The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Sunday, July 4, 2021

Climate Change and Resource Depletion. Which Way to Ruin is Faster?


What could bring down the industrial civilization? Would it be global warming (fire) or resource depletion (ice)? At present, it may well be that depletion is hitting us faster. But, in the long run, global warming may hit us much harder. Maybe the fall of our civilization will be Fire AND ice.
 
 
The years after World War 2 saw perhaps the fastest expansion and the greatest prosperity in the history of humankind. Yet, it was becoming clear that it was exactly this burst of prosperity and expansion that was creating the conditions for its own collapse. How long could humankind continue growing an economy based on limited natural resources? How long could the human population keep increasing?

Not everyone agreed that this was a problem, and the mainstream idea seemed to be that technological progress could maintain the human expansion forever. But, for those who were concerned about this matter, the discussion soon split into two main lines: one focused on depletion, the other on pollution. Over the years, the "depletionists" concentrated on fossil fuels, the main source of energy that keeps civilization moving. Initially, the disappearance of fossil fuels was seen simply as a necessary step in the progression toward nuclear energy. But the waning of the nuclear idea generated the idea that the lack of fossil energy would eventually bring down civilization. The collapse was often seen as the result of "peak oil," the point in time when oil production couldn't be increased anymore. It was estimated to occur at some moment during the first 2-3 decades of the 21st century.

On the other side, the focus was initially on pollutants such as smog, heavy metals, carcinogenic substances, and others. Pollution was generally seen as a solvable problem and, indeed, good progress was done in abating it in many fields. But the emerging idea of global warming soon started to be seen by "climatists" as an existential threat to humankind or even to the whole planetary ecosystem. The time scale of climate change was never defined in terms of momentous events but as a gradual temperature rise that could play out over a century or more. Some climatists spoke of "tipping points," e.g., the "methane explosion," that could have brought rapid ruin to humankind. But it was impossible to estimate the time scale of these events, and the majority of climatists tended to regard those who expressed these views as scare-mongering catastrophists.

Climatists and depletionists were looking at the same scene, just from two different viewpoints. But human beings notoriously have difficulties in changing their views. Their minds seem to become easily fixed on a single problem, and they tend to play the game of "my problem is bigger than yours." Ours is an age of "either-or" positions (you are either with us or against us, as G.W. Bush famously said). So, climatists and depletionists found it hard to work together and, often, they became bitter enemies of each other. It was a dispute that reminded the struggles of the Medieval Christian Church between heretics and orthodoxes (with the orthodoxes defined only after the debate had ended, sometimes with the members of the other side burned at the stake)
 
Depletionists were often geologists who had no training in climate physics. Sometimes they would scoff at the idea of climate change as the delusion of a group of pseudo-scientists who played with models that were unrelated to the real world. More often, they would not attack climate science directly but argued that the depletion of fossil fuels would solve all climate problems: no oil, no emissions. Then, no emissions, no climate change. 
 
On their side, climatists were often specialists in atmospheric physics. They were heavily focused on climate models while tending to rely on industrial estimates for the available fossil resources as external parameters in their calculations. They tended to see these resources as abundant and believe that curbing emissions to avoid a climate disaster would make depletion irrelevant. 

It was a clash that could not be solved by discussions among people who were speaking different scientific, and even political languages. Peak oil had its moment of popularity during the first decade of the 21st century, then it faded out of the debate. Climate change, instead, kept making inroads in the global memesphere, despite the dogged resistance of several lobbies and political sectors. By the end of the 2nd decade of the century, it was dominating the debate, and it had nearly completely silenced the opinion that peak oil was a threat worth of attention. 

The reasons for the tilt of the debate to favor climatists may have been more than one, but overall it may well be that it was because it is much easier to worry about a problem that is more distant in time. Politicians could comfortably claim that they were doing something useful while proposing that the airlines could run their planes on biofuels or that cars could be run on "blue hydrogen."  Peak oil may have arrived, probably as early as 2008 for conventional oil, but in the great cacophony of the media, it went unmentioned and invisible to the eyes of the public and of the decision-makers.  
 
All along the debate, it was almost always impossible to propose a compromise that took into account both problems, depletion and warming. But, already in 1972, the study titled "The Limits to Growth" tackled the problem in a holistic way (image by Magne Myrtveit). The computer model used in the calculation didn't share the limitations of the human mind and could simply compute the results of the interactions of the various factors. At that time, the importance of climate change was not yet clear, but the "pollution" parameter was later recognized as representing the effects of greenhouse emissions. 
  
The results of the "base case" scenario computed in "The Limits to Growth" study (see the figure below) indicated a probable collapse of the industrial civilization for some moment in the second decade of the 21st century. It was intended to be the illustration of a trend rather than a prediction, but it may have turned out to have been remarkably prophetic. 

 
But what was the cause of the collapse? Depletion or pollution? The answer was "both," but the model showed that the peaking of the production of natural resources coincided with the start of the decline of the industrial system. Pollution (climate change) arrived later, and its effect was mainly to make the decline steeper, generating a typical "Seneca Cliff." 
 
This result made a lot of sense: pollution is a consequence of resource exploitation and you would expect it to arrive after that depletion has played out its cycle of growth. Yet, it was also possible to create scenarios using the "Limits" model where pollution had such negative effects to become the main driver of the collapse. As usual, the future can be imagined but not predicted. In 1972 it was way too early to presume to be able to predict what was supposed to happen 50 years later.

But things kept moving and in 2009, Dave Holmgren systematized and arranged the collapse question in a semi-quantitative quadrant that indicated several possible futures that depended on the interplay of depletion and warming. Holmgren didn't take a specific position on what was the most immediate threat, but his diagram provided guidelines to assess just that.



And here we are: in 2021 Holmgren's scenarios were reviewed by "Rutilius Namatianus" (RN) in a series of three posts on "The Seneca Effect" (one, two, three). He arrived at the conclusion that -- just like in the "base case" scenario of The Limits to Growth --  depletion is arriving faster and hitting us harder.  According to RN, the reaction to the 2020 pandemic is mostly an effect of the economic system being on the verge of collapse because of depletion, even though the public has not realized that yet. 
 
Like other depletionists, RN is skeptical about the existence of human-caused climate change. Apart from that, though, his position makes sense. Right now, it is difficult to find a sector of the economy so badly damaged by global warming that it might cause the system to collapse. So, the crash of 2020 may be attributed to the constraints generated by the gradually increasing costs of the exploitation of natural resources for a growing economy and an increasing population. 

A civilization based on conspicuous consumption cannot keep going for long when there is little left that can be consumed. Hence, we are seeing a series of correlated changes: less traveling (especially by plane), the collapse of the tourism industry, the contraction of the entertainment industry, less commuting, and the reduction or the disappearance of other wasteful activities that we can't afford anymore. All that is officially just temporary and things are supposed to return soon to "normal," that is to the best of worlds. But we may reasonably doubt that. Instead, we may well be seeing the start of the Seneca Cliff that "The Limits to Growth" had already seen in its scenarios of 1972.

Does all that mean that climate change is not a problem anymore? Not at all. Surely, the economic crash of 2020 is reducing the human impact on climate, but as I noted more than once complex systems always kick back (a quote by John Gall). We still have to receive a kick from Earth's climate that may be much worse than anything we received so far (*)
 
What we are doing to the ecosystem might turn out to be just a moderate perturbation, with the system kicking back to its original state in a few millennia -- or maybe even just in a few centuries. In this case, some forms of human civilization could survive the change. Or the ecosystem may kick us up all the way to the Eocene, with a temperature of 12 C higher than it is now. That won't necessarily mean the extinction of the human species, but it would not be unlikely.

And here we are, laughing at the pitiful attempts of the so-called "decision-makers" to stop the tsunami with teaspoons. We are both spectators and actors of the grandest spectacle in the history of the world: the end of the mightiest civilization that ever existed. No matter how our future will be playing out, remember that the destiny of soap bubbles is just of shining gloriously in the sun for a short while. Universes may be little more than a shower of soap bubbles in the sun, just on a grander scale. As we fade out, there will be new universes and we may even be able to create a few ourselves. Humans may have done a lot of damage to the ecosystem, but surely they never lacked fantasy!


(*) In 2012 I wrote a post on "Cassandra's Legacy" titled "Confessions of a Peak Oiler" that some people interpreted as if I had reneged the peak oil movement. But it was not that (otherwise I would have titled it "Confessions of a FORMER peak oiler.") I just made the point that the climate threat was bigger than the depletion threat, not that it didn't exist. 

Monday, June 28, 2021

The Collapse of Concrete Buildings: Dust thou art, and unto Dust shalt thou return.

 We don't know yet the causes of the recent collapse of the condo building in Surfside, Florida. But it is likely that the corrosion of the reinforced concrete was one of the main reasons that weakened the structure of the building. It is a subject that I described in one of the chapters of my book "Before the Collapse" (Springer 2019) that turned out to have been timely and, unfortunately, also prophetic. We may see many more of these collapses in the future

 

Extract from Chapter 3.1 of "Before the Collapse" (2019) by Ugo Bardi 

 

In the late morning of August 14, 2018, I was busy writing this book when I happened to open my browser. There, I saw the images of the collapse of the Morandi bridge, in Genoa, almost in real time. It was a major disaster: the bridge used to carry more than 25 million vehicles per year and it was a vital commercial link between Italy and Southern France. When it collapsed, it not only took with it the lives of 43 people who were crossing it, but it was nothing less than a stroke for the Italian highway system, forcing the traffic from and to France to take a long detour. It will take years before a new bridge can be built and the economic damage has been incalculable.

How could it happen that the engineers who took care of the maintenance of the highway could not predict and contrast the collapse of such an important structure? Much was said in the debate that followed about incompetence or corruption. Perhaps the fact that maintenance of the highway was handed over to a profit-making company was a recipe for disaster: profit-maximizing may well have led to cutting corners in the maintenance tasks. But, on the whole, we have no proof that the company that managed the bridge was guilty of criminal negligence. Rather, the collapse of the Morandi bridge may be seen as another example of how the behavior of complex systems tends to take people by surprise.

Even in engineering, with all its emphasis on quantification, measurements, models, and knowledge, the phenomenon we call “collapse” or “fracture” remains something not completely mastered. If engineers knew exactly how to deal with fractures, nothing ever would break - but, unfortunately, a lot of things do, as we all know. We saw in a previous section how critical phenomena in a network can be initiated by small defects in the structure, it is the effect of cracks in real-world structures, according to the theory developed by Alan Griffith 100. The Morandi Bridge was a structure under tensile stress, sensible to the deadly mechanism of the Griffith failure.

The bridge went down during a heavy thunderstorm and that may have been the trigger that started the cascade of failures that doomed the bridge: one more case of the “Dynamic Crunch” phenomenon that leads to the Seneca Cliff. Somewhere, in one of the cables holding the deck, there had to be a weak point, a crack. Then, perhaps as an effect of a thunderbolt, or maybe of the wind, the cable snapped off. At that point, the other cables were suddenly under enhanced stress, and that generated a cascade of cable failures which, eventually caused a whole section of the bridge to crash down. You heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back, in this case we could speak of the lightning bolt that broke the bridge’s span. Complex systems not only often surprise you. Sometimes, they kill you.

But why was the Morandi Bridge so weakened? Just like many other bridges in Italy and Europe, it had been built using “pre-compressed concrete.” This is a material European engineers seem to like much more than their American colleagues who, on the contrary, tend to use naked steel cables and beams for their bridges. Pre-compressed concrete had more success in Europe because it was widely believed that concrete would protect the internal steel beams from corrosion and avoid the need for laborious maintenance work of painting and repainting required, instead, for steel bridges. But, over the years, it was discovered that steel corrodes even inside concrete, and that turns out to be a gigantic problem, not just for bridges.

In the case of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, the problem was known. The bridge had been opened in 1967 and, after more than 50 years of service, it needed plenty of attention and maintenance. Years before the collapse, engineers had noted that corrosion and the vibration stress caused by heavy traffic, had weakened the steel beams of the specific section that was to go down in 2018. A series of measurements carried out one year before the collapse had indicated that the steel in that section had lost 10% to 20% of its structural integrity. That was not considered to be dangerous enough to require closing the bridge to traffic, especially at the height of the busy summer season. After all, most buildings are built with a hefty safety margin with respect to their breakdown limit, typically at least 100%. But there was a plan to close the bridge for maintenance work in October 2018. Too late.

We see once more how the best plans of mice and men often go astray. The engineers who were working on the bridge may have made a typical mistake of linear thinking: they assumed that there is a certain proportionality between weakening and danger. In this case, they believed that a 20% weakening of the beams was not enough to cause the bridge to collapse. But that was an average, and complex systems may not care about averages: do you know the story of the statistician who drowned in a river of an average depth of 1.5 meters?

Bridges are just an example of the many engineered structures subject to collapsing under stress. The Griffith mechanism of crack propagation is typical of the fracture of structures under tensile stress, such as the beams of a suspension bridge, the beams of a roof, moving objects such as planes and ships, everyday objects such as bookshelves, and even the bones of living beings. These structures tend to go down rapidly, suddenly, and sometimes explosively, typical examples of Seneca Collapses. There also exists another category of engineered structures, those which must withstand only compression stresses: this is the case of pillars, walls, arcs, domes, and the legs of the chair you are sitting on. These structures can collapse, but are normally much safer than those under tension, because compression tends to close cracks instead of enlarging them, as tension does.

In ancient times, when reinforced concrete did not exist, buildings used to be made in such a way to avoid tensile stresses as much as possible. That was because the main construction material available in ancient times was stone, and stone just cannot take tensile stresses. So, stones can be used to build walls and buttresses, and also for bridges and roofs, provided that you arrange them carefully to form arcs and domes in order to make sure that all the elements are always under compression, never under tension.

But even compression structures have their limits. Ancient builders were perfectly aware that stone can crumble, even explode, when subjected to excessive stress. That generates a limit to the height of a building in stone: over a certain height, the stones at the base would burst out and bring the whole structure down. One of the arts that ancient builders needed to know was the capability of testing stones for their resistance to compression before using them, and they had developed sophisticated techniques to do just that. Maybe we are biased in our perception because what we see around us are only those ancient building which survived and arrived to our times, but it is true that many ancient buildings have survived the test of time beautifully, and are still around us after several centuries, even millennia.

Many Roman bridges are still standing and are used today. Another remarkable example of a building that survived from Roman times is the Pantheon temple, in Rome. It was built nearly 2,000 years ago and it still being used as a temple today, now a Catholic church. Gothic cathedrals built during the Middle Ages were also sturdy and resilient: there are only few examples of structural collapses caused by poor design. For instance, the Beauvais Cathedral, in France, built mainly during the 13th century, suffered lots of problems and some structural collapses, but it is still standing nowadays. Another example is the Pisa tower, in Italy, built during the 14th century. For centuries, it survived the bending caused by ground movements. During the 20th century, the bending had reached an angle of 5.5 degrees, bringing the tower to risk of collapse. Today, the tilt has been reduced to less than 4 degrees by acting on the foundations, and now the tower may well keep standing for more centuries in the future. Modern stone buildings are sometimes even more ambitious. The Washington Monument in Washington DC is an example of a building high enough (169 m) to be close to the limits of structural resistance of the stones at its basis. It was terminated in 1884 and seems to be still in good shape despite some cracks that it developed after an earthquake hit it in 2011.


But let us go back to the case of the Morandi bridge for a discussion on risk evaluation. I crossed that bridge by car several times in my life without ever even vaguely thinking that it was risky to do so. Probably, at least a billion vehicles safely crossed that bridge over its more than half a century of life, so the chance of seeing it collapse just when you were crossing it was abysmally low. Yet, it happened in 2018, and when a major bridge collapses, someone is bound to be crossing it. Obviously, it would have made no sense to avoid crossing the Morandi bridge, or any other concrete bridge, for fear that it could collapse. Yet, it makes perfect sense to consider the risk of collapse for a building that you use much more often than bridges: your home or the place where you work. Unfortunately, normally you have no idea of how well and carefully your home was built and maintained. Maybe all the standards were respected, maybe not and, in the second case, your life is at risk: the Seneca Collapse waiting for you could be rapid and deadly.

There are many cases when it was discovered, typically after the collapse of a structure, that the builders had saved money by reducing the amount of steel reinforcement for the concrete. Or maybe they had used poor quality sand; a typical trick to save money is to use sand taken from some beach. This sand is contaminated with sea salt and that favors the corrosion of the steel beams inside the concrete. In some cases, it is reported that instead of the standard steel beams, builders used wire mesh of the kind used for chicken coops. 

Then, you have to consider that a building rarely remains untouched after it has been built. People open doors and windows in the walls, add more floors, remove walls or add them. They may also intervene in other damaging ways: for instance, everyone loves rooftop swimming pools, but they are heavy and may destabilize the whole structure of a building. These mongrel buildings may be very dangerous: one of the worse disasters in the history of architecture happened to a building that was modified and expanded without much respect for rules or for common sense. It is the case of the Rana Plaza collapse on April 24th, 2013 in Savar, a district of Bangladesh, when more than one thousand people died and more than 2,500 were injured. The owners had added four floors to the building without a permit (!!) and also placed the heavy machinery of a garment factory in those extra floors. Not only was the machinery heavy, but it also generated strong vibrations that further weakened the building. More than half of the victims were women workers of the factory, along with a number of their children who were in nursery facilities within the building. A good example of criminal negligence.

Building collapses are rare enough for the risk to be statistically low, so small that it is not normally listed in the various “Odds of Dying” tables that you can find on the Web. Yet, it is one of those risks for which you can take precautions and there is no reason for not doing so. If you live in a building made of reinforced concrete that is older than a couple of decades, you should check for the details that may indicate danger. In some cases, you can directly see the corrosion of the steel beams where the surrounding concrete has been eroded. Cracks in the walls are an evident symptom of troubles and it has been reported that the noise of a steel cable snapping open inside a concrete beam may be perceived as the noise of gunshots. In Europe, if you hear that kind of noise, you may reasonably think that there is something wrong with the structural integrity of the building you live in, but, of course, a different explanation may be much more likely in the US. By the way, the collapse of the Morandi bridge gave rise to noises that could be interpreted as explosions and – guess what! – that led some people to interpret the disaster as the result of a “controlled demolition” carried out by the evil “Zionist Illuminati” in analogy with the demolition theories proposed for the 2001 attack to the world trade center in New York. Human fantasy seems to have no limits in terms of crackpot theories.

Not seeing or hearing anything suspicious in a building does not necessarily mean it is safe. If it is older than 50 years, it would not be a bad idea to seek professional help to have it checked for its structural integrity. It is expensive, though, and not routinely done for private buildings. Stone buildings are normally safer and more durable than concrete ones; you have to be careful, though, because these buildings can crumble under the effect of lateral vibrations generated by earthquakes. Wooden houses are often said to be more resilient and safer than both concrete and stone buildings and that is probably true, within some limits. But take into account that wooden beams are susceptible to degradation, too: they may be attacked by termites and their presence may be difficult to detect because they eat away the interior of the wood before breaking through to the surface. In terms of structural safety, an Indian tepee or a Mongolian yurt would be the best choice for a place to live. Otherwise, you have just to accept that there are some risks in life.

In the end, the problem of concrete degradation is not with single buildings: it is a global problem that affects all the infrastructure built over the past century or so.


You see in the figure how cement production went through a burst of exponential growth from the 1920s all the way to a few years ago. Only in 2015 did the global production of concrete start to show signs of stabilizing and, probably, it will go down in the coming years. It means that our highways and our cities were built in a period of economic expansion and on the assumption that the needs for their maintenance would have been minimal, just as it had been for the previous generation of stone buildings. It turned out to be a wrong estimate.

In the future, we seriously risk an epidemics of infrastructure collapses if we do not allocate sufficient resources to the maintenance of their concrete elements. Otherwise, the result could be that a considerable fraction of the world’s buildings and roads will have to be sealed off and left to crumble. Worse, crossing a bridge or living in a skyscraper could come to be considered risky. It is already the situation you have in some poor countries. In Cuba, after the revolution of 1959, the government expropriated most buildings that had been owned by rich Cubans and foreigners, and distributed them among the poor. The problem is that these buildings had been erected using Portland cement made from beach sand contaminated with sea salt. Sea salt favors the corrosion of the steel beams – it is a very serious problem. It can be remedied, but it is expensive and requires sophisticated technologies that Cubans cannot afford today. The problems of old concrete buildings in poor countries do not seem to be related to a specific political ideology or government system. Puerto Rico is under the control of the American government but the problem of crumbling buildings seems to be the same as in Cuba, worsened in recent times by the Hurricane Maria that struck the island in 2017. Other areas with warm climates and close to the sea seem to be affected in the same way.

We lack worldwide statistical data for this kind of problems, but there seems to exist a “crumbling belt” of decaying buildings everywhere in tropical regions, especially near the sea, where higher temperatures and sea salt spread by the wind cause the steel beams of concrete building to corrode faster than in other regions of the world – incidentally, the Morandi Bridge was near the Mediterranean coast and it may well be that in that case too, sea salt had a role in the collapse. Add to that the fact that in many of these regions people are poor and unable to afford the costs involved in the remediation of these old buildings, and you have a big global problem: another Seneca Cliff awaiting.

In the end, the problem has to do with an old Biblical maxim: “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Applied to a concrete structure, it would sound more like, “sand thou art, and unto sand shalt thou return.” Concrete is nothing else than compacted sand, not unlike the sandcastles that children build on the beach. The substance that binds the sand in sandcastles is water, and when it evaporates the castle crumbles. In concrete, the binder is cement, and it is typically lime or calcium silicate. Of course, this kind of solid binder doesn’t evaporate and concrete lasts much longer than sandcastles, but not forever. So, what we are seeing today in Cuba and other poor tropical countries may be just an image of what our world will be in a not-so-remote future.


See also: "Italy's infrastructure is melting in the rain" on "Cassandra's Legacy"

Sunday, June 20, 2021

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future: Part III (final)


This is the third and final part of Rutilius Namatianus' (RN) reassessment of some scenarios for the future originally proposed by David Holmgren. RN takes a position that goes against the standard interpretation that sees our problems originating mainly by climate change. Instead, RN believes that climate change didn't do much damage to humankind, so far, and so it will remain a minor component of humankind's trajectory, at least for the coming years, perhaps a couple of decades. What we are seeing, instead, is the crunch created by the gradually reduced availability of natural resources, coupled with increasing population and consumption levels. As a result, the services and the goods previously granted to nearly all social layers are becoming impossible to maintain and that is eroding the basic pact that keeps society together. Consistently, the Elites are developing a totalitarian grip on all sectors of society in such a way to funnel all the remaining resources for themselves and leave nothing to the commoners. And that's where we stand now. Of course, there is much that is debatable in RN's theses, but there is no doubt that he is identifying some real elements of what's happening nowadays. (UB)


 By Rutilius Namatianus

2021 - Future Scenarios Revisited


In Part 1 and Part 2, I re-examined Holmgren's Future Scenarios ten years after they had been proposed, and where we had moved since then in the scenario state space. I also considered a new state-space that could be more pertinent to a question that must be high on many peoples' priorities these days: we observe two trends, racing against each other: the trend of centralized power structures (however we call it, we never did get a single really good name for the great steamroller!) to conquer every last thing, consolidate power over every last place, the trend toward ever-increasing power, the logical continuation of the 'stupid' strategies we might say- to refer to a recent post- against the counter-trend of depletion, environmental degradation, exhaustion of resources, diminishing returns on complexity, and generally the whole picture we sum up with the word 'collapse'... 

We know that physics always wins in the end, yes! But it certainly makes a difference to those alive whether the leviathan eats us all before it collapses, or if it collapses before it manages to burn everything else to the ground. Large organized entities look like they're trying to carry out a 'reset' or a controlled demolition of large parts of the existing economy to preserve the parts that keep them large and organized and in power. Anything deemed superfluous to this goal is marked for deletion. 

This is a survival reaction from large power structures, but it is of course imperiled by the very complexity and interdependence of the economy: It is not easy to demolish whole sectors while leaving others untouched. Much more likely, such an effort will backfire and accelerate the collapse. Will they manage to pull off their 'reset' before everything falls apart? Or can the plans be safely put on the back burner with all priority placed on digging and planting gardens and squirreling away books to preserve for the future to rediscover? 

In 2019, I had sketched out what looked like relative trajectories of several major blocs in the world, through the concentration-of-power versus resource-depletion axes. I observed that most of the world was in Holmgren's 'brown tech' scenario, or even in more extreme conditions. The world was slipping towards a bifurcation where one path led up and right into the 'lifeboat' scenario and another led down and right towards global war and 'mad max'. 

It seems that, so far, the forces of consolidation of power have pulled ahead in the race: While in 2019 that momentum seemed to be faltering, with disorders in China and Hong Kong, the gilets-jaunes in France, the 5-star and Lega coalition in Italy, with wider gaps opening between northern Europe and the south, with the US preoccupied with internal fantasies and identity-politics, with the third world drifting further into collapse and dysfunction. At that time, it looked like the decline was breaking into a chaotic state. 

Thus, on the consolidation of power (vertical) axis, in 2018-2019 we saw a slowdown in the US, EU, and third world in the downward movement. China seems to have also already gone further faster with their social credit and facial recognition rollouts, but those were news in 2017, not 2019. On the energy front, both China and the US managed to slow down their internal declines through a combination of being able to better afford imports, and subsidizing unprofitable domestic production. In the US, the unprofitable domestic production was the shale oil 'boom' of roughly 2012-2019. In China, it was largely coal production. 

In Europe, meanwhile, the North Sea, Europe's primary source of production, continued its decline at ever faster rates. While Europe still has access to imported energy, the majority of Europeans simply can't afford as much as they used to. Thus, Europe slips further to the right in the graph with the net results of further energy decline. Huge misallocations of capital in Europe on politically motivated 'green' projects do not help this picture at all and degrade the quality of energy available for use further- also a component in the shift further into decline. The Third World has been the primary loser in the energy competition. Where does the extra energy that the US and China can afford to keep importing come from? It is the energy the Third World can't afford anymore. 

That was in 2019. Now, in 2021, we see that the past year saw the large power structures rapidly tightening their grip. The US energy decline which had been held back by high-cost oil and gas from shale formations picked up speed since those fields, never profitable, are declining already. Resource depletion elsewhere accelerated. Chinese coal has been in crisis and they even suffered rolling blackouts rather than pay the demanded price for Australian coal imports. Large portions of the population in the developed world have found themselves under heavy restrictions on movement and economic activity for much of the year, with absolutely enormous quantities of fresh debt added to the money supply in almost all the economies- total debt increased by something on the order of 20-25% in a single year! 

Balanced against this, there was some success in the controlled demolition - so far. World GDP might have contracted by about 10%. World energy consumption dropped somewhere around 7% for 2020 compared to 2019. With oil decline probably somewhere between 5 and 10 % now, a 7% reduction in consumption might buy about a year of time against the resource collapse.. But in early 2021 there are increasing concerns about increasing supply-chain problems, which are a sign of rising stress in an interdependent network, creeping closer toward dysfunction and failure.

Here we can add the 2020 experiences. Energy decline slowed down across the globe- a 7% contraction in energy consumption - although the true size of the decline will only really show up later in 2021 as the failure of the subsidized unprofitable extraction in China and the US is felt in production statistics. The real action has been in the 'developed' world, with the elites taking hold of the trend of consolidation of power and jamming a major consolidation into the picture. All three of the developed blocs show a major turn downward in 2020 as every manner of control and restriction was imposed and centralization of control and coordination of all sorts of mass-media reached almost unimaginable new extents. 

In early 2021, though, this is starting to indicate that they might have shot themselves in the foot. Resistance in many areas is growing and has gotten a better picture of what it is they are resisting against. The demolition of whole sectors of the economy through 2020 is only beginning to show up in disruptions in supply chains and lengthening delivery times for all sorts of specialty items. The recent slowdown in dozens of industries due to pressure on simple microcontroller chips almost monopolized by a handful of Taiwanese manufacturers is only one (very visible) example. They seem to still be following a 'shock doctrine' playbook for simply blowing up some part of the economy to goad the rest into moving in a direction they want. In one sense this is like watching people play some game like the once-popular Sim City, where everything is simple and one-dimensional and there's always a cheat code to get more free money, which always buys more stuff. 2021 will show a lot more of this.

It's still not clear which way the trend will break this year, but we have at least seen a major move that is accelerating the timeline. When we see many of the rulers of the major power structures proclaim repeatedly (often with enthusiastic relish) how they see a narrow "window of opportunity" to carry out their crash program of consolidation, they aren't joking. They might have bought a year or so, or they might have pushed it further down the Seneca cliff. 

While the plot is a freehand sketch just to give the general feel of the shape of the trajectories, it does seem that we are learning in the past year some important hints about how much energy and complexity are necessary to keep a modern technological empire intact- just how much can be cut before it begins to imperil the rest of the structure. There had been a lot of speculation in the past few years about this matter. Would the economy remain functional through a 5% decline? 10? 20? how far down the slope would it hold together? It seems that single-digit percentage shocks of only a few months duration are already almost fatal (and might yet be). 

To paraphrase Tainter's definition of collapse: a rapid and involuntary reduction in complexity. It could be that, in their attempt to push all the resource decline onto the weaker population, the powerful players have also even more rapidly accelerated the collapse of the only system that allows them to convert those resources into ongoing power. 



Friday, June 18, 2021

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future (part II)

This is the second part of the series of posts by "Rutilius Namatianus" (RN) that re-examines the 4 scenarios of the future proposed by David Holmgren in 2009 (first part). 

 In general, you may find that RN's interpretations are rather extreme, but I do believe that there is some method in the overall madness of the current situation and that the post may correctly identify some of of the reasons why we are here. You will also notice that RN is "not convinced" that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real. I disagree with this position, but I felt that this post was worth publishing nevertheless. If nothing else as evidence of how fast the prestige of science is collapsing, by now more or less at the same level as that of the cult of the Spaghetti Monster. 

Overall, RN argues that we have moved into the scenario that Holmgren called the "Brown Tech" scenario, where the ruling elites have decided that the way to go is to concentrate all the remaining resources for their use, while the commoners are left in the cold. RN describes this scenario as "a totalitarian monster gripping power through a pervasive surveillance and police state, and the majority of the population pressed into poverty and dependence." Enjoy this post!


 By Rutilius Namatianus

2019 - FUTURE SCENARIOS REVISITED

Ten years after the financial collapse of 2008, it was surprising that the 'establishment' had managed to hang on to control of the situation with increasingly outlandish financial manipulations. Behind the scenes though, we must also acknowledge that they only managed to pull of this magic trick because they also had a huge networked surveillance-and-control system that they expanded at top speed after the crisis. 

This period saw the proliferation of laws and regulations all designed to trap peoples finances in an elaborate electronic fun-house where there is no stable measure of anything. the proliferation of automatic collection of data, recording of every last transaction, reporting into centralized databases automatically of everything people do, and an increasingly arbitrary and opaque (and violent) system of punishment for anything 'suspicious' or 'out of the ordinary.' It cowed most of the population of the developed world into a kind of nervous submission. 

In the less developed world, we saw a huge upsurge in violence, disorder, and general upheaval as people do not accept even deeper poverty with acquiescence. It is telling that in the West the tablet-generation of people glued to small portable media devices all their waking lives has coincided with them being docile enough to accept these extreme measures of fraud which have kept the wheels on (if wobbling) the cart ten years after the big crash hit. This might well be by now a critical component of the control system and any interruption or degradation of it or its effectiveness could lead to chaos in the 'West'. So right now, in 2019, we know for sure that we're in Holmgren's 'brown tech' scenario but with a propaganda narrative of 'green tech' as a Potemkin facade. 

As real energy and resources decline, the brown tech power structures have managed to keep selling increased poverty as 'being green' but it's getting tougher to sell this to people as they realize they are getting poorer. The past couple of years have shown some developments: Brexit in Europe, the Visegrad countries resisting the EU migration agenda, led by Hungary's Orban, but echoed in not-yet-majority movements in a half dozen other countries (viz, Italy managed to put Salvini in power for a year before Brussels regained control of Italy and evicted Salvini just this year). We saw the Cyprus bank confiscation and four years of Greek 'bailout agreements' which put the country in receivership with a lapdog government executing all orders from the bankers. This continues today. 

North and West of there, the non-Greek rest of the EU can see what happened and knows they're next on the list. In the US we have the whole story of the Trump presidency. This was something the 'establishment' did not prepare for, and while they have effectively isolated him from his administration to continue the basic life support functions of the 'deep state' in the US, there has been policy stagnation in the US for three years as everything and everyone has become obsessed and preoccupied with a Trump-versus-antitrump polarization. The accompanying breakdown of reality into surrealistic political fantasy in America, with the dominance of identity politics, absolutely everything as 'fake news' and everyone following narratives instead of reality, all around, have kept America, ironically, from really moving further into the totalitarian zone of the brown tech scenario. Three more years of inconclusive wars on fringe territories have led to no real change in geostrategic balances, as the other main contenders are in equally shabby condition and busy propping up their own narratives.

A new angle 

One thing I want to propose now is a modification of Holmgren's mapping. It was pretty clear to many of us back when these scenarios were being worked out (2007-2009) that the 'green tech' future was nothing but fantasy, even then. Holmgren acknowledges that a lot of the debate of these scenarios took place in an excellent forum known as 'The Oil Drum' from the early 2000s to about 2012. By 2012 most of the main contributors and discussants in the Oil Drum had concluded their own ideas about what was going on and were already putting into action their responses, most of which involved changes of career, lifestyle, and so on, and left much less time for talking on forums about it, and meant much more hard work preparing for or dealing with the crisis. That forum is now just kept as an archive. Still, even then, many of us saw 'green tech' style scenarios as fantasy. 

Now, in 2019, it is clear that indeed, green tech was never a realistic prospect. We are already a decade into brown tech. The question is where to from here. Another big factor is the 'climate change' variable. Holmgren took this as fact. Not all of us were so convinced that it was either so serious or so related to human activity. To some of us, the climate changes look more like cycles related to solar activity and orbital aberrations similar to those which brought us the Roman warm period, the early medieval cold period, the medieval warm period, and the little ice age. Beyond that, the timescale of energy and resource decline likely makes any question of climate change irrelevant. Therefore considering this possibility, we might want to rethink the climate axis on Holmgren's map. We might want to replace it with another axis! 

It has been shown that post-2008 the brown tech elites and power structures have managed to hang on to control through increasing use of extreme surveillance and tightly networked instrumentation of more and more of the economy. This intimidates people into submission and also locks them into a tighter loop of dependence- if you will yourself directly starve because your digibit-card gets shut off or stops working, then you feel it and the threat of it immediately and you will sit down and shut up much more readily than if you only know abstractly that if the city burns down in riots, that the supermarkets won't get resupplied next week. It's a weaker connection back to the feedback loop and people are more likely to rebel. And along the gradient to that extreme, if your digibit-card gets nicked by a fine or penalty of basically being subversive or voicing dissent, then you'll keep your mouth shut- viz China's rapid rollout of 'social credit' as a mechanism of automated electronic mass control. This has the potential to ride heavy demand destruction down the decline curve without the elites losing control. 

So it seems first of all that Holmgren's four scenarios are really three - brown tech is the current reality already a decade on, and there is a bifurcation (Holmgren treats this possibility in his paper) between lifeboat and earth steward depending on local conditions. in different places the scenarios coexist. A new fourth scenario might be added which we might call 'mad max,' if it could be even more dystopian and extreme collapse than 'lifeboat'. a major variable in all this would seem to be how long Brown Tech keeps control, and how tightly they manage to clamp down. Thus, Brown Tech already left behind its 'green tech' possibility but still keeps up a facade of 'green tech' and a self-indulgent shiny consumer existence for a portion of the population. This could almost be called a Huxley's scenario. Behind the pleasant facade of Brown Tech is a totalitarian monster gripping power through a pervasive surveillance and police state, and the majority of the population pressed into poverty and dependence- a scenario that could easily be named '1984'. 

It is clear that 'Huxley and '1984' can coexist and one transitions into the other as resources decline. but let's plot a new map based on this thinking: on one axis, we have, as before, resource/energy depletion, slow vs fast. on the other, we have consolidation of power, slow/moderate to fast/total. in the slow depletion, slow/moderate consolidation quadrant, we have a scenario that's Huxley with some 20th-century style fascism and the veneer of civilization, with a future of staircase type catabolic decline into one of the other scenarios depending on which one goes sooner, energy or control. This is Holmgren's Brown Tech scenario with a nice face. 

In the slow depletion, fast/total control quadrant, we have the ugly face of Brown Tech, which I've called 'brown tech apotheosis'. This can hang on as long as it keeps the resource depletion variable above some threshold limits. On the fast depletion, slow/moderate control quadrant, we have Holmgren's Lifeboat scenario. Power doesn't manage to consolidate, and resource limits break things down into wars, chaos, and finally a low complexity lifeboat world. On the fast depletion, fast/total control quadrant, we have a period of 1984 which transforms into more or less worldwide war, and then as the wars burn out, leave behind a condition I've called 'mad max'. This is a very bleak and ugly version of the Lifeboat scenario. 

Actually, Mad max, Lifeboat, and Earth steward are all along an axis depending on local conditions, as terminal points of the chain of evolution of these scenarios (extinction is also a point on this axis, even though further beyond mad max). It seems the main variables that distinguish earth steward, lifeboat, mad max, and extinction, are local conditions (environment, climate, population salvageable resources, etc), plus the trajectory which was followed to get there through the previous map- a trajectory through 1984 and WW3 is more likely to terminate in mad max or extinction, whereas a trajectory through lifeboat might lead to enclaves of earth steward. It is looking as if much of the Third World and the US are going through worse conditions now, but will avoid some of the worst later, for example.

Thus, it is useful to try to figure out not only where we are on this map but what path we have been following and how it might evolve further, acknowledging that not every part of the world is following exactly the same trajectory. So we can also try to follow different futures for different regions. It does seem clear that before the 2005-2008 time of peak net energy, there had been in force a long trend toward tighter integration of the global economy. Thus, it is useful to consider all regions more or less as starting in the same spot circa 2005 and plot their divergence since then. 

 

 

First, let's try to see if we can get a better understanding of where we are along the depletion axis. This at least should be easier to observe and quantify than the consolidation of the control axis. We know that in 2005 our scenario begins somewhere in the 'Huxley' quadrant near the left side of the depletion axis. We know (as we suspected years back) that the recent bumps in oil/gas production and plateau maintenance of coal production have been ever lower quality resources with lower net energy and steeper decline profiles in time. We don't know if we have already crossed the middle of the map with respect to depletion but we can be pretty sure we're close to it if not over it. 

We also know that absent some unpredictable step function down in production (due to some one-off natural phenomenon like an earthquake, or to some out of band event like a war), that the decline profile will be messy but accelerating downward over a period of a couple decades. We could easily already be some years into that and just on a bump- or we might have another fifteen or twenty years to go before the bottom falls out. 

So what else do we know? We know that in 2008 we fell off peak energy and have been sliding downward for eleven years. We also know that at the time the power elites of the Huxley/brown-tech-with-a-nice-face scene, managed through increasingly extreme distortions, to keep control. The rapidity of those measures is definitely a step function type of move, so we are pretty sure we took the step out of the Huxley quadrant in 2008/2009 down into the 1984 quadrant. There is still plenty of nuance in that quadrant and most of us reading this on a computer screen are living in the Huxley zone that, while shrinking, coincides with a growing 1984 zone as parts of the same general 'establishment'. We know that 2016-2019 saw a lot of bumpy resistance to the further consolidation of control, but also saw successful responses and regaining of control by power elites in many areas. We know that now in 2019, as well as in 2010 or 2015, we were further along the depletion axis than we were in 2008 and that this is basically monotonic in time. We wont find any new resources or high-quality energy sources from here on out.

We haven't yet fallen into world war 3 (apparently), so we're still in the Huxley/1984 mix, with the Huxley component bleeding out and the 1984 cauldron waiting to collect all who fall through the cracks in the Huxley facade. And yet, wherever the brown tech/1984 steamroller has not managed to erect such an effective electronic prison, we can see massive increases in riots, chaos, violence, etc, over the past decade. That's characteristic of world war type scenarios even if it's not organized military units fighting organized campaigns.

Not to mention that the past decade has seen more of the earth's surface and population caught up in organized military violence as well. So we're somewhere between 1984 and ww3 with some Huxley on top for those still living the comfortable life. We see some major bifurcation points ahead: the last round of crazy finance manipulation and twilight-zone measures like negative interest rates and financial
markets that only go up on exponentially exploding debt numbers, all the insane measures taken in the past decade, seem to be running out of gas. New injections of imaginary digibit money have less of an effect on markets than previous injections and the effects don't last as long. People are figuring out that they're poorer and even in the developed world they're getting more restless about it. Challengers to the narrative of the elites are appearing and even managing to gain positions in prominent public office sometimes, though so far the brown tech elites have managed to keep them in check. This hints that if the brown tech elites are going to keep control and keep the scenario in the brown tech apotheosis quadrant of the map, they must up their game- new measures for even more total control. And they are working hard to do so.

Thus one major bifurcation point approaching is the question of how successful will these new measures be? It seems clear that these measures will largely involve electronic and computerized technologies- surveillance, instrumentation, automation, and centralization of processes to insert a control mechanism into the loop of execution of even simple routine actions. It's an electronic panopticon prison for the whole world, something which many people (criticized by the mass media as cranks, weirdos, conspiracy theorists, or nutjobs) have been yammering about for years. And yet that's the only real option for the elites to keep control. 

They cant control the depletion axis, that's physics driving that dimension. They can slow down the progress along that axis only be destroying resource demand, which means making people poorer or reducing their number (or a combination of the two). While an extreme version of this might be a mass-extermination of most of the human population to allow an elite to live richly for centuries yet to come in some techno-enhanced prolongation of the Huxley scenario, this is an absurdly unlikely trajectory fraught with too many real engineering problems to be realistic. Not that the elites of the brown tech world couldn't accomplish the kill-off of billions, that's a technically feasible move, but rather that they wouldn't be able to keep up a technological empire afterward. They would merely instead transition rapidly and sharply through a world-war-3 phase into the mad max with enclaves of an especially evil lifeboat scenario, some of which would be whatever remained of those elites. 

Thus it seems clear that all trajectories ultimately lead monotonically to the right and eventually either down to (near-?) extinction or, even if they bow deeply down through mad max, ultimately curve back up into lifeboat. So some combination of population decline and increased poverty, though, can prolong the elite's hold on a brown-tech/Huxley scenario, and this seems obvious to be their main focus. The equal amount of noise about the evil lurking beneath the surface of trends like the UN 'agenda 21' and other such forces, while they might sound like far-out conspiracy theories would actually fit perfectly with an effort to hang on to a brown-tech Huxley/1984 hybrid world as long as possible, with the Huxley fragment keeping control. 

However, it is not at all clear how they will manage this next round of measures without also breaking some of the electronic facades that have kept the populations of the developed countries docile thus far. It looks like their aim there instead is to drop the facade and dump the mass of them into 1984 rather swiftly by closing the last loose ends in economic activity, communication, and individual tracking of people's movements 24/7. Once they feel confident they have those pieces in place they can drop the remains of the facade and they will have locked the majority into the 1984 scenario, which can continue for perhaps even a decade or more before it melts down into mad max. 

That's a scary proposition for anyone alive right now, because it would mean most of the rest of his life would be lived through such a scenario. Another bifurcation question is in the world war direction- will for example the widening rift between the US and China turn more hostile and end up in a hot war? will it percolate into more proxy wars in the third world? Cold war? How rapidly will it move in that direction? In some aspects, the map and our experience hint to us that we're already in WW3, it just doesn't look like any world war we've seen before. Further refinements can be attempted at drawing trajectories, for smaller regions, by trying to identify local conditions which will influence the bigger trends as the play out in those regions. Let's try to picture what we know or think is a pretty solid guess for some major modern blocs: the US, the EU, the 'third world', and China. (places like Japan and Australia go largely with the US in this picture). 

The future will be examined in the next installment of this series of posts.



Thursday, June 17, 2021

Four Scenarios for a Catastrophic Future (part one)

This post is contributed by a commenter of "The Seneca Effect" who signs it as "Rutilius Namatianus." It is the first of a series of three posts that re-examine the four scenarios proposed by David Holmgren in 2009. It is an interesting story and I am sure you'll find much food for thought in reviewing those old predictions which (unfortunately) seem to have been prophetic in several respects. We seem to live in a world of total madness but, in that madness, there is some method. (UB)

 By Rutilius Namatianus
 
This is the first section of Part 1 - written Nov 2019. In this first section I give a summary of Holmgren's famous "Future Scenarios". In the second half, I made a ten year reflection on them Finally, Part 2 will bring it up to today in 2021. (RT)
 
 
Ten years ago, David Holmgren brought out a thesis he titled 'future scenarios,'  wherein he laid out some reasoning for two main axes along which the next few decades could be characterized and developed four main scenarios which corresponded to the four general quadrants laid out by his axes of primary variables. 
 

His two major variables were the rate and severity of climate change,  and the rate of oil/energy/resource depletion. See his paper here, https://www.futurescenarios.org/  where he laid down the following  scenarios: 


Slow/benign climate change, slow resource depletion 'green tech.' A scenario in which conditions remain stable enough and resources abundant enough to develop an organized and controlled descent to lower resource consumption and ultimately lower complexity, without falling into chaos. This is the solar power, wind farms, electric cars and tech future type of story that is being pushed hard by the propaganda machine of the 'establishment' during the past few years. 
 
Fast/harmful climate change, slow resource depletion: 'brown tech.' A scenario in which the situation gets more chaotic, more rapidly, where economic imbalances and breakdowns prevent a 'green' transition, and where instead the focus remains on extending the service life of existing energy sources in a top-down forced reduction in consumption. This scenario is characterized by pragmatic  totalitarianism, and gratuitous violence to control resources. If it is possible to consolidate power quickly, current societal structures can even hang on for some decades until they run out of the stores of high-quality energy embedded in leftover technology it can't reproduce. Then, society breaks down into a more decentralized post-tech picture.

Slow/benign climate change, fast resource depletion: 'earth stewards.'  A scenario where chaotic environmental conditions cause a rapid breakdown of large power structures, so that nobody can manage any sort of green tech build-out before things slip down the decline curve. The situation stabilizes at a salvage-tech society of highly localized cultures who, while they go through a huge decline in population and complexity and affluence, manage to catch a foothold in an eco-wholesome scenario characterized by permaculture, with most people working on farms in small polities - which might be more like the high middle ages than anything else.

fast/harsh climate change, fast resource depletion: 'lifeboat.'  A scenario where things are too rapidly evolving for any centralized power to hang on to a brown-tech regime very long or very effectively, and civilizations melts down in chaos until there are only scattered bits of structure left, living primitive farming, hunting/gathering, or scavenging cultures on whatever's left. Large regions are abandoned as unexploitable by anything by nomads and nomads make a big comeback. Population is probably lowest in this of all the 4 scenarios.

Holmgren also describes two general affinities among these scenarios, where 'green-tech' will overtime devolve towards 'earth steward' and where 'brown tech' will over time devolve towards 'lifeboat'. 

Now, that was in 2009. Ten years on, let's review his scenarios and how they have followed real events. In 2009, we suspected that oil had peaked recently. Without the redefinition of non-oil things as oil (the most extreme being corn ethanol and 'refinery gain' in US statistics!), it is clear now that conventional crude oil did peak in 2005. 

Oil plus not-really-oil peaked in 2008, and has held on a plateau in the decade since then. American production has risen dramatically while the rest of the world has seen stagnant or declining production, but all the American gain has been tight shale formations with extremely steep production/decline profiles. Such wells have a producing life of only five years or so, and the first wave of wells is already being shut down! 
 
More difficult to estimate, but certainly a real factor is the quality of this energy and the net energy available from it. In parallel to this development for oil, we have seen corresponding peaks in the gross quantity and net energy of coal production worldwide. That hit a peak around 2010 and has not broken though its plateau either- which means that net energy has been declining. So it seems pretty clear that the average supply of net energy peaked somewhere between 2005 and 2008.

Right on time, 2008 saw a huge crackup in the nervous system of the modern economy, as seen in the financial breakdown in that year. That was a major turning point that we can use to measure our progress in the Holmgren scenarios. 

Naturally a big question for all of us is "where are we along the curve of the Seneca cliff?". It looks simple enough when you plot a graph on paper, but when you're standing on the curve, it it a lot harder to figure out exactly where you are (until you've fallen off, at which point it might be too late to do anything about it!) 

In the next part we will look at my 2019 review of Holmgren's scenarios and propose a new angle of view of the situation.
 
 

Monday, June 14, 2021

Stereocene: The Future of Earth's Ecosytsem

Here is a post that appeared four years ago on "Cassandra's Legacy" and that I think is worth republishing here, on "The Seneca Effect," after some minor revisions. It is part of a series of rather speculative posts on the future of humankind and of the universe. Here are the links to the series

The Next Ten Billion Years

Star Parasites

The Long-Term Perspectives of Nuclear Energy

The Great Turning Point For Humankind: What if Nuclear Energy had not been Abandoned? 

 

______________________________________________________________________________

Stereocene: The Future of  Earth's Ecosystem



 During the "golden age" of science fiction, a popular theme was that of silicon-based life. Above, you can see a depiction of a silicon creature described by Stanley Weinbaum in his "A Martian Odyssey" of 1934. The creature was endowed with a metabolism that would make it "breathe" metallic silicon, oxidizing it to silicon dioxide, hence it would excrete silica bricks: truly a solid-state creature. It is hard to think of an environment where such a creature could evolve, surely not on Mars as we know it today. But, here, on Earth, some kind of silicon-based metabolism seems to have evolved during the past decades. We call it "photovoltaics." Some reflections of mine on how this metabolism could evolve in the future are reported below, where I argue that this new metabolic system could usher a new geological era which we might call "Stereocene", the era of solid-state devices.
 


An abridged version of a paper published in 2016 in 
"Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality"

Ugo Bardi
Dipartimento di Chimica - Università di Firenze

The history of the earth system is normally described in terms of a series of time subdivisions defined by discrete (or “punctuated”) stratigraphic changes in the geological record, mainly in terms of biotic composition (Aunger 2007ab). The most recent of these subdivisions is the proposed “Anthropocene,” a term related to the strong perturbation of the ecosystem created by human activity. The starting date of the Anthropocene is not yet officially established, but it is normally identified with the start of the large-scale combustion of fossil carbon compounds stored in the earth’s crust (“fossil fuels”) on the part of the human industrial system. In this case, it could be located at some moment during the eighteenth century CE (Crutzen 2002; Lewis and Maslin 2015). So, we may ask the question of what the evolution of the Anthropocene could be as a function of the decreasing availability of fossil carbon compounds. Will the Anthropocene decline and the earth system return to conditions similar to the previous geologic subdivision, the Holocene?

The Earth system is a nonequilibrium system whose behavior is determined by the flows of energy it receives. This kind of systems tend to act as energy transducers and to dissipate the available energy potentials at the fastest possible rate (Sharma and Annila 2007). Nonequilibrium systems tend to attain the property called “homeostasis” if the potentials they dissipate remain approximately constant (Kleidon 2004). In the case of the Earth system, by far, the largest flow of energy comes from the sun. It is approximately constant (Iqbal 1983), except for very long timescales, since it gradually increases by a factor of about 10 % per billion years (Schroeder and Connon Smith 2008). Therefore, the earth’s ecosystem would be expected to reach and maintain homeostatic conditions over timescales of the order of hundreds of millions of years. However, this does not happen because of geological perturbations that generate the punctuated transitions observed in the stratigraphic record.

The transition that generated the Anthropocene is related to a discontinuity in the energy dissipation rate of the ecosystem. This discontinuity appeared when the ecosystem (more exactly, the “homo sapiens” species) learned how to dissipate the energy potential of the carbon compounds stored in the earth’s crust, mainly in the form of crude oil, natural gas, and coal). These compounds had slowly accumulated as the result of the sedimentation of organic matter mainly over the Phanerozoic era over a timescale of the order of hundreds of millions of years (Raupach and Canadell 2010). The rate of energy dissipation of this fossil potential, at present, can be estimated in terms of the “primary energy” use per unit time at the input of the human economic system. In 2013, this amount corresponded to ca. 18 TW (IEA 2015). Of this power, about 86 % (or ca. 15 TW) were generated by the combustion of fossil carbon compounds.

The thermal energy directly produced by combustion is just a trigger for other, more important effects that have created the Anthropocene. Among these, we may list as the dispersion of large amounts of heavy metals and radioactive isotopes in the ecosphere, the extended paving of large surface areas by inorganic compounds (Schneider et al. 2009), the destruction of a large fraction of the continental shelf surface by the practice known as “bottom trawling” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011), and more. The most important indirect effect on the ecosystem of the combustion of fossil carbon is the emission of greenhouse gases as combustion products, mainly carbon dioxide, CO2, (Stocker et al. 2013). The thermal forcing generated by CO2 alone can be calculated as approximately 900 TW or about 1 % of the solar radiative effect (Zhang and Caldeira 2015), hence a nonnegligible effect that generates an already detectable greenhouse warming of the atmosphere. This warming, together with other effects such as oceanic acidification, has the potential of deeply changing the ecosystem in the same way as, in ancient times, LIPs have generated mass extinctions (Wignall 2005; Bond and Wignall 2014).

Burning fossil fuels generate the exergy needed to create industrial structures which, in turn, are used to extract more fossil fuels and burn them. In this sense, the human industrial system can be seen as a metabolic system akin to biological ones (Malhi 2014). The structures of this nonbiological metabolic system can be examined in light of concepts such as “net energy” (Odum 1973) defined as the exergy generated by the transduction of an energy stock into another form of energy stock. A similar concept is the “energy return for energy invested” (EROI or EROEI), first defined in 1986 (Hall et al. 1986) [see also (Hall et al. 2014)]. EROEI is defined as the ratio of the exergy obtained by means of a certain dissipation structure to the amount of exergy necessary to create and maintain the structure. If the EROEI associated with a dissipation process is larger than one, the excess can be used to replicate the process in new structures. On a large scale, this process can create the complex system that we call the “industrial society.” The growth of the human civilization as we know it today, and the whole Anthropocene can be seen as the effect of the relatively large EROEI, of the order of 20–30 and perhaps more, associated with the combustion of fossil carbon compounds (Lambert et al. 2014).

A peculiarity of the dissipation of potentials associated with fossil hydrocarbons is that the system cannot attain homeostasis. The progressive depletion of the high-EROEI fossil resources leads to the progressive decline of the EROEI associated with fossil potentials. For instance, Hall et al. (2014) show that the EROEI of oil extraction in the USA peaked at around 30 in the 1960s, to decline to values lower than 20 at present. A further factor to be taken into account is called “pollution,” which accelerates the degradation of the accumulated capital stock and hence reduces the EROEI of the system as it requires more exergy for its maintenance (Meadows et al. 1972).

Only a small fraction of the crustal fossil carbon compounds can provide an EROEI >  1, the consequence is that the active phase of the Anthropocene is destined to last only a relatively short time for a geological time subdivision, a few centuries and no more. Assuming that humans will still exist during the post-Anthropocene tail, they would not have access to fossil fuels. As a consequence, their impact on the ecosystem would be mainly related to agricultural activities and, therefore, small in comparison with the present one, although likely not negligible, as it has been in the past (Ruddiman 2013; Mysak 2008).

However, we should also take into account that fossil carbon is not the only energy potential available to the human industrial system. Fissile and fissionable nuclei (such as uranium and thorium) can also generate potentials that can be dissipated. However, this potential is limited in extent and cannot be reformed by Earth-based processes. Barring radical new developments, depletion of mineral uranium and thorium is expected to prevent this process from playing an important role in the future (Zittel et al. 2013). Nuclear fusion of light nuclei may also be considered but, so far, there is no evidence that the potential associated with the fusion of deuterium nuclei can generate an EROEI sufficient to maintain an industrial civilization, or even to maintain itself. Other potentials exist at the earth’s surface in the form of geothermal energy (Davies and Davies 2010) and tidal energy (Munk and Wunsch 1998); both are, however, limited in extent and unlikely to be able to provide the same flow of exergy generated today by fossil carbon compounds.

There remains the possibility of processing the flow of solar energy at the earth surface that, as mentioned earlier on, is large [89,000 TW (Tsao et al. 2006) or 87,000 TW (Szargut 2003)]. Note also that the atmospheric circulation generated by the sun’s irradiation produces some 1000 TW of kinetic energy (Tsao et al. 2006). These flows are orders of magnitude larger than the flow of primary energy associated with the Anthropocene (ca. 17 TW). Of course, as discussed earlier, the capability of a transduction system to create complex structures depends on the EROEI of the process. This EROEI is difficult to evaluate with certainty, because of the continuous evolution of the technologies. We can say that all the recent studies on photovoltaic systems report EROEIs larger than one for the production of electric power by means of photovoltaic devices (Rydh and Sandén 2005; Richards and Watt 2007; Weißbach et al. 2013; Bekkelund 2013; Carbajales-Dale et al. 2015; Bhandari et al. 2015) even though some studies report smaller values than the average reported ones (Prieto and Hall 2011). In most cases, the EROEI of PV systems seems to be smaller than that of fossil burning systems, but, in some cases, it is reported to be larger (Raugei et al. 2012), with even larger values being reported for CSP (Montgomery 2009; Chu 2011). Overall, values of the EROEI of the order of 5–10 for direct transduction of solar energy can be considered as reasonable estimates (Green and Emery 2010). Even larger values of the EROEI are reported for wind energy plants (Kubiszewski et al. 2010). These values may increase as the result of technological developments but also decline because of the progressive occupation of the best sites for the plants and the increasing energy costs related to the depletion of the minerals needed to build the plants.

The current photovoltaic technology may use, but do not necessarily need, rare elements that could face near-term exhaustion problems (García-Olivares et al. 2012). Photovoltaic cells are manufactured using mainly silicon and aluminum, both common elements in the earth’s crust. So there do not appear to exist fundamental barriers to “close the cycle” and to use the exergy generated by human-made solar-powered devices (in particular PV systems) to recycle the systems for a very long time.

Various estimates exist on the ultimate limits of energy generation from photovoltaic systems. The “technical potential” in terms of solar energy production in the USA alone is estimated at more than 150 TW (Lopez et al. 2012). According to the data reported in (Liu et al. 2009), about 1/5 of the area of the Sahara desert (2 million square km) could generate around 50 TW at an overall PV panel area conversion efficiency of 10 %. Summing up similar fractions of the areas of major deserts, PV plants (or CSP ones) could generate around 500–1000 TW, possibly more than that, without significantly impacting on agricultural land. The contribution of wind energy has been estimated to be no more than 1 TW (de Castro et al. 2011) in some assumptions that have been criticized in (Garcia-Olivares 2016) Other calculations indicate that wind could generate as much as about 80 TW, (Jacobson and Archer 2012), or somewhat smaller values (Miller et al. 2011). Overall, these values are much larger than those associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, with the added advantage that renewables such as PV and wind produce higher quality energy in the form of electric power.

From these data, we can conclude that the transduction of the solar energy flow by means of inorganic devices could represent a future new metabolic “revolution” of the kind described by (Szathmáry and Smith 1995). (Lenton and Watson 2011) that could bootstrap the ecosphere to a new and higher level of transduction. It is too early to say if such a transition is possible, but, if it were to take place at its maximum potential, its effects could lead to transformations larger than those associated with the Anthropocene as it is currently understood. These effects are hard to predict at present, but they may involve changes in the planetary albedo, in the weather patterns, and in the general management of the land surface. Overall, the effect might be considered as a new geological transition.

As these effects would be mainly associated with solid-state devices (PV cells), perhaps we need a different term than “Anthropocene” to describe this new phase of the earth’s history. The term “Stereocene” (the age of solid-state devices) could be suitable to describe a new stage of the earth system in which humans could have access to truly gigantic amounts of useful energy, without necessarily perturbing the ecosystem in the highly destructive ways that have been the consequence of the use of fossil fuels during the past few centuries.

References (see original article)