Gail Tverberg

"The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990." Interesting. But the club of Rome predicted in the 70ies problems for the first half of the 21st century. And I think they are going to win the bet. Two blogs I can recommend: 1. https://senecaeffect.substack.com/ 2. https://ourfiniteworld.com/ Both bloggers I consider extremely smart.

Economics is broken in a number of other ways. The biggest questions to me are growth and sustainability. In the neoclassical world (I studied and degreed in the study) growth factors are all engogenous to economics: The Neoclassical Growth Model, where output is a function of current stocks of capital and labor: Y = A K^α L^(1-α ), and capital accumulation is simply a function of investment and captial depreciation: K = sY - δK The AK theory, which reduces growth to aggregate capital: Y = AK. The product-variety model (Romer, Dixit & Stiglitz): production as a function of summed intermediate production functions based on capital The Schumpeterian model, output is based on a productivity function (technology, assumed to be increasing without limit, and capital. Technology increases. Inputs are perfectly substitutable. Innovation will produce substitutes. And that's straight out of the first chapter of a graduate level text in economic growth (Aghion & Howitt, The Economics of Growth, ISBN 978-0-262-01263-8). Then there's the whole class of heterodox economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_economics Among these, the fields of thermoeconomics / biophysical economics / ecological economics, in which a, if not the primary factor relating to economic growth is energy. Many of the contributions to this field come from outside the field of economics, particularly from ecology, biology, and physics, but there are also a number of classically trained…

“Germany could become power independent” and I doubt that. First in general, second on statistics (e.g. produce aluminum and other energy expensive products outside of Germany). But I gave you, for the sake of the argument, that it is possible. You still would have to compensate for ongoing energy demand growth. Be it inside Germany or outside. So your "final target" is an exponential moving target. " It just has no bearing on a more realistic timeline at stake here." 10-30 years in not long. I claim we are seeing the limits of growth, and the central banking voodoo is a sign of it. And again, if economic growth stops, our economy and society will collapse too. A steady state economy can only work on the industrial level of the Amish people. https://ourfiniteworld.com/

"Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters?" Well, it will likely fail. But it is great to finance such "blue sky" projects. Only in the US. "Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas." Some people would disagree: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy…

This article covers major issues: Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/02/09/limits-to-green-energy-are-becom… [1] It is becoming clear that intermittent wind and solar cannot be counted on to provide adequate electricity supply when the electrical distribution system needs them. 2] Adequate storage for electricity is not feasible in any reasonable timeframe. This means that if cold countries are not to “freeze in the dark” during winter, fossil fuel backup is likely to be needed for many years in the future. 3) After many years of subsidies and mandates, today’s green electricity is only a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep our current economy operating. [4] Even as a percentage of electricity, rather than total energy, renewables still comprised a relatively small share in 2020. 5] Most modelers have not understood that reserve to production ratios greatly overstate the amount of fossil fuels and other minerals that the economy will be able to extract. 6] The world economy seems already to be reaching limits on the extraction of coal and natural gas to be used for balancing electricity provided by intermittent renewables. 7] Conclusion. Modelers and leaders everywhere have had a basic misunderstanding of how the economy operates and what limits we are up against. This misunderstanding has allowed scientists to put together models that are far from the situation we are actually facing.

This is obviously a massive, unanswerable, difficult question. (It's also a great question, in my opinion!) I'll just throw some thoughts out there, from my US-centric point of view: The way I think about climate change and collapse is that, at least in the near-term, doesn't look like The Day After Tomorrow. It looks like more blackouts, more storms, bigger wildfires, more potholes in the street, higher food prices, etc. A bunch of small things piling up, sometimes slowly and sometimes fast. It looks like trying to convince your grandma not to move back into the house that got flooded in the last storm, or your local hardware store running out of N95s. In the very short term, it seems clear that we're likely to see continued issues with air quality, extreme weather events, and infrastructure issues. Several other people have mentioned getting to know your neighbors, and I think that's an excellent idea (plus it's nice to know your neighbors, climate aside). For myself, I also have a few things I keep around that help me stay relaxed and prepared for temporary lapses in some of the systems we rely upon. Most of this is very basic emergency preparedness stuff and doesn't get close to "prepper" sorts of things: - N95 masks and respirators (were useful in the pandemic, but I originally had them bc of the west coast wildfires... which recently blanketed the entire country in their smoke, so it's not just a west coast thing, really.) - Air purifier, similarly for air quality…

She wasn't just predicting conventional oil declines. In her 2007 posts she explicitly considers and rejects the adequacy of unconventional oil sources (Canadian oil sands, American shale) to prevent oil from peaking imminently [1]. Most people would like a flying car or a trip to the moon. That's possible. But the technology to offer those to the mass market hasn't been invented! If the only problem with flying cars was that they burned a lot of fuel, millions of high-income people would be flying around in them today. I'm not saying that we can never invent more energy-intensive devices that reach the mass market. But I have observed that nothing like this has reached the mass market in 50 years. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for routine Moon vacations or flying cars. I find that the Jevons paradox is cited more often in online discussions than it is understood. The Jevons paradox can be considered a special case of the energy rebound effect. Energy rebound is the tendency of people to use more of an energy service when that energy service can be supplied more efficiently. For example, replacing incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs saves energy, but some of that energy savings is negated if people also install brighter bulbs when they switch from incandescent to LED. The Jevons paradox is the unusual case where the rebound effect is greater than 100% -- like somebody installing 20 new LED lights for every incandescent they replace. It's remarkable…

I can't. The major book that I would recommend is not available in English. These are a few links I have posted several times on HN: "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-… Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-d… Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumptio… Maybe you can grab a few ideas. A gold backed currency would make no difference. The driving force of capitalism is debt. Debt that needs to be served with more debt (there is no treasure box in the cellar of General Motors that they can use to build car manufacturing plants). To keep the system running you have to continuously create more debt. To be able to do this, you need to have a growing economy, for the economy to grow, you need more energy. To make things worse, this grows exponentially. This is not bad in itself, it has enabled capitalism based economy a tremendous dynamic in the last 150 years. The Problem: Nothing that growth exponentially can grow very long and nobody has ever been able to show how a system that does not grow anymore or does not create new (higher) debt anymore can work. ("There is no steady state economy").

You can't look at the US alone. The economy is gobal. https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-total-ener…

> nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades That's not quite right. In the West, energy usage per capita has risen until the 1970's or 80's, then stayed flat or fallen. (Of course, it's continued to rise in Asia, but fairly linearly; I wouldn't call it an explosion.) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&… https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1…

Alternative paper: https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Tverberg-Collaps…

Short answer: No Long answer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy…

TLDR; Religious person thinks religion is helpful and renewable energy isn't: https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/

"What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months." Wrong Chinese people are very happy. In some rankings they belong to the happiest people. Here they are medium range: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/09/10/a-fascina… My prediction: We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/09/12/our-energy-and-debt-predicament-… PS: The US is also pretty good at making other countries unhappy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran to name a few :-)

"Debt Is the Result of Repaying Debt with More Debt" Actually, you can pay debt only with more debt. This is fundamental to capitalism and reason for it's dynamic and future downfall. "In order to pay back debt with interest, it is necessary to have economic growth, and financial growth and growth in fossil fuel use are very closely tied." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy…

"The simplest: No exhaustible has been depleted yet" You are correct. In fact, they never will be depleted. Same with the oil. Most of the oil that is still in the ground will stay there. "These forecasts are made possible by assuming the limit on the amount of oil extracted is the amount of oil in the ground. In fact, the limit is likely to be a financial (debt) limit that comes much sooner." https://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/13/why-eia-iea-and-randers-2052-ene… Please also see: Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet https://www.amazon.com/Extracted-Mineral-Wealth-Plundering-Planet/dp/1… It is well possible we are beyond the peak already. This brings us to the "Seneca effect" http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/08/seneca-effect-origins-of-c… Otherwise: Business as usual.

> This measure, usually called the oil intensity of the economy... ...is calculated by dividing the total national oil consumption by GDP expressed in constant monies. So it's not taking into account the increased offshoring of our economy's oil and energy consumption, and the article chalks everything up to increases in efficiency (or switching to coal). http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/11/15/is-it-really-possible-to-decouple…

So the US produces 11 mbpd (million barrels per day) of liquids (oil, gas2liquids, ethanol, biodiesel). However it consumes about 19 mpbd [0]. Unfortunately this is just a bleep because more expensive prices have made fracking (a 30 - 20 year old technology) economical, but the typical decline rates of these fields are extremely high (produces loads the first year, dies out very very quickly thereafter) [1]. In the longer view (5 - 10 yrs) it's a bump in a long,unstoppable and ever more expensive decline [2]. [0] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/us_oil.cfm [1] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9506 [2] http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/10/02/our-oil-problems-are-not-over/

>https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-sta... That article is so riddled with issues it's hard to take it seriously even if you believe the underlying conclusion. >But overall, there is no evidence that fossil fuel use, or even oil use, can be divorced from economic growth. If there is a big decline in fossil fuel use, it will translate to a decline in economic growth. Yes there is: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#many-countries-have-decoupled… >The need for economic growth in order to pay back debt even applies to our money supply itself. Money is loaned into existence. This happens when a commercial bank makes a loan and deposit at the same time. The problem is that when the money is created, not enough money is loaned into existence to pay back the interest as well. So economic growth is needed to create the additional money so that the debt can be paid back with interest. This ignores the existence of a central bank, which can print money at will. >The problem with going to a system without fossil fuels and with much less debt than we have today is the fact that the world supported fewer than one billion people in 1750. There are now nearly 7 billion people in the world. The world supported less than 1 billion people in 1750 because the industrial revolution and the green revolution wasn't a thing yet. Both vastly increased productivity and thereby the…

More reading: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Problem-Is-Far… > No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost. > This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse. And Hyman Rickover's 1957 speech on energy and scarcity: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predicting-peak… Climate change is chiefly caused by two things: uncontrolled population growth and energy consumption growth. A high standard of living - and civilization itself - is impossible without high energy consumption per capita. Do you see the problem? I can think of solutions that would be effective, but it would involve a lot of suffering.

It is mentioned in this post: Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumptio… I don't know a book in English out of my head that explains some inherent features of capitalism. Gail Tverberg does a pretty good job but she does not explain a lot of things, she just assumes that you are aware of some things: "There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-… Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growth-at-our-d… Partly relevant if you accept: 1. The need of growth in capitalism 2. That growth and energy consumption are interlinked: Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ The was one guy he wrote, I think it was in the HBR if I remember correctly, that he found that the US has more and more industrial output/GDP growth with fewer energy needs. This is not wrong but it is only true because the US outsources energy hungry productions to China. I actually emailed him with some data. Unfortunately he never replied.

The article says: 'Australia’s attempt to put renewable electricity on the grid has sent electricity prices skyrocketing and resulted in increased blackouts. It has been said that intermittent electricity has “wrecked the grid” in Australia.' whereas reality is somewhat more nuanced: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/24/south-australia… 'Hugh Saddler, the author of the monthly audit and an associate professor at the Australian National University, said wind and solar power supplied more than 50% of the electricity generated in South Australia for most months over the past two years. “That’s made electricity in SA the cheapest in the national electricity market and dramatically increased reliability.”' To give an idea of the quality of the analysis from "Our Finite World", consider this post from 2017: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/10/2017-the-year-when-the-world-eco… "Things could start falling apart badly in 2017, or alternatively, major problems may be delayed until 2018 or 2019." or this post from 2015: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2015/08/26/deflationary-collapse-ahead/ "The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse."

There's a [1] hypothesis that economic growth is mostly the result of 1) population growth, 2) energy consumption, and 3) interest rates. Current projections estimate that population will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055. Nearly all of that growth will occur in "developing" countries. Yuval Harari makes the case in Homo Deus that the world is quickly reaching a point where the less developed areas of the world will be mostly ignored and left behind in the coming years, as the developed world has reached a sort of critical mass that it makes more sense -- economically -- to keep investing there. As technology continues to get more and more efficient, it is quite possible we are near peak energy consumption. Interest rates have been around 0% for quite some time. To me, it's interesting to wonder if we live in a world that might "objectively" be getting better, but we don't see the verification with the same type of economic growth that's occurred in the past. [1] - https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/08/29/the-long-term-tie-between-energy…

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1… No idea how good the source is, however it looks like we have a nice exponential there. Lets see what the envelope says for an exponent of 2: Using numbers from parent commentors, log2(6.6 x 10^13) is about 45.9, so we are in our 46th doubling period. A guess on the graph says its 25 years to double. > The total heat content of the Earth is of the order of 12.6 x 10^24 MJ, and that of the crust the order of 5.4 x 10^21 MJ (Dickson and Fanelli, 2004). so that's end of crust energy usefulness at the start of the 72nd period and end of Earth energy less than halfway through the 84th period. So that gives us 500-1000 years of energy from now if we solely use the planets heat. Whether we soley use it or not becomes largely irrelevant due to the exponent, we can stretch it as a major source a few hundred more years or so. Of course, if in 1000 years we aren't only using this planet we should be good. How many years to the next system again?