Climate Change is not the Problem
So you think that if we switch to renewable energy all our troubles will be over, think again.
Energy is essential for all life; be it a lioness chasing down a gazelle or a farmer growing wheat, harvesting, threshing and grinding into flour. Beyond supporting our basic requirement for food, shelter and producing offspring, an excess of energy, allows for more complex needs such as expressing ourselves through art and culture, systems of governance, law and order, trade, education, a public health system as well as the luxuries and comforts of life.
It’s almost impossible for any of us to fully appreciate how all pervasive the contribution of energy inputs are to every aspect of our modern, hyper-connected, consumer lifestyle. It’s even harder to imagine what might happen if there was an interruption to what we’ve always considered to be a limitless supply. Despite promising advances in renewable energy and all that we know about the need to transform our energy system, fossil fuels still account for the vast majority of energy we use today. Are we being realistic with our assumptions that these new energy sources will come online with a speed and capacity to avoid supply constraints, and are we prepared for the very real possibility that we may not achieve this Herculean undertaking?
In an era of apparent abundance, it’s easy to take for granted the remarkable treasure that mother-nature has locked away deep under our feet. As we approach a critical junction in the timeline of human habitation of the Earth, are we ready to ask of ourselves the difficult question, what responsibility do we have to balance the relative comfort of people alive today against the catastrophic impacts that our lifestyles will have upon generations to come?
When we tapped the rich vein of concentrated, carbon-based energy, we opened a honeypot that began to undo nature’s solution to stabilise the wild fluctuations in climate that have been a part of Earth’s supercharged carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years. Conditions that made it difficult for complex life to get a toehold as the climate flipped from one extreme to the next, accompanied by regular mass-extinction of life.
The relative calm of Earth’s climate over the past 10,000 years has enabled complex society to flourish along with all that we know. As we take for granted this miracle of nature, we miss the common wisdom that belongs to a great majority of indigenous cultures. That humankind is ultimately subservient to nature and we should pay respect to the Earth as the great provider, for the rich bounty from which all wealth in our society originates.
Over the last 200 years humanity has made an enormous leap in progress. This has brought opportunity and prosperity to a great many, however, as technological innovation weaves its way deeper into our lives we lose our ability to balance our techno-optimism with the fundamental role that nature plays as a source and sink for all the material resources of our consumer-based lifestyle. This inevitably leads to so-called magical thinking and the belief that we can somehow transcend all limits of nature, that somehow we are all gods in an age of no-consequences.
The oil and gas industry (and arguably our entire financial system) is built upon a number of self-serving myths that have offered big returns, so long as you can ignore the long-term costs. Energy companies have been exploiting oil fields laid down in our geologic past, then sold off to the public at a price relative to the cost of extraction, not according to its true worth or more importantly, it’s replacement value. Along the way there has been no consideration given to the life-cycle of the resource, the cost to the public to deal with the carbon pollution produced when it is burnt, nor how we should feed our dependence on this impossibly cheap energy source, now that the end of oil is within sight.
It’s not that any of this is especially new or unexpected. The warnings against techno-utopianism and overconsumption have been described throughout modern history. An essay by William Forster Lloyd in 1833, still studied by students of economics to this day, warned against ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Whereby farmers sharing a communal pasture, each grazing their herd according to their individual self-interest, would inevitably destroy it.
Charles Darwin proposed that any population should naturally stabilise under the influence of biological constraints, while Thomas Malthus suggested that populations always increase exponentially while resources increase linearly. Leading to the conclusion that as population approaches the resource limits, where natural constraints have been mitigated, there has to be some social intervention to avoid overconsumption and collapse. This is known as the Malthusian-Darwinian Dynamic.
As we rely on technology to further defer systemic biological restraints, the human population continues to expand in an exponential manner, requiring ever more complexity and intervention. Today the financial system has become a major source of stimulus to the global supply chain by drawing down the promise of future goods and services through debt, at a level which is unsupported by the actual growth in the same.
A philosophical tussle between two opposing thinkers on the problem of consumption verses technology is described in The Wizard and the Prophet, a 2018 book by Charles Mann, Norman Borlaug won a Nobel prize in 1970 for his innovation in wheat technology which led to a massive increase in agricultural production, saving hundreds of millions of people around the world from starvation, known as the Green Revolution. William Vogt an environmental scientist often referred to as the godfather of the environmental movement argued that we must limit our population otherwise we all lose.
So we arrive at a junction whereby we can observe the entire issue with mankind in it’s quest for a sustainable future essentially boils down to two competing worldviews backed up by a complex set of opposing narratives that lie at the heart of the environmental debate:
1. We have a responsibility to preserve the finite Earth for future generations by limiting our impact upon the earth.
2. We have a right to exploit the Earth for maximum personal gain and will rely on technological innovation to find solutions for the future.
At this late stage of the game, I suggest that neither of these two pathways are now available to us and the only way forward is managed descent; a strategic reduction in consumption and economic output, to fit within the resource limits or carrying capacity of the Earth.
The use of fossil fuels has enabled our species to greatly exceed the productive capacity of the Earth.
Compiled from various sources:
Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Meadows, D. L. (2004). The limits to growth: the 30-year update. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Pub. Co. p169
Charles AS Hall. Energy return on investment: a unifying principle for biology, economics and sustainability. Berlin: Springer, 2017. P167
Michaux, S. Oil from a Critical Raw Material Perspective. Geological Survey of Finland. 2019. P177, 249, 250
As we saw earlier, energy is the primary enabling resource for all life, and for today’s highly complex, globalised society, the very best energy comes from oil. It is highly concentrated, stable at room temperature, easily stored and until now, has been relatively easy to find and produce. Since the first commercial oil well was sunk 21 meters into the Earth at Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, anyone with access to oil has enjoyed a rich bounty of prosperity and comfort that was until then, only available to the very few. There are so many uses that we have found for this wondrous black stuff. It powers the machines that move, shape, heat and cool the products of our industrialised economy. It enables us to perform superhuman tasks, beyond the work that mere muscles could perform; drive our kids to school, to fly across vast oceans overnight or by cargo ship loaded with tens of thousands of containers full of a rich assortment of products also manufactured with the benefit of fossil fuels.
To put it bluntly, our incredible rise in living standards since the industrial revolution has not been because of an abundance of talent or good planning. Humans are not particularly exceptional, we just happened to have found fossil fuels. Consider that around $60 will buy you one day of human labour (global average) but a $60 barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 2833 days of human work or $991,550 based on the Australian average wage of $350/day[1].
The total yearly energy consumption from all sources within Australia is 6.196 petajoules[2]. Distilling this down to human labour — let us imagine that each of us is in command of our own personal army of willing workers, we get 314 full-time staff for every man, woman and child, permanently employed to bring us all the material goods and services we use. This includes infrastructure, both public and private, education, healthcare, roads, utilities, manufacturing, mining, transport, security as well as the maintenance and upkeep of it all.
The degree to which we rely on oil, coal and gas can hardly be overstated. We have built our cities, our lives and our future, contingent upon this on-going energetic subsidy. Nearly every single enterprise that one can think of, from real estate and finance broker to pizza shop and shoe maker, can be reduced to the advantage bestowed upon it by tapping the rich vein of near costless, high-grade energy. Unacknowledged and unaccounted for, given away at a bargain basement price, this precious resource is being wasted in the most careless way; setting it alight within the bowels of internal combustion engines. Buckminster Fuller so eloquently captured the essence of this diabolical waste when he said, “It’s like burning your house down on a cool winter’s night, to keep the family warm”.
One way or another, the use of oil, coal and gas, is coming to an end. Global scientific consensus tells us we need to get to zero net carbon by 2030 if we are to limit warming of the planet by 1.5ºC, also, perhaps far less known, is the fact that oil producers across the globe are facing a difficult future, as we have used most of the easy to access oil, leaving the hard to extract, unconventional oil such as tar sands and fracking, that at first seem to be apparently abundant, but come with a very high price tag to process into a useable product. Today the energy return on energy invested (EROI) produces far less — between 17:1 and 8:1 — than in the golden age of oil, in the middle of the 20th century (100:1)[3]. This represents a major headache for energy companies as they scramble to rearrange their operations to cut costs. It’s interesting to note that in the last 20 years, Australia has lost six out of eight major refineries as production is moved offshore to territories with lower costs.[4]
What took the Earth 200 million years of sunlight captured by algal and plant born photosynthesis, baked deep underground, will effectively be used up after 200 years of sustained exploitation. That is, within the next 40 years[5]. Sometime between now and then, the market will become aware of this devil’s bargain we have made with energy and the resulting re-evaluation of asset prices along with future returns will be interesting to say the least.
Consider this fact alone: Half of all the fossil fuels ever consumed have been used in the last 30 years.
At this point, let us dispel the most common myth that an orderly transition to renewable energy is a viable alternative to fossil fuels. The reality is very different. Although there has been an impressive uptake of renewable energy technology over the last decade, the share of renewable energy in the overall energy mix, remains a steady 6.45%, with the demand in coal, oil and gas consumption rising twice as fast as renewable energy. Secondly, there are typology issues with renewables. Solar and wind are most suitable for electricity production for static use in the home, or industry. Many other uses require the wholesale replacement of an enormous array of downstream technology, distribution, storage, and the installed base of internal combustion engines before it can be used (that’s every ship, plane, truck, bus, car, tractor and lawn mower). Considering that we are 94% reliant on fossil fuel-based energy, we’re up for a considerable chunk of our remaining carbon budget. Lastly, there are many parts of our economy that cannot be replaced with electricity, such as plastics, solvents, lubrication, fertiliser and other petrochemicals as used in agriculture, manufacturing and industry.
And here’s the rub: Even if we were to find a magic solution to the energy supply problem, say if the mystery of fusion energy should suddenly be solved, the resultant increase in demand will quickly overtake any supply-side gain. This applies to improvements in energy efficiency, nuclear power generation, pumped hydro, carbon capture and storage, etc. Even if the technology did exactly as hoped, it would merely buy us a little extra time until our consumption increased along its current trajectory. The only way forward is to focus on a reduction in demand. Please pause for a moment to consider the implications of this. I’ll put it another way — there are no supply-side solutions to the coming crisis of humanity. Not a Green New Deal, not cloud seeding, algae farms, nor colonies on Mars.
Even if we found four new Earths to exploit, we would quickly use them up with our exponential appetite, fuelled by the capitalistic growth mindset.
Whatever we choose to do from here onwards, it is abundantly clear that we have limited time to act. How we choose to use our remaining stocks of fossil fuel energy over the next few decades will determine the future of all life on Earth. Either we use up the last of it while doggedly pursuing an unrealistic ambition to maintain economic growth and expansion, while hoping for a technology miracle, or we use the remaining resource to fund the massive re-tooling of our society and re-shape the fundamental mechanisms of our economy.
.o0O0o.
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References:
[1] Assuming 75 W sustained human power output for 8 hours and 1,700,000 Wh per barrel
[2] Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (2020), Australian Energy Update 2020, Australian Energy Statistics, September, Canberra.
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259114861_The_implications_of_the_declining_energy_return_on_investment_of_oil_production
[4] www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2020/December/Oil_refineries_and_fuel_security
[5] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/BPs-Latest-Estimate-Says-Worlds-Oil-Will-Last-53.3-Years.html
