IT’S THE OILCONOMY, STUPID— Part 5: THE INDISPENSABLE ROLE OF ENERGY IN ECONOMIES

IT’S THE OILCONOMY, STUPID

Part 5: THE INDISPENSABLE ROLE OF ENERGY IN ECONOMIES or: ENERGY PHYSICS FOR THE AVERAGE IDIOT (but incomprehensible to sub-average idiot economists)

[Note: I fortuitously completed this essay #5 before essay #4 (which will be on the dialectical comparison between the geopolitical economies of China and the USA), so I am posting this first.]

Parts 1 to 4 focus on geopolitical economics, which are social “sciences” or more accurately pseudosciences, because hypotheses cannot be proven in the same way that [we do in] the hard sciences. Physics, Chemistry, Biology can prove their postulates using real-world empirical measurements, observations, hypothesis formation and experimentation to validate or refute theories.

Neoliberal/neoclassical economics in particular, despite being steeped in recent decades in fancy next-to-incomprehensible mathematical equations conjured up by necromancers and celebrated by a fake Nobel economics prize (= Bank of Sweden prize for liars and Empire apologists), has been shown to be repeatedly wrong (yet “coincidentally” always benefits the rich, especially them bankers). This has resulted in economics being called for at least a century the “dismal science”, but of course, as Yanis Varoufakis says, economics is not a science at all. It is simply dismal.

Prof. M. Hudson

Nevertheless, because our physical and mental well-being are related to achieving modest material wealth, we still need to find some way to rationally investigate economics, the study of how material wealth is created, and there are some brilliant luminaries (NON-Neoliberal/neoclassical) we must listen to, especially Professor Michael Hudson.

TRUTH

The greatest contribution to the world by Western civilisation was the scientific method, which supposedly guided the Enlightenment. The Needham paradox raises the question as to why the scientific method did not arise in China (which had been technologically far ahead of the rest of the world for most of human history), especially because the Chinese seem to take to the scientific method like ducks to water. It was the scientific method that propelled meteoric Western technological advances, especially in weaponry, which enabled the West to bully the rest since 1600 CE in particular. Today, the West has largely descended into Endarkenment, with abandonment of the principles of objective scientific enquiry and refusal to accept objective facts, exemplified by their widespread denial of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) which was first identified in 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. In China, there is simply no debate that AGW is real and is dead serious, and if we are not serious about it, we will all be dead.

Some basic concepts first. Lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, PR “experts” and other professional liars assert that there is no such thing as Truth, only what they can persuade you to believe is truth. They are self-serving sociopaths and mind polluters.

The spectacular success of the scientific method to deliver technological advances which have lifted much of humanity out of poverty and vastly improved the quality and longevity of our lives is undeniable. Robustly built climate climate-controlled dwellings and offices and shopping centres; rapid transportation systems; supply chains and industries to mass produce affordable commodities to benefit households (kitchen and laundry and entertainment appliances, etc), uncountable medical and surgical advances, etc. All those material benefits derive from scientifically proven paradigms which WORK (reproducibly and reliably, over and over) in the real world, thus proving the FACT that OBJECTIVE TRUTH EXISTS. If scientific paradigms were incorrect and did not reflect the Laws of Nature in the real world, then the technologies built from them would simply not work. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS THE ONLY RELIABLE WAY WE HAVE OF IDENTIFYING OBJECTIVE TRUTH.

This is NOT THE SAME as saying we can achieve ABSOLUTE TRUTH. Indeed, science itself has mathematically and experimentally proven that ABSOLUTE TRUTH CAN NEVER BE ACHIEVED (principally via Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the three-body problem).

Nevertheless, we can achieve a high approximation of reality, of objective truth, which has enabled all the fields of hard science to be validated in real life beyond any doubt whatsoever.

If a lawyer or politician or lobbyist or PR “expert” disputes this point with you, you must tell them to stop using their cellphones and computers because they work using technology based on science. You must tell them to never seek a scientific medical diagnosis if they ever get ill, because such an opinion, based on objective examinations, investigations, measurements and scans can never be 100% absolutely truthful, it may only be correct 90% of the time. Hence they should go to a Voodoo doctor or snake oil peddler instead, because one “truth” is as good as another, right?

Can we apply the scientific method (=method of sceptical enquiry using validated facts and rational analysis) to our daily lives? Can we discover objective truth for ourselves? YES!!!

How do we know a paradigm is true? It is based on the comprehensive collection of irrefutable facts, application of unassailable logic, and is UNFALSIFIABLE. Furthermore, it is the best explanation for a situation and the best foundation for predicting outcomes.

Of all the fields of hard science, Physics has been described as the King of sciences, because of its spectacular success and also the fact that chemical processes are dependent on the laws of Physics.

Furthermore, biological processes are dependent on chemical processes and hence ultimately dependent on the laws of Physics. The Laws of Physics cannot be argued with (certainly not by lawyers and other jackasses) because they have been proven by painstaking scientific investigation to be objectively correct. Gravity exists, well approximated by Newton’s Laws and later refined further by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The Laws of Physics are completely different from the laws of humans, which were subjectively created by humans, frequently to benefit those who created those laws (eg, laws enabling slave ownership, Jim Crow and apartheid laws, etc., etc).

ENERGY

Open any high school Physics textbook and you will find their definition of energy as “the capacity to do work”. That definition needs further elaboration, outlined below.

The vast majority of economists are blind to the absolute requirement that energy is necessary to run ALL economic activities, EVERY single activity, bar none. Those majority economists apply false thinking: if your iron ore input into a smelter drops by 10%, your iron ingot output will similarly drop by 10%. Fair enough. But most go on to believe that energy is just one commodity among many, just one input among many other equally important inputs (labour, land, capital, infrastructure, raw materials, enterprise etc) that are fed into an economic activity and if the monetary cost of the energy input represents, say, just 10% of the total input costs of the entire activity, and if you lose the input of that one commodity, your output will drop by just 10%.

It is obvious to any average idiot that if you lack the energy to run things, then nothing can happen, everything grinds to a halt, your output becomes zero. Energy is the sine qua non without which no economy can function, no activity can occur. Unfortunately, most economists are stupider than the average idiot. Here is an anecdote about a United Nations Environment Program economist who said that “if we need more energy, we can simply make it by combining capital and labour”.

(See around 6 min 20 sec)

That sub-average idiot economist held the belief that economists can violate the first law of thermodynamics (energy can neither be created nor destroyed), another basic concept found in any high school Physics textbook.

“…we will never run out of copper because “copper can be made from other metals.” The letters to the editor jumped all over him, told him about chemistry. He just brushed it off: “Don’t worry,” he said, “if it’s ever important, we can make copper out of other metals.”

From: Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy (transcript).

http://theoildrum.com/node/7343

“Professor” Simon shared a supernatural mindset held by pre-science “philosopher stone” transmutation warlocks and sorcerers, pure hocus pocus.

I will later interpret the real meaning of the famous Ehrlich-Simon wager, which Ehrlich lost not because he was wrong, but because of his failure to clarify and incorporate in his bet the difference between price and (true) cost. If energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then surely the non-descructibility of energy means that we will always have that energy forever and we will always have the capacity to do work forever? That idea is obviously incorrect; there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine and hence we need to examine more closely what it means to be able to do work, which is based on the ability to harness energy GRADIENTS.  It is true that energy cannot be destroyed, however in harnessing any source of energy (or converting one form of energy to another), the energy progressively disperses as heat and becomes ultimately unusable for practical purposes. This is the second law of thermodynamics, also called entropy, which many physicists regard as the most inviolable law of Physics of all (even the “flow” of time may depend on entropy). All concentrated high-energy sources ultimately get dispersed as heat, which is nothing more than molecular agitation (Brownian motion).

If you have water at 120 degrees Celsius that is pressurised within a tank, that represents stored energy. If you release it through a valve to the atmosphere, thus turning it into steam (which occurs because of the heat and pressure gradients between the inside and outside of that tank), you can use that steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity. However, within the confines of that tank of pressurised water of 120 C, inside that tank, it is not possible to do any work because there is NO ENERGY GRADIENT INSIDE that environment. Hence, the “capacity to do work” is NOT the same as energy, the capacity to do work is dependent on ENERGY GRADIENTS.

What are energy gradients? If a boulder sits atop a hill, it has potential gravitational energy and if it starts rolling downhill that potential energy is converted into kinetic (=mechanical) energy and heat (from friction with the ground and even the air). We harness gravitational energy gradients with hydroelectric dams, when water from a high point flows downhill and rotates turbines which convert mechanical to electrical energy. Similarly, winds blow due to atmospheric pressure gradients (created by sunlight, which differentially heats land and sea) and we harness that kinetic energy to turn windmills to generate electricity.

Where does the electricity from nuclear power stations come from? It comes from steam turbines driven by heat generated by uranium rods. Where does the heat generated by uranium rods come from? From a critical mass causing accelerated radioactive decay, from nuclear fission, derived from what physicists term the “strong nuclear force”.

Where did certain heavy elements get their ability to radioactively decay and hence generate heat? Such heavy radioactive elements were created in the unimaginably intense explosions of supernovae (indeed all elements heavier than iron originate from supernovae).

How did certain stars go supernova? Core collapse or binary star supernovae ultimately occur due to the interplay between the fusion of lighter to heavier elements and intense gravitation. Both the weak and strong nuclear forces are the mechanisms from which nuclear fusion originates.

Solar panels convert sunlight (electromagnetic photons) to electricity and that sunlight ultimately comes from nuclear fusion.

So here is the insight I give to you that my high school Physics teachers never gave to me: all energy sources originate from the four fundamental forces of nature (gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) which ultimately all degrade and eventually disperse as heat. When that heat is dispersed uniformly throughout a hugely expanded universe sometime in the looooong (>>100 trillion years) future, we will no longer have any energy gradients, there will be no capacity to do work. That will be the heat death of the Universe.

Let us now come back to Earth and to time scales more relevant to navel-gazing human beings, AKA egocentric hairless apes, back to our selfish preoccupations with economies and wealth creation.

Economies and wealth are fundamentally dependent on our ability to harness concentrated energy sources. The more concentrated and more abundant the energy sources, the greater our ability to generate wealth (= have easy access to a wide variety of high-quality goods and services).

All fuels are energy sources but not all energy sources are fuels.

What do I mean? Sunlight is an energy source but is not a fuel. Diesel is a fuel we can describe as “bottled sunlight” because it is chemical energy that originated from the photosynthesis of plants (marine microalgae) that were fossilised. We can use diesel to run a car. Some cars use LPG (propane) as a fuel.  We can use electricity from sunlight to charge batteries to run an electric car, however by convention we do not describe those batteries as a fuel source, but as an electrical storage medium.

Most of us think of fuel as stored chemical energy. However, we also call uranium rods “nuclear fuel” which represents stored physical (not chemical) energy. So perhaps a reasonable working definition of a fuel is a gas, liquid or solid containing chemical or physical energy which can be used for untethered transportation.

What do I mean by “untethered”? That is best explained by conversely using examples of tethered transportation: trains powered by electrified third rails, electric buses or trams powered by catenary wires, San Francisco trolleys pulled by understreet cables.

The idea that fuels, which are chemical or physical stores of energy, enable untethered transportation, helps us differentiate between stationary energy generators (hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants, solar and wind farms, coal or natural gas or nuclear power stations) and mobile energy generators (the engines of untethered vehicles, including nuclear-powered ships and submarines).

It is true that huge advances in batteries and electric motors have today enabled untethered transportation for light(ish) vehicles over long(ish) distances, but we are still unable to use battery-powered machinery for the heavy industrial requirements mentioned above (nor long-distance aviation) and are unlikely to ever be able to do so.

Certain untethered specialty machinery is indispensable to run our industrial civilisation eg, giant coal hopper trucks, similar massive trucks for other mining activities (1), agricultural machinery to plow, sow, harvest crops and spray pesticides/herbicides over millions of hectares. They all run on diesel (or jet fuel for cropdusters), for which we have no replacement so far. When petroleum depletes, industrial-scale mining and agriculture will no longer be possible, and billions will die (unless…more about that later…).

Different fuels are not interchangeable, and even fuels within the same category may not be interchangeable. What do I mean? It is obviously impossible to run your car with nuclear fuel rods. What about the category of liquid hydrocarbon fuels? Well, try putting petrol in your diesel engine or cold diesel in your Molotov cocktail. Piston engine light planes are designed to run on avgas (=leaded petrol) but turboprops and jet engines run on low sulphur kerosene (mostly jet A1).

The latter is crucial when it comes to long-distance passenger jets and military supersonic jets, for which nothing other than jet fuel is an option. When petroleum depletes, such jet aircraft will no longer be possible (unless…more about that later…)

The energy applications of gas/petroleum fractions are, in monetary terms, actually less valuable than their chemical feedstock uses to make various material products (eg, methane for nitrate fertilisers, ethane and naphtha for plastics, other fractions for the production of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, herbicides, pesticides etc, etc.)

It is essential to understand the qualities of the different fractional distillates of petroleum (and gas) and their different and specific roles, in order to understand how they are able to generate a wide variety of high-quality goods and services for us = wealth.

[su_note note_color=”#ebf1f7″ radius=”17″]Our addiction to fossil fuels WILL undoubtedly, indisputably, certainly kill us all due to our locked-in dependency, which will be followed by inevitable “cold turkey” withdrawal, combined with catastrophic global warming (2), unless we transition off fossil fuels.[/su_note]

Our survival depends on the 7F principle: Fight For a Fully Fossil Fuel Free Future.

The “drill baby drill” ideologues are dumb, baby, dumb. 

“Drill, Baby, Drill!”—Sarah Palin, a true believer in this moronic posture, like Donald Trump and his coterie of short-term thinking, greedy and ignorant sycophants.

Do you get that, Trumpty Dumpty, you narcissistic prostitute of the fossil fools? That is a rhetorical question; all evidence shows that he is genuinely a faaarking moron, along with his execrable obsequious retinue of sycophantic boot-lickers who have absolutely no clue.

So-called “renewable” energy electrical generators are fossil fuel extenders and not fossil fuel replacements. Nevertheless, we absolutely need to build those fossil fuel extenders as our methadone program, as a bridge to buy us time to completely get off fossil fuels.

A decade ago, I believed the situation was hopeless, however new technological breakthroughs from China offer optimism for me, a person who used to distance myself from the technocornucopians who believed that “somehow” in unspecified ways, using blind faith without any real evidence, that humanity (and the rest of sentience) could be saved.

There are now specified ways based on good evidence, albeit preliminary. Glimmers of hope that humanity may not go extinct (3) and may even maintain complex industrial civilisation and achieve even greater wealth in the future. Not a certainty, but at least a slim possibility.

More about that later…

If you are USAnian however, you are screwed.

Upcoming:

– A message to the Peak Oil / Petroleum depletion deniers: you are scientifically illiterate liars and fools and

– EROEI and net energy or A message to the fossil fools: it takes energy to get energy, you damn fools

and even more to come…

Footnotes:

1. Interestingly, the mind-bogglingly huge giant coal excavator machines run on electricity. This gives us hope that it may be possible to electrify the entire process of mining, ore transportation, smelting, processing and manufacture of final products. However, until we can clearly prove that we can make renewable energy generators using 100% renewable (or nuclear) energy throughout the entire mining, transportation, manufacturing and distribution chains, the prospect of global industrial collapse consequent to petroleum depletion remains. In China, many photovoltaic manufacturing factories are now being powered by electricity from solar PVs.

2. Recent hurricane Melissa affecting Jamaica generated winds of 295km/hr, never before experienced in history and impossible to reach that severity without the existence of human-induced global warming.

3. Avoidance of human extinction does not preclude the probability of the die-off of billions of people this century; indeed the latter is practically certain. Optimal planetary carrying capacity is unknown (dependent on the quality of life afforded to each individual among other factors) but given the guaranteed climate catastrophe mediated ecosystem devastation that is certain to occur, a total human population of 300 million in the few remaining livable less-devastated climate pockets may well be optimistic. I personally believe that mass migration to a thawing Antarctica is inevitable and will be the only way humans can survive on the surface of a world more than 3 or 4 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times.

Whether we resort to becoming troglodyte Morlocks is another question*. Whatever the case, it will be necessary for long-term human survival that all sociopaths and psychopaths be culled from all populations. Krony Kapitalist Kleptocrats (who are mostly sociopaths and psychopaths) may clutch their pearls in horror and call my views fanatical pro-tree hugging socialism. I call my views reality-based pro-survival.

*BTW, HG Wells’ portrayal of Eloi as light-skinned and Morlocks as dark skinned is the exact opposite of what reality-based biological mechanisms would induce.