I was a kid in the 70s when I recognized that the world was much more interconnected and complex than anyone was willing to acknowledge. Partly, of course, it's due to people's affinity for simplicity and easy explanations. But it is also a bug of the scientific method, where the penchant for isolating single variables in the effort to understand and comprehend the world is not just a veritable brick wall for dealing with multifaceted issues, it results in a perverse hostility to anything that isn't simplisticly presentable.
I think key to Tainter's thesis is that complex societies require escalating energy to just keep them going, there are diminishing returns to society from high complexity(low hanging fruit being picked first, maintaining ageing infrastructure draining resources and energy ), this, combined with reduced surplus energy, that is Eroi reduction.. ie reduced supply of high net energy sources, combined with overshoot results in the system becoming very unstable.. That's the rub, so called renewables have low eroi, are not reliable like fossils , they require fossils to be produced, and they dont solve the ,never discussed, industrial heat demand requirements that all our produced materials require in their manufacture..sorry for my shoddy wording.. great talk..many thanks..
Fascinating
I was a kid in the 70s when I recognized that the world was much more interconnected and complex than anyone was willing to acknowledge. Partly, of course, it's due to people's affinity for simplicity and easy explanations. But it is also a bug of the scientific method, where the penchant for isolating single variables in the effort to understand and comprehend the world is not just a veritable brick wall for dealing with multifaceted issues, it results in a perverse hostility to anything that isn't simplisticly presentable.
I think key to Tainter's thesis is that complex societies require escalating energy to just keep them going, there are diminishing returns to society from high complexity(low hanging fruit being picked first, maintaining ageing infrastructure draining resources and energy ), this, combined with reduced surplus energy, that is Eroi reduction.. ie reduced supply of high net energy sources, combined with overshoot results in the system becoming very unstable..
That's the rub, so called renewables have low eroi, are not reliable like fossils , they require fossils to be produced, and they dont solve the ,never discussed, industrial heat demand requirements that all our produced materials require in their manufacture..sorry for my shoddy wording.. great talk..many thanks..
Henry Ford had an abundant, cheap high utility, concentrated energy fuel... that was the magic ingredient... the one that's running out..