How Much Degrowth Is Enough?

A video short by Jack Alpert, Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory

AI Summary:

Jack Alpert discusses the urgent need for degrowth to achieve a sustainable civilization, citing unsustainable energy consumption due to resource depletion and environmental degradation. He emphasizes evaluating the EROI of energy sources and reducing consumption through lifestyle changes and technological innovation. Alpert predicts a drastic reduction of energy deliveries on the North American continent without new sources, estimating a 98% population reduction necessary for sustainability. [Actually, a global reduction by 97% or so.]

Action Items per AI

• Calculate the energy needs to support different populations sizes and lifestyles.
• Investigate the current energy sources powering civilization and model how they may decline this
• Analyze the energy returned on energy invested for different energy sources like wind, solar, oil, and determine at what point renewable sources may no longer be able to replace fossil fuels.
• Consider other limiting factors beyond energy like soils, climate stability, and social cohesion and estimate the population sizes they could support.

Outline per AI

Sustainable growth, energy use, and environmental impact.

• Engineers design communities to support 7B people, but overflowing CO2 and social conflict remain.
• Civilization’s energy use is calculated by breaking the weakest link.
• Energy sources will become scarce and unavailable within 100 years.

Energy sources, population reduction, and sustainability.

• Jack Alpert presents wind turbine project lifecycle analysis, highlighting energy return on investment (E ROI) and net energy contribution to civilization.
• Engineers calculate energy required for manufacturing, delivery, installation, and training, as well as energy used in infrastructure development, to determine wind turbine’s net energy contribution.
• Jack Alpert argues that wind energy may not be sufficient to support modern civilization in the long term.
• Jack Alpert warns of civilization collapse if energy use doesn’t decrease drastically.

Keywords per AI

energy, civilization, wind turbine, years, deliveries, produce, people, support, provide, investment, project, north american continent, deliver, estimate, uranium, wind, calculate, infrastructure, roi analysis, fossil

And the video (by Jack):

Transcript (AI but with corrections)

[Because there is one speaker, AI generated text with no paragraphs. I first go through and create blocks of text, which on proofreading I may combine or make new breaks. AI could do this, but using Otter AI is non-interactive — you get what you get. Correcting the transcript and converting to a Medium post with screen shots took about four hours.]

0:10
Growth has produced crowding pollution, starvation, species extinction and social conflict.

People at the Montreal North American degrowth conference suggested replacing cars with bikes, eating less meat, consuming less things that turn to trash, downsizing, rebuilding spiritual connections to Mother Earth,

putting in controls that lower stratification between the rich and the poor, and between the weak and the strong.

0:39
Presentations described a wide range of problems and their solutions.

However, no reporter panel integrated all the problems and solutions to answer the questions.

How much degrowth is enough to create a global civilization that continuously delivers wonderful lifestyles while limiting inequity, preventing social conflict and saving the environment.

1:03
Had this report been written, part of it would have resembled the one created by NASA engineers who designed this space station.

That design provided supporting resources and space for three people. A plan that was eventually scaled up to support six.

1:21
Those engineers were pretty nervous when the space shuttle brought 13 people for a short visit.

If the shuttle could not return to Earth, the toilets designed for six would overflow. So here we are on earth in the same predicament, we 7 billion passengers, Earth’s atmosphere overflows with CO2, streams never reached their seas, mountaintops get pushed into valleys, wildlife has no place to live.

1:49
And the rich crushed the poor. If we ask NASA engineers to design global communities that don’t have these problems, for example, a community in the Pacific Northwest that supported all the people in North America.

That project would provide a way of calculating how much degrowth is enough to start their analysis.

2:14
Think of civilization as a group of people supported on a plate. The plate is hanging from a chain.

If any link in the chain breaks civilization is destroyed and people die.

These red links reflect resource limits water, soil, energy, and minerals.

2:34
These links reflect process limits, photosynthesis, bio toxicity, climate instability and thermodynamic entropy.

These Goldings reflect elements of the social framework: rule of law, specialization, labor, economies of scale, and stratification of wealth and power.

A peaceful, sustainable civilization breaks no links today or in the future.

3:00
Actually, we don’t have to know the breaking strength of every link. To know how much degrowth is enough. We just have to calculate the breaking strength of the weakest link. Let’s begin a search for the weakest link by investigating our civilization’s load on the energy link.

3:18
The load is defined as the difference between energy deliveries and energy use, and when deliveries are less than use the tank empties and the link breaks.

To calculate energy use, we need to know how much energy it takes to support one person, how much it takes to transport him and his goods, how much it takes to build and maintain his home, deliver and prepare his food, make and clean his clothes, create his toys, power his services, maintain his military and government, create maintain his infrastructure, provide his entertainment and recreation, and deliver 12 to 20 years of full time education.

4:01
Let me choose for the sake of making the first of many calculations, the energy needed to support the average American. I realized that most of you will find his consumption obscene. However, we can downsize him if we find this degrowth estimate too demanding.

4:22
If it takes 96 quadrillion BTUs of energy to support 306 million Americans. It takes 300 million BTUs per year to support one. It’s enough energy to continuously light 110 100 watt light bulbs. Wait a minute. Most Americans do not turn on that many lights.

4:43
A family of four uses only enough electricity to light three of these continuously burning bulbs. That means 97% of the energy he or she uses does not pass through the home’s electric meter. It’s delivered in the form of petroleum for transportation or natural gas for home meeting, or it comes in bedding and all these goods and services.

5:07
Here’s a graph of where the energy comes from. Natural gas, coal and petroleum provide 83%. Biomass, the burning of our civilizations waste in the creation of alcohol, provides 4%. Nuclear reactors provide 9%; hydroelectric plants provide 3%, and solar, wind and geothermal provide 1%.

5:33
How will the future affect these deliveries? The history of human energy use looks like this. Today, we live in a time of abundant energy, we might call it the fossil energy age 100 years ago, we use little energy. Today we are near the peak use.

5:50
And in 100 years during the lifetime of our children, fossil energy use will drop to near zero, there will be coal and oil and gas left in the ground, but it’ll take more energy to get it out and use it and it delivers. If this is true 83% of today’s energy won’t be available.

6:10
Nuclear power plants run on uranium from mines, like oil and coal, there is a point where it takes more energy to get uranium out of the ground than the energy the uranium can produce. By some estimates, that point is at the end of the century. So this 9% won’t be available either.

6:31
Within 100 years, we will not have this fossil fuel supported infrastructure that allows us to grow corn and make ethanol. Nor will we have this throughput to create biomass waste to burn in cogeneration plants. Essentially, this 4% won’t be available.

6:51
We’ll still be able to heat our homes with the wood from a woodlot. But don’t plan on the woodlot supporting your symphony, your health care or your job.

Which brings us to this line.

7:05
All of us want to believe wind, solar and other renewable energy installations will replace diminishing deliveries of fossil and uranium energy. However, this form of wind turbine analysis shows these beliefs may be fantasy.

7:21
Let me present it step by step. Wind turbine projects have periods of construction, operational lifetime and decommissioning.

These maroon triangles reflect dollars required to complete tests during these periods.

7:34
The blue triangles represent kilowatt hours sold to customers, the maroon can be compared to the blue. After the kilowatt hours are converted to dollars and depicted as this orange column, and the maroon triangles are ready in dollars are the investment adjusted for tax breaks and investment grants and depicted as this column. The difference between the two is the project’s lifetime income.

8:02
This income can be divided by the project’s investment to give EROI dollars of energy return on investment. EROI analysis makes investors happy because it tells if investing in wind turbines is better or worse than investing in offshore drilling.

But our NASA design team is not interested in income. They’re interested in usable energy to support a peaceful modern civilization.

8:32
They need to know the net energy of wind turbines, which is the kilowatt hours a wind turbine produces, the blue column, minus the energy used to create it, this red column. The trouble is the maroon triangles are in dollars not in energy units.

8:48
The engineers must determine the energy required to: manufacture deliver, install, connect to the grid and train and support staff. Plus the energy used to create the roads, bridges, trucks, rail, manufacturing plants and educational facilities. After quantifying investment energy one can calculate the wind turbine’s net energy contribution to civilization.

9:17
Engineers can also calculate productivity of each energy process by dividing net energy by energy invested to get this different EROI, which is energy returned on energy invested. For example, the calculations show that corn ethanol produces 1.2 barrels of energy for every barrel used in its production. Tar Sands gets four barrels of energy for every input barrel.

9:47
Photovoltaics get 12 kilowatts out for every kilowatt used in production. Windmills have EROIs near 18 and petroleum production varies. Reservoir exhaustion lowers EROIs. While technology raises them. For example, when reservoirs were full in 1900, it took the energy in one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels to market.

10:12
Today, petroleum Iraqis have dropped below 20. Conversely, the EROIs of wind production have risen. And after these two curves intersect when looks like a better energy source for NASA’s new community.

However, the wind’s EROI calculations are misleading. First, in our civilization, this infrastructure is used by millions of cars each year.

10:38
When prorated this wind turbine delivery truck can be assigned, but a small part of the bridge is embedded energy. However, if there were no cars in the new civilization, the wind turbine project would be assigned 100% of the energy required to build and maintain this bridge. Second, our infrastructure was created with a cascade of sub projects, each with its own embedded energy, and each with investment energy to make that energy.

11:09
When oil and coal within EROIs of 40 to 60 were used to complete bridge projects, the investment energy was small. When this bridge was rebuilt with wind turbine energy, EROIs of 18, investment energy will be much bigger.

11:25
This error in the EROI analysis is just the tip of the iceberg. To fully understand it, visualize the world without fossil and nuclear energy as an island with only wind energy sources. Energy invested will be bigger , the net energy will be smaller. Wind EROIs may get too low to support a modern civilization. If EROIs of renewable energy production get too low, they will not be able to replace fossil fuels. In 100 years, even this 1% may not be available.

We may be running civilization on this 3% of today’s energy deliveries.

12:09
You will be provided by these large dams built with fossil fuels, but potentially maintained by the power they produce.

True, even hydroelectric projects do not last forever, but they might last 500 years before they silt in, even silted in, they still produce the same energy is just not evenly distributed throughout the year.

12:33
In 500 years, with high levels of technology, maybe we’ll find a way to store energy or even a new energy source. However, this technological advancement depends on the existence of a peaceful modern civilization during the next 500 years, technology won’t advance if civilization collapses into conflict.

12:55
In summary, without the creation of new energy sources, energy deliveries on the North American continent could decline to 3% of present, which means energy use for the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation will also decline to 3%. Three percent of the energy will support only 3% of the US population, or about 10 million people.

13:20
If everyone on the North American continent desires to live the average American lifestyle, the 32 million Canadians the 306 million Americans and the 144 million Central Americans, which sum to 480 million will have to decrease to a total population of 10 million people.

13:42
How much degrowth is enough?

13:44
This estimate a 98% population reduction. I can hear your moans all the way to my house in Kansas. We don’t have to live like Americans. We can live smaller, we can stop flying. We can put eight people in every car.

14:00
We can put eight couples in every bedroom eat like vegans have 1/8 The clothes 1/8 the gadgets 1/8 The services 1/8 The military and government 1/8 The infrastructure 1/8 the symphonies and baseball parks and eight kids can share the same textbook.

14:15
If you’re willing to implement this downsize the same energy can support eight times 10 million or 80 million people, then an 83% reduction is enough degrowth Molly wants to know, “How soon will the degrowth have to be completed?”

14:32
Within your lifetime, Molly.

14:34
“And if we don’t do it?” Molly asks.

14:36
This energy link will break, your civilization will crash and Molly, it is going to take you down with it.

14:45
In closing, how much degrowth is enough? 83% to 99% depending on desired standard of living.

14:53
Checking the breaking strength of other links, for example soil, climate, rule of law… produce similar degrowth estimates.

15:01
A word of caution. When you calculate how much degrowth is enough, be honest about people striving for a better life and be careful about consigning future generations to a diminished lifestyle. They might want to commit genocide before they proceed to your plan.

And finally, most of all, don’t underestimate the injuries associated with civilization collapse.

The End

Note that degrowth is the condition that will come anyway. So “seek out the condition now that will come anyway.” [H.T. Odum]

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

No modern human would/could live like an animal. The plan to renormalize some fraction of 1% of modern humans to live as evolvable animals will be rejected by the 99.99%, and if I could even force modern humans to consider not living as modern human domesicants of NIMH, then modern political animals (who are not animals) would be united in removing any potential threat to life as they would live it.

After making those who would live as animals ‘go away’, they would, as modern techno-industrialized humans, have to form two factions: those who work to build three megacities having the potential for persisting long term, and those who prefer to die a Malthusian death, e.g. 99% of the inecolate who would rather go extinct. If you are a modern human (and seek to persist as such), then working to build Jack’s megacities is you only hope.

The possibility of 30 to 50 million modern humans living in three megacities is not delusional (like any plan for more being served by 640 energy slaves). Their existence would not be an existential threat to life on the planet. However, if they were ever to develop an energy source “too cheap to meter,” then their culture/form of civilization has the potential to expand again to turn Earth into a Trantor, a planet of the humans as we moderns would if we could.

If one of the megacities decided to expand and the other two did not or could not stop them, then a design for a viable civilization needs to include a self-destruct feature. If one expansionist megacity could not be stopped because a second joined them, then the only viable outcome for life on Earth would be if the last semi-sane modern human leader in the third megacity, resisting public demands to join the other two, could push a button that turned all three megacities into ruins by killing all modern humans in them without exception. Writing in a ‘thou shalt not expand’ clause in your social contract would not be enough.

Otherwise, with seemingly illimitable energy, the cities would expand to cover the global, tunnel out the lithosphere, cover the oceans, and expand throughout the solar system before expanding throughout the Milky Way galaxy as Borg-like expansionists before going to nearby galaxies for the taking (doing to all other lifeforms what they had done to those of Earth — and we are doing). An expansionistic r-culture with technology/energy is lethal, e.g. modern humans presiding over the ninth mass extinction event.