I’ve been quite stressed, for reasons other than lack of materials! How about you?
I’m not particularly impressed by the podcast. It seems to lack any imagination in working out how to decarbonise the construction of renewable energy itself, which is not generally regarded as a fundamental problem (as opposed to being slightly expensive to transition).
Exponential energy consumption increase cannot be delivered for long, by any means. But renewable power can easily sustain a doubling of current power consumption.
We have a diesel crunch at the moment in Europe, meaning we are eating into our stockpiles, however all countries still have more than 61 days of consumption or import stockpiled, so considerably more than a week! Some states are less than the 90 days of imports required though. We would see factories shut down due to cost long before we started killing off food transport, so in practice this would last longer.
Agree that the rollout of electric vehicles will be expensive and will take time. But I hope that we will also reduce the number of cars required by carsharing, which autonomous vehicles makes easier. As we transition to renewable power, the prices of fossil fuels stabilises as demand is reduced. This makes greening harder, but diffuses the problem you foresee with food distribution.
5Tb an hour of data doesn’t seem like that much, particularly after Moore’s law kicks in!
A fully renewable grid well realistically require some fossil backup for the next few decades while we get hydrogen sorted. However there price of this should also stabilise, as above.
I guess I’m unclear what the lifeboats you suggest are. I agree that on the margin more people should stockpile food, and possibly more in general. I don’t know that it’s true that stockpiling, say, copper or lithium is likely to be a wise investment: probably the market is already aware of the needs for these in the future, and to make an appreciable price signal to mine more would be very expensive. There are government stockpiles of quite a few things in developed nations; while developing nations should also stockpile more I am an ideal world, it’s not clear how high a priority that is compared to tackling current, definite problems.
Ah, sorry to hear you’ve been stressed. The FTX debacle doesn’t arrange things (I myself have a 6-months in indefinite hold because of that).
I’m not particularly impressed by the podcast. It seems to lack any imagination in working out how to decarbonise the construction of renewable energy itself, which is not generally regarded as a fundamental problem (as opposed to being slightly expensive to transition).
I’m kind of disappointed that you handwave all the information in this podcast with a “lack of imagination”.
I feel a bit like if I’d been told “don’t worry, everything will sort itself out”. Well, what if it doesn’t ? I’m not asking for a scenario in which everything turns to be fine because this or this technology exists. I know it’s a possibility. I’m wondering if things will really turn out that way.
I read the book Life after fossil fuels and it felt to me that she really tried to take a look at the solutions proposed, in more depth than almost anyone I’ve seen. Anything you can think of is probably on her website Energy skeptic, but it’s more of a mess (and of course, pessimistic, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise).
But even if we somehow find a solution to replace almost all our fossil-based industrial system by something powered by intermittent electricity (the biggest ‘if’ in any sentence), I am still worrying over several points :
Time constraints
It would take time to do research and put into place these solutions. Replacing all of our industrial system that took many decades to build would take loads of time.
Renewables, so far, can replace electricity production. But if needs more complex supply chains to go beyond that (batteries, which needs mines that take time to be opened).
Right now less than 1% of truck transportation, ship transportation, cement making, steel making, most metal smelting, fertilizer production, mineral extraction, is made using electricity (and I’m not even talking about renewable electricity)
This means that until, say, 70% of the infrastructure switches to being powered by renewables, increases in oil, gas and coal prices (or at least decreases in availability) will have a huge impact on the affordability on the tranport of almost all commodities (leading to increase in prices in many place), and on food production.
Question 1 : How long do you think it will take to do the switch from <1% to 70% renewable, for these infrastructure I talked about ?
Question 2: In the meantime, wouldn’t these constraints risk putting a limit on economic growth for quite an extended period ?
About your other points:
We can leave EROI out of the debate for now, I think, we do not have the same ways to use it so it complicates things (and the man in the tweets you referred to as well, since my main point is rather that a society needs a high EROI to maintain its complexity).
It sounds unlikely that the end system would provide services as cheap and in a volume as large as is currently done by using abundant and energy dense fossil fuels. Simply, a sustainable system would have more limits (constraints of land for plastic, less or no specialty metals, decliningore grades, storage that requires a lot of materials, water constrained by climate change). Won’t that impact economic growth ?
When I talk about lifeboats, I’m talking about the fact that, for instance, our current food system is extremely dependent on many inputs: a steady flow of oil, a working financial system, a steady flow of natural gas from fertilizers , a steady flow of phosphorus, a steady flow of water… Of course, I can assume that all of this can keep working perfectly fine in the future. But what happens if one of these fails? I’m not talking just about stockpiling (even though 60 days of diesel is a start). I’m thinking about finding ways to make the agricultural system less dependant on energy and the economic system—because we won’t be able to rehaul that in 61 days.
I’m sorry your situation has deteriorated from the FTX scandal, that must be very difficult. A lot of people have it much worse than me!
I don’t see this as an argument between “everything will turn out fine” and “things will end badly”, but “things will go badly for very specific reasons to do with materials accessibility” and “materials accessibility is not the limiting factor”. I consider something a lack of imagination where every aspect of the solution exists, but for cost reasons we don’t currently combine them in most supply chains. Entirely electrified car factories already exist https://www.hyundai.news/eu/articles/press-releases/gone-green-hyundais-first-factory-powered-by-100-percent-renewable-energy.html. I haven’t read Alice Friedmann’s book, but her website seems replete with the time-lacking EROI error that we discussed above, as well as an inability to see that our current production chain is not the only way we can go about manufacturing things (for instance, there are plenty of sulfur sources appart from oil, it’s just we currently exploit a byproduct of oil manufacture). I think I’m still waiting for historic examples where a material shortage has resulted in anything more than temporary economic slowdown and protests against corrupt regimes. The gilet jaunes protests are the closest I can think of, which hasn’t come close to civilisation-threatening. Maybe if there were a clearer pipeline from this to fascism.
Coal is a plentiful resource, and in the worst-case energy crunch, would be used as a substitute for oil and gas. We see some of this happening in electricity in Europe at the moment. You can make a near-kerosene product out of coal, which with some lubricating materials should be adaptable for diesel use in extremis https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/04/19/39349/clean-diesel-from-coal/. This would be environmentally devastating and somewhat expensive, but not really more civilisation-threatening than climate change in general. The general point, that models need to account for a huge range of ways we can substitute one material for another, is the fundamental weakness of this argument.
q1) There are an number of studies showing that replacing the a very large fraction of the grid with variable energy is achievable with current technology, some are summarised in this metastudy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00695-4. Notably all of these studies suggest a lower cost than the current wholesale cost of electricity in Europe! The pace at which this can be done is a normal subject for the IAMs that you so distrust, which at least in some models is done before 2050, though it’s very inconsistent—many scenarios aiming for 1.5C that never reach 70% electrification. They usually reach more than 70% renewable though, soon after 2040. I may have mislead you above with my focus on electrification; several areas of society are projected to remain liquid-based (if biofuel/hydrogen) for some time in a lot of IAMs, though I’m personally skeptical about this. I’ve plotted the fraction of energy from renewable sources and the fraction of energy use from electricity in the AR6 database of scenarios classified as C1 (low overshoot of 1.5C) below.
The question normally is whether society will accept the costs of bringing about change at the necessary speed, but since in your scenarios the cost of FFs is much higher than most IAMs assume, the answer is basically “yes, though not through free choice”. The fact that we restrict FF use because of lack of availability rather than a carbon tax shouldn’t make a big difference to the difficulty of decarbonising.
q2) Yes, I think a lower rate of growth is likely than in an ideal world without material/oil constraints. But it’s not clear that growth is negative, nor that slower growth, particularly in developed nations, is that bad. Would high resource costs trigger civilizational collapse? Even with higher fuel prices, the declining fraction of wealth spent on food has a ways to go before we reach anything comparable to, say, the 1950s, so I find it hard to see a mechanism for anything dramatic. While energy is used in making food, it’s not the dominant factor, and over long time periods we see the correlation between oil price and food price is not that strong https://ourworldindata.org/food-prices. Economically unfortunate, sure, but not an extinction risk.
Other than specific problems with lithium and copper, it’s not clear to me that we have a problem with total material lack, simply that we don’t recycle enough or make use of agricultural waste. More effort would go towards plastic recycling if the price point of oil were higher. Similarly there is a plentiful supply of plant-food minerals that are currently pumped from rocks to our faeces to the sea.
Backups to provide food in the event of a protracted energy crash is an interesting question. As above, I don’t expect anything like a 1:1 relation from the cost of energy, but in combination with climate variability and geopolitical factors it’s possible to envisage a real crunch on availability. I feel like the solutions are very dependent on how long we want to do this for and what fraction of the world needs to be sustained this way. But the discussion of various forms of permaculture and nutrient-recycling, while interesting, should probably be handled elsewhere (and by people who know more about it than I do). Generally, working on better recycling does seem like an under-utilised EA cause area that would solve a number of these problems, and is probably cheaper to begin sooner rather than later. I don’t think I need to agree with very many of your above points to agree with this as the process is energy-saving and also protects the environment/enables more agriculture by avoiding mining.
You may be glad to note that on several occasions when writing my responses I have had cause to exclaim “he’s less wrong than I thought!” I think this is all anyone can really ask for in an internet argument.
Since you are good at challenging my position, maybe you could find some mistakes that would help improve the post. I talk about substitution and coal and transition scenarios and and whether adaptation is possible.
“I consider something a lack of imagination where every aspect of the solution exists, but for cost reasons we don’t currently combine them in most supply chains.”
For me, the core issue is scale. Every individual aspect of the solution might exist, and can work in a small system, but does that mean it can scale up to what our industrial society requires? Or worse, to the ever-increasing requirements of economic growth?
There are other ways of manufacturing things, yes. But there are also constraints of time and investment: right now, for materials this is the main constraint, since a mine takes on average 16 years to go from exploration to production. Several organizations, like the World Bank, the IEA, the IMF, McKinsey and Company and Eurometaux have all issued reports warning of this growing problem.
″ Entirely electrified car factories already exist”
Ah, I had not seen that, good point. Plus, they seemed to have done a lot of efficiency.
Does the materials that are used in the factory (metals, plastics) have been produced with renewables as well ? I haven’t seen that info in the article.
“I think I’m still waiting for historic examples where a material shortage has resulted in anything more than temporary economic slowdown and protests against corrupt regimes. The gilet jaunes protests are the closest I can think of, which hasn’t come close to civilisation-threatening. Maybe if there were a clearer pipeline from this to fascism.”
It’s hard to pinpoint for historical examples at the global level, since a feature of our current civilization is interconnectedness. Every time a material shortage arised somewhere, it was possible to compensate with the production somewhere else (especially for oil). This means that in the last 70 years we haven’t really tested yet a situation where oil is lacking everywhere, over an extended period.
Still, there are some analysts asserting that oil depletion in Syria and Venezuela were a serious factor in the collapse of these states. Of course, the economy of these states was highly reliant on oil, so a peak had more of a local impact. But I suppose one could make the case that our global economy is also extremely dependent on oil and fossil fuels at large, given the tight relationship between energy and GDP, so the analogy would hold out.
As for a pipeline to fascism, it seems pretty straightforward: declining revenues, rising inequalities (as is happening right now as well), loss of trust in institutions, increasing polarization (boosted by mass media and social networks)…
A crucial factor would be rising food prices, especially, as you said, since geopolitcial factors and climate change would weigh in. The Our World in data article is interesting and shows there’s some margin—but it seems to leave out natural gas. Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN FAO, told Bloomberg TV that unaffordable fertilizer prices (due to soaring natural gas prices) could reduce global grain production by up to 40% in the next planting season.
“The fact that we restrict FF use because of lack of availability rather than a carbon tax shouldn’t make a big difference to the difficulty of decarbonising.”
Well, the big difference is that the transition should take place at a moment where the energy required to build and transport windmills and solar panels would be much more expensive, and the economic system would be in a crisis meaning a lot more volatility.
“Yes, I think a lower rate of growth is likely than in an ideal world without material/oil constraints.”
I wouldn’t think that our current focus on growth is “ideal”—since it doesn’t add much happiness beyond a certain threshold and goes hand in hand with environmental degradation. I definitely think that it’s possible to live well with less energy, especially in rich countries where, and that we should have aimed for a reasonable level of consumption. As you said, there’s some margin before getting to threatening food prices (then again, rich countries) - which is why I’m more worried by sudden interruptions there.
“But it’s not clear that growth is negative, nor that slower growth, particularly in developed nations, is that bad. Would high resource costs trigger civilizational collapse?”
This is the reason I’m worried: high resource costs would, in all likelihood, mean a decline in economic growth. However, our entire economic system depends on the economy growing, and I fear an unplanned degrowth can go pretty poorly.
Our complex economy is based on investment. The reason people invest is that they think that they will be getting more in the future, not less—and this requires growth. If the economy declines, why invest if there’s less trust that you’ll profit from that?
Debt is doubling every 7-8 years, while the economy doubles every 20-25 years. This is unsustainable, and at some point this will to a realization that a large part of our debt will not be repaid—especially if there is a recession. This will inevitably lead to a “correction”—the form of which is unsure. One scenario could be a “run on the bank”, which could by itself lead to a massive economic crisis, the bankruptcy of many actors, and big supply chain disruption.
Of course, there’s no guarantee things will end up this way, but it’s a possible pathway. The economy has gotten back from milder shocks, but the strength of future economic shocks is expected to get bigger and bigger in the future (especially if we add environmental damage ), so we can’t assume everything will sort itself out.
This would lead to questions for which there’s no clear answer (as said in Post 2). In the past, there was a feedback loop with more growth leading to more energy extraction leading to more growth: what happens if this goes into reverse? Will investment hold up for natural gas and oil extraction? If trust in the monetary system is lost, how will trade over countries take place? Will country with a monetary system? To pursue economic growth at all costs, won’t some nations resort to wars over resources ?
Another problem is that the amount of interest would keep growing in the economy. In practice, it acts as a wealth pump, allowing loaners to get a larger and larger share of the economy unless the economy is growing. In this case, this would drive inequality (and social unrest) to unprecedented levels.
Moreover, our shared objective, as a society, is growth—having more purchasing power. If this stops being the case, what can replace this shared objective? Nationalism? Promoting your in-group at the expense of others? A focus on the local network of people that live around you?
This is why I think the end of economic growth is a big deal: it changes everything. There are of course scenarios where things end up being ok (well, depends for who) but there’s no guarantee we’ll end up in these scenarios—especially since this would lead us into the realm of “unthought futures”, so different we have trouble imagining them.
“You may be glad to note that on several occasions when writing my responses I have had cause to exclaim “he’s less wrong than I thought!” I think this is all anyone can really ask for in an internet argument. ”
Glad you’re thinking this way! I also find the exchange very interesting, and it lead me to change my position on several points. This is how I can progress, and I should thank you for that.
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.
I’ve been quite stressed, for reasons other than lack of materials! How about you?
I’m not particularly impressed by the podcast. It seems to lack any imagination in working out how to decarbonise the construction of renewable energy itself, which is not generally regarded as a fundamental problem (as opposed to being slightly expensive to transition).
I encountered this twitter thread which I think explains better than I did why EROI isn’t that useful: https://mobile.twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1341730308060831744
Exponential energy consumption increase cannot be delivered for long, by any means. But renewable power can easily sustain a doubling of current power consumption.
We have a diesel crunch at the moment in Europe, meaning we are eating into our stockpiles, however all countries still have more than 61 days of consumption or import stockpiled, so considerably more than a week! Some states are less than the 90 days of imports required though. We would see factories shut down due to cost long before we started killing off food transport, so in practice this would last longer.
Agree that the rollout of electric vehicles will be expensive and will take time. But I hope that we will also reduce the number of cars required by carsharing, which autonomous vehicles makes easier. As we transition to renewable power, the prices of fossil fuels stabilises as demand is reduced. This makes greening harder, but diffuses the problem you foresee with food distribution.
5Tb an hour of data doesn’t seem like that much, particularly after Moore’s law kicks in! A fully renewable grid well realistically require some fossil backup for the next few decades while we get hydrogen sorted. However there price of this should also stabilise, as above.
I guess I’m unclear what the lifeboats you suggest are. I agree that on the margin more people should stockpile food, and possibly more in general. I don’t know that it’s true that stockpiling, say, copper or lithium is likely to be a wise investment: probably the market is already aware of the needs for these in the future, and to make an appreciable price signal to mine more would be very expensive. There are government stockpiles of quite a few things in developed nations; while developing nations should also stockpile more I am an ideal world, it’s not clear how high a priority that is compared to tackling current, definite problems.
Ah, sorry to hear you’ve been stressed. The FTX debacle doesn’t arrange things (I myself have a 6-months in indefinite hold because of that).
I’m kind of disappointed that you handwave all the information in this podcast with a “lack of imagination”.
I feel a bit like if I’d been told “don’t worry, everything will sort itself out”. Well, what if it doesn’t ? I’m not asking for a scenario in which everything turns to be fine because this or this technology exists. I know it’s a possibility. I’m wondering if things will really turn out that way.
I read the book Life after fossil fuels and it felt to me that she really tried to take a look at the solutions proposed, in more depth than almost anyone I’ve seen. Anything you can think of is probably on her website Energy skeptic, but it’s more of a mess (and of course, pessimistic, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise).
But even if we somehow find a solution to replace almost all our fossil-based industrial system by something powered by intermittent electricity (the biggest ‘if’ in any sentence), I am still worrying over several points :
Time constraints
It would take time to do research and put into place these solutions. Replacing all of our industrial system that took many decades to build would take loads of time.
Renewables, so far, can replace electricity production. But if needs more complex supply chains to go beyond that (batteries, which needs mines that take time to be opened).
Right now less than 1% of truck transportation, ship transportation, cement making, steel making, most metal smelting, fertilizer production, mineral extraction, is made using electricity (and I’m not even talking about renewable electricity)
This means that until, say, 70% of the infrastructure switches to being powered by renewables, increases in oil, gas and coal prices (or at least decreases in availability) will have a huge impact on the affordability on the tranport of almost all commodities (leading to increase in prices in many place), and on food production.
Question 1 : How long do you think it will take to do the switch from <1% to 70% renewable, for these infrastructure I talked about ?
Question 2: In the meantime, wouldn’t these constraints risk putting a limit on economic growth for quite an extended period ?
About your other points:
We can leave EROI out of the debate for now, I think, we do not have the same ways to use it so it complicates things (and the man in the tweets you referred to as well, since my main point is rather that a society needs a high EROI to maintain its complexity).
It sounds unlikely that the end system would provide services as cheap and in a volume as large as is currently done by using abundant and energy dense fossil fuels. Simply, a sustainable system would have more limits (constraints of land for plastic, less or no specialty metals, declining ore grades, storage that requires a lot of materials, water constrained by climate change). Won’t that impact economic growth ?
When I talk about lifeboats, I’m talking about the fact that, for instance, our current food system is extremely dependent on many inputs: a steady flow of oil, a working financial system, a steady flow of natural gas from fertilizers , a steady flow of phosphorus, a steady flow of water… Of course, I can assume that all of this can keep working perfectly fine in the future. But what happens if one of these fails? I’m not talking just about stockpiling (even though 60 days of diesel is a start). I’m thinking about finding ways to make the agricultural system less dependant on energy and the economic system—because we won’t be able to rehaul that in 61 days.
I’m sorry your situation has deteriorated from the FTX scandal, that must be very difficult. A lot of people have it much worse than me!
I don’t see this as an argument between “everything will turn out fine” and “things will end badly”, but “things will go badly for very specific reasons to do with materials accessibility” and “materials accessibility is not the limiting factor”. I consider something a lack of imagination where every aspect of the solution exists, but for cost reasons we don’t currently combine them in most supply chains. Entirely electrified car factories already exist https://www.hyundai.news/eu/articles/press-releases/gone-green-hyundais-first-factory-powered-by-100-percent-renewable-energy.html. I haven’t read Alice Friedmann’s book, but her website seems replete with the time-lacking EROI error that we discussed above, as well as an inability to see that our current production chain is not the only way we can go about manufacturing things (for instance, there are plenty of sulfur sources appart from oil, it’s just we currently exploit a byproduct of oil manufacture). I think I’m still waiting for historic examples where a material shortage has resulted in anything more than temporary economic slowdown and protests against corrupt regimes. The gilet jaunes protests are the closest I can think of, which hasn’t come close to civilisation-threatening. Maybe if there were a clearer pipeline from this to fascism.
Coal is a plentiful resource, and in the worst-case energy crunch, would be used as a substitute for oil and gas. We see some of this happening in electricity in Europe at the moment. You can make a near-kerosene product out of coal, which with some lubricating materials should be adaptable for diesel use in extremis https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/04/19/39349/clean-diesel-from-coal/. This would be environmentally devastating and somewhat expensive, but not really more civilisation-threatening than climate change in general. The general point, that models need to account for a huge range of ways we can substitute one material for another, is the fundamental weakness of this argument.
q1) There are an number of studies showing that replacing the a very large fraction of the grid with variable energy is achievable with current technology, some are summarised in this metastudy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00695-4. Notably all of these studies suggest a lower cost than the current wholesale cost of electricity in Europe! The pace at which this can be done is a normal subject for the IAMs that you so distrust, which at least in some models is done before 2050, though it’s very inconsistent—many scenarios aiming for 1.5C that never reach 70% electrification. They usually reach more than 70% renewable though, soon after 2040. I may have mislead you above with my focus on electrification; several areas of society are projected to remain liquid-based (if biofuel/hydrogen) for some time in a lot of IAMs, though I’m personally skeptical about this. I’ve plotted the fraction of energy from renewable sources and the fraction of energy use from electricity in the AR6 database of scenarios classified as C1 (low overshoot of 1.5C) below.
q2) Yes, I think a lower rate of growth is likely than in an ideal world without material/oil constraints. But it’s not clear that growth is negative, nor that slower growth, particularly in developed nations, is that bad. Would high resource costs trigger civilizational collapse? Even with higher fuel prices, the declining fraction of wealth spent on food has a ways to go before we reach anything comparable to, say, the 1950s, so I find it hard to see a mechanism for anything dramatic. While energy is used in making food, it’s not the dominant factor, and over long time periods we see the correlation between oil price and food price is not that strong https://ourworldindata.org/food-prices. Economically unfortunate, sure, but not an extinction risk.
Other than specific problems with lithium and copper, it’s not clear to me that we have a problem with total material lack, simply that we don’t recycle enough or make use of agricultural waste. More effort would go towards plastic recycling if the price point of oil were higher. Similarly there is a plentiful supply of plant-food minerals that are currently pumped from rocks to our faeces to the sea.
Backups to provide food in the event of a protracted energy crash is an interesting question. As above, I don’t expect anything like a 1:1 relation from the cost of energy, but in combination with climate variability and geopolitical factors it’s possible to envisage a real crunch on availability. I feel like the solutions are very dependent on how long we want to do this for and what fraction of the world needs to be sustained this way. But the discussion of various forms of permaculture and nutrient-recycling, while interesting, should probably be handled elsewhere (and by people who know more about it than I do). Generally, working on better recycling does seem like an under-utilised EA cause area that would solve a number of these problems, and is probably cheaper to begin sooner rather than later. I don’t think I need to agree with very many of your above points to agree with this as the process is energy-saving and also protects the environment/enables more agriculture by avoiding mining.
You may be glad to note that on several occasions when writing my responses I have had cause to exclaim “he’s less wrong than I thought!” I think this is all anyone can really ask for in an internet argument.
Hi !
It’s a period with a lot of uncertainties but don’t worry, I can manage. Many people have it worse, indeed, and are more in need of help.
I am working on a post (well, probably in several parts) that aims to address the usual counterpoints to the problem of energy depletion: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l-VI5gR-xGaUL95tvNgZ_BsXFB-aUQOtlug9zC-sn3M/edit#
Since you are good at challenging my position, maybe you could find some mistakes that would help improve the post. I talk about substitution and coal and transition scenarios and and whether adaptation is possible.
For me, the core issue is scale. Every individual aspect of the solution might exist, and can work in a small system, but does that mean it can scale up to what our industrial society requires? Or worse, to the ever-increasing requirements of economic growth?
There are other ways of manufacturing things, yes. But there are also constraints of time and investment: right now, for materials this is the main constraint, since a mine takes on average 16 years to go from exploration to production. Several organizations, like the World Bank, the IEA, the IMF, McKinsey and Company and Eurometaux have all issued reports warning of this growing problem.
Ah, I had not seen that, good point. Plus, they seemed to have done a lot of efficiency.
Does the materials that are used in the factory (metals, plastics) have been produced with renewables as well ? I haven’t seen that info in the article.
It’s hard to pinpoint for historical examples at the global level, since a feature of our current civilization is interconnectedness. Every time a material shortage arised somewhere, it was possible to compensate with the production somewhere else (especially for oil). This means that in the last 70 years we haven’t really tested yet a situation where oil is lacking everywhere, over an extended period.
Still, there are some analysts asserting that oil depletion in Syria and Venezuela were a serious factor in the collapse of these states. Of course, the economy of these states was highly reliant on oil, so a peak had more of a local impact. But I suppose one could make the case that our global economy is also extremely dependent on oil and fossil fuels at large, given the tight relationship between energy and GDP, so the analogy would hold out.
As for a pipeline to fascism, it seems pretty straightforward: declining revenues, rising inequalities (as is happening right now as well), loss of trust in institutions, increasing polarization (boosted by mass media and social networks)…
A crucial factor would be rising food prices, especially, as you said, since geopolitcial factors and climate change would weigh in. The Our World in data article is interesting and shows there’s some margin—but it seems to leave out natural gas. Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN FAO, told Bloomberg TV that unaffordable fertilizer prices (due to soaring natural gas prices) could reduce global grain production by up to 40% in the next planting season.
Well, the big difference is that the transition should take place at a moment where the energy required to build and transport windmills and solar panels would be much more expensive, and the economic system would be in a crisis meaning a lot more volatility.
I wouldn’t think that our current focus on growth is “ideal”—since it doesn’t add much happiness beyond a certain threshold and goes hand in hand with environmental degradation. I definitely think that it’s possible to live well with less energy, especially in rich countries where, and that we should have aimed for a reasonable level of consumption. As you said, there’s some margin before getting to threatening food prices (then again, rich countries) - which is why I’m more worried by sudden interruptions there.
This is the reason I’m worried: high resource costs would, in all likelihood, mean a decline in economic growth. However, our entire economic system depends on the economy growing, and I fear an unplanned degrowth can go pretty poorly.
Our complex economy is based on investment. The reason people invest is that they think that they will be getting more in the future, not less—and this requires growth. If the economy declines, why invest if there’s less trust that you’ll profit from that?
Debt is doubling every 7-8 years, while the economy doubles every 20-25 years. This is unsustainable, and at some point this will to a realization that a large part of our debt will not be repaid—especially if there is a recession. This will inevitably lead to a “correction”—the form of which is unsure. One scenario could be a “run on the bank”, which could by itself lead to a massive economic crisis, the bankruptcy of many actors, and big supply chain disruption.
Of course, there’s no guarantee things will end up this way, but it’s a possible pathway. The economy has gotten back from milder shocks, but the strength of future economic shocks is expected to get bigger and bigger in the future (especially if we add environmental damage ), so we can’t assume everything will sort itself out.
This would lead to questions for which there’s no clear answer (as said in Post 2). In the past, there was a feedback loop with more growth leading to more energy extraction leading to more growth: what happens if this goes into reverse? Will investment hold up for natural gas and oil extraction? If trust in the monetary system is lost, how will trade over countries take place? Will country with a monetary system? To pursue economic growth at all costs, won’t some nations resort to wars over resources ?
Another problem is that the amount of interest would keep growing in the economy. In practice, it acts as a wealth pump, allowing loaners to get a larger and larger share of the economy unless the economy is growing. In this case, this would drive inequality (and social unrest) to unprecedented levels.
Moreover, our shared objective, as a society, is growth—having more purchasing power. If this stops being the case, what can replace this shared objective? Nationalism? Promoting your in-group at the expense of others? A focus on the local network of people that live around you?
This is why I think the end of economic growth is a big deal: it changes everything. There are of course scenarios where things end up being ok (well, depends for who) but there’s no guarantee we’ll end up in these scenarios—especially since this would lead us into the realm of “unthought futures”, so different we have trouble imagining them.
Glad you’re thinking this way! I also find the exchange very interesting, and it lead me to change my position on several points. This is how I can progress, and I should thank you for that.
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.