Late Life Manifesto @ephosianmanifesto - Tumblr Blog

In the eighties and nineties, I did energy audits and wrote specs for DOE weatherization projects. These jobs were parts of the Carter-era “moral equivalent of war” on energy waste. One of the job’s benefits to me was exposure to the ideas and personalities behind our efforts to conserve. (I also had a subscription to CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, and oblivious putz that I am, I thought everybody knew this shit.)

M. K. Hubbert was the Shell geologist who gave us the phrase “peak oil.” Peak oil is the point for an oil field, a nation, or the world when it produces at its highest rate. This peak moment might be more important than when a field’s fuel is exhausted, because we adapt to increasing production. Decreasing production demands increasing austerity, and everybody insists on different ideas about whose ox should be gored.

A biologist named Howard Odum gave us a couple or three ideas about energy. The possible third idea is to make flow diagrams of biological systems that look like wiring diagrams. Odum, born during WWI, was a radio hobbyist as a kid, and he borrowed electronic circuit diagrams to illustrate energy flow in biology. The first of Odum’s ideas I like is that every human good or service is embodied energy. It takes energy to harvest, manufacture, deliver, etc., and every product or service represents this. Koch-supported commentators have caught on to this as it relates to wind and photovoltaics, but not as it relates to oil. Odum’s second idea follows from the first. Fossil fuels themselves embody the energy that it took to mine them. Say it again: Fossil fuels themselves embody the energy that it took to mine them. Therefore a barrel of oil’s value to us is not that of a barrel, but of that barrel minus the energy that it took to find, pump, deliver, and regulate it. (In 1930 they got about eighty barrels for every one they spent. In 2010, it was nine.)

The US was thought to have already reached peak oil when I started to help households save energy. Worldwide peak was variously predicted for the 2010s or as late as 2030, and I thought that we had reached it earlier than that, but technologies like fracking and steam extraction have reopened closed oil fields or taken fuel from oil shale and tar sands, That seems to have pushed peak oil into the future. We should remember that it takes energy to get energy, so a predicted peak that doesn’t subtract the energy cost of the project will be overoptimistic.

As E. F. Schumacher pointed out, our energy sources are capital and not income. One of the wisest things this civilization could do is to recognize and get stingy and account for the energy spent on consumption, publish and regulate accordingly.

#peak energy #MK Hubbert #Howard Odum #EF Schumacher #energy ROI #Energy Policy #Energy as capital

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