That was a great interview with Tim. As he was speaking I couldn't help wondering if he is familiar with ecological economics, because much of what he discussed is reflected in this reframing of economic theory. Thermodynamics plans a big part in ecological economics, because it is based on science and recognizes that the transformation of matter by energy must have biophysical limits, and therefore the economy must have limits to how much matter, or material throughput, it consumes.
The other thing that occurred to me was his description of physics applying to social issues - especially the issue of the distribution of energy or matter (with relatively little concentrated and the majority diffuse. ) He seems to imply that this principle also applied to social situations ( there will always be a few rich, powerful people and the majority will be poor and ruled). Social systems are different from physical systems and we should not carry over principles from one area to another. Justice dictates a more even (not necessarily equal) distribution of wealth and resources. Ecological economics also has a strong ethical component, and addresses this issue as well. Thanks for what you do and for the opportunity to comment on these interesting interviews.
I think of this very much as an addiction problem on an individual behavioural level. We don’t eat as individuals connected to a body that understands how much it needs to eat, including knowing when to not overeat, we eat as individuals connected to a body that is disconnected and is disordered by addictive behaviours, borne out of fear and some illusion of control, that make the stomach a somewhat “sinking” one (like a blackhole). I think a similar idea is that we live largely in cultures that hoard and do not grieve, do not collectively lament death in ritual ways that can make sense of why people die in the ways they do and how communities can then band against those causes (like crow murder investigations: crows come together to figure out how one of them died or was hurt) when so many deaths in these systems are caused by the systems themselves (often in insidious and hard to see trickle down ways, and we are likely gaslit about them anyway) and when exploitation on a daily level is just normal and cannot be raged against (or if you do you’re not ‘coping’ correctly, which is a notion that also fractures this connection from our living bodies, but why should I cope at all?)
I agree. I’ve been trying to be conscious of it in my own life and trying to change my addictive and trauma-based patterns to more sustainable ways of cycling through life and it’s honestly been very helpful. I’m stronger than I have ever been.
Great summary of a tricky episode to understand! I keep getting stuck on the possibility of a thing not growing, ie: not using its surplus to seek new material to consume, and then consuming some more just to feel safe and ready for the next meal when actually it will be larger...
Perhaps we need to take this growth attitude towards surplus and replace with composting: civilisation creates surplus, gathers more than it actually needs in this moment, then uses that excess to actively limit the amount it grows. To slow growth rate, to recycle and repurpose, to increase wellbeing instead.
I think of sci-fi where there is a clear hard limit on resources. Near 100% of available resources are maxed out. Lots of metrics of human development/ technology/ education/ leisure etc reach limits. Perhaps we need ‘arbitrary’ limits imposed before we are harvesting 100% of the resources. Except we’re already over planetary capacity, so we need to go backwards right? So our ‘excess’ could be directed instead towards creating these kinds of societies that would actively try to consume less...
Sounds horribly unappealing to most people I think. So as much as I don’t understand the logistics of actually making that happen reframing it becomes a huge problem. The story of living closer to nature, slower, happier etc- to be obsessed with very different activities than we are now, and all the health and social benefits this brings, might be our best bet.
Thoughts most welcome I struggle to know what this looks like in the day to day, or even the imagined possible future!
Thank you for your creative writing and thought, although, sadly, this is the "heart" of our current problem of massive human overpopulation and overconsumption: when our ancestors jumped from their previous long established Hunter-Gatherer clan/band lifeway, necessarily limited to 150 members (Dunbar number) dependent on real territory for sustenance, and obligated to migration/territorial competitions, we lept from a social system that controlled our numbers/consumption to our current limitless (?) massive numbers and gigantic hierarchical social structures. So, ironically, however brilliant, abstract thought has taken the place of real territories, and it is as limitless as the brilliant comments here. The "agricultural revolution" was the first of later waves of energy generation inventions to fuel ever larger populations and their social complexities.
Honestly, I did not listen to/see Tim's obviously (from the comments) equally brilliant presentation on the physics of energy, but nowhere here is any mention of the actual amount of heat energy being produced by the expenditure of all this fuel, in whatever form: the heat energy equivalent of one Hiroshima nuclear bomb blast per second, 63 trillion BTUs. Nowhere in all of the wonderful climate science literature can I find a single breakdown of how much of that Earth's Energy Imbalance is the result of The Greenhouse Effect of GHGs retaining solar energy/heat, and how much is being generated by our burning of 8 billion tons of coal/yr. and 100 million barrels of oil per day. Clearly, both are contributing, but the massive amount of human generated "waste energy"/heat energy is never mentioned. What should be clear by now is that our planet's air conditioning (cooling) systems are highly stressed and unable to keep us cool, as they have for eons before. So, we are told that 1.2 trillion tons of global ice are melting annually, or 3.3 billion tons per day, with each pound of melting ice absorbing 144 BTUS of heat energy as it is converted to latent liquid form, and that 321 million cubic miles of oceans are absorbing enough heat to increase surface temps in the midlatitudes to 70 degF, and that 1 trillion tons of water vapor are evaporating into the atmosphere daily. Clearly, our over harvesting of ancient solar heat energy previously stored in fossil fuels is over heating the entire planet.
So, I love a well crafted brilliant idea as much as the next intellectual, but, when it comes to "energy", our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors kept their numbers and energy expenditures within the limits Mother Earth can manage and we, in our Hubris, have broken through those natural limits, which may well be our demise. All the same, thank you for this opportunity to see great thinking and participate in some small way!
We mine 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels a year. The Energy Transition will not beat that- and will only last 20 or so years - and then will start recycling most of our energy systems. This podcast seems to be dominated by mostly Degrowth Doomers that do not understand the Energy Transition at all - and attack it and other great potential solutions like Precision Fermentation. I'm Bright Green - and long to see SOME areas of the modern world less consumerist. Like greedy suburban town plans that use way too much land and energy to maintain. But many more people can live in Bright Green Ecocities, with a high quality modern lifestyle - and still have nature thrive. Energy, and food. They're the 2 systems that are changing before our eyes - and the majority of the contributors to this podcast have little clue how fast it's all going to happen! When it's done and the world is developed, the population will peak and start to decline. THEN we'll have "Degrowth". But I cannot join the Degrowth movement and describe myself that way while there is so much hate and scepticism for renewable energy. That's just weird for a so-called 'environmentalist' - and more like something the alt-right Climate Denier in America would do.
I don’t know. I think Degrowth Doomerism as you describe it, faces reality, rather than being naively optimistic about the energy transition. While growth continues, renewable energy is additive, rather than replacing. Meanwhile, the other externalities of the global economy continue to disassemble the natural world. I don’t see hatred for renewables, just acceptance that by themselves, they won’t fix anything.
FACT CHECK: THE ENERGY TRANSITION ISN’T EVEN REPLACING FOSSIL FUELS!
Tim asserted this in his podcast - and it’s just flat out statistically and mathematically WRONG.
I mean, it might be statistically true RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT - but it’s a skewed way of seeing the world I call the “Selective Static Snapshot” fallacy. Most of us don’t think exponentially - myself included until maybe my 30’s. (Maths isn’t really my thing - I’m wired for Social Sciences and humanities.) A Doomer might point out that as of 2023 only 1% of all cars in America are electric. That was true of 2023. But it is stuck in time.
THE PETRI DISH: As we all know exponential growth starts off tiny, and then suddenly is everywhere. 1% is mathematically meaningless. What matters is the rate of growth over time. The ‘story’ of exponential maths that won me over is the old example of bacteria in a Petri dish. A scientist has placed a bacteria in a petri-dish with heaps of growth medium. Assume you know two things. It will double every minute - and the dish will be *full* in one hour. When is the dish half full? The answer is in 59 minutes. The bacteria has been *almost invisible* for 50 minutes then in the last few doublings goes from one-sixteenth the dish to an eighth, a quarter, a half, then full. That is tragic if we’re talking about whaling rates in the 19th century, or a nasty virus sweeping through a population. But sometimes it is AWESOME if we are talking about adoption curves of a great new technology! Here’s the thing. Solar is on a 3 year doubling curve! It’s taken decades to get cheap enough, but now it is the market likes it.
SOLAR IS KING: There are so many solar factories under construction that when they open in 2025 they'll have FOUR TIMES the capacity of all the solar built in 2022 - nearly a terawatt per year. It's about 940 GW per year - or 5.8% of today’s global electricity demand every year (which on its own would supply global electricity in 17 years - without factoring new doublings or wind or nuclear). https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-184-eroi-of-re/
In a still developing world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of new coal was built. Yes - it’s sad that new coal is still being built. But much of that is in China where they might only run it at 30% capacity factor to backup their huge renewables farms. The good news? 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.” Also - note 110 GW of wind was built last year - over double coal! https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/ Those energy graphs that still show wind and solar as tiny specs on a giant wave of fossil fuel power do not show that many of those plants are aging and about to close. Wind and solar are growing 9 times faster than coal.
An OIL GLUT means more time for trucks and mining to go Electric. The peak oiler’s saying “There isn’t the oil to run civilisation with an energy profit large enough to also build the Energy Transition” have not factored all this in.
China is about to open 455 GW of renewables - and their emissions could peak in the next few years! The world’s biggest industrial factory - peaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX_PeNzz-Lw
BUT IT TAKES OIL TO MINE MINERALS FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION!
At one stage the first Pit Ponies went underground. They slowly multiplied and grew - until they dominated the movement of coal by their tens of thousands. But they were replaced by the steam shovel which was adopted slowly at first and then grew in an upwards curve, and gradually the Pit Ponies curved down as they were replaced. Diesel kit took over, curving up as the age of steam curved down. These days most underground mining is ALREADY electric for health and safety reasons - and all the biggest miners are starting to go electric.
Watch an electric 240 TON mining truck BURN PAST the old diesel tuck driving UP HILL while charging from hydro-power on overhead catenary lines in Canada! 60 seconds here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
Industry are going to ‘Electrify Everything’. Deutsche Welle news explains this as they cover the Sankey Flowchart. Without understanding this, ALL Degrowth conversations about the Energy Transition are going to be WAY off base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk Basically it means 1 unit of renewables replaces about 2 units of fossil fuels! We simply don’t have to replace the thermal value of coal and oil and gas - because those beasts are so inefficient our “Electrify Everything” civilisation will do the same work we do today on half the energy. More ELECTRICITY for sure - but half the thermal energy. In other words - renewables are racing forward exponentially towards our clean energy goals, but as we Electrify Everything we’ll start to see those goals racing back to meet us! Here’s a paper on it. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
I really enjoyed the discussion with Tim, Rachel. He has such an interesting way of understanding the world. Sometimes boiling things down to a molecular or quantum level can sometimes be reductive, sometimes enlightening. In Tim's case, definitely the latter, I feel.
You're doing such great work, Rachel. One of precious few journalists who really understand and report accurately on our predicament. For me, you're an oasis of sanity and clarity in a world that seems increasingly batshit.
I have a strong desire to carry over ideas from chemical systems to social systems but I think a lot of considerations need to happen to make that possible. I do think a more general systems theory that can be scaled between large and small systems would assist in this. (Ala Niklas Luhmann.) But also just dont take me too seriously. I am still cooking.
Concepts that have been the most interesting to me though is how breaking bonds and forming new ones requires energy. Which somewhat explains inertia in social systems to me. People have to be under a high enough rate of strain such that breaking bonds is energetically favorable. Which is to say, life conditions have to be so bad that revolution is socially favorable.
The most important thing to note is that nature is simple: it wants to be in the lowest energy configuration. When there is a large amount of free energy in the system, it will allow for things to be in a metastable equilibrium of sorts. But things will always creep towards the true equilibrium. Which kind of relates to the cloud phenomena, the point is that high amounts of energy allow for configurations that would otherwise be energetically unfavorable to be favorable.
You can see my pedagogy shining through, I’m a materials science guy. Haha. Point is that I’m kind of working on this from somewhere out in left field and maybe if you give me fifty years I will make it make sense. I do think mass and energy make more sense than land and labor. (Still working on how entropy fits into a more general systems theory because number of configurations must be considered but how?)
Also not to be annoying but air is a material and energy is based in distribution of materials and energy cannot exist without mass.
Thank you again and again for your ever continuing and deepening insight, your ways of sharing, and the light it shines on all things that matter, for myself and others... 🙏💕
Third paragraph: "...because it is constantly expanding energy in its search for and consumption of energy." I believe you mean expending energy...
I do think that guests from the US have a much harder time seeing how we can move away from fossil fuels and have live with less energy. I wonder if guests who are closer to a low energy economy would think differently. The comment that the conversation is being powered by electricity generated by coal is interesting. In parts of the US certainly but not so much in Europe, and hardly at all in the UK. We’re using a lot of gas but a considerable amount is generated by renewables. Obviously there’s more than just electric that needs to be decarbonised.
The EU is introducing a carbon border tax, which seems a good step. It is probably insufficient for the crisis at stake.
I think we need ways to reduce energy use, and get away from the growth economic model. We need a new story based on belonging and sufficiency. I wonder how Kate Raworth and the doughnut is progressing in that regard.
I may have to turn this comment into one of my blog posts - as these interviews require a lot of follow up work!
Tim’s metaphor about civilisation being like a spinning wheel or like an animal’s metabolism is as good as far as it goes. But like all metaphors - they soon break down. This one fails to describe the Energy Transition in the following key ways:-
AN ANIMAL CANNOT EVOLVE ITSELF - BUT OUR CIVILISATION CAN. Biological evolution can only really make noticeable differences over millions of years. An act of law - like the emergency lockdowns brought in for Covid - can change civilisation by significant degrees overnight! Oil demand went down 8 million barrels a day. It appears there are permanent behaviour changes and we are STILL about 2.5 million barrels a day short of pre-covid oil use. https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/special-reports/moving-mountains-covid-19-and-peak-oil-demand Basically - civilisation is NOT a mindless animal. Things CAN change at the stroke of a legislator’s pen. Sometimes radically! Unlike biological systems - this one reacts to economic and legislative and cultural changes. It’s like evolution sped up a million times.
ENERGY FLOWS: The change taking over our civilisation is like a lion that is suddenly mutating to go from eating energy dense meat to the scattered weak energy in grass. It’s that fundamental! The “body” is mutating to rewire itself and create new networks that flow into new internal organs that work much more efficiently. Why is this happening?
FINALLY CHEAP ENOUGH: Why was only 50 GW of new coal built last year compared to 7 TIMES that in new solar PV? And why is solar factory capacity doubling every 3 years? Easy. Price. We didn’t do anything about climate change for decades because it was too expensive to. But after decades of subsidies - wind and solar are finally cheaper than coal. They’re both on doubling curves, and will soon stop any new coal being burned - and then will start to replace all the old coal power stations that are about to fall apart from old age! There was some serious disparagement of economics in this talk - but not all economists are overwhelmed by a globalist imperialist growth mantra. Tim asserted that the economy would collapse if it could not grow. Not true! Sustainable economic systems can be integrated into our political economy - if we have the political will. Many countries have ‘stagnating’ economies - with shrinking populations - and that is fine as long as they can meet the basic needs of the population. There are a variety of economic alternatives to the growth imperative. Not ALL economists are crazed growthists. Tim needs to get out more, and maybe go meet some of the contributors to these projects?
When it emerges, this “lion” will be so much more energy efficient that a little nibble on grass will fuel it for a day, letting it do all the things it used to do - but without the need to chase down and kill an animal! So in this metaphor the grass is renewable energy - half the story. The new organs are “Electrify Everything” - the other half of the Energy Transition story. If you do not understand “Electrify Everything” - you DO NOT understand the Energy Transition - PERIOD!
Here’s the fastest, most user friendly introduction to “Electrify Everything” I have found - and it’s by Deutsche Welle news. It covers the Sankey Flowchart - but is so user friendly you’ll soon get it. Without understanding this, ALL Planet Critical interviews about the Energy Transition are going to be WAY off base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
CONSERVATION: Tim talked about the desert turtles. Funny that - as climate sceptic and renewables sceptic Michael Shellenberger also talks about the desert turtles. I guess they have to cherry-pick that one bad example. Don’t build vast solar farms on rare desert turtle habitat. Got it! While we’re at it, we’ll avoid putting wind turbines near rarer bird migratory paths and nesting grounds. But has Tim even read the statistics on the Energy Transition? Professor Andrew Blakers calculated that just 0.1% of the world’s land would be all our power! https://theconversation.com/really-australia-its-not-that-hard-10-reasons-why-renewable-energy-is-the-future-130459
0.1% of the earth's surface! The way Tim talks - you’d think it was more like 30% of the earth’s surface. Which is what GRAZING LIVESTOCK DOES USE! So if you’re going to condemn renewables for land use - what about eating meat? Going vegan would save 300 TIMES the land. I’m not a vegan. I admire them, but just don’t have the will power. I eat chicken and some fish. And mammal's - now and then if my host or a work party situation serves it up. I was raised a carnivore. But I’m HOPING to stop eating any meat as the Impossible Burger revolution improves and then Precision Fermentation takes over most of our protein requirements.
NATURE journal wrote about FLOATING SOLAR on water reservoirs near big cities and towns. “6,256 communities and/or cities in 124 countries, including 154 metropolises, could be self-sufficient with local FPV plants. Also beneficial to FPV worldwide is that the reduced annual evaporation could conserve 106 ± 1 km3 of water.”
CALM SEAS HAVE A LOT OF POTENTIAL: “up to one million TWh per year. That’s about five times more annual energy than is needed for a fully decarbonised global economy supporting 10 billion affluent people.”
It’s 2050, and our lion has been eating grass for ENERGY for a while now. Now it starts devouring it’s own waste for MATTER. Yes, MATTER - the stuff that the civilisation is built from.
Back in the days of the Energy Transition build out it required a more mining - but never as much as the mining for fossil fuels. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials But unlike oil cars that burn their fuels, EV’s don’t burn their lithium and iron and phosphorus batteries. It can all be recycled! Battery recycling is up to 95 to 97% efficient. At least - that’s in the energy sector.
That means they’ll have ghost-eco-cities of about 3 billion people to recycle - like recycling 1000 Brisbane’s or Chicago’s built out of sustainable, recyclable materials.
HOW DOES TIM NOT KNOW ALL THIS?
When I hear a technically much smarter person than myself lament “If only there were people studying this stuff!” I chuckle to myself and think “Hello Mr Echo-Chamber!” Tim needs to start reading outside of his echo-chamber.
Has he not heard of “Earth 4 All” a “Club of Rome” group specialising in the Earth’s Boundaries and how we can all find a prosperous way into a post-fossil fuel world? https://earth4all.life/publications/#executive-summaries
He needs to read about the Eco-city movement - and how we could all live a convenient modern life on vastly less energy with more community. He needs to read Solarpunk literature and stories to imagine it all. And he needs to read the recommendations of the IPCC, the Regenerative Agriculture Movement, Bren Smith’s Seaweed farms (where 2% of the world’s oceans could feed a planet of 12 BILLION people all the protein they need while REGENERATING the oceans!), and Precision Fermentation, Rewilding, and so many other things.
And he needs to drop the primitive wheel and animal metaphors. They just don’t capture the complexity and nuance of the biggest change to society since the Industrial Revolution!
Although you appear to think that humanity can curb its appetite and can get through the polycrisis, I get a different message from Tim's work. There is no way through, other than collapse, not only because resources are limited, but civilisation accumulates wealth (even in a steady state economy, if that were possible) and so requires increasing amounts of energy.
Not only that, but humans are a species and no species can curb its appetite. That's what evolution works on and how all species got here now. All species only live for today, though its not a conscious nature, it's just a consequence of being a species. Any attempts to rein in our appetite will eventually fail. Sad but, probably, true.
Hi Rachel: I looked at Tim's paper he was referring to - "Lotka's wheel and the long arm of history: how does the distant past determine today's global rate of energy consumption?" It seems like the snowball metaphor is the easiest to grasp - the "total past history of wealth accumulation" is the size of the snowball - as it gets bigger then it takes more energy to roll the snowball to make it grow more (do what the economy is meant to do).
Your counterclaim of a nonwestern or circular economy - the hunter-gatherer model is our true past history from 225,000 years ago (and some still around today, struggling) - obviously we can not "return" to the past but a negative growth model requires a deeper philosophical change of the mathematics itself.
The final metaphor you mention, "energy without materials is just hot air" - is something that should be looked at closer. Physics Today published "Thermodynamics of the Climate System" 2022 Thermodynamics of the climate system | Physics Today
Jul 1, 2022 - pointing out that: "Most studies of the second law applied to Earth, however, consider only matter (atoms and molecules) to be a part of the climate system, whereas radiation (photons) is considered a part of the surroundings. In that view, radiation is treated as an external"
So this is a deeply wrong bias in Western thinking from Platonic philosophy based on logarithms (with the inverse exponential function as the built in growth for the elite wealth). Garrett writes, "It is only by collapsing the historic accumulation of wealth we enjoy today, effectively by shrinking and slowing Lotka's wheel, that our resource demands and waste production will decline."
All of Western science has been based on "commutative geometry" with this materialistic assumption of spacetime as a symmetric geometric external measurement, whereas the energy of photon is a biological "active information" guiding us from the future - as now emphasized by Sir Roger Penrose and his colleague Professor Basil J. Hiley (the physics collaborator of David Bohm). This is called noncommutativity in contrast to commutative geometry. So the nonwestern cultures that were sustainable - as hunter-gatherers - actually relied on noncommutativity as quantum nonlocality or what Penrose calls "protoconsciousness" of the Universe. This is a newly discovered quality of energy or a new type of active force before classical amplitude is measured but since it is noncommutative it can also be amplified or resonate to the macroscale. This is the secret of what in traditional Chinese medicine is called "neigong" or internal martial arts training as meditation and yoga - in India it is their oldest philosophy three gunas of no guna. I call this "noncommutative quantum biology" and it's best understood through music theory analysis as Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes has explained in his "Music of Shapes" lecture (with several versions on youtube).
So as you experienced from your strong plant-based DMT ingestion - our body is made up of biophotons as laser coherent information but in actually all matter is made up of photons (this is analyzed brilliantly in Nobel physicist Gerard 't Hooft's paper, "Light is Heavy" co-written with Martin van der Mark). Noncommutativity then points out that light actually has gravitational mass - as the "Light is Heavy" paper points out as well - from the de Broglie Law of Phase Harmony. Another way to express this as Penrose does, is that mass originates from frequency!!
So to get to my point on practical terms - oil and coal are from algae and algae is 50% of photosynthesis on Earth while algae is only 1% of land biomass equivalent! This means algae is by far the most efficient energy sequestration means on Earth. So Sir David King is now emphasizing restoring the whale fertilization of the deep oceans to grow algae, thereby sequestrating 30 gigatons of CO2 per year (if wave pumps are added to also mimic the circulation of oxygen and nutrients). Eventually this would bring back the actual whale population to restore the lost millions killed off for whale oil. Meanwhile the double Ph.D. marine biologist Raffael Jovine has set up his "Brilliant Planet" business of near-ocean algae farms that can potentially sequester 10 gigatons per year of CO2 - if they are funded and spread around the locations he has planned. He has one now in Morocco. Algae is by far the best biofuel and algae from red seaweed also neutralizes over 90% of methane emissions from ruminants - Australia has a new commercial supplement business selling this red seaweed (macroalgae). Algae is also by far the most productive food and fertilizer source for humans.
Now will we return back to the oldest life form on Earth - 4.6 billions year old - in time? If we don't then I think algae will survive our "biological annihilation" of life on Earth. Algae is an extremophile as well - from our ancient evolution. I did an algae activism talk on Environmental Coffeehouse youtube channel - just search that for algae "drew hempel" - thanks
And on another note, I believe what also needs to come into play in these sorts of considerations is the question, what are we all here in form and appearances for...? And by all I mean all us critters, all of life, all of manifestation, all of interrelationality...
And to ask that question with the understanding that consciousness is first, rather than via the dominant zeitgeist of our times and of all these times of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is that matter is first...
For some insight into that sort of shift in understanding look into the thoughts, discussions and writings of people such as Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Spira, Donald Hoffman, and many others who are presently gathering under, around and in the vicinity of what is sometimes called analytical idealism...
That was a great interview with Tim. As he was speaking I couldn't help wondering if he is familiar with ecological economics, because much of what he discussed is reflected in this reframing of economic theory. Thermodynamics plans a big part in ecological economics, because it is based on science and recognizes that the transformation of matter by energy must have biophysical limits, and therefore the economy must have limits to how much matter, or material throughput, it consumes.
The other thing that occurred to me was his description of physics applying to social issues - especially the issue of the distribution of energy or matter (with relatively little concentrated and the majority diffuse. ) He seems to imply that this principle also applied to social situations ( there will always be a few rich, powerful people and the majority will be poor and ruled). Social systems are different from physical systems and we should not carry over principles from one area to another. Justice dictates a more even (not necessarily equal) distribution of wealth and resources. Ecological economics also has a strong ethical component, and addresses this issue as well. Thanks for what you do and for the opportunity to comment on these interesting interviews.
I think of this very much as an addiction problem on an individual behavioural level. We don’t eat as individuals connected to a body that understands how much it needs to eat, including knowing when to not overeat, we eat as individuals connected to a body that is disconnected and is disordered by addictive behaviours, borne out of fear and some illusion of control, that make the stomach a somewhat “sinking” one (like a blackhole). I think a similar idea is that we live largely in cultures that hoard and do not grieve, do not collectively lament death in ritual ways that can make sense of why people die in the ways they do and how communities can then band against those causes (like crow murder investigations: crows come together to figure out how one of them died or was hurt) when so many deaths in these systems are caused by the systems themselves (often in insidious and hard to see trickle down ways, and we are likely gaslit about them anyway) and when exploitation on a daily level is just normal and cannot be raged against (or if you do you’re not ‘coping’ correctly, which is a notion that also fractures this connection from our living bodies, but why should I cope at all?)
Interesting perspective that I think probably has the potential for behavioral changes if enough people saw the advantages of this approach.
I agree. I’ve been trying to be conscious of it in my own life and trying to change my addictive and trauma-based patterns to more sustainable ways of cycling through life and it’s honestly been very helpful. I’m stronger than I have ever been.
Great summary of a tricky episode to understand! I keep getting stuck on the possibility of a thing not growing, ie: not using its surplus to seek new material to consume, and then consuming some more just to feel safe and ready for the next meal when actually it will be larger...
Perhaps we need to take this growth attitude towards surplus and replace with composting: civilisation creates surplus, gathers more than it actually needs in this moment, then uses that excess to actively limit the amount it grows. To slow growth rate, to recycle and repurpose, to increase wellbeing instead.
I think of sci-fi where there is a clear hard limit on resources. Near 100% of available resources are maxed out. Lots of metrics of human development/ technology/ education/ leisure etc reach limits. Perhaps we need ‘arbitrary’ limits imposed before we are harvesting 100% of the resources. Except we’re already over planetary capacity, so we need to go backwards right? So our ‘excess’ could be directed instead towards creating these kinds of societies that would actively try to consume less...
Sounds horribly unappealing to most people I think. So as much as I don’t understand the logistics of actually making that happen reframing it becomes a huge problem. The story of living closer to nature, slower, happier etc- to be obsessed with very different activities than we are now, and all the health and social benefits this brings, might be our best bet.
Thoughts most welcome I struggle to know what this looks like in the day to day, or even the imagined possible future!
Thank you for your creative writing and thought, although, sadly, this is the "heart" of our current problem of massive human overpopulation and overconsumption: when our ancestors jumped from their previous long established Hunter-Gatherer clan/band lifeway, necessarily limited to 150 members (Dunbar number) dependent on real territory for sustenance, and obligated to migration/territorial competitions, we lept from a social system that controlled our numbers/consumption to our current limitless (?) massive numbers and gigantic hierarchical social structures. So, ironically, however brilliant, abstract thought has taken the place of real territories, and it is as limitless as the brilliant comments here. The "agricultural revolution" was the first of later waves of energy generation inventions to fuel ever larger populations and their social complexities.
Honestly, I did not listen to/see Tim's obviously (from the comments) equally brilliant presentation on the physics of energy, but nowhere here is any mention of the actual amount of heat energy being produced by the expenditure of all this fuel, in whatever form: the heat energy equivalent of one Hiroshima nuclear bomb blast per second, 63 trillion BTUs. Nowhere in all of the wonderful climate science literature can I find a single breakdown of how much of that Earth's Energy Imbalance is the result of The Greenhouse Effect of GHGs retaining solar energy/heat, and how much is being generated by our burning of 8 billion tons of coal/yr. and 100 million barrels of oil per day. Clearly, both are contributing, but the massive amount of human generated "waste energy"/heat energy is never mentioned. What should be clear by now is that our planet's air conditioning (cooling) systems are highly stressed and unable to keep us cool, as they have for eons before. So, we are told that 1.2 trillion tons of global ice are melting annually, or 3.3 billion tons per day, with each pound of melting ice absorbing 144 BTUS of heat energy as it is converted to latent liquid form, and that 321 million cubic miles of oceans are absorbing enough heat to increase surface temps in the midlatitudes to 70 degF, and that 1 trillion tons of water vapor are evaporating into the atmosphere daily. Clearly, our over harvesting of ancient solar heat energy previously stored in fossil fuels is over heating the entire planet.
So, I love a well crafted brilliant idea as much as the next intellectual, but, when it comes to "energy", our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors kept their numbers and energy expenditures within the limits Mother Earth can manage and we, in our Hubris, have broken through those natural limits, which may well be our demise. All the same, thank you for this opportunity to see great thinking and participate in some small way!
Well put, and this is why I think that nuclear fusion would be a tragedy, until we figure out how to curb our appetite for materials.
We mine 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels a year. The Energy Transition will not beat that- and will only last 20 or so years - and then will start recycling most of our energy systems. This podcast seems to be dominated by mostly Degrowth Doomers that do not understand the Energy Transition at all - and attack it and other great potential solutions like Precision Fermentation. I'm Bright Green - and long to see SOME areas of the modern world less consumerist. Like greedy suburban town plans that use way too much land and energy to maintain. But many more people can live in Bright Green Ecocities, with a high quality modern lifestyle - and still have nature thrive. Energy, and food. They're the 2 systems that are changing before our eyes - and the majority of the contributors to this podcast have little clue how fast it's all going to happen! When it's done and the world is developed, the population will peak and start to decline. THEN we'll have "Degrowth". But I cannot join the Degrowth movement and describe myself that way while there is so much hate and scepticism for renewable energy. That's just weird for a so-called 'environmentalist' - and more like something the alt-right Climate Denier in America would do.
I don’t know. I think Degrowth Doomerism as you describe it, faces reality, rather than being naively optimistic about the energy transition. While growth continues, renewable energy is additive, rather than replacing. Meanwhile, the other externalities of the global economy continue to disassemble the natural world. I don’t see hatred for renewables, just acceptance that by themselves, they won’t fix anything.
FACT CHECK: THE ENERGY TRANSITION ISN’T EVEN REPLACING FOSSIL FUELS!
Tim asserted this in his podcast - and it’s just flat out statistically and mathematically WRONG.
I mean, it might be statistically true RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT - but it’s a skewed way of seeing the world I call the “Selective Static Snapshot” fallacy. Most of us don’t think exponentially - myself included until maybe my 30’s. (Maths isn’t really my thing - I’m wired for Social Sciences and humanities.) A Doomer might point out that as of 2023 only 1% of all cars in America are electric. That was true of 2023. But it is stuck in time.
THE PETRI DISH: As we all know exponential growth starts off tiny, and then suddenly is everywhere. 1% is mathematically meaningless. What matters is the rate of growth over time. The ‘story’ of exponential maths that won me over is the old example of bacteria in a Petri dish. A scientist has placed a bacteria in a petri-dish with heaps of growth medium. Assume you know two things. It will double every minute - and the dish will be *full* in one hour. When is the dish half full? The answer is in 59 minutes. The bacteria has been *almost invisible* for 50 minutes then in the last few doublings goes from one-sixteenth the dish to an eighth, a quarter, a half, then full. That is tragic if we’re talking about whaling rates in the 19th century, or a nasty virus sweeping through a population. But sometimes it is AWESOME if we are talking about adoption curves of a great new technology! Here’s the thing. Solar is on a 3 year doubling curve! It’s taken decades to get cheap enough, but now it is the market likes it.
SOLAR IS KING: There are so many solar factories under construction that when they open in 2025 they'll have FOUR TIMES the capacity of all the solar built in 2022 - nearly a terawatt per year. It's about 940 GW per year - or 5.8% of today’s global electricity demand every year (which on its own would supply global electricity in 17 years - without factoring new doublings or wind or nuclear). https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-184-eroi-of-re/
Annual deployment of solar is starting to race ahead of the IPCC Paris goals. EG: They wanted 615 GW solar annually by 2030 - but that could happen in the next year or so and it's still doubling. This article wonders if we're going to see 3 TERAWATTS deployed annually by 2030! That’s 2 to 3 times the Paris goals. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
In a still developing world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of new coal was built. Yes - it’s sad that new coal is still being built. But much of that is in China where they might only run it at 30% capacity factor to backup their huge renewables farms. The good news? 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.” Also - note 110 GW of wind was built last year - over double coal! https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/ Those energy graphs that still show wind and solar as tiny specs on a giant wave of fossil fuel power do not show that many of those plants are aging and about to close. Wind and solar are growing 9 times faster than coal.
EV’S SOON TO DISPLACE OIL
EV’s were 7.2% of all new American car sales in 2022. They were 9% in 2023. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-vehicles-EVs-new-car-sales-2023/700799/
EV’s WILL CAUSE OIL GLUT by 2028!: The IEA says global car sales were: 2020: 5% 2021: 9% 2022: 14% https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive-summary
This creates an oil GLUT of 3.8 mb/d by 2028!
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
An OIL GLUT means more time for trucks and mining to go Electric. The peak oiler’s saying “There isn’t the oil to run civilisation with an energy profit large enough to also build the Energy Transition” have not factored all this in.
Wind and solar are now both cheaper than coal - even including the costs to Overbuild and Storage. The world wants LOTS of NEW energy - and renewables are now most of that. 90% next year! https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/electricity-generation-renewables-power-iea/
IEA: World FOSSIL FUEL demand will peak by 2030 and then begin to decline! That's as a whole!
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/10/iea-energy-peak-fossil-fuel-demand-by-2030
China is about to open 455 GW of renewables - and their emissions could peak in the next few years! The world’s biggest industrial factory - peaking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX_PeNzz-Lw
BUT IT TAKES OIL TO MINE MINERALS FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION!
At one stage the first Pit Ponies went underground. They slowly multiplied and grew - until they dominated the movement of coal by their tens of thousands. But they were replaced by the steam shovel which was adopted slowly at first and then grew in an upwards curve, and gradually the Pit Ponies curved down as they were replaced. Diesel kit took over, curving up as the age of steam curved down. These days most underground mining is ALREADY electric for health and safety reasons - and all the biggest miners are starting to go electric.
Watch an electric 240 TON mining truck BURN PAST the old diesel tuck driving UP HILL while charging from hydro-power on overhead catenary lines in Canada! 60 seconds here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
There are already funds to convert 8,500 mining trucks over the next 3 years. https://www.mining-technology.com/features/mining-vehicle-electrification
Industry are going to ‘Electrify Everything’. Deutsche Welle news explains this as they cover the Sankey Flowchart. Without understanding this, ALL Degrowth conversations about the Energy Transition are going to be WAY off base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk Basically it means 1 unit of renewables replaces about 2 units of fossil fuels! We simply don’t have to replace the thermal value of coal and oil and gas - because those beasts are so inefficient our “Electrify Everything” civilisation will do the same work we do today on half the energy. More ELECTRICITY for sure - but half the thermal energy. In other words - renewables are racing forward exponentially towards our clean energy goals, but as we Electrify Everything we’ll start to see those goals racing back to meet us! Here’s a paper on it. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
INDUSTRY GET IT: A giant industrial think-tank worth a THIRD of the Australian stock-market have a plan to build 3 TIMES Australia’s 2020 electricity grid to meet our domestic industry needs and another 3 TIMES for anticipated exports by 2050! PDF page 45: https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
Many coal stations are OLD. Australia will be coal free in 10 years! https://reneweconomy.com.au/aemos-jaw-dropping-prediction-for-coal-power-all-but-gone-from-the-grid-in-a-decade/
Professor Andrew Blakers - recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering (like a Nobel prize for engineers) says the WORLD will be all renewable well before 2050! https://theconversation.com/theres-a-huge-surge-in-solar-production-under-way-and-australia-could-show-the-world-how-to-use-it-190241
I really enjoyed the discussion with Tim, Rachel. He has such an interesting way of understanding the world. Sometimes boiling things down to a molecular or quantum level can sometimes be reductive, sometimes enlightening. In Tim's case, definitely the latter, I feel.
You're doing such great work, Rachel. One of precious few journalists who really understand and report accurately on our predicament. For me, you're an oasis of sanity and clarity in a world that seems increasingly batshit.
I have a strong desire to carry over ideas from chemical systems to social systems but I think a lot of considerations need to happen to make that possible. I do think a more general systems theory that can be scaled between large and small systems would assist in this. (Ala Niklas Luhmann.) But also just dont take me too seriously. I am still cooking.
Concepts that have been the most interesting to me though is how breaking bonds and forming new ones requires energy. Which somewhat explains inertia in social systems to me. People have to be under a high enough rate of strain such that breaking bonds is energetically favorable. Which is to say, life conditions have to be so bad that revolution is socially favorable.
The most important thing to note is that nature is simple: it wants to be in the lowest energy configuration. When there is a large amount of free energy in the system, it will allow for things to be in a metastable equilibrium of sorts. But things will always creep towards the true equilibrium. Which kind of relates to the cloud phenomena, the point is that high amounts of energy allow for configurations that would otherwise be energetically unfavorable to be favorable.
You can see my pedagogy shining through, I’m a materials science guy. Haha. Point is that I’m kind of working on this from somewhere out in left field and maybe if you give me fifty years I will make it make sense. I do think mass and energy make more sense than land and labor. (Still working on how entropy fits into a more general systems theory because number of configurations must be considered but how?)
Also not to be annoying but air is a material and energy is based in distribution of materials and energy cannot exist without mass.
hey matt, I've been having similar thoughts, could you rec some stuff you've been reading?
The egalitarian low energy civilization you mentioned was brilliantly described in Ursula Le Guin’s novel “The Dispossessed”
Thank you again and again for your ever continuing and deepening insight, your ways of sharing, and the light it shines on all things that matter, for myself and others... 🙏💕
Third paragraph: "...because it is constantly expanding energy in its search for and consumption of energy." I believe you mean expending energy...
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I do think that guests from the US have a much harder time seeing how we can move away from fossil fuels and have live with less energy. I wonder if guests who are closer to a low energy economy would think differently. The comment that the conversation is being powered by electricity generated by coal is interesting. In parts of the US certainly but not so much in Europe, and hardly at all in the UK. We’re using a lot of gas but a considerable amount is generated by renewables. Obviously there’s more than just electric that needs to be decarbonised.
The EU is introducing a carbon border tax, which seems a good step. It is probably insufficient for the crisis at stake.
I think we need ways to reduce energy use, and get away from the growth economic model. We need a new story based on belonging and sufficiency. I wonder how Kate Raworth and the doughnut is progressing in that regard.
I may have to turn this comment into one of my blog posts - as these interviews require a lot of follow up work!
Tim’s metaphor about civilisation being like a spinning wheel or like an animal’s metabolism is as good as far as it goes. But like all metaphors - they soon break down. This one fails to describe the Energy Transition in the following key ways:-
AN ANIMAL CANNOT EVOLVE ITSELF - BUT OUR CIVILISATION CAN. Biological evolution can only really make noticeable differences over millions of years. An act of law - like the emergency lockdowns brought in for Covid - can change civilisation by significant degrees overnight! Oil demand went down 8 million barrels a day. It appears there are permanent behaviour changes and we are STILL about 2.5 million barrels a day short of pre-covid oil use. https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/special-reports/moving-mountains-covid-19-and-peak-oil-demand Basically - civilisation is NOT a mindless animal. Things CAN change at the stroke of a legislator’s pen. Sometimes radically! Unlike biological systems - this one reacts to economic and legislative and cultural changes. It’s like evolution sped up a million times.
ENERGY FLOWS: The change taking over our civilisation is like a lion that is suddenly mutating to go from eating energy dense meat to the scattered weak energy in grass. It’s that fundamental! The “body” is mutating to rewire itself and create new networks that flow into new internal organs that work much more efficiently. Why is this happening?
FINALLY CHEAP ENOUGH: Why was only 50 GW of new coal built last year compared to 7 TIMES that in new solar PV? And why is solar factory capacity doubling every 3 years? Easy. Price. We didn’t do anything about climate change for decades because it was too expensive to. But after decades of subsidies - wind and solar are finally cheaper than coal. They’re both on doubling curves, and will soon stop any new coal being burned - and then will start to replace all the old coal power stations that are about to fall apart from old age! There was some serious disparagement of economics in this talk - but not all economists are overwhelmed by a globalist imperialist growth mantra. Tim asserted that the economy would collapse if it could not grow. Not true! Sustainable economic systems can be integrated into our political economy - if we have the political will. Many countries have ‘stagnating’ economies - with shrinking populations - and that is fine as long as they can meet the basic needs of the population. There are a variety of economic alternatives to the growth imperative. Not ALL economists are crazed growthists. Tim needs to get out more, and maybe go meet some of the contributors to these projects?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
https://neweconomics.org/
https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
ENERGY EFFICIENT GRASS EATING LION
When it emerges, this “lion” will be so much more energy efficient that a little nibble on grass will fuel it for a day, letting it do all the things it used to do - but without the need to chase down and kill an animal! So in this metaphor the grass is renewable energy - half the story. The new organs are “Electrify Everything” - the other half of the Energy Transition story. If you do not understand “Electrify Everything” - you DO NOT understand the Energy Transition - PERIOD!
Here’s the fastest, most user friendly introduction to “Electrify Everything” I have found - and it’s by Deutsche Welle news. It covers the Sankey Flowchart - but is so user friendly you’ll soon get it. Without understanding this, ALL Planet Critical interviews about the Energy Transition are going to be WAY off base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
CONSERVATION: Tim talked about the desert turtles. Funny that - as climate sceptic and renewables sceptic Michael Shellenberger also talks about the desert turtles. I guess they have to cherry-pick that one bad example. Don’t build vast solar farms on rare desert turtle habitat. Got it! While we’re at it, we’ll avoid putting wind turbines near rarer bird migratory paths and nesting grounds. But has Tim even read the statistics on the Energy Transition? Professor Andrew Blakers calculated that just 0.1% of the world’s land would be all our power! https://theconversation.com/really-australia-its-not-that-hard-10-reasons-why-renewable-energy-is-the-future-130459
0.1% of the earth's surface! The way Tim talks - you’d think it was more like 30% of the earth’s surface. Which is what GRAZING LIVESTOCK DOES USE! So if you’re going to condemn renewables for land use - what about eating meat? Going vegan would save 300 TIMES the land. I’m not a vegan. I admire them, but just don’t have the will power. I eat chicken and some fish. And mammal's - now and then if my host or a work party situation serves it up. I was raised a carnivore. But I’m HOPING to stop eating any meat as the Impossible Burger revolution improves and then Precision Fermentation takes over most of our protein requirements.
So - let’s look at SOLAR AREA POTENTIAL:-
ROOFTOPS: half our rooftops would provide all today’s electricity, but all our rooftops would start to replace transport as well http://theconversation.com/solar-panels-on-half-the-worlds-roofs-could-meet-its-entire-electricity-demand-new-research-169302
NATURE journal reports FLOATING SOLAR on EXISTING hydro power dams (already wired up to the grid!) would close global coal.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01525-1
NATURE journal wrote about FLOATING SOLAR on water reservoirs near big cities and towns. “6,256 communities and/or cities in 124 countries, including 154 metropolises, could be self-sufficient with local FPV plants. Also beneficial to FPV worldwide is that the reduced annual evaporation could conserve 106 ± 1 km3 of water.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01089-6
CALM SEAS HAVE A LOT OF POTENTIAL: “up to one million TWh per year. That’s about five times more annual energy than is needed for a fully decarbonised global economy supporting 10 billion affluent people.”
https://theconversation.com/limitless-energy-how-floating-solar-panels-near-the-equator-could-power-future-population-hotspots-210557
BACK TO MY SILLY LION METAPHOR
It’s 2050, and our lion has been eating grass for ENERGY for a while now. Now it starts devouring it’s own waste for MATTER. Yes, MATTER - the stuff that the civilisation is built from.
Back in the days of the Energy Transition build out it required a more mining - but never as much as the mining for fossil fuels. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials But unlike oil cars that burn their fuels, EV’s don’t burn their lithium and iron and phosphorus batteries. It can all be recycled! Battery recycling is up to 95 to 97% efficient. At least - that’s in the energy sector.
Also, once we give everyone everything they need and nations develop - the global Demographic Transition kicks in. First world economies have less babies. That’s the ultimate in “Degrowth” right there! IF we get the welfare settings right, the population may peak at 9 billion and drop back to 6 billion by 2100. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/world-population-bomb-may-never-go-off-as-feared-finds-study
That means they’ll have ghost-eco-cities of about 3 billion people to recycle - like recycling 1000 Brisbane’s or Chicago’s built out of sustainable, recyclable materials.
HOW DOES TIM NOT KNOW ALL THIS?
When I hear a technically much smarter person than myself lament “If only there were people studying this stuff!” I chuckle to myself and think “Hello Mr Echo-Chamber!” Tim needs to start reading outside of his echo-chamber.
Has he not heard of “Earth 4 All” a “Club of Rome” group specialising in the Earth’s Boundaries and how we can all find a prosperous way into a post-fossil fuel world? https://earth4all.life/publications/#executive-summaries
To catch up on the Energy Transition he needs to read EVERYTHING that Michael Barnard writes at Cleantechnica! https://cleantechnica.com/author/mikebarnard/
He needs to go read what the Top 10 Conservation societies in the world are doing. https://www.treehugger.com/top-wildlife-conservation-organizations-4088567
He needs to read about the Eco-city movement - and how we could all live a convenient modern life on vastly less energy with more community. He needs to read Solarpunk literature and stories to imagine it all. And he needs to read the recommendations of the IPCC, the Regenerative Agriculture Movement, Bren Smith’s Seaweed farms (where 2% of the world’s oceans could feed a planet of 12 BILLION people all the protein they need while REGENERATING the oceans!), and Precision Fermentation, Rewilding, and so many other things.
And he needs to drop the primitive wheel and animal metaphors. They just don’t capture the complexity and nuance of the biggest change to society since the Industrial Revolution!
Great comment! I’m going to break out of my own echo chamber and take a look at some of these resources.
Low energy civilisation = First Nations living in Australia for 60,000+ years
v
high energy civilisations = pretty much every empire that would rise for a couple of centuries before falling.
Although you appear to think that humanity can curb its appetite and can get through the polycrisis, I get a different message from Tim's work. There is no way through, other than collapse, not only because resources are limited, but civilisation accumulates wealth (even in a steady state economy, if that were possible) and so requires increasing amounts of energy.
Not only that, but humans are a species and no species can curb its appetite. That's what evolution works on and how all species got here now. All species only live for today, though its not a conscious nature, it's just a consequence of being a species. Any attempts to rein in our appetite will eventually fail. Sad but, probably, true.
Hi Rachel: I looked at Tim's paper he was referring to - "Lotka's wheel and the long arm of history: how does the distant past determine today's global rate of energy consumption?" It seems like the snowball metaphor is the easiest to grasp - the "total past history of wealth accumulation" is the size of the snowball - as it gets bigger then it takes more energy to roll the snowball to make it grow more (do what the economy is meant to do).
Your counterclaim of a nonwestern or circular economy - the hunter-gatherer model is our true past history from 225,000 years ago (and some still around today, struggling) - obviously we can not "return" to the past but a negative growth model requires a deeper philosophical change of the mathematics itself.
The final metaphor you mention, "energy without materials is just hot air" - is something that should be looked at closer. Physics Today published "Thermodynamics of the Climate System" 2022 Thermodynamics of the climate system | Physics Today
Jul 1, 2022 - pointing out that: "Most studies of the second law applied to Earth, however, consider only matter (atoms and molecules) to be a part of the climate system, whereas radiation (photons) is considered a part of the surroundings. In that view, radiation is treated as an external"
So this is a deeply wrong bias in Western thinking from Platonic philosophy based on logarithms (with the inverse exponential function as the built in growth for the elite wealth). Garrett writes, "It is only by collapsing the historic accumulation of wealth we enjoy today, effectively by shrinking and slowing Lotka's wheel, that our resource demands and waste production will decline."
All of Western science has been based on "commutative geometry" with this materialistic assumption of spacetime as a symmetric geometric external measurement, whereas the energy of photon is a biological "active information" guiding us from the future - as now emphasized by Sir Roger Penrose and his colleague Professor Basil J. Hiley (the physics collaborator of David Bohm). This is called noncommutativity in contrast to commutative geometry. So the nonwestern cultures that were sustainable - as hunter-gatherers - actually relied on noncommutativity as quantum nonlocality or what Penrose calls "protoconsciousness" of the Universe. This is a newly discovered quality of energy or a new type of active force before classical amplitude is measured but since it is noncommutative it can also be amplified or resonate to the macroscale. This is the secret of what in traditional Chinese medicine is called "neigong" or internal martial arts training as meditation and yoga - in India it is their oldest philosophy three gunas of no guna. I call this "noncommutative quantum biology" and it's best understood through music theory analysis as Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes has explained in his "Music of Shapes" lecture (with several versions on youtube).
So as you experienced from your strong plant-based DMT ingestion - our body is made up of biophotons as laser coherent information but in actually all matter is made up of photons (this is analyzed brilliantly in Nobel physicist Gerard 't Hooft's paper, "Light is Heavy" co-written with Martin van der Mark). Noncommutativity then points out that light actually has gravitational mass - as the "Light is Heavy" paper points out as well - from the de Broglie Law of Phase Harmony. Another way to express this as Penrose does, is that mass originates from frequency!!
So to get to my point on practical terms - oil and coal are from algae and algae is 50% of photosynthesis on Earth while algae is only 1% of land biomass equivalent! This means algae is by far the most efficient energy sequestration means on Earth. So Sir David King is now emphasizing restoring the whale fertilization of the deep oceans to grow algae, thereby sequestrating 30 gigatons of CO2 per year (if wave pumps are added to also mimic the circulation of oxygen and nutrients). Eventually this would bring back the actual whale population to restore the lost millions killed off for whale oil. Meanwhile the double Ph.D. marine biologist Raffael Jovine has set up his "Brilliant Planet" business of near-ocean algae farms that can potentially sequester 10 gigatons per year of CO2 - if they are funded and spread around the locations he has planned. He has one now in Morocco. Algae is by far the best biofuel and algae from red seaweed also neutralizes over 90% of methane emissions from ruminants - Australia has a new commercial supplement business selling this red seaweed (macroalgae). Algae is also by far the most productive food and fertilizer source for humans.
Now will we return back to the oldest life form on Earth - 4.6 billions year old - in time? If we don't then I think algae will survive our "biological annihilation" of life on Earth. Algae is an extremophile as well - from our ancient evolution. I did an algae activism talk on Environmental Coffeehouse youtube channel - just search that for algae "drew hempel" - thanks
And on another note, I believe what also needs to come into play in these sorts of considerations is the question, what are we all here in form and appearances for...? And by all I mean all us critters, all of life, all of manifestation, all of interrelationality...
And to ask that question with the understanding that consciousness is first, rather than via the dominant zeitgeist of our times and of all these times of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is that matter is first...
For some insight into that sort of shift in understanding look into the thoughts, discussions and writings of people such as Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Spira, Donald Hoffman, and many others who are presently gathering under, around and in the vicinity of what is sometimes called analytical idealism...
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