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Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society
By Karl North | July 9, 2020
Near the end of the modern age, sustainability assessment of the economic activities of modern society has encountered two problems, one physical, the other cultural. The discovery of a dense, high quality energy source had led to an explosion of human use of the planet’s raw materials and facilitated invention of new technologies, which in turn permitted even greater consumption, in a positive feedback loop. We know this phenomenon as the industrial revolution. Exponential growth in the use of raw materials, including fossil energy, eventually has caused their depletion. In the case of finite materials, this has no solution. In the case of renewables such as topsoil or fossil water, it has led to long-term and sometimes permanent erosion of carrying capacity. This whole dynamic now threatens the existence of modern society.
Also, two centuries of cheap energy have created a global cultural mindset that inhibits a clear understanding of the physical problem. As the low hanging fruit of natural resource consumption essential to sustain the industrial economy has been harvested, we simply throw cheap energy at the problem and consider it solved. Copper ore, for example, now contains only a fraction of the copper it held a century ago. But the result – increasing scarcity of this essential raw material – is palliated by enormously increasing the energy devoted to the mining and processing, so we entertain the illusion that the resource is infinite. Hence, commonly we see no need to evaluate current and future economic activities or technologies in terms of energy or raw materials costs. Only a tiny minority have understood the necessity for such cost accounting and developed the tools to do it properly. This paper will review those tools and discuss their implications for the future of industrial civilization.
As we will see, proper cost accounting requires a systemic perspective that is rare in the modern age. The reductive methods that dominate scientific inquiry deliberately ignore the systemic context of any invention or discovery and promote the illusion that what happens in the laboratory is what will happen in the real world. As a result, systems thinking is uncommon, and further inhibits honest evaluation of the sustainability of human activities.
A review of essential energy concepts
Ecosystem science teaches that human society is a subsystem of a larger ecological whole, and is subject to the same laws. In the language of economics, one could say that human society is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature. This is the premise of everything that follows. Because our schooling includes almost no ecosystem science, whatever lip service exists to this premise is mostly ignored in practice, in how we live our lives.
Nothing happens without energy. Howard T. Odum provided ecosystem science with a rigorous disciplinary basis built around a framework of energy flow, conversion, storages and feedback. By showing that all complex systems follow this energy pattern he developed systems ecology into a general theory that applies to all systems. Odum and his intellectual progeny saw that understanding how energy makes everything happen is so important, not only for the design of durable, healthy ecosystems but for the future of our species and for the future of civilization, that it needed a new term – emergy (that’s with an M): the energy involved in the chain of production of anything.
Emergy is just the full accounting of the energy cost of everything we produce, from the morning cornflakes to fighter bombers to energy itself. Emergy accounting starts with the extraction of raw materials and continues up the production and supply chain to the end product. In an age of dirt-cheap energy, few took an interest in counting up the energy costs of everything. Now, when the energy cost of the fossil energy itself, essential to modern civilization, is permanently rising, it causes energy production, followed by economic activity, to peak and go into permanent decline. That brings to an end the industrial era. Oil geologists, natural resource scientists and systems ecologists have been trying to make the public aware of this for decades, and hit a brick wall of denial.
Here is a key reason emergy accounting is so important. As defined above, emergy is the energy invested in anything produced. The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is an all-important calculation. It is a critical determinant and constraint on the level of our material standard of living. EROEI is a ratio: energy return/emergy. One can also think of it as net energy: gross energy produced minus emergy. It is simple to understand – it’s like business accounting. If your farm grosses $1 million, that is not profit. If your expense is $1 million, your profit is zero, right?
Now let’s apply EROEI accounting to our situation. Industrial civilization as we know it cannot run without oil. Only oil can power the transportation that is essential to today’s global economy, as Alice Friedemann dramatized in When the Trucks Stop Running and Why You Should Love Trucks. At the height of the oil age in the US 1930s, oil EROEI was 100/1: an energy cost of one barrel of oil for a net energy return of 99 produced and processed. Cheap as water – stick in a pipe and get a gusher. Now it has declined to 11/1 for US conventional oil production and steadily dropping, and less than 4/1 in unconventional oil like hydrofracking. Corn ethanol EROEI is 1/1. That means it adds NO net energy to the economy. The only reason it is produced is subsidies. That is where the global economy is headed as EROEI of all fossil energy sources continues to drop. No more net energy – no more industrial economy.
A group of Odum’s intellectual progeny led by Charles Hall has studied the EROEI of various energy sources, with an emphasis on those claimed to be able to replace fossil fuels. They are finding that the net energy of “renewables” in nations which have devoted serious investment like Germany and Spain is nearly zero, far from the EROEI needed to replace oil’s EROEI of 100/1 in the heyday of the oil consumption that built the industrial economy. In sum, humanity has harvested the low hanging fruit – of fossil energy and most other raw materials necessary to industrial civilization.
Hall’s group has calculated society’s energy needs as a pyramid of increasing EROI requirements of oil:
Not long into this century, even global oil EROEI will be so low that oil can no longer power any industrial economy, including conventional and most organic agriculture. The energy cost (emergy) of food is huge in our oil age society. Over 90% of that energy cost is fossil fuel, mostly oil. We are eating oil, as it were. For those who pay attention, visible signs have existed since at least 1970 that because of dropping EROEI, the wheels are coming off the US industrial economy. First it began to slow down; now it is shrinking or propped artificially in places (e.g., weapons industry, hydrofracked energy) by cheap credit and enormous debt.
Fully Burdened life cycle accounting
Hall’s group has focused on the fact that every economic activity carries a long tail of energy and material costs. In accounting the costs, systems ecologists find it useful to view our universe as largely composed of open systems, whose inputs and outputs, termed sources and sinks, are governed in part by the laws of thermodynamics. How sustainable the systems are is dependent on how well the inputs and outputs are managed. Natural ecosystems have evolved to cope with source and sink problems (the first law) regarding finite materials on a finite planet, by cycling water and minerals. System survival, even without growth, requires a regular input of energy, just to keep the system from falling apart (entropy, the second law), and approximate a dynamic equilibrium. Natural ecosystems achieve it mainly by harvesting current sunlight, passing it through a food chain. Open systems are heat engines: they use energy inputs to do work, including the work of creating and maintaining organisms, but it must be continually replenished, for in the process the energy is ultimately dissipated as heat, and lost to outer space. As stated earlier, the first lesson of ecosystem science for humanity is that human society is a subsystem of nature, not apart from it, and is therefore subject to the same laws, including the laws of thermodynamics. We need to ask: What are the implications of our subjection to nature’s laws?
Anything a society does requires energy, raw materials and technology (I am defining technology broadly as knowledge to do anything rather than its limited common meaning as some physical manifestation of the knowledge, such as a machine). Lacking any one of these elements, nothing happens. The following thought experiment might help to dramatize this claim.
Suppose that in the year 1800 an angel endowed Benjamin Franklin with all the knowledge he needed to produce a smart phone and its necessary communications infrastructure at the scale of its use in the world today. Nothing would come of this gift of technology because the industrial economy and its energy and raw materials capabilities necessary to the project did not exist.
As with the above thought experiment, most of the problems of sustainability of human activities lie not with the capability of technologies used or proposed, but with the attendant energy and materials costs of applying the technologies in an era of depleting fossil energy caused by the activities themselves. Hence, a full life cycle accounting of environmental costs of any human activity and its technologies is necessary to evaluate the sustainability of an activity. There are two reasons for this necessity.
First, all known alternatives to fossil fuels are diffuse sources that entail enormous energy costs to reconcentrate the energy to approximate the density and quality of fossil fuels, if they are intended to replace them at a significant scale. These energy costs also include sink management problems resulting from outputs that natural systems cannot handle. Negative effects are often long term, such as radiation problems from nuclear power production and silting of reservoirs serving hydropower production.
Second, most arguments ignore that replacements themselves depend on a fully functioning industrial economy which itself is inevitably shrinking due to rising energy costs of energy. As a result, a full energy accounting may reveal many existing or proposed activities or technologies to be unsustainable going forward, or of only limited transitional viability. After two centuries of industrial development based on cheap energy, few proponents of existing or proposed economic activities see the need for such an accounting, or understand what it entails. Hence, at this point, an explanation is in order.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) tracks costs from source activities like mining through a chain of processes to a final product and its disposal. LCA is not new, but the cultural mindset evoked earlier often obstructs a full accounting. Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff provides a good start on a fuller appreciation of what is missing from the picture and why.
A fully burdened accounting of energy costs of an energy source (EROI), a product or service tracks the LCA of all activities and materials needed to arrive at an end use result. Here are examples of the best such analysis to date, applied to the European projects that are the leading attempts to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar electricity.
In sunny Spain:
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1
Followed by an update:
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 2
and a slide show of the graphics in this study:
In less sunny northern Europe:
These studies reveal that net energy obtained is close to zero.
Conclusion
Large scale attempts to replace fossil fuel production with alternatives face many challenges, the leading one being the energy costs described in this essay. But fully burdened environmental accounting may be able to identify transitional strategies that incorporate alternative energy at much lower scale.
Apart from the energy costs, the foremost challenges of large scale alternatives are cultural and political. Large scale conversions of the present industrial societies to a different energy source like electricity impose changes of a systemic nature – a multitude of changes that ripple through the system, multiplying costs, which require a period of sacrifice of material standards of living. Historically, societies have accepted such forfeitures only under threat of war. Moreover, the short run profit that motivates economies under private, capitalist control is a major obstacle to such systemic changes. Societies would have to adopt a ‘command economy’ where public policy dictates economic goals, which for generations has been demonized as “communism”.
Also, efficiencies in energy or raw materials consumption that a technology is capable of are real but are subject to the Jeavons effect, whereby savings achieved by efficiencies are spent in increased consumption. This is a normal social response that the growth imperative of the capitalist system and its cultural conditioning to maximize consumption intensifies.
At the other end of the scale, societies have successfully operated on direct solar gain for long historical periods, sometimes with minimal ecological footprint. As an example of a low technology, a water wheel mill that temporarily diverts a short section of a stream multiplies the power of human and animal labor at little environmental cost, compared, say, to a hydropower mega-dam, which comes with a full panoply of inconvenient consequences for society and the rest of nature. As fully burdened environmental accounting becomes more common, it may be able to identify technologies, situated somewhere between these two extremes, that can facilitate the transition to a post-oil age.
One ironic characteristic, but a potential advantage to capitalist systems faced with a transition to a lower energy consumption is its inherent capacity to foster waste, described half a century ago by critics like Vance Packard in his The Waste Makers, and more recently by students of consumerist manufacture of desire like Robert McChesney and Noam Chomsky. Also, the practice inherent in capitalist economies of extracting rent for investment of capital necessitates a growth imperative. And capitalists have found that the best way to maximize profit is to turn natural resources into garbage at the fastest possible rate. Capitalist economies thus create unusual amounts of wasteful and other ‘discretionary’ production that in theory could be eliminated and the liberated energy and raw materials devoted to production that facilitates the transition. For example, conversion of most of the land transportation sector to rail is arguably the single most energy saving transitional policy, usable even after the energy available to move goods by rail is reduced to animal power.
However, in practice even conversions that are more sustainable from an energy accounting perspective face the same political and cultural obstacles as large scale unsustainable ones.
One of the characteristics of complex systems is their resistance to change. In healthy natural ecosystems this can be desirable, and is called resilience. If the resistance is undesirable, we call it inertia. In the present predicament of fossil fueled economies facing loss of their energy source, transitional efforts require such major changes in life styles and skill sets that undesirable inertia is inevitable. Over a decade ago, energy descent writer Richard Heinberg dramatized the problem in his essay, “Fifty Million Farmers”. Where will they be found when most of our urbanized society has neither the skills or the desire?
Topics: Core Ideas, Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments »
