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20. The evolving credit crisis has led to a drop of 19% in energy investments in 2008 according to the International Energy Agency and the cancellation of many projects that depended upon high oil prices such as the tar sands.
21. J. Hamilton, “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock 2007–2008,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (March 2009).
22. M. Scheffer, Critical Transitions in Nature and Society (Princeton Univ. Press, 2009).
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27. H. Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People, Science vol. 327 (2010).
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30. “Germany Faces Freight Train Shortage as Growth Picks Up, Der Spiegel Online (4 May 2010), spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,687291,00.html.
* We are ignoring velocity of money for clarity, though it does not significantly change the main conclusion.
* Total paper assets are approximately $300Tr based upon on a GWP of $50Tr. The latter must collapse for the reasons discussed. In addition there are the monetary system risks discussed.
Future Energy Availability: The Importance of “Net Energy”
CHRIS VERNON
There is a lot of oil still left in the ground but unless, when it is put to work, it yields perhaps four times the energy it took to extract and refine it, it might as well not be there. As a result, the supply could contract very rapidly indeed and the world may have run out of useful oil by 2050.
All life needs energy. Organisms depend for their survival on their ability to gain energy from their environment with which to weather the elements, survive pathogens, fight or flee from predators and, of course, procreate. The unique genius of Homo sapiens lies in our ability to manipulate our environment’s energy system. Tools are a means of focusing the energy in our muscles, a knife focuses energy onto a fine edge and a lever multiplies mechanical force. The development of tools elevated us beyond other species and enabled Homo sapiens to colonize the planet successfully.
Focusing internally metabolized energy with tools was just the first step, however. Humanity’s dominance of the Earth today, which has led to the Anthropocene being regarded as new geological era, has come about because we no longer rely solely on the food we eat to energize our way of life but employ secondary and greater sources of energy. A recent book, Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, claims that a breakthrough in human evolution happened 1.8 million years ago when our forebears tamed fire and began cooking. This use of fire by Homo erectus led to anatomical and physiological changes that adapted us to eating cooked food.
Offshore Wind and Tidal Barrages Give Good Energy Returns
FIGURE 1: The world does not need just energy — it needs energy that is delivered with very low levels of carbon dioxide emissions (that is, a low-carbon intensity) while still giving a lot more energy back than it took to produce it. This chart, by Evan Robinson, shows the most promising technologies and those to ignore. The half dots indicate where a technology is beyond the limits of the chart. Source: http://evanrobinson.typepad.com/ramblings/science_nature/.
Wrangham argues that hominids’ jaws, teeth and guts were able to shrink, and more calories were available to fuel their expanding brains, because cooking made it easier for our bodies to extract energy from food.
Then, in the Neolithic period, approximately 9,500 BC, the domestication of animals provided a new source of energy, and for the next 10,000 years, Homo sapiens steadily increased its access to energy by burning biomass, using draft animals and, eventually, harnessing water and the wind. The amount of energy that humanity harnessed from transient energy flows provided by the sun increased steadily for many years. The rate of growth in the energy supply accelerated somewhat when the Romans started to employ limited amounts of coal and soared dramatically after the development of James Watts’ condensing steam engine in the 1770s and, more generally, the start of the industrial revolution.
Coal represented something new. For the first time, energy from a different time period was accessible and, more importantly, available on a larger time scale. Before coal, the available energy was limited to the proportion of the transient energy flows the technology of the day could capture. Coal (and the other fossil fuels) enables us to access a stock of energy sequestered over millions of years in the distant past and, to release that energy over a few short centuries.
Just as tools enabled early man to exceed the physical limits of his body by focusing the energy of his muscles, fossil fuel enables us to use more energy than we could obtain from current natural flows by tapping into vast stocks of ancient energy. The rate at which we are drawing down this ancient stock can only lead to its depletion. The characteristics of this depletion are already becoming apparent, years before its total exhaustion.
