Energy – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.