Civilization’s Running Out of Gas Story
A video short by Jack Alpert, Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory
This is the first of Jack’s videos to view, but for this and other videos in the order Jack would have them viewed, click for a list.
Some years ago I saw a comment on a video that claimed it was the most important video on YouTube. I agreed. It is called Arithmetic, Population, and Energy, by Al Bartlett. It may still be the most important video on YouTube, but perhaps the video below is now. How could I know? Which one would posterity want you to consider? Maybe both.
Trying to communicate the human predicament to modern humans is… trying, as in trying to do so has so far proved to be impossible. Most Medium readers/YouTube viewers are modern humans who know what money is, value it, and likely have some.
Most of us also have (have had or want) a car, and all know that if powered by a battery, it has to be charged and if by liquid fossil fuel, that the car has a tank that needs to be filled (neglecting to fill it means it eventually stops). Modern humans are just so well educated.
Image you are a desert dweller (and that you are human). You live near water and travel only by foot. Legend tells of a sacred place nine days walk away, but you can’t carry enough water to go there and back (nobody you know can).
You long to go there. One day a moving box comes. Some sort of human gets out and walks off in search of a leader. You get in the rumbling box (it is cool inside). It is making noises. Pushing a peddle makes it move. Turning the round thing changes its direction of travel, so you seize the moment and drive off towards the sacred place.
You assume the apparent human is a god and the box is a gift of the gods to allow you to go to the sacred ‘Prosperity’ spot. Your prayers have been answered. That the chariot will take you there and back is assumed, as why would the gods give it to you if it couldn’t?
Some years later the car is found. The gas tank is empty. A mummified body is underneath in the only shade for miles about.
No one could have predicted exactly when or where the car would run out of gas. But the event was determinant, predictable, despite the best intentions of the gods themselves.
If you think your knowledge of cars is good enough to prevent you from driving off into futurity, a future in which cars can always pull over at a gas station, that the worst thing that could happen is you might have to panhandle for some gas, then watch his video:
Among the YouTube comments, there is this one:
Definitely an over simplified model. The most clear inaccuracies in this simulation is that there are hundreds of years of coal and tar-sands reserves and that population projections aren’t accurate, given that many countries are already at sub-replacement levels. Another issue is that given our current knowledge of synthetic fertilizer production, even if a substantial portion of civilization collapses, the surviving will devote more of their energy resources towards fertilizer production, so even a large scale collapse of civilization will still yield food production sufficient for much greater than 600 million.
Jack did not reply, but I have nothing better to do…. So, yes, there is more coal in Earth’s mantle than oil, gas, and uranium. I recall in high school doing a report that noted coal reserves exceeded oil/gas and that mining could continue beyond the 21st century, which was news to my environmentalist teacher and conflicted with his environmentalist sources of information (I was asked for my sources and provided them).
But that coal could last two hundred years is not the whole story. At best, peak coal will follow within a few decades of peak oil/gas. Continuing to mine coal will merely kick the can down the road another decade or few to maximize harm. Other claims are also misinformed. Sanity suggests we seek out the condition now that will come anyway. An optimistic projection:
Keeping modern techno-industrial civilization going a century longer will merely maximize biosphere degradation for posterity and other life on Earth. The future doesn’t end in 2100.
Transcript:
Most drivers can imagine that when a car runs out of gas it stops. However, few drivers can imagine that when running out of gas happens in a desert, with no chance of help, everyone in the car perishes.
This car in the desert tragedy may be a correct description for our global civilization if it runs out of fossil fuels.
In 1972, a group at MIT discovered such a running out of gas event.
In their data, this red line can be thought of as civilizations gas gauge, it shows the amount of resources remaining in the Earth’s crust. Full in 1900, 85%, full in 1972, and empty at the bottom of the graph.
This black line shows how global population responded to high resource delivery, first, rising towards 6 billion in 2050. And then with declining resources, descending toward 3 billion by 2100.
Including births, running out of gas costs 5 billion deaths.
Because this die off happened so far in the future, and the systems dynamic technique was still under development, it seemed too bold to report.
So they focused the report on two of civilization’s well being indicators, food per capita, green, and industrial per capita, gold. To everyone’s surprise, the simulation suggested that both stop growing here.
They titled the book, The Limits to Growth, and the contrarian view sold 5 million copies in 30 languages.
Their book faced extreme criticism that advancing technology would prevent these limits.
And for 50 years, the criticism was correct. Actual well being on earth grew faster, and at higher levels than they reported.
Population grew to 8 billion, 2 billion more and 20 years sooner than in their simulation. This super growth was made possible by the Green Revolution’s ability to triple food production.
And that wasn’t included in their simulation,
And technology’s ability to extract energy from deeper wells, wells in deeper water, horizontal and fracked wells and tar sands. These Earth’s extra gas tanks hadn’t been included.
However, this super growth did not nullify the simulation suggestion that reservoir depletion would kill 5 billion people. Why was this important part of the simulation suggestions almost universally ignored?
Maybe it was due to a defect in how humans gather and process available information.
People learn mostly from experience. Since the suggestions made by the simulation, especially the die-off event, had not happened in the past and was not projected to occur for 50 years in the future, experiential learning could not give the suggestions influence in the choice of behavior in 1972 that would avoid the suggested 5 billion deaths.
That learning would have to be accomplished using another process.
The second most common learning process is transmission.
It occurs when experts convey their view of the future to the learner. Let me suggest why transmission learning is too weak to facilitate a clear enough view of a die-off event to let the learner take a painful behavior to avoid it. When an expert uses historical information, the image he transmits contains no die off from energy depletion.
When the UN’s population projections are based on fertility trends, they contained no die-off event. When experts present different views, they placed the listener in a position of choosing which expert to believe.
Most often, the listener has no process for determining which expert to believe. Thus, the MIT simulations die-off suggestion could not be validated with transmission learning.
To validate the MIT simulation suggestions, people would have to use a third learning process, one that uses the flow of mass and energy through a simulation’s tanks and pipes to infer unexperienced events. Let me describe some simple examples where flows affect future events or events affect flows.
More flow predicts more well being. No experience necessary. No flow predicts bo well being. No experience necessary. Empty tank predicts no flow, no experience necessary. Empty tank predicts no well being. No experience necessary.
Machines wear out predicts replacement, no experience necessary. Replacement predicts more manufacturing, which predicts more mining, pumping, transport and infrastructure maintenance. No experience necessary. These simple examples of tanks and flows making predictions without experience can be extended to infer future conditions of civilizations.
For example, sunlight flowing on to all possible subsistence farming locations on earth will feed 600 million people.
Electric power plants in internal combustion engines are powered by flows of coal, oil and gas. They produce power that flows to manufacturing, Manufacturing flows machines to farms and the flows of power to these machines produce a flow of food to feed 8 billion people.
Manufacturing can also create flows of machines that perform mining, refining and pumping, and when energy flows to these machines, fossil reservoirs flow coal, oil and gas into storage.
When more energy flows to mining machines, materials can be extracted from the crust and they flow to manufacturing.
With these additional materials manufacturing can build energy capture devices, dams, wind turbines, solar collectors and fusion reactors. And these flow 2% of total energy used to produce food into the infrastructure.
The whole system keeps flowing until reservoirs become too dilute. Then pumping and refining struggle. Fuel storage empties, power plants stop, internal combustion engine stop, manufacturing stops.
Hydro, solar and wind machines wear out. Energy capture stops, energy to agriculture stops and food deliveries stop.
If fusion or dark energy cannot replace lost energy deliveries, the earth again produces only enough food to feed 600 million people.
When will this happen? It happens when delivery tasks consume all of the extracted oil before any gets to the tractor.
If this happens in the next 80 years, today’s 8 billion global population must decline to 600 million. What could make that possible?
Assume 8 billion people are living today. And an estimated 8 billion born in the next 80 years.
16 billion people live during this century.
Subtract the 2 billion who died of old age in the next few decades. 14 billion lived and did not die of old age. Now, if in 2100, energy flows can feed only 600 million. Then this 13.4 billion people must die from either starvation or fighting over food.
That’s almost everyone who lives this century. And now you know, civilizations running out of gas story.
THE END
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Technology is not energy. Without gasoline, your car’s best use might be as a lawn ornament for chickens to roost in. Fossil fuels will (not if) run out, even though somewhere, and at some depth, some fossil fuels will remain, there won’t be enough energy for continued extraction, and in a few hundred million years more will be formed.
The 600 million sustainable population is David Pimentel's best guess. One ecologist asked several dozen of his colleagues what their best guess was, and answers ranged from 50 million to 2 billion. All assumed that the question was asking what the maximum population could be. I would go with H.T. Odum and 500 million, so Pimentel’s is essentially the same answer.
But, 600 million IS A MAXIMUM. If humans were to live within carrying capacity AND leave room of other species (cease to cause species extinction), AND not prevent the evolution of new species to replace those already lost to the Anthropocene mass extinction event by not leaving enough room for Nature, then 50 million might be too many people.
Don’t ask how billions of people could die of conflict or starvation this century. Ask how they could not. Check any answer to see if the mass and joule flows supports it. Or happily drive off to your sacred place in the desert. Fill the car with bottles of water. It won’t matter, same outcome, just delayed a bit. The Gods Themselves await you.
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Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.
— Friedrich Schiller
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Human life on the downslope may resemble the past (e.g. Late Bronze Age collapse, Malta, Indus Valley civilization) and last far longer than even the doomsters imagine (figure 500 to 1000 years, 20 to 40 generations). Humans who are products of a downslope culture may be even more denormalized that those on the upslope have been (Calhoun’s behavioral sink may have no viable outcome, especially if we keep on keeping on denying it).
If potentially renormalizable moderns number in some fraction of one percent, none (no literate human as usual) may persist beyond even the initial rapid descent, much less the centuries that follow — a slow race to the bottom, extinction.
My conjecture is that any potentially viable pathway that sidesteps extinction has to be underway before climax. Prior collapse events suggest maybe a 20% chance of a viable outcome, but the first global collapse will be different, and 20% may be one or two orders of magnitude too optimistic, i.e. we moderns may be incapable of overestimating the difficulty of mitigating posterity’s ghastly future.