GeoDestinies 2022

 

Walter Youngquist (1921-2018) was a petroleum geologist, a University of Oregon professor, and my friend.  His life’s masterpiece is a 600 page book that’s now available to everyone as a free PDF download [HERE].  

Geologists study Earth resources, many of which are being degraded and depleted — aquifers, topsoil, hydrocarbons, minerals, etc.  These resources have limits.  Every drinker learns that the glass starts full, ends empty, and the faster you drink it, the quicker it’s gone.  Consumers pay little attention to resource limits, but they’re beginning to comprehend the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.  Mainstream experts repeatedly tell us not to worry.  They preach a fervent blind faith in miracles — a smooth and easy transition to a clean, green, renewable utopia.  Geologists wince. 

Youngquist didn’t believe in miracles or techno utopias.  Today, we’re living dangerously fast by destroying astonishing amounts of nonrenewable resources — a onetime binge that can never again be repeated.  Nonrenewable energy is finite.  We have been soaring in a beautiful dream world, where the air is perfumed with the intoxicating aroma of a nonrenewable prosperity.  The era of cheap energy is fading away in the rear view mirror. 

In 1973, the Eugene newspaper wrote a story about one of his lectures, “Dark Picture Painted by Youngquist.”  He gave many talks to Chamber of Commerce groups, trying to introduce them to the concept of limits.  He was almost never invited back.  America worships perpetual growth at any cost.  Growth is our god word.

In the mid-1990s, a number of the world’s petroleum geologists became alarmed that the volume of new oil discovered was declining, while the volume of consumption continued soaring.  This inspired the dawn of the Peak Oil movement, a wakeup call.  In 1997, Youngquist published GeoDestinies, which quickly sold out.  Folks begged him to print more, but Walt was reluctant.  He wanted to update the info first, but the story was moving faster than he could type. 

Finally, in 2012, he finished the update.  Unfortunately, the process hit some curves.  The book did not get to a printer, Walt died, the publisher went extinct, and the manuscript gathered dust.  In 2022, a small group of fans was able to get a digital copy, and make it available to the world.  Most of the content is still timely and very important.  For most readers, this book is largely going to be a banquet of new information, important stuff that’s rarely taught in school, if ever.

Today, many snicker at the Peak Oil dimwits.  Dudes, we didn’t run out!  We’ll always find more!  In the ’90s, the industry was primarily producing cheap and easy conventional oil (insert a straw and suck).  It appears that the global production of this oil peaked around 2005.  Unfortunately, mad scientists developed new technology for extracting oil, like hydro-fracking and horizontal drilling.  This enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil from sources including tar sands, heavy oil, shale oil (tight oil), and deep water wells.  This oil was far more challenging and expensive to extract (and the mother of many bankruptcies).

In addition to declining discoveries, a new boogeyman is EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).  It takes energy to extract fossil energy.  For example, a hundred years ago, the EROEI for conventional oil was very high.  Ram a drill into a huge pool of Texas oil, and a geyser of black gold often shot high in the sky.  Today, with the shift toward unconventional oil, the EROEI is far lower and declining.  As the energy needed for extraction approaches the energy content of the output, the industry moves closer to its expiration date.  A lot of fossil energy will be left in the ground forever. 

It took more than 500 million years for geologic forces to transform plant and animal residue into fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas.  It will take less than 500 years for humans to extract it and burn it.  We live during a brief blip in Earth history, an ecological hurricane.  Walt’s core message was a blunt warning.  “The momentum of population growth and resource consumption is so great that a collision course with disaster is inevitable.  Large problems lie not very far ahead.  …In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”

The public believes that adequate “renewable” substitutes will be available when needed.  Alternative energy is not clean, green, and free.  The hardware components have limited working lifespans.  Scaling up to replace nonrenewable energy would require vast land area, roads, power lines, and backup for when adequate wind or sunbeams are unavailable.  Manufacturing solar panels requires critical minerals like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  Each wind turbine requires tons of concrete, steel, and other resources.

Walt described the alternative energy options, and their many limitations.  He concluded that renewable energy will not come close to replacing fossil energy.  In 2021, Alice Friedemann presented a far more thorough discussion in her book Life After Fossil Fuels.  A renewable utopia seems impossible. 

Oil is just one of many Earth resource topics in Walt’s book.  Plants and animals don’t need it.  Less than 200 years ago, oil was of no great importance to anyone anywhere.  For many thousands of years, nomads wandered across the Arabian Peninsula, under which laid oceans of ancient oil.  It never occurred to them to extract it, burn it, blindside the climate, and race down crowded highways in powerful motorized wheelchairs.  Naturally, in those days, the planet was in far healthier condition.  Then, in the twentieth century, Arabia became very rich, very fast.

Other resources are genuinely essential for the survival of the family of life — soil, water, air, and sunlight.  Of all minerals, soil is the most precious by far.  Fertile soil is created so slowly that, from a human perspective, it’s essentially nonrenewable.  In his book Dirt, geologist David Montgomery wrote, “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”  Peter Salonius studied soil for 44 years.  He concluded that all extractive agriculture, from ancient times to the present, was unsustainable. 

The problems associated with soil destruction are widely understood, and widely disregarded.  Nobody became a billionaire by promoting soil conservation.  Globally, billions of tons are lost every year.  Overall, one-third of the soil on U.S. cropland has been lost over the past 200 years.  Half of the excellent topsoil of Iowa is already gone.  The highest quality soil is close to the surface, and the first to erode.  Walt wrote, “Worldwide, the con­tinuing loss of soil and depletion of groundwater is leading humanity directly over the cliff.”   

All life needs water.  Water allows mineral nutrients in the soil to be absorbed by plants.  Your body is about 60 percent water.  In some regions, farms receive adequate water from precipitation.  Other regions require irrigation.  About 17 percent of cropland is irrigated, but it produces 40 percent of the world’s crops. 

Some underground aquifers are unable to recharge as fast as pumps are extracting the water — like the vast Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. midlands.  They are unsustainable water mines.  Several communities in Colorado are (temporarily) drinking from reservoirs of 10,000 year old water.  Forty percent of humankind now lives in regions with chronic water shortages, especially Africans, with their rapidly growing populations. 

When ancient aquifers are depleted, subsidence can occur — the ground sinks, filling the empty space where the water once was.  This makes it impossible for the aquifer to ever refill again.  In some portions of Mexico City, subsidence has lowered the ground surface up to 28 feet (8.5 m), causing much damage.  Irrigation can also lead to the accumulation of salt in the soil, which eventually creates a permanent wasteland.  In the cradle of civilization, the once thriving Tigris Euphrates floodplain is now “a glistening desert of salt.”

Earth resources have played a starring role in world history.  They enable the rise of civilizations, and their limited eras of prosperity.  It’s no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, because they had abundant deposits of coal, iron, and limestone in convenient locations.  The U.S. skyrocketed into a global superpower by exploiting huge deposits of a wide variety of Earth resources.  In World War II, Japan was short on iron, coal, and oil.  Hitler invaded southern Russia in an effort to seize the huge Baku oilfields.

In coming years, as fossil fuel fades out, agriculture will once again be muscle powered and low tech (if the climate crisis allows crop production to continue).  Industrial scale food processing and distribution will fizzle.  Potent synthetic fertilizers and other agrichemicals will no longer be available.  As harvests decline, population growth will shift into reverse. 

Finally, a few footnotes.  GeoDestinies was written on a tiny digital typewriter that allowed files to be saved on a floppy disk.  As Walt typed, the display presented a single line of text.  He never owned a computer, and never had direct access to the internet or email.  He had no spare time.  Finishing this manuscript was job one.

I gave him prints of interesting online stuff, and copies of my book reviews, including Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming, and The Little Ice Age.  The Fagan reviews reinforced his belief that climate always changed.  Back in 2012, the notion that human-caused emissions were disrupting the climate was still controversial in the mainstream mindset.

In his 96 years, Walt witnessed remarkable changes in the American standard of living.  These were only possible because of our maniacal binge of energy guzzling.  Modernity’s high standard of living, and fabulous healthcare was awesome.  But the long term environmental impact of these short term benefits was huge.

He lacked some sympathy for environmentalists who opposed energy development projects in America, whilst they were enjoying a comfortable consumer lifestyle.  High impact projects were often diverted to poor nations that had few regulations, if any.  In 2012, Walt was not fully aware of the serious long term hazards of nuclear energy, and the lack of permanent storage for high level radioactive wastes.

Walt was especially horrified by exponential population growth.  In his lifetime, the human mob skyrocketed from 1.9 billion to 7.6 billion.  He was deeply disappointed that overpopulation was a taboo subject for secular and spiritual leaders.  Large numbers of immigrants to the U.S. came from cultures where large families are the norm.  Their dream was to live a maximum impact consumer lifestyle.

Youngquist’s book pulls away cultural blindfolds, and provides a mind-expanding full immersion baptism in the actual facts of life.  “The confluence of factors soon at hand may make this century the most turbulent in human history.  There will be adjustment of population size.  There will be a new energy paradigm.  There will be lifestyle change.  There will be great economic change.  There will be environmental change.  Although change has always been the order of life, the particular confluence of major factors in each of these areas will make the twenty-first century a fundamental turning point for mankind.”

Walt completed the manuscript of the second edition in 2012.  Since then, he wrote four papers for the Negative Population Growth Forum.  Our Plundered Planet (2014), A Geomoment of Affluence (2015), The Scale of Things (2016), Framework of the Future (2016). 

Bright Green Lies

 

In an era when the info stream is running heavy on conspiracy theories, fake news, and balderdash, it’s not unusual to come across stories of green energy miracles.  For example, we might see that a progressive country somewhere overseas is now almost entirely running on wind or solar energy.  Oh, really?  In this era of deceptive “news” releases, truth can be a slippery rascal.

Bright green environmentalism is a mindset that has big hopes for a brighter future, and strongly advocates renewable energy.  Their primary interest is preserving our luxurious high-impact lifestyle and mega-profitable economy, while (hopefully) lightening our eco-footprint a wee bit, allowing us to feel slightly less uncomfortable.

The cat is out of the bag with regard to approaching fossil energy limits and the Climate Crisis.  The bad old-fashioned way of living has become unhip and embarrassing.  It has to go.  Bright green is a brilliant marketing strategy.  Look!  Here’s a new and improved way of living in the fast lane that’s friendly to the birds and trees!  It’s great for the economy, and it’s great for the planet!  Imagine that!  How totally cool!  (Um, the inconvenient truth here is that, no matter how hard we wish, we can’t have both industrial civilization and a living planet.)

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of Bright Green Lies, which enthusiastically reveals all the kinky and creepy aspects of the bright green cult.  The three wordsmiths are apostles of a gospel called Deep Green Resistance, which passionately advocates defending the living world, to the highest degree possible, without delay.  (“No, that doesn’t mean killing all humans.  That means changing our lifestyle dramatically.”)  OK!

Once I made it across the border into chapter three, I suddenly became extremely excited!  I found myself exploring a fascinating, in-depth “birds and bees” discussion of the unfortunate realities, drawbacks, and limitations of alternative energy — lots of stuff they never taught me in school (and I wish they were teaching now).

My Admiral TV was made in 1946.  It doesn’t have a screen the size of a barn door.  I’ve never seen it work.  Watching a dead TV is boring.  Reading is a lot more interesting.  When you spend 25 to 30 years studying ecology, anthropology, and environmental history, you can learn a lot of stuff that mainstream folks don’t know — stuff more important than football scores, soap operas, game shows, celebrity shenanigans, and so on.

Folks who have working TVs, and thousands of channels, are often very well informed about countless subjects that are not especially important.  They are unlikely to be up to date on difficulties of lithium recycling, or why Big Mama Nature loathes and despises notorious bright green billionaires, or why the electric grid is so poorly designed for effectively distributing renewable energy that is intermittent, unpredictable, hard to control, and a pain in the ass.

They are likely to be blissfully ignorant about most of the countless eco-impacts of their consumer lifestyles.  The view outside their picture window is not strip mines, clear-cuts, forest fires, methane craters, oil fields, toxic spills, chemical plants, and landfills.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Most importantly, they are unlikely to understand why running today’s industrial civilization entirely on renewable energy is absolutely impossible, and why attempting a transition would provide little or no benefit — but a lot more damage to the planet.

Of course, everyone remembers William Jevons, who discovered something very strange in 1865.  In those days, the steam engine industry was making big gains in efficiency.  More work could be done with less coal.  Instead of reducing coal mining, demand for coal increased, because it was the greedy and profitable thing to do.  Jevon’s Paradox asserts, “Increased efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it.”

Bright greens still dance to the Jevon’s boogie.  Richard York, a University of Oregon wizard, studied data from 128 nations, and found that for every unit of “green” power brought online, only one-tenth as much fossil fuel was taken offline.  “Industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy, and fossil fuel is functionally irreplaceable.”  Electric cars can’t be made without it.  Nor can wind turbines, solar panels, planes, ships, concrete, cell phones, etc.  Oil is incredibly energy dense.

Solar power pauses for sunset or clouds, sometimes for days.  Wind turbines take a nap when it’s calm, sometimes for days.  Meanwhile, demand for electricity expects the grid to always provide our every need immediately, and demand can surge without warning.  This means that a conventional generation system (typically fossil powered) must constantly be kept running on standby, to immediately feed the grid when clouds pass, breezes calm, or demand suddenly spikes.  Brilliant, eh?

While coal or oil is energy that can be stored for millions of years, the grid delivers alternating current (AC) electricity, which is impossible to store — use it or lose it.  Batteries can store direct current (DC) electricity, but high capacity utility-scale batteries are not in common use.  There are other ways of storing energy, like hydro-electric dams, pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal, etc.  These can be used in unique locations, not everywhere.  Bottom line: “The grid was not built for renewables.”  Therefore, a new fantastically expensive state of the art grid is needed.

No storage systems are made of harmless green fairy dust.  All require a fossil energy powered industrial civilization.  In the world of batteries, lithium-ion is the most efficient.  Elon Musk is working hard to design and build lithium batteries for cars, homes, and industrial scale power storage.  Exponential growth in demand for lithium is predicted into the late 2020s and 2030s. 

Some fear that staggering demand for lithium could drive prices into the stratosphere, and close the gate to a beautiful green utopia.  Even worse, some predict that “not enough economically recoverable lithium exists to build anywhere near the number of batteries needed in a global electric-vehicle economy.”  This also applies to other gizmos that require lithium.  Oh-oh!

As a special bonus, readers are also taken on a naughty and exciting tour behind the curtains, to get a shocking peek at the steamy world of hardcore geology porn.  In addition to a long list of conventional minerals, “green” energy hardware requires exotic minerals, like lithium and rare earth metals, which are found in limited locations, and are not easy or “green” to mine.  The mining industry excels at creating enduring, toxic, eco-catastrophes.

The book explores a number of other subjects — power distribution grids, hydropower, recycling, green cities, biofuels, geothermal, and so on.  Near the end are 28 pages of “solutions,” all of which consumer society has zero interest in.  Consumer society wants to survive and grow until the planet can no longer breathe.  The authors suggest a more interesting path.

Put the plows away forever and bring back the grasslands, via holistic management (beneficial grazing).  Before long, the recovery of healthy wild vegetation will suck the excess carbon out of the air, and turn some of it into organic grass-fed meat.  Grass will save our ass!  Deal with overpopulation and extinctions.  Eliminate carbon emissions in five years.  Remove five dams per day and stop building new ones.  End logging.  And on and on.  In short, end the destruction, let the Earth heal.  Make America Walk Again.

Jensen has spoken to many audiences over 20+ years.  He asks each group the same question.  “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable society?”  No one has ever said yes.  This is exactly the point of his extreme recommendations.  There is no solution that leaves our way of life intact.  Our way of life has some really big issues.  This book will help you better understand some of them.  I liked it.

 

Jensen, Derrick, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies, Monkfish Publishing, Rhinebeck, New York, 2021.  

Wild Free and Happy Sample 49

 

[Note: This is the forty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

LIMITS

“Limit” is a power word, a gateway that can open or close, and influence the course of ecosystem trends.  When members of a species move into an ecosystem, and adapt to it, they make use of available resources, and expand until their growth is paused by limits — food, water, climate, predators, etc.  Herbivores are limited by the availability of digestible vegetation.  Predators are limited by the availability of prey.  The whims of climate can suddenly tighten limits, or relax them.  The dance of life is full of surprises.  Humans are unique in that we can sometimes blow away traditional limits via the wildcard of technological innovation. 

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote a landmark book announcing that there were limits to growth, an idea that many still consider to be silly nonsense (we have no limits!).  At the time, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was rapidly eliminating the traditional cottage-based craft workers who spun yarn, knitted garments, and wove fabric. 

During this era, aristocrats were also busy enclosing (privatizing) the common lands, which forced many peasants from homes where their ancestors had lived for generations.  Enclosure freed up land that could be used to raise lots of sheep, which generated far more income than rents from hungry dirty peasants.

Many displaced peasants migrated to filthy crowded cities to work in textile factories.  Kirkpatrick Sale described folks working up to 18 hours per day (never less than 10), breathing air that was thick with dust.  Many were injured by the whirling and jerking machines.  Most of the workforce was women and children (as young as 4 or 5), because they worked for far less money than men.  While the poor folks lived in misery, the well to do were surfing on big waves of wealth.  Life was grand!

Steam powered textile factories were driving cottage enterprises extinct, at the same time that enclosures were forcing many to migrate to cities, where low-paying factory work was available.  Factories could make clothing that was far less expensive, and far lower in quality.  Shoddy hosiery sometimes decomposed after a single wearing.  Poor folks could only afford the cheap crap.  Cottage workers were too proud of their craft to lower their standards, or work for peanuts.

Let’s take a quick side trip.  In the 1851 census, my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Cleaton Rees was a handloom weaver in the parish of Llangurig, Wales, as was her mother, sister, four of her sisters-in-law, and many of their neighbors.  The wool produced in the Cambrian Mountains was rugged.  Flannel woven from it lasted nearly forever, but was a bit scratchy.

Sarah had been a widow since 1844, when her husband died from “decline” at 23.  She had three sons.  Unlike factory rats, handloom weavers generally earned a living income.  Sarah did not marry again for 11 years, but she did leave Llangurig.  In about 1853, Sarah and her sons moved south to Merthyr Tydfil, an ironworking district.  Was she forced out by enclosure, or did her source of income go belly up?

In the 1861 census, she was working as a beer house keeper at the Green Dragon, and her sons were iron miners.  In the region, dense coal smoke made the air black, and the rivers too.  It was a miserable life — hard work, wee wages, filthy air, raw sewage everywhere, and tainted water that killed thousands.  Cholera was common.  Legends tell of families being alive and well in the morning, and all dead by sunset.  In 1863, Sarah, her sons, and new husband, packed up and moved to the U.S., where they found coal mining work in Ohio.

When Malthus wrote in 1798 there were about 8.8 million English.  By 1861, the number had soared to 20.1 million.  Sarah and Malthus spent their lives in a population explosion, an era of intense social turbulence.  In 1798, like today, the wizards in the center stage spotlights were radicalized utopians, like Marx, Engels, and Malthus’s crazy daddy, who enthusiastically celebrated the wonders of progress, and the limitless rosy future that laid ahead.

For 200+ years, legions of critics have been denouncing the legacy of Malthus, because he predicted that rapid population growth would soon lead to catastrophe.  Actually, he never made that prediction, although he was right to be wary of growth.  Few critics have actually read his book.  Over the years, Malthus penned six editions.  Garrett Hardin sat down and read them all, comparing the additions and deletions.  In Living Within Limits, Hardin concluded that 95 percent of his ideas were correct.  Not bad!

Carrying Capacity

William Catton put his finger on Malthus’ core misunderstanding.  Malthus simply could not imagine that it was possible for humankind to ever exceed Earth’s carrying capacity.  At the time, the global population was just approaching one billion.  Much of the U.S. Midwest was still a vast ancient forest.  He clearly underestimated the destructive potential of technological innovation, and what it would do to the planet.

Catton wrote a masterpiece on carrying capacity, and how it impacts humans and everything else.  On the book cover, his five word definition of carrying capacity was “the maximum permanently supportable load.”  His use of “permanent” doesn’t mean for all eternity, because all living systems never stop changing.  It sort of meant living in a manner that was not at the expense of the next generation(s), or the vitality of the ecosystem — something that could operate indefinitely, because it was not a belligerent enemy of the family of life.

Around 300,000 years ago, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans was limited by the resources available within their original homeland in east Africa.  They lived lightly, because that was their only option.  Later, as the ancestors migrated into Asia, Europe, and Australia, the planet’s carrying capacity for humans expanded, because they inhabited more territory, and had access to more resources.  Their expansion did not leave behind a wake of ecological wreckage, at first.  As discussed earlier, a number of large game species were gradually driven to extinction when the intrepid pioneers lived a bit too hard.

Over the passage of millennia, some ancestors gradually swerved farther and farther across the yellow line of limits.  Eventually, with the domestication of plants and animals, some clever ones closed their eyes and stomped on the accelerator.  Bye-bye forests, wetlands, topsoil, and animal life.  Bye-bye healthy wild ecosystems.  Hello growing mobs, civilizations, tyrants, slavery, patriarchy, and a wake of irreparable wreckage.  Whoops!

For any species, the carrying capacity limits for a region, or the planet, can be altered in two ways.  (1) Takeover is expansion into new habitat, which provides access to additional resources.  This is not inherently naughty.  For example, long, long ago horses and camels migrated from America to the Old World.  Mammoths and saber-tooth cats migrated in the opposite direction.  So, takeover can genuinely enlarge carrying capacity for a species. 

(2) Drawdown enables carrying capacity limits to be temporarily overridden by diminishing exhaustible resources — forests, topsoil, minerals, oil reservoirs, and so on.  For example, when an ancient forest is displaced to create farms and pastures, more food can be produced, and the mob can grow — at the cost of degrading exhaustible resources, and overthrowing traditional balances in the ecosystem.  Drawdown can include horses being replaced with tractors, manure replaced with synthetic fertilizer, and rainfall supplemented with water extracted from ancient aquifers.

Catton wrote that drawdown did not actually elevate carrying capacity.  Instead, it created “phantom carrying capacity,” because the expansion was unsustainable and temporary.  Writing in 1980, he said that the ongoing survival of 90 percent of humankind (including Americans) was dependent on phantom carrying capacity, far in excess of traditional limits.  Today, that percentage is certainly higher, because it is enabled by ever-growing dependence on fossil energy and other strategic nonrenewable resources.

Drawdown leads to overshoot — growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, eventually leading to crash and die-off.  Blissfully ignorant consumers, as well as world leaders, often mistake overshoot for progress.  Today, humankind has advanced deeply into overshoot, impacting the entire planet.  Consequently, as the still soaring population works harder and harder to ravage the natural world, the global carrying capacity for humans is deteriorating, while phantom carrying capacity soars ever higher.

Overshoot doesn’t <bleep> around.  It is beginning a messy and merciless process of herding the enormous human mob into a narrow bottleneck, through which only a limited number can pass.  The tight squeeze will continue until the human mob is reduced to a number that can live in peace with a severely damaged Earth (if we don’t simply get pushed off the stage forever).

Energy and Growth

In this long and lumpy comedy of errors, the transition to fossil energy shifted the monster into warp drive.  In the famous story, Dr. Frankenstein’s creepy monster spoke these words to him, “You are my maker, but I am your master.”  Today’s globalized industrial civilization is living like there’s no tomorrow, and behaving as if we were the last generation.  This story will have a crappy ending.  Consumer society has zoomed far beyond the border, deep into the bowels of Crazyland, where folks soar away in beautiful hallucinations of limitlessness — a magical realm of progress, abundance, perpetual growth, maniacal shopping, and 500 channels of nonstop entertainment with no commercials.

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke wrote about the planet shaking explosion of eco-destruction that has occurred since 1945.  They noted that energy is the guiding force, the trail blazer, of humankind’s long meandering saga.  We can’t photosynthesize sunlight, so we survive by eating plants and animals.  In the days before hominins learned how to kindle fire, their sole source of life energy was a raw food diet.  Fire led to cooking, which enabled the ancestors to transform indigestible stuff into an additional sources of life energy.  Increased access to edible energy enabled the survival of more food eaters. 

Tragically, with the emergence of plant and animal domestication, traditional limits to growth could be radically exceeded, temporarily, by rubbishing wild ecosystems, and replacing them with manmade ecosystems capable of producing far more edible energy, when conditions were favorable.  Cereal grains are energy dense, and suitable for long term storage.  Today, our food is produced by mechanized, irrigated, chemical drenched, industrial agriculture, which further accelerates overpopulation.

Similarly, the domestication of livestock and poultry generated even more food energy, especially when wild predators (competitors) were systematically exterminated.  Enslaved horses could convert the solar energy stored by vegetation into mechanical energy useful for carrying riders and cargo, or for pulling plows, carts, and carriages.  Prior to this time, for almost 300,000 years, the primary source of mechanical energy used by our ancestors was human muscle power.

Catton wrote that agriculture provided phantom carrying capacity.  Another phantom was the exploitation of “ghost acreage.”  The hungry mobs in places like Britain could be fed by importing lots of food produced on faraway acres in other lands.  Many nations are now depend on imported food.  Another phantom was industrial fish mining, depleting wild fisheries to feed hungry urban populations.  All wild animals have limits too.  The global food system can seem like a shaky house of cards.

The planet-eating monster is primarily powered by nonrenewable fossil energy, a form of stored sunshine that accumulated over the course of 500 million years.  Every day we move closer to the post-fossil era, and to the funeral wake for today’s global food industry, and the overshoot it conjured into existence.

In 2019, ecological economist William E. Rees wrote a stunning sentence: “It is a quirk of exponential growth that half the fossil energy ever used (and half the fossil CO₂ ever produced), has been burned (emitted) in just the past 35 years!”  Rees has come to the conclusion that humans are not “primarily a rational species.”  It’s hard to disagree.

Growth Soars Away

Eventually, our food production surpluses rose to the point where a portion of the mob was no longer needed in the fields and pastures.  It became possible to feed people who could indulge in specialized activities, like metallurgy, woodworking, ceramics, construction, warfare, religion, government, and on and on.  We swerved into the express lane, and commenced our joyride of turbocharged cleverness with no brakes, no roads, and no foresight — full speed ahead into the powerful nightmare world of unintended consequences.  Yippee!

Growing numbers of folks accumulated in villages, towns, and cities.  Poor sanitation, malnutrition, and high density living laid out the welcome mat to a wide variety of herd diseases.  William McNeill noted that for 8,000 years, cities were demographic black holes, because of their high death rates.  Their ongoing existence depended on the constant inflow of surplus people from the countryside, commonly bachelors, spinsters, orphans, and refugees who were not among the lucky winners in the land inheritance lottery.

William Stanton pointed out that around 1750, population trends shifted into a new mode, accelerating growth.  Food production was booming.  Colonies in Africa, Australia, and the Americas greatly expanded the area of land used for growing crops and raising livestock.  It became possible to import abundant amounts of food.  New World crop plants were sent back to the Old World, including two extremely productive super foods — potatoes and corn (maize).  Old World livestock was sent to the colonies, where they could explode into the millions. 

Our skills at soil mining improved.  The area of land that could support ten people in 1700, could support 50 by 1900.  New types of potent fertilizers became available, further boosting productivity.  Crop breeding research launched the Green Revolution, which enabled a dramatic increase in productivity. 

Stanton wrote that when agriculture became dependent on oil, the need for human labor was reduced by a factor of 40 to 1.  Using the latest mega-technology, the factor might be close to 100 to 1.  New farm machinery promoted higher crop yields.  New dams enabled deserts to become lush croplands.  New irrigation pumps enabled water miners to drain ancient aquifers.  New petrochemicals reduced crop losses by insects, diseases, and weeds. 

Birth control is intended to prevent unwelcome pregnancies.  Stanton talked a lot about its opposite, death control, which was intended to delay unwelcome deaths.  Prior to 1750, high mortality rates provided a reliable restraint on growth.  Then, from 1750 to now, stunning advances in death control kicked open the gateway to a horrific population explosion.  He decreed that this was an era of weak restraints on growth (WROG).  Naturally, when death rates drop below birth rates, population rises.  Growth happens.

In prehistoric times, there were periods of WROG that began when wild humans first set foot on uninhabited continents and islands, and discovered an abundance of delicious resources.  Five centuries ago, civilized folks from the Old World washed ashore in the New World.  The infectious diseases they carried with them rapidly spread, killing most of the inhabitants on two continents.  The massive die-off then cleared the stage for a 500 year WROG rocket ride.

In the current WROG surge, while birth rates chug along, death rates have been dramatically driven down by technological innovations.  Food production is booming.  Mortality from infectious diseases has been reduced by new vaccines, antibiotics, wonder drugs, antiseptic surgery, and other health care advances.  Public health has been improved by energy-guzzling systems for garbage disposal, safe drinking water, and sewage treatment.  What this one-time binge on fossil energy is doing to the climate will eventually drive a stake through the heart of the WROG era.

Growth Nears Retirement

As the old proverb says, what goes up, must come down.  During the current WROG nightmare, technological cleverness has made it possible to maximize drawdown, and foolishly override carrying capacity limits.  We’re rocketing into the future, at maximum velocity, blindfolded, out of control, lost in a dream world of vivid hallucinations — a joyride into the roaring flames of overshoot.  This is what is known as progress, sustainable growth, a high standard of living, and other oxymoronic gibberish.

When you spend every minute of your life pounded by a hurricane of conflicting, nonsensical, fabricated information, it can sometimes be difficult to see and think clearly.  Most folks unconsciously assume that the decadent lifestyles of the WROG era (including our entire lifetime) are perfectly normal.  Wrong! 

When I was born in 1952, there were 2.6 billion humans.  Today in 2020, it has tripled to 7.8 billion, and is still growing — a massive explosion resulting in catastrophic irreversible damage.  Oddly, most folks in the land of glowing screens consider the status quo to be not only normal, but the pinnacle of the entire human experience.  We have great powers of imagination.

We’ve gotten way too clever at exceeding limits — by sneaking around them, leaping over them, tunneling under them, or exterminating them.  Consumer society has soared away into a state of limitless debauchery.  No previous generation has ever lived in such a destructive manner.  This way of life has an expiration date, and there are folks alive today who will experience its arrival.

In the absence of wisdom, foresight, radical birth control, and enthusiastic worldwide cooperation, food will become increasingly expensive and/or scarce.  No matter how hard we wish, it is not possible to conjure megatons of food out of thin air via hope, prayers, voting, or positive thinking.  When overshoot finally slams into the stone wall of carrying capacity, carrying capacity giggles, overshoot splatters, and the obesity epidemic sings its death song.

Sooner or later, as the WROG circus rides off into the sunset, the most vulnerable regions will eventually reach what Stanton calls the violent cutback level (VCL).  When this happens, violence becomes inevitable, he says, because the surefire medicines that effectively cure acute overpopulation are bitter.  He noted that a number of regions began approaching VCL levels in the late 1970s, Rwanda for example.  The number of hotspots continues growing.  Stanton noted that folks having low social status, or high bad luck, will be among those affected first.  Political correctness will go extinct, as will sympathy for underdogs, scapegoats, heretics, and (fill in the blank). 

Societies that are ethnically and culturally homogenous, like Iceland, have not shattered into aggressively competing factions, so the possibility of reaching their VCL is not a constant danger.  On the other hand, in dysfunctional, oppressive, intolerant, multi-cultural societies — flaming hotbeds of merciless, power crazy, pathological selfishness — like the U.S., the Middle East, and many other regions, VCL is always just one spark away.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 43

[Note: This is the forty-third sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

THE GREAT BONFIRE

During the maybe four million years that hominins have wandered on Earth, the inflow of solar energy has been steady, millennia after millennia.  Meanwhile, buried underground were enormous reservoirs of fossilized solar energy, stored up for many millions of years.  This resource was almost entirely unknown and untouched until the last few centuries, when industrial societies swerved blindly into a catastrophic binge of energy guzzling.

Revolutionary transitions in the human saga include becoming bipedal, the domestication of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of civilization, and the transition to fossil energy, which sparked a great bonfire.  The great bonfire has blindsided the climate, enabled skyrocketing population growth, rubbished many ecosystems, and spurred a mass extinction.  It is speeding down the rails to deliver industrial civilization to its only possible destination — its just rewards.  Nate Hagens emphasized that cleverness is not the same as wisdom.  Cleverness has a tendency to reduce us to idiot-savants, he says.

For thousands of years, nomadic herders unknowingly drove their camels and flocks back and forth over oceans of buried oil.  These folks lived in their traditional manner, enjoyed their simple lives, and breathed clean fresh air.  The first oil well in Saudi Arabia was drilled in 1938.  For Arabians, the last 80 years have been a turbulent era of explosive growth in wealth, population, urbanization, mass consumption, and environmental destruction.

It’s a similar story with coal.  Around 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters at the Dolní Věstonice site in the Czech Republic lived in a chilly tundra where trees, if any, were not abundant.  They heated their mammoth bone huts by burning the solar energy embedded in two fuels: fat-rich mammoth bones, and chunks of black coal they found on the ground.  Until a few centuries ago, coal was not an industrial-scale fuel source.  It was far easier to exterminate forests than to drive mine shafts into seams of buried coal.  This worked well for many centuries, as long as there were still large forests to massacre.

Wood is called a renewable resource.  In theory, if you cut down a few trees once in a while, the forest will replace them, and the ecosystem will not get trashed over time.  Sadly, countless millions of passenger pigeons, auks, moas, and many others are gone forever, because they were killed faster than they could replace their losses. 

Phosphate, copper, and oil are called nonrenewable resources, because they exist in quantities that are absolutely limited.  Once a deposit is extracted from the Earth, nature does not replenish it.  Imagine how unbelievably stupid it would be to build a global, highly complex, industrial civilization, with billions of people, that was extremely dependent on the accelerating consumption of staggering amounts of finite nonrenewable resources, fossil fuel for example.  Gosh!  We are so lucky to reside in a wonderland of magical thinking, where life has never been better, and the best is yet to come.  Our benevolent leaders will always keep us safe and happy.

As mentioned earlier, over time England cut its forests too intensively, and seriously depleted them.  Firewood became more scarce and expensive.  By the thirteenth century, some regions in Europe began fooling around with coal.  By around 1550, the wood shortage in England had become a serious threat to the status quo.  Industry needed fuel, and the entire population enjoyed having warm hearths and hot meals.  Britain was home to significant deposits of coal, a dirty fuel that everyone considered to be inferior to wood.  Folks were forced to choose between sooty stinky pollution, or a miracle of mass enlightenment, radical lifestyle changes, and highly effective family planning strategies.

They unconsciously chose to remain on the less demanding path.  Coal production increased, and demand for firewood and charcoal declined.  Much of the lumber they needed was imported from forested nations.  This allowed a fair amount of former British woodland area to be converted into grazing land for livestock, or cropland for growing grain.  So, they could produce more food, which naturally encouraged population growth, which naturally boosted demand for energy.  We have a hard time accepting the notion that growth usually has a dark side, especially when its full consequences do not immediately blow up in our faces.

Water seepage into the coal mines was an ongoing challenge, and it inspired the development of steam engines to power the pumps.  This new form of mechanical power, steam, stimulated the imaginations of clever lads.  At the time, most mills and factories were located beside streams, which drove their waterwheels.  Water flows were not constant, they varied by season, and by weather patterns.  Many water-powered mills could not work reliably in the summer, when flows were low.

Other enterprises were driven by wind mills, and winds could be howling one day, and then calm for weeks.  Neither water wheels nor windmills were major power sources.  Until the expansion of steam power, the primary source of power remained the muscles of humans and other animals.

Unlike wind or water, coal fueled steam engines could reliably provide steady power output every day of the year.  By and by there were steam powered textile mills, locomotives, steamships, and so on.  Later came internal combustion engines, which were used to power a huge variety of machines.  Gasoline couldn’t run a sewing machine 100 miles away, but electricity could.  We invented generators, installed power grids, built hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants.  We invented telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, cell phones, the internet, and so on.  The human herd grew explosively from one billion to two, three, four, five, six, seven…  Zoom, zoom, zoom….

Walter Youngquist noted that fossil energy accumulated over the course of more than 500 million years.  We’re going to consume it in less than 500 years.  We’re living during a brief blip in human history, one that can never again be repeated.  Writing in 2012, he noted that the first 200 billion barrels of oil were consumed between 1859 and 1968.  The second 200 billion barrels was consumed in the next ten years.  Now, 200 billion barrels is consumed in just six and a half years.  Of all the oil ever consumed, 50 percent was used since 1984, and 90 percent has been used since 1958. 

Albert Bartlett said that since 1950, world oil production has been growing exponentially, at about seven percent per year.  At that rate, production doubles every ten years.  What this means is that children born after 1966 “will see the world consume most of its oil during their lifetime.” 

J. R. McNeill wrote that at the dawn of agriculture, the human population was maybe 2 to 20 million people.  Humans may have been outnumbered by other primates, like baboons.  Since 1800, there has been an explosion of change.  In the twentieth century, we consumed more energy than we did during all previous human history, and we impacted the planet more than in all previous centuries combined. 

Nate Hagens noted that we eat maybe 2,500 calories daily, while our ridiculously luxurious standard of living requires 200,000 calories of energy each day.  Thus, we consume 80 times more energy than our bodies need, possessing the metabolism of 30 ton primates.  He says it’s impossible to accurately predict how the future will unfold, but it’s fairly easy to imagine what it will not be.

Welcome to the bonfire!  We perceive our current way of life to be normal, because it’s all we’ve ever known.  Graduates have been taught to expect that they will spend their entire lives in a wonderland of abundant energy and perpetual growth.  They have no doubt that any obstacles in their path will promptly be swept away by the magic of new technology.  They have yet to grasp that the path they are on is a short one.  You cannot live this fast and recklessly for long.  

Coal

Britain was home to significant coal and iron ore deposits.  This encouraged the expansion of the iron making industry, which unlocked the gate to the Industrial Revolution.  Early in the seventeenth century, clever folks discovered that coal could be roasted into coke, like wood was roasted into charcoal.  Coke could burn much hotter than coal, which enabled the production of higher quality metal.  Britain became a powerhouse, and built a sprawling empire. 

One of their colonies was the future United States.  America had huge coal and iron ore resources, and many of the deposits were of higher quality than those in Britain.  This, along with abundant oil, enabled the U.S. to grow rapidly and become an industrial superpower.  History often dances to the beat of geology.

Albert Marrin noted that lignite, or brown coal, is 73 percent carbon.  It is soft, and very dirty to burn.  Bituminous coal is 85 percent carbon.  Black coal, anthracite, is over 90 percent carbon.  It is the oldest, hardest, most deeply buried, and the hottest burning. 

Writing in 2012, Jeff Rubin said that global coal production was still growing exponentially.  The total energy content of coal mined in the U.S. peaked in 1998.  Since then, we’ve been extracting larger amounts of lower quality coal.  Anthracite production in the U.S. peaked in 1950, and had decreased 75 percent by 2010.  Bituminous production peaked in 1990, and has been declining since. 

Most coal production originates in just seven countries, and they only export 15 percent of their output to other nations.  It’s expensive to ship.  Lignite is the most abundant type of coal, but because of its low energy content, it cannot be shipped long distances at a profit.  Petroleum, on the other hand, can be widely exported, because it has dense energy content, and is a far more valuable cargo.

Clive Ponting noted that world coal production was 10 million tons in 1800, 760 million tons in 1900, and 5 billion tons in 2000.  Walter Youngquist mentioned a 2007 study asserting that 50 percent of all coal ever consumed has been used since 1970, and 90 percent has been used since 1909.  He also noted that several recent studies had estimated that global coal production will peak by 2025.  Of course, folks concerned about the Climate Crisis wish we’d shut down all mines today.  Fat chance.

In 1952, during a spell of extreme cold, from December 5 to 9, greater London was suffocated by the Great Smog.  Four thousand died from the choking dense coal smoke.  Being outdoors made your clothes and skin black.  At times, it was literally not possible to see your hand in front of your face.  Pittsburgh was known as Smoke City back when it was a steel making center.  More recently, some Chinese cities have been experiencing extreme pollution.

Oil

The industrial production of oil began in 1859, in Pennsylvania.  In the following decades the war on the future became turbocharged.  Initially, the primary product was kerosene for lighting, which replaced stuff like whale oil lamps, and candles made of beeswax or tallow.  Later, oil provided the fuel source for internal combustion engines, and all hell broke loose.  New reserves of oil were discovered at an increasing rate, and society consumed more and more of the black gold.  Because oil is a finite nonrenewable resource, neither trend could continue indefinitely, no matter how hard we wish otherwise.

The discovery of new oil deposits in the world peaked in 1965, by which time we had discovered most of the easy to find supergiant oil provinces.  Since then, discoveries have been fewer and smaller.  They require drilling more wells, which drives up the cost of producing each barrel.  Meanwhile, the consumption of oil has continued growing.  We’re consuming it faster than we’re discovering it.  [LOOK]  This trend has an expiration date. 

My friend, Walter Youngquist was among the generation of petroleum geologists who first saw the writing on the wall, with regard to the limited future of world oil production.  The trends were disturbing.  It was getting harder to discover new deposits, at the same time that there were a shrinking number of promising locations that had not yet been evaluated. 

In the 1990s, several highly experienced gray-haired petroleum geologists began jumping up and down and shouting, attempting to warn humankind that terribly serious problems were approaching in the not too distant future.  They were predicting that global oil production would peak before 2010, and this was a serious threat to life as we know it.  The Peak Oil movement generated lots of information, and got significant attention for a while.

As I write in 2020, global oil production is hitting new peaks.  In recent years, with a big sigh of relief, most folks have dismissed the Peak Oil predictions as the hysterical hallucinations of doom perverts.  OK, it’s time to sit down and take a few Prozac pills.  The Peak Oil folks were focused on conventional oil, which was most of the oil produced since 1859.  With regard to conventional oil, the geologists actually turned out to be right.  Its production peaked around 2005. 

The geologists were well aware that there was lots of other oil in the ground, but the numerous and much smaller deposits could not be profitably produced by the traditional technology.  These resources are called unconventional oil.  They include tar sands, heavy oil, tight oil (also called shale oil), and deep water wells. 

Eventually, new technology, notably fracking and horizontal drilling, enabled a sharp increase in the production of unconventional oil.  This oil was far more difficult and expensive to extract, but we now had the tools to effectively produce lots of it (for a while).  Consequently, global oil production could continue growing, enabling world population to soar to greater extremes.  Humankind’s war on the future could now become more destructive than ever before.

Tight oil is extracted by a process known as fracking, which can retrieve oil from small deposits.  Richard Heinberg mentioned a 2014 report.  It found that in the North Dakota oil fields, 1,400 new wells had to be drilled every year, just to maintain current production, because the lifespan of each well is brief, just a few years.  This was not cheap. 

Nate Hagens wrote an important paper on current energy trends.  [HERE]  Don’t miss the graphs at the top of page 6.  [LOOK]  The right graph shows U.S. oil production from 1900 to 2018, and it indicates the volumes produced by the four primary types of oil sources.  The red spike is labeled tight oil, which is the unconventional oil extracted from shale beds by fracking.  The sharp spike in tight oil is what has (temporarily) made the U.S. the world’s top oil producer.  The three non-shale sources had peaked by around 1980, and have since been in steep decline.

Hagens does note an important concern.  With the transition to fracking shale deposits, the cost of extraction has been rising faster than the market price for oil, which means that profits are getting squeezed, and rich folks are sobbing uncontrollably.  On the other hand, if the market price rises too high, the global economy begins coughing up blood, and mobs of bankrupt fat cats begin leaping out of top floor windows.

Billions of barrels of tight oil remain buried in a number of nations.  This oil is “technically recoverable,” meaning that it could be extracted if profits didn’t matter.  The subset of this oil that is “economically recoverable” (makes some profit) depends on the current market price for oil.  When prices trend upward, drilling increases.

A crazy gold rush economy must have cheap and abundant energy.  Economic growth cannot occur without growing energy inputs.  When the inputs decrease, the economy shrinks.  When the market price of energy rises sharply, the economy dives sharply.  Our economic system is designed to function in just one mode — perpetual growth, by any means necessary, <bleep> the future. 

Growth enables the economy to pay the interest on the vast amounts of money it borrows to grease the wheels of the machine.  If growth stops, our voyage to utopia sinks.  As you can see, our economic system is extremely dependent on the accelerating extraction of nonrenewable resources.  It’s designed to eventually self-destruct, but for a while it allows a portion of humankind to live like children and enjoy ridiculous excess.

In the good old days of giant and supergiant fields of conventional oil, high volume production was easy.  I remember a time when gasoline sold for 22 cents per gallon.  The baby boomer generation witnessed a tsunami of robust economic growth and material prosperity.  On a chart of population growth and global oil production, both curves follow a similar skyrocket trajectory.  The descendants of the boomers are in for a far different experience.

And now, the plot thickens, and the drama takes another spooky twist.  Gobble some more Prozac. 

EROEI

It takes energy to create the infrastructure needed to acquire usable energy from solar panels, wind turbines, oil wells, hydro dams, and so on.  For oil, a geologist first has to find a promising location.  Then, a road, pipelines, storage tanks, and utility infrastructure must be built.  A drilling rig bores a well, and if the project is lucky, some oil is found — maybe a lot, maybe a little.  Nerds can then calculate how much total energy it took to extract the oil, and compare it to the energy contained in the oil that the well actually produced.  The calculation results in a measurement known as the EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested), or sometimes just EROI. 

A hundred years ago, it was much easier to locate large high quality deposits (it’s easy to find elephants).  Some wells didn’t even need to be pumped, you just opened the valve.  So, in the good old days, it was not uncommon for a project to invest one unit of energy to extract 100 units from an oil well.  In this case, the EROEI was 100:1.  The investors that funded the project made a generous profit.

Writing in 2014, Walter Youngquist mentioned that in 1930, U.S. oil production had an EROEI of about 100:1.  By 2014 it had fallen to almost 5:1, because of the growing dependence on unconventional tight oil.  The global oil industry in 2014 was operating at about 18:1, because it included production from the conventional oil reserves remaining in the Middle East.  The closer we get to 1:1, the more expensive everything gets, and the less stable the world economy becomes.  He suspected that the red line for life as we know it was about 7:1 (others say 5:1).  The ethanol produced from U.S. corn is 1:1 or less.  This industry is kept on life support by subsidies that delight Big Agriculture. 

Please note that calculating an EROEI statistic is far more complicated than weighing a hunk of copper.  Experts use different formulas, so the numbers produced by various studies are not consistent.  What is absolutely consistent across all studies is that the trend lines for U.S. and global EROEI values have been falling sharply in the last century. 

Writing in 2013, Tim Morgan estimated that the global industry in 1990 was running at about 40:1.  It dropped to 17:1 by 2010, and was expected to drop to 11:1 by 2020.  Few of the new discoveries in 2013 were likely to produce more than 10:1.  He expected that by about 15:1, the soaring costs of world production become a serious threat to profitability. 

Morgan noted that there are still large deposits of oil and gas in shale beds, but extracting them via fracking at 5:1 generates little profit for the global economy.  He wrote that tar sands are slightly higher than 3:1 — but only for the deposits that can be surface mined, which are 20 percent of total tar sands.  The other 80 percent of tar sand energy will be left in the ground forever, because its projected EROEI is very low or negative. 

There are vast tar sand deposits in Alberta, Canada.  Their area is about the size of Michigan.  Younquist noted that they contain 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen, but only 19 percent of it will ever be produced, because it takes two tons of tar sands, and lots of water and natural gas (heat), to produce one barrel of oil.  Note that the barrel of oil will emit CO₂ when burned, and so will all of the natural gas used to melt two tons of tar.  It's a double whammy for the climate.

As EROEI declines, the cost of oil rises, taking a bigger bite out of the U.S. economy (GDP).  In the 1990s, oil had been around $10 a barrel.  In 2004, it was around $30.  In 2008, it shot up to $147, economic growth slammed into a wall, and a terrifying mushroom cloud rose over Wall Street.  Youngquist said that OPEC (oil producing) nations were delighted by the sudden surge in profits.  But in the following weeks, it dropped to $60, and briefly to $40.  OPEC freaked out, because falling prices reduced profits.

Alfred Crosby pointed out that the trend of diminishing EROEI means that lots of oil will be left in the ground forever, regardless of how high the price eventually rises.  So will a lot of low quality coal.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll to get there was $100.  When it takes a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil, there is no net energy gain.  Game over. 

As the extraction of conventional oil declines, and the dependence on unconventional oil increases, the EROEI of the oil industry trends downward.  At some point, declining EROEI will make it impossible for industrial civilization as we know it to exist.  Study the fascinating chart of the net energy cliff. [HERE]  The green area shows the energy available for consumption, and the red area shows the energy used to extract it.  Note that old fields required very little energy for extraction, while tar sands and oil shale require an enormous amount of energy and money to extract.  Once EROEI dips below 10:1, the trend sharply changes.

NUCLEAR ENERGY

William and Rosemarie Alley wrote about nuclear power.  They noted that today “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31 countries.  More are on the way.  Yet, no country on Earth has an operating high-level waste disposal facility.”  Nuclear waste remains extremely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years or more.  William worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and spent years on the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada, America’s preferred site for the “safe” permanent storage of nuclear waste.

The U.S.  government invested $10 billion on 25 years of research on Yucca Mountain.  The objective was to prove that the site would be safe for a million years.  No place on Earth would be a perfect site.  Dr. Alley believed that Yucca Mountain was close enough to ideal, and should be approved.  It wasn’t.  In 2009, President Obama nuked the project, without explanation.  And so, the living generation enjoys most of the energy benefits, and most of the serious risks are our generous gift to future generations.  You’re welcome!

Because Yucca Mountain was cancelled, America’s spent fuel rods continue building up, many of them temporarily stored in cooling ponds.  If the circulating pumps for the cooling ponds stop, the water boils, the pool evaporates, and the rods are exposed to air, melt, and release radioactive gasses.  The meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were triggered by overheated fuel rods.  I was impressed when President Trump once expressed interest in approving the Yucca Mountain project, but then he got distracted by far less important ideas.

ENERGY DREAMS

OK, put away the Prozac, and fetch your medicine bag of hallucinogens.  It’s time to take a mind-altering trip into an intoxicating dreamland of industrial strength magical thinking. The belief in perpetual growth became the sacred quest for a fanatical cult that emerged among some highly respected economists.  Robert Solow, who won a Nobel Prize, asserted that the world can get along without natural resources.  Writing in 1995, Julian Simon said that the world already possessed the knowledge necessary to continue growing for the next seven billion years; population can grow forever.  Neither one was dragged off the stage, put in a straightjacket, and hauled away to the loony bin.  Economists have great imaginations.

Like many other idiotic beliefs, the ideology of unlimited growth became a deeply rooted blind faith that had absolute disregard for factual reality and common sense.  The goofy idea eventually became a carved-in-stone truth that altered the thinking and behavior of millions.  J. R. McNeill noted that the twentieth century was a time when a number of “big ideas” emerged.  A belief in the necessity of economic growth became universal, a global religion — all other concerns became secondary, or irrelevant.

Over time, more and more heretics began to question the faith, because the dream was losing its shine.  Our glorious utopia was starting to wobble, squeak, pop rivets, and leak oil.  Its designers never imagined that it would grow so large, gobble so many resources, and create so many disasters.  They believed that they could conjure “solutions” for every “problem.”  This was another big idea — technology could make everything perfect.

Problems vs. Predicaments

Before continuing, we must now take a moment for an important vocabulary-building side trip.  John Michael Greer once pointed out the huge difference between problems and predicaments.  Problems were challenges that had solutions.  The problem of thirst had an effective solution — drink something.  Sleepy?  Take a nap. 

Predicaments, on the other hand, seem to be something like powerful whirlwinds of foolish traditions, wacky beliefs, rotting cultures, bad luck, or something.  They are perplexing challenges that have no effective solution.  All you can do in response to a predicament is experiment with various responses that may, or may not, put a plastic bandage on a severe flesh-eating infection.  Overpopulation is a predicament that can’t be resolved by wise leaders, illuminated holy folks, mass enlightenment, miraculous technology, or militant opposition to family planning. 

Greer points out that it’s not unusual for societies to mistakenly perceive daunting predicaments to be mere problems that can be eliminated by clever solutions.  This error reliably generates failures, and often worsens the predicament.  There is no silver bullet cure for predicaments.  They fade away or intensify, in response to their shifting moods, if and when they feel like it.

The Climate Crisis is a powerful planet thrashing predicament, and it is just getting started.  Arctic icepacks are melting, vast regions of permafrost are beginning to melt, and enormous amounts of methane are being released into the atmosphere right now.  Nobody can accurately predict how much more carbon will eventually be added to the atmosphere in the coming decades and centuries.  There’s nothing we can do to stop the avalanche we’ve started, even if we tried.  It cannot be stopped by driving electric wheelchairs, recycling, voting, or becoming a vegan.  Of course, it is always intelligent and spiritually healthy to continuously reduce the harms we cause each day.

Nonrenewable and Unsustainable

The Earth Crisis is not a problem in need of a solution, it’s a big, strong, whoop-ass predicament that cannot be prayed away, banished by our virtuous lawmakers, or fixed with money.  Actually, it’s a mountain of predicaments — climate change, topsoil destruction, population growth, water shortages, deforestation, fishery depletion, ocean acidification, toxic pollution, mass extinction, and on and on. 

Most folks don’t have the time or desire to develop a good working understanding of this collection of issues.  They’d have to read 500 books or more.  Many choose to simply enjoy the easy path of blissful ignorance, or the snarling path of righteous misinformed confrontation.  Most do not comprehend the concepts of genuine ecological sustainability, and most fail to grasp that almost everything in their way of life is unsustainable.  McNeill diagnosed this deadly condition as History Deficiency Syndrome (HDS).  It is curable, the medicine is learning, but HDS is a global pandemic that has infected most of humankind.  The plan is to ignore HDS and live in bliss.

There is increasing awareness that we are moving into an era of climate change, and that continued use of fossil energy makes matters worse.  Some are beginning to perceive that fossil energy is nonrenewable, and that we’re getting closer to its limits.  More are beginning to realize that our lifestyles are far from harmless — but at the same time, most are not eager to abandon unwholesome lifestyle habits, and few are eager to take to the streets and euthanize industrial civilization this week.

We have a collective dream that technology will allow us to painlessly glide into a beautiful green utopia that requires no significant lifestyle sacrifices.  We get to keep our luxurious life, all the bad stuff goes bye-bye, and everyone in the world lives happily ever after.  A fundamental component of this miraculous transition to utopia is a shift to harmless, sustainable, renewable energy.  We can simply switch from gas-powered wheelchairs to electric ones that run on renewable energy!  Problem solved!  Right?

Imagine if all of the millions of cars and trucks in the world were powered via huge batteries.  Where would the energy to charge them come from?  Which planets would provide the needed strategic minerals?  Christopher Clugston evaluated the current reserves of the 89 strategic (and nonrenewable) minerals most essential to industrial civilization.  He found that by 2008, the reserves of 63 of them were becoming scarce globally.  In 1900, the U.S. had little need to import strategic minerals.  By 2008, we were importing 68 of the 89 he analyzed. 

Clugston concluded, “It is not clear to me that any intelligent response to our predicament exists.”  On the bright side, it will eventually become impossible for the massively unsustainable status quo to continue.  We desperately seek reasons for hope and optimism.  Clugston is a total optimist: “Sustainability is inevitable.”  Truth!  He says that the best case scenario for the future may have a strong resemblance to the worst case scenario.  Both take the family of life to a severely bruised and battered brave new world of sustainability (cough!).

Electric cars, bicycles, scooters, and skateboards are a serious fad now.  In 2020, Harley-Davidson released the Livewire, a “shockingly fast” 105 horsepower electric motorcycle ($29,799).  Yesterday, for the first time, I heard the term used to describe this category of products: Sustainable Transport.  I fell out of my chair giggling hysterically.  For 300,000 years, until 4000 B.C., when horses were domesticated, sustainable transport meant walking — it’s what our legs are for.  Neither Jesus, Siddhartha, Muhammad, nor Zoroaster ever had driver’s licenses.

Walking doesn’t even require paths.  Unsustainable motorized transport must have high quality road systems and lots of bridges.  Road systems require periodic repair and replacement, especially in regions with freeze/thaw cycles in winter.  The concrete industry would go extinct if limited to solar, wind, or hydro power (the same is true for mining, smelting, metalworking, and many other industries).

Youngquist pointed out that there are millions of miles of asphalt roads in the world.  In the U.S., 94 percent of the roads are asphalt.  Asphalt is made of 90 percent crushed rock, and 10 percent residue from oil refining.  It takes less energy to make asphalt than concrete, and it’s cheaper too.  Under ideal conditions, it has a lifespan of 25 years.  Elderly asphalt disintegrates.

Asphalt is like chocolate.  On sunny days, black roads can absorb lots of heat, and become much hotter than the air temperature.  A June 2020 heat wave in Britain spurred air temperatures above 30°C (86°F), which heated the road surface to about 50°C (122°F), at which point asphalt roads began melting, and heavy vehicles left ridges and ruts in the surface. 

About 80 percent of oil is used as a source of energy.  The rest is used for thousands of other purposes, like petrochemicals, tires, plastic, medicines, roofing materials, paint, cosmetics, and polyester (i.e., modern clothing).  For these types of processes, there is no substitute for using oil as a feedstock.

Renewable Energy Miracle

When I was a little boy, and skinned my knee, mommy kissed the sore booboo and made it better.  Similarly, today there is a widespread belief among adults that the transition to renewable energy will make everything better.  It will bring an end to the Earth Crisis dark ages, and lead humankind into a new and heavenly era.  Everything will be better forever.  It’s like being rescued by Superman, the all-powerful hero whose one and only vulnerability was pretty green crystals of kryptonite, an exotic substance that neutralized his super-abilities.  The green energy fantasy also has one vulnerability.  Its kryptonite is called critical thinking.

Ted Trainer invested a lot of effort studying the possibility of transitioning from fossil energy to renewable energy, while continuing to live as we do today, and preparing to successfully meet the projected growth in energy consumption.  Like many others who have carefully focused on this issue, he concluded that this was transition was impossible.  To entirely replace our current energy consumption with renewable energy would be totally unaffordable and impossible. 

One area of extreme vulnerability is liquid fuels, which are used to power stuff like cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, wars, and our food production system.  Renewable energy could never come anywhere close to replacing oil.  Producing liquid fuels like ethanol from biomass would require extra cropland and labor.  Ethanol is absurd from a net energy perspective.

Power plants based on fossil energy or nuclear fuel can be built almost anywhere.  This is not true for solar or wind operations.  Ideal sites are chosen first, and less ideal sites for future development are limited in number.  The transition to a renewable energy future would require a massive expansion of current wind and solar generation infrastructure.

Power generation plants that run on fossil fuel are capable of continuously operating at their full capacity.  This is not true for solar and wind facilities.  Renewables can only operate at full capacity during ideal conditions, which are not the norm.  Far more solar energy is produced during the sunnier summer months than in the winter.  Wind turbines do best in strong steady winds.

Trainer concluded that the transition to a totally renewable global energy supply could never be achieved via technological miracles on the supply side.  It would only be possible via enormous reductions on the demand side, like maybe 90 percent.  A renewable energy society could never support anything close to today’s massive population.  This is not the happy news that hardcore consumers want to hear.  It’s not hard to imagine that the predicament of industrial civilization will end up resolving itself, while humankind sits passively on the sidelines, staring at their cell phones.

Trainer proposed an extremely idealistic plan for an alternative utopia called The Simpler Way, which was less than sustainable.  Like Youngquist, he was perplexed by a painful predicament.  Both of them deeply appreciated the many benefits of living in an energy guzzling industrial civilization.  At the same time, both regretted the immense harm it was causing to the family of life.  Both understood that a sustainable future could not provide the full “high standard of living” they hoped to preserve.

Youngquist also presented an extensive critique of renewable energy, and pointed out a number of other weaknesses in the green fantasy.  Intermittency was a predicament.  Renewable energy from solar or wind was not produced at a steady rate — it could vary as passing clouds blocked the sunlight, or winds became calm.  During the month of February in 2003, thousands of wind turbines off the west coast of Denmark produced almost no power.  In August 2002, Denmark’s turbines produced a net energy loss, because they used more energy to run the steering motors than the turbines actually produced.  In 2006, Califor­nia’s wind turbines only produced about 10 percent of their rated capacity.

He pointed out that in the normal operation of a power distribution grid, the level of energy being fed into the grid must be very close to the level being withdrawn from the grid by end using consumers.  Rising and falling demand requires prompt adjustments to the power being fed into the grid.  Renewable energy cannot immediately do this, because it is hobbled by intermittency.  Another predicament is storage.  Storing electricity for later distribution is difficult, expensive, and inefficient. 

Consequently, renewable energy must be backed up by another energy source.  This is usually provided by a “spinning reserve.”  Some form of generator, powered by nonrenewable energy, must be constantly ready to leap into action when consumption suddenly surges.  Of course, the backup system requires a continual fuel supply.  This diminishes the perceived goodness of renewable energy.

Youngquist, a geologist, was also acutely aware of the mineral component of renewable energy.  He winced at the eco-missionaries who made nonsensical grandiose claims.  They said that, unlike oil, solar energy is free, because the sunbeams just fall out of the sky.  It’s also pollution free, no belching smokestacks, oil spills, or mountains of coal ash. 

Dudes, the materials used to create the highly complex physical infrastructure for the entire system are not made of fairy dust conjured into being with magical incantations.  They have their roots in strip mines, smelters, chemical plants, toxic waste dumps, oil refineries, and on and on. 

Many tons of steel and concrete are needed to manufacture and install each wind turbine.  To make a solar panel, you need stuff like cobalt, gallium, germanium, indium, manganese, tellu­rium, titanium, and zinc.  To create the computer hardware needed to operate the grids, you need to fetch stuff like platinum, rhenium, selenium, gold, strontium, tantalum, gallium, germanium, beryllium, yttrium and pure silicon.  In the good old days, living was easy.  Wild folks just sat around the campfire, singing, chatting, and laughing.

The missionaries almost seem to assume that renewable energy systems are like the great pyramids, creations that will last for centuries.  Wrong!  They break, wear out, and require ongoing repair and replacement.  With proper maintenance, solar panels have a lifespan of maybe 25 to 30 years.  Wind turbines have a lifespan of maybe 20 to 25 years.  To keep these systems in operation requires a functioning industrial civilization that consumes supertankers of nonrenewable energy.  This is the opposite of free, green, and groovy.

Well, hydropower is surely renewable energy, isn’t it?  No, said Youngquist.  Each dam is made of millions of tons of concrete, and all dams have a limited working lifespan.  Each devastates the ecosystem of the river it destroys.  Marc Reisner wrote that, if the dam doesn’t collapse first, every reservoir will eventually be filled with silt, and turn into an extremely expensive waterfall — no more power generation, no more flood control, no more irrigation.  Many reservoirs will be filled in less than a century.  In China, the reservoir for the Sanmexia Dam was filled to the brim with silt in 1964, just four years after it was built.

Look, solar panels and wind turbines will not keep the residents of New York City or Chicago from freezing to death.  They will not power municipal water systems, wastewater treatment systems, and trash disposal systems.  What’s so wacky is that nobody acknowledges the elephant in the room.  Everyone is dreaming as hard as possible for the prompt arrival of a renewable energy utopia, which may require a very long wait, and may never happen.  But… when you suggest radical conservation, and radical lifestyle simplification, they look at you like you are a dolt.  What a stupid idea!

The spirits of my four grandparents watch over the modern world, and wince at our crazy way of life.  They were born in 1874, 1885, 1887, and 1891 (in 1900, the world was home to just 1.5 billion).  All four were born into non-electric, car-free households, where every meal was organic.  There were no highway systems, airports, light bulbs, cell phones, or plastics.  Instead of television, radio, and internet, they enjoyed regular face-to-face contact with friends, neighbors, and family.  Life was far less lonely and isolated.  Imagine that.

Today, orbiting spacecraft passing in the night send back photos of the Earth below.  The images clearly show the locations of cities large and small, each presenting a visible splatter of millions of lights, almost all fossil-powered, a ghastly demonstration of astonishing waste.  If there had been satellites when my grandparents were born, the nighttime regions would have been almost entirely pitch black — like they may be once again by the end of this century.  Stars are beautiful.  Waste is not.

AFTER THE BONFIRE

Youngquist lived close to 97 years, and he accumulated more than a little wisdom along the way.  We’re living during an explosive blip of nonrenewable prosperity, a blip that can never again be repeated.  The blip will be a turning point in the human saga. “Most people living now will witness the peak and irreversible decline of world oil production,” he warned.  We can’t exactly predict the date of the turning point, but we’ll know it after we’ve passed it. 

He wrote, “The twentieth century witnessed the rise of the nonrenewable resource-based industrial economy.  In some respects, the twenty-first century will be like the twentieth century in reverse.”  Oddly, this is hopeful news, a reason for optimism. 

If the blip was not limited by fossil energy depletion, it could continue until limited by topsoil destruction and other nightmares.  We can survive without oil, but not without healthy soil.  What a horror it would be to have another century of ignorance-powered, maximum intensity, planet-thrashing pandemonium.  What would be left? 

John Michael Greer, a venerable druid, provided his fans with wise counsel with regard to our civilization’s funeral wake.  We need to compost the notion that the future is going to be better than today.  Even the status quo is a dead end path, it has an expiration date.  We’re not going to see utopia.  It’s time to begin thinking hard about slower, smaller, and simpler — to focus our expectations on what is realistic. 

The days of cheap and abundant energy will be drifting away into the mists of unusual twisted memories.  We’ll be moving from the express lane of full-bore abundance to scarcity, struggle, and ecological payback.  Our lifetime of decadence and excess was an abnormal fluke.  It’s time to come to grips with the notion that “there is no bright future ahead.”  That’s OK.  Toss the extinct fantasies overboard.  Our lives can still have meaning, if we strive to be fully present in reality.  We can have meaningful lives without monster trucks, giant TVs, and jet skis.

Like fossil energy, a keg of beer is a finite nonrenewable resource.  Alfred Crosby reminded us that after a binge of oblivion drinking, a hangover should be expected to follow, often preceded by projectile vomiting, and lapses of unconsciousness.  When the keg has no more beer, the party’s over.  We never expect to be rescued by the renewable beer fairy.  At house parties, it’s easy for us to accept that there are limits in life.  Perpetual growth parties are another matter, they last forever, we think.  Stupid!

Recent news stories from the oil industry:

Shale oil production may take years to recover, despite a short-term uptick

U.S. Shale Has Lost $300 Billion In 15 Years

30% of shale oil companies could go belly up if crude stays this cheap