How the End of Energy Abundance Rewrites Civilization | Rules of the Downslope Part 1

Nate Hagens (0:00)

Good morning. Last week, on Last Weeks Frankly, I outlined how we are likely nearing the end of a mega anomalous historical period of economic growth, measured by material throughput, enabled by the energy surplus from fossil hydrocarbons, extended and made invisibly fragile by the social technology of debt. As long time viewers here know, I have quite a bit of certainty about the components and logic of how all this fits together, but far less certainty on what do we do now. And where I land on that is two things. Number one, changing the initial conditions of the future in ways that we can't yet articulate or even know. And two, my deep trust in informed and engaged humans on the scout team of The More Than Human Predicament, many of you watching this show, to respond in emergent ways in the future. But there are things we can know, or at least infer, about the inevitable peaking and eventual decline of the surplus enabled by the carbon pulse. Which those things in turn imply and infer the buckets of what do we do now? So many of the rules during the upslope of the carbon pulse, over time have kind of become culturally perceived as natural laws. They're going to undergo phase shifts on the downslope. Yes, the circumstances and the biophysical backdrop will change, but so will the rules of what humans do. And today I want to speculate on how the downslope of the carbon pulse may have decidedly different rules than the upslope.

Because perhaps thinking about and discussing these will offer us some advance foresight for broader interventions and such. I think these rules are merely directional, and they're going to arrive coming at us in different speeds, in different places. And I think the transitions between the old rules and the rules of the downslope are both where the trouble is and where our work resides.

Okay, rule number one. I will start with an example of how an upslope rule completely changes on the downslope. And it involves the maximum power principle, which I've covered before. The short version of that is nature does not try to conserve energy. The organisms and ecosystems that win are the ones that capture and utilize the most energy they can get. This was originally Alfred Lotka 100 years ago and HT. Odom. And I've personally leaned on this concept for years. Decades. Viewers here are also quite familiar with Jevons' Paradox, where a system-wide improvement in technological efficiency actually paradoxically increases overall energy use because in a growth environment, the savings from the tech then gets spent on something else. It's why three centuries of consistent innovation in lighting technology has never once reduced global total energy use by humans for light. We just got more lit during those centuries. But here's a part of this phenomenon that I've kind of glossed over. The maximum power principle only suggests that whatever captures the most available energy wins. People, including me, kind of categorize that as waste wins. But what capturing the most energy looks like depends entirely on how much is available in the environmental circumstances. When there's a surplus, capturing the most means growing fast and burning it indiscriminately.

Like algae that explodes across a pond in the days after fertilizer washes in, or a business startup burning cash in order to grab customers before anyone else does. So the Jevons rebound effect is the same behavior society-wide. However, when the surplus is gone, capturing the most available energy means something very different. It means squeezing the most work out of a smaller energy flow. So not only has the winning strategy changed, but it's actually flipped. We see this in nature.

In the desert, the kangaroo rat that never takes a drink or a cactus that stores like a year of water. An old-growth forest wins by recycling almost everything. In contrast, the pond algae eats all that immediate energy right away. A black bear survives the winter by cutting its metabolism by over 70% and then living on what it has stored. So HT. Odom, who was my PhD advisor's PhD advisor, referred to this phenomenon in nature as pulsing. Systems surge when energy is abundant, and then shift to conserving when energy gets more scarce. And usually, often, it is the conservers that are the ones still there when the next surge comes at the other side of the pulse.

So on the downslope of the carbon pulse, the energy savings in society will still get spent.

What changes is what they go towards. On the upslope, those savings were spent on the next thing, the bigger house and the dopamine bling and the Halloween costume for the dog. Fresh in my mind because there were some dang funny ones on Twitter this weekend.