Global financial system implosion begins

[Nylock]

Well that's the question. Obviously, one possibility is that there is no answer. Oil is an energy carrier, not an energy source. Around 3-4 billion people are living off energy that arrived on the planet a few hundred million years ago, got captured in the massive algae blooms and forests associated with a couple of periods of global warming, and stored and concentrated in oil. Since the current energy surplus is temporary, so is the planetary carrying capacity associated with that surplus. It's hard to see how the rapid transition back to the carrying capacity consistent with real-time energy flow won't be brutal.

Set that aside (since it doesn't permit much conversation).

I've no original ideas. The most plausible I've seen are in https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prosperity...3235/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317697742&sr=8-1. Big issues are food, keeping warm and domestic energy sources, a plausible economic model, a plausible living arrangement and a plausible basis for a monetary system.

Industrial agriculture is a machine for converting hydrocarbon into protein in a sterilised medium (formerly known as soil) via fertiliser, pesticides and massive irrigation. It quadruples grain yields achievable without hydrocarbon, which will become unaffordable as oil price rises, then collapse as oil production falls. Permaculture offers the best option for delivering materially higher protein delivery, absent hydrocarbon. In the 1850's, the Germans kick started their industrial revolution by establishing a network of technological schools (Technische Hochschulen) and a network of Handelshochschulen. German universities placed emphasis on the natural sciences, and a parallel system of Fachschulen for the training of skilled tradesmen was developed. The net result was a dramatic increase in the technological competence of the German working population after 1870. We need to get rid of media studies and all those distractions and build a permaculture skills training capability and a similar dramatic increase in in the permaculture competence of our population.

Domestic energy has to be based on radical energy reduction measures (I'm building a house to German Passivhaus standards, for example, in which the principle heat source for space heating will be us). But the technologies will have to be along Schumacher's "Intermediate technology" principles - there won't be a global supply chain to replace the rare earth components sourced from China in the current crop of exotic wind turbine designs, and devices will have to be capable of being maintained by the communities that own them, using locally sourced materials.

Finding an economic model to replace capitalism will be appallingly difficult. It needs to be steady state, but it isn't obvious how a steady state model will be stable, particularly with respect to offering full employment. One requirement will be to reverse automation and increase the manual labour element of manufacturing, reducing working week lengths, and expand job sharing. We'll need a different system for recognising "wellbeing" - GDP isn't it. We will need a different financial model to support economic activity. Radical banking reform will eliminate the current business model in which profits arise from interest charges. Banks will be allowed to charge for transaction processing only. We'll need an alternative to a debt based, fiat currency system. Commodity monetary systems (e.g. gold backed) aren't terribly satisfactory. I suspect a monetary system backed by energy production capacity will simultaneously create the capital necessary to finance such capacity, and ensure that the resulting debt is always matched by commensurate assets with real value.

Living arrangements will have to be redesigned to eliminate distance (which requires transport, which requires energy). I don't think autarky will offer the best arrangement - there will still be some requirement and opportunity for regional specialisation and inter-community trade. But economies will of necessity have to be local, with local food production, energy production, employment and trade. The Transition Movement has so much to offer, here.

You have addressed a lot of the problems that face us, and i agree with your conclusions. However, you haven't directly addressed the one thing that you and free spirit are sparring over: energy production. If, as you say, alternatives to fossil fuels are merely 'science projects', then what do you see as a potential to replace/prolong the decline of said fuels? Although you suggest to 'set aside' this issue as it leaves little room for discussion, nonetheless it is the key issue that needs to be addressed among those mentioned above.

Surely without a (relatively) stable energy supply all the permaculture, steady-state capitalism models and passivhaus construction standards are going to be meaningless in the face of a brutal societal reset that 'the rapid transition back to the carrying capacity consistent with real-time energy flow' is going to entail?

..I am not having a pop here btw, i am genuinely interested to know what your alternative to 'science project' power generation is...

 

[toblerone3]

You have addressed a lot of the problems that face us, and i agree with your conclusions. However, you haven't directly addressed the one thing that you and free spirit are sparring over: energy production. If, as you say, alternatives to fossil fuels are merely 'science projects', then what do you see as a potential to replace/prolong the decline of said fuels? Although you suggest to 'set aside' this issue as it leaves little room for discussion, nonetheless it is the key issue that needs to be addressed among those mentioned above.

Surely without a (relatively) stable energy supply all the permaculture, steady-state capitalism models and passivhaus construction standards are going to be meaningless in the face of a brutal societal reset that 'the rapid transition back to the carrying capa pocity consistent with real-time energy flow' is going to entail?

..I am not having a pop here btw, i am genuinely interested to know what your alternative to 'science project' power generation is...

This^

 

[Nylock]

This and the post directly above were too long and I didn't read them. ^

righto

 

[free spirit]

By "not the same meaning", I presume you mean the meaning that allows a technology to be considered as "viable" by ignoring the hydrocarbon fuelled industrial manufacturing process upon which its "viability" depends?

Yes.

no, I mean viable once these factors have been taken into consideration, and you've repeatedly failed to supply any credible source to demonstrate that this is not so.

I presumed this was what you meant originally by the statement, hence my original reply to it, and my response to your odd changing of the goalposts when challenged on it.

for the umpteenth time, are you still contending that solar PV has a negative eroi or not, if yes, please supply some credible evidence to support your claim.

 

[Nylock]

Italian credit rating slashed, mwah.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15176947

...and in other financial news, DEXIA may be going down the tubes it seems...

 

[free spirit]

Well you've conceded that your hobby, in your words, "won't solve any problems by itself". I'm not aware of any response from you to any observation about the material, energy and capital requirements of your toys, the infrastructure that builds your toys, and the infrastructure that builds the infrastructure that builds your toys. Do you perceive any value in pursuing this ?

as should be clear by now, I'm very interested to review the sources for your claims.

Without those sources, it's difficult to get beyond this bollocks, so if you have some credible sources worth reading then it's worth pursuing, if not then no, it's probably not, but it'd help if you could stop repeating the same claim that you're either unwilling or unable to back up with anything credible.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

do what?

0.25 availability (source: My arse, 2011)

x 2,376,000,000 m² Total (Land Reg.)

= 89.1GWp

x 800 (yield, PVGIS - one huge array in Northampton facing SW)

= 71.2 TWh p.a. (Well, I said insanely optimistic).

That's the blue line, your estimate of 25TWh is the red line...

Here is the diagram for total electricity: (Edit to add: An incident involving red wine caused the lines to be mislabelled 'GWh', instead of 'TWh'. Doh. )

​

And this is UK total energy (scaled to gas input and total generation above).

​

Crude, but gives us an idea of scale.

Meanwhile, Gas is doing this:

**weeps all over crayons**

 

[Falcon]

If, as you say, alternatives to fossil fuels are merely 'science projects', then what do you see as a potential to replace/prolong the decline of said fuels?

I can't see anything that we can construct in a society that already uses all the surplus energy now available to us simply to keep functioning that can substitute in real-time for a natural mechanism that collected millions of years of sunlight over millions of square miles of territory, processed it and concentrated it with quintillions of joules of geological energy, then delivered it to us for free in a stable, storable and transportable format. I don't think anyone else that properly understands what is being proposed can, either.

 

[Falcon]

no, I mean viable once these factors have been taken into consideration, and you've repeatedly failed to supply any credible source to demonstrate that this is not so.

My credible source is you, and my demonstration is your inability to produce any evidence that the energy requirements of the device's manufacturing infrastructure's manufacturing infrastructure are accounted for in your estimates of EROEI. I guess it's a "burden of proof" thing.

for the umpteenth time, are you still contending that solar PV has a negative eroi or not, if yes, please supply some credible evidence to support your claim.

And for the umpteenth (and last) time, I restate my contention that a positive EROEI is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of satisfaction of any candidate energy source, and that your attempt to reframe the argument as a debate about whether it is small or negative is a misdirection.

I've prolonged this conversation with you longer than necessary as you evidently know something about the technology at small scale application, and I was curious to discover whether you knew anything about what happens before the FedEx truck arrives with your components so I could learn from you. Since you don't, and don't appear curious, there isn't much left of interest to me.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I don't think there's a lot of point chasing Falcon all around the thread to separate hyperbole from interesting stuff. I certainly haven't got the patience to try. However I do think there is a useful way to pose a problematic in that sort of area that won't vanish into mist when you try to pin it down. Brief version ...

Current fossil fuel consumptions can't be sustained, let alone increased in line with demand without scarcity making its impact felt in terms of skybound prices, resource wars and other unpleasantness. There are alternative energy sources, but they don't add up to a replacement for the sum of fossil fuel consumption and even in viable (in terms of EROEI) cases, mostly can't substitute for it as an industrial feedstock. Many of these alternative energy sources, even if they clearly have a net positive EROEI require a functioning international supply chain (currently but not necessarily involving fossil fuel use) to provide the necessary materials for construction.

So you inevitably end up having to consider demand reduction scenarios and looking at the level of demand reduction required to achieve sustainability, you keep running into the "capitalism won't let us do this" problem. For example, one of the biggest potential areas of demand reduction that doesn't involve "kill off billions of poor people so that fat Americans can continue to eat cheeseburgers and drive SUVs" approaches is to reduce fossil fuel consumption in our food chain, but that requires huge systemic changes that are manifestly unacceptable to powerful agribusiness interests.

So naturally, many sensible and well informed (albeit marginalized by capitalist-owned media) people come to the conclusion, "the human race can't afford capitalism any longer." However that immediately raises the question of what you are going to use to keep the supply chain supporting technologies like PV working. In no sense do I want to claim that such a thing can't be done, but I do think it's a question that it'd be nice to have a really good answer for.

 

[elbows]

Yeah that sounds about right. Personally I remain stuck in a holding pattern, waiting to see how people react to the first big waves of demand destruction. But it might be quite a long wait, especially when this stuff is discussed in the mainstream in the usual economic-cycle language, barely even touching on energy issues. Acute crisis phases provide opportunity for radical changes in direction, but only if the underlying issues show themselves clearly, and only if peoples hopes of returning to business as usual are properly extinguished. In this sense Im as interested in 'peak expectations' as much as peak oil.

 

[Falcon]

Once again, Bernie, I'm in complete agreement with you, mystified by your antipathy, and perplexed about what you believe has "vanished into mist". Since an attempt to figure out "what to do" without an understanding of what it is that needs to be done would be rather unwise, and an understanding of what needs to be done unavoidably entails a realistic account of what currently can't be done, your dismissal of my attempt at a description of what currently can't be done as "hyperbole" seems a little incoherent. I'm only sayin' ...

Here is an attempt at a slightly more precise formulation of the supply chain problem. I'm drafting this off the top of my head at 5am in New York JFK's Starbucks on a brand new laptop, so I'd appreciate some latitude…

Define:

(1) Z = the amount of energy (of the necessary quality) required to "keep things going"

(2) Xt = energy output (*not capacity*) of technology t, for technologies 1..t (solar, biofuel, wind, etc.)

(3) Ytri = the resource requirement for technology t, for resource 1..r (energy, capital, land, waste sink, etc.), for infrastructure level 1..i (device, device manufacturing infrastructure, device manufacturing infrastructure manufacturing infrastructure, etc., to significant system boundary depth i)

Then:

(4) Sum(Xt)(1..t) = Z + Sum(Yti)(1..t)(1..i) for r="energy" (energy supply/demand balance, accounting for infrastructure)

subject to limits:

(5) Sum(Yrti)(1..t)(1..i) < Y'r, the maximum available quantity of resource r

(6) Z = F(T) where F is a monotonically increasing function of time T (capitalist stability criterion to maintain the integrity of the supply chain for Xi for all i)

Observations:

(I) Simply starting to "build stuff" reduces Z by Sum(Yti)(1..t)(1..i) for some i<imax in the short run (assuming you need to build new devices, new device manufacturing infrastructure and possibly some new device manufacturing infrastructure manufacturing infrastructure) and i=imax in the long run (assuming all levels of infrastructure ultimately require construction/replacement), unless there is some magic Xt" which can be independently increased without violating condition (5) for resource r=energy. This function has historically provided by hydrocarbon. Hydrocarbon offtake rate is now fixed/declining and there is no observable alternative candidates for Xt".

(II) Reducing Z violates condition (6). All energy revolutions have been undertaken under the condition Xt">0, either because the existing energy resource satisfies the requirement Xt">0 and the revolution has commenced while there are still excess quantities of it, or the new energy resource can satisfy the requirement Xt">0 (The foundation of the assertion it is now "too late").

(III) Composite solutions ("Duh! It's a mix of PV, biofuel, and wind, stupid!") are non-viable if Sum(Ytri) > Yr' for proposed technology mix (1..t) (The foundation of the assertion that a statement to effect that "this bit is viable but not itself a solution, only part of a solution" is not a proof that the solution of which this is claimed to be a part is itself viable even if all the bits can be claimed to be individually viable).

(IV) A critical Ytir is r = "waste sink" - the system capacity to absorb the combined waste of all proposed technologies. We have already violated condition (6) before commencing any significant new infrastructure build.

(V) Z is actually Ze for energy types (1..e) (electricity, space heat, water heat) etc., reflecting the reality that not all energy types are equally useful (solar PV electricity, for example, being particularly useless for most pressing tasks - space heating, food production, etc.). I have not had enough caffein to attempt a decomposition by this degree of freedom. In practical terms, it might be possible to solve (4) in "joules" terms, and still be unable e.g. to feed everyone.

Bits of a solution: the value of "Z" required to "keep things going", contingent definitions of "things" and "going", the identity of magic Xt", efficient allocation of finite resources between Ze technologies to secure real priorities.

Discuss.

 

[elbows]

I don't think there is anything incoherent about Bernie's position, since you really do resort to hyperbole quite often. And when attempting to explore the issues in detail, I think your clarity of communication leaves something to be desired. For example your last post is very hard work.

Regardless, the end of your post is getting into territory which I consider fruitful. Wide variations in what we mean by 'keep things going' are almost certainly responsible for much of the disagreement here in recent times. A radical change in peoples expectations & priorities, with an emphasis on the essential life-supporting stuff, is certainly required in order for people like me's assertions that it is not too late, that we are not all doomed for sure, to stand the test of time.

I seriously doubt our ability to make much progress on these fronts so long as we are on the plateau, rather than steep decline phase. And your conviction about the timescales for this stuff is clearly not shared by all, so it will be hard to reach consensus at the moment. In the meantime, people can and should indulge in the things that you so readily dismiss as mere hobbies. Just because solar doesn't have the muscle to heats our lives, it can certainly light our lives.

 

[Falcon]

I don't think there is anything incoherent about Bernie's position, since you really do resort to hyperbole quite often. And when attempting to explore the issues in detail, I think your clarity of communication leaves something to be desired. For example your last post is very hard work.

An actual *example* of hyperbole would add a lot to the credibility of these claims, you know. I'm going to bet it will degrade either to a refusal to accept an attempt to reframe, or a statement which challenges a paradigm (by *definition*, hyperbolic to the paradigm subscriber).

I agree that it's hard work (although, if the maths is poorly expressed, that's my fault - if you find maths hard, that's yours. It's a simple equilibrium condition and two constraints, which is 3rd grade maths not the 2nd grade I promised earlier - perhaps this is an example of hyperbole?).

If only the hardest problem mankind has faced could be rendered in a couple of paragraphs of crisp internet forum prose. It seems I am to be crushed between the Scylla of prose's hyperbole and the Charybdis of mathematical inscrutability.

 

[elbows]

Hyperbole is perhaps the nicest thing that can be said about it. Aloof, arrogant, boastful, smug.

A large number of the people who will need to come along for the ride are not going to find maths easy, and thats everybodies problem.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

YEAH. DAMN YOU, FALCON!!! WITH YOUR WORDS AND NUMBERS AND LETTERS AND STUFF!!!

 

[elbows]

Not a bad graphic that

Thats not really my criticism though, after all personally I love to wade through nerdy and generally uninspiring documents in search of interesting details. There was one document I wish I could find from some years ago looking at PR efforts during the peak of the mini greenwashing bubble we had last decade. The public were not its audience, so it started going on about carrots and sticks, oh what fun. In reality that agenda seemed to diminish quite suddenly soon thereafter, the baton was passed to energy price concerns.

Falcon talks plenty of sense, I just get frustrated sometimes that the style can be counterproductive. And given that the main advantage that people who are prepared to 'think the unthinkable' when it comes to future energy supply have got is that they are well ahead of the game when it comes to coming to terms with the implications, and finding the right problems/solutions to focus on, I find it disturbing to think that a lot of this advantage could be squandered by getting stuck in arguments trying to convince non-believers who realistically aren't going to change their stance until we are at another stage of the great unravelling. Conspiraloons are not alone in turning their relative disconnection from the mainstream, and sense of certainty about certain aspects of the future, into an smug and cynical stance. Thats a waste, hope needs to be a major ingredient of any recipe that wants to gain serious momentum. It doesn't have to be unrealistic hope, you don't have to compromise any underlying beliefs about what will happen, but it does need to have the capability to resonate with people on levels beyond cynicism and doom.

 

[elbows]

If this is accurate then its a pretty good example of demand destruction:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15176330

Drivers have cut their petrol consumption by more than 15% since the credit crunch and the recession.
The AA has calculated that petrol sales in the first six months of 2011 were 1.7bn litres less than in the same period three years ago.
The AA says the drop in petrol sales is a direct result of record fuel prices.
Many drivers are struggling to make ends meet in any case, so the high cost of petrol leaves them with no option but to try to use less.
And businesses have been cutting back as well.

 

[Dr Jon]

I hear what you say about style, elbows - reminds me of some of my rants of years past. I seem to recall people pointing out that flaming folk and calling them fuckwits might not be the most effective way to convince them that their cherished beliefs did not quite correspond with reason and evidence.

I'd be interested to know if there is any standard for environmental / energy accounting. I know folk at AEA Technology were working on this sort of thing about 20 years ago, but I've no idea if this ever got finished.

 

[free spirit]

I was curious to discover whether you knew anything about what happens before the FedEx truck arrives with your components so I could learn from you. Since you don't, and don't appear curious, there isn't much left of interest to me.

on the contrary, we've recently sponsored a dissertation on precisely this subject, I've read several different studies over the years, and spent hours the other night reviewing all the recent research on this I could access to see if I could find anything to support your position. I'm trained in conducting such studies myself (although a little rusty), am well aware of the limitations of most of these studies, and am very interested in getting a more accurate handle on the EROI range of the systems we install, and to sus out ways that we can reduce this within our operations.

This is why I find it so infuriating that you've refused to properly clarify your position, or post up anything to back it up beyond one piece of out of date work based on some very dodgy base assumptions. If you have some relevant data or information that might help improve the accuracy of the existing assumptions, then please post it up.

eta - also, you made a specific statement about the EROI of solar PV being negative, surely you didn't expect not to be challenged on this, and not to have to supply even a smidgen of evidence to back up your statement. I've only kept banging on about it because of your refusal to either back it up or retract it. I'd also hoped we could have moved on to discussing the finer points of the EROI several pages ago, but this fundamental point needed nailing first.

 

[elbows]

I bet there are standards, but I don't know if they have any gaping holes in them. Last decades little green marketing & PR frenzy was not to my tastes, and I ran away from lots of detail as a result. For despite my attempts to do perform some kind of moderate balancing act, Im far more interested in more radical phases, the relatively easy first few steps are too much like business as usual for me to get very stimulated by them. Not being a fan of the version of reality where we suddenly leap from todays fancy world to a primitive form of 'the good life', I am stuck waiting for the main courses to arrive.

I don't even know why I rant about style in this way on this forum. Its not like I want everyone to have a carefully crafted message and the slickness & bouncy hope of a PR campaign. We'll need plenty of gadfly's & grouches for this journey, and I think we'l be able to overcome differences out of necessity, a driving & uniting force which remains somewhat elusive even as we seem now to teeter on the brink.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Not antipathy Falcon. Some of what you have to say is quite interesting. You just have a debating style I don't enjoy engaging with.

It might be a cultural thing perhaps?

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Not a bad graphic that

All the better with the right units (TWh, not GWh )

Seriously, though... I think we're all pretty much agreed that this is serious stuff, and that it isn't the easiest of things to communicate in an accessible manner.

I'm pretty keen on visualisation, but I'm struggling a little with this one and 'scale'.

(E2A: I'm not sure it's possible to do anything other than an energy graph version of 'longcat').

 

[Falcon]

Not antipathy Falcon. Some of what you have to say is quite interesting. You just have a debating style I don't enjoy engaging with.

It might be a cultural thing perhaps?

Thanks. I can do civilised. And I can engage in robust rough and tumble as well as the next man. Since the first expression which was emitted after my original post was "bollocks", and many chimed in afterwards in similar vein (not least yourself), I was going with rough and tumble.

You pick the tone and I'll comply. But please don't pick the wrong tone then whine about it. Meanwhile, there is a reason I tick "Like" on some of this criticism. Lighten up.

 

[Falcon]

and spent hours the other night reviewing all the recent research on this I could access to see if I could find anything to support your position. ... I've only kept banging on about it because of your refusal to either back it up or retract it. I'd also hoped we could have moved on to discussing the finer points of the EROI several pages ago, but this fundamental point needed nailing first.

Never mind stopping up at night trying to support MY position - the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that full supply chain energy requirements have been accounted for in your claims about EROEI - stop up at night researching that! Seriously - working out Sum(Yi)(1..i) for all the infrastructure layers is critical to this, you have a practitioners familiarity with the subject and we are genuinely interested in the result. I will be the first to throw my cap in the air with a loud "Huzzaah!" if you can show PV can build the factory in which the truck was made that gets the ore to the silicon foundry AND keep my street lights on as well.

 

[free spirit]

Never mind stopping up at night trying to support MY position - the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that full supply chain energy requirements have been accounted for - stop up at night researching that! Seriously - working out Sum(Yi)(1..i) for all the infrastructure layers is critical to this.

For a science project, how about you post up your workings so that they can be reviewed.

I'm working on the assumption that you must have at least done some back of the envelope calcs to reach your conclusions, so why not post them up. If you haven't, then frankly you've been talking out of your backside for the last few pages. Sorry if this is a bit rough and tumble for you, but I call it how I see it, and my earlier one word summation of your position stands IMO.

 

[Falcon]

It doesn't have to be unrealistic hope, you don't have to compromise any underlying beliefs about what will happen, but it does need to have the capability to resonate with people on levels beyond cynicism and doom.

Well said. I'm chastened.

 

[Falcon]

For a science project, how about you post up your workings so that they can be reviewed.

I'm working on the assumption that you must have at least done some back of the envelope calcs to reach your conclusions, so why not post them up. If you haven't, then frankly you've been talking out of your backside for the last few pages. Sorry if this is a bit rough and tumble for you, but I call it how I see it, and my earlier one word summation of your position stands IMO.

Exactly HOW do I provide evidence of absence? I've even filled in a little maths template of what a study would look like if it were comprehensive, to help recognise it if one was spotted. But contemporary studies of EROEI look like the brain scan of a stroke victim on the subject of accounting for the industrial supply chain. Since even without that supply chain, they are marginal, my "back of the envelope" calculation is that, carrying an industrial supply chain, they will sink. In some spirit of reconciliation, can you identify the flaw in that line of reasoning? I will consider it in all fairness.

NOTE: On the flight back, I did start to rough some numbers out. While it is unlikely that we could obtain even first approximate estimates for the deep supply chain more sophisticated than "oh my god, HOW much?", it would be very simple to determine the aggregate deep supply chain energy sink above which EROEI would be zero. It would then be a matter of judging whether that number was plausible to say something quite important about the technology. And it's going to be a small number. This could be done for each technology. The major complication will be accounting for the fact that bits of supply chain are shared - but it seems to me that might offer some insight into how the system could be optimised. All of which is massively off-topic in a thread about the global financial system, I suppose.

 

[free spirit]

**weeps all over crayons**

that's one response I guess.

But then again, I'm well aware that renewables in total can't possibly meet all of our current energy demand, never mind one single renewable source. I fully bought into the idea that we'd need huge reductions in the UK's energy consumption levels maybe 15-20 years ago, back when I believe falcon was still a fully fledged oil industry lacky, so I take it as read that we won't / can't even think about continuing to meet current levels of energy demand for much longer.

Given how utterly wasteful we are of energy at the moment though, I simply don't buy into the 'end is nigh' stuff propogated by several posters on this site - or at least not the 'end is inevitably nigh and there's sod all we can do about it' position. We've barely scratched the sides on the energy efficiency side of things in this country in virtually all sectors, and are still doing stupid stuff like installing millions of 50W halogen spots in place of single pendant lights etc. Once reality really starts to bite, and this sort of shit ends, we really do have the ability to rapidly knock huge chunks off the energy consumption levels of most sectors of the economy / society with barely any negative impact (and arguably many positive impacts).

From the perspective of a future situation where actual energy demand having dropped significantly, the contribution from all renewables combined potentially can start to make a far more significant contribution to the remaining energy mix. It will also be a long long time before we actually reach the situation where renewables are the only energy source available, certainly way past my lifetime, and we'll probably virtually never entirely run out of all none renewable forms of energy, just have ever lower levels of production and higher costs for them - either way, fossil fuels and nuclear will remain a major part of the energy mix for the forseeable future, hopefully alongside a growing contribution from the full range renewable technologies.

Whether or not we'll actually make this transition is open to question, but if we seriously attempt it we've got a far better chance of making it (or getting close) than if we spend another few decades working out if it's actually possible or not prior to actually doing anything. I'm not saying there's not some level of truth in some of what Falcon's saying, just that I'm fairly sure he's amplified the scale of the problem significantly beyond the point it's actually at.

 

[free spirit]

Exactly HOW do I provide evidence of absence?

you said it yourself several pages back. find the studies that exist (or a decent representative study), then point out the big stuff that's missing from them, then work out a realistic level of embodied energy to assign to them, then work out the number of panels produced in total that this extra level of embodied energy needs to be assigned across, then work out that lifetime energy payback from those panels etc etc.

I take it that you'd neither done this calculation yourself, or found anyone else's work that had already done it for you prior to you making your pronouncements on this thread then. Perhaps you've got this a little arse about tit, and should have done some workings out first prior to making such far reaching pronouncements in such strident tones as you have on this thread, or at least added some caveats that made it clear you were basing this on educated guesswork or something.

FWIW, I've also not seen a detailed EROI report on solar PV that I can't pick holes in, the difference is that I've not seen any factors missing that would justify a viewpoint that they'd all be 500-1000% out on their conclusions, hence my responses to your declarations on this thread.

eta - but yes, it is a complex subject to attempt to investigate in detail, and getting actual real world data out of the PV manufacturers is like getting blood from a stone, which doesn't really help.