Your Personal View

Posted on by Mark

Let’s say that you become energy conscious. Or, rather, energy sustainable. In doing, you strive to reduce your energy consumption. Electrical power comes from local, renewable resources. Batteries keep energy ever present. You become a vegetarian and obtain all your food from local providers. Your home could be classified as tiny. Inside it, consumer durables are mostly absent. Such actions showcase you as a very energy conscious person.

How much benefit do these actions give to other life on this planet? Less oil consumption means more stays in the ground. And, if you stop eating meat at every meal, then there would be fewer domestic animals and thus more land for wildlife. Such feedback makes being energy conscious worthwhile.

The error in this is in believing that others will continue to consume the same amount as you decrease your consumption. Without feedback or a social prerogative, people continue on their journey of excess consumption. Only by convincing the vast majority of people to be energy conscious will consumption patterns change. If enough change then other living beings benefit. Can you think of a global method to begin this change? Some have suggested a global carbon tax. Or, do you think our children’s future will be better if we continue our instinctive goal to maximize personal consumption?
Ducklings

Gradually Abrupt

Posted on by Mark

So we’re realizing that our species needs copious quantities of energy to sustain our technical wonders. How do we know? Well, even with all the recent research and reports on warming climate and species extinction, we’ve still increased our energy consumption by 50% since year 2000. Though renewable energy sources exist, their contributions remain trivial compared to the energy we extract from burning fossil fuels. If we maintain this trend then by year 2100, our consumption will increase by over 250%. Our consumption; mostly for our technology.

There is a desire, even an expectation, that energy reserves remain sufficient and that no actual harm will come to our ecosystem. This desire allows us to continue to burn oil, coal and biomass. If our expectation is met, then we are on a path of continual, immediate rewards. And we need care little about consequences.

Imagine if we are wrong. Let’s say that the energy reserves empty abruptly. And let’s say that the climate becomes unpredictable, and the weather varies enough to make living difficult. And let’s say that a homogeneous ecosystem covers the Earth’s surface, with the remaining species being overly susceptible to disease. Given these, will our species realize that our technical wonders do not provide the desired lifestyles?
Redwing Blackbird

Us or Them?

Posted on by Mark

Satellites can’t see national borders as they cruise silently through their orbit about Earth. Often, even on Earth, there’s little distinguishing one side of a national border from another. Sadly, there’s an ongoing tendency to erect barriers and fences to separate “us from them”. And so, with great expenditures of energy, we have divided up the Earth’s land surface into “mine and theirs”.

We use even more energy to maintain these artificial divisions. For one, sum the energy used to conscript armies, to purchase state-of-the-art equipment and to maintain militaries while waiting for “just in case“. For another, sum the net energy loss when we replace vegetation with physical barriers such as fences and walls all across the world’s continents. These show that the need to identify and maintain differing group identities is strong within us.

While it’s often been said and often sung, “why can’t we just get along?“ There is no simple answer. Likely, we will continue to expend great amounts of energy upon national defence. What will happen when we run out of energy? Will national borders become irrelevant and peace break out? Or will we consume every last joule of available energy to continually separate “us from them“? Do we wait and find out or do we challenge this portent by trying peace beforehand?

Ducks

Bankrupt

Posted on by Mark

Spending more than you make leads to bankruptcy. What about energy expenditures? Today, the largest per capita energy consumers use over 160,000kWh/a in some nations. For all 8 billion of us on Earth to consume this amount, we need to produce over 1.28e15 kWh per year. Our current energy production is 627 exajoules; slightly less than a seventh of the desired. This deficit began with the industrial revolution as top consumers continually consumed ever more while every other tried to catch up. In effect, our continual energy deficit has us facing an energy bankruptcy.

Given the climate change challenge and other factors, we expect to never produce enough energy. So, how do we counter this energy bankruptcy? Let’s correlate actions of a business facing bankruptcy to our needs (in italics below):

1. Concentrate Efforts on Best Customers – nurture developed nations
2. Explore Funding Options – look for alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and fusion
3. Cut Costs and Repay Creditors – maximize energy efficiency and rebuild fossil fuel reserves
4. Offer Discounted Prices in Return for Immediate Payment – subsidize renewable energy production
5. Cut Non-Essential Costs That Don’t Contribute to ROI – use energy only where essential

Many of today’s global activities do correlate to an energy bankruptcy. This supports our conjecture that we’re facing an energy bankruptcy.

Can we consider grander actions, including:

6. Revise Business Plan and Budget – have an achievable plan for civilization
7. Evaluate if major stakeholders (nations) will support a restructure
8. Determine if the business (civilization) is worth saving

Is civilization like a business? Can we afford to let civilization go energy bankrupt? If not, how do we recover from our continual energy deficit? Do you agree that our civilization needs a plan? What do you want to see in the plan?

Berry

The Pyramid of Life

Posted on by Mark

We dominate the animal kingdom. We are the apex predator on Earth. We control, eradicate, or nurture others, whether as large as a mammoth or small as bacteria.

The trophic pyramid is an illustrative segregation of Earth’s life into 4 levels. A lower level provides energy and nutrients to the higher level. Level 1, the lowest, includes all the autotrophs or plants. Level 2 has herbivores. Level 3 has carnivores. Level 4, the apex, contains the omnivores that consume almost anything. Most people live at Level 4 of the pyramid.

Assume everyone lives at Level 4. People require 12,500 Joules per day. As a rough metric, the ecological efficiency is 10% meaning that only a tenth from a lower level gets transferred to the higher level. Thus, 3.65e+19 Joules of energy from Level 1 supports the 8.012 billion people alive today. On average, Level 1 life annually stores about 2.3e7 Joules per sq.m. of energy. Thus, overall, we annually consume about 32% of energy that is captured by Level 1 life.

Being at the apex and in full control, we can form a future of our choice. So far, people have co-opted more than half the land surface for agriculture to support this consumption. We and our livestock outweigh all other wildlife 24 fold resulting in another mass extinction event. Our future could include wildlife or it will only include living creatures that directly support and maintain the human population? Which do you want and what will you do to achieve it?
Polar_Bear