Well, I’ve decided now not to do for #Oil301 what I did today for #Oil201 and yesterday for #Oil101.

I’ll probably post some excerpts from Nate’s part 3, but I’ll draw more from https://lifepod.transistor.fm/episodes/s01e00-an-introduction-to-lifepod/transcript because how Adam is framing our moment is more enabling, more agency affirming, more practical 💚

#Oil201 postscript.

When I posted the transcript of #Oil101 yesterday, part 3 was not yet out, so I hadn’t listened to it.

But I since have.

It’s longer again than its preceding 2 parts, and it doesn’t have answers. It seeks to clarify the predicament we are in, in the hope that we might throw off our delusions of *more*.

Where it leaves us is unavoidably really hard work. And I’m not yet decided if I will add #Oil301 to this thread

#Oil201: 27/27

…“In the final part of this trilogy, I’ll explain what all this means for money, for civilization, and for what comes next for us as individuals and societies living through the down slope of…

the carbon pulse.”

- - -

Transcription ends for

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/136-oil-201

#Oil201: 26/27

…“This is why technological efficiency alone cannot solve an energy and resource problem.

So the deeper question is about what happens when there might be less energy overall.

And here’s where we are:

- Cheap energy builds complex systems.
- Complex systems depend on cheap energy.
- When energy gets tight, complexity unravels.
- Current alternatives cannot replace what cheap oil does *at the scale and speed* that our current system requires…

#Oil201: 25/27

…“The same pattern has played out with almost every energy efficiency gain since.

- LED light bulbs use less electricity per bulb, so we put them everywhere.
- Fuel efficient engines made driving cheaper, so we drove more and built suburbs further out.

Paradoxically, in the same way that you will spend most of your pay raise, energy efficiency doesn’t shrink our demand.

It expands the bounds of what we can extract. It actually *feeds* our demand…

#Oil201: 24/27

…“The reality is we have never in human history fully transitioned off an energy source. We always *add*.

There’s a name for this pattern. It’s based on Jevon’s paradox.

When we find a more efficient way to use a resource, we don’t use less of it. We use *more*.

Coal efficient steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal available for more things, so demand exploded…

#Oil201: 23/27

…“Most alternative energy tech only produces electricity, which is very important, but represents only a fraction of what fossil hydrocarbons do in the world – currently around 20%.

Diesel for shipping, jet fuel, aviation, petrochemical, feedstocks, none of these have clean substitutes at scale.

But beyond these limits, there’s a deeper pattern. The current popular stories of an energy transition are built upon a myth, a false narrative about the history of humans and energy…

#Oil201: 22/27

…“So if oil is this hard to replace, what is this energy transition?

We keep hearing about solar panels and wind turbines but they do not reproduce themselves. The sun and the wind are renewable, but the technology we use to harness them is best labeled ‘rebuildable’, not renewable.

Because they require massive inputs of material and energy and complexity to build, and they need to be rebuilt every 20 or 30 years…

#Oil201: 21/27

…“Alternative energy sources will play a role in the human energy portfolio, but our current system was built around the qualities of oil.

These time, land and material dimensions are almost never discussed, but they’re some of the main reasons that direct substitution is so much harder than people assume, and why there are now warships in the Persian Gulf…

#Oil201: 20/27

…“Wind and solar deliver energy intermittently when the sun shines and the wind blows. Sometimes giving an enormous power burst, but sometimes giving us nothing, especially depending on your location.

Nuclear power can give us a constant stream of high power, but it’s difficult to ramp up and down and requires connection to a larger grid and is capital intensive and costly…