Is this sustainable? | Consciousness of Sheep
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/04/15/is-this-sustainable/
For the moment and temporarily, governments can prop up the economy in this way because the overwhelming majority of the population still buy into the belief that we will return to some form of “normality” and that the economy of the future will be bigger and wealthier than the economy as it was before the pandemic struck; allowing the debt to be repaid. One vision of that bigger and wealthier economy involves the massive deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies, switching from internal combustion engines to electric motors and swapping physical products (books, DVDs, face to face meetings, etc.) with digital equivalents (e-books, mp4, Zoom, etc.). But these fantasies depend upon a planetary resource base that simply isn’t there anymore.
Several key minerals are only available today because we haven’t attempted a WWII-scale Green New Deal. As Tad Patzek explains:
“To compare the WWII industrial effort with the global dislocation necessary to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change is surprisingly naïve… This comparison also neglects to account for the human population that has almost quadrupled between the 1940s and now, and the resource consumption that has increased almost 10-fold. The world today cannot grow its industrial production the way we did during WWII. There is simply not enough of the planet Earth left to be devoured.”
Less obviously, the energy that we depend upon to do anything is itself increasingly constrained as most of the large oil fields around the planet pass peak production. It is not that there isn’t plenty of oil – or, indeed, fossil fuels in general – under the ground. Nor that enhanced recovery techniques, deep water drilling, hydraulic fracturing and strip-mining bitumen sands cannot continue to deliver vast quantities. Rather, the problem is that each additional barrel of oil from this point on is taking more energy to produce, so that the net energy available to the wider economy is shrinking,
The net energy or energy return on energy invested can fall from 50:1 to as low as 15:1 without having a major impact on the wider economy. Between 15:1 and 5:1 things become extremely difficult. And beyond 5:1 any semblance of a modern economy is impossible. Which raises the question, where are we now? To which, sadly, there is no definitive answer. Conventional oil is probably still above 20:1. Hydraulically fractured shale oil is somewhere around 5:1. Bitumen sands are around 2.5:1 and corn-based biodiesel is energy-negative (it takes more to produce than it provides in return). Solar farms are around 5:1 and windfarms between 15:1 and 20:1 – but remember these technologies are not renewable; without a steady supply of energy-cheap fossil fuels (and in the absence of an energy-dense alternative) these technologies are likely to go the same way as the wider economy.
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The term which best describes what happens from here on is ‘de-growth’. This is a concept that some have advocated as a positive choice, but it is, in fact, being forced upon us by a relentless deterioration in the energy-driven equation which determines prosperity.”
The current lockdown measures are only “sustainable” for as long as national currencies maintain their value. National currencies, in turn, are only sustainable for as long as the myth of a bigger and wealthier future can be sustained. That myth depends upon growth in the net energy available to the economy that ceased sometime around 2005. There is already a growing list of things that we used to be able to do that – for net energy reasons – are no longer possible; from the collapse of commercial supersonic flight at one end to the growth of such things as bicycle delivery services and hand car washes at the other. In the aftermath of the pandemic, we will likely say goodbye to many more things that we used to take for granted until such time as investors notice and either markets and asset prices collapse for good or stagflation arrives to remove the paper wealth that western economies currently run on.
There is nothing sustainable about the current lockdown. But, then again, there was nothing sustainable about the “normal” economy we were operating anyway. The future is not green growth but de-growth; not more and better, but make do and mend.