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The problem I see with scenario 9 (admittedly using my perhaps limited faculties), is that it appears to indicate that by 2000 we had used less than 1/4 of our endowment of resources, indeed just over 1/8 from the look of it. Does this really square with what we are seeing with respect to resource depletion, ie copper, lead, aluminium, rare earth elements, not to mention fossil fuels? Perhaps we really do have 7/8ths of our resource endowment left, but that proportion is certainly not the high grade sources we began this adventure with.
As we move to increasingly lower grade ores we need to move more material to extract the same amount of end resource, so even with a hypothetical 100% efficient earthmoving machine we still need to expend proportionally more energy to get what we need as the ore quality declines. Even moving to electric machinery and renewable sources will require ever expanding infrastructure to supply a constant amount of a resource, meaning the use of the other resources required to make that infrastructure will rise continuously, won't it?
Essentially, what is saved in increased efficiency manufacturing aluminium window frames is lost creating more machinery & energy sources to power them to mine more rarefied aluminium ores?
The "peak minerals" question is an interesting one, and a topic that I think is far from settled.
Herman Kahn was particularly dismissive of this idea (see my "Fat Man" article for my commentary on this), and by and large I tended to agree with him.
I think with many minerals, we haven't come close to peaking. Recycling and substitution rarely seem to get factored in when depletion of minerals is considered either.
Using your aluminium window frame example, do we really need to use aluminium for window frames - isn't wood sufficient in most cases (ie. my house has no aluminium window frames at all). In addition, aluminium is incredibly common in the earth's crust - are we really even 1/8 of the way to depleting it ? Is it noticeably more difficult to extract aluminium now than it was 20 years ago ?
The most clear cut example of resource depletion seems to be oil. Some rare metals (indium for example) and phosphorus are worth keeping an eye on. Other metals like gold, copper, iron ore etc I tend to think aren't going to be a problem for a long time yet.
The other factor to consider is once population levels stabilise, and all countries reach a certain level of industrialisation, I'd expect to see the need to extract new metals from the earth to slowly wither away.
This is the cradle to cradle idea - all industrial inputs are simply recycled from previous production - you don't keep extracting more stuff out of the ground.
When you look at the future using that as an assumption, scenario 9 actually seems overly pessimistic.
I'm not saying this is the most probably outcome however - just that I think this is the best one to aim for...
"When you look at the future using that as an assumption, scenario 9 actually seems overly pessimistic."
Wow! We obviously view the world very differently. When I read LTG I found myself finding all sorts of assumptions that bias towards a fine outcome. The authors point this out themselves, explaining how in their models there are no bad actors...corrupt politicians, greedy corporations, mob-violence, religious extremism, special-interest lobbying, paranoid nation-states...etc.
Scenario 9 seems so astonishingly impossible given the real world I did basically dismiss it.
Hmmm - I didn't say that this was probable - just that if you assumed that our industrial systems were converted to operate as a closed loop system, you could come up with a more optimistic scenario.
Its not impossible for this to be done, but its certainly a huge task, even larger than converting to a completely clean energy system.
It would be a nice thing to attempt though.
You're right - it would be nice to attempt. And I think you are right in thinking that there are a lot of resources that we have barely tapped. There are two very important factors that must be considered during that attempt, however.
1) What is the realistic possibility of making an attempt that is not heavy influenced by "bad actors"?
2) Although many resource bases may still be very abundant, the real questions are - which ones are not, and how will they affect our attempts at creating a sustainable culture?
As long as these things are also kept in mind, I am all for working for a sustainable society.
I am all for working for sustainability, but for sustainability you must begin where it is at least possible to be sustainable. At 6.6 billion people with the concomitant environmental destruction, we are ... how far away from a population sustainable on the remaining ecology?
4.5 billion too far? 5.5? 6.5?
"If there were one species that could disappear for the benefit of the sustainability of the planet, it would be us." -- Jane Goodall, "The Selfish Green" BBC debate
Yep. As always, population is one of the primary problems. I think our cultural/belief biases regarding growth and our rights to reproduce are so strong that it will take non-voluntary reductions to shake us (as a society) out of our complacency.
"I am all for working for a sustainable society". But you won't.......until everyone else does...... and everyone else thinks the same as you.
When will we start sustaining? When should we have started? Will we ever?
Look at the world around you. Over consumption is normal now, it is what got us to where we are and it will inevitably lead to collapse. We absolutely need overconsumption to sustain economic growth.
We used to have one TV per household, now there is three or four, several DVD recorders, cell phones etc. We must have the latest technological gadget or appliance.
YOU will start a sustainable lifestyle when it does not affect your means or when you are forced by circumstances. You (and I) are like the vast majority, the human race as a whole is easy to understand and predict.
Look at the past to see the future. The depletion of a resource including foodstuff will encourage a frenzy, an orgy of destruction and scramble, to get it before it is all gone or before someone else does. That is human behaviour. We will watch as the last tree is cut down, carrier pigeon slaughtered or coal seam plundered.
Sustainability will be a reality forced upon us. It won't even be recognized as what it is.
Until then we will sacrifice anything and everything to maintain a perception of business as usual.
Won't I? Perhaps on a global level my contribution means virtually nothing until most other people work towards sustainability and we reduce our population, but on a personal level there are plenty of people who are voluntarily reducing their consumption, or trying to produce for themselves. And I am one. I fully understand how futile that is when 99.9% of other people are not, but you have to start somewhere. Things won't change overnight. And I, like many people who are voluntarily changing, have a long way to go.
You may well be right - sustainability may end up being force upon us. That doesn't preclude trying to work towards a voluntary change.
I'm sorry if I insulted I'm sure you mean well..
The level of sustainability which was/is/will be required, means sacrifice. Buying a smaller car and putting a solar panel on the roof won't cut it. That's not sustainability, that's self preservation.
Eating less, growing and slaughtering your own. Sustainable manufacturing and construction.
Your perception of "entertainment" must alter completely and forever.
Our obsessive quest to obtain or participate with what makes us feel good is the ultimate journey to destruction for human kind.
Every species likes to be pleased. Animals would eat themselves to death if they could. The problem with us, is we have the ability to seek and bask is pleasures which become addictive and then appear normal. Like any addict we must continually increase our pleasure levels to obtain the "high" we sought.
Human pleasure centres can be stimulated by drugs, violence, sex, power, status, gambling and eating.
In the developed world and now in the developing world, since the turn of the last century and especially since the 1950's each succeeding generation expects more pleasures from life, they also expect more for their offspring.
We absolutely, positively cannot change. Our very existence now is interwoven with the type of world we have created. Everything is interdependent on over consumption which we have grown used to. It's acceptable behaviour.
All the popular solutions to peak oil involve more consumption. It's an attempt to maintain the current way of life. Synthetic oil, wind mills, solar cells and so are illusory solutions, exploited by governments and business. They too need straws to clutch, they have a way of life to maintain.
No insult taken. Although I may quibble over some of the specifics of your argument, I agree with you in general.
First of all, you're talking primarily about the western world, not the whole world. Over consumption is a larger problem, particularly in the U.S., than in other parts of the world such as Japan, which has anemic economic growth for many years now, greatly because of lack of "western style" consumption.
Furthermore, you're going way too far if you think people need to grow their own food and slaughter their own animals. Many members of society have not been growing their own food for thousands of years now. Things may have to change, but we're not going back to the point where people all grow their own food.
As far as us being unable to change, you're underestimating people's adaptability when forced to change. People wouldn't buy 3 TVs if each TV cost $10,000. Maybe people wouldn't be happy about it, but they'd survive.
You name every single technological innovation as illusory. I say your ideal of living on the farm where we all slaughter our own animals is even more so. Even faced with problems, we're still going to endeavor to move forward, not backwards. I doubt an agrarian society could support anywhere near the population we currently have, so that scenario already assumes catastrophic failure and thus is hardly something to aim for.
As a colleague of mine is fond of saying (somewhat ominously), "by 2100, we'll all be living sustainably".
Yeah, why not give it a try.
I like the following attitude:
"Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around’ will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer “yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “no” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.” E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
Nice one - that sums it up pretty well.
Personally, I like:
-Andre'
(the quote apparently is variously ascribed to Barbara Marx Hubbard or Dee Hock)
Nice quote.
Most of this thread goes off discussing whether or not the scenarios are optimistic, pessimistic or whatever. But I'm much more interested in the why do we misunderstand part. Is there some sort of selection for groupthink - Obama, Hillary and Change, for example? Is there some sort of biochemical mechanism by which we affect each other's thinking? Is this Dawkin's evolution by meme? I can't see why we would select for mistakes, except maybe it's better to be in the herd than the single surviving lone wolf [Was the single man left on Mars in Bradbury's Martian Chronicle really any better off than everyone else who returned to earth for the final wars?]
The same thing was happening to the announcers during the Super Bowl. Before the Patriots scored in the last half, the announcers were talking themselves into turning on their golden boy Pats. And the Giants? Forget it - even though the Giants weren't playing the same game as the Patriots and there were still two minutes left. These are experience sportscasters - they should know better than I. But herd mentality or groupthink seems to trump any sort of critical thinking.
We go out of our way to misunderstand. We put effort into missing the point. Why? How does that help our genes? Does it function by increasing conflict? [Obviously I'm way past my depth here.]
cfm in Gray, ME
Drywki,
There may be a tie here to Nat Hagen's discussion regarding our dopamine based addictions to oil.
In that other post, Nate talks about pecking orders among social animals and how the establishment of a pecking order reduces repetition of infighting and thus minimizes energy expenditure (energy wastage) by the group as a whole.
Well, the phenomenon of "groupthink" achieves the same end result: minimization of energy consumption by the group through the unquestioning adaptation of a cohesive way of thinking, no matter how wrong the thinking is.
By conforming, and "going along to get along", individuals within the group minimize their own energy expenditures (because thinking consumes energy). They in essence become energy parasites who profit off the energy expended by others in the group, the ones who already did the "hard hard" thinking (as one esteemed leader of the USA is fond of saying).
Additionally, the group as a whole reduces its energy consumption by not spending more than a minimal amount of time thinking about, critiquing or reviewing a particular point of view or decision.
So take the decision by the American people to go to war with Iraq as an example. Once an initial "go" (rather than "no go") decision was adopted, the bulk of the herd fell into line and made the excuse that further questioning was "unpatriotic".
But truth be told, most people do not enjoy doing some hard hard thinking on their own. It consumes personal energy and personal time. It's so much easier to become a mental parasite and unquestionably adopt the "groupthink" as one's own.
Thank you for bringing up this very interesting question. :-)
And thank YOU for your development of it.
... Sometimes I just fall in love with this site all over again!
I'll ditto that sentiment.
This site is filled with many perspicacious contributors like Driki who spend time (and their own energy) thinking about stuff and posing interesting questions. Then collectively we start developing greater understandings of the world around us.
If it hadn't been for Nate Hagen's excellent post the other day, I would have never started thinking about energy conservation within a group. If it hadn't been for Driki's observant question, I would have never made the connection between the two ideas. So it is only with the combined contributions of all the people here at TOD that ideas are developed.
Thank you Jaymax for pointing that out about why TOD is so cool. Most web sites are filled with flame wars. This one is filled with thoughtful discussions. Let's keep it up.
Someone else made the point that any major decisions made by leaders that are supported by the people (groupthink) by definition rely on the support of 'irrational' people in order to succeed. In this case, these 'irrational' people could be seen as those who "...do not enjoy doing some hard thinking on their own."
I thought the connection with 'irrational' people was a good insight in spite of (or possibly because of) the fact that it grates on a lot of people who like to think of the human race as having the capability of making 'rational' decisions in a groupthink-like way. The challenge for a really good leader is to take advantage of the group-think (sheeple?) tendencies of people without coming across as an evil manipulator (Cheney?). Good leaders and bad leaders use the same basic 'rabble-rousing' techniques. It's just that good leaders happen to espouse policies that I agree with ;-) (after having thought long and hard about them of course!)
We are all idea-parasites.
How often have you heard someone say, "I'm not a ___ expert, but those who are say that X is true and Y is false"?
(Fill in the blank and substitute as appropriate for X and Y.
Example: ___=Petroleum, X=Infinite_growth, Y=Peak Oil.)
We all accept the "hard thinking" done by the experts and blindly adopt most of them as our own. If the doctor says, "Take this blue pill twice a day," you do it. If the banker says, "Take this subprime loan," you do it. If the government says, "We're here to help ...", you believe them.
A complex and highly specialized civilization requires that we trust others to do the hard thinking for us. We each can't do it all.
Just on the "Peak Minerals"... I was reminded of "Peak Wood"
The essay linked to from that EB article is still available as a series of unfinished book chapters which makes a very interesting read.
Chapters 3 Fire and Metals: Copper, 4 The Bronze Age and 5 Iron had some interesting ideas about the interplay between metal purity, yields and sources of fuel coupled with the development of ancient empires.
The author also mentions why there are no magic bronze swords, only magic iron/steel swords.
Isn't it a fact that we generally extract the most economical ores of a mineral first? This is why we use bauxite rather than kaolin clay for our feedstock when making aluminium. I've read an abstract of a paper that states that unless we get out there and find more bauxite we've got about 25 years left of "easy pickings". (http://www.springerlink.com/content/gl8v1738l98l122l/)
When we move to substitution we increase pressure on the substituted resource above and beyond what has already been factored into usage growth rate predictions, therefore bringing peak in that resource closer, as well as increasing the energy required and taking the hit of reduced efficiency, assuming we are generally using the most efficient material for the job in the first place (and market forces would generally dictate we are)
For example consider the current use of copper as a conductor, and the move to aluminium as the substitute suggested by some people in order to cope with the predicted increase in the use of electric cars and the need for all that extra wiring. Copper is a better conductor per unit volume, aluminium per unit weight. But the main problem is that aluminium requires a lot more energy to refine into a useable end product, so we then need more power sources to supply the extra demand to make that substitution. This, coming at a time when we want to create a heap more alternative power sources to replace existing demand, so we are hit with twice the crisis, needing more power stations, more wiring for those stations, and more wiring for more cars.
In those chapters I linked to this was one of the issues raised.
The example cited was the Island of Cyprus which was once THE preeminent copper exporter because of an unusually rich deposit but even so...
SO when you substitute a lower grade ore where does the energy come from to extract it?
Hence large grains of salt (and some healthy skepticism) are needed when someone just quotes the massive tonnages of minerals available from the earths crust without reference to the concentration (and therefore energy requirements) of the ore bodies - a key reporting requirement of any prospective mining company at float time, No?
Now some clever physical chemistry can overcome some of these limitations... but overcoming entropy is a Red Queens game.
Another interesting quote about ancient fuel use, this time around Athens, and the silver mine that powered its golden age.
I like both your quotes, and I understand the point, but in order for this to be more than an abstract argument you'll need to provide some actual examples of minerals that have ore quality that is in noticeable decline so we can consider how soon a crunch point arrives and what alternatives are available, in terms of either recycling the existing (extracted) quantity of the material or finding substitutes.
Other constraining factors can also be introduced (water, energy etc) - but in the case of energy I've long held that we could get more energy from renewable sources than we currently do from non-renewables, so I don't really feel that the assumption that energy *must be* a limiting factor is a valid one.
As a general rule, perhaps we could assume that is true - but that doesn't imply we are close to getting through the most economical ores yet.
Regarding specific minerals, I'd like to see an accurate estimate of global reserves with mineral grades plotted against against the reserves estimates (preferably showing past extraction as well). Minerals reserves estimates (in my experience anyway) don't have anything like this sort of data available. The paper you reference for bauxite looks interesting but I can't get to the detail. I'm somewhat wary of existing reserve estimates for common materials, as exploration tends to be limited when there is copious supply readily available.
In Australia, the problem has usually been finding capital and markets to develop huge mineral deposits, not finding suitable quality ore. The largest mines have lifespans that may stretch for a century - and some of these are only just being developed.
I might add that the original assumption isn't a given - it hasn't been true for oil for example - most of Iraq's high quality, cheap to extract oil remains underground, while far more expensive North Sea oil has already gone into decline. Politics (or the intersection of economics with national interests) can be as important in how and when resources are extracted as pure economics.
Are you sure this is true ? Is aluminium the cheapest form of window frame ? Or just one that meets the requirements at an acceptable cost given current energy and mineral prices ? Would it really be impossible to substitute wood, for example, for aluminium without running out of wood ?
The wiring question is interesting - but I'd like to see a copper depletion graph that shows that we can't build out an large scale smart grid and electric transport fleet before I assume that this can't be done...
It certainly would be nice to have the kind of data needed readily available, but it generally doesn't appear to be. Just briefly, the following article covers peak copper:
http://www.321energy.com/editorials/watson/watson121605.html
But as he mentions, there are other reserves that are not currently exploited for various reasons (Antarctica for one) though I have no idea whether these are included in the above figures.
Geoscience Australia indicates that investment in copper exploration (in AU) increased by 68% in 2006 to $177.5 million (http://www.ga.gov.au/minerals/exploration/resources_advice/AIMR2007.jsp) We supposedly have a resource of 42.4Mt of economic demostrated resources of copper, up just 2% after a 68% increase on exploration expenditure. The report at that address also indicates that average copper prices were up 86% in 2006, whilst we had a 5% decrease in production and an 8% decrease in exports (I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the report on other resources, should be informative...)
From the following news article on China gives a rough reference to recent production (http://www.sinofile.net/saiweng/sip_blog.nsf/d6plinks/YZHI-7465PE) June 2007:
So production has already increased by 4 million tonnes, so on the 2005 figures we have less than 33 years left, given that reserves seem to be growing more slowly than production and demand (though I cannot find any authoritative recent worldwide figures in a brief search)
Watson goes on to say:
Emphasis is mine. So we may be okay? Or is it more like growth in oil reserves?
In the following, discussing Ok Tedi: http://www.rettet-die-elbe.de/oktedi/cu_strategy.htm there is a brief mention on the change in character of ore reserves:
Which is dated in the early 1990's, but illustrates that we have moved the exploitable grades from 5% to 0.5%. There is no indication as to whether there are still reserves at 5% that we can exploit. I don't know how it really works, but would costs for the 0.8% case allow the producer to set a price that allowed competition with a similar producer operating on 5% grades, or would the market as a whole have to be down to the 0.8% case to make all of them equally viable?
I totally appreciate that politics/national interests have a large part to play, but don't they usually make the situation worse than a base quantitative case?
As for window frames, I'm not saying it would be impossible to substitute wood, but that the impacts of that substitution flow on through the entire economy and have unexpected consequences in other areas. Consider the following: if we have to ramp up timber plantations to replace the current project home usage of aluminium for windows across the country, this extra land needs to be taken from some other land uses. It obviously wont be the prime agricultural land we are currently burying under suburbia, so it must come from "real" farmland. This then puts pressure on food and fuel-crop prices, and so around we go again.
Me too :-) Have you seen anything on rough guesses as to how much wiring would be needed to build the grid and the fleet anywhere? I recall that on roeoz one of the fellows did up a rough estimate of the cabling needed to create a certain sized solar farm, and it was a fair amount. Might see if I can find it later on.
OF course the huge attraction of our aluminium window frames is lack of maintenance.
Wood needs to be periodically painted.
Of course, think of all the window frame painting jobs that would be created.
Thanks for following through with that.
I agree that this is an issue that needs to be kept in mind and studied carefully (sooner rather than later) - I'm just loath to jump to a definitive conclusion in the absence of conclusive data.
Ok Tedi is an interesting example to use - one reason for the relatively low grade of copper may be that it was also a gold mine - and thus this may not be a true indicator of the economics of a pure copper mine at this point in time (Olympic Dam would be another, where gold and uranium are also products as well as copper). It would be interesting to see the grades for BHP's big newish mines in Chile.
I'll note once again (sounding like a broken record) that with a stable population, a fully industrialised planet and cradle to cradle style manufacturing, demand for raw materials would drop dramatically compared to the current era of growing population and China and India industrialising - so the modelling for this has a lot of factors to take into account - scenario 9 still seems possible if all the right actions are performed...
The reserves of low grade copper ore can best be described as Germany. It's called the Kupfershale and includes parts of Poland as well. Of course, it's a coproduct of sodium carbonate and oil at those grades. The price of copper would have to rise to ten dollars a pound or some ridiculous figure like that to make it economic to mine a billion tons of copper from the medium grade deposits. The high grade deposits have already been mined where they were known.
And ten dollars a pound is still an economic price to pay for copper where it can't be substituted for by much cheaper aluminum or silica.
Lifeforms have a way of concentrating various elements within their bodies such as the way vertebrates concentrate calcium in their bones out of very low grade sources. Bioengineering could design microbes such as phytoplankton which can concentrate desired elements with in their bodies thereby greatly lowering the cost of extracting metals from low cost ores.
This is not true of all organisms and/or all elements
See Ecological Stoichiometry for a detailed account.
Ye gods.
I don't suppose you have an executive summary for those of us daunted by 300 pages of technical detail delivered via Google Books' mediocre interface ?
"Ecological stoichiometry" is a fancy way of saying "the conservation of mass in biological systems". The stuff making up living things comes from somewhere, and goes somewhere.
It's the study of what that stuff is (the elements), where it came from and where it goes (reactants and products in the environment), and how (organic chemistry).
I have not read the book, but SP's point is that the complex concentration of elements by biological systems doesn't always work the way thomas deplume suggests that it does.
And in working out such a complex problem, there will also be unintended, unforeseen consequences in its application.
Thanks.
I would add that your bio-concentrating process hasn't been thought thru.
Unless the elements you want to concentrate are already in solution, you still have the problem of collecting and concentrating the organisms (and collecting bacteria/phytoplankton from water isn't that easy either).
Given the high energy part is moving and crushing rocks... how is this process going to be better than leaching with acids/bases (also energy intensive)?
Any extant examples?
I wasn't saying completely how it would work but IF a bioengineered organism COULD be created that would do the job using solar energy. Perhaps a combination of microbes might be needed. The ability to slice and dice DNA opens up the POSSIBILITY of cheaper ways of processing materials. Small fast reproducing critters with shells which could concentrate metals and minerals out of a solution with pulverized low grade ore. The key words are if, could, and possibility.