Posts Tagged ‘Energy’

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Is ‘Peak Oil’ here?

July 13, 2023

This is an important question. Basically peak oil arrives, not because oil has run out, but because the amounts of energy expended to obtain the oil, transport and refine the oil, is close to, or over, the amount of energy released by the oil.

When this happens, the “Energy Return on Energy Input” is small.

It would seem obvious that if you spend more energy to get the material which gives energy, than you get from the material itself, this is going to weaken your social and business processes.

Goehring & Rozencwajg, who are an investment firm, point out that:

  • Never before has oil supply growth been so geographically concentrated. Six counties in West Texas are now 100% responsible for all global production growth.
  • Conventional non-OPEC oil production peaked in 2007 at 46.2 mm b/d and now stands at 44.2 mm b/d – 4% below its peak.
  • Including OPEC, conventional global output peaked in 2016 at 84.5 mm b/d and now stands at 81.3 m b/d – 5% below its peak.

The argue that any growth in oil production has arisen from non-convetional oil. This is oil which requires much more energy to extract, and which can often result in ecological destruction. This includes the oil of fracking, shale oils, tar sands, or requires crop convesion.

  • [Between 2006 and 2015] US shales grew by 6.8 mm b/d (65% of all growth), bio-fuels grew by 1.9 mm b/d (19% of the growth), and Canadian oil sands increased 1.4 mm b/d (14% of the growth). Please note that out of this 10 mm b/d growth figure, the Permian represents only 1.4 mm b/d or 14%.

Between 2016 and 23

  • US shales accounted for 85% of the increase. However, whereas all the major shale basins grew from 2006 to 2015, only the Permian grew afterward. 

However, the decline in availability has not lowered the demand. More importantly, not lowering the demand shows that the world’s societies and businesses are not dealing with climate change prevention, adaptation or mitigation. More oil burning increases emissions, which increase climate change, which increases the danger of social collapse. Paradoxically, decline in energy availability, also means an increase in the possibility of social collapse.

Because of the demand:

  • Global demand in 1Q23 surpassed 102 mm barrels per day — three million barrels above the 1Q19 (pre-COVID) level and almost 2 mm b/d above the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 1Q23 estimate. 
  • From here on out, just six counties in West Texas must meet all global demand growth [from the Permian shale].
  • [Their models suggest] The Permian is likely less than a year from peaking and starting its decline

The usual pattern for shale oil, is that once the decline starts, it declines very quickly.

Once oil decline, and resulting price increases, really start to bite, then air transport is likely over for the masses without major technological break throughs, which currently seem unlikely.

Because they are an investment company and not that bothered with the causes of climate change, they are ‘bullish’ about natural gas…. and

  • North American natural gas remains our highest conviction investment theme, and we have used the recent weakness to add to our holdings.

So the collapse continues….

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Addenda:

We know that when oil wells are abandoned they are rarely made safe and leak proof because that costs money. So there will be continuing pollution.

When a well is left unplugged, it can leak oil and other toxic chemicals, endanger water wells and other sources, contribute to air pollution and emit methane – a powerful greenhouse gas

Hundreds of thousands of wells across the country were not plugged by their operators and remain open to groundwater and nature, some for a century or more. These “orphan” wells have no solvent owner of record, so the cleanup liability falls on the states, federal agencies or Tribe. Unfortunately, only pennies on the dollar have been available to properly clean up these wells.

Texas could receive over $341M to plug the 6,489 currently documented orphan wells in the state.

EDF Mapping Orphan Wells in Texas

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I was asked why with peak oil coming do renewables need subsidy?

Renewables appear to get less subsidy from taxpayers than fossil fuels, throughout the world and in Australia.

  • I’ve argued before that its often hard to agree on what counts as a subsidy, and some people suggest tax concessions are not subsidies, and figures of subsidies differ. But see:
  • “New research shows fossil fuel subsidies over the forward estimates have increased to a record breaking $57.1b, up from the $55.3b forecast in 2022.”
  • “This report provides our first estimates for 2022, which show that global fossil fuel consumption subsidies doubled from the previous year to an all-time high of USD 1 trillion.”
  • “Trillions of dollars of subsidies for fossil fuels, farming and fishing are causing ‘environmental havoc’, according to the World Bank, severely harming people and the planet…. At $577bn, the explicit subsidies for coal, oil and gas in 2021 were twice as large as those for renewable energy, and almost six times higher than the climate finance promised by rich countries to developing nations.”

I suspect these weird levels of subsidy is partly about power and habit. We still expect oil to keep flowing freely, as it has done, to be the basis of our society as it has been, and it probably will be for another 10 to 20 years getting more expensive and more damaging all the time. Gas will replace some of that oil, which will keep the polluting system going longer as the investment company above celebrates.

But, even in the best cirumstances we probably need to replace the oil consumption within that 20 years or we may collapse. The Market will not do that replacement without help, because Markets are short sighted and inefficient for some things, this being one of them. The power of oil companies also warps the market and makes transition harder. They have been spewing anti-climate change crap for about 30 years and slowing the transition along with Murdoch.

So Renewables might need some subsidy to get going and build up enough energy to compensate for the energy loss that is likely to be coming.

Fossil fuels do not need subsidising, they are an established and wealthy industry which needs to go, and in the case of oil, is probably going anyway, but not without a struggle to continue its parth of destruction for as long as possible..

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Question about Entropy

April 23, 2023

I’m currently writing about energy, and I keep coming up against the concept of negentropy or negative entropy, and I just don’t get it. So it would be great if someone could explain it or point to a good URL. So far the urls or texts I have seen do not explain my issues away.

Background

You will all probably know the background ‘laws’ of thermodynamics of which two are particularly important.

0) Left to itself heat flows from a higher concentration to lower concentration. If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

1) Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The total energy of the universe remains constant.

2) Any use of energy will result in some energy being dispersed and becoming unavailable for use. This is entropy. The entropy of an isolated system [that is a system with no external source of energy] will tend to increase over time and, eventually, the system will cease to function.

3) At zero degrees Kelvin, no waste heat (entropy) is producible. [that is a paraphrase, which I hope is correct.]

Entropy is a process, not a thing. It is generally said to be irreversible. As a result, entropy marks time.

The Question

The question is what is the use and validity of the idea of ‘negentropy’. People seem to talk about the ‘consumption of negentropy’, which does not make sense to me at all. You cannot consume entropy, so how can you consume its ‘negation’? Are you violating the first law, which says energy cannot be created?

I’m assuming that negentropy arises because people want to make entropy equal to disorder, hence there is a problem of apparent increasing order as with life Life appears to build more and more complex order and repairs itself. (I think Schrodinger invents the term ‘negative entropy’ to ‘solve’ the mystery of life).

“[an organism] can only keep aloof from it [entropy], i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy”

What is Life p,71).

He goes on to ‘explain’:

If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal, 1/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order. Since the logarithm of
IID is just minus the logarithm of D, we can write Boltzmann’s equation thus:

  • (entropy) == k log ( riD) .

….. entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order.

ibid: 73

I don’t like to think that I’m saying Schrodinger is talking bullshit as its hardly easy to justify, and in his defense there seem a large number of different interpretations of what he said.

What seems to be the case

However, there is nothing in the laws of thermodynamics, which says that with an external energy source, ‘processes’ cannot build what appears to be order, or even temporarily make a place exceedingly orderly. All that seems to be required to be recognised is that the building of order, maintenance, repair or regeneration etc., takes energy and disperses energy. Consequently, all of that energy is no longer accessible to the system. That is it. Energy is used and dispersed to make order. No need for negentropy, or consumption of negentropy, at all.

After a while, it takes more energy to keep the organism or information going, and it eventually breaks down (unless its a bacteria perhaps, but its not the same being after it has split many times). Again, this is connected to the Second Law in that energy is dispersed in attempting to make the order, and if something gets way too complicated it can take more and more energy to maintain, and run out of access to enough energy to maintain, and therefore starts breaking down.

Over time, the organism (or an information string if you want to tie entropy to information) tends to fail to replicate properly – there is not enough energy available to each complex organism to ensure that every replication is accurate all the time. Likewise it takes less energy to make up bullshit than it does to make up accuracy. This failure to replicate accurately can lead to evolution if failures prove ‘useful’ to further replication.

Maxwell’s demon sometimes seems to get tied in with negentropy. You all know this involves an imaginary creature opening a door to let gas particles accumulate in one side of a box. The imaginary demon’s actions (if it were to perform them) take energy. There is no apparent mystery. The box gets organised because the ordering takes and disperses energy.

So what does the idea of negentropy add to anything?

A Social science example

Let me quote:

Our main thesis is that the Anthropocene can be described as an Entropocene, insofar as the contemporary period is above all characterized by a process of the massive increase of entropy in all its forms (physical, biological, informational).

Internation. Letter to Antonio Guterres

In 1945… Lotka showed that the production of knowledge is the condition of the struggle against entropy for this technical form of life that is human life.

Internation: General Introduction

The general implication is that we must organise to defeat entropy and that life is negantropic.

However, entropy is a measure of dispersal of energy. The more energy is dispersed or wasted, the more likely that we won’t have enough energy to fix things up as they fall apart or get stressed. Therefore we need to make energy usage as efficient as possible, with as little loss as possible. Something no one aims at when energy is plentiful.

Making energy usage efficient does not stop energy being dispersed and entropy increasing. It is not negative entropy, it is not demaking entropy or consuming entropy, it just tries to make energy dispersal as minimal as possible.

footnote

Schrodinger tries to clear up his problem, saying

The remarks on negative entropy have met with doubt and opposition from physicist colleagues. Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead.

What is life p 74

“Free energy” as I understand the term is the available energy, which can be extracted and directed by the application of energy. For example, it takes energy to find food, eat it and digest it. The ‘free energy’ of food, has to provide more energy that it takes to find it, eat it and digest it, for it to be useful. Similarly sunlight is free, but we have to use energy to take it and convert it to electricity or warm water or whatever..

He also says

And that we give off heat is not accidental, but essential. For this is precisely the manner in which we dispose of the surplus entropy we continually produce in our physical life process.

Digestion and the uses of food energy to power and repair the body, disperses energy. There are other things going on as well such as maintenance of the body between a small range of temperatures.

This seems largely because he wants a direct equality between disorder and entropy, rather than an indirect and complex connection

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Drax and woodchip energy

November 8, 2022

This is basically a paraphrase of an article in the New Yorker with a few additions. The Millions of Tons of Carbon Emissions That Don’t Officially Exist: How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry. By Sarah Miller December 8, 2021, because its really important and even by my standards is a bit long – although naturally this version grew as it went along. But please read the original.

Drax 1

The article is primarily about the wood chip powered energy production in the village of Drax, in Yorkshire, by the Drax Group. The huge Drax power station used to be a coal fired energy generator, but is, or has, now translated to “sustainably sourced biomass,” or wood pellets, so as to enable “a zero carbon, lower cost energy future (p.4).” It also:

can be at the heart of the green economic recovery in the North. Scaling up BECCS at Drax could support thousands of jobs during construction at its peak and contribute significantly to the local economy, according to a report from Vivid Economics, commissioned by Drax.

Drax: 3

BECCS is Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. We also learn from the Drax Report that:

In the US, EU and in the UK, policy makers have continued to regulate biomass in the context of global and domestic efforts to meet net zero. In the EU, the European Commission’s Green New Deal proposed a new biodiversity strategy and re-opening key legislation such as the REDII and EU ETS. In the UK, the Government announced it would begin work on a new bioenergy strategy – to be published in 2022. In the US, the EPA has been actively considering the carbon credentials of biomass.

Drax

So Drax supposedly has all the benefits of low emissions, contributing to the economy and jobs, and being backed by officials.

Ok back to the article

In 2019 Drax “emitted more than fifteen million tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by three million typical passenger vehicles in one year” (Miller). Of these emissions 12.8 million tons were “biologically sequestered carbon.” We might need to bear the ‘sequestered,’ or stored, in mind, as like the BECCS it may not be happening. Emissions increased the next year.

Draz receives heavy subsidies from the UK government….

The thinktank Ember calculates that, from 2012 until 2027, when Drax’s ROC subsidies end, it will have collected more than £11bn in government payouts.

Lawson Energy bills may rise if government gives Drax more support, say MPs. The Guardian 20 September 2022

It was possible during the energy crisis of 2022, that the British Government could get locked into another agreement, to keep power prices down, that would subsidise Drax for even longer.

Drax said in July that profit before tax had jumped to £200m in the first half of the year, up from £52m in the same period a year earlier, aided by high electricity prices. It upgraded annual profit forecasts, and has signed a deal with National Grid to keep its coal-fired operations open through the winter.

In the past 12 months, its stock has risen 63% to 709p, valuing the company at £2.84bn

Lawson…Emphasis added.

Some History of Biofuels – Origins in bad accounting?

The issue here has its beginnings quite a while back when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated in 1997. The conference did not quite know how to classify wood burning. Burning wood is renewable up to a point. If you burn it, it eventually, grows back. For some reason the IPCC decided that “if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector” (Miller),

William Moomaw of Tufts University, says that negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production. It was small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with tree harvesting of . He said “At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country,” (Miller). Officially loss of biomass did not count. Beverly Law of Oregon State University told Miller, “The wood biomass energy claims of carbon neutrality are incorrect and misleading… It can worsen climate change even if wood displaces coal.”

In 2009 the EU passed the Renewable Energy Directive to enforce the guidelines set up in Kyoto, asking nations to reduce emissions by 20% or more by 2020. Many European States decided that the cheapest and easiest way to go was to switch coal plants to woodchip plants.

Scot Quaranda of Dogwood Alliance, and activist forest-protection group says “Countries had to meet their renewable-energy targets,… There was no way to do it without gaming the system and counting biomass as carbon neutral.” If so then an error in the mode of accounting has had considerable effect.

In 2017, the E.U. spent six and a half billion euros on subsidies for biomass plants. Last year, Drax got about $1.1 billion from the British government. “The governments can claim they are compliant, while former coal companies that would have been dead get rich on government subsidies and selling electricity—much of which, with proper planning, could have come from wind and solar,” Quaranda said. “The forests are destroyed, and the world burns.”

By 2019, biomass accounted for about fifty-nine per cent of all renewable-energy use in the E.U.

Miller

Another journalist writes:

Europe gets 60 percent of its renewable energy from biomass fuels, a process that uses wood scraps, organic waste and other crops to generate heat and electricity in specially designed power plants. U.N. rules allow the European Union to write off the emissions as carbon-neutral, so long as sustainable guidelines are met, even though burning the fuel can release more warming gases into the atmosphere than coal….

[As a result] Many countries are significantly underreporting their emissions to the United Nations, leading to a massive undercount of what is actually released into the atmosphere

Birnbaum E.U.’s big climate ambitions have the scent of wood smoke The Washington Post. 10 Nov 2021

At the Glasgow COP there was little conversation about the problems of biomass, and Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s executive vice president for the European Green Deal said:

To be perfectly blunt with you, biomass will have to be part of our energy mix if we want to remove our dependency on fossil fuels….. I do admit that it’s quite complicated to get this right…. [Europe would] try to use the biomass that is not at odds with our environmental and climate objectives.

Birnbaum emphasis added

The Dogwood Alliance estimate that at least sixty thousand acres of trees—trees that would have otherwise sequestered carbon—are burned each year to supply the plants, and the amount is growing. Global demand for wood pellets is expected to double by 2027.

What is more, there is apparently no “binding governmental or industrial oversight for replanting trees at all”, which if true means that forests can be cleared for other purposes, the regrowth does not happen, and everything is ok by the regulations.

Problems with biofuel

When President Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said that the E.P.A. would declare the burning of wood from managed forests for energy production to be “carbon neutral” several scientists wrote to him saying:

Mr. Pruitt’s declaration contradicts some basic facts. Burning wood from forests to generate electricity is not carbon neutral when the direct emissions from combustion, plus emissions from soil and logging <transport> and processing the wood, are considered. Scientific studies have shown that it will worsen the consequences of climate change for decades or through the end of this century. This was not a decision based in science, but in politics, a giveaway to the forest products industry. 

Pruitt Is Wrong on Burning Forests for Energy

They pointed to scientists in Europe who had written to the EU:

Even if forests are allowed to regrow,… using wood deliberately harvested for burning will increase carbon in the atmosphere and warming for decades to centuries…. even when wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas.

Pruitt is Wrong

And then resumed, pointing to the time and delay factor which usually seems to be ignored:

regrowth takes time, a century or more for native forests, assuming they don’t fall victim to wildfire or disease. And regrowth never occurs if the land is developed or converted to pasture or farmland.

Moreover, throughout the many decades before the replacement forests can grow enough to remove the extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the previously added gas will thaw more permafrost and melt more ice, make ocean acidification worse, accelerate global warming, speed sea-level rise, increase the incidence of extreme weather, worsen drought and water stress, and hurt crop yields — effects that will persist for centuries or longer.

Pruitt is wrong

Biomass harvesting can have other ecological effects, such as increasing water run off, furthering floods and silting up rivers. They conclude that through the use of woodchips

British taxpayers there are paying electricity providers to make climate change worse.

Pruitt is wrong

Drax: Selling the project and CCS

Back to Drax. Miller gives an account of a tour of the establishment. The tour guides made a big deal of wood being natural, and the wood coming primarily from timber waste products (such as sawdust) in the USA and Canada. Given the quantities of wood involved (one mill requires fifty-seven thousand acres per year) this seems implausible, especially when many of the wood mills are owned by Drax. “Some of this activity is in primary-growth forests—forests that have never before been logged” (Miller). And photographic evidence suggests forests have been removed.

Apparently “under international definitions, if a government or private entity cuts down a forest but doesn’t develop the land, it has not officially engaged in deforestation” (Miller). The rules seem confusing and not particularly adapted to reducing emissions.

Ali Lewis, the head of media and public relations for Drax, disputed the idea of gaming the system. “How can we be ‘gaming the system’ when the carbon accounting for biomass is derived from the principles set by the world’s leading climate scientists at the U.N. I.P.C.C., and we follow those rules to the letter?”

Miller

Drax also tried to start a carbon capture and storage project it called White Rose, which does not seem to have eventuated. However, the tour guides apparently emphasised carbon storage as well.

“Before the carbon can even leave that big smokestack, Drax is intervening, and binding it with a solvent, and burying it in the ground… It’s a matter of balancing what’s being used with what’s being replaced. Wood is a sustainable material because they’re taking it away as they’re replacing it…. The solvent looks like really runny honey,”

Miller.

Miller asked them how much carbon they stored, the response was not clear at all, but:

Almuth Ernsting, the co-director of Biofuelwatch, an international anti-biomass-industry N.G.O., told me, “Drax has never actually stored a single pound of carbon.”

“With government support, the first beccs unit at Drax could be operational in 2027 with a second in 2030,” a Drax spokesperson told me.

Miller

As usual CCS projects deliver sometime in a possible future. It not only had troubles with activist organisations, but financial and political organisations.

The climate thinktank Ember has argued that Drax’s CCS plans could cost people paying energy bill £31.7bn over 25 years, amounting to £500 a household. “The cost of supporting its future bioenergy plans could climb to more than the cost of subsidising Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.” Drax claimed that the cost of retrofitting an existing plant would be much cheaper.

Shortly after the British Minister energy minister secretly expressed reluctance about biofuels (see below), the government announced a new discussion on biofuels and particularly BECCS, with Rishi Sunak telling the Yorkshire Post:

I created the £1 billion Carbon Capture and Storage Infrastructure Fund as Chancellor… As a Yorkshire MP, I am excited about the opportunities and jobs that Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage could bring to our region, as well as its potential for sustainable power generation. 

Bocott-Owen Bid to create thousands of jobs at Drax Power Station in Yorkshire to be greenlit by Government. Yorkshire Post 18th August 2022

The Yorkshire Post adds that ‘Whitehall Sources’ told them that:

Drax’s implementation of the new technology would be key to the UK’s future energy security.

“BECCS is the only sustainable way to continue biomass in the way it removes emissions from the atmosphere.

“[Drax] is by far the single largest renewable energy generator in Britain, it is critical to energy security and without it we’d have to import that electricity from abroad or burn more gas….

“It’s a no-brainer from the Government’s perspective. But of course it will take time, and no decisions have been made just yet.”

Bocott-Owen Bid to create thousands of jobs at Drax Power Station in Yorkshire to be greenlit by Government. Yorkshire Post 18th August 2022

Problems for Drax

Not all relevant organisations are positive about Drax.

Greenpeace discovered that Drax Biomass exceeded limits on chemical emissions at its wood chip plants close to residential communities in Louisiana. These included “volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a class of air pollutants linked to cancer, breathing difficulties and other health effects.” Drax agreed to two payments of $1.6m each with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to settle claims against two of its wood pellet plants, without accepting liability. The previous year “Drax had been fined $2.5m for air pollution violations in the neighbouring state of Mississippi”

In October [2021], Drax lost its place on the S. & P. Global Clean Energy Index, as did Albioma, a biomass company in France, after analysts expressed skepticism about the true carbon neutrality of their operations. But Drax doesn’t appear to be at any risk of losing its government subsidies

Miller

Luke Sussams, a Jefferies equity analyst, had argued that:

bioenergy was unlikely to make a positive contribution to climate action because of “uncertainties and poor practices” in some parts of the timber industry regarding the sources of wood, forest management practices, supply chain emissions and high combustion emissions…..

“We argue that bioenergy production is not carbon neutral, in almost all instances. This casts doubt on whether bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a net-negative emissions technology. The widespread deployment of BECCS looks challenging,”

Ambrose. Drax dropped from index of green energy firms amid biomass doubts. The Guardian 19 October 2021

A spokesperson for Drax defended the company arguing that:

“The world’s leading authority on climate science, the UN’s IPCC, is absolutely clear that sustainable biomass is crucial to achieving global climate targets, both as a provider of renewable power and through its potential to deliver negative emissions with BECCS.”

Ambrose

The Government hesitates

Kwasi Kwarteng, perhaps better known as Liz Truss’ Treasurer and supporter of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy, was energy minister in August 2022. He had a recording of a private meeting leaked. In the meeting he apparently said:

I can well see a point where we just draw the line and say: This isn’t working, this doesn’t help carbon emission reduction, that’s it – we should end it. All I’m saying is that we haven’t quite reached that point yet… There’s no point getting [wood] from Louisiana – that isn’t sustainable … transporting these wood pellets halfway across the world – that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.” 

Carrington Burning imported wood in Drax power plant ‘doesn’t make sense’, says Kwarteng. The Guardian, 11 August 2022

Other MPs apparently agreed.

One MP at the meeting told Kwarteng: “It can take 100 years to grow a tree but 100 seconds to combust it. So, unless we actually have a measure of how much CO2 is being released in the same period of time as is being sequestered by new growth, it seems to me ludicrous to say that this is carbon neutral.” Another MP said: “It’s cutting down huge numbers of forests and it’s not defensible.”

Carrington Burning imported wood

In public Mr Kwarteng has stated: “The government is fully behind biomass energy to provide more power in Britain.”

The European Academies Science Advisory Council earlier had said that burning wood in power stations was “not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change”.

Drax is more than biofuel

Drax bought the gas power stations owned by Scottish Power, when the Scottish company went fully renewable.

Drax was also planning the “biggest gas power station in Europe [which] could account for 75% of the UK’s power sector emissions when fully operational”. The British Planning Inspectorate recommended in 2019 that the station not be allowed as it:

would undermine the government’s commitment, as set out in the Climate Change Act 2008, to cut greenhouse emissions [by having] significant adverse effects.

Carrington Legal bid to stop UK building Europe’s biggest gas power plant fails. The Guardian 22 January 2021

The minister refused the advice. And a court case to stop the project was lost. However, a Drax spokesperson stated “the gas plant project was not certain to go ahead because it depended on Drax’s investment decisions and on securing a capacity market contract from the government.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy said:

“As we transition to net zero emissions by 2050, our record levels of investment in renewables will meet a large part of the energy demand. However, natural gas will still provide a reliable source of energy while we develop and deploy low carbon alternatives.”

Carrington Legal bid.

Drax later scrapped plans for the Gas energy. However, according to the article the company may still build another four small-scale gas plants for use during times of peak electricity demand.

The Real Problem?

Miller concludes by pointing to the real problem; the economy. It needs to grow and make profit and provide jobs and consume massive amounts of energy.

Even as we watch economic growth literally killing us, it is what we talk about before we talk about anything else—we are told, over and over, that we must run to it for help. The truth is that if the economy is not entirely unmade, the debates over the folly of biomass, over what counts as renewable, over whether or not a tree can grow back faster than it burns—all of it will vanish into a great silence.

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Introduction to the Introduction

November 3, 2022

I’m trying to write a book on problems with the energy transition and the use of ‘climate technologies’ such as carbon trading, carbon capture and storage, geoengineering, biofuels, nuclear, evs and so on.

This is kind of an introduction to the book’s introduction.

As well as being about the problems with the needed energy transition and the climate technologies we use to deal with climate change and ecological devastation, this book is also about some of my theoretical obsessions, such as:

  • The ways that attempts to order the world in a good way (however that is defined), generate the disorder that is feared.
  • The normality of unintended consequences, the lack of control over everything, and the need to look out for these normalities, in our lives and correct for them.
    • Despite everyone knowing about unintended consequences and their prevalence in life, this knowledge is not part of contemporary western social theory (including economics), or philosophy.
  • The realisation that everything is ecological, and interconnectedness, interdependency and lack of apparent harmony are fundamental to all life. No thing, and no one, exists by itself. Hence to perceive an action’s effects we have to look around widely.
  • This realisation implies the need for a politics which is experimental rather than dogmatic. We don’t know what a policy’s complete effects will be in advance – no matter how sensible and virtuous it appears to be.
  • The realisation that human conscious thinking is limited, and directed by the theories we have. This also tends to direct what we observe. We don’t perceive the world as it is, but through the tools we deploy.
  • To keep our modes of thinking and life, it is common for people to engage in defensive fantasy ‘solutions’ if the problem seems too big or overwhelming and potentially destructive of their ways of life. These solutions can even make the situation worse.
  • The need to listen to our unconscious awareness of patterning, and to be aware that processes which we cultivate unconsciousness of, sill exist and can harm us.
  • Forms of economic organisation can be destructive as well as productive, and we need to minimise destruction.
  • Wealth is not the same as riches.
  • Forms of economic organisation can lead to destructive power imbalances, and positive feedback loops, as the economy gets organised to feed the rich. The power and politics of neoliberalism is one of the fundamental problems of contemporary life, along with developmentalism.
  • Markets are subsidiary to ecologies, rather than ecology being submissive to markets. A market which destroys its ecology will almost certainly destroy itself.
  • Technologies involve social uses and social organisations, and they can also have harmful effects on people and ecologies if we ignore them.
  • Societies, and people, all face challenges and have to respond to them. How they succeed in this response, influences their future trajectory. Sometimes the challenges they face are self-generated and these challenges are particularly difficult to respond to, other than by avoidance of the problem. Climate change and eco-destruction are such challenges. The personal and social response are intertwined, hence they reinforce each other, either for success, avoidance or failure.
  • The obvious realisation that energy technologies, energy supply and its organisation are vital for forms of social life, what can be achieved and who is likely to dominate over others.

The energy transition is as much a matter of social and intellectual change as it is about technical phenomena. This is one reason why it can be scary. We don’t know the results.

While the book is sometimes bleak, and argues that many of the proposed technological solutions are fantasy avoidance solutions, it is also arguing that as many people as possible need to organise to face up to this problem, and this will bring some degree of personal and social health. We all have been waiting well over 40 years for governments and businesses to act, and they have delayed and prevaricated. We have tried the market for the last 40 years and it has not worked and it turns out that there are good reasons for this: markets cannot be separated from politics, corporate power or simply the power of established riches. Markets and Governments will not save us.

The problem also suggests we need a new way of thinking. This is implied in the theoretical outline above. To deal with the reality of eco-geo-social-technical problems, we have to be able to think, at nearly all times, in terms of: ecology, complexity, and unintended consequences; and be prepared to try processes out without prejudging.

We need a local action which helps us to build the communities we need to survive climate change, or uses the existing communities to build further resilience. There is an argument that local transition, is more likely to build appropriate local technologies, and that a clear local demonstration of concern is more likely to build political concern and emulation, than is a purely theoretical awareness of support.

The book attempts to draw attention to problems with the hope of advising action, and awareness of those problems. If people are forewarned, then people can act in more useful ways, and avoid distractions.

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Summary of Narrabri and its problems with energy

October 24, 2022

All the social struggles in Narrabri essentially centre on fossil fuels, and exist within the complex of the ‘Carbon Oligarchy’ and ‘Polluter Elites‘, joined to both the effects of climate change (long scale droughts, followed by massive flooding) and the apparent decline of agriculture. Agricultural decline seems to be arising partly through climate change, and partly through displacement, or fear of displacement by mining and loss of useable bore water, again through mining. The importance of long term drinkable, and useable, bore water supplies is obvious. As well as the long-term, risk to bore water (no matter how well the current isolation plans work), there also seems to be a risk of surface and air pollution through coal dust and through mineral leaks at the gas mine heads. While it was not discussed often, there is also the threat that burning these new fossil fuels (wherever they are burnt in the world) will increase the effects of climate change in Narrabri, even though their effect may be overshadowed by the effects of other fossil fuel burn offs.

Fossil fuels are intensely supported by the State and business interests. The mine expansions and the new coal-seam gas fields have been approved, although there are still some delaying court challenges. The NSW government has also just begun a process which they hope will lead to an energy intensive manufacturing site in Narrabri, powered by gas from the gas fields (again to boost local jobs). It does not look as though they will accept intense energy manufacturing through renewables with gas back up. The gas fields are being given an artificial market as we would expect in a Carbon Oligarchy.

This context makes the disputes in Narrabri existential. There is a real, and acknowledged, threat that the town could decline, and even come to an end, without some change, as the current trends do not appear good, especially if you think population and economic growth is good. This situation is a direct threat to the residents’ existence, and likely to heighten and polarise responses. The Oligarchy approved solution of fossil fuels should bring some jobs and finance to the town, which may go some way towards helping out. However, it is not clear how many of those jobs will come to exist, or how many will be for existing locals or for temporary workers or workers from elsewhere. It is also not clear how long those jobs will last.

There will likely be many jobs during construction of the gas fields, but they will be temporary, and largely go to outsiders, as the local population is small, and does not necessarily have the required skills. We have also seen how (probably due to the population size) the high-paying jobs in the mines can already lower the workforce available for the town, and the loss of farmers can increase dislocations between town and country, as their interdependence is broken. There are, apparently, many examples of mining towns which boomed, gained complete dependence on the mining, and then collapsed when the mining ended. The mining in Narrabri is short term. The gas fields are limited even if the company moves into the better agricultural lands nearby. Fossil fuel mining is also under pressure from the possible resolution of ambiguities of State policy, through States taking serious climate action and phasing fossil fuels out. This adds to the possibilities that fossil fuel mining may not guarantee a good future for Narrabri, and indeed may help destroy that future both in terms of the town’s economy, and the local ecology.

The existential nature of the dispute, and its polarisation, may be being encouraged by mining companies and the Oligarchy, phasing the dispute not only in terms of town vs country (accelerating the dislocation) and framing objectors as outsiders, but by phrasing mining as the only, and inevitable, way forward. Given the Oligarchy, the mining can seem inevitable despite the ongoing struggles against it. Whether correct or not, the mining companies appear to have control over most of the information that local people will find easily, through their own funding and talks, but through the local newspaper growing dependent on their advertising. The companies, also have the ability to fund the community and community events and clubs, and again whether or not this is true, can appear to obstruct the presentation of counter knowledges and counter proposals. This in itself can heighten the polarity. Not only is the dispute about existential issues, but about morality.

The effects of the dispute have caused much pain to local people, and show that this kind of dispute is not beneficial for local problem solving, although it may help the established powers carry on, as the local area is fragmented. It is also worth investigating whether the dispute hampered the region’s response to the crises of climate change, or whether those crises lowered the friction as people ‘pulled together’.

In contrast with the fossil fuel industry, the renewable industry appears to distance itself from the area. Its plans are not well advertised, seem covered in unintentional secrecy, are not integrated with local business, the companies make no claims about local jobs, or supplying local energy, and appear unconcerned about engaging with locals at all. This has rendered renewables marginal to the debate and until recently, there has been little locally organised support for renewables. Even renewable providers have come from out of town.

This means that the only way forward for a renewable alternative locally is through local organisation, and local support, and this is what has happened, and which will be the subject of another paper.

Going by this initial research, it can be suggested it is important to heal the country/city gap, to connect the country with the town’s workforce again, connect with independent information, and build increased communication. Mutual exclusion is misleading in an age which requires an understanding of an interdependent and inclusive ecology. We are “all in this together,” there is little chance of a fortunate few escaping. However, this is easier proposed than carried out, as the sides are not equal in their abilities to influence events. The Carbon Oligarchy will play its role in the approval process and the information likely to be promoted will support the Oligarchy and its needs. However, climate change threatens the Oligarchy as much as it threatens everyone else and its position is ambiguous and uncertain. Therefore it is possible that local people, joined with others, can persuade the State to take its obligations seriously, even despite a better funded campaign against climate reality.

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Technologies and struggles over use

February 21, 2022

None of this is original.

There is a long standing argument, going back at least to the early 19th Century, that complicated technologies intrinsically distance, or alienate, people from the natural world. Rather than interacting with the world face to face, as it were, complicated tech separates us from reality. It does most of the thinking and interaction and transformative work. It is like the difference between swords and missiles. They are both designed to kill. One gives you responsibility and the presence of death and what it means, while the other distances you from the mass death you are causing.

To some extent I think this argument might be correct. For example, the idea of overlaying reality with virtual images, could be the absolute instance of separation from the real world and its dynamics. We could, in theory, choose only to see days without pollution, destruction, misery or poverty, and thus cease to recognise that these problems exist. We could choose to make the world more interesting in fantastic ways, to also distract us from the accumulation of real problems which might require political action, rather than heroic questing for virtual items.

However, there is another argument that the problem is not so much technologies themselves, or the development of new technologies, but that technologies can be used and designed for oppressive or alienating purposes. For instance, industrial technology, throughout the 20th Century and now was generally not used to boost the craft, creativity or involvement of the workers in production and work, but to deskill them, control them second by second, and render them as replaceable as possible so as to increase the profit and power of another class of people who owned the tech.

Similarly with the media. We have the capacity for a ‘democratic’ and mass participatory media, but we do not have this – we have billionaire owned and controlled huge media corporations which are primarily devoted towards gaining an audience for advertising and to promote the media owner’s power and influence. We have online ghettoization into conflicting ‘information groups’ which reinforce bias and unreality (of other people of course!), which is encouraged by the algorithms set up by facebook and twitter etc. Youtube shows just tend to reuse the mainstream politicised material and exaggerate the views of the audience they want to attract – also for subscriptions and advertising purposes.

This is quite natural. Systems of social power and organisation generally aim at perpetuating those systems of power and organisaton, or increasing the rigour and effectiveness of that power, so as to benefit the dominant groups, and technology can be designed to be one of the tools in that process.

However sometimes technology can have unintended effects which may undermine dominance, produce destruction or which can be exploited by those who have to use it. This may undermine power and organisation. Thus fossil fuel use while responsible for many societies success, is likely to produce the conditions for their failure. Computers and internet, allowed the boom of new companies and new business models which have disrupted the corporate sector, and allowed new groups to participate, but the technologies have become reintegrated into that sector, transforming it in some ways and extending its power in others.

In all of these senses, technology is often a site of political struggle between dominant and exploited or oppressed groups, to use the tech as either a mode of control or a mode of ‘humanisation’.

It is for example, possible to see a struggle in energy transition. To simplify. There are those who struggle to retain: the established modes of energy production; the value of the capital invested in that technology; and the social dominance, and market influence, control over that technology gives them. There are those who seek to replace the established powers with massive wind or solar farms which retain the centralised energy and power structures of the old system, and those who seek to use renewable energy to boost the social power, independence, resilience and control of local communities who share and distribute the energy generated.

At the moment, it is not clear who will win the energy technology struggle, but governments tend to side with the first two positions. This should change. People into community energy usually now realise that they don’t just face technical problems, but the political and organisational problems of possibly deliberate resistance.

Hence the importance of the recognition that the problem may not always be the technology but the way it is used, and the power relations embedded in it.

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More simple thoughts on Energy and Economy

July 29, 2021

Basic Economic Facts: Destruction, Pollution and Balance

Extraction of food, minerals, fish, timber, ‘raw materials’ etc. always involves energy usage and destruction. Any economy will involve energy use and destruction of some sort. Very few people seem to want to recognise this.

Because an economy is a cycle we also have to deal with the effects of material that arises as a consequence of the economy’s action. For reasons of clarity I break this material up into ‘waste’ and ‘pollution,’ both of which are produced through energy use/dissipation.

  • Waste is material which can be be ‘used’ or processed by the economy or the ecology as raw materials for ‘repair’ in a ‘reasonable time’.
  • Pollution is matter which cannot be used or processed in such a reasonable time. It may also poison the ecology. So its another part of destruction.

The time frame (‘reasonable’ time) is arbitrary in the sense it may vary between systems, and not be specifiable in advance, but is important, and points to problems of accumulation of waste.

Waste can become pollution if there becomes too much of it. CO2 is a great example. Chlorine is another example, if its used in small amounts to keep water pure, it seems relatively harmless (so far!), but in concentration is deadly.

What people call the natural balance is when the waste and mutual feeding (destruction), plus sunlight (or other source of energy if in the deep sea) more or less balances everything out over time ie repairs things. The destruction feeds into reconstruction. This balance is in many cases delicately stable, and evolution involves the gradual change of the system as a whole.

It is worth emphasising that even balanced and ‘sustainable’ systems change, and modes of extraction which were once relatively harmless, can become destructive of the whole.

Sunlight and Entropy

Entropy is dissipated, non-deliberately usable, energy. Usually heat, which can be thought of as added movement of particles. Entropy always increases in a closed system.

In formal entropy terms, the earth is not a ‘closed system’, because of the mindbogglingly huge amount of sun energy we receive from “outside”.

Without the sun, most life forms would die off reasonably quickly, as the food supplies would rapidly decline and things would start to freeze over. If you had a store of fossil fuels you could probably survive for a while…. We depend on the Sun in a fundamental way. Fossil fuels are essentially fossilised sunlight through plant matter.

Human and other life gains energy from food, which ultimately depends on the sun. Digestion itself takes energy. But the energy released is more than taken to release it. Whether you consider this a transfer of energy or not depends on your perspective.

The process goes

  • Sunlight ->plant -> human (or cow or whatever), or
  • Sunlight ->plant -> cow or whatever-> human .

If you want to be more precise it’s something like

  • Sunlight->plant->[voluntary intermediary animal] -> human -> [possible human predators] -> [as body parts, or excreta] -> plants [and Sunlight].

Each stage involves energy use, and the energy content usually (but not always) declines. The Plant wastes lots of sun energy, and the human wastes lots of plant energy.

I’ve been reluctant to relate entropy to disorder, but, given that it takes energy to produce pollution, and it may sometimes be useful to think of pollution as concrete unusable, disordering or destructive energy – that is materials which cannot be used, transformed or re-cycled by the economy or the ecology at the rate they are produced.

I guess entropy always increases in a closed system… but is that always the case with pollution, or is that a matter of economy and design?

Nevertheless the energy expenditure and pollution should be part of economics.

Comparing Economy and Economia

In, say, an indigenous ‘economia’ (using this word to remind people all economies are not the same) the rate of destruction is equal, or less than equal, to the rate of natural repair (perhaps with a bit of help) or the people die out, or move out until the area has repaired itself, or changed. People do not need much more energy than is generated by their bodies through food consumption.

Indigenous economia has usually become part of the natural balance over time.

In a ‘modern’ developmental/capitalist economy the rate of destruction and pollution is much higher than the rate of natural repair, and much of the destruction cannot be repaired by the ecology itself. The evolutionary balance cycle does not work quickly enough to make repair.

The decision to behave in this destructive way is a political decision, which has brought many benefits, but is now more destructive than beneficial, because we are reaching the limits of what we can destroy.

Humans attempting to repair the damage consume energy. At best repair may involve something like manufactured or transported fertiliser to replace the nutrients extracted from the used soil. That is we are destroying the soil to grow things fast. Making the fertiliser takes materials and energy which is used in transport, in manufacture, in extracting the raw materials etc. So human based repair takes energy. The more repair, the more energy. And this repair also generally involves destruction somewhere else.

Once you have got into a rate of significant destruction (see Earth overshoot day), then you are probably in a bind – desperately searching for new energy to repair or avoid the consequences of destruction.

This economy also brings about and allows far more elaborate power and co-ordination factors, which paradoxically make it more resistant to change. People who can trigger the pathways of power, may not want to adapt to inevitable changes, as they only see threat and the unknown, in such a change. So they may try to avoid the consequences of their destruction and pollution for as long as possible. And until recently that was possible, so they have not had time to learn flexibility, and are likely to think they can fix problems with more energy.

Energy Return on Energy Input

The hunt for new energy runs into the problem of oil. Oil was a truly cheap and easy to use form of energy, even better than coal. The problem with oil is that we have reached the point were it seems new oil fields take significantly more energy to exploit per unit of energy recovered than they use to. Think of deep water drilling, tar sands, etc. Companies don’t do this, if they have easier sources. So the surplus of energy from oil is decreasing. To use a cliché: “The low hanging fruit has been plucked.” As well, burning the oil, and other fossil fuels, helped produce the climate crisis.

The summarising concept for this process of expending energy to get energy, I call Energy Return on Energy Input. It has many other names, but I think that one is reasonably clear. If your energy return on the energy you input to get the new energy, keeps declining you are getting less and less excess energy to do things with.

The situation is even worse if you are burning fuel and contributing to the instability which makes adaptation, production and extraction more difficult.

A Comment on Capitalist Economic Theory

In capitalist economic theory, the damage to the system from both extraction and pollution are counted as “externalities.” That is, a deliberate decision is made not to factor them into economic equations and descriptions, despite their obvious effects.

This is one reason why capitalist economists cannot see that ‘growth’ with its necessary increased destruction and pollution cannot be continued forever, or used as a tool for ‘recovery’ – they don’t factor in the relevant information.

They ignore the fundamental processes of the economy.

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Emissions intensity again

March 9, 2021

Because some responses to a comment I made on RenewEconomy indicate people do not get emissions intensity, then I’ll repeat some of those points here. If I’m wrong let me know!

Definitions

First off. I’m doing what academics say you should never do, quote from Wikipedia. This is because it is a source that accepts the ambiguities in the definition of intensity.

An emission intensity (also carbon intensity, C.I.) is the emission rate of a given pollutant relative to the intensity of a specific activity, or an industrial production process; for example grams of carbon dioxide released per megajoule of energy produced, or the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions produced to gross domestic product (GDP).

Emission intensities are used to derive estimates of air pollutant or greenhouse gas emissions based on the amount of fuel combusted, the number of animals in animal husbandry, on industrial production levels, distances traveled or similar activity data. Emission intensities may also be used to compare the environmental impact of different fuels or activities. In some case the related terms emission factor and carbon intensity are used interchangeably. The jargon used can be different, for different fields/industrial sectors; normally the term “carbon” excludes other pollutants, such as particulate emissions. One commonly used figure is carbon intensity per kilowatt-hour (CIPK), which is used to compare emissions from different sources of electrical power.

Wikipedia downloaded 10 March 2021

To repeat, emissions intensity is:

  • emissions production relative to the amount of energy generated, or
  • emissions production relative to the GDP.

For our purposes it does not matter. The more emissions go up to produce the output, the higher the emissions intensity.

The point

1) If people reduce emissions then they almost certainly will reduce ’emissions intensity’, unless they also cut back energy use or GDP, depending on how we are measuring ‘intensity’.

2) If people do reduce emissions intensity to 0, then it implies they should have no emissions.

But this is not a useful measure. Living produces emissions, and intensity is a ratio (a comparison between two figures) not an absolute (I’m not sure you can have zero emissions intensity – zero would seem to be a limit not a result). Therefore:

3) It is possible to reduce emissions intensity without reducing any emissions, or even with increasing emissions. We cannot assume emissions reduction is the outcome of reducing emissions intensity.

4) If people don’t reduce emissions, or if they increase them, they probably lock their country into those emissions for longer than the world has to keep climate stability. This is not a good thing, whoever is doing it.

  • Lets repeat this again with completely fictitious figures and practices, in the hope of making this clearer. Say we currently produce 100GW of energy, with 100MT of carbon emissions at the beginning. Emissions intensity is 1 (100/100). Say after building more coal and more renewables we have a point in which we produce 300GW of energy and with an increase of 50MT of CO2 to emit a total of 150 MT CO2. Our emissions intensity has halved (150 divided by 300 = 1/2, when compared to 1 previously). We are generating far more electricity for the emissions we issue, but our emissions have actually increased by 50%.

Even if increasing emissions appears to be the “only option” for developing countries, or not, it is still increasing emissions. The global ecology, and the global climate dynamics, are only affected by the absolute amount of Greenhouse gas emissions. They do not ‘care’ about emissions intensity.

As we all should know increasing emissions, risks increasing climate instability. If it did not then few people would be changing energy sources.

By their behaviour, in encouraging more coal burning, more coal energy and more coal mining, the Chinese and Australian governments (among others), are extremely likely to be boosting climate instability, with a resulting massive economic (and social) loss and disruption in the near future.

The ‘Simple Solution’

On the other hand, it is theoretically possible to increase energy and decrease emissions, if government’s and people want to.

They just stop building, or encouraging the building of, fossil fuel energy sources.

They stop this building, whether they are building them as well as, or instead of, renewable sources.

They remove all subsidies from fossil fuels, and they charge a slowly increasing price on carbon emissions.

They electrify as much power-use as possible, then move to deliberately phase out fossil fuel energy altogether.

In reality, it is not this simple because people with power and wealth and investments in fossil fuels or global warming, will oppose any moves. But I don’t think they deserve to have the rest of the globe sacrifice themselves to maintain their profits. However, it will be hard.

There is also the problem of where do you get the energy from to build the PV and Wind from… but that is a different question, and at least it is not a question which inevitably means you simply make climate change worse.

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Bitcoin…. and Energy

March 1, 2021

I’ve heard this story many times [for example, see here], but here is another version…

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) apparently claims that Bitcoin probably has and energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours.

The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina and the Netherlands use about the same amount of energy as the CCAF’s best guess for Bitcoin.

as Bitcoin gets more valuable, the computing effort expended on creating and maintaining it – and therefore the energy consumed – inevitably increases.

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency.

They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second – that’s 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering….

Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website [says]

All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren’t really doing any useful work….”Right now we’re using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy.”…

“We’d have to double our global energy production,” he says with a laugh. “For Bitcoin.”

He says it also limits the number of transactions the system can process to about five per second.

This doesn’t make for a useful currency, he argues.

Rowlatt How Bitcoin’s vast energy use could burst its bubble, BBC

Addenda

In a new research paper published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University have projected that on current trends, bitcoin mining electricity consumption will more than double from its current levels, peaking in 2024….

bitcoin [will] rank as the equivalent of the 12th largest electricity consumer amongst all countries, higher than the likes of major European economies, including Italy and Spain…. [and Australia].

It is estimated that around 70 per cent of bitcoin miners are located in China…. [and] is responsible for approximately 5.4 per cent of China’s electricity emissions…

[The paper’s authors state:] we find that the carbon emission pattern of Bitcoin blockchain will become a potential barrier against the emission reduction target of China.”

Mazengarb Bitcoin mining to consume more electricity than whole of Australia by 2024. RenewEconomy 7 April 2021

It is rather frustrating to think of how much renewable energy we will have to produce to power this thing on top of everything else we have to power. Bitcoin is a currency essentially based on massive amounts of electricity consumption, and hopes that people will pay real money or real products for more bitcoin.

Like all money its value is a matter of faith that other people will want it.

My only hope is that advertisements are going up on bus shelters saying “If you see bitcoin on a poster, it’s time to buy.” Anyone in finance knows that when you are trying to let the rubes into a secret it’s because those in the know are selling off….

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Time and Energy

February 24, 2021

This post is based on something I vaguely remember Sally Gillespie [linked in] [twitter] [Routledge] [Johmenadue] saying. This is almost a self help post, but I feel that somewhere there is something I don’t understand about reality lurking beneath. I don’t know what I’m doing here. So please excuse what is crass – or tell me in the comments so this can be better and more focused.

Time is fundamental

Time is like the currency of human life.

What you build and become comes out of time, or emerges from time.

Time is the first thing you have, possibly the only thing you have, no matter how short that time proves to be.

If you want to be a musician you have to devote time to music. If you want to be a sportsperson you devote time to your sport. If you want to be an academic you devote time to thinking, to reading (at least some other academics), observing/participating in what you are interested in and writing. If you want to be a successful or influential academic, sports person or musician, you also probably have to devote time to self-promotion and networking. This can be painful to some of us, but its nearly always true. Even if someone discovers you, you will nearly always still have to spend time in the networking. Think how much time J.K. Rowling had to spend to get her novels published in the first place. Or you can hope someone discovers you after death, and you can live with the difficulties (and advantages) of that. Or you can devote your time to becoming peaceful, or kind, or holy, where being a known success can be unimportant.

Of course devoting time, will not always lead to success, but it seems fundamental to what you become.

Energy and Time

As well as devoting time, you have to devote energy. If you just passively watch sport, you may gain an appreciation of the sport, you may even gain some skill, but you probably will not become a sportsperson. You need to put energy into a practice, an active involvement in doing. If you want to become a sports commentator or an expositor, you need to put energy into doing that.

You cannot use energy without time. You can perhaps use time without that much energy if you are meditating, but even meditating requires some energy and persistence when you had rather do something else. So energy and time seem related. In general ‘productive’ time requires energy.

Paradox of habit

Most of my blogs argue in favour of recognising complexity and even chaos. The main lesson is, I think, correct: humans cannot completely control the world or themselves. We always benefit by paying attention to the inevitable unintended consequences of what we do. We need to flow with reality and work with reality.

The way we spend time nearly always builds some kind of organisation or disorganisation.

It is probably useful, should you wish to build on what you have done, to aim for some kind of organisation in your approach, or what I’ve called creating ‘islands of order’. Sometimes being chaotic can be good. Sometimes being ordered can be good.

Devoting time to ‘something,’ builds organisation of necessity – whether that organisation/disorganisation is useful or not. Building organisation builds habits. Building disorganisation builds habits. Whatever we do in time repeatedly may build habits.

More or less by definition we can say that, ‘well organised habits can give momentum and direction to our work’, and ‘badly organised habits can disrupt momentum and direction’. For example, our society’s current form of economic organisation builds habits which disrupt our attempts to attempt to build momentum and direction for restoration of ecologies. To build momentum and direction we not only need to use time to recognise the complexity of the world, but (paradoxically) we need to take time to build well organised habits which help us observe and react to that complexity, and help build resilience, help reduce the crisis and lead to restored ecologies.

Practicing an hour a day on whatever we care about, will help us succeed. This is using time in an organised way to produce organisation in what we devote ourselves too – and that makes learning easier. This is part of becoming, and again we cannot avoid building habits. If we habitually (but perhaps unintentionally) produce disorder, or self-defeating habits, then that is what we produce.

Sometimes we may have to be prepared to throw habits away to get better, or learn something new, but that does not subvert the basic point. Humans build habits through time and energy, and they build their self-organisation, and approach to the world, in those habits.

This is the paradox. Human use of time and energy makes habit and some kind of organisation, this may not always be constructive or helpful; but it will be there. Habits may undermine what we want to do or need to do. It is probably good to ensure the habits we build are useful to flourishing and survival.

Loss of time

Time is not like a currency, because you cannot accumulate it. When its gone, its gone. As your life is time, your life is gone along with time. You have only what you have built with that time, deliberately or/and otherwise.

Things that ‘steal’ time from you steal your life and energy. Every second, your life is shorter, but every second has given you the time to build something (including habits), to be, or to become and you can’t help but choose to build, be and become. I’m not implying you will only become what you want to become, that requires attention to complexity, and useful organisation.

You build (your being? your existence? your habits) even if you ‘waste’ your time. Some people who are imprisoned or enslaved manage to build constructively – Nelson Mandela for one – but this is not easy, and there are probably limits. The point is that sometimes imprisoned people can engage in becoming, more consciously than people who are free (even if freedom is a massive advantage), because they can realise time is vital, and can manage to devote time and energy to that becoming and their constructive habits, more than to their imprisonment or slavery.

So, whatever our condition, we may need to attend to time, energy and the form of organisation/disorganisation we are building for ourselves and the world. Perhaps, to some extent, you have to co-operate with the loss of your time, to lose it completely.

In most cultures nowadays we waste the land as well as waste time. We probably waste time unconsciously just as we waste land unconsciously. But we need land just as we need time. What do we stand on, if not time and land?

Respite

Life and energy require respite. You cannot just use time to work at what you build consciously. You need rest. In other words to fully use time, you must apparently waste time. But this waste need not be laying to waste, but building respite, or building a useful island of order and recuperation. You can use time and energy to build your capacity to use time well, by doing nothing. Resting, lying fallow, is essential to time (as it is to cultivated land), but it can waste time as well. As usual, a process can be both useful and harmful depending on how it fits with organisation.

We don’t know what time is, we know it appears to pass, and it appears to consume, but it is what allows us to become, and to form the temporary ‘order’ of habit. It is why we need energy. One reason we need to eat.

I guess the point is to put time and energy into where your heart is, if you can feel where that is. If you can’t then you may need to put time and energy into finding where your heart is. You might also need to find out what habits are needed, and build on them, being prepared to change habits as you learn more. Another slogan is “learn by doing”.

The future

As a culture, we may need to stop ‘wasting’ our time or using our time unconsciously, and put our attention on to what we can find out about is happening, and that involves being aware that people will try and ‘steal’ our time, by sending us to places which waste time. Yet paradoxically, perhaps, we can only find out what is real, by being prepared to waste time.

But without spending our time and energy in some kind of organised way that recognises the potential of disorder, the world will be harder still for those who come after us.

To repeat: “Time is the first thing you have, possibly the only thing you have, no matter how short that time proves to be.” It is effectively your life.

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