The steampunk future

[bigbadwolf]

Thought-provoking essay by the Archdruid.

 

[tfors]

I am a bit more optimistic, the one thing that startles me though is that at the one hand one is talking about the need to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and on the other one is planning to massively increase the output of said gasses. (slight reduce in the 1st world economies does not offset at all the rapid increase in emerging economies).

 

[Yike Lu]

His schtick about how technology could have been different is certainly interesting. I like it, if only for the fact that so few people try to think that way.

But the idea that a slide rule can in any way come close to competing with computers is so laughable that I wonder if this guy has any idea how computation is done by real companies.

 

[bigbadwolf]

But the idea that a slide rule can in any way come close to competing with computers is so laughable that I wonder if this guy has any idea how computation is done by real companies.

He probably doesn't -- but it seems to me it's beside the point. The point he's made more than once is how we'll get by when the huge infrastructure needed to manufacture and support the use of advanced electronics is not around (manufacturing facilities for chips, trans-Pacific supply chains, electrical grid, et cetera). An earlier post of his (Jan. 15) first refers to it:

7. Computer-free mathematics. Until recently, it didn’t take a computer to crunch the numbers needed to build a bridge, navigate a ship, balance profits against losses, or do any of ten thousand other basic or not-so-basic mathematical operations; slide rules, nomographs, tables of logarithms, or the art of double-entry bookkeeping did the job. In the future, after computers stop being economically viable to maintain and replace, those same tasks will still need to be done, but the knowledge of how to do them without a computer is at high risk of being lost. If that knowledge can be gotten back into circulation and kept viable as the computer age winds down, a great many tasks that will need to be done in the deindustrial future will be much less problematic.

(It’s probably necessary to repeat here that the reasons our descendants a few generations from now won’t be surfing the internet or using computers at all are economic, not technical. If you want to build and maintain computers, you need an industrial infrastructure that can manufacture integrated circuits and other electronic components, and that requires an extraordinarily complex suite of technologies, sprawling supply chains, and a vast amount of energy—all of which has to be paid for. It’s unlikely that any society in the deindustrial dark ages will have that kind of wealth available; if any does, many other uses for that wealth will make more sense in a deindustrialized world; and in an age when human labor is again much cheaper than mechanical energy, it will be more affordable to hire people to do the routine secretarial, filing, and bookkeeping tasks currently done by computers than to find the resources to support the baroque industrial infrastructure needed to provide computers for those tasks.

 

[alain]

What this guy is missing is the ingenuity of the human being. New problems will come up and humans will find a solution.

 

[GoIllini]

I've been through all of this with the Peak Oil Doomers in 2005-2007. The US now gets 3% of its electricity from wind, which is a huge increase from 0.5% a decade ago, and that the naysayers claimed could never happen.

Wind has some issues when it comes to the stability of the grid and requires better energy storage technology to make up 50% of our energy supply, but I am less pessimistic than I was back in 2007-2008. And even if it doesn't work, we're getting ready to bury 200 years of US consumption of carbon-free energy (U-238 if we reprocess it into Pu-239) in Yucca Mountain. For all of the complaints about nuclear energy, radioactive decay means that all of the radiological effects of a breach of containment (EG Fukushima, Chernobyl) get 2% smaller every year. We've practically reached a state where the nuclear waste we generate (excluding the super-long-lived stuff you can also safely hold in your hand unshielded) is decaying at a rate as fast as we produce it. So I've always been surprised that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club oppose nuclear energy so much.

But our pursuit of unconventional energy like the tar sands, and shale oil/gas leaves me a bit concerned. We need natural gas prices above $5/kcf for wind, nuclear, and solar to remain competitive.

 

[bigbadwolf]

But our pursuit of unconventional energy like the tar sands, and shale oil/gas leaves me a bit concerned. We need natural gas prices above $5/kcf for wind, nuclear, and solar to remain competitive.

They're being pursued because renewables like wind, solar, and hydro can't take up the increasing slack being produced by the declining super-fields. Shale is a mirage in any case. In addition, the renewables depend on some assistance from fossil fuels for building and maintenance. And other than not being able to take up the slack, there are some things only fossil fuel can do. In short, there's probably some turbulence ahead.

 

[GoIllini]

They're being pursued because renewables like wind, solar, and hydro can't take up the increasing slack being produced by the declining super-fields. Shale is a mirage in any case.

If shale is a mirage, why have natural gas prices dropped from $12/kcf to ~$4?

In addition, the renewables depend on some assistance from fossil fuels for building and maintenance. And other than not being able to take up the slack, there are some things only fossil fuel can do. In short, there's probably some turbulence ahead.

Wind, nuclear, solar all have EROEIs in the double digits. I think there is some reason for some concern about energy but things look much better today than they did ten years ago.

I think Malthusianism does a good job of explaining the market once or twice every 30-40 years. I don't think this is one of those times, though I am long cropland and energy to cover my natural short position just in case.

 

[bigbadwolf]

If shale is a mirage, why have natural gas prices dropped from $12/kcf to ~$4?

Too much dumped on the market too fast. With regard to shale oil, the US might peak by the end of this year -- and the fall-off will probably be rapid.

Wind, nuclear, solar all have EROEIs in the double digits. I think there is some reason for some concern about energy but things look much better today than they did ten years ago.

We're not going back to the era of the Flintstones. One doesn't have to be a doom-and-gloomer to take a hard-eyed look at the energy future, at diminishing EROEIs, and try to get a feel for what life will be like a decade or two from now. The conventional super-fields are declining at around 4-5% annually in production (I think).