The energy revolution will not be televised

Three recent news items remind us that energy transitions take time, a lot of time--far too much time to be shrunk down into a television special, a few talking points, or the next big energy idea.

For example, the complex management task of putting together the international fusion research project called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) has resulted in estimated final costs that have tripled since the 2006 launch. Fusion could theoretically offer clean and abundant energy almost indefinitely because it uses ubiquitous hydrogen* as fuel and creates helium in the process. (Water you'll recall is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and is therefore the most abundant source of hydrogen.)

Despite nine years of effort, ITER has yet to carry out a single experiment; and, the project is not expected to do so for another four years. The idea for such an international project was hatched in 1985 during a summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of what was then still called the Soviet Union. Thirty years later fusion is still receding into the horizon of our energy future.

Is the slowdown in productivity growth a result of energy costs?

Slowing productivity growth in the United States has been in the news in recent months. It has become a concern to policymakers because they believe it is one of the primary contributors to a middle-class economic squeeze according to the annual report of the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

Simply put, productivity growth refers to the growth in economic output per worker or more precisely, per hour of work. When this growth slows, the potential for real wage increases diminishes since the growth in wages typically reflects the ability of workers to create more output per unit of time.

To the obstensibly naive observer the following idea may seem a plausible explanation: Higher-cost energy inputs into the production of goods and services reduce productivity growth because the economic output per dollar of energy consumed declines. And, though energy inputs aren't the only thing to consider, they are important. The high energy prices of the last decade or so may be, in part, responsible for low productivity growth. (Conversely, low energy costs would imply more output per dollar of energy consumed.)

Stephen Toulmin welcomes you to the end of modernity

Historian and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin welcomes you to the end of modernity, at least modernity as we've imagined it. By modernity, he does not mean modern gadgets. By end he does not mean an end to progress in the natural sciences, nor in human affairs in general. Instead, he is talking about a way of thinking which has held us in thrall since the 17th century, for good and for ill, and is now giving way fitfully to a new (he would say "old"), more flexible worldview.

Toulmin's book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity is not new. It was published in 1990. Its argument will be of interest to anyone concerned with issues of sustainability including climate change and resource depletion.

Toulmin offers an historical account of how this view we call modern arose, and he catalogues its tenets. The ones that are of particular interest to me are as follows:

• Nature is governed by fixed laws set up at the Creation.
• The material substance of physical nature is essentially inert.
• Physical objects and processes cannot think.
• At the Creation, God combined natural objects into stable systems.
• The essence of humanity is rational thought and action.

Terms of debate: Destroying vs altering nature, the fragile vs the resilient Earth

Last week's piece drew responses that throw into relief how much the language we use depends on our most basic assumptions about how the world works. If left unexamined, that language leads to further conclusions that go unchallenged because the underlying assumptions are never scrutinized.

I challenged the Breakthrough Institute's notion that humans are in one category and nature in another. If one views humans as merely a part of nature or the universe or the web of existence--however one chooses to name that which includes everything--then our role becomes distinctly different.

Under my assumption humans are embedded in the natural world. They are not the sole actors or agents in it, only one of countless actors, most of which we probably know nothing about. We cannot get one up on nature. We can only cooperate with its workings.

'An Ecomodernist Manifesto': Truth and confusion in the same breath

I really do want to applaud the Breakthrough Institute's recently released paper called "An Ecomodernist Manifesto." It speaks with candor about the possible catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change. It recognizes the large footprint of humankind in the biosphere. It wants to address both, and it wants to do so in a way that offers a positive vision for the human future that will attract support and, above all, action.

But, I can't applaud it because of its underlying assumption: that humans are in one category and nature in another. The key paragraph starts with the key sentence:

Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree. Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive.

"Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree." This statement seems reasonable only if humans and nature are in different categories. But, they aren't--a concept that is distressingly NOT clear to most everyone who styles himself or herself as an environmentalist. Humans and their creations are as much a part of nature as everything else. Humans don't "materially depend on nature to some degree." Humans are entirely and completely dependent on nature (of which they are a part) for EVERYTHING. Even every synthetic substance uses feedstocks and energy from the natural world.

Chinese energy figures suggest much slower growth than advertised

Last year China reported the slowest economic growth in 24 years, about 7.4 percent. But the true figure may actually be much lower, and the evidence is buried in electricity figures which show just 3.8 percent growth in electricity consumption.

David Fridley, a staff scientist in the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been a longtime collaborator with the Chinese on energy management, efficiency and policy. Fridley, who has held Chinese energy-related jobs for 35 years, believes that electricity consumption in China is a better indicator of its economic growth.

Historically, electricity consumption and economic growth in China have been very closely linked. "From 2005 to 2013, the average elasticity of electricity demand was 1.09, meaning electricity demand was up about 1.09 percent for every percent rise in GDP," Fridley wrote in an email. "In 2014, that number fell to 0.51, the lowest in this 10-year period. During the economic crisis of 2008, it did fall below the average, to 0.60, but quickly rebounded to above 1."

Taking a short break--no post this week

I'm taking a short break this week and expect to post again on Sunday, April 26.

How the climate change debate got hijacked by the wrong standard of proof

Everyone loves a courtroom drama--especially one that pits a feisty, but a determined criminal defense attorney against the awesome power of a prosecutor who has the resources of the state behind him or her. We see such David and Goliath stories every week on television.

We cheer as the defense attorney pokes one hole after another in the case of the prosecutor, raising what the audience now perceives as reasonable doubt. But will the jury see it that way? We'll return after these messages....

This is just the sort of metaphorical setting into which the climate change denial lobby is trying to place the debate over climate change without the public or even most policymakers realizing it. The deniers in the fossil fuel industry and elsewhere are attempting by sleight-of-hand to get both the public and policymakers to abandon the preponderance of evidence standard used primarily in civil trials--and which is similar to evidence-based public policymaking--in favor of another judicial standard designed for criminal trials, namely, beyond a reasonable doubt.

The hidden reasons behind slow economic growth: Declining EROI, constrained net energy

It should seem obvious that it takes energy to get energy. And, when it takes more energy to get the energy we want, this usually spells higher prices since the energy inputs used cost more. Under such circumstances there is less energy left over for the rest of society to use, that is, for the non-energy gathering parts--the industrial, commercial and residential consumers of energy--than would otherwise be the case.

It shouldn't be surprising then that as fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the power modern society uses, become more energy intensive to extract and refine, there is a growing drag on economic activity as more and more of the economy's resources are devoted simply to getting the energy we want.

A more formal way of talking about this is Energy Return on Investment or EROI. The "energy return" is the energy we get for a particular "investment" of a unit of energy. The higher the EROI of an energy source, the cheaper it will be in both energy and financial terms--and the more energy that will be left over for the rest of society to use.

The puzzling flattening of carbon emissions and the problem of global growth

Last week we learned that maybe, just maybe, global carbon emissions were flat in 2014 even though the global economy supposedly grew by 3 percent. As Brad Plumer of Vox (whose work I greatly respect) points out, carbon emissions have moved up almost in lockstep with economic growth for the entire industrial age except during recessions and one year of growth 40 years ago.

This is why I use "supposedly" when referring to the global economic growth number. It's because there is another obvious and plausible explanation for the flat carbon emissions, namely, that the global economy did not grow by the stated percentage, that it may have grown only a fraction of that amount or not at all.

Economic measures are constantly being revised, and I think it is very likely that the global economic growth number for 2014 will be revised downward. Probably not to zero, but downward nonetheless. It's also possible that estimates of carbon emissions are too low. Plumer cites "notoriously unreliable" Chinese emission numbers as one reason to be skeptical.