What do you think the probability is that humans will figure out how to make a sustainable civilisation?

[Eclipse]

I didn't know anything about it until the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, 2005. I then spent 6 months researching it, and was hooked.

Yes - it gets like that.

I was seeing a shrink about insomnia issues and then my son got cancer. Long story short - he survived and is OK - but the shrink gave me the exactly wrong anti-depressant and it drove me manic right when I discovered Life After the Oil crash in August 2004 - and my life got thrown totally off-balance for a decade. I went manic, and gathered a group together that presented to our state politicians, got permission to cut End of Suburbia down to a half-hour special and burned it to DVD for all our state and Federal pollies, etc. Manic - right when I should have been focussing only on my family needing special care.

On time and target. If you can't get it working before we self immolate it is irrelevant. Post up when it's ready to start working.

Of course! Even on a hyper-optimistic expanding techno-utopian pathway this is many centuries away.
But we can see the shape of the early stepping stones in this yellow brick road.
Self-landing, reusable, cheap super-sized rockets.



Then maybe a moon-base.
Then maybe hydrogen harvesting on the moon, with a maglev railgun firing it back to a space-station refinery around earth. Starship tankers lift carbon up to the station, where it's mixed with cheaper hydrogen from the moon for methane fuel tanks.

Then maybe the moon-base starts firing solar panels back to earth for space-based PowerSats. IF it's cheap enough. Who cares if it's baseload if it's too expensive? May as well build a bunch of Molten Salt reactors like the MCSFR to burn through our nuclear waste here on earth.

But I've been reading Professor Blakers of the ANU (who won the Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering - kind of a Nobel Prize for engineering!) and he calculates that solar and wind are getting so cheap that even with the additional costs of a super-HVDC grid and PHES everywhere, a renewable grid could already be cheaper than coal with today's tech.

So if something else comes along in the future that's even cheaper, it will be amazing! Let the competition of the clean-tech begin!

[johnny]

I didn't know anything about it until the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, 2005. I then spent 6 months researching it, and was hooked.

Yes - it gets like that.

Really? Did it grab the true believers hard and fast as well?

I was seeing a shrink about insomnia issues and then my son got cancer. Long story short - he survived and is OK - but the shrink gave me the exactly wrong anti-depressant and it drove me manic right when I discovered Life After the Oil crash in August 2004 - and my life got thrown totally off-balance for a decade.

I'll bet. An unemployed ambulance chaser as a prophet, that was one of the early tells about how the internet could dispense nonsense from the most absolutely uninformed and folks would swallow it hook, line and sinker.

I went manic, and gathered a group together that presented to our state politicians, got permission to cut End of Suburbia down to a half-hour special and burned it to DVD for all our state and Federal pollies, etc. Manic - right when I should have been focussing only on my family needing special care.

For me it was 6 months of some of the most interesting research time I've ever done on a topic. And after 14 years of underlying research and the resulting practical applications it was just another technical challenge resolved. Based on how fast the acolytes fled the church as new oil production drowned out their hopes dreams, I lasted longer than most.

On time and target. If you can't get it working before we self immolate it is irrelevant. Post up when it's ready to start working.

Of course! Even on a hyper-optimistic expanding techno-utopian pathway this is many centuries away.
But we can see the shape of the early stepping stones in this yellow brick road.
Self-landing, reusable, cheap super-sized rockets.
Then maybe a moon-base.
Then maybe hydrogen harvesting on the moon, with a maglev railgun firing it back to a space-station refinery around earth. Starship tankers lift carbon up to the station, where it's mixed with cheaper hydrogen from the moon for methane fuel tanks.
Then maybe the moon-base starts firing solar panels back to earth for space-based PowerSats. IF it's cheap enough. Who cares if it's baseload if it's too expensive? May as well build a bunch of Molten Salt reactors like the MCSFR to burn through our nuclear waste here on earth.
But I've been reading Professor Blakers of the ANU (who won the Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering - kind of a Nobel Prize for engineering!) and he calculates that solar and wind are getting so cheap that even with the additional costs of a super-HVDC grid and PHES everywhere, a renewable grid could already be cheaper than coal with today's tech.

Seems like you went pretty quickly from being messed up by a charade to arriving at the opposite end of the spectrum in record time.

What might your timeframe be on the race between self-immolation and some small start on a small piece of this idea, say, a renewable grid replacing coal? Seems like if you limit this to just coal you'll still allow oil and gas to be used, the entire self-immolation thing might still be a factor.

[Eclipse]

I've shared this before (not sure if it was this thread)... but I basically went from "nukes must be half the grid" to r"enewables can probably do it all in most countries" only about year ago. It was all about the cost curves. A year ago I realised what an LCOE 1/4 of nuclear really means

Here's my usual copy and paste on the speed.

Remember the old example of bacteria in a Petri dish. Assume you know it doubles every minute, and the dish will be full in an hour. When is the dish half full? In 59 minutes! The bacteria has been almost invisible for 50 minutes then in the last 10 minutes goes from a tiny blotch to an eighth, then a quarter, then a half, and suddenly the dish is full!

In this metaphor - renewables are just becoming visible as a smudge on the side of the petri dish. They are about to explode out exponentially. In 2025 solar factories will have FOUR TIMES the capacity of all the solar built in 2022! This is 6% of today's electricity built EVERY YEAR! 17 years to the job from solar alone! (But that's cheating - as we're going to Overbuild most grids about 3 times. But 4 times 2022’s capacity by 2025 - what will the increase be after that? It shows how fast things are accelerating.) https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/epis ... roi-of-re/

By 2030 America will have up to 15 TIMES the EV battery capacity - meaning almost 100% of cars could be EV. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/map-whi ... -2030.html

Even trucking is going electric. Tesla have their 40 ton Semi, but Janus Australia even have a 100 ton electric ROAD TRAIN that runs on a giant battery-swap system! https://youtu.be/9eYLtPSf7PY

Electric mining trucks are being experimented with. https://www.caterpillar.com/en/news/cor ... truck.html

Electric arc furnaces, hydrogen to replace coking coal as reductant, and so many other innovations are coming to mining. Lithium from seawater is nearly economical - and there’s a million years of lithium in the ocean. But sodium batteries are superior for grid storage as they are less fire prone, less toxic, and less expensive.

It's all growing SO FAST that the head of the International Energy Agency predicts that oil DEMAND will peak by 2026 and decline from there. https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-glob ... ly-by-2028

Experts think demand for ALL FOSSIL FUELS will peak soon, and phased out WELL before 2050!
http://theconversation.com/theres-a-hug ... -it-190241
Basically, people are going to be shocked at how fast things change across the next 10 years, let alone 20.

[johnny]

Basically, people are going to be shocked at how fast things change across the next 10 years, let alone 20.

I completely agree. It didn't even take the 20 years to make this centuries peak oil claims yet another cautionary tale of single subject matter folks venturing into muti-disciplinary topics.

I can go for a techno-utopia, even if it means a venerable and civilization building industry goes down the tubes. I still think the speed of which you speak had better start showing up soon, otherwise techno-utopia might only apply to young folks with a generic profile specific to a high tolerance for otherwise intolerable outside temperatures.

It's all growing SO FAST that the head of the International Energy Agency predicts that oil DEMAND will peak by 2026 and decline from there. https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-glob ... ly-by-2028

Yeah, the economists and organization who proclaimed the 2006 peak oil 4 years after it happened (just to be sure) are exactly the right folks to do it all over again, except from the demand side. Another technique that would get you banned for daring to point out back in the good ol' days. "Peak demand? IMPOSSIBLE!! You troll!"

[Eclipse]

Having raved about how fast clean tech is going to roll out, here are a few caveats.
Climate wet-bulb heatwaves could arrive over some regions, killing entire cities - even entire states. If one of these bitches hits a big Indian area - we could be game on for war, or urgent SRM (Solar Radiation Management), or who knows what? As the Pentagon says, climate change is the ultimate 'threat multiplier'.

Or - if Trump ends up being President from jail - who knows what that narcissistic spoilt-bitch psychopath might order? He might be in such a bad mood he finds a way to manipulate the world into pushing the big red button that says "DO not push this big red button!"

And even if that happens, I'm convinced we would rebuild back to say the 1950's within the next generation or so.

https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rebuil ... pocalypse/

https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/order/

https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/condense/

[johnny]

Or - if Trump ends up being President from jail - who knows what that narcissistic spoilt-bitch psychopath might order?

True. And if peak oilers had been right about peak oil they wouldn't be a cautionary tale of what happens when single discipline folks tangle with a multi-disciplinary topic. Maybe Trump will become the same type of cautionary tale. We'll wait and see what happens I guess. It should be entertaining, although I am hardly thrilled with having to go through the consequences that might ultimately arrive.

[Vortex2]

. And if peak oilers had been right about peak oil

They simply got their dates wrong.

The world is a dynamic environment .. so predicting the future can be really challenging.

When oil does finally start becoming rare then we will start to see problems.

As of today, much/most of what I buy/consume is directly or indirectly derived from fossil fuels.

If those fuels stop coming, then life could get tough.

[Vortex2]

What do you think the probability is that humans will figure out how to make a sustainable civilisation?

.
What is a human .. today?

What will a human be ... in say 25 years time?

Either a cave dweller scrabbling for food in the remnants of a world destroyed by nuclear weapons or pandemics;

Or some sort of transhuman working with AI ... or even replaced by AI.

[Eclipse]

When oil does finally start becoming rare then we will start to see problems.

During the GFC, oil use in America dropped 1/4 voluntarily - just because so many people lost work they couldn't do stuff.
During the pandemic, they couldn't give oil away - and had to pay tankers to take the stuff away!

As of today, much/most of what I buy/consume is directly or indirectly derived from fossil fuels.

I hear you - but they're looking at changing all of that.
Electrify Everything. 1/4 of all cars sold in California are EV.

Remember the old example of bacteria in a Petri dish. Assume you know it doubles every minute, and the dish will be full in an hour. When is the dish half full? In 59 minutes! The bacteria has been almost invisible for 50 minutes then in the last 10 minutes goes from a tiny blotch to an eighth, then a quarter, then a half, and suddenly the dish is full!

In this metaphor - renewables are just becoming visible as a smudge on the side of the petri dish. They are about to explode out exponentially. In 2025 solar factories will have FOUR TIMES the capacity of all the solar built in 2022! This is 6% of today's electricity built EVERY YEAR! 17 years to the job from solar alone! (But that's cheating - as we're going to Overbuild most grids about 3 times. But 4 times 2022’s capacity by 2025 - what will the increase be after that? It shows how fast things are accelerating.) https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/epis ... roi-of-re/

By 2030 America will have up to 15 TIMES the EV battery capacity - meaning almost 100% of cars could be EV. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/map-whi ... -2030.html

Even trucking is going electric. Tesla have their 40 ton Semi, but Janus Australia even have a 100 ton electric ROAD TRAIN that runs on a giant battery-swap system! https://youtu.be/9eYLtPSf7PY

Electric mining trucks are being experimented with. https://www.caterpillar.com/en/news/cor ... truck.html

Electric arc furnaces, hydrogen to replace coking coal as reductant, and so many other innovations are coming to mining. Lithium from seawater is nearly economical - and there’s a million years of lithium in the ocean. But sodium batteries are superior for grid storage as they are less fire prone, less toxic, and less expensive.

It's all growing SO FAST that the head of the International Energy Agency predicts that oil DEMAND will peak by 2026 and decline from there. https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-glob ... ly-by-2028

Experts think demand for ALL FOSSIL FUELS will peak soon, and phased out WELL before 2050!
http://theconversation.com/theres-a-hug ... -it-190241
Basically, people are going to be shocked at how fast things change across the next 10 years, let alone 20.

[johnny]

. And if peak oilers had been right about peak oil

They simply got their dates wrong.

They sure did. When you don't even understand the moving parts of the system, you only get it right by luck or the broken clock routine. They got the consequences wrong as well, as we now know, 5 years after global peak oil. As just one example of what was contemporaneous to the heyday (as opposed to the revisionist views so common now that we've gone through 5 prior ones claimed or occurred this century) we have the heavily sold as an insiders expert knowledge in Jan Lundberg, he of some fame with here comes the nutcracker.

And getting the date wrong is the entire point of being wrong. They weren't selling fairy tales were they V? "Oh...some day....oil might run low...just as Hubbert pointed out in 1956....but we'll be fine because it could be because of peak demand, and we'll drive EVs, and there'll be some consternation but things won't be too bad". You think that kind of wishy washy went anywhere back in the days when the acolytes required absolute faith in the pablum being pitched to those in the church pews? Can you even imagine someone offering multi-decade uncertainty bands around their estimates?

The world is a dynamic environment .. so predicting the future can be really challenging.

Of course. Apparently all the peaker prognosticators couldn't be bothered to not put those multi-decadal uncertainty bands around their answers to demonstrate they knew it. What would you think it is called, when they express false certainty? Lying? Incompetence in basic probability because..as you know...its the future? Because their entire game was faith based, and they would rather do it with oil than becoming the next Jim Jones?

When oil does finally start becoming rare then we will start to see problems.

Depends on what demand is related to supply. Both can become rare.

As of today, much/most of what I buy/consume is directly or indirectly derived from fossil fuels.

Of course. And why? Because the old school peak oilers were wrong.

If those fuels stop coming, then life could get tough.

Depends on the demand for those fuels. Funny thing about peak oils...scarcity isn't the only mechanism available to cause it, and peak oilers never even tried to use the correct independent variable to solve the thing. Not once. Only in the past 5 years or so have some of the commercial information providers managed to do it just as a part of their standard modeling.

[Eclipse]

Factories give me hope.
The number of solar factories being built now that open in 2025 will quadruple output from 2022.
The number of battery gigafactories being built right now is staggering.
America's getting so many THEY will have the capacity to build 100% EV's by 2030, or at least split it half EV, half grid.
Not China. America. They're investigating domestic lithium supplies etc right now.
Even the UK is getting a gigafactory!
This stuff is scaling, fast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tws2G3EKIPI

[Vortex2]

A world without cheap plastic will be VERY different.

Plastic bags would be well looked after, plastic toothbrushes will become family heirlooms, computer cases etc will have to change.

Lots of plastic items will be specifically recyclable and/ reusable in standard applications.

Disposable plastic will reduce drastically.

All-in-all this could be a bit of a pain.

[Eclipse]

Rationing plastic back to essentials would be awesome - we use too much of the stuff.
I say restaurants should BAN the sale of plastic water bottles - water out of the tap and a bunch of glasses should be everywhere. Buying water like that is obscene - it's 3000 TIMES more expensive than out of the tap!

But my guess is seaweed or Precision Fermentation will solve the plastic feedstock issue.
Have you heard about deep seaweed marine permaculture arrays? What if carbon could be sequestered as a side-effect of feeding the world? What if this was self-funding? Important scientists like the UK's Dr David King and Australia's Dr Tim Flannery are now saying that permaculture seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world all the protein we want. The shellfish are delicious, and the seaweed can be dried and ground into a powder additive we put in many of our foods and protein bars, much like soy beans are. No fresh water or fertiliser are required. The seaweed can also be liquified to make fertiliser for our crops. It replaces fishing with permaculture farming of the oceans. It's GOOD for the oceans! It stimulates the ocean's food chain as tiny fish eat nibble on the seaweed, and bigger fish eat the little fish. Seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant. A good fraction breaks off and sinks to the ocean floor where the carbon is trapped - meaning we get food AND carbon sequestration. The result? All the food we want, oceans restored, and carbon gradually sequestered. Win win win. http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/seaweed/

Some have been working on seaweed for many industrial processes including a feedstock for plastics and fertilisers.

But wait there's more! It all depends on cost - and many of these technologies might start in the food sector where a kg of protein can be sold quite expensive but a kg of fuel or plastic must be a lot cheaper. But check this out. They can brew Precision Fermentation up into Palm oil, and palm oil can become plastics.

Have you heard of “Precision Fermentation”? It could feed us all the protein and fats we need from an area the size of Greater London. That's all the bacteria-grown-meat (served up like chicken tenders?), milk, palm oil, etc we could want. It basically replaces cattle and other livestock, letting us return 2 billion hectares to forest. That's (on average) 3 trillion trees - enough to return CO2 to 350ppm and solve climate change! The human race fed, habitats restored, and climate change solved! George Monbiot for 6 minutes - check it out! https://youtu.be/6eaTIe_TBZA