De-growth is coming - how to prepare?

I think it is important to have the damage humans have donee out in the open, as a recourse for everyone to learn and know about.
Sustainability means to me, in that case, to be aware of damaging effects we have on our surrounds.
A collective positive would be perfect- I however think that only the individual (at the time) can take control and act responsible.
My opinion is that we need to get down to the actual problem and that is over populating and that we should slow down on that for at least one generation and become fully aware on how we make our bad conduct better in our environment. I think this is the main issue- not rats or possums.
Once this is addressed we can deal with the thousands of good ideas that are around. I mean- what is the point of raping the entire country with the dairy industry? the scale is ridiculous .

More supporting quotations:

Roger Boyd's blog, 'Humanities Test' : http://bit.ly/1qXz6Gd
"Most of what we know as wealth is a claim upon future economic growth, growth that has to date been made possible by huge supplies of cheap energy. Now, with increasing constraints on cheap energy, the vast majority of that wealth will be shown to be a mirage. The ‘financialization’ of the advanced industrial economies in the past few decades has exacerbated this problem by greatly increasing such ‘wealth’ in the form of debt and equity holdings. In addition, globalization has reduced the resilience of the economy through placing efficiency well above diversity and resilience. Thus, the impending impact of cheap energy constraints may cause a cascade of problems facilitated by the complex webs of global supply chains and financial linkages. The crisis of 2007-2009 is only the latest example of how a crisis in one financial area can be rapidly transformed into a global crisis and near collapse. We may not be able to predict when the next crisis will hit, but we can predict that it may spread extremely rapidly. Trying to take defensive actions once the crisis has started may turn out to be a relatively futile gesture. Instead, such actions need to be made beforehand. These actions would have to take into account the exposure of a person’s job to the financial system as well as the exposure of their investments within that same system.

Location may play a significant part in how someone will fare once cheap energy constraints become evident. The best individual plans may come to nothing if the country, region, city, or town where one lives is greatly dependent upon either cheap energy from somewhere else or the financial system. The energy importers, especially those that are mature economies, will be the first to be hit and the hardest. Locations with a large share of employment and economic activity coming from the financial system will also be heavily hit as that system crashes. In addition, countries which are dependent upon exchanging financial I.O.U.’s for critical imports may find that the supporting financial arrangements – and the requisite trust – are suddenly in very short supply.

Some may believe that the government, or “the powerful”, will wake up and skillfully navigate society through the crises. History does not provide much evidence of elites grasping the reality of a given situation and taking corrective action. Instead it is full of societies driving themselves over the edge while stubbornly refusing to accept reality."

And also this piece: http://bit.ly/X97xPk
"Yes, there are going to be some very uncomfortable repercussions as we adjust to the reality that we can’t have more year after year. But that’s just a fact of life, and the sooner we get on with the transition to a more sustainable economy, the gentler those bumps in the road will be. The only choice we have is whether to embrace it with some elegance or go down fighting.

The good news is that bigger is rarely better, and that more affluence does not make us happier, so the end of growth does, in fact, represent a tremendous opportunity. The sooner we begin to recognize and enjoy the benefits of a new system rooted in sufficiency, respect, cooperation and relaxation, the sooner we’ll get through that turbulence.

Smith’s piece is deeper than most on this subject, and while he dips his toe in it, he manages to avoid sinking into the quicksand of inaccessible hyper-intellectualism."

Nathan - I cut this from your blog:

We are being told, “Renewables will save us,” but this is basically a lie. Wind and solar PV are just as much a part of our current fossil fuel system as any other source of electricity. They will only last as long as the weakest link–inverters that need replacing, batteries that need replacing, or the electric grid that needs fixing.<

Could you clarify this statement please as I don't follow its logic.

@stephenbryson

You can't follow it's logic because it doesn't have any.

Essentially its saying that renewable energy such as solar and wind are made using energy produced by fossil fuels and thus when fossil fuels run out we won't be able to make wind and solar any more. This is a load of bollocks as we'll be able to make the wind and solar generators from the renewable energy produced by wind and solar.

Thanks Draco, I'd still like Nathan to clarify however as perhaps there is some other rationale not immediately obvious..

Hi guys. Thanks @stephenbryson for the question. This is a complex issue, so apologies if it wasn't clear. Basically, I'm arguing that: oil is fundamental to our economies; production cost for new oil supply have been rising at around 10% per year for the last decade or so; at some point we can't afford the price that new oil supplies need to be economic (leading to a reduction in supply bit.ly/1uiPchk); this will cause chaos, which we're already seeing signs of in the banking system, as debt defaults ensue; this will lead to stagnation and some level of collapse of globalised, 'just in time' supply chains, which will lead to the unavailability of certain parts, which will eventually impact our ability to maintain and therefore sustain our current infrastructure.

@colinengland - unfortunately for all of us, "neither hope, nor fear, can change the seasons"
I refer you to this piece, which summarises the basis for my concerns as to why you may be wrong : bit.ly/1q6znpS - I quote :
"Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power.  Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.

The problem is analysed in an important paper by Weißbach et al.1 in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that was required to build it.  It takes energy to make a power plant – to manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on.  The power plant needs to make at least this much energy to break even.  A break-even powerplant has an EROEI of 1.  But such a plant would pointless, as there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.

There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society.  An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded.

For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al. estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7.  An energy source with lower EROEI cannot sustain a society at those levels of complexity, structured along similar lines.  If we are to transform our energy system, in particular to one without climate impacts, we need to pay close attention to the EROEI of the end result....

... It’s important to understand the nature of this EROEI limit.  This is not a question of inadequate storage capacity – we can’t just buy or make more storage to make it work.  It’s not a question of energy losses during charge and discharge, or the number of cycles a battery can deliver.  We can’t look to new materials or technological advances, because the limits at the leading edge are those of earthmoving and civil engineering.  The problem can’t be addressed through market support mechanisms, carbon pricing, or cost reductions.  This is a fundamental energetic limit that will likely only shift if we find less materially intensive methods for dam construction.

This is not to say wind and solar have no role to play.  They can expand within a fossil fuel system, reducing overall emissions.  But without storage the amount we can integrate in the grid is greatly limited by the stochastically variable output.  We could, perhaps, build out a generation of solar and wind and storage at high penetration.  But we would be doing so on an endowment of fossil fuel net energy, which is not sustainable.  Without storage, we could smooth out variability by building redundant generator capacity over large distances.  But the additional infrastructure also forces the EROEI down to unviable levels.  The best way to think about wind and solar is that they can reduce the emissions of fossil fuels, but they cannot eliminate them.  They offer mitigation, but not replacement.

Nor is this to say there is no value in energy storage.  Battery systems in electric vehicles clearly offer potential to reduce dependency on, and emissions from, oil (provided the energy is sourced from clean power).  Rooftop solar power combined with four hours of battery storage can usefully timeshift peak electricity demand,3 reducing the need for peaking power plants and grid expansion.  And battery technology advances make possible many of our recently indispensable consumer electronics.  But what storage can’t do is enable significant replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy.

If we want to cut emissions and replace fossil fuels, it can be done, and the solution is to be found in the upper right of the figure.  France and Ontario, two modern, advanced societies, have all but eliminated fossil fuels from their electricity grids, which they have built from the high EROEI sources of hydroelectricity and nuclear power.  Ontario in particular recently burnt its last tonne of coal, and each jurisdiction uses just a few percent of gas fired power.  This is a proven path to a decarbonized electricity grid.

But the idea that advances in energy storage will enable renewable energy is a chimera – the Catch-22 is that in overcoming intermittency by adding storage, the net energy is reduced below the level required to sustain our present civilization."

I hope that's clearer...?

Thanks Nathan. Great link, quite a bit to look into there, especially that EROI and EROEI.

Yeah. EROI is the missing link in many people's understanding of this issue...

I'll be glad to hear your thoughts.

This is a really great 'in depth' look at EROI:
EROI and the limits of conventional feasibility assessment
bit.ly/TOUHnN
Part 1: The technical potential for renewables
bit.ly/TOULDQ
Part 2: Stocks, flows and power return on investment
bit.ly/1ntVvGl
Part 3: Intermittency & seasonal variation

@felix I agree that the real issue is overpopulation but I dont see any solution in a democracy. No party will ever raise the topic, let alone address it. We can't even allow a citizen with, say, Alzheimer's to die in peace at a time ofd his own choosing. We seem happy to keep people alive on artificial life-support systems, when they are virtually cabbages. I defy any member of this discussion group to suggest solutions that will not be drowned in a wave of protests. The problem is obvious; the solutions unobtainable.