Energy – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Sleep? That’s for the weak.

“All persons who die during this crisis from whatever cause will come back to life to seek human victims, unless their bodies are first disposed of by cremation.” – Night of the Living Dead

Also, remember that sleep is no substitute for caffeine.

Sleep and I have always had a rocky relationship. If I were married to Sleep, Sleep would have filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment. For most people, this starts at an early age, but for me it started when I was a very young John Wilder, at around the age of five.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m adopted, but it’s the kind of adoption that involves family members. The ones that were closest to me before the adoption were Grandma and Grandpa McWilder. To me they seemed astonishingly old, even though they were in their late sixties when I toddled into their lives at the age of five.

All five year old children are difficult. I think I was more difficult than most – I found where the electricity entered their house, above a window. How difficult was I? I grabbed the bare wires coming in with one hand. After I got shocked, what did I do? Grabbed it again. I was a high maintenance.

But the benefit of being with a grandparent is the word “no” is generally a foreign word to their vocabulary. I recall discovering that Star Trek® would be on after the news on Saturday. So, I stayed up to watch it. Grandma and Grandpa McWilder had already gone to bed, having watched the weather.

Now, I have no idea why they were so concerned about the weather. They didn’t farm, they didn’t really do anything that would require them to be concerned about the weather, but they watched it every night. Me? For the most part (there are exceptions) I don’t worry much about the weather – you can’t change it after all, unless you’re a sixteen year old girl from Sweden.

After Captain Kirk® had finished gallivanting around the galaxy at 11:30pm, I still wasn’t tired. What was next? Creepy Creature Feature. As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature, I was hooked.

What was Creepy Creature Feature? It was a pair of science fiction and/or horror movies, most of which were black and white. These were generally not what anyone today would call good movies – the special effects in most of them involved foam rubber, chocolate syrup, and someone imagining what George Soros’ face would look like in 2020.

This wasn’t the logo my local station used, but you get the idea.

Okay, why on Earth would such wonderful people have such poor judgement as to allow a five-year-old to watch horror movies deep into the night?

Let me explain how I was treated when I visited Grandma and Grandpa:

Grandma McWilder would cook me my favorite dinner, and give me money to buy comic books. You’re thinking Archie® and Superman© and X-Men™, right? Sure, I bought plenty of those. But Grandma didn’t seem to care what a five-year-old bought, and the store didn’t seem to care, either.

This was a far different time and place than today. If I went to the local drugstore and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me. Five year old me. And they would have asked if I needed matches. While at the drugstore I bought issues of National Lampoon® that had mostly naked women in them. And while you may have thought that all people were fully clothed all the time before the Internet, I can assure you that it was not so.

They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though. You had to at least be in sixth grade for hard alcohol. Beer? Heck, that’s practically water.

So I bought magazines like this:

Creepy® and Eerie™ Magazines – the best in 1970’s black and white cartoon gore. Nothing unusual here, just a woman holding a disembodied hand close to her chest. Happens every day, most normal thing in the world.

And the drugstore even sold off-brand magazines like Weird™. These didn’t tell stories as polished as Creepy©, but made up for it with artwork that looked like it was done by crack addicted chihuahuas with an unlimited supply of crayons:

No, that’s not “Wired©” it’s “Weird™.” I’m pretty sure I had this issue, but sadly can’t remember a thing that went on in the comic – I’m sure there must be a reason purple-skull man and the werewolf are killing vampires. Probably California zoning enforcement officers?

Anyway, given that I had Creepy® and Weird© magazines around the house, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on after the television station finished watching invisible atomic brain monsters in 1958’s Fiend Without a Face© get shot by a .45ACP and then dissolve. When I was five, I thought it was really, really good. When I reviewed it, I seem to recall that I gave it five blankets over the head.

Thankfully, most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain wasn’t scared because there was no way that these monsters were real. Mostly, I’d just watch the giant radiation-enhanced spider fight the giant radiation-enhanced cow and then go to bed.

Not a radiation enhanced cow.

But then one night they showed Night of the Living Dead. Uncut. Totally uncut – bare butts and all. More importantly, all of the zombies eating uncooked (and cooked) humans was in the movie, too. This was certainly the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and only one or two in the future would ever capture the utter dread that this movie brought, along with the certainty that Grandma’s house simply had too many windows to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse. Plus, being five, the entire concept of zombies was new to me. Dead people craving the first take-out food: people.

Zombies don’t eat brains with their fingers. They eat fingers as an appetizer.

After the movie is over, it’s 1:30AM. Time to go to bed, but I don’t want to walk on the floor because it creaks. That would certainly draw the zombies my direction. I finally get up, and go to the spare bed that’s in Grandma’s bedroom where I normally sleep.

After watching zombies eat living humans my five-year-old brain processed certain facts:

Dead people might become zombies.
Zombies develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
Grandma was very old.
Old people sometimes die.
Therefore, Grandma might become a zombie in the middle of the night.

And:

I was made of human flesh.

So, if you’ve ever had difficulty sleeping because you thought your wonderful, kindly Grandma might become a zombie and eat you while you were still alive, raise your hand.

Only me?

I’m not sure that I slept at all that night.

Sleep and I have continued a dubious relationship, and during my life, whenever I could stay up late I certainly did. But when I was younger, I would never sleep more than eight or so hours at a stretch and I always avoided naps. When I was in head start, I would throw blocks at the other kids who were actually good and attempting to sleep like I was supposed to do. Heck, even before they kicked me out of head start I knew that naps weren’t for closers.

Eventually I got older and I discovered that I really liked naps. What fun! My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drifted even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon. But after graduating from college, work happened. Work started at 7:00AM, and I had to see early morning sunlight.

The break of dawn. Beautiful, you say? Not to me – if I want to see a beautiful sunrise, I can look one up on the Internet.

At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes. And, WebMD© says that weird sleep patterns are not really good for me unless you call heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes good things. The Internet further states that not enough sleep can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and make me die earlier.

I slept great last night! I got a full 73 minutes!

That sounds negative, which makes me wonder how did Edison get by on a steady schedule of only four hours of sleep a night? Well, apparently he did a lot of napping, which must not have counted. But he really did get by on less sleep than 8 a night. A lot less. And a host of famous people have gotten by with less, even though WebMD™ says they’re all going to die next week.

So, if you’re up too late and can’t sleep, here’s a copy of Fiend Without a Face, courtesy of YouTube® – I hear a remake is coming, but you can enjoy the 1950’s era effects, especially about one hour and seven minutes into the movie.

Just make sure that you have a contingency plan in place to take care of Granny if she goes zombie on you . . .

This is a revamp of an earlier post from when the blog was just starting. I like this newer version better.

The Global Warming Memo They Don’t Want You To See (Okay, I wrote it.)

“Yes, it keeps me up at night. That and the Loch Ness Monster, global warming, evolution, other fictional concepts.” – House, M.D.

Looks like she uses Coppertone® for her sunscreen.

I intercepted a note from the Global Warming Community(C) to the media using the extremely old technique of making it up. Here it is in it’s entirety, with no further commercial interruptions.

It’s the end of summer, so the Global Warming Community™ would like to take a moment to remind you that hot summer weather is a sure sign of Global Warming®. Cold winter weather is just weather. And if there are more hurricanes, you can bet that it’s a sign of Global Warming©. If there are fewer hurricanes, you can also bet that is a sign of Global Warming™, too.

Firstly, please ignore that our models aren’t even close to accurate:

Please ignore previous climate predictions that had the 97% Consensus© like the one by “42 top American and European investigators,” which stated . . . “The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.” Please ignore these other predictions, too:

Worldwide famines by 1975. You remember those, right? On August 10, 1969, Paul Ehrlich stated that “The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead.” Ehrlich is still alive.
On April 16, 1970, it was announced that there would be an ice age starting in the first third of the new century because there would be enough air pollution to “obliterate the Sun.”
Ehrlich wasn’t happy to have just one spot on the list. In 1970, he stated that there would be water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. And the oceans would be as dead as Lake Erie. Please ignore the tilapia your wife had for dinner last month.
In 1974, it was noted that sea ice had increased 12% between 1967 and 1972. It was also noted in the article that “This appears to be in keeping with other long-term climatic changes, all of which suggest that after reaching a climax of warmth between 1935 and 1955, world average temperatures are now falling.”
Time® magazine noted in June, 1974, that, “Telltale signs are everywhere – from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7°”
From the New York Times Book Review, July, 1976: “The Cooling, so writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”
From the New York Times, January, 1978 headline: “No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.”
1980: Reports were that acid rain will kill us. Please ignore that in 1990 the report came in: acid rain is not really a thing.
June 24, 1988, Dr. James Hansen said, “Our climate model simulations for the late 1980s and the 1990s indicate a tendency for an increase in heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and Midwest United States.” Please ignore that 1988 was the driest year in the upper Midwest in the last 31 years.
In September of 1988, it was noted that “A gradual rise in sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation [The Maldives] of 1196 small islands in the next 30 years.” Please ignore that the Maldives are still there.
Hansen also noted that “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water (by 2018).” Please ignore that it’s not.
In 2004, one prediction was that Great Britain would be “Siberian” by 2020. Four months to go!
In June of 2008, Dr. Hansen said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013 to 2018. Please ignore that it’s not even close.
In December of 2008, Nobel Prize Winner® Al Gore noted that the Arctic “polarized (sic) cap will disappear in 5 years.” Please ignore the 14,000,000 square kilometers of ice that was in the “polarized” area. And please ignore all of the other people who said the same thing.
Please don’t go to the CEI blog where all of the above (and more) is documented (LINK).

I wonder if she can say “indeed” as deeply as Brian Blessed?

Please remember how charming the clinically depressed, autistic child suffering from whatever “selective mutism” is and obsessive compulsive disorder. Realize that this is certainly the best leader the Global Warming Community® can offer for climate change because if you make fun of her you’re making fun of clinically depressed autistic that suffer from “selective mutism” and OCD, and to dispute anything she says is hate filled. Please note that the Global Warming Community™ did nothing manipulative or unethical in having a child with mental issues be our spokesperson. Thankfully, the Global Warming Community© has managed to get the Global Warming Agenda® into schools so impressionable children with mental issues can become so upset that they lose 22 pounds due to worry.

Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a “Green” (read communist) who is the handler for Greta Thunberg. The Internet says she works for Soros, but I find that connection a bit tenuous – I think being communist is probably enough.

Please ignore how the primary discussion during climate conferences has been how much money developed countries would have to pay to undeveloped countries. Thankfully, the media has ignored projections that the Paris Treaty™ might cost the United States as much as $2.5 Trillion a year, and only make the climate slightly cooler, as low as 0.17°C cooler in the year 2100 than without the agreement.

Please ignore how many Global Warming™ temperature graphs start in 1978, one of the coolest years on record. This is like picking that day you drank fifty beers and saying you’ve made progress because you’ve cut down consumption by 50%. Please ignore Dr. Roy Spencer’s (LINK) graph, even though it also starts at the cool period in the 1970’s:

Also, please ignore that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s advisor stated about her Green New Deal™: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Please ignore that the primary driver for many Global Warming Agenda™ items are about control of people and economies, and if we really wanted to eliminate carbon emissions the Global Warming Community™ would have embraced nuclear power thirty years ago.

Also, Please ignore these Greenland Ice Cores from Joanne Nova’s site (LINK):

Also, please make sure you don’t publish “stop having babies because a person in the United States has a bigger Carbon Footprint™ and adds more to Global Warming© than the wonderful citizens of the third world” articles right next to “we need more immigrants to replace all the babies we’re not having.” It’s okay in the same issue, but not right next to each other.

And whatever you do, please don’t let anyone know that we’re at the characteristic end (more or less) of a typical interglacial warm period (LINK) and that our demise is much more likely to come by ice than fire, unless you read George R.R. Martin (and I must note it takes him about 415,000 years per novel nowadays:

Lastly, please, please, please ignore the fact that the International Panel on Climate Change® came up with the conclusion that variance in the Sun’s output doesn’t impact climate. Yes, even though there is ample evidence that the gigantic thermonuclear reactor in the sky just might have something to do with climate (Climate Change, Solar Output, Ice Ages, The Planet Vulcan, And Old Guys With Beards).

We’ll be back next spring to remind you that if we don’t act in the next (checks watch) five minutes . . . WE ARE ALL DOOMED!

The Impending End of The Age of Oil. But Not This Week.

“You have raw emotion deep under your surface. Frack it!” – The Simpsons

From the movie Sad Max®: Beyond Soy Latte™.

Energy rules our world. Advanced civilization depends entirely on the availability of inexpensive energy, and wars have been fought for energy, and lost because of the lack of energy. Every task you or I do during a day is made easier by the availability of that energy. Every task. Even something as simple as a hike in the woods is made easier due the hiking shoes I wear that incorporate polymers and plastics and artificial fabrics made possible through cheap energy and more specifically: cheap fossil fuels. Cheap energy gives us fresh strawberries in winter, and baby oil for sunbathers in summer.

Even though the oil changes are more fun, I imagine the upkeep is more expensive than a Buick®.

I’d even make the case that when energy is cheap, freedom flourishes. Why have a slave? It’s much cheaper to have a gas powered weed trimmer. Slavery is immoral, but cheap energy removes that pesky incentive. Why have serfs? You have to feed them, which is a big drawback. If the Russian Emperor had used tractors instead, he might have lived long enough to be on Dancing with the Czars®.

Cheap energy is freedom.

One of the biggest recurring questions that has popped up (again and again) during my lifetime has been the impending end of the Age of Oil. If you say “impending end of the Age of Oil” in a really deep, booming baritone like Brian Blessed it sounds even cooler. The first time the impending end of the Age of Oil reached mass public consciousness was in the 1970’s, and for good reason. Texas had passed its peak in oil production in 1973, it was thought that every year after would see the production decline.

True Life Snippet From Stately Wilder Manor: Whenever I agree with The Mrs. by saying, “Indeed” she says, “Now say it like Brian Blessed.” And she’s serious. She won’t let me say the word “Indeed” without impersonating Brian Blessed.

How crazy were we for oil in the 1970s? When oil was found in Alaska on the North Slope, several major oil companies put together a four-foot wide (16 meters) pipeline that brought oil 800 miles (6 kilometers) from the Arctic sea down to the Gulf of Alaska. At the time, the project was one of the most ambitious construction projects in United States history, and cost the equivalent of $34 billion 2019 dollars, or about what Elon Musk spends on weed and hair implants in a year. It was expensive, and even in the 1970’s the lawyers and environmental groups had their knives out. In 1970, they were all NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard. In 2020? They’ve gone BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Nothing as grand or great as the Alaska Pipeline will ever be built again in the United States.

After the Alaska Pipeline oil started flowing and the United States sweet-talked the Saudis into making oil cheaper than a date with Miley Cyrus, oil concerns continued – with oil companies looking for oil in ever more remote locations, including the a mile under the sea, couch cushions, and the faces of teenage boys. Billions were invested in both conventional oil (think about a Texas oil derrick) or unconventional (think about the oil platform used by a James Bond villain as a secret hideout). Exxon© even spent millions trying to learn how to mine shale, crush it, and cook it so that it could be turned into Happy Motoring™ gasoline, but gave up.

These concerns disappeared in 1999 when it became obvious that if you wanted a barrel of oil, in the future all you would have to do is order one on the Internet via Hotmail® after you looked it up on AltaVista™. At that point The Economist© had a woefully stupid cover proclaiming that oil would be cheap from here on out since it was trading as low as $15 a barrel at that point, even though oil doubled in cost over the year. In 2008, crude oil would hit its (so far) all-time high in 2019 dollars of $173.

On a positive note, with her skin Meg Ryan could now do commercials for Jack Links® beef jerky.

The thought in 2008 was that we were certain to have hit impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!). How certain? George W. Bush, an oilman president from Texas, was in favor of creating incentives to add ethanol to gasoline, despite the anguished cries of people who would rather have consumed the alcohol directly. Ethanol plants appeared throughout the corn belt of the United States, turning seed, sunlight, fertilizer, and diesel fuel into food. Which was turned into fuel. Farmers loved this.

This led to yet more investment in energy alternatives – schemes to turn natural gas into ammonia for fuel, yet deeper wells into the ocean, fracking, turning coal into liquid fuels, turning “switch grass” into fuel, and any other silly idea that would could come up. People even touted the coming “hydrogen economy” because they forgot that hydrogen had to be made using some other form of energy. The world was needing an energy savior.

Or, could he be the foretold Anti-Cat?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Apocalypse

Of course in 2008, the trend was clear: impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!) was upon us. But one of the unlikely saviors had turned out to be real.

In 2012 if you would have asked me, I would have told you that fracking was just a great way to turn money into wasted fuel – it took almost as much fuel to make fracked oil as you got out of it – not a good investment. In 2015, I would have told you the same thing – the fracking companies were losing money like there was no tomorrow – if you had to invest more energy (think Btu or kilowatts) into getting oil out of the ground than it was worth in energy terms, you were just sinking yourself faster by using that kind of energy – it’s like burning your blankets to keep your bedroom warm in winter.

I was putting together my notes for a Big Energy Post in October of 2018, and had even written the first few paragraphs (okay, 500 words or so) when my research was showing something different. I skipped the Big Energy Post and moved on to another topic, since it was clear to me that my preconceived notion that fracking was a waste of energy might be wrong. My research was showing something other than fracking was a waste of energy. It was showing that fracked oil might actually be . . . worth it?

It turns out that when anyone first starts doing anything, they suck at it. And unless it’s me practicing singing, I have learned that if I practice, I’ll get better. There’s even a curve that describes this – it’s called an “S-Curve” or logistics curve or learning curve. When you first start walking, you suck. When you first start driving, you suck. When you first start, well, anything you’re awful at it. Over time you get better, and the more you practice, the more competition there is? The better you get.

If you have hundreds of people practicing something with billions of dollars on the line? They get better. Quickly.

And that’s the story of fracking oil in the United States. Water usage in fracking is down. Chemical usage in fracking is down. Drilling costs, energy expended, and labor per barrel are down. After practicing thousands of times on thousands of wells, companies have figured out how to frack a well to maximize crude oil production and minimize cost (and energy) put into it. One metric I saw showed that fracked oil was now competitive (with a profit) compared with the cheapest oil on the planet – oil from Saudi Arabia. Companies have gotten so good at fracking that natural gas in the United States is essentially free.

I guess I’m not a fan.

Fracked oil is on a trajectory to be competitive with the lowest cost oil produced conventionally any place in the world. And fracked oil has some other advantages – it’s “lighter” than conventional crude – that means it contains more gasoline and diesel, and less of the “heavier” stuff that is harder to turn into gasoline and diesel – think asphalt.

The United States is the largest crude oil producer in the world. I never thought I’d type that sentence and it represent a real fact, but in 2019, it does. The United States is, as promised by every president starting with Nixon, actually, really and for trues, energy independent.

[Edit – Chart added after Lathechuck’s comment]

Was it alternative energy, like windmills? No. Was it the communist fever dreams of The Teen Girl Congress Squad®? No.

Is it “sustainable”? Kinda. It is for a while. There are an estimated (as of 2019) 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the world, 293,000,000,000 of them are in the United States. At 20,000,000 barrels a day in just the United States, using just United States resources, that’s forty years that we have from 2020 – until 2060 – to find an alternative, like, oh, nuclear. And don’t believe me – here’s an actual clean energy evangelist who finally did that math and discovered . . . windmills are worse than natural gas as far as carbon emissions.

We still face headwinds – economic, exponential growth, two billion people that would love to hop the border to the United States, and communists that want to tear the place down. But oil? Oil isn’t the place to look for an apocalypse, at least this week.

And, trust me, if I hear a whiff that any of the above is wrong, I’ll pop it right back up on this blog as soon as I can confirm.

So, at least for today, Happy Motoring©. We have maybe forty years to fix this, so let’s not waste it. This has obvious foreign policy implications we’ll discuss in future posts. Upside? Why do we care about the Middle East anymore?

Economic Bubbles, Knife Juggling Toddlers, and Sewer Clowns

“Well, I don’t think it’s officially called bubble bath if the bubbles happen accidentally, but whatever, Shawn.” – Psyche

The Four Horsemen of the Wilderpocalypse®, now in living color!

The world is in a weird place. Very weird. And that’s just what it says on my performance review.

What’s really weird is money. Money, capital, whatever you call it, is in a vast oversupply. How much of an oversupply?

Interest rates on about $15 trillion (not that brightly colored wrapping paper some countries naively use for money, but real dollars) is negative. Negative. In my bank account, I loan the bank my money. In turn, the bank gives me a little extra back each month. Not much at all, in comparison to historical standards, but a little.

Alas, there will be no Christmas Goat in Zimbabwe this year.

In Germany, if you loan the government €100 (which is like a metric dollar for feminists) you pay 0.593%, or €0.59 a year for the privilege. If you think this is a really good deal, come on down to John Wilder’s Toddler Knife Juggling School and Bank®. I’ll only charge you €0.25 a year. Plus you get to see videos of all the toddlers learning to juggle knives. I’ll maintain that I’m giving you the much better deal. Well, it’s a better deal depending upon what your insurance deductible is and how coordinated your toddler is.

Heck, keeping the cash in a box under your bed is a better deal than paying the Germans to watch it for you. Why on Earth would you give someone piles of your hard-earned cash and be happy that you got less back,? Well, some pension firms are required to invest in government securities, and some (probably German funds) are required to invest in German bonds. In terms of deals, this is the functional equivalent of a Mafia bargain: “It’s an offer you can’t refuse,” but in this case spoken with an accent like Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes®.

But the shear sum is mindboggling – I could come up with lots of really meaningless descriptions of what a trillion dollars is worth – a football field full of pallets of $100 bills stacked 8 feet high, enough to fill 1.8 miles worth of semi-trucks, almost enough space to hold Charlie Sheen’s spare virus load. So, we as humans can’t really understand a trillion dollars in any meaningful way – and $15 trillion is how much money that’s parked in government bonds earning negative interest. This is a travesty while my toddler juggling students are in desperate need of a prosthetics and eyepatch fund.

Also 50% off vision, but that’s no charge.

When I was just dating The Mrs. (The Mrs. was just The Miss then), we visited her house so her parents could thump me like a melon to make sure I was ripe. In her bedroom I noticed a box of toys. On top was a plastic plane that I assume belonged to her older brother. The plane didn’t look like the one below, but it was of a similar quality – very cheap plastic. If I were buying that toy today, I’d expect it would be $1 or $2. Not much, since it couldn’t be more than five pieces of cheap molded plastic.

I still miss lawn darts. If you’re going to make a hazardous toy, go all out and make it really hazardous.

As I recall, this particular toy plane still had the sticker on it from when cashiers used to manually punch in the prices – not a bar code in sight. The sticker had a price of (I seem to recall) about $7.95. A silly price for a cheap toy today, but in 1978 or so, maybe it was a good deal.

This is what stickers used to look like before iPhones. Or before I was old.

Inflation and Led Zepplin® ravaged the 1970’s, but nobody drank a pony keg and toked up to get psyched up for inflation. A big part of the inflation was the oil shocks as the United States hit (then) peak oil production and OPEC® found they could dictate energy prices. Another big part of inflation was because Nixon pulled the United States off of the gold standard. I know people blame Nixon (and I have done so myself) for taking us off of the gold standard, but the alternative was giving all of our gold to the French. The French. They would have just spent it all on baguettes, berets, cigarettes, and mime school, so it was for their own good that Nixon said, “nope, no gold for you.”

Also, he’s missing track shoes to run from ze panzers.

But as the dollar went from being nominally backed by gold to being backed by governmental promises, there was a messy, messy decade as prices adjusted. I believe this led to many economic horrors. And disco. Eventually the dollar became the currency everyone used to trade with – if you wanted to buy Brazilian waxes and ship them to Japan, the Japanese would have to first trade yen for dollars, and then pay the Brazilians in dollars. The Brazilians would then trade the dollars for more wax, or maybe matches to keep that pesky rainforest burning so it wouldn’t grow back.

The dollar became the required currency for world trade, especially in oil. In the meantime, we had too many dollars chasing everything in the United States, and prices of everything went up. So did interest rates. Pop Wilder once told me that he was going to try to buy a $100,000 Treasury bond when the interest rates peaked back in 1981. He said that it would have paid him $17,000 a year for twenty years, and then would have paid the $100,000 back to him. But, his boss wouldn’t loan him the money while he sold some stock and moved some money around – Pop had the money, but he couldn’t get it that week. That one bugged him for years. He certainly wasn’t planning on paying the Treasury to take his loan.

After the Great Recession, the central bankers at the Federal Reserve® flew around dropping money by buying up mortgage-backed securities. How much? $1.8 trillion at last count – they discontinued the data. And then the Fed went started buying US treasuries so the interest rates would stay low – peaking at $2.4 trillion from a starting point of less than $0.5 trillion.

This was called “Quantitative Easing” since that sounds much more sober than “panicking and throwing money on the fire to try to put it out.” The Fed© pumped through just these two mechanisms over $3.7 trillion into the economy from 2008 to 2015. It’s not like they wanted to keep the party going for a specific president, is it? Nah.

Anyway, the Fed® pumped money, manipulated interest rates, and what happened?

See, it’s topical, it’s current, and it’s a scary sewer clown. Ma Wilder told me these were the three basic elements of humor. Oh, and toddlers juggling knives.

This time, the world currency reacted entirely different – the money was in the hands of the already rich. So what did the rich do? Invested it. Prices went up, but in this case, it was the price not of cheap plastic airplanes, but of investments. Money began chasing profits. As such, the stock market increased a wee amount, going from about 10,000 to over 28,000 today. For those that didn’t major in math, that was an increase of 2.8x. During the same time, the economy grew about 33%, or, 1.3x. Bond interest rates plummeted – that means that bonds were in demand, since it takes a lower interest rate to get someone to buy a bond.

And now you have to pay to buy a bond.

Money has been chasing assets that can be invested in. The stock market. Bonds. Farmland. San Francisco condos. Because of the investor money looking for profits, these have all grown much faster than the price of a Big Mac®, though that seems to be heading up now, too. College and medical costs have gone up as well, but that’s mainly because government gets involved and “helps out” with student loans and generally screws up medical care entirely.

Most of the other things needed for day-to-day living in the heartland haven’t gone up that much – cheaper energy has certainly helped the entire economy. And housing prices in Modern Mayberry have stayed as flat as your sister for the last decade, if not declining a bit.

But the stock market can’t outpace real growth in the economy forever, and the Fed™ has stopped injecting money into mortgage-backed securities, and investors seem to want to by Treasury notes, so the Fed© can stop buying those for a while.

I’m thinking she may do better at math than the Fed®.

To me it seems clear that our economy is in a bubble where investors are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a little bit of profit, or a little bit of interest return. We are in a bubble – a bubble where the assets are those things that can produce income, or at least a return on investment. In this particular bubble, capitalism itself is the commodity that is over inflated, aided and abetted by bankers that seem to want to keep the economic party going forever.

Hey, it’s still working for Zimbabwe, right?

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter. Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million. But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Update: I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man. Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.” He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house. And the television. And the car. And the other car. And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending. While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards. The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old. It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more. He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house. The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it. He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship. Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that. Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe. He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

Pop says he saw him. But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability. That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly. He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things. Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots: the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area. A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption. I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop. Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it. When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered. The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail. But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business. He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder. But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run. What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback. Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse. Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled. Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished. They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving. Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay? No. But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates. And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money. But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you.

Pop Wilder spent it all. Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe. Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month. Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month. And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker. I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study. I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake. There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out: “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense: most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you. And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help? Maybe.

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end? Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain. Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad. This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5^th Century book, City of God. Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6^th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna. There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

there be inflation?
they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills? We thought about it, but live next door to a banker? I hear they bring down property values.
civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
I live to be 190? I hope not.
government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty? In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see. The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire. Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually. Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning. That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there. The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day. And not only in the galaxy, but in your house. In your carpet. In your body. In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.

In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Limits to Growth and Exponential Feminists

“Look, man, do I look like an ichthyologist to you? Big damn bugs, all right? The size of my fist. The size of a peanut butter and banana sandwich. What do I know? I got a growth. . . .” – Bubba Ho Tep

Zombies or Mad Max®.

When my older brother, also (really) named John Wilder, (my parents didn’t want to have to call two names when they called us for dinner) came back from college one year, he brought back a large number of textbooks. Most of the books were exceedingly dull, written by exceedingly dull college professors about business. I’m not sure what a college professor would know about business, since if they were any good at business they’d have one, not teach it. Honestly, I have no idea why you’d want to get a college degree in “business” at all, unless it was because you like spending $20,000 a year to drink beer and go rock climbing with college girls wearing skimpy outfits . . .

Oh, that’s why you get a degree in business and take six years to get it. Never mind.

But one of my brother’s textbooks caught my eye, a copy of Limits to Growth. It was a dog-eared paperback with a bright yellow sticker on matte black background proclaiming it, “USED.” Knowing my brother’s interest in subjects like economics and the fate of society, the only way that particular textbook was USED was as a doorstop or beer coaster. I’m surprised that Limits to Growth was being used as a textbook, since my brother was going to school at a community college on a competitive mixed doubles checkers scholarship, and actually teaching something to a student athlete at a community college can cause the college to lose its accreditation, I’ve been told.

Limits to Growth was a book based on a computer model back when a 2006 Blackberry® had ten times as much computing power as a the computer they used. The study came out in 1972, when, for whatever reason, the entire world mood started to get gloomy. Here is a book cover from a novel published that same year:

Yes, Ma Wilder bought this for me (at my insistence) when I was about 12. It was a little gloomier than Harry Potter® or Captain Underpants™.

This particular computer model used by the authors was one that purported to take a bunch of inputs and determine future economic growth and population. Because computers are magic, I guess.

Spoiler alert! The results were not good.

Well, this is one solution for overpopulation . . .

You can fiddle with the model yourself over here (LINK). I played with it a few times and, like an amateur knitter gladiating against Spartacus at the Coliseum™ on Ladies Night (two for one Buffalo wings!) I kept losing. I guess my inability to make the computer model turn out well means billions of you are going to have to die and civilization will collapse. Sorry. Bright side? Buffalo wings.

The one fault I have with the model is that most of the “solutions” that drive longer human civilization timelines or stability involve state control and a general shared misery of technological standstill. Oh, and almost all of the solutions had to be implemented back in 1972 for them to be useful.

The cure was to stop economic progress, to live in a world that’s much like Cuba – stuck in the 1950’s with oppressive government limiting actions of individuals, up to and including mandatory beards and licensing of new children. I say “was” because, in the terms of the authors of the original study, it’s too late now to avoid a population growing beyond the capacity of the Earth to provide for it (overshoot) which inevitably leads to a collapse in population.

Normally I am skeptical of model runs. Reality has a way of pointing out all of the things we really don’t know when we place too much faith in models. And yet . . . exponential growth is, well, exponential. Let me illustrate with a story you’ve probably heard before:

You can smell the cats through the computer monitor.

If your town has angry feminists with unnaturally-colored hair in it, and they double in number every day, and you know on day 30 that the town will be overrun with feminists, how many much of the town will be overrun on day 29?

Half. I won’t mansplain that. But on day 28, only a quarter of the town will smell like cat-loving harpy. On day 27, only 12.5%.

Oops. I guess I mansplained that. But the human brain is not wired out of the box to understand exponentials. Thousands of years have taught us that people don’t double in height during a day, that the number of villagers don’t double in a month. But after we study it long enough, we realize the power of exponential growth. If the number of pageviews on this blog increased like they did on a consistent basis, by the year 2026 I’ll have almost 22 billion pageviews a day. Heck, some blogs go a whole year and don’t get that many pageviews.

Okay, that really won’t happen. I’d be lucky to have everyone on Earth visit just once a day.

We’ve been stuck with the exponential growth of humanity. Al Bartlett (R.I.P.) was a professor of physics at the University of Colorado who lectured a lot about exponential growth. His website remains up here (LINK). His conclusion is that, given finite resources, infinite growth isn’t possible. A guy named Thomas Malthus came to that same conclusion in 1798, but his website was on Myspace® and is down now.

Malthus has been for now, wrong, with respect to Western Civilization. Technological progress has increased the carrying capacity of Earth and (generally) increased the standard of living of the vast majority when compared to 1798. At least for now. As we look at civilizations in the past, from the Romans to the Mayans to Easter Island (and others), all collapsed due to unchecked growth.

So, maybe Bartlett, Malthus, and the Club of Rome will win in the end. But until then, I guess 20 year olds will spend six years getting business degrees for the beer and the babes. Might as well enjoy the decline . . . .

Beer, Nuclear Bikinis, and Agriculture: What Made Us Who We Are

“A living nuclear weapon destined to walk the Earth forever. Indestructible. A victim of the modern nuclear age.” – Godzilla 1985

Ahh, sexy nuclear power.

I was at a job I had (while we lived in Houston) and I was getting coffee. One safety tip: the most dangerous place in the world is being between Ocasio-Cortez and a camera. The second most dangerous place in the world is being between me and the office coffee pot. On this particular day a gentleman who worked for a parallel department to mine was also at the coffee bar. We exchanged the ritual office grunting. “Ugh, John hate Mondays.” “Ugh, me hate Mondays too.” As I waited for my coffee to brew, he asked me this question:

“John Wilder, what do you think the most important invention in human history was?”

I thought about it. I didn’t have a ready answer, but this popped into my head. “Besides the bikini, I’d have to go with agriculture.” Who doesn’t love swimwear named after nuclear bomb testing?

See, told you nuclear power was sexy.

He was a little surprised. I think he expected me to say “stapler” or “strapless gown” or some other word starting with “s”, but, no, agriculture was my answer. And upon several years’ worth of reflection, do I stand by that answer? Yes.

Why?

Agriculture has remade our culture. Prior to agriculture, there was no real reason to stay in one location. In fact, if you hunted out an area, it would make sense to move to an area that hadn’t been hunted out – that would have been pressure for them to be nomadic and move periodically. A nomadic people has a limit to the amount of stuff they can have – they have to be able to carry it (or, if they’re a girl, convince the guys to carry it – fur bikinis were useful for that) to the next place they’ll make camp.

Okay, I’d carry her stuff.

Obviously, this lack of stuff limits the ability to create a technological society, and the nomadic lifestyle also makes it difficult for Amazon to deliver the hand-crank margarita maker you ordered since you don’t have an address. Why build a house, or a village? You’re just going to be leaving it to follow the critters you’re hunting. Certainly there were artifacts that were made before agriculture – Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey was built before agriculture, starting at around 10,000 B.C., or about the same time your mom was learning to drive.

But nomadic tribes stayed small – limited by Dunbar’s number – this post is from when I wrote about it last year (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings):

Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.

Göbekli Tepe – these people knew how to rock.

Now that doesn’t mean that Göbekli Tepe is proof that villages didn’t occur – Neanderthal habitations have been found even farther back in time, but those were probably seasonal as they followed the game. Göbekli Tepe was probably a ceremonial location where those people who collect ceramic figurines of frogs met for the annual ceramic frog convention, though this is just my speculation. But what isn’t speculation is that villages and settlements didn’t really exist until agriculture started, also around 10,000 B.C.

Perhaps the high point of Western Civilization?

And at that point everything changes. Archeological evidence indicates that hunter-gatherers worked just a fraction of the time (less than 20 hours per week) that the farmers worked after agriculture was invented. The hunter-gatherers spent time doing things that we think of as “fun” today – men take time off from work to hunt or fish. Women take time off to go and shop – modern-day gathering.

So why on earth did we stop doing things we’d been bred to find fun? We stopped hunting and gathering to trade for long hours of backbreaking farm labor in crowded villages that could allow violence, disease, and theft. My best guess that those hellish villages provided enough technological sophistication to provide constant streams of beer for the guys and red high-heeled shoes and makeup for the women. Oh, and the villages allowed for another unique feature: slavery. If you had an army (which you could now) you could go and take men, women, and crops from other villages. You could eat their food, and then make them plant more for you. And then you could make more beer.

But the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer is possibly enshrined in the Bible book of Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain the farmer, killed Abel the shepherd. The farmer killed the hunter-gatherer, which is what eventually happened within all of society.

Hey, bro, want to be a metaphor?

This change also impacted the genetics of humanity. As divisions of labor were made possible by the villages, genes for hunters were less in demand (except for soldiers) and genes for farmers were in demand. Artisans making pottery and accountants and tax collectors were now needed. The breeding for people changed: for the first time ever, people need to read, to do math. From my observation, it seems like math and reading are innate in many of the children I’ve worked with. The concepts are already within them.

That would indicate a pretty successful breeding program. Too dumb to read? No kids for you. Can’t add two plus two? Enjoy being the last of your family line.

In this way, man made civilization, and civilization changed man. If 10,000 B.C. man took a stroll in Central Park, Manhattan in modern clothes, he’d be indistinguishable physically from a modern man, if you could ignore the raw goose he was gnawing on. But mentally? He’d be incapable of living in a modern city. It’s probably he could never learn to do math, even rudimentary math. Reading would likely be possible only at the lowest levels, things like true crime books.

But he’d be a sucker for beer. And nuclear fur bikinis.

Göbekli Tepe photo by Zhengan [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Economics, Thermodynamics, A Bikini, and the Future

“It’s a little known law of thermodynamics: the conservation of optimism – there’s only so much to go around.” – Andromeda

Okay, zero Kelvin is absolute zero. Thus, Kelvin is really the coolest name ever.

Economics is often called the dismal science. I’m sure that’s because economists look in a mirror, and are upset to see that the supply of economists is greatly in excess of the demand for them as dating partners. Thus, economists have their Saturday night open for Hot Pockets®, box wine and the Internet. See? Dismal. But if economics is dismal, thermodynamics will make you want to cut your wrists. Yeah. It’s worse than Hot Pockets™.

We know economics is defined as lying about the economy. But I hear you asking: “What the heck is thermodynamics and why are you ruining a perfectly good Wednesday morning by bringing this up?”

Let me explain.

Much like a three year old with a metal fork and an outlet, thermodynamics is the study of how energy flows. The father of thermodynamics was a Scot named William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin if you’re nasty. Proving once again that the British Empire was awesome for smart people, Lord Kelvin got rich and famous by being a total stud at physics and engineering. He even had a yacht that he tooled around the Mediterranean on and held massive seagoing parties – sort of like Mark Cuban, but smart and with a Scottish accent. Think Bill Gates with an artificial personality implant. Lord Kelvin even had unit of temperature, the kelvin, named after him. Top that, Elon Musk.

Lord Kelvin was the first to understand the fundamental and disturbing implications of the physics he was discovering. Energy moves from a highly organized state to a poorly organized state. A piece of firewood or a gallon of gas or a PEZ® is concentrated energy. Once it is combusted and the energy extracted, what’s left becomes diffuse, the molecules mostly turned into CO₂ and H₂0 that are mixed into the rest of the atmosphere. You can never form that firewood or gasoline or PEZ© again – it’s a one way trip.

This is significant. Kelvin discovered that the Universe as a whole is like a pizza after delivery: it moves from a hot, high energy state on Saturday night towards a chaotic, cold, low energy state on Sunday morning.

But wait, what about oil the gasoline was made from? Doesn’t the formation of oil violate this? It went from icky goo and dinosaur bones into energy dense crude oil, right? That’s energy from nothing!

No.

Every drop of oil, every piece of firewood, and all the sweet PEZ© on this planet came from the input of thermonuclear energy – the Sun. Every time you use a gallon of gasoline in your car or a cubic foot of natural gas in your home heater, you’re burning millions of years of concentrated sunlight, which really ought to be a lyric in a pop song. Our Earth isn’t a closed system – it is bathed in the life-giving thermonuclear radiation every day from the Sun.

Tans are so sexy when I put it that way.

Outside of suntans for girls wearing bikinis, sunlight is a very weak energy source. It took millions of years to make your gasoline. Gasoline burns in a car engine at 500°F, and gallon of gasoline can move a modern car for 40 or 50 miles. It would take (at minimum, under the best conditions) a one square yard solar panel 60 days to produce the equivalent amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline. Add in storage losses and real weather conditions? It might take a year. Solar energy is weak and diffuse or else bikini girls would turn into piles of ash after a day lounging in the Sun. Gasoline is awesome and full of energy and great for your skin. I soak my hands in it while I drive, you know, for the ladies.

Okay, this is a picture of a really hot girl.

I thought you mentioned economists?

Oh, yeah. People confuse economic viability with thermodynamic viability. In economics, the idea is that you can’t continually produce something that’s worthless, unless you’re the government. If you’re the government, producing worthless things is your whole plan. But any business that did this would be bankrupt faster than a whimsical elf buying reefer. Economists have even developed a worse idea than that: Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Modern Monetary Theory is the equivalent of the government burning your country’s factories for lighting so you can make more fidget spinners at night, so of course certain people in Congress love Modern Monetary Theory. It’s making infinite money from nothing!

Even without dim Congressmen, economics still fails when it comes to energy, because economics neglects the physics of energy. An economist would say that if oil were $200 a barrel, why, there wouldn’t be a problem because while we’re running out of barrels of oil we can make at $10, there are LOTS of barrels of oil that we can pump if oil costs $200.

Sure. If only everything about oil was measured in the price of a barrel of oil. What economists miss is that producing energy takes energy. In 1920, each barrel of oil produced between 20 and 50 barrels of oil. We found and used the easiest oil first – we didn’t start off drilling in three miles of ocean. No. We went to Texas where oil was 10’ underground and you could pull it out in seemingly limitless quantities because it would jump into your truck like an obedient basset hound if you left the doors open. We didn’t frack horizontal wells with thousands of pounds of pressure and special chemicals. Why would we? In Pennsylvania and California it was seeping into the rivers. Natural gas? What a nuisance. Burn it at the well to get rid of it. They originally tried to smoke the natural gas in California, but they couldn’t figure out how to get it in a bong.

Fracking has been one of the bright spots in oil production – millions of barrels of fracked oil are produced daily in the United States, so it’s good? Well, maybe not. Each barrel of oil invested in fracking produces, at most, five barrels of oil.

Five to one, that’s awesome, right?

Well, no. That fracked oil is from the best portions of the shale. Just like we didn’t start off drilling in the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle in 1850, we didn’t start off with the hardest fracked oil. It won’t get too much better, and if recovery technology improves, maybe we can stay the same. Rune Likvern was the first (that I can find) to use the analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as applied to the energy problems we face (LINK).

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I’ll note that Likvern was quite wrong in that he felt the Bakken wouldn’t produce more than about 0.7 million barrels per day. It’s producing in excess of 1.2 million barrels a day now, and I don’t doubt that it will produce even more. Pipelines from the area clearly lower the cost of energy production, so the Bakken will continue to produce, at least for now.

But at least you can make cool jet noises and pretend, right?

Our civilization is built on energy, and the more energy it takes to produce energy, the more of our economy that will be devoted to it, we’ll be like the Red Queen and Alice, running faster and faster just to keep in place. Sooner or later you end up with the absurd situation where everybody has to be working to get the energy, all the time, and then who would give out free samples of aerosol “cheeze” at Costco™? Don’t kid yourself – energy is that important to the society we currently have structured. We don’t get fresh fruit in winter, daily commuting to the ‘burbs, climbing walls at colleges, pensions, Brady Bunch© re-runs, and all that health care without consuming a LOT of energy.

“But John,” you say, “certainly biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel and hemp-powered hippy busses will save us.”

It looks like (according to a lot of data) that corn ethanol and biodiesel actually consume more energy to make and transport than they provide. These fuels have a return of less than one. Why on Earth would we do that? It’s like eating your own foot because you’re looking for a snack, which is actually a quote by The Mrs. when I was explaining this topic in the hot tub. Well, farmers vote. And why would The Mrs. suggest that we start with a foot? I bet feet are all stringy, and not nearly as good as spleen.

If ethanol is so bad for the economy why would people make it, I mean, besides for drinking? Because it’s mandated to use a certain quantity of ethanol each year in gasoline because farmers who vote like to sell corn. That’s it. And if it’s mandated, you can make a profit at it, even as you waste energy that could be used to make PEZ® instead.

Thermodynamics is a tough master – you can’t win, and you can’t even break even. But at least there are Hot Pockets© and box wine . . . .

This is the first post in an occasional series about energy.