Concerning Energy Return On Investment (EROI)

Dr. Homer-Dixon presents powerful arguments for the coming energy crisis, arguments with which I agree for the most part, although again I believe the picture he paints is overly pessimistic. He argues that oil provides very high energy return for a modest amount of effort required to extract,harvest, refine and distribute it, while other energy sources provide much lower EROI. He suggests that ethanol production, if it can be tuned to guarantee a positive EROI, may provide a low EROI renewable energy resource that competes, however, with land needed for farming. Coal, especially the new technologies that are somewhat less harmful to the environment, may be useful for a time. Hydrogen provides a high EROI, but is difficult to produce, while solar energy has low power density, and hence cannot be used to support industrial processes that require high energy density.

Overall, he argues that the alternatives will not sustain our current industries, which assume high power density, nor will they support our current concentrated living arrangements, such as found within cities. Essentially, he is saying that we cannot continue to function under our current socio-economic arrangements for much longer.

There we agree. His fear, of course, is that the result will be catastrophic breakdown of social structures. He argues that our societies have little built in "resiliency" against such failures. This is where we disagree. I believe that we, humanity, is engaged in a vast process of developing new ways of functioning within a changing world, and that these new ways of functioning essentially provide the needed resiliency. I suggest that the two processes are matched - on the one hand, the old ways of functioning of the environment is changing in dramatic ways, and on the other, we are changing along with it.

Homer-Dixon draws an analogy with the collapse of ancient Rome, and suggests that we are in a similar situation. I disagree, despite the apparent similarity of contexts. I believe that what is different is that we are operating at the limits of what the planet can sustain, that the world is no bigger than we are. Although the Roman empire was huge, it was still a centrally organized society, and one that operated in a much larger world. We are not in the same situation - there is no place on the planet that is not also part of our dilemma, the paradox we face. I believe that places us in a situation in which no alternative but change is possible, and that we WILL change, as a consequence.

Humanity is in a systems interaction with our environment, to the extent that each determines the other, and both have to change together. The ancient Roman empire had other alternatives, bad ones perhaps, from the perspective of a centrally organized civilization, but alternatives nonetheless. We do not. We're the only game in town. Either we succeed, or we die. And while dying is a possibility, it is not an option.

The way forward must therefore be, that we change the way we do business, the ways in which we live, the ways in which we make things. The energy alternatives we face are inevitable, inescapable. We must reinvent ourselves, in such a way that as a society we can function with low power density and lower EROI energy sources. Already we are moving away from a centrally-oriented society, to one that expects to function more peripherally, more fragmented, less uniformly at the local scale. Social upheaval will occur, but not at levels that exceed our capacity to deal with them.

Although i think there has been a "dearth of ingenuity", rather than a death, I believe that our current (receding) socio-economic arrangements are the source of the problem, and that the newer arrangements coming into being will act to correct the problem.

The Argument

This blog is focussed on the task of challenging and critiquing those writers who choose to predict and announce disaster, as well as on and their writings. The primary argument I present against these writings is that they aim to promote change by raising fear, and fear is the least motivating of all our emotions, the least useful as a source of empowerment. Most people stay frozen by their fears, most of their lives. It is not fear that drives us forward, it is desire, and need, and action, and identity, it can be greed, and love, and anger, but almost never, fear!

A second argument against doomsaying is that it is usually an argument that predicts chaos and announced the need to re-establish order. And with order comes orthodoxy, and doctrine, and ways of coralling people to "behave". The doomsayer argument is an argument for increasing control, it is an argument that predicts the ills when control is lost and argues in favor of a re-establishment of control. But the world is not structured in terms of control, but rather in terms of complex interlocking and interacting systems. Any attempt to take control of this structure is not only doomed to failure, it will become the source of the failure of the system as a whole, it is how we have gotten into trouble with the planet in the first place.

However, the systems that make up the world are larger than are the systems that can be controlled, and eventually, compensatory mechanisms come into play, bringing the global system back to a level of functionality. These checks and balances are, ultimately, what prevents the doomsayers from being right. Not that the world and its life forms cannot suffer enormously from unwise activities on the part of humans, but rather that it will eventually find new grounds for re-establishing some form of harmony.

The same can be said of individual human beings - we are larger than our control systems (those under conscious control are, fortunately, only a tiny fraction of the whole system), and we have checks and balances in our own makeup that prevent, most of the time, our own self destruction. And it can be said of human societies. All this does not suggest that disaster is not possible, only that a viewpoint that sees disaster as the result of lack of control is of low utility.

If one understands the way a system operates, especially a very large one that operates at least in part outside of any control networks that can be put into place, one does not seek to change the operation of the system by promoting a doomsday message... instead, one seeks to become cognizant of the different and contradictory parts of the system and their interaction, and one uses this knowledge to change elements of one self and one's interaction with the world, for all changes propagate from such individual actions (see my blog on orthodoxy and paradoxy).