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.
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, 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.
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.
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/