In the face of cognitive failure the choice is now ours
- xav031
- Mar 23, 2015
- 5 min read
Professor Klare concluded his “30-year war” essay by making a bet:
“Were I to wager a guess [for a range of most beneficial solutions], I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralised, easy to make and install, and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment. For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s. The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.”
The paradigm shift profiled in the literature reviewed in the previous section would enable winning Professor Klare’s bet and fulfilling the “miracles” called for by the likes of Bill Gates.
In fact, the know-how to use innovatively existing, well-proven, technologies and to integrate them in order to achieve the objective summarised by Professor Klare is available and initiatives to do so are taking place albeit in extremely precarious fashion in the midst of billions spent by governments and large corporate businesses on extremely low EROI projects that have no longer-term future – the metaphor of tiny mammals evolving in between the legs of doomed dinosaurs comes to mind.
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 EROIs 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 – that is to say, the equivalent of Professor Klare’s “laptop” and even more to the point creating a highly efficient and sustainable Internet of Energy. [1]
In fact, technology presently under development commercially, including at SynGeni, goes well beyond what is presented in the above works. We can be so bluntly affirmative because we have been working in this very field for decades and have filed for patents concerning some such high EROI novel technology integration. Under mass manufacturing conditions, at SynGeni, we have ascertained that it is feasible to very rapidly achieve equipment costs of less than €500/kW of installed power and energy costs of less than €0.05/kWh for electricity as well as hot and cold energy flows generated directly at or near end-users’ premises using 100% direct solar influxes. This is over 12 times less expensive than nuclear in terms of capital costs and 2 to 4 times less expensive in terms of average end-user energy costs, and sometimes even less. This kind of emerging technology would enable achieving an increase in productivity by a factor of about 10 over the whole of agricultural and industrial value chains. This is rapidly feasible on the basis of innovative integrations of well-proven, existing technologies.
In short, 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 harvest 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 humankind must face is thus not one of technology development – technology development is the easy part. Instead, the most stringent challenge humankind presently must face is that of cognitive failure, that is to say, the cognitive and cultural inability by key decision-makers, and by extension that of a society or civilisation, to figure out how to use available know-how, expertise, experience and skills, in order to successfully meet the challenges it faces within the time frame that remains for them to face them.[2]
Figure 13 – to BAU or not to BAU?
Figure 13 illustrates the BAU trajectory our industrialised world is presently on by focusing on the Global Industrial Output generated in the Standard Run of the World3 model. [3] In effect, the blue curve in Figure 13 has come to summarise the challenges and dire prospects that humankind is now confronted with, namely that short of drastic action over the next few years the most probable trajectory is a collapse down to pre-industrial levels.
The blue curve on Figure 13, in effect illustrates the dynamics that Joseph Tainter analysed as early as 1988. In short, notwithstanding their actual knowledge and capabilities, in most cases civilisations do not collapse directly as a result of overstepping ecological limits but more fundamentally when the energy costs of solving the problems that they encounter or create become significantly higher than the energy flows that they can mobilise within the framework of the mythical corpuses under which they operate. [4] The abundance of thermodynamic evidence that has come to light in recent years points firmly towards the globalised industrial world being in the process of falling into such an energy trap.
The fall is not yet irretrievable. On Figure 13 we have also superimposed the “green” trajectory that has been demonstrated to be feasible, based on the kind of paradigm shift, Bill Gates, Professors Klare, Rifkin and others all are calling for. The contrast between the blue and green curves is striking.
It is probably far too late to escape some form of global crash over the next few years, of which Professor Klare’s “30-year war” is the most likely foreground. However, on the one hand a brisk and sustainable recovery along something like the green curve in Figure 13 remains feasible and on the other hand if the present narrow “window of opportunity” to follow this track is missed, it is most unlikely that the global situation will be any longer retrievable and a civilisation collapse much worse than that of the Roman Empire is the most probable outcome.
So, for all of us right now the choice is indeed ours to let matters follow the BAU course or to take the initiative and ensure our future.
[1] Concerning information in the public domain see for example:
Jacobson, Mark Z. and Delucchi, Mark A., 2009, “A path to sustainable Energy by 2030” in Scientific American, November;
Teske, Sven, Zervos, Arthouros, Lins, Christine, Muth, Josche and their research Team, 2010, Energy [R]evolution, towards a fully renewable energy supply in the EU 27, European Renewable Energy Council (EREC) and Greenpeace International;
Matthes, Felix Chr., Hermann, Hauke and Zimmer, Wiebke, 2011, The Vision Scenario for the European Union 2011 Update for the EU-27, Öko-Institut e.V., Berlin;
WWF in conjunction with ECOFYS and OMA, 2011, The Energy Report, 100% Renewable Energy by 2050, available at: http://www.bcg.com/expertise_impact/publications/PublicationDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-51645).
[2] Prevailing cognitive failure in the face of the global energy and ecological catastrophe in the making is intimately allied with a profound lack of intelligence understood in the etymological sense of the word, from an Indo-European root *leg- to pick, choose, gather, the Latin intelligere, to discern, intellectus, discerning, intelligens, judicious – a profound lack of ability to judiciously discern what is actually the case and what can and is to be done about it.
[3] Adapted from Debora MacKenzie, 2012, “Boom and doom: Revisiting prophecies of collapse” in New Scientist, No 2846, 4 January. To date the blue curve has remained within 10% of actual historical data.
[4] Tainter, Joseph, 1988, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, and Tainter, Joseph A., 1996, “Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies”, in Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics, Island Press.
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