Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, deminishing EROEI and the long term implications for the continued development of China...

Moore's Law is still relevant. The transistor density keeps increasing.



The rate of growth isn't constant. It was higher a couple decades back but the rate wasn't always that fast either. Just look at the chart.
The rate of density growth in the 1970s and 1980s was roughly similar to the past decade. It is 1992-2005 which was an aberration.
The transistors are more leaky, sure, but you still have more of them. Clockspeeds aren't increasing at the same rate.
But there are new parallel programming and hardware paradigms which make it easier to accelerate applications.

One example is GPGPU hardware architectures.

It still takes more programming effort to write such applications but it isn't impossible.

quantumlight said:

Click to expand...

LOL, you watch too many pseudo-science shows.

wrong thread

The thing with life is that a healthy ecosystem is an engine in and of itself. In the above video, we can see China expending massive amounts of labor and energy to reforest the land.

One might be tempted to assume that this kind of activity means some kind of "fossil fuel" subsidy, but that would ignore the fact that once established, the ecosystem would become self-sustaining. Energy in this instance is not a "subsidy" but an investment.

Science and technology is always advancing. We are already finding better ways of producing did than the traditional energy intensive and highly polluting industrial farming methods. New methods are being developed every day to conserve energy, reduce waste, and increase productivity.

Take for example this extremely innovative method of treating waste from chicken farms. Normally all that chicken manure would just become pollution, but now it is turned into natural fertilizer and fish food:

This is as "Big picture" and most broadly categorical stroke of the brush as it gets: the global world as a whole is now running out of energy, and we have peaked in late 2019 in terms of both the quantity and quality of high density energy sources available for our collective use.

... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the global energy is gone... the purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and abundantly high-quality energy (and the work/productivity multiplier derived thereof) and the assumption that it would always be the case of remaining exercisable into perpetuity.....

For every calorie of food that is consumed, nine other calories of energy was required to produce it. When the first barrel of oil was produced back in 1850's the global world population stood at just 1 billion people. Since oil was first discovered the human population on earth has exploded over 800% in this very short period of time and this would never have been possible without the existence of cheap and abundant energy dense hydrocarbon resources that directly powered and fueled the mass production of food required to sustain such artificially high population levels.

A gallon of gas contains about 132 million joules of energy, or the equivalent of nearly two weeks (actually six weeks if considering 8 hour workdays) of manual human muscle power and labor. Currently the minimum wage is $7.25 /hr and with gas at $2.8 per gallon, this roughly translates to acquiring 2 gallons of gas per hour and obtaining the energy and work/force multiplier of almost a factor of 672 times. By some estimates every American has somewhere between 200 to 8,000 'energy slaves'.

Currently you can buy 1 kilowatt hour of power from the grid for about ten cents. But imagine instead of using that kilowatt of power what it would cost you to hire a worker to pull a car of 2,500 lbs., using a pulley with a factor of 1:40, from the ground to the top of the Empire State Building. That’s at least a day’s of hard work or $200 to $300 in money terms. This perfectly illustrates the huge subsidy modern industrial society enjoys while the oil age will last, which is not too long anymore.

But the problem is our modern world depends entirely on the presumption of eternal growth afforded by being able to extract, produce and consume ever larger quantities of high EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested) sources of fuel/energy in order to sustain the system... a prolonged global slowing down of this energy usage (or production availability) will inevitably cause the entire global pyramid scheme to collapse upon itself in supernova fashion... already resulting in things like QE infinity, hyperinflation, negative interests rates, global lock-downs to create artificial demand destruction, etc etc etc ("you will own nothing, have no privacy, be able to go nowhere, and be happy")

If you look at our planet as an isolated system (3D sphere in space) then from a physics, mathematical, energy and entropy/thermodynamic standpoint its clear that we have already used up (collectively on global scale) the vast majority of the high density, high quality, high EROEI, "low entropy" energy sources on our planet, while at the same time our human population is higher than its ever been before, whilsts many of the developing countries are still trying to jump on the capitalism bandwagon and chase their own version of the American dream by propelling upwards the quality of life, living standards and GDP/energy usage per capita of their own citizens... all the economic models of modern times are based on the axiomatic and 'a priori' assumption of infinite perpetual growth... and none of the models account for the fact that by all accounts back in 2019 we have already globally peaked...

Money is just a mere symbolic representation of the ability of cheap and abundant higher EROEI energy to do 'work' on our behalf. When the quality and quantity of energy available to us continues to decline and decrease, then proportionately so does the value or purchasing power of the money that we hold... for that money was a representation of the 'multiplier effect' of energy to do work and the resulting productivity that cheap energy had amplified and enabled but with the energy depleted so too does our money become worthless. This is why when global energy has peaked as it has back in 2019, in the grand scheme of things no amount of stimulus, printing more money, etc is going to do any good... its but like rearranging chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic... its really not about money, which is but a human construct created to represent resources and energy...

In the long run, and from the bigger picture perspective, a net-positive rate of return-on-investment overall in aggregate is only possible in whole of society if that society or global civilization continued to grow as a whole... Continued global growth is only possible if we are able to consume more and more resources as well as have increasingly abundant access to usable energy of EROEI density sufficient to power modern global civilization and it's continued upwards growth.

Given that our modern civilization and globalized economy/world is predominantly powered by fossil fuels and hydrocarbons as the main source of energy, and given the fact that we enjoy and are indeed direct recipients of this "multiplier of work/productivity/wealth" enabled by the use of (still relatively) cheap and abundant oil, natural gas, coal, etc it stands to reason that as we approach the final global limits to energy consumption growth, so will our aggregate economies contract... by most estimates global production of conventional oil peaked back in 2019, and there is no turning back...

There is no debate that we have long since passed peak discovery curve. And there is no doubt that all production/consumption curves must necessarily follow and trail their discovery curves/peaks...This is basic logic, math, physics...

Nothing in the short term will be able to replace or fully substitute the energy deficit left by both the decline in quantity of fossil fuels and the drop in quality (EROEI) of the limited quantity still remaining. Renewables such as solar are currently subsidized by governments economically and entropically by leveraging our existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and solar is a net energy sink as far as modern civilization is concerned given we require at least EROEI of 7 to just survive (15+ to thrive) and the rate limiting factor of lithium, battery technology, rare-earths all add up to the infeasibility of solar as a renewable solution.

The "energy payback time” of renewables means it will incur a permanent 'energy taxation' on all work/productivity/interactions in society somewhere between 20% to 40%, (resulting in a total collapse of global economies and permanent macroeconomic depression everywhere) and that is even assuming there are enough raw resources to scale up renewables to replace fossil fuels in mass in the first place. (there is not) Even if we solved nuclear fusion or fast breeder reactors today it would still take another three decades to fully scale up, and our global civilization cannot avoid the common collapse in the meantime...

Given that globally economies will shrink as a whole, given that our total access to energy both in terms of quantity of energy and the quality of remaining energy will continue to steadily decline over time, and since clearly it has been established that modern global wealth is entirely dependent upon its access to energy; it is inevitable to assume anything else other than the reality that as the aggregate amount of real energy, resources and wealth on our planet falls off a cliff and we enter the long decline/collapse that we will have a massive surplus of the "symbolic human construct" that we have used to "count up, tally, measure, represent and account for energy, resources, wealth, etc out there in the world." and therefore with a bunch of existing money no longer able to find/pair/bind with their corresponding resource/wealth counterparts out there in the 'real world', we have a situation of hyperinflation whereby all currencies and monies will lose the vast majority of their currently perceived value and purchasing power... those that get out fast and convert to real hard assets and tangible resources first will be much better off than those left hodling fiat currency or digital cryptocoins...but in truth none will be spared as the current situation is more akin to the Earth being one giant 3D "Easter Island" in space and we have used up all the high density 'free energy' that accumulated over the course of billions of years in a comparative blink of an eye (roughly 150 years since the Industrial revolution and most of it on the backend of the last four decades)

Wealth creation is actually the extraction, conversion and consumption of energy. All other forms of wealth are merely derivatives that are layered on top of and powered directly by the underlining energy infrastructure of society/civilization. For billions of years, through a process of photosynthesis and thanks to the natural energy from our closest star the sun, our planet has steadily built up a massive reserve of energy, mainly in the form of hydrocarbons underneath the ground. And yet in less than 150 years since the industrial revolution began, we have globally already consumed more than half of all available hydrocarbons and nearly all of the sweet crude, high density EROEI, and other easy-to-extract low-hanging-fruit energy sources on earth. The implications are indeed foreboding.

Modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the energy is gone... purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and high quality energy and the assumption that it would always be the case.

Pertaining to the “Energy Cliff”, modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...

The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slowdown means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself...

Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was an EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, it’s just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says it’s still half full...

Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a Petri dish right before it encounters rapid die-off as it hits its resource constraints...

... that nest egg you saved is not going to be there for you for the simple fact that the global energy is gone... the purchasing power of money was almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and abundantly high-quality energy (and the work/productivity multiplier derived thereof) and the assumption that it would always be the case of remaining exercisable into perpetuity.....