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Putting The Real Story Of Energy & The Economy Together
Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
What is the real story of energy and the economy? We hear two predominant energy stories. One is the story economists tell: The economy can grow forever; energy shortages will have no impact on the economy. We can simply substitute other forms of energy, or do without.
Another version of the energy and the economy story is the view of many who believe in the “Peak Oil” theory. According to this view, oil supply can decrease with only a minor impact on the economy. The economy will continue along as before, except with higher prices. These higher prices encourage the production of alternatives, such wind and solar. At this point, it is not just peak oilers who endorse this view, but many others as well.
In my view, the real story of energy and the economy is much less favorable than either of these views. It is a story of oil limits that will make themselves known as financial limits, quite possibly in the near term—perhaps in as little time as a few months or years. Our underlying problem is diminishing returns—it takes more and more effort (hours of workers’ time and quantities of resources), to produce essentially the same goods and services.
We don’t measure our investment results with respect to the quantity of end product produced (barrels of oil produced, liters of fresh water produced, kilos of copper produced, or number of workers provided with sufficient education to work in high tech industries), so we don’t realize that we are becoming increasingly inefficient at producing desired end products. See my post “How increased inefficiency explains falling oil prices.”
Figure 1. The way we would expect the cost of the extraction of energy supplies to rise, as finite supplies deplete.
Wages, viewed in terms of the product produced–oil in this case–can be expected to decrease as well. This change isn’t evident in usual efficiency statistics, because some of the workers are providing new kinds of services, such as fracking services, that weren’t required before.
Figure 2. Wages per worker in units of oil produced, corresponding to amounts shown in Figure 1.
Even investment is becoming increasingly inefficient. It takes more and more investment to extract a given quantity of oil or other energy product. This investment needs to stay in place longer as well. The ultra-low interest rates we have been experiencing reflect the poor returns investments are now making.
The myth exists that prices of all of the scarce goods and services will rise high and higher, as the economy encounters scarcity. The real story, though, is that the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of common workers is falling lower and lower, especially in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Not only can these workers afford to buy less, but they can also afford to borrow less. This means that their ability to purchase expensive goods created from commodities is falling.
At some point, this lack of purchasing power can be expected to affect the financial markets, and the prices of many commodities can be expected to fall. In fact, this already seems to be happening.
The likely impact of such a fall in commodity prices is not good. If low oil prices cannot be “turned around,” they will lead to debt defaults, and these debt defaults are likely to lead to failing financial institutions. Failing financial institutions have the potential to bring down the system, because it becomes very difficult for businesses to continue if they are not supported by a banking system that allows a company to pay its employees. Workers also need the banking system to pay for goods and to save for a “rainy day.”
A big part of what has allowed the economy to grow to the size it is today is increasing debt levels. These rising debt levels play many roles:
- They make high-priced goods more affordable to consumers.
- They create greater demand for goods, allowing more end-product goods to be produced.
- They create more demand for commodities required to make end-product goods, allowing the price of these commodities to rise, so that more businesses have more incentive to create/extract these commodities.
At some point, debt levels stop rising as fast as they have in the past (because of a lack of growth in purchasing power because of diminishing returns in investment), and the whole system tends to fall toward collapse. We seem to have reached this point in the middle of 2014. China was raising its total debt level rapidly up until the early part of 2014, then suddenly moderated its growth in debt level in mid 2014. At about the same time, the US scaled back and eliminated it program of quantitative easing (QE). Oil prices dropped starting in mid-2014, at the time debt levels started moderating. Other commodity prices started falling as early as 2011, indicating likely affordability problems.
We are now in the period when many people still believe everything is going well. Oil prices and other commodity prices are low—what is “not to like”? The answer is that the system in not at all sustainable—profits of oil companies and other commodity businesses are down, just as wages of common workers in developed countries are down in inflation-adjusted terms. Companies are cutting back in investment in oil production. Soon oil production will drop. With lower oil supply, the economy will face huge challenges.
Many people believe that oil prices can bounce back up again, but this really isn’t the case, because of growing inefficiency related to limits we are reaching–the need to use more advanced techniques to produce oil; the need for desalination for water in some places; the need for more pollution control equipment that doesn’t really increase the finished goods and services we are producing but instead makes goods more expensive to produce.
Each worker is, on average, producing less and less of the finished goods we really need. Whether we like it or not, standards of living will have to fall. The amount of debt workers can afford decreases rather than increases. This new reality can be expected to manifest itself in debt defaults and increasing financial system problems.
Even if oil prices bounce back up again, it is doubtful that shale oil drillers will be able to again borrow at a sufficiently high rate to increase their production again—what lender will believe that oil prices will remain high indefinitely?
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Thanks obama
Speaking about oil, the latest of a series of booms and busts, many attribute the boom and bust cycle to the feds actions, but this doesn’t drill down nearly far enough. To find the solution we need to find the root cause of these busts. The feds reaction is merely a symptom.
Obama's got nothing to do with it, other than nixing the Keystone Pipeline which was a bone thrown to his pal Warren Buffet whose trains haul all that dirty tar sand oil around along with the more volitile shale oil that keeps blowing up when said trains derail.
Plus the Keystone Pipeline would have help Canadians more than us. It would have helped them more easily ship that sludge from The Great White North to us for further refining.
Obama is a sock puppet with somebody else's hand up his ass. Just like Bush, just like Clinton, just like Reagon...etc...etc.
Just like Jeb Rodham Rubio Mallory will be.
I'm not buying what Gail is selling, I think she went off her rocker.
What exactly is the product she is selling that you are not buying?
She's not "selling" anything,
just pointing out the complete fallacy that our "economy" has become.
It’s a metaphor meaning I don't think her analysis is correct. I listened to an interview with Chirs Martenson, someone who I think has it right on oil, and it sounded like he was talking to his grandmother who wanted to mail her cat across the country. He was polite and listened to what she was saying but I got this feeling he didn't think she was right or frankly all there. Oh I guess I better not say 'all there' or you might think I'm being literal. If got the feeling he didn't think she was completely in control of here mental faculties.
I'll try not to use metaphor's you don't understand but that might be tough.
great wars will be fought with increasing intensity over oil. this is in play. the oil fuels the war machine like vegas needs water. do not live near oil and strive for efficiency of any oil use is all we can do. enjoy the benifits of oil til it all changes to the biggest club standing next to the keg, ha...
Two guys trying to make a real difference in the world's energy predicament.
Do we sit and watch, or shall we join them?
http://stanmeyerreplications.net/
Smells like horse shit.
I can build a 'water car' too. Little tank of sodium borohydride hidden away somewhere, with a secure way of excluding air while dripping water in, and piping the hydrogen out. Some sort of motor that runs on hydrogen, either fuel-cell/electric or combustion.
It works just great until your magic is all converted to borate. You'd be surprised how long such a gadget can go before it needs replacement tank of its secret ingredient.
http://www.google.com/patents/US5149407
http://www.google.com/patents/US4936961
These guys are just replicating what is in the Stan Meyer patents. Since the patents expired in 2008, anyone can build and sell devices based on these patents. It really does work. Anyone can run their car, truck, semi, cat-gen, etc on water. Stanley Meyer 1997 Denver Mariot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhxY_0tq16s Stanley Meyer and his brother on how the water fuel injection system works. (NEW RELEASED) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXctY1K4wkoI have 25 years to go in the workplace on this small, mudball in space and the prospects are NOT pretty. If I can make it to old age with a job, a flushing shitter, three hots a day, and a warm cot, I think I am going to call that success. I might be crazy (a few million short of being eccentric), but I am NOT stupid.
Gail isn't a prophet (hint: she's an actuary - look that up) and no one can PREDICT the future per se, but we can look at data, how systems behave, and if done properly draw general conclusions as to where things are going with some accuracy. Gail writes great stuff and shares her insights (freely) without a clear angle to profit or benefit (sans self satisfaction and love of the work she does).
Or, perhaps more along your vernacular; fuck off.
Regards,
Cooter
My gosh, do you guys think Gail is your grandmother and you need to protect her. She sites the reason for lower wages as too much debt, well that is going to be rectified one way or another, inflation or debt default, it will not act as a drag on the economy forever.
Now on to her other premise. It is true that more labor and resources are being allocated to getting oil and other raw material to market, but other costs are coming down through automation and other technological advances. If allowed to work the free market will take human capital and other resources from say the manufacturing sector that no longer needs it due to automation and put it towards the energy sector. Gail assumes the free market will not reallocate effectively, but if allowed to work, it will!!! To allow that allocation I believe is necessary oil/energy prices MUST go up not down!
My original comment was meant to be a quip and I'm surprised I got so many down votes. How about this, listen to her interview on Peakprosperity and you tell me if she sounds 'all there'.
http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/91503/gail-tverberg-beginning-end-...
The economy must grow forever….not possible according to math.
At 2% continuous growth, in about 2500 years from now, we would be using a large galaxy’s worth of energy.
A must read for science nerds - Link.
Yep, that's pretty nerdy.
ZHrs are not good at maths.
It's Bush's fault.
Indeed, in fact if all countries consumed the way the developed world does now, then we would need 6 planets of resources.
Buffet is the ultimate insider pretending to be a representative of the common folk.
He should hang along with the banksters considering he is one.
A true wolf in sheep's clothing.
A true wolf in sheep's clothing within a human clothing. There, corrected for you.
This is just politics/business.
Want to know something interesting? There are two oil formations in the world that are NOT like all the others; the Orinoco belt in Venezuela and the Athabasca tar sands. While I am not a geologist (correct me if I am wrong - but please provide respectable sources) these formations were less about "organic matter capped by salt domes" and more about "subduction zones filling with organic material and cooking off the light stuff".
What is the difference? Economical reserves are orders of magnitude in size larger.
These two resources will become the focal point of future US hegemony, mark my words. The EROI isn't great, but they are just fucking BIG. CA is more or less family, but VZ is going to go down at some point and the US is going to be 100% percent involved and right up front to prop up whoever moves in afterwards. If the US can lock up those to resources, they will have the future oil markets by the nuts.
Want to learn something about oil that underscores my comment? Try either of these links (same stuff):
NOTE: ~1 hour documentary that is very well done
http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e44ydPIQGSc
Regards,
Cooter
Here we go with more of the Peak Oil nonsense. Imagine this, the Western Powers That Be have suppressid information that might make a real difference to the world's energy supply. Possible?
It's called Abiotic Oil, and it is the geological science that Russia followed to become the world's number one producer. You don't get to be number one with bogus science. They quit trying to convince the rest of the world years ago.
"The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth , called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude."
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___R...
I find the theory on abiotic oil interesting and certainly possible, but I don't know that for a fact and neither do you. Taking the fact that Russia is a major oil producer certainly doesn't prove anything on the theory either. They are the country with the largest land mass and as such they have a huge amount of natural resources, including oil.
Let's take a look at the at the next 4 largest countries
2nd largest country by land area Canada #5 oil producer in the world.
3rd largest country by land area China #4 oil producer in the world.
4th largest country by land area US #3 oil producer in the world.
5th largest country by land area Brazil #12 oil producer in the world.
Of course there are other factors, but it’s pretty clear having more land mass thus more possibility of oil deposits makes it pretty likely that you will be a major oil producer. Russia being more than 70% larger than the next largest country would naturally have a huge advantage in possible oil deposits based on its size alone, not based on its amazing scientific abilities. I’m not arguing that the theory an abiotic oil is wrong, land mass would certainly help no matter how the oil is produced, just that there is another very easy explanation, if Luxemburg all of a sudden became a major oil producer then you would have my attention. Russia being a major oil producer is no surprise. Heck considering their size I would expect them to be producing more!
Where do you think climate change fits into all this?
Whether we have infinite oil or not, it matters little. We quite lierally, have a gigantic storm on our hands.
Climate Change fits into your Colostomy bag. It's nothing but S H I T.
Oh yeah? Prove it. You cant just call it 'shit' and hope that it doesn't exist.
If by abiotic one means abiogenic then I think RUBBISH which I believe is a scientific term.
If by abiotic one means that oraganic based petroleum is still being cooked in the earth's crust then, yeah, most likley. I am more doubful that said process feeds the super giant and giant oil fields that are being depleted today and so, the thinking goes, will last forever. But it needs a bit more GEOLOGIC time-frame "time" to become soup and it's possible that our species may not be around to extract it.
As Rockman, late of The Oil Drum (R.I.P. The Oil Drum) , and now of PeakOil and elsewhere is fond of saying (I'll paraphrase my undestanding), "technology has never made it so easy to find oil, but the technology is not always there to make it economically feasible to get at it (e.g. deep water, deep earth)". And, I'll add, certainly not envrionmentally friendly or low risk.
It may or may not have been Gail on The Oil Drum who said, in our lifetime and beyond there will always be oil to be bought. It's just that many if not most of us may not be able to afford to pay for it regardless of its cost per barrel, gallon, liter, etc.
Pete
Well, we know that abiogenic hydrocarbons exist on Titan, for example. So there's that.
The oil we know about here is all biogenic though. The ratio of even/odd length of carbon chains is a pretty good indication. And RIP, The Oil Drum. That site was a thorough education for me.
Of course, when it comes to replenishment, you'd think the biogenic type of oil would be good news. Every time a patch of green slime algae dies, you have the makings of more oil. If it were merely a component of the planet, it wouldn't ever be renewed.
Problem is, we are burning like 400 years' worth of dead algae every day, or whatever the ratio is.
You are correct on how huge the Venezeulan and Canadian oil sand reserves are, but you are 100% wrong on the Ven. reserves going to be 100% US owned: the Chinese have locked up those reserves from venezeula years ago.
"Speaking about oil... The feds reaction is merely a symptom."
The solution is derived from the Root Cause: A CB Ponzi, with each boom-bust cycle geared to extract hard-earned cash from entrepreneurs, builders and savers ('weak hands'), and move it into those of the Oligarchs ('strong hands').
"All the world's a stage, and... we all play our parts" comes to mind. The Fed is playing its part in this wealth-creation and wealth-transfer scheme.
I think, I can never earn over which I paid by my precedent employer, but I was wrong, world is so large to try their fate.but now I am making $92/hr even more, can easily minimum $1700/week, on the experience everyone must try to do work online, easy way to earn, here's an example what I do... www.globe-report.com
Video of Chilli Sauce Chillin' while working online, courtesy of the NSA fusion center in Utah.
THis is what is REALLY cummin' from glob-repuke.com
So sick of this user's shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfPDmkswoR4
internet tough guy fights for years as to whether peak oil or peak demand are the stronger market forces... looks like we have our answer, peak demand ftw
Got to give him credit for doing it alone.
what has human energy got to do with
the concept of "work"? oh my.
You all have no idea of what happened during the Enron fiasco
I still think the oil price will be smashed and catapulted.
Maybe that's why they are shutting down coal plants. A few years from now you'll hear "The economy is doing so well that powerplants aren't able to keep up with power demands".
THE END OF CHEAP OIL Global production of conventional oil will begin to decline sooner than most people think, probably within 10 years
Feb 14, 1998 |By Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrre http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-end-of-cheap-oil/
HOW HIGH OIL PRICES WILL PERMANENTLY CAP ECONOMIC GROWTH For most of the last century, cheap oil powered global economic growth. But in the last decade, the price of oil has quadrupled, and that shift will permanently shackle the growth potential of the world’s economies. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-23/how-high-oil-prices-will-permanently-cap-economic-growth
HIGH PRICED OIL DESTROYS GROWTH
According to the OECD Economics Department and the International Monetary Fund Research Department, a sustained $10 per barrel increase in oil prices from $25 to $35 would result in the OECD as a whole losing 0.4% of GDP in the first and second years of higher prices. http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/high_oil04sum.pdf
BUT WE NEED HIGH OIL PRICES: The marginal cost of the 50 largest oil and gas producers globally increased to US$92/bbl in 2011, an increase of 11% y-o-y and in-line with historical average CAGR growth. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/05/02/983171/marginal-oil-production-costs-are-heading-towards-100barrel/
Steven Kopits from Douglas-Westwood said the productivity of new capital spending has fallen by a factor of five since 2000. “The vast majority of public oil and gas companies require oil prices of over $100 to achieve positive free cash flow under current capex and dividend programmes. Nearly half of the industry needs more than $120,” he said http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11024845/Oil-and-gas-company-debt-soars-to-danger-levels-to-cover-shortfall-in-cash.html
THE PERFECT STORM (see p. 59 onwards)
The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
A downloadable pdf version of the original "the end of cheap oil" article :
http://tribune-pic-petrolier.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/campbell-lah...
And you can still sign a related "tribune/call to candidates" :
http://tribune-pic-petrolier.org/mobilizing-society-in-the-face-of-peak-...
Our planet is getting better in regards green techlogy . We hope is not too late. Many companies and countries are gong green. Electric cars are close to be perfect and gas soon will be history. http://www.hometaurus.com
of course this is what you get from a real estate agent LOL
Nicely done Gail - I am always impressed by a sound holistic argument.
The reality is that in today's world, once you strip away all of the statistical deceptions, the global economy is essentially at 0 growth, and this is why interest rates, which are a global measure of the future value of money (when balanced against the relative expected performance of currencies) are at essentially zero percent. If at a macro level there is no true growth, then the future value of money is the same as today; hence there is no premium to having money sooner, and thus a 0 percent interest rate. It just so happens that, in our desperate attempts to create growth where none exists,we will typically mortgage future generations by throwing good money after bad, and thus max out our global credit card before succumbing to the inevitable, but I propose that maximized debt, and its resulting unsustainable interest carrying charges, only sped up the time at which we had to adopt a 0 percent interest rate; there never was a choice once we entered a 0 growth world. And the reason why we are there is well argumented in this article; our growth since the dawn of civilization has always been linked to our increasing ability to control energy, as opposed to expending personal energy. And when those economics become constrained through EROEI reductions, we find ourselves first reverting to a growth equilibrium, and subsequently, depending on the energy availability decay curve, may well find that negative global growth is in our future. The true Malthusian limit is not a hard stop, but a gradual descent driven by increasingly expensive energy economics.
As a corollary to this; we have finally uncovered that which many religions have, for centuries, told us to be true; ie: that usury is not a good thing, because if you start down that road, then building debt will eventually bring you back to the point where usury is again not appropriate (ie:unsustainable), except that if you had refrained from usury in the first place you would have been free, while in the second case, you have the same result, except that you are now a debt slave with no pardon short of a complete revolution, which ends poorly for pretty much anyone in the two or so generations invoking the change, not to mention the third generation of children growing up amongst the embers of your once naively proud civilization. And while throughout history this has happened many times before, this is the first time we are trying this with nuclear weapons (and Neocons ready to play with them). I'm quite concerned that we may not have the wisdom to sort this one out (I wonder if this cycle is fundamental to the nature of life, and if so, perhaps this is why it is so hard to find intelligent life in the near universe ... just a ponder here)
Schacht Mat +1000
The end game is nukes and those willing to use them. There is a reason we have not taken out Iran's nuclear program, it will take nukes to destroy the program. Sooner or later they are going to use them and all bets will be off.
We are predators in nature for a reason and that will never change and resources mean survival.
Riddle me these Batman
After Texas-based Schlumberger Buys Into Russian Oil Firm……It Lays Off 20k People
Putin Gives ‘Order of Friendship’ Award to Rosneft Norwegian Partners….Gratitude to Haliburton, ExxonMobil, Schlumberger
ExxonMobil Boosts Drilling Rights in Russia Giving It More Holdings There Than in U.S.
Russian Investment Board of Milhail Fridman Filled With Western Elites
Newsweek – What Sanctions Russia’s Economy Growing Again
Energy Stocks Reveal Sanctions on Russia Meaningless – Investorplace
NY Law Firm Chadbourne & Parke Expand Moscow Office to Support Energy Sector
Energy Company’s Consolidate…….Oil Price Cut Working
Why do so many Russian tycoons/oiligarchs have non-Russian sounding names? "Miller", "Fridman"... WTF?
Are these the guys who were so well-positioned after the collapse of the USSR, to swoop in an 'buy' the former national assets for peanuts, with money they did not have? Or was it with Western money, i.e. from the Redshield clan?
Can we please stop talking about 'green technology'
Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren't guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or "technology" of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
The theories put forth in the article would have been true before fiat or even in the '80's and 90's. Now the markets are completly controlled by high tech and digital finance. For now at least the laws of demand and supply etc. are suspended.
Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World
Why am I not surprised to hear yet another unhinged simplistic exponential-model end-of-the-world doomer fable from that source?
Which are of course characteristically always accompanied with a total lack of solution to their imagined endless sore-arse whining about how bad we're really screwed 'n stuff.
Other than that it's really, really important info! :D
Yeah ... sure Gail.
For every problem there is a solution.
The solution is never ideal and it can lead to civilizational tipping points.
It could lead to world depopulation to reverse the trend of last 250 years when energy consumption per capita exploded thanks to fossils (coal-oil-gas) and the resurgence of human activity all based on cheap energy occurred in Western world (our currrent first world Trilateral construct).
But Gail has a point : if fossil is limited then human activity (the asymptote she refers to gets lowered per capita) which means either the denominator decreases or the numerator will have to increase; aka we find unlimited new source of energy from electromagnetic sources (sun's rays) and we learn how to store and transmit it to replace fossil; OR we decline in population as our human output on current fossil resources is unsustainable --whatever monetary means we use to prime the innovative pump we are stuck if energy stays bottleneck.
But..if a new energy revolution occurs its a whole new ball game!
That transition and Moore's law application to it should make renewable grid price come down lower than fossil is today (or the intermediate step of toxic nuclear power we currently use).
So either human population will decrease (the likely scenario in 21st century like the 14 th previously) or else we find cheap solar to replace our cheap fossil age that started 250 years ago.
Whats 250 years on the geological scale?
Huge for a human life span, small for the Sphinx and what it represents...
I guess thats what Gail is really saying; except she is too timid or too cautious to profer the visionary argument of Prometheus's sons refinding fire made from solar to re-ignite human endeavour!
Cheers ! And lets see that solar revolution occur 'cos we are damned to diminish as a race if it doesn't!
You may need to stop the earth spinning to get the full benefits of solar energy 24/7 though.
Alternatively the problems are imaginary, as is the fear of them, and the imaginary hopelessness of imagined non-solutions.
It still amazes me to find that 99% of humanity is so afraid of every damned thing they're told to be afraid of or are induced to imagine, or simply make up. Humanity is only doomed and damned to misery by its own self-defeating mind and unfortunately Gail has nothing but a bed of verbal misery nails, of a pretend neo-prophet for non-comfort.
A grid allows you to import from countries with a time difference.
And in the next thirty years the storage of light energy will be a major challenge.
falak, I'm surprised at you, I would have supposed you were aware of transmission line losses via resistance heating leading to uneconomic transmission across large countries, let alone across continents, or across oceans. The number of electrons falls and the cost of meeting the demand rises non-linearly with radial distance to the consumer.
The light energy storage will not be as photons, given a photon can pass right through earth with a few path changes between atom interactions.
they are using DC current transmission and photonic storage is not the route.
I referred to the electron transmission loses in the cables, not the ~30% DC to AC loss in a transformer from a DC solar panel.
AC or DC transmission is quite irrelevant on the resistance properties and the losses to resistance in a transmission line metal conductor.
My point stands.
Global transmission is not a viable technical option. If it were it would already be used for that purpose to cover diurnal coal and U generation cycles more efficiently.
It also ignores the exorbitant uneconomic costs of either towered, buried or submarine transmission lines. One of the major costs of establishing an maintaining supply.
All of this was thrashed out over a century ago, and little has changed since. Without cheap room-temp superconductors it won't.
This is why I regard superconductors as the #1 break-through tech that would be a total game-changer for humanity, on every level, and even for space flight, and I would not hesitate to invest trillions into the attempt to develop them, because if you succeed ... holy crap ... we will be all over this solar system in about 100 years time.
Not bad for a glorified monkey.
Room temp superconductivity will some day become a reality. Resistive losses will then be reduced drastically.
Agree on too cautious, because if you read her: "Failing financial institutions have the potential to bring down the system, because it becomes very difficult for businesses to continue if they are not supported banking system that allows a company to pay its employees. Workers also need the banking system to pay for goods and to save for a 'rainy day.' "
I see only fear and no solution but we are always capable of finding ways.
Just only a few find and walk the new path.
What an appallingly miserable creature Homo-Doomer is. For goodness sake, if you're going extinct would you please mercifully hurry the hell up, with less whining! No one cares and the planet and wider cosmos promise to not give a stuff if you go away permanently.
Thank you in advance.
Its is not about fundamentals. It is about financialization and since a few people determine the price of things and what will be done it is up to those few people as to what happens. They own the western world and it is up to them as to what the western world does. You have to arrest them and redistribute their stolen wealth and then you can use reason to predict the future. Until then you might try to get to know them well enough to ask them what is going to happen.
Ah, I saw that once, in Robin Hood.
Peak Everything, bitches.
Two guys trying to make a real difference in the world's energy predicament.
Do we sit and watch, or shall we join them?
http://stanmeyerreplications.net/
Thorium, bitchez.
And space-based solar.