Preface. Nate Hagens and DJ White’s book is the kind of book I’d like to write someday. Like them, I’d publish only in paper to preserve knowledge because the electric grid will come down some day since it can’t outlast fossil fuels, as I explain in my books “When Trucks stop running” and “Life After Fossil fuels”. One reason is that wind and solar are intermittent, so if the grid comes down even for an hour or less then computer chips can’t be built. Making computer chips requires thousands of steps over several weeks — any power outage and they all have to be tossed out. Microchips are the pinnacle of technical achievement and therefore likely to be the first to go away during the coming decline (as you can see in the The Fragility of Microprocessors section of the Preservation of Knowledge).  Yet so many books, magazines, and journals are found only online that can only be read with electrical devices that depend on microchips. Poof! All that knowledge will be gone when the grid goes down.

White & Hagens book was written for college students at the University of Minnesota. I’ve seen many iterations as Nate perfected his teachings over several years.  You couldn’t find a better book to give to anyone who is energy blind, but especially younger people since this book might change what career they choose. The authors recommend young people follow their passion, but I think there are some pretty obvious careers and skills to pursue as we return to a world powered by muscle and wood as fossil fuels decline and the electric grid winks out. And they should pursue their passion in a place that’s under carrying capacity, as Hall & Day advise in “America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends”.

Much of their book is about human psychology, which is critical to understanding how the coming Great Simplification may play out.  What follows are some excerpts that I’ve cut or paraphrased.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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White DJ, Hagens NJ (2019) The Bottlenecks of the 21^st Century. Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament.

The way things have been the last several hundred years is not the way they have been for the bulk of the human past, nor will be for the bulk of human future. You exist in a near-stroboscopic blip of time in which humanity is churning through millions of years of resources in a one-time pulse. This has ramifications both wonderful and terrible, and we should probably make ourselves aware of them if we are to make self-awareness actually good for anything.

The information to be covered is existentially challenging, but the human condition has always faced existential challenges of one sort or another which required living humans to rise to them. But there’s a psychological adjustment to make that has to do with the tapestry of expectations and beliefs about the future we’ve soaked up from the cultural narratives we exist within. 

The long-term story of complex life is steered as much b catastrophe as by stability with ~99.9% of all species ever to live now extinct (or speciated).

Mankind’s cleverness at opening new niches finally tapped the dead remains of fossil plants from earlier eras. This grew human biomass by an order of magnitude and granted a bolus of temporary energy wealth, which humans created the industrial society run the energy of these long dead organisms. This enabled us to take anything we wanted, which is now leading to mass extinctions. 

Why does something feel bad or good to us at all? It’s because the ancestors who “felt good” about doing things which happened to enhance their relative fitness at that time survived to pass on these tendencies and the behavioral rewards inherent in their particular brain structure. Sex feels great.  Eating high-energy-content food feels great. Being a high-status tribal member feels great. Hating outgroups feels great. And killing large prey (and outgroup members during wartime) feels great. To some of us that is such an uncomfortable thing to hear it feels incorrect.  Our ability to recognize the way our own brains function is limited because our conscious minds can access only the output results of the more-powerful brain regions which influence us, and not the processes they use to arrive at those results.

The mindless evolution of life across the ages has created a world of incredible wonder and diversity. Our current economics consider this to have zero value, but in our mind se (most of us) realize otherwise. Swimming over a coral reef, walking in a rainforest with its sounds, hiking a desert, we are surrounded by other species that have survived until now. 

Then on page 99 my favorite part of the book – how candy and oil are similar.  I used to trick-or-treat for three nights: beggars night, Halloween, and clean-up, so I loved this metaphor.  Author DJ White sets it up by explaining that he was the oldest of four siblings and found more candy than the others by getting up first, and hiding his easter basket with candy from the other siblings baskets in the basement.  Now a metaphor of candy and economics and oil:

You can only eat what you find.  My dog understands this, but the fact that hardly any large new oilfields are being discovered hasn’t filtered into the common wisdom. The filled Easter baskets have long since been emptied, but most Americans think the USA is now a net oil exporter. Not even close.

You can only eat it once. Once you eat it, it’s gone. The sophistication of this parable has leapfrogged neoclassical economics, which believes that demand creates energy and that resources will always be found if the price is right. I literally seethed with demand during the lean months, but it didn’t make any candy appear. I had no money, so it didn’t matter that the stores had candy.

Concentrations of energy are finite and unevenly distributed, and mostly found already. What is our oil doing underneath all those foreigners? There is such a thing as “abiotic oil”, but nobody has ever found enough to make it useful. DJ used to look for more candy in the yard after he ran out of the good stuff a week later, and compares his hunt to why oil companies are no longer actively looking for new oilfields. They know that what’s left is the equivalent of ant-covered jellybean remnants and rained-on marshmallow peeps.

The most aggressive competitors get to eat the most candy. The resources of weaker nations don’t do them much good and can cause stronger nations to take an unhealthy interest in them.

The quality of an energy source can vary. While it’s all called “candy”, there is a lot of difference between fresh Cadbury eggs and stale hairy jellybeans.

The biggest energy deposits get found and eaten first, so new discoveries get smaller and smaller.  The big concentrations (the Easter Baskets) are where everyone goes first. Today there are no more super-giant oilfields on earth. We’ve already drilled the good places, now we’re doing the equivalent of sticking our hands into suspicious holes in the backyard.

Sometimes an energy source is so marginal that it’s barely worth using, taking more energy than it’s worth and making a disgusting mess.  Once the holiday candy ran out, DJ bummed moldy Jell-O into candy, the equivalent of tar sands. We’ve always know they were there but haven’t been hard-up enough to actually eat them.

Energy and wacky ideas travel together. At any given time children believe that easter candy comes from giant pink rabbits. This is a fair parallel to the general state of energy knowledge in the USA, where we not only have a right to our own opinions, but to our own facts. So we say “drill baby drill” as though the process of drilling creates oil reservoirs, and when oil prices go up assume it’s a conspiracy. We think about energy in the same magical terms young kids think about candy, while being similarly uncertain as to its origin and prospects.

No kid saves his good candy. It’s not human nature to save stuff for the future, even though we know that it’s a long long time until the next sugar holiday, but we don’t care. Candy!

Nobody worries about diabetes until after they have it.  We believe what we want to believe.

And a few more excerpts:

There’s no reason to think that we humans aren’t fit enough to look at reality honestly. We became who we are by facing some daunting realities. We are kick-ass primates who until recently have dealt with some very hairy, scary realities. Plagues. Famines. Mile-high ice sheets and blizzards. Horrible parasitic diseases. Sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, cave bears. We kicked their asses into oblivion and made houses out of mastodon bones. So at what point in evolution did we become aristocratic weenie debate societies, …unwilling to take risks or endure hardship?

The big shock is not reality itself, but in abruptly finding out – after much of your life—that you’ve been told incorrect, incomplete, and wildly overoptimistic stories about the world by those around you who never questioned that what “feels good to believe” might not be true.  We think that if kids were taught the realities of energy, evolution, and ecology from a young age, they’d adjust to it, though more than a bit annoyed with the situation they’re being handed. 

Cleverness to find energy only works when there is energy around to be found, and a practical way to put it to work. An astronaut stranded on the moon will die even with an IQ of 300, because cleverness isn’t magic. If Einstein had been born in 1800 AD, he would not have discovered relativity. At that point human knowledge hadn’t advanced far enough. And Darwin wouldn’t have discovered evolution by natural selection if Britain hadn’t expanded greatly harnessing coal and able to finance scientific voyages.

The problem is that people forget energy is a fundamental driver of all life and technology.