradigm shift in human history.
NNR scarcity is the most daunting challenge ever to confront humanity. If we Homo sapiens are truly an exceptional species, now is the time to prove it.
"Scarcity is an impressive analysis of our present predicament. Far too many influential people are attempting to address that predicament with flagrantly misconceived notions about it, and most of what nations and their leaders are trying to do about today's troubles remains counterproductive. This you know, and you show it crisply and emphatically.” – William R. Catton Jr.
Note: For those who are unfamiliar with William Catton, he published the seminal work on humanity’s “predicament”, entitled "Overshoot", in 1982. If you have not yet read "Overshoot", I strongly encourage you to do so; it is arguably the most important book written in the 20th century.
Many of us who have been paying attention to the state of the world over the last half century have now begun to realize with growing horror that the progressive deterioration we have been tracking shows no signs of resolution In fact, to some of us it looks as though there is no way to resolve this deepening crisis. The end of the track is in sight. The planetary factory is in flames, and all the exit doors are barred.
Proposed technical solutions are utterly inadequate to the scale of the problem. Many ideas like geoengineering will simply make matters worse. There is no political constituency for degrowth – none at all. There is precious little political support for even putting a light foot on the brake. This road to Hell has been paved with the very best of intentions – giving our children a better life stands near the top of the list – but here we are nonetheless. The climate is signalling that our future may be a little warmer than we were expecting, once our seven-billion-passenger train passes those gates.
Now that the denouement is in sight, I’m setting aside the anger and outrage, the blame and shame, to focus my attention instead on why this outcome seems to have been utterly inevitable and unstoppable.
Why has this happened? I don’t buy the traditional “broken morality” or “flawed genetics” arguments. After all, our genetics seemed to be perfectly appropriate for a million years, and the elements of morality that some of us see as sub-optimal (the greed and shortsightedness) have been with us to varying degrees since before the days of Australopithecus. I don’t think it’s just a mistake on our part or a bug in the program – it appears to be a part of the program of life itself. It looks to me as though much deeper forces have been at work throughout human history, and have shaped this outcome.
The main difficulty I have with all the technical, political, economic and social reform proposals I've seen is that they run counter to some very deep-seated aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Mainly, they assume that human intelligence and analytical ability control our behavior, and from what I've seen, that’s simply not true. In fact it’s untrue to such an extent that I don’t even think it’s a “human” issue per se.
I have come to think that most of our collective choices and actions are shaped by physical forces so deep that they can’t even be called “genetic”. I haven’t written anything definitive about this yet, but the conclusion I have come to in the last six months is that a physical principle called the "Maximum Entropy Production Principle”, which is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, actually underlies the structure of life itself. Its operation has shaped the energy-seeking, replicative behavior of everything from bacteria to humans. All our intelligence does is makes its operation more effective.
This principle is behind the appearance of life in the first place, has guided the development of genetic replication and natural selection, and has embedded itself in our behavior at the very deepest level. Like all life, our mandate is simple: survive and reproduce so as to form a metastable dissipative structure. All of human behavior and history has been oriented towards executing this mandate as effectively as possible. This “survive and reproduce” program springs from a universal law of physics, much like gravity. As a result it even precedes genetics as a driver of human behavior. And lest there be any lingering doubt about the connection to our current predicament, the survival imperative is what causes all living organisms to exhibit energy-seeking behavior. Humans just do this better than any other organism in the history of the planet because of our intelligence.
In this context, the evolutionary fitness role of human intelligence is to act as a limit-removal mechanism, to circumvent any obstacles in the way of making make our growth in terms of energy use and reproduction more effective. It’s why we are blind to the need for limits both as individuals (in general) and collectively as cultures. We acknowledge limits only when they are so close as to present an immediate existential threat, as they were and are in hunter-gatherer societies. As a result we tend to make hard changes only in response to a crisis, not in advance of it. Basically, the goal of life is to live rather than die, and to do this it must grow rather than shrink. This imperative governs everything we think and do.
As a result, I don’t think humanity in general will put any kind of sustainability practices in place until long after they are actually needed (i.e. after population and consumption rates have begun to crash). I don’t think it is possible for a group as large as 7 billion people to agree that such proactive measures are necessary. We are as blind to the need for limits as a fish is to water and for similar reasons. After the crisis has incontrovertibly begun we’ll do all kinds of things, but by then we will be hampered by the climate crisis and by severe shortages of both resources and the technology needed to use them.
I have given up speculating on possible outcomes, because they are so inherently unpredictable, at least in detail. But what I’m discovering about the way life works at a deep level makes me continually less optimistic. I now think near-term human extinction (say within the next hundred years) has a significantly non-zero probability.
Our cybernetic civilization is approaching a "Kardashev Type 0/1 boundary" and I don’t think it's possible for us to make the jump to Type 1. Like most other people, Kardashev misunderstood the underlying drivers of human behavior, assuming them to be a combination of ingenuity and free will. We indeed have ingenuity, but only in the direction of growth (and damn the entropic consequences). We can’t manage preemptive de-growth or even the application of the Precautionary Principle, because as a collective organism humanity doesn't actually have free will (despite what it feels like to us individual humans). Instead we exhibit an emergent behavior that is entirely oriented towards growth.
I see no purpose in wasting further physical, financial or emotional energy on trying to avoid the inevitable. Given our situation and what I think is its root cause, I generally tell people who see the unfolding crisis and want to make changes in their lives simply to follow their hearts and their personal values. I'm not exactly advising them to “Eat, drink and be merry”, though. You might think of it more as, “Eat, drink and be mindful.” Paul Chefurka
August,2013
Ottawa,Canada
Comments:
We struggle to explain why the conventional economic doctrine battles the realities of existential economic science; the first hypothesizes an infinite positive sum-game for human activity, while the latter goes begging to find an wider audience for its voice - that asserts a finite negative sum-game, dictated by the physical constraints and the laws of exponential mathematics. These two beliefs are deeply conflicting with one another because the first chooses to ignore the governing rules of the universe, whereas the other proposes integration with science, physics and mathematics, in order to set a better path for human activity.
So in our search for explanations we look to other writers, scholars, thinkers and activists for insights into why our collective actions and theories act in defiance of realities by endorsing infinite growth doctrines that are not only impossible to continue any longer, but they also push our species along an accelerated path destined for premature extinction.
As Paul Chefurka sets out in “Paradise Lost” maybe there is nothing to be done or anything else that can be said. Our internal wiring is so connected to the natural forces of the universe that it causes us to pursue and use more energy to serve our primary purposes of survival and procreation. Call it an inborn energy-seeking behavior. We are then just an integral natural part of the second law of thermodynamics serving to further and accelerate the causes of entropy in the whole universe. That being the case, conventional economic doctrines sadly wins the battle, as it is clearly aligned with entropic forces that invisibly shapes the destiny of humanity, the universe and eternity. Hence in our last analysis, it as certain as it gets that we cannot defeat eternity, but that in itself should not dissuade us from seeking to optimize our entropic relationship with the universe in pursuit of a longer path. Too many things could happen along the way!
For sure the first thing we have to do is get the metrics right so that we can properly diagnose, manage and remedy, if possible, our population predicament.
To do so, we must first understand that this is not about population numbers at all. Rather it is all about "population equivalents," but so long as the focus remains on person numbers, then we are doomed to head down the wrong path with little hope of finding a cure. In the end, you cannot remove a brain tumor by doing a heart transplant - it is just not going to happen.
There is no responsible economic organization or entity on this planet that does not have an accounting system with metrics to determine, monitor and control its status. So there is no good reason as to why we should not work towards and apply similar concepts for the whole planet as an initial way to get a handle on our planet's overall situation. As a metric - "population equivalents" is a fairly straightforward mathematical concept to apply as the prime unit of measure within this overall planetary accounting system.
Population equivalents should firstly allow us to start comparing apples to apples and not to pears, turnips and potatoes. For example, when the entropic/climate/resource footprint for each developed nation person is estimated to be 34 times larger than a underdeveloped nation's person - this comparison shows a huge gap in the annual-planetary cost between these two person types to the planet. The implications of this difference needs to be better understood and managed based on objectives. As a medical professional you might start with an old idea and goal like - LONGEVITY!
Now consider the case when 100 million people migrate annually from these underdeveloped nations to developed countries. That migration alone has the equivalent impact of adding 3.4 billion people to the underdeveloped nations population totals. Or you could also say it is equal to the birth of 3.4 billion people in these underdeveloped countries.
Put in another way - the 1 billion people footprint of developed nations calculates to an equivalent 34 billion people footprint in underdeveloped countries. Thus, the planet's population size using approximate actual numbers could be considered closer to 40 billion people when population equivalent footprint measures are used.(1 billion developed plus, 6 billion underdeveloped people)
BIG number? But now you be the doctor and tell the patient where you think the problem is - Heart or Brain?
So in order to get things right, we first and foremost need to start measuring properly. Moreover, it is a "conceptual technology" that has been well-developed by the medical profession, among others, over many years. So why not apply it to the most important patient we know?
In short, we need to go beyond checking the patient's brain condition based on its pulse rate and advance ourselves to using proper clinical metrics and devices to better diagnose and remedy our sickly patient. In so doing, we may then stand an improved chance of extending its life.
Never in the history of literature has any short story entered the world with such fanfare, mystery and expectation. For a few moments thousands of eyes from all around the globe will be engaged for a brief minute or two making, at the very least, literary history. For days, months and years thereafter, thousands of minds are destined to confront the enigma of “Infinity Express Flight 2100: Entropy Fueled”. For as John Milton so profoundly stated in Paradise Lost – “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” Are you ready to board this Starship? Are you sure?
Boarding passes were presented by the 10,000 or so passengers who happily jumped onto Starship Earth, some 250,000 years ago. For Infinity Express Airlines, Flight 2100, was then finally boarded; destined to take its passengers to the last shores of Eternity. Engines were fueled by cosmic fuel - entropy; the flight crew was a top class professional team, captained by Economics, while Theology, Politics and Science rounded out the rest of the key cabin crew members.
After take-off, the passengers’ only concerns were survival, procreation and creating the distractions needed to keep their brains’ - primary organ - neurological mass and energy mix, actively producing a range of various cognitions. Through their cognitions they could also create many stories that would allow them to organize and entertain themselves over an expected long voyage. So they did all these things. It was a circular process, like everything else around them.
All the essential necessities were provided in the cargo store for this journey, along with enough entropy supply for the Starship’s engines, as well as, the daily use of passengers for their survival needs and distractions purposes. This cargo store was certified and approved prior to departure, and then managed, in flight, by the crew.
About fifty-nine “cosmic minutes” after takeoff, the Scientist was becoming concerned, that the now over seven billion travelers, had been consuming too much, from both the necessities cargo store and entropy fuel tanks. It was a grand party, as evidenced by the thick cabin smoke and clutter. But this ever-growing passenger population created after take-off was testing the logical stress limits of the ship and voyage. Particular attention was given to the half-full entropy fuel tanks.
“No worries” said both the Politicians and Theologians “The Captain says there is more than enough for another 250,000 years given past usage experience, more than enough to refuel at the next rest-stop along the way. “With these assurances the passengers relaxed and continued with their affairs for a moment, not even realizing that they were still going around-in-circles. Moreover, the Scientist for some strange reason was quickly re-assigned to coach, with the other passengers.
Back in the cockpit cabin, its atmosphere was now engulfed by the team’s fear, high-tensions, blinking-lights and stuttering confusion. The abstract Positive-Sum Infinite (PSI) gauges for GDP, Wealth, and Growth were all stabilized and normal, but the concrete Negative-Sum Finite (NSF) gauges for Climate, Resources, Water and Biosphere had just jumped sharply into J-curve configurations. The Politician, and now acting flight engineer, immediately pulled-out and started reading the” Infinity Express - Emergency and Flight Disaster Protocols Manual.
“Quickly, what are we supposed to do?” asked the sweat-drenched Captain.
“Captain,” replied the Politician, “it says we are now LinearCurve Code Red Nth”
“Then, what does it say next. Tell me! Quickly! Please?”cried a clearly terrified Captain.
“Strange Captain? All it says is that, the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. Dr Albert A Bartlett. That’s it?”
“Holy jumping Star bucks guys – the fuel tank just dropped to empty. Get into batten-down mode; we gotta to tell the passengers,” bellowed the now highly-strung Captain at the top of his lungs.
Suddenly, back in coach, in just a few brief moments the Captain’s voice broke the newly found Starship’s passengers’ cabin short-lived calm. “Attention all passengers, please push back your trays; buckle your seat belts as our indicators are telling us that we are about to enter an unexpected area of accelerated exponential turbulence”the Captain deeply lamented in an official resonant tone.
Then just as suddenly, sparse moments after the sturdy voice left their ears - the engines went quiet. Then a brief ghostly hiss, followed by Dead Silence…
Hardly moments later, within the carnage of terrifying wreckage, a few survivors clung to their last gasps of time. A young little girl softly and quietly turns to her father’s darkened somber face. With all her remaining strength she blurts, “Why? Why Daddy? Why?
A single lonely teardrop etches on his face, then falls into the soulless murmur of waves flowing into an existential universe. Looking for the welcoming hand of eternity’s shores? Or humanity’s last thought?
There were no hands, no shores and no thoughts in the remnants and carnage of unanswered why’s. Only whys. And then, another cosmic minute lapsed, bearing the soft humming sounds of another passing Starship...
Special thanks to those who contributed alphabetically to the crafting of this parody; Paul Chefurka, Chris Clugston, Fred Magyar, Terry McNeil, and Frosty Wooldridge. And a very special acknowledgement and thanks to the late Dr Albert A Bartlett, whose famous quote is cited above regarding humanity’s (particularly mainstream economics) inability to understand and apply the exponential function.- a conceptual failing which will ultimately have such profound effects on its condition, sustainability and longevity. In the end, it should prove to be one of its greatest failings of understanding and intellectual honesty.
