[MonteQuest]

We all know that fossil fuels are the root cause of our overshoot condition. Those heretofore inaccessible and unexploited energy sources gave rise to a high exponential growth of our population. We lament it’s going away daily. In fact, we wish to breed its’ replacement through the construction of so-called renewable energy systems.

Is that the plan? Replace the support of fossil fuels with the support of an energy system that is only possible by using that temporary energy subsidy to do so? Swap out the oil energy slave and replace it with a renewable energy clone? To what end? To forever perpetuate the overpopulation condition we find ourselves in with an energy subsidy with virtually no limits? It’s like using one credit card to pay off another so you can continue spending and ignore the hole you have dug for yourself.

We claim to want to get off of our addiction to fossil fuels with one caveat; we want one last fix, one more shot of that energy subsidy that gave us such a high, such a kick, and such hubris. We will then stop destroying our ecosystem, polluting, and reducing biodiversity, as if moving to renewable sources of energy will somehow endear us to Nature and return mankind to a more sustainable husbandry.

It will not. It will be used to continue BAU and everyone knows it.

The only really sustainable and renewable energy is that passing through the Earth's life systems, thus we can't call it sustainable or renewable if we obstruct it and prevent it from fulfilling its function, as might be the case with wide scale wind, solar, tidal, or biofuels.

[dohboi]

Welcome back again, MQ. Buckle up, 'cause it may be a bumpy ride!!

We all know that fossil fuels are the root cause of our overshoot condition

.

Do 'we'?? Look at Chinese population growth rates. Do those match ff use?

Those heretofore inaccessible and unexploited energy sources gave rise to a high exponential growth of our population.

"high exponential" is not necessary for nonsustainability. Simple 'exponential' will do!

We lament it’s going away daily.

OK, now you're really starting to bug me. Who, pray tell, is this mysterious "we." Presumably it does not actually include the actual speaker. So it is some kind of darkly ironic other "we."

Please drop the dark, mysterious innuendo and just say whatever it is you f'n want to say. (Sorry if that was too off color for you, T.)

I

n fact, we wish to breed its’ replacement through the construction of so-called renewable energy systems.

OMFG, who again is this god-forsaken 'we.' We want to breed. Well, yeah, that's kinda biological. But who is the 'we' who wants to 'breed [the] replacement [of 'high' exponential growth]"??

You seem to be aiming your barbs at some pseudo-green BAU mindset that hardly exists here anymore, old chap. Maybe you need to spend a bit more time lurking to get up to date? We're all pretty much confirmed doomers here (except maybe Graeme, bless his sweet heart), thanks partly to you pointing the way, old chap (or, of course, outright denialist or the occasional techofantasist troll--but I hope you're not trying to address them; nobody much bothers anymore.)

Is that the plan?

Welllllll....... n o .

Not for pretty much anyone here at least. I mean, you can talk about green BAU mindset, but please drop the sardonic first person plural (non-inclusive-of-the-speaker, apparently) pronoun; it's just, well, it's like addressing a bunch of Hell's Angels as if they are suburban housewives...it doesn't fit the situation.

Replace the support of fossil fuels with the support of an energy system that is only possible by using that temporary energy subsidy to do so? Swap out the oil energy slave and replace it with a renewable energy clone?

Well, speaking of clone, are you now a clone of Gail Tveberg? 'Cause this argument is starting to sound like a warmed over version of her very tired cliches.

To what end? To forever perpetuate the overpopulation condition we find ourselves in with an energy subsidy with virtually no limits? It’s like using one credit card to pay off another so you can continue spending and ignore the hole you have dug for yourself.

OMG again. What's the obverse (if that's a word) of preaching to the choir? Your preaching to what you think is the other churches congregation but which is actually the deacons of your own damn church.

We claim to want to get off of our addiction to fossil fuels with one caveat; we want one last fix, one more shot of that energy subsidy that gave us such a high, such a kick, and such hubris. We will then stop destroying our ecosystem, polluting, and reducing biodiversity, as if moving to renewable sources of energy will somehow endear us to Nature and return mankind to a more sustainable husbandry.

Yes, yes, we want to get off one form of our addiction rush over to another one. Been said here in one form or another about a million times.

It will not. It will be used to continue BAU and everyone knows it.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz


(I'm only this snarky 'cause I know you can give as good as you get. So let it roll, MQ, let it roll!!)

[MonteQuest]

(I'm only this snarky 'cause I know you can give as good as you get. So let it roll, MQ, let it roll!!)

Oh, you think I wrote this thread for you? A quick check shows 727 lurkers online and 38 members.

Has peakoil.com become just a back scratcher forum to assuage egos? Thought not.

If I wrote it for anybody in particular it's for those endless cornucopians that Graeme endlessly posts.

[dohboi]

"727 lurkers online and 38 members"

LOL, their mostly bots.

But I'll shut tf up and let you smoke out any pollyanna panglossian pro-technology pantywaists lurking here abouts, if you can manage it. More power to ya!

[MonteQuest]

LOL, their mostly bots.

5 are bots

[KaiserJeep]

You are entirely correct, of course. We need a plan to reduce the overshoot population before embark upon another round of BAU.

[sarcasm]Therefore we should organize ourselves into murder squads, and each of us kill as many people as we think we can get away with, and then stop forever.[/sarcasm]

I thought this one through years ago. There is one plan that allows BAU to continue, and only loses us the one planet we were born on. A lucky few move off the surface of this one world, and live in space habitats. We continue to reproduce, we continue to consume raw materials and energy, until the local human population is in the hundreds of Trillions. We let the poor doomed inhabitants of Earth, presently circling the drain, go down. They are doomed by the utter impossibility of changing basic human behaviors with regard to reproduction and the loss of cheap fossil energy supporting mechanized agriculture.

About this time, somebody insecure about technology always starts screaming about how that will never work. Ecologists are going to be in high demand, modeling and designing habitats optimized for raising food crops and food animals, given endless supplies of sterile soil, solar flux, water, and basic hydrocarbons from the carbonaceous asteroids. We will need seed species, everything from soil bacteria to insects and worms. We can probably re-purpose the Permies as grunt labor in the habitats, although if one is practicing something like monoculture hydroponics, you really should automate harvesting and planting via robots or specialized machines - energy is present in almost endless supply.

Or maybe you would prefer to retire to your luxurious new abode. I enjoyed the heck out of your thread on your Earth-sheltered home. I will hopefully be selling my Silicon Valley tract home and building a new home compliant with the Passive House standard in Wisconsin over the next two years.

[MonteQuest]

You are entirely correct, of course. We need a plan to reduce the overshoot population before embark upon another round of BAU.

A little late for that, I am afraid.

Perhaps the best plan would entail preserving key elements of civilization. That list would be as varied as fingerprints. We all know that the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria exists somewhere with a geothermal powered backup. Maybe TPTB have done all that needs to be done.

[sunweb]

Thanks MonteQuest. It is hard to break the BAU and the technophantasy dream.

[Timo]

YES! YES! Let's subsidize the sun, and the wind, and the earth's own heat, and all of those other "so-called" renewables that will only produce energy if we subsidize them with our money, just like oil and coal. Just to be clear, those subsidies are for the extraction of oil an coal, and for the conversion of those so-called renwables into useable energy. For the so-called renewables, those subsidies are to help achieve an economy of scale so that, in our capitalist world, they will achieve parity in price per KWH, and become the preferred option for energy. You are absolutely correct that it is expected that those so-called renewables will be of substantial quantity to replace fossil fuels, thus allowing BAU for eternity. However, those so-called renewables, once up and running with the infrastructure to support the capture of their energies actually are (shock!) renewable! The sun always shines on our planet. The wind always blows somewhere on our planet. Geothermal is always available somewhere on our planet. Those sources of energy are not actually renewable. They are a constant. We do not have to renew them to make them available! They never run out! What's more, once the proper infrastructure is established, those energy sources are FREE! Our only cost comes through conversion and transmission. But, that is a deal killer because that only perpetuates the overshoot that you're so worried about. I tend to agree with that point, actually. But, on the bright side, those so-called renwables don't add GHG that will shorten the lifespan of a habitable planet. Either we continue to subsidize FFs and reach that event horizon sooner, or we switch the target of those subsidies to so-called renewables in order to forestall reaching that event horizon, thus giving ourselves, and future generations a fighting chance at survival, here on this planet, and not on some artificially built space station built large enough to support human habitation in the order of millions. Sorry, but a structure built in space, large enough to support millions of people would require centuries to build, and several planet's worth of raw materials. Never, ever going to happen. And people think Elon Musk is crazy???

Sorry to rain on your parade, but i would much rather subsidize these so-called renewables to produce our energy needs, than subsidize the contamination of the Gulf of Mexico, the removal of mountains for coal, the spills from pipelines that contaminate rivers, and spew GHGs into the atmosphere, shortening the time this planet has left to support life.

We all have a choice to make. What's it going to be? A chance at life, or certain death?

[sunweb]

Timo "Sorry to rain on your parade, but i would much rather subsidize these so-called renewables to produce our energy needs, than subsidize the contamination of the Gulf of Mexico, the removal of mountains for coal, the spills from pipelines that contaminate rivers, and spew GHGs into the atmosphere, shortening the time this planet has left to support life."
you are raining and choking on your own technofantasy parade.

Solar and wind capturing devices are not alternative energy sources. For the physical devices – for wind, photovoltaices, solar hot water, hot air panels - the sun and wind are there, are green, are sustained. The devices that are used to capture the sun and wind’s energy are an extension of the fossil fuel supply system.

There is a massive infrastructure of mining, processing, manufacturing, fabricating, installation, transportation and the associated environmental assaults. There would be no sun or wind capturing devices with out this infrastructure. This infrastructure is not green, sustainable, or renewable. The making of these devices inadvertently but directly supports fracking, tar sands and deep ocean drilling because of the need for this infrastructure.
Of course, denial works too, so go for it. Or pull out your wand and get all the natural resources and energies to build, install, maintain and replace the wind and solar energy capturing devices magically. Of course, denial works too, so go for it.

[dohboi]

Sun, I don't really have a problem with your over all point, but whey you say "are an extension of the fossil fuel supply system" it is on the one hand so obvious as to not be worth mentioning--before alternative power sources are developed there will of course be no other way to power their development than by non-alternative power sources.

This is essentially a tautology and is so banal, it shouldn't have to be stated. But in the same way, it really isn't much of an argument against developing alternatives by itself (since how else could the ever be developed?) unless your claim is that they can never make more energy than the ff energy that created them. Is that your claim?

[Shaved Monkey]

A ff dependant pretend economy, propped up by a pretend currency if used to build renewables seems like a good thing while the fantasy allows it.
Replacing a subsidised ff industry with a tax payer funded military to ensure supply by tax payer subsidised solar thermal, wind, geo thermal pv solar,hydro storage and wave seems better to me.
Plenty of people will lose cash flows and power though ,thats the true problem.

[onlooker]

Their is a report the Hirsh Report from the author Robert Hirsh, I encountered on the Oil Drum site. It is very good among other things it states:
Mitigation efforts will require substantial time.
• Waiting until production peaks would leave the world with a liquid fuel deficit for 20 years.
• Initiating a crash program 10 years before peaking leaves a liquid fuels shortfall of a decade.
• Initiating a crash program 20 years before peaking could avoid a world liquid fuels shortfall.
Their is no easy way to transition, hardships from a lack of transportation liquid fuel would be crippling to the world economy. Yet I believe we all are losing our focus if we concentrate on the economy. The ecological deterioration is such now that any further continuation of this consumption global economy will push us over the edge environmentally so that Earth will not be able to support complex life. To me that is the Overshoot Predator coming to get us. So all this discourse on energy is at best a moot point if not counter-productive, in so much as keeping this massive economy going is inherently detrimental to every aspect of the biosphere. On the other side of this bottleneck and crash, perhaps the survivors can turn to renewables as Monte said by preserving basic knowledge and technology capabilities. But all I can say is that at this time nothing is certain about our future.

[Quinny]

Why don't we at least start by planting loads and loads of 'renewable' fruit and nut trees?

[Newfie]

Why don't we at least start by planting loads and loads of 'renewable' fruit and nut trees?

We've already got loads of fruits and nuts, that's the problem.

[Newfie]

Monte.

Thanks for the frank and honest statement of bare fact. A breath of fresh air.

[MonteQuest]

But, on the bright side, those so-called renwables don't add GHG that will shorten the lifespan of a habitable planet.

No, they just allow excessive population growth to continue to degrade the environment through overshoot. It isn't just GHG's that are lowering the carrying capacity. It's agriculture, deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and the list goes on....

We all have a choice to make. What's it going to be? A chance at life, or certain death?

That's pure hubris. The sequel to overshoot is always a die-off.

[MonteQuest]

This is essentially a tautology and is so banal, it shouldn't have to be stated. But in the same way, it really isn't much of an argument against developing alternatives by itself (since how else could the ever be developed?) unless your claim is that they can never make more energy than the ff energy that created them. Is that your claim?

Sure it's an argument. Fossil fuels were an energy subsidy that caused us to overshoot the carrying capacity of earth, resulting in massive environmental degradation that has actually lowered the natural carrying capacity. To use that subsidy to continue our overshoot condition is just foolishness and shows the hubris with which our minds work.

Since the horse is out of the barn with regard to stopping overshoot, it begs one to reconsider our past decisions with regard to our use of fossil fuels and their effect on our population. As I wrote some years back, "Had we been truly intelligent, we could have limited our numbers on the commons. Think of the world we could have had: a small healthy population, relatively free of disease and suffering with a high quality of life—almost forever. In our insistence to breed with freedom on the commons, we squandered that opportunity. And since the population went up due to the population sustainability of fossil fuels, it will go down as they decline—although there is uncertainty as to what a sustainable global population would be without them."

This means we wouldn't have exploited them without a serious consideration of their environmental impact and the propensity for such an energy subsidy to cause population overshoot. Our population would have remained small and the need for large amounts of energy wouldn't even have existed.

Unlikely, you say? I might have to agree.

So, what are we left with that would have avoided overshoot and environmental destruction, or where would we be if fossil fuels had never become available? How many people could the earth have supported then before the feedback mechanisms dialed us back to sustainable numbers? With only biomass, primarily wood, for energy, along with some primitive renewables using wind and water, how much could we have built? : How much technology would the world have achieved without the advent and exploitation of fossil fuels?

"Early iron smelting used charcoal as both the heat source and the reducing agent. Charcoal, derived from the charring of wood in a kiln, was an excellent source of energy to smelt the iron; however, its widespread use caused a serious depletion of England’s forests during the 18th century. the production of higher quality iron and steel required much higher temperatures. In the early 18th century, a significant breakthrough came when pig iron was successfully smelted using coke made from coal."

I'll tell you. Perhaps less than a billion people living close to the land as was always sustainable. Technology wouldn't be used for "labor saving' devices. Capitalism wouldn't exist.

Maybe Vonnegut had it right.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
-Kurt Vonnegut

PS And I got to ask: why would you ever want to "make more energy than the ff energy that created them" knowing the consequences the first time out of an energy subsidy?

[MonteQuest]

When I wrote, "The only really sustainable and renewable energy is that passing through the Earth's life systems, thus we can't call it sustainable or renewable if we obstruct it and prevent it from fulfilling its function, as might be the case with wide scale wind, solar, tidal, or biofuels."

That was a clip from something I wrote here most of ten years ago. Here's what I wrote just before that paragraph:

Understand this: Eventually, to replace fossil fuels, all energy will have to be derived directly or indirectly from the sun. However, if our current fossil fuel energy demand would have to be supplied solely from solar sources, what are the consequences of diverting that much solar energy to human use?

We already appropriate 40% of the earth's NPP. Solar energy, just because it isn't used by man doesn't mean it isn't used or is wasted. In nature, there is no such thing as waste. It is all part of the ecological balance.

According to energy expert John Holdren, the potential environmental problems with solar energy generation can be summarized as follows:

‘‘Many of the potentially harnessable natural energy flows and stocks themselves play crucial roles in shaping environmental conditions: sunlight, wind, ocean heat, and the hydrologic cycle are the central ingredients of climate; and biomass is not merely a potential fuel for civilization but the actual fuel of the entire biosphere. Clearly, large enough interventions in these natural energy flows and stocks can have immediate and adverse effects on environmental services essential to human well-being."

Modern renewable energy sources are solar "capture" systems, diverting flows of energy away from their sustainable end uses and appropriating them for man. We have seen the consequences that the damming of our rivers has had on ecosystems down stream. Wind turbines take energy from the atmosphere and turn it into electricity. Are we so brainwashed from the incessant "free energy" mantra that we don't see any down wind consequences?

Scientific American does. Wind Power Found to Affect Local Climate

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-found-to-affect-local-climate/

Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9234715/Wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change-finds-new-study.html

Even MIT:

Potential Climatic Impacts and Reliability of Very Large-Scale Wind Farms

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/climate-wind-0312

And this is happening when solar and wind only garner 1% of our energy mix. While I don't have the data to make a case, it seems rather intuitive that any energy system nearing the scale of fossil fuels is going to have large scale negative consequences.

[Quinny]

It seems to me that the question posed makes a major assumption that renewables can be scaled up to provide similar levels of usable power that we gain from ff. I tihnk this highly unlikely.

I see a gradual move towards use of solar for Electricity generation but as usual scalability is a major issue, and that is even before considering transportation. OK there are good examples of electricity powered transit systems throughout the world, but they are hardly replacing diesel driven transit on a global basis. Despite the reduction in costs produced by economies of scale, the embedded energy is significant, and if a major push for renewable installation was launched by governments throughout the world, the cost of production would have to reflect this. You also need to consider the Energy trap which would further exacerbate the fossil fuel crisis.

Having said that I would suggest that whilst we are scraping the barrel that energy would be better invested in projects that give some cushion to the fall off the cliff, than facing the inevitable die-off.

I don't believe it's going to happen though - the scale of investment is just too great. People want it all and they want it now.