Me too, I wish it was possible to make other people change behavior and stop using fossile fuels. Even the younger generations who are focused on the climate change waste a lot of oil and gas just for fun, but still blame all others for this cathastrofic situation we are in now. Sometimes I just feels like I dont care about the long term future, but only on what is going to happen the next days or a week forward. But I always get in heated discussions with climate alarmist who think we should change our life style.
@@thorsrensen3162 At this point it makes essentially no difference to likely future for humans, whether we change or not. IMO this merits a profound spiritual response. Consequences are not the only reason for acting (or not).
Thanks Nate. Sometimes I give you a hard time in the comments section-- quibbling about details in your interviews-- so I wanted to take the time to say that you truly have my respect. You are one of the best at explaining our predicament. Your humility and thirst for knowledge is commendable. I give you a hard time because 1) If anyone can grasp the complexities and nuances, it's you. 2) You are making a difference-- your platform is important. Keep up the good work! I have learned a lot from your channel-- and yes, I try to recommend your channel whenever possible :).
An extraordinary presenter of science (or any subject), especially in relating the subject matter to the viewer, and with a perfect voice in pitch with all other presentation attributes joined to reach perfection - I promise. I read and learn everyday and have since I entered the IT industry in 1980 and became a prolific presenter of making complex more simple, which enables me to appreciate what you do to make the subjects you cover, easily absorbable...and you leave me in the shade in presentation technique. I am now retired from the UK and living where the hot sun is, with time to learn, and learn as I approach eighty years on our good planet, consuming yesterdays sun for todays needs. Thank you Nate, your'r great...!
Great video, thanks again, Nate. Everything I've learned about human nature and our political system during the climate crisis (and the way our species and our politicians have behaved in the last 20 - 30 years in respect of this crisis has been incredibly revealing!) suggests to me that we will not do the sensible thing in following the 'sapient' gradient. We are addicted to fossil fuels. Addicts don't ration their drugs to make them last and do not act in rational ways in respect of managing their 'supplies'. I appreciate that is a simplistic metaphor, but its the best one I can find to emphasise the lack of rational behaviour. An addict who is told by his doctor that his use of drugs will soon kill him will likely leave the doctor's surgery in search of his next fix. In the same way, the likes of Joe Biden, a man fully aware of the severity of this crisis cannot help himself but exploit new opportunities to maintain oil supplies despite full cognisance of the likely impact. If I were a betting man, I'd place my bet on the precipice gradient being the likeliest of the options explored here. Strap in!
Small correction: addicts ration when they realize most of their stuff is gone and they can't get more (immidiately). Expect the same behavior at societal stage. Probably by the government sanctioning and banning unnecessary or wasteful energy use and prioritising essential functions.
Always a pleasure to hear from you, Nate. Excellent explanation about carbon pulse. Liked your perspectives on how geology serves as the best case over which is laid the social, governance, and politics. It reminded me of the recent disasters in the Indian state of Himachal where disregard for the poorly understood geology gave its way when overlapping factors of illimited hunger for growth, politics, and poor governance culminated in unprecedented events of a series of disasters
So much sense Nate and succinct. Shared on my facebook page tho who will take the munutes to watch absorb and recognize whats happening is another thing. Thank you for your work
That was fascinating. There have been times in my life where ive read a book or had my eyes opened to something - eg how money is created, the role of evolutionary psychology in inter-gender relationships, the 48 Laws of Power - and I cant believe they i had been so ignorant to something so obvious all my life. The Carbon Pulse is the pinnacle of that. I cannot believe i didnt know about it until last year. Its made me reconsider everything, go back to college, and live differently.
20 years ago conservation biologist Jeff Dukes found that it took 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material to make ONE gallon of gasoline. That's equivalent to loading 40 acres worth of wheat - stalks, roots and all - into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles.
In watching this video a second time I had different thoughts than my original thoughts I posted here. Everything and everyone just appears more crazy!
This was one of your most compact brain to brain infusions of knowledge and wisdom yet! Thank you x 10. To all you out there who feel you have no agency, so why bother, consider this. Suppose you do you. Do the things you perceive necessary and which you can control in your own life. Whenever you succeed at lowering your energy/carbon footprint, re-examine and look for the next thing you can do. Improved alignment with your values will benefit your mental health by reducing your cognitive dissonance and enhancing your sense of agency. Don't worry about your personal efforts not being "sufficient". By aligning your life with your values, you are adding pressure to the Overton Window to shift. Point people towards Nate and his cohort. Some of them will get turned on, align their lives a little more with simplification, and add a little more pressure to the Overton Window. Maybe there won't be enough pressure on the OW in time for sapience, but if you don't do you, there CERTAINLY won't. Besides, the second recovery in the stairstep could look more like sapience, if more sapience happens to be on the table.
Great thoughts, Nate. I think like the four groups of people that arise during the Great Simplification, these carbon pulse groupings may intermingle to show a little of each. I'm sure it will depend upon geographical location and local or regional economic and political structure.
Very informative, Nate. I have to say that I agree most with the declining step function. Like with COVID, I imagine human society trying to "get back on track" and re-grow production/consumption of energy-intensive resources...only to fall again subsequently. Having said that, I am rooting for the sapient shape with major cultural shifts.
Excellent job, Nate. A helpful expansion after your Frankly on the probability distributions and range of variables linked together in our complex system. And thanks to Michael for the helpful art. The visuals help it sink in.
All the same, whatever curve imagined on the other side of the "carbon pulse" it most certainly isn't 'simplification' - it is #collapse - a return to vastly diminished limits. This needs to be publicly acknowledged by Nate as the 'simplification' euphemism is highly problematic, and an act of violence for those earthlings already in the throes of collapse.
Oh my goodness. This one was “frankly” amazing. You are a gifted sapien! You and your team’s work is creating tools of immense value for us to put to good use. On behalf of our 15 year old, her cohort and all those (H. sapiens and others), that will follow, Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
It made much sense Nate! This perhaps the most important thing to explain to everyone. I'm doing what I can with presentation on this as Captain Future
Some people are bullish on the extraction industries but I think the risk in these investments is much higher than the days of high grade ores and oil reservoirs. Don’t forget to add in geopolitical/nationalization risk. Commodities could go up a lot and you still might lose on your commodity stock portfolio. You might not do much better playing the futures markets.
Just a note to say thanks for what you're doing here. I work in utility scale PV and out of curiosity just looked up how much new capacity was installed in 2022...approximately 200GW AC. Figuring we use 20TW and solar has about a 20% capacity factor.... that's about 1/500th what we need assuming we figure out storage. I don't think we're going to solve it just with solar in time.
This is a compelling explanation, thank you Nate. If we had a concerted effort by the international community, surely we could forestall the negative impacts of the precipice scenario by investing what carbon remains in a developing a fully nuclear-powered economy? I realize there are issues with transportation in particular, but if we focus our dollars and the world's intellects on the energy transmission and storage questions, there is hope we can sustain our energy extravagance well beyond the exhaustion of existing fossil fuel supplies.
My optimistic hope is stair step to sapient. I simply can’t see society behaving responsibly enough without some disasters first. My view is based on there being a couple of world wars where nations totally mobilized but eventually found that the price was too high, even for the winners.
Was thinking of WW2 too. In my country, food and fuel been rationed over 5 years after ending the war. The country been in ruins as the Germans could prolong the occupation for a year after the Allied Advance was halted and the Krauts took all they could their hands on and demolished what they couldn't take. Rationing could only end when economy was building up again, there being plenty of resources available in those days. In contrast, after the carbon precipice, oil will still be scarce, and coal too, a much sought after product. Most likely, other stuff like copper phosphorus and other essential elements would be in short supply - mining is very energy / fossil intensive. It would be logical for countries that control those resources to limit their exports, so that resource poor nations really have to set controls on the use products that friend one such rare resources. It's a world that no Westerner under 70 can fathom, but oddly familiar to those that experienced live in communist rule. One would expect for people that have tradition in having the squeeze on their consumption, like Russians and Chinese, would fare better than luxury folk in the West. On the other hand, being flexible and inventive are the more Western traits, so who knows. Russia and China are also very resource rich, leaving them in potentially powerful position. Drastic climate change with a load of extremes ever increasing, will play a role, and put more pressure on societies having to deal with very limited supply. Rationing requires a decent government, but one could imagine a total takeover by militia, mafia and robber barons, a bit like South America today is being taken over by powerful drugs mafia. Then, the ruling class would take all they can get, leaving next to nothing for the rest. Not looking forward to that one bit...
10 to 28 million times faster ....remarkable ...so sustainability will be a bit of a slow down...can't wait to watch the grass grow. Thank you, Nate, interesting topic and learned much as always. Please keep posting...great service
its actually 'millions' to be safe. 10 million is defendable - i had read a stat this weekend on 10-20 million on something else and the 'to 20 million' was stuck in my neurons. But...order or magnitude...
Why can't nuclear fusion be the savior? The leftover carbon will be channeled more and more into transitioning to fusion, which will take over as main energy source.
Usually what will happen when you ban fossil fuels thereby destroying the economy is that peasants will resort to making fires for cooking and to stay warm. So they will use anything as a fuel source after they are done burning all the wood in the area. Which is worse for pollution. The ruling elites will still keep their private jets and big mansions.
Thanks Nate ! One question. We have to make a 180° move to get through the carbone impulse. The consequences of such a shift are difficult to forecast. We know that we will have to live with much less material comfort. Less energy leads to less State ressources ; which can lead toward less public services (health, education, police, justice, army, pensions, infrastructures...). My question is the following one : is democracy the good system to make this 180° shift ? Is any candidate can be elected promising less ? "Democracy is the worst system except all others" said W Churchill.
No way to support 8 Billion people without fossil energy. green revolution, diesel tractors, diesel trucks & trains, etc. By 2050 Global population will be below 2 Billion (ie 6 Billion dead in about 27 years). if it ends in nuclear war, than the population will likely be below 200M, and decline to about 10M over the next 50 years, possible extinction by the 2200.
Isn't the global temperature going to keep rising for centuries to come, even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today? Look at the havoc that's already happening at 1.2°C.
Autocracies _could_ make quick decisions, if only the leaders would accept expert advice instead of what their cronies and yes men say. Look at Xi - after he replaced independent thinking staff members for guys who talk the leaders' words, China economy now quickly goes to rubbish. If Putin had had critical thinkers instead of men that say they think the leader likes to hear, he wouldn't have started that war the way he did. Yes, without democracy you can decide quickly, doubtful if it's the right way instead of the _desired_ way. Climate and fossil pulse theory and management are territory for critical, independent thought, not for flunkeys.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, it was not fossil fuel related but certainly complexity related, both the Precipice and the Stair Step decline patterns in GDP were observed. The city of Rome and the Western Empire utterly collapsed very quickly. The Eastern or Byzantine Empire survived another 1000 years because they underwent a "Great Simplification" to a lower level of complexity but it was still a relatively high standard. That's our history. Can we become Sapien? We must try.
The Eastern Empire wasn't dependent of fossil fuels to sustain itself. Global Population in 400 AD was about 200 Million. Today its about 8 Billion. I suspect global population will be below 2 billion in 2027 as diesel production collapses. Diesel is essential for farming, transportation, mining. Nothing gets done without Diesel.
@@guytech7310 The situation and scale today are indeed very different from 400AD. The fact that some parts of the planet, blessed with fossil fuel reserves, may simplify quickly and survive is a parallel to the Eastern Empire though. Russia could probably adapt since they are already at lower complexity level and have reserves. China and India might not have bright prospects. All about scenarios. If we go Mad Max route then Texas could secede from the Union with its oil and gas and make a go of it for a few more years. Tar sands in Alberta join up with Bakken states of Montana and N. Dakota to form new Plains Empire , etc etc... Collapsing early and avoiding the rush may be the best option. ( Credit JMG for that one )
@@VisDaddy11 Tar sands is no solution. Its basically burning a lot of natural gas to extract some heavy oil, that has low fuel yield since most of the desirable hydrocarbon compounds evaporated centuries in the past. All the equipment used (ie mining trucks & diggers) need parts made from a function industrial system. I don't see TX faring any better since Its dependent on Manufacturing from other states (ie Pipe, Drilling bits, parts & assemblies for Refining, etc). TX is also getting invaded from the left coast (CA, OR, WA) and from the South (illegals, Drug cartels, etc). TX is also highly dependent on its shrinking ground water which its loosing about 2 to 3 feet per year.
@@guytech7310 How about this then, an Ecotopia powered by the hydro dams in Quebec. Corridor is fully protected. And wherever else the large dams can keep generating. Good real estate move? IDK.
Like airline accomodations and pricing, not all passengers on spaceship earth will be subjected to disaggregation of The Pulse in the same way. The jockeying has already begun. I just saw video where a father on a Delta flight was threatened with jail time if he didn't give up his two years old's seat (which he paid for) to another passenger on an overbooked flight. If you think about it the "Elysium" potential future would have roughly the same shape as the "Sapient" plot, however the "seed corn" would instead be used a bit differently.
I think Ugo Bardi should be mentioned wrt the Precipice scenario, which he calls the Seneca Effect, or Seneca Cliff. It's not necessarily a free fall, but the point is, there are various kinds of feedback loops which cause asymmetries in the shape of the carbon pulse, the collapse happening much faster than the rise.
Nate always finds a way to get a handle in things, and explains in a way most people can get a grasp. But it’s too bad most people are so disappointing.
I believe the ExxonMobil 2050 Global Outlook report sees energy from fossil fuels peaking at around 20% above current levels, but with a marked switch from coal to gas with corresponding reductions in CO2 and other emissions. The main driver is the projected doubling of GDP per capita in the global south by 2050. I don't see what can stop this. I'm not sure how large the area under your curve will prove to be. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a question that never needs to be answered because we will have real alternatives before we need to get better at oil/gas discovery/extraction. The metaphor that best describes Western energy policy is someone jumping out of a plane without a parachute, and instead only a bag of materials that can hopefully be sown together into one before hitting the ground. An even more realistic description would be of someone jumping out of a plane before parachutes had been invented with a collection of bright ideas dreamed up by some enthusiastic and creative but not very practical types with some miscellaneous bits and pieces they have an intuition might by fabricated into something useful. The insanity in all this, of course, is not the dreamers who are confident their fanciful notions are realistic blueprints, but the rest of us who didn't insist that the designs were fully proven and certified ahead of agreeing to jump out of the plane. To get back to your curves: the stepped decline implies a series of shocks. If this happens it is more likely to be because of political crises than anything arising from economic or technical fundamentals (e.g. the war in Ukraine). A more sensible curve - assuming sanity prevails - is the adoption curve when one technology replaces another, which also follows the classic 'S' shape (ditto innovation). An extreme example of this is the computer Flop/$ index of recent decades. If you take the 10 years up to 2016, hardware prices per GFLOP were $52, $30, $10, $1.8, $0.73, $0.22, $0.12, $0.08, $0.06, $0.03, respectively. What this means is if you had a computing task that required 10GFLOPS of processing power in 2007 and it had to be completed within 10 years, by far the best plan would have been to do nothing for 9 years and do it all at the end. The cost of dividing 10GFLOPS into 10 years and doing 1GFLOP/yr (as explicitly recommended by the IPCC), would have been $94. The cost of doing everything at the last possible minute would have been $0.30. Now it's fair to say that computer makers need a market in order to make advances, but nonetheless those in the know understand what the future likely holds and bet on it as they go along. That is the difference between the green market and free market - there is equal conviction of the likely future in both cases, but the participants in the green market are so unselfish they want the state to take some of the glory, which they are willing to donate for the small price of taking all the risk. Of course what this really means is they don't believe their own propaganda for even a second.
Good work Nate as always. As a simple organic carrot farmer, I can tell you that it is inaccurate and quite misleading to characterize our energy challenge as a 'carbon pulse.' For one thing carbon is the sine qua non--without which nothing-- element of life. But much more importantly in terms of your rap is that energy is stored in hydrocarbon bonds-- it is not stored in carbon, this is not a carbon pulse. What energy is stored in hydrocarbon bonds? The energy of the sun, of the wildly crazy fusion process taking place in our nearest star (i.e., 600 million tons of hydrogen fused into helium per second for the past 4.5 billion years-- no small trick!). What is a hydrocarbon bond? It has to do with the arrangement of the electrons in that bond; closer to the nucleus, they store more energy; further from the nucleus, you can take your next breath. Maybe the ancient Egyptians had it right: the sun is our life-giver. Are you aware that CO2 sank to about 180 ppm during the last glacial age? The biosphere was near collapse. Now, what is the biosphere made out of? Answer: mosly plants. What are plants made out of? Mostly CO2, 90%. Which exists in the 'atmosphtere' only in parts per million and has to diffuse through microscopic holes in leaf cells (stomata) in order to build the 600 billion tons of biomass on earth. Let's see you make something (alive) out of a gas that exists in ppm in the sky! Also I don't buy your bit about money; money is psychological game, like 'countries' (which don't actually exist; can you see any in a satellite image?). It's not about money, it's not about carbon, it's about access to energy. Homo sapiens is in 'overshoot,' just a simple fact. The biosphere (with a little help from its systemic partners) will make the necessary adjustments.
Maybe you should rename it the 'hydrocarbon' pulse, after all we're talking about the synthesis of certain inorganic elements, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen into carbohydrate energy, and the exploitation of this buried treasure of ancient stored sunlight.
I would be interested in some social psychology experts on here, Sheldon Solomon comes to mind. Peter Turchin also has done some great work also in the same domain as Joseph Tainter on complex societies.
All very clear and analytical Nate, but you missed something crucial. Slavery is intrinsic to state formation. There is not a single state-level society without some form of slavery. [If any of you readers can tell me one, I will investigate it. I have not found one in over forty years of researching this.] Now keep in mind that slavery includes corvee, not just chattel slavery. Feudalism can also be folded in. The key is 1) whether you are forced to work and 2) if you are punished for not working. Civilization did quite well with just slave labor from ancient times. When fossil fuels started replacing human slaves, civilization did not change. Consequently, as fossil fuels become less economical and harder to extract, human slavery will take up the slack. The scenario is that manual labor is used to subsidize the ever-increasing costs of fossil fuels. We can see this happening already. As Joseph Tainter said, collapse of a civilization results in a less-complex regional polity. We can see this happening too. Look around at the places in the world where warlords, clans and gangs are fighting for power. As the state breaks down, less complex organization does the job. And then there is dieoff. (Or die-off if you prefer.) I have yet to hear Nate accept that human population will crash dramatically once we cannot use as much fossil fuel as we use now. This then becomes a positive feedback loop. All models and projections that do not have a die-off scenario are invalid. A side note. If you calculate the heat generated by human overpopulation, it is similar to the third largest oil producer - Russia. 8 billion people burning 2000 kilocalories per day (some more, some less) generates 66.94 million gigajoules of energy per day. A barrel of oil has 6.1 gigajoules of energy that is released when it is burned, so the heat generated by humans every day is equivalent to burning 10.97 million barrels of oil every day. Russia's current production (per Worldometer) is 11.26 million barrels a day. So, to recap. Slavery is intrinsic to state-level society and is returning. The waste heat generated by human overpopulation is equivalent to another major oil producer spewing fossil fuel heat. [Many people who focus on carbon and methan emissions miss the contribution of heat to climate change.]
Thanks for this video as always Insightful and expands our understanding of what we are doing to this planet. But I have to disagree on the focus of Carbon as an energy source. It’s only the byproduct of Hydrogen reaction with oxygen. Carbon is only one component of what Hydrogen attaches it self to. Coal’s formula is C240 H90 O4 NS . That is 240 atoms of Carbon, 97 atoms of Hydrogen, 4 atoms of oxygen and a Nitrogen Sulphide molecule. Please note the coal and every other Hydrocarbon is only useful to us as energy because of the Hydrogen. It’s the Hydrogen that when catalyzed or heated the wants to attach itself to Oxygen that caused the chain reaction to oxidize the carbon and Nitrogen. So the carbon gets transformed to carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide transformed and sulphur transformed and some particles of carbon. Carbon has no energy value. We only measure the carbon output from the Hydrogen reaction that transforms the Carbon to its oxides . Again it’s oxygen that binds with carbon in combustion which give of heat it’s an exothermic reaction, but it’s the Hydrogen that gives us the heat energy to facilitate the carbon reaction with oxygen .The true value to us is not the carbon it is the Hydrogen. Can we please have a chat about the Hydrogen. Feel green to contact me any time. Thanks.😊
Although I suspect your right about the extraction rate being greater than the "production" rate at depth, I don't think we really know how crude oil or natural gas is formed. As in... we don't know the exact, actual process for this. The narrative is organic matter under high heat and pressure, but that's a conjecture or theory. Has anyone reproduced this effect?
I am leaning towards precipice being the most likely. I suspect and hope that we won’t use all of the fossil carbons in the ground but I think we will use a lot for much longer than we should. I don’t know that there is a good solution to our problems. Also Nate do you have thoughts on the adoption of windmills in addition to the adoption of wind turbines? I was thinking about how if we convert wind straight to mechanical energy for different kinds of processes like milling grain, sawing wood, and powering simple machines. If avoids storage and grid issues that come with turbines tho I imagine turbines are much more efficient and electricity is much more practical. Maybe there is some potential there for both mills and turbines?
After a collapse that will likely happen as people likely won't have the means to get replacement parts. That said if there is a nuclear war, than most of industrialize world will become uninhabited, as the land becomes a toxic wasteland. Not just from the bombs, but from the Nuclear powerplant meltdowns and burning cities that will emit toxic ash contaminating the land for centuries if not millennia's.
In first world countries, agriculture is between 1 and 4% of the gdp. It would take a long long time to event dent the population overshoot by just insuficient caloric intake alone because plant-food is so cheap to produce.
Don't forget credit destruction Nate, as the principal part of a loan is repayed, and hence what does that do to our ability to trade, if there aren't sufficient funds available. Where do we go ? Back to the bank, so we have a built in contrived imperative to keep people in jobs, combined with the conditioned pursuit of profit, which is going against the market tendency which is towards automation, and to displace people from their jobs, and during this process we're just chewing through the finite energy and material resources of this planet like their going out of fashion.
A small quibble here, but isn't it better to say the geology represents the "maximum case" rather than the "best case" because the shape of the "sapient case" with the area of the geology would presumably be the best case...
It's a sad fact that if we had to pay the real cost of things we buy, including environmental costs, they would cost too much for most of us. The S curve is too steep.
@@AlanDavidDoane If the horizontal axis were stretched out, then perhaps we'd see a decline twice as steep as the rise. A decline, not a collapse/precipice.
My holdings are increasing in fertility, since I have been learning how to do this without the stored carbon it will continue on regardless. But, something or someone could be take me away, in the blink of an eye, much faster than it took to build it up, and no doubt they will reverse the process I produced.
The stair step down chart is the most likely. Most big crashes play out with multiple bear market rallies on the way down. Resources like Alberta's oil sands have been landlocked and scorned by the green intelligencia. This will change fast when the SHTF and the reality smackdown comes for them.
we would be lucky to experience a palendrome no matter the horror that degrowth has in store. the scramble for resources through the population decline is in control of our suffering.
My thoughts include the economy impact and labor market impact we are going to feel moving from a very inefficient use of energy to a more efficient use of energy over the next few decades. As fossil fuels are so extremely energy dense, we tend to use it very inefficiently. Both in consumption, and in production. Many of our use of fuels only captures a small percentage of fuel energy into useful work, a lot of the energy from fuels just floats into atmosphere. Like car engines, decades of improvements and they are still only 20-50% energy efficient. Compare them to modern bEV which are over 90% energy efficient. And then there is the production of fuels in the first place. Add up exploration, extraction, storage, transportation, storage, refining, storage, transportation, storage, transportation again, more storage, distribution, management of it all - and all of the materials and support industry for all of that; we have a massive portion of our materials and labor economy just supporting the fossil fuels production industry. Most of the alternative energy sources may not be as dense, but they require substantially less materials and labor to produce, and they are used significantly more efficiently. For example electrified transportation and electrified industrial process use a lot less total energy due to the efficiency compared to the fuel alternative. And wind, solar, nuclear, hydro generation all use way less raw materials and way less labor per unit of enegy produced than fossil fuel based generation. And electricity grids transport energy a lot more efficiently than trucks, trains, pipelines and ships. So all added up, transitioning away from fossil fuels will mean a massive reduction in materials and labor requirements for the entire global economy. We will be able to produce the same amount of goods and have the same lifestyle consumption with a lot less materials extraction and a lot less labor once we transition away from fuels. Then combine this with the idea that humanity may adjust our value systems for less individual consumption, meaning even less materials, labor and energy requirements. Plus potential for population decline. Initially this all sounds great. But if you think about it this also means a massive cut in national GDP and more importantly a massive cut in labor requirement. If we cannot make a corresponding adjustment to the societal value of labor, reducing the number of hours all of us work while still maintaining the same or higher annual income, we will end up with EVEN WORSE wealth and income inequality. Mass unemployment, and human tragedy. The solution to all of this is to globally adopt a social philosophy increasing the value of labor per hour, each household working less hours, and a more even distribution of wealth/income accross society. If we cannot do that the wealth gap will continue to worsen until we have 90+ percent of global population starving while the few elites are living even more opulent lives.
@@klondike444 nothing I have said above is opposed to any of the thoughts from Michaux. Partially developed after reading some of his work and seeing some interviews.
@@5353Jumper I don't know what you think we can transition to, or how, but if you're aware of Michaux's work I'll leave it there. It's probably all moot anyway, as we won't do enough to avoid collapse of some kind.
@@klondike444 I don't think you fully understand Michaux's work. Many people see some of his content and then think he is saying "there is not enough of some specific materials to transition to wind and solar, so we should just do nothing and stick with fuel". That is nowhere close to what he is saying. From Michaux: - he does think we need to transition off fuels for both atmospheric health reasons and because fossils are in limited supply and going to force us to anyway. - we should adopt wind as solar as PART of the solution, but also do other things. - we should adopt batteries as PART of the solution, but also do other things. - we need to do those other things too because the global community thinking wind, solar and batteries solve everything is misguided. - we need to focus on reducing consumption and improving recycling, and an overall change in our definition of society as a huge part of the transition because there is not enough of other things currently to replace our over use of fuels - this is going to be very difficult and requires all of humanity to pull its head out of its arse to get this done without extreme tragedy - it would have been a lot better if we had stared this transition decades ago, our delay is going to cause a lot more tragedy. So I am expanding on his thoughts by saying we need to work out a redefinition on the value of labor, the distribution of income/wealth. The transition off total reliance on fuels can happen in a planned manner, or it will happen to us in a sudden disaster. Either way it will happen. My hope is that we actually start embracing it so it can happen in stages we design to minimize human tragedy. If we try it with our current value of labor and distribution of income, most of us will just starve to death and that will cut our consumption. And the first ones starving will be the general labourers who are not the ones that lecd us to this mess. The wealth elite that led us to this mess will be the survivors. That is not my preferred way to get this done.
@@5353Jumper I initially thought you were going with the conventional "let's switch to wind and solar and continue BAU" fantasy. You did say "We will be able to produce the same amount of goods and have the same lifestyle consumption..." So I was puzzled when you said you were familiar with Michaux's work. I think I agree with most of your last reply regarding what would be needed to get us through what we are facing with the minimum of suffering, though it appears the mining etc. of some of the necessary materials for longer than the medium term presents problems. Either way, our "leaders" seem determined to take us into some form of collapse, the universal need for economic growth is just assumed, and most people are focused on the single issue of climate change, with many dismissing even that, while others are fretting over a potential population decline. So whatever the possibilities for action there may be, for me the future of humanity looks bleak.
Well, the first three are possible, especially number 3..Number four, not so much..I always say that we are on the bell curve to hell/annihilation...Highway to hell might be more appropriate..We've already started down the far side of that bell curve...You certainly must be pumping the Oxygen into your brain while pumping on those pedals..I'm usually sucking in the natural world, in awe, on my bike rides, very zen, without much thinking at all..
I was searching today for the speed of melt at 2, 3 degrees, I could find the difference in eventual levels but I was wondering even if we reached five degrees by end of century, how long would it take before the impact be felt, at say the 3 degrees which is 2-4 metres and that would eventuate? I used to think it would be a thousand years before the end of global warming happened and 66 metres happened, would anybody know if this would be a feasible timeline? Edit : Does anybody know the lag time between reaching a temperature and the melt associated with that temp?
5'C seems quite too steep, 2-3 seems where we're going, unless some tipping points trigger drastic warming. Melting would take centuries, though it seems the ice dynamics can cause it to happen more quickly. Watch Jason Box, he's an expert on Greenland but you might want to find other scientists for (West) Antarctica By the way, expansion of sea water because of the oceans warming quickly, plays a role too in acceleration of sea level rise.
We know it was 0.18 of a degree between 1975 and 2010 and post 2010 it jumped 55% to .28 of a degree warming, it looks as though it has jumped again this year, I don't know by how much but let's say it jumped another 55% then we are at .43 of a degree per decade,@@reuireuiop0let's imagine for some reason there is no increase on this in the next 8 decades which to me is incredibly doubtful as it's too low but let's keep it at that, that's 3.44 degrees, plus the 1.3 we already have and we are at 4.74 degrees. The above could be quite low as it means no more increases from any feedback, for example, 26 centimetres of sea level rise at 2 degrees will be very different to 3 degrees when there will be 2-4 metres of sea level rise but 3 degrees by end of century will mean the world has changed drastically from what they are doing now in the next year or so and that's prob not going to happen.
Nate, I'm quite amazed that you are completely ignoring AI impacts on our future. I say this because you never seem to add this reality in your analysis. If experts in this AI field can be trusted, we simply cannot predict a future world where AI intelligence will surpass human intelligence by a million fold. And this is now, not 100 years in the future. Get Mo Gawdat on your podcast and debate him from your perspective. By the way, if you are not familiar with Gawdat, I think you will be surprisingly impressed.... I truly appreciate the work you do.
Ai will have big impacts on economy. But (if it scales as Mo predicts) it will act similar to debt on shaping the carbon pulse- pulling sources and sink capacity forward in time. AI uses non-renewable energy faster, it doesn’t create more
Nate, Thanks for the reply. Try to get Mo on your podcast and share your thoughts with him and let's see how he responds. We are entering the most critical point in human history. I think we need to consider that if these AI's are able to "think and reason", and ultimately far surpass human intelligence, this is no longer technology. This is something very different. I think it was Gawdat himself who said we are at an "Oppenheimer moment" in time...
AI needs cheap & reliable electricity to function. AI cannot solve a fundemential problem like an energy crisis. Its like giving a caveman a new vehicle without any fuel for it. Civilization won't make it the next 100 years. Its all going to start collapsing in the late 2020s or early 2030s due to the big diesel shortage, Debt (Global Debt to GDP 320% US is 370%), & Demographics. I suspect global population will drop below 2 Billion in 2050, and like below 200M if a nuclear war occurs. I would guess 80% of a nuclear war in the next 10 years.
@@guytech7310 The storage of all the world's ever-increasing amount of data requires an enormous amount of energy and materials (in the form of energy-guzzling data centers), something that is usually ignored by everyone.
"We're already well through the first half of this ancient carbon." Yes? Maybe I'm missing something. That's true for oil arguably, if the peak was 2018, but not for coal or gas, yes? This Frankly flipped a little between talking about peak carbon, and once or twice about peak oil? If it actually was peak carbon, what is the date of the peak? In the three graphs from Mohr et al (2015) from about 19 minutes in the presentations shows three peaks, the first looks about 2010 maybe. The second looks about 2020 maybe? Only the third looks somewhere out in the future, about 2050, and it has a wide rounded shape. That last one might be a total carbon pulse, but not the first two, yes? Now, to all of this can be added the disruptive effects of an actual oil peak, if that becomes more noticeable, starting maybe now, and accelerating downward. That could derail a lot of things, including the mining of the remaining natural gas and coal, in which case, they would never reach their true peaks. Ok, just looking to be clear on things. Straighten me out where I'm wrong, anyone. I think the major thrust of the talk is as usual for Nate, very well done and much needed, and the four scenarios for descent are very reasonable, that doesn't change.
Yes. In my book peak carbon will * roughly track* w peak oil as it is the lynchpin of global finance and stability. We are decades away from peak gas, in theory. And there is lots of coal left. I think peak oil in moderately high likelihood was nov 2018. But lots of variables still as you point out. The graphs I drew had large rounded peak of carbon implying an absolute peak is less likely than a decade or do “rolling top”
I presume also that oil is still needed to support even a coal and gas source, so peak oil would presumably just make gas and coal harder to extract and get to market(s), and make it more expensive/less efficient.
@@thegreatsimplification Great, yes, I thought that was probably your intention. And I think your main focus was not on locating the peak but on describing those four scenarios at the end. I also imagine descent of fossil energy use as some kind of stair-step, though the big collapse scenario is always looming as a possibility out there, and Odum also recognized that as he lobbied vigorously instead for a more controlled descent in his Prosperous Way Down book. -- Tom Abel
The end Permian extinction was caused by magma contacting some sort of coal seam or oil chamber in an area of what is now Siberian. How big could that have been? Was it bigger than anything we have today? It was one area of the globe, and yet it caused the extinction of 70% of species. Compare that to us burning essentially all the carbon reserves at once and at a vastly faster rate. The Earth's ecosystem couldn't handle a slow release of CO2 over millions of years. It appears the carbon cycle is very slow in sequestering carbon. How is it possible, knowing what happened in the Earth's past, that modern ecosystems can even adapt to our greater burning on the human time scale?
What is something that you consider impossible to do and were it to happen might make you reconsider the impact of the carbon pulse. Where is the line.
Why don't we just switch gradually to renewable energy and electrified transport as fossil fuels decline? We could use sodium-ion batteries for cars and trucks.
renewable power sources can never replace the amount of power generated from fossil & nuclear. Plus a lot of renewable energy system have short lifespans. Modern solar panels usually only last about 12 years (damaged from weather, accidents, or just failures). Wind turbine last about the same in real world condictions. Both depend on fossil fuel for production as the materials are mined using diesel fuel, Plastics from NatGas, etc. When fossil fuels become too expense that is when the next dark ages begin as the world economy will collapse and revert to a 19th century level economy. We'll also see the population collapse as food production is depend on fossil fuels: Diesel tractors, Diesel trucks, Fertializers, Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides all come from fossil fuel sources.
Short answer: Because renewables can't meet our energy demands, even if we cover the entire earth with solar panels, wind farms, and other renewable energy sources. Also, there is not enough metal on Earth (in the ground) to build out the required electrical grid. And even if the metal were available, mining it would destroy the planet. (Are you familiar with the way that mine drainage travels in an underground plume until it reaches groundwater?) Look for a paper entitled "The Inadequacy of Wind Power," by Wade Allison. Dr. Allison talks about wind power, but his conclusions apply to other renewable energy sources too.
@@Apjooz No. The Moores law applied to Batteries (doubling capacity) is about 30 years. Chemical batteries will always suffer from degradation because they work on the process of corrosion & plating. During discharge batteries corrode the electrode, and during charging (reverse corrosion) by plating the metal back on the electrode, This leads to uneven corrosion & plating causing the electrodes to thin in some places and get too big (dendrites). The only way to resolve the issue is to use a different process that does not require metal oxidation & plating. The only viable grid storage systems is pumped hydro, but this is limited availabily or water near locations that can hold water and offer a siginificant elevation difference to make it worthwhile. However this is a challenge, especially since a lot of location are already fully developed (ie in urban, or significant populated areas).
I drop in in the middle and then hear something to spout off about. The precipice idea. When you look at the graphs like that which show what they call on price charts parabolic angle. As soon as you open your eyes and look at the graph it is game over. The precipice is now. This is the precipice. We are basically saying that some of us will have to be sacrificed. Which is pretty bleak, but it might be happening already more than we realize. I mean, looking at nature, the humans. The animals with the big brains. With the super computer. Our shadow may be overshadowing us. The big bang is the model, it is the fact that we have decided is the best fact, have built the institutions around. It isn't the reality of billions of years ago. The only reality we know for sure is that we have built the institutions around our theories. Being a full on anti-imperialist Marxian American normie liberal slacker under achiever smart ass rocker. when I heard this term eco-fascism, my ears perked up. We do have a pretty messy recent history of philosophical and heady western deep thinker tradition. But it is ever evolving. It is never not evolving. It is usually made up of market players of one kind or another, or ideologues of one kind of another or professionals of one kind of another, or bureaucrats, politicians, thought leaders, celebrities etc. I don't know where I was going with that but some things that are true about our current time and our shadow is that science and policy can have a very big shadow. PR and ideology can have a very big shadow. Policy can be called a leg when really it is a tail. Same with science. Often science is simply policy. I'm sure there is a very long history of this, but recent history from the 80's as told by economist Bill Black, who has worked in legal cases against banks. He tells the story of what is referred to as control fraud. I don't know the details. I just know the big arc of the story basically. It involves controlling the environment where you can carry out massive fraud and still be ahead of the law or above it or both. No pun intended with "environment". Over the last 70 years or so, economics has gone through a lot and like everything is always evolving. It evolves so much that it is hard to tell if it is in the shadows or not. It can often become above the law and in the shadows at the same time. Maybe I will make this comment into a children's book. But the science or theory often is used to serve an end other than an empirical facts based inquiry. It is used to uphold the institution before anything else. Are institutions what we should be serving or are they little more than habits that turn into rackets? Control fraud? I'm speculating. thumbs up. And if I was to write what I was irritated about from the last video, it would be that the tendency to be waiting or hoping for a technological holy grail that will remedy our biggest problem is probably our minds trying to turn our shadow into something else. Waiting hoping for some kind of technological edge is really never used to ease the pain is it? It is used to monopolize the market. That is kind of the first commandment in our institution isn't it? So the mission would be to take what we know we have and readjust it, but friendly like. And this is the great clash. The great liberal free market v. the evil communism or government tyranny.
I must disagree with the statement that coal comes from carboniferous deposits. Much of the coal we find is from deposits that are of far more recent origin.
According to Britannica: ====== There were two major eras of coal formation in geologic history. The older includes the Carboniferous Period (extending from 358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago and often divided into the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian subperiods) and the Permian Period (from approximately 298.9 million to 251.9 million years ago) of the Paleozoic Era. Much of the bituminous coal of eastern North America and Europe is Carboniferous in age. Most coals in Siberia, eastern Asia, and Australia are of Permian origin. The younger era of coal formation began about 145 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and reached its peak approximately 66 million to 2.6 million years ago, during the Paleogene and Neogene periods of the Cenozoic Era. Most of the coals that formed during this later era are lignites and subbituminous (brown) coals. These are widespread in western North America (including Alaska), southern France and central Europe, Japan, and Indonesia.
This is prety good, but it gets the economics wrong. Public debt is not an issue, bond markets for public debt are not an issue, for any sovereign, currency-issuing government. The constraints in the real economy are genuine, as is how private debt frontloads our energy consumption
Can you please clarify how that front-loaded spending squares with what will actually happen to those currencies once serious material constraints occur? Thermodynamics says energy cannot be created or destroyed but new currency is created all the time through lending. That sounds like a recipe for sudden and severe hyper-inflation should the amount of available energy be suddenly and severely reduced.
We only have to look at a satellite view of the earth at night to see just how profligate our consumption of energy is. I'm sure we could dispose of at least 50% of that illumination without compromising our way of life. When we have perfectly good headlights on our vehicles what is the point of floodlighting miles and miles of straight roads the world over?
So much nuance.... Thanks Nate, your conversations and musings have had a massive impact on me!
Me too, I wish it was possible to make other people change behavior and stop using fossile fuels. Even the younger generations who are focused on the climate change waste a lot of oil and gas just for fun, but still blame all others for this cathastrofic situation we are in now. Sometimes I just feels like I dont care about the long term future, but only on what is going to happen the next days or a week forward. But I always get in heated discussions with climate alarmist who think we should change our life style.
@@thorsrensen3162 At this point it makes essentially no difference to likely future for humans, whether we change or not. IMO this merits a profound spiritual response. Consequences are not the only reason for acting (or not).
Thanks Nate. Sometimes I give you a hard time in the comments section-- quibbling about details in your interviews-- so I wanted to take the time to say that you truly have my respect. You are one of the best at explaining our predicament. Your humility and thirst for knowledge is commendable. I give you a hard time because 1) If anyone can grasp the complexities and nuances, it's you. 2) You are making a difference-- your platform is important. Keep up the good work! I have learned a lot from your channel-- and yes, I try to recommend your channel whenever possible :).
Same here. I would personally be lost without you, Nate. When I "quibble", it's in search of clarification or expansion of your teachings.
Dr. Nate is so calming, but I think he is secretly freaking out inside.
This guy has completely transformed my thinking. I have binge watched every video of Nate’s this month.
An extraordinary presenter of science (or any subject), especially in relating the subject matter to the viewer, and with a perfect voice in pitch with all other presentation attributes joined to reach perfection - I promise. I read and learn everyday and have since I entered the IT industry in 1980 and became a prolific presenter of making complex more simple, which enables me to appreciate what you do to make the subjects you cover, easily absorbable...and you leave me in the shade in presentation technique. I am now retired from the UK and living where the hot sun is, with time to learn, and learn as I approach eighty years on our good planet, consuming yesterdays sun for todays needs. Thank you Nate, your'r great...!
Great video, thanks again, Nate. Everything I've learned about human nature and our political system during the climate crisis (and the way our species and our politicians have behaved in the last 20 - 30 years in respect of this crisis has been incredibly revealing!) suggests to me that we will not do the sensible thing in following the 'sapient' gradient. We are addicted to fossil fuels. Addicts don't ration their drugs to make them last and do not act in rational ways in respect of managing their 'supplies'. I appreciate that is a simplistic metaphor, but its the best one I can find to emphasise the lack of rational behaviour. An addict who is told by his doctor that his use of drugs will soon kill him will likely leave the doctor's surgery in search of his next fix. In the same way, the likes of Joe Biden, a man fully aware of the severity of this crisis cannot help himself but exploit new opportunities to maintain oil supplies despite full cognisance of the likely impact. If I were a betting man, I'd place my bet on the precipice gradient being the likeliest of the options explored here. Strap in!
Exactly my comment. Only more time spent explaining.
Well stated. I agree.
Small correction: addicts ration when they realize most of their stuff is gone and they can't get more (immidiately). Expect the same behavior at societal stage. Probably by the government sanctioning and banning unnecessary or wasteful energy use and prioritising essential functions.
@@DevotionsVisage I've seen addicts hoard and hide their substance of choice so others can't take it.
@@DevotionsVisage Correction accepted, and good point!
Always a pleasure to hear from you, Nate. Excellent explanation about carbon pulse. Liked your perspectives on how geology serves as the best case over which is laid the social, governance, and politics. It reminded me of the recent disasters in the Indian state of Himachal where disregard for the poorly understood geology gave its way when overlapping factors of illimited hunger for growth, politics, and poor governance culminated in unprecedented events of a series of disasters
So much sense Nate and succinct. Shared on my facebook page tho who will take the munutes to watch absorb and recognize whats happening is another thing. Thank you for your work
Great presentation explaining society's delima. Please keep up the great work, we all need you.
New viewer here. Glad I found you. Thanks for the stimulating and sorely needed conversations.
I love hearing your voice. Despite the dreary thoughts, the way you speak is soothing. I'll be back for more 🙏
absolutely fascinating! i look forward to any other videos you do after your bike rides. Thanks for sharing!
That was fascinating. There have been times in my life where ive read a book or had my eyes opened to something - eg how money is created, the role of evolutionary psychology in inter-gender relationships, the 48 Laws of Power - and I cant believe they i had been so ignorant to something so obvious all my life. The Carbon Pulse is the pinnacle of that. I cannot believe i didnt know about it until last year. Its made me reconsider everything, go back to college, and live differently.
Nate thanks for keeping the dialogue alive. You might want to check “A Prosperous Way Down” by Howard Odum he was concerned about this problem.
Drawing down this carbon energy 10 million+ times faster than it was made is astounding. More 'stounding most don't want to know what happens next.
Ok, the best case scenario is a catabolic collapse. However, all those useless buildings and machines will be salvageable.
All of my friends and family avoid me like I have the plague. They don't want to hear about it. I have been told its a bummer.
20 years ago conservation biologist Jeff Dukes found that it took 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material to make ONE gallon of gasoline. That's equivalent to loading 40 acres worth of wheat - stalks, roots and all - into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles.
Wow. The timescale is deep. Everyone I know has no idea...
In watching this video a second time I had different thoughts than my original thoughts I posted here. Everything and everyone just appears more crazy!
This is a great video explaining the likely scenarios of carbon pulsing and does a lot to clarify what can actually occur.
This was one of your most compact brain to brain infusions of knowledge and wisdom yet! Thank you x 10. To all you out there who feel you have no agency, so why bother, consider this. Suppose you do you. Do the things you perceive necessary and which you can control in your own life. Whenever you succeed at lowering your energy/carbon footprint, re-examine and look for the next thing you can do. Improved alignment with your values will benefit your mental health by reducing your cognitive dissonance and enhancing your sense of agency. Don't worry about your personal efforts not being "sufficient". By aligning your life with your values, you are adding pressure to the Overton Window to shift. Point people towards Nate and his cohort. Some of them will get turned on, align their lives a little more with simplification, and add a little more pressure to the Overton Window. Maybe there won't be enough pressure on the OW in time for sapience, but if you don't do you, there CERTAINLY won't. Besides, the second recovery in the stairstep could look more like sapience, if more sapience happens to be on the table.
PS, Nate, take more bike rides!
Great thoughts, Nate. I think like the four groups of people that arise during the Great Simplification, these carbon pulse groupings may intermingle to show a little of each. I'm sure it will depend upon geographical location and local or regional economic and political structure.
Excellent! Thank you Nate! Keep these great videos coming!
Excellent presentation Nate! kudos to your clarity of thought
Very informative, Nate. I have to say that I agree most with the declining step function. Like with COVID, I imagine human society trying to "get back on track" and re-grow production/consumption of energy-intensive resources...only to fall again subsequently. Having said that, I am rooting for the sapient shape with major cultural shifts.
Excellent job, Nate. A helpful expansion after your Frankly on the probability distributions and range of variables linked together in our complex system. And thanks to Michael for the helpful art. The visuals help it sink in.
Sorry! My error! Thanks to Nathan Moore for the art.
Your videos are the most jawdropping and educational! 🙏 Keep them coming, so many things more peole should consider jammed into a brief video
Thank you Nate! Your videos always activate my brain even on a Friday evening!
Really important and valuable stuff said here - thanks Nate and Team. :)
All the same, whatever curve imagined on the other side of the "carbon pulse" it most certainly isn't 'simplification' - it is #collapse - a return to vastly diminished limits. This needs to be publicly acknowledged by Nate as the 'simplification' euphemism is highly problematic, and an act of violence for those earthlings already in the throes of collapse.
Oh my goodness. This one was “frankly” amazing. You are a gifted sapien! You and your team’s work is creating tools of immense value for us to put to good use. On behalf of our 15 year old, her cohort and all those (H. sapiens and others), that will follow, Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
It made much sense Nate!
This perhaps the most important thing to explain to everyone.
I'm doing what I can with presentation on this as Captain Future
Thanks for breaking it down Nate
This will be interesting- Nate
my morning update thanks 😊🙋🏻♀️
Some people are bullish on the extraction industries but I think the risk in these investments is much higher than the days of high grade ores and oil reservoirs. Don’t forget to add in geopolitical/nationalization risk. Commodities could go up a lot and you still might lose on your commodity stock portfolio. You might not do much better playing the futures markets.
Excellent encapsulation!
Very interesting conceptual framing Nate
Good job 👍
Just a note to say thanks for what you're doing here. I work in utility scale PV and out of curiosity just looked up how much new capacity was installed in 2022...approximately 200GW AC. Figuring we use 20TW and solar has about a 20% capacity factor.... that's about 1/500th what we need assuming we figure out storage. I don't think we're going to solve it just with solar in time.
Thanks a lot for your brilliant podcast
great talk Nate, as usual.
Two weeks to flatten the carbon curve!
hahahahah
You may find interesting Daniel H. Rothman's 2017 article Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system.
Thanks, this made sense to me.
This is a compelling explanation, thank you Nate. If we had a concerted effort by the international community, surely we could forestall the negative impacts of the precipice scenario by investing what carbon remains in a developing a fully nuclear-powered economy? I realize there are issues with transportation in particular, but if we focus our dollars and the world's intellects on the energy transmission and storage questions, there is hope we can sustain our energy extravagance well beyond the exhaustion of existing fossil fuel supplies.
"a concerted effort by the international community". See, there's the stumbling block right there.
Maybe check out mathematician Sid Smith's one hour talk to the Green Party for a different perspective on this.
My optimistic hope is stair step to sapient. I simply can’t see society behaving responsibly enough without some disasters first. My view is based on there being a couple of world wars where nations totally mobilized but eventually found that the price was too high, even for the winners.
Was thinking of WW2 too. In my country, food and fuel been rationed over 5 years after ending the war. The country been in ruins as the Germans could prolong the occupation for a year after the Allied Advance was halted and the Krauts took all they could their hands on and demolished what they couldn't take.
Rationing could only end when economy was building up again, there being plenty of resources available in those days.
In contrast, after the carbon precipice, oil will still be scarce, and coal too, a much sought after product. Most likely, other stuff like copper phosphorus and other essential elements would be in short supply - mining is very energy / fossil intensive.
It would be logical for countries that control those resources to limit their exports, so that resource poor nations really have to set controls on the use products that friend one such rare resources. It's a world that no Westerner under 70 can fathom, but oddly familiar to those that experienced live in communist rule.
One would expect for people that have tradition in having the squeeze on their consumption, like Russians and Chinese, would fare better than luxury folk in the West. On the other hand, being flexible and inventive are the more Western traits, so who knows. Russia and China are also very resource rich, leaving them in potentially powerful position.
Drastic climate change with a load of extremes ever increasing, will play a role, and put more pressure on societies having to deal with very limited supply.
Rationing requires a decent government, but one could imagine a total takeover by militia, mafia and robber barons, a bit like South America today is being taken over by powerful drugs mafia. Then, the ruling class would take all they can get, leaving next to nothing for the rest.
Not looking forward to that one bit...
That explanation at
~4 min was elucidating
Reminds me of Limits to Growth graphs. Can’t get the shapes you’d like.
+1 "Creamy nougat of oil" 😂
❤❤ your stuff, Nate!
10 to 28 million times faster ....remarkable ...so sustainability will be a bit of a slow down...can't wait to watch the grass grow.
Thank you, Nate, interesting topic and learned much as always.
Please keep posting...great service
its actually 'millions' to be safe. 10 million is defendable - i had read a stat this weekend on 10-20 million on something else and the 'to 20 million' was stuck in my neurons. But...order or magnitude...
Thank you for the clarification.
Just like money, a million here and a million there and we are talking about a good amount that has to be dealt with
We consume about 400 years worth or fossil fuels per day. it took nature about 400 years to produce the fossil fuels that is consumed in one day.
We're currently riding the vertical asymptote, and boy, is it going to get wild.
Why can't nuclear fusion be the savior? The leftover carbon will be channeled more and more into transitioning to fusion, which will take over as main energy source.
What i find very frustrating is that most of the fossil fuels are burned for fun.
Usually what will happen when you ban fossil fuels thereby destroying the economy is that peasants will resort to making fires for cooking and to stay warm. So they will use anything as a fuel source after they are done burning all the wood in the area. Which is worse for pollution.
The ruling elites will still keep their private jets and big mansions.
It has been a 200 year party, mostly for the rich.
Just stop oil then.
@@Rawdiswarnot that simple my friend.
Think of how future generations are going to learn about Nascar racing 😢
Thanks Nate ! One question. We have to make a 180° move to get through the carbone impulse. The consequences of such a shift are difficult to forecast. We know that we will have to live with much less material comfort. Less energy leads to less State ressources ; which can lead toward less public services (health, education, police, justice, army, pensions, infrastructures...). My question is the following one : is democracy the good system to make this 180° shift ? Is any candidate can be elected promising less ? "Democracy is the worst system except all others" said W Churchill.
No way to support 8 Billion people without fossil energy. green revolution, diesel tractors, diesel trucks & trains, etc. By 2050 Global population will be below 2 Billion (ie 6 Billion dead in about 27 years). if it ends in nuclear war, than the population will likely be below 200M, and decline to about 10M over the next 50 years, possible extinction by the 2200.
Isn't the global temperature going to keep rising for centuries to come, even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today? Look at the havoc that's already happening at 1.2°C.
Autocracies _could_ make quick decisions, if only the leaders would accept expert advice instead of what their cronies and yes men say.
Look at Xi - after he replaced independent thinking staff members for guys who talk the leaders' words, China economy now quickly goes to rubbish. If Putin had had critical thinkers instead of men that say they think the leader likes to hear, he wouldn't have started that war the way he did.
Yes, without democracy you can decide quickly, doubtful if it's the right way instead of the _desired_ way.
Climate and fossil pulse theory and management are territory for critical, independent thought, not for flunkeys.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, it was not fossil fuel related but certainly complexity related, both the Precipice and the Stair Step decline patterns in GDP were observed. The city of Rome and the Western Empire utterly collapsed very quickly. The Eastern or Byzantine Empire survived another 1000 years because they underwent a "Great Simplification" to a lower level of complexity but it was still a relatively high standard. That's our history. Can we become Sapien? We must try.
If the Romans had used coal oil and natural gas they would not have collapsed. Until years later.
The Eastern Empire wasn't dependent of fossil fuels to sustain itself. Global Population in 400 AD was about 200 Million. Today its about 8 Billion. I suspect global population will be below 2 billion in 2027 as diesel production collapses. Diesel is essential for farming, transportation, mining. Nothing gets done without Diesel.
@@guytech7310 The situation and scale today are indeed very different from 400AD. The fact that some parts of the planet, blessed with fossil fuel reserves, may simplify quickly and survive is a parallel to the Eastern Empire though. Russia could probably adapt since they are already at lower complexity level and have reserves. China and India might not have bright prospects. All about scenarios. If we go Mad Max route then Texas could secede from the Union with its oil and gas and make a go of it for a few more years. Tar sands in Alberta join up with Bakken states of Montana and N. Dakota to form new Plains Empire , etc etc... Collapsing early and avoiding the rush may be the best option. ( Credit JMG for that one )
@@VisDaddy11 Tar sands is no solution. Its basically burning a lot of natural gas to extract some heavy oil, that has low fuel yield since most of the desirable hydrocarbon compounds evaporated centuries in the past. All the equipment used (ie mining trucks & diggers) need parts made from a function industrial system.
I don't see TX faring any better since Its dependent on Manufacturing from other states (ie Pipe, Drilling bits, parts & assemblies for Refining, etc). TX is also getting invaded from the left coast (CA, OR, WA) and from the South (illegals, Drug cartels, etc). TX is also highly dependent on its shrinking ground water which its loosing about 2 to 3 feet per year.
@@guytech7310 How about this then, an Ecotopia powered by the hydro dams in Quebec. Corridor is fully protected. And wherever else the large dams can keep generating. Good real estate move? IDK.
Like airline accomodations and pricing, not all passengers on spaceship earth will be subjected to disaggregation of The Pulse in the same way. The jockeying has already begun.
I just saw video where a father on a Delta flight was threatened with jail time if he didn't give up his two years old's seat (which he paid for) to another passenger on an overbooked flight.
If you think about it the "Elysium" potential future would have roughly the same shape as the "Sapient" plot, however the "seed corn" would instead be used a bit differently.
Thanks
I think Ugo Bardi should be mentioned wrt the Precipice scenario, which he calls the Seneca Effect, or Seneca Cliff. It's not necessarily a free fall, but the point is, there are various kinds of feedback loops which cause asymmetries in the shape of the carbon pulse, the collapse happening much faster than the rise.
I see that youll be speaking (virtually) at the NZ degrowth conference next week. Cant wait
That was a very enjoyable podcast.
The debt was accrued when oil was cheap, it cannot be repayed when oil is expensive.
Nate always finds a way to get a handle in things, and explains in a way most people can get a grasp. But it’s too bad most people are so disappointing.
I believe the ExxonMobil 2050 Global Outlook report sees energy from fossil fuels peaking at around 20% above current levels, but with a marked switch from coal to gas with corresponding reductions in CO2 and other emissions. The main driver is the projected doubling of GDP per capita in the global south by 2050. I don't see what can stop this.
I'm not sure how large the area under your curve will prove to be. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a question that never needs to be answered because we will have real alternatives before we need to get better at oil/gas discovery/extraction.
The metaphor that best describes Western energy policy is someone jumping out of a plane without a parachute, and instead only a bag of materials that can hopefully be sown together into one before hitting the ground. An even more realistic description would be of someone jumping out of a plane before parachutes had been invented with a collection of bright ideas dreamed up by some enthusiastic and creative but not very practical types with some miscellaneous bits and pieces they have an intuition might by fabricated into something useful. The insanity in all this, of course, is not the dreamers who are confident their fanciful notions are realistic blueprints, but the rest of us who didn't insist that the designs were fully proven and certified ahead of agreeing to jump out of the plane.
To get back to your curves: the stepped decline implies a series of shocks. If this happens it is more likely to be because of political crises than anything arising from economic or technical fundamentals (e.g. the war in Ukraine). A more sensible curve - assuming sanity prevails - is the adoption curve when one technology replaces another, which also follows the classic 'S' shape (ditto innovation). An extreme example of this is the computer Flop/$ index of recent decades.
If you take the 10 years up to 2016, hardware prices per GFLOP were $52, $30, $10, $1.8, $0.73, $0.22, $0.12, $0.08, $0.06, $0.03, respectively. What this means is if you had a computing task that required 10GFLOPS of processing power in 2007 and it had to be completed within 10 years, by far the best plan would have been to do nothing for 9 years and do it all at the end. The cost of dividing 10GFLOPS into 10 years and doing 1GFLOP/yr (as explicitly recommended by the IPCC), would have been $94. The cost of doing everything at the last possible minute would have been $0.30.
Now it's fair to say that computer makers need a market in order to make advances, but nonetheless those in the know understand what the future likely holds and bet on it as they go along. That is the difference between the green market and free market - there is equal conviction of the likely future in both cases, but the participants in the green market are so unselfish they want the state to take some of the glory, which they are willing to donate for the small price of taking all the risk. Of course what this really means is they don't believe their own propaganda for even a second.
Good work Nate as always. As a simple organic carrot farmer, I can tell you that it is inaccurate and quite misleading to characterize our energy challenge as a 'carbon pulse.' For one thing carbon is the sine qua non--without which nothing-- element of life. But much more importantly in terms of your rap is that energy is stored in hydrocarbon bonds-- it is not stored in carbon, this is not a carbon pulse. What energy is stored in hydrocarbon bonds? The energy of the sun, of the wildly crazy fusion process taking place in our nearest star (i.e., 600 million tons of hydrogen fused into helium per second for the past 4.5 billion years-- no small trick!). What is a hydrocarbon bond? It has to do with the arrangement of the electrons in that bond; closer to the nucleus, they store more energy; further from the nucleus, you can take your next breath. Maybe the ancient Egyptians had it right: the sun is our life-giver. Are you aware that CO2 sank to about 180 ppm during the last glacial age? The biosphere was near collapse. Now, what is the biosphere made out of? Answer: mosly plants. What are plants made out of? Mostly CO2, 90%. Which exists in the 'atmosphtere' only in parts per million and has to diffuse through microscopic holes in leaf cells (stomata) in order to build the 600 billion tons of biomass on earth. Let's see you make something (alive) out of a gas that exists in ppm in the sky! Also I don't buy your bit about money; money is psychological game, like 'countries' (which don't actually exist; can you see any in a satellite image?). It's not about money, it's not about carbon, it's about access to energy. Homo sapiens is in 'overshoot,' just a simple fact. The biosphere (with a little help from its systemic partners) will make the necessary adjustments.
Maybe you should rename it the 'hydrocarbon' pulse, after all we're talking about the synthesis of certain inorganic elements, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen into carbohydrate energy, and the exploitation of this buried treasure of ancient stored sunlight.
One thing, it’s not carbon, it’s hydrocarbon - I don’t think carbon burns does it? Absolutely fascinating subject nonetheless.
I would be interested in some social psychology experts on here, Sheldon Solomon comes to mind. Peter Turchin also has done some great work also in the same domain as Joseph Tainter on complex societies.
All very clear and analytical Nate, but you missed something crucial. Slavery is intrinsic to state formation. There is not a single state-level society without some form of slavery. [If any of you readers can tell me one, I will investigate it. I have not found one in over forty years of researching this.] Now keep in mind that slavery includes corvee, not just chattel slavery. Feudalism can also be folded in. The key is 1) whether you are forced to work and 2) if you are punished for not working. Civilization did quite well with just slave labor from ancient times. When fossil fuels started replacing human slaves, civilization did not change. Consequently, as fossil fuels become less economical and harder to extract, human slavery will take up the slack. The scenario is that manual labor is used to subsidize the ever-increasing costs of fossil fuels. We can see this happening already. As Joseph Tainter said, collapse of a civilization results in a less-complex regional polity. We can see this happening too. Look around at the places in the world where warlords, clans and gangs are fighting for power. As the state breaks down, less complex organization does the job.
And then there is dieoff. (Or die-off if you prefer.) I have yet to hear Nate accept that human population will crash dramatically once we cannot use as much fossil fuel as we use now. This then becomes a positive feedback loop. All models and projections that do not have a die-off scenario are invalid.
A side note. If you calculate the heat generated by human overpopulation, it is similar to the third largest oil producer - Russia. 8 billion people burning 2000 kilocalories per day (some more, some less) generates 66.94 million gigajoules of energy per day. A barrel of oil has 6.1 gigajoules of energy that is released when it is burned, so the heat generated by humans every day is equivalent to burning 10.97 million barrels of oil every day. Russia's current production (per Worldometer) is 11.26 million barrels a day.
So, to recap. Slavery is intrinsic to state-level society and is returning. The waste heat generated by human overpopulation is equivalent to another major oil producer spewing fossil fuel heat. [Many people who focus on carbon and methan emissions miss the contribution of heat to climate change.]
So more people can think about the consequences in possebilities instead of only negative talk
Dude you look haunted by this information. It's haunting me too.. the implications.
Question: What is the orgin of volcanic carbon? Is it coming from fossilized biomaterial?
If the history teaches us anything, the text shows: wars, plaques, migration, genocide, famine, drought, flood and fire.
I thought it was called the carbon cycle. The most delicate, because it is such a small fraction of the atmosphere.
The Market, oh no! The magical place where nothing ever happens!!
Thanks for this video as always Insightful and expands our understanding of what we are doing to this planet. But I have to disagree on the focus of Carbon as an energy source. It’s only the byproduct of Hydrogen reaction with oxygen. Carbon is only one component of what Hydrogen attaches it self to. Coal’s formula is C240 H90 O4 NS . That is 240 atoms of Carbon, 97 atoms of Hydrogen, 4 atoms of oxygen and a Nitrogen Sulphide molecule. Please note the coal and every other Hydrocarbon is only useful to us as energy because of the Hydrogen. It’s the Hydrogen that when catalyzed or heated the wants to attach itself to Oxygen that caused the chain reaction to oxidize the carbon and Nitrogen. So the carbon gets transformed to carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide transformed and sulphur transformed and some particles of carbon. Carbon has no energy value. We only measure the carbon output from the Hydrogen reaction that transforms the Carbon to its oxides . Again it’s oxygen that binds with carbon in combustion which give of heat it’s an exothermic reaction, but it’s the Hydrogen that gives us the heat energy to facilitate the carbon reaction with oxygen .The true value to us is not the carbon it is the Hydrogen.
Can we please have a chat about the Hydrogen. Feel green to contact me any time. Thanks.😊
The hydrogen isn't the problem though. It's not the hydrogen that is building up in our atmosphere and causing global warming.
Although I suspect your right about the extraction rate being greater than the "production" rate at depth, I don't think we really know how crude oil or natural gas is formed. As in... we don't know the exact, actual process for this. The narrative is organic matter under high heat and pressure, but that's a conjecture or theory. Has anyone reproduced this effect?
I am leaning towards precipice being the most likely. I suspect and hope that we won’t use all of the fossil carbons in the ground but I think we will use a lot for much longer than we should. I don’t know that there is a good solution to our problems.
Also Nate do you have thoughts on the adoption of windmills in addition to the adoption of wind turbines? I was thinking about how if we convert wind straight to mechanical energy for different kinds of processes like milling grain, sawing wood, and powering simple machines. If avoids storage and grid issues that come with turbines tho I imagine turbines are much more efficient and electricity is much more practical. Maybe there is some potential there for both mills and turbines?
After a collapse that will likely happen as people likely won't have the means to get replacement parts. That said if there is a nuclear war, than most of industrialize world will become uninhabited, as the land becomes a toxic wasteland. Not just from the bombs, but from the Nuclear powerplant meltdowns and burning cities that will emit toxic ash contaminating the land for centuries if not millennia's.
The turbines break down a lot, and don't last forever.
In first world countries, agriculture is between 1 and 4% of the gdp. It would take a long long time to event dent the population overshoot by just insuficient caloric intake alone because plant-food is so cheap to produce.
Without a surplus of cheap oil, that agricultural production will not last long. Modern agriculture needs oil just as much as it needs water and soil
Don't forget credit destruction Nate, as the principal part of a loan is repayed, and hence what does that do to our ability to trade, if there aren't sufficient funds available. Where do we go ? Back to the bank, so we have a built in contrived imperative to keep people in jobs, combined with the conditioned pursuit of profit, which is going against the market tendency which is towards automation, and to displace people from their jobs, and during this process we're just chewing through the finite energy and material resources of this planet like their going out of fashion.
Well said!
A small quibble here, but isn't it better to say the geology represents the "maximum case" rather than the "best case" because the shape of the "sapient case" with the area of the geology would presumably be the best case...
Yes
Why do you have so many lights on?
The precipice at 15:10 appears to take place around 2033.
It's a sad fact that if we had to pay the real cost of things we buy, including environmental costs, they would cost too much for most of us. The S curve is too steep.
Why didn't you mention the Seneca curve?
Isn't that The Precipice?
@@AlanDavidDoane If the horizontal axis were stretched out, then perhaps we'd see a decline twice as steep as the rise. A decline, not a collapse/precipice.
My holdings are increasing in fertility, since I have been learning how to do this without the stored carbon it will continue on regardless. But, something or someone could be take me away, in the blink of an eye, much faster than it took to build it up, and no doubt they will reverse the process I produced.
4:18 not my Viagra, Nate! 🤣🤣
Thank you for all you do. I wish more people started following you. Your work is very important .
Fun fact - Viagra, with its effects on narrowing blood vessels, is now being tested as a medicine for the after effects of Covid 🤓
The stair step down chart is the most likely. Most big crashes play out with multiple bear market rallies on the way down.
Resources like Alberta's oil sands have been landlocked and scorned by the green intelligencia. This will change fast when the SHTF and the reality smackdown comes for them.
we would be lucky to experience a palendrome no matter the horror that degrowth has in store. the scramble for resources through the population decline is in control of our suffering.
My thoughts include the economy impact and labor market impact we are going to feel moving from a very inefficient use of energy to a more efficient use of energy over the next few decades.
As fossil fuels are so extremely energy dense, we tend to use it very inefficiently. Both in consumption, and in production.
Many of our use of fuels only captures a small percentage of fuel energy into useful work, a lot of the energy from fuels just floats into atmosphere. Like car engines, decades of improvements and they are still only 20-50% energy efficient. Compare them to modern bEV which are over 90% energy efficient.
And then there is the production of fuels in the first place. Add up exploration, extraction, storage, transportation, storage, refining, storage, transportation, storage, transportation again, more storage, distribution, management of it all - and all of the materials and support industry for all of that; we have a massive portion of our materials and labor economy just supporting the fossil fuels production industry.
Most of the alternative energy sources may not be as dense, but they require substantially less materials and labor to produce, and they are used significantly more efficiently.
For example electrified transportation and electrified industrial process use a lot less total energy due to the efficiency compared to the fuel alternative.
And wind, solar, nuclear, hydro generation all use way less raw materials and way less labor per unit of enegy produced than fossil fuel based generation.
And electricity grids transport energy a lot more efficiently than trucks, trains, pipelines and ships.
So all added up, transitioning away from fossil fuels will mean a massive reduction in materials and labor requirements for the entire global economy. We will be able to produce the same amount of goods and have the same lifestyle consumption with a lot less materials extraction and a lot less labor once we transition away from fuels.
Then combine this with the idea that humanity may adjust our value systems for less individual consumption, meaning even less materials, labor and energy requirements. Plus potential for population decline.
Initially this all sounds great. But if you think about it this also means a massive cut in national GDP and more importantly a massive cut in labor requirement.
If we cannot make a corresponding adjustment to the societal value of labor, reducing the number of hours all of us work while still maintaining the same or higher annual income, we will end up with EVEN WORSE wealth and income inequality. Mass unemployment, and human tragedy.
The solution to all of this is to globally adopt a social philosophy increasing the value of labor per hour, each household working less hours, and a more even distribution of wealth/income accross society. If we cannot do that the wealth gap will continue to worsen until we have 90+ percent of global population starving while the few elites are living even more opulent lives.
"transitioning away from fossil fuels". I suggest looking at the work of Simon Michaux, though I don't think you'll like it.
@@klondike444 nothing I have said above is opposed to any of the thoughts from Michaux. Partially developed after reading some of his work and seeing some interviews.
@@5353Jumper I don't know what you think we can transition to, or how, but if you're aware of Michaux's work I'll leave it there. It's probably all moot anyway, as we won't do enough to avoid collapse of some kind.
@@klondike444 I don't think you fully understand Michaux's work.
Many people see some of his content and then think he is saying "there is not enough of some specific materials to transition to wind and solar, so we should just do nothing and stick with fuel". That is nowhere close to what he is saying.
From Michaux:
- he does think we need to transition off fuels for both atmospheric health reasons and because fossils are in limited supply and going to force us to anyway.
- we should adopt wind as solar as PART of the solution, but also do other things.
- we should adopt batteries as PART of the solution, but also do other things.
- we need to do those other things too because the global community thinking wind, solar and batteries solve everything is misguided.
- we need to focus on reducing consumption and improving recycling, and an overall change in our definition of society as a huge part of the transition because there is not enough of other things currently to replace our over use of fuels
- this is going to be very difficult and requires all of humanity to pull its head out of its arse to get this done without extreme tragedy
- it would have been a lot better if we had stared this transition decades ago, our delay is going to cause a lot more tragedy.
So I am expanding on his thoughts by saying we need to work out a redefinition on the value of labor, the distribution of income/wealth. The transition off total reliance on fuels can happen in a planned manner, or it will happen to us in a sudden disaster. Either way it will happen. My hope is that we actually start embracing it so it can happen in stages we design to minimize human tragedy.
If we try it with our current value of labor and distribution of income, most of us will just starve to death and that will cut our consumption. And the first ones starving will be the general labourers who are not the ones that lecd us to this mess. The wealth elite that led us to this mess will be the survivors. That is not my preferred way to get this done.
@@5353Jumper I initially thought you were going with the conventional "let's switch to wind and solar and continue BAU" fantasy. You did say "We will be able to produce the same amount of goods and have the same lifestyle consumption..." So I was puzzled when you said you were familiar with Michaux's work.
I think I agree with most of your last reply regarding what would be needed to get us through what we are facing with the minimum of suffering, though it appears the mining etc. of some of the necessary materials for longer than the medium term presents problems.
Either way, our "leaders" seem determined to take us into some form of collapse, the universal need for economic growth is just assumed, and most people are focused on the single issue of climate change, with many dismissing even that, while others are fretting over a potential population decline.
So whatever the possibilities for action there may be, for me the future of humanity looks bleak.
The scary part is that Precipice looks more likely as time goes on...
Is it just me, or is the sound volume very low in the video?
Couldn't almost hear it outside, drowsed by sound around
Who created the concept of carbon pulse? What can I read to better understand this concept?
Well, the first three are possible, especially number 3..Number four, not so much..I always say that we are on the bell curve to hell/annihilation...Highway to hell might be more appropriate..We've already started down the far side of that bell curve...You certainly must be pumping the Oxygen into your brain while pumping on those pedals..I'm usually sucking in the natural world, in awe, on my bike rides, very zen, without much thinking at all..
On va se prendre un de ces Dirac... Please excuse my french.
HI, you said the symetrical curve has probability almost zero. But you don't say the probability of the other scenarios.
I was searching today for the speed of melt at 2, 3 degrees, I could find the difference in eventual levels but I was wondering even if we reached five degrees by end of century, how long would it take before the impact be felt, at say the 3 degrees which is 2-4 metres and that would eventuate? I used to think it would be a thousand years before the end of global warming happened and 66 metres happened, would anybody know if this would be a feasible timeline?
Edit : Does anybody know the lag time between reaching a temperature and the melt associated with that temp?
Ice scientist Jason Box might have the answer to your last question on his channel. Also ice scientist Peter Wadhams.
5'C seems quite too steep, 2-3 seems where we're going, unless some tipping points trigger drastic warming. Melting would take centuries, though it seems the ice dynamics can cause it to happen more quickly. Watch Jason Box, he's an expert on Greenland but you might want to find other scientists for (West) Antarctica
By the way, expansion of sea water because of the oceans warming quickly, plays a role too in acceleration of sea level rise.
We know it was 0.18 of a degree between 1975 and 2010 and post 2010 it jumped 55% to .28 of a degree warming, it looks as though it has jumped again this year, I don't know by how much but let's say it jumped another 55% then we are at .43 of a degree per decade,@@reuireuiop0let's imagine for some reason there is no increase on this in the next 8 decades which to me is incredibly doubtful as it's too low but let's keep it at that, that's 3.44 degrees, plus the 1.3 we already have and we are at 4.74 degrees.
The above could be quite low as it means no more increases from any feedback, for example, 26 centimetres of sea level rise at 2 degrees will be very different to 3 degrees when there will be 2-4 metres of sea level rise but 3 degrees by end of century will mean the world has changed drastically from what they are doing now in the next year or so and that's prob not going to happen.
Nate,
I'm quite amazed that you are completely ignoring AI impacts on our future. I say this because you never seem to add this reality in your analysis. If experts in this AI field can be trusted, we simply cannot predict a future world where AI intelligence will surpass human intelligence by a million fold. And this is now, not 100 years in the future.
Get Mo Gawdat on your podcast and debate him from your perspective. By the way, if you are not familiar with Gawdat, I think you will be surprisingly impressed....
I truly appreciate the work you do.
Ai will have big impacts on economy. But (if it scales as Mo predicts) it will act similar to debt on shaping the carbon pulse- pulling sources and sink capacity forward in time. AI uses non-renewable energy faster, it doesn’t create more
Nate,
Thanks for the reply. Try to get Mo on your podcast and share your thoughts with him and let's see how he responds. We are entering the most critical point in human history. I think we need to consider that if these AI's are able to "think and reason", and ultimately far surpass human intelligence, this is no longer technology. This is something very different.
I think it was Gawdat himself who said we are at an "Oppenheimer moment" in time...
AI needs cheap & reliable electricity to function. AI cannot solve a fundemential problem like an energy crisis. Its like giving a caveman a new vehicle without any fuel for it.
Civilization won't make it the next 100 years. Its all going to start collapsing in the late 2020s or early 2030s due to the big diesel shortage, Debt (Global Debt to GDP 320% US is 370%), & Demographics. I suspect global population will drop below 2 Billion in 2050, and like below 200M if a nuclear war occurs. I would guess 80% of a nuclear war in the next 10 years.
@@guytech7310 The storage of all the world's ever-increasing amount of data requires an enormous amount of energy and materials (in the form of energy-guzzling data centers), something that is usually ignored by everyone.
"We're already well through the first half of this ancient carbon." Yes? Maybe I'm missing something. That's true for oil arguably, if the peak was 2018, but not for coal or gas, yes? This Frankly flipped a little between talking about peak carbon, and once or twice about peak oil? If it actually was peak carbon, what is the date of the peak? In the three graphs from Mohr et al (2015) from about 19 minutes in the presentations shows three peaks, the first looks about 2010 maybe. The second looks about 2020 maybe? Only the third looks somewhere out in the future, about 2050, and it has a wide rounded shape. That last one might be a total carbon pulse, but not the first two, yes? Now, to all of this can be added the disruptive effects of an actual oil peak, if that becomes more noticeable, starting maybe now, and accelerating downward. That could derail a lot of things, including the mining of the remaining natural gas and coal, in which case, they would never reach their true peaks. Ok, just looking to be clear on things. Straighten me out where I'm wrong, anyone. I think the major thrust of the talk is as usual for Nate, very well done and much needed, and the four scenarios for descent are very reasonable, that doesn't change.
Yes. In my book peak carbon will * roughly track* w peak oil as it is the lynchpin of global finance and stability. We are decades away from peak gas, in theory. And there is lots of coal left. I think peak oil in moderately high likelihood was nov 2018. But lots of variables still as you point out. The graphs I drew had large rounded peak of carbon implying an absolute peak is less likely than a decade or do “rolling top”
I presume also that oil is still needed to support even a coal and gas source, so peak oil would presumably just make gas and coal harder to extract and get to market(s), and make it more expensive/less efficient.
@@thegreatsimplification Great, yes, I thought that was probably your intention. And I think your main focus was not on locating the peak but on describing those four scenarios at the end. I also imagine descent of fossil energy use as some kind of stair-step, though the big collapse scenario is always looming as a possibility out there, and Odum also recognized that as he lobbied vigorously instead for a more controlled descent in his Prosperous Way Down book. -- Tom Abel
The end Permian extinction was caused by magma contacting some sort of coal seam or oil chamber in an area of what is now Siberian. How big could that have been? Was it bigger than anything we have today? It was one area of the globe, and yet it caused the extinction of 70% of species. Compare that to us burning essentially all the carbon reserves at once and at a vastly faster rate. The Earth's ecosystem couldn't handle a slow release of CO2 over millions of years. It appears the carbon cycle is very slow in sequestering carbon. How is it possible, knowing what happened in the Earth's past, that modern ecosystems can even adapt to our greater burning on the human time scale?
Good question!
Volcano, Viagra, Volvo, Vacation, Volkswagen...I see what you did there!
I can't see the sapient scenario happening. I foresee disagreement on conserving reserves and corruption preventing this outcome.
What is something that you consider impossible to do and were it to happen might make you reconsider the impact of the carbon pulse. Where is the line.
Why don't we just switch gradually to renewable energy and electrified transport as fossil fuels decline? We could use sodium-ion batteries for cars and trucks.
renewable power sources can never replace the amount of power generated from fossil & nuclear. Plus a lot of renewable energy system have short lifespans. Modern solar panels usually only last about 12 years (damaged from weather, accidents, or just failures). Wind turbine last about the same in real world condictions. Both depend on fossil fuel for production as the materials are mined using diesel fuel, Plastics from NatGas, etc.
When fossil fuels become too expense that is when the next dark ages begin as the world economy will collapse and revert to a 19th century level economy. We'll also see the population collapse as food production is depend on fossil fuels: Diesel tractors, Diesel trucks, Fertializers, Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides all come from fossil fuel sources.
Short answer: Because renewables can't meet our energy demands, even if we cover the entire earth with solar panels, wind farms, and other renewable energy sources.
Also, there is not enough metal on Earth (in the ground) to build out the required electrical grid. And even if the metal were available, mining it would destroy the planet. (Are you familiar with the way that mine drainage travels in an underground plume until it reaches groundwater?)
Look for a paper entitled "The Inadequacy of Wind Power," by Wade Allison. Dr. Allison talks about wind power, but his conclusions apply to other renewable energy sources too.
We are doing that and much faster than people realise. Batteries are scaling much faster now than oil ever did in absolute terms.
@@Apjooz No. The Moores law applied to Batteries (doubling capacity) is about 30 years. Chemical batteries will always suffer from degradation because they work on the process of corrosion & plating. During discharge batteries corrode the electrode, and during charging (reverse corrosion) by plating the metal back on the electrode, This leads to uneven corrosion & plating causing the electrodes to thin in some places and get too big (dendrites).
The only way to resolve the issue is to use a different process that does not require metal oxidation & plating.
The only viable grid storage systems is pumped hydro, but this is limited availabily or water near locations that can hold water and offer a siginificant elevation difference to make it worthwhile. However this is a challenge, especially since a lot of location are already fully developed (ie in urban, or significant populated areas).
Because most of the world's energy usage can't be converted to battery power--or any renewable source, for that matter.
A rising tide of fire will burn all boats.
I drop in in the middle and then hear something to spout off about. The precipice idea. When you look at the graphs like that which show what they call on price charts parabolic angle. As soon as you open your eyes and look at the graph it is game over. The precipice is now. This is the precipice. We are basically saying that some of us will have to be sacrificed. Which is pretty bleak, but it might be happening already more than we realize. I mean, looking at nature, the humans. The animals with the big brains. With the super computer. Our shadow may be overshadowing us. The big bang is the model, it is the fact that we have decided is the best fact, have built the institutions around. It isn't the reality of billions of years ago. The only reality we know for sure is that we have built the institutions around our theories.
Being a full on anti-imperialist Marxian American normie liberal slacker under achiever smart ass rocker. when I heard this term eco-fascism, my ears perked up. We do have a pretty messy recent history of philosophical and heady western deep thinker tradition. But it is ever evolving. It is never not evolving. It is usually made up of market players of one kind or another, or ideologues of one kind of another or professionals of one kind of another, or bureaucrats, politicians, thought leaders, celebrities etc.
I don't know where I was going with that but some things that are true about our current time and our shadow is that science and policy can have a very big shadow. PR and ideology can have a very big shadow. Policy can be called a leg when really it is a tail. Same with science. Often science is simply policy.
I'm sure there is a very long history of this, but recent history from the 80's as told by economist Bill Black, who has worked in legal cases against banks. He tells the story of what is referred to as control fraud. I don't know the details. I just know the big arc of the story basically. It involves controlling the environment where you can carry out massive fraud and still be ahead of the law or above it or both. No pun intended with "environment".
Over the last 70 years or so, economics has gone through a lot and like everything is always evolving. It evolves so much that it is hard to tell if it is in the shadows or not. It can often become above the law and in the shadows at the same time. Maybe I will make this comment into a children's book. But the science or theory often is used to serve an end other than an empirical facts based inquiry. It is used to uphold the institution before anything else. Are institutions what we should be serving or are they little more than habits that turn into rackets? Control fraud? I'm speculating. thumbs up.
And if I was to write what I was irritated about from the last video, it would be that the tendency to be waiting or hoping for a technological holy grail that will remedy our biggest problem is probably our minds trying to turn our shadow into something else. Waiting hoping for some kind of technological edge is really never used to ease the pain is it? It is used to monopolize the market. That is kind of the first commandment in our institution isn't it? So the mission would be to take what we know we have and readjust it, but friendly like. And this is the great clash. The great liberal free market v. the evil communism or government tyranny.
I must disagree with the statement that coal comes from carboniferous deposits. Much of the coal we find is from deposits that are of far more recent origin.
According to Britannica:
======
There were two major eras of coal formation in geologic history. The older includes the Carboniferous Period (extending from 358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago and often divided into the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian subperiods) and the Permian Period (from approximately 298.9 million to 251.9 million years ago) of the Paleozoic Era. Much of the bituminous coal of eastern North America and Europe is Carboniferous in age. Most coals in Siberia, eastern Asia, and Australia are of Permian origin.
The younger era of coal formation began about 145 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and reached its peak approximately 66 million to 2.6 million years ago, during the Paleogene and Neogene periods of the Cenozoic Era. Most of the coals that formed during this later era are lignites and subbituminous (brown) coals. These are widespread in western North America (including Alaska), southern France and central Europe, Japan, and Indonesia.
Paul Ehrlich or Julian Simon?
Are you a Paul Ehrlich?
This is prety good, but it gets the economics wrong. Public debt is not an issue, bond markets for public debt are not an issue, for any sovereign, currency-issuing government. The constraints in the real economy are genuine, as is how private debt frontloads our energy consumption
Can you please clarify how that front-loaded spending squares with what will actually happen to those currencies once serious material constraints occur?
Thermodynamics says energy cannot be created or destroyed but new currency is created all the time through lending. That sounds like a recipe for sudden and severe hyper-inflation should the amount of available energy be suddenly and severely reduced.
We only have to look at a satellite view of the earth at night to see just how profligate our consumption of energy is. I'm sure we could dispose of at least 50% of that illumination without compromising our way of life. When we have perfectly good headlights on our vehicles what is the point of floodlighting miles and miles of straight roads the world over?
Not reallty much, lighting only used about 5% for lighting. 38% of power use is for HVAC.
LEDs mean lighting doesn't really use a lot of power anymore.
@@loungelizard3922 Don't forget the Jevons paradox.