A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources

This is another in the series of posts where I've been talking about things a government might do to ease our transition to a low energy economy, if it (the government) wasn't shackled by political realities.

The depletion of fossil fuels, and the economic contraction it's causing, is at the core of our current problems. Coming up with an energy policy which solves those problems is a major challenge, and perhaps it's a political fantasy to think it can be done.

In my last post I talked about non-renewable energy sources and "energy sprawl", which is what happens when we try to keep up with the demand for energy without considering the quality as well as the potential quantity of the energy sources we are trying to tap into.

In this post, I'll be talking about renewable energy and its limitations.

Renewables would seem to solve the major problems with non-renewables – that the supply is finite and the easy to access portion of that supply is becoming depleted, and that, in the case of fossil fuels, that burning them is causing climate change. But renewables come with a whole new set of problems of their own, and learning to live within the constraints posed by renewable energy is going to be one of our major challenges in the coming decades.

First, let me clarify what I mean by "renewable". Energy sources that are based on the sun, not just solar power, but also biomass and biogas, and the power of falling water, the wind and ocean waves, are called renewable. The sun keeps coming up every day and will continue to do so for a few more billion years. Technically, that's not forever, but it's good enough for me. The same can be said for other renewables like tidal power, which comes from the orbit momentum of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun, and geothermal power which, depending on how deep you go, either from the sun shining on the ground or from the heat of decaying radio isotopes deep within the earth.

The tie between the quality of energy and the economy is something that governments, most economists and indeed most people in general, just don't get. It's central to thinking clearly about the energy problem and renewable energy, so I think it is worth repeating this part of what I have to say again (and again). It may even be that I'm getting better at it with practice (I hope).

The economy is actually about people working to produce goods and services that other people need and/or want. “Working” is the key word here. To accomplish work, energy must be consumed, be it food powering muscles, fuel powering engines or electricity running motors. So energy is the essential resource that enables all production. I would say that wealth in our growth based economy can largely can be defined as claims on future productivity. So if wealth is based on productivity, then it is a actually based on energy.

And it’s not just the amount of energy that we can access that's important, but also the difference between what it costs us to acquire the energy and the value of what we can produce with it – the “surplus energy”. When there is an abundant supply of surplus energy economic growth is essentially unstoppable.

In the last century, when fossil fuels were cheap and available in copious quantities, economic growth came to be accepted as the normal state of affairs. Our financial system adapted to the demand for a constantly growing supply of money by creating money out of thin air, as debt. For providing this service, banks insisted on being paid back with interest. This worked fine as long as the economy was growing and the cycle of borrowing and paying back with interest could go on. But when growth slows, we have no elegant way of dealing with debts that can no longer be repaid. Demand for goods and services decreases, companies shut down, unemployment grows and demand for goods and services decreases even further.

A good way of looking at the quality of energy is to compare the cost of energy with what it's worth – what can be accomplished using it. This is clearly expressed in the ratio “Energy Returned on Energy Invested” or EROEI, calculated as Energy Returned divided by Energy Invested. Every energy source that is available to us has a certain characteristic EROEI. It’s pretty obvious that if it takes more energy to make a fuel than you get from burning it (if its EROEI is less than one) then you’d be wasting your time. And actually, because of losses in processing and distribution (which aren't usually included in EROEI numbers), it takes an EROEI somewhere between 3 and 5 to really break even. But what isn’t so obvious is that an energy source must have an EROEI considerably higher than one (or even five) in order to drive the kind of economy to which we’ve become accustomed. It seems that if the average EROEI of the energy sources we’re using falls below about 15, the economy fails to generate enough surplus wealth to drive growth, and as the EROEI falls even further, there isn't even enough surplus wealth to maintain existing infrastructure.

In our current circumstances, it is very important to understand why that last bit is true.

When our average EROEI is well above 15, sufficient wealth is created to pay for the ongoing search for energy, accessing it, converting it into useful forms and moving it to where we need it. There is sufficient energy (wealth) to provide the necessities of life, with lots left over to keep productivity high and build more of the machinery of production, so the economy keeps growing. But as the EROEI drops off, a larger and larger portion of the wealth being created is used up just supplying the energy. When we get into an energy sprawl situation such as we have at present, so much wealth (and energy) is being put into building new energy infrastructure (energy sprawl) to access low quality energy sources that there is barely enough left over to supply the necessities of life. Economic growth has slowed down and the infrastructure of our economy is being allowed to crumble. Many governments are borrowing immense sums of money in an attempts to "jump start" the economy. But this isn't working because, to continue with the automotive analogy, the problem is not that the battery is dead, but that the gas tank is empty.

Indeed it seems very unlikely that a "business as usual", high tech, global, industrial society can be sustained with an average EROEI of less than 15. Efforts to access even more low EROEI energy just make the situation worse by gobbling up more wealth with insufficient return to improve the situation. This is what I've been calling "energy sprawl".

There's one more non-obvious aspect of this situation is that we really need to be aware of. Many of the possible renewable energy sources that we'll be talking about in a moment have an EROEI of less than 15, which means they won't support a growth based high tech industrial society, but at the same time they require a global high-tech infrastructure to support them. Let's be clear on the way this works. Yes, we could use what remains of high EROEI fossil fuels to set up the infrastructure for such renewables, solar panels for instance. And I think that, technically speaking, after the fossil fuels are depleted, the energy from these renewables would be sufficient to maintain them and even to replace them as they wear out. But there would not be sufficient energy left over to support an industrial society if we did so. And if there is no industrial society, the large scale manufacture of solar cells would not be feasible, so that "technically speaking" doesn't really help. By pinning our hopes on such sources, we're heading straight for collapse.

It is time now to talk about specific renewables, their EROEIs, and the problems and limitations that come with them.

Biomass

Biomass is sunlight (solar energy) converted by plants into sugar, starch, cellulose, lignin and so forth. People has been using biomass as an energy source for a very long time, first as food and then as firewood.

I will cover agriculture in another post, but food as a source of energy should not be forgotten. Of course, modern agriculture has an EROEI of 0.1 (yes that's "point one", and it's not a mistake), so energetically speaking it is an abject failure. But even traditional agriculture had an EROEI of about 6 and with judiciously chosen modern refinements we should be able to do even better. Food converted to muscle power, both of people and draught animals, is low tech and very effective in many situations. It is under-utilized today, because we have accepted labour efficiency as the main metric for judging success in business.

Firewood has an EROEI range from 13 to 40, depending on the type of wood and how far the tree is from where it will be burnt. But it can be used at the very lowest levels of technology, by anyone who can pick up deadwood and start a fire. With modern, clean burning, high efficiency wood stoves (which certainly aren't high tech) it can be used quite effectively and at fairly low levels of air pollution. Of course, people do have to be trained to burn wood properly. And firewood is still probably not suitable in areas of high population density due to air pollution and having to ship the wood a long way from its source.

Wood, unfortunately, has a lower energy density than any of the fossil fuels, and it isn't nearly as convenient to handle as any of the liquid fuels that can be refined from crude oil.

We are, in fact, quite desperate to find a renewable replacement for those liquid fuels. So far, the results are not encouraging. Ethanol from corn has an EROEI of around 1.3. Corn biodiesel has an EROEI of 3. Ethanol from sugar cane has an EROEI of around 5. Ethanol from cellulose has an EROEI of around 4. These low numbers are a reflection of the reality that sunlight is not a very concentrated sources of energy, that plants are not very efficient at converting it into sugars, starches or oils, and that growing these plants and turning them into alcohol or biodiesel takes energy as well. It also takes a great deal of land to produce to produce liquid fuels in the quantities we've grown used to.

It is possible to make biodiesel from algae grown in clear tubes to maximize their exposure to sunlight, but thus far the EROEI is less than 1, so that clearly is not going to help.

There are a couple of other ways of turning biomass into fuels, but in both cases the fuels are gases.

Biomass that is decaying anaerobically (without oxygen) gives off methane gas, in this case called "biogas". The EROEI of this process is about 7.9, so it is probably worth doing in cases where the gas would just be released to the atmosphere anyway, on farms with lots of manure, or in cities where human waste could be collected and used for this purpose. Unfortunately, current sewage systems add too much water to the waste stream.

Biomass can also be broken down into a flammable gas consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide(wood gas), simply by heating it in an oxygen starved environment. This gas can be used directly or processed into more conventional liquid fuels. I haven't been able to find any EROEI figures for this process, but indications are that it would be better than cellulosic alcohol, somewhere between 5 and 10 for direct use of the gas, lower if further processing is done.

There are a few other things to remember about using biomass as an energy source.

Forests grow at a certain rate and if we harvest wood at a faster rate, soon the forest is gone. If we were to switch over much of our current energy use over to wood the countryside would soon be completely stripped of trees. We need to engage in a urgent program of reforestation if we're going to start burning a lot more wood.

While vast plantations of the same type of tree planted in nice rows at the same time are easy to harvest, after a generation or two yields decrease, and if the trees are all cut at once, the land is left unprotected from erosion until more trees are planted and grow. A mixed forest that supports a more complete ecology is more sustainable, especially if harvesting is done by "single cutting" trees as they mature. And the nutrients taken out of the soil by the trees need to be replaced, at the very least by returning the ashes to the forest.

Indeed, when any plant grows, it take nutrients from the soil and those nutrients must be replaced be replaced if the practice is to be sustainable. Modern agricultural practices don't do this, so alcohol from corn grown using non-renewable fertilizers can hardly be called a renewable fuel.

A certain amount of organic matter needs to go back into the soil to maintain healthy soil, so all the biomass that is produced on a piece of land can't be burnt, or the organic matter content of the soil drops off, reducing its ability to hold water and nutrients and resist erosion.

So, desperate as we are for a renewable, high energy density liquid fuel than can replace gasoline and diesel, especially for use in transportation, it seems that biomass isn't going to supply us with one at a suitably high EROEI. We'd actually be better to concentrate on not needing nearly so much of the kind of transportation that is powered by those fuels. And return the land that is currently being used to grow corn and sugar cane back to growing food.

Firewood does seem to be such a practical, high EROEI source of energy that every bit of land not suitable or needed for growing food should be reforested.

Wood gas and biogas are in that intermediate range of EROEI between 5and 15, and the technology needed to make and use them is not extremely high. So where the feedstock is readily available, perhaps as a byproduct of process we already want and need to be doing, then it is probably worth developing these sources of energy.

On top of all this, it is important to carefully balance biomass production with food production, lest the demand for energy drive up the price of food and leave more and more poor people hungry.

This is probably the right place to mention the idea of burning garbage to generate electricity. This can certainly be done, with equipment that isn't particularly high tech. But it is not scalable because we can't readily expand the supply of garbage and indeed we would like to eliminate garbage as much as possible, because of the waste it entails, both of materials and energy.

Direct solar

What about using energy from the sun directly? There are several problems with that.

Solar energy is quite diffuse so large areas of collectors are needed to capture a significant amount of energy. Solar energy is intermittent, on the regular day and night cycle, and randomly as clouds obscure the sun, so if you want continuous power some form of energy storage is required, which reduces the EROEI by approximately half. At high latitudes the sun is at a lower angle in the winter, providing less energy exactly when more energy is needed.

Photovoltaics (solar panels which generate electricity) have an EROEI of only about 6.8, perhaps half that if you include storage, and require a high level of technology to produce. So despite their great popularity, they aren't at present the answer to our energy problems. Perhaps more research should be done to develop solar cells that can be manufactured using a lower level of technology, so that they can fit into the kind of tech level that can be maintained at an average EROEI somewhere between 5 and 15. But it doesn't seem that this has occurred to anyone in a position to do something about it.

In the face of seemingly boundless enthusiasm for solar electric power, I'd like to do a little "back of the envelope" calculation. I happen live a few miles from one of the largest nuclear power stations in the world. To match Bruce Nuclear's output (over 6 gigawatts) would take an array of solar cells over 400 square kilometers in size (a square 20 km on a side), and cost over $3 trillion. And that is only at noon on a clear summer day. To match BNPD's output round the clock would require a much large solar array with storage facilities that are beyond current technology.

By way of comparison Bruce Nuclear Site is around 900 hectares (9 square kilometers) in area and cost less than $15 billion to build. I make this comparison not as a booster of nuclear power, but to give some idea of how large and expensive utility scale solar power installation would be, if we were foolish enough to try to build them.

Solar CSP has an EROEI around 19, half that with storage. This is a moderately low tech system where mirrors focus sunlight on tubes full of fluid which boils and drives turbines which power generators.

Solar water and space heating have EROEIs around 10 and are moderately low tech.

Hydro Power

Water power has an EROEI ranging from 11 to 267, depending on circumstances. The technology required to harness water power (dams, turbines and generators) is not terribly high, late 1800s level for electrical generation, much less if the energy is to be used directly for mechanical purposes as in a water mill. The flow of water typically varies somewhat on a seasonal basis, but is much less intermittent than solar or wind, and with a large head pond this sort of energy can actually be stored. The limiting factor is that there is only so much water flowing downhill and only in specific locations.

There are also some environmental impacts of large hydro developments that need to be considered. Depending on the geography, large areas may be flooded when a dam is built. Fish that spawn upstream can't get around dams, unless special "fish ladders" are built. Silt which would normally be washed downstream by the river will build up behind the dam. This is a long term problem for the power station itself, and it can also have negative effects downstream where that silt would have enriched the fertility of the soil on the river's flood plain. But there are ways to mitigate these effects, if we care about the environmental side effects of our energy system, rather than treating them as externalities that can safely be ignored and dealt with by future generations. And we certainly should care about that.

There aren't a lot of large scale hydro power sites that haven't yet been developed, but there are lots of small scale sites, which haven't yet been developed or, more commonly, were abandoned when grid power became available and they were no longer competitive.

There are a few locations (3 or 4) in the world where there is a sufficient concentration of water power to support a localized high tech civilization of a few million people, about 50 million total. This has been studied in some detail by Jack Alpert, a fellow I met at the Age of Limits conference in 2014. The practical stumbling block is reducing our population down to that level, which makes me doubt it will ever be attempted. But if we are willing to accept a somewhat lower level of technology we can get by with smaller concentrations of people and power, spread over more of the world, and a large total population supported, especially if we add a few other reasonably high EROEI sources of energy into the mix.

Wind Power

Wind power has an EROEI of around 18. It is randomly intermittent and varies according to location. It is low tech if it can be used just when the wind is blowing, but a nightmare to hook up to a power grid and by the time measures are included to cope with the intermittent supply, the EROEI is much lower.

Wave, Tidal and Geothermal Power

Tidal power, wave power and geothermal power all have EROEIs ranging in the range of 5 to 15. This can vary quite a bit depending on the location. So too, can the level of technology required to access the energy source. In a world hungry for energy, any moderately plentiful local resource that can be access at a fairly low level of technology and has an EROEI above 5, should be developed.

Summary

When formulating an energy policy, it is extremely important to keep in mind the debilitating economic effect of investing in lower EROEI energy sources. It is so tempting to spend a lot of money on "energy sprawl" in an attempt to tap into those resources, especially if you're trying to keep "business as usual" alive as long as possible. But it won't work.

We are currently observing this with oil. Conventional (cheap) oil peaked around 2005 and since then we've been using various type of unconventional (expensive) oil to keep up with demand. Initial this drove the price up over $100 per barrel, but this had such a negative effect on the world economy that demand fell off and with it, the price of oil fell to around $50 per barrel, below the cost all unconventional sources of oil and many conventional ones.

If we were to develop any of the low EROEI renewables something similar might happen, but more likely since energy demand has already started to fall, we will never have the where-with-all to do so in any large way. The future of corn alcohol, for instance, is determined largely by how long the American government can keep up the subsidies.

So, what renewable energy sources we should be investing in?

Based on EROEI and the level of technology required, the main ones would be food and firewood, hydro, wind, solar CSP and solar heating. Biogas, wood gas, tidal, wave and geothermal should also be considered depending on local circumstances. The result of switching over to these renewables with be two-fold. First, we will probably end up with an average EROEI below 15, or at best not far above it. Second, the total amount of energy available will be much less than we are now using, perhaps 10% to 20% of our current energy consumption. Taken together, that means the economy will not only have to quit growing, but will actually have to contract significantly.

It seems unlikely to me that large scale electric grids will be sustainable under such conditions. The so-called smart grids that are being developed will prove too complex and not resilient enough due to their high level of optimization and efficiency. Because of the intermittent nature of many of the renewables, and the lack of suitable storage technology, we will have to change our energy use to match energy availability.

All of this means backing off from our current addiction to high tech and adopting more "appropriate technology", at a somewhat lower level, adopting the "LESS" approach to consumption: less energy, stuff and stimulation, and deciding to be happy with having "just enough". I'll talk about how our patterns of energy use need to change in my next post, but I will say now that I don't believe we need fall back to anything like a medieval level and certainly not to the stone age. In fact, I am willing to say that we need fall no further that the level of Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868). This was a society with a steady state, sustainable economy which relied on food and biomass for energy. And which was in many ways more civilized than Europe at the same time. Of course, this is provided we can respond to our current challenges in a reasonably intelligent fashion (though no more intelligent than the Japanese of 400 years ago). I can highly recommend the book "Just Enough – Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan", by Azby Brown.

Note that on my list of the renewables that we should be using, "food and firewood" come first. This is because, while I don't believe we need fall very far, if we keep on the way we are going things could fall considerably further. Food and firewood can carry us through with very simple technology while still yielding a fairly high level of EROEI. With what we now know (that we didn't 1000 years ago) and with modern industrial civilization as a starting point, we should be able to do rather well for ourselves and go on to redevelop the rest of that list of energy sources. Of course, if we are fortunate, or if our governments were to plan ahead and develop suitable energy policies, the switch over to renewables and the descent to lower levels of energy use could take place in a more organized fashion with a lot less pain involved. And under such ideal circumstances, we may indeed manage not to fall nearly as far as Edo Japan's level.

Having food and firewood as an energy safety net will be especially important for those who fall out of the consumer economy. It seems that this economy is bent on keeping itself profitable by eliminating its labour expenses, even though this at the same time eliminates the consumers on which it depends to maintain the demand for its products. But rather than worrying about keeping the consumer economy going, we should be concerned with how to carry on without it, and access to energy is an important place to start.

In order for food and firewood to serve as an energy safety net, we need to undertake a major program of reforestation and get started switching over to sustainable farming methods, the subject of my "post-after-next". Both these items should be a major part of our energy policy.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

• The Great Contraction
• Technology Isn't the Answer, Depending on What Question You're Asking
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1
• A Political Fantasy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI, and Non-Renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7: Agriculture, Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture, What Lies Ahead

A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI and Non-renewable Sources

In my last couple of posts I've been talking about things a government might do to ease our transition to a low energy economy, if it (the government) wasn't shackled by political realities.

As I've said before, this is a fantasy—I don't think it has much chance at all of actually happening as I am suggesting here. More likely we'll continue on as we are and end up making the transition to a lower energy use when we are forced to, the hard way, by falling flat on our faces.

For the purpose this series of posts, though, I'm indulging that fantasy. Energy is at the core of our current problems. Governments have an important role to play in our transition to a sustainable, lower energy society—particularly in the area of energy policy, deciding which energy sources we should use and what we should use them for. These days governments are supporting what might best be called “energy sprawl”, a frantic effort to keep up with the demand for energy by tapping into poorer and poorer sources of it as the high quality sources dry up. This requires ever more energy infrastructure, from oil wells to wind mills, which is why it’s called “sprawl”.

Those who are pursuing this policy are making several errors.

First that we simply must keep up with all the current and ever growing demands for energy. And because we must, we can. Of course, the facts don't support any such thing—reality simply doesn't care what happens to us. And all the people who think we can't go "back", can't change our lifestyle, are just having a failure of imagination. There is also a tendency to think that just because we descend to a lower level of energy use, we must regress to the level of social injustice that existed when last we used that amount of energy. This doesn't really follow at all—there is no reason that the gains we have made socially have to be lost just because we move to using less energy.

John Michael Greer spoke eloquently about the subject of technological regress in a blog post early in 2015, which I would strongly recommend reading.

Second, that since we use technology to access energy, technology will always allow us to access more energy. Technology doesn't actually create energy—it uses it, and more complex technology uses even more energy. Along with this goes the mistaken idea that when one resource runs out, we can simply switch over to another, without making any changes to the way we live. We are currently relying on some resources (primarily fossil fuels) for which there simply aren't any adequate substitutes.

Third, that just because an energy resource exists in large quantities it can solve our energy problems. The cheap, easily accessed fossil fuels are becoming depleted. When choosing which of the remaining energy resources to invest in, we need to consider the quality of the energy source, as well as the quantity of it that we can potentially access. The quality of an energy source is best summed up by its "EROEI", the energy returned on energy invested. I like this metric because it bypasses money and the often false valuation things are given when we put a price on them in terms of money. And let me make it clear that I am talking about things being priced too low, when they should be expensive.

It takes energy to access energy resources and to convert them into a useful form. Obviously, if you are getting less energy back than you are investing (EROEI<1), there is no point in going to the effort.

Less obviously, when the average EROEI of the energy sources a country is using falls to around 15, economic growth falters and “business as usual” (which is based on growth) begins to experience difficulties. As the average EROEI falls further, it becomes difficult to maintain the infrastructure that makes industrial civilization work and that infrastructure starts to crumble. This is just about exactly where we've been for the last few years.

I've recently been using the term "surplus energy" as a synonym for EROEI, but I see that this is causing some confusion. It might seem that if we can access large quantities of a low EROEI energy source, it would generate enough "energy surplus" to maintain economic growth. Actually, it doesn't work that way. Having large quantities of a low quality energy resource creates more problems than it solves. I'll look at that in more detail in the section on oil.

Another problem is that many of the energy sources we are pinning our hopes on today require the infrastructure of a high tech industrial civilization to make them work. And yet very few of them generate enough surplus energy to maintain that infrastructure. Down that road lies collapse.

Unfortunately, that is precisely the road we are currently headed down. There are several things governments should be doing about this.

First, change their focus from low EROEI resources that require a high tech infrastructure to those that can work without such high tech support.

Second, emphasize conservation and other ways to use less energy, rather than always concentrating on producing more energy.

Third, admit that some of the ways we are using energy aren't sustainable and will have to be abandoned and replaced with simpler, less energy hungry alternatives.

These ideas seem to exist in a blind spot that governments (and most everybody else) find it very difficult to seriously consider. But consider them we must if we are going to come up with a workable energy policy.

Let's take a close look at the available energy sources first.

Non-renewables

You may wonder why we even need to discuss non-renewables here since they clearly don't constitute a long term solution to our energy needs. When you keep using something of which there is only a finite supply, eventually it runs out. To do this without any clear plan for coping with that eventuality is surely crazy. But that is pretty much what most governments are using for an energy policy today. And a closer look shows it's actually even worse than that.

Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) are our primary non-renewable energy sources, and they are absolutely vital to our growth based economy. First let's acknowledge that there are a lot of these fossil fuels left in the earth's crust: deep offshore oil, heavy oil, tight oil and gas (accessible via fracking), tar sands, oil shale, bituminous and brown coal and so forth. Divide the amount that's in the ground by the current yearly rate of use and it would seem that we have hundreds of years of supply left. If actually accessing these energy resources was as easy as doing this sort of calculation then we wouldn't have a problem. Unfortunately, it isn't.

Since energy companies are run as profit making businesses, they always harvest the easiest to access resources first. In other words, the resources with the highest EROEI&emdash;the "low handing fruit". It certainly makes sense to do it this way, but the result is that as time passes the easiest to access resources are depleted and we must turn to resources with lower EROEIs. In addition to being more expensive (in terms of both energy and money) the rate at which these resources can be made available is lower than that of the resources they are replacing, so it is hard to keep up with the existing demand.

Oil

Oil discoveries in the 1930s yielded EROEIs of around 100. By the 1970s, this had declined to 30, and today new discoveries are rarely better than 10. The EROEI of fracked oil from shale ranges from 1.5 to 4, and oil from tar sands ranges from 3 to 5.

The history of oil production and consumption over the last few years provides an excellent example of how resource depletion and falling EROEIs play out. Production of conventional oil peaked around 2005 and has decreased since then. The overall use of oil has stayed approximately level (a bumpy plateau) and the deficit has been made up using unconventional forms of oil, all with low EROEIs. The price of oil went up from less than $20 per barrel in 1999 to around $140 in 2008, back down to around $30 in 2009 after the economic crash of 2008, and then recovered to as high as $120.

Due to heroic measures by governments this didn't cause an outright economic crash as it did in 2008, but it certainly had a damaging effect on the world economy, restricting growth and finally reducing demand for oil until in late 2014 the price of oil fell to around $50 per barrel. This is less than the cost of production for all the new, unconventional oil sources and even some of the remaining conventional sources, leaving the oil industry in an unprofitable mess.

I first encountered the idea of Peak Oil around the turn of the century and have been following the energy and economic situation since then. Conventional economists and energy experts have gotten it wrong again and again, showing an almost total disregard for reality and zero willingness to change their ideas as the situation unfolds. Those who buy into the idea of peak oil have told us again and again that something was about to happen and something has indeed happened, though most often not exactly what they were predicting. But at least they are aware that something is going on, and have been willing to refine their ideas after the fact when they were wrong.

The trouble is that our modern industrial society is a complex and chaotic beast, difficult enough to understand in hindsight, largely impossible to predict in advance. So it is very hard to say where the price of oil is going to go. Because of declining demand, there is currently an excess of oil being pumped out of the ground. If that excess is continues, soon all the oil storage in the world will be full. When this happens demand will drop even further, at which point the price of oil will go down again. (For more on this, check out a recent post on the Our Finite World blog, by Gail Tverberg, especially near the top of the comments section).

At some point, dropping oil prices may actually stimulate the economy enough to increase demand and force the price back up again. Whether oil companies who have shut down part of their operations as not profitable will have trouble responding to increased demand is another question. Exactly when any of this will happen and how many cycles of it lie ahead of us, we just don't know.

The take away from all this is that oil, be it conventional or unconventional, has too low an EROEI to sustain a growing, high tech, globalized industrial economy. This doesn't always translate into high oil prices, but volatile oil prices do as much damage to the economy as excessively high prices would, especially on the supply side.

Natural Gas

Conventional natural gas has an EROEI of around 10 and fracked natural gas from shale formations has an EROEI of 1.5 to 4.

Conventional natural gas peaked in North America shortly after the turn of the century, but fracking technology opened up a new supply. So effectively, in fact, that supply exceeded demand and the price of natural gas went down, well below the cost of gas produced by fracking. Over the last few years two things have been happening: fracking companies going ever deeper in debt, and fracked wells have been depleting quicker than almost anyone expected.

By the end of this decade the fracking boom will be over with both the wells and the lines of credit depleted. The price of natural gas, in North America, at least, will go back up and anyone who believed the hype about 100 years of cheap gas will be sorry indeed.

I have the dubious honour of living in one of the few areas in Southern Ontario which doesn't have gas service. There is a move afoot to extend a pipeline to give us a natural gas supply, at great cost of the municipal government. This is clearly an ill timed and ill advised investment.

Coal

The EROEI of coal, at the mine head, is between 70 and 80.

One hears that we have hundreds of years of coal left. But that's based on outdated estimates of resources. In fact, most of the high quality coal has been used up and we have turned to lower quality deposits. Coal will peak around 2025 according to the best estimates I have heard. It is clearly not a long term alternative to oil and gas.

Other things being equal, I think it would be reasonable to continue using fossil fuels. Especially where the EROEI is high, as in the case of coal, or the extraction process is reasonably low tech, as with the remaining conventional oil and gas. There is still a fair bit of that sort of resource left, and if we can slow that rate at which we are using it, it might last long enough to be of considerable help in the transition to lower energy use.

But all thing are not equal. Using fossil fuels involves burning them and releasing various pollutants, carbon dioxide (which causes climate change) among them, into the atmosphere. Pollution and climate change are not trivial problems and it seems that while fossil fuel supplies are declining there are sufficient quantities left to make our already serious climate problems a whole lot worse.

On this basis, governments should do everything they can to discourage the use of fossil fuels. I suspect that carbon taxes and carbon trading would likely be gamed to such an extent that they wouldn't achieve their intended goal. Carbon pricing, applied at the point of extraction, might be more effective. Better yet, governments could remove their support for the uses of fossil fuels, especially in the transportation sector. Withdraw that support and use should go down quite a lot.

Of course, this will also serve to increase the rate at which economic contraction proceeds, so governments must also be prepared to mitigate the negative effects of transition to a lower energy economy.

Nuclear

It may surprise many readers to see nuclear included in the section on non-renewable energy sources, but fissionable and even "fusionable" elements exist in finite quantities on this planet. Certainly in the case of fission power, if we were to build sufficient plants to replace the energy currently provided by fossil fuels, supplies of uranium would run out in a few decades. Thorium reactors and more advanced reactors which can reuse spent fuels thus far exist only on paper and are unlikely make it through a lengthy development process during the extended economic contraction we are facing.

In any case, the EROEI of current nuclear plants is in the range of around 5 to 15, too low to power the level of high tech industry needed to operate them. Like so many alternatives to fossil fuels, they have been subsidized (in the energy sense) by the surplus energy available from fossil fuels. One wonders how long this is likely to go on.

The other issue with fission power is what to do with the spent fuel. Currently we can't even agree on how to safely store the relatively innocuous low and medium level waste from the day to day operation of these plants. Safe storage of the spent fuel is a bigger, but certainly not insoluble, problem. It seems to me that we should come up with a solution before energy depletion and economic contraction renders us incapable of tackling the problem. But it seems to be such a political hot potato that it isn't being seriously addressed.

Nuclear fusion seems to hold great promise, but is also an immense engineering challenge. Funding is already being cut back on ITER, the most seriously promising attempt to develop a fusion reactor. And if we did develop a working fusion reactor, it's complexity would guarantee an even lower EROEI than fission reactors, so it doesn't look to me like a solution to the "energy problem".

If we did have fusion, with a high EROEI and the copious quantities of cheap energy that many people believe it would provide, then yes, we'd likely be able to overcome some of the limits we currently face. But eventually we'd run up against other limits we haven't even considered yet, such as what to do with the waste heat from all the energy hungry industrial processes fusion would make possible.

As long as we insist on using abundant, cheap energy to fuel growth, it will eventually get us in trouble—even if that energy is readily available (which it is not). This is actually a major point I've been trying to make in this set of posts: growth is not the answer to our problems, but their source. We need to figure out how to get along without growth. And actually to engage in some "degrowth" until we get to a sustainable level of impact on the biosphere.

So, I don't think governments should be building new fission plants. Let the existing ones operate until they reach the end of their lives and then have a plan in place and resources set aside for safely shutting them down and storing the spent fuel.

And, sad as it seems to me, spending a lot more money trying to develop fusion power probably just isn't a good idea.

Instead we need to get serious about working on renewable energy sources, be honest about their limitations and not delude ourselves about what can be done with them. I'll talk about that in my next post.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

• The Great Contraction
• Technology Isn't the Answer, Depending on What Question You're Asking
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1
• A Political Fantasy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI, and Non-Renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7: Agriculture, Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture, What Lies Ahead

A Political Fanatsy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System

In my last post I talked in general terms about things a government might do to ease our transition to a significantly lower level of energy use, if it wasn't shackled by political realities. Things like encouraging and facilitating conservation, decentralization and rehumanization. But that was all a bit too vague to be very satisfying and I promised to make some more specific recommendations in my next post. I believe the three most important areas to consider are money, energy and food, and I'll be talking about them in this post and the following two.

I should say once more that this is a fantasy, and I don't think it has much chance at all of actually happening. More likely we'll continue on as we are and end up making the transition to a lower energy economy the hard way.

Money may seem an odd thing to consider first, but a great many of our interactions with the world are mediated by money. When we need or want something, we generally buy it rather than growing it or making it for ourselves. When we work, we usually make things that we neither need nor want and get paid in money rather than directly using the fruits of our labour. When we save, rather than stocking away real goods, we save money. And when we want to know the value of something, we check its price in dollars ( or whatever our favourite currency may be).

Because of this we are quite dependent on money, and the financial system that manages it. When that system isn’t working, we stand to suffer even if there isn’t a real shortage of what we need and we are still quite capable of doing productive work. And there’s certainly lots wrong with the financial system that could be fixed.

But there is more to the problem that just that.

When it comes right down to it, money is nothing more than a token for claims on future productivity. And since productivity is primarily based on energy, what money actually represents is surplus energy--the energy that is left over to fuel growth after we've supplied all the necessities of life.

In the last century, when fossil fuels were cheap and available in copious quantities, there was an abundant supply of surplus energy and economic growth was essentially unstoppable. Our financial system adapted to the demand for a constantly growing supply of money by creating money out of thin air, as debt. For providing this service, banks insisted on being paid back with interest. This worked fine as long as the economy was growing and the cycle of borrowing and paying back with interest could go on.

But the supply of surplus energy is now dwindling and the rate of economic growth is declining along with it. Our current debt based financial system is not set up to cope with this situation, and is having difficulty providing all the services we have come to rely on. You can print more money, but you can't print energy and no amount of adjusting the money supply or fine tuning of financial regulations can fix the energy problem.

Along with this comes another problem. Beyond just supplying various money related services to the rest of the economy, the financial sector has developed a whole set of activities based on trading money (or derivatives of money), on using money to make more money. And many of us have come to rely on such activities for our livelihoods, including people like me whose income comes from a pension fund. As long as the economy was growing reliably, this was very popular because it allowed one to make a living without any great expenditure of effort. Sadly, in a contracting economy, it doesn't work.

But what is it that a government should be trying to do? Ensure good times in the short run for the richest few percent of its citizens and the corporations they own? I think not. And since this is a political fantasy, I can say outright that for me the ideal society must provide its members with a useful role to play and in the process earn their livelihood, and assure them of protection and support in times of need. And this must be accomplished within the limits imposed by the carrying capacity of our finite planet.

Even if we weren't facing real problems like resource depletion and climate change, our current societies are not set up to do this.

The standard solution is to try to get the economy growing again, assuming that growth will solve all the other problems. Most governments are trapped in the mindset that this is the only solution, which is a pity, since many of our problems are actually caused by growth.

I would say that it is vital to resist the temptation to borrow money to "jump start" the economy. The automotive analogy is a good one, because cars need energy to run and so does the economy. The problem we face is not that the battery is dead, but that the fuel tank is nearly empty and the engine is starting to sputter. Trying to stimulate the "business as usual" economy is an effort doomed to fail and leave governments even further in debt.

What to do instead?

Well, first it would be vital to acknowledge the situation--that the limits to growth are real and a big part of our problem is caused by a decreasing energy surplus. Then it would be good to quit lying with statistics and make public a realistic appraisal of the current economic situation.

And then, we should have a look at all the things that have been done by governments attempting to keep "business as usual" going over that last few decades. There is a long list of excesses that need to be rolled back.

Reductions in taxation on corporations and the rich surely need to be reversed. It's become pretty clear that reducing taxes doesn't stimulate the economy or create jobs and a revenue starved government can't accomplish much but go deeper in debt, until it finally has to default on that debt. Tax reform should place the burden on those who can most afford to pay, discourage unsustainable activities and support the sort of government programs that will actually help us deal with the current situation and become more sustainable.

Governments have relaxed many regulations which businesses claimed were making it hard for them to operate profitably. But we know it was a declining surplus energy, not overregulation that caused the problem, and we also know that relaxing those regulations has made things worse in many ways.

I'm supposed to be focusing on money here, so I guess this isn't really the place to discuss environmental protection regulations (though they do need attention). I'll leave that for another day.

But financial regulations do bear directly on the subject of money, and many governments have drastically loosened regulations governing the FIRE industries (financial, insurance and real estate). This allowed those industries to pursue ever riskier endeavours in an attempt to offer high rates of return in a contracting economy (a fool's errand). What is really needed are stricter regulations to stop financeers from taking ridiculous risks at our expense. We should take the approach that financial institutions that are "too big to fail" are actually too big to exist.

Many governments have off loaded the job of managing the money supply on semi-independent central banks, organizations with strong ties to the financial industry. To me it seems like this is putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Governments should take over the central banks and directly manage the money supply, to make sure that more than just the big financial players benefit.

I should make it clear that I don't believe precious metals are of much use as a basis for money. The artificially high values we place on precious metals are far beyond what would be indicated by their practical uses--they are little different from the values we place on paper, "fiat" currencies, and are of little more use as a store of value. Currencies based on gold (or whichever metal you prefer) don't offer a real solution to managing a contracting economy.

Corporations in general (not just in the FIRE industries) have gained such a high level of rights and political influence that people are almost second class citizens. This is at the very heart of the "political realities" that I discussed in my last post. First we need to change the regulations governing how election campaigns are funded, to reduce corporate influence. Then we need to cut back on corporate rights and increase their responsibilities.

Big business has been a major proponent of the "free market", mainly because a free market, unregulated by government, is much easier to manipulate. Those with the most financial power can control the operation of a free market to their own advantage. And even if it was free of such manipulation, the market is not an effective mechanism for regulating an economy. The individuals dealing in the market are not reliably rational nor are they guaranteed to always seek their own best interest (or even know what that might be). Markets have a long history of blowing bubbles and crashing, and need to be regulated to minimize such behaviour.

While granting corporations more rights, many governments have actively engaged in union busting, assisting companies in reducing wages and making working conditions worse. This is done in the name of increasing profits and stimulating growth, but workers are also consumers and when they have less disposable income demand goes down, making things harder for businesses, not easier.

Globalization and free trade agreements are more of the same. Moving manufacturing to countries where labour is less expensive and safety and environmental regulations are less strict has a short term beneficial effect on the bottom line of the companies who do it. But it basically guts the economies of the countries loosing those jobs, and eventually reduces the demand for the goods those companies sell. This is a "race to the bottom" that a wise government would do well to avoid.

Many governments have signed free trade agreements that, in addition to greasing the tracks for the "race to the bottom", bind them to support "business as usual" and restrict them from many activities that would actually help mitigate the effects of economic contraction, such as encouraging localization and protecting local economies from competition with the global economy. Those agreements need to be cancelled. A low energy economy is not going to be based on international trading, so promoting free trade is not something we need to worry about

I could go on like this for a while longer and I am sure my readers could pitch in with more ideas. Much of what has been done in an attempt to keep "business as usual" going has in fact made the economic contraction worse and harder for people to cope with. It would be a big help if governments would quit doing that. But none of this would stop the economy from contracting to a level of activity that matches the available supply of surplus energy.

We need a plan for a steady state economy that can function at the much lower level of energy that is available from renewable sources. This new system will have to be much simpler and less centralized than what we have at present, because we won't have the resources to do anything more complex. And it will have to work without relying on growth.

Exactly what such an economy would look like demands a post or perhaps series of posts in itself. And since this will involve decentralization, and policies set on a community-by-community basis, there is ample room for many different solutions. But I'd like to use the space I have left in this post to discuss how governments might help us get there from here without leaving a large part of the population stranded without savings or livelihood. And that plan is going to have to work at a time when government revenue, even with a more rational approach to taxation, is going to be shrinking along with the rest of the economy.

I've usually talked about all this in terms of energy, but it can be seen just as well from a financial viewpoint. Our current economy is growth based and globalized, and much of it is financialized as well. That is, based on trade in financial instruments rather than the manufacture of and trade in real goods. The economic contraction is irresistibly pushing us towards an economy that will be de-centralized, low energy and largely based on the production of necessities for the local population.

I expect that this transition will occur very unevenly. Of course, in the developing nations there are still areas that have never been industrialized and which will hardly notice this as a change at all. On the other hand there will be areas in the developed world that will prove very resistant to change and will instead optimize their systems to carry on with less and less surplus energy. Unfortunately that sort fine tuning makes for a very brittle system -- the very opposite of resilient -- which is highly susceptible to breakdown when conditions change. And we'll certainly be faced with lots of changing conditions in the decades to come: droughts, heavy weather and rising sea levels related to climate change, wars over resources, stock market bubbles and crashes to name only a few.

But even if, through good luck or good planning, we avoid that sort of thing, the economy will still be contracting and that will bring its own sort of slow, grinding change. This will hit first and hardest in rural and low-income urban areas. It is important to remember that a corporation’s overriding goal is to make a profit and pass that on to its shareholders. If part of its business is no longer profitable, it must be shutdown, regardless of whether the services and jobs it was providing are seen by ordinary people as vital.

If you are a wealthy shareholder in corporations that are still operating successfully, you can likely afford to live in a community that has not yet been touched by any of this and you probably wonder what all the fuss is about. But if you are an employee of the business being shut down or you rely on its products, you will have no doubt as to what the fuss is about. A couple of examples that are currently happening will make it easier to see what I mean and where this is leading us.

The first of these is the phenomenon of food deserts, which Wikipedia defines as "areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods". Food deserts usually exist in rural areas and low-income urban communities, where it is difficult for retailers of fresh and healthy produce to make a profit, and so they have been replaced by fast food outlets and convenience stores. People in these areas are left with no affordable source of healthy food, since travelling to distant supermarkets would be too expensive in both time and money. Also note that the jobs offered at fast food outlets and convenience stores may well be poorer in pay and working conditions than those in the food markets they replace.

This sort of situation arises quietly and with relatively little uproar beyond some minor protests about the closing of a supermarket here and there. I've seen it happen in small rural towns in the area where I live and it is quite common in many large cities. There is little doubt the trend will continue, and one can hardly fault the corporations involved, they are only doing what they are set up to do. Should governments intervene and regulate corporations, forcing them to continue operating in unprofitable situations? The only practical way to do so would be through subsidies and tax breaks--more of the same losing strategy that we've been following for a while now.

The real solution lies in localizing the food supply, and much of this can happen on its own. But it would be even easier if governments would set up programs encouraging farmers and urban gardeners to grow food for local consumption, and encouraging people to set up farmers markets, food co-ops and so forth to connect the producers with their potential customers.

Along with this I expect to see a move away from the formal economy towards an informal economy that is less dependent on the financial system and less mediated by conventional money. Governments could help with this by encouraging the development of local money and local credit systems which would continue to function as the formal financial system gradually crumbles and fails.

The second example is the response of oil companies to the recent drop in oil prices. It is important to understand that this was caused by accumulated demand destruction during several years of high prices, not by a sudden glut of oil. Production of conventional oil peaked around 2005, and what growth in production we've seen since then has been from higher priced sources, like deep offshore wells, tar sands and fracking, which aren't profitable at the current lower prices. The big oil companies have responded by cutting back on investments in exploration and development, areas where they don't see much possibility of a profit. Even the "promising" non-conventional sources of oil are suffering cut backs.

I wouldn't hazard a guess as to how long oil prices will stay low--the interplay of declining supply and demand destruction as the economy contracts due to reduced surplus energy is much too complex to predict. But I will comment that it is starting to look like the limiting factor on the supply of fossil fuels is not how much is in the ground, but how much can be gotten out profitably. It doesn't matter a bit how much we need the energy, if it can't be produced profitably, it won't be produced at all. Governments could take over and run the energy business, as they already do in many countries, but if the business isn't profitable, that just means the governments will go further and further in debt.

In the meantime, we need to learn to get by with much less energy. That's the subject of my next post, but I have just a bit more to say yet about the economic transition that is the subject of this post.

Governments need to facilitate the transition to the low energy economy.

As the current economy contracts, more and more people will fall out of it and need help in making their move to the local, low-energy economy. Finding jobs in the new economy may not be as much of a problem as you'd think, because a lot of rehumanization will be going on in the new economy--that is machines will be replaced by people, especially in areas like agriculture. The trick will be helping people find a place where they are needed and getting them trained to do the new jobs.

But many will be saddled with debts that they have no hope of ever paying off. I strongly suspect that the best thing would be to forgive those debts. There is normally a great reluctance to forgive debt, on the basis that this creates a "moral hazard", encouraging people to borrow with no intention of repaying. But that is clearly not the situation here, and indeed a lot of this debt problem lies with the banks, who continued lending on the groundless assumption that economic growth would continue forever.

Of course, the flip side of forgiving loans is that creditors suffer. Indeed all those who take their livelihood from the financial system will suffer as it contracts, even pensioners like myself. And this will be more traumatic because of the high expectations we have held. But, presumably if the political fantasy we are considering is actually attainable, it will also be possible to sway public opinion to the idea that getting by on "just enough" is a laudable goal. A major part of that would be getting those who have been the most conspicuous consumers to set an example, particularly those in positions of power.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

• The Great Contraction
• Technology Isn't the Answer, Depending on What Question You're Asking
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1
• A Political Fantasy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI, and Non-Renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7: Agriculture, Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture, What Lies Ahead

A Political Fantasy, Part 1

Occasionally, I ask myself what could be done about the challenges we face in the age of scarcity, if political realities didn’t prevent us from addressing these problems on the provincial (state) and national scale?

When I originally sat down to write about this I had just finished a series of three posts on Deliberate Descent. This is based on adopting a lower energy lifestyle in a deliberate and organized fashion while we still have resources available to us to facilitate the transition, rather than waiting until we are forced to do so, at which point we will have far fewer resources. This is a response on the individual, family and community scale. I tend to focus there, because I think it unlikely that anything significant can be achieved on a larger scale.

Sometimes, though, it is nice to fantasize. What if the Prime Minister called up and asked me what I think he should do. Given our current PM’s leanings, this seems pretty unlikely. But the other problem is, what the heck would I tell him?

For me, the trouble is that all the political parties are only arguing over how the benefits of growth should be divided among the rich and the poor. Or when we are in a recession, arguing over what should be done to get growth started again, as if that is the only possible response. This sort of tunnel vision is a problem because things have changed and the system that worked fine in a growing economy driven by cheap energy doesn’t fit present conditions. Growth is over and what we need is a way to do degrowth (ungrowth?) with a minimum of pain and suffering. So far, we don’t even have a name for this, much less a workable response.

In order to take any steps toward coping with today’s reality, our governments would first have to acknowledge that reality. In fact, they are currently either ignorant of it or deeply in denial of it. And so I wrote my last two posts: The Great Contraction and Technology Isn’t the Answer. If you haven’t read them, now is the time—it will help make sense of what I have to say here.

Basically, for the past 200 years, cheap fossil fuels drove economic growth—almost inescapably, though no one was trying very hard to escape it. Government was a matter of keeping up with this. In the latter half of the twentieth century, western democracies settled into a pattern. In a democracy, getting elected is a major part of what politics is about. With the advent of mass media, a lot of money was needed to fund an election campaign. When trying to raise money, it is best to talk to those who have lots of it to spare, and convince them that your policies are in their best interest. Largely this means that you won’t be raising taxes or restricting the money making activities of industry. Of course, the purpose of a media campaign is to win the election, so promises must be made that appeal to a majority of voters, not just the rich. That means promising to spend money on job creation, stimulating economic growth and other programs that promise to benefit the whole population, or on the pet projects of a great many special interest groups, or both. When you finally get into power, keeping all these conflicting promises can lead to deficit financing. As long as the economy is growing, that isn’t so much of a problem. Even if you go so far as to reduce the tax rates, a somewhat smaller chunk of a much larger pie can cover growing government expenditures.

For the last forty years or so, the initial economic effects of fossil fuel depletion have led to both reductions in tax revenues and a call for more government programs to benefit those hit by the beginnings of economic contraction. Realistically this calls for tax increases or reductions in government programs, or both. But it takes a brave politician indeed to propose these things, and such a fellow is unlikely to get elected. Those that have been getting elected have piled up more and more government debt to bridge the gap between revenue and expenditures. These are the political realities I am talking about.

But there other others realities we need to face up to, as well. We really are running out of cheap fossil fuels, and there really isn’t anything to replace them.

The level of growth an economy can sustain is determined by the amount of surplus energy that is available. Surplus energy is the energy left over after you perform whatever activity it takes to access that energy—the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). In the early 1900s it only took about one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels of it out of the ground, leaving a surplus energy of 99 barrels. All the energy sources now available to us, even using the best technology we can bring to bear on the problem, provide significantly less surplus energy.

Because of this, attempts to stimulate economic growth with government spending are doomed to fail. Whether we like it or not, and no matter what we do, our economy is going to shrink to a level that can be supported by the amount of surplus energy that is actually available—around one tenth of what was available at the height of cheap fossil fuel abundance. This is so little that there is serious doubt about the continued operation of our industrial society, what I often refer to as “business as usual”, at least without some major changes.

When many people become aware of this, they jump to the conclusion that those “major changes” amount to a sudden and catstrophic collapse into a new dark age. I don’t agree with that.

This “collapse” of industrial civilization is already occurring, but slowly and very unevenly. Thing seem to be going along just fine or even improving for a while, then there is a crisis or disaster of some sort and they get worse, only to settle out at some lower level and stay there or even improve again for a while. At any one time, some regions seem hardly to be affected at all, while others are clearly suffering a serious decline.

And certainly there are aspects of our high tech industrial civilization that we will not be able to sustain at a decreased level of surplus energy. But it is not necessary to fall all the way back to the level of civilization that existed when food and firewood were the only sources of energy. Even if food and firewood were our only sources of energy, we could do much better with them than we did hundreds of years ago. We know a lot more and we have the resources of our current high tech society to work with as we begin our descent to a lower level of energy use. And beyond food and firewood there are other renewables—wind, water and solar, at least, that can be used much more effectively now than they were in the dark ages, even with relatively low tech equipment.

People also tend to assume that as we fall back to lower levels of energy use, our society will have to revert back to the forms it took when last we operated at that energy level. This is just plain silly, as social practices and cultural mores have very little to do with technology and energy use.

So, I think our government should be taking action to mitigate human suffering over the decades to come as we transition through economic contraction to a sustainable, steady state economy at a some substantially lower level of energy use. And doing it in such a way as to preserve the civil liberties and social justice advances we’ve made over the last couple of centuries.

At present most governments are convinced that stimulating economic growth is the only way to improve things, when in fact reckless spending and tax reductions are actually making things worse, by increasing deficits and reducing government capability to respond to the challenges we face.

I know that many people feel that government is the problem and the only solution is less government, but I disagree. Government is the best sort of organization for pursuing certain goals, especially when those aren’t likely to be accomplished through market mechanisms and the profit motive—exactly the kind of goals I am discussing here.

It is not that difficult to think of some things that a government could do… if we are going to fantasize about not being restricted by political realities. But a revenue starved government can do little to help. So, governments who have been reducing taxes in the mistaken belief that this will stimulate the economy are going to have to switch gear and start increasing taxes, and those who are most able to pay must surely shoulder a larger share of the burden. This needs to be done soon, as the tax base will dwindle as the economy slows down and governments will have to scale back their activities to match the lower level of tax generating economic activity. But it seems to me there is still a window of opportunity, and much that can be done by a government that is willing to face up to reality and take action.

Finding (or electing) such a government is another matter. Remember, this is a fantasy and I don’t for a moment expect that it will ever come true. What is far more likely is that we will do this the hard way, continuing on with business as usual until change is forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control. At that point, our ability to respond effectively will be considerably less than it is now. If you disagree with me about the inevitability of what faces us, that’s fine. I’m pretty sure you are suffering from some degree of denial, but enjoy yourself until reality comes crashing in.

Back to my fantasy. Having acknowledged that because of the decreasing availability of cheap energy the economy will continue to contract, and that high taxes are not what is causing the contraction, governments need to increase taxes on those who are most able to pay, and focus spending where it will do the most good. They also need to stop subsidies, tax breaks and other forms of support for the people, corporations and activities which are making the situation worse by trying to keep “business as usual” going just a little longer. Then we need to sort through all the worthy projects up for consideration and fund those that will best help people adapt to the realities of economic contraction and move them toward a sustainable non-growth economy at a sustainable level of energy use.

There are three areas of change that governments could promote and support that would make a huge difference. John Michael Greer, one of my favourite authors, speaks eloquently about this, so I will first quote him directly and then make a few comments of my own. These quotes are from a blog post where Greer is talking about the “bargaining” stage of our grief for industrial civilization, where we start to come up with ideas for what we can give up and how we can change in order to retain some elements of civilization.

First is conservation. That’s the missing piece in most proposals for dealing with peak oil. The chasm into which so many well-intentioned projects have tumbled over the last decade is that nothing available to us can support the raw extravagance of energy and resource consumption we’re used to, once cheap abundant fossil fuels aren’t there any more, so—ahem—we have to use less. Too much talk about using less in recent years, though, has been limited to urging energy and resource abstinence as a badge of moral purity, and—well, let’s just say that abstinence education did about as much good there as it does in any other context.

The things that played the largest role in hammering down US energy consumption in the 1970s energy crisis were unromantic but effective techniques such as insulation, weatherstripping, and the like, all of which allow a smaller amount of energy to do the work previously done by more. Similar initiatives were tried out in business and industry, with good results; expanding public transit and passenger rail did the same thing in a different context, and so on. All of these are essential parts of any serious response to the end of cheap energy. If your proposed bargain makes conservation the core of your response to fossil fuel and resource depletion, in other words, you’ll face no criticism from me.

Greer has written elsewhere about “LESS”—less energy, stuff and stimulation. We need to be aiming for “just enough” to get by on, rather than more of everything for everyone, which seems to be the ideal at the moment.

Another thing we need a lot less of is waste. Waste is currently seen as an entitlement, or at the very least an unfortunate necessity, when in fact it is at the heart of many of our problems. Our industrial society is in many ways little more than a way of using the energy of fossil fuels to turn natural resources into pollution and garbage, while producing a few consumer good in the process. And even those goods are expected to wear out and be thrown “away” fairly quickly.

The problem is that you can’t use an open ended system inside a closed system like our planet. Not for long, anyway. So we need to switch over to circular systems that reuse the materials involved as much as possible. This includes using human wastes (humanure) for fertilizer in agriculture.

Second is decentralization. One of the things that makes potential failures in today’s large-scale industrial infrastructures so threatening is that so many people are dependent on single systems. Too many recent green-energy projects have tried to head further down the same dangerous slope, making whole continents dependent on a handful of pipelines, power grids, or what have you. In an age of declining energy and resource availability, coupled with a rising tide of crises, the way to ensure resilience and stability is to decentralize instead: to make each locality able to meet as many of its own needs as possible, so that troubles in one area don’t automatically propagate to others, and an area that suffers a systems failure can receive help from nearby places where everything still works.

Here again, this involves proven techniques, and extends across a very broad range of human needs. Policies that encourage local victory gardens, truck farms, and other food production became standard practice in the great wars of the 20th century precisely because they took some of the strain off overburdened economies and food-distribution systems. Home production of goods and services for home use has long played a similar role. For that matter, transferring electrical power and other utilities and the less urgent functions of government to regional and local bodies instead of doing them on the national level will have parallel benefits in an age of retrenchment and crisis. Put decentralization into your bargain, and I’ll applaud enthusiastically.

When energy was cheap, the benefits of centralization and the complexity that comes with it outweighed the costs. Indeed we have been largely unaware of those costs, but they are now starting to catch up with us. The solution is de-globalization, relocalization, re-ruralization, de-urbanization and a general loosening of control from central authorities.

Already we are seeing a move toward this as some areas see resources spent supporting central governments as a burden that gives little in return. Central governments need to acknowledge that they aren’t playing a winning hand and step back as gracefully as possible.

Third is rehumanization. That’s an unfamiliar word for a concept that will soon be central to meaningful economic policy throughout the developed world. Industrial societies are currently beset with two massive problems: high energy costs, on the one hand, and high unemployment on the other. Both problems can be solved at a single stroke by replacing energy-hungry machines with human workers. Rehumanizing the economy—hiring people to do jobs rather than installing machines to do them—requires removing and reversing a galaxy of perverse incentives favoring automation at the expense of employment, and this will need to be done while maintaining wages and benefits at levels that won’t push additional costs onto government or the community.

The benefits here aren’t limited to mere energy cost savings. Every economic activity that can be done by human beings rather than machinery is freed from the constant risk of being whipsawed by energy prices, held hostage by resource nationalism, and battered in dozens of other ways by the consequences of energy and resource depletion. That applies to paid employment, but it also applies to the production of goods and services in the household economy, which has also been curtailed by perverse incentives, and needs to be revived and supported by sensible new policies. A rehumanized economy is a resilient economy for another reason, too: the most effective way to maximize economic stability is to provide ample employment at adequate wages for the workforce, whose paychecks fund the purchases that keep the economy going. Make rehumanization an important part of your plan to save the world and I won’t be the only one cheering.

Along with rehumanization must come reskilling—relearning many of the skills that we’ve off loaded onto machines.

Of course, so far, all this talk has been in generalities. That’s the right place to start, of course. For the most part, the tools of government are blunt instruments and work by pushing society in a general direction. Today most governments are pushing in precisely the wrong direction. They could do a lot just by stopping that and could do even better by pushing in the right directions, as outlined above.

Even so, I really would like to be able to offer some specific suggestions, and in my next post I’ll do exactly that.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

• The Great Contraction
• Technology Isn't the Answer, Depending on What Question You're Asking
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1
• A Political Fantasy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI, and Non-Renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7: Agriculture, Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture, What Lies Ahead

Technology Isn't the Answer, depending on what question you're asking...

In my last post I talked about how the economy and energy are linked together and how depletion of fossil fuel resources is effecting the economy. I promised to explain why I don’t think technology can solve the problem. So here we go...

When I first heard about Peak Oil, my reaction was basically, “That’s pretty bleak, but surely we’ll develop some technology to solve the problem”. I spent my working life in the power industry, I enjoyed learning the latest technologies and I thought I knew what we could potentially do. Fifteen years later, I am convinced that technology doesn’t hold the answer, at least not to the questions most people are asking of it.

For most people, I think the question is, “Can technology allow industrial civilization to keep growing, essentially without limits, as it was doing during the latter half of the twentieth century, so that we can carry on without a significant change in lifestyle, or better yet, with continued improvements in lifestyle.” The answer to that question is easy, and it’s, “no.” For anyone who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century, though, this is a very counter intuitive answer, and I think it is worth going into some detail about why I say “no.”

Because of the way our financial systems are set up, industrial civilization must continue to grow. The kind of growth we are talking about is exponential and in the real world it always runs into limits. As I’ve commented before, people don’t have a good grasp of how exponential growth works, and we always seem to be surprised by where it leads. While it might be worthwhile revisiting the idea of limits to growth at some point, today I want to focus on technology.

First, let’s be clear how I feel about technology — it is an essential part of being human. When we are faced with a problem, we typically solve it by applying more complex technology. Sometimes this leads us into a corner, a “progress trap”, and we are forced to simplify. But we rarely do it willingly. It seems to me we are currently caught in one of those progress traps, based on our reliance on fossil fuels--a dead end because those resources are becoming depleted. The way out is through simplification of our technology, not further investment in complexity.

I think the enlightenment was a good thing--it added some very important thinking tools (critical thinking and the scientific method, along with all sorts of new mathematics) to our mental tool kit. The enlightenment and heat engines for converting fuels into mechanical power were two separate, necessary but not sufficient conditions for the development of industrial civilization. Put them together and voila, industrial revolution.

Many people who have thought about this are not convinced that it was a good thing. I'll agree that when taken too far, it has gotten us into trouble. And while that trouble is a major thing, I still think the benefits were worth it, though it is a pity we couldn’t have stopped before things got to the state they are currently in.

I am particularly irritated when I hear ivory tower intellectuals bemoaning the failings of technology when their lifestyle is completely dependent on very complex technology, of which they are largely unaware. Lewis Mumford’s book “Technics & Civilization” comes to mind--let’s just say I laid it down in disgust before finishing.

So, if the question is, “will our response to the challenges that face us involve the use of technology”, then I would say, “absolutely yes!”

But I am also pretty irritated with people who say “surely they’ll come up with something”, and are willing to just leave it at that, trusting that "they" will indeed look after it. A pretty unjustified leap of faith, I’d say.

Many people believe technological breakthroughs will soon give us access to sources of energy as rich or richer that fossil fuels and let business continue on as usual, or perhaps even better than usual. Others think that we can find a way to maintain our current lifestyle by using renewable energy sources and improving the efficiency with which we use that energy. I don;t agree with either of those ideas.

I’ve spent quite a few years researching this subject and I will share my conclusions shortly, but I can recommend a couple of writers who will lead you through this in more detail than I have space for here. Tom Murphy is a physicist whose blog Do the Math does an excellent job of just that--doing the math. David MacKay is an engineer whose book “Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air” is another valuable resource. It’s contents are available on line at http://www.withouthotair.com/. Both writers are accessible to anyone who was comfortable with high school math, and even if numbers aren’t your friends, they also make their conclusions clear in simple English.

But now for my conclusions. One thing to get clear is that technology is not energy, indeed technology uses energy, rather than creating it. Many people are confused about this because we do use technology to access sources of energy and convert them into more useful forms. During recent history technological advances have allowed us to access more sources of energy than ever before. But make no mistake, if you don’t have a prime mover, a source of energy, all the technology in the world isn’t going to help.

So, can we find a way to make our “business as usual”, growth based economy keep going for the foreseeable future? This means finding a way to keep an ever growing population fed, housed, clothed and entertained to an ever improving standard. Energy seems to be the key and by looking closely at energy, we can find some answers.

There are indeed huge quantities of hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) trapped underground in rock formations where we can’t access them at the moment. Let’s assume technology improves and allows us to access those resources. Enough to last several hundred years, which for many people is effectively forever. At any rate, long before we run out of those resources, sometime in the next few decades, we will have released such vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that climate change will spoil the future we are trying to build here. I don’t usually argue that near term extinction for the human race is a possibility to take seriously, but that would be one way to make it a reality.

OK, can we tap into some cleaner sources of energy? What about nuclear fission or maybe even nuclear fusion?

Fissionable materials are pretty rare and every analysis I read says that if we built fission reactors to replace fossil fuels as our energy source, we’d run out of fissionable materials in a few decades. Yes, there’s thorium as well as uranium and there are breeder reactors. That would get us a few more decades. But not enough to last into anybody’s definition of the foreseeable future.

But there is enough fusion fuel (heavy hydrogen) in the oceans to last a very long time. We don’t have working fusion reactors yet, but maybe it’s time we doubled or quadrupled the research budget (instead of halving it, as we recently did to the funding for one fusion research project) and get the problem solved. Once we can tap into nuclear fusion as an energy source, our problems are solved, right? Wrong. The process of making usable energy from any of these resources, gives off quite a lot of waste heat. This isn’t some failing of insufficiently advanced technology, but a simple consequence the laws of thermodynamics. Typical power plants runs with an efficiency of 25 to 35 percent. The rest of the energy ends up in the environment. The downside of fusion is that it can keep us going long enough for that to be a problem. If our civilization keeps on as it is for a few hundred more years, we’ll have released enough waste heat to boil the oceans. This is quite a lot worse than the few degrees of warming we’d get from releasing more greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere. And it is not dependent of which energy source we choose — whatever it is, if it allows us to continue growing for a few hundred years, we end up with this problem. Another deal breaker, for sure.

What about space resources and generating power off the planet so we don’t have to worry so much about waste heat? Solar power stations in orbit, beaming energy down to receiving stations here on earth. This just puts the waste heat problem off for a few hundred more years, since we’d still be adding some heat to the environment. In order to radiate it away, the temperature has to go up. If we keep growing, eventually it becomes a problem.

Some of you will be jumping up and down in frustration at all the other problems with any of these idea, that I appear to be ignoring. I am aware of those problems, and I agree that the analysis above is pretty cavalier. But I’m trying to show there are fundamental problems that stop these ideas from working even before we consider more subtle issues.

Perhaps the problem is growth. I would certainly say so. What if we stop growing and switch over to clean, renewable energy sources? The wonderful thing about such a plan is that it is simplicity itself to implement. We just keep going as we are at present and let nature take its course.

Climate change and the end of industrial agriculture as fossil fuels run out would reduce the human population to a fraction of it’s present level. Before many decades passed, we’d be back to firewood and food as energy sources. Straight back to the dark ages, though with the benefit of what knowledge we can retain from the industrial era and all the refined metal and machinery that will be lying around waiting to be salvaged, maybe not quite as far back as you might think.

Still, I’ll bet you are not so keen on the idea. Well, neither am I. It seems to be where we are heading, though. Can we find some way to hold things together, solve, avoid or mitigate the many problems we’re facing and retain at least some of the benefits of the high tech society we are now living in, without its downside? To that I will answer, “maybe....”

I often think that if we had switched over to a non-growth based economy in the first half of the twentieth century, things would have been much simpler. With a smaller population and concerted efforts to conserve, to get by on “just enough”, the supply of fossil fuels would have lasted much longer and climate change not have become a problem until much later in the game. This would have given us a much better chance to succeed at a transition to renewable energy sources. The “just enough is good” attitude, especially, would make this easier to accomplish. As opposed to our current “more is always better” and “waste is our entitlement” approach to things. But...woulda, coulda and shoulda are futile words.

As I said earlier, many think that we can find a way to maintain our current lifestyle and continue with "sustainable growth"(whatever that may be) by using renewable energy sources and improving the efficiency with which we use that energy. That is not what I am saying “maybe” to. It seems to me that retaining the benefits of science and technology is a vastly more attainable goal than maintaining our current lifestyle. Let’s consider why renewables can’t support an industrial society of the sort we currently have.

When it comes to energy, it’s not just the amount of energy that is available to us, but also the difference between what it costs us to acquire the energy and the value of what we can produce with it – the “surplus energy”. This can be represented by a single number, the Energy Returned on Energy Invested or “EROEI”. This surplus energy is what fuels productivity, and makes our economy grow. You can average together the EROEI’s of all the energy sources that an economy uses. When that number goes below a certain level (around 15), the economy ceases to grow and goes into a recession. “Capital formation”--raising money to start projects becomes difficult. As the number goes lower, it becomes difficult even to raise enough money to maintain vital infrastructure and things start to crumble.

I scanned the graph above from Tim Morgan’s book, Life After Growth. The red line at EROEI=15 is mine. The horizontal axis represents EROEI, and that quantity decreases are we move from left to right. The vertical axis represents the percentage “profit” of gross energy extracted. The graph shows the EROEI of the various energy sources that are available to us. If a country is looking to develop new energy sources to improve its economic situation, it needs to pick sources that will improve its average EROEI. Spending money on energy sources with an EROEI of less your current average actually make things worse. Most of the developed nations have an average EROEI around 9 to 12 these days.

Nuclear fusion is not on the graph, presumably because there are no working fusion reactors to get data from. But it is proving much harder to build them than it was to build fission reactors, so it is a pretty good bet that if we do build them, their EROEI will be even worse that fission reactors, which are in the 8 to 10 range.

There are a few energy sources worth of mention that aren’t on the graph. A quick Google search led me to this website, which borrows a table from Richard Heinberg’s book, “Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society”

The EROEI’s quoted there vary a little from Morgan’s diagram, but none of these numbers are meant to be taken a terribly precise. Heinberg tells us that wave energy systems have an EROEI of around 15, geothermal 2 to 13, and tidal around 6.

So, I have introduced several criteria for evaluating energy sources: long term considerations like waste heat, emission of greenhouse gases, availability of a long term supply or renewability, and perhaps most important, having an EROEI of greater than 15.

It is also important to realize that if an energy source requires the infrastructure provided by an high tech industrial economy to make it work, but has an EROEI of less than 15 then it cannot support the sort of economy that is needed to make it work. Eventually the infrastructure will crumble and that energy source will no longer be accessible. Off the top of my head I would say this applies to nuclear fission and solar photovoltaics in particular.

If we are looking to maintain a growing industrial civilization we can quickly eliminate all the energy sources to the right of the red line on the graph. High tech isn’t going to help with that, because using more complex technology will tend to lower the EROEI, not raise it, because of the extra energy needed to build and run such equipment.

So let’s look at the energy sources on the left side of the graph.

Wind is intermittent and I do not believe that this has been taken into account in calculating the EROEI shown on the graph. When you add in the cost of storage equipment or companion generation needed to fit wind into a grid that is committed to supplying continuous and reliable power, the EROEI is much worse. That is why I would move wind to the right of the red line on the graph.

1970s oil and gas finds are moving into the decline phase at the end of their lives and that is what is causing our current energy crisis. Non-renewable energy sources tend to move to the right on this graph as they become depleted, because we always use “pick the low hanging fruit first”, leaving the poorer quality, harder to access parts of the resource for later. Note also, that current oil and gas finds are over on the right side of the graph. The vast amounts of hydrocarbons still in the ground all have a very low EROEI, sometimes less than 1. Hypothetical discussion about there being enough fossil fuels left to last hundreds of years tend to ignore this.

Coal has a good EROEI, but that is for coal sitting at the mine head. Transporting it to a power station and burning it to produce electricity reduces the EROEI considerably, probably by a factor of 3, down to 25. Using it to replace oil and gas will result in vastly increased emissions of carbon dioxide. Schemes for capturing the CO2 and keeping it out of the atmosphere have been suggested, but energy is used in those schemes, from 10 to 40% of the energy in the coal being burned. So if we have to capture and store the CO2 released by burning coal its EROEI starts to get down close to or below 15. And the technology to do this hasn’t been developed yet. Further, coal extraction is moving toward a peak just like oil and natural gas, which may come as soon as 2025. Already we have used up most of the high quality coal and have been forced to mine the lower quality stuff.

Obviously, 1930s oil and gas finds are history.

Hydroelectricity is fine and no doubt the few remaining suitable locations will be developed. But there just isn’t enough to replace fossil fuels.

But what about proposed energy sources that haven’t yet been built, so there is no EROEI data to evaluate?

If you have a favourite one, feel free to bring it up in the comments section. I’ll let you know what I think of the idea and I’ll be very relieved if you come up with something that will work . But I am pretty certain that most such suggestions will fall into a few categories:

1) Energy sources which fail for the reasons I’ve already discussed, though perhaps in a less obvious ways.

2) Things that are science fiction--just not physically possible.

3) They are “academic or paper reactors”. This phrase comes from Hyman G. Rickover, who was a United States Navy admiral who directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of Naval Reactors. In addition, he oversaw the development of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor used for generating electricity. Rickover is known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." Even though he was pretty clearly in favour of nuclear power, he had this to say:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:

1. It is simple.
2. It is small.
3. It is cheap.
4. It is light.
5. It can be built very quickly.
6. It is very flexible in purpose.
7. Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components.
8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics:

1. It is being built now.
2. It is behind schedule.
3. It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items.
4. It is very expensive.
5. It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
6. It is large.
7. It is heavy.
8. It is complicated.

The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it.

The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of "mere technical details." The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solution requires manpower, time and money.

Unfortunately for those who must make far-reaching decision without the benefit of an intimate knowledge of reactor technology, and unfortunately for the interested public, it is much easier to get the academic side of an issue than the practical side. For a large part those involved with the academic reactors have more inclination and time to present their ideas in reports and orally to those who will listen. Since they are innocently unaware of the real but hidden difficulties of their plans, they speak with great facility and confidence. Those involved with practical reactors, humbled by their experiences, speak less and worry more.

Yet it is incumbent on those in high places to make wise decisions and it is reasonable and important that the public be correctly informed. It is consequently incumbent on all of us to state the facts as forthrightly as possible.

Sadly, the whole energy field, conventional and alternative, is littered with paper reactors. Don't be fooled by them

4) Similar to mistaking academic ideas for practical ones, is the tendency to assume that if something needs to be done, the means to do it will be found. In a failing economy (EROEI less than 15) finding the means to do anything much is very challenging. In fact it is a major concern that we won’t be able to scrape together cash to do many possible and practical things which would improve the situation.

5) Energy sources will scalability problems. Sources that pass all the other tests but exist such small quantity that they can’t be scaled up to solve our problems. Burning waste is one such example. Yes, some energy can be generated by incinerating garbage. But there is only so much garbage and scaling up the creation of garbage is not something we want to do. As the economy declines further, there will be less. Indeed much of what needs to be done will result in much less garbage being created. So its potential as a source of energy will decline as time passes, instead of increasing.

All of this is why I don’t think technology offers much hope of enabling “business as usual” to continue as usual. Indeed, I don’t believe there is much chance of that happening at all.

I’d like to close by suggesting that maybe we are looking at things from the wrong angle. What if we could change our requirements for energy to fit what’s available? I’m not primarily talking about efficiency here, especially the sort of efficiency improvement that adds complexity and cost and lowers EROEI. What I am talking about, yet again, is lifestyle changes. This seems to be a taboo subject, but I appears to me to be the one real answer. There just aren’t any energy sources that will support a growing high tech society on an on-going basis. But it seems to me we could have a non-growing (steady state) society at a somewhat lower level of population, technology and resource use, without falling all the way down to the seventeenth century, or worse yet, the stone age.

I am on record as saying that I expect our industrial civilization will collapse over the next few decades. But I am definitely not talking about some sort of apocalypse. I expect this fall will be a bumpy but gradual one. As it collapses the ability of our industrial civilization to provide the necessities of life will decrease and we will be left to fend for ourselves. There is much that can be done to reduce how far the decline goes and to lessen the abruptness with which it occurs. Efforts in that direction have to be applauded for their potential to reduce human suffering. In my next post I’ll consider what a government that wasn’t shackled by “political realities” could do to mitigate the effects of the collapse.

As an aid to those who are reading this whole series of "Political Fantasy" posts, here is a complete set of links.

• The Great Contraction
• Technology Isn't the Answer, Depending on What Question You're Asking
• A Political Fantasy, Part 1
• A Political Fantasy, Part 2: Money and the Financial System
• A Political Fantasy, Part 3: Energy, EROEI, and Non-Renewable Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 4: Renewable Energy Sources
• A Political Fantasy, Part 5: using energy wisely when we don't have much
• A Political Fantasy, Part 6: Agriculture, an Overview
• A Political Fantasy, Part 7: Agriculture, Details
• A Political Fantasy, Part 8: Agriculture, What Lies Ahead