Vision of the Future
Vision of the Future
The Global Energy Perspective
by Energy Consortium
VISION OF THE FUTURE
THE GLOBAL ENERGY PERSPECTIVE
BY ENERGY CONSORTIUM
***
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Copyright © Energy Consortium 2023
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Written by Energy Consortium
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Table of Contents
1.
Exponential .................................................. 6
2. Importance of Oil ................................................ 22
3.1 Part 1 ................................................................ 48
3.2 Part 2 ................................................................ 63
4. Implications ....................................................... 79
5. Behavioral .......................................................... 96
6. Climate Change - what does it teach us about transition?
.............................................................................. 111
7. How Africa might change the world ..................... 119
8. Why are the media ignoring this problem? ........... 129
9. Beyond Earth: Can we find a Solution in Outer Space 149
Vision of the Future – The Global Energy Perspective
1. Exponential
When the Europeans entered the western part
of America, they must have thought the world and
its resources were limitless. Humans are very tiny
creatures compared with the Earth. Who would
have imagined in the eighteen seventies that
human economic activity one day will change the
composition of the Earth's atmosphere?
Earth is a spaceship, very much like a
spaceship. It has limited resources. We need to
conserve its resources, recycle them, and find
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new innovative ways to make sure we don't
overshoot our spaceship ability to keep the life
support system healthy. That is essentially the
subject that the bigger picture is going to look at
today.
We will carry you on a hopefully swift and
pleasant journey. Taking a look at the one thing
that really matters above all else to human
survival, energy. In essence there is a question,
how will human civilizations operate without
their primary fuel?
The cosmologist Carl Sagan in his epic TV
series called The Pale Blue Dot, summed up
planet Earth and live on it could be envisioned as
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Vision of the Future – The Global Energy Perspective
a thin film of life on a solitary lump of rock and
metal. To understand what Sagan was talking
about, we need to scale the earth down to
something we understand. If the earth was the
size of an apple, the skin of the apple would
represent the entire known life in the universe.
This skin, a layer of life is what we call the
biosphere.
Humans, though, mistreat the biosphere, their
life support system. They do this using the take,
make and throwaway system of economic
production. Let us know, pause for a moment and
consider what the goal of humanity is and what
allows us to achieve this goal.
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At times when people were religious, many
humans believed the survival of the human soul
beyond death was the ultimate purpose. Scientific
knowledge has replaced his goal with a new one;
the survival of the human species. Human growth
and survival have been regulated by our access to
energy.
Throughout our history, we have been hunter
gatherers, horticulturalist, and agriculturalists
with the invention of technology such as steam
powered diesel engines. We have become
industrialized, largely divorced from nature.
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The Russian physicist’s Kardashev’s scale, the
human ability to harness energy by comparing us
with a supposed alien civilization that has
harnessed all of that planet's available energy. He
called this a type one civilization. The civilizations
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on Earth are only a type zero-point seven
civilization on this scale. Type two, a civilization
that is able to harness all of the power available
from a single star like our sun. This, then, is the
objective of humanity to become a solar
civilization.
Humans mistreat our biosphere by acting
rather like a plague species, like plague species,
though we do not die often masked right away
after the feast, but instead carry-on populating
and feasting. Let us look at the current process
used by humans to service their demands. We can
call this the take make a system.
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And although we recycle much, the general
outline here is still quite accurate. Firstly, we take
the resources, sometimes using violence or we
just eradicate areas of life or force native tribes to
leave. We ship the resources vast distances,
process them in factories and transport them
again. In the meantime, we advertise and sell the
products that they're made into creating or
satisfying consumer demand at all stages.
There is waste, waste from production and
waste after the products have ended their
lifespan. Some of this waste goes for recycling,
but sometimes this in itself creates toxins that
enter our food chain. We might burn, bury, or
dump it seem much of a waste, and although it
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only looks like a tiny fraction of the size of the
earth, the toxins spread out.
Without new resources, the process cannot
continue. So we return to new areas to start the
process again. The economic forces at work often
drive native tribes into city slums where they
exploited, abused and some are even involved in
recycling toxic waste. The barriers to achieving a
type one civilization can be easily summed up as
follows.
One, uncontrolled population growth with
high demand for energy to a large-scale nuclear
war, asteroid strike, or super volcano explosion.
Three, a global uncontrollable pandemic for
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Vision of the Future – The Global Energy Perspective
climate change. And five, loss of primary fuel oil
without the ability to find viable substitutes that
can meet the demands.
These are not all the barriers, but represent the
key ones, the last one we will focus on in this
book. Humans are not very good at estimating
exponential growth. For example, General
Clarkson, the book writer, once asked an
international major energy company that he
worked for whether or not he could be paid as
follows.
One Saturday to tomorrow for the next day.
The next day. And six in the next day for 30 days.
Without carrying out any calculation. Guess how
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much you would have by day 13 in your mind?
Yes. No. The answer is approximately ten point
seven million dollars, how good was your guess?
The same exponential growth problem applies to
resource decline, the inverse exponential or
exponential decay.
Here's a good example provided by Professor
Alperovitz of Colorado University. A bottle is
filled with energy liquid used by bacteria to grow.
The bacteria do not die off in this experiment
within the time frame unless they are deprived of
liquid energy to divide and multiply the bacteria
double a number every minute, using up the
energy in the bottle, converting the liquid into
equal amounts of bacteria.
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We know that it takes one hour for them to
exhaust the finite supply of energy in the process
and thus fill the bottle with bacteria. If we start
the growth at 11:00 a.m., what time will it be when
the bacteria have half the bottles still to consume
less? The time long because things are rather slow
for most of the time by 11:54 a.m. with just six
minutes to go.
The proportion left is ninety eight percent. Its
mouth is still full of energy liquids by 11:55 a.m.,
we have nine seven percent still full of liquid
energy and only three percent of bacteria. The
bacteria, if they had intelligence, would think that
their food supply was fine. At eleven fifty-six a.m.
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we have still ninety four percent of our energy
liquid and just six percent of the bottle is bacteria
by 11:57 a.m. there is now eighty eight percent
still surely lost to consume by 11:58 a.m.
The bottle contains a quarter bacterium and
seventy five percent of liquid energy left to
consume. Life is still great surely. No problem at
all. I'd love it up to 09:00 a.m. We have half the
bottle full of books here and have left with liquid
energy to consume. The answer to our question is
11:59 p.m.
Now look at what happens at twelve we have a
bottle containing one hundred percent of bacteria
and zero liquid energy suddenly without any
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warning or hungry bacteria, without any liquid
energy to live on and to divide. If the bacteria
could think like we do when we didn't know there
was a problem. Here when they have 80 percent
left. Or here, where they have 20 percent left.
And explore a bacterium at great expense
leaves the bottle at 11:58 p.m. and discovers three
new bottles that should help us survive much
longer, says the Explorer, assuming that the
whole of the bacteria can access the other bottles.
How long will the energy last if the bacteria
continue to double in size every minutes?
As we know, at 12:00 p.m., the first bottle is
empty of energy at 12:01 p.m., the first and
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second bottles are empty of energy at 12. They
were to all four bottles are empty. What will
happen to our colonies of hungry bacteria? The
human population has been largely built upon oil
consumption. We can see this in many graphs,
and you can go and investigate this yourself.
Instead, we will simply look at another one of
Professor Bartlett's famous examples.
Oil demand has been doubling every 10 years
or a rise of just seven percent a year. We can see
this in diagram form. Watch what happens each
decade from nine to one hundred fifty. Fossil
fuels are generally considered non-renewable
resources because oil takes millions of years to
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form. This is some profound implications for
humans depended upon it.
Look at the graph below this, plus the number
of years until coal, oil and gas expire against the
average rate of consumption per year. What
happens
is
we
increase
our
fossil
fuel
consumption to how long this fuels last. Let's take
a close look at oil. If we consume it at a rate of
seven percent a year, we will use it all up within
just 20 years.
If we only consume it at one percent a year,
then it could last nearly 40 years. In other words,
our consumption matters. The longer it lasts, the
more time we have to find viable substitutes. No
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one wants to tell you about this problem. And in
the last 10 years, I've only ever seen one television
program on this subject from a US channel.
It is not surprising that countries in the Middle
East are investing in nuclear and solar power
despite being surrounded by massive amounts of
conventional oil underground. However, what
you see here on this graph is not the only
problem. What really matters is the oil energy use
to extract the oil unless more comes out of the
ground than is used to extract it. It is not viable.
That is for a next chapter. See you then.
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2. Importance of Oil
In the last chapter, which looks at how
exponential growth and demand have an impact
on the lifespan of a species, we discovered that
the faster we use oil based fuels, the quicker it
runs out by applying the expiration formula,
probably the most important formula ever
discovered in mathematics, you hopefully now
understand that exponential consumption means
that new forms of energy are used up relatively
quickly as demand increases in this chapter will
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consider the dominance of oil in our age of all
civilization.
Why its energy density makes it the premium
fuel type on planet Earth. And then we'll look at
the energy return on investment of energy, which
is the key to understanding why oil will run out. It
will become simply too expensive to extract. We
will then look at the concept of net energy and its
consequences for a fully functional, modern,
industrialized society.
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Oil is the world's dominant primary fuel. It
successfully took over from coal in the 20th
century, which was a dominant fuel of the
industrialized world during the 19th and early
20th centuries. Oil based fuels now have a vast
and complex infrastructure like transportation
links across the world's oceans, roads, and
railways. All energy builds a modern civilization
and our global population.
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The reason is quite simple. A barrel of oil
contains the energy equivalent of twenty-three
thousand hours of human labor. To be able to do
that amount of work and a relatively low cost
without much human and animal muscle power
means we can build things like bridges, houses,
nuclear plants, wind turbines and planned reap
harvest, transport, and processed food in
abundance.
We can also spend time developing new
medicines, inventing new technologies and even
land on the moon. So what is oil and why is it so
important? Due to the biotic nature of oil or then
gas deposits are therefore found only in the
geological areas that are suitable for them to exist.
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The last great fine of conventional oil, despite
millions of test drills, was in nineteen sixty-seven
due to the exponential nature of consumption of
oil.
Even if oil was extracted in the Arctic, it would
only last about two years. Such oil could come at
a huge cost to the local environment, giving the
spate of recent accidents in much fewer hostile
locations. The lack of conventional oil has driven
oil companies to seek unconventional sources.
These are much more costly and damaging to the
environment.
Tar
sands
and
shale
oil,
a
typical
unconventional source. Tar sands oil uses open
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cast mining, and the environment will never be
the same once the extraction is ended. Shale oil is
extracting
a
great
cost
financially
and
environmentally, particularly due to the use of
water and chemicals. The process can also cause
substantial earthquakes to have occurred in
America and in Great Britain.
Examine this resource pyramid diagram and
write down what you know about the differences
between conventional and unconventional oil. At
this point, hopefully you're asking, why do we use
oil anyway? Why did you start using renewable
energy to charge battery driven machines? If that
doesn't work, then we could use hydrogen as it
burns cleanly.
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So why are we still using fossil fuels? There are
very good reasons why humans haven't yet moved
over to use renewable and clean energy. It's called
energy density. Look at this diagram. It was
different fuels by energy density in terms of
megajoules
per
liter
and
megajoules
per
kilogram. Take a careful look at where a natural
gas, LPG, LNG, and hydrogen are in this graph.
What are they lacking? Now have a look at
batteries like lithium ion and zinc er batteries.
Know that these are all here, but they are not
primary fuels, they have to be charged using all
the types of energy. Compare them to the oil-
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based fuels like diesel, gasoline and kerosene.
What do these batteries lack in comparison?
Take a quick look at underside, which is a
compact type of coal, which is better its energy
per liter or its energy per kilogram compared with
diesel. What do you find? Hopefully now you
realize the best fuels are clearly diesel, gasoline,
and kerosene in terms of energy per kilogram and
energy per liter. This means they are easy to
contain, so very safe and have a relatively low
weight. So, they are highly portable.
Oil based fuels dominate global energy use and
along with coal and gas, make up 85 percent of the
total oil is embedded into everything we take,
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make, and throw away from metals to plastic.
Even your clothes contain plastic fibers. Plastic
comes from oil, as do many other materials. Here
is a challenge for you. Find something in your
house that you use every day. For example, your
mobile phone.
What materials does it contain? How were they
mined? What are they made of? What energy was
used to mine them, transport them. When you
factor them, get rid of the waste, transfer them to
the shops and finally to you. You can think about
that after the chapter. Make a note of it now.
During Victorian times, when Great Britain
was the first and largest industrialized economy
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on Earth, sailing ships and later coal driven
steamships were the arteries of the first global
economy, the arteries of the modern world, a
container ships, they run on bunker fuel oil.
There is no plan to use battery driven shipping
because of the poor energy density.
Nuclear powered commercial ships have
proven too expensive to use and were quickly
mothballed after a few extended trials. Unless we
find substitution for oil, the shipping arteries of
our global economy will be a thing of the past.
Cheap oil means plenty of foreign imports, huge
houses, big cars and bigger trucks, and the ability
to fly long distances in countries. Expensive oil
means all resources suddenly inflated price.
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Local food will become the norm rather than
the exception. Domestic industries will prosper
since there will be no cheap foreign goods,
vehicles will be smaller and lighter. What will you
do about large vehicles like juggernauts, mining
vehicles
and
machinery
is
going
to
be
challenging. During and after World War Two,
Leslie White, the anthropologist, developed a
theory called White's Law.
White spoke of culture as general human
phenomena like the sum of all human activity on
planet Earth. He argued that culture was in three
parts technological, sociological, and ideological.
He said that the technological component played
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the
primary
role
in
determining
cultural
evolution. Wyden stated.
Man is an animal species and consequently
culture as a whole is dependent on the material
mechanical means of adjustment to the natural
environment. Why theory was that technology is
an attempt to solve the problem of survival, and
that involves capturing enough energy and
diverting it to human needs, societies with more
energy use more efficiently have an advantage
over the others.
These societies are more advanced. Why stated
that culture evolves as the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year is increased or as
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the efficiency of instrumental means of putting
energy to work is increased? Imagine you were a
cave man or woman in order to eat, you had to
expend energy to obtain energy.
This involved hunting and gathering every
member of the tribe that was fit enough to do this
had to do it. It takes energy to gather energy when
we apply this to different types of energy sources
used in industrial civilizations like oil. It is called
the energy return on Investment of energy.
Abbreviated to EROI, it is usually expressed as a
ratio as the energy return on investment of energy
equals the energy gathered divided by the energy
invested.
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Conventional oil is not just limited by the fact
that it is a non-renewable resource on a finite
planet. It is truly limited by our ability to extract
all of it economically. This is because it takes
energy to extract and make energy. For example,
it takes about seven hundred thirty-five joules to
lift 15 kilograms of oil five meters. It takes energy
to pump water and chemicals in order to extract
oil or gas. It takes energy to refine crude oil into
something useful like gasoline, diesel fuel,
heating oil, kerosene, or liquefied petroleum gas.
Every part of the process takes energy. When
oil was struck in California in nineteen hundred,
it took one barrel of oil energy to extract one
hundred barrels. This is a ratio of one hundred to
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one. By the nineteen seventies this had fallen to
twenty-five to one. Currently, globally, it is about
10 to one and five to one for shale oil or tar sands
oil.
Given the fact that it takes energy to gather
energy, it is not surprising that oil and gas
companies prefer to quickly remove the easy oil
and gas first and spend their energy on finding
new sources to extract more oil and gas, rather
than drilling deeper in case of shale oil with its
best to Europe production, it leads to a treadmill
of drilling.
Net energy is a surplus energy made available
to society from gathering energy, net energy
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equals the energy return on investment of energy
minus one. The one in this formula represents the
energy invested. If the energy return on
investment of energy equals one, then the net
energy is zero. If it falls below one, we have what
is called an energy sink. The system's ecologists
plotted this as a graph where net energy was a
percentage of energy.
Return on investment of energy and energy
available to society in blue varies with the energy
return on investment of energy. The red is the
energy being used to gather energy. The
mathematics of energy return on investment of
energy is known as the energy cliff due to its
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shape. Dr. Charles Hall is right on it. Take a close
look at this graph now.
We've only marked three things on it for now
historical, conventional oil, conventional oil and
unconventional oil like tar sands oil or shale oil.
Without this graph, it is easy to think that an
energy return on investment of energy of one
hundred to one is ten times more beneficial to
civilization than 10 to one from 11 to one to the
limits of this graph. Incremental increases of
energy, return on investment of energy deliver
much smaller benefits. This is because the graph
is virtually a flat line below 10 to one.
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The decline is like falling off a cliff, which in
this case means that we have less net energy
available for society and diminishing ability to
gather energy. Dr. Charles Hall is the father of
analysis when it comes to energy returns of
investment without the E that stands for energy,
this method adds capital and investments as well
as energy into the calculations hole of the others.
In 2009 studied how much oil would be required
to drive a truck, including the energy to use the
energy, then add up the energy to obtain, refine
and deliver the oil, which was 10 percent each
step.
Then the energy to build and maintain the
roads, bridges, and vehicles and so on. They
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found that we need a free trader at the oil well,
had to use one liter of gasoline in the trucks tank.
This didn't include the energy to put something
useful into the truck like grain. They also included
the depreciation of the truck driver, mechanic,
road worker and the farmer that was required to
pay for the domestic needs schooling, health care
and replacement.
Lower energy return on investment of energy
means more expensive oil and lower energy
means growth is harder as there is less left over
for maintaining civilization or culture, as Leslie
White called it. Those conclusions are very
interesting. The world's most important fuels, oil,
and gas, have declining energy return on
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investment of energy values. This will likely have
enormous economic consequences for many
national economies. It is important to understand
how energy return on investment of energy is
calculated.
There is no universal method. As you already
know, you're required to focus the energy
gathered and the energy invested to get this
figure. Scientists make mathematical models that
factor in as many things as possible to give you a
taste of the complexity of calculating energy.
Return on investment of energy. Here's a diagram
from Petrine Hall of the Building, operational and
the commissioning phases of a typical power
plant.
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Similar models are made for all kinds of energy
systems, all kinds of factors are taking into
consideration.
The
energy
used
to
make
materials, energy consumed by labor and the
quality of the energy must be factored into each
and every stage. Proxy data is used to estimate
energy and structures such as the mass of steel
and the hours of labor used during construction.
If energy outputs intermittent, this must be taken
into consideration.
Researchers
often
don't
have
decommissioning costs as these are future costs.
It is important to use one metric at the end so we
can compare different kinds of energy systems in
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a valid and scientific matter. For example, it is not
valid to compare coal with nuclear power because
coal converts less efficiently than nuclear power.
Thus, fossil fuels are adjusted using a metric
called electricity equivalent, or EKU.
For oil based fuels, the impact of digging ever
deeper, drilling ever further, using new fracking
techniques and technology appears currently to
be winning battles against geology. Some
American news agencies are proclaiming that the
US will never return to the days when gasoline
stations so huge mile long queues. However, no
one in the know is suggesting technology will ever
win the war. Take a look at this energy cliff graph.
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The areas marked in blue, purple or dark
purple represent the net energy available to
society. The red above the graph is the energy to
gather energy, hydroelectric power and historical
oil and gas are way off to the left of this graph.
This would be ideal sources of energy for a
growing civilization. But the form is limited by
geography and the cost of building them and
environmental damage they cause. And the latter
is just a memory like the old self is gone with the
wind.
Now, look at the other fuels here. Notice that
natural gas is still more than 15 to one but note
that this is because oil is around 10 to one. Shall
oil. By contrast, is only four to one. So a society
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running on this wouldn't function at all, nor
would it operate using solar PV, biodiesel or corn
ethanol as these are falling off the net energy cliff.
We
should
note
with
trepidation
that
conventional oil provides a free subsidy to all
other energy systems or fuels, we already know
we cannot easily run society using energy systems
with poor energy density because we need to keep
the mines operating, the diggers digging and
containerships running. Add to these net energy
problems, peak oil and gas and exponential
demand. And we have a perfect storm by
midcentury.
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Tim Morgan of Tullett Prebon University of
Cambridge in his strategy report, calculated that
energy costs could absorb 15 percent of GDP at an
energy return and investment of energy of seven
point seven to one but two thousand thirty, he
states. The essential conclusion is that the
economy, as we have known it for more than two
centuries, will cease to be viable at some point
within the next ten years unless, of book, some
way is found to reverse the trend.
Actually, we don't know when the real problem
will occur. It's a matter of timing. In the next
chapter, we will consider in more detail the
potential list of technical solutions to these
problems.
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3.1 Part 1
This chapter is about the terrestrial technical
solutions to an oil crisis that is predicted to occur
sometime this century. Before we begin, let us
glance at something called peak oil. Unlike the
other mathematical models, we've looked at, such
as energy return on investment of energy and
exploration time, peak oil gives us a way to
estimate when a solution will be required.
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If the peak in production is going long ago,
we're probably too late to do anything about the
crisis. If a peak is yet to come, we've got time to
plan for the longer term and if it has only just
peaked, we need to start putting in place. New
infrastructure is to transition our economy from
oil to new technologies. Peak oil is a point in time
where we measure that the maximum rate of
extraction of oil is reached, after which there is a
terminal decline.
It is based upon a mathematical model by King
Hubbard, which looks at the observed rise, peak
fall, and depletion of aggregate production rates
in oil field over time. Peak oil is not oil depletion,
but rather the point of maximum production.
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Hubbard use statistical modeling in 1956 to
accurately predict U.S. oil production would peak
between 1965 and 1971.
The key features of peak oil are that even if we
increase the amount of oil resources, all of the
numbers change. The behavior of the system
stays the same. Peak oil does not happen because
we're running out of oil, or conversely, that it
won't happen because we have plenty of oil.
It happens because of feedback loops between
the resource and the amount of oil capital
available, although expiration time gives us a
good idea of when the real problems occur and
energy return on investment tells us which
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energy types of worthwhile, we just like the
bacteria in the bottle, need an alarm system that
contradicts our senses and form a new nation.
The majority of scientists now agree that global
oil peaked around 2010, despite a few new finds.
This is related to the fact that no great fine has
occurred
since
nineteen
sixty-seven
of
conventional oil technology has helped to delay
the problem a tiny amount. And currently our
senses deceive us into thinking that fracked oil
and gas has solved the problem.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. This means
we need to act now to start transitioning from one
type of economy, the oil economy, into something
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that will effectively replace it. We can classify free
major solutions to the oil crisis as follows. Firstly,
the hydrogen economy, which, as the name
suggests, relies upon producing for electrolysis or
chemistry
major
amounts
of
compressed
hydrogen.
This economy uses lots of renewable energy,
including biomass and possibly nuclear energy.
Secondly,
the
electric
renewable
energy
economy, an economy where renewable energy
is used to run electric vehicles and heat homes.
Such an economy would require much better
energy storage systems due to the intermittent
nature of renewable energy.
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This is similar to the hydrogen economy but
focused on electrification of nearly all aspects of
energy use.
Thirdly, the plutonium and synthetic fuel
economy in which nuclear power takes care of
the domestic and industrial energy requirements
and synthetic fuels made from gas, coal and
biomass solve our transportation needs. In
reality, different countries will probably adopt a
mixture of these and where possible, will try to
use existing infrastructure.
Before we begin looking at known potential
alternatives to oil, we need to consider the
unknown solutions waiting to be discovered.
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What is the probability that scientists will find a
brand-new primary fuel that perfectly substitutes
for oil? We tend to expect our scientists and
businessmen to find a solution to any problem.
However, in the world of energy, we still use
Faraday's method of generating electrical energy,
regardless of the fuel burned.
To make the turbines to imitate the principle of
batteries has stayed the same as have combustion
and jet engines. When Jay Huebner, the physicist,
looked at the statistics of new inventions and
patterns, he discovered
that
turning new
inventions peaked in the fifties and new patterns
peaked during World War I. The graphs he
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produced are revealing change. New inventions
are in decline and so are the patents.
What we have now is largely developments of
previous
technologies,
many
miniaturized.
Before we look at the solutions, perhaps we need
to take a quick look at the intermediate stage. This
is because a transition from the oil economy to
the size of energy economies will not happen in a
single leap. We want stop burning fossil fuels
straight away.
Instead, we will probably try to adapt to a world
without cheap oil. But try not ready-Made nonrenewable alternatives first before the age of oil is
ended. We will probably utilize stop gap fuels
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Vision of the Future – The Global Energy Perspective
such as gases. This will only be feasible for a short
time, and will no doubt be part of what we will
slowly transition away from.
Vehicles can be older to using liquid petroleum
gas known as LBG and liquid natural gas known
as LNG. LBG can be used in petrol engine cars that
have been converted to run on it. LNG is used and
converted
diesel
engines.
This
is
current
technology that is already in use in experiments
in Canada. The maintenance costs were doubled
in one railroad experiment, so it was soon proven
unsustainable and was abandoned after just one
year in 2013.
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However, eight companies across Canada have
LNG fuel trucks and are considered successful.
Both LBG and LNG or only stopgap measure is
being uneconomic. Without cheap oil, nonrenewable and expensive to process and contain.
These will not solve the jet fuel or the bunker oil
fuel problem for aircraft and container shipping.
However, they will keep the land transport
moving whilst we make the transition.
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Let's look at our first major solution, the
hydrogen economy here, we want to electrify
everything possible and still produce liquid fuels
for those things that best operate on them, like
agricultural or mining machinery. Hydrogen is
just an energy carrier, like a battery. When
burned in air, it produces water vapor to
manufacture vast quantities of hydrogen.
We use electrolysis or chemical processes. And
actually, this means making hydrogen on side,
usually from water, using energy from nuclear
power stations, waste incineration, power plants,
wind and solar farms. Chemical processing
involves using biomass, algae ponds, or gases
from various forms of waste.
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Vaclav Smil, who has studied this in detail,
suggests that a hydrogen economy would occupy
a land area of 25 to 50 percent of the United States,
compared with just half a four percent claim by
today's fossil fuel, hydro and nuclear systems.
The amount of energy required to isolate
hydrogen from water, natural gas in the medium
term or biomass and longer term and compress it
into a liquid and send it to the end user, leaves
about 25 percent of the energy for practical use.
This is highly inefficient. To illustrate some of
the problems, let us look briefly at hydrogen from
bio crops. Biofuels from crops have a very poor
energy return on investment of energy. It's so bad
that you need low priced conventional diesel oil
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to make them economic, to plant, harvest and
transport. And that's before you've started turning
the crop into biofuel, which involves lots of
energy inputs.
The National Academy of Sciences in the USA
concluded in 2012 that a scale up of algal biofuel
production to replace just five percent of US
transportation fuels such as diesel or gasoline
would place an unsustainable demand on energy,
water, and nutrients. Some of the math behind
these conclusions comes from looking at the
amount of land required to grow biomass to
replace liquid fuels.
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We can see from this that it would take nearly
four million square kilometers to grow enough
biomass to replace the approximate one thousand
one hundred gigawatts of energy that United
States alone burns as liquid fuels. Each year. The
USA only has nine point eight million square
kilometers available in total, and not all of that is
going to be able to grow biomass for fuel. This is
part one. Please go to part two of this chapter
now.
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3.2 Part 2
We now can turn to the electric renewable
energy economy. David Mackay, the former
government adviser, several years ago, did an
energy plan for the U.K. It worked like this. He
added up the total energy use and compared it to
how much the UK could conceivably produce
using purely renewable energy and switching to
electric vehicles.
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The method was cartoon like, intended to be
informative rather than factual. However, it gives
us an insight into the problems facing every
nation around the world. McKay's method went
something like this. Imagine you own slaves. The
power output from one human slave equals about
one kilowatt hour per day, assuming 10 hours of
labor make estimates that the average American
uses 250 kilowatt hours per day.
It is much lower for Great Britain at just one
hundred twenty-five kilowatt hours per day per
person. This comes from adding up the average
energy use from driving, heating your homes,
obtaining commodities, and even flying by
looking at renewable energy and new technology
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with better efficiency as an alternative to fossil
fuel economy.
Created five solutions for the United Kingdom.
McKay, being a skeptic when it came to human
nature, factored in public opinion, even though
the public wants renewable energy, he believes it
would ultimately reject the idea based on things
like aesthetics and noise from wind turbine
blades.
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This is sometimes called NIMBYism if we can
get over the barriers to renewable energy or
nuclear energy. McKay also shows that it is
possible to finance these plants. He makes his
assertion by comparing the cost of updating
missile systems or being less than three percent
of the United Kingdom's current expenditure in
energy.
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Please note McCain's focus is on eliminating
fossil fuels to assist climate change, whereas our
focus is on solving the oil crisis. Energy plans are
very much unique to each nation, however, not
one of this plans solves the problem of flying large
passenger and cargo aircraft. None of these plans
offer any comfort to the shipping industry that
want to avoid having to power ships using nuclear
power due to cost and safety concerns.
Even if shipping is relatively efficient in terms
of energy use, neither do this of how we
manufacture pig iron or on any of the things we
take for granted that use intense amounts of fossil
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fuel, energy, agriculture, mining, building, and
heavy industries are very reliant on fossil fuels.
And these plans don't really seem to plug these
gaps once we factor in growing populations and
apply the method globally. In other words, there
is an energy gap. The third solution we will look
at could be called the plutonium economy. This
involves building 50 nuclear reactors here, only
20 below what the world achieved in nineteen
eighty-four.
We can estimate that the total recoverable
uranium in the ground, including phosphate
deposits, is 27 million tons. What is for one
gigawatt? Nuclear power station uses one
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hundred sixty-two tons per year of uranium. If we
share that between six billion people for one
thousand years, we can supply zero-point five
kilowatt hours per person per day.
And alternative to ones for nuclear reactors is
a so-called fast breeder reactor. A fast breeder
nuclear reactor is one that generates more fissile
material than it consumes. Fast breeder reactors
could develop 30 free kilowatt hours per day per
person. This is because fast breeder nuclear
reactors are 60 percent more efficient than ones
for counterparts.
If we manage to be able to extract uranium
from sea water at a rate of two hundred eighty
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thousand tons per year or 10 percent of the total
uranium in the oceans, we could make one
thousand seven hundred fifty gigawatts per year
using normal ones for reactors or seven kilowatt
hours per day per person, or four hundred twenty
kilowatt hours per day per person using fast
breeder nuclear reactors.
With nuclear power taking care of the domestic
and industrial needs, synthetic fuels in this plan,
take care of transportation. Robert Laughlin, the
physicist, believes so will use synthetic fuels in
the future. A method using coal was perfected
post-war by Cecil in South Africa. The advantage
of using synthetic fuel is that we don't need to
change our supply infrastructure.
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We just have to build synthetic fuel plants, lots
of them new sources of coal and gas, or in the
longer term, new sources of biomass like farms
on the Great Plains of the United States of
America. Synthetic fuels are very costly, meaning
that everything would have to rise in price if they
were fully scaled up, if they're made from coal,
they would speed up the depletion of coal as it is
turned into liquid fuels and lots of CO2.
The energy return on investment of energy is
less than one to one. That means you get less out
than you put in. We've looked at existing nuclear
power, which is known as fission. What about the
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much-heralded fusion power fusion is what stars
like our sun used to generate energy.
We're probably 50 years away from solving the
problem of making a fusion reactor viable,
according to Miklos Ballclub, one of the leading
physicists involved in fusion research.
Not for some speculation. Based on what we
currently know, assuming we solve all of the
problems and are able to build and safely contain
fusion reactions. There are two main fuels for
fusion reactors lithium and deuterium, and two
types of reaction.
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The DTA reaction fuses deuterium and tritium
to make helium. Tritium is manufactured from
lithium. By contrast, the reaction fuses deuterium
with deuterium using the DETI reaction, nine
point five million tons of lithium lambast or could
give everyone 10 kilowatt hours per person per
day for one thousand years. If we extract the
lithium in the ocean, we can get one hundred five
kilowatt hours per day per person for six billion
people for one million years.
The reaction requires 30 free grams of
deuterium per ton of seawater to be extracted
from this gram. We get one hundred thousand
kilowatt hours. The mass of the oceans is two
hundred thirty million tons per person. So that
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gives 60 billion people thirty thousand kilowatt
hours per day per person for one million years.
Very impressive, but unfortunately, still only a
dream.
Now it is time to revisit where you learned
about in the previous chapter, EROI, EROI and net
energy, a very important for future energy
policies. Governments are like gamblers in many
cases, sometimes misled by dodgy bookies who
encourage them to back a favorite or tipster's,
who break the horse race in such a complex world
like energy. Who should they believe in chapter?
One, we noted that the objective of mankind was
to survive.
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If we are to survive, we surely want to do more
than just that. We want to preserve life on planet
Earth for future generations. We want all humans
to live comfortably. We want to build technology
that prevents incoming comets or asteroids from
wiping out all life on earth. We want to be able to
build structures to allow humans to even survive
potential super volcanic eruptions.
We want to be able to explore space, perhaps
even colonize Mars, but want to become at least
two planets, type two, solar civilization. Take a
look at this graph again. It now has a range of
potential solutions marked upon the net energy
cliff. Do you see a problem or is this an
opportunity? What is your assessment of the free
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solutions? We noted notes down your preference
and reasons for choosing this particular solution.
Why is it predicted that oil won't be easy to
replace globally, the Post Carbon Institute
analyzed 18 energy sources from oil to tidal power
using 10 criteria, not including speculative fusion.
The criteria included scalability, renewability,
energy density and energy, return on energy
invested and so on. It was the first time that so
many energy sources had been studied with
regards to finding a potential solution.
To fully appreciate this, we need to look at this
balloon graph from the Post Carbon Institute
report. The conclusion was profound and boring.
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There was no credible scenario in which
alternative energy sources could make up for
fossil fuels as the latter deplete society by two
thousand one hundred would have less energy
available for economic purposes. The world's
economy said the report is likely to become
increasingly energy constrained.
New sources of energy in many cases have
lower net energy profiles than conventional fossil
fuels and will require expensive infrastructure to
overcome the problems of intermittency. The
question now arises, if we fail to find or adopt the
correct solutions, what impact does that have on
our world in the future? That is a subject of our
next chapter.
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4. Implications
This chapter is about implications of failing to
find a solution to the future oil crisis. To do this,
we will take a look at a number of different
subjects, including globalization, politics, history,
the danger of nuclear weapons and carrying
capacity overshoot. Finally, we will let you decide
what are the implications of failing to find a
solution to the oil crisis, but will return to the
Stone Age, as one major theory predicts.
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Before we begin, let us recap the book so far,
any rise in demand, however small, is always
exponential in nature. Oil is a non-renewable
resource that is difficult to phase out and replace
with substitutes of equal quality or quantity. Our
solution so far has proven incomplete with most
of the main elements sitting in the nonfunctional
society part of the net energy graph.
Modern nations are highly interconnected. We
rely on energy, food, materials, goods, services,
arms assistance, and workers from everywhere
on Earth. America and China are almost like one
nation when it comes to economic connectivity.
Capital flows freely around the world, speeded up
by the Internet.
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The extent of globalization is highlighted when
we consider banking and investments. In 2008,
the Lehman Brothers and major global financing
firm based in the USA collapsed as a result of
liberalized lending regulations. This had global
implications as a domino effect took hold around
the world. Markets operate nowadays at the speed
of light, unlike the 1929 Great Depression, where
countries outside the USA did not feel the impact
for several years.
Countries outside America react to percentage
rises and falls on Wall Street. Market trading
computers make unseen decisions on behalf of
humans every second, and oil crisis predicted by
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data analysis would be picked up 15 years before
it
actually
occurred
by
computers
that
automatically trade oil futures, changing the very
nature of trading energy for the foreseeable
future.
Corporations are very powerful players in the
world economy. 30 of the wealthiest corporations
have more money than some nations. Global oil
companies regularly spend more than 60 million
dollars a year lobbying American politicians
against sustainable development projects. Many
corporations no longer believe the majority of
people's views matter.
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For example, Citigroup, a major U.S. consumer
bank memo written on the 16th of October 2005,
stated that the USA was a plutonomy or society
where the majority of wealth is controlled by an
ever-shrinking minority as fortunes determine
the outcome of the entire economy.
The question you have to ask yourself is this
who is in control of the long-term policies that
affect future generations? Energy security? Is it
the politicians, with their short terms in office
and vague promises far into the future, or the
corporations with a short term need to make a
profit for shareholders? Or perhaps it is the
government's advisors or civil service.
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Here is an exercise for you to do later, it is
included in your book notes, think about the
political barriers to changing from the oil-based
economy to a zero oil or low carbon economy.
What is the term of office for your country's
leader? Does this help or hinder long term plans
on things like the environment or energy
systems? Nationalism, religious and linguistic
differences are important to how we cooperate
with other countries.
Would you invest billions in North African
solar plants to supply Europe? Explain your
reasons. You can do this after the rest of the
chapter. However, pause a moment and make
some notes. What are your initial thoughts?
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Lieutenant General Sir John Glob, military
commander and historian analyzed the various
declines and falls of the major great empires of
the past, Glob discovered that empires have many
things in common.
They all achieve a national greatness for about
two hundred fifty years, an average that has not
changed in three thousand years after which they
decline
and
finally
disintegrate.
The
disintegration takes several hundred years. The
stages of the rise and fall for a pattern. There were
ages
of
pioneering
conquest,
commerce,
affluence, intellect and lastly, decadence.
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Decadence is marked by features we currently
know it exists in our globalized world of nation
states defensiveness, pessimism, materialism,
frivolity, immigration, and a religious weakness.
Decadence, Glob argued, is largely due to a two
long period of wealth within powerful regimes
where selfishness, a love of money and general
loss and a sense of duty have occurred.
The life histories of great empires amazingly
similar and are due to internal factors, and their
falls are diverse due to external factors go beyond
Glove's work. It is often noted that many empires
suffered from two major problems during the
decade and faced a huge gap between the mega
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rich and everyone else and a decline in the
primary energy.
When these two factors combined, it often led
to revolution or invasion. Let's look at some
examples. Here are two main examples from
history. Firstly, the fall of the five great empires
of the late Bronze Age. And secondly, the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire, the Bronze Age
empires of Egypt, Mycenae, and the Hittites
today.
But three of them were the equivalent of
modern superpowers. The great Bronze Age
civilizations of the Middle East and southwest
Mediterranean around the 12th century B.C. were
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highly interconnected in terms of trade and
diplomacy as a cuneiform tablets and Egyptian
hieroglyphs records.
It is now believed that the loss of their primary
fuels, barley, and wheat, were a major reason for
that decline and fall over a period of just three
hundred years. Similarly, the Roman Empire
declined during periods when they suffered from
the loss of the primary fuel barley, rye, and
wheat.
Professor Harper of Oklahoma University
noticed that between two hundred B.C. and
hundred fifty A.D., there was a climate change
event known as the Roman Climate Optimum and
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notable warm period. This was followed by the
late antique little ice age of four hundred fifty to
seven hundred eighty when the Roman Empire
fell apart.
This led to droughts, movements of people,
including invasions affected by poor harvests and
a weakening of Rome's economy so vital to the
upkeep of a large military force and mid or late
21st century global oil crisis could be far more
dangerous to our civilization than anything
humans have suffered in the past. Because we
possess weapons of mass destruction.
As of 2017, the USA, UK and France have seven
thousand three hundred and fifteen warheads.
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Russia has seven thousand. China has two
hundred and seventy. Israel, it is believed as 80.
Pakistan has 140. And India 130. North Korea is
alleged to have ten. Dr. Hallman has calculated
the probability of nuclear war but using the
Cuban missile crisis as a guide.
Take a look at this table here. This ignores the
numerous command and control errors or
malfunctions that had often occurred and, of
book, the potential of nuclear terrorism. It is a
time invariant model, assuming the experience of
the last 50 years of TERANCE can be extended into
the future.
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It therefore underestimates the probability in a
plutonium economy based on fast breeder
reactors
that
could
circumstances,
plenty
be,
of
under
nuclear
certain
material
available, which might fall into revolutionary or
terrorist hands. Dirty nuclear weapons could be
easily
created
without
much
technical
knowledge. If the world changed forever due to
9/11, the world would alter dramatically after
nuclear terrorism.
The coming oil crisis is part of what is known
as carrying capacity overshoot. As any population
grows, it enters is a point where its ecosystem can
no longer sustain it. This occurs when a
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industrial world muscle energy was turned into
food. In the modern world, oil energy is turned
into food for a much larger population, according
to the Global Footprint Network.
Studies show that since the 1970s, humanity
has been in ecological overshoot. We now use
over one and a half years to provide the resources
we use and absorb our waste. This means it takes
Earth's biosphere over one and a half years to
regenerate what we use per year. Further studies
using societal overextension analysis or SLA.
I have drawn similar conclusions about the
USA. For example, the USA as of 2007 use seven
billion tons of natural resources, of which 90
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percent were non-renewable. This means that
ninety three percent of primary energy was nonrenewable, and 87 percent of non-energy
minerals were newly extracted.
Only 13 percent of this non energy minerals
were either renewable or from recycled sources
during a period of volatile oil prices. It might not
be possible to invest in alternatives or substitute
technologies. This means the longer will leave
solving the oil crisis, the less opportunity we have
to make a transition. Whilst there are many ways
to delay matters, it would not be prudent to wait
too long because most, if not all, of our solutions
are best deployed incrementally.
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It does not seem possible that we'll be using
renewable energy by 2030, which is the general
target for most countries. Instead, it is more likely
that a plutonium and synthetic economy mix with
renewable energy for charging electric vehicles
and a hydrogen economy will be phased slowly in
over one hundred years.
As we have seen, the implications of getting
this wrong are huge. Economic certainty is built
upon energy security. Any form of energy
insecurity is likely to destabilize regimes where
there is a large economic transaction. Such
destabilization has already been seen in the
Middle East and North Africa triggered as oil
prices rose and then banks collapsed in 2008. And
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our next chapter, we will consider behavioral
solutions to the oil crisis.
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5. Behavioral
Today, we are going to look at the behavioral
solutions to future oil crisis, the economists view
is that people are in general rational. That is their
react to market forces. If you cannot afford to buy
and run a Ferrari or a private jet you want, instead
you will choose an option that suits your budget.
In this chapter, we will briefly consider human
behavior as a potential solution to the oil crisis.
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We will focus on one technology, personal
electric vehicles. The reason for choosing this
particular technology is simple switching to all
electronic personal transport would have a
significant impact on the use of oil because 55
percent of all oil is personal transport. As a result,
oil demand will fall along with investment and oil
extraction, and this might spark the beginning
phase of a systematic change towards one or a
combination of almost all economies discussed in
previous chapters.
This choice does not suggest for a minute that
this alone will solve the oil crisis, industries won't
be able to wean themselves off oil gas easily to net
energy issues. However, it provides a good basis
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to consider if changing our behavior is an
effective means to alter the economy. Electric
vehicles have exceptional acceleration, but most
people only remember false stories about that
battery endurance.
Since most people don't drive huge distances,
they are practical. As long as recharging or
battery swapping infrastructure is put in place,
electric vehicles are heralded by many to be the
future of all personal transport. Before we look at
one example study, answer the following
questions and note your answers. You might need
to search the Internet to find them.
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Is range an issue for someone who wants to buy
an electric vehicle?
Two is cost a major factor in purchasing an
electric vehicle, if you like, find out the cost of EVs
and compare them to typical diesel vehicle.
What is the difference in running costs
currently? Do you think this will go up or down as
more electric vehicles are utilized as the century
proceeds for?
If you are a businessman, which would you
prefer a built-in permanent battery in your
electric car? Would you charge up regularly or a
car that could pick up every charge battery and a
battery swap station on the highway?
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What is the symbolism of owning electric
vehicle? What does it tell others about you and
your personality?
Does the performance of an electric vehicle
matter in terms of its speed. Is this a major factor
in buying a new vehicle?
Now, we will not fully answer all these
questions in the next section, but we'll cover some
of them. OK, so hopefully you have some brief
answers to these questions now. We'll look at a
study carried out in 2013 by the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research known as
NWS.
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Compare your answers with their study and
know the differences. The study concluded that
people would buy electric vehicles that could
drive 160 kilometers if they were 60 percent lower
in cost than their fossil fuel rivals. The vehicles
range is driving duration and how it was refueled
by charging or swapping batteries or important
factors in different types of users.
Businessmen wanted to be able to swap
batteries with special battery stations rather than
have fixed batteries, which require charging
while the vehicle was stationary, which were
preferred by domestic users. Psychological
perspective, such as the instrumental, symbolic,
and environmental factors are also important.
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People want their electric car to reflect the
personality and demonstrate their concern for
the environment. However, performance was
overestimated as a key factor, which was an
interesting finding. Can government policies
pave the way to switch to electric vehicles, policy
makers in Germany, France, India, Norway, the
United Kingdom, the Netherlands and a number
of states and provinces in North America have
provided timetables to phase out fossil fuel
vehicles sometime between 2025 and 2050.
China has their own timetable. Currently,
electric vehicles represent only two percent of the
total market share in new cars. However, the
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industry is growing rapidly, automakers investing
heavily in giga sized battery factories. And this is
incentivizing electric charging providers and
power utilities to get involved. China has finalized
a new energy vehicle quota system, which
requires the sale of one million vehicles per year.
The EU is considering similar policies. Both
policies are designed to lower the cost of
production, which would lead to mass adoption.
Since 97 percent of electric vehicles are made in
the Far East, new policies are sure to be made to
promote in country manufacturing in Europe and
the USA, trade policies might be changed to
increase the free flow of imported electric cars.
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India has already reduced duties on electric
vehicles, spare parts to assist the electric car
market. We will find out how successful these
policies are in the future. What is your opinion?
No.
Two
answers
now.
What
are
the
psychological barriers to buy an electric vehicle?
This question will be answered differently in
different countries because driving behavior is
different in a nation like the United States
compared to somewhere like Belgium or Holland,
which are much smaller nations. However, since
America is the key nation regarding the oil crisis,
we will focus on a recent study carried out in 2015.
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This was published in the articles in Advance
Section of Manufacturing and Service Operations
Management. The study showed that people
suffer from two anxieties over by electric
vehicles, range anxiety and resale anxiety. Of
book, since the study, battery ranges have
improved. Nevertheless, range anxiety is a key
factor.
This means users require regular charging
points
or
battery
swapping
stations.
Technological improvements will decrease this
anxiety as charging points increase. Resale
anxiety stems from a concern that the price of
electric vehicles will drop so vastly in future that
reselling an older used vehicle will become a
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difficult option. The study was based on two game
theory.
Stage one examined the early phase of electric
vehicle availability and states to investigate the
maturity phase of both new and used electric
vehicles on the market. To Lawlis, calibrated
specifically to the San Francisco Bay Area, we're
actually quite promising, the first model was
based
on
supercharging
stations
being
introduced by the U.S. firms such as Charge Point.
The second model was based on consumer
leased batteries, as well as having access to
enhanced battery charging services and battery
swapping. We're not, for example, cell phones in
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Europe with a battery leasing and quick charging
infrastructure. This gets around the problem of
battery degradation over time, a point noted in
our book on micro renewable energy for
beginners.
This study also shows that consumers can
strangely benefit from these anxieties, yes, range
anxiety hurts early adoption, but research anxiety
only helps adoption. This is because consumers’
anxieties are something that manufacturers take
into consideration, which in return lowers the
cost of cars and increases charging point
deployment.
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In conclusion, behavior is largely determined
by
individual
circumstance,
environment,
government incentives and policies. Demand is
governed largely by initial price running, cost,
reliability, and the product symbolic meaning to
the owner. In the past, Railway's replaced canal
and horse transport and motor vehicle road
transport largely replaced major rail transport
because of two factors that affected cost, speed,
and convenience.
Electric vehicles do not improve speed or
convenience. Instead, they improve local air
quality, which an unseen factor is rarely thought
about unless they suffer from conditions like
asthma. Therefore, government policy is the key
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to their expansion. Also, the change from rail to
road transport was incremental and happened at
different rates in different countries.
Even in the 1960s, there were comparatively
few vehicles in many countries, even if America
had already been using them in cities in the 1930s.
This will be the same again during the
incremental change from fossil fuel vehicles to
electric vehicles. Here is a brighter thought for
the future. Imagine walking down a street that
was freed from local air pollution. That's
something that we all need to be able to do.
When will it happen? Will it be before the oil
crisis becomes apparent to everyone, or will we
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do something about it soon? Because air pollution
and climate change are major concerns. These
are the questions we cannot answer yet. In our
next chapter, we will look at climate change and
what it teaches us about transitions from a fossil
fuel economy to a low carbon economy.
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6. Climate Change - what
does it teach us about
transition?
In this chapter, we will be considering actions
on climate change can help us forecast if humans
will be able to solve the oil crisis. The idea is to
compare what has been done so far to see if it was
successful and then work out if we will be able to
solve future oil crises in a similar way. We will
start by looking at a brief history of the world's
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reaction to climate change in terms of policies
and a position.
In February of 1979, the first ever climate
change conference was held, the signs were still
in its infancy, largely the result of new computing
techniques. Nine years later, in 1988, the United
Nations announced carbon dioxide plays a
fundamental role in determining the temperature
of the earth's atmosphere. And it appears
plausible that an increased amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a
gradual warming.
But the details of the changes are still poorly
understood. The assessment on human CO2
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emissions on climate took a further nine years
until in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was
adopted by most of the world, with the exception
of the USA, the largest cause of the current
emissions. This was the foundation of all political
action
globally
to
reduce
carbon
dioxide
emissions.
In 1998, the oil companies decided to take
action against what they saw as uncertainties in
the scientific evidence Exxon funded groups, a
campaign to undermine climate change theory,
scientific credibility. That same year, a group
from the Oregon Institute of Science and
Medicine collected a petition from scientists who
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believe that there was no convincing scientific
evidence that climate change was manmade.
The petition had thirty-one thousand four
hundred signatures. However, environmental
activists noted that the list contained a number of
fraudulent signatures, including Gary Helliwell, a
former glamour model famous back then as
Ginger Spice. The petitioners later said that they
removed fraudulent names. Oil companies often
lobbied heavily against climate change policies,
was pretending that their companies were green
and clean.
However, by 2006, Exxon had changed track.
Rex Tillerson, the head of Exxon, decided the
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evidence was not sufficient that climate change
was happening due to anthropogenic carbon
dioxide emissions. After all, he advocated carbonbased taxes rather than cap and trade policies.
Was the Kyoto Protocol a success or a failure?
Much of the data is difficult to analyze because
you can find different conclusions depending on
your criteria or perspective.
However, here is one interpretation. The
figure still is one thing. If we consider all nations,
not just those that signed up to the Kyoto Protocol.
Overall, carbon dioxide emissions have risen
between 1990 and 2008 by seven percent. This is
despite European nations claiming an emission
reduction of one percent after 2008.
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There were some reductions due to the global
economic downturn and China trying to do
something about smog. However, in general, it is
clear that the climate change policies have been a
failure. Many nations are now going backwards
on agreements. Some, like the USA, are politically
divided on this subject as much as any other.
Climate change is only on top of the agenda for
fringe movements like the Green Party or
Greenpeace. Major political parties in the USA
and the UK are either ignoring the matter,
sidelining it or openly hostile to the science. The
attitude is that solving this problem is impossible.
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The Kyoto Protocol, therefore, can be seen as
both a success and a failure. It succeeded in
lowering European emissions, but it failed to stop
countries
like
China
from
creating
huge
emissions. The latest version of the U.N. treaty is
known as the Paris Agreement, which virtually
every nation signed up to, including the United
States.
Unfortunately, the USA pulled out of the deal
after Donald Trump took office. If we have first
the oil crisis in the same way the world has tried
to slow down climate change, it might be too little,
too late. This is because, unlike climate change,
which is a long-term problem with the results of
activities, might not be seen for a thousand years.
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The oil crisis could be upon us within the 21st
century. In our next chapter, we will look at an
unlikely glimmer of hope, a continent that could
become the model for all nations if it adopts the
least cost solution to its electricity needs and
understands the need to switch to new kinds of
clean fuels or electricity to power its vehicles.
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7. How Africa might
change the world
This chapter is about the potential of Africa to
help solve the oil crisis. We've called this chapter
How Africa Might Help to change the world. It's
both a question and a statement. In 2018, the U.N.
goals of solving energy poverty in Africa by 2030
are hardly on track to be met.
The goal is to provide electricity to 600 million
people in Africa who don't currently have access
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to it, using the least cost method possible. The
major barriers to this goal a vested interest,
inertia, aversion to change, corruption, political
ineptitude, and a lack of knowledge about the
energy sector amongst political and community
leaders.
Border religious and tribal conflicts don't help
either. Some nations may need to cooperate in the
future if a solution is to be found. The debates to
hurdle the current various revolves around who
should pay for the electrification of Africa and
what type of energy should be used. Then there
are the ongoing payments to consider giving the
levels of poverty in many African nations.
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Finally, Africa will ultimately need a solution to
future transport systems that currently rely on
diesel fuel. Let's start by taking a look at
electrification. Fuel poverty in Africa has massive
implications. It means that many families use
biomass to cook with often in unventilated
accommodation that burn kerosene lamps, which
also emit indoor pollution.
And if they can afford it, they use diesel
generators to power electrical equipment. These
all have health and financial impacts on the
quality of their lives. Notice that both diesel and
kerosene are oil-based products. There are three
ways to solve the African fuel poverty crisis.
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Number one, each African nation could simply
extend its national grid into rural areas to they
could build many smart grids consisting of power
generation like solar Povey battery storage,
automated computer control and transmission
capacities. These are ideal for households and
businesses off grid or integrated with a national
grid. Not free.
They could also invest in standalone systems,
however
big
or
small,
perhaps
to
solve
individual’s needs. These could be upgraded and
integrated with a smart mini grid at a later date.
These three methods all have the parts of play
where you go to look at which one is the least
costly.
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The International Energy Agency in 2017
estimated that smart grids could serve 219 million
people by 2030 and is the least cost option. Other
free choices were mentioned earlier. Smart grids
are self-sufficient electricity grids that possess
their own power generation, usually in the form
of micro renewable energy, such as solar PV,
battery storage and the ability to transmit and
share that power.
Locally, one household can be generating
energy wealth. Another utilizes its power when
there is a demand. Alternatively, unused energy
can be stored to be used at nighttime. If the
system is large enough, this can do away with the
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need to use diesel generators in homes or
eliminate the need to use biomass to cook. In
other words, it is cheaper to put in smart grids
than it is to extend the national grid into a
particular area.
Also, it can be achieved at such a low cost that
governments
could
easily
persuade
utility
companies to help fund it. Given that they make
the ultimate cost savings in future, it can be
connected to extensions to the national grid that
may occur as the country economically develops.
Now we'll take a look at the most difficult
problem, transport, where nations have political
stability, but it's still largely rural.
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Many people are now able to access loans.
These loans help ordinary people buy petroleum
and diesel-powered motorbikes, cars, and trucks,
respectively. It's a progression that seems great
for the economy but is not good for air quality
health, climate change and as we know, is
ultimately unsustainable.
Africa is a large continent similar to the USA.
However, unlike the USA is broken into many
different nations. Trade between these nations
relies on extensive road networks, port facilities
and increasingly air transport. It is also a mineral
rich continent, which means there are many
mines.
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African nations, depending on their size, will
therefore probably for a mixture of solutions to
their transport needs. If they are forced to use less
diesel fuel, this mixture will probably include
LPG and LNG to begin with, followed by a switch
to both electric vehicles and synthetic fuels made
initially from fossil fuels followed by biomass.
The synthetic fuels will probably end up being
used in heavier or longer distance forms of
transport in many nations. At the beginning of
this chapter, we stated how Africa might help to
change the world, we have noted already that
Africa has a huge demand from 600 million
people for electrical energy. That's 600 million is
going to grow rapidly by 2100.
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Where there is huge demand, there is a huge
opportunity. Africa can become the model for
smart grid deployment as US cities grow. It might
be cheaper to use this method first before
relinking to the electric grid at a later date as the
economy takes off. Africa is always worse hit
when there is a global oil crisis, when oil spikes in
price, it often triggers food price rises and
stimulates revolutions and anarchy.
Becoming self-sufficient using biomass to
make synthetic fuels and electrified vehicles is
clearly going to be hugely beneficial to keep food
prices down and thus the stability of government.
Africa is not just going to be a place where
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developed nations go to get resources in the
future, but also will become a huge opportunity
for energy companies, particularly those that
provide smart grids.
Do you think this is a dream? We think, again,
it's already happening. In our next chapter, we
will look at the media and the role in failing to
highlight the future of global oil crisis.
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8. Why are the media
ignoring this problem?
Now we're going to look at the media and why
they're not highlighting the coming oil crisis, this
point has been made by many leading scientists
in this field, but hardly ever reported. It's as if the
media want to hide it. However, where are you
going to show that this is probably not the case?
What is the media? Media is the collective form
of mass communication. There are lots of
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different types of media, such as the Internet,
radio, television, and print media. Social media is
part of the Internet and is starting to become a
dominant form of information exchange. All of
these forms of media have a role to play in
altering
government
policy
and
assisting
technological development.
The question then is why are the media not
highlighting the oil crisis now? We'll take a look at
all the reasons in this chapter, however. Firstly, I
want you to do an interesting exercise. Please look
at two local newspapers, local to your city, town,
or region, and three national newspapers. Feel
free to pause this video and go out and buy them.
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Alternatively, use online versions that are free.
Make sure at least one is a popular tabloid. Now
to the exercise. Look for any articles on the future
oil crisis. If you find any, write down what they
are discussing. Do not include stories about
electric vehicles or renewable energy or shortterm oil price write stories.
Have you done that? Now check the front pages
of each of these papers and write down the major
story headline with a brief note as to what this
headline refers to. I now want you to do the same
using Facebook or Twitter or other social media
use, then Google News, your radio channels and
finally using the Internet, both national and
regional and television websites.
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Remember, we don't want you to put an oil
crisis as a search term, just look at what's on offer
as it is not that on Google you can sign up to
specific items using preselected search terms if
you have done this and use another search engine
without this filter. Now, summarize your
findings. Did you find any news stories relating to
the oil crisis of the future?
Hopefully the exercise has told you something
you should already know, news is about what is
currently happening, not the long-term future or
the past is pretty obvious now. Chuck Hagel,
again, perhaps under the news tab, lets us this
time put in a search term, future oil crisis. When
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we did this, we discovered a whole set of news
items, none of which really got to the heart of the
matter. Most of the other articles are about shortterm oil problems with local production.
The Financial Times says one article that
mentions peak oil suggesting that if we include all
types of oil production, the peak will happen after
2020. That was just one longer piece on the future
decline of globalization. When energy becomes
constrained in this exercise, we have to put this
term into Google News, put it straight into Google
search engine. We would get more results that
those do not point people don't search for news,
then let it arrive.
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They are passive harvesters, not hunter
gatherers of news media. People like journalists
are also often not as independent as we would like
to believe. Many media giants are nothing more
than the partisan power political propaganda
channel. So my right wing, others left. Some
claim to be unbiased when they're clearly heavily
biased.
In some nations, media's heavily controlled
Russia's media are heavily censored and careful
to praise President Putin and avoid discussions on
energy, which Putin has in the past used to
control neighboring states by simply cutting off
supplies.
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In theory, we would expect the far-right media
in the United States of America would support the
belief that unregulated oil drilling would solve the
problem, whereas the left wing wants to stop
climate change but limit its oil use and replacing
it with renewable energy. No doubt you will find
these extreme views out there on the Internet.
However, when the longer-term oil crisis is
highlighted, the bias evaporates in the face of
facts. This is a sign that we still have hope. Not
much, but at least it shows potential. Back in 2012,
Fox News interviewed Robert Repay, the author
of Powerplays Energy Options in the Age of Peak
Oil.
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Rubio spells it out that oil depletion and the
lack of solutions are a threat to energy supplies in
the future. He's very clear that we need to start
acting now or face serious consequences. This is
a minor video, not an ongoing story like plastic
pollution in the ocean. The media are not
highlighting the need for young people to get
involved in solving the coming oil crisis. It's a
problem that is not going to attract readers,
listeners and viewers and thus will be of no
interest to advertisers.
Then there is a problem of opposing so-called
experts’ views, most journalists are not experts in
the field of energy. They often pay for expert’s
views. To get unbiased views is quite difficult. So
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they might stretch their budget to pay to experts
with opposing views in our subject matter. This is
usually an extremist clash between a cornucopia
and a guest.
The first believes oil or something similar will
always be here due to human ingenuity. The latter
says statistics prove the oil must peak in
production. Unfortunately, the complexity of the
subject matter ends up with a journalist
misinterpreting both sides.
Peak oil, being a complex subject, gets
misrepresented as a decline of oil or end of oil and
energy, or EROI is hardly noticed, since these are
too difficult to explain, leaving the cornucopia
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and views of a bright and sunny future prevalent
because their theory is easier to explain. If the
journalist thought about it for a minute, they
would know that everything has its limits, even
human ingenuity.
The world economy is like a bicycle. If it
doesn't go fast enough, it topples over. That's
essentially the problem we face. Unless the
economy grows, it collapses. Likewise, if global
oil production fails to grow, the global oil
economy collapses. Yet no journalists ever
consider this as a starting point to discuss a future
energy crisis.
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Then there is the issue of what advertisers and
customers want to hear about. Advertisers want
the media to sell more products. A story about a
future oil crisis 50 years or more away is unlikely
to compete with current affairs or scandals.
Instead, what we get in the media is exactly what
advertisers believe will help to sell the products.
That is, we get newsworthy stories that attract
readership. No one is suggesting this is a bad
thing. This is, after all, the stuff of life. Media is
becoming open to all. Many people now rely on
Google News or similar rather than conventional
sources such as newspapers for information.
They can choose what they wish to read, or they
can just let the Internet feed them.
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The news from the statistics, we see less and
less people reading in-depth articles. People are
increasingly relying on video or so Facebook
articles for news. News in this format is open to
manipulation. It is becoming more sensational
click bait, full of fear and largely reveal the very
wealthy.
News agencies and outlets, especially on
television, still have control because advertisers
are still ready to pay them. Even on the Internet.
Gaining higher placement on search engines is
often obtained by being able to pay more money.
Here's a question for you. What is your opinion of
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the views expressed on your favorite social media
channel?
Do they ever question your long-held views? Do
they provide you information you are interested
in, or is it just random noise? The growing
problem with the media is that there is a
developing lack of trust. Trust is hard to establish,
but easy to lose. There are many ways that stress
is lost by the worst of all is by a slow, relentless
loss of sales.
People can get into the news free of charge on
the smartphone. Why then buy a newspaper?
Furthermore, this can now be exploited by using
sound bites reminiscent of Nazi Germany instead
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of a Foo bar I and lies. We now have Made
America great again or a strong and stable
government.
On top of this we have fake news, a phrase you
saw often by Donald Trump to dismiss reasonable
questions that everyone is now using it as a means
to stop people from investigating reality. Peak oil
is often now related to fake news, even though, as
we have shown, it is a valid theory based on
statistical modeling.
The lack of trust is not helped by outrageous
acts of pure journalistic bias and improper
behavior. Two examples come to mind. Firstly, in
twenty seventeen during a British general
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election, the BBC did a short report on the Labor
Party there. One of the two main political parties
in the United Kingdom as a journalist walk down
the street.
The camera ended by panning up words to
show the street name on the wall. It said
shambles. The BBC has also recently been found
guilty, infringing Sarah Kliff Richards privacy
rights in a serious and sensationalist way and
heavily fined if they are unable to control their
reporters and editors regarding relatively easy to
understand matters such as these, then what is
the hope for journalists being trusted on
complicated matters such as the portrayal of a
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future oil crisis, peak oil, EROI, e net energy and
climate change?
Let's draw some conclusions, Willis' some of
the conclusions for you to complete. Sit down for
five minutes and consider your own findings
from the exercise you did at the beginning of this
lesson. Freeze the video now and do that exercise,
then continue. OK, hopefully you will see a
pattern that goes something like this, though it
may be different in some parts.
Firstly, the media are nearly oblivious to the
coming oil crisis unless they search for it. That
means people will be oblivious to it as well. What
is never highlighted is never known. This has
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similarities to plastic pollution. That's why David
Attenborough's Blue Planet two documentary on
plastic pollution seems to have come to many
people
as
such
a
shock,
even
though
environmental experts have known about it for
years.
Secondly, media is now so diverse that the old
forms of print media will soon be non-existent or,
if they still exist, will be read by a minority rather
than a majority. This means that people are
engaging in forms of media that are unchecked,
factually and potentially biased.
Thirdly, these new forms of media, which
include Internet video platforms like YouTube or
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Vimeo and social media such as Facebook or
Twitter, are becoming the major sources of news
search engines like Google, who owns you to
promote
the
space
and
advertising
or
newsworthiness.
Fourthly,
mentioned,
even
when
journalists
the
often
oil
like
crisis
to
is
put
opponents against each other. One of these will
usually be misrepresenting scientific knowledge,
falsifying what peak oil is, and never mentioning
important issues such as net energy, EROI or
energy density.
These subjects are considered too complex for
ordinary folks to understand. Religion less
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interviewer avoids that subject. Although it may
seem the media are intentionally blacking out a
story that's not the case.
Climate change campaigners are often in the
news because it's newsworthy. It's much easier to
campaign to reduce CO2 emissions than to
campaign
for
technological
and
economic
overthrow of the age of oil.
The few transitions town groups people
campaign to alter society by transitioning away
from oil are seen as extremists, allotment growers
and tree huggers, even though they probably
share the same goals and values as Greenpeace,
the Green Party, or the Worldwide Fund for
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Nature. In our next chapter, we're going to give
you a treat.
It's the concluding chapter for this book and
the look forward to next book on finding a
solution to the even longer-term energy crisis by
utilizing our space. I'm starting to understand
your book.
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9. Beyond Earth: Can we
find a Solution in Outer
Space
Today, we will pull together some of the
previous books, chapters, to give you an
understanding of the probable future of energy,
as we noted earlier. No one can tell the future.
However, we're lucky to live in an age of
unprecedented computing power and maturity of
knowledge in science and history. This means we
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have the tools to make better predictions about
the future than any generation before.
US will therefore look back at our chapters and
finite resources such as fossil fuels and recap the
problems associated with consumption rates.
Then we will look at the potential solutions and
see if they meet the energy criteria that make
society functional and civilization stable.
Then we'll see what additional things we might
do to help increase this functionality in a future
without oil. Let me quickly summarize some of
the key aspects of this book regarding the loss of
resources over the coming century. This is also
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known as resource exploration. Our planet is like
a spaceship with limited resources.
Humans are both a species and a potential
long-term protector of life on Earth, where plague
species, because of the sudden exponential
growth in our population, which appears to be
correlated to the growth of oil as the primary fuel.
Rates of growth of any kind have associated
doubling times, which means there are always
growing exponentially.
For example, even a tiny growth rate of just
seven percent per year will double what is
growing every 10 years. This also applies in
reverse for decline rates. The expiration timing of
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natural resources such as oil, gas and coal are
highly dependent on consumption rates of
growth.
Finding new sources adds very little time to the
point at which the resource is no longer economic
to extract, to utilize at a global consumption rate
of two percent a year. Despite new finds and
technologies, economically recoverable oil is
predicted by First-order calculation to expire by
midcentury, followed by gas and coal towards the
latter half of the century. The exact timings are
not known, but it must happen eventually.
Oil is the dominant fuel since the 20th century.
It runs out a global economy, powering
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containerships between China and America and
helping to carry goods across vast continents. If it
rises in price beyond what can be afforded, it has
the potential to cause mass unemployment, bank
collapse,
economic
stagnation,
and
social
anarchy.
We've experienced this in 2008 to 2009 and
previously. As oil becomes scarce, it is likely that
gas will take over. It may come in many different
forms from LBG and LNG to hydrogen and even
biogases. However, the evidence is that natural
gas will be only a stopgap method by around two
thousand seventy-five.
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Gas will also expire economically if the
consumption rate is two percent a year. Although
coal is a huge resource, it is highly dependent on
the reboots we obtain from cheap oil and gas for
extraction and transportation. Coal is likely to
deplete economically by the end of the century
and a few decades beyond. It may even end up
being turned into synthetic liquid fuels.
This may be one way we forestall the
inevitable, but it may come at a huge cost to the
environment in terms of climate change, because
unlike natural gas, turning coal into liquid fuels
releases lots of carbon dioxide. The consequences
of failing to solve the oil crisis are profound.
Imagine a world without a plentiful supply of
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energy
for
transport,
building
or
mining
materials.
This would be an economic catastrophe. We
know from history that the bronzy civilizations
fell into a period of anarchy, of a three hundred
years that led to a dark age where nothing was
recorded because no civilizations existed.
One of the major reasons for these falls was the
loss of their primary energy as the primary
energy returned so that new civilizations we do
not know if it is possible for future civilizations to
return after full of the kind that our modern world
would
experience,
especially
proliferation of nuclear weapons.
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What we're required to solve the problem is a
sustainable energy solution to start with and a
long-term solution that goes beyond what we can
achieve on planet Earth with its limited resources.
In this book, we've tested three major solutions to
the problem of the loss of oil and fossil fuels.
Firstly, we discussed the hydrogen economy,
which was several difficulties, mostly to do with
using energy to compress hydrogen and then
containing it. Secondly, we looked at electric
renewable energy economy, which in smaller
nations such as in Europe, may prove to be an
ideal solution.
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It may also work very well in remote areas such
as Africa, where smart grids may take over from
larger utility companies. Thirdly, we discussed
the plutonium and synthetic fuel economy. This,
we noted, would work very well in larger
countries where existing pipelines and transport
networks could be utilized at a lower cost than
having to extend the electricity grid.
Fusion power utilizing the oceans for biomass
and geothermal energy may also add to the
mixture. Going beyond this century, however,
one exciting idea is to utilize the oceans and later
out of space. This will be the subject of our next
book. Here we will look at the possibilities of
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going beyond the limits of planet Earth, limited
resources.
Net energy matters, it matters because it tells
us if an energy economy is viable in terms of
allowing society and thus civilization to function
correctly, we know that the hydrogen, synthetic
fuel and renewable electric energy economies all
fall inside the non-functional society areas of our
graph. Only the plutonium economy fits inside
the marginally functional society area about
Grauwe.
Oil in its heyday, the period that built most of
what we have now said above this area, the ratio
of 15 to one where society was fully functional.
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Now it has fallen below that to about 10 to one or
seven to one, according to how you measure it.
We're just about hanging on the cusp of what is
functional.
This may help to explain some of the issues
that we're currently facing around the world. This
does not bode well for the future of civilization,
societies that devote too many resources merely
to dealing with obtaining energy, yet have vast
populations to satisfy, are in danger of ecosystem
overshoot.
If the demand for energy is more than can be
supplied, it means that many will go without.
When people in large numbers go without, there
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is
usually
instability,
both
politically and
militarily. If the solutions are not completely
viable, then humanity will need to think laterally
and differently to solve these problems.
There are lots of ways to tackle these problems
if we start to challenge our assumptions and long
held beliefs, each one of the following would help
to ameliorate low net energy ratios that we
encounter when we're no longer able to utilize oil
economically.
Firstly, the human population is the key
problem to all our environmental and energy
problems. Solve this and we solve everything we
believe we currently have is the preservation of
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human life at all costs. However, keeping people
alive longer increases demands on everything,
including energy.
Extending human life seems to be the general
goal of all medical science. This raises the
question is this a wise policy, given what we know
from the viewpoint of energy and ecology?
Secondly, we could try to increase our energy
efficiency. However, we must note that consume
Brooks postulate and the Jevons Paradox both
teach us that energy efficiency alone does not
always solve energy use. In some cases, it even
increases it. Whatever the case, in cooler
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climates, insulation is to be a standard fitting on
all homes and retrofitted if necessary.
Thirdly, we could buy food from local farms or
grow our own where possible if we were to try to
encourage as much self-sufficiency as possible,
along with designing cities so that they can use
permaculture techniques. This would again
increase efficient use of energy.
Permaculture may be the most sustainable
method of living we can envisage going forward.
Fourthly, we could seek technological solutions
that right now seem too expensive, but in the
future it may be possible. These would include
utilizing our oceans and later, outer space. This is
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often called going beyond sustainability, and this
is a subject of our next book. Now answer the
questions at the end of the section. We hope you
enjoyed this book. And we look forward to you
reading the next one, The Energy of the Future.
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