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An approach to the politics and economics of coal

August 19, 2019

1) Coal usage and burning is the problem, not coal itself.
People often write as if coal has imperatives in itself. If this was so, then everywhere with coal would have the same trajectory as happened in the UK. This did not happen independently, but as a matter of emulation and conflict. Taking coal as having imperatives, may move us into technological determinism, and coal useage is political at many levels.

2) If a post-coal future is to arrive, it will arrive through political struggle
Politics, to a large extent, is about people in struggle using narratives and scripts, where scripts are semi-automatic formulations and associations of ideas and actions.

Politics involves persuasion – whether this is through words and ideas, through force, or the imposition of risk for dissent.
Various groups argue about the meaning and value of coal. In other words the value of coal is tied to the meaning of coal, which is tied to a family of scripts or narratives which are being used to change, or reinforce, that meaning.
Without reinforcement of established meaning and action, there would be no struggle.

3) In considering the politics of coal, we are exploring how the meaning and value of coal can be challenged and change.
This ongoing political struggle is why commodities are not “stable entities.” For example, ivory, slaves, uranium. Commodities are unstable in capitalism anyway; very few people buy typewriters nowadays – and if they do, they do so because the typewriters are ‘collectable’ not high-tech.

Coal is not inherently valuable, useful or whatever. For example, it can be classified as dirty, poisonous, dangerous, and old-fashioned.

An item only becomes a commodity in a particular type of pattern of social action.

4) Coal is burnt because of:

  • a) Its association with scripts and narratives of ‘development’ largely based on the history of ‘development’ of ‘the West’, ‘First World’, or ‘North’.
  • The established economic and other power or influence of various fossil fuel companies in the State (which has come about largely through previous acceptance of scripts of development).
  • c) Existing scripts about “needs” for (increasing) profit in capitalism.

    • 5) This recognition implies that: Economic relations are fundamentally political and about meaning.

  • a) Markets involve struggles (often about the shape of the markets, and who should succeed in them). Not all markets are capitalist.
  • b) The State supports particular scripts about markets, and attempts to give those scripts legitimacy, and force in law – this includes capitalist markets which depend on the State to guarantee private property, contracts and the subservience of workers
  • c) Legitimacy comes about by violence, AND through reinforcing these scripts and other scripts and narratives. De-legitimacy comes from people actively weakening established scripts and reinforcing new ones.

    • 6) The State is not monolithic.

    There is struggle in the State, as elsewhere, which is why scripts, policies, and markets, can change. The state is a site of legitimate conflict. It gains its power like everything else gains power, through a combination of violence, wealth, persuasion, organization, communication etc.

    7) Developmentalism can be a tricky term. Not all developmentalisms are the same. However, the type of developmentalism we are describing, means aiming for material prosperity, economic growth, emulation of Western nation-states in terms of power and prosperity, ‘modernity’ and military power/security.

    Those forms of life which are classed as traditional which impede this ‘progress’ are classified as obstacles to be sacrificed for the greater good.
    Cheap and plentiful energy is at the heart of development, as is steel production. Hence importing, production and burning of coal has been a key developmentalist operator.

    8) Relationships between developmentalist states spur developmentalism.

  • a) From a desire for military security and defense against the capacities of other developed states.
  • b) From importing, building or exporting developmentalist products like coal, steel etc. to, or from, other states. Or from accepting investment projects and monies from developed states which use developmental scripts (which usually do not have the interests of local people at heart, who are sacrificed).
  • c) Competitions for status and influence and role in the world.

    • 9) The expansion of thermal coal production and burning occurs in response to these scripts, and relationships, of development.
    Reducing thermal coal apparently could leave people in life-threatening poverty, unhinge the eternal increase of development, and weaken the State with respect to other States.

    10) The main conflict or struggle is between:

  • a) Groups that demand coal burning for development (which often involves industrialization, military security, and competition with other countries) and/or profit.
  • b) Groups trying to defend local modes of life, land use, and to resist dispossession. And
  • c) Groups against climate change, and for transition to a new economy of some sort.

    • There can be alliances between b and c, but not necessarily.
    Groups in c, can lift local struggles into the national and even international field.
    Alliance between b and c, is potentially useful, unless people in b feel it alienates them from the holders of State power, or attracts State hostility or State support of the mining companies.

    11) The force in ideas arises because people use them, or because they reinforce, or challenge, a way of life or way of dominance.
    People often write about things like the contradiction between ideas of coal use and climate policy, as if the ideas have force.
    But the force in ideas comes from struggle between people with different ideas. These ideas were developed or utilised in that struggle, or in the politics before the struggle.
    For example, arguments do not become ‘anachronistic’ (this is an evaluation which assumes that the change is happening), they become challenged by other people.

    When making an analysis, reported statements should be anchored in the groups making them. Statements do not exist without context or makers.

    12) That climate change is happening could be irrelevant to coal use, without the idea of climate change being used by politically active groups opposed to coal use.

    In other words coal supporters do not have to necessarily worry about pollution or climate change; they can just keep burning and denying, or not recognizing, the problems. Just as renewable energy people do not have to see the problems that come with particular organizations of renewable energy.

    People who are opposed to coal “in their backyards”, do not have to care about climate change. So people who do care about climate change, need to be careful not to make everything about climate change, and alienate these people. Both groups are opposed to more coal mining and/or burning.

    13) Climate change often seems used as a mode of ‘Framing’ arguments and attempting to change meanings.
    While climate change is real, it is also part of the mode of scripting used by some of those opposed to coal.

    ‘Pro-capitalist or neoliberal economics’ and ‘Development’ are also ways of framing the argument. These framings are used to favour coal use, the profit of particular groups of companies, and reinforce the established meanings of coal as commodity and useful resource.
    People who use these economic or developmental framings tend to suppress awareness of the destructive parts of actual developmental and economic processes as part of their politics and framing.

    Hence it is useful for opponents to emphasise those necessarily destructive parts: ‘sacrifice of the less powerful for the general good’, or more theoretically, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ ‘capitalisation of nature,’ Luxemburg’s vision of capitalist ‘primitive accumulation’ as ongoing, etc.

    14) There is no apparent consensus on climate change and policy.
    This is despite the science and political necessities of survival appearing clear.
    That is why there is struggle going on.
    If there was consensus, there may well be no need for struggle.

    I think it is clear the Australian government does not worry about climate science as a reality, only as an argument it needs to dismiss, and as pointing to people it would like to suppress.
    Likewise I’m not sure that the Australian government recognises transition as a necessity or is arguing that transition should happen later on, when we are ready. it may well prefer to stop transition. Likewise, in Australia Labor seems to be moving to a ‘do little’ and support coal mines position.

    While some coal mines have been stopped, not all mining has been stopped. The Adani mine is being speedily approved. New coal mines are opening in NSW and QLD for example, despite water problems, and the Australian Resources Minister Matthew Canavan is aiming to promote the sale of an additional 37 million tonnes of coal. He said:

    That is the equivalent of three or four new Adani Carmichael–sized coal mines. If this investment occurred in the Galilee Basin, it would open up a new, sustainably-sized coal basin in Queensland.

    Villages seem to be continuing to be destroyed in Germany to make way for coal.

    Trump is actively encouraging pollution, ostensibly for economic/developmental purposes. He does not accept any climate consensus, unless the consensus is “burn away and be damned”

    China is actively encouraging coal power in the rest of the developing world.

    Coal, itself, has probably not been ‘discredited’ in India by the corrupted privatisation process. Some people may have utilised this position in political struggles. Others used it to redistribute coal licenses to other companies – and the second process seems to have been more effective.
    Forests are still being cleared for coal, and villagers thrust into heavy pollution or complete loss of land.
    India would, at best, seem to be ambiguous. Sure they have a good renewables programme, they also have an increase coal programme.

    It is pretty clear by now, that IEA recommendations for a decline in coal consumption by 2020 will not happen in most of the world.

    We cannot ignore this if we want to understand what is going on, and the stakes involved. Yet many people opposed to climate change talk as if there was a real and universal consensus. This is not correct.

    15) The fight is not won.
    It is not inconceivable that the appeal of known scripts of development and profit will win out over the appeal of survival until it is way too late.

    16) The politics of waiting works both ways.
    While the strategy of delay has been used by coal protestors, in the hope that the mine will become uneconomical, as the problems of climate change become clearer, the politics of waiting work both ways. Companies can wait until protest becomes unfocused, or people assume that no one can be crazy enough to open a mine, and then move in and open up those mines or whatever. We have been waiting for climate action for decades. Waiting is not just an anti-coal strategy.

    17) Solar and wind power use is small throughout the world
    When people are discussing transition to renewables they need to be careful, as biofuels are often classed as renewables, although they are not as clearly beneficial, and this hides the low level of progression towards transition to solar and wind.

    For example in the Key World Energy Statistics for 2017 the IEA points out that only 1.5% of World total primary energy supply by fuel is “geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat,” 2.5% is hydro and 9.7% is biofuel.

    If you look at ‘Electricity generation by source’, in the same publication, then, 7.1% of Electricity is generated by “non-hydro renewables” – this includes biofuels – it is not just solar and wind.

    Elsewhere they say: “Modern bioenergy (excluding the traditional use of biomass) was responsible for half of all renewable energy consumed in 2017 – it provided four times the contribution of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind combined.”

    So the percentage of low GHG renewables is tiny. It could appear that currently there is no significant move to solar or wind throughout the world, only in certain places.

    This makes the struggle even more important, but it does not make it easy.

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    What is Energy?

    July 26, 2019

    This is an attempt to talk about energy more concretely. It is clearly exploratory, rather than finished. Comments and disagreements more than welcomed. I do not claim to be particularly well informed.

    What is Energy?

    Many people spend a lot of time talking about energy in social theory, but they don’t say what they are talking about. This probably produces confusion, so this is an attempt to be more specific.

    Energy is present in motion, change or transformation, or keeping things in regular dynamic patterns. This usually involves forces (such as electro-magnetism, differences in heat, or gravity) being transmitted through: physical contact; ‘radiation’;  displacement in space;  chemical bonding and so on. This is particularly the case when we are talking about “cause”. Causing or producing events takes energy. Jean Mark Jancovici, a French energy and climate ‘expert’ writes “Energy is what enables you to change the environment, by definition”.

    Energy is often defined in terms of “work”. In normal parlance work means controlled, or directed, energy expenditure. It may, or may not, be useful to keep the term “work” for that specific meaning of human labour. Labour might be thought of as the directed and controlled application of human energy. With this definition, we can perhaps more readily understand why human labour may not have to increase, for there to be increased production, value or potentiality – we just need the energy to come from elsewhere.

    Energy is in some ways observed in a dynamic set of relationships between ‘things/nodes’ and the systemic context and changes that the things/nodes ‘cause’.

    What any organism, or group of organisms, can do, is limited by the amount of energy available to it for conversion into activity. Some animals spend almost all their obtained energy in eating, growing, healing and reproducing. As shall be stated later, energy is always lost, or dissipated, when it is used.

    Let’s look at the cycles of energy on earth.

    • Naturally occurring nuclear energy within the Sun (energy within the atomic structure) provides sunlight and heat.
    • This heat drives movement of ‘matter’ on Earth: tides, weather, water cycles etc.
    • We also have planetary geothermal heat gradients, volcanoes and so on, and geographical gradients from uneven weather, stratification, upheaval, water flow, and other chemical state changes (expansion of water as it freezes, natural acids etc), which also drive the movement, and break up, of matter on Earth.
    • Chemical/biological conversions of sunlight, to the movement, or growth, of a pattern of material (an organism).
    • After organisms die they can form fossil fuels over very long (geological) periods of time and chemical processing. This also requires energy and pressure which is a form of energy stemming from gravity.
    • Organisms can convert other organisms to energy, through eating.
    • Finally we have ‘tools’ and ‘machines’, some of which are powered by human or animal energy, some by weather, some by fossil fuels, nuclear energy, or electrical energy from some other source.
    • For humans, after they are fed, using more energy really means “using more machines” (Jancovici again), or killing themselves through over-eating, or whatever.

    Fossil fuels are amongst the most efficient forms of energy currently available to humans. They are easy to use, have been easy to find, and the technology involved is pretty simple. So far replacement technology for fossil fuels is more complicated, and requires more energy expenditure to build.

    The laws of thermodynamics apply to energy. The important ones for social analysis, seem to be:

    1) Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.

    2) In a closed system the entropy, or dissipation of energy as random motion or heat, will increase over time. Things will run down. Hence energy needs to be arrive in the closed system from somewhere else.

    Entropy is often equated to disorder and randomness, but this is not quite correct. With universal heat death, where entropy is maximal, order is almost total. Everything is uniform. One space is not distinguishable from another, over time. Nothing of “any interest” occurs. In that sense, disorder and difference seems essential for functioning systems. Energy occurs in patterned systems of difference.

    These principles of thermodynamics roughly translate as follows (even experts sometimes disagree on what they mean):

    1) Energy is not created. It is converted from one form to another, or transported from one place to another. Conversion and transport of energy usually require some other form of energy conversion. There is no energy available to humans without previous energy expenditure. Understanding this idea is vital.

    Energy that is taken from a patterned system for a particular use, is not available for other uses – partly because of the next law.

    2) We can never use energy with total efficiency. Some energy will be lost in processes of conversion or transport and dispelled into the general systemic context/relationships – perhaps disturbing or disrupting them. The more steps to a process, the more energy is likely to be lost/dissipated.

    The ratio between energy expended and the energy available as a result of that expenditure is usually known as “Energy Return on Investment” (EROI) or, as I prefer, “Energy Return on Energy Input” (EREI)- because this makes it clear that energy input is central and money, while important, is secondary. The higher the EREI the higher the “energy availability” and the more freedom of action; although, for particular societies, this also depends on the social organisation. In economies of high inequality, large groups of people are likely to be powerless and poor with little energy available to them. EREI ratios of one or less are disastrous for complex civilisations, because it implies all the energy available is being used to produce less replacement energy.

    The ‘external’ Sun is the basis for continuing life and any “interesting” planetary functioning. Without the Sun, the system would run down. Earth does not form a closed system because of the input from the Sun.

    I have heard people say that “entropy will kill us anyway in the long run”, therefore we should do nothing about climate change. But they rarely say: “we don’t need to be employed because of entropy, or we don’t need wealth, we don’t need energy etc…” So this argument is rather selective.

    Eventually we will all die, and the solar system will end; but this is probably not a basis for not caring about the near future. As long as the sun shines at roughly its current rate Life will continue. For current day humans, this ultimate end is not an immediate worry, or even a distant worry. It will not affect us, or our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren. It will occur in billions of years.

    While it is not formally part of the entropy theory, we can extrapolate and say that any long-term directed use of energy to produce what the users consider to be order will produce disorder as well, because of the effects of dissipation of energy. Disorder or randomness is not unimportant to the system’s ability to function, or its ability to fall apart. Without generation of entropy nothing happens.

    In macro terms, this means we cannot ignore the production of waste and pollution if we want to keep the system functioning. This means we cannot ignore the destruction of ecological sources of energy through energy usage (ie the destruction of ecologies, of food, the capacity for chemical conversion of waste into useful products for the ecology, and so on). These ecological systems provide energetic resilience, or systemic stability (within bounds). Without them, the system is more likely to become unstable. So we always have to look at the whole system in order to understand the effects of the parts of that system.

    Most of these sources of energetic resilience are currently ‘free’ – or, more accurately, provided by the planetary system without human effort. Destruction of the natural ecology, destroys the processes of conversion of waste into resources, and the resilience of the system. This ongoing destruction, through social ordering, opens the possibility of a general transition to new and unfamiliar, disruptive stabilities or instabilities, which humans will find costly in all senses of the word. It will require a lot of energy usage for humans to compensate for the loss of these systems, and that will produce more pollution, and it will possibly take energy away from other necessary activities.

    The problem with fossil fuels, despite their extraordinarily high Energy return on Energy investment, is that they increase disorder through pollution, and climate change, and they poison the systems they are used within. This is not strictly entropic, but it is comparable, as it disrupts the energetic resilience of systems.

    If we counted destruction of energetic resilience as a problem, we would be expending more energy to solve the problem, whatever else we do. We might even abandon fossil fuels. There is also the possibility we are losing high EREI fossil fuel extraction anyway: people do not extract oil from tar sands if oil is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere. Likewise, people do not frack, if gas is easily, and cheaply, available elsewhere – unless there are other incentives such as government subsidies, or economic distortions such as Ponzi type loan schemes.

    Money is a sign of energy. Easily available money can enable the appearance of human organised energy, and activity. However, currency depends upon social power. If social power and monetary accounting is used to ignore real energy deficits, the destruction of energetic resilience, or increases in disorders, then we are headed for lower EREIs and probably for intensified disaster.

    Monetary cost and profit can also distract from significant problems such as the noticeable entropic or disorderly effects of our ‘movement’, such as when we overgraze land, overfish waters, or stick poisons in rivers because it’s easy. In some cities the amount of heat produced as a side effect of air conditioning (cooling) is supposed to be noticeable, but in general that does not seem to be a problem.

    One of the problems for decarbonisation projects is that those energy substitutes for fossil fuels, which are easily available, do not have as high EREI. They require more energy to build (in the short term) and are often built through heavily polluting processes. It may also be the case that the lower EREI means that less energy is freely available, lowering the ease of transition at the very moment we require freely available energy to build that transition. However, the consequences of delaying the change, get worse with every delay. This is not an easy process, but it is essential.

    But if we did not have a civilisation that was based on ignoring the basic nature of energy, and the energetic production of entropy in the form of disruptions and dissipations of production through pollution and ecological destruction, then we could be better off to make the transition and to plan realistically for life afterwards….

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    Energy, Management, Money

    July 22, 2019

    Economies and organisations always run on available energy, and energy is fundamental to any kind of economy/organisation. This is true whether you are hunting and gathering to obtain the food to enable people to have the energy to gather more food and socialise, or whether you are trying to run a world-spanning army through electric and oil power. The amount of energy that is available to the organisation after deducting the amount of energy expended to gain that energy, fundamentally influences the possibilities of what it, and its members, can do for ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Financial cost is one way of measuring this, but it should probably not be taken as the only or fundamental way of evaluating the relationship between energy expended and energy gained.

    The ratio between energy expended and the energy available, as a result of that expenditure, is usually known as “Energy Return on Investment” (EROI) or as I prefer “Energy Return on Energy Input” (EREI)- because this makes it clear that energy input is central and money, while important, is secondary. The higher the EREI the higher the “energy availability” and the more freedom of action; although, for any particular group of people, this also depends on social organisation. In economies of high inequality, large groups of people are likely to be powerless and poor with little energy available to them.

    Time is also a factor that is important. It might be necessary to expend more energy than is released in the hope of building a better energy system. It may also be the case that an energy system is so destructive in its side effects that it needs to be modified quickly. However, in the long term energy output must be greater than energy input for any kind of survival.

    A fundamental reason why we have both our current prosperity and troubles, is because fossil fuels have been a massive gift. Their EREI has been very high. Some people suggest that it took the energy from one barrel of oil to produce 50 barrels of oil (figures vary but are large, I’ve seen figures of 1 to 100). We have had similar EREI’s for coal. Fossil Fuels are also easy to transport with relatively little energy loss – or in the case of gas, where there has been massive loss of escaped gas, the quantities of non-leaked gas have been so great and the loss so invisible, that it has not been counted until recently. Fossil fuels are also easy to use; the technology involved in their application is pretty straightforward and simple.

    However, these huge ratios are no longer the case; EREI is declining for fossil fuels. Easy to access sources seem to have been used up, are close to having been used up or are taking more energy to extract energy. Companies are having to drill deep in the ocean, which takes lots of energy, with high potential for accident and loss. Other companies are moving into small, difficult or energy intensive processes such as tar sands, shale oil and fracking. These sources of fossil fuels would not be being used, if higher EREI sources were easily available. Coal appears to be still relatively low in energy consumption because miners now largely do open cut mining, which uses explosives, or straightforward drilling in to a cliff face. In other words coal seems to be good provided you ignore the ecological costs.

    However, more people are starting to realise that fossil fuel pollution is not good for human and environmental health, coal in particular. Mines are often destructive of fertile lands needed for food production. Even more destructive mines which not only threaten food supplies, but threaten water or endangered wildlife are being opened or proposed. Finally, burning fossil fuels produces disruptive climate change, which is likely to consume even more energy in repairing, or abandoning, infrastructure damaged by that change. The more destructive, or potentially destructive, the mode of extraction allowed, the cheaper the financial cost, and probably the less energy deployed to obtain energy in the short term. There is an incentive for fossil fuel companies to be immediately destructive – which is not good on top of the destruction from climate change.

    The energy needed to deal with, or remediate, such destruction and enforced change is quite high, and severely diminishes the available EREI, but the costs are usually put on the taxpayers (or ignored) rather than being charged to polluters, so the polluters notice it less.

    With fossil fuels we have been spoilt. Energy became invisible, and rarely even features in most economics other than as price, despite its centrality. Likewise, we have not needed an economy of air, even if we all know that without air you are dead, and air might slowly accumulate poisons.

    Declining availability of energy, may not mean that customer costs increase immediately; many energy companies have vast supplies of financial capital which they can use to maintain customer lock-in and prevent change, in the hope of recouping the loss over time, or in the hope of getting the last fossil fuels out of the ground before they become unsellable – either because people are sensible and abandon them, or because the system collapses in its own muck.

    Given these factors of decline and destruction, it becomes vital for any organisation to think carefully about how they obtain the excess energy which enables them to act, and about the likelihood of the costs of cleaning up after destructive ways of obtaining energy.

    Energy has to be the fundamental concern of any organisation whatsoever. Members of an organisation may always have to be thinking, ‘How can we get or generate more energy more efficiently, use it more efficiently, co-ordinate that use, and then expand what we can do with that amount of energy?’

    Energy is even more fundamental than money, because without excess energy you cannot do anything. If the electricity to power the office buildings and computers is simply not available, nearly everything would shut down – no matter how much money you had.

    Energy becomes a manageable problem if you use the right sorts of technology for the future, have the right kinds of organisation that can allocate energy where and when it is needed, and if the people in the organisation give the energy system the right kind of attention – the kind of attention that they would nowadays give to the monetary system.

    Consequently, organisations probably need an Energy co-ordinator to make sure that different parts of the organisation co-ordinate energy uses, and that energy savings and efficiency are not diminished by another department making financial savings. Over time EREI, energy use and the effects of that usage are likely to become more pronounced in accounting and management measures.

    An added aim for, say, local government involves questions about how they can increase the ability of their inhabitants to live well, which involves saving the conditions of life on the planet and local area (as they are not disconnected), providing adequate energy, guaranteeing low destructive energy supplies and using that energy well within the organisation and in local area.

    To some extent renewable energy could provide an opportunity for organisations to become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on suppliers while saving money. ‘Distributed power systems’ also tend to be more resilient to shock events as they are not vulnerable to a central source collapsing or the transport wires collapsing. Taking such action may be inhibited by regulations which assume that the existing system is the only system possible.

    If the EREI of fossil fuels is declining or increasingly produces dangerous effects, these energy sources need to be abandoned before they are used up, yet currently renewable, or low polluting, energies do not have as high EREI. Consequently organisations may need to restructure their energy expenditure, as part of their preparation for the future. It may be that for the short-term attempt to produce future energy savings, energy expenditure will be quite high, and this may also require financial expenditure.

    At the moment, immediate financial savings are likely to disrupt energy savings, and possibly even make EREI invisible or low priority. What matters is what is counted, and the ease of counting money should not always make money the priority.

    To reiterate yet again, the more energy availability, the more can be done for ‘good’ and ‘bad’. However, there are often organisational limits, what is often called ‘lock-in’; ways of doing things that become harmful after a certain threshold and are difficult to change.

    For example, the more complicated an organisation can become, then in general the more it can do. All large multi-faceted organisations tend to become complicated. However, after a point the energy expended for the organisational energy released, can become unsustainable and declines. It takes more and more effort to maintain the physical and organisational structures. In many countries, we can see roads and bridges in bad repair. Maintaining complexity requires energy. Not using energy for the necessary repair and maintenance to keep the organisation going is a political decision deferring costs to the future. To save organisations from this fate, organisational limits may need to be investigated and recognised.

    Money can resemble the excess of the energy system because an organisation can give itself temporary energy boosts by going massively into debt. This was the secret of apparent prosperity in the 80s; anyone can look prosperous if they burn up the future, but eventually the debt runs out or is called in. There has been an argument amongst financial analysts that fracking, for example, is only successful because of growing debt in the industry, based largely on future promises (imaginings) of high prices for the product and improved technologies of extraction.

    However, if you constrain money too much then you cannot do anything because advancement requires financial investment. Ultimately, you can have a pile of money but if you do not have energy, you cannot actually use that money to do anything. Money may be based upon energy circulation and energy availability – if so, it can act as a form of stored energy (for a while).

    Again with no energy availability, money is worthless. Energy production and its relation to Energy input is fundamental.

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    Social action and adapting to climate change

    July 14, 2019

    Excerpt from an old article by Craig Morris slightly paraphrased:

    To deal with climate change we are suggesting that we redesign our world and our social life. That’s exciting, but it’s also not the way we talk about it.

    We could, for example, ask people some questions: how would you like to improve your community? What are the important things in life that should not be lost and should made easier? What do you value? These might help to get people involved, rather than resistant.

    Instead, the discussion often reduced to lowering energy emissions, and roughly breaks down into three types of propositions, largely about technology (which most people don’t really understand):

    1) We need to convert from fossil fuels to renewables quickly, as they can help us live within planetary boundaries at a high enough living standard;

    2) Renewable energy alone will not suffice, and;

    3) If we fail to do anything, our civilization is on a path to destruction.

    None of this asks people what they want to work towards, apart from technology. And they cannot make the technology themselves, so this framing of the issues implies people are at the mercy of others.

    The transition may not only need to reduce carbon emissions, but also strengthen communities and overcome the isolation that people increasingly suffer from. It needs to make life better, not more of what we have now…. If people do need renewables, and that seems likely, how are they going to organize this? How will they gain power over energy?

    Getting people to agree on action and work together is not always easy, but it may need to begin, now to get action on other things progressing.

    The need to bring people together is one reason to be skeptical of nuclear power. Up to now, the technology has required too much secrecy, thereby undermining good governance and democracy…. Communities and citizens have never made their own nuclear power.

    However, this working together is not being encouraged and the wording of the Paris agreement itself shows how marginalized the focus on social benefits still is – perhaps because it suggests a “crisis of democracy” in which people want to rule their own lives with others, rather than obey the elites or retreat from demanding service from the State.

    Coal and oil are bound into social formations, they are stuck in ‘Carbon Oligarchies’, where peoples’ lives are being risked to support established sources of profit. It is possible that renewables are not yet stuck in the same way, but open to being shaped by community involvement and democratic process. If so, we should encourage it.

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    Mining in Australia II

    July 10, 2019

    There has been a recent report which suggests that fossil fuel mining in Australia accounts for 5% of global greenhouse emissions, as well as being one of the highest per capita producers or greenhouse emissions. It is possible that with the new coal and gas mines Australia could be responsible for something like 17% of Global emissions by 2030.

    see RenewEconomy and The Guardian

    Obviously the country hits well above its weight, and the argument that we shouldn’t do anything because our contribution to the problem is trivial, is completely wrong.

    One potential response is to suggest that we are just not going to stop because its so economically important, but as previously suggested its doubtful we make that much from this type of mining, due to export of profits overseas, low royalty rates, massive tax concessions and decreasing employment in the industry.

    But, if we recognised that fossil fuel mining and burning is a problem, then another possible response is “someone has to stop fossil fuel mining first, if we are going to survive in our society, and so it might as well be us.”

    However, I suspect that the real question, may well be “should we go about increasing the amount of fossil fuel mining we are doing, so that we become the one of the world’s biggest exporter of emissions, and one of the biggest causes of ecological destruction on the planet, or should we begin to phase fossil fuel mining out?”

    If people agree that is a real question, then we can begin to stop opening new mines, especially mines that threaten water supplies and agriculture as do the Adani mines, and the mines in the Sydney catchment areas, and when that is done we could stop expanding existing mines into agricultural regions, and then start phasing them out altogether.

    If we are about to increase exports to provide 17% of global energy emissions, then it might well appear that the rest of the world is cutting back by comparison. Certainly some countries plan to phase out coal mining. So why not us as well?

    This may not happen because the parties are bought by miners…. but we probably should not let corruption stop us from doing the sensible or moral thing. Behaving morally is not always easy, and won’t always make you as much money as behaving immorally.

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    2040

    July 7, 2019

    I suggest that people see the film 2040. It portrays how we can start to beat climate change with the tech we have now. Its a bit glib on occasions but it gives hope that something could be done, if we could remove the corporate and governmental opposition.

    First he goes to Bangladesh, to see how villages (we are talking shacks) can put solar on their rooftops and share it with other households, through a network of wiring and metres, which allows people to buy energy from this micro grid, even without being able to afford solar panels. The process allows microgrids to connect up, thus making a robust local system, which can cover the countryside. If the grid is broken by the increasing natural disasters of climate change, people can still get some power, as opposed to none.

    This system would work well in Australia, but is currently illegal due to pro-corporate regulations. (We sold off our wires, and had to make them safe for private enterprise…). At the moment if i want to share my solar power with my next door neighbour i can’t. We need to make such links, installed by registered electricians, legal.

    Then he looked at self driving electric cars, and how people could come to think of cars in terms of use, like they now think of music and films, rather than ownership. This would free up massive amounts of parking space which could be turned into urban farms, solving some of the food supply crisis, and relieving the need to transport food over vast distances. He also seemed to think it would reduce traffic and traffic jams, but i’m not sure about that. It might work because the cars go off after they have delivered you and don’t have to search for parking.

    As far as I understand, this set up is not yet workable, making self driving cars that are relatively safe outside of small areas is still quite difficult. If it did reduce traffic, then you could also expect massive opposition from our toll road owners who have paid billions for waste property, and of course from oil companies who are not renown for their ethics, but are renown for ruthless political operation and massive misinformation campaigns. Anyone need to say Exxon? I’m not sure carpark owners would sell their property for urban farming either, but this could be solved by the State buying land and buildings back for people’s use (however unfashionable it is for the State to do anything useful).

    Then there is regenerative agriculture. One person claimed that agriculture was responsible for more carbon emissions than burning fuels. This makes it important.

    It turns out relatively easy to fix (apart from droughts). In Australia, industrial farming with fertilisers kills the soil, and the water runs off, taking the soil with it and taking the fertilisers into rivers where they provoke algal blooms and dead fish. Destructive ecologies spread.

    The film maker visited a farmer who had simply planted a mix of grasses, sunflowers, sorgum, millet etc. and let them grow to about over a metre or so in height. Then he let in some cattle who ate them and defecated on the soil, and moved about as they are supposed to. Cattle that eat corn are unhealthy and their meat not so good for people, cattle that eat grass are pretty good alround.

    After three months it was possible to see a marked difference between the old concrete like soil and this new spongy friable dark and moist soil. Apparently this process puts masses of carbon back into the soil and makes it more fertile without fertilisers. If we eat less meat then more soil can be let wild, we can store more carbon, and probably get a bit healthier.

    We can also grow seaweed for food and fertiliser on platforms in the ocean deserts (although transport might be a bit of a problem). This provides areas for fish to grow, de-acidifies water from excess carbon, and could revitalise fish stocks – although we would have to stop industrial fishing from killing everything again. We could also do this closer to the coast. It is really easy to upscale with few negative ecological consequences.

    Problem: Big agriculture will hate this, as it requires care rather than cheapness of production. They will fight against it. They want us to eat GMO foods that depend on brand name fertilisers and weed killers. However, small farmers should love it, and in the non-industrialised world saving small farmers, removes poverty (from dispossession for large farms…etc) and provides most of the food anyway. Some possible problem as crops rot releasing CO2 and methane, but still better than industrial ag.

    Finally educating and empowering women and girls. Lowers population, increases care for the planet. The whole deal. What can I say?

    Problem: Religions…. most of them.

    Watch the film, and have a look at:

    https://whatsyour2040.com/

    2040

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    HT Odum on Energy, Ecology and Economics

    June 3, 2019

    Howard T. Odum was one of the earliest people to tie economics together with energy and ecology, so it is worthwhile giving a brief outline of some of his thought. As Odum develops his thought, the ideas seem to get a little overcomplicated, so this is only a basic account which seems enough to be useful for understanding our current situation and highlighting its problems. More detail may follow later.

    Ramage & Shipp (Systems Thinkers) describe his underlying theme as follows:

    The central method for Odum in understanding the behaviour of an ecosystem at any scale was to follow its energy flows: the way in which energy was transferred and transformed from one part of the system to another.

    Odum also wanted to develop principles which applied to any ‘ecosystem’ from the ‘individual’ to the world.

    I’m not sure what Odum’s definition of energy is, as I cannot find one at this moment, but let us assume energy is the ability to do work, move particles (produce heat) or to build organisation, structure or what is sometimes called ‘negative entropy’. We can use the Jancovici definition of energy as produced by, or allowing changes in, the world/system, or as being the engine of transformation. A constant stream of fresh available energy is needed to maintain any system’s functioning.

    Paying attention to the ‘laws’ of thermodynamics, Odum notes that there is always a loss (or more accurately ‘dispersal’, or ‘degrading’) of energy; this is known as ‘entropy.’ There is always a difference between usable, or available, energy and the total energy expended to produce, transport and concentrate that available energy. The usable energy is generally less than the total energy expended, through the system.

    For example, the energy used by motor transport is not just the energy used by the automobiles to move around, but the energy used in manufacturing the cars; building the roads and bridges and petrol infrastructure; transporting petrol; maintaining roads and cars etc. Energy is constantly dispersed, or lost as heat, in these processes, and the energy required to maintain the whole traffic system is much greater than just the sum of petrol burnt to power cars.

    The amount of available, or net, energy to a society, organism or ecological system, determines the limits of what may be done. For Humans, real wealth, or prosperity, is ultimately limited by geophysical, ecological and energetic processes.

    Odum argued as far back as 1974 that humans were using more and more of our available fossil fuel energy to generate new fossil fuels or other energy sources, thus lowering socially available energy as a percentage of energy use. This was presumably overcome through using up energy sources more rapidly.

    Most business predictions about future available energy are based on the gross (total) energy of the source and not the available energy. This relationship between energy consumed to make energy available (what other people call Energy Return on Energy Input) can be excessive and Odum argued that shale oil, for instance, would never yield more energy than was used to extract it. This does not mean that people cannot structure the market to make profit from shale oil in the short term, but it is ultimately a non-constructive use of energy and will cause collapse somewhere in the system.

    Odum suggests that social systems will succeed and dominate, the more they can “maximize their useful total power from all sources and flexibly distribute this power toward needs affecting survival”. When it is possible to expand inflow of available energy into a society, then survival can be helped by rapid growth or expansion allowing that society or organism to take over a domain, even if there is a large amount of energy (and other) wastage.

    This spread or domination often involves using energy before others can use it; or ‘stealing’ energy from others and the future. The expanding system is heavily competitive (perhaps internally as well as externally). The more energy a system steals from others, the more likely its expansive phase will be short, as it is probably destroying its ecological base.

    In general, if a society, or organism, consumes all of the resources it requires for survival, then it must change, diminish or die out.

    Furthermore, if the energy expended by a society (especially one with decreasing available energy) does not help support energy collection and concentration, or social replication and general equilibrium processes, then the system is also likely to become vulnerable to collapse.

    When energy inflows are limited or declining then successful systems (or parts of systems) are more likely to use the available energy to build relatively co-operative, stable, long-lasting, high diversity, equilibrium states. These societies are more oriented towards maintaining energy inputs without increasing energy expenditure to do so. In this case, previously marginal lifeforms or societies, using energy sources that are neglected by the dominant form, may continue after the dominant form has burnt itself out.

    Odum seems primarily interested in the dominant systems using maximum power and then changing, rather than in evolution on the margins. He also seems to assume steady states (equilibriums) are what ‘nature’ seeks, rather than that all systems change and risk disequilibrium. His thesis was largely developed before Chaos and complexity theory, and assumes that all systems develop maximal use of energy: “systems organize and structure themselves naturally to maximize power [energy use]”. However he notes that “energies which are converted too rapidly into heat are not made available to the systems own use because they are not fed back through storages into useful pumping, but instead do random stirring of the environment.” This could be destabilising.

    He suggests that modern economics developed during an extremely high expansion era, and economists are generally not even aware of the possibility of relatively steady, low growth, societies. Most of our other institutions and understandings are also based upon, and demand, expansion. These institutions and ideas will be challenged and stressed by lower energy availability and may actively sabotage attempts at change.

    However, most of human existence has occurred in relatively low expansion societies, so such societies are not impossible.

    Furthermore, as most economists take expansion as natural (living in societies of high energy availability), they assume expansion of energy is also natural or easy. They tend to oppose ideas which suggest contraction or conservation are healthy phases, and tend not to notice how new post-fossil-fuel, energy sources (e.g. nuclear and solar) often depend on a kind of subsidy through fossil fuel use. These new energy sources become less useful, less easy to build and less profitable when that energy subsidy is removed.

    [M]ost technological innovations are really diversions of cheap energy into hidden subsidies in the form of fancy, energy-expensive structures.

    It is even possible that the successes in expanding agriculture in the last 100 years does not primarily come from improvements in agricultural knowledge and practice, but from burning lots of fossil fuels, so that we invest far more energy into food than we get out of it. People now eat “potatoes partly made of oil.” The expansion of fish catch has come from massively increased tonnage of ships, massive increase in the energy expended in the building of them and powering them. With the decline of fish populations, even more energy may be required to carry on getting a profitable fish catch, until the fish are gone, and the fishing system collapses.

    Changing social energy sources to renewables takes massive energy expenditure (and probable ecological destruction) to make the factories, gather resources, build the equipment, fuel the transport etc. That does not mean it is completely impossible to slowly organise the manufacture of renewables entirely through renewable energy, but that it won’t occur without considerable planning and enforcement, and it may not happen in time to prevent disastrous climate change.

    It may be the case that there there are no new sources of low energy input, and low polluting, energy becoming available. For example, fusion is still a fantasy.

    The energy available to contemporary society, and hence the amount of work/organisation and effective activity that can be done, may well be running down. Consequently economic expansion is slowing. Quite a number of people argue that the period of real growth in the West ended in the 1970s or even earlier.

    It could be that current appearances of expansion are largely being funded by the attempt to use easy currency availability as energy, through low interest debt and through syphoning wealth up the hierarchy. But this ‘simulation’ of available energy cannot continue forever, without new sources of energy availability. Some of the global expansion may be happening because developing countries are using energy to generate growth, from a low basis, as happened earlier in the west.

    The question arises that if we are now beginning an era of declining global energy availability, how should we best spend the energy remaining? Sixty years ago we possibly could have used the energy to build a renewable system, that may now be more difficult, because of the decline in availability.

    Societies also receive an energy subsidy which comes from the natural workings of ecologies such as the flows of sun, wind, waters, waves, etc. Another method of achieving apparent growth could arise through accelerated destruction of the world ecology (consuming it without replacement) which will have fierce consequences as life supports are destroyed, and need to be repaired (requiring large amounts of energy if possible).

    An economy, to compete and survive, must maximize its use of these [ecological] energies, [while] not destroying their enormous free subsidies. The necessity of environmental inputs is often not realized until they are displaced.

    Our current societies are tending to destroy these subsidies, or remove vital parts of the system (such as water) and replace the ecosystem workings (if replaced at all) by high energy expenditure technologies, which become vulnerable to energy decline. A society which is aiming for relative equilibrium may need to make sure it helps its natural ecology to increase its own replication and equilibrium capacity.

    After this discussion it should seem obvious that the energy used to give us energy availability includes the works of the sun, ecologies, humans and technologies. A lot of this energy availability comes without human work, and the more human activity destroys this ‘free energy’ the more expensive energy production becomes.

    High availability of energy allows the building of complicated structures, greater resilience against natural fluctuations and threats, and allows greater concentrations of people and built organisation. Cities, for example, depend on cheap energy for building concentrated structures and for bringing in food. With fossil fuels, cities have increased in size as food can be brought in from far away and local lands do not have to support the population. Loss of energy availability, may mean cities collapse.

    High energy availability also gives greater capacity for expansion. High energy availability human societies are usually military threats to lower energy availability societies – hence the pressure for everyone to increase energy availability for defense. Attempts to maintain growth seem to be a matter of maintaining, or obtaining, dominance at the expense of a functioning eco-system. In times of energy scarcity, militarily active societies may burn themselves out, putting energy into expansion rather than conservation, or they may put increasing amounts of energy into maintaining the power and lifestyles of the already wealthy and powerful. This may postpone apparent system breakdown, but it will only increase the problems and collapse will more likely be hard to control.

    In the contemporary world, those countries which have only recently embarked upon the growth/expansion process, may be starting it at a time when it would be better to support or improve their former economic and energy flow patterns, if they wish to survive.

    Countries which save energy now are more likely to survive, and they will have functioning energy resources in the future. Countries which attempt to solve their energy problems through warfare at a distance will probably expend more energy than they can recover.

    With the decline in available energy human labour will become more important. Without some degree of social change in attitudes to labour, this seems likely to involve the creation of an under class or even slavery (although Odum does not argue this). Information storage, processing and availability may well decline, as that consumes a lot of energy. Information (because of the second law) tends to disperse, depreciate, and develop error, and it requires ongoing energy usage to preserve unchanged or develop, although it may require less energy to replicate than to generate anew.

    The contemporary world is caught in the paradox of needing energy to continue with its patterns of development and expansions, but the only energy and economic processes which can power this, are destructive of the ecosystem at large and of the capacity of these societies to continue. The only way non-catastrophic way forward is to find some way in which general economic expansion can be curtailed, ecologies supported, and energy usage reduced.

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    Energy and Economy

    May 16, 2019

    Another attempt to theorise what seems to be both obvious and undertheorized…. This material is very basic and possibly wrong.

    As I have argued elsewhere economies require the transformation of materials and energy, together with exchange from one person to another. The more energy that is available, through technologies of energy production, the more that can be done by those with access to that energy.

    Energy production can mark military security, as it allows action at a distance, rapid manufacture of complicated weaponry and so on (assuming access to the materials etc). Most States take action to ensure they have excess energy and can defend themselves, or extend their range of attack, as well as extend the influence and power of their nation’s businesses.

    All energy on Earth largely originates in two sources:
    as ‘Interspatial energy‘,
    or as ‘Planetary Energy‘

    Interspatial Energy (IE) comes primarily from the Sun as electromagnetic energies, light and heat. There are also gravitational tides from the Moon, which affect planetary weather and water movements – this is energetically important. The consequences for the Planetary system of IE is huge, but the return effects of Planetary systems on IE is, so far, negligible.

    Planetary Energy can come from weather, the water cycle, winds, tides and so on, which result from interaction between the Planetary system and Interspatial Energy. Other sources of Planetary energy, include Geothermal energy, fire, the interactive properties of materials, and potential nuclear energy. I want to summarise all this with the term ‘Planetary Energy and Materials’ (PEM). PEM largely depends on the existence of IE. This is an example of the laws of thermodynamics in action. Without continual energy input from an external source, the Earth system will run down. It would not have much available energy, and there is little likelihood of life evolving into anything particularly complex (not completely zero chance, we have hope for the moons of Saturn, but little chance).

    The PEM leads to Planetary Ecological Cycles (PEC), which are complex living systems in which everything interacts with everything else, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

    Complex systems have numerous properties in general. Some of the important ones, are

  • that they are in flux and evolve
  • they can reach temporary equilibrium states
  • they are subject to accident, and rapid change at tipping points and
  • they are (humanly) unpredictable in specific (we might be able to predict trends and general events, but not specific events).

    • Eventually, the living system covers the planet, becoming planet wide, and we have something approximating the Gaia idea. PEC and PEM are linked. PEC depends on both PEM and IE, and can affect PEM on some occasions – as when early life changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

    PEC provides us with coal, natural gas and oil from the long time decay and death of plants and animals. These materials are all stores of ‘Carbon’ in various forms, as that is one of the major materials of Earthly life. When burnt, or released into the atmosphere, they release stored material which forms Greenhouse gases, and effects the functioning of the PEC.

    Eventually we end up with humans and human organisation. Human organisation involves technologies, relations of power, relations of kinship, relations of labour, relations of knowledge and so on (all of which we often lump together and call ‘culture‘), which make use of, and are influenced by, PEC and PEM. We will call this level the Social Economy (SE), it depends upon the workings of all ‘previous’ stages, and can influence the workings of those stages.

    In ‘simpler’ economies the main energy source is human labour, powered by available food and water, and perhaps fire which primarily makes more potential food edible and safe, drives away dangerous animals, allows deliberate or accidental changes in ecology and may allow some processing of minerals (copper, bronze, iron etc), which then have unexpected consequences for human lives. The use and harnessing of animals also boosts energy availability, which affects the possible scale of agriculture, population density, warfare and so on. The more organised the labour the more energy is available. However, slave (or indentured) labour appears to have been the energy basis of many large scale societies prior to widespread use fossil fuels. People also use technology to tap the power of geography and weather with river power (water wheels) and wind power (sails and windmills). This again adds to possible production, and people work to use the technology when the power is available.

    Then we get the use of fossil fuels and technology to generate steam power, mechanical motion and electricity. Finally we get nuclear energy and renewable power – all stages build on the complexities of earlier stages, and multiple paths are available, both taken and not taken – for example, many nations have not used nuclear energy. Each stage in this development comes with different forms of social and work organisation, and relationship to environment (including the capacity to damage it).

    The more available energy becomes, the more people can do, the wider and more integrated their organisations can become, the quicker, longer and more voluminous trade routes can become, the more separated in space the relationships that can be built, the faster armies can move and damage be delivered, and the greater the distinction in class that becomes possible: those that own or control vs those who labour, or are controlled. With plenty of cheap energy it is possible to develop mass consumption societies, with large numbers of goods.

    The State, where it exists, is part of the social economy, and often promotes and protects energy systems for the obvious reasons of building trade and production that is beneficial for it and its ruling factions, and to extend military security and aggression (often to increase easy access to raw materials and energy). The State also exists to protect unequal divisions of wealth internally. The State has tended to provide slaves, protect relations of slavery (along with other forms of property), promoted navies, wind power, river power, and subsidised coal and oil production and infrastructure, and also has often supported nuclear energy because of its costs and risks. Eventually, these subsidies and supports become familiar and invisible, and support for new energy sources (not managed or owned and controlled by the same people) can become a political issue. For example the IMF advises us that fossil fuel subsidies globally amount to US$5.2 trillion or 6.5% of global GDP. This is far more than given to renewable energy generations. The subsidies include estimations for the damage from pollution, which is both a silent subsidy, and an approval of the pollution as it is not penalized.

    As proposed, initially organisation of human labour and food (energy) availability, together with a set of relationship to the environment determined what could be done and what could be produced. This is the domain in which the labour theory of value is almost correct, given the addition of cultural and religious values. Relations of power are also important in influencing value, but I shall discuss all of these factors elsewhere.

    Labour is simply one form of energy generation. As economies get more complex, other forms of interconnection and energy generation are added, together with issues of supply, demand, control and power. Also it is quite clear that with easily available energy people may produce more of an item than there is a market for, and it does not really matter how much labour/energy goes into the item, it can still not bring a return on a cash/commodity market. So exchange value is not directly equivalent to labour or other energy expenditure.

    One important concept for consideration of energy in the economy is ‘Energy return on energy investment’ (EREI). I prefer the phrase ‘Energy return on energy input,’ (same initials) as it avoids using financial terms with very specific meanings. This idea refers to the ratio of the amount of energy you have to input into a technical system, when compared to the amount you get out. The higher the ratio, (or the more energy is emitted per unit of energy input), then the more easily available energy there is. If the energy input is continually higher than the energy output, the system is likely to eventually grind to a halt.

    EREI is also dependent on organisation, or the direction, of energy expenditure. Uncontrolled energy expenditure is not the same as energy availability, just as the directed energy expenditure in a nuclear reactor is different to the energy expended in nuclear bomb. Energy availability may also be directed towards particular social groups; aluminium factories amy get supported by higher prices for other people; those who can afford energy may get more of it, and so on. There is, inevitably, a social component, and restrictions, to energy availability.

    Fossil Fuels radically changed social EREIs. Fossil Fuels have been easy to extract, relatively easy to transport and process, and emit huge amounts of easily deployable energy in return. This availability has allowed transport of food from distant locations, world trade, world empires, world war, mass manufacturing, industrialisation, mass electrical technology and mass computing. It has allowed technology to become incredibly complicated and small. All of these procedures require, and use, cheap and easily obtainable energy – they also require a large and complicated back drop of production and skills – so technology is enmeshed in complex systems. Cheap easy energy has increased the possibilities of general prosperity, especially when coupled with organised labour.

    It might also be the case, that the more freely energy became available, the more extraction can shift into destructive modes, as it becomes relatively easy to destroy ecologies (especially distant ecologies), transport the extracted materials anywhere, and to protect oneself as destroyer (temporarily) through more technology and energy expenditure.

    Human energy and technology use can, fairly clearly, have consequences for the PEC, and thus affect human life.

    In some cases, of long residence, it can appear that human life styles are ecologically harmonious, or even determined by ecologies. In these cases, the interactive system as a whole generates an implicit knowledge of how to survive, which may not be explicitly known by anyone. Such local harmonious systems are hard to replicate or transport elsewhere. They may also only be harmonious until external forces disrupt the system, or the success of particular internal forces generates tipping points.

    Finally we get into the recognition of waste and pollution which we have discussed in other posts. Briefly, ‘waste‘ is defined as the by-products of production and consumption, which can (in relatively brief time) by reprocessed by the economy or the PEC. ‘Pollution‘ is defined as the by-products of production and consumption which cannot be processed by the economy or the PEC, and which has the capacity to disrupt or poison those processes. The more destructive the extraction processes, the less able ecologies are able to process waste and that waste becomes pollution. Pollution is often distributed according to relations of power, and dumped upon poorer or less powerful people, and poorer less visible places. Pollution eventually feeds back into the complexity of the PEM and PEC and affects a society’s ability to survive – at the least it generates changes in the Social Economy.

    The problem we face is that pollution is changing the PEC to such a degree that the civilisation we participate in could fall apart in many ways. This is not that unusual. Previous civilisations have destroyed their ecologies by determined accident. In our case one of the prime dangers is the pollution from fossil fuels.

    The same processes which give us a huge EREI and hence cheap, plentiful energy, will cause massively turbulent weather, storms, droughts, flooding, sea water rise and so on.

    These are severe problems for us. It will be hard to tackle these problems if the EREI goes down, which it seems to be, and the problems will also increase if we continue with fossil fuels to try and keep the EREI up.

    Oil and gas are no longer as easy to find and extract as they were, hence the use of tar sands and fracking. Their EREI is declining. Quite a lot of people, who claim to be experts, argue that rates of discovery of new oil and gas fields has declined since the early seventies. Some consider that no new massive oil fields are likely to be discovered in the future. Desperate attempts to keep going, may mean that oil companies are becoming overburdened with debt, which they will never be able to repay from profitable discoveries. Lack of oil will affect supply chains which largely depend on it for transport. Coal is now gained by open cut and other explosive techniques which are far more destructive of the environment and poisoning of nearby people. Any increased efficiency of use of fossil fuels is likely to require a fair amount of energy expenditure to implement, and may not be economic. Renewable technologies require far more energy input for their energy output than fossil fuel energy, at least at the beginning of their lives.

    So far, the amount of coal and gas fueled energy is increasing at similar rates as solar and wind, increasing emissions.

    There is a further economic theory which is of use here; the Jevons Paradox. This is disputed, and not everyone accepts it. Some of the rejection seems to stem from the recognition that, if correct, it has unpleasant consequences.

    The Jevons paradox is basically that “The more, available, efficient or cheaper the energy, the more it will be used.” This implies that energy efficiency can result in greater consumption of fuel, rather than less consumption, and hence greater emissions. It is also in the interests of corporations who sell energy, to boost sales of energy, rather than to have unused energy on hand, so there are a few social drivers operating here, few of which favour reduction of pollution.

    One consequence of the above, is that new renewable energy may not displace fossil fuel energy. Energy use may merely go up, as new renewable energy adds to energy availability, and is accompanied by even more Fossil Fuel burning – which seems to be what we are currently observing. India and China are building huge amounts of both renewable and fossil fuel power, and organisations may cut fossil fuel use at home and encourage it elsewhere in the world, where there are fewer controls. Renewable energy technology also requires energy input, for extraction, production and transport and this has been provided by fossil fuels. This increases Greenhouse gases. If fossil fuels remain stable, then building renewables at the rate required lowers energy available to run the rest of society. Any decline of the availability of fossil fuels, (due to shortage or phase out) may also mean that we cannot build renewables with the speed and financial return required to keep civilization going.

    If we succeed and the percentage of renewables relative to fossil fuel increases then the amounts of cheaply available energy will sink, and the world will head for ‘degrowth’ and disconnection, whether voluntary or involuntary.

    Involuntary degrowth could be disastrous. If emissions are to be reduced that will take legislation and regulation and a likely cut in living standards and the cut back of world trade, which may be culturally hard to accept. At the moment, working to satisfy consumption urges, drives the system. It is unlikely that this can be maintained, and that requires cultural work and change to make acceptable – and we are not good at doing this deliberately.

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    Considerations on Technology

    May 15, 2019

    Another attempt at working out the basics….

    Any consideration of technology has to at least five factors:

    1) The Material-ecological basis. What we call the physical, chemical, biological (and so on) processes of the world. Technology depends on properties of the world and interacts with ecologies. The world does not have to be understood accurately for technology to be made. The properties of the world, and lack of understanding, mean that technology does not always produce the results intended, and has the possibility of side-effects. Not every imagined technology is possible, at every stage of technological development, and it may not be possible at all. Surprisingly, standard economics seems to assume that when a technology is needed it will arise, and arrive in the form and at the cost we would prefer. Technology may arrive, it may not.

    2) Energy requirements or production. All technology requires energy to make, or to power, and some technology generates energy. The amount of energy generated for the amount of energy invested in the technology, is a relatively important indicator of how much impact the technology can have. We have to look at the energy available (human, animal, thermal, weather, fossil fuel, nuclear etc) to understand the possibilities of a technology. Even the most basic technology magnifies the effect or precision of the users actions.

    Ecologies also require energy circulations, and that circulation can form part of the systems of technology, and be disrupted by those systems of technology.

    3) Social organisation. Every technology comes from a form of social organization, which may influence its design and effects. It also interacts with the social organisation. Social organisation can be fundamental to the technology as, for example, when building pyramids. The organisation of labour-energy is just as important as the tools used. Technology can change or restrict forms of social organisation. Social organisation can disrupt technology as when managers assume that they can define the requirements of a software system without consultation with people doing the work, and design software incapable of being smoothly integrated into work.

    • 3a) Social Struggle. Take it as a likely heuristic (or guide) that every form of social organisation, involves a form of social struggle. Technology is often used to extend and resist social power. It is designed to reinforce patterns of work, obedience and decisiveness. It may be being used to enforce cosmologies, and religious power. What does the design and implementation do in political terms? Who is intended to benefit? Who suffers? How are risks allocated? How is pollution and other forms of harm allocated.

    4) Symbolism, art, magic, rhetoric. Technology is often designed to have a particular ‘look’ and this look or ‘decoration’ becomes inseparable from the technology and its use. Technology can act as a metaphor for the way we think about the cosmos and life. Not long ago the universe was supposed to be like a clock, nowadays it may be thought of as like a computer. Minds can be seen in terms of software etc. Technology can be used to impose and reinforce social distinctions, as with 19th Century hall furniture. Technology can be used to persuade us of the rightfulness of social actions, as when imagined Carbon Capture and Storage is used to keep fossil fuels burning. Geoengineering assumes that manipulating the world ecology is easier than changing social systems, thus defending the social systems that produce pollution and probably undermining Geoengineering’s success. In the case of CCS and Geoengineering, the imagined technology may also function as a social psychological defense mechanism, and suppress the awareness of the danger of the current situation and its social generation. Magic can be seen as a way of coordinating activity, changing people’s consciousness, focusing attention and so on, and so it can be difficult to separate what we call magic from what we call technology. Traditional Balinese irrigation systems, seemed to depend on religion for their co-ordination and functional, largely non-conflictual, distribution of water. Something which collapsed when the traditional system was abandoned as a result of taking on the magic of capitalism.

    Technology can be part of the rhetoric involved in imagined futures. Or in futures hoped for by some particular social group. In that sense it can also enter into social struggle.

    5) Unintended consequences. Because technology arises within complex systems and is used in complex systems its use, especially new usage, can result in unintended consequences and unintended disorders. One obvious example is that producing technology can result in pollution, or use of technology can result in pollution. These consequences are, in a way, also part of the technology. People can use them to learn more about the world, or they can dismiss them as accident (even if they are recurrent), or say that they have nothing to do with the actual technology usage.

    Technology is rarely straightforward and simple. It is embedded within and generative of complexity.

    A kind of definition of technology:

    A combination of material (involving chemical, physical biological processes), organisational, communicational, symbolic, artistic, magical, and other, processes which expands, magnifies, or makes more precise human actions and their consequences (intended or otherwise). Technology is intimately tied up with energy production and magnification.

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    Carbon Markets

    April 30, 2019

    Elaborations on a lecture by Gareth Bryant (Political Economy, Sydney University) although probably not accurately, and I’ve probably added some inaccuracies.

    The aim of carbon trading and taxes is to keep capitalism and economic growth while making them more ecologically sensitive. We are in no way certain that we can keep corporate capitalism or keep economic growth while reducing pollution and ecological destruction, but that is the hypothesis. It could be wrong to begin with.

    Assuming that it is possible, the idea is that by allowing the market to set prices on Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, they become more expensive and this diminishes their attractiveness. It lets ‘the market’ seek the answer to how this reduction is done. That contemporary corporate markets can succeed in this, is also a hopeful hypothesis.

    If you go with emissions trading you have to set up an artificial market in which emissions can be traded. The idea is that people who cut emissions have ‘carbon credits’, ‘carbon permits’ or ‘carbon allowances’ which they can sell to others, allowing those others to pollute. What this does in reality is keep the emissions stable, unless permits are regularly removed from the market – which can be difficult unless taxpayers buy them.

    Both allocating and removing the credits are political processes open to influence, so large companies usually end up with larger amounts of credits than they should have. In the EU trading system there was a massive over-allocation of permits, which may have made the market under-priced and under-responsive with little incentive to reduce GHG.

    Some companies, predicting a trading system is coming, can increase their emissions deliberately, so as to receive larger numbers of credits than they should have. When the credits are introduced, the companies reduce their emissions back to normal and sell off the excess. This increases emissions rather than lowering them.

    If people don’t want to change, or there is a severe lock-in effect, then this can just increase prices for everyone, without reducing emissions.

    ‘The market’ is advocated, because it is supposed to remove the knowledge and planning problem from the process. That is, if the State is going to promote Green energy, reduced emissions and so on, then it has to know what it is doing. It has (in the terminology) to “pick winners”.

    In neoliberal theory, the State is inefficient and always stupid and the market always knows what is best or finds the best way of doing it. Neoliberals do not like the possibility that ordinary people could influence corporate behaviour or diminish profit, through effective use of the State.

    The problem with this idea is that the ‘best way’ can just mean cheapest and most profitable in the short term, Or, perhaps, the method that requires the least actual change. The market may crash or opt for destruction in the long term.

    The idea also forgets that many uses of the environment are actually destructions of the environment, and once the environment has been destroyed, or transformed into waste, it takes massive amounts of energy to put it back together again (more than it took to demolish it). Corporations are nearly always primarily concerned with whether the process of destruction and waste makes them a profit. They are unconcerned about generating waste and pollution, especially if it could significantly diminish profit to tidy it up.

    While government planning is given up, as it potentially interferes with the market, the scheme pretends that there is no significant corporate planning, and that corporations do not crony together for their own benefit. Unfortunately this happens – many boards have shared members for one. So the markets get distorted in the interest of the more powerful players, and this is not perceived or considered to be part of the market process, while State planning (which could possibly be in a more general interest, and have a general input, not just a corporate input) is defined as interference in the process.

    In general, carbon markets diminish the tools available to a government, and make politics become about saving the carbon market rather than dealing with climate change. As already suggested, any governmental action, or target setting, whatsoever can be construed as interfering with ‘the market’ and as stopping it from working with its supposed efficiency. It is always possible to blame the State for market failure.

    However the market does not have to go in the direction intended. Markets do not force emissions reduction. If it becomes more profitable to increase emissions (perhaps they are under priced because of market collapse), or prevent decrease, or to emit false information, then that can happen.

    Financial markets, such as carbon markets, depend on volatility for both their profitability and financial-trader interest. We would essentially be trying to use a volatile financial market with its continuous stream of bubbles, crashes and information corruption in order to stabilise the ecology we depend upon for life. This makes no sense at all.

    Let us be clear, there is no evidence that carbon trading anywhere in the world has successfully reduced emissions by any significant amount, but such markets do reduce the possibility of demanding emissions reduction in a relatively democratic way.

    Carbon taxes are better because they set a relatively predictable price and can be moved up or down depending on the results being attained. Money from a carbon tax can also be distributed to the consumers to lessen their costs nd allow them to make market choices with greater ease. However, Carbon taxes do not seem politically possible, as all Australians know. This is probably because they are step towards letting the State interfere with the markets, rather than letting corporations interfere with markets.

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