Guest post by Louis Arnoux
Part 3 – Standing slightly past the edge of the cliff
The
Tooth Fairy Syndrome
that I discussed in
Part 2 is, in my view, the fundamental reason why those
holding onto BAU will grab every piece of information that can
possibly, superficially, back up their ideology and twist it to suit their viewa,
generating much confusion in the process. It is also probably fair to say that the advocates of various
versions of
“energy transition” are not immune to this kind of syndrome
when they remain oblivious to the issues explored in
Parts 1 and 2. Is it possible to go beyond such
confusion?
The need to move away from ideology
The impact of the
Tooth
Fairy Syndrome is all the more felt in the main media and among politicians
– with the end result that so many lay people (and many experts) end up highly
confused about what to think and do about energy matters. Notably, we often encounter articles
advocating, even sensationalising, various energy transition technologies or
instead seeking to rubbish them by highlighting what they present as problematic
issues without any depth of analysis.
For example, a 2013 article from the
Daily
Mail was highlighted in recent discussions among energy experts as a case
in point.
The UK is indeed installing large
numbers of subsidized, costly diesel generators to be used as back-up at times
of low electricity supplies from wind turbines. This article presented this policy as very problematic but
failed to set things in perspective about what such issues say about the
challenges of any
energy transition.
In New Zealand, where I lived close to half of my life before
a return to my dear Provence (
De reditu suo mode, as a wink to
anearlier post by Ugo) about 73% of electricity is deemed renewable (with hydro
60%, geothermal 10%, wind 3%, PVs about 0.1%); the balance being generated from
gas and coal. There is a policy to
achieve 90% renewables by 2025. Now, with that mix we have had for many years something like what the UK is
building, with a number of distributed generators for emergency back-up without
this being a major issue. The main
differences I see with the UK are that (1) in NZ we have only about 5M people living
in an area about half that of France (i.e. the chief issue is a matter of
renewable production per head of population) and (2) the system is mostly hydro,
hence embodying a large amount of energy storage, that Kiwi
“sparkies” have learned to manage very
well. It ensues that a few diesel
or gas generators are not a big deal there. By contrast, the UK in my view faces a very big challenge to
go
“green”.
The above example illustrates the need to extricate
ourselves from ideology and look carefully into systems specifics when
considering such matters as the potential of various technologies, like wind
turbine, PVs, EVs, and so on, as well as capacity factors and EROI levels in
the context of going 100% renewable.
All too often, vital issues keep being sidestepped by both BAU and
non-BAU parties; while ignoring them often leads to erroneous “solutions” and even dangerous
ones. So as a conclusion of this
three-part series focused on “enquiring into the appropriateness of the
question”, here are some of the fundamental issues that I see in
front of us (the list is not exhaustive):
“Apocalypse now”
At least since the early 1970s and the Meadows' work, we
have known that the globalised industrial world (GIW) is on a self-destructive
path, aka BAU (Business as usual). We now know that we
are living through the tail end of this process, the end of the Oil Age,
precipitating what I have called the
Oil
Fizzle Dragon-King,
Seneca style, that is, after a slow, relatively smooth
climb (aka
“economic growth”) we are
at the beginning of an abrupt fall down a thermodynamic cliff.
The chief issue is whole system change. This means thinking in whole systems
terms where the thermodynamics of complex systems operating far from
equilibrium is the key. In terms of
epistemology and methods, this requires what in anthropology is called the “hermeneutic
circle”: moving repeatedly from the particulars, the details, to the whole
system, improving our understanding of the whole and from this going back to
the particulars, improving our understanding of them, going back to considering
the whole, and so on. Whole system
replacement, i.e. going 100% renewable, requires a huge energy embodiment, a
kind of “primitive accumulation” (as a wink to Marx) that presently,
under the prevailing paradigm and technology set, is not feasible. Having the “Energy Hand” in mind (Figure 5),
where does this required energy may come from in a context of sharp decline of
net energy from oil and Red Queen effect, and concerning renewable, inverse Red
Queen/cannibalisation effects? As
another example of the importance of whole system thinking, Axel Kleidon has
raised the question of the viability of very large-scale wind versus direct
solar.
Solely considering the performances and cost of this or that
alternative energy technology won’t suffice. Short of addressing the complexities of whole system
replacement, the situation we are in is some kind of “Apocalypse now”. The
chief challenge I see is thus how to shift safely, with minimal loss of life
(substantial loss of life there will be; this has become unavoidable), from
fossil-BAU (and thus accessorily nuclear) to 100% sustainable, which means essentially,
in one form or another, a direct solar-based society.
We currently have some 17 TW of power installed globally
(mostly fossil with some nuclear), i.e. about 2.3kW/head, but with some 4 billion people who at best are grossly energy stressed, many who have no access to
electricity at all and only limited transport, in a context of an efficiency of
global energy systems in the order of 12%.
To address the
Oil Fizzle Dragon-King and the
Perfect
Storm that it is in the process of whipping up, I consider that we need to
move to 4kW/head for the whole population (assuming it levels off at some 8 billion people instead of the currently expected 11 billions), plus some 10TW additional to
address climate change and other ecological energy related issues, hence about
50TW, 100% direct solar based, for the whole spectrum of energy uses including
transport; preferably over 20 years. Standing where we now are, slightly past the edge of the
thermodynamic cliff, this is my understanding of what’s required.
In other words, going “green”
and surviving it (i.e. avoiding the inverse Red Queen effect) means increasing our
Energy Hand from 17 TW to 50 TW (as a
rough order of magnitude), with efficiencies shifting from 12% to over 80%.
To elaborate this further, I stress it again, currently the
17 TW do not even suffice to cater for the whole 7.3G global population and by a
wide margin. Going “green” with the current “renewable” technology mix and related
paradigm would mean devoting a substantial amount of those 17 TW to the “primitive accumulation” of the “green” system. It should be clear that under this
predicament something would have to give, i.e. some of us would get even more
energy stressed, and die, or as the Chinese and Indians have been doing for a
while we would use much more of remaining fossil resources but then this would accelerate
global warming and many other nasties. Alternatively we may face up to
changing paradigm so as to rapidly steer away from global EROIs below 10:1 and
global energy efficiency around 12%.
This is the usual “can’t have
one’s cake and eat it” situation writ large.
Put in an other way, when looking at whole societal system
replacement one must look at the whole of what’s required to make the system
work, including people and their own energy requirements – this is
fundamentally a matter of system boundary definitions related to problem
definition (in David Bhom’s sense). We can illustrate this by considering the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia (KSA). As a thought
experiment, remove oil (the media have reported that KSA’s Crown Prince has
seen the writing on some wall re the near end of the oil bonanza). This brings the KSA population from some
27M down to some 2M, i.e. some 25M people are currently required to keep oil
flowing at some 10M bbl/day (including numerous Filipino domestics, medics,
lawyers, and son on) plus about three times that population overseas to supply
what the 25M require to keep the oil flowing…
Globally, I estimate very roughly that some 1.5G people,
directly related to oil production, processing distribution and transport
matters did require oil at above $100/bbl for their livelihood (including the
Filipino domestics). I call them the Oil
People. Most of them currently are unhappy and
struggle; their “demand” for goods
and services has dropped considerably since 2014.
So all in all, whole system replacement (on a
“do or die” mode) requires considering
whole production chain networks from mining the ores, through making the
metals, cement, etc., to making the machines, to using them to produce the
stuff we require to go 100% sustainable, as well as the energy requirements of
not only the
Oil People but the full
compendium of the
Energy People involved,
both the
“fossil” ones and the
“green” ones; while meanwhile we need to
keep existing fossil-based energy systems going as much as possible. Very roughly the
Energy People are probably in the order of 3 billion people (and it is not
easy to convert a substantial proportion of the
“fossil” ones to
“green”,
including their own related energy requirements – this too has a significant
energy cost). This is where Figure
2,
with the interplay of Red Queen and the inverse Red Queen, comes in.
Figure 2
In my view at this whole system level
we do have a major problem. Given
the very short time window constraint, we can’t afford to get it wrong in terms
of how to possibly getting out of there – we have hardly enough time to have
one go at it.
Remaining time frame
Indeed, under the sway of the
Tooth Fairy (see
Part 2) and an increasingly asthmatic Red Queen,
we no longer have 35 years, (say up to around 2050). We have at best 10 years, not to debate and agonise but to
actually do, with the next three years being key. The thermodynamics on this, summarised in
Part 1, is rock
hard. This timeframe, combined
with the Oil Pearl Harbor challenge and the inverse Red Queen constraints, means
in my view that none of the current
“doings” renewable-wise can cut it. In fact much of these stand to make
matters worse – I refer here to current interactions between efforts at going
green largely within the prevailing paradigm and die hard BAU efforts at
keeping fossils going, as perhaps exemplified in the current UK policies
discussed earlier.
Weak links
Notwithstanding its apparent power, the GIW is in fact
extremely fragile. It embodies a
number of very weak links in its networks. I have highlighted the oil issue, an issue that defines the
overall time frame for dealing with
“Apocalypse now”. In addition to that and to climate
change, there are a few other challenges that have been variously put forward
by a range of researchers in recent years, such as fresh water availability,
massive soil degradation, trace pollutants, degradation of life in oceans
(about 99% of life is aquatic), staple food threats (e.g. black stem rust,
wheat blast, ground level ozone, etc.), loss of biodiversity and 6
th
mass extinction, all the way to Joseph Tainter’s work concerning the links
between energy flows, power (in TW), complexity and overshoot to collapse.
These weak links are currently in
the process of breaking or are about to break, the breaks forming a
self-reinforcing avalanche (SOC) or Perfect
Storm. All have the same key
timeframe of about 10 years as an order of magnitude for acting. All require a fair “whack” of energy as a prerequisite to handling them (the “whack”
being a flexible and elastic unit of something substantial that usually one
does not have).
It's all burnt up
Recent research shows
that sensitivity to climate forcing has been substantially underestimated,
meaning that we must expect much more warming in the longer term than touted so
far.
This further exacerbates what we
already knew, namely that there is no such thing as a
“carbon budget” of
fossils the GIW could still burn, and no way of staying below the highly
political and misleading 2
oC COP21 objective (Figure 6).
The 350ppm CO2 equivalent advocated by Hansen et
al. is a safe estimate – a boundary crossed in the late 1980s, some 28 years
ago. So the reality is that we can’t
escape actually extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, somehow, if we
want to avoid trying to survive in a few mosquito infested areas of the far north
and south, while some 80% of the planet becomes non-habitable in the longer run. Direct Air Capture of atmospheric CO2
(DAC) is something that also requires a fair “whack" of energy,
hence the additional 10TW I consider is required to get out of trouble.
Cognitive failure
Figure 7 – EROI cognitive failure
The “Brexit” saga
is perhaps the latest large-scale demonstration of cognitive failure in a very
long series. That is to say, the
failure on the part of decision-making elites to make use of available
knowledge, experience, and expertise to tackle effectively challenges within
the timeframe required to do so.
Cognitive failure is probably most blatant, but largely
remaining unseen, concerning energy, the Oil
Fizzle DK and matters of energy returns on energy investments (EROI or
EROEI). What we can observe is a triple
failure of BAU, but also of most current “green”
alternatives (Figure
7):
(1) the BAU development trajectory since the 1950s failed; (2) there has been a
failure to take heed of over 40 years of warnings; and (3) there has been a
failure to develop viable alternatives.
However, although I am critical of aspects of recent evaluations of the feasibility of going 100% renewable,
I do think it remains feasible with existing knowledge, no
“blue sky” required, i.e. to reach in the order of 50TW 100% solar I outlined earlier, but I also think that a crash on the cliff side of the Seneca is no longer avoidable. In other words I consider that it remains possible to partly retrieve the situation while the GIW crashes so long as enough people do realise that one can’t change paradigm on the down side as one may do on the upside of a
Seneca, which presently our elites, in full blown cognitive failure mode, don’t understand.
To illustrate this matter further and highlight why I consider that production EROIs well above 30:1 are necessary to get us out of trouble consider Figure 8.
Figure 8 – The necessity of very high EROIs
This is expanded from
similar attempts by Jessica Lambert
et al., to perhaps highlights what
sliding down the thermodynamic cliff entails. Charles Hall has shown that a production EROI of 10:1
corresponds roughly to an end-user EROI of 3.3:1 and is the bare minimum for an
industrial society to function.
In sociological terms, for 10:1 think of
North Korea. As shown on Figure
7,
currently I know of no alternative, either unconventional fossils based, nuclear
or
“green” technologies with production EROIs (i.e. equivalent to the
well head EROI for oil) above 20:1; most remain below 10:1. I do think it feasible to go back above
30:1, in 100% sustainable fashion, but not along prevalent modes of technology
development, social organisation, and decision-making.
The hard questions
So prevailing cognitive failure brings us back to Bohm’s
“enquiry
into the appropriateness of the question”. In conclusion of a 2011 paper, Joseph Tainter raised four questions
that, in my view, squarely address such an enquiry (Figure 9).
To date those four questions
remain unanswered by both tenants of BAU and advocates of going 100% renewable.
We are in an unprecedented situation. As stressed by Tainter, no previous
civilisation has ever managed to survive the kind of predicament we are in. However, the people living in those
civilisations were mostly rural and had a safety net, in that their energy
source was 100% solar, photosynthesis for food, fibre and timber – they always
could keep going even though it may have been under harsh conditions. We no longer have such a safety net;
our entire food systems are almost completely dependent on that net energy from
oil that is in the process of dropping to the floor and our food supply systems
cannot cope without it.
Figure
10
summarises how, in my view, Tainter’s four questions, his analyses and mine
combine to define the unique situation we are in. If we are to avoid sliding all the way down the
thermodynamic cliff, we must shift to a new “energy
pool”. In this respect,
dealing with the SOC-like Perfect Storm
while carrying out such a shift both excludes “shrinking” our energy
base (as many “greens” would have it)
and necessitates abandoning the present highly wasteful energy use paradigm –
hence the shift from 17TW fossil to 50TW 100% solar-based and with over 80%
useful uses of energy that I advocated earlier, over a 20 to 30 years
timeframe.
Figure 10 – Ready to jumping into a new energy
pool?
Figure
10
highlights that humankind has been through a number of such shifts over the
last 6 million years or so. Each
shift has entailed:
(1) a nexus of revolutionary innovations encompassing
thermodynamics and related techniques,
(2) social innovation (Ã la Cornelius
Castoriadis’ imaginary institution of society) and
(3) innovations
concerning the human psyche, i.e. how we think, decide and act.
Our predicament, as we have just begun to slide down the
fossil fuels thermodynamic cliff, similarly requires such a nexus if we are to
succeed at a new “energy pool shift”. Just focusing on thermodynamics and technology won’t
suffice. The kind of paradigm
change I keep referring to integrates technology, social innovations and innovation
concerning the human psyche about ways of avoiding cognitive failure. This is a lot to ask, however it is
necessary to address Tainter’s questions.
This challenge is a measure of the huge selection pressure humankind
managed to place itself under. Presently, I see a lot going on very creatively in all these three
intimately related domains. Maybe
we will succeed in making the jump over the cliff?
Bio: Dr Louis Arnoux is a scientist, engineer and entrepreneur committed to the development of sustainable ways of living and doing business. His profile is available on Google+ at: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115895160299982053493/about/p/pub