It appears Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has been making lots of waves lately…. The New York Observer has just run his warning of the probability of a converging oil, food and financial crash in or shortly after 2018 which I discussed here on DTM a few days ago. Not only that, it went viral, hitting the top 20 stories on Medium for several days (at one point hitting number one), and giving him ‘Top Writer’ status on ‘energy’ and ‘climate change’ there….. is the word finally getting out…..?
It gets better….. Nafeez then wrote this via Insurge intelligence in solidarity with the arising people’s movement in the form of the worldwide women’s marches, tying together how the Trumpian inauguration represents at once the culmination of a global war on women, while simultaneously starting a war on the planet.
Nafeez thinks “there is a deep, fundamental but little-understood connection between white supremacist patriarchy and misogyny, and the interlinked environment-economic crisis.” This piece is perhaps the most important – because it highlights the real symbolic meaning of the women’s marches: a planetary declaration of intent to build bridges, not walls.
Then yesterday, Nafeez wrote another piece for VICE anticipating the Great Orange Face’s ‘America First Energy Plan’, bringing together cutting edge science on why Trump’s fossil fuel madness is doomed to kill the economy.
It simply won’t work, cannot work….. It will backfire. Big time. And it will backfire economically before it even has time to “backfire planetarily” as he so well puts it…… We are already hearing a lot of outrage, rightly so, about the cleansing of the Wipe House website of climate information, and the promotion of this madcap anti-science scheme to burn our planet to hell. We’ll hear less about the science of global net energy decline, which proves decisively that this scheme can simply never work – but you’ll find it here:
Nafeez begins…..:
As President-elect Trump spearheads plans to boost oil, coal and gas, a major new study by one of the world’s foremost energy experts shows just how dangerous this path would be—not just for the planet, but for the economy.
The new study, just published in January as part of the SpringerBriefs in Energy series, suggests that as long we remain dependent on fossil fuels, economic contraction is inevitable. And while renewable energy offers the only potentially viable future, it is also unlikely to sustain the sort of mass consumerism we are accustomed to—like three or more cars per household, SUVS or massive military projects like aircraft carriers.
The bottom line is that we can’t sustain our present rate of consumption no matter what energy source we rely on. And clinging to oil, gas and coal in the hopes of keeping the endless growth machine alive will be even worse: leading to a spiral of debt and economic recession that has already begun.
Nafeez then introduces his readers to the concept of thermodynamics….. yes, really…!
It all comes down to physics: the laws of thermodynamics. Economies need energy to function. And to grow, they need extra energy to fuel that growth in production and consumption. But as more energy is required just to extract new energy from fossil fuels, there is less “energy surplus” available to continue driving economic growth—to ramp up even more production and consumption. And increasingly, more and more energy is being used just to maintain the existing infrastructure of society as it is, leaving less room for further growth.
“Of perhaps greater concern than the quantity of oil and other energy sources is their declining EROI [energy return on investment]”, writes study author Charles Hall, ESF Foundation Distinguished Professor of Environment Science at the State University of New York. Hall is the founder of the concept of EROI.
Hall’s ground-breaking methodology is now used by scientists around the world to measure the total value of energy a resource can generate. It works by comparing the quantity of energy extracted to the quantity of energy inputted to enable the extraction.
He points out that throughout the energy literature “there is widespread concern that net energy returns (e.g. EROI) for oil and gas are declining and likely to continue declining.” This has economic implications:
We (as in DTM followers) all knew that of course, but it’s interesting that this stuff is actually starting to go viral…..
Yes indeed, where did all the growth go…… down the Limits to Growth plughole, that’s where…..
Charlie Hall’s study, Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics 
and Sustainability, clearly shows a correlation between the declining abundance of resources, “as reflected in lower production and EROI for oil and other important fuels”, and the decline of economic growth.
And that gets to the crux of the problem. We need more energy to get more stuff to grow the economy. So what happens when we can’t get as much energy as before? Growth slows.
That’s why Hall fingers the declining EROI of fossil fuels as the key culprit in decreasing rates of production, which in turn has played a key role in the economic slowdown: “Past investments— over the past century— were made at a time when the production of high quality fossil fuels was increasing at rates as high as 5% a year. At the time of this writing they have declined to no more than 1% a year, and the US (and global) economies show similar pattern.”
Hall argues that modern developed economies, with their enormous infrastructures, roads and cities, are rapidly approaching “a stage where all of the available energy is used in ‘maintenance metabolism’ to support the infrastructure that exists.” This leaves less and less energy “available for net growth.”
As I have been saying for a very long time now, the 20th Century was built one brick at a time, as and when it was required, using very cheap and very dense fossil fuels with very high ERoEI. Now we have to replace all the old stuff, more or less all at once (it is getting old now…), and simultaneously build all the new stuff, with low ERoEI energy that is literally costing the Earth.
Make no mistake, America will never be great again………. Trump or no Trump.
Damn the Matrix 