The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]
terebess.hu
terebess.hu
I'm glad we aren't worried about peak oil anymore but the climate and food scarity is going to be the next pitfall to avoid.
hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t
16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…
I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.
Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.
Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important.
The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.
Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon
Name one that is safe to handle, easy to convert, and has even 1/2 the energy density.
Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build.
But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power.
Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.
More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.
Almost no new wind or solar can be deployed at scale in Australia now without battery deployment. Both individuals and grid scale batteries are fine. They serve different parts of the supply chain.
FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.
Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.
Networks are, and always were a public utility function. Converting to bid models was a huge mistake.
Nuclear can be made to be load following and is in France. Baseload is just the cheapest way to generate power because the plants are simpler (+ demand pricing only needs to shift a small amount of power to smooth out the peak and valley caused by surges in human activity patterns instead of completely shifting night time usage which is a whole other massive amount of energy - peak to trough is typically only a ~30% drop from what I’ve seen). I think you’re being overly optimistic about people time shifting their night time load more drastically to reduce the need of batteries as there may be countervailing patterns that are unavoidable (eg if you’re not rich and work somewhere where there’s free charging at work during the day, you might need to charge your car at night when solar is most expensive - and EVs haven’t even become part of the grid story yet so any data today is horribly misleading). Demand pricing can shift things a bit but you’re not going to have a 90-95% peek to trough reduction in terms of shifting your night time usage to the day. There’s also a huge amount of industry that runs 24/7 (also hospitals) and there’s no time shifting a lot of that load (certain industrial processes can maybe shift but it varies a lot from it’s ok to 0% - it’s also typically an expensive capability to retrofit and will make those good more expensive just to accommodate solar).
> More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.
As I said, this is the most expensive way to build solar and batteries. Just because someone is doing it doesn’t change the reality that it’s a bad idea. What happens when energy usage grows over time? Think of the maintenance costs involved in upgrading a bunch of panels and batteries all over the place vs centrally installed ones in the grid. It’s a myopic short term plan. Easy to sell politically because who doesn’t love free government money. Also expect their utilities to start having serious problems operating and needing bailouts, to raise prices drastically, or risk going bankrupt as load disappears from their grid in favor of local generation. There’s a reason CPUC changed the pricing rules around selling solar back to the grid to remove the implicit subsidy homeowners were receiving from the grid (dropping rates from retail to wholesale). Even that was extremely unpopular and a political battle and doesn’t cover the fact that grid pricing isn’t broken down correctly because historically no one cared - the grid maintenance fee isn’t a mandatory tax for a dwelling and even when you pay it it’s underpriced vs how much it actually costs to maintain the grid because the electricity pricing would cover the rest.
> Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.
Nuclear would last the longest because it remains the cheapest installed capacity (eg the amount to keep the California plant going still is cheaper than any new construction of solar/wind per watt). It’s still also cheaper per watt for new construction (even including absurd cost overruns that primarily come from a crazy regulatory environment and sustained deinvestment in nuclear which are both fixable issues) than the offshore wind projects that are starting to become popular and cheaper than solar if you start to include the required storage (which no one ever does when claiming that solar is cheaper than nuclear).
> FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.
FCAS does not solve the problem of night time energy use. It’s horribly misleading to claim that this presents grid scale energy. It does not. It’s purely an arbitrage play because they can respond to changing market conditions faster than peaker plants. That’s fine and helps stabilize the grid, but it doesn’t represent sufficient capacity to power the grid at night (+ wear and tear in this usage is drastically different than charging and discharging every day).
Beyond arresting the worsening conditions (which we’re failing at spectacularly) I’m not sure how to unwind the damage. Technology is unlikely to save us unless we get insanely lucky somehow (like fusion reactors that are trivial to scale and trivial to make cheaply and then shoving all that energy into carbon recapture at a scale we don’t know how to do because even at current levels it’s diffuse enough that it takes a long time to capture a small amount of carbon).
I’m all on board for nuclear. So just start convincing the “green” types that are stopping it.
Nuclear alone is enough to sustain civilization nearly infinitely.
Meanwhile, natural gas is plentiful, geothermal is plentiful, solar and wind is plentiful and all of these contribute to energy availability.
Oil still has its uses, it's not going to go away, but I suspect consumption will be reduced by 90% or more in the next 2 decades.
Still, it’s frustrating that there’s such a disagreement on basic facts between two quantitative and careful thinkers.
The stock market is now a farce and price is dictated by market makers, not "discovered". The housing market is nonsensical and has priced a generation out of home ownership. The US military is evil incarnate and our civil court system is based on whoever has the most money and is willing to lie wins. I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system and I'm sure there are many more like me.
The USD and therefore the world is on a count down timer to total collapse, problem is no one knows how long we have left.
How?
It's naive to think all those systems are subservient to some other "master" system, or that the fragility of those systems is multiplicative instead of offering complementary strengths. It's naive because none of those systems developed dependent on the other systems, nor were they independent; they've all been developing together for thousands of years. It's like an ecosystem of systems; if one fails (such as currency) then there's a dozen or more others that are ready to pick up the pieces. And it's myopic to think currency is even one of the more important systems, as though it's somehow more important than the other foundations of human experience that led us here.
You and the people you care about will, of course, be totally unaffected and simply observe the suffering of Those Other People Who Don't Matter from a distance, then step out of your bunker into the newly rejuvenated world and begin enjoying life?
Wake up! YOU ARE ALSO INSIDE THIS MACHINE, ALONG WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND LOVE.
And accelerationism is an incredibly pretentious stance. People actually think they have understood perfectly what civilization is and what it ought to become. That is a colossal claim.
> Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [which sometimes is a collapse], and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs.
S-curves for populations that settle. Sometimes a population goes above the carrying capacity and it crashed and oscillates until it stabilizes. Humans are in an exponential J-curve that seems to keep going, but it's just because our culture and technology continually raise the carrying capacity on an S-curve.
But if we "break" either culture or tech, then the carrying capacity immediately becomes lower. And then it crashes more and becomes even lower. Etc until society rescues itself from crash in carrying capacity. So the crash is potentially harrrrrd. I recall it being referred to a J-curve crash.
But maybe my high school teacher was just riffing a bit, and this isn't established understanding... When I search, I don't find this talked about online in the ways I recall from 2002 biology class haha :)
1.https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays —
'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust —
Ruin is formal — Devil's work
Consecutive and slow —
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping — is Crashe's law —
However, I think the rapid collapse probably refers to what is observable on the outside
This is a rather nice "dedica". Of course we all hope he's wrong.
Ugo Bardi is a very cool person. This is his blog:
The collapse of the Dow Jones industrial index during the 2008 financial crisis. A Seneca Collapse if ever there was one (data from Dow Jones)
from pg 68.
This was not the case in 2000-2003 or 2021 -2022 in which the stock market fell in a gradual/orderly pattern. People who made tail-hedged volatility bets lost money due to the failure of volatility to spike. The gradual nature of the selling meant that the out-of-money puts did not profit as many assumed or hoped. Many bought into the Talab hype and lost money with this.
The taleb comparison survives on the idea that talebs thesis (long tail events are underestimated) is the same as negative long tail events happen quickly. So I don't think that sheds much light.
On the financial side, those look like two arbitrarily long term periods where you couldn't 100x in O(weeks) by a long tail bet on the negative side - but alas, arbitrary. ex. stonks traded sideways in 2021 but I made an absolute fantastic amount of money in about 3 weeks in Feb/March 2020, as an accident, buying puts to poke fun at this new silly mistaken trend of thinking options were for retail investors (ah, I was so young and innocent)