This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Overview Of Our Energy Modeling Problem
Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
We live in a world with limits, yet our economy needs growth. How can we expect this scenario to play out? My view is that this problem will play out as a fairly near-term financial problem, with low oil prices leading to a fall in oil production. But not everyone comes to this conclusion. What were the views of early researchers? How do my views differ?
In my post today, I plan to discuss the first lecture I gave to a group of college students in Beijing.
A PDF of it can be found here: 1. Overview of Energy Modeling Problem. A MP4 video is available as well on my Presentations/Podcasts Page.
Many Limits in a Finite World
We live in a world with limits. These limits are not just energy limits; they come in many different forms:
All these limits work together. We can work around these limits, but the workarounds are higher cost–for example, substituting less polluting energy resources for more polluting energy resources, or extracting lower grade ores instead of high-grade ores. When lower grade ores are used, we need to process more waste material, raising costs because of greater energy use. When population rises, we must change our agricultural approaches to increase food production per acre cultivated.
The problem we reach with any of these workarounds is diminishing returns. We can keep increasing output, but doing so requires disproportionately more inputs of many kinds (including human labor, mineral resources, fresh water, and energy products) to produce the same quantity of output. This creates higher costs, and can lead to financial problems. This phenomenon is one of the major things that a model of a finite world should reflect.
Economists Views
Economists developed their views of the economy long ago, when limits seemed to be far in the distance. Thus, the models they built do not reflect the expected impact of limits. They are missing variables that would be needed to adjust for changes in the economy’s behavior as limits are reached.
The story in Slides 3 and 4 tends to be true if we are far from limits, but is it really true when we are close to limits? Perhaps diminishing returns as we approach limits changes the results.
World Oil Situation as We Approach Limits
Perhaps we can get some indication of how diminishing returns are affecting the economy by looking at historical oil supply and prices. Up until 1970, US oil production grew quite steadily.
After 1970, oil production suddenly began to decline. Oil companies did not expect such a decline; they assumed that oil production would rise endlessly. Once oil production began to decline, oil companies quickly began trying to find ways to fix their problems. One of these approaches was quickly to ramp up production in areas that they knew contained oil, but hadn’t previously been drilled. These included Alaska (northern United States), Mexico, and the North Sea. Oil production in these areas is now in decline.
Several ways were also found to reduce oil usage. These included change from oil to alternate fuels for electricity generation and home heating, and offering smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. With this combination of approaches, oil prices were brought down, most of the way to the $20 level (Slide 7).
The inflation adjusted level of oil prices is important because oil is the single largest source of energy use in both the US and world economy. If oil prices are cheap, it easy to grow food cheaply, and manufacturing and transport can be done cheaply. Because of this, the economy tends to grow. If oil prices rise, economic growth tends to slow, because the cost of many types of goods (including oil products, food, and building new homes) tends to rise faster than wages. It becomes more expensive to replace infrastructure such as roads and pipelines as well. The higher cost of oil effectively acts as a “tax” inhibiting economic growth.
Oil prices again reached a high level in the early 200os as we again began to reach limits of the amount of oil that could be extracted at the then-available price. This time we weren’t able to cut back on world demand, so prices tended to stay high. Instead, the big change made was in oil supply, with higher oil prices enabling (after a several years time-lag) greater production both from US oil from shale formations (called “tight oil” in Slide 6 above) and from the oil sands in Canada.
The question becomes: can the economy really function adequately on $100+ barrel oil? Or do the negative feedbacks from these high oil prices have too adverse an impact on economic growth?
Slide 8 shows more detail regarding production and prices for recent years. We see that oil prices were generally rising up until mid 2008, and then dropped steeply. Prices rose again after several types of economic stimulus were added. More government spending was added, interest rates were dropped to very low levels and a program called quantitative easing (QE) began.
Prices stayed at a level a little over $100 barrel from January 2011 though mid-2014. More recently, oil prices have dropped to a little more than half of their previous level. This decline in oil prices appears to correspond to a time when world debt is not rising as rapidly: the US stopped its QE program, and China’s debt no longer rising as rapidly. Thus, some of the economic stimulus that helped hold oil prices up is disappearing.
The problem we are now encountering is not the high price problem that economists thought would bring on more supply. Instead, we are encountering a problem with oil prices that are too low for oil producers to make a profit. Such low oil prices can quite possibly bring down world oil production, because investment in oil production is no longer profitable. A person might ask: Is the low price situation we saw in 2008 and are encountering again in 2014-2015 what diminishing returns really looks like? Is the problem we encounter as we reach limits one in which oil prices drop too low, rather than rise too high?
In 2008, huge stimulus efforts were required to bring oil prices were brought back up to the $100+ level. Perhaps one point raised by economists (Slide 3) was correct: Maybe there is a connection between economic growth and oil demand. Perhaps the issue as we reach limits is that world economic growth sinks too low, and it is because of this slow growth that wages stagnate, debt stops rising quickly, and oil (and other commodity) prices drop too low.
Now let’s look at what some early energy researchers have said.
M. King Hubbert
Many believers in Peak Oil theory consider M. King Hubbert to be the originator of their theory. It seems to me, though, that Peak Oilers have inadvertently picked up some of the economists’ theories, and mixed them with Hubbert’s theories.
It seems to me that the only way a Hubbert Curve might happen is if oil prices stay high, as we approach limits. That way, as much oil as possible can be extracted. If oil prices fall too low, then the decline may be much quicker. If low oil prices are a problem, above ground problems such as governments of oil exporting nations collapsing, or rising debt defaults leading to bank failures, may be a problem.
Dennis Meadows and Donella Meadows
Dennis Meadows led early computer modeling efforts at MIT regarding limits of a finite world. His wife, Donella Meadows, led the write-up effort regarding this model in a 1972 book called “Limits to Growth”. The model looked at physical quantities of resources, expected amounts of pollution, and expected population trends. The base model suggested that the world would start reaching limits in roughly the current timeframe.
In fact, more recent analyses suggest that the base model is more or less on track.
I don’t think that we can count directly on this analysis, however.
Charles Hall
Prof. Charles Hall has been one of the recent thought-leaders with respect to oil limits and how they might play out. He started work in the early 1970s as an ecologist, studying the energy patterns of fish. When he read about the possibility of energy shortages that might occur in the 1972 book Limits to Growth, he tried to adapt an approach used for studying energy patterns of fish to the world of energy production. The result was new way of measuring the efficiency of a particular energy product, called Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI).
This idea was an advance when it was first developed, but it has a number of practical difficulties. One of these difficulties is that its usefulness is tied to a particular view of how oil limits will affect us, namely that prices will rise, and this will allow a slow transition to alternative fuels that are less favorable in terms of EROEI. On Slide 21, this is Item (2).
At this point, it is my view that the EROEI approach to analyzing energy products can be misleading and needs updating. Energy extraction is much more complicated than the energy use of fish swimming upstream. The EROEI approach, besides being tied to the Peak Oil view of how limits will occur, is difficult to calculate. Different researchers get quite different answers, when analyzing the same energy product.
Furthermore, EROEI looks at a piece of energy costs (those involved with production at the well head), but how this piece relates to the total varies from one type of energy to another. It lumps together cheap energy and expensive energy. There are several other issues as well, with the result being that in practice, low EROEI doesn’t necessarily correspond to expensive to produce, and high EROEI doesn’t necessarily correspond to low cost to produce.
I should point out that the same problem exists with a wide range of similar metrics including Life Cycle Analysis, Energy Payback Period, and Net Energy. In practice, what seems to happen is that if an energy type is high-priced, the use of one of these metrics is used to justify its production, anyhow. Low EROEI (for example, of biofuels) does not seem to be a barrier to production, even though it was the hope of Prof. Hall and other EROEI researchers that this would be the case.
»
- 15472 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
People get upset when I say it but the only realistic outcome or solution is fewer people.
Not advocating it, just pointing out the obvious sad reality.
The left and greens can't decide who to cull. Fortunately for the rest of us they're self culling.
Harbanger, you drive a V8 don't you?
But really man, I mean like really.....so much bull frigging shit spewed about our energy problem in a world which is so damned obviously highly energy in-efficient what with Internal combustion engines and 13% eta to the wheels. Fractally true across th eboard, macro and micro-lly speaking.
This is all a massive justification attempt by the supply-side world as they watch their inherently flawed, anti-nature economic model crumble (or perhaps it is all by design, but the point remains).
JIT was the supply side's pinnacling achievement in mfg...then what? Ah yes, anarchy came, the 3D printer......but we digress...
How can a cube shaped (most common room shape globally) ever be energy efficient, it creats deaf and blind spots for air and light and heat .... and yet we all "dwell" in cubes....
In a fractal world, this is true then in every aspect of our lives, this round peg in square hole human conundrum.
Thinking this way has brought things into stark perspective for me at any rate...
Something interesting perhaps?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6F6olSbupc
Of course I drive a V8. How else am I supposed to work, by strapping 4 liberals to my plow? Maybe after the war. Fuck the progressives and their "we must destroy them in order to save them" narrative. I think they've done enough of saving us and the planet. Like I said, fortunately they're self destructive.
I like V8 too... and vodka... separately ;-)
Looney
Was this article written in 1920? Economic growth is no longer driven by oil, gas, steel, and other hard commodities it is driven by data, social media, on-line transactions, data mining, biotech, and semiconductors.
Things change whether people are willing or not. Pick just about anything in the real world and it can be either changed or improved but it requires hard work and time. Nodody wants to sweat and the average attention span is less than ten minutes. The correction is coming and population pressure is self-correcting...one way or another....
While u r Charles Vth son!
How did that end??
Spanish Inquisition : take no prisoners anywhere; in 80 years war at home or in Cortes's burn your boats land and then...well u know it.
How many Habsburg run the world, those who reigned like a massive military supremacy on all they saw in the name of Spanish main and the order of the Golden Fleece. And what happened to them after WW1 after having lost their empire? The same sad end that arrived to their counterparts the Ottomans.
Empires die 'cos they lie. V8 is an expression of that lie like "the sun never sets on our empire" song.
The left and greens can't decide who to cull.
wrong
It's an artificial selection world at this anthropocene moment. Ultimately, it's really up to women to decide who gets culled. The state (religion too...) can only exercise control over that up to a certain point.
Cunts are still ruling the world ; )
Shrink via attrition. Birth control, educated women, end tax breaks for kids, etc. Why does everyone jump straight to "culling"? Weak thinking.
It is very complex and almost impossible to have a rational public debate about it. Moreover, our political science is so outdated that it is a virtual impossibility that anything could be done at this time on a meaningful scale, as it would need to be universally accepted. Think the duality of Roe vs Wade, think the duality of "the commie" one-child policy vs "the free" democratic republic, or Harbanger-esque left/socialist/progressives/green vs. right/libertarian/conservative duality.
Number of children per woman is dropping in the more advanced nations but one western child will consume resources at a much greater level than one child from a less developed nation, and the later is demanding a higher standard of living...
Eventually, probably as this century draws to an end, becoming pregnant will be truly terrifying. People will stop being hypocritical and operate their own death controls instead of letting the state do it for them (via war) and pretend to hold the moral high ground.
People will "worm their way back to BAD DECISIONS" and hold those decision makers accountable...
This bullshit would end tomorrow if women in this world universally refused to have children today. A new social contract is required.
p.s. "cunts are still running the world" is a double entendre ; )
Why yes.
In the civilized world feminists consider abortion a moral duty---especially if the foetus is a white male who might turn men's rights advocate when he grows up.
Meanwhile in Africa nigger bitches are popping out litters of ten or more, and the pups are being encouraged to head to Europe as soon as they can walk. Spaying them would be racist, you see.
We don't have a pollution problem, we have a population probem.
We don't have a resources problem, we have a population problem.
We don't have a .... problem, we have a population problem.
Reminds me of the story about the Govt Post office that fixed the complaints about slow service by removing the clock on the wall. No clock, no problem.
Preventing the gross misallocation of resources by out of control governments and corporations, starting right now, would buy us a few hundred years......
Yes, ebworthen, after there is life, then that comes as a package deal with death, and the death controls necessarily direct the future of that life. The deeper problems with respect to human death controls were that those developed to be most successfully done through the maximum possible deceits and treacheries. Those who were the best at being dishonest and backing that up with violence became the biggest bullies that dominated the social systems, through applications of the methods of organized crime on larger and larger scales, while those biggest bullies were able to promote bullshit stories about what they were doing, by being able to control their opposition to operate within the same frame of reference as the biggest bullies' bullshit, which went around and around, operating the death control systems with the most social success by being the most deceitful and treacherous while doing that.
Following through that line of analysis leads to radically different conclusions regarding the taboo topics that we tend to regard the delayed death controls as becoming "the obvious sad reality." There are EXTREME PARADOXES that the only genuine resolutions to the real problems are to develop radically different ways of perceiving and operating the human death control systems.
Since the death controls backed up the debt controls, the political economy developed within the history of warfare, and so, economics is actually a subset of militarism, which therefore embraces the paradoxical ways that warfare is the oldest and best developed form of social science and engineering, whose successes were based on backing up deceits with destruction, while being as treacherous as possible.
Recall that the oldest book on The Art of War starts by saying "success in warfare depends upon deceits" and ends by saying that "spies are the most important soldiers." The rest of the traditions of understanding warfare, e.g., such as Machiavelli and Clausewitz, have elaborated upon those fundamental points. Indeed, as Russian General Alexander Vladimirov has summarized it: "All human history can be portrayed as the history of deception."
I know from reading lots of other material from Gail Tverberg, that she tends to presume too much upon the use of Hanlon's Razor regarding the political economy, and therefore, she tends to believe that the problems are more due to incompetent stupidity, rather than due to malicious plans. Of course, that sort of presumption is quite common with respect to futurologists generally.
There is an overwhelming abundance of historical evidence (IF one is willing to look at it) that demonstrates our political economy is based on ENFORCED FRAUDS, which morphed from the history of warfare being based of destruction backing up deceits. The FACTS are that the production of destruction controls production. However, that kind of production of destruction was most successful when done through the maximum possible deceits. Hence, the political economy actually operates through there being a core of organized crime, surrounded by controlled opposition groups, both of which stay within the same basic bullshit frame of reference. Thus, the actual social situations are the governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals. However, the ways that those things work are that the biggest and best organized criminals deny what they are doing, while their controlled opposition deny that anyone should do that.
In general, a SUPERIOR "Overview Of Our Energy Modeling Problem" SHOULD include a modeling of the death control systems, or the ways that the production of destruction controls production. However, by and large, people like Gail Tverberg shy away from doing that. Rather, she is a typical representative of those who do NOT actually follow through on applying general energy system concepts to human beings and civilizations, because (IF one does that) it becomes clear that not only do civilizations operate according to the principles and methods of organized crime, but that they must necessarily do so!
Therefore, that is what is going to drive to actually happen what ebworthen stated, "the only realistic outcome or solution is fewer people." However, along the paths we are now on, whereby progress in physical science enables technologies to become trillions of times more powerful, and are headed towards becoming quadrillions (IF civilization could survive it contradiction that long), I would not be as optimistic as the chart featured above which predicts that as death rates radically increased, the birth rates would also increase. Rather, the runaway combination of progress in physical science, without progress in political science, is more likely to result in the human species committing collective suicide, or self-extinction, rather than developing better death control systems.
After "pointing out the obvious sad reality," I AM "advocating it," because, we are headed towards the established debt slavery systems, driving their numbers to become debt insanities, which will provoke death insanities. The most realistically probable futures are ones in which there are unprecedented manifestations of runaway death insanities. That is the realistic context in which it might become possible to develop different death control systems.
More and more energy is being pumped into social pyramid systems which were never designed nor adapted to deal with running into the planetary limits of their exponential growth, manifesting as seriously diminishing returns, that will force there to develop radically different human, industrial, and natural ecologies. How those manifest will depend upon the biggest unpredictable factors, which are future human behaviors. My basic theory is that natural selection was internalized as human intelligence. The human forms of artificial selection, enabled by the development of that kind of intelligence, which could build models of the world, within which were models of themselves, within their model of the world, were driven by natural selection pressures to address those abilities to the most significant selection pressures, which were other people doing the same things.
Hence, there developed the history of warfare, which emerged out of the basics that when one relatively SUBTRACTS human beings from their environment, then across those relatively defined boundaries those human beings necessarily behave as ROBBERS in their environment. Human beings always operated as organized lies operating robberies, due to the basic ways that human minds operated, as models of their world, with models of themselves within their models of their world.
Human beings and civilizations were necessarily acting as entropic pumps of energy flows. However, since the most socially successful forms of death controls were accomplished through being the most deceitful and treacherous, that enabled the biggest bullies who were doing that to have their bullshit become the dominant social stories, which kinds of bullshit were also adopted and repeated by the various controlled opposition groups, that surrounded that core of triumphant organized crime controlling civilizations. That kind of bullshit world view was built into the basic structure of the dominate natural languages, as well as installed into the dominate philosophy of science.
After all, science, as a social institution, was dominated by the biggest bullies in similar ways as all other social institutions. Therefore, the history of philosophy of science is full of compromises with the biggest bullies bullshit world view, and continues to be so. One of the most abstract forms that took was that an arbitrary minus sign was inserted into the entropy equations of thermodynamics and information theory. Thus, the currently dominant conception of entropy was inverted, while that being backward is taken for granted by almost everyone, who tend to never consider that.
When we recognize that human beings and civilizations necessarily operate as entropic pumps of energy flows, we tend to still be doing so through presuming that our conception of entropy is correct, while our presumptions are backward, and therefore, a lot of our behaviors are becoming increasingly absurd, due to perceiving things backward, while not recognizing that. The biggest bullies' bullshit world view is overflowing with false fundamental dichotomies and the related impossible ideals. Therefore, the central social facts that governments developed from warfare, which was organized crime on larger and larger scales, tend to not be recognized nor fully appreciated. Similarly, the central social facts that our political economy is built in a foundation of ENFORCED FRAUDS, tends to not generally be understood, but rather, tends to be as deliberately misunderstood, or ignored and denied, as possible.
The current political economy is due to the international bankers being the biggest gangsters, or the banksters, that were able to apply the methods of organized crime to the political processes in order to capture control over the powers of governments, and thereby effectively privatize those powers, as government ENFORCED FRAUDS by privately controlled banks. The sweep of history was that private property does not exist outside of some system of public violence, because all private property is based on backing up claims with coercions, while the most abstract form of that became that money is measurement backed by murder.
The ways that the debt controls are backed by the death controls are obvious, IF one is willing to look at how the power to tax and legal tender laws transformed fiat "money" as paper backed by gunpowder into electronic frauds backed by the threat of the force of atomic bombs. MAD Money As Debt, backed by MAD Mutual Assured Destruction, are the currently established systems, whereby there are globalized electronic monkey money frauds, backed by the threat of force from apes with atomic bombs, all of which is accomplished through social pyramid systems that basically operated through backing lies with violence, that developed at an exponential rate, to become more sophisticated systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, or the current monetary systems, backed by murder systems, which are ENFORCED FRAUDS.
THAT is the real context in which we are running into the limits of being able to strip-mine the planet's natural resources, while there are significant issues with diminishing returns from being able to do that, which are impacting first and foremost upon the fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems, that are currently the ways that human activities are being organized by the established situation, where the "money" is made out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing, while that transforms the use of that "money" as a means of measurement into being like a bent rubber ruler, that has reduced the values of things into being like irrational fetishes.
The tremendously IRONIC PARADOXES are due to human energy systems being deliberately misunderstood in the maximum possible backward ways, due to the history of successful death controls being done through the maximum possible deceits, which then enabled the debt controls to drive financialization towards being based on the maximum possible ENFORCED FRAUDS, all of which was as deliberately ignored and denied by both the central established systems of organized crime, as well as similarly so by their controlled opposition groups. The results are that not only are almost everything we do being misunderstood in the maximum possible ways, but also, it includes that almost all of the publicly promoted "solutions" to those problems continue to operate inside of the biggest bullies' bullshit frame of reference, and therefore, those "solutions" are also bullshit, and as backwards as possible, because the human death controls, or the murder systems, are necessarily the central feature to human ecology, as well as the central feature to the political economy.
Both of those FACTS can be understood as completely consistent with understanding how human beings and human civilizations actually manifest as general energy systems. Even the paradoxical FACTS regarding the ways that those systems attempt to maintain the maximum possible backward misunderstanding of themselves is also inherently consistent with a more thorough appreciation of how human being operate as energy systems, which have deliberately inverted the ways that they conceptualize entropy.
Those FACTS are some of the deeper levels of the paradoxical "Overview Of Our Energy Modeling Problem." In that context, articles like the one above from Gail Tverberg is superficially correct, but profoundly mistaken at the same time, because most of the progress made through a series of profound paradigm shifts in physical science has nothing like that happening in the areas of political science. Instead, there are growing Grand Canyon Chasms that human beings are understanding other energy systems better and better, such as demonstrated by electronics and atomic energy, etc., while nothing like that has been allowed to happen in the areas of political science.
The ideally necessary paradigm shifts in political science would have profound effects upon all of the bullshit promoted by the biggest bullies, and their controlled opposition groups. Philosophically speaking, what the biggest bullies did was that they SUBTRACTED THEIR SUBTRACTION, while they did not recognize or admit that. Therefore, the genuine solutions are to subtract the subtraction of the subtraction, or to negate the negation of the negation, because that is what then returns us to the more radical truths about what was always really there.
Human beings and civilizations must necessarily continue to operate as entropic pumps of energy flows, which develop their evolutionary ecologies. However, in order to survive doing that, political science has to surpass the paradigm shifts which have already been achieved in physical sciences. The essence of what that means are that there should be radical transformations in militarism, or the ideology of the murder systems, so that radically different perceptions of the death controls could enable those death control systems to be operated in radically different ways. That would then also result in the combined money/murder systems being able to be transformed, since the death controls back up the debt controls.
The future of human beings and civilizations primarily depends upon whether or not "we" could survive through the runaway problems of electronic frauds, backed by the force of atomic bombs. Unfortunately, "we" appear to be running out of time for paradigm shifts in enough people's perceptions to be able to happen, since those usually took generations to accomplish in the past. But nevertheless, the basic points that ebworthen made above in his comment are what is necessarily all boils down to: "the only realistic outcome or solution is fewer people." (Or, at least, for exponential growth on a finite planet to be stopped, one way or another, sooner or later.)
Since that is inevitable and unavoidable, I AM "advocating it," rather than "just pointing out the obvious sad reality."
I am promoting a series of intellectual scientific revolutions, which apply through political science to the combined money/murder systems. I am promoting a radical transformation in the ways that we think about death controls, which therefore would profoundly change militarism, or the ideology of the human murder systems. Of course, as the present time, we are on the tragic trajectory of the established systems of ENFORCED FRAUDS driving debt insanities to provoke death insanities, and therefore, it is only inside of that context that "we" may be able to develop different death control systems.
I am well aware that: "People get upset when I say it."
From a biological point of view, sex and death come as a package deal. From a sociological point of view, money and murder come as a package deal. At the present time, the social taboos regarding money are even greater than those regarding sex, so much so that most people are not aware of that. Since the ruling classes have long waged war against the consciousness of those they ruled over, and we have been living inside of those sorts of systems for generation after generation, after generation, the overwhelming vast majority of people completely take for granted the biggest bullies' bullshit world view, despite that being as backward and absurd as it can possibly be.
The established social pyramid systems were always based on being able to back up lies with violence. There were deeper real reasons regarding how and why that happened, and that it necessarily had to happen. However, we are now encountering astronomically amplified political paradoxes, due to progress in physical sciences not being surpassed by progress in political science. Hence, the progress that some human beings have made through understanding other energy systems better has not been followed, nor allowed, to happen in the realms of political science. The results may seem ironic to a macabre sense of humour, since militarism has always been, and still is, the first priority of successfully surviving civilizations, because militarism was necessarily the supreme ideology, because the most important things that some human beings did was murder other human beings.
Those systems ended up being accomplished through the maximum possible deceits about themselves, and that included that their controlled opposition groups adapted to stay within the same frame of reference of deceits regarding the death control systems. Therefore, the keystone to any possible systems of alternative energy technologies, and matching alternative life styles, must necessarily be the alternative death control systems. The future of human murder systems will be the lynch pin that may hold together the components of the trains of possible adaptations of different systems of integrated human, industrial and natural ecologies, which adapt to the limits of a finite planet, which limits are becoming realized at the present time as diminishing returns, impacting first and foremost in paradoxical ways upon the ENFORCED FRAUDS that are controlling the currently established social pyramid system civilization.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to have a sufficiently developed "Overview Of Our Energy Modeling Problem" that does NOT include that the death control systems are central to any attempt to model how the world really works. A more rigorous "Overview Of Our Energy Modeling Problem" should recognize that the existing combined money/murder systems are operating through the maximum possible frauds and deceits, which includes that those systems must necessarily exist tends to not be admitted, just as much as how those systems factually exist tends to not be addressed. Since both the ruling classes, as well as most of those they rule over, do not want to consider that, but rather, get upset when those issues are raised, we continue to head into the future in hyper-complicated ways, whereby human behaviors are directed inside of systems based upon ENFORCING FRAUDS, which deliberately ignore, deny, or misrepresent themselves, as much as they can, on as many levels that they can.
Thanks for the treatise, I enjoyed it.
Frauds and deceits, yes, and unsustainable as currently constructed.
I don't know why you got so many negatives? You didn't say you were advocating killing people (I can't really say if you were or weren't). But you are indeed correct. Imagine the US population at 30 million instead of 340 million. Less stress, easier life. Sustainable. It's possible. And necessary. The world would be a better place. So how do you do it? Not difficult. 1) Set a goal of 2.0 children per family. 2) Take away financial incentives to have more children than two. Feeding people welfare checks to multiply without limit hurts everybody. Giving people tax credits to have a boatload of kids is not a good idea anymore. In fact, a third child should cost you, not give you tax credits. To maintain a population, the birth rate must be 2.1. At 2.0, our population would slowly shrink. This would at least point us in a sustainable direction. A new economic model must be created to deal with a shrinking population, as the present models only work with sustained growth of population and ever more plundering of resources. I'm thinking we have to go back to a more agrarian centered economy, at least one that is renewable to conserve resources that are left. Government would have to reduce size, and be way more careful of its spending habits. This is doable, and it must be done. You can't forever grow a population in a finite world with limited resources.
US birth rate 2012: 1.88. The conventional wisdom was moar immigration...
We don't need fewer people. We need better people.
Imagine a world where the average person had an IQ of 115, that of the average Ashkenazi Jew.
Now imagine one where the average person had an IQ of 85, that of the average piece of ghetto trash.
Which world would you want to live in?
Which world do you think you'll actually live in when you're eighty?
If you don't want to live in that world, how might that be rectified?
More to the point, why won't anyone get on with that?
... the population increases together with the energy consumption and environmental pollution. Scientists warn about the implications in the close future for the environment and the natural resources, but only few appear to be truly concerned. Politicians surrendered to the oligarchs only to keep alive a failed model in every aspect.
"Capitalism .... all economic ventures .... are managed by people .... who have skin in the game .... this makes for good football .... and good business !" Mao Monedas 1949
An ironic view, since the whole point of a corporation is to shield shareholders from accountability for the actions of their business.
"Skin in the game"?! anathematic to the rules as stated. (not my down arrow, BTW)
Dammit this is Amerika, send the kids to the war zones to secure oil. This is the basic rights of Amerikans. After that hang the Yellow Ribbon and Support our Troops crap to show support.
What a jaundiced, cynical outlook on life in America .... you need a little reality Yoga in Yemen .... or Syria .... to focus your thinking .... I wish Do Chen was here .... we need his jaundiced, hopeful outlook !
A liberal eats the good peanuts first .... a conservative eats the broken shell peanuts first .... a Libertarian eats the old maids first and sells the popcorn to the highest bidder !
The poor eat the peanuts out of the conservative and liberal's poops.
I don't suppose you're speaking from experience? Never mind. There are some things that I just DON'T want to know.
The classic economists are correct, the system will "fix itself". Everything will come back to balance, no matter what we do or do not do.
Good thing we live in a infinite universe. Why people constrain their models to Earth only shows some serious idiocy.
Not to mention the technical marvels like fusion and fusion arc which will provide energy and turn it also into matter aka Elements that we dig out of the ground.
10,000 year supply of H3 just on the surface of the moon.
Water? Most is wasted and flows into the ocean, the Western U.S. should be enjoying 200-300 percent more water then what they have, but we needed the Vitenam War, go off the gold standard, reaganomics, repeal glass-steagall and load up on derivatives, have the CIA create Al-Qeada/ISIS/ETC...etc...etc, tons of wars, tons of bailouts....instead of NAWAPA.
California, it's true has less water due to the natural cycles on Earth... but had NAWAPA been built, the drought wouldn't be shit to California...now it might completely fuck California's shit up. Bad choices and bad planning.
The ACTUAL LIMIT we are facing is what happens with a growing population world when all the stuff that supports us is being torn down for Wall Street's gain.
When a society doesn't try to do shit for the future, eventually what is in the present is not enough. That is what we are doing to ourselves.
The very nature of a forceful pyramid scheme in a sentient species disallows the possibility of interplanetary/galactic propagation (not just travel to local satellite) [, and if it does happen, it will not be possible for all but the tip of the pyramid].
Each and every day the Sun sends us abundant amounts of energy. We'll tap into it fully when the time is right.
We are only limitied by our imagination and government regulations.
There is not a shortage of energy. Only a shortage of energy at certain price levels.
Hey, don't forget these quants that know how to go in and rip out power grid consumption contracts as the utility quants can't keep up, so we lose on the savings this is supposed to generate.
Quants are messing up too much out there today...and it's not limited to markets only.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/08/quant-run-investment-companies-cashing.html
let me say this to Gail :
She excites my irrepressible desire to feel the lightness of being by the damning nature of her implacable pessimistic demonstration.
I try and understand her logic and find it compellingly forceful but somewhere deep down inside me I know there is an answer that still HAS TO SPELL ITSELF OUT...
What it entails in terms of civilization change is the unknown unknown that better become known unknown if we want to tackle it!
Bravo for tickling my Ulysses bone and my Dartagnan quest for finding a solution; which will be an Odyssey for the new generations. (Probably beyond my own limited capability).
Pretending that we don't have a sea of options for energy conservation and that petro power is the only usable source on the planet is almost as fallacious as the eternal supply sider's dreams of avarice.
The perpetual growth paradigm is fraudulent........
Cheap fuel (feedstock can be pretty much anything, including sewage sludge) and cheap metals:
http://www.westinghouse-plasma.com/
Cheap clean water:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/mst/features/2013/130322-wanted-clean-d...
Cheap clean water means cheap drip agriculture. Lots of waste heat means lots of hothouse growing capacity.
We have pretty much all the solutions we need already available. Those available in the near future (such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) are the icing on the cake.
Now all we need is the dangerous Green retard extremists to be bulldozed out of our way.
For perspective, if all our waste here in the UK was put through Plasma Gasification and syngas production, just the ultra clean synthetic diesel output would be about 4 times what America uses per year, and the metals extraction would be about 16.5 million tons.
Plus all the other stuff.
we could stop using oil tomorrow. Eletric cars, nat gas cars, fuel cell cars....heck they could make nuke cars easily. It is a matter of cost...and we should use the low cost...techinal revolution has been saving man's bacon for 100,000 years....and it will into the future. This whining about oil, coal, etc is short sighted!
For values of "tomorrow" that are greater than 20 years.
do we have a population problem or a fixation on growth problem?
All things are possible, but all things are not probable. The blue line is troubling. Transition to any alterative transport solution will take a decade. Read the Hirsh Report. Lloyds of London has researched this. The German Army has researched it. Google has even put in its two cents. Do the research. The general consensus is that renewables and alternatives while viable will not keep us at our current levels of energy production and consumption.
This is the hard truth: The current levels of economic activity and population cannot be supported by our current options. I wish I was wrong. I pray to God that I am wrong but my research tells me I am right. It is pretty disconcerting when the best mitigation strategy the German Army can come up with is permaculture and local economies.
We already have a real world existing model. Cuba has been through this. Their mitigation strategies are enlightening. While we congratulate them, remember the average Cuban lost 20lbs during the transition.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&u...
The problem is that we don't have any dead dinosaurs to bury so that we can make some more oil.
We own the carbon cycle from WW2 on.
Q99X2 do believe it will be harvest time this Autumn.
Nuclear energy has a horrible EROEI when future containment costs are figured in. The rest of the article is valid.
Wow. This got the attention of the statist-bots. Good work, Mrs. Tverberg.
You said more here than Brandon Smith did in 6 boring and counter-factual articles.
Biophysical economics for the win.
Okay, honey, Limits to Growth was alarmist bullshit the first time around. Even the Keynesian economists laughed at its crude save-the-earth-kill-yourself message.
Not to mention that it was at the time the Club of Rome put it around to get white people to stop reproducing that the floodgates were opened in most of the developed world to the white people's replacements, sourced in the cesspits of the Third World. Our masters couldn't have it both ways. If the carbon footprint of the civilized was already too big, why was the footprint of savages being increased by an order of magnitude the day of their arrival?
The earth has more than enough resources to sustain the population of the civilized world several times over for centuries to come, by the end of which time most of the technical problems involved in settling other parts of the solar system should be resolved. In the meantime, the peoples of civilized nations have the wit and industry and creativity to find new ways of doing this when the old ones are no longer feasible. See to it that they're rewarded for their hard work and they'll do just that.
Our masters just aren't into sharing with anybody posing a potential threat to their rule---namely, anybody of European descent with an IQ above 70 or so.
There won't be aby growth. We're cursed with
The American Curse >>> http://wp.me/p4OZ4v-3z
I've nothing against what you're saying. You put out an interesting theory, support it with some equations, correct the equations when they don't match the data, evolve the theory over time to incorporate more and more complexity. It's interesting to read, and even if I don't agree with your premise or conclusions it's good to have ideas put out there and discussed.
Where I disagree is when others take your theories and put them into action thru the government to make me live as if your theories were fact. I'm not lobbying to make you live by my concepts, but it sure as hell seems like I'm being forced to live by yours. And being forced to live by your concepts is severe, to say the least. And while you may be reasonable in moving to use free market controls (think that phrase over for a while ...) to move society in the direction that your theories say we should head, others are not so patient. Just read some of the looney-tunes comments on this enlightened blog and you'll see the most popular solution to the problems your theories predict are to decrease population. When the solution to the world's problems is to remove that portion of the world causing the problem ... well, I don't even need to finish that sentence.
I'm sure that in your lectures on the topic you present ways for people to position themselves financially to take advantage of the changes implied by the models you support. This, in a way, is the proof of whether what you say is correct or not: do people profit from doing what you suggest or do they suffer losses. That's where it should be left, but I'm afraid the implications of what the models say get picked up by TPTB at some level and force fed to the general population because there is a benefit to TPTB to force controls on the general population. The theories you present, rather than being used for investment purposes, are used instead for political and social purposes and serve as justification for horrendous policies. True, no one except China has implemented mandatory birth restrictions (and look how well that's working out for them ... try to find get a date when the male female ratio is skewed 15% towards men because of selective abortions), but it's casually talked about in western society as though it's no big deal. I know it's tin foil hat stuff to link what you're putting forward to the control state of the world today, but just for discussion purposes can't you see how what you're talking about has such bigger implications than the financial?