“Islands of expertise surrounded by oceans of incoherence” – today’s energy policies in a nutshell
July 4, 20237:00 AM Terry Etam9 Comments
Recently, thanks to a YouTube-fiend friend, I was introduced to a new genius. Ordinarily, I’d reserve that qualification for someone that agrees with me lock, stock and barrel. But my capacity for self-delusion doesn’t stretch quite that far, and sometimes one runs across people that just see the world better, if differently; they just have better vision, and are better able to condense the madness swirling around us (not just energy, everything). It is fun to have beliefs challenged by such people because that can only enhance one’s own views.
This newly-discovered (by me) genius, Nate Hagens, is a very big picture thinker. As noted, I do not necessarily agree with him (he is an advisor to something called the Post Carbon Institute, which is populated by some serious activists whose thinking, to me, borders on delusional), but that doesn’t matter – he understands fundamentals of energy in a way that I’ve rarely seen, and is at the forefront of statements like this (from the PCI website): “[Fossil fuels] are energy-dense, portable, and storable sources of power. Accessing them changed nearly everything about human existence. They were uniquely transformative in that they enabled higher rates of harvesting and using all other resources—via tractors, bulldozers, powered mining equipment, chainsaws, motorized fishing trawlers, and more.”
Even if he participates in an organization with diehard activists that want to kill the hydrocarbon industry, it is awesome to see a simple reflection of reality like that, and then to discuss what he calls “Reality 101” – humans combine labour, energy and resources into products, which help create dollars, which we spend to generate feelings, and a byproduct of this process is waste and environmental impact. It may sound strange to say we do all this to generate feelings, and that often isn’t exclusively so (we generate products and then money to fill our stomachs and put roofs over our heads), but his point is correct insofar as travel and leisure and sports cars and expensive cocktails do fit into the positive feelings bucket.
But beyond quibbling over feelings, his grand assertions are correct and wise: “The amount of surplus energy we have dictates how much leisure time, and how much we can accomplish…” He notes that fossil fuels add “energy armies” that do nearly unbelievable things for us. In energy equivalents, one barrel of oil does about 4.5 years worth of a person’s human labour. “Our current global industrial infrastructure has specific requirements and constraints, and is particularly dependent on energy-dense liquid fuels.”
https://boereport.com/2023/07/04/islands-of-expertise-surrounded-by-oceans-of-incoherence-todays-energy-policies-in-a-nutshell/
