Just to be clear: oil is primarily a transportation fuel, and only rarely used to make electricity. So you should probably be comparing more to coal and natural gas. It is a complex question, what it would take to fully or near-fully electrify all energy consumption/replace fossil fuels in electricity production/replace oil in transportation. These choices are likely to involve some complex tradeoffs about our civilization’s priorities.
Frankly, there are very few, if any, authorities in any country that are actually even trying to set forth a coherent plan or trajectory, with or without AI and electric vehicles and heat pumps all impacting demand growth trajectories. Those complex choices? They’re being made… not quite blindly, but with an extremely strong status-quo bias even when the status quo is very obviously not maintainable, or outright incoherent. Often, you have (I’m exaggerating a bit but not much) some people screaming that something is impossible to achieve when it’s already been done a dozen times in other places, and other people screaming that if we don’t do [unnecessarily aggressive and hard version of a solution] immediately then we’re all going to die, when that is also obviously untrue. In the middle are the Very Serious People who are unwilling to make large changes to a system that seems to work well enough for now, and will continue to do so until it’s no longer their responsibility, regardless of whether the next group in charge will still have enough time to implement any sufficient solutions.
Edit to add: The state of our civilization obviously has a lot of path dependence, but ultimately replacing fossil fuels is an economic problem mediated by technological progress and infrastructural choices (including policy).
If the question is whether we will navigate the situation sufficiently skillfully… I don’t know, but a lot of people are putting in a lot of effort to make that more likely.
If the question is whether we can, in principle, solve this problem, then trivially yes. The world’s renewable energy resources, if you could tap all of them, include around 170k TW of solar, 424 TW of wind, 47 TW of geothermal. Estimates of extractable nuclear fuel suggest stored energy of about 350 PWh (electricity from uranium, not incuding heat or the use of breeder reactors) and maybe a hundred times that from thorium if we decide to invest in that route. I don’t have a good estimate on total resource if we figure out practical use of fusion but it should be several OOMs higher. Human total primary energy use today is <20 TW.
Right, now when you said that there are people putting in a lot of effort to make it more likely, who are you referring to exactly? I’m trying to wean myself off of doomers and that camp is very adamant that no one is doing anything useful and any solutions either only make the problem worse or are impossible to implement ( as you’ve mentioned)
This is not to say that Doomers are necessarily 100% right, I’m just asking who they could be missing.
So, first off, keep in mind that something like 16 million people globally work in jobs related to renewable energy, including 7 million in solar. So I can point out some examples and statistics but this is not a niche set of people/groups. And even the places that are best-in-class on one aspect or another rarely celebrate their progress enough (IMO) and focus on the remaining problems that they still need to be addressing. Also, for the time being, it would, legitimately, still be unrealistically hard and expensive to run a 100% renewables grid without a lot of hydro or geothermal (look at the list of countries with the highest renewables penetration, and this is very obvious). A lot of the ‘Doomers,’ as you call them, are doing some combination of denying the likelihood of continued advances, ignoring or not noticing the progress already made, or playing up the fear and risk for some perceived advantage.
First, there’s the aggregate impact of decades of innovation and policy: Last year, 20% of new cars globally were electric. The world added 632 GW of (nameplate capacity) electricity generation, of which on 47GW was non-renewable, and 3⁄4 of the rest was solar, because solar-during-the-day has been the cheapest electricity in almost all parts of the world, even unsubsidized, for 5-10 yrs. (Due to capacity factor considerations, this means somewhere around 70-80% of total net new electricity generation was renewable). China alone claims to have something like 1TW/yr solar panel manufacturing capacity, so it’s not like this is anywhere near an upper bound on how fast we can go. Installations are generally limited by long backlogs in grid interconnection queues.
Second, the impact of improved regulations: In Australia, streamlined permitting and installation rules mean home solar with batteries cost less than half what they cost in the US, 1⁄3 of homes have solar there and nationally solar provides ~20% of power. Hawaii has similar stats for solar, but uses a lot of oil for much of the rest. Both places are at the forefront of adopting improved grid management (smart grid) tools to do this without destabilizing the grid.
The UK, for all its challenges, has an unusually sophisticated market for electricity, particularly in the context of ancillary services. More than anywhere else I know, individuals and businesses can profit from providing energy storage and load shifting capacity to the grid in various ways.
It’s not a coincidence that these leaders are all islands—these technologies and policies become necessities sooner when you have fewer interconnections with neighbors and fewer total power plants to balance everything.
Right, now one of my main concerns for the future ( among others which I’ll probably share in another post is that we’ll regress to a pre industrial standard of living as purported by limits to growth to happen mid century ( 2030ish-2050ish)
A prediction which was confirmed by Gaya Herrington a few years ago.
A prediction which was confirmed by Gaya Herrington a few years ago.
Having tried to read it, I don’t know if I can even enumerate all the ways I disagree with the approach, the analysis, and the rhetoric being thrown around based on the analysis.
Yes, we might make choices that lead us to that bad of an outcome. That is within our power.
Yes, we could be in a much better position today, and also be richer for it, if we’d made better choices since 1972.
No, I don’t think you can draw the conclusion that we’re headed for a high probability of economic decline or collapse. Not the way papers like that are trying to argue for it.
First, consider that the 2020 paper assumes-as-given that the various scenarios adequately capture the range of possibilities, and that the model used accurately projects forward what the model assumptions would mean in practice. My fundamental problem with this is that it implicitly assumes failure is inevitable. The SW and CT examples don’t lead to collapse, and do assume increasing efficiency of resource use, but neither includes the possibility of substituting renewable resources for non-renewable ones. This was reasonable in 1972, and plausible even in the early 2000s, but is a denial of current physical reality here in the 2020s. The remaining problems to such a transition involve a lot of hard engineering, but achieving such is fundamentally social/political rather than technological. We have a large enough set of plausible pathways and emerging solutions to the critical problems that with adequate investment, enough should pan out to become practical.
Second, relatedly, the original paper and subsequent follow-ups do not try to account for behavioral shifts and substitutions caused by changes in the market prices (relative and absolute) of different resources as some become more scarce. They talk about physical capital diversion as extraction difficulty increases, which is fine, as well as lag times in adaptation, also important, but not what might drive any other kind of shifts. This… seems to me to be the resource equivalent of the lump of labor fallacy. It just assumes that capital extracts non-renewable resources and irreversibly converts them to near-term human welfare, and concludes that making conversion more efficient is insufficient to achieve sustainability. Which is a logically correct deduction, but doesn’t require a study or model to demonstrate; it’s basic physical fact. In practice, as things become scarce, their price goes up, and people look for substitutes. Those substitutes include (at some falling-over-time extraction difficulty) renewable materials and energy sources, whose potential supply does not diminish with time (at least not on any timescale under consideration). They also include changing how and where we live, and what we actually use our resources to make and do. With the right renewable resource technology, it is not clear that resource supply becomes the limiting constraint on humans until the Sun renders the Earth uninhabitable, and possibly not until the heat death of the universe.
Third, the core premise of the 2020 paper is that we’re looking at recent data to figure out which trajectory we’re closest to. That’s great, I’m all in favor. I love using data, simple assumptions, and crude models to investigate these kinds of hard forecasting questions. It does this by simple counting of NRMSD across metrics, which… just seems utterly and obviously inadequate. The metrics are not anywhere near equal in importance for the questions we’re claiming to investigate (“CO2 pollution” is counted as 1, as is “education spending”—these are not the same). The differences between scenarios are mostly quite small (except for SW), many well within their uncertainty thresholds on the data. The paper is honest about this, which is great. But even on its own terms, the two closest matches are BAU2 and CT, which are completely different in their assumptions and implications. The paper seemingly does not even really try to figure out what’s actually going on beyond “We’re clearly not trying to get to SW.” Which is true. We’re not.
So I guess those are the main ones. In 1972 the authors didn’t know what would happen, and made what seems to be an honest, reasonably thorough attempt to evaluate the possibilities they could imagine. Unfortunately they could not imagine a large chunk of what has actually happened since then: Their CT scenario does not account for replacing non-renewable resources with renewable ones. Subsequent updates (including the Herrington 2020 one) do not even try to fix this. That omission is fundamentally why the 1972 paper concluded that an end to growth, with or without collapse, was inevitable. Failure to update on what has actually happened since then is something I can no longer consider to be an honest mistake. It is, at best, intellectually lazy. At worst, a sign of politically or ideologically driven commitment to degrowth regardless of economic and technological options to obviate any need for same.
Just to be clear: oil is primarily a transportation fuel, and only rarely used to make electricity. So you should probably be comparing more to coal and natural gas. It is a complex question, what it would take to fully or near-fully electrify all energy consumption/replace fossil fuels in electricity production/replace oil in transportation. These choices are likely to involve some complex tradeoffs about our civilization’s priorities.
Frankly, there are very few, if any, authorities in any country that are actually even trying to set forth a coherent plan or trajectory, with or without AI and electric vehicles and heat pumps all impacting demand growth trajectories. Those complex choices? They’re being made… not quite blindly, but with an extremely strong status-quo bias even when the status quo is very obviously not maintainable, or outright incoherent. Often, you have (I’m exaggerating a bit but not much) some people screaming that something is impossible to achieve when it’s already been done a dozen times in other places, and other people screaming that if we don’t do [unnecessarily aggressive and hard version of a solution] immediately then we’re all going to die, when that is also obviously untrue. In the middle are the Very Serious People who are unwilling to make large changes to a system that seems to work well enough for now, and will continue to do so until it’s no longer their responsibility, regardless of whether the next group in charge will still have enough time to implement any sufficient solutions.
Edit to add: The state of our civilization obviously has a lot of path dependence, but ultimately replacing fossil fuels is an economic problem mediated by technological progress and infrastructural choices (including policy).
If the question is whether we will navigate the situation sufficiently skillfully… I don’t know, but a lot of people are putting in a lot of effort to make that more likely.
If the question is whether we can, in principle, solve this problem, then trivially yes. The world’s renewable energy resources, if you could tap all of them, include around 170k TW of solar, 424 TW of wind, 47 TW of geothermal. Estimates of extractable nuclear fuel suggest stored energy of about 350 PWh (electricity from uranium, not incuding heat or the use of breeder reactors) and maybe a hundred times that from thorium if we decide to invest in that route. I don’t have a good estimate on total resource if we figure out practical use of fusion but it should be several OOMs higher. Human total primary energy use today is <20 TW.
Right, now when you said that there are people putting in a lot of effort to make it more likely, who are you referring to exactly? I’m trying to wean myself off of doomers and that camp is very adamant that no one is doing anything useful and any solutions either only make the problem worse or are impossible to implement ( as you’ve mentioned)
This is not to say that Doomers are necessarily 100% right, I’m just asking who they could be missing.
So, first off, keep in mind that something like 16 million people globally work in jobs related to renewable energy, including 7 million in solar. So I can point out some examples and statistics but this is not a niche set of people/groups. And even the places that are best-in-class on one aspect or another rarely celebrate their progress enough (IMO) and focus on the remaining problems that they still need to be addressing. Also, for the time being, it would, legitimately, still be unrealistically hard and expensive to run a 100% renewables grid without a lot of hydro or geothermal (look at the list of countries with the highest renewables penetration, and this is very obvious). A lot of the ‘Doomers,’ as you call them, are doing some combination of denying the likelihood of continued advances, ignoring or not noticing the progress already made, or playing up the fear and risk for some perceived advantage.
First, there’s the aggregate impact of decades of innovation and policy: Last year, 20% of new cars globally were electric. The world added 632 GW of (nameplate capacity) electricity generation, of which on 47GW was non-renewable, and 3⁄4 of the rest was solar, because solar-during-the-day has been the cheapest electricity in almost all parts of the world, even unsubsidized, for 5-10 yrs. (Due to capacity factor considerations, this means somewhere around 70-80% of total net new electricity generation was renewable). China alone claims to have something like 1TW/yr solar panel manufacturing capacity, so it’s not like this is anywhere near an upper bound on how fast we can go. Installations are generally limited by long backlogs in grid interconnection queues.
Second, the impact of improved regulations: In Australia, streamlined permitting and installation rules mean home solar with batteries cost less than half what they cost in the US, 1⁄3 of homes have solar there and nationally solar provides ~20% of power. Hawaii has similar stats for solar, but uses a lot of oil for much of the rest. Both places are at the forefront of adopting improved grid management (smart grid) tools to do this without destabilizing the grid.
The UK, for all its challenges, has an unusually sophisticated market for electricity, particularly in the context of ancillary services. More than anywhere else I know, individuals and businesses can profit from providing energy storage and load shifting capacity to the grid in various ways.
It’s not a coincidence that these leaders are all islands—these technologies and policies become necessities sooner when you have fewer interconnections with neighbors and fewer total power plants to balance everything.
Right, now one of my main concerns for the future ( among others which I’ll probably share in another post is that we’ll regress to a pre industrial standard of living as purported by limits to growth to happen mid century ( 2030ish-2050ish)
A prediction which was confirmed by Gaya Herrington a few years ago.
Having tried to read it, I don’t know if I can even enumerate all the ways I disagree with the approach, the analysis, and the rhetoric being thrown around based on the analysis.
Yes, we might make choices that lead us to that bad of an outcome. That is within our power.
Yes, we could be in a much better position today, and also be richer for it, if we’d made better choices since 1972.
No, I don’t think you can draw the conclusion that we’re headed for a high probability of economic decline or collapse. Not the way papers like that are trying to argue for it.
Right, could I ask what exactly you agree and disagree with about her assumptions?
Ok.
First, consider that the 2020 paper assumes-as-given that the various scenarios adequately capture the range of possibilities, and that the model used accurately projects forward what the model assumptions would mean in practice. My fundamental problem with this is that it implicitly assumes failure is inevitable. The SW and CT examples don’t lead to collapse, and do assume increasing efficiency of resource use, but neither includes the possibility of substituting renewable resources for non-renewable ones. This was reasonable in 1972, and plausible even in the early 2000s, but is a denial of current physical reality here in the 2020s. The remaining problems to such a transition involve a lot of hard engineering, but achieving such is fundamentally social/political rather than technological. We have a large enough set of plausible pathways and emerging solutions to the critical problems that with adequate investment, enough should pan out to become practical.
Second, relatedly, the original paper and subsequent follow-ups do not try to account for behavioral shifts and substitutions caused by changes in the market prices (relative and absolute) of different resources as some become more scarce. They talk about physical capital diversion as extraction difficulty increases, which is fine, as well as lag times in adaptation, also important, but not what might drive any other kind of shifts. This… seems to me to be the resource equivalent of the lump of labor fallacy. It just assumes that capital extracts non-renewable resources and irreversibly converts them to near-term human welfare, and concludes that making conversion more efficient is insufficient to achieve sustainability. Which is a logically correct deduction, but doesn’t require a study or model to demonstrate; it’s basic physical fact. In practice, as things become scarce, their price goes up, and people look for substitutes. Those substitutes include (at some falling-over-time extraction difficulty) renewable materials and energy sources, whose potential supply does not diminish with time (at least not on any timescale under consideration). They also include changing how and where we live, and what we actually use our resources to make and do. With the right renewable resource technology, it is not clear that resource supply becomes the limiting constraint on humans until the Sun renders the Earth uninhabitable, and possibly not until the heat death of the universe.
Third, the core premise of the 2020 paper is that we’re looking at recent data to figure out which trajectory we’re closest to. That’s great, I’m all in favor. I love using data, simple assumptions, and crude models to investigate these kinds of hard forecasting questions. It does this by simple counting of NRMSD across metrics, which… just seems utterly and obviously inadequate. The metrics are not anywhere near equal in importance for the questions we’re claiming to investigate (“CO2 pollution” is counted as 1, as is “education spending”—these are not the same). The differences between scenarios are mostly quite small (except for SW), many well within their uncertainty thresholds on the data. The paper is honest about this, which is great. But even on its own terms, the two closest matches are BAU2 and CT, which are completely different in their assumptions and implications. The paper seemingly does not even really try to figure out what’s actually going on beyond “We’re clearly not trying to get to SW.” Which is true. We’re not.
So I guess those are the main ones. In 1972 the authors didn’t know what would happen, and made what seems to be an honest, reasonably thorough attempt to evaluate the possibilities they could imagine. Unfortunately they could not imagine a large chunk of what has actually happened since then: Their CT scenario does not account for replacing non-renewable resources with renewable ones. Subsequent updates (including the Herrington 2020 one) do not even try to fix this. That omission is fundamentally why the 1972 paper concluded that an end to growth, with or without collapse, was inevitable. Failure to update on what has actually happened since then is something I can no longer consider to be an honest mistake. It is, at best, intellectually lazy. At worst, a sign of politically or ideologically driven commitment to degrowth regardless of economic and technological options to obviate any need for same.
I’ll need to go back and reread the 1972 Limits to Growth, but then I’ll try to put something together
thank you