Ideology over pragmatism?
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Ideology over pragmatism?
PiSigma
"the engineer"
Of course it's Canada.
Right now renewables (Wind, Solar, etc) are being heavily subsidized in more ways than one. Firstly, there is the more obvious economic and financial subsidizes and incentives given by governments, without which renewables would be even a lot more expensive than it already is, and make a lot of projects not make sense. If the government mandates the people to pick up the tab (absorb the costs either through maintaining the subsidizes and taxing the public more or even by removing them and forcing people to buy that solar panel out of pocket!) the net effect is the same, it hits peoples wallets both individually and collectively and any way you put it in the end switching renewables will have a marked negative impact to global economics, wealth, finance, growth, etc...more and more of GDP will have to be allocated to the energy sector when before it could have been utilized elsewhere to actually boosts standards of living.
But wait a second you may say, isnt the whole point of subsidizes to be temporarly and help bootstrap certain projects and initatives to profitability and eventual mass adoption as unit costs drop due to economies of scale?
But herein lies the problem. Currently the costs (both economic in terms of money and thermodynamic in terms of energy and entropy) of renewables are deceiptively and artificially low because of the fact that we are leveraging the still predominantly energy dense (high eroei) petroluem based society and oil based infrastrutures of today in order to mine, extract, process, manufacture, transport/deliver, install and maintain these renewable alternatives, which themselves are heavily dependent on our oil/petroleum based system right now. Once this system goes away or increasingly once the global energy mix really starts to replace petroluem with renewables as it inevitably would have to do when these renewables continue to be scaled up, thats going to dramatically skyrocket the costs (both in terms of price and energy) of scaling up even more renewables, and so on and so forth.... So no, its only going to get harder and harder as we scale up more and more renewables, not the other way around, and this will change the entire economic and energy calculus on renewables not to mention it will greatly increase the energy payback period from 2 years to say 4 years or more...
Andrew fails to mention the energy payback is not a one time costs, its perpetual since solar panels and wind turbines dont last forever, they require more energy and costs to be retired and decommissioned at the end of their life cycle. Then you are back to square zero. Even if recycled its never going to be close to 100% efficency, eventually you will run out of rare earths and other materials, thats assuming there is even enough to go around in the first place... which most likely there isnt. Say as we continue to scale up we end up with something like 2 to 4 year payback on a 10 year service life... thats a permanent perpetual 20% to 40% energy tax on renewables compared to the free energy we got from petroluem sources... like all taxes this steep energy tax (you cant cheat the 2nd law of thermodynamics aka mother natures tax and there are no free lunch) will be an insurmountable burden to our modern global economic system... its compounding in that each and every economic and physical transaction will be taxed at this base rate as well as all intermediary steps and middle processes in between....
Global economies will be forced to contract by as much as 50 to 80 percent even assuming we can somehow manage to get to majority renewables.... thats the best case scenario.... the worst case scenario I will leave it up to the imagination of the reader....
I think I'm done here.
PiSigma
"the engineer"
It's not contraction of economy but a slow down of growth.
Most of what you say is correct, but economics of energy is not that simple. It's still a net positive for solar and wind production even with disposal costs included, it is just less efficient than O&G right now.
It all comes down to the cost for the consumer, if government dictate a certain percent have to come from renewables, like u said it will hit the wallet. If no government mandate, then the cost of renewables will have to equal to O&G for people to pick it. So either renewables come down more than now (current trend) and/or o&g go up, which it will. The question is where is the equilibrium.
There is no way the renewable are going to come online in time to cover for the reduction in global oil production, we are not only running out of oil, but as you know, the bottom of barrel, so to speak, is the most energy intensive to extract and process...
Even playing devil advocate and say it will "just" be a slowing down of growth and not a contraction, that in and of itself will invariably lead to a major global contraction because of the way the global economy works everything is basically a ponzi pyramid scheme that requires perpetual infinite growth in order to sustain and be propped up... when growth slows, it all starts falling apart... This is the way the modern economies are structured, we always borrow from the EXPECTATION of future growth to use that as collateral for today's debt and spending...
Think back to the stone age era before agriculture and before written language, math, and any concepts of accumulation of wealth, net worth, etc... say you as a young flintstone put aside some beefy jerky you made with stone age tools and just for the sake of argument say the beef jerky last forever... you save it aside and wait until you are 65 and close to 'retirment' age, and then you go look for that beef jerky you saved up when you were a youngster and imagine your surprise when it turned into a mountain of beef jerky!
Now obviously this is impossible since it violates the law of conservation of energy and mass not to mention from a thermodynamic and entropy standpoint it doesn't make sense and would never happen in nature.
Yet since high school we have all been taught the so-called "time value" of money and how if we set aside some money when earlier in our years and "make our money work for us" that by the time we are 50 or 60 or 70 etc that money due to compound interest and exponential accumulation would have turned into a small fortune in the millions!
You don't have to be an economic professor like Gatekeeper to realize what is really going on here, its all about perpetual growth of society as a whole rather than a stead-state or godforbid a shrinking economy... back when the going was good, if you put aside some money and let society use that capital to reinvest in growth, then you were rewarded at the end of your life since the entire PIE grew much larger and so your portion of the pie grew in conmensuration as well.. Again the time value of money and all of modern finance is predicated upon the assumption of continuous perpetual growth! Like any ponzi scheme, it cannot last forever, and when it stops growing, like every ponzi scheme, it collapses upon itself!
Hint, all the pensions, 401k, unfunded liabilities, all depend on the model and expectation of exponential and perpetual growth.... you don't have to be Einstein to figure out what is going to happen when global growth finally stops
You wanna know why back in the 2000's CD's gave up to 10% interest rate but now banks only give you a 0.01% rate which basically you are losing money since the real inflation is already close to 10% per year? Its because of Peak Oil...
What do you think negative interest rates are? Its when there is degrowth and you putting away money is actually a lose for you because the beef jerkies are all shrinking now...
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PiSigma
"the engineer"
Peak oil is actually peak production of conventional oil on continental US. Shale oil in US will last another 10-15 years I think, then run oil. Shale is also a giant Ponzi scheme that can bankrupt a lot of big banks in the states.
Heavy oil is actually great, it gives higher margins for refineries. It does take a bit more energy to extract, but it's within 5% of most conventional oils. The good thing about heavies is you can make the entire range of petroleum products with it. With light oil (shale) it's only good for making naphtha.
There are several hundred billion barrels of heavy oil just in Canada and Venezuela, so no worries about running out.
I'm actually going to patent some new tech on the extraction soon, should see it built in 2032, will revolutionize Alberta oil production
I enjoy your fresh first principles perspective on the economy. Although it may seem alarmist, it provides a good wake up call to the soundness of underlying assumptions in the current economy.
Another issue is the capital glut created by the demographic structure. The largest cohort in developed nations are in the highest earning period of their lives and not spending as much, they also have most of society's savings and own most of the assets. Large supply of capital vs low demand of capital promotes low interest rates.
With rate of return on capital greater than the growth of the overall economy, we will see a growing gap between those that depend on trading labour for money and capital owning class. We see have seen stagnant wages in real terms while the capital markets have grown substantially over the last few decades. Those that hold most of the financial assets are in the minority and will continue to get wealthier.
Even without great income disparity, the wealth inequality that already exists affects one's ability to accumulate assets. A person with paid off house or purchased it at a price much lower than current market value is able to invest more and leverage using a homeowner line of credit. Those with a large existing investment portfolio will see that continue to grow and see the benefits of continued automation of the economy. Those without will find it increasingly hard to save money and lowering of living standards. Young adults have the highest long term cost for spending a dollar they have now due to more time for their investments to compound. Ones able to live with their parents for a few years before they move out will likely have much higher lifetime wealth compared to the average young person that cannot.
Yes... to add to this... Money and currencies such as bitcoin, gold, dollar, yuan, etc can be best thought of as socially agreed upon symbolic representations that leverage "network effects" and are basically tokens or proxies of the real goods and actual services etc in the underlining physical world that they stand and account for... Basically its all social constructs humans conjured up as convinent accounting /bookkeeping unit/system thats supposed to have some measure of standardization and to help facilitate trade, economic interactions, as well as serve as tally marks for allocation of resources and accumulation of wealth.
Merely printing more money without the commensurate and corresponding production of goods or extraction of resources means the existing money supply simply dilutes its purchasing power and becomes devalued, having more tallys to account for the same amount of products, resources, services etc is useless... One cannot violate the laws of physics, such as law of conservation of energy and matter or 2nd law of thermodynamics and entropy etc....
The current state of the globalized world the situation is that there is a lot more money that exists than actual resources they represent, but this reality is largely hidden from the public who can only see their retirement savings rising because of a skyrocketing stock market propped up by direct Fed printing per the infinite Quantitative Easing brrrr machine.
All these billionaires like Bezos, Zuck, Billy Gates, sure they are super wealthy but their nominal net worth is fake in that if they tried to actually exercise a good portion of that paper net worth they will collapse the system. If Jeff Bezos sold all his stock of Amazon tomorrow there will be mass panic. Say he somehow managed to convert it to cash and tried to spend it all, say all the top 1% wanted to cash out and convert their funny money to actual goods, products, resources, etc... what do you think will happen?
The true reason wealth is getting more concentrated and that the rich are getting richer has to do with the fact this is a sign and symptom of degrowth/collapse... the top 1% holding on to 50% of the wealth or whatever the actual ratio is, means that wealth is "locked up" and cannot be actually effectuated... because the resources that wealth is supposed to represent doesnt even exists... Billionaires can help hide this illusion and starve off a "run on the banks" scenario whereas your average joe can not. Most superrich only spend a tiny percentage of their money, the rest is locked up as "investments", but for low to middle class folks who are living paycheck to paycheck they spend it all and then some... these people dont have much in the way of discretionary income.
This is why US can afford to have the superrich get these trillion bailouts but Biden struggles to send everyone a $1400 check....
Think about it.
Please stop lying about a 10 year service life for wind and solar.
I've stated 20+ years, which you can easily look up yourself.
That immediately blows away your analysis of solar/wind viability.
Your projections about the economic impact are only valid if you assume that the technology and costs for wind/solar/batteries remains the same.
But we know there are going to be dramatic improvements in the next 10 years. Look up the cost curves for yourself.
And a cursory analysis indicates that renewables + batteries will be much cheaper than coal/gas.
And that should apply even with indirect costs of renewables.
The UK energy regulator is working on the assumption that in 10 years time - a completely unsubsidised [new-build Windfarm plus battery] will cheaper than keeping an existing coal plant operating. You can look this up for yourself.
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