Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 February 2022

Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies

Pinnacle Rock Falls
about 2 hours drive east of Kincardine

This is the second of several posts that I'd have preferred to publish all at once, were it not for the extreme length of such a piece. I would suggest that you go back and read the first one, if you have not already done so. To briefly and inadequately summarize, I'll just say that overpopulation and overconsumption (and their consequences) are, in my opinion, the most serious problems we face. Overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly if certain obstacles could be gotten out of the way. By reducing our level of consumption, we could reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

The blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit and its endless blaring marketing machine which convinces us that we must consume, consume, consume. It is important to note that the majority of that consumption is done by a minority of people, the top ten to twenty percent of the richest people in the world. Sadly, I am part of that group and I suspect that many of my readers are as well, even though we wouldn't call ourselves rich.

In a previous post where I looked at the problems with industrialization, I had also promised to have a more detailed look at our financial systems and our governments.

In this new series I am finally doing that, and last time we looked at our financial system and saw that money is a tool that facilitates the accumulation of wealth by the rich, and a mechanism by which they control the rest of us. It does this by making it possible to keep score in the complex game that is our economy. Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow, or it will collapse. At the same time, the inevitable consequence of continued growth on a finite planet is also collapse.

I then asked if we could do without keeping score—without money—and concluded that we could indeed, and to the benefit of most everyone. Especially since the collapse we are facing will hurt people of all socio-economic classes.

Today I'll take a similar look at our governments (and most of the rest of our organizations), identify the problems with them and ask if we could do without them.

These days our families, communities, businesses and so on all the way up to our countries and the UN are organized as hierarchies, and most have been since they were first created. Like money, this sort of organization is a tool designed for the benefit of certain people (those at the top), to be used by them to secure their power, wealth and privileges, and to keep the rest of us in the position where we "belong"—lower down in the hierarchy. And in the process, to stop us from ever realizing that there is any viable alternative.

Inherent Failings of Hierarchies

We are told that a global civilization like ours is so big and complex that it simply couldn't function without a hierarchical organization. I would say just the opposite—that our civilization is so big and complex only because it has to support hierarchies. If we didn't have to maintain hierarchies for the benefit of those at the top of them, we could adequately take care of ourselves with much simpler organizations, in smaller groups, at less expense—in other words, with less consumption.

I usually refer to this phenomenon as the "diseconomies" of scale—the opposite of economies of scale. Economies of scale do exist, of course, but beyond a certain point the organizational costs swamp out the advantages of size. And that point is surprisingly small.

In a small group, say 200 people or less, no formal organization at all is required. With little effort, everybody gets to know each other, and to know what's going on. Decisions can be made by direct democracy, where the whole group gets together, talks things over and a consensus is reached. I'll be talking about that at length later in this series, but the thing to realize here is that even in small organizations, if there is a hierarchy, it introduces problems.

In a hierarchy, even one that is ideally organized and where everyone involved is a willing participant and eager to do their part, information must flow upward from where the actual work is going on to the appropriate decision making level, and decisions must flow down to where they will be actually implemented. This involves a lot of non-productive effort done by people who must be supported by those who are productive.

Of course, real hierarchies are far from ideal. Things are done in unnecessarily complex ways just to support the hierarchy and in many cases to make it look more impressive. The people at the top are inevitably isolated from the rest of the organization and rarely have the information they need to make good decisions. I was a supervisor and then a manager, after years of being a worker, and I was shocked by how quickly I lost touch with things at the workface. And I was trying very hard not to be influenced by the bullshit flowing down from higher in the hierarchy. Often, low level managers wallow in that stuff enthusiastically.

Many managers are not particularly capable of making good decisions. And even those that are frequently focus on their own benefit, with little concern for anything else.

But beyond all this, there are other problems that result from how hierarchies have to be established and maintained. In real hierarchies most of the people involved are not there willingly and are not particularly eager to do their part. They must be forced to do so, which is another cost of running a hierarchy. To be absolutely clear, inequality is an inherent feature of hierarchies, and can only be maintained by exploiting and oppressing those in its lower classes and blaming that situation on those same oppressed people. Let's have a closer look at how this works.

There are three basic mechanisms for establishing and maintaining a hierarchy—physical coercion, bureaucracy and charisma. Any one of these mechanisms can be used to build some sort of hierarchy, any two can make a pretty solid hierarchy, but when all three function together you get the situation we have today—that of being firmly stuck with our existing hierarchies.

One assumes that physical coercion started with a leader simply forcing his will on his followers. The next step would be surrounding himself with some bullies to who he could delegate that job. One suspects that this was not too effective for the rulers as their control wouldn't extend much beyond their own physical reach. Even with henchmen, this improved only a little, since those guys had their own interests and spent much of their time seeing to them. And there were always a few who, when the opportunity arose, were willing to step into their leader's place. Killing him, if necessary, to get rid of him.

Actually, this sort of organization wasn't too onerous for those being ruled. You had a number of options—quiet disobedience or just leaving, possibly to set up your own more agreeable organization in another location.

But since then, the techniques of physical coercion have been considerably refined. Today, states claim a monopoly on violence, which they implement through police forces and the military. If this is managed with a light enough touch, the populace may well be willing to go along quietly. Or, in totalitarian states, there is little alternative and people suffer under a much heavier touch.

Bureaucracy amounts to a state monopoly on information. Everyone in a hierarchy needs information and controlling it is an effective way of keeping people in line. Much of how money and debt are used as a mechanism of control falls under this category.

Charisma is a way of influencing people without using force or bureaucracy. It is easy enough to imagine how charismatic leaders may have taken over small groups. But even in our supposed democratic countries, what is an election but a popularity contest, whereby the most charismatic leaders are chosen. Often with little thought as to their effectiveness at governing. And while using charisma to influence people may seem like a pretty benign way to run a hierarchy, it is still a form of coercion. And just as onerous as any other form, especially if you are not blinded by your leaders' charm, which can happen if things don't go well under their rule.

Beyond the three basics, religion has long been a way of getting people to willingly accept their placed at the bottom of hierarchies. And, in our modern world of mass media, propaganda has become an extremely effective way of controlling the population. In both cases, as Voltaire noted, if you can get people to believe in absurdities they will be willing to commit atrocities.

Because of all this, the bottom of a hierarchy (and that's where most people live), is not a very pleasant place. And in our modern hierarchies, for many people, there is simply nowhere else to go. You can't even head for the hills, as they are already occupied by people also living in hierarchies.

Another problem with hierarchies is that they love to grow. Even taking into account what I've said about diseconomies of scale, the people at the top still benefit by having more people below them, more people to tax. Living, as we do, on a finite planet this leads to trouble. First, hierarchical countries, with their drive to expand, do not make good neighbours, and this leads to conflict. War is expensive and destructive and for the people actually doing the fighting, pretty horrific. Second, the inevitable has finally happened and we as a species have grown to the point where we are running out of room, depleting non-renewable resources and destroying the bio-sphere on which we rely for the necessities of life.

Co-optation of Our Hierarchies by Capitalism

If all this wasn't bad enough (and it certainly is), most hierarchies on the planet today have been co-opted by capitalists and are devoted to the goals of capitalism—the accumulation of ever more wealth into the hands of the capitalists. Which is bringing us up against the limits of life on this finite planet even quicker and harder than otherwise would have happened.

Capitalism goes hand in hand with industrialization and really came into its own during the last couple of centuries when heat engines, driven by burning fossil fuels, made possible production at much higher levels than when most everything had to be done using human or animal muscle power. This lead to a time of unprecedented material abundance in what we now call "the developed nations."

There was a time, not too long ago, when this looked like the greatest thing that had ever happened, but burning all that coal, oil and natural gas have had some negative consequences. Beyond climate change and resource depletion, the primary consequences result from the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. We used the "lowest hanging fruit" first. By the early 1970s the energy cost of accessing what was left had increased to where it started to cause problems for our economies. Capitalism soon found itself in the early stages of collapse. Since then things have grown continually worse—the middle class has continually decreased in size and economic inequality between the bottom and top of our hierarchies has increased to an unprecedented degree.

Still, capitalism has managed to maintain its hold on our governments, and I think that deserves a closer look. You might assume that your government is at the top of the hierarchy you live in. That has been true at many times in the past—with aristocracies, for instance. But today the situation is more complex.

Representative democracies are a prime example. They are a particularly clever tool for giving the people the illusion that their government is for the people, by the people and of the people, when in reality it serves mainly the plutarchs—wealthy capitalists who sit quietly above the supposedly representative government, exercising a great deal of influence on its policies, solely for their own benefit.

Pretty much everyone is supposed to have a vote in representative democracies, so how can this be? Easily—election campaigns are huge popularity contests. The way the mass media work today this makes them expensive endeavours and while politicians do accept donations from the working class, most of their financial support comes from the wealthy. Those donations come with strings attached, and politicians are expected to rule in such a way as to benefit the wealthy people who support them.

Politicians do make election promises to attract support from the majority of voters, who are not rich. Once they get elected, the trick is to spend as little money and effort as possible on keeping those promises, keeping the voters somewhat happy while changing not the systems that support the plutarchs. Who, of course, provided the majority of financial support for their campaigns, and hopefully will continue to do so in the future.

Another mechanism used by capitalists to increase their control of our societies has been to organize their businesses as corporations, and then gain those corporations rights similar to, and in some cases exceeding, those of people. This makes it harder for governments to regulate their activities.

Over the last few decades "neoliberalism" has become the standard ideology of the great majority of governments the world over, be they democratic or totalitarian. The Wikipedia article on Neoliberalism says it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. Through these mechanisms our governments have been even more thoroughly co-opted by capitalism, giving businesses much more freedom to do as they will.

Neoliberalism has been sold to the people by convincing us that whatever is good for business is good for us as well.

There was a time, in the 1800s and early 1900s, when there was a very clear distinction between the working class and the upper classes. Working people knew quite well where their interests lay. But in the mid-twentieth century when the economy was growing very fast, some of the vast wealth that was being accumulated was allowed to trickle down to the working class. The result was that many people in the working classes came to see their interests as lying with the capitalists. They came to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", expecting to strike it rich "any day now". And so they began to vote with the rich, even though that is clearly not in their own best interest. And thus neo-liberalism was able to triumph. This continues even until today in some countries.

But despite the neo-liberal propaganda that we all benefit, economic inequality has continued to grow, and more and more people are falling out the middle class, and out of the bottom of the economy altogether, first to become jobless and eventually to become homeless and often suicidal.

Social Injustice and Structural Violence

The inequality that is inherent to hierarchies results in social injustice and structural violence.

Structural violence refers to "the avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people that constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible. These limitations, which can be political, economic, religious, cultural, or legal in nature, usually originate in institutions that exercise power over particular subjects. It is therefore an illustration of a power system wherein social structures or institutions cause harm to people in a way that results in 'maldevelopment and other deprivations'."

There always seem to be groups of people in any hierarchial society who aren't really welcome and who are forcefully kept at or near the bottom level. These include the poor (working, jobless and homeless), women, BIPOC* and LGBTQ* people, those with physical and mental challenges, the aged, and probably others who I am forgetting. And of course, that's just what the rest of us are supposed to do—forget about these people and leave them to suffer.

You can recognize structural violence when you see people at a higher level in a hierarchy complaining about just not being able to understand what those below them are complaining about, while the people at the lower level have a keen understanding of those above them. This occurs because those who are above have power over those below, and can simply tell them what to do without having to know anything much about them. Those at the lower level have no choice but to serve those above and, in order to do so successfully, have to understand the people above them very well.

One clear example of this is when you see men saying that there is just no understanding women or keeping them happy. At the same time it is clear that our wives, mothers and daughters do a great job of keeping us happy. They put a lot of effort into understanding us in order to be able to do so, largely because they have no choice in the matter, while we, sitting at the top of our little family patriarchies, can easily get away with just not making the effort. Of course, this situation has improved quite a bit over the last century or so, but there is still a long way to go.

Summing Up

This has been a whirlwind tour of the issues with hierarchies, but I think I've hit on the high points:

  • There is a great deal of waste involved in running a hierarchy and this makes our overconsumption problem even worse, while only benefiting those at the top.
  • Our modern hierarchies are enabling capitalism, which is the main source of our overconsumption problems.
  • Economic inequality and social injustice are inherent to hierarchies and prevent the realization of billions of peoples' potential, which is much needed if we are to successful face the challenges ahead of us.

Many people in the "collapse sphere" feel that we should not worry about "minor" social injustices, and instead focus on preparing for and adapting to the economic, resource, and environmental problems that are already far along the way to causing the collapse of our society. I disagree. Both social injustice and collapse result from the same issues inherent in our hierarchies and in capitalism. Any adaptation that doesn't address them both is sure to fail. Anyone who tells you different is playing "divide and conquer" games, and whether they want to admit it or not, what they really want is to keep the existing system going as long as possible—business as usual and damn the consequences.

So, it's clear to me that hierarchies, especially when combined with capitalism, are not a good thing. Would it be possible to do without them? I think so, and in my next post I'll go into the details of how that might work.

For those who aren't up on the jargon I've been using:
*BIPOC = Black, Indigeous and People of Colour
*LGBTQ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Queer

During the last few months I've been reading a number of very interesting books, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of those books, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Collapse, you say? / Time for Change

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Tuesday, 29 September 2020

Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs

Waves breaking along the Lake Huron shore—and this on a relatively quiet day.

The title of this series of posts comes from the typical reaction you get when suggesting that our civiiization might be collapsing, "Collapse you say, surely not!" In my last post I said that I am convinced it is already happening or at least will happen at some point soon. Then I went on to explain what I mean by collapse—the process by which a civilization declines in its ability to provide the necessities of life to its members, the end result being that people are forced to fend for themselves or perish.

It seems to me that this is in fact happening today—that for all but a tiny minority at the "top", things are getting continually worse. The how and why of this process is the subject of this post and the ones that follow it.

The means of production and distribution that provide us with the necessities of life in modern industrial civilization require certain inputs and produce certain outputs. Today I want to the look at the problems posed in acquiring those inputs and disposing of those outputs.

I would guess that it's clear that by inputs I mean the energy and materials required to make the things we need. But what I mean by outputs may be less clear. I am not referring to the goods that are produced from the inputs, but the waste products produced in the process and the garbage that is left over when we are done using those goods.

But why should these inputs and outputs constitute problems?

Conventional thinking has our civilization in a box, separate from our planet and its ecosphere. The inputs (energy and materials) our civilization uses come from sources that are seen as essentially infinite and the outputs (waste heat and waste materials) are discharged into sinks that are also seen as being essentially infinite in size. Given all that, no reason is seen for progress—economic growth in this context—not continuing for the foreseeable future. This way of looking at things typifies some of the blind spots of modern thinking on economics and business.

Figure 1

Figure 1 illustrates what I am talking about. As long as there were relatively few people on our planet, and they weren't consuming excessively, it's easy to see how we might have looked at things this way. But now that we are well on our way to filling up the planet—or more likely well beyond that point—this is no longer valid. And sure, many people are aware that this is a very unrealistic picture, but the people who are running things, even those who verbally acknowledge the realities, continue to act as if there are no limits built into the system. In a future post we'll look at why this is so, but for now it suffices to say that it truly is the case.

Figure 2

Figure 2 is a different diagram, which provides a more realistic depiction of things as they exist today.

First of all, our civilization exists on a finite planet, entirely within that planet's ecosphere, with no real separation from it (note the dashed border). Our inputs are taken from that finite source and our wastes are discharged back into that same finite space, used as a sink for waste heat and all our material wastes. This has some truly nasty consequences.

Inputs and outputs come in two forms: energy and materials. Energy flows from more concentrated to less concentrated forms, and regardless of where it comes from, is eventually radiated away from the planet as waste heat. Because of this, at any one level, we only get to use energy once. Materials stay around and can be reused, but generally change from more organized forms to less organized, (and less useful) forms as time passes.

For the planet itself, on the relatively short timescales we are considering, the only significant inputs and outputs are in the form of energy—sunlight in and waste heat out. This means that the planet isn't a closed system and incoming energy can be used to arrange matter into more complex forms, converting the energy used to a less concentrated form in the process. That's the good news—the rest of the news is bad.

Outputs

Let's look at outputs first, since that will make it easier to understand some of the problems with inputs. As I said, the outputs I am talking about are the wastes from processes within our society, and the garbage left over when we are done with the products of those processes. We simply throw these things away, but the trouble is that there is no such place as "away". The sinks into which we dispose of wastes are part of the very same environment where we get our inputs from, so this is much like shitting in our own nest. And in a great many cases it is not necessary at all. Many of these end products could, with relatively little effort, be fed back into the processes, and not treated as "wastes" at all.

That we haven't "circularized" our use of materials is a really bad sign. Why we continue to do this is inherent to the internal workings of our civilization and I'll go into the details of that in a future post. For now it is sufficient to understand that as long as that civilization exists in its present form, it's outputs will continue to be a problem.

There are a great many different types of pollution, but for our purposes today I'll concentrate on two particular type of waste—carbon dioxide and methane.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced in the burning of fossil fuels and biomass, and in the processes we use to make things like steel and concrete, essential building materials of our civilization. CO2 is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect and consequently climate change, and is also the cause of ocean acidification.

Methane (natural gas, CH4) has been touted as a replacement for coal and oil since it gives off less (but not zero) CO2 when burned. But it is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Between the wellhead and where it is used a great deal of methane leaks into the atmosphere—probably enough to overshadow any reduction in CO2 released by burning natural gas instead of other fossil fuels. Methane is also produced during the decay of organic matter and by the digestive systems of many animals. Warming due to climate change is releasing methane currently trapped in permafrost and in methane clathrate hydrates at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, further intensifying the warming process.

Ocean acidification the lesser known evil twin of climate change, occurs when CO2 is dissolved in water. An estimated 30–40% of the carbon dioxide from human activity released into the atmosphere dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes. Some of it reacts with the water to form carbonic acid. Some of the resulting carbonic acid molecules dissociate into a bicarbonate ion and a hydrogen ion, thus increasing ocean acidity (H+ ion concentration).

Increasing acidity is thought to have a range of potentially harmful consequences for marine organisms such as depressing metabolic rates and immune responses in some organisms and causing coral bleaching. A net decrease in the amount of carbonate ions available may make it more difficult for marine calcifying organisms, such as coral and some plankton, to form biogenic calcium carbonate, and such structures become vulnerable to dissolution. Ongoing acidification of the oceans may threaten food chains linked with the oceans.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for the last two paragraphs.)

These are food chains that we sit at the top of, with many people, especially in poorer nations, relying heavily on seafood for protein.

Climate change has been in the news a lot lately, with a wide range of people expressing concern about its negative effects on our future. If, despite this, you are still a doubter or denier, you're in the wrong place on the internet, and need not bother leaving any comments. In my experience, if you scratch a climate change denier, you will find beneath the surface a rich person who is worried about losing their privilege.

So, climate change is real and it is driven by increases in greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4 among others) in the atmosphere which cause the planet to retain more of the sun's heat. It has also been called "global warming", since it causes the overall average temperature of the planet to going up. The high latitudes in particular are already experiencing temperature increases. Eventually this is going to cause enough melting of glaciers to make for a significant increase in sea level.

In the meantime, climate change is also causing more frequent and heavier storms, which combined with even small increases in sea level, are causing a lot of damage along the oceans' shores. Such storms are also causing more frequent and serious flooding of many rivers.

Climate change is also intensifying droughts in many other areas, and in some of those areas this is leading to wild fires.

How does all this tie into collapse?

Storm surges, high winds, river flooding and wild fires are doing a great deal of damage to human settlements, at a time when our economy is struggling and the added cost of rebuilding can scarcely be afforded. Especially since we tend to rebuild in the same areas, leaving rebuilt settlements just as exposed as they were before.

The effects of climate change on agriculture are even more serious. In the ten or so millennia since we started practicing agriculture the climate on this planet has been particularly friendly to that endeavour. Farmers have been able to count on reliable temperatures and rainfall. This is now starting to change and as the rate of that change picks up over the coming decades, it is going to be very challenging to adapt to. This at a time when we are struggling to keep up to the demands of a growing and ever more affluent population for food and when there is little left in the way of wilderness to expand our farms into.

Even if climate change was the only problem we faced, it is serious enough to place the continued survival of our species into question. We are facing, to quote Jem Bendell, "inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction."

The threat of climate change is serious enough that most people who worry about such things at all are concentrating on it alone. Unfortunately, they are largely ignoring looming problems with the inputs required by our civilization.

Inputs

The problem with inputs is "resource depletion". We live on a finite planet and we can really access only a small part of it—the lower part of the atmosphere, the oceans and a few thousand feet at the top of the crust. Within that volume, there are finite supplies of the resources that we rely on.

Several problems result from the way we access and use those resources.

We generally access the lowest hanging fruit first. This means that the most convenient, easily accessible and highest quality resources get used up first. That makes sense as far as it goes, but it means as time goes by we are forced to use less easily accessible and lower quality resources. This takes more energy and more complex equipment, and is more costly.

Many of the resources we rely on are non-renewable—there is a finite amount of them on this planet, and "they" aren't making any more. Further, we use them in very wasteful ways. It is important to be aware here that, even at best, there is always some irreducible waste in our use of any resource, but currently we tend to make things, use them once and throw them "away". This means that depletion of many resources is happening thousands of times more quickly than it really needs to, and as I said in the section on outputs, that waste is accumulating in the environment.

Some of the resources we use are renewable, but the processes by which they are renewed work at a limited rate. We are using many of these so called renewable resources at greater than their replacement rate, and so they too are becoming depleted.

Conventional economists will tell you that when a resource starts to get rare, its price goes up, encouraging the development of substitutes. This is true to some limited extent, but many of the most critical resources simply have no viable substitutes. Not unless we are willing to make significant and unwelcome changes to the way we live.

At this point, we should look at some specific resources and the unique problems each of them presents.

Energy, Fossil fuels

Despite what conventional economists would tell you, energy (not money) is actually the keystone resource for our economy. Nothing happens inside our civilization without energy as an input and degraded energy (waste heat) as an output. Money functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value, all of which is very useful, but energy is what makes the economy function and grow. About 80% of that energy currently comes from fossil fuels (primarily coal, oil and natural gas). The remaining 20% comes from sources that we can only access using equipment that is both made using fossil fuels and powered by them.

So, our civilization is utterly dependent on having a cheap and abundant supply of fossil fuels. "Peak Oil" enthusiasts have been saying for decades now that we'll soon run out of oil and things will come to a grinding halt. In fact, though, there are still large quantities of hydrocarbons to be found in the earth's crust, so you might ask, "What's the problem?"

Well, there are two problems with continuing to burn fossil fuels.

One is the consequences for the climate of burning hydrocarbons and releasing ever larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is a very serious problem, for which we are having trouble finding and implementing any sort of solution.

The other problem, I'll be calling it "the surplus energy problem", is in many ways more complex and more serious.

Because we use various forms of technology to access energy, many people think that technology makes energy, and with improved technology we can always make more energy. Or, in this case, access the difficult to access hydrocarbons that currently remain in the ground. But in fact, the opposite is true—technology uses energy and won't work without it.

The energy that remains after we've powered the processes used to acquire that energy is referred to as "surplus energy." For instance, the technology used to drill oil wells and pump crude oil out of the ground uses energy. Back in the day, it used to take the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels of oil out of the ground, leaving a surplus energy equivalent to 99 barrels of oil. This is usually expressed as "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" (EROEI), in this case 100/1, giving an EROEI of 100. Another way of looking at this is to talk about the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE). In this case that would be 1/100, or 1%. Note that both these numbers are just bare numbers without units, and most significantly without a dollar sign in front of them. The "money cost" of energy is another thing entirely and since it is influenced by speculation on future supply and by fluctuations in demand (as we have seen in 2020 during the pandemic) it is not a reliable indicator of the actual cost of energy in energy terms, or the future availability of energy.

Conventional oil discoveries have not been keeping up with depletion for some time and our use of conventional oil actually peaked in the last few years. So we have been forced to switch to lower quality and more difficult to access sources. Conventional oil today has an EROEI ranging from 10 to 30. Tight oil and gas (from fracking), heavy oil and the "dilbit" (diluted bitumen) made from tar sands all have EROEIs less than 5, or ECoEs of 20% or greater.

"So what?" you might say. As long as the net amount of energy available is sufficient to power our civilization, what's the problem? Well, it's not just the amount of energy available from any particular source that really counts, but the EROEI. Or more precisely the weighted average of the EROEIs of all the various energy sources an economy uses. That number needs to be around 15 or more to keep that economy growing.

When the average EROEI goes below 15, growth slows and eventually stops and it becomes difficult to raise enough capital to even maintain existing infrastructure. Why our civilization needs to grow is a topic for another day, but it certainly does. This is what most people are missing about energy. Yes, a country can use debt to finance access to low EROEI energy resources in order to keep the economy going. But only for a while, until its economy contracts to the point where things begin to fall apart. This is certainly the case in the US. Fracking has made sufficient energy available, at what seems like a reasonable dollar price, but the real economy is mysteriously contracting, and debt is continually growing. Both economists and politicians, while putting on a brave face, are hard pressed to do anything about it, because they don't understand the surplus energy problem.

As we saw in the section on "Outputs", there are pressing reasons not to continue burning fossil fuels. But even if that were not the case, it would not be possible to continue running a growth based industrial civilization on the low EROEI fossil energy sources now available to us. For this reason alone, collapse seems like a sure thing to me, and I would say it has been underway since oil production in the continental U.S. peaked in the early 1970s.

But, you may say, what about renewable energy sources? Like non-conventional fossil fuels there are large amounts of energy available from sources like hydro, biomass, wind, solar and so forth. A great many people today believe that renewables can replace fossil fuels and solve both our surplus energy and climate change problems. In fact it has become very unpopular to challenge that idea, but I am afraid I must do just that.

This post ened up at over 6000 words long, enough to try the patience of even my most loyal readers. So I have split it in two at this point, leaving the second half for my next post, which will pick up from here and cover renewable energy sources, ecosystem services and fossil water.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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