|
|
Musings Report 2020-45 11-7-20 Leonardo da Vinci, Energy and Resilience
You are receiving this email because you are one of the subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Thank You, Patrons and Contributors!
Welcome new or returning patrons / subscribers Jonathan M., Jerry F., Simons C. and Richard S. -- thank you very much!
Leonardo da Vinci, Energy and Resilience
I just finished a fascinating 2005 biography of Leonardo da Vinci by Charles Nicholl (I have Walter Isaacson's 2017 bio of Leonardo on hold at our public library).
I also recently read a study of the subtle sociological transformations behind the collapse of the Soviet Union, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (recommended by my Salon colleague Mark Jeftovic).
For fun, I read a 1976 edition of Michael Grant's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which I'd read in a later, shorter edition, and his marvelous 1971 coffee-table book, Cities of Vesuvius (Pompeii and Herculaneum).
In pursuit of a fuller understanding of the 19th century Danish Kierkegaard, I also read two short works on his complex and elusive philosophy. (Though he's generally pigeonholed as a Christian philosopher, his work speaks to topics beyond faith, hence his standing as the founder of Existentialism.)
All these apparently disconnected books are tied together in my mind by two themes: energy and resilience.
Though I knew of Leonardo and his astonishing drawings of the human form and various inventions (hundreds of years before technology caught up with his designs), I knew little of his own life and the everyday world he inhabited in Florence and Milan.
Life was pretty good in Renaissance Italy, even if you were, like Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a notary who grew up in the countryside. Even in the remote village where Leonardo lived with his mother and stepfather, everybody had food and shelter and opportunities.
Travel was by horseback or cart, but it was not reserved for the elite; the populace was quite mobile. (Leonardo was comfortable on horseback and also walked considerable distances, which reconnected him with his youth in the countryside.)
In the 25 small notebooks we still have that Leonardo filled with sketches, notes, shopping lists, etc., we have a window not just on his genius but on everyday life. His shopping lists give us a sense of his household (an artist's workshop with apprentices, a secretary/PA, maid/cook, etc.).
Wine and bread were cheap, and vegetables and fruit available to city dwellers for modest sums. There were fancy stockings and hats, lavish civil celebrations, public art and much more.
What's remarkable from our perspective is that this busy, productive world of 1500--and what a range of talent/genius it fostered--had no oil, natural gas or coal. It was all enabled by human and animal labor, candlelight, wind (sailing ships) and an occasional waterwheel mill.
(In terms of an explosion of talent--Leonardo personally knew Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Botticelli, among others.)
The Roman world of 79 AD, when Vesuvius erupted and locked Pompeii and Herculaneum in a time-capsule of volcanic ash, was also a lively, productive world of art, ideas, music, theater, electoral politics and commerce--all without the leverage of fossil fuels.
The Roman era is dismissed as being dependent on slavery, and this was undoubtedly an economic reality. But slavery in Rome was far more porous than the slavery of colonial America. It was considered good form for the wealthy to free their slaves or allow them to buy their freedom via their own side-business. Many former slaves went on to become wealthy themselves. (We know this from gravestone inscriptions.)
(Becoming a slave was often a result of conquest: you're going about your business when in comes a Roman army, and suddenly your labor was a spoil of war: off you go to the slave market, or you might already be the property of a Roman officer.)
Life was good in these small Roman cities, and the good life wasn't just reserved for the super-wealthy elites who owned villas outside of town. Most of the residents were merchants of wine, baked goods, etc., generally sold in a shop fronting their residence, or they provided services and crafts.
Local officials were elected (the vote was of course restricted to men of a certain class) but women were actively engaged in electioneering as well--we know from the graffiti scratched on the plaster exteriors of the buildings.
But there were no slaves in Renaissance Italy, and many of the artists had come from humble beginnings and learned their craft in workshops like the one Leonardo apprenticed in. There was clearly a great deal of social mobility through art, craft skills, commerce, military service or service to the church.
While some very preliminary industrial use of coal was emerging in Kierkegaard's 1845 Denmark, and whale oil was used for lighting, by and large prosperous Copenhagen operated on the same energy sources as 1500 Florence. (Kierkegaard was an avid urban walker, spending hours wandering about Copenhagen, engaging strangers in long conversations.)
As for the Soviet Union circa 1985-1987, Gorbachev's policy of perestroika ("restructuring") sent shock waves through the social and economic orders of the USSR, and these changes set the internal stage for individuals to have a different view of what was possible.
But to pinpoint the pressing need for "restructuring," we have to look at the collapse in oil prices in the early 1980s, and the devastating decline in hard-currency earning this inflicted on a low-productivity Soviet economy.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986 was an enormous blow to Soviet confidence and its standing in the world as a superpower, and this was widely understood as a reflection of a faltering state.
The quagmire of the Soviet was in Afghanistan (1980 to 1989) also damaged the perception of the USSR as a superpower, both within the Soviet Union and the world at large.
In financial terms, the key driver of "restructuring" was the collapse in oil revenues, which were the USSR's primary source of hard currency it needed to buy what it could not produce.
Simply put, when something is no longer financially viable, it collapses. This is scale-invariant, meaning it's equally true for households and small businesses as it is for global corporations, nations and empires.
Energy--its availability, abundance and cost--is the foundation of financial/economic viability, in every place and every era.
The modern world has gorged on the cheap abundance of oil for 150 years, in ever greater gulps. "Modern civilization" now consumes about 90 million barrels of oil a day.
All the alternative energy generated by wind, solar, geothermal, etc., only provides 3% of the total energy consumed globally. Despite rapid growth, these energy sources don't actually replace oil or natural gas or coal--they are absorbed by humanity's voracious appetite for more energy, the cheaper the better.
(The analogy is building a new highway to relieve traffic congestion on the existing highway. All the new highway does is encourage more driving/traffic, so congestion on the old road is barely dented. Adding alt energy simply enables total energy consumption to rise. It doesn't replace fossil fuel.)
How much of our industrial civilization is essentially 100% dependent on cheap, abundant fossil fuels? Virtually all of it. Even the much-touted electric cars are made largely of oil-derived plastic (can't make plastic out of electricity) and metals, and batteries composed of lithium and other minerals that require massive mining machinery and refining powered by oil.
Every electrical vehicle, motor, inverter, windmill, solar panel, etc. is nothing but a derivative of fossil fuels.
The essence of a sustainable, resilient society is an economy with multiple sources for everything both essential and extraneous, and multiple layers of redundancy.
If a society is entirely dependent on one resource, it's intrinsically fragile and prone to collapse if that one source falters.
Leonardo carted his most famous painting, Mona Lisa, around with him for years, as it remained unfinished in his eye. It was carted from Florence to Rome (a note of the cost exists) and then back to Florence, then to Milan, and finally to Amboise, France, where Leonardo died in 1519.
Could we transport Leonardo's entire household and all his tools, papers, books, etc. these great distances without oil now? No.
Consider this (by our standards) "primitive" transport system. If your horse goes lame on the road, you can hire an ox cart in the next village, or simply walk on your own two feet until another option becomes available. If flooding ruined a harvest in one locale, grain was shipped by riverboat or carts from another locale. The system was highly resilient due to its redundancy, decentralization, low energy consumption and minimal dependence on any one source of energy.
Just as the USSR was fatally dependent on the income derived from one resource--oil--the global economy is fatally dependent on fossil fuels. If the tractors and combines have no fuel, we have no grain. Without fossil-fuel lubricants and petrochemicals, a great deal of "modern life" goes away, and there are no substitutes.
The fantasy is that we can build an energy system that generates as much or more energy as we squander now, and this system would free us from dependence on oil. But as Nate Hagens has explained, most of these energy sources are not renewables, they're replaceables, and they need enormous quantities of fossil fuels to be replaced in 25 years.
Right now less than 5% of all the lithium batteries powering mobile phones, cordless tools, Tesla cars, etc. are recycled, because it makes no financial sense to do so in the current arrangement. When will it make sense? Perhaps never. Once China stopped accepting the West's immense flow of garbage, i.e. "recycling," the absurd fantasy that we could make our dependency on oil go away by recycling the mountains of waste we generate went away.
As the foundation of literally everything in our world, oil has a feature few view as a threat: oil has a cost that is not a function of central banks printing money. The easy-to-get oil is gone, and what's left is increasingly costly to extract, refine and transport. The supply is exquisitely vulnerable to geopolitical upheavals.
The redundancy in the supply of oil is illusory: a handful of major exporters provide most of the world's oil.
The supply of oil won't go to zero, but any reversal in the trend of "there's always more somewhere" could lead to irreversible declines in supply that could double or triple price in a very short time.
As I've noted here previously, spikes in the price of oil have been rare and brief. This is not the result of the system; it was pure good luck.
The U.S. doubled its production of fossil fuels in the past decade from around 5 million barrels a day to over 10 MBD. This remarkable increase was the result of fracking and related technologies that enabled the drilling of thousands of new wells.
But this industry was never financially viable at current oil prices; its "success" was one of financial engineering, and the tens of billions of dollars lost in propping up the illusion of viability have come home to roost.
Nobody is willing to loan the industry another $10 billion that will be lost.
Oil exporters remain completely dependent on selling oil for their survival: it's "pump or die." As the world economy slides into recession, demand for oil will fall, and those who must "pump or die" have no choice but to keep pumping as price falls due to slumping demand.
This is what I've called the "oil head-fake." A crash in demand will trigger a crash in price which will bankrupt exporters and cause less productive oil fields to be shut down: if you're losing money on every barrel, why pump more?
Once this production goes offline, it's not a flip of a switch to restart it. It takes months, and the certainty that the cost will be justified by the price of oil.
Price is not linear. If oil production drop 10%, it doesn't mean price moves 10%. Price is set on the margins, and a 10% permanent drop in oil supply could push the price up 50%.
In summary, the fragilities of our complete dependence on fossil fuels have been masked by good luck: it really does seem as if oil is limitless and will always be cheap and abundant.
But this is illusion. The oil industry has to be financially viable or it will collapse. As the cost of extracting oil goes up, price must go up. Printing money doesn't change this.
Can a debt-based consumer economy remain financially viable as the one essential resource doubles in cost? We assume the answer is "yes" but the answer is actually "no." A great many enterprises and governments are "zombies," unable to service their existing debts without borrowing ever larger sums.
The illusion of financial viability can be maintained by increasing debt for a while, but eventually that "solution" becomes a "problem" that can't be solved by borrowing more money and throwing it on the bonfire.
Could civilization manage on 50% of the energy we currently squander on absurdities like flying grapes and goodies thousands of miles to distant markets? 79 AD, 1500 AD and 1845 AD offer templates for ways of organizing human endeavor that are far less fragile and far more resilient than our current dependence on fossil fuels for virtually everything we touch, see and eat.
The greater the dependence on one resource, the greater the fragility. Perhaps our luck finally runs out in 2021 and this becomes apparent.
Systems evolve or expire just like species. What works well at lower levels of energy consumption will succeed, everything else that requires terribly inefficient and unsustainable energy consumption will collapse.
The good news is that life could actually be much better for humanity and the biosphere in an arrangement focused on delivering well-being with the least amount of energy, i.e. DeGrowth, and achieve this not through centralized power but through anti-fragile decentralized, distributed networks of local production.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
AxisOfEasy Salon #29: A Deep Dive into the Network State
Could ELECTION SHENANIGANS Investigation UNCOVER Something DEEPER? (45 min)
Posts:
Forget GOAT, Look at GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble Of All Time 11/6/20
Here's Our Historical Analogy Menu: Rome, the USSR or Revolutionary France 11/5/20
What We Don't Elect Matters Most: Central Banking and the Permanent Government 11/4/20
Our Imperial Presidency 11/3/20
Want Hope and Real Growth? Let the Dead Forest of Corruption and Fed Manipulation Burn Down 11/2/20
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
First harvest of the new tomato garden.
From Left Field
The Rich in New York Confront an Unfamiliar Word: No
If Restaurants Go, What Happens to Cities?
How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System -- a worthy intro to the complexities of the immune system...
How Straight Talk Helped One State Control COVID
The engines of SARS-CoV-2 spread
The tragedy of the post-COVID "long haulers"
Harrowing Holidays: Around the world, the best predictor of controlling Covid is social cohesion.
How to make yourself employable--forever. -- not sure about this but an interesting effort...
That One Time John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell Played "Yer Blues" (via GFB)
The Fall of Silicon Valley-- long but worth a read as it's written from the trenches....
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? -- good summary...
Thermodynamic Oil Collapse & Future (2 hours) -- what we all need to understand but few do...
"Wildness is out there. The most vital beings and systems hang out at the edge of the wildness. The next time you howl in delight like a wolf, howl for unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic non-linear dynamic systems. Lao Tzu and Thoreau and Abbey will be pleased." Jack Turner
Thanks for reading--
charles |
|
|
|
|
|
