Dr. Abel Explains the Energy - Life Connection
EROI - what?
Author: Cal Abel, PhD - @cal_abel
The EROI threshold of economic viability comes from the fact human beings have to use energy to sustain a certain level of existence. This is about the best explanation I have found.
Beginning at the 16:45 point on the podcast, he talks about the three energy inputs into the economy: Food, animal feed, and wood. Everything that we did up until the industrial revolution was constrained be these renewable resources.
Humans had a relatively flat growth from neolithic up to the 1790s. Inventions like the Medieval horse harness, or the Bronze Age ox yoke, may not seem like much now but the innovation in these devices allowed greater EROI, our beasts of burden became more efficient.
This flat growth 0.4% give (17:50 in podcast) or take was due to the amount of energy that we had to expend just to produce the energy needed to maintain society at such poor levels. Suffering was the universal mode of existence, something Buddha identified out millennia ago.
For all but the last 250-years of our existence as a species, all energy had to be harvested. This resulted in an EROI of about 5-10 for many many millennia. Our religions even have guidance on stewardship, e.g. the parable of the faithful servant.
Waste not want not.
Then we found coal, well actually we had it before but never did anything with it, because we had trees. Leave it to an Englishman (also us yanks) to do the right thing when all alternatives are exhausted. Once the trees were gone, they had no choice but to innovate.
This innovation took us from an EROI of 5-10:1 to 30:1. (19:46) It was this step change that allowed our society to begin to accumulate capital. The speaker properly identifies that all economic activity is just a series of energy conversions. (18:55)
The centrality of energy in our economy is fundamental. All economic activity is about the exchange of energy.
This is why I say, "Value IS Energy."
If you can handle a dense read of math, economics, and quantum physics, I prove this truth here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4228762
All of the capital that we have accumulated in the last 350-years since Newcomen has been a result of this surplus EROI. And we are squandering it because we are so arrogant to think that we know better than our ancestors. We are cutting down the trees that they planted!
We, as a society, think that we know better that relying on low EROI energy sources is the pathway to the future. It is only a pathway to a fundamental return to mass suffering and starvation. Think I'm exaggerating, look at Sri Lanka.
We must look towards high EROI supplies to fuel our society and to preserve what we've been given for our unborn children. We are but stewards of this place in which we've been granted dominion.
How do we increase EROI?
1. Build more Nuclear ♾.
2. Recycle our nuclear waste: EROI 75:1 to 9000:1.
3. Use the heat from the reactor to refine our fossil fuels Particularly coal, 30:1 and Oil, 18:1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856
https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4731797.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856
I've spent the last 15-years of my life devoted to figuring out how to do just this with all of the tools our forefathers gave us, plus a small contribution on my part.
Energy isn't hard, it's just common sense. You know it because you live it. You just don't know that you do.
https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1021/2022/esd-13-1021-2022.html
Garrett supports you.
The valuation of money is flat relative to energy in production when inflation is removed.