The Fundamental Principle of Ecology

The fundamental principle of ecology ought to be "Leave it alone".  It is not necessary to solve a huge stiff system of differential delay equations to manage an eco-region; i. e., a connected area of the face of the earth all of which drains into a large body of water - usually an ocean - with no part of the drainage region omitted.  It's not necessary to read extensively in the QH and QL sections of the library. It is necessary only to let your eco-region manage itself by behaving as a well-mannered guest.  Don't do very much.  In fact, do as little as possible.  Cultivate sloth.  Be lazy.

Mankind has discovered that he may harvest energy, as well as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries, from Nature.  He presumes that he is entitled to exploit these resources with no thought of paying Nature, putting anything back, or cleaning up. Now, he is in a bind.  His life is filled with feverish activity.  He knows that he has way too great an impact on the environment.  But he can't stop.  He has credit card debt.  He just barely avoided the last big lay-off at his job.  His wife has been bugging him to earn more money, in keeping with the normal measure of worth in his society, usually referred to as status.  He has a brokerage account; but, he has been unable  to earn extra money by trading stocks, options, and other securities.  This man's troubles will be recognized as instances of the modes in which Capitalist economies achieve the economic growth they require.

But, all of this activity, from which Capitalism will not let up but demands more of the same is in violation of the Fundamental Principle of Ecology (now promoted to initial caps).  Thus, Capitalism's route to inevitable collapse is accompanied by catastrophic harm to the world and all of its inhabitants.

[Note:  Besides venting a little frustration with conservatives (I almost said "frustration with the stupidity of conservatives"), this post constitutes an experiment in writing short choppy sentences.]

ERoEI* Redux

I just wrote the following to a detractor on the Energy Resources Yahoo! group who imagined that I must be just like every other advocate of left-wing politics he has encountered.  I am not like that at all.  In fact, the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat makes me rather uncomfortable.  Perhaps, a dictatorship of the precariat ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noam-chomsky/plutonomy-and-the-precari_b_1499246.html.

Hey, Howard, don't shoot the messenger.  I shall suffer as much as you if market economics is abandoned.  Markets have been very, very good to me.  That said, I believe you are missing the principal point.  

The Autonomous Alternative Energy District (AAED) is obviously a very good concept to employ in a thought experiment. The society we live in can be very readily analyzed changing whatever needs to be changed in the AAED; but, the AAED is much simpler.  So, to be definite, let's imagine a USA completely dependent upon shale oil and gas with no other energy technology employed whatever.  Moreover, it is recognized that the nation can barely produce enough to support itself with nothing left to export except, possibly, energy in the form of shale oil and gas itself or electrical energy over power lines to our near neighbors.  Immigration is banned and the population is otherwise stable with no imported goods affecting our standards of living. The nation is isolated, then, except for the export of energy, if there is any.

The nation then either continues with things pretty much as they were during the conventional petroleum era or not. If the standard of living declines year after year until famine begins, it must be because the ERoEI* of shale oil and gas is less than 1.0 FOR THAT TYPE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY even without an attempt to achieve sustainability.   If society manages to run on an even keel but is not quite able to achieve sustainability, again it is because ERoEI* < 1.0 for that type of political economy.  Clearly, each type of political economy will have certain activities that must be carried out, each with its associated energy costs.  If society manages to run sustainably at  steady state and exports some electrical power to Canada, say, then ERoEI* is greater than 1.0 for that type of political economy, which society is free to accept or reject purely on moral grounds.

[Clearly, I am assuming that conservation has been carried out as far as can be expected and that the citizens cooperate voluntarily with the possible exception of a very few sociopaths. We might say that whatever society is doing to enhance ERoEI* is normal; and, therefore, it may be incorporated into the definition of ERoEI* just as the efficiency of the manufacturing process was incorporated into the definition of emergy.]

I hope that is helpful.

Capitalism, Marxism, and Dematerialism

Let us review the steps whereby capitalism was defeated by communism in logical argument:

I don’t know if any of the latest statements about deaths and ruined lives under so-called communist rule are true or merely another salvo in an endless war against communism waged by both branches of the American Capitalist Party; but, this much is certain: communism is sustainable and capitalism, because it requires perpetual economic growth in a finite world, is not.  Capitalism requires growth to retire debt incurred by fractional reserve banking, to justify economic inequality by telling the poor they will not grow poorer as the rich grow richer, to provide new jobs for workers displaced by improvements in productivity due to technological progress, and to finance industry in a stock market that would collapse if it did not grow.  None of these is necessary in a communist economy despite the undeniable fact that many regimes that call themselves communist whether they are or not have encouraged economic growth.  (Of course, many (undeveloped) nations should grow economically, but new growth in the poor nations must be accompanied by even greater shrinkage in the rich nations to more than compensate for it.)

It is necessary to divide the community dividend equally among the members of the community for a number of reasons: 

1.         Whatever advantages of intelligence, strength, ability, character, appearance, breeding, or connections one is able to exploit to acquire wealth, they are accidents of birth that are normally disallowed as justifications for worldly success. 

2.         It is impossible to evaluate a person’s contribution to the community until hundreds of years after that person’s death, if then.

3.         Suppose that one potato in the Mark I Economy  represents the amount of emergy that is required to keep one person alive for one day.  The ability of the earth to provide emergy for consumption is already so limited that people are starving to death because we do not share wealth. 

Thus, wealth sharing is reasonable, beautiful, and practical.  However, without wealth sharing, society is vulnerable to very serious problems:

1.         Differences in wealth spawn covetousness, envy, resentment, anger, and, finally, revolution if they grow sufficiently steep or if they are perceived as patently unfair.

2.         If there are differences in wealth, we have materialism with all of the horrible things people do to acquire greater wealth because of greed, because of fear of losing what they have, or to remedy personal poverty.  In Chapter 9 of On thePreservation of Species, I showed that materialism is Pandora’s Box.

Materialism is the perfect transition from the debate between communism and capitalism to the debate between Dematerialism and Marxism:

Let us examine the reasons why Dematerialism has supplanted Marxism:

Marxism was supposed to have remedied the problems caused by differences in wealth; but, inasmuch as it requires people to work to earn a living, it still permits competition for wealth.  Also, it does not address competition for power except by preventing huge concentrations of wealth that make fair competition unnecessary for many aspirants to political power.  Even supposing a meritocracy in the distribution of jobs, political positions, and incomes, almost all of the problems of materialism will arise. 

1.         Dematerialism requires each person to have an equal share of the community dividend regardless of what he does or doesn’t do, which prevents all of the evils of materialism discussed in Appendix II of On the Preservation of Species.

2.         It is important that people who do not work be compensated the same as those who do (except that the portion of their energy budget that was expended solely because of their employment) because most of the workforce will have to be furloughed to reduce the energy budget to that which can be supplied by renewable energy technologies only.  Please see the three energy papers hyperlinked to http://dematerialism.net/ where this is explained and proved. 

3.         Dematerialism avoids punishment of misbehavior as well as punishment of sloth.  People will do something interesting and/or useful because they need to be effective to be happy.  Since Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment 150 years ago, we have suspected that punishment exacerbates anti-social behavior.  Dematerialism lets go of punishment and revenge as well as other irrational and maladaptive behavior peculiar to Western culture or learned during out Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness.

Indeed, Marx, apparently, was not familiar with the Sermon on the Mount and the many fine sentiments expressed there by Jesus.  We could say that Dematerialism is the New Testament of Communism and Marxism is the Old Testament. 

Houston, Texas

July 26, 2007

* In this paper,  the word “communism” refers to any system of wealth distribution that does not depend  upon (i) dog-eat-dog competition or (ii) the hazards of a marketplace in labor , or (iii) any system that favors economic inequality whether dynamic or static and, if dynamic, whether unbounded or not.  By “communism” I mean some system of sharing the community dividend.  I could replace the term “communism” by “wealth sharing” without the loss of very much except the opportunity to show respect for the great communist writers, thinkers, and leaders of the past.  Normally, I think of “communism” as referring to equal or nearly equal wealth sharing.  Varieties of communism are sometimes termed “socialism”, “syndicalism”, “dematerialism”, etc.

Renewable Energy

Here is a letter to Energy Resources and Denis Frith's Google group too:
 

To everyone except Denis Frith,

Denis doesn’t want to admit that solar and wind energy either are renewable or would be if it were not for the ridiculous energy cost of supporting a market economy*.  As it turns out, in a debate with another of Denis’s critics, Dave Kimble of Running on Empty Oz, who argued that the front-loaded investment costs of photovoltaic solar installations disqualify PV solar as a way to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil even in Australia, I conceived of a plan to bootstrap solar by purchasing abroad solar energy equipment to start up with.  Now, renewable energy technologies came into a world dominated by coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear fission; so, it is understandable that the first front-loaded energy invested in “renewables” probably came from fossil fuel and nuclear, but possibly hydroelectric.  Let us assume, though, that the solar installations purchased abroad to get started in a solar economy were produced without the application of any energy that could not be termed “renewable”.  Then, the first wave of solar energy installations slated for Australia would be completely renewable.  That is, they would produce enough stored energy such that no fossil fuel at all need be used to maintain the infrastructure and build replacements for it when they were needed – and, for that matter, to restore such portions of the earth as were occupied by solar installations to Earth-as-a-garden ideality.  If the ratio ERoEI*, as defined at http://dematerialism.net/eroeistar.htm and, in greater detail, on my new blog at http://eroei.blogspot.com/, is greater than 1.0, this can be done, although ERoEIs very close to 1.0 will be poor investment risks because of long payback times and because a very slight change in circumstances could render them infeasible or because ERoEI* is actually less than 1.0 except for minor computational inaccuracies.  In the spreadsheet analysis done by Dave Kimble and me, we used an ERoEI equal to 3.0.  I assumed that ERoEI*_PV = 3.0.  Both Dave and I included construction, maintenance, and eventual replacement energy costs in perpetuity in EI.  In any case, if solar and wind are not strictly renewable, a competent energy analyst would compute ERoEI* < 1.0 and be fore-warned.  See http://dematerialism.net/pv.htm.

The reason investors are bailing out of renewables is that they have become convinced by investment bankers that the ERoEI for shale plays is greater than 1.0 if, in fact, they know what ERoEI is or should be.  To their sorrow, they are about to find out that ERoEI for shale is less than 1.0 even if operators neglect their responsibilities toward Earth.  When the shale bubble bursts, there will be much gnashing of teeth here in Texas. I feel sorry for all the new Houston citizens who are about to be left high and dry except for submergence in unmanageable credit card debt based upon false hopes for a prosperous future.  It’s too bad that they didn’t invest their futures in solar and wind and political change.

By the way, Denis Frith has been most helpful by suggesting various concrete problem areas in energy production that have to be addressed to calculate ERoEI*.  The difficulty of finding a new recycling methodology or a substitute material resource in case a material is encountered with no known substitute for which recycling is impractical remains a tough nut to crack; however, we shall cross that bridge when we come to it – and perhaps we never will.  I am certain he will continue to be of service by suggesting problem areas in establishing renewable energy technology.  It is, of course, the component of energy input that comes from the sun that suggested the term “renewable” to earlier workers.  Although we intend to “pay” Mother Earth, we have no such intention to “pay” Papa Sun.

Thomas Wayburn, Houston, Texas

http://dematerialism.net/

http://eroei.blogspot.com/
http://dematerialism.wikispaces.com/
http://modrr.net/ (model railroading)

* 

• http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html
• http://dematerialism.net/ne.htm
• http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html
  

---

From: senescence-of-civilization@googlegroups.com [mailto:senescence-of-civilization@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Denis Frith
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 9:30 PM
To: Google IPP Group
Cc: Robert Gregory; energyresources@yahoogroups.com
Subject: {senescence-of-civilization:1833] Fw: alternative energy and the rise and fall . . . .

The article below provides insight into misguided decisions stemming from the misperception arising from the misuse of terminology. The issue considered relates to systems providing energy. Investors with little understanding of physics are only slowly learning that the term 'clean energy' relates to systems that supply electrical energy with less use of the emission producing fossil fuels for their construction, operation and maintenance. There is no such commodity as 'clean energy'.The decline in the stock reflects the realization by many investors that they have been conned by the spurious rhetoric. If realistic terminology had been employed in describing these projects, investors would have been in a much better position to assess the worth of the proposed system, bearing in mind that it would have a limited life.

Denis Frith

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Robert Gregory <bobbygreg@gmail.com>
To:
Sent: Tuesday, 11 December 2012 10:10 AM
Subject: alternative energy and the rise and fall . . . .

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/climatism-watching-climate-science/2012/dec/6/so-hows-your-green-energy-stock-doing/

So, how's your green energy stock doing?

[[[ http://media.washtimes.com/media/community/viewpoint/entry/2012/12/06/rennix-640_s640x427.jpg ]]]

[snip]

What Is the Energy Cost of Pollution?

This is an easy question to answer:  The energy cost of pollution is the energy cost of whatever has to be done to prevent pollution whether it be (i) the alteration of the process to avoid the pollution step, (ii) the decontamination and temperature normalization of process water for recycle or discharge, where the discharge of fresh water effluent to the  environment must be accompanied by the transport and desalination of sea water, (iii) the treatment of gas phase effluent to remove all contaminants such that only air and water at normal temperature is discharged.  The discharged air may be oxygen-rich provided it does NOT contain ozone, and (iv) whatever else must be done to prevent air, earth, and water pollution.

In cases where the process pollutes, the fine shall be sufficiently great that it is cheaper to prevent pollution than to pay the fine.  The fine shall be used to further the agenda of the most sincere environmentalists and to partly compensate the victims. Someone should implement some sort of plan to make it uneconomical to cheat.  Photovoltaic cells do not pollute, but the factory that makes them does.  It  is the responsibility of the purveyors of solar energy installations to make certain that their vendors and suppliers do not pollute and/or add the cost of the appropriate process equipment or the principal of the fine to the energy-invested term.

Additional Concerns about Recycling

 

In Item 2 of "Some Important Components of the Energy-Invested Term that Are Generally Neglected" (Dec. 6), I imply without proof or explanation that the repositories of materials needed for the main process under investigation and the essential ancillary processes can be maintained at their original levels. I wrote as though the recycle problem had been solved and a steady state could be achieved without further ado. That is not the case. Recycling the material in the infrastructure is a tricky business. More research is needed. Here is what I wrote to the critic who raised that point and, in addition, was concerned about the effects of friction:

Friction is not a problem. In general, the principal effect of friction is overcome by pushing harder. Let us weigh an engine with serious friction, like the gas turbine on a 747, when it’s brand new and after it is ready to be replaced. I would be surprised if the difference were appreciable.  I am under the impression that the slight loss of material will not affect sustainability.

In other cases, the problem should be categorized as follows: (a) Separate the materials that we require to carry out the activities we consider important to our civilization, i. e., the materials we need to produce food and clothing, maintain shelter, provide health care to a stable or shrinking population, and provide art, music, literature and a few luxuries to take the drudgery out of life, e. g., computers; (b) divide the useful materials into two categories: (b1) the materials that can be recycled and devise the most energy efficient techniques to recycle them; (b2) find substitutes for the materials that cannot be recycled in any way, shape, or manner. (Remember that, even if only the elemental species can be recovered, the original substance can be synthesized at the expense of our supply of available energy (enthalpy minus the lowest temperature reservoir to which waste heat can be rejected times the entropy).)

I expected that a critic might nail me on recycling pharmaceuticals. I gave it a lot of thought. For now, I am satisfied that urinating on the ground might have to be forbidden. This was done by the Freemen on Frank Herbert’s Dune, a Desert Planet. Useful chemicals can be extracted from sewage by chromatography, for example. Materials that are deemed essential and for which no practical method of recycling has yet been found will remain a challenge for the time being. But, isn’t it a shame that I can’t write the University of Michigan and explain why this would make a relevant research topic. Since I am an alumnus, they should listen. But, not even a million dollar gift would be an incentive to deviate from the corporate agenda or violate the received wisdom from the ruling class.

Five Ways to Compute ERoEI

(from http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html)

On Sheet 4 of both spreadsheets* five different ERoEIs for each political economy and for two levels of conservation are tabulated below and to the right of DN68:

The five types of ERoEI are as follows:

1.     The energy invested (EI^o) is the direct energy overhead of the energy sector.

2.     EI¹ includes, in addition to the direct energy overhead, the indirect energy costs associated with the energy overhead of the manufacturing and transportation portions of the overhead of the energy sector but not the overhead due to commerce.
3.     EI² includes, in addition, the overhead due to the activities of commerce in connection with the sale of energy.

4.     EI³ includes, in addition, the consumption of energy associated with that portion of the salaries paid to the energy sector in excess of what they would have been if no one earned more than the workers do.  This is thought to account for over-consumption associated with profit taking in connection with the sale of energy.

5.     EI⁴ includes, in addition, the consumption of energy by the workers in the energy sector and the pro-rata shares of the energy expenses of the workers and managers in other sectors insofar as they support the energy sector.

The four political economies are as follows:

1.     The Base Case (BC) is a steady-state idealization of an American-style market economy.

2.     The No-Managers Case (NM) is a steady-state idealization of an American-style market economy with managers, presumably chosen by the workers from among themselves, who get paid the same as workers, which reduces energy consumption.  The expression No-Managers, then, is not particularly well-chosen.  I suppose this is an idealization of market communism.

3.     The No-Commerce Case (NC) is a planned economy that has a negligible energy  overhead but that has a commissar class which enjoys the same privileges as managers do in a market economy.  Perhaps it is an idealized Soviet economy.

4.     The No-Commerce-No-Managers Case (NCNM) has a give-away economy with no energy overhead and with the same income for everyone whether they work or not.  It is most like the natural economy advocated in On the Preservation of Species, “Energy in a Natural Economy”, “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”, and “The Demise of Business as Usual” all of which are hyperlinked to http://www.dematerialism.net/.


The two levels of conservation are as follows with the second level split:

1.     Conservation Level 1 is no conservation at all or rather only such conservation measures as have been implemented in the US American economy at the present time.

2.     Conservation Level 2 is any conservation factor, ψ, less than 1.0 in the linear relations that adjust the levels of consumption of the four commodities between their values in the Base Case, which represents the US economy at the present time, and a fraction φ_i of the present value where φ_A = 0.2, φ_R = 0.3, φ_M = 0.1, and φ_T = 0.1; and that adjusts the energy overhead for each of the four sectors C, A, M, and, T between their values for the Base Case and a fraction ξ_i of the present value where ξ_C = 0.5, ξ_A = 0.1, ξ_M = 0.5, ξ_T = 0.1.

2a.     With an ERoEI^o = 21 for a fossil-fuel economy, the conservation factor ψ is reduced until the energy budget in the Base Case has been reduced to Pimentel’s value for Maximum Renewables.

2b.     With an ERoEI^o = 3 for a renewable-energy economy, the conservation factor has been reduced until the energy budget for the No-Commerce-No-Managers (NCNM) Case corresponding to the Natural Economy has been reduced to Maximum Renewables.

The final ERoEI calculations are done on Sheet 4 in the block spanned by DN48 and DR66.  The principal computations are in Columns GM through IV, the end of the spreadsheet.

*
http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.xls  The fractions of gross income to each sector retained for salaries are equal.
http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy-CSP.xls   Constant sector population:  The percentage of the population associated with each sector remains constant throughout all computations.

Missing Components of ERoEI

Let us recall once more that, in a sustainable society, the store houses of natural resources with which the earth and our species are blessed must be retained at more or less steady-state accumulations.  The atmosphere and the land are natural resources as well as the repositories of iron and other metals, the nutrients in the soil, and the atmosphere itself.  This means air and water quality and the infrastructure of primary and recycle processes must be maintained.  Therefore, let us add to the list of energy expenses that must be met to achieve sustainability.  (In this work, feasibility and sustainability mean the same thing.)

1) Sequester carbon, in case fossil fuels are involved in the process - even if only in the start-up phase.  But, in the case of shale oil and gas, the energy costs of carbon sequestration that must be borne by the consumer should be added to the energy-invested term to calculate ERoEI.  Probably, under present-day economic conditions, this can be thought of as a tax, which should be levied.

2) Maintain storehouses of materials that are used to build and maintain the principal process and the secondary processes such a tax preparation, healthcare, etc.

3) Mothball process equipment at the end of its life and restore the plant site to the pristine conditions in which we found it.  Let us maintain Earth as a garden.

4) Desalinate sea water to replace the fresh water used and decontaminate such water as the process renders unfit to drink.

5) To the energy costs of 1 - 4, add the energy budgets of the employees and the appropriate pro-rata portions of those whose services must be charged to the process such as the  health services that keep the workers healthy.  If there are stockholders or venture capitalists who take profits from the process, an appropriate portion of their energy budgets must be charged to the energy-invested term (EI).  Recall that every item that adds to the (monetary) price the consumer must pay for the product has an associated energy cost.  Clearly, salaries, fees, profits, and taxes add to the price.  All computations of ERoEI and/or emergy must be carried out just as they would have been carried out if government subsidies had not existed.  Quite frankly government subsidies are not the best way to defeat market intransigence and they make  our job as analysts harder. Quite possibly there is an energy cost associated with subsidies that should be added to EI.

6) If there is an energy cost due to withdrawal of the land from other uses, it should be added to EI.  I am not quite certain how to calculate this term.  Perhaps the reader has some ideas.  If you do, please leave a comment.

Undoubtedly, additional energy costs that should be charged to the process will come up. Denis Frith renders a valuable service with his extreme skepticism inasmuch as most of his objections to the use of ERoEI suggest a new energy cost for which a methodology must be chosen or invented to meet.  Denis is never quite right; but, the ways in which he errs are not likely to play a role in a world that seems to be hell bent on destruction.  Most people are not interested in being absolutely correct theoretically when the bottom line (survival) is not affected.  Therefore, Denis may do a lot of good and only a little harm.

Here is Denis's latest round of objections to the general utility of ERoEI.  (If there is any repetition, well, Denis does tend to repeat himself.)

ERoEI in even the sound form that Tom has promoted does no more that provide a measure of the effectiveness of an energy supply process. It does not take into account

1. whether the energy supplied is used for a useful purpose or otherwise. Is all the fuel used by cars serving a useful purpose?
2. that the supply process produces waste material that has caused such deleterious consequences as climate change and the accumulation of stores of radioactive materials
3. that the supply process irreversibly divests limited natural material resources, including fossil fuels and uranium

Denis Frith

Here are my comments on Denis’s three points listed below:

1. This is not the business of the analyst and it should not be.  Can you imagine what most people would say if I told them that the energy they use to conduct their lives or businesses is wasted because I do not approve of what they are doing?
2. This is included in the energy-invested term by including the cost of sequestration.  Even the loss of space to sequestration can be given an energy value by counting the insolation that might have been harvested but could not be because the space was otherwise occupied.
3. If the process does consume material resources, the energy-invested term can be increased by the energy cost to recycle not consume, which is always possible except for an insignificant trace amount.  In some cases, this expense is unbearable and must be avoided by choosing different technology.

Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas

 

Not all planned economies are the same.

We need to discuss central versus distributed planning - and fractal planning, whatever that is. Also, there is syndicalism and the out-sourcing of the fractal government's responsibilities to a  private collective of professional planners who can be fired and/or replaced.  Planned economies do not preclude private enterprise; that is, your collective of planners is completely independent of my collective of planners and each of us is free to bid for the honor of activation.  The point is that there are many ways to skin that cat and we should continue to imagine more ways. Just because something has never been done correctly in the past should not deter us from doing better.  

Also, I need to convince myself that distributed economic planning (or economic planning by consumer) can be done without corruption and without the expenditure of appreciable energy*.  Suppose, for example, that the economic planning for an eco-region could be accomplished by 20 scientific planners with a rather large computer.  I wonder how many employees the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington has.  That would be a tip-off because, in reality, an economic plan is always in place.  Read the description of consumer planning in http://dematerialism.net/wiki.htm#consumer_planning .

* The Bureau of Economic Analysis has 606 full-time employees, 565 full-time equivalent employees, and a budget of about $100 million.

Time Delay and Spatial Separation for ERoEI

I think I know how to treat time delays now. It strikes me as too arbitrary to piggy-back the time value of energy on the current time value of money. We would much rather use something with a physical basis that
would remain constant throughout most periods of interest. Suppose that the consumer of the Energy Returned has to wait 24 hours for the delivery even though he is obliged to consume energy constantly at the rate contracted for. The value of the Energy Invested over the life of the project should be increased by the value of the energy from the best available replacement technology adjusted by the appropriate transformity as discussed at http://www.dematerialism.net/ops.htm#_Toc173388355; however, the life of the project must be increased by one day. Suppose that a crucial part in an energy installation like an electric turbine generator is not available until one year after the time it was needed by the builder of a wind power
installation. The Energy Invested should be increased by the value of the substitute energy just as in the previous example with the life of the project extended by one year. Presumably, the energy cost per unit of energy recovered of the substitute technology exceeds the energy cost for the planned technology, which is why the new technology is contemplated provided they are both renewable. Other similar cases require similar consideration; however, nothing relieves the analyst from the intelligent and judicious application of the principles of his craft. The fundamental principle of dealing with all departures from ideality, such as intervals in space separating the locations where the energy is produced and consumed or emission of greenhouse gases, is adding all energy costs of such additional equipment as would restore ideality. It is clear that the energy embedded in any material that must be considered in any analysis can be computed properly by making as many adjustments as are required to the straightforward cost of production by the method of judicious substitutions.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning, especially to a person like yourself (Tom Robertson of Energy Resources) who is interested in treating the spatial domain of a given problem as an ecological system, that a numerical analyst lecturing at Rice University earlier this year had solved linear systems of equations from quantum
electrodynamics (QED) in an ordinary vector space (as opposed to a Hilbert Space) to the extent of 25 million equations in 25 million unknowns. So, we need not be especially daunted by systems ecology or the energy cost accounting of an alternative technology. However, it should be realized that these require lots of work by a large number of  energetic dedicated people. The corporate, mainstream academic, and big (centralized) government worlds don't seem terribly interested to help. If you know of any small decentralized government, you might ask them if they are interested. Probably, they have already transcended the impenetrable obstacles represented by market and growth economies. Try North Korea and
Cuba.

Why We Need a Planned Economy

 

The notion that a market economy is the only basis for human economy has been supported by a massive propaganda campaign of unprecedented scope.  It is taken as an article of faith by nearly every American that every planned economy must be accompanied by merciless tyranny with the Soviet Union cited normally as the principal example and proof.  Before I prove that market economies are unsustainable if not positively harmful and immoral, it might be worth mentioning that (i) no proof of the principal claims of market apologists has ever been offered and (ii) not every form of economic planning has been considered.  When the argument presented here has been assimilated, it is safe to say that it is incumbent upon those of us who understand the finiteness of the earth and the limits to growth to give serious thought to the problem of crafting a planned economy that does not suffer from the defects of past attempts to replace market economies.  

What I found instead at the Austin meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) was religious faith in market economies and, in fact, widespread intention to profit in the marketplace because of a better understanding of fundamentals than most traders.  Whatever I said in support of ERoEI* as a tool to determine feasibility was studiously ignored, presumably because it showed that every energy technology considered by the ASPO is infeasible (unsustainable) in a market economy – but possibly because my personal attributes do not meet the requirements of the ASPO for speakers, namely, youth, physical attractiveness, imposing stature, and a large public presence.  It seems that my only (slim) hope to overcome the prescriptions for doom advocated by speakers at the Austin meeting is the internet.  I plan to enter this document in my new blog at http://eroei.blogspot.com/.

The late David Delaney gave the best explanation of why capitalism and, in turn, market economies in general require economic growth. “The Economic Growth Trap”, which can be found at http://www.dematerialism.net/economicgrowthtrap.htm, begins as follows:

Economic growth requires increasing the amount of high quality energy and materials degraded by the economy each year.  Economic growth on a finite planet will eventually stop.  If it does not exhaust the resources needed for its continuation, it will stop earlier for some other reason.  Allowing resource depletion and biosphere degradation to terminate economic growth will produce catastrophe.  Unfortunately, our dependence on economic growth makes it extremely unlikely that we will give it up voluntarily before the catastrophe.  Our dependence has at least four aspects: A) in the need to deal with adverse consequences of labor-reducing innovations, B) in commercial bank money, C) in the need to maintain tolerance of inequality, and D) in financial markets. more

Various manifestations of market economies can be contrived to avoid all of these except the need to maintain tolerance of inequality.  Indeed, any steady-state economy that permits any sort of resource dominance will eventually devolve to a class of rich people who have been adept at acquiring wealth and a much larger class of losers in the competition for wealth who are not much better off than feudal surfs.  In the wake of Peak Oil, it is not clear that the losers would not become victims of Die-Off.  Any attempt to mitigate this unstable situation will be perceived as economic planning.  If society waits until instabilities arise, most of us may not like the sort of economic planning that is forced upon them.  Serfs liberated by revolution might not treat their former masters charitably.

But, according to papers I have written in the past such as “Energy in a Natural Economy” furloughed managers and financiers might be accorded equal shares of the sustainable community dividend measured in energy units with perhaps the energy that they would have expended by virtue of their participation in the economy as employee, employer, investor, trader, or hustler subtracted from a useful worker’s share. Indeed, it is time for us to channel some of the considerable creativity we have demonstrated in market activities toward the design and implementation of sustainable planned economies in which democracy is retained, tyranny is avoided, population is maintained at or near the optimum, and the greatest happiness possible for nearly everyone is assured.  I continue to dream of Earth as a garden.

Comment on the Austin ASPO Conference

 

After yesterday's session, about which I will write a great deal later, I have only the following comment at this time, which is meant to be taken with a grain of salt; namely, at the next conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil USA, the leadership would do well to ban the use of the word "money", or  the terms "dollar", "yen", "Euro", "pound", "franc", "mark", "RMB", etc.  Let us discuss energy in terms of energy for a change. Let us abandon totally man-made fictions and deal exclusively with physical realities. I shall have a great deal more to say about the religious faith in market economies because given Peak Oil or the finiteness of natural resources, it is easy to see that market economies are a prescription for doom, but I didn't say that in this brief note.

Definition of Emergy

  

I have been asked to give a definition of the emergy unit.  I would like to do a little more and define emergy itself as well as emergy efficiency.  Further, I will give some examples as they apply to special cases.

Definition (Availability).  Availability (or available energy) is energy [enthalpy, H, or internal energy, U] corrected for entropy, S.  Rigorous definitions of the Gibbs availability function [H – T_oS], the Helmholtz availability function [U - T_oS], and entropy are given in Appendix I, Fundamentals of Thermodynamics, where the symbols and technical terms employed in this paragraph are explained.  [T_o is  the  temperature of the environment, usually taken to be the temperature of the coldest body of water or the atmosphere into which the waste heat of a heat engine can be discharged.  For Earth, 300 K will do.  The effect of entropy on the availability function of sunlight is to reduce it by the ratio of the temperature of Earth to the temperature of the Sun – a factor of  about 19/20.  Since the enthalpy of a proton is 4/3 times the energy, the Gibbs availability of sunlight is about 76/60 times the energy.]

Odum’s original definition of emergy.  Odum defined emergy, measured in emjoules, to be the Gibbs availability of the sunlight, measured in joules, required to produce, by an optimal process, (1) fuels; (2) other energy sources such as wind or fresh water in mountain lakes; (3) natural resources such as grass and trees, (4) manufactured objects, (5) human resources; (6) information; and (7) any other objects of economic interest that can be associated with an identifiable quantity of sunlight.  This is a sunlight-based emergy.  It leads to large numbers for the emergies of primary fuels that are known only approximately; therefore, we shall modify the definition slightly to give common industrial energy products emergies that are known precisely and that are close to 1.0 in magnitude.

Definition (Standard Electricity).  In this paper, single-phase, 60 Hz, 110-volt alternating current is taken to be standard electricity.

Definition (Emergy Unit).  My arbitrary – but well-defined – choice for one unit of emergy (1 MU) is 1.0 kilowatt-hours of standard electricity.  Although electrical current carries a small amount of entropy manifest in difference currents, for all practical purposes, that is, for engineering purposes, electricity is pure work.  The availability of electricity is equal to its energy; and, with this choice of emergy unit, the emergy of electrical current is numerically equal to its energy in kilowatt-hours.  The transformity of sunlight, wind, biomass, and other energy products will be less than – but close to – 1.0.

Definition (Transformity).  The transformity of a primary fuel is the number of kilowatt-hours of standard electricity one can obtain from 1 kWhr of the primary fuel by an efficient process, the tradition of reporting the availability of fuels in BTUs per pound or kilocalories per gram mole notwithstanding.  Any unit of energy can be converted to kilowatt-hours.  This is an electricity-based transformity, the units of which are emergy units per kilowatt-hour.

Definition (Emergy).  The embodied energy or emergy of a primary fuel is the Gibbs availability of the fuel in kilowatt-hours multiplied by the electricity-based transformity.  The emergy of anything else is the sum of all the emergy that went into producing it by an efficient process minus the emergies of any by-products formed.  The emergy of an activity is the average rate of expenditure of emergy times the time.  These definitions are easily extended to include the dependence of emergy on location and time.  The concept of nemergy or negative emergy can be introduced to aid in the discussion of environmental damage.

Definition (Emergy efficiency).  Emergy efficiency is emergy out divided by emergy in.  This efficiency is 1.0 for an optimal process because the emergy of the output is defined to be the emergy of the inputs.  For a less than optimal process, the emergy efficiency is the emergy of the inputs to an optimal process over the emergy of the inputs to the process under investigation.  Emergy efficiency lies between zero and one.

The transformity of any fuel can be determined by using it to generate standard electricity by an efficient process.  The most efficient process might be a fuel cell.  Therefore, the emergy of any fuel is the Gibbs availability of the fuel multiplied by the electricity-based transformity.

Balance Equations etc.  

The second and longest part of this paper has been changed sufficiently to bear deletion and replacement by the balance-equations part of On Emergy (Part 1): Definitions and Balance Equations

Comment on Computing ER and EI

It's easy to compute the quantity of energy (really availability, which is energy corrected for entropy) we expect to be produced over the life of the project for any energy production installation we wish to investigate - in particular, to determine whether or not it produces more than it consumes. We consider energy spent to prevent or repair environmental damage caused by the installation, embodied and direct energy purchased with money paid to the stakeholders in the system, and the many other direct and indirect energy costs discussed in eroeistar.htm all to be part of the energy consumed by the process over the life of the installation. The energy produced is denoted ER for Energy Returned and the energy consumed to produce it is EI for Energy Invested. Clearly, if ER/EI < 1.0 (ER < EI), the installation should not be built. In a fossil-fuel economy, if the installation is built - usually because subsidies hide its true nature from analysts who go by monetary costs - it will result in the combustion of more fossil fuel not less. Thus, the computation of ERoEI* should be done way before the installation is built using our best estimates of things like the amount of energy required to hold the supply of materials in steady state, the energy costs to rehabilitate the plant site to a pristine condition if the plant becomes obsolete, demographics change, or for some other reason the installation abandons the planned plant site, etc. If you do this computation for any given nuclear plant taking proper account of every negative effect, you will probably determine that ERoEI* for nuclear is less than 1.0. If it is less than 1.0 for solar, it shows that more research should be done, as we have not reached our goal yet of a sustainable renewable energy technology. But, we must eventually succeed and we will.

Why We Need the Concept of Emergy

The input to the production facility that produces solar cells and their ancillary equipment consists of energy corrected for entropy and material streams and human effort.  The embodied energy or emergy of the material imputs must be added to the Energy Invested term.  Thus, a blog on ERoEI must discuss the concept of emergy.

On ERoEI as a Measure of Feasibility

Currently, I am trying to convince Charles Hall, Tom Robertson, and the rest of the world that I have solved the problem of computing the ratio of energy returned to energy invested, i. e., ER/EI or ERoEI or EROI, depending upon who is writing the term. My latest effort to state the solution concisely is posted at http://dematerialism.net/eroistar.htm, which has hyperlinks to longer discussions elsewhere. The notion of the autonomous alternative energy district (AAED) originated in a section of “Energy in a Mark II Economy” that was posted at http://dematerialism.net/remarks.htm. In “Energy in a Mark II Economy”, I computed a series of subscripted ERoEIs beginning with the direct production expenses of the manufacturer in the energy-invested term and with each successive ERoEI_i including more components. The last is very close to the composition of the energy-invested term for ERoEI* in the AAED that determines feasibility. (Overwhelming sentiment dictated that I change EROI back to EROEI or ERoEI – regardless of the similarity of that term to EIEIO in the lyrics of Old MacDonald’s Farm.)

In a community that can subsidize a renewable energy technology with fossil fuel, it is especially important to use ERoEI* as discussed at http://dematerialism.net/eroistar.htm because the lifestyles of the participants can be supported by fossil fuel. Thus, the alternative energy technology might be able to produce energy, but the total amount of fossil fuel used by the community would be increased rather than diminished. And, no one might ever know.

Before I ask you to read “ERoEI* as a Measure of Feasibility” copied from http://dematerialism.net/eroistar.htm (with EROI changed to ERoEI), I need to emphasize a few key points:

· One of the correspondents claimed that ERoEI does not account for quality or convenience. That is not true, provided that transformity is applied to the final product accounting for quality and for time and place of production to compute the emergy of the product in terms of a well-defined standard as I have done in my papers on emergy and ERoEI. It is essential to combine emergy analysis with the computation of ERoEI to determine the feasibility and sustainability of the process under investigation.

· The price of energy should reflect the cost of preventing or repairing any changes to the environment that diminish the quality of life of mankind and other species or that compromise the sustainability of the relevant ecosystems including the magnitude of the storehouses of natural resources. The quality of life depends upon aesthetics as well as pure material circumstances.

· The energy-invested term should have an energy contribution corresponding to every monetary item that affects the price even if this reduces ERoEI* to less than 1.0. Research should continue until technologies with ERoEI* greater than 1.0 are found. This approach is mathematically rigorous as opposed to other approaches that merely state that an ERoEI must be greater than some unsupported number such as 3.0 to support the operations of civilization.

Revised April 29, 2011 and December 6, 2012

ASPO Conference Austin, Texas, 2012

 

Yesterday, I attended the ASPO Pre-Conference Workshop in Austin where the recent World Energy Report that predicted that the USA would achieve cornucopian oil output was discussed. Despite general acceptance of Peak Oil by the meeting speakers, some otherwise astute economists who claimed to reject the standard economic model seemed to be pretty much caught up in flat-Earth economics principally based upon money rather than energy. They rejected planned economies and retained faith in market economies with religious conviction. Basically, they were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But, there I must leave it, as I don't want to be late for today's ASPO meetings.

Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas