Thanks, a great read as always. Anyone who thinks industrial civilisation is going to run on electricity is a bozo. And if it could, all the mining and erecting of solar and wind facilities is just a continuation of ecocide by other means. What humanity should be doing is learning to reduce our need and desire for the products of industrial energy and to accept that energy is meant to be what we get from eating food. Although I think the ability of the ecosystem to sustain humanity is already ruined beyond repair. Ho hum.
Spot on. The assertion that we can a) transition our energy system b) without any meaningful change in lifestyle or consumption patterns and c) actually make money or increase wealth while doing it has always struck me as facile bullshit. The idea that places like LA, Dallas, and Phoenix will continue to exist as they are, only with Teslas and Rivians choking the highways powered by rooftop solar, sounds totally insane.
It seems to me that energy consumption per capita must collapse downward. The first 50% reduction can come from abandoning F-150s, highway sprawl, and 6000sf McMansions for compact walkable/e-bikeable cities - which IMO would be incomparably better places to live. But most people would rebel against it, and no serious efforts are underway to bring this about, except a bit of tinkering along the edges. Even in Europe climate mandates are becoming enough of an issue that it's toppling governments, and we literally haven't even begun the sort of deep reductions in emissions & energy use that elites claim are necessary.
I always say that I really hope global warming turns out to be a scam/hoax, a massive collective delusion, or just a nothingburger for currently unappreciated reasons, because the chances of us actually achieving "net zero" by 2050 or whatever are a hard zero.
Not only must it collapse downward to such a degree that there will be instant rioting, but we need to invent magical CSS tech to go into negative emissions.
We basically need to live like the amish: no flying, driving, producing anything we don’t need to survive, energy use like televisions, vacuum cleaners, computers, etc meat consumption. Not only will the economy collapse and global famine quickly ensue, there will be global despair and suicide waves in the hundreds of millions, and the few of us capable of atrocities will go to very barbaric behaviours.
The is why (among other reasons) it’s a catch-22 and the politicians literally can’t sacrifice the now for the future. It’s not even a question of blindness or power corruption (although they have that too). There is just no way out of this predicament. We are in overshoot, the damage is already done, the tipping points imminent, and a lot of people need to die asap if the small remainder are to have an earth that doesn’t cause a mass extinction among literally all mammals (1000ppm CO2 and/or +10 degrees traditionally guarantees that).
Your vision of what must inevitably happen is a rather extreme one. Like yourself, I take it that some degree of "collapse" (a very complex term with many possible interpretations) is now inevitable. Unlike you, I don't believe mass global famine and mass die off and the rest is unavoidable - - though it may be if the climate system has fallen off a cliff, which it very nearly seems to have done. It's going to be threading a needle, in any case.
If we're lucky, we can stop flying and driving around in circles. We can re-design our economies, making the provisioning of basic needs at the center of the economy even in the "developed world". We could all learn how to, and have access to land for, community self-provisioning of food and other basic needs. There is so, so much we can do. But we won't do any of this with a vision as bleak and horrifying as the one you're offering us.
No, global warming is not a hoax, and it's far worse, and far more dangerous, than most people imagine it to be at present.
"The first 50% reduction can come from abandoning F-150s, highway sprawl, and 6000sf McMansions for compact walkable/e-bikeable cities ...."
Some people will continue to live in cities in the future, but access to livelihood in cities is going to shrivel up significantly, and so very many millions will have no other option than to leave the cities and take up residence in places with enough open space to engage in what I call "community self-provisioning" of food, water, shelter and other basic needs. It's not going to be possible to maintain an urban-centric material culture for reasons I address here.:
Self-provisioning of food is ... well, gardening, small farming for personal and family use, fishing for one's food, hunting and foraging of wild edibles. When communities do this for themselves it is "community self-provisioning". Typically, self-provisioning takes place outside of the Market economy. It's just about attending to one's needs without a market standing in the way.
The rare metals we need to produce even a fraction of the first generation of “renewables” do not exist on our planet - and if they did, would be too energy-intensive and polluting to mine without destroying the planet. Check out, for example, Thomas Murphy re ‘Physics and Planetary Ambitions’ on ‘The Great Simplification with Nata Hagens’, 11 May 2022
On a side note, a shockingly thin sliver of human beings have the mental dispositions to both comprehend and accept the meanings and conclusions of simple sentences like the above, or indeed, ones like “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.”
It just. Does. Not. Compute.
We really do literally believe what we want to believe, concocting our own made-up view of reality, glady imagining our actions won’t succumb to physical realities right up until we run head first into the wall and die. It’s quite fascinating really, apart from being so very tragic.
Hey Chad. For some reason, Substack won't let me message you. Please DM me. I'd love to have you guest post on my page, if you'd like. This is a great piece.
I'm a "mid-level" expert on what I call The Three Es (EEE) -- energy, economy and ecology in relation to one another. There are top level experts in this field, such as Richard Heinberg. And there are a lot of lower level experts.
I've learned a lot from Heinberg. And he has said a couple of things which have simply enormous importance, and yet these statements have been largely ignored.
Here are two of them.:
“Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.”
"There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude."
To fully comprehend the significance of what Heinberg is saying here one must understand that, in all honesty, we no longer have a "carbon budget", because the carbon budget concept was originally devised to try and avert a movement from a "safe" climate system to a "dangerous" one. But we're now in the danger zone ... and heading rapidly toward catastrophic.
So any fossil fuels we burn now is more than we can actually afford to burn. So a short term (ten year) burst of fossil fuel use expansion, which would be inevitable if we sincerely attempt a full replacement of energy strategy (called "rapid transition"), would contradict the ostensible purpose of "energy transition".
What we need to do is redefine "energy transition" as mostly a deliberate shift to a much, much lower energy and materials throughput economy. But that's not being discussed because of The Narrative on "energy transition" is obviating that public conversation.
I'm not an advocate for replacing fossil fuel automobiles with electric automobiles. I am an advocate for phasing out the car culture as rapidly as possible.
That said, the principal reason electric cars were replaced by internal combustion cars (or why electrics never won the hegemonic race), in the most plausible version of the story I've heard or read, is that at the time when electric cars were in ascendency, and as liquid fuel cars began to emerge, opportunities to recharge an electric car battery were scarce. (Ouch, that sentence is way too long!)
The real problem was that electric cars were only any good for intra-urban transportation, as the story goes. They were no good at getting from one city to a distant other city... at a time when there was a lot of wide open spaces between towns and cities. But with a gasoline powered car, one could bring containers of extra fuel along on the trip -- something you could not do with electrics. When the fuel tank ran close to dry, just pour in some of the extra fuel stored in your stash. That'd get you to a distant city without having to charge your battery in the sticks.
"It’s the 2070s. The world is running on clean energy. Everyone has access to sufficient supplies. No one is choking on dirty air. They’re well-fed. There are almost no gasoline cars on the road. Deforestation has come to an end. We use tiny amounts of land to produce food. We’re not killing tens of billions of animals for meat. Wildlife is making a comeback."
This will be true, but not for the reason she thinks. Collapse will bring us into sustainability whether we want it or not. Those of us who remain will be sustainable and the world will heal. I'm not sure about the 2070s part, but I expect we humans will be fairly rare by the start of the next century.
Thought-provoking. And a good reminder of just how much energy we produce today.
However, I think the central claim is a notch misleading. Yes, there has never been a global energy transition. But there have been many national energy transitions, some of them very ambitious. For example, UK industrialised with coal-power, but transitioned to cleaner sources. Coal did not plateau - it was phased out by active policy decisions. These policies were not easy and they were contested by many. But they worked. In 2024, we burn almost no coal.
Isn't this the kind of analogy that people think of when talking about historic energy transitions?
Thanks for the comment Ilari, I enjoy your podcast!
I guess it's true that we have had a transition if you confine "we" to certain specific countries, or to specific areas. The statement does hold true if you look at humanity as whole, which the what the chart shows and what I was referring to. So we could say that it's true at a local level, but not at a global one. So it's a question of semantics. This chart appears to show a substitution effect for the UK of coal being replaced by natural gas + renewables, with gas as the dominant factor:
I did kind of address that at the very end when I talked about the reporting about individual countries--for example, Costa Rica and Portugal, and I believe Denmark has a high proportion of its energy coming from wind as well (100 percent in some instances). I believe that Iceland runs mainly on geothermal, but they're a special case. I know that a lot of coal plants have switched over to natural gas in recent years including here in the U.S. Some industries also claim that they are moving over to different energy sources. So there are indeed instances of a transition at a local, national or industrial level. That's a very good point.
But I would expect this to show in the aggregate statistics, at least a little. But that's not what I see, unless I'm missing something. I don't see a substitution effect worldwide, despite seeing it within individual countries. Why is that? It's possible that energy transitions in various industrialized countries are being offset by expanding energy usage in developing countries which still primarily comes from earlier methods. Coal use has indeed slowed, essentially becoming a "bumpy plateau" rather than a steady increase, but there's still no permanent decline even as carbon-free sources come online. That's important, since the planet's atmosphere is not confined by national borders. Again, I'm not arguing that such a thing is not possible, only that it has never so far taken place at a civilizational level.
But I'm still skeptical of the idea that we can just transition over without significant disruptions to our current way if life, effectively maintaining business as usual. For example, I believe energy policies, combined with environmental restrictions, are already causing the farmer protests across Europe that I read about: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68249099. It's also worth noting that Britain has deindustrialized greatly since 1965, which has had effects on quality of life for certain areas, and not always positive.
Of course, some of those "disruptions" might be to our benefit. As I recall, the per capita energy use in European countries is quite a bit lower than the United States, despite having what I would argue is a much better quality of life. Your native Finland is a great example of this. I've long argued that a lot of economic activity is just consuming energy to make profit numbers go up without increasing quality of life--or even *decreasing* it in some instances--which is what degrowth advocates have long argued and what "mainstream" economists are fanatically opposed to discussing.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response! I could not agree more on the spirit of your last paragraphs. And just to be clear: I think the main observation is thought-provoking and important: the the global history of energy us is not one of transitions but an ever-growing demand. And I share your worry that renewables could just become part of this story. As a personal example, a group of us recently helped an old friend in Zambia to get a solar panel. It improves his life. But to be completely honest, it is in no way making his life more environmentally sustainable. It simply allows his shop to stay open after dark. I think this is kind of the worry captured by your essay. Very perceptive. And quite worrying.
I guess I just want to highlight that genuine transitions have also happened. And I guess my optimistic take would be this: a global transition is just a bunch of national transitions. (Whether that's possible and adequate is another question.)
PS. On the specific case of UK:
Again, a very perceptive point about deindustrialisation. It probably helped a lot. But there has also been very active policy against coal, often to the chagrin of energy producers. A lot of the coal plants are just inactive today. Some of them burn biomass, but others are just lost assets. I think it helps to know that these things have happened (or in this case, are happening as we speak). I have a close friend working on this and I have been genuinely impressed at the speed of progress on their front.
The pricing of renewables in UK is also something to be hopeful about: Wind and solar are really, really cheap to produce. And importantly, they are not subsided in the traditional sense. It’s almost the opposite: the market price for renewables swings too low sometimes, so the government helps investors hedge against that with their “contract-for-difference” scheme. Basically, the price for unit of electricity is set up by an auction. If the market price goes below, the government pays the companies. If it goes higher, the companies pays the government. So this is industrial policy, yes, but not a case of artificially lowering the price. The prices are genuinely low. The problem is in the cost-structure: investors don’t tend to like heavy upfront costs. Hence these policies to create predictability.
It is striking, I should add, that a lot of the UK progress has happened during and after David Cameron, who famously said “cut the green crap”. I do sometimes wonder what could have happened if the political economy was different…
PPS. Great to hear you’ve listened and liked! Any thoughts or requests, hit me up.
Doubtful, unless you believe that all of the whales in the ocean collectively had more blubber than all of the world's underground petroleum deposits. Plus, as Moby Dick (1851) demonstrates, bagging a bunch of whales was a lot harder than drilling a well into the ground as Drake did in Pennsylvania (1859). As a result, I'm betting that the EROEI was much higher for petroleum than whale oil.
The point not is that we haven't had an energy transition. It's that every previous energy transition went to a superior energy source, in terms of EROEI, total energy available, energy density, transportability, usefulness, or all of the above. And even then, I'm guessing whale oil was only a tiny fraction of humanity's total energy generation compared to biomass--it was basically used for kerosene lamps in the North Atlantic and a few other industrial uses--that's it.
You've got to look at humanity as a whole, which I do here. My argument is that if we do actually transition energy sources globally--and not just layer on renewables as an additional energy source--we will not be able to maintain the status quo and will have to undergo profound social transformation. Yet the mainstream media implies that the transition will occur (or even has occurred) with no disruption to our way of life whatsoever.
Thanks, a great read as always. Anyone who thinks industrial civilisation is going to run on electricity is a bozo. And if it could, all the mining and erecting of solar and wind facilities is just a continuation of ecocide by other means. What humanity should be doing is learning to reduce our need and desire for the products of industrial energy and to accept that energy is meant to be what we get from eating food. Although I think the ability of the ecosystem to sustain humanity is already ruined beyond repair. Ho hum.
Spot on. The assertion that we can a) transition our energy system b) without any meaningful change in lifestyle or consumption patterns and c) actually make money or increase wealth while doing it has always struck me as facile bullshit. The idea that places like LA, Dallas, and Phoenix will continue to exist as they are, only with Teslas and Rivians choking the highways powered by rooftop solar, sounds totally insane.
It seems to me that energy consumption per capita must collapse downward. The first 50% reduction can come from abandoning F-150s, highway sprawl, and 6000sf McMansions for compact walkable/e-bikeable cities - which IMO would be incomparably better places to live. But most people would rebel against it, and no serious efforts are underway to bring this about, except a bit of tinkering along the edges. Even in Europe climate mandates are becoming enough of an issue that it's toppling governments, and we literally haven't even begun the sort of deep reductions in emissions & energy use that elites claim are necessary.
I always say that I really hope global warming turns out to be a scam/hoax, a massive collective delusion, or just a nothingburger for currently unappreciated reasons, because the chances of us actually achieving "net zero" by 2050 or whatever are a hard zero.
Not only must it collapse downward to such a degree that there will be instant rioting, but we need to invent magical CSS tech to go into negative emissions.
We basically need to live like the amish: no flying, driving, producing anything we don’t need to survive, energy use like televisions, vacuum cleaners, computers, etc meat consumption. Not only will the economy collapse and global famine quickly ensue, there will be global despair and suicide waves in the hundreds of millions, and the few of us capable of atrocities will go to very barbaric behaviours.
The is why (among other reasons) it’s a catch-22 and the politicians literally can’t sacrifice the now for the future. It’s not even a question of blindness or power corruption (although they have that too). There is just no way out of this predicament. We are in overshoot, the damage is already done, the tipping points imminent, and a lot of people need to die asap if the small remainder are to have an earth that doesn’t cause a mass extinction among literally all mammals (1000ppm CO2 and/or +10 degrees traditionally guarantees that).
Jan Blaxham -
Your vision of what must inevitably happen is a rather extreme one. Like yourself, I take it that some degree of "collapse" (a very complex term with many possible interpretations) is now inevitable. Unlike you, I don't believe mass global famine and mass die off and the rest is unavoidable - - though it may be if the climate system has fallen off a cliff, which it very nearly seems to have done. It's going to be threading a needle, in any case.
If we're lucky, we can stop flying and driving around in circles. We can re-design our economies, making the provisioning of basic needs at the center of the economy even in the "developed world". We could all learn how to, and have access to land for, community self-provisioning of food and other basic needs. There is so, so much we can do. But we won't do any of this with a vision as bleak and horrifying as the one you're offering us.
No, global warming is not a hoax, and it's far worse, and far more dangerous, than most people imagine it to be at present.
"The first 50% reduction can come from abandoning F-150s, highway sprawl, and 6000sf McMansions for compact walkable/e-bikeable cities ...."
Some people will continue to live in cities in the future, but access to livelihood in cities is going to shrivel up significantly, and so very many millions will have no other option than to leave the cities and take up residence in places with enough open space to engage in what I call "community self-provisioning" of food, water, shelter and other basic needs. It's not going to be possible to maintain an urban-centric material culture for reasons I address here.:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/
Self-provisioning of food is ... well, gardening, small farming for personal and family use, fishing for one's food, hunting and foraging of wild edibles. When communities do this for themselves it is "community self-provisioning". Typically, self-provisioning takes place outside of the Market economy. It's just about attending to one's needs without a market standing in the way.
The rare metals we need to produce even a fraction of the first generation of “renewables” do not exist on our planet - and if they did, would be too energy-intensive and polluting to mine without destroying the planet. Check out, for example, Thomas Murphy re ‘Physics and Planetary Ambitions’ on ‘The Great Simplification with Nata Hagens’, 11 May 2022
On a side note, a shockingly thin sliver of human beings have the mental dispositions to both comprehend and accept the meanings and conclusions of simple sentences like the above, or indeed, ones like “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.”
It just. Does. Not. Compute.
We really do literally believe what we want to believe, concocting our own made-up view of reality, glady imagining our actions won’t succumb to physical realities right up until we run head first into the wall and die. It’s quite fascinating really, apart from being so very tragic.
Hey Chad. For some reason, Substack won't let me message you. Please DM me. I'd love to have you guest post on my page, if you'd like. This is a great piece.
Oops. FAIL to take in the totality. Duh.
Oh, yeah. Too many, as you note, take in the totality.
Very helpful essay. Thanks. Have you heard of the recent book The Dark Cloud? Worth reading.
Interesting. Seems to argue that the digital world is not the energy-saver it's often touted as.
I'm a "mid-level" expert on what I call The Three Es (EEE) -- energy, economy and ecology in relation to one another. There are top level experts in this field, such as Richard Heinberg. And there are a lot of lower level experts.
I've learned a lot from Heinberg. And he has said a couple of things which have simply enormous importance, and yet these statements have been largely ignored.
Here are two of them.:
“Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.”
from – Why We Can’t Just Do It: The Truth about Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions – resilience - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-03-23/why-we-cant-just-do-it-the-truth-about-our-failure-to-curb-carbon-emissions/
In yet another article, Heinberg said this:
"There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude."
-- from - Is the Energy Transition Taking Off—or Hitting a Wall? - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-07/is-the-energy-transition-taking-off-or-hitting-a-wall/
To fully comprehend the significance of what Heinberg is saying here one must understand that, in all honesty, we no longer have a "carbon budget", because the carbon budget concept was originally devised to try and avert a movement from a "safe" climate system to a "dangerous" one. But we're now in the danger zone ... and heading rapidly toward catastrophic.
So any fossil fuels we burn now is more than we can actually afford to burn. So a short term (ten year) burst of fossil fuel use expansion, which would be inevitable if we sincerely attempt a full replacement of energy strategy (called "rapid transition"), would contradict the ostensible purpose of "energy transition".
What we need to do is redefine "energy transition" as mostly a deliberate shift to a much, much lower energy and materials throughput economy. But that's not being discussed because of The Narrative on "energy transition" is obviating that public conversation.
Regarding note #1:
I'm not an advocate for replacing fossil fuel automobiles with electric automobiles. I am an advocate for phasing out the car culture as rapidly as possible.
That said, the principal reason electric cars were replaced by internal combustion cars (or why electrics never won the hegemonic race), in the most plausible version of the story I've heard or read, is that at the time when electric cars were in ascendency, and as liquid fuel cars began to emerge, opportunities to recharge an electric car battery were scarce. (Ouch, that sentence is way too long!)
The real problem was that electric cars were only any good for intra-urban transportation, as the story goes. They were no good at getting from one city to a distant other city... at a time when there was a lot of wide open spaces between towns and cities. But with a gasoline powered car, one could bring containers of extra fuel along on the trip -- something you could not do with electrics. When the fuel tank ran close to dry, just pour in some of the extra fuel stored in your stash. That'd get you to a distant city without having to charge your battery in the sticks.
"It’s the 2070s. The world is running on clean energy. Everyone has access to sufficient supplies. No one is choking on dirty air. They’re well-fed. There are almost no gasoline cars on the road. Deforestation has come to an end. We use tiny amounts of land to produce food. We’re not killing tens of billions of animals for meat. Wildlife is making a comeback."
This will be true, but not for the reason she thinks. Collapse will bring us into sustainability whether we want it or not. Those of us who remain will be sustainable and the world will heal. I'm not sure about the 2070s part, but I expect we humans will be fairly rare by the start of the next century.
Thought-provoking. And a good reminder of just how much energy we produce today.
However, I think the central claim is a notch misleading. Yes, there has never been a global energy transition. But there have been many national energy transitions, some of them very ambitious. For example, UK industrialised with coal-power, but transitioned to cleaner sources. Coal did not plateau - it was phased out by active policy decisions. These policies were not easy and they were contested by many. But they worked. In 2024, we burn almost no coal.
Isn't this the kind of analogy that people think of when talking about historic energy transitions?
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01102019/uk-coal-addiction-phase-out-natural-gas-renewable-energy-electricity/
Thanks for the comment Ilari, I enjoy your podcast!
I guess it's true that we have had a transition if you confine "we" to certain specific countries, or to specific areas. The statement does hold true if you look at humanity as whole, which the what the chart shows and what I was referring to. So we could say that it's true at a local level, but not at a global one. So it's a question of semantics. This chart appears to show a substitution effect for the UK of coal being replaced by natural gas + renewables, with gas as the dominant factor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg
I did kind of address that at the very end when I talked about the reporting about individual countries--for example, Costa Rica and Portugal, and I believe Denmark has a high proportion of its energy coming from wind as well (100 percent in some instances). I believe that Iceland runs mainly on geothermal, but they're a special case. I know that a lot of coal plants have switched over to natural gas in recent years including here in the U.S. Some industries also claim that they are moving over to different energy sources. So there are indeed instances of a transition at a local, national or industrial level. That's a very good point.
But I would expect this to show in the aggregate statistics, at least a little. But that's not what I see, unless I'm missing something. I don't see a substitution effect worldwide, despite seeing it within individual countries. Why is that? It's possible that energy transitions in various industrialized countries are being offset by expanding energy usage in developing countries which still primarily comes from earlier methods. Coal use has indeed slowed, essentially becoming a "bumpy plateau" rather than a steady increase, but there's still no permanent decline even as carbon-free sources come online. That's important, since the planet's atmosphere is not confined by national borders. Again, I'm not arguing that such a thing is not possible, only that it has never so far taken place at a civilizational level.
But I'm still skeptical of the idea that we can just transition over without significant disruptions to our current way if life, effectively maintaining business as usual. For example, I believe energy policies, combined with environmental restrictions, are already causing the farmer protests across Europe that I read about: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68249099. It's also worth noting that Britain has deindustrialized greatly since 1965, which has had effects on quality of life for certain areas, and not always positive.
Of course, some of those "disruptions" might be to our benefit. As I recall, the per capita energy use in European countries is quite a bit lower than the United States, despite having what I would argue is a much better quality of life. Your native Finland is a great example of this. I've long argued that a lot of economic activity is just consuming energy to make profit numbers go up without increasing quality of life--or even *decreasing* it in some instances--which is what degrowth advocates have long argued and what "mainstream" economists are fanatically opposed to discussing.
Thanks for such a thoughtful response! I could not agree more on the spirit of your last paragraphs. And just to be clear: I think the main observation is thought-provoking and important: the the global history of energy us is not one of transitions but an ever-growing demand. And I share your worry that renewables could just become part of this story. As a personal example, a group of us recently helped an old friend in Zambia to get a solar panel. It improves his life. But to be completely honest, it is in no way making his life more environmentally sustainable. It simply allows his shop to stay open after dark. I think this is kind of the worry captured by your essay. Very perceptive. And quite worrying.
I guess I just want to highlight that genuine transitions have also happened. And I guess my optimistic take would be this: a global transition is just a bunch of national transitions. (Whether that's possible and adequate is another question.)
PS. On the specific case of UK:
Again, a very perceptive point about deindustrialisation. It probably helped a lot. But there has also been very active policy against coal, often to the chagrin of energy producers. A lot of the coal plants are just inactive today. Some of them burn biomass, but others are just lost assets. I think it helps to know that these things have happened (or in this case, are happening as we speak). I have a close friend working on this and I have been genuinely impressed at the speed of progress on their front.
The pricing of renewables in UK is also something to be hopeful about: Wind and solar are really, really cheap to produce. And importantly, they are not subsided in the traditional sense. It’s almost the opposite: the market price for renewables swings too low sometimes, so the government helps investors hedge against that with their “contract-for-difference” scheme. Basically, the price for unit of electricity is set up by an auction. If the market price goes below, the government pays the companies. If it goes higher, the companies pays the government. So this is industrial policy, yes, but not a case of artificially lowering the price. The prices are genuinely low. The problem is in the cost-structure: investors don’t tend to like heavy upfront costs. Hence these policies to create predictability.
It is striking, I should add, that a lot of the UK progress has happened during and after David Cameron, who famously said “cut the green crap”. I do sometimes wonder what could have happened if the political economy was different…
PPS. Great to hear you’ve listened and liked! Any thoughts or requests, hit me up.
Doubtful, unless you believe that all of the whales in the ocean collectively had more blubber than all of the world's underground petroleum deposits. Plus, as Moby Dick (1851) demonstrates, bagging a bunch of whales was a lot harder than drilling a well into the ground as Drake did in Pennsylvania (1859). As a result, I'm betting that the EROEI was much higher for petroleum than whale oil.
The point not is that we haven't had an energy transition. It's that every previous energy transition went to a superior energy source, in terms of EROEI, total energy available, energy density, transportability, usefulness, or all of the above. And even then, I'm guessing whale oil was only a tiny fraction of humanity's total energy generation compared to biomass--it was basically used for kerosene lamps in the North Atlantic and a few other industrial uses--that's it.
You've got to look at humanity as a whole, which I do here. My argument is that if we do actually transition energy sources globally--and not just layer on renewables as an additional energy source--we will not be able to maintain the status quo and will have to undergo profound social transformation. Yet the mainstream media implies that the transition will occur (or even has occurred) with no disruption to our way of life whatsoever.
Most of the writing about the "Petrodollar" is libertarian conspiracy nonsense.