The ugly, the bad and the good

The ugly, the bad and the good – Overview of the dire global situation and of the opportunity it presents for a bright, 100% sustainable, prosperous future.

Analyses of recent energy and ecological data show conclusively that the whole of the industrialised world is in the process of passing below key thermodynamic viability thresholds. This decline, in progress since the 1970s, cannot but rapidly deepen so long as the thermodynamic challenges this very industrial world has unwittingly created for itself have not been understood and met. Failing this, if the present trajectory is pursued even only a few more years, collapse will rapidly become unavoidable. To be bluntly clear, over the last two decades the global situation has become one of sheer emergency.

Along the present trajectory the industrialised world can no longer generate each year energy flows large enough to (1) reinvest part of these flows into ensuring further ongoing energy supplies in subsequent years using existing infrastructures, (2) sustain the levels of prosperity expected in industrialised countries, (3) bring more people globally to these levels of prosperity, (4) alleviate and mitigate the huge ecological consequences of fossil and nuclear fuels use, and (5) develop and deploy alternatives to fossil fuels with high enough energy yields to ensure sustainability. Put metaphorically, these five types of energy flows fit together like the five fingers of one’s hand. Not only the global financial and economic crisis that has been unfolding since 2007 is fundamentally energy driven but, even more to the point, since around the mid-1990s the industrialised world has begun to relentlessly lose its “fingers” knuckle by knuckle, like a kind of insidious, still largely unseen, leprosy.

The challenges are four folds:

1. Yields in terms of energy returned per unit of energy invested (EROI) for fossil fuels are rapidly declining and now passing below the 10:1 bare viability minimum;

2. Yields for all alternative technologies (concerning nuclear, non conventional fossil resources as well as so-called renewable ones) also remain far too low, mostly below 10:1;

3. In the absence of a viable thermodynamic future the present fiat monetary and financial system has fallen in a state of limbo, de facto economics as we know it has lost all meaning, the global debt that amounts to over three times the world GDP cannot be ever repaid, and the total global monetary and quasi monetary mass, presently in the order of US$700 trillion has no longer any tangible value; and

4. Instead of climate change and other global ecological challenges unfolding gradually into the very long term we must now face the immediate threat of very abrupt, catastrophic warming (potentially over 6oC in a matter of a few decades).

Perhaps of greatest concern in respect of item four above is the accelerated warming of the Arctic and the chain of drastic consequences this trend entails for the near future, including the collapse of Arctic summer ice (now expected to be completely gone between 2015 and 2018) and huge Arctic methane stores becoming highly unstable as a result of present accelerated Arctic warming. Large releases to the atmosphere of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, are becoming susceptible to be triggered at any time once the stores are unstable. Any such release would mean drastic, abrupt climate change. The chief issue here is that presently the industrialised world does not have the first Joule of the huge amounts of energy required to deal with abrupt climate and global ecological change, let alone maintaining its own thermodynamic viability.

Notwithstanding the gloomy prospects for the present “Business-as-Usual” trajectory (BAU), at the very heart of the global tragedy that is unfolding, lies the opportunity for a bright, 100% sustainable, prosperous future. Within the short and rapidly shrinking time window that remains, the above four challenges can be met, and in fact can only be met, through a radical paradigm shift focusing on the 510 TW of available solar influx versus only about 17 TW presently derived from fossil and nuclear sources. There is absolutely no “natural” energy scarcity. Scarcity is something engineered by people as a result of how they think, what they believe, and how they act to achieve essentially predatory, shorter-term aims for their own businesses notwithstanding that other paradigmatic options they remain blind to would be significantly more beneficial to them as well as to everyone else.

Specifically, established knowledge and expertise are available concerning how to generate electricity (as well as motive power and other hot and cold energy flows) in a completely distributed fashion, on or near the places of energy use or concerning transport, with sustainable EROI yields well above 30:1, at a significantly lower cost than electricity derived from nuclear or fossil resources, and 100% from primary energy derived from the sun. At SynGeni we have ascertained that this is rapidly feasible on the basis of innovative integrations of well-proven, existing technologies and in a fashion that would enable achieving an increase in productivity by a factor of about 10 over the whole of agricultural and industrial value chains. Such high EROI and productivity yields are only achievable by emulating what nature has been doing over some 3.8 billion years, i.e. integrating energy harvesting and uses in highly distributed and intelligently networked fashion, that is, creating a highly efficient and low cost Internet of Energy.

Instead of a politics of poverty and energy scarcity, it is feasible to put in place a politics of sustainable energy abundance that would maximise the thermodynamic power that each country or region may muster over its own territory and this without affecting in anyway the production of food and other goods from agriculture or impinging on existing wilderness spaces.

The fundamental challenge is not one of technology development. Instead, the most stringent challenge that we must all face is that of cognitive failure – the demonstrated cognitive and cultural inability of present decision-making elites to use available know-how, expertise, experience and skills, in order to forge a sustainable path within the time frame that remains. So, right now it is up to all of us, as individual or as businesses to take the initiative and ensure our future. The opportunity but also the responsibility is there for all of us to take, right at the heart of the crisis, to forge a 100% solar, sustainable, and prosperous world, the opportunity to support and contribute to the accelerated development and implementation of high EROI energy technologies and use them to accomplish the urgently required energy, ecological and social paradigm shift.

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