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Ken

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For many years now I have been asserting that we are headed toward an energy-poor future, in which flying in planes and riding in cars (at least, cars weighing one ton and up, like those we drive today) will be rare, at best.

The following article is a superb explanation of why that will be the case:

What Would a Real Renewable Energy Transition Look Like?

Posted : 28/08/2024 3:35 pm

Ken

(@ken)

Posts: 46

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Some of the best books I’ve read on the climate crisis, the transition to renewable energy, environmental issues in general, and related subjects:

1. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GVPFH5V

The single best and most up-to-date tome on the climate crisis. I guess I should state upfront that this is depressing reading. Well, all the books here are, to one degree or another, but.

2. “A Short History of Progress (The CBC Massey Lectures)” by Ronald Wright

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTJ4K26

Our environmental and other crises are not new; similar emergencies have appeared any number of times throughout history. The term “progress” in the title is thus ironic.

3. “The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945” by J. R. McNeill, Peter Engelke

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CYR5S6C

Plot any of a number of quantities–world population, total steel produced, CO2 emissions–against time on a log scale, and you’ll find that the plots, with some adjustments, look much the same: first rising hardly at all, then sloping up, then skyrocketing. This is “The Great Acceleration”. These authors discuss these numerous accelerations in detail, explaining what they mean for our collective future.

4. “Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy” by Richard Heinberg, David Fridley

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GD4XKA8

In response to all these problems, some persons maintain that all we need to is switch over from fossil fuels to renewable energy–solar, wind, hydro. Heinberg and Fridley explain in painstaking detail why we cannot expect such a plan to allow us to continue our energy-intensive lifestyles. Like it or not, we are headed toward an energy-poor future.

5. “Hot Earth Dreams: What if severe climate change happens, and humans survive?” by Frank Landis

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017S5NDK8

This is one of the most interesting and offbeat of the hundreds of books on these subjects that I have read. Note the qualifier in the title: homo sapiens may not, in fact, survive the extreme soiling of its own collective nest. Landis addresses issues that I have not seen elsewhere; for example, he notes that humans and their domesticated animals (primarily cows, sheep, pigs, chickens) account for well over 90% of vertebrate biomass, and points out that this makes us uniquely susceptible to infectious diseases.

Posted : 13/11/2024 10:56 pm

Ken

(@ken)

Posts: 46

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I have a very smart and knowledgeable friend in Munich named Alan, with whom I have been exchanging emails on technology, energy, the climate crisis, and other subjects for many years. Recently I have been trying to persuade him that we are almost certainly moving toward an energy-poor future; said future may well arrive while I at least am still alive. It occurred to me that it might be worth copying a recent email of mine to him here. The book I’m referencing is the fourth one in the post above.

WRT solar, and wind as well: the main points raised in the Heinberg & Fridley (“H&F”) book, which is now 8 years old, i.e. somewhat dated but still mostly reliable, support my contention that a sustainable energy system in a given country is likely to be limited in capacity and not able to provide reliable, dispatchable energy in the quantities to which we are accustomed, anytime soon. Recall that because of the intermittency and unpredictability of wind and solar, we will need 1) storage, 2) long-distance transmission, and 3) redundant capacity; each of these lowers the effective EROI of the energy system, and each has a finite lifetime.

(People commonly conflate energy sources and energy harvesting systems, in such a way that when solar energy is called renewable, many tend to think that the solar panels, inverters, transmission lines, storage, etc are also renewable or have indefinite lifetimes; as you know, they most certainly are not and do not.)

Those are here-and-now issues. Stepping back to look at the big picture, we must remember that the energy transition has still only just begun, that the availability of oil in particular will likely begin to fall rapidly soon, and that, given our dysfunctional politics (especially here in the US), we cannot expect wise decisions from govts, as a rule. Plus, somewhat more abstractly: why would we expect that robbing any given natural area of obscene amounts of energy would not have truly dire environmental consequences??

Plus, there arguably will not even be an “energy transition” of any kind at all:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203177895-sans-transition&source=gmail&ust=1734467696420000&usg=AOvVaw37K_pRageqZuoPBGc2DAY F”> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203177895-sans-transition

Instead there may just be voracious consumption of energy from new sources.

In short, there are many, many reasons for pessimism here, or at least for a more circumspect stance.

In their concluding discussion, H&F aver that “scale is the biggest challenge”:

“When we performed the thought exercise of starting with a blank page and designing a renewable energy system that (1) has minimal environmental impacts, (2) is reliable, and (3) is affordable, we found this could easily be done in several different ways—as long as relatively modest amounts of energy were needed. Once current U.S. scales of energy production and usage were assumed we found we had to sacrifice the environment…or reliability…or affordability….”

To sum up. The other day I wrote: “A ‘completely sustainable electricity supply’ does not exist, and may never exist, at least on a scale that matters (that is, on a scale that would allow us to continue our energy-intensive practices).”

I would change only the “on a scale that matters” qualifier, replacing it with “on a scale that we would today deem adequate.”

As I said, we are headed toward an energy-poor future. Best to accept this now and plan accordingly.

You concede that a successful energy transition depends on the requisite political will. You might as well say that it depends on our mastery of hot fusion. Not. Gonna. Happen.

I will address the rest of your email within a few days….

Posted : 16/12/2024 8:39 pm

The nascent transition to renewable energy and our imminent energy descent