When will the world energy crisis begin?

Can 'renewable' energy really replace oil?

Is 'renewable' energy technology actually renewable?

What really determines global economic prosperity?

Nuclear could save our way of life, couldn't it?

Our choice.

"Bonus Section – The Cause of the Financial Crisis in a Single Sentence

When Will The World Energy Crisis Begin?

In the real world, we would begin to notice reductions in our ability to build capital intensive projects (such as a Concorde or space shuttle replacements), recessions becoming more frequent and/or deeper, the price of food and oil would rise sharply. The only way for rich countries to  counter this trend is to push more people into poverty so less people have access to wealth. This way, rich countries can stay rich for longer before resources hit a critical point.

In a societal simulation, this situation precedes a societal collapse. If this is true, concentrating on holding onto our present way of life will result in the harshest collapse possible. On the other hand, if we accept that we have to change our way of life, we could produce a society that is much more satisfying for everyone.

According to British Petroleum, the world consumption of oil in 2009 was 84,077,000 barrels per day[2]. If we convert that oil into units of energy we get 5.13 x 10¹⁷ Joules per day.[3]

Wind turbines is by far the cheapest ‘renewable’ technology. Throughout the year of 2009, all the wind turbines in the world produced 3.353 x 10¹⁵ Joules per day.[4] If we divide that number into the energy contained in our daily use of oil we find that we need 156 times the number of wind turbines that existed worldwide in 2009 in order to take over from oil.

To put it another way, if we built all the wind turbines that existed in 2009 in just one year, it would take us another 156 years to build enough turbines to generate the energy we use daily through oil. Of course, this only works if the population remains at the 2009 level, otherwise, we will need more.

How much would this cost? Assuming the price of oil doesn’t go any higher than $80 US a barrel and none of the non-renewables needed to build wind turbines become more expensive, the current price estimate to build wind power is £1,100 per KW. From this, we can calculate the cost to build (but not maintain) enough wind turbines to replace oil: £5.9 trillion or $8.2 trillion US (assuming £1 = $1.4).

So, if we use the cheapest known ‘renewable’ energy resource and build it faster than we’ve ever built them before, it would take 156 years and $8.2 trillion to replace oil. So it is possible to replace oil, but we would have to give up a very great deal in order to do it.

Of course, none of this addresses an even bigger issue: is what is normally referred to as renewable energy technology actually renewable?

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Is Our ‘Renewable’ Energy Technology Actually Renewable?

The air we breath is renewable because while we absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, the plants absorb carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen. This is an endless loop that can go on forever as long as plants and animals co-exist within a broad balance.

Everything that is not in an endless loop is not renewable. For example, copper is a non-renewable resources because only so much exists. Every time we mine some there is less in the ground. Also, energy is required to harvest it, process it from raw ore to a useable metal, and transport it to factories, manufacture something useful from it, and transport it to market. Currently, energy from oil does all this for us.

If we had perfect knowledge, we could plot exactly how much non-renewable resources there originally were and how much we now have available to us. In the simulation it looks like this:

Wind turbine, solar cells and nuclear power stations all depend on consuming non-renewable resources in order to build and maintain them. If a wind turbine is ‘renewable’ simply because it uses renewable wind, then the internal combustion engine must also be renewable because it uses air to run.

Similarly, if we can reasonably call a wind turbine or a solar cell ‘renewable’ simply because they burn up non-renewables at a slower rate than normal engines then a modern fighter jet must also be ‘renewable’ technology because it burns up non-renewables at a dramatically slower pace than the space shuttle.

Any society depending on non-renewables will predictably go into crisis when the non-renewables hit a critical level of scarcity.

Renewable technology does not include recycling. Recycling does not create an endless loop, it simply slows the consumption of non-renewables. If nothing else changes, this would allow society to grow to even greater heights on the back of non-renewable resources before the inevitable non-renewable crisis causes a collapse.

Can you visualise actual renewable technology? If you can, you are an exception. Right now, we are very far away from a sustainable culture in fact and in vision.

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What Really Determines Global Economic Prosperity?

A simple dominating fact governing global prosperity has been drowned out in the maze of complex economic and market analysis: surplus labour.

surplus labour = total labour (all possible labour) – labour needed to obtain enough sustenance to remain alive

If you need 100% of your total labour to feed yourself, you don’t have any surplus labour. You don’t have time to paint, build green power sources, fill in forms, protest, or do anything other than find food. Any other activity will lead to death.

However, if you only need half your labour to feed yourself, then the other half is available to do anything you wish. You can harvest excess food and trade it, or build something, form a conspiracy theory, or stare at sunsets.

In society, all activity not producing food must come from surplus labour. If it doesn’t, someone dies.

The more surplus labour available from each person, the less proportion of surplus labour is needed to create any ‘thing’. If someone earns $10/hour, a $20 ‘thing’ will cost them 2 hours of labour. However, if surplus labour rises, the proportion of surplus labour required to make the same ‘thing’ drops. If it now costs $10 it will only take that person 1 hour of labour to buy the same ‘thing’. This, in turn, increases this person’s surplus labour by 1 hour. This cycle can fuel rapid economic growth.

In the long run, the cost to bring anything to market is determined by the proportion of surplus labour required to bring it to market. The exception is irreplaceable things.

Surplus labour can be dramatically increased by using an external energy source. Oil has done this in our society. While ‘green’ energy has the potential to equal oil in sheer power, it falls far short in terms of surplus labour. ‘Green’ power takes considerably more effort to build and maintain for each unit of power returned. Replace oil with green energy and surplus labour plummets. This pushes up the price of everything, including the parts necessary to build ‘green’ power. This, in turn, further reduces available surplus labour.

If this downward cycle goes beyond a critical point, a societal collapse will follow. The following charts are what historical human population collapses have looked like once their surplus labour hit a critical low level.

                               [5]

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Going Nuclear Could Save Our Way of Life, Couldn’t It?

The short answer is ‘yes’, until the non-renewable nuclear fuel runs out.

However, before going on, let us first remind ourselves of the quality of our way of life:

• Most people born on earth die of starvation.
• Rapid world-wide eco-system decline. 
• Population explosion.
• Building society on a foundation of non-renewable resources.
• Possible catastrophic climate change.
• Low prices on a vast range of goods and services.

If we went nuclear to maintain our lifestyle, we should add one more point to this list:

• Embracing the highest possibility that we will make significant parts of our planet uninhabitable because of radiative pollution.

When asked about Deepwater Horizon (the oil rig that recently sank in the Gulf of Mexico), BP responded truthfully that the probability of an accident was so low that it was practically 0. However, unless it actually is 0, then the possibility exists. Given enough chances, even a low low possibility will become a reality.

If you buy a lottery ticket, what is the probability that you will win the jackpot? Low. Practically 0. Still, someone wins almost every time. If you bought millions of tickets, would your chances go up? Indeed they would. In fact, if you buy enough, it becomes a certainty.

Similarly, a huge nuclear accident is highly improbably, but not impossible. The best way to improve our chances of getting a jackpot nuclear accident is to build more nuclear stations. Each new station improves our chances of winning the big one.

Replacing oil with nuclear power stations throughout the world will accomplish just this feat. You can’t win if you don’t play: replacing oil with nuclear will have us buying as many nuclear accident jackpot tickets as is humanly possible.

Is this really a rational course of action?

It is if we live in a society governed by a wealth creation imperative, because human well-being is irrelevant in such a system. All that is importing is using any means necessary to make as much wealth as possible.

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Our Choice

Does your life depend on any of the following things: metals, minerals, water treatment plants, medical technology or rare earth magnets (used in powerful electrical motors and wind turbines)? How about plastic (all plastic is made from oil) or electronic devices such as a phone or the internet or a bank card?

All these things are made from non-renewable elements. The supply of non-renewable elements will end. It’s in the name ‘non-renewable’.

If we knew exactly what the earth contained, we could draw a chart of what we started with, how much we have used so far, and what was left. It would look something like this:

 
Everything wears. Everything eventually needs maintenance or repair. This all requires energy and resources. The older it is, the more effort and money it requires. Some older things require large fortunes every year in order to be kept in ‘original condition’ (the original US Declaration of Independence, for example). Take away that effort and things quickly decay and disappear.

How about recycling? Recycling takes a lot of energy and the result is rarely as good as the original (consider recycled paper). Something is lost on every cycle. It would take a huge amount of energy to return things to its original condition. Recycling non-renewables costs a great deal more than mining them. That means energy currently used to bring food to market, make clothes or phones, or fly people around the world would have to be diverted into recycling instead.

Now, consider the impact of inventing something that didn’t need any effort or energy from us to keep working. For example, what if we built a supermarket that repaired itself and restocked its own shelves with food that was very nutritious, completely organic and free? Does this sound like a fantasy to you?

It already exists. It’s called nature. When used properly, it can give us a fantastic standard of living.

Using nature properly does not mean we have to go back to caves. The tall sailing ships of old were built from renewable materials using renewable energy sources and were powered by renewable energy. It really was renewable in all respects. The pyramids, the Greek Coliseum and Stonehenge were all built using renewable energy. In the Americas, entire civilisations flourished in cultures that had a great respect for their renewable systems. Not only that, but these cultures were ahead of the invading Europeans in some areas of science and social practice[6].

Renewable technology can be just as exciting as non-renewable technology.

We have a choice. Do we continue our non-renewable party and hope the inevitable collapse occurs in our descendent’s lifetimes rather than our own, or do we turn our vigour to renewable technological wizardry instead? If we did this, not only could we build something we would be proud to hand to our children, we could return modern humanity to the circle of life and love.

We think this is worth talking about.

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Bonus Section -- The Cause of the Financial Crisis in a Single Sentence

A number of people have asked if the financial crisis is easy to understand. It is. The banks valued their ‘assets’ higher than they should have, spent their money accordingly, and then realised their ‘assets’ were worth a great deal less than they originally thought.

This is like an American discovering that what they thought was a roll of $20 bills in their pocket was, in fact, a roll of $1 bills: it rapidly changes their perceived financial situation. If this were happen to an extremely large global roll of money, bad things would happen to the economy. And thus it was.