Free Energy Does Not Occur in Nature

written by: barath

[F]ree energy does not occur in nature…

There’s one thing about that Orlov quote that has struck me over the years: how it applies more broadly than he originally meant it.

It’s not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn’t occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in the everyday lived environments of people in industrial nations, which we might thus say are unnatural. (To apply the name of this blog: if nature implies a lack of free energy, then the presence free energy implies a lack of nature.)

So what are instances of free energy that we experience in our lives, and why do they matter? They matter for two reasons: a) they’re the easiest places to save energy (and money) and b) they’re likely to go away in the coming decades. Before we get to some instances of the former, a couple of clarifications:

What does “free” mean in this context? It means someone pays for the energy in question, just not a member of the public who can receive that energy at no direct cost.

And what forms free energy are of interest? Obviously the sun’s energy isn’t an interesting thing to include, though it is “free energy” for some reasonable definitions of free and energy. What I’m most interested in is instances of energy provided for free (whatever the intent) to the public at large in everyday environments. Here I’m not going to include energy consumed by the government on my behalf (because all government action would fall into that category).

Put another way, I’d like to consider things that are free now that are unlikely to continue to be free in the coming years. They all represent slack in the system, symptoms of energy wealth. It’s in the disappearance of these items that a country like the United States might become more like a country like India is today.

So, to the list. I’ve organized it around the free energy in question:

Electricity. Go to any coffee shop, university building, or transit station, and you can get electricity for free. Just plug in to one of the outlets and draw as much juice as the outlet can handle.

Internet service. Many of the same institutions above provide free Internet service to users, which represents energy usage on the provider’s end on behalf of those users.

Air conditioning. Many public spaces—malls, public buildings, businesses, etc.—even extraordinarily large ones, are air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter.

Refrigeration. Many stores keep non-perishable items such as sodas refrigerated. In addition, many if not most public water fountains have built-in refrigeration.

Foods. Due to long-standing agriculture policy in the U.S. we have an energy subsidy that’s delivered to us through most processed foods and nearly all meats due to subsidized corn and soy that are farmed using industrial agriculture.

Personal motion assistance. In most multi-level public places there are escalators and elevators to provide motion assistance. Some larger buildings such as airports even have moving walkways. Many of these devices don’t detect whether they’re in use: they just run continually. Automatic doors (both sliding and swing) are also ubiquitous, and often can’t even be avoided.

Disposable items. Paper and plastic shopping bags are the most common instance of free disposable items that have only recently been identified (by policymakers) as wasteful. Many other businesses provide other free disposable items, from disposable dishware, cups, and utensils to single-serving packages of just about everything.

Air travel. One of the most amazing sources of free energy is that of frequent flier mile rewards. Websites like flyertalk have long dedicated themselves to figuring out how to squeeze the most miles out of airline credit card offers, often with amazing (and ridiculous) results. With enough effort one can—apparently completely within the rules—get hundreds of thousands of frequent flier miles per year for zero personal financial cost, worth several trips around the world and vast quantities of jet fuel.

Oil. Finally, the strangest example of them all, one that deserves greater discussion: on a national level, Western (net oil importing) nations have deep deficits. That means they are borrowing many billions of dollars a day via bond issuance. However, via quantitative easing and other similar mechanisms, central banks are buying up a large fraction of those bonds. The proceeds, once the bonds mature, will be deposited back at the treasury (at least here in the U.S.). The money the central bank buys the treasuries with is created in a spreadsheet for that purpose, thereby increasing the money supply. Once this money is in the government’s books, it can, through its fiscal policy, do what governments do: use the money for various national priorities and thus disburse the money to businesses and individuals. That money, now in the hands of businesses and individuals can be used to buy oil and other commodities on the (global) market.

And that brings us full circle:

An economic arrangement can continue for quite some time after it becomes untenable, through sheer inertia. But at some point a tide of broken promises and invalidated assumptions sweeps it all out to sea. One such untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years. Free money with which to buy energy equals free energy, and free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.

Date: May 14th, 2012 | Comments: No Comments »

Category: economics, invisible waste, oil

The Power of Transformity

written by: barath

I recently understood the elegance of H.T. Odum’s concept of transformity.

The transformity table presented at the link above shows that electricity has a transformity of 300,000 seJ/J, where seJ stands for solar-equivalent joule. It’s a weird unit, so I tried to digest it as follows: to produce electricity requires 300,000 solar-equivalent joules per joule. By contrast, sunlight is by definition 1 seJ/J. The numerator is the emergy input to the energy source / carrier in question. (Brief aside about emergy: the reason that emergy is measured in “solar-equivalent” joules, as I understand it, is so that there is a common basis for embodied energy comparisons. One trap that’s easy to fall into when doing such calculations—one I’ve fallen into—is to do a calculation based upon different sorts of energy inputs, and then to combine them together as if they’re equal, like oil and electricity. By using solar energy as the root, this issue is mostly resolved.)

Back to transformity: the confusing part is the measurement of the denominator. The joule in the denominator can be thought of as the useful work you can extract from the energy source. To put it more concretely, since a joule is a bit ugly as a unit (I don’t like thinking in newtons), we can translate all the transformities into calories (i.e. solar-equivalent calories / calorie). So to heat a gram of water 1 degree using sunlight takes 1 solar-equivalent calorie. But to do the same thing with electricity takes 300,000 solar equivalent calories. That’s a massive difference. Heating water using sunlight is not just a bit more efficient than using electricity or fossil fuels—it’s multiple orders of magnitude more efficient.

It seems the main reason for electricity’s high transformity is that the fossil fuels used to produce that electricity have high transformity. That in turn is because of the quantity of biomass transformed through geologic time (i.e. that biomass’s emergy is large) to produce fossil fuels.

From a practical (shortsighted) standpoint we don’t really care that biomass and geologic forces went into making fossil fuels, as long as we ignore that we’re running out of them. So you could think of rescaling the transformity of electricity to a fake unit we could call a “nature-equivalent joule / joule” (neJ/J) and treat seJ/J as equivalent. (The idea being that as long as a joule came from “nature”, I don’t care if it’s from the sun or from a chunk of coal.) Then we could rescale electricity by the value of coal to something like 4.5 neJ/J, which tells us even in this case using solar to heat water is 4.5 times more efficient than using electricity to do the same task. (However, using neJ/J, using coal directly is by definition as efficient as solar.)

There are some interesting ideas in the post linked above, such as Odum’s conjecture about how solar PV might be inefficient because it is trying to leap too far in transformity. The open question there, in my thinking, is whether electricity is fundamentally of high transformity. It would be interesting to see the analysis done again for CdTe cells, for example, since they may have high EREOI.

The reason to repeat that analysis is another reason that transformity is a great concept. EROEI, along with most net energy variants, have the weakness of conflating different sorts of energy inputs, and also of ignoring the fossil fuel subsidy provided to all industrial processes. Even if CdTe photovoltaic cells have high EROEI, that doesn’t mean that they have low transformity. And post-fossil fuels, it’s tranformity that will matter.

Hemenway made a good case for the resilience of the food system post-peak oil, and he argues, I think with good reason, that we ought to be concerned about the sustainability / stability of the numerous high transformity systems we depend upon in industrial societies before we worry about the food system. The transformity of today’s food system is low compared to banking and the electric grid and so on—and that’s today’s food system, which is more complex than it ought to be or needs to be.

In any case, I’m reminded of a great saying, one that I now understand is backed up by the idea of transformity: “let light be light; let heat be heat; let food be food.”

Date: May 7th, 2012 | Comments: 4 Comments »

Category: alternative energy, emergy, food

Computing in the Long Emergency, part 2

written by: barath

I recently learned about a (so-called) international development project taking place in Niger. People in a region of the country have been suffering from malnutrition and outright hunger due to periodic drought-induced crop failures. To help respond to this humanitarian crisis, an NGO that was providing food aid to the region partnered with some researchers to determine whether it was best to give the aid as cash disbursements or via a cell-phone based payment system. Since most of the people in this region did not yet have cell phones (or at least ones with support for this functionality), the group distributed inexpensive cell phones to about half of the people receiving aid, and disbursed their aid electronically. They also gave cell phones to a control group who continued to receive cash aid.

The NGO and the researchers were sincere in their efforts to end the hunger—the project did indeed feed hungry people, and that’s a good thing. Also, the experiment did show slight benefits to cell-phone based disbursements, though not for the reasons you might expect. One benefit was that because the disbursement took place at a random time of day, women, who otherwise had little say in money matters, had a chance to delay purchases until the following day, giving them time to discuss purchases with their husbands. Another benefit was that people didn’t have to travel to a disbursement location to receive the aid money. Regardless, the aid recipients spent an overwhelming fraction of their money on the same thing, regardless of the form of the aid: millet.

I was left thinking about what happens a few years from now. After the NGO moves on, the rains will still fail and the land will still dry up and the crop will still fail. Perhaps it will happen a bit more often as the region desertifies. In any case, because nothing fundamental was done to address the root causes of the problem, people will once again starve. But at least they’ll have cell phones.

A couple of months ago I was thinking about different possible future scenarios for the next couple of decades, and in particular focused on what I think are the most likely two: slow reversal and business as usual (slow growth). However, there was a somewhat intentional oversimplification in the post: I treated them as mutually exclusive scenarios in time and space.

What if they happen concurrently? What if industrial societies (and industrializing ones as well) simultaneously experience techno-utopia, business as usual, slow reversal, and collapse (say roughly in the proportions specified—1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1/8, respectively). The consequences of these scenarios overlapping are very hard to envision in general. In this post, I’d like to continue looking at computing in the long emergency in this context. Last time I looked at aspects of computing today and how they might be transformed by the limits to growth. Here I’d like to consider how the interleaving of different levels of technology might play out, and take a more holistic look.

Resource limits.

There’s a seemingly common belief in the peak oil community that the minerals required to make computers are likely a limiting factor in their long-term production, and thus computing as we know it is limited in the same way as fossil fuel-based systems. I’m not sure that’s the case, as I suggested in my previous post. There are few if any rare minerals in modern computing devices, and those minerals that are rare—coltan, for instance—can be recycled. While the sort of scavenging of minerals from e-waste that goes on today could hardly be called recycling, since it’s a labor-intensive process those who do it can easily select for certain minerals should they become scarce. PCBs and chips are made of very common elements—silicon, copper, aluminum, tin, gold, and silver.

It seems what’s more limiting is the manufacturing facilities. They’re expensive and complex. It seems likely that the money to build new ones will become harder to come by and as a result the relative cost of the chips they make will increase. But as long as the facilities exist and there’s a market (and it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some sort of market for computing devices) existing facilities can continue to produce these components. What seems more likely then is not that computers won’t exist, but that, just like infrastructure, money won’t be spent on them. As people get materially poorer those who have less need for a computer might do without.

Energy intensity.

Stepping back from the four possible future scenarios, what is it that they might have in common? That is, certain macro features of the world must underlie them all—energy limits, for example. For example, techno-utopia as it is usually framed these days as mostly independent of energy use; more than talking about flying cars and daily shuttles to moonbases, techno-utopians talk about nanocomputers that can augment your brain and the like.

Energy intensity—the availability of concentrated energy—is one of the key things we are losing as fossil fuels (oil in particular) become more expensive and less available. So one consequence we might expect from this is to see the waning of technologies and societal structures that depend upon the availability of cheap, high density energy sources. And even between different computing devices, we might see a proliferation of fewer, cheaper, smaller, and less energy and resource hungry devices as the primary technology people use to stay connected with the world. (We’re already seeing this happen.)

These factors might manifest as some of the following trends:

Increased social / economic stratification. As some individuals, groups, and regions would continue to reap the benefits of the remainder of the growth economy (and potentially some revolutionary new technologies), the existing social compact, which is already frayed, might degrade even further. As a result, increased social, physical, and emotional distance might be the coping strategy required for those living a comfortable life. Those sectors of the economy that are less dependent upon high energy density—what we might call the dematerialization economy—might remain strong, though as we’ve seen over the past few years, the growth in employment at Web companies is a small fraction of the job losses in, say, construction. From their perspective (especially if the next point holds true), techno-utopia will still be on track. (How far the inequality rubber band can be stretched would require a whole post in itself.)

Increased technological escapism. In Tom Murphy’s recent post detailing his discussion with an economist, the economist comments that it’s possible decrease the energy contribution to the economy by virtualizing life. (It’s not just that economist—the technologists I cited in my last post on this subject had a similar wish.) As Adam put it:

My favorite part of the Murphy dialogue is learning that not only would the economist plug into Nozick’s experience machine, but he can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t want to do it.

My response was that if you have a virtual world, there’s no reason to worry about the real world, and indeed people are less and less worried about the real world. And virtual worlds, in some cases, may use less energy to provide similar experiences to real life. So while the economist in Murphy’s dialogue might be onto something, virtual worlds also distract us from the real world that we in fact live in, one in which we might see over a billion climate change refugees this century (a number so vast it’s hard to even imagine).

Maslow’s hourglass. It’s quite possible that there’s already discussion of this, but it seems that technology today is focused on two sorts of needs: ones at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy and those at the top. As technology advances (and remains somewhat cheap), these properties could be amplified, and we could have technology that is designed to help people achieve self actualization, express themselves creatively, and, at the other end of the spectrum, tell them where to get some cheap food (though not really provide that food). But at the same time, it might do little to help navigate a fraying social/community/economic fabric, stay healthy, employed, etc. (As an exercise, think about how well technology helps people stay healthy, employed, or close to their neighbors. At best, it seems to not make these worse.) This effect may be the most insidious when it becomes lopsided—when the benefits of technology are skewed to the top of the hierarchy, and we end up with the post-NGO scenario described above.

More than anything else, we might want to step back and ask the question Herman Daly asked about the economy: what is it for? What is computing for? What is its ultimate purpose in human life?

One key shift in thinking that might be needed is to begin applying the term technology more broadly. I think of permaculture as a technology, and the people of Niger might have benefited much more had the NGO realized that a technology that can green the desert is more valuable than one that allows a slightly different means of money distribution. If computing can help meet human needs in conjunction with other technologies like permaculture, we should use both, but we shouldn’t ignore a whole class of technologies as we do today.

While technologists and anti-technologists alike seem to agree that technology has its own inherent purpose, I disagree. Computing, and technology broadly, is made by humans and human systems, and its end goals are determined by us. What do we want those goals to be?

Date: April 29th, 2012 | Comments: 4 Comments »

Category: climate, computing, economics, food, limits, oil

The Wisdom of Deathbed Conversion

written by: barath

In 2005 it seemed that everything had changed. And then in 2007 it happened again. All of a sudden the only thing to expect was the unexpected. I’m talking of course about the weather, and the changes due to radiation entrapment. The climate seemed like it was dying.

Out of desperation, many prominent environmentalists converted to the religion of nuclear (fission) power between 2008-2011. Each year the news about the climate was (and still is) getting worse. Nuclear seemed to be the only way out. After the Japanese earthquake and tsunami last year, some hedged and others doubled down. Given that the crisis there is ongoing and possibly worsening, maybe this is a good time to rethink those deathbed conversions.

There are two broad reasons why the conversion to nuclear doesn’t make sense:

  1. It assumed that nuclear is in fact a safer alternative for current and future energy production.
  2. It assumed that society can’t decrease demands.

I’m going to leave the second point alone for now.

To begin with let’s look at what British environmental writer George Monbiot said in 2009:

It’s true that my position has changed. As the likely effects of climate change have become clearer, nuclear power, by comparison, has come to seem less threatening.

…

But I have not, as many people have suggested, gone nuclear. Instead, my position is that I will no longer oppose nuclear power if four conditions are met:

1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account.
2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried.
3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay.
4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.

None of them are insuperable.

Mark Lynas, author of the excellent book Six Degrees, I was disappointed to discover, took an even bolder stance in How nuclear power can save the planet:

I would take a stronger position myself: that increased use of nuclear (an outright competitor to coal as a deliverer of baseload power) is essential to combat climate change, but clearly there need to be some significant technical advances in nuclear fission if it is to become acceptable to many in the west.

…

Such “fourth-generation” nuclear power is still a dream, but potentially a much more realistic one than carbon capture and storage. Deployed entirely in tandem with renewables, fourth-generation nuclear could offer a complete decarbonisation of the world’s electricity supply – and on the sort of timetable that Dr Hansen and his fellow climatologists demand.

There are many other prominent environmentalists and scientists who’ve done the same calculation—we need nuclear or we’re doomed. Here’s one accounting of who’s changed their mind on nuclear in the last few years.

For better or worse, when I was in high school I did a summer internship in the nuclear industry, working on a blue sky project (that never ended up becoming reality). I’m not sure that at the time I had strongly held views on the technology, but if nothing else I learned how inordinately complex nuclear power production is; few other human endeavors are of such complexity.

Consider a conventional coal-fired plant. Take some coal, burn it, boil some water, pipe the steam to run a turbine. Afterwards, add more coal.

Consider a conventional nuclear BWR. Take some carefully machined and enriched nuclear fuel, maintain the appropriate level of water moderation, start the reaction, maintain the appropriate level of control, boil some water but not too much water and don’t create too many bubbles, pipe the steam to run a turbine. Afterwards, open up the fuel assembly, move the fuel rods into an on-site spent fuel pool with appropriate water cooling for future transport to a reprocessing or long-term storage facility, with all of these steps done with protective gear.

I’m a fan of technologies that fail well. You can just walk away from most other power plants and not much will happen. Stop putting coal into a coal plant, and it will stop. Nuclear isn’t quite so simple. As we’re seeing with Fukushima, the dangerous plant is the one that wasn’t even operating at the time of the disaster—reactor number 4—simply due to the amount of waste that was held there.

A natural response by many nuclear proponents is that modern designs have a much greater margin of safety. No doubt that’s the case, though a little known fact is that utility companies regularly go to regulators and ask to do power uprates of their nuclear plants—that is, to run the plants above the original maximum power level, on the theory that the original designers built in a safety margin. Consider the huge number of uprates that the NRC has approved in the last decade. I’m reminded of the tradeoff between resilience and efficiency, and when money is involved people opt for short-term efficiency over long-term resilience.

Despite this, nuclear proponents might still be justified in standing their ground: risk is everywhere, and statistically nuclear is much safer than many other things in industrial society. That is, in ordinary times. And if there’s anything that’s clear about the combination of global climate change and peak oil and the many other challenges we face, it’s that we’re not in ordinary times—they are unprecedented in recorded history, and point to harder times ahead.

Specifically, three things strike me as the major reasons to avoid nuclear:

Limits to growth. In a (permanently?) declining global economy, the resources (mostly financial, though military resources are important for nuclear safety) to keep plants well maintained are going to be scarce. Nicole Foss said it well-–-that after studying nuclear safety in Eastern Europe she concluded that nuclear power is incompatible with hard times. It’s these hard times that invalidate assumptions about the safety procedures and other risk modeling, for example, that can cause unforeseen cascading accidents.

Waste storage. I think it is possible for us to store waste for the short term. It’s the longer term that is a bit more doubtful, and regardless of the duration it’s an expensive undertaking. The 2010 documentary Into Eternity on Finland’s waste storage plans reminded me of a few things: a) Finland is a small country, and yet the scale of the waste site is huge, b) planning for the 100 years it’ll take to finish the waste site is hard enough (will there be the money needed to complete it? how is it possible to plan for 100 years when we can’t plan beyond the next congressional election?) let alone the hundreds of thousands of years it needs to survive intact, and c) they’ve been working on this for a decade already, while no other country has even the beginnings of a solution. (The documentary was a bit sad: Finland has assembled a number of expert, sincere people trying to solve a problem that you sense they realize cannot be solved.)

Scale. Nuclear isn’t particularly cheap when you compare it to alternatives (though cost estimates vary wildly) and is difficult to scale up quickly. In my calculations on alternative energy several months back, I found David MacKay’s estimate that the peak rate of nuclear power plant construction ever achieved was 30GW of nameplate capacity per year, globally. At that rate we’d only build 0.6TW in 20 years, a drop in the bucket compared to the ~16TW of primary energy we consume globally today.

The combination of these factors, and the fact that it’s not a technology that fails well means that even barring a catastrophic failure, at some point the whole plant has to be decommissioned and many of its parts stored as waste, at great expense. The nuclear industry itself is old, and most nuclear engineers are nearing retirement, so a lot of institutional knowledge is about to be lost.

It’s for these reasons that I prefer solar thermal power (both for heat and for electricity) for baseload generation. A solar thermal tower with mirrors is about as low-tech as can be. There’s little risk of any sort of disaster—the entire system can be passive if it needs to be—and all the parts can be built using ubiquitous materials and simple technology. With heat storage—again, simple technology—solar thermal can provide stable baseload power in a way that most major renewables (other than hydroelectric) can’t.

Finally, stepping back for a moment, there’s the question of whether it was wise to advocate for a technology from a position of weakness—environmentalists felt they had been backed into a corner, and had to pick something—anything—to get us and the climate out alive. That’s not a frame of mind that leads to good decision making. Post-Fukushima, nuclear is off the table in many countries but the pattern that led to that choice is repeating with natural gas, and may keep repeating until we step back from the premise: that we can’t use less energy.

Date: April 21st, 2012 | Comments: 8 Comments »

Category: alternative energy, climate, complexity, greenwashing

The Invisible Technological Midpoint

written by: barath

Some time back Adam explored the notion of minimalism, and I’d like to revisit that in the context of technology and civilization. The conclusion he seemed to come to was that some sort of middle course is the right one—shunning all technology can be just as limiting as embracing all of it. In part because of his posts and in part from reading authors at either end of the spectrum I’ve become more convinced of the value of such a balance. The question is where that “balance” point actually is and how the limits to growth, technology, and culture interact. So I’ve done a bit more reading to try to explore that question further, though I am still far from an answer.

First, let’s start with Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, which I picked up at the library primarily because I expected to disagree with it. Kelly makes a good point that by opting for minimalism / anti-civ, while one might maximize “freedom” (from technology / from complex systems outside our control), it’s really just an increase in latitude among a sparse set of options (as he puts it: the freedom to hoe the potatoes whenever one chooses is a limited sort of freedom). On the other hand he argues that embracing the “technium” gives one more options but at some cost to latitude to choose among technologies to accept; he contends this is still a net positive. He puts it this way:

[we] willingly choose technology, with its great defects and obvious detriments, because we unconsciously calculate its virtues.

I think he’s wrong here, but not because a) people are wrong in that calculation or b) because they’re not doing any calculation at all, but rather because of the metrics and means used in calculating (and the things we consider virtues). Those things come from the broader culture, and as part of the paradigm we’re not in a habit of questioning them upon each calculation. And those calculations and individual decisions add up, but no broader examination of the metrics or virtues takes place. So yes people might be doing some sort of rudimentary or short-sighted calculation(s), but those calculations are likely within a bad framework. To examine and/or change that thinking one must get more meta.

Kelly has a fascinating section on the Amish, who he characterizes, contrary to popular conception, as quite technology-savvy in a quirky sort of way. According to Kelly, the Amish have built advanced energy storage, distribution, and use systems using compressed air, so a central generator compresses air and then sends it to households to run ordinary appliances without electricity (he gives examples of everything from blenders to sewing machines to power saws and drills). He describes how what the Amish are really doing is just carefully and slowly adopting technology, and as a result are a) dependent upon the “technium” and b) effectively a first-world protest movement, not something that could exist or does exist in places that already operate at or below their level of technology. He also discusses back-to-the-landers he knew who eventually started tech companies as the end result of Amish living without Amish cultural and community limits and the sacrifice of individual free choice. That is, he contends that without community-based limits, one naturally tends to adopt more and more technology and eventually give up a technologically-austere lifestyle.

I think Kelly is wrong in his take that those who are not pro-technology (not necessarily anti-tech) don’t contribute to things used by others, since their ideas can be spread via things they build, books they write, via the Internet, etc. And he’s misguided in his diatribe against the precautionary principle, which he claims if implemented would prevent all technological development because all technologies can be used equally for good or ill. Maybe overall system complexity is the problem and so that’s what should be limited, but I’m not sure how to measure that (as I discussed last week). Regardless, he comes up with a list of 5 ways to respond to a new technology, which are pretty good: 1) Anticipate its effects (build a hypothesis), 2) Continually re-assess, 3) Prioritize resulting risks, including ones from nature, 4) Quickly correct harm, and 5) Don’t prohibit technology but redirect it to other uses or constraints.

Second is the notion of where we’re headed as a global civilization, whether it’s inevitable, and what’s in control of it. It seems that the civ and anti-civ folks actually agree on something without realizing it: the argument on one side is that we should let technology set its own course (as if it’s a self-aware complex system in some sense) and on the other that technology will devour everything if allowed so it must be destroyed. (Kelly indirectly admits this when he agrees that “technology is a holistic, self-perpetuating machine.”) It seems both sides share a premise, which is technology cannot be limited. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not—by humans, anyway. But what about by ecological limits?

Separate from that notion, there’s the question of what perpetuates it. Adam identified advertising as one possible culprit, and in re-reading Jerry Mander, I’m reminded of how much not just advertising, but perhaps, as Mander argues, the medium of TV itself is to blame. Beyond advertising, it seems that the growth-based economic model is at the root of much of this. If we were in Herman Daly’s world, would these problems still exist in the same way? I’m reminded of what Meadows wrote in the Limits to Growth:

All people and institutions play their role within the large system structure. In a system that is structured for overshoot, all players deliberately or inadvertently contribute to that overshoot. In a system that is structured for sustainability, industries, governments, environmentalists, and economists will play essential roles in contributing to sustainability.

Third is the notion of what sorts of fundamentals exist (emergy/transformity, limits to growth, ecological footprint, etc.). I don’t have a clear notion of how this interacts with the technology discussion, but it seems to be the missing piece in the pro-technology case since there’s a general denial that limits to growth exist and that they’re likely to affect the way technology is developed and the economy functions. Kurzweil, for example, flatly denies that anything can stop technological advancement of the kind he shows on his exponential charts; he likes to point out recessions and depressions have no effect. (Will the limits to growth? This is a question I’m very interested in, but have yet to find good data or arguments one way or the other.)

I think what Kurzweil might be basing his argument on is the fact that we haven’t had a decline sharp enough or pervasive enough in the last few hundred years to have eroded the natural buffer that science and R&D have had; energy growth has continued unabated for a few centuries. As long as we live in a growth-based world, R&D is what you need to keep growing. But it’s only worth it if growth is still possible. Without growth, the economic argument for R&D is stripped away, leaving only the academic argument of advancement and science for its own sake. And that seems like it’s a harder sell.

There’s probably also a historical argument here as well—that in times when societies weren’t extremely wealthy, only the rich were able to really pursue science, and so it advanced fairly slowly (at least relative to today). Whereas in societies where the wealth was broad-based, the state was able to spend money on all sorts of academic pursuits, some profitable to the state and some not. It seems we might be moving from this latter state to the former.

That last sentence raises the notion of reversalism. Staniford and Greer had an interesting and friendly, though blunt, discussion a few years ago on the question of the consequences of peak oil. While they agree on the fundamentals, Staniford thinks that we’re in for a couple of decades of hard times, not a slow and permanent decline of industrial civilization. I find it very hard to reason about how and why one or the other might be likely, which is why I try to avoid thinking more than 20 years out (not that it’s possible to even think that far out). I think if peak oil were truly the only issue that we face today, Staniford might be right, because we’d just substitute our fuels as the Hirsch report recommends, grind through the rough transition, and recover. But given climate change and peak everything, I’m not sure how that’ll work. The answer to the reversalism question is crucial; it informs us about the sorts of technologies we should embrace. It seems more study and debate, both scientific and philosophical, is needed on this question.

Fourth is the question of where a good life might be in all of this, whether Hemenway is right about horticultural societies, and what technology should look like in this context. Hemenway makes the case that we want regenerative systems rather than degenerative or sustainable systems. Might he be right that it’s not about the end goal but rather the process by which a system (or civilization) sustains itself? If so, the case can be made that the question people have been asking (should we aim for civ or anti-civ, tech or anti-tech?) is the wrong one, or at least one that doesn’t help lead to an answer even if it leads us to understand the problem.

That is, once we’ve concluded that neither civ nor anti-civ is the right answer, we might conclude that the question should be something like: what should be the operating mode of the target system? It seems that the operating mode—degenerative, sustainable, or regenerative—leads naturally to constraints on what technology or civilization will look like because only certain forms can work well in each mode. (This once again is backed up by what Meadows and Daly have written.) I suppose Hemenway is saying that horticultural societies are ones that best function in a regenerative mode. Kelly makes the case that technology will and must advance, but I think he thinks about technology too narrowly (and cites Wendell Berry as an example of someone who seems to be stuck in a notion of 1940s America as the pinnacle of technological-human harmony).

Personally I think of permaculture as a technology, and, for example, I hope that someday people figure out how to directly tap into the electrical current that plants naturally produce when photosynthesizing as an alternative to silicon solar panels. (As Odum wrote: “The natural conversion of sunlight to electric charge that occurs in all green-plant photosynthesis after 1 billion years of natural selection may already be the highest net emergy possible.”) The question is what differentiates these latter technologies. Surprisingly, Kelly comes up with a decent set of guidelines: 1) Promotes collaboration between people and institutions, 2) Transparent in origins and ownership, understandable by all, 3) Distributed in ownership, production, and control, 4) Flexible and easy to adapt, modify, etc., 5) Redundant and not monopolistic, and 6) Efficient and minimizes its impact on the ecosystem. These guidelines mesh nicely with the goals of Appropriate Technology.

Sadly, in his final chapter, Kelly discusses what he thinks is likely for the future, and goes off the Kurzweil deep end, mostly ignoring his guidelines. As a random example:

Yet we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog…As the technium’s autonomy rises, we have less influence over the made. It follows its own momentum begun at the big bang. In a new axial age, it is possible the greatest technological works will be considered a portrait of God rather than of us.

Maybe he read McKibben’s The End of Nature and misunderstood the message? Instead of mourning the fact that Nature was no longer independent from humanity, as McKibben was, Kelly seems to have taken it to mean that if Nature is just another force under humanity’s thumb, then what differentiates a tree frog and a cell phone?

Fifth, and finally, is the question of whether we’re headed to an environment conducive to regenerative systems anyway. For a system to expand beyond its ecological footprint (i.e. for it to use more than its share of resources in the physical region it operates in) requires resources to come from somewhere else (either in time—borrowing from the future by drawing down stocks—or space—geographically). The only way for that to happen is via transportation. (Where does information fall? Macroscopically we can treat this as zero.) Will expensive energy naturally return us here? Will relocalization become a must as a result as many peak oil authors contend? Thus will the social environment we’ll find ourselves in be a perfect fit for regenerative systems if we have the wisdom to apply them at the right time?

In this exploration, I’ve concluded that a) the larger system is what needs to be defined, not the ways in which we operate within it, and in this way Daly hits the nail on the head—we want at the minimum sustainable if not regenerative flows at the macro level but a rapid and constant churn of ideas, technology, etc. at a micro level, and b) the discussions over civ / anti-civ, technology / anti-technology, collapse / singularity, etc. are mostly unhelpful even if they’re interesting because they’re trapped within the wrong paradigm: one in which technology or civilization itself has a self-determined path.

Date: April 10th, 2012 | Comments: 2 Comments »

Category: appropriate technology, culture, limits

Limiting the Complexity of Complex Systems

written by: barath

It’s widely known that financial system is very complex. Even just the credit system is complex:


One question we might ask is “is the global financial system complex?” The answer is obvious: yes. But there’s a different question I’ve been wondering for some time: “how complex is it?” That is, is there a way to quantify, in some meaningful way, the complexity of the financial system?

A couple of years ago some CS theorists started analyzing one specific class of complex financial products—collateralized debt obligations. (The latest update of the paper is here.) Their primary focus is on the asymmetry of information between the buyer and the seller—the fact that the seller knows what among the debts being sold is bad and what’s good, whereas the buyer may not. What they prove is that the seller can manipulate the CDOs in such a way that it is computationally intractable for a buyer to know whether the CDOs they’re buying are junk or not. Worse than that, they show that such tampering can’t be detected after the fact, making them difficult or impossible to regulate; as they put it at the time:

Would a lemons law for derivatives (or an equivalent in terms of a standard clauses in CDO contracts) remove the problems identified in this paper? The paper suggests a surprising answer: in many models, even the problem of detecting the tampering ex post may be intractable.

While their results are fascinating, the complexity issues that they address are of the computational complexity variety rather than an examination of systemic complexity. That is, they looked at the downsides of the complexity of a specific financial product, not the downsides of the complexity of the whole financial system.

It’s this latter issue I’ve been trying to understand better. I’ve been on the lookout for ways to analyze and understand systemic complexity, but haven’t found much well-established work. (Not being an economist, it’s quite possible I’m just unaware of some well-known approaches here.) My hope was that something like the Ratnasamy complexity metric (developed to analyze the complexity of network protocols and distributed computer systems) could be applied to systems like the credit system above, and would enable economists and regulators to precisely study the complexity of those systems that succeed as well as those that fail. The metric yields an asymptotic complexity measure that is an attempt to capture how many pieces of information are manipulated by how many parties how many times. As it turns out, the complexity measure that this analysis yields happens to align with intuitive notions of complexity, and may naturally map to the analysis of systems like the credit system as depicted above. My hope is that by analyzing the complexity of a financial (sub)system, it would be possible to identify best practices—i.e. match those systems that work well with their complexity to see if / how the two are correlated—to reduce complexity and avoid future global economic meltdowns. That is, establish complexity limits beyond which regulatory bodies are allowed to step in and decrease system complexity.

As a final step, it would be valuable to develop simpler, more intuitive thresholds that are functionally equivalent to more complex thresholds that come out of the metric(s). Then we could both assure ourselves that the limiting mechanism in place would do the job and we’d be able to understand what the limit is. (We don’t want to rely upon arcane rules in an effort to make things more simple.) For example, suppose we were to institute two rules: “1. No financial institution may be responsible for more than 1% of national assets. 2. No financial institution may sell or transact more than two classes of products.” The first rule would help decrease the cascading damage caused by failures and the second rule would help increase the diversity and decrease widespread common-cause failures. Hopefully it’d be possible to relate these rules or ones like them to the system’s complexity analysis.

Stepping beyond the financial dimension, I’d be interested to learn if any such studies have been conducted on ecosystems. Many if not most ecosystems are complex, and involve an intricate dance of creatures and biogeochemical cycles, and so it seems somewhat unlikely that complexity itself is a core problem in unstable ecosystems. Are those problem factors discoverable from a macro analysis of the ecosystem in question? Is diversity more primary in this context than complexity? Do the patterns generalize?

At this point fixing the financial system seems like wishful thinking, but I still believe understanding the problems we’re in today in greater depth is the first step to figuring out how to prevent them from happening again.

Date: April 2nd, 2012 | Comments: 4 Comments »

Category: complexity, computing, economics

If Only We Had Free Energy

written by: barath

I thought I’d do a thought experiment. Suppose tomorrow morning a hypothetical university—let’s call it T.I.M.—sends out their weekly press release claiming a “revolutionary breakthrough” that will change the way we think about energy. Unlike every other time in the past decade they’ve made this claim, though, suppose this time it’s actually true: they’ve discovered a way of producing extremely cheap energy—as near to “free energy” as can be imagined. Specifically, they’ve invented Mr. Fusion, a system that can turn anything—trash—into energy via a form of cold fusion. While it can’t be done on a small scale, it’s expected to have an EROEI of more than 100, producing power at a cent per KWh. The plants are expected to last 40 years at the minimum, but nobody quite knows—maybe they’ll last 80. And best of all, the research team is only 5, not 15, years away from commercialization.

Let’s start the clock at the time the press release hits the inboxes of technology journalists. What might happen after after that?

1 day later: Wired and other tech sites pick up the story, hailing the invention as a breakthrough using the language from the press release almost verbatim with the same stock photography as every other energy article. Blogs and other online media pick up the story, omitting pertinent details.

1 week later: Some folks at The Oil Drum are showing some surprise at the results, which have supposedly been verified by other scientists. Perpetual cynics dismiss it as yet another free energy hoax. At this point it’s still hard to tell that this development really is the game-changer that is claimed.

2 weeks later: A number of blogs begin proclaiming this discovery as a turning point for humanity, but most energy blogs exhibit skepticism.

28 days later: The viral meme spreads.

2 months later: In an attempt to quell growing skepticism about the project, the original team of researchers holds a Q&A session for interested parties. Representatives from ExxonMobil and Massey are present, asking about commercialization; the team says they have a startup company underway and hope to start taking orders in a year. Physicists try to identify holes in the project, but come away empty handed. The corporate presence triggers some mainstream media coverage of the event, and a few major news channels do a short piece on it. Sentiment among energy analysts shifts ever so slightly away from disbelief.

6 months later: The Guardian picks up a story that several big energy companies, including ExxonMobil and Massey, made bids to buy Mr. Fusion and were turned away. Both companies immediately deny the story. A week later the founders of Mr. Fusion write an editorial describing the buyout attempts and saying that they will see the company through themselves.

8 months later: The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial by Daniel Yergin, who describes Mr. Fusion as a bad idea; he also calls into question the ethics of the scientists involved (ominously noting the government funding that enabled the research); he claims that we have more than enough oil for the foreseeable future and thus don’t need to rely upon untested technologies. “Even the New Republic” echoes Yergin’s message; other papers cover the coverage.

9 months later: Several large environmental groups, along with a few backers of the photovoltaic industry, begin to publicly question the safety of Mr. Fusion. They note that since it harnesses nuclear reactions to produce electricity, it should be placed under the same scrutiny as any other nuclear plant. The Mr. Fusion team does a few interviews to try to quell any concern, noting that no long-lived radioisotopes are produced in the reactions. They conduct another round of demonstrations to show that the radiation level inside of their test facility is lower than inside a coal plant.

10 months later: Senators from Oklahoma, West Virginia, Texas, North Dakota, and Montana—states with significant fossil fuel interests—issue a joint press release announcing congressional hearings on Mr. Fusion. The press release cites Yergin’s editorial as exhibit A. They also note the huge capex of the fossil fuel infrastructure ($10 trillion, according to Paul Roberts), and observe that they supported the idea of Mr. Fusion until they found out what it would cost in lost investments. They announce a plan to require testimony from each of the researchers and members of their startup company; they also plan to call representatives from several large energy companies as expert witnesses.

1 year later: Several investors for Mr. Fusion back out, citing increased investment risk due to political opposition and increased scrutiny.

2 years later: The Guardian runs a story, citing a leaked diplomatic cable from the previous year, indicating extreme displeasure shown by Saudi Arabia regarding Mr. Fusion. Their ambassador is quoted saying that the country will begin to severely limit oil exports in response to the development and deployment of Mr. Fusion. However, no changes in their export volumes are apparent in the preceding months.

3 years later: After significant lobbying by the American Petroleum Institute, the NRC issues a ruling that Mr. Fusion must meet the established suite of nuclear safety standards—those developed for conventional nuclear fission plants—including those rules on containment, redundancy, hardening, and safety protocols. The Mr. Fusion team appeals the ruling while they continue plans for construction.

5 years later: Oil exports from most net exporters begin to decline steeply and prices rapidly begin to rise.

6 years later: The NRC dismisses the appeal, and reiterates its original ruling.

8 years later: Construction on the first full-scale plant complex is begun. (The recent recession made the commission of more than one financially infeasible. Energy demand is down, and few utilities have the money to do more than maintain existing infrastructure.) Mr. Fusion’s investors are frustrated, and some openly discuss the idea of selling the technology and patents off to the highest bidder. Except for periodic news about dissent within the ranks, Mr. Fusion is largely forgotten by the press and the public.

12 years later: The first Mr. Fusion plant complex comes on-line with some, mostly muted fanfare. However, due to years of slowly declining energy demand there is little immediate need for such major new capacity. Nevertheless, the lower electricity rates are cautiously welcomed by households in New England. Orders for Mr. Fusion plants begin to trickle in, but mostly from the few nations that are still growing economically.

13 years later: Regional coal plants, natural gas plants, and their related industries begin to shut down, devastating the economic base of the small towns in which they are located. Politicians begin to question the wisdom of building more Mr. Fusion plants given their economic impact.

14 years later: New plant construction is begun in China and India, which are struggling to maintain growth in the face of high oil and coal prices. A few plants are commissioned in California and the member states of the RGGI as Mr. Fusion has very low life-cycle carbon emissions, but fear about the short-term economic impacts of the plants, combined with their up-front cost, tempers interest.

20 years later: Several dozen Mr. Fusion plant complexes are operating worldwide, producing on the order of 100 GW of electricity, about 2% of global electricity consumption.

I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: “when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” If we had a (nearly) free energy source that was discovered overnight, and all that had to be done was to build the plants that would produce it, it would be seen as a major threat to entrenched interests. Fossil fuel companies would try to buy out the technology to sit on it, and failing that, would use their considerable political and media clout to throw up roadblocks. Fossil fuel exporters would panic—entire nations like Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Canada would fear being thrown into crisis, as would many states within the United States. Environmental fears would be raised, legitimately at first, though after contrary evidence is presented the fears wouldn’t be assuaged. And even in the best case the transition to the new energy source would try both the patience and the finances of those involved during a time of slow economic contraction. Despite this, it’s likely the technology would be adopted over a long period of time, but not at nearly the scale or impact initially assumed. It’s this combination of tensions I’ve tried to capture.

Of course it’s impossible to know if this is how it’d play out, but one thing is quite clear: our society isn’t set up for rapid change of the sort presented by a new energy breakthrough. Institutional and social inertia can sometimes be a good thing, but here it’s a major drawback.

Date: March 20th, 2012 | Comments: 20 Comments »

Category: alternative energy, culture, economics, limits, oil, policy

…And We Thought Nation States Were A Bad Idea

written by: barath

There’s a notion that I’ve been seeing crop up in more places: that our options for the future have narrowed. I’ve been wondering about this for a while—it’s a pretty basic set of questions when I think about it: what were our options in the past, what are our options now, what has changed, and what has stayed the same?

In this recent remarkable (though dry) talk on the 40th anniversary of the release of Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows spells our options out as clearly as one can: sustainable development is no longer possible given the extent to which we have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity. Our global civilization has not made the changes required in time to avoid decline. However, this was not a foregone conclusion: their World3 scenarios were not predictions, and they didn’t all end in collapse. To the contrary, they represented an exploration of a number of possible outcomes, and suggested a positive and sustainable way forward. Since we didn’t choose that path, we foreclosed upon the high-development sustainable society that would have resulted.  While I’ve known all this and have been thinking it myself, for him to spell this out as clearly as he did—as someone who has spent over 40 years looking at these issues—is a reminder that we really should question (and probably ditch) any efforts aiming for sustainability within the current paradigm.

So what did he endorse instead? Resilience. The idea of targeting resilience over other approaches is one that I’ve been coming across more often. The idea that one should aim for resilience rather than try to predict and directly shape the future is one that comes up frequently in Taleb’s writing on Black Swans and a newer concept he calls Anti-Fragility. The basic notion, though I’m not sure I can really put my finger on it (Taleb can be a bit glib, but overall I find his ideas thought-provoking), is that systems that rely upon prediction for positive outcomes are exposed to potential cascading errors in those predictions that can lead to catastrophic results. Instead of building a system around predictions, building it around resilience to unknown outcomes does not require the ability to predict the future.

Taleb subdivides systems into three categories: those that are fragile (that suffer from shocks or randomness), those that are resilient (that are indifferent to circumstances), and those that are anti-fragile (that benefit from shocks and stresses, within some limits). Systems that rely upon prediction are fragile, and thus the first step is to move towards resilience, and then reach for anti-fragility where possible. (He discussed these ideas in more depth in a recent interview.) Interestingly, Toby Hemenway seems to endorse this decomposition, though he frames it a bit differently; he considers systems that range from degenerative to regenerative, with sustainable systems residing in the middle. (I suppose you’d have to say sustainable systems are resilient, since, well, they sustain; however, resilient systems don’t have to have macro-level sustainability.)

Many of the common proposals for resilience in a post-peak / post-carbon future—the kinds of proposals from Transition Towns and the like—are naturally aligned with Taleb’s and Hemenway’s worldview. I didn’t expect this to be the case; I’m not sure there’s a whole lot in professional background or personality that Taleb and Hemenway or, say, Rob Hopkins or Richard Heinberg have in common. My hope is that they have in their own ways all identified and captured something fundamental that manifests in all sorts of systems.

Small is Beautiful.

Taleb likes to talk about artisans. He argues that due to their small size, lack of dependency on complex global financial and business systems, artisans and small local businesses are the only variety that don’t and won’t implode spectacularly. As he puts it, “when the dust settles we’ll have more robust systems and more artisans.” This is of course quite in line with permaculturists like Hemenway suggesting we move away from grain monocultures (which, as he argues, contribute to hierarchical agricultural civilizations) and move towards small-scale gardening with polycultures.

In particular, Taleb’s argument is about the complexity of the financial system, and how its bigness and complexity are inherent problems. I agree, but in moving to the opposite extreme, I wonder if it’d be possible to achieve anti-fragility. For example, D. Radiodurans is about as robust as a life form can get. But I’m not sure it’s anti-fragile—it’s just too simple to benefit in any real way from stresses it experiences. (Is there a certain, maybe “right”, level of complexity required for anti-fragility?) In any case, Taleb argues that nature in general—the target of emulation in permaculture—is naturally anti-fragile and needs constant stresses and dynamism for its health. I think he’s making a case that our economic and social systems should be modeled after nature—permaculture for the economy (which I imagine many permaculturists would agree with).

Resilience.

Before one can reach for anti-fragile or regenerative systems, it seems building resilience is required. In complex systems, Taleb contends it’s not possible to have resilience unless the participants have skin in the game—that we need to move away from a financial system that’s publicly subsidized, privately profitable. I’m reminded of an idea Greer suggested in The Wealth of Nature that corporations should have the downsides of personhood as well as the upsides, and thus face the equivalent of jail time for crimes they commit.

Taleb argues against the development of utopian systems, and instead suggests robustness to defects and errors, even in human behavior—for example, greed-proof systems, or ones that even benefit from the greed of individuals rather than, as today, suffer from it. (Is strategyproofness a small-scale example of this?) He rants a bit, as he is wont to do, about how prediction is a bad approach to problem solving for systems that are social or economic in nature (whereas they work in systems that are physical in nature). This makes me wonder: where does the Limits to Growth fall? Is it modeling the world as an ecosystem that follows certain known patterns, or is it modeling a socio-economic system? It seems to be a bit of both.  Thus instead of avoiding shocks and enduring low-level stress—the economic analogue to fire suppression—we should embrace shocks. Shocks expose weaknesses without weakening whereas chronic stress is the opposite, as is the temporary / artificial suppression of negatives; the approach reminds me of annealing.

More than just shocks, we should accept and embrace non-linearity of negative effects. Taleb gives an example of traffic non-linearity—a small increase in the number of cars on the road can hugely affect the traffic experienced (something true with network traffic as well). (Regarding responses to such situations I’m reminded of Braess’s paradox, which arises due to a suboptimal Nash equilibrium in, say, a freeway system; in certain situations, adding roadway capacity can decrease the throughput, which may be a partial explanation of the value of freeway metering lights.) He gives a similar example regarding the size of banks and the stress tests that are applied to them, and echoes the idea that too big to fail is too big to exist.

So it seems that, following this reasoning, we should identify some set of plausible Black Swans and then become robust to them. How do we determine what is plausible? Taleb makes the case that physical systems are ones where models work and thus we shouldn’t be worrying about whether the sun will rise, but this needs more refining. One goal is to first decrease fragility, and a way to do that is to mitigate the impact of volatility and randomness. Buffers are one general technique to that end, and I imagine there are a number of others. An approach to this, which is akin to Adam’s explanation for the name Contraposition on our About page, is to accept that we are going to shed parts of our economic and social systems as we decline, and make it possible to shear them off without affecting the functioning of the overall system—the Black Knight writ large. Once our systems are resilient (though not sustainable), we can reach for some measure of anti-fragility through approaches such as permaculture.

Finally, when it comes to political systems, Taleb makes a case against large nation states and for confederations like Switzerland: “mistakes are made small and things aggregate up without the mistakes.” Not having a background in political theory, I’m not sure I have much to say on this, except to say that massively distributed direct democracy is something that has appealed to me for a long time. Only a few years ago I learned how numerous towns in New England are still governed by town meeting; it seems to me that such communities, like Switzerland, will be well served by these established systems of local direct democracy in the years ahead.

Date: March 7th, 2012 | Comments: 3 Comments »

Category: complexity, economics, limits, policy, transportation

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