More Magical Thinking: Why Hydrogen Trains?

  

 Image from FranceTv

One more expression of the magic thinking that surrounds hydrogen technologies. Now we see it applied to the one sector of transportation where it is definitely not needed: railroads.

Why would we need a "green hydrogen train" when railroads in Europe are mostly electrified? Electric trains are already the greenest land transportation technology we have, and they become more and more green as renewable energy penetrates the grid. Wouldn't it be easier and more efficient to electrify a line rather than using an expensive experimental technology? Hydrogen is way less efficient than batteries in terms of energy storage. 

So, with great fanfare, the French announce their hydrogen train. No reason for why such a train would be desirable is given. It is pure magical thinking at work. Hydrogen is good for the environment because it is hydrogen. 

The beauty of the story is that they even mention at the end of the article that, you know, this thing is "a little expensive." 14 million Euros for a one-track line. But -- hey -- don't you feel the magic?

Just as a note, the city of Bologna, in Italy, is now planning to introduce 127 hydrogen buses in its transportation system at the modest price of some 76 million euros. A little expensive, to say the least. But hydrogen is hydrogen. 

Tomas Pueyo Returns: Energy Lockdowns are Coming?

 

Tomas Pueyo is known for being one of the main supporters of worldwide lockdowns during the pandemic, Now, he is back with an even more ambitious idea; how to solve the global warming problem in a few, easy, and quick steps. Will he be more successful this time? 

You may remember Tomas Pueyo, the man who forced us into lockdowns with his idea that we needed "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve." His post on this subject is said to have generated some 40 million visualizations! Then, as we know, the two weeks turned into two years, and the curve was not flattened (I describe the story in detail in this post of mine). 

Now, Pueyo is back with another idea, this time about how to "solve" Global Warming. Simple: capture CO2, turn it into methane, burn it as fuel. Problem solved. Maybe not in two weeks, but quickly and easily. And making money on it, too!

I think Pueyo is a well-intentioned person. It is just that he has problems with connecting dreams to reality. His approach is typically "political;" it is the search for simple solutions to complex problems. With the "flattening the curve" idea based on strict lockdowns, Pueyo was proposing a major social disruption on the basis of two hand-drawn curves with scarcely any data supporting it. Incredibly, he succeeded in having his proposal experimented worldwide. The hope that the Covid problem could be solved in two weeks was so fascinating for politicians, and the public as well, that everyone jumped into the barrel heading for the Niagara Falls. 

This time, Pueyo does a little better, and, at least his "solution" for global warming doesn't involve locking us inside our homes again (so far, at least). But his paper is a rambling mix of unoriginal and unproven ideas. At least on one thing, though, Pueyo is right: the dramatic decline of energy prices generated by renewable makes it possible to think of things that were unthinkable just a few years ago. 

As we know, renewable energy is very cheap, but it has a problem: matching demand. That, in principle, requires storage and there are several ideas and possibilities to do that. Several years ago, in the 1990s,  George Olah proposed a "methanol-based economy" (see this article published in 2005).  The idea was to react CO2 and hydrogen with each other to create methanol (methyl alcohol). Since CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere, and hydrogen can be created from the electrolysis of water, it is possible to run the process by means of renewable energy. The result is a fuel, methanol, that is completely renewable. Methanol is liquid at room temperature, so it is easy to store and transport, and it could work wonders both as fuel and as an energy storage system.

In time, Olah's ideas have been incorporated into the more general idea of "electrofuels." The idea is the same, but arcane catalytic chemistry is used to create, for instance, "renewable gasoline" and "renewable diesel fuel." It is possible, even though, at present, there only exist hopes and a few prototype plants. 

The problems with electrofuels are several. One is simply a question of cost: making renewable hydrogen from electrolysis is already expensive enough that it is not cost-competitive with simpler energy storage solutions, such as batteries. Then, CO2 exists in air as less than one part in a thousand, so it takes a lot of energy and effort to extract and concentrate it. Consider also that conventional engines are hugely inefficient, and running them on electrofuels doesn't improve that. Finally, the problems with the pollution caused by combustion in engines remain unchanged. Right now, electrofuels are neither cost-competitive nor able to reduce pollution. But they might be useful for specific needs; planes, for instance. 

Now, back to Pueyo, he proposes to use renewable energy not to make electrofuels but plain, simple methane (natural gas). The idea is not commonly discussed in the debate mostly because liquid electrofuels are much more valuable than gaseous methane, and so their production is expected to be more cost-effective. Of course, an advantage of renewable methane would be that we could use the already existing pipelines and cryogenic ships to transport it (and no, hydrogen cannot flow through the existing pipelines). But if methane is created from renewable energy, then it can be produced more or less anywhere, and there would be little need for a huge network of pipelines. 

Basically, what Pueyo is doing is making a sales pitch for a company called "Terraform Industries" which has published on the Web some nice-looking sketches of what a renewable methane plant could look like. They also published some back-of-the-envelope calculations of how much this methane could cost (maybe), and claims that production should soon start. 

Alas, dreams tend to shatter into tiny pieces when hitting the ugly reality. Turning CO2 into methane is not impossible, but it is inefficient, expensive, and complicated, even when taking into account the low cost of solar energy. Right now, it is more expensive than just about any other form of renewable energy and would simply keep us stuck to an inefficient and polluting energy system. Then, in itself, making methane from CO2 is not doing much to "solve global warming" (to use Pueyo's wording). True, it does not add CO2 to the existing stock in the atmosphere, but unavoidable methane leaks from the plants could do a lot of damage since methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. 

Unfortunately, Pueyo's post is perpetuating the idea that those who push for renewable energy are just dreamers who have little contact with reality. We have to be open to new technological solutions as they appear, but electrofuels are not a miracle solution for anything. We should always keep in mind that moving to renewable energy is not going to be easy, nor it is going to be cheap. But not impossible, either! 

h/t Olivier Guyot

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)

Our Photovoltaic Future: The Metabolic Revolutions of Earth's History.

 

Illustration from a paper by Olivia Judson on "Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017) "The Energy Expansions of Evolution." 

This is a post that I published on "Cassandra's Legacy" in 2017. I think it anticipated the spirit of the new blog "The Sunflower Paradigm," so it is worth republishing it here with some modifications. 

Olivia Judson published an interesting paper on "Nature Ecology & Evolution." It is a cavalcade along 4 billion years of the history of the Earth, seeing it in terms of five "metabolic revolutions." That is, the complex system that's Earth's ecosystem (the great holobiont) has been evolving by exploiting and dissipating higher and higher potentials. 

It is an approach that goes in parallel with a paper that I wrote a few years ago on BERQ; even though I focussed on the future rather than on the past. But my paper was very much along the same lines, noting how some of some of the major discontinuities in the Earth's geological record are caused by metabolic changes. That is, Earth changes as the life inhabiting it "learns" how to exploit the potential gradients offered by the environment: geochemical energy at the very beginning and, later on, solar energy.

Seen in these terms, the Earth system is a gigantic autocatalytic reaction that was ignited some four billion years ago when the planet became cool enough to have liquid water on its surface. Since then, it has been flaring in a slow-motion explosion that has been going faster and faster for billions of years, until it is literally engulfing the whole planet, sending offshoots to other planets of the solar system and even outside it.

Starting from the weak geochemical energy in the depths of the oceans, the ecosystem moved to the surface to use the much more energetic light of the sun. It stepped up its capability to process sunlight by developing an oxygen-powered metabolism, then it moved onto the land surface in the form of complex organisms. Some 500 million years ago, fire appeared, although it played only a marginal role in the metabolic machine of the ecosystem. Only during the past few tens of thousands of years, has one species, humans, managed to use fire to complement its metabolic energy process.  

Judson correctly identifies the ability to control fire as the latest feature of this ongoing explosion. Fire is a characteristic ability of human beings, and can be argued that it is the defining feature of the latest time subdivision of the planet's history: the Anthropocene.

Judson stops with fire, calling it "a source of energy" and proposing that "The technology of fire may also, perhaps, mark an inflection point for the Solar System and beyond. Spacecraft from Earth may, intentionally or not, take Earthly life to other celestial objects." Here, I think the paper goes somewhat astray. Calling fire a "source" of energy is not wrong, but we need to distinguish whether we intend fire as the combustion of wood, which humans have been using for more than a million years, or the combustion of fossil hydrocarbons, used only during the past few centuries. There is a big difference: wood fires could never take humans to contemplate the idea of expanding beyond their planetary boundaries. But fossil energy could fuel this expansion at most for a few centuries, and this big fire is already on its way to exhaustion. If the Anthropocene is to be based on fossil fuels, it is destined to fade away rather rapidly.

Does this mean that we have reached the peak of the great metabolic cycle of planet Earth? Not necessarily so. Judson seems to miss in her paper that the next metabolic revolution has already started: it is called photovoltaic conversion, and it is a way to transform solar energy into an electric potential coupled with the capability of controlling the motion of electrons in solid-state conductors. It is a big step beyond fire and thermal machinery (*). It is, by all means, a new form of metabolism (**). It is generating a new ecology of silicon-based life forms, as I discussed in a previous post that I titled "Five Billion Years of Photovoltaic Energy." 

So, we are living in interesting times, something that we could take as a curse. But it is not a choice that we are facing: we are entering a new era, not necessarily a good thing for humans, but most likely an unavoidable change; whether we like it or not may be of little importance. It is a new discontinuity in the billion years long history of planet Earth that will lead to an increased capability of capturing and dissipating the energy coming from the sun.

The great chemical reaction is still flaring up, and its expansion is going to take us somewhere far away, even though, at present, we can't say where. A new lifeform just appeared in the Earth's ecosystem: it is called "photovoltaic cell." Where it will bring us, or whatever will come after us, is impossible to say, but it could take us to realms that, right now, we can't even imagine.




(*) The Jews have been arguing for about a century whether electricity has to be considered a form of fire and therefore prohibited during the Sabbath. It is surely an interesting theological discussion, but for what I can say (theology is not my field), fire (a hot plasma ignited in air) is not the same as electricity (controlled movement of electrons in solids)

(**) The supporters of nuclear energy may argue that the next metabolic revolution should be seen as the production of energy from nuclear fission or fusion. The problem is that the resources of fissionable material in the whole solar system are small and they could hardly fuel a truly new geological epoch. As for fusion, we haven't found a technology able to control it in such a way to make it an earth-based source of energy, and it may very well be that such a technology doesn't exist. But, in the sun, fusion works very well, so why bother?

Renewables: the Reverse French Revolution

 

The French Revolution came when coal replaced agriculture as the main source of wealth in society. Today, we face a repetition of those events with renewable energy replacing fossil fuels. Several details are returning, including the three estates (nobles, clergy, and commoners) who fought for power at the time of the revolution. The modern nobility is the fossil fuel lobby, the bourgeoisie is the growing renewable-based economy, and the clergy is represented by the "catastrophist" movement. 

(Image of Robespierre and wind towers made with Dezgo.com)

The best way to interpret the French Revolution is by using the lens of Biophysical Economics. All systems, including social ones, are dissipative structures that generate complexity by processing energy and creating entropy. No energy, no complex society. Then, when an energy source runs out, it is collapse. When it is replaced by another source, it is a transition to a different structure which may be larger and more complex. 

This is what happened with the French Revolution, which took place when coal replaced agriculture. Coal was extracted and burned in Europe already during the Middle Ages, but production started becoming important only during the 18th century. Up to then, European society relied on agriculture to provide metabolic energy ("food"). Coal couldn't directly provide metabolic energy, but it could be transformed into food by a process that included smelting steel, using it to make weapons, conquering large swats of land overseas, enslaving the local population, and setting them to work in plantations that provided food for Europeans. 

The transition led the landed nobles and the new mercantile bourgeoisie to be set on a collision course for dominance. The fight went on for about two centuries. In some cases, the transition was smooth, as in England; in others, it involved much bloodshed, as in France in 1789, in the US in 1861, and in Russia in 1917. In all cases, the final result was the same. It is not surprising that the term "King Coal" became commonplace. 

The switch from farming to coal deeply changed the structure of European society. The power was not anymore in the hand of regional nobles, but came to be concentrated in the hands of powerful national elites who could control coal production and, with it, everything else. Lenin understood the reasons for the process when he claimed that the Bolshevik revolution was all about the control of the means of production. He didn't say that there could be no production without coal, but it was implicit in the concept. 

The power of the new elites was immense, but they still needed commoners as soldiers and workers. So, the structure of the new national states was managed in such a way as to give the illusion that "the people" were in charge. In practice, the power was in the hand of entrenched lobbies in Western Europe and bureaucratic structures such as the communist party in the Soviet Union. Moving from coal to oil changed little to the power structure; the main difference was that oil could be more easily transformed into food by chemical processes that produce fertilizers. It led to a further step onward in dominance, with the elites becoming global. 

Today, renewables in the form of photovoltaics and wind have the capability of changing everything. Their low cost makes them able to break the grip of the global elites on production and bring back an economy that looks close to the old agricultural world, where land was the main source of wealth. A true "reverse French Revolution," bringing back the means of production into the hands of regional centers instead of global ones. Don't expect Capitalism to vanish in a puff of smoke as the result of renewable energy, but the capability of global elites to control energy production, yes, that will vanish or, at least, it will be much diminished.  

No wonder, then, that the rapid growth of renewable energy production is generating a strong negative backlash from the sections of society that see themselves threatened. Here, we see parallels with the historical French Revolution. You may remember that before the attack on the Bastille in 1789, King Louis XVI convened the three "États Généraux," the general estates, to manage the response to growing financial and political crises in France in the late 1700s. They were formed of the nobles, the clergy, and the commoners. It was a clash from the very beginning between the two entrenched estates; the nobles and clergy representing agriculture, and the third state; the commoners representing coal. The commoners decided to create their own National Assembly, and then, as they say, it was history. 

Today, we don't have a king convening the three estates of society in an assembly, but the presence of similar entities is detectable. The modern nobles are the oil lobbies that control the functioning of the state by means of their financial power. Their adversary is the "renewable-based bourgeoisie" (*), a new social class that derives its wealth from the growing power of renewables. And who are the modern equivalent of the clergy? At the time of the French Revolution, their role was to provide ideological support for the nobles by scaring the commoners into submission. The method used was the threat of eternal punishment if they dared to try to raise their status to something more than mere survival. 

There is now an equivalent of the old religious clergy in the "catastrophist" movement. They share an apocalyptic vision of divine punishment for human sins, and their current role is to keep the fossil economy alive by convincing the commoners that renewables are a pipe dream, that becoming poor and destitute is a virtue, and that they should be happy with "de-growing." That will allow the fossil lobbies to maintain their grip on fossil energy production while they try to switch to nuclear energy, another centralized source that can be controlled at the global level. In the process, commoners will be left in the cold to fend for themselves the best they can. If they can.  

The new clergy of the catastrophist movement is having some success. Western propaganda is a powerful weapon, and the new, Web-based social networks are being used in full to denigrate renewable energy. But renewables are growing fast, they are creating wealth, and they are racing upward at such speed that it is hard to think they can be stopped. The battle for energy is being fought. There will be no need to behead anyone, but the next few years will decide the destiny of humankind. 

(*) I discovered the concept of "renewable-based bourgeoise" in a recent book by Mauro Romanelli, "The Answer." A good book that explains the basics of renewable energy. Alas, it is available only in Italian.   

The Next One Hundred Years: A Story Told in Three Scenarios

 

Looking back at how the future was seen half a century ago, it is amazing to see how things have changed. When the conquest of space seemed to be the obvious way forward, nobody would have imagined that, today, we would be discussing the probability of survival of humankind, and that many of us would judge it as low. 

Yet, even though the future remains obscure, it still follows the laws of the universe. And one of these laws is that civilizations exist because they have a supply of energy. No energy, no civilization. So, the key element of the future is energy; the idea that it would be cheap and abundant gave rise to the dream of the conquest of space in the 1950s. Today, the idea that it will be neither gives rise to the prospects of doom. 

So, let me try a simple "scenario analysis" of what may happen in the future in the next century or so in terms of choices that will determine the energy infrastructure that could support a complex civilization (if any will survive). We are in a moment of transition, and the choices that will be made in the next few years (not decades) will determine the future of humankind. 

_________________________________________________________________

Scenario #0: collapse. I call this a "non-scenario" in the sense that it assumes that nothing is done or, anyway, too little and too late. In this case, people remain stuck in their old paradigms, the resources that kept society alive are not replaced, and it becomes impossible to maintain a degree of complexity comparable to the current one. Within some decades, humans return to an economy that we might describe as "medieval," if we are lucky. But we might also go back to hunting and gathering or even, simply, go extinct. Personally, I see this scenario as the most likely one, but not an obligate outcome of the current situation. 

Scenario #1: Sticking to Fossil Fuels. Here, we see a repetition of the events that led to stemming the decline of oil production during the first two decades of the 20th century. It was done by pouring large amounts of resources into the "fracking" of tight oil deposits. It produced a temporary resurrection of the oil industry in the US, bringing production to levels never seen before, albeit at enormous economic and environmental costs. The same policy could be continued with renewed efforts, for instance, at exploiting tight oil deposits outside the United States, tar sands, or maybe making synthetic fuels out of coal. That could maintain the production of fossil fuels to levels similar to the current ones. It would make it possible to keep alive the military apparatuses of the main states, and at least some of the current organizations and social structures. But the cost would be enormous, and it would imply beggaring most of the world's population, as well as unimaginable damage to the ecosystem. This strategy could keep a semblance of the current civilization going on for a few decades, hardly more than the end of the century. Then, it will be Scenario #0, but the crash will be even worse than if it had arrived by doing nothing.

Scenario #2: Going Nuclear. Supporting a complex society on nuclear energy may be possible, but it is complicated by several factors. Among these are the limited uranium resources, the need for rare mineral resources for the plants, and the strategic problems involved in disseminating nuclear technologies and uranium processing knowledge all over the world. Because of the limited amounts of mineral uranium, it is well known that the existing technology of light water reactors would not be able to supply the current global energy demand for more than a few decades, at best for a century or so. Then the outcome would be again scenario #0. The fuel supply could be greatly increased by moving to the challenging task of "breeding" new fuels from thorium or non-fissile uranium. If that were possible, a complex civilization could continue to exist for several centuries, or even more. In all cases, a major war that would target the nuclear plants would rapidly send a nuclear civilization to scenario #0.

Scenario #3: The Solar Era. In this case, we see the continuation of the current trend that sees renewable energy technologies, mainly solar photovoltaic and wind, rapidly expanding. If this expansion continues, it can make both fossil fuels and nuclear energy obsolete. Renewable technologies have a good energy return on energy investment (EROI) and little need for rare minerals. Renewables are not a strategic problem, have no direct military interest, and can be used everywhere. The plants can be recycled, and they are expected to be able to support a complex society; even though in a form that, today, we can only barely imagine. A solar-based infrastructure is also naturally forced to reach a certain degree of stability because of the limited flux of solar energy available. So, a solar-based civilization could reach a stable state that could last at least as long as agricultural societies did in the past, thousands of years, or even longer.

Combined Scenarios #1, #2, #3: Feudalization. The three scenarios above are based on the idea that human civilization remains reasonably "global." In this case, the competition between different technologies would play out at a global scale and determine a winner that would take over the whole energy market. But that's not necessarily the case if the world's economic systems separate into independent sections, as it appears to be happening right now. In this case, some regions might adopt different strategies, fossils, nuclear, or renewables, while some would simply be shut off from the energy supply system and go directly to "Scenario #0."  With lower demand, the problems of depletion of nuclear and fossils would be greatly eased, although, of course, only for a limited population. Note also that these near-independent regions can be described as "feudal," but need to be much larger and more structured than anything seen during the historical Middle Ages. Keeping alive complex technologies, nuclear in particular, requires maintaining a functioning industrial society, and that may not be obvious in a time of diminishing returns for everything. 

The next few decades will decide which direction humankind will take. No one has the hands on the wheel that moves the giant thing we call "civilization," and we are seeing efforts to push it in one of the three scenarios above (some people even seem to be actively pushing for scenario #0, a civilization-level expression of what Sigmund Freud called the "death instinct"). 

The problem, here, is that the Western governance system has evolved in such a way that no decision can be taken unless some groups or sectors of society are demonized, and then a narrative is created that implies fighting a common enemy. In other words, no decision can be taken on the basis of data and planning for the common good, but only as the result of the confrontation of the lobbies involved in supporting different options. (*)

We have seen the demonization-based decision mechanism operating during the past few decades. It is a well-honed procedure, and we may expect it to be also applied to the allocation of resources for new energy strategies. We have already seen an energy technology being demonized;  it was the case of nuclear energy in the 1970s, the target of a successful propaganda campaign that presented it as an enemy of humankind. Today, renewables and everything "green" may soon be the victims of a new demonization campaign designed to promote nuclear energy. We are seeing it in its early stages, (see this article by George Monbiot), but it is clearly growing and having a certain degree of success.

Nothing is decided yet, but the writing is on the blades of the wind turbines. Propaganda rules the world, and it will continue ruling it as long as people fall for it. 

(*) Simon Sheridan provides an interesting discussion of the inner decisional mechanisms of modern society, defined as "esoteric" in the sense of being hidden, unlike the "exoteric," e.g. public decisional mechanism, which is only a reflection of the esoteric process. 

(**) For much longer-term scenarios, see my post: "The Next Ten Billion Years" 

Data without interpretation are useless, interpretation without data is dangerous. More on "non replaceable" energy

 

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat," Sun Tzu. (Image created with Dezgo.com)

I am always amazed by how people tend to see the world in terms of "self-evident" statements which the don't see as requiring demonstration, quantification, or verification. It is like if they were rewriting the American Declaration of Independence (We hold these truths to be self-evident...). But whereas things such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are hard to quantify, when you deal with physical entities such as renewable energy, then quantification is not only possible, but vital. 

On this point, Sun Tzu would have said that interpretation without quantification is dangerous because by dismissing renewable technologies you are disbanding your best troops without giving them a chance to prove their mettle in a real confrontation. 

Here, as an example, a recent post by Tim Morgan where we read a long discussion, interesting in many respects, but completely disconnected from real-world data. 

This is where the term “renewable” ought to be subjected to far more critical examination than it has tended to receive so far. We can’t source the plastics required for the renewables sector without hydrocarbon feedstocks. Renewables can’t, of themselves, power the extraction, processing and delivery of the vast amounts of concrete, steel, copper, cobalt, lithium and a host of other resources required for the development, maintenance and eventual replacement of wind and solar power.

In short, “renewables” would merit that label only if they were capable of renewing – that is to say, replacing – themselves over time. This isn’t possible now, and there are few reasons to suppose that it will become so in the future.

Morgan is not the only one who keeps repeating the mantra that renewables are unable to replace themselves without worrying too much about justifying his statement, something that would require, at minimum, demonstrating that the energy yield of renewable technology is too low for this purpose. But there is no attempt to do that in the post. 

Eventually, it doesn't matter what intellectuals are saying; the real world is moving along the path created by physics. The lines are drawn for a battle that's going to be fought over the carrion of the fossil fuel industry. Victory will go to those who can follow Sun Tzu's statement that “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” And onward we'll go! 

(For a quantification of the capability of renewables to expand and replace themselves, see these references: 

100% Renewable Energy Transition by Kemfelt, Breyer, and Oei. 2020

On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research, Breyer et al, 2022

Rethinking Energy 2020-2030, Dorr and Seba, 2022

The sower's way: quantifying the narrowing net-energy pathways to a global energy transition, Sgoruirdis, Csala, and Bardi, 2016

Energy Return on Investment of Major Energy Carriers: Review and Harmonization, Murphy et al., 2022

And many more....)