Is the world doomed to economic collapse

Calliban · 2019-08-22 11:26:18

Well worth a read. If this assessment is correct, then none of the ambitions for space colonisation that this board was founded upon, have any hope of being achieved.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017 … -collapse/

The world economy is basically a thermodynamic machine. What we call wealth, is really just the result of energy used to transform matter into valuable products and services. The problem is that most of this energy comes from fossil fuels and with each passing year, the Earth's stock of high grade fossil fuels is progressively depleted. This suggests that we are ultimately heading towards economic collapse in the not too distant future, because increasing proportions of refined energy must be reinvested in the extraction process. This leaves less available to power the production of goods and services that aren't related to primary energy. Given that GDP is really just a function of energy use; declining profitability of fossil fuel energy will increasingly crush human prosperity in years ahead.

Last edited by Calliban (2019-08-22 11:29:04)

RobertDyck · 2019-08-22 14:25:33

The wild appeared to hit peak oil before the US developed fracking. As 3rd world countries develop, trying to achieve the same lifestyle as modern Western countries, they will demand more oil. The wild doesn't have enough to supply everyone. But that assumes all energy must be fossil fuel. We are developing alternate energy sources.

Terraformer · 2019-08-22 15:18:56

The real problem isn't energy production, it's storage. Solar has a high enough energy return on investment (EROI) before storage is accounted for, but you can't run an economy on solar if you don't have lots of storage. Batteries are out - world lithium reserves are only enough for five hours of energy use at current rates, and lithium is the most abundant option. We could, potentially, extract it from seawater, but that would kill the EROI and make solar non viable. Non battery options exist, but the most common one, pumped hydro, requires flooding vast amounts of land, and there may not be enough sites. Flywheels could work, maybe.

Terraformer · 2019-08-22 16:03:38

Okay, there *may* be an option, if we don't try all living like Europeans.

Iron-Brass batteries

There should be enough zinc and copper resources to provide a day of energy storage for the worlds current consumption. Include some biofuel generators for cloudy spells and seasonal variation, and we can switch entirely onto renewables.

SpaceNut · 2019-08-22 17:20:02

What we do not have for solar is a system to transmit the energy around the world on a grid as its DC voltage and not AC. The conversion of solar to be useable else where would require a new power movement grid to be able to use the high frequency which is not the same as low frequency AC.

Calliban · 2019-08-22 17:23:26

Declining EROI has been exerting an increasing drag on the global economy since the turn of the century. Soaring commodity prices, especially energy, were an important contributor to the 2008 great recession. The more complex, wealthy and energy intensive an economy is (and those three things do tend to go hand in hand) the more vulnerable the economy is to declining net energy. However, EROI of fossil fuels has now declined to the point where developing countries are encountering problems too. The Chinese economy is stalling largely because its domestic coal production has levelled off.

Tim Morgan explains in this primer exactly why 21st century economic problems can be directly traced to declining EROI of the world's energy sources.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.files.wo … onomy2.pdf

Gail Tverberg on why renewable energy sources are unlikely to replace the energy provided by fossil fuels:

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/07/31/r … -mandates/

Global fossil fuel average EROI remained high until the 1990s, because new technology and globalization was developing previously inaccessible resources. But we ultimately hit limits around the turn of the century when all of the best global resources were already under development.

Last edited by Calliban (2019-08-22 17:28:36)

SpaceNut · 2019-08-22 17:39:44

There is a limit to what people can afford and its seems to be around $2.50 a gallo in parts of the US and when it climbs as it did earlier in the year the ecoomy did slow and people stop spending there extra money as they needed for more gas price increases. The years of 2008 had even higher costs for fuel and that was were the shale oil helped to lower its costs to the customers at a gradually lowering the price at the pump as the oil was extracted.

kbd512 · 2019-09-01 21:46:13

Every time this ridiculous "limited pie" theory rears its ugly and ignorant head, it turns out not only to be wrong, but absurdly wrong in every sense of the word. How the cretins who peddle this nonsense continue to get anyone to buy into it is beyond my comprehension. Humanity has been advancing in living standards, some societies faster than others, but this requires more energy and better energy usage efficiency to continue doing it. Even so, we're in no danger at all of ever running out.

Some of what I read in that is profoundly ignorant, but I attribute that to stupid people with stupid ideas coming to stupid conclusions to further their own stupid agendas. The notion that America was most economically productive in the 1930's, for example, is mind-blowingly dumb. It's almost as if the idiots who wrote that hit every branch on the stupid tree before they nose-planted into the mountain of their own brain droppings. It's also why we tend to ignore such cretins until they seize power and begin implementing their stupid agendas.

Quote from the article covering the idiocy of these two idiots- Victor Court and Florian Fizaine:

Insight: The US economy, he shows, appears to have reached "the peak in productivity in the 1930s, the same period in which the EROI of fossil fuels reached an extraordinary value of about 100."

People were starving to death in the 1930's because they had no jobs and no food. Nobody starves to death in the US today, except by choice. To this day, we still can't fix stupid. The people I see begging for change on the roadside today have beer guts. Good luck finding photos of poor people from the 1930's who were morbidly obese. Yes, these morons are as derp-tastic as they come.

Anyway, let's diverge from nearly always wrong zero-sum thinking here. We've already mined all the natural resources required to provide a modern motor vehicle to every last man, woman, and child on the planet, along with a minimal modern dwelling with modern amenities and enough food to make diabetes far more probable than starvation- not that most of us are content to live in Japanese-style hotels. Powering all of them is another story, but we're working on that and always have been. In many places, the population density is so high now that providing everyone with a car is impractical, if not counter-productive. I never owned a car when I lived in Japan, for example, and only rode in one once as a passenger in 3 years time. However, I did take trains and buses, as required. To merely go to work here in Texas, I drive a vehicle every single day. There's no other practical way to ensure that I get to work on time every day. They've been talking about building train lines here in Houston for years. Apart from spending a lot of our tax money, we have nothing else to show for it. Owning and using a car doesn't make either one of us more "well to do" than the other, just "different". In short, life will not be the same everywhere for everyone at all times- and that is A-OK.

Since we already have the technology and materials and money to provide a cell phone and tablet (the new personal computer) and electricity to power it to every person on the planet, I think we're in much better shape than anyone on the planet would have ever dreamed of being in the 1930's. We can educate virtually everyone on the planet, if we were interested in doing that and they were actually interested in learning. That aspect of modern life more or less guarantees better outcomes for the vast overwhelming majority of humanity- even if everyone everywhere doesn't benefit equally from it at all times.

Calliban · 2019-09-02 13:52:37

kbd512 wrote:

Every time this ridiculous "limited pie" theory rears its ugly and ignorant head, it turns out not only to be wrong, but absurdly wrong in every sense of the word. How the cretins who peddle this nonsense continue to get anyone to buy into it is beyond my comprehension. Humanity has been advancing in living standards, some societies faster than others, but this requires more energy and better energy usage efficiency to continue doing it. Even so, we're in no danger at all of ever running out.

Some of what I read in that is profoundly ignorant, but I attribute that to stupid people with stupid ideas coming to stupid conclusions to further their own stupid agendas. The notion that America was most economically productive in the 1930's, for example, is mind-blowingly dumb. It's almost as if the idiots who wrote that hit every branch on the stupid tree before they nose-planted into the mountain of their own brain droppings. It's also why we tend to ignore such cretins until they seize power and begin implementing their stupid agendas.

Quote from the article covering the idiocy of these two idiots- Victor Court and Florian Fizaine:

Insight: The US economy, he shows, appears to have reached "the peak in productivity in the 1930s, the same period in which the EROI of fossil fuels reached an extraordinary value of about 100."

People were starving to death in the 1930's because they had no jobs and no food. Nobody starves to death in the US today, except by choice. To this day, we still can't fix stupid. The people I see begging for change on the roadside today have beer guts. Good luck finding photos of poor people from the 1930's who were morbidly obese. Yes, these morons are as derp-tastic as they come.

The authors are talking about productivity growth rates, not productivity per se. They are not arguing that life is harder now than in the 1930s; something that is clearly not true. Productivity was growing more rapidly throughout most of the 20th century than it is today. Average productivity is the integral of the productivity growth rate curve. This makes sense when you consider that our ability to perform useful work depends upon investments of energy embedded within infrastructure made in previous times. Ahmed should have been clearer about the difference between productivity and productivity growth rate when he discussed their work. The difference in this case is far from trivial - because of his gaffe you completely misunderstood the article. It shows the importance of proof reading.

Productivity growth rates hit record high values in the two decades between 1920 and 1940. This was the period in which abundant, storable and portable energy in the form of oil products; allowed rapid growth of low-cost road and rail transportation. This improved the mobility of labour and finished products and the large US population, allowed huge economy of scale to be realised in factory production. Factories were able to take advantage of cheap coal based electricity and the growth of hydropower. Steel and refined materials also became cheaper as they exploited oil based energy in mining and coal based energy in their manufacture and cheap transport allowed them to develop their own economies of scale. Ultimately, America grew into the world foremost industrial power by exploiting a solid resource base of fossil energy. That is the source of the wealth that you and I enjoy to this day. The UK did the same thing in the previous two centuries by exploiting coal based energy. These facts are uncontroversial, but economists don't generally talk about the economy in physics terms, so it sounds a little unfamiliar to consider it in this way.

The problems that Ahmed alludes to stem from the fact that the quality of our energy resource base is now degrading, in that for each unit of energy we get out, a growing proportion must be invested in the extraction process. The most striking example is shale oil, which requires very high drilling rates to maintain production and produces lower quality crude that must be blended prior to refining. It is the continuation of a trend that has been growing since at least the 1960s; but had not reached levels that would choke economic growth until the early years of the 21st century. It is noteworthy that even though oil prices have tripled since 2000, shale oil producers are unprofitable and have run up hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. The situation is mirrored across the globe; it is now impossible to find a price that is both affordable to consumers and profitable for producers. If Court and Fizaine are correct, then EROI will soon decline to the point where productivity growth rate will become negative.

Globalisation allowed the effects of fossil fuel depletion to be mitigated for at least a couple of decades, by allowing energy intensive industry to relocate to Asian countries (especially China) with low cost coal production and cheap labour. This aggravated problems of inequality in western countries. The effects of energy resource depletion are aggravated by depletion of other resource sets, such as metal ores.

I don't think there is anything ignorant or moronic about thermodynamic models of the economy; that is simply the way it works. What we call wealth is simply the effects of surplus energy (that is energy harnessed, minus the energy used in its production) transforming or manipulating matter into things that we want. It is a giant machine that we are all part of and the laws of physics govern it in the same way they govern any other machine. The problem in a nut shell is that it takes a certain amount of energy to produce a unit of GDP. If you want a cup of coffee, it takes 100KJ to boil the water. If you want a tonne of steel, you need 30GJ to heat the ore and reduce it. There are certain irreducible energy requirements that need to be input to generate goods and services. Hence an energy intensity to GDP. So there are limits to what we can afford to pay without going into debt.

The question ultimately is what, if anything, we can do about this. Since the 2008 recession, global debt burden has more than doubled. Interest rates in all major economies have been beneath inflation for a decade. Quantitative easing has flooded the world with cheap money that has so far failed to stimulate economic growth, because the crisis has nothing to do with a shortage of money. It results from physical resource depletion. The solution, so far as I can see is to expand humanity's resource base. We can start by rapidly expanding the use nuclear power and bringing in new sources of rare elements from near earth asteroids. But ultimately, we need to leave the Earth behind.

Last edited by Calliban (2019-09-02 14:29:12)

Terraformer · 2019-09-02 16:00:45

If someone here can access the paper, please could you tell me what's in it? Junkyard battery.

Okay, so more information is available without access here. The brass was 67% Cu/33% Zn, and the batteries achieved 20 Wh/kg. What I want to know is how much copper and zinc is needed per kWh of storage. It's very exciting, since we have on the order of a billion tonnes of recoverable copper according to the USGS, though only ~250 million tonnes of zinc, so that gives us 750 million tonnes of brass for the batteries. World energy consumption is ~15 TW, so 18 billion tonnes of battery would be needed. Eh, it might work, depending on how much they need and whether they can be improved (probable).

Calliban · 2019-09-02 16:46:23

Terraformer wrote:

If someone here can access the paper, please could you tell me what's in it? Junkyard battery.
Okay, so more information is available without access here. The brass was 67% Cu/33% Zn, and the batteries achieved 20 Wh/kg. What I want to know is how much copper and zinc is needed per kWh of storage. It's very exciting, since we have on the order of a billion tonnes of recoverable copper according to the USGS, though only ~250 million tonnes of zinc, so that gives us 750 million tonnes of brass for the batteries. World energy consumption is ~15 TW, so 18 billion tonnes of battery would be needed. Eh, it might work, depending on how much they need and whether they can be improved (probable).

Batteries are a poor solution for large-scale energy storage. They are poorly efficient, have limited cycle life and significant embodied energy. Maybe the solution is to ditch the batteries all together. The most successful electric vehicles in the world are grid connected. It would appear improbable that the battery electric car is a scalable solution.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/01 … s-o-1.html

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/07 … trams.html

For long-term energy storage, heat is a good option. Deposit heat in rock or gravel using heating elements and convert it back to electric power using a boiler working on an S-CO2 cycle. Efficiency is about 50% but embodied energy and capital cost per unit power are low.

kbd512 · 2019-09-02 16:47:29

Calliban,

In the 1930's, the US economy was abhorrent by any rational person's metrics, irrespective of how easy and inexpensive it was to access energy resources. The unemployment rate didn't fall to 10% until 1941. IIRC, it reached 25% in 1933. Furthermore, using a World War as an indicator of economic productivity is, quite frankly, a little sophomoric. The only reason the US economy did well during and after WWII was that nobody else in the world had a functional industrial base. Every other industrialized nation was utterly destroyed during the war, either through loss of infrastructure or workers or both.

Your assertion that the quality of shale crude is lower than that of other sources is backwards. We down-blend shale oil with lower quality crudes from other sources because the shale oil is of such high quality that we can't readily process it using our existing refinery infrastructure and still obtain all of the cuts we want. Our refineries were set up to process lower quality crude than what we get from shale and we're not going to spend the money to completely rebuild them to exclusively process shale oil. The tar sands in Canada, for example, provide a lower quality crude that we can blend into our shale oil to produce a crude that provides all of the cuts we want (everything from gasoline to tar). Venezuela also provides low quality crude.

We keep drilling to continually expand reserves, not because the resource provides less usable product. However, we only extract when we can maximize profitability. That's why the business is operated at a loss at certain times. If it wasn't profitable, then we wouldn't still be doing it. At current consumption rates, we'll need a bare minimum of a few more centuries to run out of easily extractable product at today's rates. We drill as much as we can today because labor rates, insurance rates, and environmental regulations are sure to cost us more tomorrow. Shale oil cost more to extract in the recent past because the technology was brand new and we had to figure out how to refine it. Both problems have now been solved. In the past, we lacked the technology required for precise directional drilling and that was why we didn't do it.

Globalization had nothing to do with mitigating EROI effects and everything to do with lower labor costs through exploitation of destitute communists who had their living standards intentionally depressed by their oppressive governments. The environmental regulations and labor costs have been the major cost drivers in this century, as it pertains to the extraction and consumption of carbon-based energy resources. And yes, newer / faster / better technology nearly always costs more money. When someone says something is "better", the first question you should ask is, "In what way?" Better for the seller's bottom line? More economical for you?

I suppose there's nothing ignorant about what those two wrote if we flippantly ignore every other factor driving economies and pretend that all the increasingly draconian environmental regulations and increasing labor costs have no effect whatsoever on what is or isn't profitable. I would expect someone who specializes in macroeconomics to take that into consideration, but I think ideology overpowers reason more often than not. The Chinese are building new coal-fired power plants at an astonishing rate. If there wasn't cheap and abundant coal available to burn in them, then something tells me they wouldn't waste their time. There's no shortage of cheap energy, only a shortage of people willing to use what they have available to achieve the goals they say they want to achieve.

We're in debt right now for three reasons:

1. Social welfare programs that have consistently failed, since the 1960's when they were implemented, to produce better economic outcomes for those receiving the handouts. Ignorance, and I don't just mean ignorance on the part of the poor people, and/or an unwillingness to change, as required, is what keeps poor people poor.
2. Endless warfare programs that have consistently failed, since the 1920's when they were implemented, to produce better security outcomes for America. There's no reason at all that we can't have the best military in the world at an affordable price, but that requires embracing the practical and ignoring the impractical.
3. Short-sighted thinking of businesses with executives who fail to grasp the national security implications of their behavior. A steel company shouldn't be permitted to move their operations to China just to save a buck or two, nor should we permit cheap Chinese steel to be dumped on our market at a price below what it cost to produce, only to watch them jack up the prices as soon as they put their competitors out of business.

The cost of energy doesn't even factor into the equation. Nobody is making us stay in Iraq and Afghanistan or a thousand other places across the planet except our politicians who don't have our best interests in mind. Similarly, the politicians continually pushing for the expansion of the welfare state don't have anyone's best interest in mind, either. They're suckering in poor people with promises of free crap that they know they can't deliver on. Why? Well, for some we seem to have a really hard time electing politicians who aren't evil little turds who want to control other people.

That's it. That's all, folks!

I'm all for expanding the use of nuclear power, but we have too many ignorant people claiming to care about the environment to do that. We'd have to either change their thinking, something which would require a minor miracle, or we'd have to elect politicians who actually care enough about our environmentalists to simply ignore their idiotic beliefs that solar panels and wind turbines will somehow solve all of life's energy problems, despite all evidence to the contrary. France actually has clean electricity because they're intelligent enough to use nuclear power. Germany is still paying lip service to the idea while they burn coal and guzzle gas from Russia and bankrupt themselves buying more solar panels and wind turbines.

kbd512 · 2019-09-02 17:46:52

Calliban wrote:

Batteries are a poor solution for large-scale energy storage. They are poorly efficient, have limited cycle life and significant embodied energy. Maybe the solution is to ditch the batteries all together. The most successful electric vehicles in the world are grid connected. It would appear improbable that the battery electric car is a scalable solution.

Clearly, but the people you're arguing with over this point are transfixed by the promise of a magical battery technology that doesn't exist and in all probability won't exists within our lifetimes. Energy density only has to increase by about an order of magnitude to compete with hydrocarbon fuels. A magical new battery technology would be great, but we can't seem to make one at any cost. We've been dumping money into this effort for decades, with very little to show for all the time and money spent.

My previously proposed solution was to start expanding the use of NH3 fuel cells and capturing the CO2 from the Haber-Bosch plants to make CF and CNT fabrics for lightweight but strong motor vehicles. The C can be cleaved from the O2 in a single-step process that uses an EUV laser. Thereafter, that Carbon powder becomes a high-purity salable product that requires a fraction of the energy required to dig it out of the ground and remove metal oxide impurities or oxidize fibrous material at extreme temperatures. As always, easier to talk about than to industrialize at a global scale, but the basic process has already been proven to work.

Anyway, alkaline fuel cells use dirt cheap catalysts that we have in extreme abundance. An alkaline NH3 fuel cell is roughly twice as efficient at converting chemical energy into mechanical work as a motor vehicle's internal combustion engine and only emits Nitrogen and water. We probably can't use them everywhere due to Ammonia's toxicity and storage requirements, but there are plenty of heavy vehicle applications where they'd compare quite favorably to diesel or kerosene burners, such as buses / trains / airliners. Lightweight CNT tanks would drastically improve the mass associated with LNH3 storage.

Calliban wrote:

For long-term energy storage, heat is a good option. Deposit heat in rock or gravel using heating elements and convert it back to electric power using a boiler working on an S-CO2 cycle. Efficiency is about 50% but embodied energy and capital cost per unit power are low.

I tend to favor molten salts and CO2 heated by solar concentrators or fission reactors with primary and secondary loops. We already have commercial molten salt solar power plants driving supercritical CO2 through gas turbines with hot/cold side temperature deltas that never vary by more than 1F throughout a 24 hour time period. These types of technologies work 24/7/365, unlike photovoltaic panels and wind turbines.

As I stated previously, I don't actually believe that our environmentalists want any practical solutions.

Calliban · 2019-11-05 13:42:47

Well worth a read.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpres … ding-down/

We are heading into a recession. There is nothing particularly unusual about that - typically recessions occur once every decade. But for the last 10 years, central banks around the world have inflated enormous debt bubbles and have printed money in a desperate attempt to maintain economic growth. The result is that total debt burden is roughly 5 times worse than it was on the eve of the Great Recession. The next bust, which may arrive in 2020, will likely rival the Great Depression, as fiat currencies are now in danger of a crisis of confidence.

Last edited by Calliban (2019-11-05 13:43:51)

louis · 2019-11-05 14:50:21

We might be heading into a recession - that can't be discounted. But we are not heading towards some sort of economic armageddon because of depletion of high quality fossil fuels.

The real issue with energy is how much labour goes into each unit of energy. Try this thought experiment...There's a huge PV field in the desert. This powers a factory that makes machines that can mine and otherwise source all the raw materials required by industry.
Some machines make the factories that make the machines and some make the PV arrays that power the whole industrial area.

This is pretty much the way we are headed and it is all powered by a "fuel" - solar radiation - that is free and requires no transport to the energy generation facility. In terms of the EROI, this is huge.

Calliban · 2019-11-05 15:30:36

louis wrote:

We might be heading into a recession - that can't be discounted. But we are not heading towards some sort of economic armageddon because of depletion of high quality fossil fuels.
The real issue with energy is how much labour goes into each unit of energy. Try this thought experiment...There's a huge PV field in the desert. This powers a factory that makes machines that can mine and otherwise source all the raw materials required by industry.
Some machines make the factories that make the machines and some make the PV arrays that power the whole industrial area.
This is pretty much the way we are headed and it is all powered by a "fuel" - solar radiation - that is free and requires no transport to the energy generation facility. In terms of the EROI, this is huge.

The economy is an energy system that runs on surplus energy. That is to say, the energy that is left over after the energy invested in getting the energy out of the ground or building your solar plant. The smaller the energy surplus, the higher the cost and the less energy left over to both consume within the economy and invest in replacement infrastructure and new infrastructure for new growth. The increasing energy cost of energy of fossil fuels, has been slowly crushing new economic growth in the developed world since the 1990s. Japan was the first domino to fall. It has now reached levels that are crushing new growth in the developing world as well.

The ECOE of renewable energy sources has been declining as scale and slow technological improvements have improved economics. But ECOE of renewable energy will never reach the low levels of fossil fuels in their heyday, because low power density means that renewable energy is relatively heavy on capital infrastructure. It take about 20 times more steel to produce a unit of wind energy compared to a kWh of nuclear energy. For gas turbines, the disparity is even greater. This sets a floor beneath which ECOE for renewable energy cannot fall.

What Tim Morgan doesn't address is the energy cost of storage. Comparing renewable energy to nuclear or fossil fuel energy, is like comparing apples to oranges. One is controllable and responds to demand, the other is not. When the energy cost of a storage plant is factored in (it is after all, a whole other power station) and losses are included; the ECOE of renewable energy roughly doubles. It goes from being a weak option, to being an unworkable option.

louis · 2019-11-05 17:25:13

Sounds more like dogma than analysis.

Price is a good indicator of energy input prior to energy capture. The price of both wind and solar have fallen dramatically. Even the price of coal in 2011 was about 11% cheaper in real terms than in 1949 - hardly suggesting its EROI was declining.

It's absurd to focus on one part of a factor of production (steel on your example). Nuclear power stations need fuel which is very rare and expensive...proves nothing either way. Only unsubsidised cost in a free market can really give you a good idea of energy input.

You seem to think that PV and wind energy can't go any lower in price, but they can and will - PV in particular. Are you still going to maintain that coal is a better bet when it's four times more expensive than PV and more expensive even than PV plus storage? It may be valid now to point to the intermittency of solar and wind as a cost factor (though it's only a marginal cost factor) but what will you say when storage technology is also sorted? Do you even accept that PV plus storage could at least in theory outperform coal or are you adhering to a dogma?

Calliban wrote:

louis wrote:
We might be heading into a recession - that can't be discounted. But we are not heading towards some sort of economic armageddon because of depletion of high quality fossil fuels.
The real issue with energy is how much labour goes into each unit of energy. Try this thought experiment...There's a huge PV field in the desert. This powers a factory that makes machines that can mine and otherwise source all the raw materials required by industry.
Some machines make the factories that make the machines and some make the PV arrays that power the whole industrial area.
This is pretty much the way we are headed and it is all powered by a "fuel" - solar radiation - that is free and requires no transport to the energy generation facility. In terms of the EROI, this is huge.
The economy is an energy system that runs on surplus energy. That is to say, the energy that is left over after the energy invested in getting the energy out of the ground or building your solar plant. The smaller the energy surplus, the higher the cost and the less energy left over to both consume within the economy and invest in replacement infrastructure and new infrastructure for new growth. The increasing energy cost of energy of fossil fuels, has been slowly crushing new economic growth in the developed world since the 1990s. Japan was the first domino to fall. It has now reached levels that are crushing new growth in the developing world as well.
The ECOE of renewable energy sources has been declining as scale and slow technological improvements have improved economics. But ECOE of renewable energy will never reach the low levels of fossil fuels in their heyday, because low power density means that renewable energy is relatively heavy on capital infrastructure. It take about 20 times more steel to produce a unit of wind energy compared to a kWh of nuclear energy. For gas turbines, the disparity is even greater. This sets a floor beneath which ECOE for renewable energy cannot fall.
What Tim Morgan doesn't address is the energy cost of storage. Comparing renewable energy to nuclear or fossil fuel energy, is like comparing apples to oranges. One is controllable and responds to demand, the other is not. When the energy cost of a storage plant is factored in (it is after all, a whole other power station) and losses are included; the ECOE of renewable energy roughly doubles. It goes from being a weak option, to being an unworkable option.

SpaceNut · 2019-11-05 18:31:02

Which also takes in the energy in all forms, from fuels to what gets supplied from all other sources as we have found that when gas prices rise the consumer does not spend what they no longer have for other items of need. Its those other items of needs that keep the economy growing. Its once those start to slow and layoffs continue that money gets tight.

louis · 2019-11-05 19:03:19

Slow growth in advanced economies is really down to general prosperity - labour gets expensive which means it's more difficult to make a profit, so you get less investment...so the economy grows more slowly. A lot of poorer countries are registering growth rates of over 6 per cent per annum currently - like Philippines and Burkina Faso - but you can only really do that from a poverty base.

SpaceNut wrote:

Which also takes in the energy in all forms, from fuels to what gets supplied from all other sources as we have found that when gas prices rise the consumer does not spend what they no longer have for other items of need. Its those other items of needs that keep the economy growing. Its once those start to slow and layoffs continue that money gets tight.

Calliban · 2019-11-12 17:11:32

The average UK citizen is 20.8% poorer now than they were in 2003.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpres … unreality/

For the US, the decline has been less extreme but still significant. The average French citizen lost 40% of their prosperity between 2003 and 2019.

The growing public anger around falling real income and rising inequality, is a large part of the driver behind 'populist' politics in developed countries; think the Trump election; Brexit and the yellow vest protests in France. This things would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.

The ruling elites, who continue to model the economy as a purely financial entity, do not understand what is happening. In Britain, they will deal with popular unrest by turning on the people with more and more oppression. Expect to see more spying; more censorship and more imprisonment of anyone that dares to utter the wrong sort of opinion too publicly.

Ultimately, falling tax revenues are going to impede the Elites ability to oppress the people. At that point, it is entirely possible that the British political elites will face violent revolution.

Last edited by Calliban (2019-11-12 17:25:47)

louis · 2019-11-12 17:46:24

Yep, that's according to "them" - whoever they are.

They seem to confuse debt with negative income. As any bank knows - when they loan money they are loaning money and someone is benefitting from that.

I am a GDP sceptic, so I don't believe the average UK citizen's real income has increased in the way the UK official figures suggest but people are NOT 20% poorer than they were in 2003.

"These things would have been unthinkable in the 1990s." Maybe - but not in the 1970s when we were a fully coal-based economy. There was constant crisis in the 70s over real income issues.

In the 1990s we were still benefitting from the fake "cheap China" syndrome - before China and other emerging economies started to really eat into our manufacturing base. The deal was:

- We will allow you (China) into the (capitalist) world trading system even though you don't have free market policies and cheat on patents, steal industrial secrets and generally operate with complete disregard to our legal systems.

- In return you provide us with dirt-cheap consumer goods which will mean people's incomes in the "West" will rise in real terms.

- We will then try and turn our economies into hi-tech service economies, which will provide your big Chinese economy with servicesm and advanced technology.

Around 2005 the Chinese send a note: "You know that stuff we agreed to back in 1972? - we forgot to add that we don't accept any limits on our growth. We will compete with you in all areas. We don't need your services and we can do hi-tech ourselves, thanks...we just get our military to steal all your tech secrets. Easy-peasy. "

Calliban wrote:

The average UK citizen is 20.8% poorer now than they were in 2003.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpres … unreality/
For the US, the decline has been less extreme but still significant. The average French citizen lost 40% of their prosperity between 2003 and 2019.
The growing public anger around falling real income and rising inequality, is a large part of the driver behind 'populist' politics in developed countries; think the Trump election; Brexit and the yellow vest protests in France. This things would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
The ruling elites, who continue to model the economy as a purely financial entity, do not understand what is happening. In Britain, they will deal with popular unrest by turning on the people with more and more oppression. Expect to see more spying; more censorship and more imprisonment of anyone that dares to utter the wrong sort of opinion too publicly.
Ultimately, falling tax revenues are going to impede the Elites ability to oppress the people. At that point, it is entirely possible that the British political elites will face violent revolution.

Calliban · 2019-12-03 17:57:53

The world is now $250trillion in debt.

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-fina … us-history?

louis · 2019-12-03 19:22:50

We don't owe the money to the Martians! It's debt we owe to ourselves, so it isn't really debt at all. It's like Japan - they have a huge national debt (over 200%) but nobody worries about it much because it's owed to Japanese people/institutions...the money is just circulating within Japan and if they defaulted on the debt Japan would not be any the poorer, or richer for that matter.

Debt defaulting can destabilise world finance, but it doesn't have much effect otherwise.

World GDP has been rising at a strong rate for hundreds of years now, and even major financial crises don't hold back the rise for long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_eco … _Scale.png

Calliban wrote:

The world is now $250trillion in debt.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-fina … us-history?

SpaceNut · 2019-12-03 19:59:03

Louis wrote:

They seem to confuse debt with negative income. As any bank knows - when they loan money they are loaning money and someone is benefitting from that.

Some loan types have a built in insurance that is paid with the consumers premium for just incase there are issues of default for lots of reasons. This is the gamble that they take when loaning out money as they gamble on whether they will ever see any of it come back for any of the policies terms that might be considered by them for the debt owners non payment. You can check the latest credit scores and still not be able to get the real picture of credit worthlyness pf the person asking for the money.

louis · 2019-12-04 05:10:15

Risk is often spread in various ways. That was the problem with the sub-prime racket in 2008 when the USA and EU went into recession: basically junk loans were being passed off as not that bad...so institutions down the line were misinformed about what they were buying into. It's important that everyone in the market knows the risks involved.

SpaceNut wrote:

Louis wrote:
They seem to confuse debt with negative income. As any bank knows - when they loan money they are loaning money and someone is benefitting from that.
Some loan types have a built in insurance that is paid with the consumers premium for just incase there are issues of default for lots of reasons. This is the gamble that they take when loaning out money as they gamble on whether they will ever see any of it come back for any of the policies terms that might be considered by them for the debt owners non payment. You can check the latest credit scores and still not be able to get the real picture of credit worthlyness pf the person asking for the money.

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