On your new document: I think I generally nod along to the peak oil and efficiency stuff. The renewables section is unconvincing, as you might imagine from our discussion above. You are right that there are a bunch of problems with IAMs making simplifications, but you don’t demonstrate that any of the factors they are missing would seriously change the results of them. It’s good to see that some of your arguments have grown more nuanced, but it also makes reviewing it more complicated and I don’t really have the time to debug the report in detail. I’m somewhat (pleasantly?) surprised that at the end of this all you’re suggesting that energy depletion might be good for reducing extinction risk though, I don’t know to what extent that flips the whole of this conversation—maybe you are actually the optimistic one!
These studies show that mineral requirements for clean energy grow rapidly. But they don’t show that the requirements are actually that high in most cases, as they state the ratios “for energy technology”. Currently we don’t use a lot of minerals in energy provision, so a quadrupling of that amount sounds dramatic but doesn’t represent a particularly large global consumption increase. Quote from the IEA: “There is no shortage of resources. Economically viable reserves have been growing despite continued production growth… However, declining ore quality poses multiple challenges for extraction and processing costs, emissions and waste volumes.” So the problem is still one of energy, rather than actual availability, which is why power is more important than minerals. So really the minerals question is still a renewables question.
Of the minerals shown here to require more than 100% of their current levels in 2050, only lithium would not be fairly easy to replace or produce for a small efficiency penalty (graphite is just carbon, indium is used in solar cells but can be replaced with graphene https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=3942, cobalt & vanadium are used in batteries and and all have known substitutions). There’s some good stuff in this twitter thread, although it doesn’t have citations for everything it needs.
The historic examples you give are of the resource curse; societies becoming dependent on extracting commodities. I’m looking for examples of societies falling because they can’t buy commodities. E.g. I might have expected the increase in guano price to have created a food shortage and thus civilisational collapse, but as far as I know we didn’t see that; similarly, the rise in fertiliser prices you mention don’t seem to have had a rise in fascism so far—indeed, the elections so far since the invasion started have gone better for the left than might be expected.
I reiterate that debt economics aren’t my field, but I’m skeptical that they provide a barrier comparable to physics. There is clearly a secular trend towards rising debt, but I think you’re overestimating it; this IMF graph of global debt-to-gdp only grows at 1%/year from 2000-2018.
I feel like the majority of people I know don’t really have personal finance growth as their primary objective in life, and I don’t see how our society does either—it’s almost an accident of economics at this point.
I hope that virtualisation and renewable power means we can happily all bring on the great stagnation!
Thanks for the answer, sorry I didn’t reply earlier. I started working on another project for EA France, aiming to identify impactful charities working in France, so I had much less time to spend on the topic of energy depletion. I didn’t want to do a rushed answer, but didn’t find the time to dig into the topic once again… you know how it goes.
So instead, I’ll just publish an update on my thinking on the topic (while keeping in minf that I have found several important articles that I have to read).
So far, I’ve updated more positively on renewables—their improvement is indeed faster than just about anyone had anticipated (which makes papers obsolete as soon as they’re a few years old, and therefore makes it very difficult to get properly informed on the subject).
Several articles I’ve read have indeed made me update on them. There were several elements where I had underestimated adaptability. The EROI of renewables is indeed correct. I have a higher probability of an energy transition “from the top”, where we maintain energy growth (which isn’t necessarily good news, given that the more energy we have, the greater our capacity to destroy our environment and generate existential risks). Your link about the Twitter thread exposing the limits to the GTK report was indeed interesting. I also found an article here that showed several other limits.
I’m talking less and less about a 2050 timeframe (which is what most of the litterature talks about). However, I’m more worried about what short-term disruptions could imply.
Indeed, my worries are more about the fact that limits on fossil fuels are probably short-term : and that time constraints could prove significant. Going from a system where almost all trucks, or cement making, or steel making, or fertilizers, or hydrogen, or plastics (etc.) are dependent on fossil fuels, to a system where >50% of these are not fossil… this is going to take time, and I’m worried about what would happen during this time.
Same goes for storage : batteries are improving… but it seems that we’re a long way from the deployment speed required for seasonal storage in order to have a stabilized grid.
As a French Energy expert stated (prominent member of EDF) :
“The RTE report clearly shows that energy mixes with a high proportion of renewable energies can only be achieved with a very significant drop in consumption [...]. I admit that this reduction must be significant enough to involve much more than a simple technical improvement in process efficiency. Even so, why deprive ourselves of what at least makes it possible to reduce the pain, or even avoid widespread chaos?”
It’s the “chaos” scenario that worries me.
I feel like the majority of people I know don’t really have personal finance growth as their primary objective in life, and I don’t see how our society does either—it’s almost an accident of economics at this point.
It seems pretty clear to me that growth is the main goal of our society—and that it stopping would have far reaching consequences. As I said, a society where everyone’s share of the pie is growing is very different than one where everybody is competing to secure access to declining resources—the degree of trust is not the same. Especially when some wealthy people in society have the ability to agregate more and more resources, as is currently happening.
The importance of financial growth is exemplified by the fact that “degrowthers” have besically no traction on a political level, despite clear evidence on their side of a strong correlation between environmental impact and growth.
The more I look at it, the more the global economy appears to be working like a Ponzi scheme—requring an ever growing amount of capital and energy and resources to keep everyone’s trust in the fact that everyone’s investments will be paid out later. At some point, it has to stop. The question is : how do you end a Ponzi scheme in a smooth way?
Still, the future is full of weird stuff, so we’ll see. I’ve had less time to keep an eye on these subjects recently—I’ve got several interesting papers to look at (and I’ll check your point on minerals and debt). I’ll update then.
On your new document: I think I generally nod along to the peak oil and efficiency stuff. The renewables section is unconvincing, as you might imagine from our discussion above. You are right that there are a bunch of problems with IAMs making simplifications, but you don’t demonstrate that any of the factors they are missing would seriously change the results of them. It’s good to see that some of your arguments have grown more nuanced, but it also makes reviewing it more complicated and I don’t really have the time to debug the report in detail. I’m somewhat (pleasantly?) surprised that at the end of this all you’re suggesting that energy depletion might be good for reducing extinction risk though, I don’t know to what extent that flips the whole of this conversation—maybe you are actually the optimistic one!
These studies show that mineral requirements for clean energy grow rapidly. But they don’t show that the requirements are actually that high in most cases, as they state the ratios “for energy technology”. Currently we don’t use a lot of minerals in energy provision, so a quadrupling of that amount sounds dramatic but doesn’t represent a particularly large global consumption increase. Quote from the IEA: “There is no shortage of resources. Economically viable reserves have been
growing despite continued production growth… However, declining ore quality poses multiple challenges for extraction and
processing costs, emissions and waste volumes.” So the problem is still one of energy, rather than actual availability, which is why power is more important than minerals. So really the minerals question is still a renewables question.
Of the minerals shown here to require more than 100% of their current levels in 2050, only lithium would not be fairly easy to replace or produce for a small efficiency penalty (graphite is just carbon, indium is used in solar cells but can be replaced with graphene https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=3942, cobalt & vanadium are used in batteries and and all have known substitutions). There’s some good stuff in this twitter thread, although it doesn’t have citations for everything it needs.
The historic examples you give are of the resource curse; societies becoming dependent on extracting commodities. I’m looking for examples of societies falling because they can’t buy commodities. E.g. I might have expected the increase in guano price to have created a food shortage and thus civilisational collapse, but as far as I know we didn’t see that; similarly, the rise in fertiliser prices you mention don’t seem to have had a rise in fascism so far—indeed, the elections so far since the invasion started have gone better for the left than might be expected.
I reiterate that debt economics aren’t my field, but I’m skeptical that they provide a barrier comparable to physics. There is clearly a secular trend towards rising debt, but I think you’re overestimating it; this IMF graph of global debt-to-gdp only grows at 1%/year from 2000-2018.
I feel like the majority of people I know don’t really have personal finance growth as their primary objective in life, and I don’t see how our society does either—it’s almost an accident of economics at this point.
I hope that virtualisation and renewable power means we can happily all bring on the great stagnation!
Hi !
Thanks for the answer, sorry I didn’t reply earlier. I started working on another project for EA France, aiming to identify impactful charities working in France, so I had much less time to spend on the topic of energy depletion. I didn’t want to do a rushed answer, but didn’t find the time to dig into the topic once again… you know how it goes.
So instead, I’ll just publish an update on my thinking on the topic (while keeping in minf that I have found several important articles that I have to read).
So far, I’ve updated more positively on renewables—their improvement is indeed faster than just about anyone had anticipated (which makes papers obsolete as soon as they’re a few years old, and therefore makes it very difficult to get properly informed on the subject).
Several articles I’ve read have indeed made me update on them. There were several elements where I had underestimated adaptability. The EROI of renewables is indeed correct.
I have a higher probability of an energy transition “from the top”, where we maintain energy growth (which isn’t necessarily good news, given that the more energy we have, the greater our capacity to destroy our environment and generate existential risks).
Your link about the Twitter thread exposing the limits to the GTK report was indeed interesting. I also found an article here that showed several other limits.
I’m talking less and less about a 2050 timeframe (which is what most of the litterature talks about). However, I’m more worried about what short-term disruptions could imply.
Indeed, my worries are more about the fact that limits on fossil fuels are probably short-term : and that time constraints could prove significant. Going from a system where almost all trucks, or cement making, or steel making, or fertilizers, or hydrogen, or plastics (etc.) are dependent on fossil fuels, to a system where >50% of these are not fossil… this is going to take time, and I’m worried about what would happen during this time.
Same goes for storage : batteries are improving… but it seems that we’re a long way from the deployment speed required for seasonal storage in order to have a stabilized grid.
As a French Energy expert stated (prominent member of EDF) :
It’s the “chaos” scenario that worries me.
It seems pretty clear to me that growth is the main goal of our society—and that it stopping would have far reaching consequences. As I said, a society where everyone’s share of the pie is growing is very different than one where everybody is competing to secure access to declining resources—the degree of trust is not the same. Especially when some wealthy people in society have the ability to agregate more and more resources, as is currently happening.
The importance of financial growth is exemplified by the fact that “degrowthers” have besically no traction on a political level, despite clear evidence on their side of a strong correlation between environmental impact and growth.
The more I look at it, the more the global economy appears to be working like a Ponzi scheme—requring an ever growing amount of capital and energy and resources to keep everyone’s trust in the fact that everyone’s investments will be paid out later. At some point, it has to stop. The question is : how do you end a Ponzi scheme in a smooth way?
Still, the future is full of weird stuff, so we’ll see. I’ve had less time to keep an eye on these subjects recently—I’ve got several interesting papers to look at (and I’ll check your point on minerals and debt). I’ll update then.