They bring up Malthus w/o noting that his math was correct --- he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world.
The one valid point made is that we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?
Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's *genuine* carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt. It has directly accelerated the mass-depletion of countless other finite resources such as water, healthy top soil, micronutrients, and more. The fact that it has allowed humanity to grow so much without consideration for other finite factors has also contributed to several secondary "loans" which have further trapped us in debt. Most notably, humanity's dependence on mono-culture farming which ravages biodiversity, creates super pests, and zaps soil health. You simply cannot feed 8 billion people with organic farming methods and the current energy cost of controlled-climate hydroponics makes it impractical at scale. As you mentioned, all of this growth also contributes to humanity's collective appetite for, well, everything. Plus the HB process is responsible for 1.4% of global emissions, giant oceanic dead-zones caused by runoff, increased acid rain, less overall nutritious foods, and so so much more. It's a planetary catch-22. Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.
> Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's genuine carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt.... Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.
It's worth noting that process is one of the technologies that techno-optimists like to cite to shout down skeptics of their belief we humans will always techno-magick ourselves out of every problem. We will until we can't, and a couple generations after being proven wrong by famine and extinctions, the techno-optimists will resume their chant.
And yet the food supply is fine, so when exactly do you predict this "loan" will come due exactly, and what separates you from all the other people who discredited themselves with such predictions in the past?
A lot of water used for agriculture in the US is "fossil water" from aquifers that takes millions of years to replenish. The oceans are a limitless supply of water, but like the HB process, require energy to convert to a useful form.
Moreover, in many instances, the conversion to a useful form is short-changed, leaving salts in the water which results in long-term problems --- look at agriculture around Lake Baikal for an example.
Is it "fine"? 44 million people in the US experience hunger. Countless more in the global south are straight up starving. I'm not sure I'd call that fine.
> he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world.
... which is why historically Malthusians have been wrong.
A Malthusian bacterium writing at the time before photosynthesis would have concluded that life on Earth was doomed. Chemotrophic bacteria were gradually consuming all the left over high energy compounds from the Earth's formation and eventually this would run out, leading to a population crash and the end of organic life.
Their math would have been correct.
The thing they are leaving out of their models is adaptation and intelligence. Life isn't guaranteed to always find a way, which is why shorter term stagnations and die-offs do occasionally happen, but given time and resources it eventually will. Life will probably keep finding a way until the heat death of the universe.
The bumps in the road are part of the process. In evolution they provide the constraint that stimulates learning through natural selection. In post-evolutionary cognitive intelligence (humans and eventually AI) constraints give rise to signals such as price signals that tell the system that it needs to learn, change, and adapt.
This isn't a justification for total rose colored glasses woo-woo utopianism because as I said bumps in the road do occur. But it shows why simple Malthusian reasoning hasn't historically been accurate and probably will continue to be mostly inaccurate.
Malthusians are like perma-bears that are always calling for a recession in the market. Occasionally they're right, but there's a joke in finance that these are people who have "predicted 54 of the last 3 recessions."
A prediction method that's wrong that often isn't actually worth very much.
There's predicting short-term fluctuations and then there's predicting thermodynamic limits.
You can blame Malthus for not predicting an efficient way of getting nitrogen out of the atmosphere; this was theoretically possible, the nitrogen was always there, etc.
You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 years. Thermodynamics is a bitch. Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun.
Of course 2.3% Y/Y energy production growth on Earth is impossible. That means it won't happen. The question is how it won't happen.
Malthusians assume it won't happen in a destructive, collapse kind of way. They assume there's a wall and the system will mindlessly accelerate toward it and then, on impact, will die.
Malthusians deny the existence of intelligence, more or less. They model life as a non-adaptive physical system.
So how else might it not happen? Two possibilities, both of which could happen: decoupling of energy growth from GDP and continuing of growth off-world.
Efficiency increase could go a long way. We are not even close to efficiency limits for... pretty much anything.
I'm arguing against Malthusian doomerism. I'm not necessarily arguing that growth can continue forever on Earth, though it can probably continue longer than Malthusians predict.
At some point Earth has to plateau. That's fine except for the fact that all our economic systems depend on eternal number go up. I do think that will be a crisis mid-late 21st century.
My hope is that our civilization doesn't eat itself because banks can't operate the way they're accustomed to operating.
I personally think self-inflicted wounds are a more likely cause for our civilization collapsing than limits to growth directly. We could start to plateau (on Earth at least) and be totally fine but nuke ourselves because we can't deal with the implications for our socioeconomic systems and elect a bunch of populist imbeciles.
> Unless a magic future technology turns Earth into a heat pump which can push heat back into the Sun
You mean like those panels[0] which radiate heat in specific infrared band in which atmosphere is transparent? We don't need to push energy into the sun, just out of atmosphere into the coldness of space.
Nice tech but 500w/m2 is… not too much in the limit. If you operate a few thousand multiple dozen TW fusion plants, these won’t matter much unless you plaster Sahara with them. Maybe.
It's only a start, there may be better technologies when we actuallu do have TW-scale fusion plants. Like TW-scale heat pumps using nanopatterned laser emitters to get rid of the heat at super high temperatures (remember, that energy emitted is temperature^4 [0]). There already are technologies for this, but we don't need them yet.
> You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400
Yes you can.
Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth.
Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.
There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted.
That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.
> I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country
Past performance usually doesn't predict future results.
I'm not aware of any good or service that is not subject to diminishing returns from increased consumption. Keep increasing energy consumption and you start hitting other limiting factors like the availability of other resources, labor, population growth, food, etc. Energy can help with some of those but not all of them and not in a linear relationship. Eventually you hit the ultimate limiter: diminishing marginal utility of wealth itself. At some point you start to max out as a human.
There are countries that consume more energy than the USA that are actually poorer and their higher consumption is a function of either climate (lots of HVAC) or the use of old inefficient technology (in which case poverty actually increases consumption).
It really looks like the ultimate limits to growth (on Earth) are demand side limits to growth due to leveling off of population. Humans have fewer kids when they have more wealth and/or see more humans around.
I actually did show it, but I am happy to elaborate and explain further.
A common thing that malthusians do is just take one single metric, then extrapolate it out, and then yell about a doomsday based on that one metric.
One such example is horses. Many decades ago, there were people panicking about an extrapolated line related to horses and transportation.
Cities were supposedly going to fall apart, because of all the problems that an ever increasing amount of horse usage would cause.
We know this to be false, of course, because as our transportation usage increased, we used technology to switch to a new form of transportation (cars), which allowed us to continue to increase our transportation usage, without any of the problems that were predicted via a nieve extrapolated line.
The obvious parallel and point to such an analogy, would be that an extrapolated line based on one single metric, is the wrong thing to worry about because it doesn't take into account that we can switch to a different thing.
So, just like we switched from horses to cars to fulfill increasing amounts of transportation, we also might be able to switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth.
This is relevant to the topic because I was responding to someone who was also extrapolating out lines a whole 400 years into the future.
Ergo, that's why I criticized and disagreed with the concept of line extrapolation far into the future, which is something that malthusians like to do a lot.
400 years in the future is not that much time in human scale. It's more than a generation, but with some luck your grandchildren's grandchildren will live then, it only takes a few anti-ageing advances, after all.
> switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth.
There's techno-optimism, there's sci-fi and there's... I sincerely hope our need for economic growth can be completely satisfied before we need to move on from energy to something else.
Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating cells were born on Earth.
The Fermi Paradox explodes into a massive tree of possibilities. The truth is we just don't know. We haven't been looking very long or very far, and space is called space for a reason.
Space could be "full" of complex intelligent life, but the definition of "full" for space could be an overall average of one intelligent artifact per cubic light year per million years. We haven't looked around enough to have any chance of spotting that.
Radio SETI is kind of a joke; radiation diminishes with the square of distance so for us to detect a signal from another star it would have to be both intentionally beamed in our direction and incredibly powerful. They'd have to be screaming at us. Anything less than megawatts melts into cosmic microwave background before it reaches even the Centauri system, and anything with complex modulation just sounds like noise anyway.
Long range detection of technosignatures is riddled with assumptions around what to look for. Dyson swarms? If you tame fusion you don't need a Dyson swarm. Megastructures? Those are fragile and unwieldy and lots of small objects might be better. Powerful propulsion systems on spacecraft? It would have to be aimed right at us. Etc.
> we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?
In economics we deal with supply and demand curves. If you price in the emissions, mining will at some point come into equilibrium with demand and continue to supply copper for those essential activities that require it, while forcing alternatives to switch to something else.
For the specific case of copper, aluminum is a close substitute in most practical applications (or CCA composite wires, combining the advantages of both). The world reserves of bauxite seem sufficient for centuries at current rates of extraction. For high end applications like ship or wind turbine use, superconductor motors are becoming a reality.
If you mean developed vs developing world, I'm more in favor of:
"let's scale down growth and distribute existing wealth and resources more evenly, even if it means I'll go scale down compared to where I'm now and you'll scale up"
Perhaps eponential growth isn’t a problem because its not happening. What exponent are we using for exponential growth? The modern graphs look more like a log 2 or log e.
Infinite growth is a potential problem that is rooted in limits of efficiency, availability of resources, and most importantly the demands/expectations/despiration of people. We can support more people. The real question is what the sustainable limit is. Lifestyle is perhaps the biggest factor, but that changes as does the technology to support it. It seems our species likes to live on the edge of maximum consumption. I feel that given a long enough timeline, that will be disastrous when we feel we deserve more, but there is no more unless it is taken.
> per capita coal emissions in the UK peaked more than 100 years ago. Some of that fall represents the offshoring of industrial processes, with the coal choking someone else, but most of it reflects the use of cleaner, more efficient technology.
The UK's global empire existed 100 years ago. Not a knock against the UK, I think they've been by and large doing the right thing, but their policies over the last century has been managing the decline and dissolution of their civilisation in as graceful a way as possible.
They're an inspirational case of a group of people regressing to the mean politely. But I'm doubting the intelligentsia can pull off the "this is really an improvement!" line. There is a lot of anger in the EU on the subject that we see in things like the Brexit vote and I suspect the AfD's polling in Germany is reflective of similar policy choices in Germany. France had the Yellow Vest protests. People don't like it when their energy access gets choked; it does a lot of real-world harm and this intellectual burying of heads in sand is unhelpful.
If you were to map human population growth against the energy technologies in the table, you would basically see that human population growth bursts with jumps in EROI.
There are a couple of elephants in the room on that table that warrant some discussion.
One is nuclear: the massive jump in EROI it provides and our comparative hesitant/tepid adoption of it.
The other is a lot of the renewables: the massive leap backwards they offer.
No, growth is a an economic concept that expresses our consumption in monetary terms. We could consume anything: 1 million $ worth of electricity is perfectly equivalent, as far as GDP growth is concerned, with a 1 million $ painting that requires 100Wh to make.
Coming from an energy, food and housing starved world, of course our growth seems to be energy driven, because that's what people will consume first when they acquire wealth. But there are strong diminishing returns, you only can eat so much and keep tidy so much floor space.
In fact, the substantial housing cost bubble in the Western world, far above the greenfield costs of new construction with similar comfort, suggests we already are not pricing the house itself, rather the abstract values it comes with, such as the surrounding community, available schools and jobs etc. There is no practical limit to the subjective value of these, and they don't need energy to inflate in relative value.
I'm pro-nuclear but reality is you can commission, operate and decommission a PV farm or a wind farm in less time than it takes to build and start a nuclear reactor. Excessive regulation is the reason, but it exists for a reason, too, and that reason isn't ecoterrorists, it's a rational fear that a major ef-up will make a piece of any country inhospitable for all intents and purposes forever.
For some reason I'm disinclined to trust a table that has "failed verification" next to almost every entry.
Besides - EROI is almost completely irrelevant compared to more obviously useful metrics like cost per kilowatt hour.
YMMV, but it's clear that renewables have the potential to offer very, very cheap and reliable energy.
Someone always points out that wind is intermittent, but renewables currently have almost no storage, and oil isn't any less intermittent - as almost every major geopolitical event since the 1970s oil crisis proves. See also, what's happening in the Red Sea.
Nukes? There's a reason that the recent string of coups in Africa has concentrated on uranium producing countries.
The real reasons for hostility to renewables are political. If there's a robust wide smart grid for distribution, and everyone has PVs on their roof, the fossil and nuclear BigCos no longer have a monopoly on supply. They also lose the political leverage that goes with it.
The fossil industry makes around $4tn a year in profits, and receives around $7tn a year in global government subsidies. That is a huge drain on the planetary economy, and a global renewables program would cut that by quite a bit.
We have a nice fusion plant called the sun. Almost everything we do is powered by it directly or indirectly. Tapping into its power more efficiently is what is driving economic growth this century.
Nuclear has one big problem. It's just way too expensive. Not just a little bit but by orders of magnitude. That's why renewables are outgrowing nuclear by an order of magnitude as well. We're talking pitiful amounts of nuclear here and there (mostly China actually) and a sweet 0.6-0.7 TW of new renewable capacity added every year, growing year on year. That should cross the TW mark some time later this decade just by virtue of current investment levels (which are also growing).
In comparison, there currently are plans for about 110 GW or so new nuclear capacity. Mostly in China. That's a total, spread over the next few decades. Per year it probably will average around 10-20 GW added per year. That's about 2 orders of magnitude off. And before you consider the existing nuclear capacity that will reach end of life during the same period. Nuclear capacity might actually start experience negative growth (i.e. shrink). And of course some those plans might actually be shelved. A lot can happen in a few decades. Like the addition of tens of TW of new renewable capacity making nuclear kind of redundant. Those nuclear plans date back to an age when people were severely underestimating how much renewables we'd have by now.
Even if you'd double or triple that amount of nuclear, it would still be a side show. The main economic driver for economies this century will be energy delivered mostly by wind, solar, and batteries and a long tail of other, more costly solutions like nuclear, hydro, geothermal. Unless something happens on the cost front, that's how it is playing out.
In my opinion economic growth is mostly fueled and sustained by population growth. And population growth depends on various societal, industrial and scientific advancements that often also coincide with EROI improvements.
Would our society look so different if 90% of our energy needs would be produced by nuclear? Would energy be cheaper?
Even if we use 100% free renewable energy with theoretically maximally efficient engines, at some point we will boil the oceans from just waste heat, as long as exponential growth in energy use continues.
Real GDP per habitant is fueled by energy usage (except for a short period in the 70s where it was fueled by increased efficiencies, at least in France).
> The lack of methodological consistency, however, among these papers has led to a
situation where inappropriate comparisons are being made across technologies. In this paper we
provide both a literature review and harmonization of EROI values to provide accurate comparisons
of EROIs across both thermal fuels and electricity producing technologies. Most importantly, the
authors advocate for the use of point-of-use EROIs rather than point-of-extraction EROIs as the
energy “cost” of the processes to get most thermal fuels from extraction to point of use drastically
lowers their EROI. The main results indicate that PV, wind and hydropower have EROIs at or above
ten while the EROIs for thermal fuels vary significantly, with that for petroleum oil notably below ten.
Bravo on pointing out growth is dependent on energy -- we don't care about our exponentially growing economic debt because it doesn't matter as long as The Economy is growing exponentially, but if growth is tied to energy, that means we need to be exponentially growing our energy supply too.
Awesome job bringing in EROI. We can keep exponentially growing our energy supply as long as we have infinite reserves of high-return energy supplies.
Let's take a look at oil from your link:
> The weighted average standard EROI of all oil liquids (including coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, biofuels, etc.) is expected to decrease from 44.4 in 1950 to a plateau of 6.7 in 2050
Huh, in EROI-speak, that means we're expending more effort to get fewer returns out, which is a fancy way of saying "Oil's getting tapped out"
Shale revolution?
> Resulting EROI is typically around 1.4-1.5
Anything above 1.0 is worth doing, but the Revolution sounds like bottom-of-the-barrel marginal returns.
So how about your incendiary renewables-massive-leap-backwards comment?
PV had admittedly a "depends on how you measure things" high error bars:
> mean harmonized EROIs between 8.7 and 34.2
Wind is quoted as 19.8 with front-of-the-technology-curve numbers quoted as high as 31. The nuance here is whereas oil has finite reserves and can only decrease long-term, manufacturing-based technologies will increase up the learning curve before they plateau.
So, finally we have nuclear: quoted as EROI 75-106. Clearly a winner on energy-return, but EROI doesn't capture the messy pragmatics. Instead of energy-return, we can look at cost-returns: Levelized Cost of Energy, or how much lifetime energy do you get out vs. the lifetime costs of that energy. And we all know how expensive nuclear plants are to design, build, and maintain. There have been nuclear plants shuttered because in the 10 years it would take to get them online, you could just overbuild solar way more cheaply. Big advantage of renewals is they're getting dirt-cheap (relatively speaking).
And I'm not even touching the politics of nuclear risk and waste yet... yes, there's solutions, but I would argue that's still a much hairier problem than renewables' intermittency.
Point is, yes, from a "exponentially-growing civilization requires exponentially-growing energy" point of view, nuclear is the only path forward. But cost-returns are just as important as energy-returns -- both can make a project infeasible, and if you consider both constraints, renewals aren't a bad solution.
My examples for how fast exponential growth gets out of hand:
• At 1% annual population growth starting now without access to faster than light travel in ~12000 humans the total volume of all human bodies would exceed the volume of the 12000 light year radius sphere that humanity would be limited to.
• At 1% annual energy growth in energy needs starting from now in ~12000 years our annual energy use would equal the energy of the entire universe. All the mass including dark matter converted to energy (E=mc^2) and all the gravitational potential energy and all the dark energy...one year of human use.
• At 1% annual population growth starting now in ~12300 years the total mass of all human bodies would exceed the mass of the observable universe.
Let's break that last one down into waypoints along the path to needing the entire universe. Starting from now with 1% annual population growth and assuming humans don't evolve so much in the next 12000+ years to be massively (no pun intended!) smaller:
• 3400 years until we need the entire mass of the Earth plus to Moon for human bodies.
• 600 years after that and we need to add Jupiter's mass.
• 700 years more and we need all the mass in the solar system.
• It is then 2000 years until we need to mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
• A mere 100 years later we need to add the mass of the Andromeda Galaxy.
• That's 6800 years from now. From there it is another 5500 years to need to add the rest of the observable universe.
I'm not sure which metric would be the best to use - we did reach it in population growth during the 1900s. However I mostly think the calculation is an interesting exercise to calibrate our expectations for what sensible growth rates can be.
Opinion columns are not the same as editorials. But anyway, the Financial Times is well able to publish pieces that say "this currently profitable endeavour will blow up in everyone's faces". It's a serious newspaper.
You think that people directly benefitting from saying that growth must be kept positive year over year would say exponential growth isn't a problem? Preposterous.
Right? Capitalism at its core relies on exponential growth, since every investor wants ROI. So acknowledging that exponential growth is a problem would go against the interests of pretty much all financial players.
By the same token, the destruction of the earth is directly against the interests of pretty much all financial players, therefore environmentalism is not a concern because the market will self regulate.
...is the response with the same level of nuance as is present in your comment.
Human incentives are much more complicated than that. The incentives that capitalism creates are much more complicated than that.
> Capitalism at its core relies on exponential growth, since every investor wants ROI
No it doesn't. You can have capitalism in a world where growth is zero or negative, nothing much happens except the world getting slightly worse (a recession).
Criticisms of capitalism on the other hand do rely on BS claims about exponential growth.
Using per-capita numbers for the first industrialized nation is highly disingenuous. There are limits to efficiency, and billions that aspire to the lifestyle of the average Brit.
In the past we have replaced resources that we might run short of with other resources. We have almost entirely replaced wood as a source of energy, and many countries have almost replaced coal.
It's basically impossible for the developing world to copy the route to replacing coal usage that the developed world has taken though, because that relies heavily on natural gas and there simply isn't enough of it being produced, and of course the wealthier developed world gets first dibs. This has likely been made worse by environmental activists campaigning against new gas production. Countries like Pakistan have had to switch away from gas and launch emergency coal power building programs because they simply cannot keep the lights on otherwise.
Coal was not just replaced only by natural gas in developed countries though - it was replaced by multiple other sources.
We have constantly replaced materials with others, and availability is a factor. Stone and wood in construction are less used because we have cement, concrete, bricks etc. We replaced copper and bronze with iron and steel. These go back many millennia. We have replaced natural materials with synthetic to deal with shortages (e.g. silk with nylon).
I get the problems with electricity generation, but as a general rule exponential economic growth does not require an exponential increase in the consumption of any particular resource.
No one needs to copy routes through technological progress, though. You do need a build-up of capital (without outside investment), but the history of technological progress is full of less-developed groups jumping ahead because of the strides taken by more-developed groups.
1) There are population groups which are exponentially growing
2) There are ones which are declining
This is not taken into account in models. Economic growth shifts bucket 1 into bucket 2, but genetically-speaking, we favor people who want a lot of kids. The exponential growth groups will eventually overtake the exponential-decline or the plateau groups.
For a silly exploration of this phenomenon, see the movie Idiocracy.
Trigger warning: This movie is nearing 20 years old, and has a lot of things which might trigger the types of people who expect trigger warnings.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
They bring up Malthus w/o noting that his math was correct --- he just didn't anticipate the Haber process, nor the on-going improvements afforded by foodstuffs from the new world.
The one valid point made is that we are moving ever larger quantities of rock for ever-smaller returns --- when does that reach a point at which it no longer makes sense?