I would like to start a thread to discuss in earnest the bigger picture of energy/resource dynamic and how it will affect China's continued growth and development going forward in the next decades to come... As you all know, recently Xi committed China to be carbon neutral by 2060, and the implication is that by then China will also be energy independent... maybe we will have solved fusion and fast nuclear breeders AND have scaled them up by them to avert the oil crash... or maybe not... but there is a real possibility that unlike the Thucydides Trap or the Great Filter, this is one hurdle that China will not be able to overcome, for simply said everything, including Chinese civilization, exists within the laws of physics and abide by this grander force rather than the other way around... human ingenuity cannot out-think the energy problem of which it exists within...
Shell just declared 'Peak Oil'... a NVIDIA graphics card such as the RTX3080 that MSRPs for $799 USD is now on ebay/Craigslist with the current market value of $2500 USD+, and in some cases nearly quadruple the retail price... Where I live, the Harbor Freight inverter generators such as the Chinese brand Predator 3500 series that used to go for as low as $600 just last December are now at or above $1200 on Amazon and elsewhere... the popular Thrustmaster joysticks are still not available (zero inventory) unless you are willing to shell out nearly 3x the cost to get one for $400 bucks on ebay for the Airbus edition when it should have been not more than $120... You getting the picture now?!
Sure some of this is Trumps trade war tariff and some of it is due to the COVID shutdowns and the impact to the supply chain and JIT systems of globalization... (and that large EverGreen ship that got stuck in the canal didn't help matters but I digress) but I posit that these are all one and the same, in that the trade war as well as the tech/semiconductor battle and even to some degree COVID and other bio threats and/or climate catastrophes are all manifestations of a overcrowded world in which we humans have overshoot the population in a blink of an eye (when compared to normal evolutionary timescales) and indeed have all but consumed nearly all of the high EROEI fossil fuel deposits that took nature billions of years to slowly accumulate over time yet we wiped it all out within 150+ years since the industrial revolution and really most of it was at the tail end in the last 20 years...
I try my best to remain optimistic and see things glass half fool, but even the most rosy plans and projections do not take into account the physics and the thermodynamic truth of the bigger picture in terms of quantity and quality of energy resources and the fact that we as human species have already front-loaded everything by exploiting the low hanging fruits of easy to extract energy/mineral resources head first...
The inhabitants of Easter Island built a lot of gigantic stone monuments before they all seemingly and suddenly disappeared... We know in hindsight they grew too quickly, depleted their resources, but the limited scale and size of the island provided them with no means to "grow out of the problem" long enough to reach the economics of scale to bootstrap themselves up the technology ladder by exploiting other forms of energy resources (coal, gas, fission, etc)... Likewise, our planet earth, the third rock from the sun, the pale blue dot, as it were, is like an 3D island onto itself... and our current geopolitical, macroeconomic and global civilization structures make it increasingly unlikely that we will be able to bridge the gap of "The Great Filter" and successfully transition from a largely fossil fuel and hydrocarbon/petroleum based society to that of one of fusion and other more exotic energy technologies at scale and in mass... Just like there are fundamental limits to the universe and physical reality (for example the speed of light being the ultimate speed limit which dictates the viability of forms of long term space travel) it is apparent that the laws of physics are such in this universe that it is not conducive for the evolution nor sustained survival of lifeforms reaching Type I on the Kardashev scale...
Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a petridish right before it encounters rapid dieoff as it hits its resource constraints...
The problem is that our modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented...
There is the problem of the Energy Cliff, in that modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...
Fusion is perpetually 30 year away, even solving the fast breeder nuclear fission issue will take another 2 to 3 decades to ramp up and that is precious time the world just doesn't have left anymore. None of the renewables are energy dense enough (high threshold of EROEI) to power modern society and certainly not the kind of globalized world we have become accustomed to... for example solar has a energy payback of 2 to 3 years currently... that means for the first three years of a solar project you have net sunk energy into it and don't make an energy profit until after that period. Whereas oil as an energy payback period of zero days, you can use it immediately to provide net positive energy and it is both a means of energy and storage of energy. The problem with solar is that it needs energy storage, and there are not enough lithium nor rare earth in the world to be able to build enough batteries to store enough energy to scale to the entire world's current energy consumption levels even if we could achieve 100% renewable sources... (solar, wind, hydro, etc)
The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slow down means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself... Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was a EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, its just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says its still half full...
Shell just declared 'Peak Oil'... a NVIDIA graphics card such as the RTX3080 that MSRPs for $799 USD is now on ebay/Craigslist with the current market value of $2500 USD+, and in some cases nearly quadruple the retail price... Where I live, the Harbor Freight inverter generators such as the Chinese brand Predator 3500 series that used to go for as low as $600 just last December are now at or above $1200 on Amazon and elsewhere... the popular Thrustmaster joysticks are still not available (zero inventory) unless you are willing to shell out nearly 3x the cost to get one for $400 bucks on ebay for the Airbus edition when it should have been not more than $120... You getting the picture now?!
Sure some of this is Trumps trade war tariff and some of it is due to the COVID shutdowns and the impact to the supply chain and JIT systems of globalization... (and that large EverGreen ship that got stuck in the canal didn't help matters but I digress) but I posit that these are all one and the same, in that the trade war as well as the tech/semiconductor battle and even to some degree COVID and other bio threats and/or climate catastrophes are all manifestations of a overcrowded world in which we humans have overshoot the population in a blink of an eye (when compared to normal evolutionary timescales) and indeed have all but consumed nearly all of the high EROEI fossil fuel deposits that took nature billions of years to slowly accumulate over time yet we wiped it all out within 150+ years since the industrial revolution and really most of it was at the tail end in the last 20 years...
I try my best to remain optimistic and see things glass half fool, but even the most rosy plans and projections do not take into account the physics and the thermodynamic truth of the bigger picture in terms of quantity and quality of energy resources and the fact that we as human species have already front-loaded everything by exploiting the low hanging fruits of easy to extract energy/mineral resources head first...
The inhabitants of Easter Island built a lot of gigantic stone monuments before they all seemingly and suddenly disappeared... We know in hindsight they grew too quickly, depleted their resources, but the limited scale and size of the island provided them with no means to "grow out of the problem" long enough to reach the economics of scale to bootstrap themselves up the technology ladder by exploiting other forms of energy resources (coal, gas, fission, etc)... Likewise, our planet earth, the third rock from the sun, the pale blue dot, as it were, is like an 3D island onto itself... and our current geopolitical, macroeconomic and global civilization structures make it increasingly unlikely that we will be able to bridge the gap of "The Great Filter" and successfully transition from a largely fossil fuel and hydrocarbon/petroleum based society to that of one of fusion and other more exotic energy technologies at scale and in mass... Just like there are fundamental limits to the universe and physical reality (for example the speed of light being the ultimate speed limit which dictates the viability of forms of long term space travel) it is apparent that the laws of physics are such in this universe that it is not conducive for the evolution nor sustained survival of lifeforms reaching Type I on the Kardashev scale...
Infinite growth in a finite environment is a mathematical impossibility. Human population growth tracks precisely that of bacteria growth in a petridish right before it encounters rapid dieoff as it hits its resource constraints...
The problem is that our modern civilization is built upon both the expectation and the requirement of perpetual infinite growth in order to be sustained, and its tenet is one of always borrowing from the expectation of future growth to use as collateral to pay for the the present/current debts and expenses... essentially it is the most massive high level Ponzi Pyramid scheme of the ultimate form of kicking the can down the road that humanity has ever conjured up or invented...
There is the problem of the Energy Cliff, in that modern civilization is highly dependent upon high thresholds of EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) in order to sustain the sort of globalized Just-In-Time structures needed for modern society and trade, and to prop up the sort of high standards of living and at the enormously high levels of carrying capacity (almost 8 billion humans) that we've all come and grown to be accustomed to in the so-called modern world for the past hundred years or so...
Fusion is perpetually 30 year away, even solving the fast breeder nuclear fission issue will take another 2 to 3 decades to ramp up and that is precious time the world just doesn't have left anymore. None of the renewables are energy dense enough (high threshold of EROEI) to power modern society and certainly not the kind of globalized world we have become accustomed to... for example solar has a energy payback of 2 to 3 years currently... that means for the first three years of a solar project you have net sunk energy into it and don't make an energy profit until after that period. Whereas oil as an energy payback period of zero days, you can use it immediately to provide net positive energy and it is both a means of energy and storage of energy. The problem with solar is that it needs energy storage, and there are not enough lithium nor rare earth in the world to be able to build enough batteries to store enough energy to scale to the entire world's current energy consumption levels even if we could achieve 100% renewable sources... (solar, wind, hydro, etc)
The human body is 70% water. You don't have to lose the very last drop of water in your body to die. Once you lose 10% of water weight you are severely dehydrated and at the edge of death, by the time your body lost 20% of its weight in water you are already died. Likewise, modern civilization doesn't have to run out of oil before it dies... We are already margined to the hilt and basically the entire system is like Gamestop gambling on margin and we need continously growth in order just to sustain the fabric of globalized society, any slow down means the entire house of cards come toppling down! In terms of conventional oil the world has already peaked back in 2008 and now we are relying on unconventional shale, fracking, etc etc to make up for the energy deficits but like turning the knob faster and faster towards the Hot side of a shower as the hot water starts running out, we are only delaying the inevitable and making the collapse cliff that much more steeper when it finally implodes upon itself... Back in the golden age of oil for one barrel of oil energy expended we could drill, extract, process and make usable about 100 additional barrels of oil, that was a EROEI ratio of 100 to 1. Now we are barely at EROEI ratio of 10 to 1. All the sweet crude is gone, there are no more low hanging fruits, its just the dirty, sulfuric, hard to extract/drill and energy intensive to process/refine tar stuff left now... so even the quality and density and usable energy we are getting from the remaining hydrocarbons under the ground have reached terminal point of diminishing returns... when you have reached "peak" oil and have approximately half of the reserves left underground, from an energy perspective you really only have 10% left in the gas tank even though the meter says its still half full...
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