https://richardheinberg.com/muselet...e-worsening-energy-crisis-is-due-to-depletion November 2021 How Much of the Worsening Energy Crisis is Due to Depletion? "Coal and natural gas spot prices have recently soared to record levels internationally, while oil is trading at over $80 a barrel—the highest price in seven years. Newspaper columnists are asking whether people in Europe and Asia who can’t afford high fuel and electricity prices might freeze this winter. High natural gas prices are causing fertilizer prices to spike, which will inevitably raise costs to farmers, with eventual catastrophic impact on people who already have trouble paying for food. "Political commentators are naturally searching for culprits (or scapegoats). For those on the business-friendly political right, the usual target is green energy policies that discourage fossil fuel investment. For those on the left, the culprit is insufficient investment in renewable energy. "But there’s another explanation for the high prices: depletion. I’m not suggesting we’re about to completely run out of coal, oil, or gas; there’s no immediate danger of that. However, the energy industry has historically targeted the highest-quality and easiest-accessed of these resources, which means that what’s left, in most cases, are fuels that will be costlier to extract and process—and also more polluting. The proximate causes of current price spikes may be transient market conditions (the see-sawing pandemic, Britain’s decision to leave the European Internal Energy Market, Russia’s reluctance to provide more gas to European buyers until a new pipeline is given final approval, and China’s choice to reduce coal imports from Australia). But behind the energy headlines is persistent, accelerating depletion. "Fossil fuel supply shocks have long been forecast by the few analysts who track resource depletion and its consequences. In the early years of this century, a robust literature developed around the concept of “peak oil” (as well as “peak gas” and “peak coal”). Analysts predicted that world oil production might begin to decline as soon as 2005 or 2010, natural gas in the 2020s, and coal in the 2020s to 2040s. "Forecasts for a peak in world oil production proved premature, with new supplies of “unconventional” petroleum (i.e., tight oil, oil sands, and deepwater oil) coming on line to boost US and world production by millions of barrels per day. Roughly 90 percent of new oil output added during the last decade came from US tight oil wells that were horizontally drilled and fracked. At the same time, using the same drilling and fracking technologies, so much natural gas was liberated that the US became a significant exporter. Meanwhile, Australia ramped up its coal mining in order to export the fuel to support fast-growing Asian economies. Supply problems were solved—sort of, and temporarily. "Now, circumstances are changing and reality seems to be catching up with peak-supply forecasts. Many economic analysts attribute shortages and price hikes to failure by the fossil fuel industry to invest enough in exploration and production. But, to some extent, that’s just a misleading way of acknowledging that, from now on, extracting fossil fuels from Earth’s crust will take more money, technology, and energy than it used to. "So, to directly address the question with which this essay is titled: exactly how much of the world’s current energy crisis is due to fossil fuel depletion, and how much to other factors? It’s impossible to assign percentages. There has always been some volatility in fossil fuel markets. But as depletion continues, price spikes and troughs are likely to grow in amplitude, and to become more frequent. And that’s precisely what we are seeing. Since 2005, when world conventional oil production stopped growing, petroleum prices have indeed become more volatile, with spot prices rising to the all-time record high of $147 (in July, 2008) and sinking to the all-time record low of -$37 (in April, 2020). Without depletion, there would still have been price variation—just as there would still be extreme weather events without climate change. But, like climate change, depletion is a slowly accumulating background condition that widens the envelope of day-to-day or year-to-year extremes. "Let’s dig a little deeper into the “lack of investment” explanation for high fuel prices. As we’ve seen, higher rates of investment are needed because new projects are expensive. But, at the same time, it is also true that concern over climate change is leading major investors to reconsider long-standing practices of funding fossil fuel producers. Recently the highly influential International Energy Agency recommended that no new fossil fuel projects be approved after 2021—a suggestion inconceivable from that organization just a few years ago. The list of pension funds and banks that are divesting from fossil fuels grows with each passing month. "But depletion and climate concern are not the only reasons for levels of investment in fossil fuels that may be insufficient to stave off hardship for the industry—and likely for society as a whole. The fossil fuel industry requires relatively stable and predictable prices for its own internal investment purposes. High prices are viewed as good, in that they generate more profits that can be reinvested in new projects. But very high prices have a downside: when energy becomes unaffordable, the stage is set for a price collapse. Market volatility makes fossil fuel companies wary to expand operations, as new projects are often many years in development, and the comparatively few remaining prospective drilling sites are unlikely to yield profits absent stable, high prices. In recent years, some companies have decided that their free cash flow is better used in buying back their own stock shares rather than in funding speculative new oil or gas drilling. That’s also partly because divestment campaigns are tending to lower the value of shares in oil and coal companies. "So, if there are reasons for high energy prices other than depletion, why focus on this particular one? Two things. First: virtually nobody is mentioning depletion. I routinely scan energy-related news articles in the mainstream press, and in its coverage of the energy crisis I have yet to see depletion mentioned once—even though it is undeniably a contributing factor. Why is it being ignored? Maybe because of this second thing: it can only get worse. Other causes of energy price volatility may be solvable with investment or government policy, but not depletion. As long as society is extracting and burning fossil fuels, their resource quality (that is, their accessibility, affordability, and usability without expensive processing to remove pollutants like sulfur or to bring them up to standards that will suit existing refineries) will continue to decline and costs of production will increase. "If fossil fuel prices are becoming more volatile, and if that’s partly due to depletion (which is irreversible), then this has a couple of implications—one fairly obvious, another less so. The obvious implication: we probably have a wild ride ahead of us. Energy is the master resource; literally everything we do requires it. If energy gets more expensive, cost increases will migrate throughout the economy, making everything we do harder and more expensive. Unaffordable energy usually translates to inflation, with wage hikes unable to keep pace with soaring prices of food and consumer goods. The main likely brake on the inflationary accelerator of high energy prices would be widespread deflationary debt defaults—which would likewise draw nasty consequences in their wake. "But there’s a less obvious consequence of depletion and energy price volatility, and it has to do with climate policy. It takes energy to make solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and all the rest of the technology that policy makers propose to replace current fuel-burning infrastructure. Most of the energy that will be required for transition purposes, at least in the early stages, will have to come from fossil fuels—as is the case currently with Chinese solar panels being made in factories operating with coal-fueled electrical power. If society attempts to maintain current levels of energy services throughout the transition, the result will be a spike in both energy usage and carbon emissions (which policy makers hope to offset using unscalable and unaffordable carbon capture technologies). If fossil energy prices are going haywire during the transition, that makes an already arduous and perilous process even more so. "Many climate activists may be happy to see fossil fuel price spikes and supply problems. Yes, if oil gets expensive, that means more people will buy electric cars. But where are the electric airliners, semi-trucks, container ships, and cement factories that will be needed? No company can simply order one today; they’re mostly still in the realm of fantasy. Meanwhile, solar and wind together are supplying just 3.3 percent of the world’s current primary energy budget. "Policy makers envision an energy transition in which solar and wind seamlessly and quickly substitute for coal, oil, and gas, leaving consumers enjoying just the same comforts and conveniences as they do now, while emitting no carbon. That’s an exceedingly unlikely scenario. The real energy transition will almost certainly be a shift from using a lot to using a lot less. "If that’s true, then what should we do? Over a dozen years ago, I was among several energy analysts and commentators who recommended the adoption of depletion protocols (which are essentially programs for conserving and rationing nonrenewable resources) as a policy tool for helping society adapt to the inevitable end of the fossil fuel era. Politicians were uninterested. Today, rationing is still the best policy response. Energy could be rationed in several different ways; in addition to depletion protocols, another rationing approach I’ve long liked is tradable energy quotas, which effectively provide monetary incentivizes to those who use less energy. With rationing, those who use the most sacrifice the most, while those who use the least maintain (or gain) access to necessities. "There were always two reasons to reduce society’s reliance on fossil fuels: pollution and depletion. Pollution has taken center stage via climate change. But as long as we keep extracting and burning coal, oil, and natural gas, our depletion problem likewise keeps simmering away in the background. This winter, the pot may boil over. No honest policy maker can say they weren’t warned, or that there are no good responses."
Time Essay: The Nightmare Life Without Fuel Monday, Apr. 25, 1977 Americans are so used to limitless energy supplies that they can hardly imagine what life might be like when the fuel really starts to run out. So TIME asked Science Writer Isaac Asimov for his vision of an energy-poor society that might exist at the end of the 20th century. The following portrait, Asimov noted, "need not prove to be accurate. It is a picture of the worst, of waste continuing, of oil running out, of nothing in its place, of world population continuing to rise. But then, that could happen, couldn't it?" "So it's 1997, and it's raining, and you'll have to walk to work again. The subways are crowded, and any given train breaks down one morning out of five. The buses are gone, and on a day like today the bicycles slosh and slide. Besides, you have only a mile and a half to go, and you have boots, raincoat and rain hat. And it's not a very cold rain, so why not? "Lucky you have a job in demolition too. It's steady work. "Slow and dirty, but steady. The fading structures of a decaying city are the great mineral mines and hardware shops of the nation. Break them down and re-use the parts. Coal is too difficult to dig up and transport to give us energy in the amounts we need, nuclear fission is judged to be too dangerous, the technical breakthrough toward nuclear fusion that we hoped for never took place, and solar batteries are too expensive to maintain on the earth's surface in sufficient quantity. "Anyone older than ten can remember automobiles. They dwindled. At first the price of gasoline climbed—way up. Finally only the well-to-do drove, and that was too clear an indication that they were filthy rich, so any automobile that dared show itself on a city street was overturned and burned. Rationing was introduced to "equalize sacrifice," but every three months the ration was reduced. The cars just vanished and became part of the metal resource. "There are many advantages, if you want to look for them. Our 1997 newspapers continually point them out. The air is cleaner and there seem to be fewer colds. Against most predictions, the crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive (and too easy a target), policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king in the cities of 1997, and people walk everywhere far into the night. Even the parks are full, and there is mutual protection in crowds. "If the weather isn't too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air conditioning they get. And at least the street lights still burn. Indoors, electricity is scarce, and few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper. "As for the winter—well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn; but sweaters are popular indoor wear and showers are not an everyday luxury. Lukewarm sponge baths will do, and if the air is not always very fragrant in the human vicinity, the automobile fumes are gone. "There is some consolation in the city that it is worse in the suburbs. The suburbs were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. One way out for the suburbanites is to form associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Pushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn't easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open. There is not much in the way of refrigeration except for the snowbanks, and then the dogs must be fought off. "What energy is left cannot be directed into personal comfort. The nation must survive until new energy sources are found, so it is the railroads and subways that are receiving major attention. The railroads must move the coal that is the immediate hope, and the subways can best move the people. "And then, of course, energy must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. We can huddle together when there is a lack of warmth, fan ourselves should there be no cooling breezes, sleep or make love at such times as there is a lack of light—but nothing will for long ameliorate a lack of food. The American population isn't going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export so that we can pay for some trickle of oil and for other resources. "The rest of the world, of course, is not as lucky as we are. "Some cynics say that it is the knowledge of this that helps keep America from despair. They're starving out there, because earth's population has continued to go up. The population on earth is 5.5 billion, and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time. "All the statistics point to a rapidly declining rate of population increase, but that is coming about chiefly through a high infant mortality; the first and most helpless victims of starvation are babies, after their mothers have gone dry. A strong current of American opinion, as reflected in the newspapers (some of which still produce their daily eight pages of bad news), holds that it is just as well. It serves to reduce the population, doesn't it? "Others point out that it's more than just starvation. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that there are now nearly 2 billion people in the world who are alive but who are permanently braindamaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing year by year. It has already occurred to some that it would be "realistic" to wipe them out quietly and rid the earth of an encumbering menace. The American newspapers of 1997 do not report that this is actually being done anywhere, but some travelers bring back horror tales. "At least the armies are gone—no one can afford to keep those expensive, energy-gobbling monstrosities. Some soldiers in uniform and with rifles are present in almost every still functioning nation, but only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes and ships—which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves. "Energy continues to decline, and machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours and there is less leisure; but then, with electric lighting restricted, television for only three hours a night, movies three evenings a week, new books few and printed in small editions, what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed. "Where will it end? It must end in a return to the days before 1800, to the days before the fossil fuels powered a vast machine industry and technology. It must end in subsistence farming and in a world population reduced by starvation, disease and violence to less than a billion. "And what can we do to prevent all this now? "Now? Almost nothing. "If we had started 20 years ago, that might have been another matter. If we had only started 50 years ago, it would have been easy." http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,918862-1,00.html
Milankovitch Cycles "Axial tilt (obliquity) "The angle of the Earth's axial tilt with respect to the orbital plane (the obliquity of the ecliptic) varies between 22.1° and 24.5°, over a cycle of about 41,000 years. The current tilt is 23.44°, roughly halfway between its extreme values. The tilt last reached its maximum in 8,700 BCE." So, a single cycle lasts nearly four times as long as the holocene epoch, in which agriculture evolved, and about 136 times as long as the fossil fuel era in which the current civilization evolved. So much for the "axial tilt is doing it" hypothesis.
On catabolic collapse By John Michael Greer, originally published by The Archdruid Report May 31, 2006 "A couple of years ago I wrote an article titled “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse” — quite the cheerful topic, granted, but it’s relevant nowadays in more than an academic sense. I’ve never been able to find much common ground with the neoprimitivist types who insist that civilization is an awful idea and we all ought to go back to hunting and gathering, but there isn’t much encouragement to be had from the cheerleaders of perpetual progress, either. "In ecological terms, civilization is quite a new thing, not much more than 10,000 years old at most, and like most new evolutionary gambits, it’s had its share of drastic ups and downs. Visit cities in Italy, China, or elsewhere that have been continuously inhabited for 2500 years and it’s clear that, in the right environmental conditions, the civilized way of life can sustain itself over the long term; visit the ruins of Ur of the Chaldees or the Mayan metropolis of Tikal and it’s equally clear that when environmental conditions don’t support it, civilization is a mayfly phenomenon that flits past and vanishes in a blink of ecological time. "The question on many minds these days is whether our current industrial civilization falls into one of these categories or the other. It’s a fair question, and one that a steady look at the ecological processes behind the fall of other civilizations can help answer. That was the motive behind the paper. In its original form, though, it bristles with equations, footnotes, and all the other impedimenta of the modern academic paper — it was intended for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in the field of human ecology, a destiny it hasn’t yet managed to achieve — and to judge by the questions I’ve fielded since it appeared online last year, not all its readers have been able to hack their way through the scholarly undergrowth to the ideas at the core. "The idea of catabolic collapse is simple enough, and it’s best communicated through a metaphor. Imagine that, instead of the fate of civilizations, we’re discussing home ownership. Until recently, when people went shopping for a home, most of them were sensible about it and bought one within their means. The housing bubble of the last few years, though, encouraged quite a few people to get in over their heads, buying much more house than they could afford, on the assumption that appreciating real estate values and the other advantages of home ownership would make up the difference. "If you’re one of these latter, though, you probably didn’t take the time to work out just how much your huge new McMansion would cost to own, maintain, and repair, and you almost certainly didn’t realize that every period of rising real estate values gives way to a period of stagnant or falling values sooner or later. As these realities begin to sink in, you find yourself in a very awkward bind, because your monthly paycheck doesn’t cover all your monthly expenses. You can cover the difference for a while by refinancing your house and extracting any extra equity in cash, but that only works as long as interest rates keep dropping and home values keep rising. Once that option’s closed off, you’ve got very few others as long as you plan on keeping the house. You can take on more debt, which means your bills go up; you can postpone maintenance and repairs, which means your house begins to fall apart, and your bills go up; or you can stop paying some of your bills, which means your house becomes much less livable, and your bills go up. Eventually you end up so deep in the hole that you can’t pay the mortgage and the property taxes any more, and you lose the house. "That’s catabolic collapse in a nutshell. Like suburban mansions, civilizations are complex, expensive, fragile things. To keep one going, you have to maintain and replace a whole series of capital stocks: physical (such as buildings), human (such as trained workers), information (such as agricultural knowledge), social (such as market systems), and more. If you can do this within the “monthly budget” of resources provided by the natural world and the efforts of your labor force, your civilization can last a very long time. Over time, though, civilizations tend to build their capital stocks up to levels that can’t be maintained; each king (or industrial magnate) wants to build a bigger palace (or skyscraper) than the one before him, and so on. That puts a civilization into the same bind as the homeowner with the oversized house. "What happens then depends on whether the civilization’s most important resources are sustainable or not. Sustainable resources are like a monthly paycheck; you’ve got to live within it, but as long as you can keep expenses on average at or below your paycheck, you know you can get by. If a civilization gets most of its raw materials from ecologically sound agriculture, for example, the annual harvest puts a floor under the collapse process. Even if things fall apart completely — if the homeowner goes bankrupt and has his house foreclosed, to continue the metaphor — that monthly paycheck will let him rent a smaller house or an apartment and start picking up the pieces. Civilizations such as ancient Egypt and imperial China, which were based on sustainable resources, cycled through this process many times, from expansion through overshoot to a self-limiting collapse that bottomed out when capital stocks got low enough to be supported by the steady resource base. "If the civilization depends on unsustainable resource use, though, the situation is a lot more serious. In terms of the metaphor, our homeowner bought the house with lottery winnings, not a monthly paycheck; his income is only a fraction of the amount he spends each month — and not necessarily a large fraction, either. The process that leads to foreclosure is different, too. Our lottery winner can spend as freely as he wants, up to the point that his bank balance drops far enough that his checks start bouncing. By the time he runs into that limit, though, the chance to do anything about the situation is long past. The money is gone, he’s faced with bills his monthly income won’t even begin to cover, and by the time the collection agencies get through with him he may very well end up on the street. Civilizations such as the Classic Maya, which used core resources (in the Maya case, the fragile fertility of tropical soils) unsustainably, went through this process, and the “collection agencies” of nature left nothing behind but crumbling ruins in the Yucatan jungle. "This is not good news for our modern industrial civilization, of course, because its capital stocks are supported by winnings from the geological lottery that laid down fantastic amounts of fossilized solar energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Even the very small fraction of our resource base that comes from the “paycheck” of agriculture, forestry, and fishing depends on fossil fuels, and is being used up at unsustainable rates. Since the late 1950s, scientists have been warning that what’s left of our fossil fuel resources won’t sustain our current industrial system indefinitely, much less support the Utopia of perpetual economic growth promised by pundits across the political spectrum. For the most part, these warnings have been roundly ignored. If they continue to be ignored until actual shortages begin, we may be in for a very ugly future. "That future may be closer than most people like to think, too. The collapse of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina drew attention from around the world, but few people seem to have noticed the implications of the Big Easy’s fate. The United States has suffered catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters before, and always in the past the disaster was promptly followed by a massive rebuilding program. Not this time. The French Quarter and a few other mostly undamaged portions of the city have reestablished a rough equivalent of their former life, but much of the rest of the city has been bulldozed or simply abandoned to the elements. The ruins of the Ninth Ward, like the hundreds of abandoned farm towns that dot the Great Plains states and the gutted cities of America’s Rust belt, may be a harbinger of changes most Americans will find it acutely uncomfortable to face. "One place where the housing metaphor breaks down, though, is that a civilization has a fractal structure — that is, the same patterns that define it at the topmost level also take form on smaller scales. The long-lasting cities in Italy and China mentioned at the beginning of this essay maintained urban life through the fall of empires precisely because of this fractal structure; a single city and its agricultural hinterland can survive even if the larger system comes apart. The recent spread of Peak Oil resolutions and projects by cities and towns across America is thus a very hopeful sign. It’s going to take drastic changes and a great deal of economic rebuilding before these communities can get by on the more limited resources of a deindustrial future, but the crucial first steps toward sustainability are at least on the table now. If our future is to be anything but a desperate attempt to keep our balance as we skid down the slope of collapse and decline, these projects may well point the way." https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-05-31/catabolic-collapse/
Numbers don’t lie: Amazon deforestation increased despite Brazil’s greenwashing attempt at COP26 Diego Gonzaga 19 November 2021 No amount of greenwashing by the Brazilian government can obscure the truth: The Amazon is being destroyed at a historic rate. The country’s PRODES monitoring system shows there was a 21.97% increase in deforestation compared to the previous year and the highest rate of forest destruction since 2006. Between August 2020 and July 2021, Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-environment government has overseen the destruction of 13,235 km² in the Amazon — an area 17 times the size of New York City. Aerial view of an area in the Amazon deforested for the expansion of livestock, in Porto Velho, Rondônia state. © Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas This data was released just days after the conclusion of COP26 where Bolsonaro attempted to greenwash the environmental destruction in Brazil. Over the course of his administration, the government has slashed environmental protections, weakened agencies responsible for monitoring and protecting the forest, and put the rights and lives of Indigenous Peoples at risk. Despite international pressure for countries to ensure their products are clean of deforestation, the agreement signed by Bolsonaro and other world leaders at COP26 gives green light to another decade of forest destruction. The Amazon is already on the brink, with some areas already emitting more carbon than they can capture due to deforestation, according to a study. Aerial view of an area in the Amazon deforested for the expansion of livestock, in Lábrea, Amazonas state. © Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas There’s no more time to waste. Even though Brazil’s energy comes from hydroelectric power instead of fossil fuels, the country is still one of the top carbon emitters due to deforestation and industrial agriculture, and the Brazilian Congress, which is aligned with Bolsonaro’s agenda, keeps pressing for more anti-environmental bills that would reward land grabbing and threaten Indigenous Peoples’ lands and rights even more. The destruction of the Amazon is a threat of multiple levels: it is a risk to the health of those living near the forest, who have to breathe the poisonous smoke originating from the fires; a threat to the balance of the global climate, which depends on the forest standing to absorb carbon; and a threat to the lives of Indigenous Peoples, who have their lands invaded by land-grabbers and are often met with violence. According to a report by Brazilian organization CIMI, 263 Indigenous People were killed in 2020 as a result of confrontations with invaders. Aerial view of an area in the Amazon deforested for the expansion of livestock in Lábrea, Amazonas state. © Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas This widespread destruction is unacceptable and must be stopped. World leaders must take meaningful action and stop giving a platform and social license to a government that is putting so much at risk. That means not making deals with Bolsonaro that threaten the forest even more, and demanding that companies disclose their supply chains and prove products coming from Brazil are completely clean of deforestation and human rights abuse. We don’t need more forest destruction for industrial cattle ranching and soy farming. Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities already have sustainable practices that can feed the world without putting people and the planet at risk. It’s time to take action now and prevent further destruction that we cannot afford.
I suspect US industrial agriculture is invested there and could successfully lobby against such a measure.
If big oil is having lawyers locked up for Ecuadorian spills without trial, I suspect you may be right