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The global battery

Debates about environmental problems invite to strong opinions and easy solutions. Greenwashing is usually the result of well-meaning naïveté and a vain hope that new technologies will solve all our problems. Everything will become so much better with electric cars. Lithium mining for batteries has its consequences in the form of political destabilisation and mountain top shaving. Solar and wind power still rely on mining, and on fossil fuels to construct the materials. Consequences for landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems are downplayed or neglected.

The peak-oil movement rightly identified our civilisation's addiction to fossil fuels, and the perils as the sources run dry, or rather the energy return on energy investment approaches a ratio of 1. Almost everything splendid and remarkable in our era are results of this energy input, including a few not so splendid things like high-rise brutalist architecture and crypto trading. To nuance the picture, the expansion of material wealth cannot be explained solely as a result of abundantly available fossil fuels, it is also a matter of technological progress that has increased the efficiency of energy conversions, as Vaclav Smil has documented (see Energy and Civilisation, a history).

There are a few tremendously important facts that are not that hard to understand, yet are too often left out of debates.

The economy depends on raw material and energy; economic growth is possible only as long as stocks of raw material and energy are available to be extracted.

Raised living standards and expectations lead to growing consumption. Growing population size does the same, and these two factors are multiplied.

Limited resources on a finite planet are not compatible with economic growth other than over a limited and exceptional window of time.

Fossil fuels directly or indirectly sustain the current population size by contributing to fertilisers and pesticides used in food production. So-called renewable energies are not nearly as efficient.

One reason this perspective tends to be ignored is that it is such a gloomy vision if you consider the consequences. It is a common psychological mechanism to shield us against unpleasant thoughts, even to denounce anyone who dares to bring up the subject as an alarmist.

One of the most depressing scientific papers I have ever come across is the following, and nevertheless I warmly recommend reading it, taking it seriously, and meditating on its implications, unless you are already depressed.

Schramski et al: Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind. PNAS, 2015

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511

According to their battery model or metaphor, humanity consumes stored chemical energy loaded over hundreds of millions of years by solar radiation and photosynthesis. This energy store is available as living biomass and as fossil fuels. As the useful energy is used, it is converted to heat and radiated into space and thus lost (not quite rapidly enough, otherwise climate change would not be an additional problem, but this question is not the main point of the paper).

> The laws of thermodynamics dictate that the difference in rate and timescale between the slow trickle-charge and rapid depletion is unsustainable. The current massive discharge is rapidly driving the earth from a biosphere teeming with life and supporting a highly developed human civilization toward a barren moonscape.

The authors introduce a sustainability metric, Ω = P/BN, where P is chemical energy available in phytomass, in Joules, B is the basic metabolic energy need per capita per year (about 3 x 10^9 J) and N is the size of the human population. Thus, B being constant, at any time the sustainability metric depends on the amount of phytomass available divided by the population size, and its units is years. The authors thus have derived a plot of Ω against time from year 0 to the present, and starting at somewhere below 70,000 years it dropped to around 30,000 by the year 1000, and is currently at roughly 1000 years and steeply decreasing with accelerating resource consumption. But these numbers are conservative estimates, meaning that the situation is likely worse.

> Living biomass is the energy capital that runs the biosphere and supports the human population and economy. [...] There is simply no reserve tank of biomass for planet Earth. The laws of thermodynamics have no mercy. Equilibrium is inhospitable, sterile, and final.

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