[Polybius]

This is as "Big picture" and most broadly categorical stroke of the brush as it gets: the global world as a whole is now running out of energy, and we have peaked in late 2019 in terms of both the quantity and quality of high density energy sources available for our collective use.

... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the global energy is gone... the purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and abundantly high quality energy (and the work/productivity multiplier derived thereof) and the assumption that it would always be the case of remaining exercisable into perpetuity.....

But the problem is our modern world depends entirely on the presumption of eternal growth afforded by being able to extract, produce and consume ever larger quantities of high EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested) sources of fuel/energy in order to sustain the system... a prolonged global slowing down of this energy usage (or production availability) will inevitably cause the entire global pyramid scheme to collapse upon itself in supernova fashion... already resulting in things like QE infinity, hyperinflation, negative interests rates, global lock-downs to create artificial demand destruction, etc etc etc ("you will own nothing, have no privacy, be able to go nowhere, and be happy")

If you look at our planet as an isolated system (3D sphere in space) then from a physics, mathematical, energy and entropy/thermodynamic standpoint its clear that we have already used up (collectively on global scale) the vast majority of the high density, high quality, high EROEI, "low entropy" energy sources on our planet, while at the same time our human population is higher than its ever been before, whilsts many of the developing countries are still trying to jump on the capitalism bandwagon and chase their own version of the American dream by propelling upwards the quality of life, living standards and GDP/energy usage per capita of their own citizens... all the economic models of modern times are based on the axiomatic and 'a priori' assumption of infinite perpetual growth... and none of the models account for the fact that by all accounts back in 2019 we have already globally peaked...

Money is just a mere symbolic representation of the ability of cheap and abundant higher EROEI energy to do 'work' on our behalf. When the quality and quantity of energy available to us continues to decline and decrease, then proportionately so does the value or purchasing power of the money that we hold... for that money was a representation of the 'multiplier effect' of energy to do work and the resulting productivity that cheap energy had amplified and enabled but with the energy depleted so too does our money become worthless. This is why when global energy has peaked as it has back in 2019, in the grand scheme of things no amount of stimulus, printing more money, etc is going to do any good... its but like rearranging chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic... its really not about money, which is but a human construct created to represent resources and energy...

For every calorie of food that is consumed, nine other calories of energy was required to produce it. When the first barrel of oil was produced back in 1850's the global world population stood at just 1 billion people. Since oil was first discovered the human population on earth has exploded over 800% in this very short period of time and this would never have been possible without the existence of cheap and abundant energy dense hydrocarbon resources that directly powered and fueled the mass production of food required to sustain such artificially high population levels.

A gallon of gas contains about 132 million joules of energy, or the equivalent of nearly two weeks (actually six weeks if considering 8 hour workdays) of manual human muscle power and labor. Currently the minimum wage is $7.25 /hr and with gas at $2.8 per gallon, this roughly translates to acquiring 2 gallons of gas per hour and obtaining the energy and work/force multiplier of almost a factor of 672 times. By some estimates every American has somewhere between 200 to 8,000 'energy slaves'.

Currently you can buy 1 kilowatt hour of power from the grid for about ten cents. But imagine instead of using that kilowatt of power what it would cost you to hire a worker to pull a car of 2,500 lbs., using a pulley with a factor of 1:40, from the ground to the top of the Empire State Building. That’s at least a day’s of hard work or $200 to $300 in money terms. This perfectly illustrates the huge subsidy modern industrial society enjoys while the oil age will last, which is not too long anymore.

In the long run, and from the bigger picture perspective, a net-positive rate of return-on-investment overall in aggregate is only possible in whole of society if that society or global civilization continued to grow as a whole... Continued global growth is only possible if we are able to consume more and more resources as well as have increasingly abundant access to usable energy of EROEI density sufficient to power modern global civilization and it's continued upwards growth.

Given that our modern civilization and globalized economy/world is predominantly powered by fossil fuels and hydrocarbons as the main source of energy, and given the fact that we enjoy and are indeed direct recipients of this "multiplier of work/productivity/wealth" enabled by the use of (still relatively) cheap and abundant oil, natural gas, coal, etc it stands to reason that as we approach the final global limits to energy consumption growth, so will our aggregate economies contract... by most estimates global production of conventional oil peaked back in 2019, and there is no turning back...

There is no debate that we have long since passed peak discovery curve. And there is no doubt that all production/consumption curves must necessarily follow and trail their discovery curves/peaks...This is basic logic, math, physics...

Nothing in the short term will be able to replace or fully substitute the energy deficit left by both the decline in quantity of fossil fuels and the drop in quality (EROEI) of the limited quantity still remaining. Renewables such as solar are currently subsidized by governments economically and entropically by leveraging our existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and solar is a net energy sink as far as modern civilization is concerned given we require at least EROEI of 7 to just survive (15+ to thrive) and the rate limiting factor of lithium, battery technology, rare-earths all add up to the infeasibility of solar as a renewable solution.

The "energy payback time” of renewables means it will incur a permanent 'energy taxation' on all work/productivity/interactions in society somewhere between 20% to 40%, (resulting in a total collapse of global economies and permanent macroeconomic depression everywhere) and that is even assuming there are enough raw resources to scale up renewables to replace fossil fuels in mass in the first place. (there is not) Even if we solved nuclear fusion or fast breeder reactors today it would still take another three decades to fully scale up, and our global civilization cannot avoid the common collapse in the meantime...

Given that globally economies will shrink as a whole, given that our total access to energy both in terms of quantity of energy and the quality of remaining energy will continue to steadily decline over time, and since clearly it has been established that modern global wealth is entirely dependent upon its access to energy; it is inevitable to assume anything else other than the reality that as the aggregate amount of real energy, resources and wealth on our planet falls off a cliff and we enter the long decline/collapse that we will have a massive surplus of the "symbolic human construct" that we have used to "count up, tally, measure, represent and account for energy, resources, wealth, etc out there in the world." and therefore with a bunch of existing money no longer able to find/pair/bind with their corresponding resource/wealth counterparts out there in the 'real world', we have a situation of hyperinflation whereby all currencies and monies will lose the vast majority of their currently perceived value and purchasing power... those that get out fast and convert to real hard assets and tangible resources first will be much better off than those left hodling fiat currency or digital cryptocoins...but in truth none will be spared as the current situation is more akin to the Earth being one giant 3D "Easter Island" in space and we have used up all the high density 'free energy' that accumulated over the course of billions of years in a comparative blink of an eye (roughly 150 years since the Industrial revolution and most of it on the backend of the last four decades)

Wealth creation is actually the extraction, conversion and consumption of energy. All other forms of wealth are merely derivatives that are layered on top of and powered directly by the underlining energy infrastructure of society/civilization. For billions of years, through a process of photosynthesis and thanks to the natural energy from our closest star the sun, our planet has steadily built up a massive reserve of energy, mainly in the form of hydrocarbons underneath the ground. And yet in less than 150 years since the industrial revolution began, we have globally already consumed more than half of all available hydrocarbons and nearly all of the sweet crude, high density EROEI, and other easy-to-extract low-hanging-fruit energy sources on earth. The implications are indeed foreboding.

Modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the energy is gone... purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and high quality energy and the assumption that it would always be the case.

Pertaining to the “Energy Cliff”, modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...

The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slowdown means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself...

Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was an EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, it’s just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says it’s still half full...

Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a Petri dish right before it encounters rapid die-off as it hits its resource constraints...

[Pops]

Nice rant, notice it is a cross post from r/conspiracy, LOL

I agree with most of what you say. I would state it in simpler terms

Don't hold your breath for PO in 2019, or your lifetime for that matter. EIA says demand is returning faster than expected and supply is playing catch up. It would be a stroke of luck if CoViD prompted an end to commuting but I'm not holding my breath. Generally I think it is bast to prepare for as many possibilities as you can, including the possibility of not much.

I've always been skeptical of the hidden threat of low eroi. I see it as wishcasting when oil price is low. Look, oil infrastructure, well to pump, is in direct competition with all the other oil consumers for energy. Way before oil production secretly becomes a net energy loser, the price of oil will rise dramatically as the industry increasingly competes for its own product. The clues to the big secret are posted daily at the corner gas.

All the blather about money is just air. Money is a human construct, a convenience a token, nothing more. Call it a representation of energy or of unicorn farts, doesn't matter. When energy becomes (became?) too expensive to support the growth to which we've become accustomed, the economy will slow. Currency will do what is best for the people who have it. Maybe inflate away all value or deflate to the point of irrelevance, or be preserved by wealth transfer upward. But don't forget, the people with the money have the power, whatever is in their best interest is what will happen.

It is easy to see tea leaves and goat entrails in your news feed—ignore all that. The price at the pump is the only thing that matters. Prepare for the day when your paycheck can't foot that bill, whether because EROI fell below some level, the supergiants developed old age fade or your paycheck disappeared

.

[Tanada]

Nice rant, notice it is a cross post from r/conspiracy, LOL

I agree with most of what you say. I would state it in simpler terms

Don't hold your breath for PO in 2019, or your lifetime for that matter. EIA says demand is returning faster than expected and supply is playing catch up. It would be a stroke of luck if CoViD prompted an end to commuting but I'm not holding my breath. Generally I think it is bast to prepare for as many possibilities as you can, including the possibility of not much.

I've always been skeptical of the hidden threat of low eroi. I see it as wishcasting when oil price is low. Look, oil infrastructure, well to pump, is in direct competition with all the other oil consumers for energy. Way before oil production secretly becomes a net energy loser, the price of oil will rise dramatically as the industry increasingly competes for its own product. The clues to the big secret are posted daily at the corner gas.

All the blather about money is just air. Money is a human construct, a convenience a token, nothing more. Call it a representation of energy or of unicorn farts, doesn't matter. When energy becomes (became?) too expensive to support the growth to which we've become accustomed, the economy will slow. Currency will do what is best for the people who have it. Maybe inflate away all value or deflate to the point of irrelevance, or be preserved by wealth transfer upward. But don't forget, the people with the money have the power, whatever is in their best interest is what will happen.

It is easy to see tea leaves and goat entrails in your news feed—ignore all that. The price at the pump is the only thing that matters. Prepare for the day when your paycheck can't foot that bill, whether because EROI fell below some level, the supergiants developed old age fade or your paycheck disappeared

.

Well said! My eternal objection to the EROEI true believers remains, nobody can agree on a standard set of values so every calculation is in effect a single cherry picking expedition whose outcome is predestined. On the other hand the cure for low oil prices is high oil prices and vice verse'. When prices rise people buy less lowering demand and cutting prices in the eternal cycle. Even blips like the January 2016 low coming from the super glut of 2015 follow a predictable pattern.

The main problem IMO is that as with most endeavors human attention spans are focused on a very short cycle rather than the long term patterns. We see prices rise and a predictable fraction of society seizes on that as a major significant event even though if you look back 2, 5 or 10 years you can find a repetition of the same pattern. It isn't significant unless it breaks the old pattern, like the rise from 2005-2008 that first broke $100/bbl. Even that event turned out to be just a reset, not a paradigm shift. For most people living in North America it turned out that $100/bbl and even $147/bbl was quite tolerable once they got over the shock moment. After all because of our low fuel taxes most Americans think energy should be "too cheap to meter" while in Europe fuel taxes had far in the past made the price at the pump higher than what America experienced with $147/bbl oil. Yet Europe manages to function just fine, thank you very much, with those prices from more or less the 1950's though 2021.

For America to hit "regular" European fuel prices you would need crude to be selling somewhere around $250/bbl. If or when that happens and is sustained you will see Americans demanding a more European style infrastructure with public transit improvements and super fuel efficient vehicle. Until then the status symbol of the giant SUV guzzling gas will remain more important to the majority than the cost efficiency of a subcompact vehicle and minimized commuting.

[jedrider]

Nicely done Polybius. A very through summery of the human energy predicament. Alas, it could be no other way given the humans, like all life, must operate under the dictates of evolution & the Maximum Power Principle [MPP]. We're not driving the bus - just passengers.

The purpose of life is to disperse energy

The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the
center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same
egotistical species.

The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.

So, basically, we're 'wasters' in the grand scheme of things. Remind me of the lottery winner who answers how he spent the money: "Wine, women and songs and the rest he just wasted!"

I'd like to second that "Nicely done Polybius".

As far as the relationship between money and energy, they have clearly been separated in their ways. IMO, money now represents political power and no longer energy resources as on the upward slope of our energy trajectory. That means that the wealthy just keep those digits as a measure of their power as they dispense meager amounts to us plebeians for whom those digital bits are our lifelines. They will never be spent in their entirety because that is not even possible any longer.

[Plantagenet]

Wealth creation is actually the extraction, conversion and consumption of energy. All other forms of wealth are merely derivatives that are layered on top of and powered directly by the underlining energy infrastructure of society/civilization.

Not really.

The real engine behind wealth creation is the inventiveness of the human mind. Look at the largest corporations the exist on the planet today.......Facebook, Apple, Netwscape, Google, Microsoft, etc.----these corporations are perhaps the the greatest creators of wealth in the history of humankind, and none of these are primarily about extracting, converting or consuming energy.

For billions of years, through a process of photosynthesis and thanks to the natural energy from our closest star the sun, our planet has steadily built up a massive reserve of energy, mainly in the form of hydrocarbons underneath the ground. And yet in less than 150 years since the industrial revolution began, we have globally already consumed more than half of all available hydrocarbons and nearly all of the sweet crude, high density EROEI, and other easy-to-extract low-hanging-fruit energy sources on earth. The implications are indeed foreboding.

The implications are we have to stop using hydrocarbons and other fossil fuels as energy sources and switch to other sources of energy.

modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slowdown means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself...

The suggestion that civilization is doomed to collapse because fossil fuels are running out assumes that there is no way to replace fossils fuels. However, there are alternative energy sources that are available. These include things like wind and solar and hydro and geothermal. And, perhaps in the long run, there will be nuclear power. The amount of energy we could potentially generate from nuclear power alone is almost unlimited.

Now...whether this will happen or not is the real question. Sure...we could switch the economy from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear energy.....but our political leaders most likely don't have the brains to do it.

Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was an EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, it’s just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says it’s still half full...

Again, you are assuming that the only available energy source is hydrocarbons and fossil fuels, when this just isn't true.

Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a Petri dish right before it encounters rapid die-off as it hits its resource constraints...

That also isn't true. For instance, the EU, the US, and Japan would be a zero population growth or even negative population growth right now if not for illegal immigration. That shows that in some cases it is possible for human populations to restrain their growth, i.e. that not every population of humans is doomed to infinite growth. However, again, right now its our leaders and politicians who are actually doing all they can do to open US borders and INCREASE population growth here in the US. Its just about insane, but thats what our so-called leaders are doing.

A lot of our problems could be solved....if we had intelligent and brave people running the US and other countries....however....unfortunately we do not.


Imagine a futurama where we rely on clean, safe nuclear power instead of hydrocarbons and fossils fuels. We'd have access to almost unlimited energy...

Cheers!

[ROCKMAN]

Been a long time since I joined the EROEI debate. And won't bother now...too fucking old to waste what time I have left. LOL. But just a fact: during 4 decades of working in the oil patch the concept of EROEI has never come up in my decision process nor that of countless managers I've worked for. Not saying it isn't a factor somewhere in the process but has never been used to determine what wells do or don't get drilled in my universe. And thus has never been a factor in how much new production has been brought on line nor if current producing wells were cut back or jacked up to max output.

Just saying.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Right now cheap energy gives money its multiplier effect... you can buy a gallon of gas for about 3 bucks, which even working minimum wage you would amass 2 gallons of gas in an hour... thats the same as 12 weeks of manual muscle labor... How much purchasing power of present day money do you think would regress once cheap energy becomes less and less abundant and money spent in the future can no longer command the same multiplier effects it once had went energy was dense and plentiful?

Learn the basics before you get schooled by me again

Perhaps you should proclaim doom less and learn more basics yourself. Instead of imagining that the usual empty doom tropes have ever been accurate, re results over time.

In the real world, it's CLEAR that we're going to be able to extract a tremendous amount of clean, useful electrical energy from the sun, via systems like solar, wind, geothermal, etc, and rely less on things like burning hydrocarbons for heating, cooling, and transport over time.

And there's plenty of oil for decades, while the transition occurs, and things like battery tech. improves, to help store that energy and to load balance things like solar and wind net output.

Obviously, doing things like reducing the population through far less human reproduction would help greatly over time, re needed energy, AGW, etc., but slow progress, like since the industrial age started (where we have by far the most detailed history, science has been formalized as a well defined process, etc), seems to be the way humanity is going to go about things.

If we'd been smart enough to stop growing the global population, say, 50 years ago when it was blindingly obvious how much increasing damage humanity was doing to the biosphere and that there are limits (just looking at resources consumed and pollution and food required), we'd be AMAZINGLY well off per capita compared to where we were in the early 70's.

As it is, with all the population growth, we still get wealthier per capita in the wealthy countries, considering technology and the products, medical care, lifespans, etc. people have, but it's halting, struggling progress.

That does NOT imply fast doom, just that we are far stupid and less efficient as a species than we could (and should) be, given our capacity to make technological progress and adapt to a change world, at least to deal with issues in the short term.

[Pops]

It will never get to that point because installations are falling 5% a year and wind will be dead in 2032.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40252

The U.S. wind energy industry had its strongest year ever in 2020 as the amount of new wind power capacity added increased by 85 percent over 2019. The industry added 16,913 megawatts (MW) of wind power capacity to the grid in 2020—enough to power more than 5 million American homes. Most of this growth came in the fourth quarter, when developers commissioned 10,593 MW of capacity, smashing all quarterly records. With these additions, there are now 122,478 MW of operating wind power capacity in the United States, providing enough power for 38 million American homes.

https://www.evwind.es/2021/02/05/the-us ... 2020/79174

Despite pandemic-induced supply chain challenges and construction delays, renewable capacity additions in 2020 expanded by more than 45% from 2019, and broke another record. An exceptional 90% rise in global wind capacity additions led the expansion. Also underpinning this record growth was the 23% expansion of new solar PV installations to almost 135 GW in 2020.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210511221 ... lectricity