Energy and Hubris
According to Greek mythology, Zeus assigned the task of making sentient beings to the Titans: Epimetheus (afterthought) and his brother Prometheus (foresight). Epimetheus gave animals the essentials for their survival, claws, fangs, fur, and strength. Prometheus pitied humans, the naked ape with no advantageous attributes, so he stole fire from King Hephaestus and mechanics from Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to balance the prospects of Homo sapiens.
Prometheus brought energy and technology to humans, which allowed them to start civilizations, multiply, and rise to become the top predator on Earth. The god Zeus didn’t like what Prometheus had done, he saw that these gifts could bring trouble to humanity through unregulated progress that would lead to war, destruction, arrogance, and hubris. Prometheus was severely punished for his misjudgment; Zeus tied him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat at his liver eternally. Having punished the offender, Zeus tried to remedy the problem by ordering the god Hermes to give humans justice (dike) and respect (aidos) to be shared among all people. These qualities were supposed to help us be aware of the negative consequences of our energy and technological use and avoid hubris.
Our current culture does not have much connection with Greek mythology, instead, in our creation myth, god instructed humans to populate the Earth and use nature for their benefit without thinking about the consequences. There was no talk about the dangers of hubris in Western mythology, just a god-given right to rule over nature. This is the culture that has directed our progress since the Industrial Revolution, when humans devoted themselves to extract and pollute the Earth with no regard for any collateral damage. The belief in the absolute value of technological progress has led us to arrogance and extreme hubris. Zeus would be livid to see that justice and respect have been rationalized to excuse the trampling of the Earth and its ability to sustain us in the name of our new gods, technology, and the energy on which it depends.
Our industrial and technological progress would have never been possible without the most wonderful of Prometheus gifts: fossil fuels. Once we became aware of their power, we increasingly ignored the qualities of justice and respect and went on a rampage of exploitation and progress. We never looked at the collateral damage it caused; our ethical system takes for granted that humans are here to rule the Earth and use it as they see fit.
Just as we have failed repeatedly to notice the collateral damage that our energy and technology hubris has done with the climate and the environment, we also refuse to notice that energy is an intrinsic part of our economic system. Without energy, there is no growth in economics, there is no production, there can be some innovation, but limited by the availability of energy.
The discovery of fossil fuels was like winning the lottery for industrialized societies. The wonder of energy-packed fuels that humans hadn’t seen and will never see again seemed plentiful and easy to obtain with a little bit of ingenuity; our hubris didn’t allow us to think that they might be finite. At the beginning of the 20th century, the US was awash with oil, but by the late 1970s, it was dwindling. The US found then that the wonderful gift of powerful energy was finite; this was no problem, the rest of the world still had oil and as long as the US had its power and army, it could control its flow to benefit its economy. The feast continued and the Middle East was intervened by the US to have full control of the main supply of black gold. The feast reassured us that the supplies were never-ending; with the prevalence of the Petrodollar, the economies that used the dollar or more powerful currencies were blessed and their economies grew with no trouble. For the rest of the oil-using world, it was a different experience, the growth was quite elusive.
Fossil fuel exploration has increased proportionally to technological advances which each year require more and more energy. In the beginning, the extraction and refining of oil was easy and cheap, but as the easy fuels became scarcer, new technologies were needed to try to keep up with the energy needs of the advancing world. We have continued with our hubris, not noticing that each day there are fewer fossil fuels, and the ones that are left are getting more expensive and difficult to get. We fool ourselves into thinking that our ingenuity in creating new technologies for deep-sea drilling, fracking or tar sands will keep us in a perpetual state of energy abundance and economic growth.
Our economic growth is inherently dependent on the availability of net energy we have, the energy that is left to do work after discounting the energy required to extract and refine it. The concept of EROI, Energy Return on Energy Invested, the energy cost of acquiring a particular energy resource, is helpful to understand the net energy problem that we have; the higher the EROI, the less energy is required to transform the energy to do work. The crème de la crème of fossil fuels that started the industrial revolution had a very high EROI of around 100, which ensured the fast growth of the economies in the industrialized world. Unfortunately, this type of oil was a one-time experience, the beauty of its density would not last, oil is a finite commodity. After two centuries of use, we are finding ourselves with less and less net energy to do work, and EROIs are lowering dramatically. According to systems ecologist Charles Hall, the coiner of the term EROI, energy-guzzling economies like ours require at least a 30 EROI, but there can be no functioning economy when the EROI goes below or about 10.
In the US, by 1970, the EROI of oil had good down from 100 to 40 and by now it is about 14.1. As oil becomes more difficult to extract, the combined EROI of world fossil fuel resources remains below the comfortable zone. As a result, oil prices soared to $140 per barrel in 2007. The excessive price of the prime economical mover, oil, hurt the economy by affecting the whole chain of manufacturing, transportation, and consumption. The 2008 financial crisis was a reflection of the drastic fall in EROI that happened since 2005; we had to pay more to produce less energy, having to provide for our ever-increasing energy demands was looking more like a losing battle.
In 2009, President Barak Obama opened up the US to fracking, tar sands, and more deep-sea drilling, all in an attempt to mask the reality of the energy situation. Obama was very proud of making the US independent in oil and a world top producer; even in recent speeches at Wall St firms, he is still proud of this big feat. The problem is that Obama and many people in Wall St. don’t seem to be aware of the term EROI. All the new explorations that Obama was so proud of are mirages that appear to have plenty of opportunities, but in reality, are boondoggles of very difficult to extract and refine energy with a dismal EROI. The EROI of all new oil explorations, shale oil, tar sands, oil shale, deep-sea drilling is well below the 10 EROI required for a minimum functioning of economies. For example, the EROI of the Athabaskan tar sands in Alberta Canada is just 6.1
Obama’s hubris about energy independence produced a boom in fracking and tar sands. Wall St invested, loans were given, the media made a big deal about the wonderful oil prospects, but the reality is that it was a very sly Ponzi scheme in which nobody ends up with gains. The only way to make a small financial gain is by begging for government subsidies, a very unsustainable practice. Oil industry consultants like Daniel Yergin, author of “The Prize”, know how to convince prospective drillers into the goodness of fracking; he once said that companies can go bankrupt, but the rocks don’t. That is where business people like Yergin get it wrong; fracking is a mirage in which you use a lot of energy and money to squeeze out and an ever-decreasing amount of oil out of the cracks of rocks; so yes, Daniel Yergin, rocks certainly go bankrupt too.
What most people perceive as a great move by Obama was just an unsustainable strategy that revealed the hubris in our society. Obama’s energy policies were not sound from the profit and energy point of view, but they were even worse from the environmental one. Fracking and tar sands produce tons of greenhouse emissions and pollute the nearby water, aquifers, and soil.
As the climate change disaster continues its progress, it has become evident that some action is needed. The new ideas espoused by the Green New Deal to solve the climate problem, insist on totally replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, without noticing that these new energies don’t fare very well from the EROI point of view. Renewable energy has a very dismal EROI; the highest is wind with a 28 EROI, then solar, geothermal and wave, all way below the 10 EROI baseline. This means that a complete move out of fossil fuels would mean drastic de growth that would happen as a consequence of low EROI, without the need for any economic policy. Green New Deal proponents demand divestment from fossil fuel companies, but in a way, the ever-increasing reduction in net-energy in these fuels will cause their fall. The problem we have is that there is nothing to replace them, so our net-energy availability will continue to decrease.
The intermittency and unreliability of renewable energy make it very inefficient and this is why the EROI is so low. Renewable energy requires a big investment of energy in mining rare earths, manufacturing of steel, carbon fiber, plastics, copper, and transportation, to end up with very little energy in return. To make it worse, most plastics are currently made out of fossil fuels, which are either dwindling or being reduced because of their effect on the planet. Wind turbines could not exist without plastics, solar power could not exist without enough energy to mine and manufacture the panels. Modern renewable energy currently gives us about 0.3% of our total global energy needs, so the drastic increase required to replace fossil fuels with such low net-energy reservoirs would be impossible.
There is a good metaphor for the relationship between net energy and the economy. Let’s imagine a boat that starts its journey in a river at the top of a mountain; the boat is the economy and the net energy is the river. When you start at the head of the river your boat moves fast through the rapids, this is the equivalent of an economy with high EROI fuels. The boat is moving so fast for a long while, convincing the passenger that this wonder will last forever; moving requires little effort, just a paddle to direct the boat is needed. As the river goes down the mountain, the speed of the water is gradually reduced, each time more and more, until it arrives in the valley where it moves very slowly. This is what happens to an economy relying on a finite resource, low EROI starts creeping into the scene. The passenger is aware that the speed of the river has changed and tries to adapt to the situation. He is finally mired in the mud and there is no energy he can input to make the boat move, so he leaves the boat.
We are in a similar situation but we don’t seem to be noticing that our fast river has changed. We think all energy is the same, all we have to do is to replace it for supposedly cleaner methods; unfortunately, that is not how a world ruled by thermodynamics works.
Our move into low EROI, accompanied by our usual hubris, is a reality, yet we still behave as though we were a delusional occupant of the boat, who doesn’t notice it source of speed is gone. Our economy can’t move without powerful energy refueling it. It is a fact, not a supposition. The limits to economic growth are built into the system itself from the beginning; our species problem is that we don’t like to accept that the energetic situation has changed, and we continue making plans as though everything remained the same.
Most economists continue modeling their theories based on the availability of powerful energy that doesn’t exist anymore. In our metaphor, it is as if the occupant of the boat would make his decisions based on the movement of the boat when the water was moving fast, when in fact it is mired in a marsh. We are in trouble not just from the point of view of net energy depletion, but the availability of resources.
The economic hubris based on the assumption that technology can solve the dwindling in net energy and resources was challenged in 1972 by systems scientist Jay Forrester, whose research on system dynamics was used for the book “Limits to Growth” by the Dennis and Donella Meadows team. Forrester’s modeling showed that complex systems have strong non-linearity, which means that they don’t behave in smooth super predictable ways, as economists like it, but can suddenly change dramatically. This will become more and more evident with our low EROI energy and resource situation.
The Limits to Growth idea, though quite sound, was unfairly criticized and debunked by economist William Nordhaus, winner of the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize. His criticism, a paper entitled “Measurements without Data” made possible the continuation of economics modeling that insists on smooth progressions that don’t correspond to reality. Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his models that include some thinking about climate change, but allow the economic paradigm to continue as usual.
This hubristic status quo acts as a blindfold on our reality; there is no way that we can avoid what scientist Ugo Bardi calls the Seneca fall. About 2000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a very prescient passage about how growth is slow, but ruin is rapid. Bardi used it to point out how our continuous and increasing use of resources and energy is unsustainable and will lead to a sharp decline soon.
The natural resource cliff that we are facing, which will also affect our economy greatly, doesn’t mean that we are running out of the most common metals and minerals, but that those materials are becoming more difficult to access, requiring more and more energy for their processing; this is what physicist and economist Robert Ayres calls resource depletion. This problem is compounded by our low EROI. This crunch in energy and resources is inevitable but is not the only thing curtailing our hubristic ideas of eternal growth; the greenhouse concentration on our atmosphere has been increasing in the complete opposite direction of EROI and resources. Their concentrations are so high, that they have affected the Earth’s ability to guarantee our survival shortly. Even after the reduction in greenhouse emissions during the reduction in activity caused by the lock-downs, the CO2 concentration numbers have been climbing to previously unknown heights and sustaining the climb at around 418 ppm.
Prometheus was harshly punished for giving energy and technology to Homo sapiens, leading to excess and hubris. We have arrived at the highest point in hubris; we refuse to see how our net energy resources are dwindling and our planet is on fire. Zeus tried to modify Prometheus’ dangerous gift by giving us justice and respect, but we have chosen to use them to further our hubris, instead of curbing it. Our short-term obsessed minds think it pays to indulge in hubris; it seems optimistic and massages our species ego to confirm our superiority over the rest of life on the planet. Our hubris prevents us from noticing that we are walking on a tight high rope and the worrisome lowering of the EROI means we don’t have an energy-net to fall back on. Our excessive use of energy has added to our woes by disturbing the Earth and dramatically lowering our chances of survival. No mighty Zeus is delivering his punishment, but we will soon notice how the hubris itself incorporates its woes for our species.
