I disagree, however, on the lack of resource limits. There's the absolute amount of the resource, and then there's the effort, time and energy required to get it. For example, Saturn's moon Titan is essentially made of hydrocarbons, but even moving a single barrel of oil from there to here, without considering the weight of the rockets or extraction machinery, would require more energy than can be had from burning the stuff. It has a negative energy return on energy invested.
But before EROEI becomes negative, it becomes quite low. There was an article some time back about shipbreaking in Bangladesh. The authour saw all the workers bashing away at the metal, and saw a large crane sitting idle. "Why don't you use the crane?" he asked the site manager. "They're cheaper than fuel," he said.
Of course, workers in Bangladesh are cheaper than those in the West. So - how expensive does petrol have to be before you get out of your car and walk?
So yes, we have the technology to get heaps of resources. But we're getting them from more and more marginal areas, and it's taking more and more energy to do it. At some point the cost of resources will rise to greater than the cost of labour. I think what you've described in this article will amplify that. The US only graduates several hundred oilfield geologists annually. More marginal oilfields will require more of them. More will go to university to do this, but the universities will charge more for those in-demand degrees, and the oilfield geologists will want higher wages - as will all the technicians and engineers and drill workers and refinery guys and so on and so forth. The cost of resources will rise.
And when resources are expensive, some people end up doing without. And that won't be the parasitic class - or rather, the poor parasites will do without, but the rich parasites will ensure they get some. There is no occasion in history in which the rulers and hangers-on of a starving nation themselves went hungry.
So: resources are finite, become harder to get, and this will amplify the effects of population decline you've described.
I was going to post a similar comment. EF Schumacher, economist and head of the British Coal Board for many years, rightly noted that energy is the Ur resource that all other resource production depends on. If you have enough energy available, you could extract trace elements from sea water and run your society on that. The one resource you can’t do that with, is energy, since using high grade energy to condense low grade energy results in a net loss (as everyone knows, this is why perpetual motion machines are impossible. Some energy is always lost to waste).
You're absolutely right. Low cost energy is the key to everything. So my question is, do we have a technical shortage of low cost energy, or a political shortage of low cost energy?
The consistently moderate oil prices, in spite of millions of barrels of OPEC supply cuts, tells me we aren't even close to reaching technical limitations in cheap hydrocarbon extraction.
But that's a side issue compared to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is literally the almost free infinite energy source of every science fiction story, from a technical perspective. If the political choice has been made to stop the regulatory strangulation of nuclear energy 60 years ago, we could have global modular thorium reactor tech producing all our electricity at a fraction of the current cost. We could be building out that technology today, if the political choice hadn't been made to waste untold trillions building ridiculous solar panels and windmills like 14th century peasants.
With essentially unlimited cheap electricity, electric cars might actually begin to make economic sense. But that's not even the best part. With low cost electricity, we could produce our own synthetic hydrocarbons using hydrogen extracted from seawater and carbon extracted from natural gas or from the atmosphere itself. Those synthetic hydrocarbons, synfuel, can be used just like gasoline or diesel to power existing internal combustion engines. There's no real technical issue with the process, just a cost issue, because electricity is too expensive to make synfuel production competitive with crude oil.
So I would maintain that the only limiting resource here is still human ingenuity and common sense. If we had the good sense 60 years ago to focus on commercializing and building out next-gen nuclear tech, the whole energy system and the global economy could look completely different. And the time to do that was while population growth was rewarding economies of scale, rather than now while we're facing imminent population collapse and losing those economies of scale.
Well at least we agree on what is, even if we disagree on what *could be*. It seems to me that thorium reactors started to replace fusion reactors in the nerd imagination at the point when the “just 10 more years, bro” of fusion technology became too much to stomach. But commercial thorium reactors don’t exist, and for all sorts of reasons, including the population contraction you spoke on quite eloquently, they probably never will.
This is kind of an aside but I couldn’t find any human commentator who had thought about the right investment strategy for a market that consistently shrinks, rather than grows, over the long term. So I turned to the google AI and it had some pretty solid advice, although with the caveat that a perpetually shrinking market is “highly unlikely.” Maybe we should see what it says if we factor in persistent population decline as well.
I guess time will tell. It's pretty clear to me why they don't exist commercially, but I could be wrong. If you want some data that might change your perspective, you should give this podcast episode a listen.
A couple engineers got a commercially viable project off the ground with basically a million dollars of their own money. I can't listen to him describe the concept, research the technology, and conclude that there's some technical hurdle preventing it from happening.
In some respects it is. But the effectively-infinite sources (sun, wind, wave) are diffuse and unreliable, and have a low rate of energy returned on energy invested. Which suggests that over time we will have to make do with less.
“Consume less” is not an election-winning slogan, unfortunately.
Some particular reason to leave out the most concentrated, most reliable, of the effectively-infinite energy sources? The one with an extremely high rate of energy return on energy invested? Or is it just an ideological bias toward a future of making do with less?
Unfortunately, nuclear is likewise subject to EROEI issues. Notably, the richness of the uranium ore. Because nuclear is small globally, and because around half of the countries with commercial power reactors have at some point had nuclear weapons programmes, this has not been an issue.
But were nuclear to become more widespread, it would be an issue. As with coal, oil and gas, we'd quickly use up the rich resources, and over time have to use the less good ones.
There do of course exist breeder reactors, which could effectively double the resources available. But that raises nuclear weapons proliferation issues, as well as technological and safety issues - is Rwanda going to safely operate a breeder reactor? Will the world let them try? - and in any case only puts the issue off for one generation, one round of doubling of energy consumption.
There's thorium, too. But it's notable that the only country seriously pursuing this is India, which has a nuclear weapons programme, not much uranium and lots of thorium - in other words, they want to conserve their uranium to be able to nuke people. As good uranium ores become scarce, no doubt thorium would become more popular. However, each thorium reactor requires a uranium seed - in effect, each thorium reactor requires a uranium reactor to keep it going. So this too would effectively double uranium reserves, postponing the problem for another generation of doubling of energy consumption.
In other words, it's just kicking the can of the consumption problem down the road for someone else to deal with later. It doesn't address the fundamental issue.
The Earth is finite. This is very difficult for a person brought up in our Faustian culture to understand. But there are limits to growth.
I can't tell what point you're trying to make. You say "over time we will have to make do with less. “Consume less” is not an election-winning slogan, unfortunately."
I get the impression you think that reducing human living standards is some essential and worthy goal. Which if the "over time" you're talking about were something like a few generations, okay, that would be worth discussing. It's not.
There are no energy scarcity limits to growth anywhere in the foreseeable future. We have hundreds of years of known, economically viable, extractable hydrocarbon deposits. If you don't want to use that, we have just in the US enough known thorium to last us at least 1,000 years at current rates. And the reason we didn't go with thorium to begin with isn't that the technology wasn't available. It's because the people in charge wanted the uranium reactors so they could get a steady supply of nuclear weapon material. Which is a perfect illustration of human stupidity. Instead of creating a world of energy abundance to reduce conflict, let's keep energy scarce and expensive and instead build weapons powerful enough to destroy the earth.
So I'm really not sure what your point here is. That we should all drive our cars less and turn the lights off because if no technological progress ever happens again humans many run out of easily exploitable energy resources 1,500 years from now? If that's your concept of a fundamental issue, it falls well outside the scope of productive discourse.
Fully agree with you re parasites and BS jobs - they literally are everywhere. However, isn't the population decline an opportunity rather than a threat to get rid of them? That's what will have to happen to prevent a total collapse of the economy. Someone will still have to collect your rubbish every morning, bake bread, ensure essential civic services like police, health care. All the flunkeys (to use David Graeber's favorite word from BS Jobs) will have to go for the economy to reach its potential. I actually think that if you spend vast resources on automation (look at Japan, which is at the forefront of aging and they are doing exactly that) and you get rid of all the freeriding flunkeys, whose existence so far has only been enabled by the favorable demographic tailwinds from the past, we could yet be surprised as to how few highly productive people you will actually need to keep the economy going.
Well done. If I understand your argument, the question that determines the future of human prosperity and stability is: how fast can we make the broad class of unproductive people productive before the network effects of a large specialized population dissolves under pressure from a shrinking population that will be forced to become generalists.
Easy peasy! People will become more generally productive the minute they have to. And not a second sooner. Sigh.
They don’t call it the dismal science for nothing.
A good essay.
I disagree, however, on the lack of resource limits. There's the absolute amount of the resource, and then there's the effort, time and energy required to get it. For example, Saturn's moon Titan is essentially made of hydrocarbons, but even moving a single barrel of oil from there to here, without considering the weight of the rockets or extraction machinery, would require more energy than can be had from burning the stuff. It has a negative energy return on energy invested.
But before EROEI becomes negative, it becomes quite low. There was an article some time back about shipbreaking in Bangladesh. The authour saw all the workers bashing away at the metal, and saw a large crane sitting idle. "Why don't you use the crane?" he asked the site manager. "They're cheaper than fuel," he said.
Of course, workers in Bangladesh are cheaper than those in the West. So - how expensive does petrol have to be before you get out of your car and walk?
So yes, we have the technology to get heaps of resources. But we're getting them from more and more marginal areas, and it's taking more and more energy to do it. At some point the cost of resources will rise to greater than the cost of labour. I think what you've described in this article will amplify that. The US only graduates several hundred oilfield geologists annually. More marginal oilfields will require more of them. More will go to university to do this, but the universities will charge more for those in-demand degrees, and the oilfield geologists will want higher wages - as will all the technicians and engineers and drill workers and refinery guys and so on and so forth. The cost of resources will rise.
And when resources are expensive, some people end up doing without. And that won't be the parasitic class - or rather, the poor parasites will do without, but the rich parasites will ensure they get some. There is no occasion in history in which the rulers and hangers-on of a starving nation themselves went hungry.
So: resources are finite, become harder to get, and this will amplify the effects of population decline you've described.
I was going to post a similar comment. EF Schumacher, economist and head of the British Coal Board for many years, rightly noted that energy is the Ur resource that all other resource production depends on. If you have enough energy available, you could extract trace elements from sea water and run your society on that. The one resource you can’t do that with, is energy, since using high grade energy to condense low grade energy results in a net loss (as everyone knows, this is why perpetual motion machines are impossible. Some energy is always lost to waste).
You're absolutely right. Low cost energy is the key to everything. So my question is, do we have a technical shortage of low cost energy, or a political shortage of low cost energy?
The consistently moderate oil prices, in spite of millions of barrels of OPEC supply cuts, tells me we aren't even close to reaching technical limitations in cheap hydrocarbon extraction.
But that's a side issue compared to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is literally the almost free infinite energy source of every science fiction story, from a technical perspective. If the political choice has been made to stop the regulatory strangulation of nuclear energy 60 years ago, we could have global modular thorium reactor tech producing all our electricity at a fraction of the current cost. We could be building out that technology today, if the political choice hadn't been made to waste untold trillions building ridiculous solar panels and windmills like 14th century peasants.
With essentially unlimited cheap electricity, electric cars might actually begin to make economic sense. But that's not even the best part. With low cost electricity, we could produce our own synthetic hydrocarbons using hydrogen extracted from seawater and carbon extracted from natural gas or from the atmosphere itself. Those synthetic hydrocarbons, synfuel, can be used just like gasoline or diesel to power existing internal combustion engines. There's no real technical issue with the process, just a cost issue, because electricity is too expensive to make synfuel production competitive with crude oil.
So I would maintain that the only limiting resource here is still human ingenuity and common sense. If we had the good sense 60 years ago to focus on commercializing and building out next-gen nuclear tech, the whole energy system and the global economy could look completely different. And the time to do that was while population growth was rewarding economies of scale, rather than now while we're facing imminent population collapse and losing those economies of scale.
Well at least we agree on what is, even if we disagree on what *could be*. It seems to me that thorium reactors started to replace fusion reactors in the nerd imagination at the point when the “just 10 more years, bro” of fusion technology became too much to stomach. But commercial thorium reactors don’t exist, and for all sorts of reasons, including the population contraction you spoke on quite eloquently, they probably never will.
This is kind of an aside but I couldn’t find any human commentator who had thought about the right investment strategy for a market that consistently shrinks, rather than grows, over the long term. So I turned to the google AI and it had some pretty solid advice, although with the caveat that a perpetually shrinking market is “highly unlikely.” Maybe we should see what it says if we factor in persistent population decline as well.
I guess time will tell. It's pretty clear to me why they don't exist commercially, but I could be wrong. If you want some data that might change your perspective, you should give this podcast episode a listen.
https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-qm8gr-16085dc
A couple engineers got a commercially viable project off the ground with basically a million dollars of their own money. I can't listen to him describe the concept, research the technology, and conclude that there's some technical hurdle preventing it from happening.
Yes. And sadly, people assume energy is infinite.
In some respects it is. But the effectively-infinite sources (sun, wind, wave) are diffuse and unreliable, and have a low rate of energy returned on energy invested. Which suggests that over time we will have to make do with less.
“Consume less” is not an election-winning slogan, unfortunately.
Some particular reason to leave out the most concentrated, most reliable, of the effectively-infinite energy sources? The one with an extremely high rate of energy return on energy invested? Or is it just an ideological bias toward a future of making do with less?
I'm assuming you're referring to nuclear.
Unfortunately, nuclear is likewise subject to EROEI issues. Notably, the richness of the uranium ore. Because nuclear is small globally, and because around half of the countries with commercial power reactors have at some point had nuclear weapons programmes, this has not been an issue.
But were nuclear to become more widespread, it would be an issue. As with coal, oil and gas, we'd quickly use up the rich resources, and over time have to use the less good ones.
There do of course exist breeder reactors, which could effectively double the resources available. But that raises nuclear weapons proliferation issues, as well as technological and safety issues - is Rwanda going to safely operate a breeder reactor? Will the world let them try? - and in any case only puts the issue off for one generation, one round of doubling of energy consumption.
There's thorium, too. But it's notable that the only country seriously pursuing this is India, which has a nuclear weapons programme, not much uranium and lots of thorium - in other words, they want to conserve their uranium to be able to nuke people. As good uranium ores become scarce, no doubt thorium would become more popular. However, each thorium reactor requires a uranium seed - in effect, each thorium reactor requires a uranium reactor to keep it going. So this too would effectively double uranium reserves, postponing the problem for another generation of doubling of energy consumption.
In other words, it's just kicking the can of the consumption problem down the road for someone else to deal with later. It doesn't address the fundamental issue.
The Earth is finite. This is very difficult for a person brought up in our Faustian culture to understand. But there are limits to growth.
I can't tell what point you're trying to make. You say "over time we will have to make do with less. “Consume less” is not an election-winning slogan, unfortunately."
I get the impression you think that reducing human living standards is some essential and worthy goal. Which if the "over time" you're talking about were something like a few generations, okay, that would be worth discussing. It's not.
There are no energy scarcity limits to growth anywhere in the foreseeable future. We have hundreds of years of known, economically viable, extractable hydrocarbon deposits. If you don't want to use that, we have just in the US enough known thorium to last us at least 1,000 years at current rates. And the reason we didn't go with thorium to begin with isn't that the technology wasn't available. It's because the people in charge wanted the uranium reactors so they could get a steady supply of nuclear weapon material. Which is a perfect illustration of human stupidity. Instead of creating a world of energy abundance to reduce conflict, let's keep energy scarce and expensive and instead build weapons powerful enough to destroy the earth.
So I'm really not sure what your point here is. That we should all drive our cars less and turn the lights off because if no technological progress ever happens again humans many run out of easily exploitable energy resources 1,500 years from now? If that's your concept of a fundamental issue, it falls well outside the scope of productive discourse.
Fully agree with you re parasites and BS jobs - they literally are everywhere. However, isn't the population decline an opportunity rather than a threat to get rid of them? That's what will have to happen to prevent a total collapse of the economy. Someone will still have to collect your rubbish every morning, bake bread, ensure essential civic services like police, health care. All the flunkeys (to use David Graeber's favorite word from BS Jobs) will have to go for the economy to reach its potential. I actually think that if you spend vast resources on automation (look at Japan, which is at the forefront of aging and they are doing exactly that) and you get rid of all the freeriding flunkeys, whose existence so far has only been enabled by the favorable demographic tailwinds from the past, we could yet be surprised as to how few highly productive people you will actually need to keep the economy going.
Well done. If I understand your argument, the question that determines the future of human prosperity and stability is: how fast can we make the broad class of unproductive people productive before the network effects of a large specialized population dissolves under pressure from a shrinking population that will be forced to become generalists.
Easy peasy! People will become more generally productive the minute they have to. And not a second sooner. Sigh.
They don’t call it the dismal science for nothing.