The World is in Crisis

This is why

Over dinner last week, I was asked to give a sweeping overview as to why the planet is in crisis. As I was talking, I realised I am yet to amalgamate that same information for my subscribers in one post. So, here goes.

Energy

Every living thing requires access to an energy surplus to survive. The surplus of the energy supply ensures that said living thing will secure more energy than it expends. This is known as net energy. Some living creatures have a near constant access to the store of energy, like antelope grazing on grass, while others live on the edge of running out of surplus, like a lion pride who has failed to make a kill in weeks. However, while the antelope has constant access to grass, the disadvantage is that grass is not particularly energy-dense; these grazing animals must spend most of their days grazing. In contrast, a lion pride can restore their energy levels from one kill as an antelope is much more energy dense than grass. In this way, every living thing is also a store of energy, like a battery.

Humans, as biological organisms, need the energy in organic matter to survive, roughly 2000–2500 kilocalories per day. But this isn’t all we need. In the process of our evolution, we have lost our fur, our claws and our large canines, making us physically vulnerable in comparison to most predators. We lost the physical attributes of our distant cousins probably because we developed more sophisticated tools. These allow us to take on challenges insurmountable to our bodily form. Fire allows us to warm ourselves in freezing climes, as do clever building structures which trap hot air. Bows and arrows allow us to shoot game from a distance. Swords allow us to kill warring neighbours. Burning wood allows us to power complex machinery. Burning coal more complex still. Every single tool requires energy to power, and for a long time these tools were either man-powered or livestock-powered, like a hunter pulling back her bow arm. But as the technology became more complex, it demanded more energy—or rather, as we had more access to energy, the technology became more complex. More energy came from finding increasingly energy-dense fuels, from homo sapiens’ elbow grease to petroleum, the most energy dense fuel known to man. To compare those two energy sources, one barrel of oil equates to five years’ work of an adult male. It was these surpluses of energy throughout the ages that allowed humans to grow civilisations, sprawling networks of organic and inorganic matter powered by energy harvested from burning ancient energy stores, from forests to fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are incredibly energy dense, so dense that we us them deeply inefficiently, producing an incredible amount of waste heat in the process of securing net energy. They are stores of energy built up over millions of years, as the sea floor compacted organic matter like plants trapped underneath it. Living matter is 18% Carbon, and under high pressure and high temperatures, these pockets of trapped matter were transformed into high-Carbon and Hydrogen deposits. Burning those deposits releases heat, which can be thought of as a transferral of energy. This is how humans secure some of the energy from fossil fuels. However, the chemical reaction also produces Carbon Dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases which is causing the global average temperature to rise at a rate which can only be attributed to human activity, causing cascading effects through the earth’s systems.

This is where most mainstream analysis stops. Burning fossil fuels causes the atmosphere to saturate with CO2 which is warming the planet. Therefore, we must decarbonise, and remove carbon from our energy systems and from the atmosphere. If we do that, then everything will be fine.

Let’s return to the lion pride, who are panicking on the plains as climate change has killed off most of the antelopes. They need to change their strategy and find a new energy store—a new battery. This will involve migrating to lands they have never traversed, going long periods without water, and learning to change their hunting technique for whatever prey they find. This new prey will probably be smaller than antelope, as the large animals which once walked the land have run out of resources—energy surplus—to maintain themselves. The big batteries are gone. The lion is going to have to transform what it is to be a lion in order to survive, and have less energy available to it while it does this transformation. Thermodynamically, it’s a huge ask.

This is the trap humankind is now in. Shifting to renewables demands a huge transformation of society, one that will need to be powered by energy. However, we are running out of fossil fuels. Where it was possible to discover deposits 30 metres underground 200 years ago, now we are digging up to 10km to find lower-grade deposits. This means we are spending more energy to get less energy than before—our net energy is decreasing, or “plummeting” according to the Journal for Petroleum Technology. Some scientists say that by 2030 we won’t get any net energy from extracting fossil fuels; there will be no more surplus. Without an energy surplus, everything stops. The battery dies.

What happens when the battery dies? Civilisation grinds to a halt. Billions of people no longer have access to the tools they need to survive, like heating, fuel, or even food, given so many in the minority world depend on complex supply chains to feed themselves. London only stores three days’ worth of food for its population at any time—a dangerously inefficient battery.

Renewables

How do we keep the battery going? This is where renewables come in. Renewables capture the infinite energy of the wind, sun and waves, which then must be stored in batteries for times when the wind drops, sun disappears, or waves calm. This technology is truly marvellous, harnessing the energy from the living planet rather than harvesting from graves of the past. Importantly, its carbon footprint is negligible compared to fossil fuels.

However, wind and solar farms capture energy. They don’t produce it. Nothing produces energy, as energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This means that whilst the energy from the sun, sea and wind is infinite (at least until the sun explodes), the technology we use to capture it is not. Solar and wind farms will need to be rebuilt, unlike nuclear plants and oil rigs. And whilst the overall material footprint of a renewable economy would be less than a fossil-fuel powered economy, renewables demand more critical minerals than other energy sources. According to the IEA: “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010 the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables in new investment has risen.”

Sadly, most of those critical minerals are now found in the few remaining biodiverse hotspots around the world. Ancient forests are being destroyed so that we can get our hands on copper and cobalt to make green energy. Often, the environmental defenders protecting these lands are not those who will benefit from the materials extracted to provide energy.

Renewables also have an energy density problem. Let’s take electric cars. To think of the battery in one car and the petrol in another car as different is a incorrect. Both are stores of energy, and for now fossil fuels far outstrip every other battery. Gasoline has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery, and is ten quadrillion times more energy-dense than solar radiation, one billion times more energy-dense than wind and water power, and ten million times more energy-dense than human power.

However, calculating net useful energy challenges the significance of energy density at scale. Research published earlier this year suggests that renewables “deliver more net useful energy per unit of final energy invested than fossil fuels”, once calculating the energy investment from initial material extraction to end energy available for the user. Great news. Except the net useful energy declines in a ‘High Demand’ scenario, modelled by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The researchers also point out the high initial energy investment of transitioning our energy systems: “Renewable energy systems require much larger up-front energy investments than traditional fossil fuel systems (for which the operational energy requirements are much higher). Dynamic effects may therefore result in a situation in which the net useful energy available to society temporarily drops as energy investments in the energy system take place and then recover once the majority of investments are done.” This is why we need to use fossil fuel energy to scale out renewables where possible. Unfortunately, despite renewable roll-outs around the world, renewables are not replacing fossil fuels.

The global energy supply is increasing, and green energy is only adding to it, not substituting out brown energy. Renewables are increasing our energy supply without directly challenging the use of fossil fuels. They can’t. Our civilisation is fundamentally fossil-fuelled, powered by centralised systems of energy-dense fuel. Using fossil fuels, we can extract gas in one part of the world and process it in another; we can send tankers of oil to allies when they’re in trouble; we can dig up coal in end of the country and burn it in another. For now. Renewables don’t work the same way. We can’t charge a battery in one part of the world and ship it to another. It’s simply not worth it energetically, and doing so would demand transport fuel: oil. The problem with a renewable system is it needs huge investment, mass roll-out and to come online everywhere all at once to directly challenge fossil fuels. Or it needs to be deployed on a local scale by communities. Rolling out renewables demands a huge energy investment when we are running out of access to our most energy dense fuel. Can we build a renewable world without fossil fuels when we can’t ship minerals around the world for processing? Maybe, but the economic cost would be immense, leaving many nations in the dark.

Renewables can’t just save the day unless we actively fuel the transformation. Instead, wind turbines are being built atop oil rigs to fuel continued fossil extraction. We’ve added more batteries to the system without changing the output of the system: waste.

Materials

I wrote above about the relationship between energy and tools, that a bigger energy supply facilitates more complex tools. This is because homo sapiens use energy to transform materials from one state to another. This is why we burn wood or coal or oil—by transforming the state, we release heat, which is a transferral of energy we can then use to produce electricity or make steel or anything else. We use energy to play around with chemical compounds to produce medicine. We use energy to turn ore into gold rings. We use energy to turn old forests into dollar bills. We use energy to break down fast food in our guts to nutrients and waste. The transformation of materials always produces waste and, in organic cycles like the antelope and the lion, that waste is then recycled back into the organic system: the lion becomes the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. By having access to such a huge energy surplus, we have produced more waste than the earth systems can reabsorb and recycle. Our atmosphere is a prime example, as are Britain’s polluted rivers, Delhi’s polluted skies and even Everest’s polluted peak.

Evolution didn’t plan for our species to access such huge batteries. Evolution works drip by drip, changing matter over millions of years. But we humans move fast. We have quickly worked our way up from great ape cousin to all-mighty being, rapidly rising through the ranks of predators since first practising agriculture 10,000 years ago. Arguably, this was the first time we so dramatically transformed the material world around us, packaging off parcels of land, manipulating organic matter, and defining parts of the world as belonging to us individuals.

As we fiddled with the materials world around us, using the energy stored in our muscles and the muscles of the animals we domesticated, we discovered more and more ways to transform materials, which eventually led us to fossil fuels. These immense battery deposits allow us to transform the earth’s crust into civilisation itself. They’ve also allowed us to rapidly populate the planet, increasing our population from 2 billion 100 years ago to 8 billion today. All this is thanks to our transformation of organic materials into materials we need to live. It also produces waste, to the extent we are choked with it, and the planet cannot keep up to recycle it. In just 200 years we have radically and almost unimaginably transformed the planet, driving many creatures to the brink of extinction and pushing stable earth systems to the brink. The earth is finite. Its materials are finite—even if energy is not.

It is deeply ironic that a species which came to dominate the planet by its intimate relationship with the material world has since lost sight of that same world. There is little discussion about the relationship between energy and materials outside of physics circles. In fact, we live in a world where the future of human civilisation is touted to be dematerialised. Not only are we going to decarbonise our economies, we’re also going to dematerialise them. This, of course, is impossible. The problem is not one of the fundamental building blocks of life, nor the very matter everything exists as, but the excessive use of energy stores to transform that matter to grow sprawling and, frankly, often meaningless societies. Why are they meaningless? Because their growth is not predicated on development and human wellbeing, but upon generating wealth. Wealth grows as civilisation grows because spending money is akin to spending energy and transforming materials.

Economics

Our economies are directly coupled to our material footprint, and almost directly coupled to our energy footprint. Our economies grow the more energy we use and the more materials we transform. Neoliberal economics measures value by economic growth, parroted by politicians who say we have to grow the economy to protect the economy. This seems similar to the very nature of living creatures, which need access to an energy surplus to survive. However, all living beings eventually reach stasis. Nothing grows forever. Why? Because to do so would have a terrible impact on a local ecosystem which is finite. CO2 in the atmosphere may be the symptom, and burning fossil fuels the reason, but growing a global human economy with a vast energy surplus by transforming every material in sight on a finite planet is the cause of the crisis.

Wealth results from using energy to transform natural abundance into personal resources. Every unit of currency represents a material transformation and an expenditure of energy. This is why even if we did facilitate an incredible, global rollout of renewable energy whilst somehow protecting the remaining endangered ecosystems, it would not guarantee a stable planet. Humans use available energy to transform materials to produce wealth. Until we take wealth generation out of the equation, and re-engineer our economies to facilitate human and planet wellbeing, our energy supply will be used for material transformation. The only thing stopping us would be running out of materials, by which point the planet would be a littered graveyard. This is why some men want to send civilisation to space—or at the very least start mining on the moon.

Yet, rather than discuss minimising our economic footprint, mainstream economics talk about decoupling our economies from the very things that create our economies. How did economics become so unscientific? Perhaps because it has never been a science, but nothing more than a language game which mediates excuses for continued over-extraction by an elite class. This is not a new phenomenon. Whether it was Lords extracting taxes, surplus wheat, or manpower from the peasant class, or ancient civilisations extracting water by irrigating river systems, growing an economy has always demanded taking from planetary systems, of which we are a part. Yet, when major economies began to abandon the gold standard, this provided an avenue to metaphorically dislocate value creation from the material world. Only in a systen where currencies are pegged to each other could we have wealth represented in the mind-boggling billions; imagine banks having to store the equivalent of Elon Musk’s wealth in gold in their vaults. Digitising our monetary system helped us forget even more, and create speculative markets which appear to create money out of thin air despite the fundamental connection to materials and energy. Money cannot be created out of thin air given it is a signifier of our energy expenditure and material transformation because energy and materials cannot be created out of thin air. Yet, thanks to language, we remake the world as we wish to see it.

It is unsurprising that neoliberalism garnered attention when it did. Its grand architect Friedrich Hayek had been largely ignored for most of his career, and was only taken seriously by Thatcher and Reagan when he was an old man. This was after post-modernism had paved the way for arguments against material reality—that there are no grand narratives in the world. Yes, perhaps not for each individual’s existence, but there are hard, scientific truths we have ignored in the rush to increase our wealth. The only thing that can stop us, seemingly, is the planet itself.

It is bizarre how obsessed the mainstream is with economic growth when there is little evidence that economic growth actually helps improve the lives of the working and middle classes, especially since 2008. Economic growth is attributed as the post-WWII boom which saw a vast jump in the personal wealth of many people in the minority world. It’s true the economies did grow, thanks to neo-colonial policies which extracted cheap labour and resources from the majority world. It’s also true that wealth somewhat trickled down when we had policies that regulated the market. Neoliberalism stripped those regulations away and in countries like the USA and UK which are still seeing economic growth, the wealth of average families is decreasing as wealth floods to the top, wealth derived from stripping our planet bare to generate mostly meaningless goods and services to distract populations in democracies from an increasingly harsh reality and dangerous future. Wealth is generated all the time, but little value is generated. This is how divorced economic thinking is from material reality.

Another excellent example of this, and to demonstrate how dangerously many economists misinterpret climate change, is the work of William Nordhaus. He won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on calculating the impacts of climate change. He claims—still—that a rise in average temperature of 3 degrees would only cause a 2% fall in GDP because most industries operate indoors. Nordhaus equated climate change to the weather, and won the most esteemed prize in academia for his efforts.

There are many excellent proposals for re-engineering our economies to protect people and planet, including doughnut economics and degrowth, both of which suggest redistributing wealth, shifting to renewables, supporting the development of the most vulnerable communities, and protecting our remaining ecosystems upon which we depend. We absolutely need to implement these proposals, for continued over-extraction will eventually crash the economy as increasing extreme weather events wash away parts of our civilisation, and as tensions over increasingly-scarce resource drive us towards war. However, given our economies are signifiers of our material and energy footprint, shifting towards renewables would contract our economies—significantly. There would be less and less money to finance the transition as it went on, let alone finance development abroad. Again, this is fine once we’ve arrived in the new world—not while we’re trying to drum up money for the voyage.

Of course, our current economic system is deeply entwined with fossil fuels, not just because of the connection with energy and material footprints, but also with regards to pensions, assets and power. When the fossil fuel system collapses, our economies will too, along with political power. Not only will people no longer have access to fuel, they will no longer have access to the currency with which they could buy that fuel. Banks will go broke. So will governments. People will die.

Simply, there is no future in which our economies continue to grow. Power will atrophy. Perhaps this is why we are failing to transition.

Power

In physics, power is how quickly energy is used. Politically, it’s not dissimilar. The bigger the energy surplus, the more power available over time, or the more time available to spend energy. The Chiefs who became Kings were those who had more power—more warriors, more food, more gold. Political power cannot be disentangled from our energy systems, nor our economies, and fossil fuels are the best imaginable system to buttress political power.

Fossil fuel energy systems are weak eco-systemically. They are centralised rather than diverse, reducing their resilience when something goes wrong. But if everything goes right that weakness becomes a strength, putting centralised power in the hands of a minority who then wield it to generate more power and wealth. Militaries demand fossil fuels, growing economies demand fossil fuels, complex technologies demand fossil fuels. This same centralisation has also homogenised the global system—everywhere you look, the same brand logos stare back at you. Such centralisation is a boon for rapid growth, sequestering power whilst, initially at least, providing for a population such an enormous energy supply that they come to depend on it for survival. If fossil fuels were to stop tomorrow billions everywhere would be at risk because of the lack of pesticides, but it would be populations in the global north who would be most vulnerable to the loss; we are swimming in fossil fuels in the global north. We no longer know how to do without.

Asking the biggest economies in the world to get off of fossil fuels is not only a demand to shrink their economies, but their access to power. They will not have the same opportunity again to shore up power in such a centralised way. Renewable energy systems can be deployed in a decentralised way: villages can install their own wind turbine, individuals can put solar panels on their roof, and a seaside town can invest in wave energy. The cost of renewables is through the floor. It is the cheapest energy system in the world. It makes economic sense to deploy it. The only reason against it (barring a concern for biodiversity) would be it threatens power structures by emancipating populations from a centralised power system.

Yet, parts of the equation are still centralised. China has spent the past decades securing dominance over the resources necessary for a renewable economy. All around the world, minerals and materials are flooding out of the majority world and into China to be manufactured into solar panels and wind turbines. Even if a country wanted to bring said green manufacturing industry home within its own borders, they would very likely still have to buy the requisite materials from China. A renewable economy, therefore, secures economic buoyancy for China at a time when every other major economy would be contracting. China’s enemies don’t like this idea. It’s likely why Biden didn’t remove Trump’s anti-China tariffs.

In retaliation, China, also a major fossil fuel producer, is allying with other fossil fuel producing countries, including Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, UAE, Egypt. This BRICS bloc is expanding its membership rapidly and is threatening to begin trading in their own currencies, directly attacking the power of the US petrodollar and therefore US political power. If the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currencies, nations will rush to get rid of those reserves, tanking the value even further. The United States has a propensity to go to war, or fund proxy wars, to get what it wants. So do many of the members of BRICS. Resource scarcity is driving conflict all over the world as states seek to shore up power. Winning wars provides access to a bigger energy surplus—and frees up more of that surplus by wiping energy-hungry people from the face of the earth.

People

Our brains are wired for finding bananas with friends. We are simply not competent enough to deal with the level of complexity the polycrisis confronts us with. But we must do our best nonetheless. It is hard to imagine the world being other than it is, which is why a historical analysis of how access to immense batteries has changed the fabric of civilisation is critical. This is not how we have lived for the vast majority of our species’ existence. It could end in the blink of an eye, the equivalent to how long we have enjoyed it for. We may be used to this way of life, even if we vehemently disagree with it, but that does not make it normal. The earth cannot sustain our greed and our waste. There are not enough batteries, or stuff to make batteries. There are limits to growth; everything must decay for life to go on. Traditions of Western thought have disavowed this universal truth, creating eternal homes in sky kingdoms where man basks in his purest form having freed himself from the profanity of the living world. These thoughts live on in investment funds which are throwing money at dematerialising the human existence, creating machines within which our consciousness can live forever, hurtling through space and time—a meaningless juncture without a body to experience it.

We are beings of language, speaking the world into being and trapping it in the written word. We have created constancy where there is only temporality. We have even created individuals where there are only relationships. When it comes to money, we consider ourselves alchemists, creating something out of nothing. But the world of words falls away under the pressure of reality, whether we see it or not. Some of us fall with it. Some of us retreat. Some of us scramble for different words. Some of us scream. Almost none of us stop to look.

Language got us here, and reality will get us out. Yet, we now depend on language to understand reality, another paradox of this emergency. This is a world where the truth has lost its value, along with everything else that is real. The word economy is inflating along with everything else, filled with nonsense, lies and propaganda. Wordflation. It almost leaves you speechless.

I hope these 4000 were of value.

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