what is ‘net energy’?

what is ‘net energy’?.

the hockey stick

 

 

canadians might not know exponential math, but we know hockey. however, ‘the hockey stick’ describes an exponential function, which in turn describes the impacts of population and consumption.

just cuz it’s math, don’t tune out. this could be the most important bit of math you’ll ever learn–more important even than your tv bill.

follow me. imagine the beginning of humanity. if you start out with two people,  and you double it, twenty years later you have four people, twenty years later eight, twenty years later sixteen, and so on. it takes a long time to reach a billion–which we did around 1800, even two billion, which we did around 1927.

so, graph-wise, with time on horizontal or y-axis and human population on the x-axis, things stay pretty flat, like the shaft of a horizontal hockey stick. even forty years ago, in 1972, the earth had room to spare.

or so it seemed.

oh, doomsayers like robert malthus started prophecizing the end in 1798, but it wasn’t until after ww2 that we started noticing: hibbert’s prediction of peak oil, in 1956, was bang on. the erlichs’ the population bomb came out in 1968, the club of rome’s the limits to growth in 1972, and more recently, al gore’s an inconvenient truth won an oscar in 2007 and a few months later, the ipcc won the nobel prize–all warning of danger if we don’t change our ways.

but instead of heeding the prophesies, our population in the last forty years has sky-rocketed. suddenly that flat, horizontal line–the shaft of the hockey stick–goes left, shooting almost straight up–the blade of the hockey stick. that’s how it is with exponential math–it’s NOT gradual; it’s flat, flat, flat, then boom! surprise!.

problem is, our consumption has kept pace with our population. almost everybody wants to live like an american–excessively. and so, population and consumption (also known as population, affluence, and technology, or IPAT) impact the earth. for all of us to live like americans it would take nine earths, but we only have one.

consumption takes energy. our energy is almost wholly dependent on oil, which is in decline and no longer cheap. we’re scrambling to develop renewable forms of energy, but they will take time to develop and will differ somewhat. and few are taking conservation–living more with less–seriously. what do we do in the meantime?

hockey sticks don’t go on forever, even zdeno chara’s. there are limits to growth. more and more of us see them, accept them.

electrons & entropy

electrons have been around for billions of years–what *i* think for not even fifty, and it’s against the odds–wa-a-ay against odds–i’ll still be thinking in another fifty. even if i could extend my thinking for generations, entropy’ll get us in the end–all of us, even electrons.

recently i wondered how an electron can keep on ticking for billions of years, and my thinking, my consciousness, my self, my identity, for just an instant–after all, we’re made of electrons. what is the link between my thinking and my electrons? or have i got that backwards, from an electron’s p.o.v.? i think i’ll think on that and let you know.

but even just a few years–even a moment–can make a difference, regardless of the energy required or how far into the future we have to go. in some ways, all we have are moments. the energy of the moment doesn’t know about the energy of the future or the energy of the past. what you don’t know can’t hurt you. or help you. but we know-nothings feign omniscience, though none of us has succeeded going into the future (and returned to tell the rest or pick up our pets). nor can we go back, as far as we know, cuz entropy only goes one way: from more to less; somehow, life, tho mortal, goes the other way, seeming to make less into more.

but life comes at a cost: living requires energy. tho the universe is vast, eventually it and its electrons will run down. in our neck of the woods, most energy comes from the sun, which only expends energy; some energy–a little, tiny bit–comes from the earth (geothermal). but either way, whether from the sun or from the earth, energy is broken down. life, on the other hand, builds it up. life is special, hallowed even, but it only occurs when things are just right–goldilocks conditions, like the conditions for liquid water, which are found on neither mars nor venus but only here on earth (and possibly one of the moons of saturn).

we tamper with those conditions at our peril. misunderstanding and hubris breed misdirection. like a rocket when it goes haywire, everybody ducks. we don’t know where it’s going to land, but it won’t be on target, and that’s bad. in that case, for rocket engineers, in this case, for life in general.

so here’s my pitch: let’s go slow. we’ve got a few billion years, let’s use ‘em. forget pipelines. forget mining tar from sand or coal from mountain tops or natural gas from shale or uranium from ore. let’s go fishing instead. or berry picking.

paradigm shift

 

 

david suzuki says ‘the negative costs of damaging the environment and the benefits that nature provides are rarely factored into economic equations.’

but that’s changing. jean vanier senses, ‘a yearning for solidarity …. For too long we’ve been walking on the road to independence. We’re beginning to feel our loneliness. We’re beginning to see that we can only live if we’re together. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.’

competition comes at a cost, richard heinberg reminds us. realistically, though, cooperation ‘is the only path going forward that doesn’t end in a global tragedy in which the fate of the “winners” is hardly preferable to that of the “losers.”’

there’s a paradigm shift going on. from good ol’ wikipedia:’ Social scientists have adopted the Kuhnian phrase “paradigm shift” to denote a change in how a given society goes about organizing and understanding reality.’

margaret laurence reminded us that the river flows both ways. heraclitus reminded us we can’t step in the same river, meaning, as mike nickerson put it, the pattern is there tho the elements change. are we just another dance for trillions and trillions of electrons? joni mitchell, who warned us ‘you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone’, advises us to ‘get back to the garden and set our souls free.’ if we have souls. or maybe just dancing patterns of energy we call electrons.

mortal concerns

 

 

where am i theologically now? does it matter? well, for starters, if it’s all interrelated, is a quark really separate from the rest of the universe? is the dreamer separate from the dream? besides, i got mortal concerns. ahh, here she comes now. and i got my own stuff to worry about. still….

follow your bliss, or blisters

 

 

‘It is only by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.’ ~J Campbell–is this the same jc who said, ‘follow your bliss’? i remember that bliss doesn’t mean happiness. it’s closer to passion, and passion comes from suffering. to me, ‘follow your bliss’ means ‘what are you prepared to suffer?’ also, i believe fear too is a sign, guiding us to doors to pass thru. may you leave no doorknob unturned!

from wikipedia:

He saw this not merely as a mantra, but as a helpful guide to the individual along the hero journey that each of us walks through life:

‘If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.’

… During his later years, when some students took him to be encouraging hedonism, Campbell is reported to have grumbled, “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’”

think locally and carry a big chainsaw

• the biggest story on the planet got buried in canada, unlike the tar sands, but you can read about here.
• locally, some folks don’t see anything wrong with cutting down trees.  that’s how i found out our town has no policy to replace trees. all this economic planning don’t mean a thing in a concrete jungle (and, if you’re keeping score, concrete and pavement generate carbon and add to water and soil degradation; trees sequester carbon, trap  water, and build-up fertile soil–all free! last i checked, free is good.). google ‘awenda ontario map’ (or go here)–make sure you have it on ‘Satellite’ view, not ‘Map’ view, and see for yourself. down here, at eye level, it looks like we got lots of trees, but the bird’s eye view says different. you’d think no self-respecting bird would land here, let alone try to raise a family here. but they do. and we’re all the better for it. to call it a ‘tweety bird’ is like calling an african-american a nigger. it denigrates, and literally paves the way for more exploitation, i mean, development. and it’s not just birds that benefit from the trees; whole ecosystems, and casual passers by like you and me, and gawrsh! the trees themselves benefit. every tree is precious. but you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone. and sometimes tipping points are sudden, not gradual. like the straw that broke the camel’s back. don’t think it can happen? where’s the passenger pidgeon? the cod? look how perilous we are with acid rain and dutch elm disease. do you know how tenuous things are with bananas? we decree that scrubby, second growth trees are not fit for living? when’s the last time you saw a mature chestnut? where would we be without the christmas tree, the maple tree, or oxygen? here are two posts from last week. the first one kind of summarizes some of my recent mind mappings, the second casts some heroes and villains in this local tree tempest, so watch out for flying shrapnel. and for dessert, some timbits. no, you don’t have to go through the drive-through or drink their coffee.

the slippery slope

Posted on 2011-12-10

to a town planner friend–

yeah, i avoided urban planning 30 yrs ago cuz i read the job satisfaction was really low. for your sake, i hope it’s improved. but what i heard the other night wasn’t encouraging.

on the other hand, the world is changing; times of transition (there’s that word) are hard–nobody really knows what’s going on. mike nickerson says it’s a question of direction; thomas berry says we’re entering a new era, but do we choose the complicated, biodiverse ecozoic or the relatively simple monoculture of the technozoic?

people around us in comfortable huronia seem to think technology will save us. but even without the twin barbs of peak oil and climate change, we’re in over our heads technologically–plastic and less benign persistent chemicals, nuclear waste, overpopulation, to name but a few of the challenges we have in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

but people don’t know. after all, for example our way of dealing with our waste is to not deal with it, but to put it on a barge or train and externalize it. but we can’t do that anymore in a global world, on a finite planet.

you write, ‘policy direction should go from the residents of the community directly to Council (and then to staff)’, and i agree, except that that takes time and we may be running out of time; also people in our culture tend to be anthropocentric, instead of biocentric–but impatience and hubris are my banes and sometimes i’ve been pleasantly surprised by being wrong!

for the future (which, as a planner, you know, both never comes and simultaneously is here now–in fact geneticist theodosius dobzhansky said our choices for the future are neither random nor determined, but are creative responses to past conditions; furthermore, there really is no future tense in english. futurity is signified by ‘will’ (or the semi-formal ‘going to’) which really is not a verb, it’s an aspect, it’s a modal–bottom line, the future doesn’t exist, at least not in the english language (where i do my thinking). but it does in the language of quantum mechanics, where it’s just a dimension, part of the space-time continuum. but i digress from the ordinary, everyday, garden-type of future), i’d put my money on less energy inputs, less technology, less complexity, and more what homer-dixon calls ‘shocks’, which i think means resource–energy, food, water–wars. time frame? tho coal and peak oil and nuclear may extend the horizon to the 23rd century, paul chefurka thinks it may come to pass in as little as 75 years, ie, 2087. better get cracking!

that’s what i find disheartening about cop17: even with our future in peril, we couldn’t set aide our differences and pull for the common good. as elizabeth may writes from durban, ‘the realization that we will leave here with something that is better than nothing but inadequate to the threat is sinking in.’ and things get harder, the more we delay (see ‘impatience’).

that’s why it’s so wonderful to go to the karma marketplace and the grounded coffee company where people get it, know something’s fundamentally wrong, and are determined to do something about it–not just throw up their hands, say ‘oh well’, and watch ‘wheel of fortune’. and people like you, in the town apparatus and leading transition town huronia (tth).

i’ve got my personal demons to fight, but who doesn’t and who cares? i wanna increase the joy in my heart and in my community, now and now and now. for starters, i guess i can read the sustainability plan. and the transition primer. it’s a slippery slope from there!

cutting down trees

Posted on 2011-12-08

sue and i went to a town meeting tonight. we sat at the back. julie joined us. it was quiet for a while. good thing i brought my book. then it got really interesting when a councilor (pat file) and the deputy mayor (stephan kramp) opposed development without a site plan. i wrote them a letter. (other mentionables include councilor bob jeffreys; wes crown, chief town planner; and tim tully, naturalist and head of awenda prov pk; he wanted to speak tonight but had a prior engagement.)

dear pat and stephan,

thank you.

okay, i admit it. i’m a treehugger, i guess. i spent nearly twenty years in business, but deep down (and through and through) i’m a treehugger, really (surprise!)

however, i also know when due process needs to be followed. and you’re right: there’s no site plan. no site plan means poor decision. some thing could be missed. overlooked. under-valued.

and something’s being rushed, like the truth. no site plan speaks of a lack of planning. really, wes crown should know better.

it takes a long time to grow a tree, and in life and death it shelters and feeds birds and mosses and many other organisms. cut down a tree and it’s gone for generations. you can always pave paradise, if not this year, then next. what’s the rush?

meanwhile migratory birds might have one more flock to raise. that’s a bad thing? i’m more worried where they’re going to go after the trees are gone. is that in the site plan?

but i fear councilor jeffreys and the many who voted for him are myopic. they don’t see that the environment is not ‘out there’ to be commodotized. it’s everywhere, including councilor jeffreys. and i learned first-hand thru ‘out of the cold’ we’re all connected.

but he too and many others also fear. they fear sending the wrong message, that midland is not business-friendly (tho i fear that midland *is* business-friendly sends the wrong message).

i want to hear tim tully speak. probably, it won’t stop trees from being razed and birds fighting for a new nesting site and paradise being paved and humans losing out, this time, but it might change a few hearts. this time.

i bought a house on norene street, but by the time i moved in, my back yard neighbour, norman’s, had cut down trees. i see it again and again. mss. little lake. now this. do we have to grow economically just to stay alive? can’t we grow in other ways, in our hearts, in our compassion? or am i barking up the wrong tree?

i’m not a tree-hugger or even so much an environmentalist. i’m a realist, and the reality is what goes around comes around. nature, including humanity, moves in cycles. (it also appears to move linearally; put them together and what do you get? bippity-boppity-boo? no, a helix. now, where have i seen that before? but i digress. oh, that’s the end. almost.)

the cc’s? cuz sue and julie were with me; i won’t put words in their mouths, tho. my kids? cuz it’s their town, their future, too. and i’m their dad. also, cady’s worked for tim tully.

the end

peter

the power of the timbit

Posted on 2011-12-09

‘we don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.’–howard zinn

hey, it’s how mcdonalds, tim’s , wal-mart, and all the rest make their millions. it’s why i and many others choose fair trade and local.

knights in shining armour need not apply.