Gail Tverberg, an actuary, writes about energy limits, economic growth, peak oil, and why she thinks green energy and growth are constrained.
HN commenters link it for her argument that green energy limits are becoming clear, and in debates over growth, sustainability, and resource scarcity.
This is obviously a massive, unanswerable, difficult question. (It's also a great question, in my opinion!) I'll just throw some thoughts out there, from my US-centric point of view:
The way I think about climate change and collapse is that, at least in the near-term, doesn't look like The Day After Tomorrow. It looks like more blackouts, more storms, bigger wildfires, more potholes in the street, higher food prices, etc. A bunch of small things piling up, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast. It looks like trying to convince your grandma not to move back into the house that got flooded in the last storm, or your local hardware store running out of N95s.
In the very short term, it seems clear that we're likely to see continued issues with air quality, extreme weather events, and infrastructure issues. Several other people have mentioned getting to know your neighbors, and I think that's an excellent idea (plus it's nice to know your neighbors, climate aside).
For myself, I also have a few things I keep around that help me stay relaxed and prepared for temporary lapses in some of the systems we rely upon. Most of this is very basic emergency preparedness stuff and doesn't get close to "prepper" sorts of things:
- N95 masks and respirators (were useful in the pandemic, but I originally had them bc of the west coast wildfires... which recently blanketed the entire country in their smoke, so it's not just a west coast thing, really.)
- Air purifier, similarly for air quality…
>https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta...
That article is so riddled with issues it's hard to take it seriously even if you believe the underlying conclusion.
>But overall, there is no evidence that fossil fuel use, or even oil use, can be divorced from economic growth. If there is a big decline in fossil fuel use, it will translate to a decline in economic growth.
Yes there is: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#many-countries-have-decoupled-economic-growth-from-co2-emissions-even-if-we-take-offshored-production-into-account
>The need for economic growth in order to pay back debt even applies to our money supply itself. Money is loaned into existence. This happens when a commercial bank makes a loan and deposit at the same time. The problem is that when the money is created, not enough money is loaned into existence to pay back the interest as well. So economic growth is needed to create the additional money so that the debt can be paid back with interest.
This ignores the existence of a central bank, which can print money at will.
>The problem with going to a system without fossil fuels and with much less debt than we have today is the fact that the world supported fewer than one billion people in 1750. There are now nearly 7 billion people in the world.
The world supported less than 1 billion people in 1750 because the industrial revolution and the green revolution wasn't a thing yet. Both vastly increased productivity and thereby the…
She wasn't just predicting conventional oil declines. In her 2007 posts she explicitly considers and rejects the adequacy of unconventional oil sources (Canadian oil sands, American shale) to prevent oil from peaking imminently [1].
Most people would like a flying car or a trip to the moon.
That's possible. But the technology to offer those to the mass market hasn't been invented! If the only problem with flying cars was that they burned a lot of fuel, millions of high-income people would be flying around in them today. I'm not saying that we can never invent more energy-intensive devices that reach the mass market. But I have observed that nothing like this has reached the mass market in 50 years. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for routine Moon vacations or flying cars.
I find that the Jevons paradox is cited more often in online discussions than it is understood. The Jevons paradox can be considered a special case of the energy rebound effect. Energy rebound is the tendency of people to use more of an energy service when that energy service can be supplied more efficiently. For example, replacing incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs saves energy, but some of that energy savings is negated if people also install brighter bulbs when they switch from incandescent to LED. The Jevons paradox is the unusual case where the rebound effect is greater than 100% -- like somebody installing 20 new LED lights for every incandescent they replace. It's remarkable…
Economics is broken in a number of other ways.
The biggest questions to me are growth and sustainability. In the neoclassical world (I studied and degreed in the study) growth factors are all engogenous to economics:
The Neoclassical Growth Model, where output is a function of current stocks of capital and labor: Y = A K^α L^(1-α ), and capital accumulation is simply a function of investment and captial depreciation: K = sY - δK
The AK theory, which reduces growth to aggregate capital: Y = AK.
The product-variety model (Romer, Dixit & Stiglitz): production as a function of summed intermediate production functions based on capital
The Schumpeterian model, output is based on a productivity function (technology, assumed to be increasing without limit, and capital.
Technology increases. Inputs are perfectly substitutable. Innovation will produce substitutes.
And that's straight out of the first chapter of a graduate level text in economic growth (Aghion & Howitt, The Economics of Growth, ISBN 978-0-262-01263-8).
Then there's the whole class of heterodox economics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_economics
Among these, the fields of thermoeconomics / biophysical economics / ecological economics, in which a, if not the primary factor relating to economic growth is energy. Many of the contributions to this field come from outside the field of economics, particularly from ecology, biology, and physics, but there are also a number of classically trained…
This article covers major issues:
Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/02/09/limits-to-green-energy-are-becoming-much-clearer/
[1] It is becoming clear that intermittent wind and solar cannot be counted on to provide adequate electricity supply when the electrical distribution system needs them.
2] Adequate storage for electricity is not feasible in any reasonable timeframe. This means that if cold countries are not to “freeze in the dark” during winter, fossil fuel backup is likely to be needed for many years in the future.
3) After many years of subsidies and mandates, today’s green electricity is only a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep our current economy operating.
[4] Even as a percentage of electricity, rather than total energy, renewables still comprised a relatively small share in 2020.
5] Most modelers have not understood that reserve to production ratios greatly overstate the amount of fossil fuels and other minerals that the economy will be able to extract.
6] The world economy seems already to be reaching limits on the extraction of coal and natural gas to be used for balancing electricity provided by intermittent renewables.
7] Conclusion. Modelers and leaders everywhere have had a basic misunderstanding of how the economy operates and what limits we are up against. This misunderstanding has allowed scientists to put together models that are far from the situation we are actually facing.
I can't. The major book that I would recommend is not available in English.
These are a few links I have posted several times on HN:
"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/
Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-doorstep-but-not-recognized
Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumption-are-inseparable.html
Maybe you can grab a few ideas. A gold backed currency would make no difference. The driving force of capitalism is debt. Debt that needs to be served with more debt (there is no treasure box in the cellar of General Motors that they can use to build car manufacturing plants). To keep the system running you have to continuously create more debt. To be able to do this, you need to have a growing economy, for the economy to grow, you need more energy.
To make things worse, this grows exponentially. This is not bad in itself, it has enabled capitalism based economy a tremendous dynamic in the last 150 years.
The Problem: Nothing that growth exponentially can grow very long and nobody has ever been able to show how a system that does not grow anymore or does not create new (higher) debt anymore can work. ("There is no steady state economy").