The Blog of Jeff Vail - Litigation, Resilient Systems, Risk Management, Sustainability

2009 ASPO Presentation - "The Renewables Gap"

2009-11-09T02:21:00.000-07:00

Appologies for the break in posting--the perfect storm of the birth of my second daughter and an extremely busy period at work have forced me to prioritize, and my writing didn't make the cut. However, I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll be able to get back to posting on a fairly regular (Mondays) schedule. I plan to dive right back in to where I left off on the "Diagonal Economy" series.

For now, here are the slides from my recent presentation at the Association for the Study fo Peak Oil conference in Denver, entitled "The Renewables Gap" (.pdf). If you want to watch the video of the presentation, you can purchase it at the ASPO website. I've posted a general text of what I said to accompany the slides below:

My talk is about what I’m calling the “Renewables Gap.” The basic question that I’m seeking to evaluate here is whether, and at what cost, it’s possible for our civilization to mitigate peak oil with renewable energy generation—specifically solar PV and wind power.
One important caveat before I get started—My goal is to explore the solution space of our future, not to predict exactly what will happen.

Slide 1: If we seek to mitigate peak oil with renewable energy, we need to first ask what do we need to mitigate. My answer: the decline in NET energy produced from oil, not the decline in overall production. This graph shows the decline in NET energy available from oil, taken from Dave Murphy’s previous presentation.
If, hypothetically, 20 years from now we’re producing 100 million barrels of oil per day, but it requires 100 million barrels of oil worth of energy input to do so, we have ZERO energy left for the operation of society at large. This is functionally the same as producing no oil at all.

Slide 2: What I want to quantify is the amount of net-energy that we need to replace going forward. A “classic” peak oil decline graph shows a plateau, followed by a gradually accelerating decline. Let’s consider why that’s so. What happens when we hit a plateau—as we arguably have now? The existing fields are declining at rates between 3% and 15% per year. But, because we’re scrambling to bring new production on-line, the overall level of production is buoyed for some time. We’re compensating for this underlying decline with more expensive oil—both financially and energetically. That keeps the level of OVERALL oil production steady, but the rate of NET energy production from oil is falling. That’s what this graph depicts.
For the purpose of exploring the solution space, let’s pick two numbers to evaluate: 5% and 10% annual rates of decline in NET energy production from oil. I’ll call these the “low” and “high” range scenarios. I’ll be discussing the potential to use renewable wind and solar power to mitigate this decline.

Slide 3: Specifically, I want to focus on some systemic effects of unique profile of solar and wind energy: the vast majority of the energy invested in these sources comes up front, before they ever begin to generate. Between 80% and 90% of the total energy ever required to build, operate, and maintain these systems must be invested UP FRONT.
I won’t discuss other renewables such as tidal and geothermal power, though their profiles are largely similar. I’ll also ignore biofuels and nuclear—hopefully we’ll have time to discuss these in the question period, but the bottom line is that I think they don’t significantly change the thrust of this presentation.

Slide 4: Another preliminary issue: these renewables produce ELECTRICITY, not oil. We’re talking here about using them to replace oil—let’s talk about conversion issues. How many GWh are needed to replace 1 mbpd of oil production?
A straight BTU-to-BTU conversion: replacing 1 million barrels of oil per day production, or 365 million barrels of oil per year, equates to 70.78 Giga-Watt-Years. Clearly, however, oil and electricity are not the same thing.
Some people have suggested that you only need 1/3 this much electricity to mitigate peak oil because oil fired electricity generation can be only 33% efficient. I think that modern oil-fired electricity is actually somewhere between 50% and 66% efficient, but we need to explain the validity of using the BTU-to-BTU conversion:
First, because we need to replace oil, not electricity, and because relatively little oil is used to generate electricity, it’s incorrect to use this oil-fired electricity efficiency number.
Second, our infrastructure is currently adapted to burning oil in many applications. Therefore, to the extent we want to use renewably-generated electricity to replace this oil, we need to adapt this oil-burning infrastructure to electricity. For example, if you want to replace transportation fuel with plug-in electric cars, you need to invest in significant new infrastructure in the form of cars, batteries, charging stations, etc.
Third, any form of mitigation using renewably-generated electricity will require significant additional investment in the transmission grid to handle higher loads and to balance or store electricity due to the variable availability of renewable generation.
I don’t know if it’s possible to calculate the exact energy balance here. However, I’ll argue that, in order to mitigate peak oil with renewably-generated electricity, we’ll need to generate effectively the same number of BTUs of electricity as we’re losing in oil. Maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less, but I think the BTU-to-BTU figure of 70.78 Giga-Watt-Years per million barrels of oil per day lost is pretty close.

Slide 5: Another argument is that we don’t need to produce as much energy renewably as we lose to peak oil because conservation and improved efficiency can largely make up the difference. There’s some truth here, but it’s only ½ the equation. That’s because two factors—population growth and the desire of the world’s poor to improve their standard of living—will cancel out some or all of the gains from efficiency and conservation.
As shown in this graph, if population increases according to various UN estimates, that alone could cancel efficiency and conservation gains of as much as 40%.
Additionally, at least 5 Billion people and growing want to “improve” their level of energy consumption to Western levels. In India, car sales are up 26% over last year, to 120,000 cars per month. Admittedly, these cars tend to be more efficient than in America, but this is new demand, and far more than cancels out the fact that the Tata Nano gets 56 miles per gallon. While markets or force may deny the world’s poor access to Western levels of energy consumption, the geopolitical consequences of such this disparity will only accelerate energy scarcity.

Slide 6: The key question is: how much up-front energy input will be required to build out enough renewables to mitigate the decline in net energy from oil production? We know how much energy must be produced to meet this target, so the answer to this question is a function of the EROI and the lifespan of our renewable options.
You’ve just heard David Murphy’s excellent presentation on EROEI, which highlighted many of the same issues involved here. What I want to focus on is this concept of boundary.
We could talk about this boundary and EROEI calculation issue until we’re all blue in the face—my intent here is not to argue that some specific number is correct, but rather to point out the uncertainty and potential range. At the lower end of the range, I’ve proposed a proxy of price to account for ALL inputs and outputs. There are significant problems with this methodology, such as dealing with financing costs, but it has the distinct advantage of allowing us to account for all inputs—regressed infinitely—rather than drawing some sort of artificial boundary. IF you look at modern wind turbines using the price proxy, you get something like an EROEI of 4. I’ll call that my “low” value.
Now let’s consider more conventional calculations. Wind seems to be most promising at the moment, and I’m looking specifically at a 2009 paper by Kubiszewski, Cutler, and Endres entitled “Meta-analysis of net energy return for wind power systems.” The authors review 50 different studies of wind EROEI. In a section entitled “Difficulties in calculating EROI,” they make this statement:
“Studies using the input-output analysis [one method of calculating EROEI] have an average EROI of 12 while those using process analysis [another method] an average EROI of 24. Process analysis typically involves a greater degree of subjective decisions by the analyst in regard to system boundaries, and may be prone to the exclusion of certain indirect costs compared to input-output analysis.”
What I take away from that is that there seems to be a range of 12-24, but the authors—a highly respected group—suggest that the “24” figure fails to account for many inputs. That suggests to me that an EROEI of 12 is more accurate.
For our purposes, though, my intent is to explore the solution space, so I’ve selected what I think is an optimistic upper “high” EROI value of 20. I think this is unrealistically high—especially because this figure doesn’t even account for the intermittency, transmission, and storage energy costs that must be considered in such a large-scale societal transition—but for now let’s use 4 and 20.

Slide 7: How much energy must we invest if we want to ramp up renewable generation to keep pace with declining net energy from oil? This graph answers that question using a 5% net energy decline and a renewable EROEI of 20.

In this scenario, to mitigate the year-1 decline in net energy from oil, we’d need to invest 467 GWy of energy in year one without any production in return—that’s the equivalent of almost 7 million barrels per day. Then in year two it’s about 130 GWy more invested than cumulative production to that point, or about a 2 million barrel per day deficit. Not until year-three will the cumulative renewable generation be more than the investment deficit for that year—meaning that not until year 3 will we begin to have surplus energy available to mitigate the actual decline in oil production (which by this point leaves us 12 million barrels per day behind the peak oil decline curve.
That’s the “Renewables Gap.”

Slide 8: Here’s the pessimistic quadrant – 10% net energy decline, and a renewables EROI of 4. Here, the up-front energy investment is more than 4,600 Gwyears in year one. That’s 58 million barrels of oil per day diverted to renewable energy production. Plainly impossible. And the level of renewable energy production wouldn’t even catch up to the level of energy invested EACH YEAR until year 7.

Slide 9: Here you can see the boundaries of the Renewables Gap—the optimistic assumptions on top, pessimistic on the bottom. The lines represent, under each scenario, the net energy supplied by oil, minus the energy invested that year in building renewable energy production, plus the energy produced that year by the renewables brought on-line to date.
To be sure, we can slow the initial rate of investment in renewables in order to lessen this dramatic initial impact, but that option results in falling even further behind the net energy decline curve. We can also bootstrap the energy produced by renewables to provide the energy required for the next round of renewables—if the EROI is 20, this will work to some extent, but it will still have the effect of making us fall even further behind the decline curve. If the EROI is 4, it’s simply unworkable—we never catch up.
Is it theoretically possible to close this gap more quickly? Sure—by investing more energy up front, which actually serves to exacerbate the problem over the short term. We’ll be chasing our tail. It might be possible to catch up—to make a significant public sacrifice up front and kick start the program—IF the economy as a whole is healthy. The Renewables Gap puts us in a Catch-22 situation: using renewables to mitigate peak oil will make the situation worse before it makes it better. Our ability to absorb the up-front costs of transitioning across this gap is a function of our economic health, but to the extent that our economy remains healthy enough to do so we are unlikely to muster the political will to address the problem.
Just to provide some context for the size of this gap: Under the optimistic scenario, this is the equivalent of adding one new China to world oil demand immediately, and maintaining that for many years. Under the pessimistic scenario, this is the equivalent of adding more than 9 new China’s to world oil demand.
Now I recognize that there are energy conversion issues, there are calculation issues, there are timing issues—simply too many variables to make any definitive statements here. But what I hope I’ve highlighted here is this CONCEPT of the Renewables Gap problem, and the uncertainty of our ability to bridge that gap.

Slide 10: As a civilization, we still have a small and shrinking bank of net-energy surplus with which to build our future. We have to make tough choices about how to spend it. Perhaps our most fundamental choice will be this: do we spend it attempting to bridge the Renewables Gap—despite our uncertain ability to do so? Or, at the risk of using the phrase “Paradigm Shift” in serious conversation, do we cut our losses with the “perpetual growth project” and consider if that energy could be better spent building a fundamentally different future?

I don’t mean to make any secret about my own views here: it seems unlikely to me that we’ll be able to continue “Business as Usual” via massive investment in renewables. It seems sufficiently unlikely that I don’t think it’s the best way to spend our civilization’s limited and shrinking supply of surplus energy. I think that energy will be better invested in the infrastructure needed for communication within and transition to a much more locally-self-sufficient, topologically flat society. I’m not here to tell you that my vision of the future is somehow “right,” or that other visions are “wrong,” but I am here to suggest that ANY vision of the future predicated on a transition to renewable sources of energy to mitigate the decline in oil production must first address this Renewables Gap.

Distributed Manufacturing Contest

2009-10-07T08:42:00.000-06:00

Appologies for the slow posting of late--I anticipate more time issues in my life over the the next month or so (ASPO conference this weekend, baby due in two weeks, more "real" work than I can handle at the moment). That said, the good people at Ponoko were kind enough to offer me a coupon for free use of their system thanks to my article last week mentioning them (I have no financial/other relationship with Ponoko, and as the comments to that post point out, they're just one of many different faces of the coming distributed manufacturing revolution).

So... since I clearly don't have time to design something at the moment, I'm going to hold my first ever blog contest. If anyone is interested, I'll offer my Ponoko coupon to the person that comes up with the best "primary goods" design (see last week's article for definition of "primary," but basically I'm looking for something that will increase localized self-sufficiency and resiliency). All I ask is that the winner send me a picture of the final product that I can post here. Submissions can come in any format (I don't need the actual file format used by Ponoko for input), and can be posted in the comments or emailed to me. Deadline is the end of October.

Enjoy...

Distributed Manufacturing Beyond Trinkets

2009-09-28T01:59:00.006-06:00

I've spent the last week swamped with work, out of town taking depositions, and preparing my presentation for the upcoming ASPO conference in Denver. As a result, I haven't been making the hoped-for progress on my Diagonal Economy series. However, I have been spending some spare time thinking about distributed economies, and specifically distributed manufacturing. Ponoko seems to be the current leader in this area--they aren't especially distributed yet, but there's certainly promise. However, as I've wondered before, how much are current distributed manufacturing efforts focused on the creation of "trinkets," and how much promise do they hold to provide what I'll call "primary" goods in the future?

First, two definitions. "Trinkets"--I'm using this term to describe most everything that seems to be currently available on Ponoko. Some of them are pretty nifty, but not exactly essential to sustaining our civilization and quality of life in a post-peak energy world. "Primary" goods are, by this makeshift definition, the opposite of trinkets--things that can play an integral role in our future production of food, water, energy, shelter, communication, materials, etc.

Now my question to ponder for the week: Do you think that a system like Ponoko can currently, or will in the future, facilitate the distributed production of primary goods? Let's take that 1 step beyond a simple yes/no answer--can you describe such a good that can presently be produced via Ponoko? How about one that could be produced via Ponoko with minor modifications to their system and infrastructure? My intent is not to promote Ponoko per se, but rather to use its very well defined parameters to facilitate this conversation on distributed production in general.

I'll start:

Primary good that can be presnetly produced via Ponoko: a bat box. Sounds simple, admittedly, but it's well suited to the current production capabilities of Ponoko. Additionally, this qualifies as a "primary good" precisely because, by housing bats in one's yard, it's possible to 1) control insect populations, and 2) accumulate valuable fertilizer from the bats for use in localized food production. Bee hives and relate systems are another good example, though the need for wire mesh is slightly beyond the current Ponoko capabilities. Another: cold frames. Worm farm. The list goes on.

Primary good that can be produced via Ponoko with modifications to its capabilities: A hand pump. This would probably require the ability to work with metal, in both sheet and tube form. I recognize that this is well beyond the current capability of Ponoko, but it's not theoretically that big of a change. Also, if you added the ability to work with sheet metal and pipes/tubing, the universe of potential "primary" goods would open quite quickly (e.g. solar water heaters, stoves, etc.).

Other ideas? And a related question: what primary goods are most important for future distributed manufacture (such that we can guide the evolution of distributed manufacturing systems in a direction, rather than hoping the needed capability arises)?

Final thought: to what extent must distributed manufacturing networks also address local sources and production of the input mateirals? Distributed wood milling? Distributed bioplastics production? Metallurgy?

The Diagonal Economy 3: Growth and Sustainability

2009-09-21T05:22:00.000-06:00

I’ve written before about the Problem of Growth. There, I suggested that our current civilization is structurally unsustainable because an excess of hierarchy requires that it seek perpetual growth. There, I argued that we must build a non-hierarchal and locally self-sufficient alternative structure that I call Rhizome to replace our current economic and political structure if we are ever to achieve actual sustainability. Of course, I’ve always recognized that Rhizome is not a practicable mass-transition strategy—it could exist at the peripheries, perhaps even creating a valuable symbiosis with “primary” society, but it’s plainly not realistic to suggest that we just abandon “hierarchy” and adopt “Rhizome.”

Some readers may have wondered by now about the similarities and differences between the Diagonal Economy and Rhizome—are they the same, am I abandoning my previous theory and replacing it with a new one, etc.? While there is some overlap, the simplest answer is that the Diagonal Economy and Rhizome are two separate concepts intended for two separate purposes.

Rhizome was always intended as a theoretical counterposition to hierarchy—its purpose was to explore the problems with our current system by imagining its opposite and attempting to frame it in a way that would be viable. But it is, in the end, a theoretical model. I think it can provide useful guidance for people in the unusual position of building something from the ground up—usually very small or remote situations—and while I think it provides much practical guidance in design (as it influenced my development of the Diagonal Economy), it provides little guidance about implementation or transition amidst real-world challenges and constraints.

The Diagonal Economy was created with the express purpose of filling that gap left by Rhizome theory. I’m less interested in articulating a pristine model for non-hierarchal and sustainable organization than I am in articulating a set of trends and principles that we can all use, at all levels, to guide the continuing evolution and emergence of human civilization. The Diagonal Economy is expressly intended to adapt the theory developed as “Rhizome” to provide answers and guidance to the challenges that I predict we will face in the coming century. As such (and as suggested by the title of this post), the Diagonal Economy is intended as a set of guidelines for growing a truly sustainable civilization—specifically, one that has a scale-free absence of the need to grow—within and only eventually replacing the Legacy economic and political structures.

I won’t repeat the argument that I’ve made at length before, but the Problem of Growth is at the core of our civilization’s problems. Many people suggest that overpopulation is the core problem, but this, too, is but a symptom of our structural problem of growth. While I think the Diagonal Economy provides many other advantages as a model for transition, most of these are ultimately subsumed under its ability to address the Problem of Growth. Again, while details of this approach are discussed in the linked articles (and will be covered in more depth later), the keys to addressing the Problem of Growth are scale-free self-sufficiency, non-hierarchal political, economic, and social structures, and an ethic and aesthetic of elegant simplicity. As I will explain in coming posts, these qualities can be infused into our current structure gradually, rather than attempting some kind of revolution of direct confrontation and sudden replacement. And this can be done at all levels—not only does it not require action by “others,” but it also does not offer the excuse that we’re waiting on “them.”

In this sense, by attempting to provide a realistic and implementable approach to addressing our civilization’s structural Problem of Growth, the Diagonal Economy may be the only “program” that offers any real hope of achieving true sustainability, not just greenwashing or empty victories.

The Diagonal Economy 2: The Impact of Energy Descent

2009-09-14T05:20:00.001-06:00

I’ve wondered how to best explain the advantages of the Diagonal Economy in confronting energy descent. I think that reference to an old post addressing “anti-economies ” is perhaps the best framework. There, I discussed the classical sources of economic efficiency: economy of scale and economy of place.

Both economies of place and scale will be impacted by the phenomenon of energy descent—the idea that there will be increasingly less surplus energy available to society going forward. While I am very confident that this will be the case, it’s necessary to recognize that there are those who don’t think this will be true—or at least that this won’t be a significant force going forward because we’ll have plenty of energy available from renewable or other sources. Some even think that technologies like thin-film-solar will make energy “too cheap to meter.” While I think this is highly unlikely, it’s also important to accept that this is a possibility—to think otherwise (or to think that it’s an inevitability of technological innovation) is an inherently faith-based position.

I’ve critiqued this “viridian vision” previously here and here . This post operates on the assumption that society does undergo energy descent, and to the extent that assumption is mistaken then the conclusions reached in this post will be incorrect. However, even if this assumption is faulty, the general concept of the Diagonal Economy is not necessarily flawed because there are several other forces supporting its adoption that I will address in coming posts. Now, on to a discussion of the impact of energy descent:

Economy of place, the first of the two classical “economies,” is the concept that some things are more efficiently done in certain places--to use the classic example, it would be just plain silly for to try to grow grapes for Port in dreary England when they grow so nicely in Portugal. Lumber is more ripe for the logging in Oregon than it is in Kansas, etc.

Of course, when it comes to physical products, economy of place is facilitated by affordability of transportation. It still made sense to grow grapes in Portugal when the only way to get them to England was via sail. This effect was less powerful, however, because of the comparatively higher cost of transport via sail (though wind is free, the overall cost of transport by sail was more than modern transport by containerized freighter). Many items that are transported between continents on a routine basis today were produced locally in the past because of the then higher cost, or slower speed, of transport. But the oil age, with its cheap and rapid transport options, has fundamentally re-shaped our economy around extreme economies of place. This will change as oil and other sources of energy for transport (potentially even for the energy for transport of information over the internet) become increasingly expensive. As economy of scale is less decisive a grantor of fitness in our ongoing economic evolution, we’ll see more localized industry gain on its centralized predecessors. This won’t necessarily mean a return to the same look and feel of past localization—too much as changed to think we’ll simply revert to the 18^th century. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Economy of scale is the concept that it is more efficient to do lots of one thing rather than trying to do a little of everything. You can specialize and stratify and apply all kinds of economic terminology, but the bottom line is that if all you do all day is draw out wire into pins (to take Smith’s classic example), you're going to get pretty good at it. But if you only had to draw out wire into a pin when you need one (can't remember the last time that happened to me), you will probably be very slow and inefficient in their manufacture. This is economy of scale--and it applies, for obvious reasons, even better to things like microprocessors and flu vaccines than push pins.

As with economy of place, the leverage available through pursuit of economies of scale will change under energy descent. To some extent, economy of scale is facilitated by cheap transportation fueled by cheap energy. Of course, economy of scale also facilitates specialization, which can lead to economies of production under certain circumstances. While not strictly a prerequisite to reaping economies of scale, centralization is a common symptom of such efforts. It’s possible to leverage distributed networks of highly specialized functions to achieve economies of scale (something especially compatible with the Diagonal Economy, and that I will cover later), but this is not yet commonplace. As a result, economies of scale tend to require cheap energy for transportation to meet three needs: 1) to get workers to a physically centralized location where they can perform specialized tasks, 2) to transport physical goods to this specialized location, and 3) to redistribute the resulting physical product to its end user. It’s also worth addressing one more symptom of economies of scale: the information-processing burden of hierarchy, or what Robert Anton Wilson called the SNAFU principle. Economies of scale are usually (though, importantly, not necessarily) the result of hierarchal structures—corporations, governments, religions, etc. Because control (both of process and output) is often a requirement of those who design such institutions, hierarchal structure is a necessity. However, with such hierarchal structure comes an increased information-processing burden as the top must communicate through several relays to the bottom, and vice versa. This tendency, while individually important, is relevant here because it can exacerbate the importance of cheap energy/cheap transportation to economies of scale because hierarchies tend to require more people—and hence greater centralization and more transportation to and from—as a result of this information-processing burden. The truism that hierarchy tends to result from a need or desire for control—of inputs, outputs, process, etc.—also suggest that hierarchies can be avoided by forfeiting control over these parts of an economic process.

Like economies of place, the result of energy descent will be that economies of scale provide less comparative advantage than it did in the past. This will be particularly true where economies of scale require physical centralization and where it depends on hierarchal control structures. Therefore, as a result of energy descent, we’ll see two trends: away from physical centralization, and away from hierarchal control structures. Here in particular, because of both available communications technology and the conscious understanding of modern communication possibilities like P2P and open-source, the future will not be a simple reversion to the past. Instead, there will be great comparative opportunity to structures that develop a way to leverage economies of scale without depending on physical centralization or hierarchy. The Diagonal Economy is specifically conceived with this possibility in mind—open-source information processing, the development of platform-based manufacturing, and other concepts that I will discuss in more detail later.

I think it might be useful to envision the spectrum of economic possibilities along two axes: degree of hierarchy and degree of physical centralization. The result of the declining importance of economy of place and economy of scale presents a potential bifurcation point on the resulting graph of our future economic path(s). If you accept that, on one axis, the scale and centralization of our economy will recede due to energy descent, then I argue that the variable axis is the degree of hierarchy within our economy.

Less centralization and scale but more hierarchy than present looks like a form of neo-feudalism to me. I certainly don’t mean that this will be a regression to jousting and castles, but rather that we’ll see an increasing disparity in standard of living among an increasingly stratified local political and economic structure. For matters of ontogeny and optimizing the median standard of living, this is the less desirable option. However, as this option may prove the best option (both in absolutes and comparatively) for current elites, I would not be surprised if there is a significant push in this general direction. I think that, absent active pursuit of the alternative outlined below, the natural tendency under energy descent will be for our current structure to “erode” into some kind of a neo-feudalism with less centralization but more hierarchal stratification.

The alternative—less centralization, less scale, and less hierarchy—is what I envision as the Diagonal Economy. This is my preferred vision of the future, but not one in which I am especially confident. While I think this option will be the most effective in maximizing the absolute median standard of living in an environment of energy descent, it will be a challenge to implement because, as I just pointed out, there will be little incentive for existing elites to choose this path.

Finally, the third option of less centralization and scale but about the same amount of hierarchy seems unlikely. This option is the analog to the viridian vision of the future as a land of renewable plenty! Considering that this framework accepts declining surplus energy due to energy descent, the existing economic structure will simply be untenable. As pointed out above in the discussions of economies of place and scale, if energy for transportation is less available then we must reduce centralization. Existing levels of hierarchy that made sense under existing levels of centralization will no longer be tenable—the overall economic product per person available will decline along side energy, requiring either more hierarchy to enforce a greater stratification or no providing enough economic incentive to those at the top of the hierarchy to justify its costs. While I have argued that a flatter structure with much less information processing burden may also provide high quality of life to its constituents, it does so specifically because of the avoided cost of hierarchy. Instead of the status quo, then, It is my guess that we will either see an intensified but localized hierarchy (neo-feudalism) or a dissipation of hierarchy itself (the Diagonal Economy). Finally, for those who do not actively pursue the Diagonal Economy option, the existing political and economic terrain will all but mandate a neo-feudal future.

Tainter on Complexity and Sustainability

2009-09-09T08:07:00.000-06:00

Joseph Tainter has published a new essay at The Oil Drum, a definite must read. For those who are unfamiliar, Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies" is, in my opinion, one of the most important books available to explain the structural nature of our current predicament. His new essay is not just a rehash of his previous work--it explores a new theory with startling implications. In short, it turns common perceptions of sustainabilty on their heads.

I think Tainter's thinking highlights the need for a specific type of solution that I have attempted to articulate in the past: elegant simplicity, designed tecnics, vernacular zen, etc. My problem is that I have not had a suitable framework to give structure to my ramblings. Tainter's latest essay provides that structure--after I finish the Diagonal Economy series, I will turn to re-articulating these previous works as a solution specifically intended to address the issues raised by Prof. Tainter.

On the Diagonal Economy series, my work schedule has kept me from getting it published as quickly as I would like. I have completed the next installment, and hope to finish up a few more this weekend, ensuring that the next few weeks will be a return to substantive postings...

Directionality of Hierarchal System Evolution

2009-08-31T03:23:00.000-06:00

Too busy to write anything new on the Diagonal Economy at the moment. I am, however, having an interesting email exchange with a friend who is currently deployed to Iraq and is tasked with shoring up their hopelessly over-extended intelligence databases. We've been discussing how to "fix" the problem, with me (predictably) recommending adopting a flatter, decentralized information processing system that removes the analyst from the loop and uses some form of blog ecosystem to unify operator and analyst into a single position. While I never really expected this to be an implementable solution, over the course of the conversation it became increasingly clear to me that hierarchal structures can't "go back"--they can't easily and selectively implement decentralized, p2p approaches to information processing because to do so effectively would be fundamentally antithetical to their constitutional form. A short excerpt:

The more I think about the issue, the more it seems that there's just a fundamental directionality of hierarchal systems such as the military. It's not possible to move away from the centralized analysis model to a decentralized model because that would lead to a landslide of decentralization, and the whole structure would break down. The "blogging intel ecosystem" works best when it's done exactly the way the "enemy" conducts business (US cathedral v. "enemy's" bazar): it's unclassified, anyone can participate, and often your very funding and operational capability depend on not only your participation but your success in that ecosystem. If analysts were paid only by the number of hits and links their intelink blogs received (e.g. their google ranking, for lack of a better term), then suddenly you'd have an amazingly well populated and up-to-date system (side note: the current system is so bad that most intelipedia pages are still largely the same as when they were cut and pasted from wikipedia in the first place!). For example, if the US military stopped paying people, and instead paid for operational success in some kind of market-system, and if the US military abandoned all rank/hierarchal structure and let people organize in whatever way worked best to get their piece of the pie (payment for operational success), then there would be real value in open and decentralized reporting and analysis being conducted by the very people who are also using that information to operate. Of course, anything structured like that would never have gotten itself into the royal mess we're now in...

More to the point, minus the mumbo-jumbo, and my conclusion is that this entire set of solutions that I'm hinting at is fundamentally unavailable to the military because of its structure. For the concept to work as a solution, the military would need to abandon its structure to such an extent that it would no longer be in need of the solution. And this structure is also the source of the original problem.

In all honesty, do you think that this problem will ever get better? Which is more likely to happen: 1) "they" add another 300,000 hours of predator video first to your analytical load without considering the consequences to your processing/exploitation/dissemination system, or 2) "they" conduct a top-down re-evaluation (complete with the budgetary authority to make real changes) of how their system functions and begin to collect data with the efficiency of the overall process in mind. What you're grappling with is a symptom of a structural problem that will only continue to get worse, not better, until the structure is addressed. While I have no doubt that you'll be able to improve the system to some degree, that will work in a way like Jeavons' paradox, and make the overall situation worse: by improving system capacity by some amount, the immediate need to address the underlying structural problem will recede and you'll get 500,000 hours more predator video, not 300,000 hours, because now you can handle it. Which, of course, will only get you back into the same jam you're currently in, but with more invested in a flawed structure and less elasticity of that structure to respond to future demands because you've picked the low-hanging fruit improvements already...

Begs the question: to what extent is this unique to Nation-State military structure, or, as suggested by Tainter and others, is it impossible to voluntarily contract the scale and scope of hierarchy, leaving collapse as the only possibility?

On a semi-Diagonal Economy-related note, does this support the argument that we must focus on building diagonal structures rather than adapting existing, hierarchal institutions, or is that overreaching?

Diagonal Economy 1: Overview

2009-08-24T03:34:00.000-06:00

I often have a difficult time articulating my vision of the future. Some people think that I’m a “doom and gloom” type—that there will be small, fortified islands of farming communities trying to fend off the starving masses after civilization collapses due to energy shortages. Others, of course, think that I’m either hopelessly optimistic or a hopeless romantic, and that I’m suggesting we can replace modern society wholesale with some fantasy-world of cooperative networks of suburban homesteads. While I understand how these misperceptions have come about, I haven’t done a very good job (yet) of articulating how I do, in fact, see the future of civilization unfolding. That’s my hope for this Diagonal Economy series: to outline the major forces and systems driving the evolution of our civilization and economy, including in-depth analysis of major forces and thoughts on how we can help, or gain from, the resulting trends. This first post in this series will provide an overview of my vision of the Diagonal Economy--you can keep track of the larger series at the Table of Contents .

This civilizational and economic evolution will, under my theory, give rise to what I’m calling the “Diagonal Economy.” I initially planned to use the phrase “Parallel Economy,” but that sounds too much like a mere shift to black and gray markets, instead of addressing the more fundamental, structural shift that I predict away from hierarchal organization to a flatter, peer-to-peer form of organization that I have called “Rhizome ” elsewhere. Perhaps “envision” is a better word than "predict"—I advocate for this shift, and think that it makes sense from several perspectives (fulfilled ontogeny and true sustainability in particular), but what I am not doing is suggesting, like some Marxist prophecy, that this shift is somehow our civilization’s destiny. I think this shift will occur on some level, but that it will meet powerful resistance. In the end, it is primarily a set of tools that will become increasingly available to those who wish to shape their own future.

Here, I think that “diagonal” best captures this shift—movement along one axis (energy consumed and scale) and along a second (degree of hierarchal order of organization). The term also draws from a discussion (using the same label) in the Intermezzo section of Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.”

So what is the Diagonal Economy? Ultimately, I see it as a structural response to the various forces that will increasingly shape the coming century and beyond. A limited list includes energy descent; other resource constraints; imminent ecological and climatic pressures; the limits of human ontogeny; information processing burdens; and the breakdown of the nation-state system. I use the term “structural” quite a bit, yet I rarely define what I mean by it. Each of these forces, for reasons that I will explore in individual posts in this series, have particular impacts on hierarchal structures. Likewise, each force interacts differently with what I’ve called “Rhizome ” --topologically flatter, peer-to-peer networked structures that exhibit scale-free self-sufficiency. While I don’t suggest that we will—or could—abandon hierarchy entirely in favor of rhizome, I do think that each of these forces will more negatively affect hierarchal patterns of organization than they will affect rhizomatic patters. For that reason, while I actually predict a reactionary response by hierarchy, when confronted by these patterns, to enhance the hierarchal nature of existing structures, I think that there will be the opportunity to instead confront these forces with increasingly rhizomatic solutions. So, in that sense, the Diagonal Economy is my proposed solution to humanity’s current and dawning challenges.

That may work as a statement for the intent of this notion of “Diagonal Economy,” but it isn’t much of a description. I hesitate to articulate a vision for the Diagonal Economy, not because I’m worried about being proven wrong (I’m quite confident that will happen often enough), but because I don’t want to limit the modes of expression of the basic principles that I will articulate. That said, I think it’s worth describing one possible manifestation:

The diagonal economy might rise amidst the decline of our current system—the “Legacy System.” Using America as an example (but certainly translatable to other regions and cultures), more and more people will gradually realize that there the “plausible promise” once offered by the American nation-state is no longer plausible. A decent education and the willingness to work 40 hours a week will no longer provide the “Leave it to Beaver” quid pro quo of a comfortable suburban existence and a secure future for one's children. As a result, our collective willingness to agree to the conditions set by this Legacy System (willing participation in the system in exchange for this once "plausible promise") will wane. Pioneers—and this is certainly already happening—will reject these conditions in favor of a form of networked civilizational entrepreneurship. While this is initially composed of professionals, independent sales people, internet-businesses, and a few market gardeners, it will gradually transition to take on a decidedly “third world” flavor of local self-sufficiency and import-replacement (leveraging developments in distributed, open-source, and peer-to-peer manufacturing) in the face of growing ecological and resource pressures. People will, to varying degrees, recognize that they cannot rely on the cradle-to-cradle promise of lifetime employment by their nation state. Instead, they will realize that they are all entrepreneurs in at least three—and possibly many more—separate enterprises: one’s personal brand in interaction with the Legacy System (e.g. your conventional job), one’s localized self-sufficiency business (ranging from a back yard tomato plant to suburban homesteads and garage workshops), and one’s community entrepreneurship and network development. As the constitutional basis of our already illusory Nation-State system (.pdf) erode further, the focus on #2 (localized self-sufficiency) and #3 (community/networking) will gradually spread and increase in importance, though it may take much more than my lifetime to see them rise to general prominence in replacement of the Nation-State system. Ultimately, the conceptual “map” of the American Nation-State will re-open, and those pockets that best develop a Diagonal Economy to fill that gap will enjoy the most success in what will otherwise be a time of substantial—though I think largely subconscious—transition.

That might be unsatisfactory as a description of the Diagonal Economy in action—I’m happy to elaborate in comments. In upcoming posts, I will articulate this vision in more detail by focusing on component forces and phenomena within this shift to the Diagonal Economy. Hopefully a coherent picture will emerge, and a set of principles and tools will be clearly defined. But, if this vision is only clear in my own head, please let me know. My goal here is to figure out how to translate something that is half intuition and half foggy notions into a comprehensible essay . . .

Simplicity, Resiliency, and Artifacts

2009-08-17T02:26:00.001-06:00

I won't begin the promised "Diagonal Economy" series quite yet. The main reason is that I don't want to start down that path without putting full effort into it. So, in the interim, I've wanted to write a bit about lifestyle design and philosophy. While this may seem like a major departure from my general themes, I think it's actually complementary: by approaching our individual and community patterns as something to be consciously designed, rather than merely followed, we have the opportunity to make our lives more resilient, more energy efficient, more environmentally sustainable, and more pleasurable. That can't be all bad?

First, two blog recommendations on this topic:

Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week. This has been on my sidebar for some time. Superficially, his book is about figuring out how to make quick money off the internet and then take long vacations. At its core, however, he is working to design a set of tools and principles for living that can be used to adapt to rapid change, build a more resilient lifestyle, become healthier, solve problems--a host of useful things.

Leo Babauta, and his blog Zen Habits. Leo has build a very successful career for himself by applying one simple principle: examine and simplify everything you do. Will be added to my sidebar soon (along with several other blogs I've been meaning to add for some time).

While it's relatively easy to dismiss these two as self-help gurus, I think they offer something more. More than the actual tips they offer, they serve as examples of the kind of lifestyle and process design that I think will be increasingly important (at least if individuals or communities want to succeed) in a post-peak oil, post-Nation-State, post-caretaker-economy world.

The notion that we should look at everything we do, deconstruct it, and design it to better meet our needs, is one that will become increasingly important as old assumptions no longer remain valid. A complement to this is the notion that we should simplify as much as possible. While it's not exactly sexy advice, the continuous application of these two principles will serve us well in the coming years--no matter what they hold.

Personally, my life is far from simple. I'm not sure my life is really any more complex than most people--kid(s), demanding job, interests and hobbies, etc.--but I know these principles have been useful to me. I'm healthier, fitter, better informed, more successful, and happier as a result, and I still have a long, long ways to go.

So, take a moment and check out the two links above if you're so inclined. But, if they don't immediately appeal to you, perhaps because you initially find them irrelevant to the reason you read this blog, as an exercise try to figure out how they offer tools that ARE helpful to the reasons you are reading this right now. Perhaps in future posts I'll get into the details ("diagonal lifestyle design"?), but I think readers will find these ideas readily applicable to issues of energy, geopolitics, and societal transition.

EROEI Uncertainty

2009-08-10T07:06:00.000-06:00

No new post on the Diagonal Economy--I've been working on re-writing this post, on EROEI Uncertainty , for publication today at The Oil Drum. Should be controversial...

Back to the Diagonal Economy series next week.

The Rise of the Diagonal Economy and the Transition to Decentralization

2009-08-03T02:05:00.000-06:00

Below is an outline of the general chapter structure of my next series of posts—these on the notion of a “Diagonal Economy” (drawing from the use of the term by Hardt and Negri ). I hope to 1) outline my positive vision for a post-peak-everything world, 2) outline a set of principles and forces for use in decision making and strategic planning, and 3) spur further discussion on the topic. I’ve linked this Table of Contents on my side bar—I won’t necessarily proceed through these chapters uninterrupted over the next 13 weeks, so this TOC may be useful in pulling the overall process together into one coherent piece:

1. Overview of the Diagonal Economy - (Lay out vision, discuss the similarities and differences between the Diagonal Economy and existing gray and black market economies, the meaning of “diagonal” compared to parallel overlapping systems)

2. The Diagonal Economy and Energy Descent – (Why declining energy and net energy will lead to reduction in the ability of hierarchal and centralized systems to function, and why as a result we’ll need to revert to more localized and smaller scales production systems, at least for most physical goods. Hierarchal and centralized systems don’t voluntarily downsize well, and may not be able to adapt effectively to lower energy environments, resulting in both a growing need/demand for the Diagonal Economy and a growing low-competition space for it to flourish)

3. The Diagonal Economy and Sustainability – (Why the legacy hierarchal economy is fundamentally unsustainable; the opportunity to build an economic system compatible with true sustainability)

4. The Diagonal Economy and Human Ontogeny – (Why the legacy hierarchal economy is fundamentally incompatible with human ontogeny; why that won’t be resolved by merely allowing current institutions to collapse and reconstitute on smaller scales; why the Diagonal Economy shows promise in being able to overcome these issues and provide a high quality of life when measured by a human-ontogeny-relevant metric while simultaneously dealing well with energy descent and sustainability issues. Propose new metric based on fulfillment of humanity’s genetic ontogeny while providing opportunity or spiritual growth)

5. The Diagonal Economy and The Power of Networks – (The Diagonal Economy is not a regression to a less sophisticated form of organization—on the contrary it is arguably a more sophisticated form of organization that combines some elements of historical economics with new understanding of network and information theory that is only now widely understood. This allows the Diagonal Economy to significantly fulfill human ontogeny while simultaneously maintaining its own in direct competition with the legacy hierarchal economy merely on “sales pitch” items of material consumption—discussion on legacy-economy-sponsored states and use of force later…)

6. The Diagonal Economy and the New Map – (Gray markets, non-Cartesian and uneven conceptual terrain, and the re-opening of the map. While all politicians maintain that we live in “Nation-States,” this is already a shallow statement, and energy descent will further the minimal extent to which the state fulfills its constitutional promise to its theoretical “nation.” In reality, we’re slipping in to a market state system (some places faster than others, or in different ways than others) but on universal constant is the increasing ability for the Diagonal Economy to gain ground)

7. The Diagonal Economy: A Society of Entrepreneurs - (and Entrepreneurial Communities)—and why this will be necessary as we transition from Nation-State to Market-State. Sharon Astyk (sp?) has written a book called “A Nation of Farmers.” I think we must take this a step further—“A Society of Entrepreneurs.” It goes unstated that farmers are entrepreneurs, but all of us are ultimately entrepreneurs—it’s just that for most of us, the business we choose to engage in is the sale of our time and services to (usually) one customer in a specific job market, otherwise known as a “job.”

8. The Diagonal Economy and Localized Diversification – (People who work a standard job don’t tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs—and that’s a poor entrepreneurial business plan. Family/Community Systems Design, and the Resiliency of Multiple “Careers. We all do several things, but we need to start designing these systems of activities to most resiliently provide for the goals of our families and communities, rather than assume that the State will do so for us.)

9. The Diagonal Economy: Surge Capacity as a Measure of Brittleness – (Surge Economics and why working under capacity is beneficial)

10. The Diagonal Economy: Resilient Quality of Life Metrics and the Resurgence of Vernacular Technology - (how, when we begin to focus on maximizing the resiliency of our quality of life, we will simultaneously begin to shift toward the use of “vernacular” technologies that require fewer concessions to unsustainable and hierarchal “other”)

11. The Diagonal Economy: Localized and Peer-to-Peer Design and Manufacturing – (Localized manufacturing, collaborative and open-source design, and the potential boundary layer between the Diagonal Economy and the Legacy Economy)

12. The Diagonal Economy: Interface, Parasitism, and Boundary Layers with the Legacy System – (Economic, Political, Legal, and Military interface and relationships between the Diagonal Economy and the legacy hierarchal global Nation-State/Corporate economic system)

13. The Diagonal Economy: Overlaps and localization in law, sovereignty, and the use of force in a post-peak-Nation-State World – (Lessons from Mexico, the breakdown of exclusive legal systems, and the potential for adaptation and resiliency by the emergent Diagonal Economy)

One possible complement to this series is my plan to gradually go through several strategic principles, systems thinking principles, game theory concepts, and show their application to the ideas discussed on this site. I may intersperse these chapters with such strategic commentary where appropriate, or I may integrate them into these posts.

Introducing the Litigation Wiki Project

2009-07-27T04:27:00.001-06:00

I've alluded a few times in recent posts that I'll gradually begin focusing on law and legal issues in this blog, while maintaining the connection to my core interest in resilient, sustainable, and decentralized civilizational systems. As part of that effort, and in an attempt to combine theory with practicality, I'm launching the Litigation Wiki Project.

Open-source and collaborative legal tools, such as the Litigation Process Checklist component of the Litigation Wiki, has great potential to:
- Reduce costs of litigation (thereby increasing access to the judicial system)
- Reduce the barriers to entry for small firms or solo attorneys, resulting in a more decentralized legal profession
- Improve the opportunity for innovation and accelerate information processing by reducing the systemic noise created by hierarchal control and distribution of information

If you aren't an attorney, this process may still be of interest as an exemplar of the spread of open-source and decentralized systems. The wiki is still in early stages of development--for the moment I've left the permissions open to everyone to view and edit. If I run into problems with spam, I'll shift to requiring registration, but for now I'd like to make it as easy for other to contribute as possible.

At this early stage it is certainly far from a complete tool, but I'll point to one example of its potential: the Affirmative Defense checklist component of the Litigation Checklist. Over 100 affirmative defenses and counting to date--certainly the most extensive list of affirmative defenses that is freely and openly available. While this may not seem like a significant accomplishment, the identification of all relevant affirmative defenses is a significant task in most civil litigation. In just the past week I've already used it to identify and plead an affirmative defense that will be potentially significant and that I most likely wouldn't have otherwise thought of. With a bit of open-source collaboration--including brief explanations of each defense, related case law in various jurisdictions, and strategic considerations for use--this list could easily become the standard for the legal community on this subject. Significantly, to my knowledge this would be the first free and open-source legal reference standard.

If this kind of project interests you--or if you know of people or resources that could contribute--please contribute.

Distributed Economies: Focus vs. Distractions

2009-07-20T02:21:00.002-06:00

John Robb recently wrote about developments in distributed manufacturing and distributed production. While I share John's enthusiasm for the potential of peer-to-peer, decentralized, localized, and otherwise distributed manufacturing and production, two of the projects he highlights are excellent fodder for a discussion of some thorny issues on the topic. Take a look at these two videos:

Video 1: Microfactory table cutting tool (link to article )

Video 2: Windowfarm (link to website )

Forgive my skepticism, but despite my general enthusiasm these projects both look like gimmicks. Is this weakness merely because these projects are at an early stage in the evolution of truly important techniques, or does this demonstrate a deeper problem?

Take the window farm concept: good intent--an attempt to increase the ability of dense urban areas to feed themselves. However, execution and focus are lacking: this solution is high-tech (relies on artificial growing mediums that derive nutrients from industrial liquid fertilizers, not natural soil processes), high-cost/energy input (at least to the extent that light bulbs are required), while producing very low calorie output. All the windows in an average family's urban apartment could--by this model--probably produce less than 1000 calories per year in salad greens. Is it realistic to think that we can ever produce significant quantities of calories/nutrition in sparse urban windows, or is this just a token effort? Certainly, by failing to recognize this weakness and address projections to output significant levels of nutrients or calories in future iterations, this projects seems off track. Is there any kernel of value here, or is it so distracted from substantive distributed production as to be nothing more than a token? While I don't think there is significant potential to adapt urban windows to significant calorie production, it may be more realistic to focus on significant nutrient production through the provisioning of year-round, high-nutrient vegetables (here the salad greens approach is OK, but a much better focus would be on spinach, chard, kale, etc.). Bottom line: window-farming may have real promise, but the failure to focus on any meaningful metric in this project makes me conclude that it is more gimmick--and potentially harmful to the point that it advances symbolism over substance.

Now consider the table cutting tool (Microfactory MOW): again, good intent, to empower decentralized groups to capitalize on open-source design databases to increase their ability to provide their own manufactured products. However, this certainly seems like an overly complex solution to a simple problem. In the example of the coat hangar in the video, it would be significantly simpler and would require significantly less reliance on externally produced advanced tools like the various electric motors involved, to simply cut the design with a box cutter. What is impressive here is the information distribution process: the open-source provision of the DESIGN. The actual manufacturing process seems like more of a gimmick.

However, while the automation of decentralized manufacturing may seem like a gimmick at this point, these efforts are pioneering a process that may bear fruit. It would certainly be significant if:

- we could reach a level of automated, decentralized manufacture that could, utilizing only locally available materials, replicate itself
- we could use such decentralized manufacturing to--on a systemic analysis--reduce our localized dependencies on external systems
- we could use such decentralized manufacturing to save significantly on the energy required for transportation of products by, for example, only transporting the manufacturing system and then leveraging local materials to provide manufactured items to the locale

I'm actually fairly optimistic about the ability of distributed manufacturing to provide some of these sources of value mentioned above. What concerns me about the cutting tool highlighted in the Microfactory MOW video is not that they are still at a very early stage along the road to these types of value, but that the designers do not appear to be consciously aware of these end goals or the current shortcomings of their design. To the extent this is true, I see their efforts as more gimmick than substance, which is unfortunate as they clearly have the intelligence, motivation, and funding to pursue potentially important advances.

In a somewhat related note to "distributed economic systems," next week I'll introduce my open-source litigation checklist wiki project (for those interested in the future of law and legal systems). The link is already available on my sidebar if you want to take an early peek...

The Renewables Hump 8: Concluding Thoughts on EROEI and Carbon

2009-07-13T03:22:00.001-06:00

Time to wrap up my "Renewables Hump" series with a few concluding thoughts. Below are links to each of the prior 7 posts. My current plan is to synthesize this series into a shorter set of posts for The Oil Drum--I'll post those links here when they're up.

Renewables Hump 1: Introduction
Renewables Hump 2: Digging Out of a Hole
Renewables Hump 3: The Target
Renewables Hump 4: EROEI Issues
Renewables Hump 5: Proxy EROEI Calculations
Renewables Hump 6: EROEI of Solar and Wind
Renewables Hump 7: Can We Transision?

In wrapping up my thoughts on EROEI and the potential for our civilization to transition to renewable sources of energy, there remains at least one loose end I'd like to address:

Climate change. One of the most frequently-cited arguments in favor of transitioning to renewable sources of energy is that these technologies tend to be zero-carbon soruces of energy. What seems to go unsaid, however, whether we're talking about solar, wind, geothermal, or even (not really renewable) nuclear, is the up-front carbon footprint required to build this infrastructure. Simply put, the vast majority of the energy required to build a renewable energy generation infrastructure will be carbon-heavy fossil fuels. That means, in order to affect a transition, we need to spike carbon emissions in the build-up phase in order to reap lowered carbon emissions at some point in the future.

This necessarily cycles back to the EROEI questions that I have raised in this series. If the EROEI of renewable technology X is 40:1 over a 20-year lifespan, then only a very small amount of fossil fuels must be burned to produce long-lasting clean energy, and after a very short time the remainder of this transition can be financed with clean energy from the renewables build at the outset of the project (here, as fast as 6 months with a maximal investment at startup). Of course, if the EROEI is actually 4:1 over that same 20-year lifespan, for every 4 tons of carbon saved over that lifespan, one ton must be emitted in production, and that carbon emission must be up-front. Additionally, it won't be possible to bootstrap this clean energy to produce more clean energy for years, and likely far longer because it would create an impracticable energy price spike to build enough generation at the very outset of such a transition to allow for complete bootrapping of the next waves of production.

All this boils down to some of the most poorly understood aspects of climate science: are we better off raising carbon levels now in order to better reduce them in the future, or is it more important (from the perspective of various feedback loops, etc.) to keep levels from ever going over a certain threshold, even if that means more overall emission down the road? We simply don't have an answer to this question, but it suggests that the climate/carbon argument for a renewables transition is, at a minimum, built on a shaky and uncertain foundation. The real problem is that--much like broader discussions of the renewables transition--the uncertainty in the carbon-reduction argument for renewable energy flies under the radar because nearly all involved in the discussion use very high EROEI figures for renewables. If these figures, as I have argued, could actually be 10x lower than current estimates, then much of the current debate is off track.

None of this is to suggest that we should use uncertainty to abandon action, to stop efforts to transition to a sustainable society. However, we must accept this uncertainty in deciding HOW to best make that transition. More centralized wind and solar and a better grid might be the answer. It might not. Maybe the answer is decentralization and radical reduction in energy consumption? As I'll address in the future, structurally self-interested participants tend to argue for the former solution--you don't hear GE raising the uncertainties and potential socio-political pitfalls of centralized wind or solar. Unfortunately, we'll only find out if their confidence in our ability to transition was misplaced after such efforts have conclusively failed...

The Renewables Hump 7: Can We Transition?

2009-07-06T02:53:00.000-06:00

Last week, I argued that the "true" EROEI of solar and wind power is far lower than that commonly advertised--closer to 1:1 for solar (photovoltaics) and 4:1 for wind power. Additionally, these EROEI values don't account for the energy cost of the transmission, storage, and conversion to electric power that will be required in any large-scale transition to renewables. Where does that leave us? Does that mean the "transition" is dead in the water? I don't think so? But I also don't think this means that we can continue under the assumption that the EROEI of renewable technologies are high enough (if only we had political will, etc.) to facilitate the continuation of business as usual.

Simply put, we are presented with a series of unknowns. People may (and will) continue to claim that the "true" EROEI of renewable X is 20:1, 40:1, 100:1. We must recognize that we don't know these values to be true--they are probably sales pitches, and even if they are truly disinterested, they are guesses at best. Until we have a verifiable methodology to calculate an unbounded EROEI value for a technology (and price-estimated EROEI does not claim to be such a solution), we will continue to only guess. Others may argue that renewables are all less than 1:1, or less than some value higher than 1:1 required to keep our society afloat. They mary argue that we should abandon renewables investment entirely on these grounds, but this is also just a guess.

In light of this uncertainty, I think it is clear that we must take a highly conservative approach, and focus immediately on efficiency and conservation. One thing we can known for certain: the EROEI of conservation is more than 1:1! However, we must also recognize that efficiency and conservation alone cannot solve the root problem presented by a society and economic system predicated on perpetual growth.

I think this uncertainty is a compelling argument for shifting toward a non-hierarchal mode of civilization (as I suggested in The Problem of Growth) as a means to address this core problem of growth. However, I do not expect humanity to voluntarily and proactively make such a switch. I do, however think that there are tremendous opportunities for businesses, individuals, communities, and regions that successfully make such a switch (to what I have called "Rhizome," John Robb has called "Resilient Community," etc.).

Initially I had hoped to lay out an empirical analysis of our ability to transition to a renewables-driven society. In some senses, the analysis of our ability to transition at a given EROEI is very interesting. For example, at 3:1 EROEI returned over 30 years, what is timeline to transition 50% of our current energy use if we accept that it will be politically and economically impossible to divert more than 10% of global energy production into renewables investment? It was my plan to conclude this series by answering (with pretty graphs, no less!) several questions like this. However, I fear that such an exercise is largely meaningless: I have been unable to come up with a verifiable proxy for EROEI measurement, and without that I would only be addressing hypotheticals. Worse, questions that will be permanently hypothetical.

Instead, I am left with only a confirmed sense of uncertainty. Perhaps that uncertainty is itself valuable. If I have poked holes in (what I believe to be) the widespread assumption that we can surely transition to a renewables-driven economy if only we make the decision to do so, then perhaps this series has been of value. If I shift the discussion (even only in my own mind) toward what to do in light of this uncertainty, then I will feel that this has been worthwhile. It is in answer to this last question that I am most excited: I plan to focus more in the future on decentralized, networked, open-source, platform-based systems that we can use to simultaneously build resiliency, address this fundamental uncertainty, and address the problem of growth by reducing the hierarchal nature of our civilization.

It's also worth noting that there will be significant--though largely superficial--shift in the focus of this blog over the next several months. Increasingly, I will work to write posts about law, legal systems, and legal processes. While this will result in a reduced coverage of energy-related issues directly, it will still be the result of my core interest in systems, systems theory, and structural anthropology. I've been writing about energy for some time now as a result of my view that our energy problems are the most significant and visible symptom of these deeper, structural systems. I will write about law in the same light. In part this is due to my (interim) conclusion that the uncertainty surrounding the kind of precise numbers that would be required to make definitive energy decisions is insurmountable. In part, it is because law is my chosen profession, and I would like to increasingly merge this intellectual interest (systems theory and structural anthropology) into my vocation.

The Renewables Hump 6: EROEI of Solar and Wind

2009-06-29T10:30:00.000-06:00

As my brief pause from posting may have suggested, I'm struggling with how to best tackle the next step in this series. To recap, so far I've been discussing the "true" EROEI of renewable energy sources--meaning the measurement with no artificial boundary for accounting--and the need and challenges for calculating this figure. My plan was: 1) work through a few price-estimated EROEI calculations (at least one recent solar and one recent wind project); 2) show that these price-estimated EROEI figures are too low to support envisioned transitions to renewable energy sources; and then 3) argue that, while this method of calculating EROEI is itself suspect, until we come up with a better method for calculating boundaryless "true" EROEI, we must seriously scrutinize the viability of the predominant transition vision.

I've been having a difficult time figuring out how to best make this into a solid argument. My initial desire was to use a very numbers-driven approach. I never intended price-estimated-EROEI to provide some verifiable, "true" EROEI figure, however (it is intended more as a reality-check backstop), so I've been concerned with proceeding on such a numbers-driven approach with price-estimated EROEI as the foundation. To be honest, I was hoping that, in writing this series, I would arrive at some far more accurate and transparent means of calculating "true" EROEI. Unfortunately, the result has been the opposite--while I am still convinced of the value of price-estimated-EROEI as a reality check, its inherent flaws have been well highlighted by my own efforts to refine it, and especially by the very thoughtful comments that I've received.

Therefore, I now think it's best to embrace this fuzziness--to use the price-estimated-EROEI in its originally intended role of reality check. While I'm concerned that my critique of the "renewables transition" will now be more logic-driven and less hard numbers-driven, I am increasingly OK with this shift (a decision process which, in part, explains my lack of recent posting). I've arrived at this conclusion because a logic-driven approach actually seems more true to form: I've been arguing for some time that "true" EROEI is fundamentally impossible from a nuts-and-bolts accounting perspective. Instead, we must use proxies to measure emergent phenomena--such as market price--to estimate its value.

That said, here's my current plan: Below I'll outline my calculations of the price-estimated-EROEI of one recent solar project and one (less) recent wind project. Next week, I'll argue the impacts--and uncertainties--of these numbers on the viability of the "renewables transition." Following that, I'll address a number of ancillary issues: an analysis of the minimum EROEI for society (drawing on, but to some extent disagreeing with Hall's work on the same topic), a discussion of the carbon-impact of the "renewables transition," and I'll conclude with, hopefully, some general guidelines for going forward amidst this uncertainty.

Solar Example: Downtown LA Solar PV Installation: This 2009 installation is my example for price-estimated EROEI calculation. I think it's a good example (no example is perfect) for several reasons: at 1.2 MW, it's modest in size, but large enough to reap economies of scale; because it is installed on an existing roof space, there is no land cost associated with the installation (that, in some circumstances, could present acquisition costs or environmental compliance/impact statment costs not truly representative of net energy issues); because it is in California, where the average cost of electricity (and especially peaking "sunny day" electricity that solar provides) is higher, it will provide a more conservative estimate; because it is located in the downtown of a major metropolitan area it will not require significant transmission investment to provide a true measure, and is therefore also more conservative. Finally, there are good cost and output numbers available for the site.

Basic data: 1.2 MW array installed 2009 in Los Angeles, cost $16.5 million up front (ignoring rebates/tax credits/incentives), projected financial return of $550,000 per year. At the rough California rate of $.15 per KWh, that's about 4 GWh per year (conservative).

Price-Estimated-EROEI Calculation: The $16.5 million up-front is, at $0.09/KWh (here using national average, as there's no reason to think that manufacturers would use primarily California peaking power to build this system), an input of 183 GWh through installation (I'm ignoring the realtively small maintenance costs here, which will also make the figure more conservative). If we assume a life-span of 40 years, then the energy output of this system is 160 GWh. That's a price-estimated EROEI of 0.87:1.

Wind Example: I've had a more difficult time finding a recent wind project where good data (on both cost and actual, as opposed to nameplate, output) is available. As a result, I've chosen a 2000 Danish offshore wind project at Middelgrunden. While up-front expenses may be higher off-shore (making the resulting EROEI more accurate for offshore projects than on-shore), I think this is a relatively modern installation (2MW turbines). If readers have more current projects with full data, please provide in the comments--another point for investigation is whether the price-estimated-EROEI of solar and wind have been improving or if they are holding relatively stead.

Basic data: Cost of $60 million, annual energy ouput 85 GWh.

Price-Estimated-EROEI Calculation: At the US national average rate for electricity ($0.09/KWh), the $60 million up-front energy investment works out to 666 GWh. Using a life-span of 25 years (and assuming zero maintenance, grid, or storage investment, making the result artificially high), the energy output comes to 2125 GWH. That's a price-estimated-EROEI of 3.2:1.

I'll let everyone chew on these numbers--and the various issues surrounding how they were derived--for the week. If you have access to similar numbers for other solar or wind projects (or numbers for tidal or geothermal), please provide them in the comments and we'll see if we can generate more figures. Next week I'll discuss the impact--and uncertainty--of these calculations.

The Renewables Hump 5: Proxy EROEI Measurement

2009-06-15T02:21:00.001-06:00

Today's installment will address two of the potential proxies for calculating "true" EROEI (meaning a calculation with no artificial system boundary) for renewable energy sources. Last week's post discussed the price-estimated EROEI theory, and this week I'll discuss two additional potential proxies. Up front, it's important to note that, much like the price-estimated theory, these proxies have significant weaknesses. I don't think either is yet ready for use, but talking through them helps to better define the issues surrounding proxy-calculation of EROEI, and may result in readers figuring out how we CAN make ideas like these work...

Asymptote location model:

The first proxy I'll discuss is--for lack of a better name--the asymptote location model. I'll start by noting that I think this model is still too incomplete to be workable. I include it here because I think it may be fertile ground for someone to develop. Here's the basic concept: under traditional EROEI calculations, there is an artificial system boundary drawn at some point, and the result is an artificially high EROEI (because those energy inputs outside that artificial boundary are not counted). My theory starts with the assumption that, as that system boundary is expanded, the resulting EROEI will approach some theoretical "true" EROEI that lies at an infinite, but uncomputable, system boundary. This is a classic example of an asymptote. If we can plot the degree of system boundary expansion on the Y axis, and the resulting EROEI value on the X axis, then X will approach the true EROEI value as Y approaches infinity (unbounded EROEI calculation). This, in theory, will allow us to fit an equation to a few points (which can be calculated) and deduce the location of the asymptote that represents "true" EROEI without actually needing to perform the impossible calculation of the unbounded EROEI analysis. The problem, of course, is that while it's quite possible to fit that X-value (EROEI) into a meaningful scale, but the same can't quite so easily be said about the Y-value. What does a "5" on the Y-axis (degree of system boundary expansion) mean compared to a "10"? What is the scale? Unless an 8 is double a 4 is double a 2 in some meaningful sense, the equation fit to locate the asymptote will provide a meaningless result. Can we create a meaningful scale for the Y-axis? Maybe. It seems possible to use the number of steps of regression (as in 1=just the energy used at the plant and installation, 2= 1 plus the energy used to create everything in the plant/installation, etc.) as a scale, but this is just speculation. This might be fertile ground for someone looking to develop the field of EROEI analysis, but it's not ready for prime-time at this point. I'm very interested in any ideas readers may have about turning this rough idea into a workable proxy measurement.

Worker-year model:

Neil Howes sent me a a very interesting calculation for wind energy that used the ratio of worker-years involved in the wind industry to total US worker-years as a means to determine what portion of total US energy consumption was required as input to US-produced wind capacity. His EROEI measurement came out at over 100:1, and I think significantly overestimates the true ratio because, like most EROEI calculations, it artificially limited the system boundary quite severely (for example, it based its worker-year number on a DOE study that estimated the number of wind-energy jobs that may be created for a set amount of production--this didn't include all the supporting industry jobs that would be created in mining, transportation, marketing, finance, training, etc.). Additionally, I think that the brute-force methods for calculating EROEI (input/output and process analysis) necessarily represent an upper bound to the "true" EROEI--they accurately count energy output, and are universally low (to an unknown extent) on their accounting for energy input. As a result, any proxy that estimates higher than the brute-force approach must be reconsidered.

The far more significant inaccuracy is that this methodology assumes a uniformity of the very EROEI it attempts to measure. The measurement is only accurate IF every worker-year can act as a proxy for an equal amount of US annual energy consumption--it can't. Instead, some workers (and their associated industrial/commercial processes) represent far more energy than others. This lays bare the problem with this methodology: it would come back with the same energy input for 1000 worker-years on a 50:1 EROEI oil well as for 1000 worker-years on a 3:1 EROEI solar plant, even where the energy generation capacity of each is the same--the energy input is not necessarily the same. I would argue that the energy input could be seen as the same IF we took a boundary-less approach to attributing worker-years, but then we get back to our overarching accounting problem.

I think that these two proxy-methodologies outlined above both present some potential for development, but neither is yet ready for actual use. They both present novel approaches to the proxy-calculation of EROEI, but seem to me unacceptably ill-defined--both when compared to brute-force EROEI calculations and when compared to the price-estimated theory of proxy-EROEI calculation.

Going forward, I'll look at both solar and wind, and I'll present a survey of traditional EROEI calculations as well as proxy calculations based on the price-estimated model. If readers have any thoughts on other proxy-methodologies to use (or how to make the asymptote or worker-year methods work), please let me know.

Thoughts on Rick "Duncan" Strandlof

2009-06-11T18:20:00.000-06:00

A little current-affairs bit that seems worth interrupting my Renewables Hump series (still hope to get a new post in the series up Monday):

I was on vacation from June 4-10, and had the chance to read the paper edition of the New York Times cover to cover each day. I was amused to see an article on a Colorado veterans advocate named Rick Duncan (here's a CNN article with no pay-wall). Turns out that Mr. Duncan, actually Mr. Strandlof, was a fraud--albeit a very successful and high profile one.

About two months ago I had lunch with Mr. Strandlof and LtCol John Flerlage (running for Congress in Colorado's 6th district, and certainly not a fraud). Ducan/Strandlof set up the meeting with the intent that I help LtCol Flerlage develop his energy and energy geopolitics platform. While I didn't speak with Strandlof for more than a minute or two, he seemed very sincere and interested--the same qualities, I'm sure, that brought him to a position of influence in Colorado politics.

While I disagree with Strandlof's fraud, my only first-hand impression of him was that he was doing important work. I won't profess that I understand what was going on in his head--we have more than enough media personalities who will happily discuss that without any real insight. What I can say is this: as a veteran, and as someone who worked (though very briefly) with Strandlof, I don't feel in any way hurt by his actions. Other than my assumption that the veterans energy policy conference he was setting up won't materialize as a result of his lies, his brief legacy is more likely to be increased awareness of veterans issues--something I really can't argue with.

The Renewables Hump 4: EROEI Issues

2009-06-08T01:29:00.002-06:00

As discussed in the last post in this series, the energy return on energy invested in renewable sources of energy will be a critical measure of whether it is possible to transition on a large scale from a fossil-fuel powered economy, or whether a global "powerdown" is eventually inevitable. If EROEI, the net-energy ratio of a renewable energy source, is high--say 40:1--then it should be possible to rapidly transition our fossil-fuel driven economy to a renewable energy base, and to support ongoing economic growth that requires ever more energy. If this ratio, however, is low--say 4:1--then at a minimum a transition to renewable energy will be extremely challenging, and may be effectively impossible. As a result, the actual EROEI value of the various renewable energy options available to us is plainly critical. There are lots of measures, lots of studies, and lots of figures floated about for the EROEI value of solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, etc. There is not, however, a universally accepted methodology for calculating EROEI. In fact, I don't think it's a stretch to say that EROEI figures are more likely to be marketing copy intended to secure venture capital than the result of rigorous inquiry.

In my opinion, understanding the reality of our society's ability to transition to a renewable energy basis for our economy is one of, if not THE most important issue to be resolved. If this transition is a realistic possibility, then it should be our society's primary and immediate focus. In addition, improving our understanding of just how realistic such a societal transition is will help us understand the necessary rate of investment in renewables, as well as the nature and degree of the challenges to be accomplished. If it is not realistic, then we must not waste what little surplus energy we have on a fools errand. In addition, the present understanding that such a transition is unrealistic will allow us to both develop and focus on those societal options that are realistic. Given the importance of accurate EROEI calculations, this post will discuss the current methodology issues with EROEI calculation and make recommendations for proceeding.

There are two generally used methods for calculating EROEI: process-analysis and input-output analysis. Both basically boil down to a brute-force accounting of energy used in various component processes of producing a renewable energy source, with the key differences being how wide a net is cast in counting energy inputs. For example, is the diesel fuel required to deliver the turbine blades to the installation site accounted for? What about the energy required to build the truck, divided by the percentage of that truck's useful life used in that delivery? What about fraction of the energy required to build the machine tools used in the manufacture of that truck?

This highlights the problem main problem with current system boundary calculations: you can regress these energy inputs infinitely far (e.g. what about the energy used to grow the rice eaten by the merchant marine captain who piloted the ship that delivered the metal ores used in manufacturing the bolts that hold together the turbine tower), and it's fundamentally impossible to use a brute-force accounting methodology to account for all energy inputs. If one hopes to use such a brute force approach (as used in both process-analysis and input-output analysis methods of EROEI calculation), then one must draw an artificial boundary for what is counted, and what is not. Is it acceptable to artificially constrain the accounted system? Clearly any artificial system boundary results in an artificially high EROEI, but how artificially high? Does this long-tail of non-accounted-for system inputs make the resulting EROEI figure 1% too high? 10%? 100%? 10 times too high? It's easy to dismiss, but how do we know if we are completely ignoring these long-tail energy inputs? I think there's great cause for concern that our EROEI is significantly over-estimated. For example, in a paper by Prof. Cutler Cleveland and others, the EROEI of wind-power is assessed by looking at over 100 separate EROEI studies. These studies are broken down into process-analysis and input-output methodologies. Prof. Cleveland notes that process-analysis generally draws a tighter system boundary than input-output analysis--that is, it counts fewer inputs. In that survey, the process-analysis EROEI measurements for wind average 24:1, and the input-output measurements average 12:1. That's a 100% difference based on where the artificial system boundary is drawn. In light of that significant difference, how can we be sure that a truly inclusive system boundary wouldn't result in a further 100% (or more) decrease in the measured EROEI? The take-away here is that we simply can't trust the accuracy of currently available EROEI calculations. Further, it seems unreasonable to place any credence in any brute-force (e.g process-analysis or input-output analysis) approach to EROEI calculation.

How can we get around the accounting difficulties and arrive at an accurate EROEI calculation--a calculation that can do more than just provide a comparison between renewables, and can actually provide a self-contained assessment of whether a given technology can facilitate a societal energy-transition? Odum has proposed what he calls an "Emergy" measurement that intends to account for a true EROEI measurement. However, while Odum recognizes the importance of an inclusive calculation, Odum's methodology does nothing to address these accounting issues, and the end result is still a brute-force estimate that suffers from the same methodological failings as traditional EROEI calculations (even if it tends to arrive at lower EROEI figures).

Rather than a brute-force approach that literally attempts to count all the energy inputs, I think it will be necessary to use a proxy to calculate "true" EROEI. One methodology that I've proposed for this task is to use price as a proxy for EROEI. I'll discuss briefly the theory of how this would work, as well as the clear problems with this approach.

It always struck me as fishy that various EROEI claims (especially for wind) result in an energy payback time of less than a year. In other words, these figures suggest that it would only take a few months to pay back all the energy required to build a wind turbine, and then that wind turbine would go on generating electricity for decades more. Why, then, didn't we already transition the vast majority of our energy base to wind if it's so efficient? The answer is that the financial payback isn't nearly so rosy. What accounts for the difference between the rapid energy payback (only months) and the much longer financial payback (often an order of magnitude or more longer)? Intuitively, it seems that at least part of the answer is that the EROEI wasn't accounting for many inputs that were counted in the financial analysis. For example, the financial analysis accounted for the high salaries--derivatives of the long years of training--that must be paid to the engineers, the financiers, the technicians, the managers, the materials scientists, etc. that are involved in the production of a wind turbine. These long years of education certainly represent an energy input, but aren't accounted for in either process-analysis or input-output analysis EROEI calculations. Similarly, the cost of raw materials represents, at least in theory, the full spectrum of energy, machinery, personnel, and support systems needed to extract, refine, transport, and market it--a great deal of which lies outside the traditional artificial system boundaries drawn in traditional EROEI calculations. It seemed to me that the financial cost of a renewable was a better proxy for the energy inputs to that renewable than were any of the accepted EROEI calculation methodologies. This is the core of what I've called "price-estimated EROEI," which uses financial cost as a proxy for energy cost. The basic calculation assumes that the entire cost of a renewable is made up--eventually, if one regresses far enough--by energy, so divides that cost by an average energy cost to arrive at the energy input, and then compares that as a ratio to the amount of energy the renewable will produce over its lifetime. Not surprisingly, this form of calculation tends to produce a far lower EROEI than any of the accepted EROEI methodologies.

Of course, there are acknowledged flaws with this price-estimated EROEI methodology. Just to name a few, it's difficult to account for the differing values of the various types of input energies and the resulting output energy; there are market distortions, tax-incentive distortions, geopolitical distortions, etc. That said, I think this type of proxy calculation at least directly addresses the need to calculate a truly inclusive EROEI, and may well be much closer to the "truth" of the required energy inputs than any traditional methodology.

In the next two post I'll address two other potential methods for measuring "true" EROEI: asymptote location and worker-year calculation (as suggested by Neil Howes). Then, I'll look at the EROEI of wind power and solar power from both traditional and proxy methods of calculation.

The Renewables Hump 3: The Target

2009-06-01T03:12:00.000-06:00

In he last post in this series, I discussed the criticality of accurately measuring EROEI of potential alternative energy technologies. If the EROEI of a renewable energy is high enough, then a relatively small initial investment of energy can lead to the rapid scale-up of renewable generation by bootstrapping its own energy production to finance (in energy terms) its own growth. However, if EROEI is too low, then the amount of energy that society must invest to meet a renewable target would be so great as to be effectively impracticable (because it would cause sufficient energy price spikes as to threaten so much immediate economic damage as to be politically impossible).

Before proceeding with this discussion of EROEI, I thought it would be worth defining what this target for a renewable transition actually looks like:

First, it's important to recognize that there are a variety of possible targets. Some include: a general transition target (either total transition to renewables, or transition to some arbitrary %), a peak-oil mitigation target, a peak fossil-fuel mitigation target, and a climate change mitigation target. All have differences and similarities. Clearly, its one can define a "target" that is plainly achievable, as can one define a "target" that simply can't be done (e.g. 100% transition in 5 years). As such, the definition of "transition target" represents an easily manipulable variable in any discussion of renewables transition. If two people or organizations don't recognize the same target, they'll be constantly talking past each other in discussing renewables and the practicality of transition. While I certainly don't think that I'll be able to convince all parties to adopt a unified transition target in this blog post, I do plan to argue for a threshold target that, in my opinion, represents a minimum rate of transition to keep the "viridian vision" of a renewable future possible: a peak oil mitigation target.

So, it seems clear that a renewable energy transition will need to, at a minimum, replace the decline in oil production with renewable energy generation. I'll elaborate on why I draw this line in the sand below, but in brief the viridian vision (by which I mean a general continuation of our current neo-liberal, capitalist/market-socialist civilizational structure into the distant future by leveraging technological advances and a transition to a renewable energy base and "green" economic foundation) requires that we maintain generally the same level of present energy consumption into the foreseeable future.

Why this focus on the "viridian vision"? I think my personal biases are clear: I'm very skeptical about the practicality of viridian vision--to be more plain, I don't think it's realistic, and further I think it's the modern opiate of the masses when it comes to confronting current energy issues. That said, I think anyone who refuses to recognize that both 1) the viridian may be possible, and that 2) it may be fundamentally impossible is taking a faith-based and irrational position. I don't want anyone to accuse me of hiding the ball as this series progresses--my own studies to date suggest that the renewables transition necessary to fuel the viridian vision is most likely not realistic, and my purpose in this series is to build an argument to this effect. I'm not trying to be pessimistic. Rather, I'm trying to prevent a waste of effort, focus, and our limited (and dwindling) supply of surplus energy on an epochal folly. For lack of a better analogy, it's a bit like our childhood fantasies: at some point, the little league baseball player needs to give up on the dream of becoming a star professional athlete and focus on a more realistic plan for the future. Sure, for any given kid it's a possibility to become the next big star, but it would be folly to advise all of them to pursue that dream at all expense.

It's also important to point out the obvious, that there are significant differences between the energy produced by renewable technologies (that, for our purposes, produce electricity) and the energy lost by declining oil production. In general terms, in order to use the electric energy produced by renewables to replace oil, there will be an additional energy cost required to transition the energy-consuming infrastructure to utilize electricity rather than oil. This will increase the overall amount of energy required to affect this transition. For the time being, I'll ignore this additional cost--the result is that my estimates will be more conservative than an estimate that would account for these additional transition demands.

One key argument in favor of the viridian vision is that we can mitigate peak oil with increases in efficiency and energy conservation. These arguments generally don't, however, address how we're going to meet the energy demands of 1) a growing population, and 2) a huge third-world population that wants to live at Western standards of energy consumption. The more optimistic population estimates show the Earth's population peaking at 8.3 billion, and more pessimistic estimates show population peaks between 9 and 13 billion. It's important to point out that may population estimates reason that population will stabilize--and then decline--because of the effect of bringing the standard of living of the world's poor closer to Western standards. Will the energy pressures presented by population growth and efforts to improve living standards roughly balance out any improvements in efficiency and conservation? I think so. In fact, I think that this is overly optimistic, and that demographic pressures will more than eat up any energy savings from efficiency and conservation. For this reason, I think that we must increase renewable generation capacity at the same rate that oil production declines--we can't count on efficiency and conservation to make up any of this decline.

Additionally, any renewables transition that attempts to mitigate peak oil must cope with the disparity between effective ramp-up rates and effective oil decline rates. It's nothing more than a simple issue of math: if you use a post-peak decline rate of 5% for oil decline, then that works out to about 4.4 million barrels per day of decline per year, gradually decreasing over time. Conversely, because the current renewable generation base is so small (excluding hydropower, which can't be easily ramped up), even a 100% per year increase in renewable generation comes nowhere close to mitigating this 4.4 million barrel per day decline in the early years. At some point, a 100% annual increase in renewable generation overtakes the declining annual oil production decline figure, but there is a significant gap, especially if we are currently at or very near peak oil. For this reason, we can't necessarily look at the rate of increase of renewables generation over a 20 or 30 year window, because this long-term view alone may overlook a very significant energy gap. It's possible that this gap can be filled with fossil alternatives that are not yet at peak--specifically coal and gas--but that's probably the best we can expect from such fossil alternatives given that they are already experiencing significant EROEI declines (and cost increases) and that their climate consequences may be incompatible with the viridian vision...

All of these values--renewable generation, population growth, conservation, efficiency--are arbitrary decisions. There are simply too many variables to produce a single, agreed set of assumptions on which to base a target estimate. Here, my goal is simply to make my assumptions (and their rationale) clear so that others can question them and change them if they wish. Ultimately, I'll continue with this Renewables Hump series using this peak oil mitigation transition target outlined below. If others have alternative targets, it should be relatively simple to apply the remainder of this series to those different targets...

Numbers:

In looking at these figures, I'm choosing to ignore hydropower, which has a current generation capacity of approximately 800 GW. My rationale is that hydropower is largely location constrained, and is not scalable in the way that other renewables (especially wind and solar) are. For example, only about 10 GW of hydropower were added in 2008. Compare this to a rough doubling in wind generation capacity.

The world consumes roughly 500 Quads per year (Quadrillion BTUs) from all energy sources. Of this roughly 186 Quads come from oil consumption. If you accept a post-peak decline rate of 5% per year, then that represents a decline of 9.3 Quads per year. 9.3 Quads equates to roughly 102.3 GW-years, or 896,000 GWh. To round that off, let's call it 100 GW-years, or 900,000 GW-hours. That's how much new renewable generation must be added each year going forward. That's the transition target. How does that compare with current renewable generation rates?

The current global installed (nameplate) solar capacity is about 15 GW, including about 5.5 GW added in 2008. That works out to roughly 1 GW-year of solar generation capacity added in 2008. One EIA study estimates that, under an "aggressive" growth scenario, total all sources of solar power could displace a total of 22 Quads of fossil fuel consumption by 2050 (that's the total from present to 2050, to an annual rate). Clearly this rate of transition is woefully insufficient to mitigate peak oil.

At the end of 2008, global (nameplate) wind generation capacity was 121 GW. That works out to roughly 42 GW-years of total global wind generation, of which 35 GW, or about 12 GW-years of wind generation was added in 2008. Combining solar and wind, we added about 13 GW-years of renewable generation capacity in 2008. That's a bit over 10% of the rate at which we'll need to add new renewable capacity each year just to compensate for a 5% global oil production decline rate (not to mention future natural gas decline, coal decline, etc.). There are two take-aways from this: 1) the current rate at which we are increasing renewable energy generation is an order of magnitude lower than that necessary to mitigate peak oil, and 2) the amount of energy invested in renewable energy projects at present does not pose the kind of energy drain that will be presented by investment sufficient to mitigate peak oil.

On this last point, mitigating a decline of 4.4 million barrels of oil per day each year with new renewable generation capacity will impose a significant up-front energy cost. If the energy payback time is 1 year for the mitigating renewable source, and this represents a 90% increase in current renewable energy investment, then we need to invest the equivalent of an additional 3.96 million barrels of oil each day to facilitate the transition. That's like adding another half of China to global demand, and that 1-year payback time assumes an EROEI of 40:1 on a 40-year generating life. If the energy payback time is 2 years (or a 20:1 EROEI) then you can add another full China to global demand. If it's 10 years (an EROEi of 4:1), then go ahead and add 5 Chinas. You can see where this is going--getting an accurate measure of EROEI, and properly understanding the mechanics of scalability, are critical before we can determine if it's possible to mitigate peak oil with renewables...

The Renewables Hump 2: Digging Out of a Hole

2009-05-18T02:57:00.001-06:00

In the first post in this series, I introduced the general notion that renewable energy requires an up-front investment of energy, and that this may dramatically impact our ability to transition to a renewable-energy economy because the transition effort will initially exacerbate the very energy scarcity that is its impetus. Beyond this general notion that the transition to renewables first requires exacerbating our current energy scarcity, the time that it takes a renewable source of energy to return the up-front energy invested in it becomes especially critical. Here’s a quick example (for the simplicity of these examples, I'm assuming that 100% of energy requirement is up-front with no maintenance requirement):

Let’s say you want to transition 1 million Barrels of Oil Equivalent per year (mBOE/y) of current global energy to a renewable source this year. If this renewable source (a concentrating solar power plant, for example), has an EROEI of 20:1, and will generate for the full-power equivalent of 40 years, then it will take roughly 2 years for the solar plant to return the energy invested in it. Over the course of 40 years it will generate 40 mBOE, and it will take the equivalent of 2 mBOE of energy invested up-front to enter operation. While this return-on-investment seems excellent, this up front investment of 2 mBOE is still very significant—it is an increase in global energy consumption roughly equal to the decrease caused by the current economic crisis—but the reward of a mBOE of renewable generation capacity every year for the next 40 years seem well worth the price. With this kind of EROEI, a transition to a renewable energy economy seems feasible, and it may be possible to affect such a transition quite quickly.

What happens if the EROEI of that renewable is actually only 4:1? Now it takes 10 mBOE to bring this renewable capacity into operation, and you won’t pay this back for ten years. In the meantime, where are we going to find an extra 10 mBOE beyond what we currently need to fuel our economy? The answer is that, of course, we won’t. We’ll instead reallocate our existing energy supply, displacing the most highly elastic 10 mBOE in demand. Prices will spike. And this is only to create 1 mBOE of renewable capacity each year. That’s enough to compensate for a decline rate of about 1.2% in global oil production—far lower than most post-peak projections, and less than ½ of 1% of total global energy use. Of course, renewables with an EROEI below 4:1 would present an even less feasible scenario.

This is an extremely simplistic example intended only to introduce the problem (more detailed examples will follow), but it highlights two issues:

First, the type of net-energy barriers illustrated by these examples only become an issue when significant amounts of renewable capacity are in the pipeline at once. If we continue to bring insignificant amounts of renewable energy online each year (compared to what will be needed to affect a transition within a few decades, or to keep pace with fossil-energy descent), then the impact of the up-front energy investment will be similarly insignificant. This may seem like a tautology, but it explains one important point: this “renewables hump” is a novel issue lurking below the surface of current discussion precisely because we have not yet encountered it with current renewable energy projects—and we won’t until we begin a serious effort to transition to renewables. At that point, failure to understand this problem may be catastrophic.

Second, EROEI--how we measure it, and what its true value is for a given technology--is critical to the feasibility of any transition to renewable energy. If EROEI is high enough, then it is possible to rapidly transition to renewable energy sources and get ahead of the peak oil (and peak fossil fuels in general) decline curve, especially because renewables will soon be able to provide enough energy to bootstrap their own production to a significant degree. However, lower EROEI values will make transition increasingly challenging, and below some threshold a low net-energy value will render transition entirely impracticable.

In order to facilitate a transition of our civilization to renewable energy, renewables must offer more than a high EROEI ratio alone. Time to pay back energy invested also becomes critical, as does generation/production life after payback—these figures must be considered separately and in unison. Consider, for example, the difference between two renewable sources, both with an EROEI of 5:1, but one with a lifespan of 10 years and another with a lifespan of 50 years. The 10-year option may appear inferior, but it represents a payback time of only 2 years—this means that the renewable can begin to bootstrap the energy for its replacement at a much more rapid pace, making it far more scaleable from a net-energy perspective. Conversely, the 50-year option won’t pay back its initial investment for 10 years, making it much more difficult to scale rapidly enough to address time-critical issues such as peak oil without an increased (and likely impractical) up-front investment of energy. To consider the mechanics of transitioning to renewable energy, we must be aware of all these measures: EROEI ratio, payback time, production/generation lifespan.

Now that the problem has been more clearly defined, the future course of this series will make more sense. In the next post I will look at problems in EROEI measurement methodology, and discuss both the potential to address system-boundary issues and the challenges posed by our inability to precisely measure EROEI. In the following two posts, I will analyze the possible EROEI measures for current renewable energy options presented by solar and wind energy. I will also discuss the transition potential presented by these technologies. If I have time, I will also look at the EROEI for geothermal, tidal, nuclear (with a discussion of the issue that fission reactors are non-renewable, and that so-called "fast-breeder" reactors have yet to be proven), and biofuels. More likely, however, I will skip these later renewable options for the moment to continue with this series as a whole, and revisit them individually at a later date...

The Renewables Hump 1: Introduction

2009-05-11T02:16:00.001-06:00

This post is the first in a series on structural problems of transitioning to renewable energy. Broadly labeled “The Renewables Hump,” this series will address net energy, scalability, bootstrapping, and time-frame considerations involved in such a transition.

The requirement (and problem) of up-front investment.

To the extent that America (and the world in general) is concerned with energy scarcity at all, there is a pervasive belief that, over the coming decades, we will overcome these challenges by gradually transitioning to a renewable-energy economy. We know that fossil fuels won’t last forever. We know that it is possible to generate renewable energy from sources such as the sun, the wind, waves, and geothermal heat. And then, as a civilization, we tend make a huge leap, arriving at what has largely become an article of faith: we will transition to these renewables as the basis of our future civilization.

How?

How will we prioritize this transition among competing economic desires? How will we pay for it, both in terms of financing and the up-front energy cost of most renewables? How do our assumptions about the availability of fossil fuels going forward affect this transition? Does renewable energy technology provide sufficient net-energy returns to make this transition practical? How will this transition be organized and implemented?

There are many answers to these (often unasked) questions: the market will take care of it, government subsidies and incentives will pave the path, technology will improve, etc. These are all fine theories, but it is important that we must recognize them as exactly that: possible, not certain, outcomes. The purpose of this series is to examine the actual process of transition. Specifically, I hope to take a system-wide perspective to identify systemic choke-points and externalities that may result from efforts to take existing renewable energy programs and technologies—currently comprising only a very small portion of our civilization’s energy production—and scale them up to meet the majority of our global energy needs.

One focus will be on the systemic impacts and cascading effects of one simple reality: renewable energy sources tend to require an up-front investment of energy, and then pay-back that investment (plus, hopefully, a significant surplus) over a period of time.

Figure 1: A breakdown of the up-front, maintenance, and marginal cost of generating electricity from a variety of sources. This cost is a rough proxy for the amount of energy required at each stage.

The simple fact of the matter is that renewables, much more so than most fossil-fuel based modes of energy production, require primarily up-front investment (of both money and energy—to the extent that we should consider there to be any real difference between the two).

So what? Here’s the quick outline of why this matters: We are currently in a climate of energy scarcity, and this will likely get worse in the future. If you want to increase the amount of energy derived from renewable sources (and thereby help to ameliorate the energy scarcity), you need to first exacerbate that scarcity to use some of our available energy as an up-front investment in these new renewables.

It's also worth addressing one concern raised previously on this point by readers: the difference between electricity generation and the overall energy requirements of our civilization. Right now, electricity is only a portion of the total energy consumed by our civilization. And of that portion, the majority is generated by burning fossil fuels like coal, and, arguably, nuclear. However, the renewables that are generally seen as the key to our society's energy transition (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) all produce electricity. This electricity can be used to substitute for liquid fuels consumption (either directly through electric motors and heating or indirectly through conversion to hydrogen, etc.). In a post-peak fossil fuel scenario, a continuation of our society's energy consumption can only be maintained by substituting for the declining production of fossil fuels (first oil, then gas, then coal and fissile-materials used in nuclear energy, probably roughly in that order). Shortfalls in fossil fuel production can be substituted with electricity (or a derivative such as hydrogen) or biofuels.

Biofuels have demonstrated very poor EROEI, have a nasty habit to conflict with food production, are highly susceptible to weather changes (whether or not caused by global warming), and appear highly dependent on soil fertility that is currently maintained by massive inputs of iNPK fertilizers that will themselves become a serious resource constraint in the future. The prospects for transitioning the majority of global energy use to a "sustainable" biofuels foundation are, in my opinion, unlikely at best, catastrophic at worst. However, I will address this option toward the end of this series.

Renewable electricity generation, however, shows more promise, at least superficially. Most serious policy discussions, environmental groups, and viridians (what's I've elsewhere called "Roddenberrys"--those who think the continuation of our current civilizational trajectory is possible through green technology) are counting on the use of renewable electricity generation to 1) replace fossil fuel derived electricity, and 2) provide a renewable, green source of energy to substitute for increasing portions of all other current energy consumption (e.g. liquid fuels). My main focus will be on examining the practicality of this path.

So, returning to the question posed above, because of the up-front investment required by renewable energy options, if you want to increase the amount of energy derived from renewable sources (and thereby help to ameliorate the energy scarcity), you need to first exacerbate that scarcity to use some of our available energy as an up-front investment in these new renewables. How much such investment, how much exacerbation of current energy scarcity, is practical? Whether or not this amount of additional energy draw is practical is largely a factor of how much is needed to affect any significant degree of transition within the necessary timeframe (e.g. to keep pace with fossil fuel decline rates). How much up-front energy investment is needed, I will show, is a factor of the true EROEI of these renewable technologies and the mechanics of net-energy scalability. Those will be the topics of the next several posts in this series...

Blog Plans

2009-05-04T02:32:00.000-06:00

Last week I wrote that the theme of this blog was to write about an improved set of operating instructions for human society. Rather than specifically reviewing my successes and failures in pursuing this goal, I'll outline my post plans for the coming year and briefly explain why I'll cover each topic. Hopefully a composite will emerge that outlines the future direction of this blog.

1. The Renewables Hump. In this series, I'll be discussing what I've referred to as the "bootstrapping problem" elsewhere. Briefly, it takes an up-front energy investment to build renewable energy generation capacity. It takes X amount of energy to build a 5 MW wind turbine, for example, and it will take Y years of that turbine in operation to pay back that up-front cost. So what? This means that we need a significant energy surplus to invest now if we hope to transition our fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy. There are two repercussions of this. First, the window of opportunity to make this transition is rapidly closing as we pass peak oil. Second, the true EROEI of renewable energy generation is critically important as a result. If the EROEI of photovoltaics, for example, is advertised as 15:1, but is actually 2:1 (I've argued in the past that it may be lower than 1:1), then the available transition window is dramatically smaller than we have been led to believe--possibly even closed. In my mind, we need to address this question immediately so that we can figure out if it's worth pursuing the promise of a green-tech future or if we need to instead pursue a more conservative, low-tech vision of the future...

2. The international law of polar resources. I anticipate this will become in increasingly important geopolitical flashpoint over the next decade: who owns arctic and antarctic oil and gas, what is the existing international law precedent, an what are the practical (political, economic, and military) realities of potential ownership disputes. It will also be an excellent platform to discuss the role of an evolving Nation-State system on future geopolitics.

3. Revisit my ongoing writing on energy geopolitics in light of the current economic recession and longer-term catabolic collapse. How will the current recession and longer term cycles impact my existing theory of geopolitical loops in oil production disruption?

4. Green capitalism and religion--is salvation delusion or distortion of an authentic message. I'm very concerned about the sales pitch of the "green" industry: we can all continue our business as usual if we just screw in a different light bulb, or if we wear organic cotton clothing. But there's clearly some authentic message in the "green movement." It strikes me that this is oddly analogous to the historical development of Christianity (and possibly other religions--I'm just beginning this line of thought): Read the actual words of Jesus, and then look at the actions of Christians, and especially Christian states. Listen to how a camel will more easily pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man will enter the kingdom of heaven--not exactly representative of Christianity's actions from a position of power. Seems to me quite a bit like the basic premise of sustainability and "green" economics compared to the "green capitalism" we see in practice...

5. Charting the solution space: I've written about this before, and won't belabor this here, but the process for optimal decision making in light of imperfect information and unknowable future outcomes will be critical. We can't know exactly how the future will unfold, but we can assign probabilities to certain divergent possibilities and devise an optimal strategy for proceeding in light of this uncertainty.

6. Three paths to sustainability: enlightenment, control, and erosion. It seems to me that we have three possible paths to a truly sustainable society. First, we can all act in an enlightened manner--true and universal voluntary sustainability. Is this possible? Second, if this goal of universal enlightened action is impractical (hmmm...), then we can achieve it through the imposition of top-down control. Do we want to live in this kind of a society (and do we have an alternative)? Third, we can fail to attain sustainability proactively, and the inevitable (?) result will be an erosion of our ecological support structure to the point where society collapses to a point where, even operating at maximal capacity, we will be operating at an involuntarily minimalist level of subsistence--which would quite likely also be "sustainable." Is there a fourth option?

7. Collapse surfing: lifeboats, monasteries, and pirates. In light of the (proposed?) reality (discussed in #6, above) that we likely won't be able to achieve voluntary, proactive, and "true" sustainability, what are the options for selective groups/sects/individuals to build sustainability? Can we realistically build "lifeboats"--exemplar communities that will help to pull others up to true sustainability when it becomes obvious to the masses that drastic action is necessary? Are we better off building "monasteries"--similar to lifeboats, but walled off from the profane world until such time as they can open their gates ad re-colonize the destroyed terrain around them? For what it's worth, "walled gardens" may be more appropriate--both in the computer architecture sense and the "Alamut" sense... What about pirates: piracy was a symptom of a "non-closed map" in the past, and will likely become one (in many conceptually-related modes) with increasing frequency in the future. I'm not specifically referring to Somalis or swashbucklers here, but rather opportunists of all stripes that exploit the growing "edge" in the map--especially the formerly (nearly) closed map of the Nation-State system.

8. Reviews. I may also write a series of reviews on the works of a few authors and theorists I've considered highly influential: Hakim Bey (reference the map discussions above), Aldous Huxley (consider "Brave New World" and "Island" as book ends to our future options), Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Quinn, and--yes--even James Bond as Ian Fleming's alchemical tale of the struggle between genetic and memetic ontogeny in human civilization (that one may take a bit of explaining!).

Suggestions are always welcome...

System of Future Planning, Part II.

2009-04-27T01:42:00.000-06:00

My post from two weeks ago generated some excellent feedback, and unfortunately it came exactly at a time that I had to stop paying attention to this blog to focus solely on a trial. My apologies, but hopefully this post will get me back on track. In this post, I'll recap the major themes that I have discussed in the several years I have been writing here, and I will also directly address the comments from two weeks ago.

Major Themes:

1. System-analysis of our civilization, focusing on the core themes of Hierarchy and The Problem of Growth, and its symptoms of peak oil, energy geopolitics, and economic "wizardry."

2. Systems-theory in general, and specifically as it informs the inefficiencies of hierarchy, alternate modes of information processing and economic organization, and

2. Philosophy, specifically understanding human ontogeny (how the process of our evolution dictates our current physiological, neurological, and emotional processes) as an input into human systems and as the foundation for individual happiness and fulfillment.

2. Moving forward: addressing the two very separate goals of optimizing the functioning of human civilization and individual human functioning in light of the systems-analysis and human ontogeny "problems."

In reality, this is one unified theme: an attempt to create a set of instructions for operating humans, both as individuals and in groups of all sizes, in light of both internal and external constraints. I think it is inextricably linked to the traditional studies of history, politics, economics, biology, psychology, anthropology, mathematics (specifically game theory), and physics. But in my mind it is so much more than that. The goal is not to improve psychology or anthropology or any of these other discrete disciplines per se, but rather is specifically to generate a synthesis, a meta-theory for humanity. This is essentially the mission of philosophy, but I hesitate to accept the limitations commonly ascribed to philosophy. Perhaps, though, it is accurate to view this goal as similar to the very practical philosophical approaches of, say, Plato in The Republic (though, like Karl Popper, I disagree vehemently with Plato's conclusions...). Here is a case where, perhaps, John Zerzan's more extreme theory of language and symbols shows its strengths: any attempt to label this process, and my goals, is unacceptably limiting. Hopefully this brief explanation has been slightly clearer than mud! Next week I'll take a look at this goal and evaluate what, specifically, has been accomplished and what is left to be accomplished, and set forth a roadmap for what I will address in future posts. For now, though, I'll finish by responding to comments from last week:

Neven commented about the frustration that stems from realizing what could be done, but not yet being able to put these plans into practice. I share this frustration. I certainly don't live in a real-world hamlet economy that I have created for myself--far from it. I think it's important, however, to stress that I am not a "fast-crash" proponent. I fall generally into the "slow-crash" camp--the theory that our economic, political, and social systems will gradually degrade over the next several decades (and longer). I don't think it is necessary to have a self-sufficient farmlet immediately--though if this is something that 1) is realistic for you, and 2) will make you happy, then by all means it sounds like a wonderful plan. I think it is best to use an improved understanding of our civilization and its trajectory to influence every decision that we make in our day-to-day lives, but I don't think it's necessary to quit your job, sell your house, and become a neo-homesteader. Largely I think this because the network that such efforts need to succeed is not yet established. I think we're much better off gradually moving in these directions because this is something that we can potentially do as a group (e.g. everyone). Any "solution" that doesn't include mass transition is essentially a blueprint to build a fortress. That said, I'm not sure that mass transition is possible, and one of the gradual transitions that I am making is to put myself in the position to make a sudden transition when possible and if necessary...

Nick, I agree with your concern that virtual discussions of these topics is just not enough. When I am able to have lengthy discussions in person with large groups (such as at last year's ASPO conference), the payoff is amazing. This year's ASPO conference is in Denver in the Fall--worth considering if you can make the train trip/drive/flight/etc. It's also interesting to hear your observation that many rural communities are already moving in the direction of rhizome without using this as a conscious model. I think we'll see more of this as the global financial and energy systems continue to erode, become less reliable, or simply exact more transaction costs. But I do think that establishing self-sufficiency is something where we need to get out ahead of the curve--if we wait until we're forced to establish self-sufficiency, the results will be at a minimum "expensive," and potentially catastrophic. There are many excellent models for moving toward a higher degree of self-sufficiency (100% is certainly unrealistic and unnecessary in almost all instances). The Transition Towns movement is a great place to start--it has an excellent model for building momentum and consensus in existing towns without everyone understanding the gravity of the situation. Additionally, moving toward scale-free self-sufficiency is a complementary strategy: while 100% self-sufficiency at the individual level is nearly impossible (short of a hunter-gatherer mode of production which cannot support our population levels), I think we can realistically attempt to increase our individual self-sufficiency, our community self-sufficiency, and our regional self-sufficiency by a few percent per year. A good model might be increase personal self-sufficiency each year by 5%, and increase community and regional self-sufficiency each year by 1%?

Eadwacer suggests making more explicit connections between my theories and existing systems models--I agree, and hope to do that in the future.

Jeremy gaiasdaughter, and TH all suggest that, while the mainstream my ignore these issues, that doesn't make them any less important. I have often used the monastery in Dark Ages Europe as an example here: we need to develop individual and community solutions not because they will spread voluntarily at first, but because they will exist as proven solutions to transfer knowledge when people are actively searching for this. Additionally, this highlights how important it is that we not develop one solution, but that we develop many solutions, appropriate for many regions and sets of circumstances.

Lonnie adds that we need a new lexicon to discuss these concepts, and to counter preconceptions. I think that, more than just a new lexicon, we need extant examples of these ideas in action to show directly that they need not conform to any stereotype...

Finally, Theo wrote a well though out response on his blog. I agree with Theo that I have a pessimistic bias--specifically, that I don't think we can continue on our current course indefinitely, and that I foresee a gradual collapse over the next several decades. I disagree with Theo, though, to the extent that he interprets my writing as an unending pessimism--I specifically think that our current civilizational structure is not very compatible with our ontogeny, and that we are actually presented with a golden opportunity to re-cast civilization, post-collapse (or, more accurately, through the long process of collapse) into something that is more compatible with humans and the rest of our planet. While I commend efforts at green capitalism because I think they will ultimately soften and facilitate a transition, I disagree with Theo that green capitalism, or a green market-state system, can "save" us from the Problem of Growth. Turning briefly to Robert Anton Wilson, I understand how Theo sees me as opposed to the basic notion of Wilson's book, but I think I actually agree with the basic premise--simplistically, that humans as individuals can take control of ourselves and our environments with nearly unlimited potential if we properly understand ourselves and our environment--because I separate individual potential and prospects from those of our civilizational structure as a whole. I think Wilson and Leary's "Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension" notion is an artifact of the time they were writing, but that the underlying goal was actually freedom, enlightenment, and fulfillment for individuals--something that I am actually very optimistic about in a rhizome future. To the extent that this is the "real" wealth to which Theo refers, I think the growth-based predicate for "green" capitalism and its failure to address the incompatibility between human ontogeny and hierarchal systems eliminates it as a solution--I think it is ultimately more a case of "greenwashing" as a systemic defense to internal threats to hierarchy, and one that I think will do nothing to make that system fundamentally sustainable...

A System of Future Planning.

2009-04-13T01:16:00.000-06:00

Unlike last week, this post is not about developing a model for decision making (more on that later), but rather my thoughts on the future of this blog. No giant changes in store, I’ve just been thinking about what to write about next, and part way through my thinking I decided it would be best to make this process itself into a post.

In part, that’s because, at a meta-level, the purpose of this blog is as a tool for my own use. This blog serves as a development platform for my own thinking—it forces me to keep thinking in order to meet my self-imposed weekly publishing schedule; it forces me to put my thinking in at least semi-coherent form; it allows me to get feedback from a very interesting, diverse, and intelligent group of people all over the world; and it gives me a platform to engage in dialogue with these and other groups of people in many different contexts (through The Oil Drum, at conferences, by discussions in blogs that I find through links to this site, etc.). All the while, I get at least the occasional feeling that I’m reciprocating by helping others with the same process of intellectual development with which they help me. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it—this is a process that was historically available to only a very select and lucky few who lived in the right place, at the right time, with the right friends: a few elites among medieval religious orders (which reminds me of the prayer "God, give me chastity and give me constancy, but please Lord don't give it to me quite yet), the “moveable feast” of Fin-de-Ciecle Paris, the RAW/Timothy Leary/Hakim Bey network (beginning to show signs of a dispersed and mobile network, but certainly not “open”), Aldous Huxley’s Los Angeles circle, etc. Today it’s available to anyone with access to the internet.

Which leads me to my thoughts on where this blog is going. This starts with what I want from this blog: discussion and exposition of ideas on topics that interest me 1) where I have something original to add and 2) that is important to many individuals if not humanity in general. I don’t want to be a news aggregator—many others are already doing that, and probably much better than I would. Commentary on news items, something I do engage in on occasion, is something I hope to do less of, though there’s a fine line between the analysis of a phenomenon as reflected in several news stories and simple news commentary. What I want to do is write stand-alone essays providing critical analysis from a systems-thinking perspective and provide novel system-oriented proposals for the future. This, of course, can be a bit difficult on a weekly basis, so I will probably increase the practice I’ve used frequently in the past of publishing a series over several weeks to cover a given idea. In the next post is a brief recap of some of the core analyses and proposals I’ve made so far, my thoughts on where these previous ideas need to go next, and in an interim conclusion, a post with a list of ideas I hope to explore in the future. I’m not writing this just to see my thoughts turned into words—there are two goals here: 1) in keeping with the intent of this blog to be a meta-tool for my own thinking, these post force me to compose my thoughts on this topic in a more coherent manner; and 2) to solicit feedback (either via email or in the comments, as usual) on these ideas.

However, before I delve into the details, there’s one more purpose of compiling these lists: to evaluate whether they have done anything, either for my self or for a broader community. I’ll comment more on this later, but have the ideas I’ve previously written about gained any traction? Have they moved me or others to take action that would not have been taken without these posts? Have they spurred anyone else to thoughts that have had an impact? And, of course, my future writing plans must be influenced by these answers. My goal, to the extent that this blog is a tool for my own thinking, is to impact my own life. I’m increasingly of the opinion that “we” as a society will not take the steps necessary to “solve” our problems, so is there any broader value to my writing, or am I just entertaining myself while shaping my own plans? Is there value in shaping the plans of others even though they will never constitute the mainstream or the power elite? Should I, in fact, with it no other way (as I tend to think)? What, specifically, is the broader value of this blog (which, it seems, must be one of my future topics…)?

Your thoughts are not just permitted (the comments are always open), but encouraged. If you have read this blog for one day or for years, I'd love to hear what you think of it, if it has been of value, if I'm drifting off course, and what that course should be. Or even if you just have topic suggestions. As always, I take comments and emails at jsvail@gmail.com and do my best to respond directly to all (though last week's 34 was a bit overwhelming, especially since I'm preparing for trial this week)...