Category Archives: Resource Constraints

Chart of the Day, 28 February 2015: US Natural Gas Production for December 2014

Posted on February 28, 2015 | Leave a comment

The US government agency The Energy Information Administration reports  gas production figures with a two month lag. So yesterday we saw the natural gas production numbers for December 2014 (here). So far, the tend is still upwards–indeed, production has actually been accelerating (click for larger image).

US Dry Gas Production Dec 14 jpeg

December 2014 dry gas production was up 11.6% year on year, and the 12-month moving average was 5.6% higher year on year, the highest growth since November 2012. Any particular individual month reflects the impact of weather events, but the strength of production over recent months is still noteworthy. Of course, natural gas prices have shown far more resilience than oil prices over the last 6 months. Indeed, up until December, prices were little changed from mid-summer (click for larger image).

Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price jpeg

However, over the last two months, we have seen a step change downward in Henry Hub prices to around US$3 per million British thermal unit (Btu), a 25% decline from the US$4 seen for much of 2013/14 (apart from a cold winter spike). Source: EIA here.

At this stage, I will restate my definition of a “shale revolution”. To me, you can attach the moniker “revolution” if we see higher production at a lower price. We now have a lower price. Will we continue to see rising production? Watch this space.

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Collapse Comes of Age

Posted on February 21, 2015 | 2 comments

Not long ago, the study of human collapse and extinction was the preserve of cranks (or Hollywood). True, a few maverick scholars have taken on the topic, Joseph Tainter and his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” springs to mind. Yet little academic infrastructure existed to give collapse studies depth. But just as with happiness studies, another topic covered by this blog, the situation has now changed.

In the UK, our two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have both set up institutes that probe into the greatest risks faced by mankind. In Oxford, we have the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), and in Cambridge the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). To get a taste of the FHI and its founder Nick Bostrom I recommend you read this in-depth article by Ross Andersen of the magazine Aeon here.

Like this blog, Bostrom’s principal concern is risk; that is, the probability that an event will occur combined with the impact should that event occur.

Risk jpeg

However, Bostrom extends this concept to take in scope: whether a particular risk is limited to a locality or whether it is all encompassing. This produces a risk matrix like this (source for the following analysis his paper here; click for larger image):

Typology of Risk jpeg

The X in the grid marks what Bostrom calls “existential risks”, which he defines thus:

A risk where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-orginating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

Bostrom then goes on to subdivide such existential risk into four categories:

Bangs: Intelligent life goes extinct suddenly due to accident or deliberate destruction.

Under this category we get traditional disaster movie scenarios of asteroid impact, nuclear holocaust, runaway climate change, naturally-occuring modern plague, bioterrorism, terminator-style super-intelligence and out-of-control nanobots.

Crunches: Society resets to a lower-level of technology and societal organisation. 

This includes bang-lite scenarios that don’t quite kill off intelligent life but rather just permanently cripple it.  Crunches also cover resource depletion and ecological degradation whereby natural assets can no longer support a sophisticated society. Crunch could also come from political institutions failing to cope with the modern world–subsequent to which emergent totalitarian or authoritarian regimes take us backwards.

Shrieks: A postmodern society is obtained, but far below society’s potential or aspirations. 

This is a rather nebulous category since the measuring stick of our potential is against something that we may not be able to understand–a reflection of Bostrom’s philosophical roots, perhaps.

Whimpers: Society develops but in so doing destroys what we value. 

Under this scenario, we could pursue an evolutionary path that burns up our resources or we bump up against alien civilisations that out-compete us. Over the time scale that this blog looks at–the lifespan of our young–this existential threat can be ignored.

Building on many of Bostroms preoccupations, a joint report by FHI and the Global Challenges Foundation has just been published under the title “Global Challenges: 12 Risks That Threaten Human Civilisation”. The Executive Summary can be found here and the full report here.  The report is again concerned with existential risks, but approaches this idea somewhat differently than Bostrom’s earlier work.

The focus of the report is on low probability but high impact events. The logic here is that low probability events are generally ignored by policy makers, but when such events occur, they could have catastrophic consequences. Accordingly, policy makers should be duty bound to plan for them. From a probability perspective, what we are talking about here is the often-ignored right tail of the probability distribution.

Existential Probability jpeg

The 12 risks falling into the right tail of the distribution highlighted in the report are:

  1. Extreme climate change
  2. Nuclear war
  3. Global pandemic
  4. Ecological collapse
  5. Global system collapse
  6. Major asteroid impact
  7. Super volcano
  8. Synthetic biology
  9. Nanotechnology
  10. Artificial intelligence
  11. Unknown consequences (Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns)
  12. Future bad global governance

As an aside, finance is one of the few disciplines that takes these tails seriously since they are the things that will blow you up (or make you a fortune). The industry often doesn’t get the tail-risk right (incentives often exist to ignore the tail) as the financial crisis of 2008 can attest. However, the emphasis is there. A lot of science ignores outcomes that go out more than two or three standard deviations; in finance, half your life is spent trying to analyse, quantify and prepare for such outcomes.

Returning to the Global Challenges report, the emphasis of the analysis is on dissecting tail risks, with the goal of provoking policy makers to consider them seriously. One of the most interesting proposals within the report if for a kind of existential risk early warning system, which I will look at in a separate blog post.

Finally, I will finish this post with a chart dealing with severe climate change (click for larger image or go to page 64 of the report), a risk that I hope will be at the centre of the upcoming COP 21 climate talks in Paris in December. The fact that our top universities are seriously studying such risks will, I hope, prevent them being seen as the preserve of cranks and disaster movies in future.

current climate risk jpeg

 

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Chart of the Day, 6 Feb 2015: Is Natural Capital a Helpful Concept?

Posted on February 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

Although David Cameron has come under criticism for his previous boast about running “the greenest government ever” in the UK, the coalition should be given credit for bringing some fresh thinking to the field of environmental economics. In particular, the concept of natural capital – the different elements of nature that provide value for people – has been lifted into the limelight (click for larger image).

Natural Capital jpeg

The idea of natural capital first popped up in E.F. Schumacher’s 1970s eco classic “Small Is Beautiful”. Only recently, however, has it migrated from academia to economic policy-making, most noticeably taking centre stage in the 2011 government white paper “The Natural Choice: Securing the Value of Nature”.

This white paper, in turn, gave birth to the Natural Capital Committee, chaired by the Oxford economist Dieter Helm, which has produced a series of three reports under the common title “The State of Natural Capital” (here).

So is this all “green crap” (the phrase attributed to PM Cameron when talking about energy bills)? At first glance, it looks eminently sensibly from a business perspective; that is, subjecting nature’s assets to the discipline of accrual accounting. Firms are comfortable with the concept that capital depreciates and that this is a cost. For a company to remain an ongoing concern, it can’t trash its balance sheet to the benefit of the income statement–at least not for long. Similarly, if we erode our soil or pollute our air, the benefits from these resources will gradually diminish.

Yet there are many problems. While we can sometimes back out the value of complex assets like shore-line ecosystems in terms of their functioning as flood defence, extending this approach to intangibles such as a picnic in a park is problematic.

Further, if we wish to prevent natural capital eroding, then we have to assign costs. Much natural capital suffers from the tragedy of the commons (certain economic actors secure profits but dump the costs associated with these profits on society as a whole), and getting the Office of National Statistics to compile natural capital accounts will be meaningless if enforcement isn’t given teeth. The record on climate change isn’t encouraging here. The economics profession is almost unanimous in recommending a carbon tax to make CO2 polluters pay, but few governments have thad the guts to implement one in the face of vocal opposition from vested interests.

Finally, natural capital accounting will live or die by how much you discount the future compared to the present. If we assign a high discount rate, then there is a rationale for gutting our children’s future in order to consume now. A low rate implies we care about coming generations. After the May elections, the incoming government will get to show how much it cares.

 

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Links for the Week Ending 16 July 2014

Posted on July 16, 2014 | 4 comments

I haven’t posted for quite a while. Basically, family commitments have eaten into my blogging time, and this state of affairs will likely continue for an indefinite period longer. Nonetheless, I will try to get some posts out as we grind through the last few innings of what I would term the ‘Great Hiatus’: a hiatus period—or pause— amid the longer term trend of rising global mean temperatures, higher oil prices, increasing resource constraints and greater global economic instability.

For example, with a 70-80% chance of an El Nino by year-end, temperature records have the potential to start falling again. Further, oil has built a solid base above $100 per barrel but appears poised to go higher in the next year or so as oil companies struggle to find new fields that can be developed at the right price.

At the same time, many of the financial fragilities in the system posed by ageing demographics, declining productivity and increasing resource constraints have to date been countered by the super easy monetary policy pursued worldwide. The aggressive, unprecedented and unorthodox monetarism  led by the Federal Reserve Board has been a policy triumph over the short term. Since the credit crunch of 2008/2009, the sky has not fallen down.

Yet the jury is still out as to whether the provision of free money can be maintained long enough to see a return to sustainable economic growth, or whether it will beget a new cycle of chronic instability through having fostered the extension of credit into intrinsically poor investments and a generalized asset price inflation that benefits few but the rich.

In the meantime, here are some links which I hope will flesh out some of the themes of this blog:

  • Occasionally, my left-learning friends berate me for reading the right-of-centre Daily Telegraph. I offer two defences: first, you need to read opinion with which you may instinctively disagree, but find of some merit with a bit of reflection. Second, a good newspaper has intellectual mavericks—and The Telegraph has many (probably more than The Guardian). Here is an article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard portraying the fossil fuel industry as poor capitalists; in short, the oil majors have been investing ever more, to reap ever less; while renewables are slowing sloughing off their subsidies. Joseph Schumpeter would be proud of this epic creative destruction.
  • And despite all the new technology we are bringing to bear on oil extraction, when fields go into decline it is damn tough fighting the tide. North Sea oil was a much ignored saviour of the British economy in the 1980s, but is decline is inexorable and, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), accelerating. The Financial Times has the story here (access to FT articles after free registration), but if you want to go to the primary OBR source you can find it here.
  • We are still seeing a lot of commentary over “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty. Piketty argues that the relative reduction in inequality in advanced countries over the post-war period was something of an aberration. Accordingly to his analysis, without direct political intervention (or in the most extreme case revolution), capital will gradually accrue to a relative few. In short, when the return on capital is greater than the growth rate, it is the owners of capital who prosper most, not those in capital’s employ. For a fuller treatment, I recommend Cory Doctorow’s summary here,  and an interview by Maththew Yglesias of Vox  a while back with Piketty here.
  • You can also slice growing inequality in different ways. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in the UK has just issued a report detailing how the real incomes of young people are falling much faster than those of any other age cohort (here). Meanwhile, I have often commented on how London has detached itself form the rest of the UK. In the US, Emily Badger of The Washington Post’s Wonk Blog charts a similar divergence between cities showing a virtuous cycle of education and growth and those showing a vicious cycle of poor education and decline (here)
  • Climate sceptics love to start any global mean temperature chart with a data point centred on 1997/98, which happens to coincide with the largest El Nino for a century. This monster El Nino ushered in the record breaking hot year of 1998 (slightly eclipsed in later years depending on which data set you look at, but still one of the hottest years on record: see NASA’s data set here). Global mean temperature is a construct of short-term weather volatility, long-term green-house gas induced temperature rise and the medium-term ENSO cycle. Eventually, CO2 will do its stuff and records will fall regardless of whether we have an El Nino. But for us to quickly retire all the talk of a hiatus in temperature rise will require a new and powerful El Nino. True, an El Nino appears on the cards by year-end, but quite how strong it will be is still clouded in uncertainty as this post at Skeptical Science explains here.
  • If you visit London, take time to visit some of the quirky, smaller museums. One of the most intriguing (and downright disturbing) is the Old Operating Theatre that used to be part of St Thomas Hospital just south of The Thames. This is no Disney Land reconstruction, but a perfectly preserved part of pre-antiseptic medical history.  Despite appearing to be a set from a particularly dark Harry Potter movie scene, the Old Operating Theatre shows how and where surgeons removed a damaged limb in around two minutes flat, with minimal anaesthetic. The museum demonstrates how far we have come health-wise in an historical blink of an eye (150 years or so). And for those who would welcome an economic collapse as a route toward a more authentic form of living, I direct you to a post at Club Orlov explaining a world of post-collapse, or village, medicine. Humanity is put right back on the St Thomas Hospital’s operating table. Pray for four strong men to hold you down—and a surgeon who has not only washed his hands, but is also quick with blade and saw.

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Links for the Week Ending 9 March 2014

Posted on March 10, 2014 | 8 comments

Apologies for the late posting of this week’s links. Has been a crazy week.

  • For those of a non-business background, any reference to The Economist magazine with respect to climate change may appear strange. Who cares what The Economist writes on the subject? I would beg to disagree. Few, if any, senior business executives will read posts on Real Climate or Skeptical Science, let alone academic articles on the subject. For English speakers, most climate change commentary will come out of the pages (much of which will, of course, be online these days) of The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, other serious non-financial dailies like The New York Times in the U.S. and The Telegraph in the U.K., a motley collection of weeklies like Forbes, and, of course, The Economist. And The Economist is rather special in terms of its reach into board rooms across the globe (and for that matter cabinet offices). For example, Playboy Magazine once asked Bill Gates what he reads. The answer: “The Economist, every page”. A year ago, The Economist wrote an extended article on the global warming ‘hiatus’ that, I thought, gave too much weight to a few studies suggesting that climate sensitivity was far lower than previously thought (here, free registration). This week, however, the magazine made amends by publishing an excellent piece titled “Who pressed the pause button?” on the so called ‘hiatus’ in temperature rise. It ended with this statement:  “Most of the circumstances that have put the planet’s temperature rise on “pause” look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.”
  • Talking of ‘The Terminator’, The Guardian carries an interview with the Crown Prince of techno-optimists and Google geek in chief Ray Kurzweil. God help us if anyone actually believes this stuff.
  • Up the road from me in Oxford is the NGO Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN). Its founder George Marshall has an interesting blog that looks at the narratives surrounding climate change. In a post called “How the Climate Change Messengers Became Blamed for the Floods” he deconstructs the media’s reaction to the recent U.K. floods. It’s somewhat depressing stuff.
  • One of the sharpest observers of the shale hype has been the petroleum geologist Art Berman. He has a site called The Petroleum Truth Report, but, frustratingly, doesn’t keep it current. Fortunately, he has just given a new interview with Oilprice.com updating us on his recent thinking. The interview is full of gems such as this: “Oil companies have to make a big deal about shale plays because that is all that is left in the world. Let’s face it: these are truly awful reservoir rocks and that is why we waited until all more attractive opportunities were exhausted before developing them. It is completely unreasonable to expect better performance from bad reservoirs than from better reservoirs.” I highly recommend you read the whole thing.
  • The economist Noah Smith writes a lively blog called Noahpinion. In this post he makes some keen observations on the ‘jobs and robots’ debate, while in this article in The Week he compares America’s decline with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.

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Posted in Climate Change, Peak Oil, Post Growth, Resource Constraints, Technology

Data Watch: US Natural Gas Monthly Production December 2013

Posted on March 3, 2014 | 2 comments

The US government agency the Energy Information Administration (EIA) issues data on U.S. natural gas production, including shale gas, on a monthly basis with a lag of roughly two months. The latest data release was made on February 28th, and covers the period up until end-December 2013.

Data is reported in billion cubic feet (bcf). Key points:

  • December 2013 natural gas dry production: 2,090 bcf, plus 2.1% year-on-year
  • Average monthly production for the 12 months to December 2013: 2,023 bcf, +0.9% over the same period the previous year

Since the end of 2011, production growth has stalled (click chart below for larger image), with the year-on-year 12-month average bumping along a plateau.

US Dry Gas Production Dec 13 jpeg

Natural gas well-head prices exhibit seasonality, with winters generally seeing stronger prices due to heating needs. The recent polar-vortex induced cold snap in the U.S. has pushed prices up to their highest since February 2010 (here, click for larger image).

Natural Gas Spot Prices Mar 3 jpeg

To put the current price of $5.0 per million British thermal uni (Btu) in perspective, a longer term monthly time series going up until end December 2012 is given below (click for larger image). Note that natural gas production is very inelastic over the short term. Accordingly, the market is brought back into equilibrium during periods of strong demand through large jumps in price. However, these don’t generally prompt an investment surge in natural gas infrastructure since they are viewed as temporary in nature. Only if prices remain elevated beyond winter would we likely see a supply-side response. However, prices are already coming off their highs as we move toward spring.

US Nat Gas Well Head LT jpeg

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Links for the Week Ending 2 March 2014

Posted on March 2, 2014 | 1 comment
  • Martin Wolf has been revisiting the robots and jobs topic over the past few weeks in a couple of articles in The Financial Times here and here (free access after registration). This is a theme I have been addressing a lot recently in a series of posts starting here. Wolf finishes his last article with the observation that technology does not always have to shape institutions; it should be the other way around: “A form of techno-feudalism is unnecessary. Above all, technology itself does not dictate the outcomes. Economic and political institutions do. If the ones we have do not give the results we want, we must change them.” I agree, but this will not be easy.
  • I have also just discovered a fascinating blog that pulls together articles on the new robot economy called RobotEnomics (sic). For example, check out this post on the economic implications of driverless cars.
  • California has experienced significant rainfall over the last few days. The latest Drought Monitor (released weekly) doesn’t capture this rainfall, so we should see some slight improvement when the next update comes out. Critically though, California’s water bank—its high mountain snow pack—is still running at around 20% of average. You can see the end month figures as measured by the Department of Water Resources here and an article giving background to the snowpack here. Mother Jones has some nice graphics on the crops being hurt by the drought here, while The Atlantic has a very interesting (and very long) article on the history and future of California’s massive water engineering projects here.
  • Here I go again: linking to the March 1998 Campbell and Laherrere article titled “The End of Cheap Oil” in Scientific American. The authors ended the article with this sentence “The world is not running out of oil—at least not yet. What our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend.” Average price of Brent crude in 1998: $13.2 per barrel, equivalent nowadays to around $19 after adjusting for inflation. Brent now: $109 per barrel. But isn’t fracking going to give us an endless supply of cheap oil?  Here is an article in Bloomberg titled “Dream of Oil Independence Slams Against Shale Costs”. In other words, Campbell and Laherrere continue to be proved right and the energy cornucopians continue to be proved very wrong.
  • For technological optimists the dream is for a transformational technology that can permanently alter the energy supply equation. Fusion has always been one such hope, but forever decades away from commercial development. The New Yorker has just published a superb article called “A Star in a Bottle” on the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER) being built in France. The audacity and scope of the project is extraordinary. Yet my takeaway from the article is that fusion provides little hope of providing a timely saviour with respect to either climate change or fossil fuel depletion.

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Links for the Week Ending 23 February 2014

Posted on February 23, 2014 | 2 comments
  • The so called hiatus period of flat-lining global mean temperatures has certainly been a godsend for the climate skeptic lobby. A lot of this recent change in temperature trend is due to the ENSO cycle: El Nino years are generally hot years, and we haven’t recently had many strong El Ninos. You can see this effect in the NASA chart here. So the next time we get a strong El Nino year expect to see a new global mean temperature record. When will we see the next one? This intriguing guest post on Jeff Masters Wunderblog suggests we may be due for a big El Nino in 2014. If true, expect to see the ‘hiatus period’ disappear from the climate skeptic lexicon.
  • By coincidence, I saw the NASA chart above reproduced in a blog post on Econbrowser by Menzie Chinn. Hamilton and Chinn, who co-author the blog, are two of the most respected economists in the world. Hamilton wrote one of the standard time series texts that a generation of econometricians grew up on. Chinn’s post is titled “Economic Implications of Anthropogenic Climate Change and Extreme Weather“. He takes aim at those who think we can easily adapt to climate change, pointing out that not only will the trend change but also volatility. All of this will cost a lot of money.
  • The global media has picked up on the Californian drought to a certain extent. If you want to track it yourself, click the U.S. Drought Monitor page here. There has been far less coverage, however, of the Brazilian drought; here is a rare piece of coverage by National Public Radio. And what is happening in Brazil is already having an effect on food prices as witnessed by the skyrocketing price of coffee; see here.
  • I have frequently commented that despite rising resource constraints  and a productivity slowdown, global GDP growth has motored on at around 3% per annum regardless. The is mostly because China has acted as a growth locomotive for everyone else, offsetting anaemic growth in the U.S., Europe and Japan. So if China’s growth collapses, this will likely mean that global growth takes a step-change downward (the other BRICs and MINTs have their own problems). Having seen Japan’s experience first hand (one day growth, the next day no growth), I have been a huge skeptic of China’s economic model. But to date, the sky has not fallen down. The BBC’s economics correspondent Robert Peston has just produced a short documentary called “How China Fooled the World” that sets out the pessimist’s case and can be found on iPlayer. If you have a problem accessing BBC content, try this link at YouTube here.
  • Most web-based technology favours scale: it facilitates ‘winner takes all’ economics. Think Google and Facebook. Yet it also reduces the cost of information and, potentially, small production runs. This, in turn, favours the so called ‘long tail’. This strange dance between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of information technology is a source of both fragility and resilience as we face resource and climate change challenges. For a slightly different riff on the same theme see this article by the economist Robert Frank in The New York Times.

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Posted in Climate Change, Resource Constraints, Technology

Energy Return on Investment (EROI): State of Play

Posted on February 5, 2014 | 3 comments

In my last post, I referred to the work of Charles Hall on Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and biophysical economics. Following an exchange of e-mails with Professor Hall,  he directed me to some of his more recent work, including a January 2014 paper titled “EROI of Different Fuels and the Implications for Society” published in Energy Policy (free access). The paper looks at the critical EROI question: “How many units of energy do you extract for each unit of energy you invest?”.

The paper is a veritable chartfest of all things EROI, but I will wet your appetitive with just three. First up, is an EROI comparison between different fossil fuel and biomass energy sources (click for larger image).

Mean EROI jpeg

The bad news here is that coal remains the king of EROI since you get around 40 times as much energy out for each unit of energy you put in. Hardly good for CO2 emissions trajectories and climate change.

Next up is the decline in global oil and gas EROIs (click for larger image):

Global Oil and Gas EROIs jpeg

The decline is unsurprising since we are trying to exploit ever more geologically marginal sources of oil and gas in ever more unconventional forms.

Finally, a chart showing fossil fuels up against renewables (click for larger image):

EROIs Different Energy Sources jpeg

I was genuinely surprised at this one because both wind and photovoltaic (PV) came in higher than I expected. Hall flags all the major problems with wind and PV (need for base load and so on) and also points to disputes over PV EROI methodology. Nonetheless, I have heard arguments in the past that PV is almost break-even in EROI terms; this does not appear to be the case.

There is a lot more in the paper, including numerous interesting references. When I get time, I will come back to the EROI of renewables as it seems such an important topic.

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Should We All Give Up?

Posted on February 4, 2014 | 7 comments

The frustration within the sustainability and resilience blogosphere is palpable. Oftentimes it is expressed in terms such as this: “Why even bother communicating with the mainstream, when the mainstream has no intention of listening?”

But ideas have a life of their own, and many are gradually infecting the mainstream, without the mainstream even being aware of their origin. For example, take the chart below titled “Costly Quest” taken from a Wall Street Journal article published on 28 January (behind paywall here, click for larger image):

Majors Oil Production jpeg

This is a classic case of the Red Queen syndrome, under which Big Oil has to run ever faster purely in order to stand still; that is, ever more investment for the same level of production. (A previous post dealt with the Red Queen and shale gas here.)

The Red Queen can also be described another way: a decline in the energy return on investment (EROI), under which you have to put ever more energy into an extraction and production process just to get the same amount of energy out.

EROI was first conceived of by the systems ecologist Charles Hall who later developed it more deeply into the discipline called biophysical economics, the best exposition of which can be found  in the book “Energy and the Wealth of Nations” by Hall and co-author Kent Klitgaard.

You can listen to a recent 19 January 2014 podcast by Hall talking about EROI and biophysical economics at Progressive Radio Network at the link below. Don’t get put off by the weird bird noises at the beginning. The podcast starts one minute in and Hall gets on to fossil fuel depletion issues about 25 minutes into the podcast. The first 25 minutes are still interesting as they explain how Hall got involved in biological energy systems when studying migrating salmon.

http://prn.fm/resistance-radio-charles-hall-011914-2/

At the height of the credit crisis, the revolutionary ideas espoused by advocates of biophysical economics chimed with the times and even got an airing in the mainstream media, as, for example, in this article in The New York Times in 2009.

Five years on and this intellectual strand of thought remains marginalised, as Joseph Tainter, one of the movements most high profile supporters predicted back then:

“Of course I’m trying to send a message,” said Joseph Tainter, chairman of Utah State University’s Department of Environment and Society. “I just don’t expect there’s anyone out there to receive it.”

And many who tried to get the message out have given up, the demise of The Oil Drum being, perhaps, the most famous example. Similarly, we got a post from the blogger Question Everything yesterday making a very definitive statement:

What follows is actually something that has been brewing for a while. I started writing this a little over a year ago. A recent e-mail list exchange with some other people who have been blogging, mostly about things like climate change, energy depletion, and the collapse of civilization, reminded me of my own evolution in thinking. Several well-known luminaries in the blog and book-writing world have begun to voice a kind of remorse that their voices have been ignored. Meanwhile the world has careened toward the consequences they have warned us of. And now they are realizing that they have been tilting at windmills. Somewhere along the line I did too…..

…..In any case I plan to no longer concern myself with warning of imminent collapse or a bottleneck. In all likelihood I may, from time to time, simply mention another signpost along the way, like the current draught problems in California as indications that climate change is having its effects much sooner than expected. But I won’t dwell on how it could have been different if only people would have listened to the warnings and taken heed. I won’t complain about those in governments being so incredibly stupid and foolish. I’ve said quite enough about it already. Think of this as a kind of retirement from the role of a Cassandra.

My own position is somewhat less gloomy. Why should we be so surprised that a well-financed climate skeptic lobby would have emerged after Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  “Fourth Assessment Report” in 2007? Or surprised that, with an oil price spiralling above $100 per barrel, the fossil fuel industrial complex would throw more cash and technology at getting marginal barrels of oil out of the ground?

My optimism rests on the fact that our problems cannot be permanently ignored: the planet will continue to warm and energy prices will continue to rise. In The New York Times article back in 2009, Hall was quoted thus:

“It isn’t that there’s no technology,” Hall said. “The question is, technology is in a race with depletion, and that’s a whole different concept. And we think that we can show empirically that depletion is winning, because the energy return on investment keeps dropping for gas and oil.”

This is basically the core idea behind The Wall Street Journal article I commenced the post with.

So should we all give up? I think my answer is “no”: every idea has its time and biophysical economics is an idea whose time is just arriving. From the heretical to the mainstream in tiny incremental steps. Indeed, in the not too distant future, even The Wall Street Journal will believe in the idea of peak oil and dangerous anthropogenic climate change. You may call me stupid and naive; I prefer to see myself as patient.

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