Thermodynamics and Economics
The most obvious social effect of humanity’s collective ignorance of the first two Laws of Thermodynamics is poverty.
A lot of people have been talking lately about “peak oil production”. That refers to a mathematical bell curve that was discovered in 1956 by Dr. M. King Hubbert, the greatest geologist of the 20th century.
This bell curve measures oil production, in which the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents amount. I could give you an illustration, but it’s so simple you can draw it yourself.
The bell curve begins at zero time and zero production. This represents the beginning of world oil production.
Oil contains energy. Prospecting for oil, drilling for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, and building all the equipment to do those things all require energy. The more oil you drill, the more energy you have that you can invest into drilling more oil.
In the beginning the limiting factor on how much oil people could drill was the amount oil production equipment they had. The more oil production equipment people built, the more oil they could produce. The more oil people produced, the more oil production equipment they could build. That’s a self-perpetuating process, also known as a positive feedback loop.
Out of all the oil that was buried underground at first, some was close to the surface. That was the first oil people collected, because it was the easiest to reach. That meant it required the least amount of oil production equipment.
Some of the oil was in easily accessible places, like sitting in big puddles on the ground in Texas or Saudi Arabia or wherever. Other oil was buried under the ocean or the under the Rocky Mountains or somewhere. The oil that was in the most easily accessible places was the easiest to collect, and required the least amount of equipment to collect.
The oil that was on the top contained the least impurities. That made it the easiest to refine. That meant it required the least amount of refinement equipment.
The more oil people drilled, the more oil they had. They more oil they had, the more uses they found for oil. That created more demand for oil, so people drilled more oil. That created another positive feedback loop.
Once people began drilling oil, they began ascending the front slope of the bell curve. As time went by, they built more oil production equipment and produced more oil each year than they did the year before. Maybe one oil well became two the next year, four the next year, eight the next year, sixteen the next year, and so on, doubling every year. Or maybe 100 oil wells became 110 the next year, 121 the next year, 133 the next year, 146 the next year, increasing by 10% every year like compound interest in a bank account. The numbers themselves don’t matter. Either way, they increase at an exponential rate.
When roughly half the oil is gone, you reach the plateau of the bell curve. In the beginning, the oil being close to the surface, free of impurities, and in easy to reach locations made oil production easy. But the more oil you drilled, the less those qualities applied to the oil that was still available. As time went by, the oil became progressively further beneath the surface, less pure, and in harder to reach locations. That made the oil progressively harder to produce, and that made your oil production require progressively more energy.
For the first half of the oil production cycle, the limiting factor on your ability to produce more oil is still your amount of oil production equipment. Your oil production is becoming increasingly inefficient, but you can still overcome that by building more oil production equipment.
Halfway through your oil production cycle, the laws of diminishing return catch up to you and the limiting factor on your ability to produce oil changes. At this point, you have all the equipment you can use to drill and refine all the oil that’s available. Building more oil production equipment won’t help you anymore, because it will cost you more oil to build the equipment than the equipment can produce. All the oil there is available is already being produced by the equipment you have.
Building more oil production equipment now would make your oil production less efficient than it is already. If your existing oil production equipment is working at 100% capacity, pumping oil out of the ground as fast as mechanically possible, if you invest more energy into building 10% more equipment, you’ve burned a bunch of oil just so you can operate all your equipment at only 90% capacity. That means you wasted the oil it took you to build the new equipment, and that means you made your oil production less efficient.
The mathematics get more complicated from here, but all that does is to turn the smooth bell curve into a bell curve made up of lots of spikes and valleys. Any politician or businessperson could show you three numbers and make it look like oil production could increase indefinitely. But that’s just a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. It takes a lot of numbers to be able to see through the short-term fluctuations to recognize an oil production bell curve.
We are somewhere close to the plateau on the world oil production bell curve right now.
When we pass the plateau, we will descend the back slope of the bell curve. Now exponential growth will become exponential decline. As time goes by, the remaining oil in the world becomes increasingly deeply buried, impure, and hard to access. Those factors have caught with you now. Those limiting factors on oil production continue to increase. Now every drop of oil you pull out of the ground becomes more expensive than the last.
We will never be able to use all the oil in the world, simply because some of it is so hard to reach that it would take more energy to drill it and refine it than the oil contained.
Dr. Hubbert predicted we would hit peak oil production in the United States sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. We reached peak oil production in the United States in 1970. Ever since, U.S. oil production has been on the downhill slope.
Dr. Hubbert predicted that if our trends of the time continued, we would hit peak oil production for the world in 1995. Peak oil in the United States and the OPEC embargoes shocked Americans into researching and developing more energy efficient ways to use oil, so our current trends didn’t continue. Dr. Hubbert died in 1989, so he can’t update his predictions now.
We bought ourselves a couple of extra decades. A lot of scientists are working on this now. Some think world peak oil is still ahead of us, some think we’re already past it. None of them think it’s further away than 2020. Due to all those fluctuations, you can’t get enough numbers to determine that you’ve passed peak oil until you’re already well beyond it.
A documentary to watch about this is called The End of Suburbia. Another good, related documentary is called Who Killed the Electric Car?.
From the first two Laws of Thermodynamics, it’s obvious that all forms of energy, on any scale of production—local, national, or worldwide—must follow a bell curve.
Producing energy always requires moving things from one place to another. That means that producing energy always requires energy. Energy produced can be reinvested in producing more energy, at an exponential rate. A greater amount of energy produced will create a demand for more energy to be produced, as people find more ways to use the energy. Then they grow accustomed to having it, and forget how to live without it or else start living their lives in a way that makes them dependant on it.
Some energy sources are easier to produce than other energy sources of the same type. Some energy sources are more pure than others of the same type. Some energy sources are more accessible than others of the same type. Eventually, the three negative feedbacks will overtake the two positive feedbacks, and make continued production of that energy source increasingly inefficient.
Hunting and gathering wild animals and plants requires energy. The more you hunt and gather, the bigger families you can feed. The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to hunt and gather. Some animals are easier to catch than others, and some plants are easier to collect than others. Some animals and plants are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others. Some animals and plants live in places that are easier for you to reach than others, whether they live in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to you.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are hunting and gathering in an area, the easiest to find, the easiest to catch, the biggest, most edible, most digestible, and most nutritious animals and plants will eaten first, which will make the remaining animals and plants increasingly difficult—meaning inefficient—to find, catch, eat, and otherwise extract food energy from.
This is exactly how the pre-agricultural Mesopotamians depleted the wild food production of their local environment.
It’s also how our pre-human ancestors drove the wild animals of Africa to evolve to be so big and mean and to run so fast, because they ate all the ones that were easiest to catch.
It’s also how the first Native Americans drove a lot of animals in the Americas into extinction, because when they arrived in the Americas 14,000 years ago, they had well-developed hunting skills, and found two continents full of animals that had no natural fear of humans. Some had natural fears of other animals that worked well against humans also, but others didn’t. Once again, the animals that were easiest to catch were the ones that got eaten.
This is also how we’re depleting the world’s fishing banks today.
Farming and ranching works the same way as hunting and gathering, but in a man-made environment. Now the limiting factors are the climate and the fertility of the soil. Ranching and farming domesticated animals and plants requires energy. The more you ranch and farm, the bigger families you can feed. The bigger families you have, the more people need to be fed, and the more people there are to ranch and farm. Some areas are easier to ranch and farm in than others. Some plants and animals grow better in some places than others, and some of them grow faster, are more edible, more digestible, or more nutritious than others.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are ranching and farming in an area, the most fertile and most accessible fields will be used first. When people move into a new region, like the Europeans did when they colonized the Americas, and the Colonial Americans did when they settled the west, the regions with the most fertile fields in the best climates are settled first. That will make the remaining land increasingly inefficient for ranching and farming.
This is how the first Mesopotamian farmers over-farmed their lands and destroyed their environment.
This is also how agriculture spread through the world from there, and from the other original centers of agriculture, as the people of the most physically powerful civilizations conquered neighboring hunter-gatherers to claim more land to farm and ranch.
This is also, as I said, how the Americas were colonized and people of more physically powerful agricultural civilizations conquered people of less physically powerful civilizations.
This is also how the Norse settlers of Greenland, the original inhabitants of Easter Island, the Anasazi farmers of the American southwest, and various other groups of people destroyed their local environments and destroyed their civilizations along with them, which you can read about in Dr. Diamond’s book Collapse.
Logging in Europe followed the energy production bell curve. Logging requires energy. The more trees you cut down, the more wooden axe handles you can build, the more wooden logging equipment you can build, and the more houses for loggers you can build. The more wood is available, the more uses people find for it. The more wood people have, the more families can be housed, the more their houses can be heated, and the more meals they can cook. Some trees are easier to cut down than others. Some trees are bigger than others. Some trees grow in more accessible terrain, or simply closer to where the people live.
If an exponentially increasing number of people are logging in an area, the biggest and closest trees will be cut down first. That will make the remaining trees increasingly inefficient for logging.
Mining coal, drilling natural gas, and mining uranium work the same way as drilling oil.
Building solar or wind power stations depends on mining the minerals to build them from, which works the same way as mining anything else. It also depends on how often the sun shines or the wind blows in a location, how hard the sun shines or wind blows, how close those places are, and how accessible the terrain is. If an exponentially increasing number of people are building solar or wind power stations, the stations will be built in the best places first. That will make the remaining places increasingly inefficient for building solar and wind power stations.
And so on.
All the basic components that interact to create the oil production bell curve also apply to all other forms of energy production.
That means that all energy production in the entire world must follow one giant bell curve also. The front and back sides of the bell curve will probably change their slopes greatly from time to time, and would show very large fluctuations as we move from food and firewood to coal to oil and so forth, exhausting one major energy source and then moving on to a different one that had different qualities. But the gross global energy bell curve is simply all the individual global energy bell curves added together.
As you will notice, the exponentially increasing number of people harnessing solar and wind power, and creating an ever growing demand for it by finding ever more uses for it, was not a factor. That’s because an exponentially increasing number of people won’t find more ever uses for solar and wind power, because they’ll need all of it just to take the place of the fossil fuels they were already using. This is how things work on the downhill slope of the bell curve.
All life depends on energy, and all activity, including economic activity, depends on energy also. What this means for our human economy is that as we pass the plateau of any energy production bell curve, the economy breaks down. First the economy grew as energy was produced at an exponential rate. Without being aware of the energy production bell curve, people won’t have any way of realizing they’re approaching the plateau. Based on their experience to that point, more energy is always available. They’ll plan on more energy still being available, even though a relatively constant level of energy will only be available now, followed by an ever decreasing amount of energy being available, as they have to devote ever more energy just to producing their energy.
This will result in frequent economic recessions that get progressively worse, and each of which is never fully recovered from. Ultimately, it will lead to an unrecoverable economic depression.
You know what economic recession means. Poverty for the least politically powerful people. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Specifically, the materially wealthy can invest some of their material wealth into protecting the rest of their material wealth, use the political advantages that their economic advantages give them to make the materially poor people bear the brunt of the economic breakdown, and let the economic and political inequality increase.
Poverty leads to things like crime rates and famine. Those things reinforce poverty. You know the rest of the story from there.