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.
6 comments:
IMO Nikiforuk is largely wrong. He's right about one thing: Continuing compounding growth forever is a recipe for a dead planet. That's true either with or without a transition to renewables. So sure, we have massive ecological crises in our future if we don't make a fundamental shift in how our economy works, away from compounding growth.
But he's fundamentally wrong about the transition and the likelihood of ongoing high fossil fuel prices. He's wrong about that because he's wrong about the energy density thing, and because he hasn't thought through the nature of, well, compounding growth, something the pandemic should have hammered home in most of our heads.
So, energy density first. The problem with that is he hasn't defined the term, and as a result he (and the people he's referring to that he got this from, who mostly seem to be dealing in rather abstract thinking) are looking at measures that don't matter. Fundamentally, "energy density" is intended to be an idea about "can you drive an economy with this energy source?" and specifically, "How much of the economy has to be used just to generate the energy, before you even get to doing things with it?" So OK, fine, if you understand what you're talking about and follow through consistently and use decent data, that could be a reasonable way to assess energy sources. But he and his sources ain't doing that. If we're talking about how much of the economy you need to devote to generating the energy, well, this is an ECONOMY we're talking about. How do you measure that in a (capitalist) economy? How much money it costs. So Nikiforuk instead throws around stuff about how much land area solar or wind take up, which is irrelevant and misleading, and throws out unsourced figures about how many jobs are involved, which I find extremely dubious, but never gets to the basic fact that solar costs less than coal and is just getting cheaper. It costs less--there's your energy density right there, renewables actually have better energy density than fossil fuels, you can tell because they're cheaper. At that, the real cost advantage is greater than it seems, because fossil fuels have way bigger subsidies.
OK, so renewables are viable in terms of energy density, and every credible study I've seen makes it clear that you can in fact build enough of 'em (given the current economy size). So the remaining question is about how we've been busily building renewables, and starting to make electric cars and stuff, and the amount of fossil fuel use is still increasing, and won't things just keep on like that and there will never really be a transition?
Um, no.
This is not a subtle concept. So the thing is that the economy grows exponentially; let's say at an average 3% per year, compounding. So say you've got this base of fossil fuel energy infrastructure, and to keep the economy going you have to add another 3% (compounding) worth of infrastructure every year. Now, renewable energy comes onto the scene, and some amount of renewable energy installation happens every year. As long as that amount is smaller than 3% of the economy's energy use, per year, then there's also new fossil fuel energy infrastructure still being built. (You're also retiring old stuff and replacing it--but if the total renewable installation is under that 3% it won't even be touching that)
Up until now, that has been the situation--renewables keep being installed, renewables are increasing their total percentage in the energy mix, but the total installation per year is under that 3% compounding. But the thing is, both renewable energy and electric cars have also been growing exponentially. And it's a much bigger exponent, it seems to be in the 30%+ range of growth per year, some years as high as 50%. They started very small, but as we noted with the pandemic, the trend seems small until suddenly bloody everyone has it. So at a certain point, the amount of renewable energy infrastructure installed is bigger than that 3%, and after that it's like 5% the next year, then 7%, then 10%, and at that point you're totally cannibalizing the old fossil fuel infrastructure. In some cases we won't even wait until the old stuff is retired--it has been calculated that there are now places where it is cheaper to install new solar than to keep running the existing fossil fuel infrastructure--yes, you read that right, just keeping the old stuff running is more expensive than putting in new solar.
The electric cars is in some ways simpler. Government after government has been putting in mandates saying by X year, Y% of cars sold have to be electric. These mandates are getting increasingly aggressive, and car manufacturers aren't even really complaining, which suggests they've already all made the decision to go electric. Meanwhile, Tesla sales are frigging doubling every year; a couple more doublings and they'll actually be one of the big manufacturers instead of just playing one on the web. Everyone else is going electric because they know if they don't, Musk will cheerfully eat them alive. Now, consumer vehicles aren't the only thing that uses petroleum. But they're a real big chunk. Again, right now we're probably in the last year or two where the percentage of electric car sales is not big enough to exceed economic growth and so oil use is still going up. But that exponent for electric cars is big, and old cars are retired faster than old power plants.
So the transition is happening, and we are very near the point where it starts actually reducing the use of fossil fuels, at which point their prices will start going down and will stay there. Yes, shale oil will run out relatively soon, but it won't matter. Nikiforuk's notion that we're back to peak oil is not true--the prices right now are purely due to war shocks, and maybe a bit to weird financing stuff around the fracking, both of which are temporary. Also probably to oil companies thinking they better do some profiteering because they may not have too many more chances. Peak (affordable) oil will still arrive at some point, sure, but the transition will happen before we get there. In a while, the war will end. The sanctions on Russia may stay, but it's still all the same oil and it will still all be sold to someone; they'll get their refineries and deliveries sorted out to deal with the shift in what grades of crude are being shipped where. And then the bottom will fall out as the electric cars and the renewable energy compounding size get big enough that the whole fossil fuel industry starts to shrink at a pace that cannot be ignored.
Caveat: Natural gas power plants may see a temporary boost around the time electric car sales hit really high gear, because we'll need a hell of a lot more electricity.
The final question for me is, where is Nikiforuk getting this? There is a strand of thought that has reacted to the arrogant failures of techno-utopianism by deciding that technology is terrible stuff and can never be a solution to anything. And so in a way kind of analogous to the reactionary right, they decide what we need is to go back to a past that never existed; in this case, a utopian peasant existence with organic farming and plenty of tasty vegetables and a small ecological footprint. This strand of thought seems lately to be pushing de-technologizing as the solution to climate change: Shrink the economy, go rural, stop using fossil fuels by stopping using energy at all. In order for this to become attractive, or necessary, you have to first rubbish renewable energy, and this line of thinking is already disposed to figure renewable energy won't work because it's a technology and for them, technologies never work; doing anything with technology means you're a techno-utopian. So they rubbish renewable energy, but the fact is renewable energy does work.
We still need to transform the economy before compound growth finishes wrecking the planet. But I don't think the "everyone becomes a peasant" option is either desirable or do-able, and I'm not even sure it would be environmentally friendly at our current population. Imagine all the billions of people in the cities go back to the land . . . and what happens to the land when they do.
Purple Library Guy,
I was taking Nikiforuk at his word as an authority. Subjects like energy density are not my fort-tay. But I'm a pessimist and I remember the Mound of Sound/Disaffected Lib also writing posts and linking to studies saying that the costs of building renewable energy infrastructure (to the point where you say the momentum continues until fossil fuels usage is dwarfed) will itself consume enormous amounts of energy and resources.
Whatever the final word in that debate is, I think we both agree that our present consumption patterns are unsustainable. I didn't see Nikiforuk advocating a return to agricultural peasant lifestyles, but I think more hands in labour-intensive local agriculture is better than the buying and selling of disposable garbage that we're now doing.
Thanks again for commenting. Yours has always been a welcome voice throughout the years.
Covid was a dress rehearsal for apocalyptic scenarios in the future, and humanity (especially our leadership) failed miserably.
Anonymous,
Hence my constant lament that humanity is too stupid to survive. Another symptom: brain-dead "musings" about whether nuclear war will be necessary to bring "justice" to the Ukraine.
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