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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-05-17/the-most-colossal-planning-failure-in-human-history/

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1. Home
2. Energy

The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History

By Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org

* May 17, 2021

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A couple of days ago I happened to pick up an old book gathering dust
on one of my office shelves--Palmer Putnam's Energy in the Future,
published in 1953. Here was a time capsule of energy concerns from
nearly a lifetime ago--and it got me to thinking along the lines of
Howard Baker's famous question during the Watergate hearings: "What
did [w]e know, and when did [w]e know it?" That is, what did we know
back then about the climate and energy conundrum that threatens to
undermine civilization today?

The fossil fuel age had begun over a century prior to 1953, and it
was known by then that coal, oil, and natural gas represent millions
of years' worth of stored ancient sunlight. At the start, these fuels
had appeared capable of supplying useful energy to society in
seemingly endless quantities. Since everything we do depends on
energy, having much more of it meant we could do far more farming,
mining, fishing, manufacturing, and transporting than was previously
possible. The result was an economic miracle. Between 1820 and today,
human population has grown eight-fold, while per-capita energy usage
has also grown eight-fold. We went from horse-drawn carts to
jetliners in just a few generations.

But there were a couple of snags. One was that, though initially
abundant, fossil fuels are nonrenewable and therefore subject to
depletion. The second was that extracting and burning these fuels
pollutes air and water, subtly but surely changing the chemistry of
our planet's atmosphere and oceans. Neither issue seemed compelling
to the majority of people who first benefitted from coal, oil, and
gas.

So, back to Putnam's book. This thick tome wasn't a best seller, but
it was considered authoritative, and it found a place on the desks of
serious policy makers. Remarkably, it explored both of the core
drawbacks of fossil fuels, though these were as yet on almost no one
else's radar screen.

Putnam understood that the fossil fuel age would be relatively brief.
With regard to coal, he wrote: ". . . costs of extraction continue to
rise, while the average heat value in a ton of coal has begun to
decline, at least in the United States." Similar symptoms of
depletion would inevitably overtake the oil and gas industry, the
author noted, even if the tar sands of Canada and shale oil (Putnam
used these specific terms), as well as improvements in exploration
and production technology, were all accounted for.

In a section at the very end of the book, titled, "The Combustion of
Fossil Fuels, the Climate and Sea Level," Putnam wrote, "Perhaps such
a derangement of the CO[2] cycle would lead to an increased CO[2]
content of the atmosphere great enough to affect the climate and
cause a further rise of sea level. We do not know this. We ought to
know it." Now we know, and it turns out that a lot more than just a
hike in sea level is in the offing. But we still haven't done much to
change the worrisome trend of soaring greenhouse gas emissions.

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While the writing and publication of Energy in the Future were paid
for by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Putnam was not a
single-minded proponent of nuclear power as a substitute for fossil
fuels. The subject did get substantial treatment in his book, but he
spent as much ink on limits and downsides as he did on the potential
of nuclear sources to meet energy needs. Putnam concluded that,
"Based on present knowledge, it does not appear likely that the
fission of uranium or thorium could ever support more than 10 to 20
per cent of the energy system of the United States patterned as at
present. The figures for the world energy system would hardly be
higher." Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from
nuclear power, while the global figure is closer to 4 percent.

Putnam explored a range of alternative energy sources, including fuel
wood, farm wastes, wind power, solar heat collectors, solar
photovoltaics, tidal power, and heat pumps, but judged that these
would not be sufficient to propel the continued economic growth of
modern societies. Putnam, who died in 1984, was himself a pioneer in
the development of wind power.

Energy in the Future was favorably reviewed in the prestigious
journal Science, but it had negligible impact on public policy. And
here we are, seven decades later, using fossil fuels globally at
roughly three times the rate we were depleting and burning them in
1953. They still supply 85 percent of global energy.

Here's the essence of our planning failure: we have built up
civilization to a scale that can temporarily be supported by finite
and polluting energy sources, and we have simply assumed that this
scale of activity can continue to be supported by other energy
sources that haven't yet been developed or substantially deployed.
Further, we have incorporated limitless growth into the requirements
for civilization's success and maintenance--despite the overwhelming
likelihood that growth can occur for only a historically brief
interval.

Failing to plan is often the equivalent of planning to fail. Planning
is a function of language and reason--of which we humans are certainly
capable. We plan all sorts of things, from weddings to the
construction of giant hydroelectric dams. Yet we are also subject to
cognitive dysfunctions--denial and delusion--which seem to plague our
thinking when it comes to issues of population and consumption, and
their implications for the future. In effect, we have collectively
bet our fate on the vague hope that "somebody will come up with
something."

Our failure continues--now with regard to the transition to renewable
energy sources, primarily solar photovoltaics and wind power. Putnam
himself, after surveying the limits to fossil fuels and nuclear
power, seemed to settle on solar as humanity's long-term hope; yet he
acknowledged that the realization of this hope depended on the
development of technologies to make solar electricity available "in
more useful forms and at lower costs than now appear possible." His
wording suggests that he was grasping at straws.

There have indeed been significant technical improvements in wind and
solar PV technology, along with huge cost reductions. Nevertheless,
limits still exist. Sunlight and wind are themselves renewable, but
the machines we build to capture ambient energy and convert it to
electricity are made from non-renewable minerals and metals. Making
these collectors requires energy for raw materials extraction,
processing, manufacturing, transport, and installation. And renewable
energy sources require considerably more land area than is needed for
fossil fuel infrastructure. Further, solar and wind power sources are
inherently intermittent, since the sun doesn't always shine nor the
wind always blow; so, energy storage, source redundancy, and a major
electrical grid upgrade are needed. There are work-arounds for each
of these issues, but the difficulty of deploying the needed
work-arounds increases dramatically as the scale of renewable energy
production increases.

Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we'll fail to
produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at
which we want it to operate. So, we'll continue to get most of our
energy from fossil fuels--until we can't, due to depletion. Then, as
the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our
planning failure will finally hit home.

It may already be too late to avert that scenario. But let's assume
there is indeed enough time, and that we suddenly get serious about
planning. What should we do?

We should start with conservative estimates of how much energy solar
and wind can provide. No one has a definitive figure, but for
industrial nations like the US, it would be wise to assume some
fraction of the energy currently provided by fossil fuels: half, for
example, would be a highly ambitious goal (one of the first projects
of the planning process would be to come up with a more precise
estimate). Then, planners would explore ways to reduce energy usage
to that level, with a minimum of disruption to people's lives.
Planners would also seek to determine approximately the scale of
population that can be supported long-term by these sources without
degradation of the environment (yes, Putnam discussed the
relationship between population and energy back in 1953), and then
create and implement policies to begin matching population to those
levels in a way that reduces, rather than worsening, existing social
inequities.

A comprehensive plan would detail the amount of investment required,
and over what period of time, and would specify the sources of the
money.

Finally, as I have suggested elsewhere, good planning would entail
the creation of a pilot project, in which a medium-sized industrial
city is transitioned to get all its energy (for food, manufacturing,
heating and cooling, and transportation) from renewables. Such a
project would itself require subsidy and planning, but it would yield
invaluable practical data.

It's gob-smacking to think that such a planning process actually
could have started as early as 70 years ago, and that, at this late
date, it has still barely begun. Instead, today's policy makers
mostly just extrapolate PV price trends, hope for further
technological improvements, and assume that huge systems for
supplying society's needs using renewable energy rather than fossil
fuels will somehow self-assemble in an optimum way and at full
scale--all in just a couple of decades.

Without planning, it just won't happen.

Addendum

Some readers may be thinking: Wasn't agriculture, rather than the
adoption of fossil fuels, the biggest planning failure in human
history? After all, if we hadn't adopted grain crops, we wouldn't
have developed full-time division of labor and all the specialized
knowledge and skills that were required to mine coal and drill for
oil and gas, and to apply these fuels to the solution of practical
problems. True enough. However, from a quantitative standpoint, it's
clear that fossil fuels have enabled much higher population growth
during the past two centuries than occurred during the previous
10,000 years. The same could be said for per capita consumption rates
and environmental damage. Agriculture may have set us humans on an
unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a
superhighway.

Teaser photo credit: Vauban, Freiburg a sustainable model district.
By Claire7373Andrewglaser - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2637411

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Tags: building resilient societies, clean energy transition, climate
change, powering down, Resource Depletion

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[heinberg-thumb-200x200]
Richard Heinberg

*
*

Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books including: - Our
Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean
Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (2016) - Afterburn (2015) -
Snake Oil (July 2013) - The End of Growth (August 2011) - The Post
Carbon Reader (2010) (editor) - Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the
Last...

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