The Warthog and the Sunflower: Energy and the End of Empires

 

The warthog and the sunflower have a common characteristic: they are both dissipative structures powered by thermodynamic potentials. And they share this characteristic with much larger and more complicated structures, such as empires. Warthogs and Sunflowers need metabolic energy (food) to survive: no food -- no warthogs, and no sunflowers either. If we want our civilization to survive, we need "food" in the form of energy potentials that we can dissipate. So far, our food has been in the form of fossil fuels. Will we be able to found a new, and perhaps more nutritious, food in the form of solar energy?  

"The End of Empires" is a multi-author book published by Springer in 2022.  In 744 pages, it covers the collapse and the disappearance of 32 empires, from Akkad to the modern US Empire, over some five thousand years. I got myself a copy, but I must say I was a little disappointed. Not that it is not good scholarship. It is a wide-ranging treatise that provides much food for thought. But in terms of understanding why empires fall, well, it doesn't say much. 

I am not saying I know more than historians about history; I am sure they have a deep grasp of many details and events that pertain to human empires, much better than anything I can manage to know. But the problem with this book is the lack of a common thread in the story of these 32 empires. In every chapter, you read of things that happen: battles fought, laws enacted, rulers coming and going, neighbors invading or being invaded, all sorts of things, and yet, somehow, these apparently unrelated events always gang together to bring down the whole stupendous edifice. It reminds Shakespeare's line, "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions." Shakespeare was a poet, not a historian, but he grasped a basic point: sorrows do come in battalions, but why?

In "The End of Empires," the discussion on this point is mainly in the first introductory chapter, where the authors endeavor to tell us that empires may fall because of three factors; 1) Internal factors, 2) External factors, and 3) Unforeseen events. Which is tantamount to saying that anything and everything can bring down empires, But, again, why?   

If you are reading this blog, "The Sunflower Paradigm," you are interested in energy, and I think you are prepared to accept the idea that what keeps empires together is nothing but energy. No energy -- no empire. 

This concept would be basically incomprehensible for someone who doesn't have a minimum training in the mechanisms that keep complex systems "alive." It is energy. It is an intuition that goes back to Ilya Prigogine, who proposed the concept of "dissipative structures."  A definition that can be applied to many things, from warthogs to sunflowers, including empires. 

A dissipative structure is something that emerges out of energy potentials. It is actually strictly linked to the definition of "potential," which has to be understood as something that can be dissipated, that is turned into entropy. Dissipative structures are self-assembled machines that turn energy potentials into entropy, that is low-temperature heat that disappears in the environment. 

Think of a living being. It lives on the energy produced by the energy potential stored in food, metabolic energy. No metabolism, no life. You can say that of a warthog or a sunflower: no food -- no warthog, and not even a sunflower. You can say the same for empires, although their metabolic processes are quite different from those of biological creatures. 

The concept of dissipative structures is wide-ranging, and it is an incredibly useful tool for understanding how the universe works. You can use it in physics, chemistry, and, yes, in the science of those complex systems we call human social structures. Empires, for instance. The simple concept that energy (more exactly, energy potentials) creates social structures is a powerful tool for understanding the mechanism of the collapse of empires. 

Of the 32 chapters of the book, none mentions energy flows. Maybe you know that in 1984 the German historian Demandt listed 210 (!!) causes of why the Roman Empire fell, including such concepts as “Tiredness of life” and “Escapism." You can't accuse historians of lacking fantasy, but you might perhaps propose that they don't have a good understanding of the mechanisms that create and destroy these large human enterprises. 

Only recently, the historian Thomas Homer-Dixon proposed that the Roman collapse was the result of the decline of the energy return on energy investment (EROI) of the Roman society. It was a good idea, although vague as it was proposed. But it was approximately correct. The Roman Empire was a stupendous structure that relied mostly on slaves as its source of energy. Slaves cultivated the land that provided food, then they also mined gold and silver to pay the military apparatus, the legions, and the civilian bureaucracy that kept the empire together. The whole machine required gold and silver to keep working. Soldiers wouldn't fight without being paid, and the same was for civil servants. 

We have little or no evidence of a decline in the productivity of Roman agriculture until the last gasps of the empire, during the 5th century AD. But we do have evidence that the mining system of the empire collapsed during the 3rd century. It was because depletion made mining more and more expensive. The Empire would have needed many more slave miners than it could afford to have. So, it became unable to mine gold. No gold, no legions, no legions, no empire. And the whole system went through that kind of transformation that simply meant it had to reduce its rate of entropy dissipation. The end of the empire.

The same story is playing out in our case. Depletion of our fossil resources (our "energy slaves") is making us less and less able to provide the kind of energy that makes our civilization able to create entropy at a rate much faster than any previous civilization in history. And, if we keep going along the road we are following, it doesn't help to talk of being "more efficient" or developing "new economic paradigms." There is no other destination for us than a society working at a much lower dissipation rate. A low metabolism society, agricultural, or even based on hunting and gathering. 

That is our destiny unless we manage to replace fossil fuels with a comparable, and perhaps much higher, energy potential that we can dissipate. It was the dream of the 1950s, the "atomic age," that never really materialized. Today, solar energy could provide the potential that we need to maintain a high dissipation rate. The society that could develop out of this jump to a new source could be as different from ours as a warthog is different from a sunflower. Still, it will be based on a fast metabolic rate. Will it come? We can't say, but whatever will happen, will happen because it had to happen. 

(A more detailed discussion of mine on the collapse of the Roman Empire)

A Christmas Post: The Miracle of Renewables

by Ugo Bardi

This is a post that I wrote for the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano." For this reason, it is simplified and short, yet it says what's needed to understand the revolution we are going through that will change the world in the coming years. If you are interested in the source of the data on which I am basing my considerations, you can find them on Lazard.com. So, Merry Christmas, and never despair. Sometimes, miracles happen! 

Miracles are not so frequent and, if one has serious health problems, it is not probable that a swim in the Lourdes pool will solve them. However, it is also true that sometimes things change quickly, opening up new possibilities. That's what's happening with renewable energy. Talking about a "miracle" is a bit much, I know, but recent technological developments have made available to us a tool that until a few years ago we didn't even dream of having. And this could solve problems that once seemed unsolvable.

For years, I've been lecturing about climate change and other looming worries, such as oil depletion. Usually, the people who came to listen to me were prepared for a message that was not exactly reassuring, but the question was what to do about it. At the end of the conference, a debate normally ensued in which the same things were said: ride a bicycle, turn down the thermostat in the house, install double glazing panes on the windows, use low energy light bulbs, things like that.

It was a little soothing ritual but, in reality, everyone knew that these weren't real solutions. Not that they're useless, but they're just a light layer of green on a system that continues to depend on fossil fuels to function. We have been talking about double glazing and bicycles for at least twenty years, but CO2 emissions continue to increase as before. Actually, faster than before. If we don't go to the heart of the problem, which is to eliminate fossil fuels, we will get nowhere. But how to do it? Until a few years ago, there seemed to be no way except to go back to tilling the fields by hand, as our ancestors did during the Middle Ages.

But today things have changed radically. You probably didn't notice it, caught up in the debate on politics. But it doesn't matter whether the right or the left wins. Change, the real one, is coming with renewable technologies. Wind and photovoltaic plants have been optimized and scaling factors have generated massive savings in production costs. Today, a kilowatt-hour produced by a photovoltaic panel costs perhaps a factor of 5-10 less than a kilowatt-hour from natural gas (and maybe a factor of 5 less than a nuclear kilowatt-hour) (source). We used to call renewables "alternative energy," but today all others are "alternative."

Furthermore, producing energy with modern renewable technologies does not pollute, does not require non-recyclable materials, does not generate greenhouse gases, does not generate local pollution, and nobody can bomb the sun to leave us without energy. Now, don't make me say that renewables have automatically solved all the problems we have. It is true that today they are cheap, but it is also true that they are not free. Then, investments are needed to adapt energy infrastructure throughout the country, to create energy storage systems, and much more. These are not things that can be done in a month, or even in a few years. There is talk of a decade, at least, to arrive at an energy system based mainly on renewables.

But it is also true that every journey begins with the first step. And now we see ahead of us a road ahead. A road that leads us to a cleaner, more prosperous, and hopefully less violent world. I haven't stopped going around giving conferences but, now, I can propose real solutions. And it's not just me who noticed the change. In the debate, today you can feel the enthusiasm of being able to do something concrete. Many people ask if they can install solar panels at home. Others say they've already done it. Some mad (and rightfully so) at the bureaucracy that prevents them from installing panels on their roof or in their garden. You see the changed trend also on social media.

There is always someone who speaks out against renewables reasoning like the medieval flagellants who went around shouting "remember that you must die". But there are also those who respond in kind, like, "good riddance, live happily in your cave together with the other cavemen." If you have a south-facing balcony (and if your municipality doesn't sabotage your idea), you can already install photovoltaic panels hanging from the railing that will help you reduce your electricity bill. No paperwork needed! (another small miracle). One step at a time, we will succeed!

Humankind's Tragic Mistake: How we Blew our Chances of Survival

 

A chronicle of how our civilization (if we want to call it in this way) blew its chance of survival. If we had invested in what really mattered, energy, we could have made it. But we preferred to invest in the toys we like so much: military hardware. And think that these 6 trillion dollars of hardware were used to make sure that some foreigners would send us the energy the US needed. With the same money, we could have had the same amount of energy produced at home. So much money thrown away, and that doesn't count the damage done on the receiving end. And now we are throwing away another good chunk of our remaining resources to follow the impossible hydrogen dream

 

An amazing article by Paul Gipe.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2019/12/19/beating-swords-into-plowshares-or-wind-turbines-solar-panels-we-could-have-done-it/

 

 

We Could Have 100% Renewable Electricity If We Had Invested in Wind and Solar Instead of War in the Middle East

Yes, the United States could be generating 100% of its electricity from renewable energy if we had used the money spent on our ill-advised wars in the Middle East to build wind and solar systems, as well as battery storage, here at home.

That’s the startling conclusion of a simple calculation my colleague Robert Freehling and I made after the latest reports on the economic cost of our wars in the Middle East.

This is, after all, not rocket science. Money spent on war–anywhere–is money lost. It’s not an investment in the future. It’s money quite literally that goes up in smoke.

In contrast, money spent on building wind and solar farms or putting solar systems on rooftops is money invested in the future that will be earning returns–in the form of electricity–for 20 to 30 years.

I’ve followed this topic since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I posted my first article on this subject on July 4, 2005, and I’ve been updating that article periodically since then as the cost of our wars continued to grow.

On the anniversary of September 11th this year, news articles on the cost of the war in Afghanistan prompted me to take another look at our lost opportunities to invest in infrastructure here at home for the direct benefit of Americans.

What I learned shocked me. Using what I call a back-of-the-envelope method, I calculated that we could have installed enough wind turbines to more than provide 100% of our electricity with what we’d spent on war.

That just didn’t seem right. These are big numbers and it’s easy to get them wrong. After all, we’ve been told for decades that it’s simply too expensive to install that many wind turbines and solar panels. We could never afford it, critics warned.

So I called my colleague and renewable energy analyst Robert Freehling for help. I’ve relied on Freehling to sort out such thorny problems in the past.

His conclusion? Yes, we could be generating 100% of our electricity in this country from just wind and solar; that is, not counting existing hydro, geothermal, or biomass generation. Freehling, though, goes even further. We would be generating so much renewable electricity that we could store huge amounts in batteries–electricity storage that also would be paid for with our “war savings.”

How did we reach such a conclusion? Did we use a supercomputer to calculate all the possible permutations of what a renewable electricity supply would look like?

No. We kept it simple. We looked at two respected estimates of what our wars have cost in economic terms to the US taxpayer, not what they’ve cost in human suffering, nor what they’ve cost the countries on the receiving end of our expenditures.

The National Priorities Project calculates that the wars in the Middle East since 2001 have cost $4.9 trillion, a sum that continues to rise. The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimates $5.9 trillion through Fiscal Year 2019. Their latest estimate raises that to $6.4 trillion through FY 2020.

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, “A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money.” For a sense of perspective, one billion is 1,000 million. Thus, a trillion is one million million. That’s a one with twelve zeros behind it–a very big number.

We made no attempt to match the annual costs of the wars to the deployment of wind and solar. Again, we kept it simple. We simply prorated the costs over two decades with the exception explained below.

Freehling’s simple spreadsheet model assumes ramping up installations from a low base over a decade to reflect the necessity of scaling up manufacturing to meet the demand. Then he held installations constant for another decade until he reached 100% renewable generation from wind and solar. If we had started in 2001, the whole conversion would be accomplished by 2020.

Shockingly, there was a lot of money left over. So Freehling plowed the remainder into battery storage using the same approach as with wind and solar. He scaled installations up from a low base until the industry was likely to reach maturity.

Existing renewable generation from hydro, geothermal, and biomass was then shunted into the mass of new storage. Batteries would be used to equalize the grid when winds were light or the sun had set. The remainder could then be used to charge electric vehicles.

Wind and solar are cheap today. That was not so, two decades ago. Freehling accounts for this by using historical figures for the cost of wind and solar.

He dropped the initial cost of wind from $2,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity in the year 2000 to about $1,400 today.

Solar has seen a dramatic drop in cost during the past two decades. Freehling used $12,000 per kilowatt as the cost of solar capacity in 2000 and dropped it to nearly $1,500 per kilowatt in 2020.

We apportioned how much wind and how much solar were built, based on the work of my French colleague Bernard Chabot. He found that for a temperate climate, such as the United States, the optimum mix of generation is 60% wind and 40% solar energy. This mix minimizes the amount of storage needed.

Batteries are still expensive. The cost of battery storage, however, has fallen 80% in the past decade alone notes Freehling. He suggests that the cost of battery storage would have fallen even more rapidly through economies-of-scale if we had begun deploying them at scale sooner. Batteries for Electric Vehicles (EVs) would also be cheaper today if we had plowed some of our war savings into battery development.

Here in California, the Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) requires 4-hours of storage for it to reliably meet peak demand.” Our scenario calls for one million megawatts of wind and another one million megawatts of solar. This scenario uses some 700,000 MW of batteries to store 3 terawatt-hours (TWh) or 3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. The amount of storage is approximately enough to meet the peak electricity demand for the entire United States for a period of 4 hours.

All together, wind, solar, and storage would be capable of providing 4,400 TWh per year–the amount of electricity generated annually in the United States–for an investment of $6 trillion over two decades.

The United States produces more than 700 TWh per year–about 17% of annual electricity generation–from existing wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biomass. Existing renewables would be capable of powering more than one-third to as much as one-half of the entire US passenger vehicle fleet with electricity.

If we had instead invested the $6 trillion we squandered on war in the Middle East, we would, two decades later, have made our grid more resilient with battery storage, and be generating 100% of our electricity with wind and solar. Moreover, existing sources of renewable energy would be sufficient to power a substantial portion of our passenger cars with clean, renewable electricity.

Incredible.

What a lost opportunity.
———-
Paul Gipe is a renewable energy analyst and the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for the past four decades.

• United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion

• Cost of National Security, National Priorities Project

• Watson Institute of Public Affairs, Brown University, Economic Costs of War

• Beating Swords into Wind Turbines–or Solar Panels if You Like, December 29, 2007. This op-ed was originally posted on July 4, 2005 and then appeared at Renewable Energy Access.com (Now RenewableEnergyWorld.com) on July 11, 2005. This version has been updated with current figures for the cost of the war and estimates of its total direct and indirect costs (to the USA only).