Question Everything

Why scaling up alternative energy sources won't work

And why we are probably screwed by our own blindness

A number of articles have appeared in the popular press, mainstream media, and even science magazines or journals, suggesting that we could produce all of our energy needs from renewable energy sources such as solar (photovoltaics and concentrated solar generation), wind, and some tidal and geothermal thrown in for good measure. I am always profoundly amazed at these claims because they hinge on the substance of what our energy needs actually are or will be by the time the requisite infrastructure is in place. Those needs are generally predicated (or certainly implied to be) on our current economic systems and a consumer-oriented civilization. Even with a massive effort to improve process efficiencies across the board (e.g. the Smart Grid for delivering electricity, electrifying transportation, insulating houses and office buildings, switching to low power per lumen lighting, etc.) the total required energy needs of the US and the world (remember we have to think of this as a global problem) are so vastly huge compared with the current output of installed alternative energy systems that one has to take pause. If we want a civilization that is essentially equivalent to what we have today, only run on alternative, renewable energy sources, the scale of the needed energy capture and conversion equipment is literally mind blowing (for those with some technical background and interested in seeing the numbers, this Wikipedia article is reasonable, though contested in some areas - keep in mind it isn't the estimates of total available energy from each source, but the rate of capture and conversion, or extraction, that is what we should focus on).

The basic problem is one of energy density of the source, and power (energy per unit time) recoverable for useful work. Fossil fuels are high density with respect to weight. They combust at high temperatures so that they can deliver power required to run our engines and appliances, etc. Sunlight and winds (except for hurricanes, maybe) have a very low power density meaning that you need very large collection surfaces to capture enough energy to be equivalent to what is generated by fossil fuels burning.

So the scale of building out an infrastructure, which would also include nuclear power, equivalent to the energy infrastructure that we presume we will need (due to population and economic growth and development of underdeveloped countries) that does not depend on fossil fuels is so large that it would probably take 50 to 100 years to accomplish with an all out (WWII-style) effort. If you've never been involved in a large and complex building program (and note that assumes that we don't have any basic new technology to invent along the way) you will have great difficulty imagining the problems involved. Deploying just-developed industrial-grade technology is a slow painful process. Among other problems you have to address is what to do with the sunk costs in existing infrastructure. Financially-minded folks (the owners of existing infrastructure) won't consider tossing installed capital unless the new capital promises to pay extraordinarily high profits to offset the losses from capital write offs. This where capitalism will be the enemy of the future, even more so than it has been the enemy of the present in the sense that it created this dilemma in the first place. Under market economy rules with profit-motivated free agent firms doing the work, no one is going to step up to the plate to start investing in the kinds of projects needed to accomplish the goal, even in a longer time frame.

There is a closely related issue in that we are going into a rapidly declining energy available from fossil fuels regime. That means, simply stated, we have less and less energy available to do economic work; to create real wealth. As things stand all solar panels and wind generators are built using fossil fuel based energy (small exceptions for hydroelectric inputs in some parts of the world). They are transported to the sites with oil. In the foreseeable future the massive infrastructure we are talking about will be almost completely dependent on fossil fuel inputs for construction. We could imagine a 'bootstrapping' approach in which we build a huge solar panel array to power a solar panel production plant which would build more panels to power electric transport vehicles, and then more to power the suppliers of materials and services to the plant, and then more panels to electrify farms that grow the food to nourish the plant employees, and... You can see where this is going. By the time we did all of that we might have a self-sustaining solar power production capability but we haven't yet addressed the need to supply excess energy to the society that needs the energy.

I honestly think that something like a bootstrapping operation is called for. But it won't happen with private enterprise and market economics. From a political philosophy point of view, since energy is the most fundamental resource people need to live let alone have a civilization I think there is a strong argument for nationalizing (actually globalizing) energy production and distribution. Take the profit motive out of the equation and by directive make the necessary investments to get this working before we run out of fossil fuel energy resources completely. I realize this raises all kinds of issues (aside from the fact that libertarians and republicans will go ape shit). Managing such an enterprise efficiently and effectively is a daunting task. But a little judicious application of hierarchical control theory (see the series Sapient Governance might go a long way in the hands of competent leadership.

Which brings up the other major hurdle that could prevent even getting started on such a project: democracy. Very few people are going to vote for the leaders who tell them the truth, that they are going to have to make huge sacrifices in the near (and not so short) term in order to make this feasible. People want to hear how the politicos are going to create jobs and wealth and profits. Those are the ones they will vote for.

So you see it comes down to some pretty fundamental barriers for which there is no consensus basis for overcoming. The scale is too big to accomplish and not have a downturn in our level of material wealth, the energy to do the work needed would have to be siphoned off from other consumption-directed work, it cannot be even contemplated as a profit-making venture so our market economy won't go for it, and no one (except possibly the Chinese) will be in a politically powerful position to make it happen.

I hate this role of being a Cassandra. Oh, I know there are a few readers out there who actually do see this, so it isn't completely the case that no one believes any of this doomish stuff. But it is frustrating to see how things are going down while knowing it doesn't have to be this way. There is a way to salvage a future for our grandchildren or maybe great grandchildren if we could but wise up. But I just don't see that happening. There are a lot of far more eloquent writers and speakers than me out there who are pitching similar messages or warnings already. Some are nearly household names or at least have been recognized by the media. And still, very few of the masses or the media are paying attention. Contraction and depression don't sell. So I continue to write in my meager way, pointing out what would work, yet knowing it won't even be considered. And I think about the future, after the crash of civilization and population. What kind of world might we prepare for in that time by understanding what we are doing wrong now?

And my research continues in spite of this schizophrenic (a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements) mindfulness because there is always hope.

The Evolution of Sapience

Finally! Part 5 of my series on the sapience is available here. I apologize for the long delay, but as some of you know I had been preparing for my sabbatical, coming here to Syracuse NY to SUNY-ESF to study energy return on energy investment with Charlie Hall and his students. And believe me, Charlie has kept me hopping.

So here it is: Abstract

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas

The Emergence and Development of Sapience

The story of sapience and its conjoined twin, second-order consciousness (awareness of being aware), is told in the evolution of hierarchical control, both within the individual human brain and in the societal matrix in which humans operate. It is the emergence of elaborated strategic management of the self, coordination management (tactical and logistical) in the social group, and the begriming of strategic management for the group. Humanity finds itself in an awkward adolescence of consciousness. We have emerged from ape-hood as beings with superior future-thinking, mental models of both ourselves and others, and the language facility to share abstractions. But we are not fully mature sapient adults, on average. As a species we are only somewhat sapient. I suspect the story of our species' evolution has more chapters to open.

In this final installment I want to consider that story in terms of the evolution of sapience in our genus, Homo, its current status with respect to the degree to which it is expressed in modern populations, and its future potential as the next stage in human evolution.

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The whole series can be gotten in the index page.

Transitions?

We are in what I suspect will be the most fundamental transition Homo sapiens has ever experienced. By transition I mean a change in the ways of living so radical it constitutes a revolution.

Preceded by the language revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the so-called information revolution, the current transition is hard to characterize by one single name — an evocative sound bite. If I were to try to describe it succinctly it might be called the "Evolution Revolution"! Our world is changing, mostly at our own hands, so much that the only possible transition we can make is a rapid evolution. And by that I do not mean cultural evolution alone. I mean primarily evolution of our species.

The reason is that evolution, that is speciation, takes place under emerging (and long-term) stressful conditions that select for fitness in dealing with them. Fitness means individuals having certain traits, either behavioral or physical (or both) are better able to cope with the new conditions and procreate more successfully than their less fit conspecifics. Individuals having a genetic head start, meaning possessing a specific allele^** that endows them with slightly better coping capacity, have a good chance of passing that allele on to their offspring, and over generations even better versions of the allele may emerge. Then the continuing selection pressure will assure that the allele starts to dominate in the population. Another scenario is that a drastic change in the environment can result in active selection against most members of the population NOT possessing a favorable allele, leaving only those whose "pre-adaptation" allows them to survive. Of course if no such allele exists than it can spell extinction for that species.

The fact is that our world is changing rapidly and those changes are leading to highly stressful conditions for us and many other species. Are we on the verge of an evolutionary revolution as a result? Can Homo sapiens produce a new, better adapted species — adapted to what the world is becoming? The answer depends on whether or not there are individuals in the population who have pre-adapted allelic forms¹. The two main questions about this transition are: How rapidly will the changes occur? and How radical will they be?

There is a great deal of uncertainty about the changes in the physical environment due to climate changes resulting from global warming. Even though we have some startling and frightening empirical data on things like polar ice cap melting, we are still struggling with the validity of our models that produce various scenario projections regarding how bad and how soon. However, there is another major threat looming that may very well have a sooner and much more drastic impact on our species in terms of a change so radical that it could lead to an evolutionary revolution. That threat comes from the decline in net energy available to support our complex, high energy civilization.

Many people in economics and politics are starting to, at least vaguely, grasp the significance of something like peak oil production. For many people, affected by Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", the initial concern has been on raising CO₂ atmospheric (and oceanic) concentrations due to burning fossil fuels and leading to a general average heating of the world's fluidic systems. Now it turns out that we have been burning those fossil fuels at accelerated rates for the last 100 years (or more) and depleting a non-renewable reservoir at a phenomenal rate. Now we learn that it is taking increasing amounts of energy to do the work of getting the raw fuels out of the ground, leaving less net energy to do the work of the rest of the economy. On top of that, and because of it, we are finding it increasingly unprofitable to get that next unit of energy out. It now looks pretty much like we have reached the peak of production of oil, and will before long reach the same limits for natural gas and coal! After the peak things don't look promising. As I've written elsewhere in these blogs, except for nuclear power, there is no other (renewable) energy source that comes close to fossil fuels for the purposes of running the kind of economy we have gotten used to (or as I claim, spoiled by!)

The talk among these economists (e.g. Paul Krugman), commentators (e.g. Tom Friedman), and politicians (e.g. Barack Obama) now is of a transition from a high energy (carbon-based) civilization to a low energy one. In the minds of all too many people this is imagined as a civilization that in not much different from today but perhaps with more localization of production, smaller communities, using locally generated electricity from solar and wind. These communities will be dotted all over the world to replace dense urban centers which require transportation of all essential commodities from distant production centers (though imagined to be not too distant). Some urban visionaries imagine such centers will persist but the transportation bringing stuff in will be electrified rail, powered by giant thermal solar generators out in the desert. In most cases the scenarios accommodate the 9+ billion population that the UN projects for 2050. It isn't clear to me though what these visionaries picture for grappling with climate change. I think many of the same people believe that we will, as part of that transition (to smaller carbon footprints), fix global warming and avert climate disasters.

We are in a transition alright. But I seriously doubt that it will be the one these many hopeful people envision.

Human beings are extremely adaptive. As a species we have shown remarkable capacity to adapt to so many kinds of environments and events over history. We are extremely clever. We are inventive and often insightful when it comes to making do with what we have to work with. There is no doubt that humans have the capacity to accommodate a wide range of stressful conditions. But there is one very significant difference between all prior historical experience and what we are about to experience. For all of history the net flow of energy has been increasing in volume and power. Much of our pre-history and history is a story of finding and learning to exploit new, more potent sources of energy to supplement our simple physiological conversion of food into new biomass and the ability to move and do work. We discovered how to control fire, how to plant and harvest seeds, how to manipulate animals, how to harness water and wind for mechanical power, etc. With the discovery of fossil fuels, however, we really broke into the bank. And today we have a global population of 6.7 billion people, most of whom depend either directly or indirectly on the burning of fossil fuels for their incomes. We can't even build a nuclear reactor without a significant input from coal and oil! And the bank vault is getting spare. Oh sure there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas underground. The problem is it is getting harder and harder to get to it. Simple laws of physics. And the principle of picking the low-hanging fruit first. It takes much more work (and hence energy) to pick the apples high in the tree. Similarly, it takes much more work to get at those diminishing supplies of fossil fuels.

What is true about not being able to build a reactor without fossil fuel is also the case for alternative energy capture equipment. As of right now you can't build wind turbines or solar panels and deliver them to suitable collection sites without fossil fuels². Then there is the problem of scale. Currently fossil fuels account for more than 80% of the energy flow in the US (somewhat less in other OECD countries). Hydroelectric and nuclear for about 19% and the new alternatives about 1%. How do you go from that low base to virtually replace the 80% (a lot of which is transportation) in just a decade or two. That is what it will take because the projections for the decline in fossil fuel availability indicate that after about two more decades fossil fuels will be prohibitively expensive³. Some commentators and politicians imagine a WWII-level effort to ramp up production of alternative power systems because of this. What it would more likely require is an order of magnitude greater than WWII effort AND redirecting most of the current energy flow from fossil fuels to the effort. The rationing of fuels for such an effort will make the rationing of rubber and fuels during WWII look like a cake walk.

More and more, the likely scenario is looking to me like an accelerating downward spiral (and this doesn't take into account truly foolish reactions of violence and attempts to grab resources through war — you know, like what we are doing now!) that will diminish civilization to a meager shadow of itself, if anything that you could call civilization remains at all. And the really devastating news is that such a scenario has horrific consequences for the vast majority of people in the world. The current population cannot be sustained without massive inputs of high power energy. Modern farming depends entirely on huge inputs from fossil fuels. So does the health care system everywhere (no matter how funded). Indeed, all of our infrastructure and protection services (fire, police, etc.) could not operate without equipment (manufactured using fossil fuels) and transportation.

It is a matter of time and resources. It looks increasingly like we have not enough of either. And then there really is the human psychology factor. How will we humans react to a declining energy world? Will we roll over and die without some kind of reaction? Not likely. Will we thrash out trying to preserve our own skins and screw civil behavior? Certainly an imaginable reaction. But if the rate of energy decline is fast enough there won't be time for even hoarders to get a leg up. There won't be energy supplies to fuel an army, navy, or certainly not an air force! There aren't even enough horses to have a mounted cavalry.

Some people have envisioned a future in which we simply regress back through the 19th, then 18th, then 17th centuries, and so on, until we reach some kind of equilibrium, perhaps a pre-Roman style civilization. After all they didn't have fossil fuels like we do. Maybe we could live like they did before the collapse of the Roman Empire? Right. Really?

The transition we are entering is global and fundamentally different from anything our species has faced before. There is no where else to go now. We can't escape to some different continent. We can't even leave our gravitational well without significant energy. This is it. We are stuck in this world with the consequences of our own past excesses and that is all there is to the story.

I can imagine a future world where the population is down to a sustainable level using real-time solar energy capture to sustain a suitable civilization, even a technological one. It is feasible for humans to exist, have their comforts, their entertainments, arts, and leisure thanks to energy supplementation beyond food and shelter, at appropriate population size and in steady-state. But getting from where we are to that ideal future is going to involve a revolution — an evolution revolution.

The stresses are going to be substantial. I suspect that the selection forces are going to be primarily directed at selecting against most current failings of human nature. I have written extensively about how we humans today are, ourselves, what I think is a transition species. We set on the path toward truly sapient beings, but we're at best a work in progress. The brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, needs further physical development to boost our moral sentiments, our strategic thinking abilities, and our abilities to regulate our limbic emotions. We need to become a much wiser version of what we are now. And by 'we' I mean our genus Homo since I mean that the brain needs actual genetic improvements. Our distant progeny would be a new species, one I have dubbed Homo eusapiens, man the truly wise. I have evidence-based reasons for believing that the pre-adapted alleles are available in the population of humanity. Perhaps they are sparse, perhaps only in a weak form, but the potential is there. We just have to find them.

If this scenario is even partially correct then it leaves a very important question for those of us who are thinking about what to do so save humanity. If we can see our real objective as saving our genus and realizing that our species has to evolve to meet the new environment of tomorrow, then what should we be doing now to help make survival more likely? Or do we just give up on that and either fight for our own hopeless survival or roll over and accept the extinction of Homo?

As our species is now, smart, creative, and with the glimmer of high moral sentiments, do we have the capability of facing reality when it means our demise? Do we have the courage to set aside our own selfish desires to imagine our kind going on until the Sun dies. Do we have the moral fortitude to accept the science we have embraced even when it tells us we are finished and it's time for a new start with a more adapted species? Can we, or many of us anyway, do the right thing and help prepare for a distant future that we will never see?

All of us know, as individuals, that we are mortal. As we approach the end years we come to accept that mortality and, if we are concerned at all for our surviving families, we take steps to help them carry on after we are gone. This is a natural part of life that all of us face. Some probably better than others, of course. But it makes sense to plan for the futures of those we leave by investing our resources in their future. Why should it be different for us as a species?

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^** Wikipedia article with some possible problems, read carefully! I thought it fairly stated the definition and description well enough to save me some typing!

¹ We are talking not just about a single allele (a single gene), but most likely several important ones. Not only that we have to consider various versions of the short snippets of DNA that are not protein-coding, but part of the elaborate gene expression control program we now know to exist in much of what we used to call 'junk' DNA, the huge segments between protein-coding sections. Small changes in these control segments can have major impacts on when genes are expressed during development and hence produce significant changes in phenotypes with very little difference in genotypes. Our genome differs from that of chimpanzees by less than expected by the gross differences in behavior and body form. Part of the explanation may well involve subtle but important differences in the control networks for development.

² I have heard there are attempts to construct manufacturing facilities for both solar cells and wind turbines using electricity generated by these technologies! I hope a lot more of this is tried. However, we shouldn't get too excited until those technologies are also being used to extract the raw materials, ship them, drive the final assembly, ship the final products, and account for their installation. The shipping is particularly interesting since it means using electrified vehicles that can be recharged based on electricity production by, say some windmill somewhere, putting the electricity into the grid. Running the main manufacturing plant using your own product is a step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done.

³ A complicating factor is that many exporting nations (for oil in particular) are increasingly using their own products even while production rates are not rising or are even declining. That means countries dependent on imports of energy are going to be hurting far more quickly than those that can produce some portion of their energy needs.

Energy and the economy

What is the relationship between energy flow and the economy?

I'm here in Syracuse, getting settled at SUNY-ESF, and already deep in the thick of things with biophysical economics (BPE). This blog, just to get myself going again and to start preparing for the Second Annual Biophysical Economics Meeting on Oct. 16/17, is a quicky tutorial on BPE so readers who have not investigated my category (to the left) on the subject will not have to go searching for the background. Those of you who are already up on what I'm doing here may find this a simpler explanation and I would love feedback regarding its value as a tutorial.  

Let's start with this figure.

Figure 1. The basic relationship between energy flow and the productive economy.

This is a macro view of the economy. The open arrows represent energy flows, including waste heat. The black arrows represent value added such as the results of labor in physical assets and services. The labor energy flows are hidden inside the large process circle labeled "work processes". Rounded rectangles represent what we might call the "stocks" of accumulated value added stuff. The angle-cornered block represents the accumulation of service value, which might or might not have a physical product component (e.g. paper or computer files).

Let's start with "energy capture & conversion". This is the process whereby raw energy from the environment (oil, coal, or sunshine) is extracted and converted to what we can call a usable form of energy. This means, for example, converting fuel into heat into electricity that can be used directly by equipment and people in the work process. Though I don't show it here, that would also include agriculture, food, and human physical and mental labor. Note that not all energy input is available as usable energy as output from this process. Some (in fact quite a lot of it depending on the efficiency of the process(es)) is lost as waste heat. I'll get back to this later.

The usable energy is input to the work processes of the economy. I haven't shown material inputs to keep the diagram simple, but let's assume that the basic extractive processes for raw material, including things like smelting metals, and distribution are subsumed under the work processes label. Note that waste heat is also produced by the work. Eventually all input energy will be accounted for as waste heat that leaves the system, absorbed by the environment. The principle that makes all this possible, in fact, is very simple. Energy will flow from a high potential (high power) source to a low potential sink proportional to the difference between the two end points. For example, in heat processes, energy flows from high temperature sources, like boilers, to low temperature sinks, like the atmosphere or bodies of water. Energy flow that must go through a physical system will be available to do work according to this differential. And the work can then result in useable goods and services if we have the right "tools" available within the work process.

A tool is any device or process control that directs the energy flow to more efficient use in producing a product or service. Tools range from things like plows to electric motors to computers, and includes things like work procedures that guide human thought and labor. All of these devices organize the flow of energy through the work processes to gain leverage as a product or service is produced. The efficiency of the work process is a result of the design of the tool relative to its maximum theoretical advantage. Better designed tools will produce the same amount of product using less energy, or, more product using the same amount of energy.

In the diagram I show tools as actual products of the work processes themselves. This means that some portion of our work processes must be devoted to designing and manufacturing said tools. This is generally what we mean by technology, running from chipping rocks to form arrowheads to constructing computers from sand and metals. The tools are fed back into the work processes for the purpose of expansion (more later), for replacement, or for improvements in efficiency. All of these have an implication for how well the economy is doing with respect to providing the assets and services to end users^*.

I do want to make sure you understand something very important about technology. Science and engineering have allowed us to more-or-less continuously improve the nature of our tools as well as discover new sources of energy (from wood and farming, to water and animal power, to fossil fuels, to nuclear power). Science, in particular, has been accumulating understanding of what can be done and what exists in the form of energy sources. We know a lot today as compared with when we were pure agrarians, or even 19^th century manufacturers. And two of the things we know are the theoretical limits to efficiency of use (you will never come close to 100% no matter what you do) and sources of energy. The bad news is that we have basically learned to exploit all of the forms of extractable energies available (the jury is still out on nuclear fusion, but it is certainly taking its time in deliberations!) and in many instances we have been asymptotically approaching the upper limits of efficiencies (though there are still many areas we could definitely improve on). In other words, modern technological society is nearing the peak of technological improvements in energy efficiency from technology itself. This doesn't mean there aren't some things we can still do. But the economists are simply wrong to suppose that we have ample room to keep things going just because we always have had technological improvements in the past. Figure 2 shows an approximate representation of human history in terms of the improvements in efficiency resulting from technological improvements. You can think of this graph as running from the stone age through the scientific revolutions that have provided us with advancing technologies to the present day. Note that this depicts an "S" shaped curve (a logistic) that reaches a maximum that is much less than 100%. Researchers in technology have produced several such results by studying the history of technology. The graph below is just an illustration. The real graphs show jumps, as you might expect, and flat areas when technological improvements were lagging and science hadn't yet discovered the next great thing. Nevertheless, this illustration shows that a smoothed estimate of the phenomenon approximates this logistic curve.

Figure 2. A very rough graph of the improvement in work processes' efficiencies as a result to science and engineering advances.

The take-away lesson to be learned is that we should not expect technology to just go on improving in any way like we have seen historically. In this case history is no reliable guide to the future except as understood as illustrated above by actual historical data.

One very important kind of tool is the device that captures and converts raw energy to usable form. Labeled in Fig. 1 as "equipment production, maintenance, & improvements" these are very vital tools for the maintenance (or growth) of the economy. Without them we are just a hunter-gatherer society! Even our most primitive technologies (stone tools and spearheads, etc.) count as energy capture equipment. We, of course, constitute the conversion of raw (food) energy into usable (muscle and brain) forms. Everything I said above for tools in general applies to these tools. Technological improvements have been made in some forms and we expect a bit more improvement (e.g. solar photovoltaic cells going from below 10% in the early days to about 20% efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity at peak insolation times), but the aggregate (averaged) efficiency of all of our conversion tools is already approaching the limit imposed by the laws of physics. Unless there is some very radical breakthroughs in the science and engineering of nuclear fusion sometime soon, we don't expect any great improvements in that arena.

The questions before us in BPE involve issues of economic growth, energy accounting (and energy's relationship specifically to what we think of as money), and human well-being in light of the well-being of the Ecos — the rest of the natural world. Classical economics has done a pretty poor job of illuminating the issues, let alone studying the consequences. Energy is often treated as just another commodity like corn or pork bellies. Peak oil production has caused a few economists to pay a little closer attention to the nature of non-renewable resources, but they still analyze them in terms of classical supply-demand and substitution (e.g. substituting electricity from solar or wind for oil). We maintain that while there is value in appreciating these phenomena as real contributions to the economics of energy, they are not the laws governing everything about energy. Hence we impose the physical and biological realities (including ecological realities) and laws that do apply to complete the picture and improve our understanding of the economy.

Here at SUNY-ESF, in Charles Hall's lab, the main focus of study involves the energy return on energy invested (EROI), or determining how much energy from that going into the work processes above is used to produce the energy capture/conversion tools relative to the amount of usable energy actually extracted. In other words, not all of the usable energy will end up going to make goods and services. Some has to be fed back as an investment to generate future usable energy through the manufacture and maintenance of those tools. He and his students have found that over time there has been an increasing need for energy investment just to keep the same overall flow of usable energy into the work processes resulting in assets and services. Even though there have been technological improvements that have increased the overall amount of energy captured, an increasing amount of that energy has to go back into replacing the next unit of energy for the general economy. This is not good news, especially for non-renewable sources like fossil fuels.

In that regard we are faced with twin problems that suggest, no, clearly demonstrate, that our economic systems are in trouble. Absolutely nothing in the form of work, be it mental, physical labor, or machine operation, can be accomplished without the flow of energy as described above. The implications of peak oil production (and other fossil fuels to follow in not too many years) are that the raw energy arrow in Fig. 1 will be contracting over time due to the depletion of the resource (we are not finding new oil fields at anywhere near the rate of using up the old ones). Declining EROI means that the arrows going to the four boxes are going to shrink. In desperation (WRT oil) we may try to invest more in the energy extraction tools, but this will just exacerbate the shrinking effects on goods and services. The sum of the quantity of work (black arrows) must equal the total usable energy flowing into the work processes. If that declines, as it will, then everything else declines with it.

Right now the evidence suggests that actual decline in usable energy started somewhere in the 1970s. The combined effects of leveling off of oil production (remember the S curve?) along with decreasing EROI for oil (off-shore oil rigs take a lot more energy to produce and operate) started to take effect on our net energy production. Some improvements in work process efficiencies helped to mask this effect. So too did the increasing tendency to move manufacturing overseas and shift more work to manual labor. Also hiding the effect, from a monetary perspective (subject of a future blog) was increasing reliance on debt financing where we were essentially borrowing energy from the future, expecting that net energy would always increase as it had prior to the cross-over point. The financial bubbles that have recently burst and continue to haunt the economies of the globe, are a direct result of decreasing ability to do real work in order to pay back the debt in the form of real assets. I will try to explain this in a future blog.

This has been just a peek at the relationship between energy and the economy. Fundamentally it can be summed up as I said above. All work, of every kind, depends on the flows of energy. And the energy form has to be of exactly the right kind in terms of form (e.g. electricity) and potential (e.g. power) in order to do useful work. The most useful work we can do is to produce or repair tools so that we are maintaining, if not improving, the energy flows. In the past, when energy sources were expanding (more oil being pumped at high EROIs) we got used to the idea of doing non-useful work, i.e. production of stuff for excessive consumption — toys and such — thus wasting a lot of energy on trifles. We can't be blamed for this, exactly, as consumers. Our system was designed in such a way to promote consumption of more and more energy. We, collectively, just thought that was the way of nature! But we can blame traditional economists for ignoring the realities of non-renewable energy flows. In one sense I could give them a pass in that as a group they were too enamored with their theoretical constructs which didn't include energy flow. And they were too ignorant of physics to stop and think through the implications of things like peak oil. Today, with the evidence mounting that we are in trouble, they will even deny that oil production has or will soon peak. But that is a story about human psychology (also another blog) and its failings in our modern, complex world.

There isn't much to be gained by polemics and pointing fingers. But it is important to forgo ideology and rely on science to determine what is happening and from that suggest things we should be doing to adapt to the new realities. I wish I could say that our political process will be up to the challenge, but that looks not so good. It will be up to citizens to pound on their representatives and the administration to pay attention to what biophysical economists (we like to think this is the real scientific form of economics!) are finding out and start thinking about policies that will help us through this difficult transition to contraction rather than growth. Are you, dear reader, up to that challenge?

 

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^* Unfortunately I can't come up with a better term for people who buy houses, cars, and services, or consume food and plastic packaging. Economists like to call us consumers and note that we live in a consumer-based economy. That, of course, is a large part of the problem!

Arrived in New York state!

I really don't have anything profound to write (I know, what's new!). I'm stopped at a rest stop in NY that has free WiFi. First time I have been able to log on for a few days. Just wanted to let readers know I'm still alive (so far) and will be back to work in a few days.

I will be going into SUNY-ESF (Charles Hall's) office tomorrow and am charged up to get to work on the science of biophysical economics. I have had some more thoughts on energy  and it's relationship to the economy, and some refinements of thoughts I've already posted. So look for those.

Thanks for your patients. Back on line soon.
Battery low! Got to go.

George

Are we guilty of over abstraction?

What makes humans different from other animals?

All mammals and birds form representations of things in the world in their brains. It is doubtful that other animals assign "names" to these things. The representation in neural encoding is its own index. This is essentially what we mean when we say we see something in our mind's eye. We are activating the representation directly. But, we humans go beyond this direct representation and also assign an abstract, second order representation to index the thing-itself representation. That is we give it a name, a more compact representation, presumably encoded in the language area of neocortex (as opposed to the visual cortex). This is the basis of language ability — to be able to talk about the thing or hear someone else talk about the thing. [We might interpret the fact that some chimpanzees, gorillas, and even parrots(!) have been trained to associate symbols (hand language or symbols on a computer screen) with very primitive language expression that these animals have some simple abstraction capacity. After all, our capacity to form true abstractions had to start somewhere.]

Arguably, however, an even more significant differences between human and all other animal mentation is the capacity for recursive abstraction. That is, we not only assign abstract symbols (like words or pictographs) to represent real things, relations, and events in the world, but we also manipulate those abstract representations coming up with even more abstract symbols to represent relations between our abstract representations! For example, we can classify all words referring to objects as "nouns", the name for all such words is an abstraction once removed from the object abstractions (names of things). Moreover, we can manipulate these abstractions of abstractions to form even higher order abstractions, e.g. we can talk about grammars as rules for how to use nouns (and verbs, etc.) without any reference at all to the basic word representations and certainly no reference to specific 'thing' representations. Our ability to create new abstractions from combinations of lower-level abstractions is seemingly endless. It is based on a recursive operation that is one of the new tricks that the human brain has mastered. We use it to build mental models of the world and conceptualize rules for how that world works. Our creativity allows us to construct novel manipulations and play "What-If" games in our heads.

The problem with recursion is knowing when to stop!

Could it be that we have gone overboard? Is one of humanity's mental problems in dealing with the real world (e.g. denial of global warming) that we have a tendency to go too far in abstracting already existing abstractions? Essentially what I am asking is, have we gotten so abstract in our ways of thinking that we can no longer refer back to what is happening in the real world for confirmation that our beliefs are veridical? It would be like saying that we have constructed mental representations of names for things that don't actually exist, but now we think of those things as a reality in themselves. Consider how easily people cut off in their minds the linkage between the steak wrapped in plastic in the butcher's case and the steer that was raised in miserable conditions, that had to be slaughtered, butchered, and transported in many pieces to the grocery store for them to buy and consume. None of this is abstract, yet it is easy to ignore when picking out that perfect cut for the barbecue. The grocery store as our source of food is a metaphorical abstraction. We've been so good at creating and manipulating abstractions that we now believe in non-metaphorical realities that do not conform to physical reality. Unlike other metaphorical realities, fictions, we create for merely entertainment value, these realities are accepted as actual reality. And we are willing to risk our existence on those beliefs. I want to explore this conjecture a bit more.

First I will give you a couple of examples of 'good' recursive abstraction, that is where the process is generally a 'good' thing and in which there is always a way to reference back to physical reality, thus assuring veridicality. Then I will offer some examples of where I think we might be too inclined to over-abstraction with a result that is problematic, and we can discuss the consequences of the latter.

I've already mentioned language as an expression of recursive abstraction. Our ability to form complex sentences that go beyond merely describing things and beyond describing relations between things, but can also describe higher-order abstractions (like the noun) and relations between these, is at the root of some of our crowning glories in the expansion of knowledge. Two examples come immediately to mind. Mathematics and science are spectacular achievements based on the ability to abstract and manipulate abstractions forming higher-order abstractions. In my series on I expound on the ultimate abstraction of science and math in the sense of being able to describe these in a completely abstract form.

Mathematics is a system of symbols used as abstractions, for example using variables to represent some parameters or equations and relations to represent relationships, with a well developed set of rules for manipulating these symbols so as to derive other abstractions. Mathematics, in all its various forms, is a formal language. Formal means that the use of the rules is very strict (consistent). Interestingly, there is a slight (and surprising) hitch in mathematics that fortunately only shows up at the fringes — that the system might be consistent, but it cannot be complete, or vice versa, (see: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) in the sense that one can prove all true theorems in the same system. That little hitch isn't much of a problem for the practical use of mathematics, but it is interesting to pure mathematicians and philosophers. Even with this interesting hiccup, math is still an extremely useful, productive way to drive abstraction to stratospheric levels.

Math is the language of science. All of the sciences use mathematics in multiple different ways to express statements about the nature of the world at all levels. This can be as simple as algebraic expressions relating various variables in a dynamic process (e.g. Newton's Laws of Motion, F = ma), or as complex as mathematical models of complex processes composed of multiple partial differential equations (calculus) that can only be solved by advanced computation. Computer models are, in some sense, the penultimate in abstractions since they are the result of the aggregation of more abstraction than any one human mind can accomplish and no single human could ever 'run' such simulations in their heads.

Math and science can be viewed as systems of extreme abstraction that have been shown repeatedly to 'work' in the sense of producing practical results. Philosophy is another formal system of abstraction that preceded math and science (at least the logic part of philosophy is formal), but taken as a whole is too dependent on ambiguous language and mentation (argument) to produce consistent results. How many schools of philosophy that have been at odds with one another have been started? The branches of science and math don't compete with one another. And when there are seeming incompatibilities between any two or more sub-branches, there are formal methods for resolving the conflict. Again, these have proven to work time after time. So, while I consider philosophy to be an important endeavor to keep the mind sharp and working well, it is not an adequate method of recursive abstraction that is reliable or always tracked back to the grounding in reality.

Now for some examples of rather poor abstraction that has gotten us into some serious trouble.

My first example is money. Once long ago, the value of things could be determined rather straightforwardly based on the thing's contribution to survival and perhaps (after survival was assured) pleasure. But gross things, like cows and bushels of barley, are difficult to trade and even keep track of. So somewhere in Mesopotamia sometime after agriculture got going, some bright bulbs started creating markers (symbols pressed into clay slabs) representing quantities of goods of value (see: Wikipedia's History of Money). The markers were abstractions. They worked because the represented something real in the minds of the farmers and accountants. Simple enough. People in Sumer and Ur and throughout the Middle East as well as other parts of the world, developed trading methods based on the markers. You deposited your quantity of barley in a granary, received a 'chit' marking the 'value' and later you could use the chit to buy back your grains or convert the value into something else you needed. It still worked because it wasn't that far from the old direct barter system — just a hell of a lot more convenient.

But things have gotten bizarre since then! One of my earlier blogs provided a different way of looking at money (What is money, really?) as being information about the amount of usable energy that was available to do useful work — a physicist's perspective, if you will. This viewpoint actually takes us back to the original idea that money (those markers in clay tablets) ought to represent the actual survival/enjoyment value of things rather than some abstract market value that no one has a clue about connection to reality. I will be writing a good deal more about money in its current incarnation, especially in its form called debt, in future blogs. Here I just want to point out how incredibly abstract we have gotten in our thinking about wealth, denominated in monetary terms. Tell me, exactly what is a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) worth in terms of survival/enjoyment value? Our financial economy system (as opposed to the so-called 'real' economy where we make things that we use to survive and enjoy) has gotten so over abstracted that no one, not the economists, not the boys on Wall Street, or the investment bankers, or the politicians, or the Fed chairman and his minions — no one knows what the hell anything is worth any more. And it has had a devastating effect on valuation of real things like houses and infrastructure. Today's concept of money is so abstract (in fact money is treated as a commodity without any intrinsic value at all!) that the reality of the financial world is as much about religious beliefs as about anything called economic science (the latter now widely acknowledged as an oxymoron).

Stay tuned over the next several weeks as I steep myself in biophysical economics and explore the evolution of our conceptualization of money and how disconnected from physical reality it has gotten.

While we are on the topic of economics (as a study) lets mention that that particular discipline has gotten so out of touch with reality that the practitioners' guidance of policy decisions, by poor deluded politicians, has become downright dangerous. Nay, not just dangerous, suicidal! As I read Paul Krugman's Sept. 2^nd article in the New York Times it became abundantly clear to me that NO economists, even the ones who supposedly predicted this economic debacle, has any real idea about what is going on. Krugman, at least, understands that markets are not perfect, but he falls short of recognizing that the real underlying problems with the economy is that we have finally reached fundamental limits to growth and resource extraction. Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is apparently a Keynesian. someone who believe that the government should pump lots of "money" into the economy to save jobs and stimulate spending! My god, what a delusion! A formula for disaster if ever there was one, given that net energy flow into the economy is declining. Krugman, like all non-biophysical/ecological economists believes in growth. And he has his own ideas (different from the Obama crowd) as to how that can be accomplished.

Economics is one of those fields that deals in over abstraction. Early economists like Leon Walras were entranced by the spectacular achievements of physics with its mathematical models. Some have coined the term "physics envy" to describe the desire that economists had for developing elegant mathematical formulations describing the "laws" of economics, and this is probably accurate to some degree. Economists are enthralled with the perfection of mathematics as a method for abstracting the underlying processes of economic activity and then manipulating those abstractions (in accordance with strict mathematical rules) to make predictive pronouncements about the way the economy works and will work in the future.

The problem is that none of these deep thinkers bothered to check whether their math made sense! Until people like Kahneman and Tversky started questioning the basic assumptions of rational agents in the standard models of economics (see: Behavioral economics) there was very little attempt (within classical economics) to check with reality (to be fair many economics PhD candidates spent years collecting data from favorable periods that seemed to confirm economic models, but there are statistics and then there are statistics!).

Today economics is a religion rather than a science. Anything that doesn't conform to orthodoxy is not recognized (the psychological data about how humans are anything but rational agents is getting harder and harder to ignore!) Politicians have yet to figure this out so, for the time being, economists still have power (look at Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers as examples). But it can't last forever. Physical reality has a way of forcing itself into our consciousness even when we try hard to ignore it.

Incidentally, the so-called Nobel prize in economics is actually not recognized as a true Nobel science award. It is called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It is highly regarded by economists, naturally, but is not now, nor ever was a recognition for 'scientific achievement'. Just so you know.

Well, speaking of religion...

One of the most profound and dangerous abstractions humans have engaged in is convincing themselves, and firmly believing, that they are something so special in the world that they have transcended nature completely. The human mind, as epitomized in Descartes' philosophy, for example, and in the teachings of most religions, is beyond natural law. We have extraordinary powers of reason and mentation that do not depend on bodily functions to exist. We have convinced ourselves that we have an immortal soul that exists beyond the death of the body. Never mind that no one has ever shown this with evidence. But just about everybody believes it. Those who claim it isn't so are called atheists, and I have to wonder how they know any more than believers what the 'truth' is.

I will be the first to proclaim that humans are unique in the animal kingdom. We have evolved an extraordinary brain that can do things, like recursive abstraction, that, apparently, no other animal has achieved on this planet. As such we are to be congratulated for participating in a new round of emergence. We operate under a new set of dynamical laws that give rise to new behaviors and new organizations. Congratulations Homo sapiens. But don't let it go to your heads (damn, too late).

We are still nothing more than a part of natural evolution. We are still completely dependent on all the organization that underlies our unique position. And because we were too immature to recognize this relationship with nature, we made some horrendous mistakes. We are facing some of the worst of them right now. The globe is warming. The energy is running out. And we simply don't know what to do about it. We are still having collective trouble believing that we aren't those transcendent beings divorced from mere physical reality. But that lesson is about to be learned.

We learned the trick of recursive abstraction. We learned it so well that we abstracted ourselves and our activities from reality and severed the connection (in our minds) so that we could do whatever we liked or could imagine doing. We found it expedient to go to war and kill, to rob and steal the wealth of others, to disrupt the more peaceful indigenous peoples, to destroy ecosystems and species of animals (and plants) wantonly. All because we were above it all. We abstracted our existence and simply forgot about physical reality.

And, in due course, we are going to find out what the consequences of over abstraction will be.

Recursive abstraction is a good thing, really. You just need to know when to stop.