The Tyee has posted Andrew Nikiforuk's two-part essay about the very real energy crisis that is upon us and how we need to radically transform our societies to reduce our energy demands.
Nikiforuk starts off by saying how the recent surge in fuel prices, though given a big push by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is actually part of a long-term trend and that things are only going to get worse. Remember "Peak Oil"? The argument that we have passed the point where the most readily accessible fossil fuels are used up and it will be increasingly harder to find further sources. The more difficult it is to find this energy the more expensive it will be. We were spared the increase of fuel costs temporarily due to the fracking boom and the OPEC price war that was waged against it. This price war inflicted a heavy toll on the fracking industry but I recall reading more than a few sources who said that fracking was nevery viable in the long-term.
This is very important because fossil fuels are still the major source of energy for our industrial societies.
Despite effusive rhetoric about an “energy transition,” fossil fuels still account for 79 per cent of all energy spending in the global economy.
Whenever the price of those fuels rises, so too does the cost of food, housing, clothing and transportation, renewables and electric cars.
Art Berman has repeatedly underscored the basics: “Energy is the economy. Money is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.”
For decades now economists have mostly preached a different gospel. Their models pretend that money, labour or technology make the world go around. But this profession largely has been ignorant of the central role that energy plays in the rise and fall of civilizations. Whatever the economists might say, physical reality still rules. Growth doesn’t happen unless the per capita energy spending of fossil fuels increases. Period.
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Meanwhile rising oil prices affect the cost of dinner, directly and indirectly. Whenever the price of diesel goes wild so too does the cost of our food, much of which travels far to our pantries. As the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil has calculated it takes the energy equivalents of five cups of diesel fuel (from fertilizers to herbicides to transportation) to put one kilogram of imported tomatoes on the table.
In fact we live in a wasteful civilization that thinks it is entirely acceptable to burn 10 calories of mostly fossil fuels to make one calorie of food, and all by employing fewer than one per cent of the population. Prior to the colonization of farming by fossil fuels, agriculture was local, small, low energy (employing human or animal muscle), inefficient and nutritious. Now it is global, big, high energy, efficient and tasteless.
The inflationary problem doesn’t stop with food. Most people, for example, still don’t understand that one barrel of oil does the equivalent work of 4.5 years of human labour.
As a consequence current oil consumption equals the employment of 500 billion fossil fuel “energy slaves” in our economy. This vast disruptive army has enabled the level of global consumption responsible for the relentless poisoning of oceans, the degradation of forests, the depletion of fisheries, the erosion of soils, the disruption of nutrient cycles and the destabilization of the climate.
So the truth is this: Civilization largely has used fossil fuels to destroy robust natural ecosystems and to replace them with artificial and fragile ones.
I mean, we have to cut back anyway due to the environmental damage caused by fracking, and the apocalyptic consequences of global warming. But regardless of all of these realities, as a collective, humanity wants to continue on auto-pilot, wants to sleep-walk into the future, wants to continue to live in Dreamland.
One of the ways we're doing this is by deluding ourselves that we can continue to make and consume all of the crap that we're doing and grow the economy and build more unsustainable shit for all of humanity simply by switching to renewables like wind and solar:
Meanwhile the green technocrats offer an equally distorted narrative about the state of things. They get climate change, but pretend a transition to renewables can be achieved without a massive investment of fossil fuels (try making a solar panel or windmill without oil) and the brutal mining of rare earth minerals. They even pretend that inflation, which makes every renewable more expensive, is not a barrier.
They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.
The techno-greens also pretend that civilization can substitute fossil fuels, which are densely packed with energy, with renewables, which are less energy dense — and do so without subsequent reductions in demand or changes in behaviour.
Power density can’t be taken for granted. It measures how much a particular form of energy can flow from a given unit area. Art Berman recently explained what a shift from high density to low density energy sources means. In basic English, “it takes two coal workers, 169 solar workers and 1,100 wind workers to equal the work of one natural gas worker.”
Low density energy not only requires more materials but occupies a larger physical space on the land. It also delivers smaller energy returns. If a forest spends more energy growing fewer leaves to conduct photosynthesis, it must either shrink or collapse.
An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder.
The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.
So it's nonsense. Global warming is real. Fossil fuels are running out in any case. Renewables are not up to the task. (Nuclear energy is still problematic.) And we are a wasteful civilization consuming more than we need and destroying the earth's ability to sustain us on numerous levels. We have to reduce our consumption levels.
There is, of course, a third narrative which no one wants to discuss. Lovelock, who is famous for postulating the Gaia hypothesis for how Earth’s systems are regulated in synch, urged in 2005 that we embrace “a sustainable retreat.”
An economic retreat means shrinking fossil fuel spending by at least one third, which means the end of economic growth. (One recent study suggested high income states probably need to cut their resource use by 70 per cent.)
So what does shrinkage look like? It means returning to standards of living prevalent in the 1960s and 1950s. It means deglobalization. It means slow living instead of fast consumption. It means walking instead of flying. It means more people growing food on smaller plots. It means relocalizing life. It means making changes most of us are not yet willing to talk about, let alone make.
This is an enormous task and, sadly, it is my observation that the Left (the political demographic that most accepts all these realities) has so far not progressed beyond identifying the problem; petitioning our overlords to change; and grumbling about how our overlords continue to only pay lip-service to changing.
