I recall a kid’s TV program from 1969 where a bumbling wizard from the 11th century comes to the future and is enamored with the magic of “Electrickery.” He would flip a light switch and act as if he cast a spell so that the light turned on. Now a quick question. How many people do you think know the process of what actually happens when they flip a light switch on? I am not trying to be demeaning in any way here, just trying to make a point. To many people, power stations somehow generate electricity which runs through lines to outlets where they live and work. Plug in something to an electrical outlet and switch it on – hey presto – electrickery. They don’t see a need or have any desire to understand the process – they use electricity and pay their monthly usage bills – and occasionally, depending on where they live, they have inconvenient brown outs or blackouts. And that is all fine and well until you start talking extreme conservation and renewable energy systems, then the cognitive switch flips off.
In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla promised free energy to everyone – literally everyone on the planet – and we were only in the middle of the industrial revolution then in developed countries, in which electrical systems were only just becoming mainstream. Whether Tesla could have fulfilled his promise we may have to wait to find out. When Tesla’s financial supporter, J.P. Morgan, realized Tesla’s aims and also that his systems were also wireless, the funding was pulled. (Many investors in electricity were also heavily invested in copper and ways to charge per unit of electricity used.) Tesla died in 1943 and government agents immediately removed all of Tesla’s research. And the point being, how would the world look now if Nikola Tesla’s genius had been allowed to flower.
In the last post I covered the idea of EROI. Hypothetically, what would you measure if EROI were irrelevant and we literally had ‘free’ energy? We live within a convoluted economic system that works, only, if everything has value because of its scarcity. Valuating scarcity is what drives the stock exchange, market prices, and how money is controlled. All these factors are illusionary concepts only. We accept them because the controllers of this economic system have convinced the masses that it is too complex for them to understand – a hell of a lot like ‘electrickery’ – not that hard to understand if you want to comprehend it.
When, or if, we ever find out Nikola Tesla was right and we finally get ‘free energy’ then society will change radically and mega-corporate systems involved with energy generation will collapse. Meanwhile we need to start using ‘Emergy’ calculations for future energy needs now! Currently, EROI is used to determine how useful various energy generating technologies for any given area. Solar in Barrow, Alaska, not a good idea, but wind would be. Fossil fuels, being the dense energy stored fuels they are, have always had an energy EROI advantage, but they also have a serious pollution side-effects, besides being limited resources in the long run. Yes, fossil fuel scarcity will eventually be a problem in the not-too-distant future.
Emergy tells us the precise energy value inherent in the complete life cycle of any item. In one of my college classes I had my students give the full manufacturing story of a single item from initial resources to its final disposal. All were shocked at the amount of energy and manufacturing involved – and they weren’t even calculating it all; as in emergy. Now imagine if every product we obtained had a real and honest emergy number on it; we could make decisions about its worth based on the total energy.
In 2002, William McDonough and Michael Braungart published their landmark book Cradle to Cradle – now generally referred to as C2C – that also incorporates the idea of a ‘circular economy’ as opposed to our current linear economy. A circular economy is the way that nature’s natural energy economy works. As with biomimicry, nature has had hundreds of millions of years to finesse technical systems that work on a finite planet, and a natural energy economy is among them. I think of it as full accounting, which seems reasonable, but is apparently too extreme for economists to fathom.
Now the natural world works with limited resources – minerals, and nutrients and limited sunlight for photosynthesis (varies from season to season and atmospheric conditions) – then utilizes carbon dioxide for an amazing start to the trophic cycles (see link) that produce so much biodiversity thriving wherever, and whatever, ecological conditions exist for life. While there is competition, there is also extensive collaboration within the natural world and even more mutualism (an interaction between two or more different species that benefits all of them in some way) – much more than biologists once believed. Indeed, the interactive aspects between many species is so complex that biologists are only now coming to terms with just how elegant the whole natural economic system truly is, and it is all built within interlinking cycles that have no hierarchy.
No one part of any cycle is more important than any other. I recall when the trophic levels were referred to as a trophic pyramid with higher mammals and apex predators at the top of the pyramid – that is only true for energy usage, not importance within the system. As a biologist I do have a minor love for the organisms considered lowly but which are really the most crucial to the whole of life – the detritovores – those mostly invisible (either through size or hidden within the soil) that produce all the nutrients for life from dead things. Then come the producers – the photo or chemo-synthetic organisms, and then the consumers that just eat and reproduce, before going back to feed the detritivores. So, the consumer trophic level is really expendable, unlike the detritivores and the producers that are the crucial parts of the trophic cycle.
Ok, so let’s move back to the human situation of material-consumerism. One thing that does not work within this cycle is when any species creates a monoculture that benefits only itself. It might appear to work for a short period at the start of a successional event following a major ecosystem collapse, but generally, monopolies fail under their own weight. This is as true of all of nature as it is of human systems – only humans are stupid enough to believe that they are somehow outside the natural system.
Nature abhors a monoculture, and human economic monocultures are as problematic. Consider the case of global human food production. Over the past few years, food companies have been bought up and consolidated with larger brands – we’re not even talking about food quality here, which is a problem in itself. The graphic shows many of the food brands you are probably familiar with from any supermarket in the world. Note that they all belong to just 12 companies, and that is reducing as the giants gobble up the smaller ones with economic take-overs – starting food monopolies. That, and the pathetic quality of processed food they give us, should make you nervous. Our market economic system is more akin to parasitic organisms than being part of a complex and healthy ecosystem.
And I love how economists and statisticians use economic and statistical terms to confuse and mislead us.
To Be Continued …………………..
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