Friday, November 6, 2015

Feeling the Elephant

Artwork by Digital Gheko

Most people have heard the Indian tale about the blind men and the elephant. For those that have not, it goes something like this. A group of blind men come across an elephant and, perhaps puzzled by the noise it is making, set out one by one to investigate. The first one feels the elephant’s leg and rushes back to report to the others that it is some kind of pillar. The second one feels the beast’s tail and decides that the thing making the noises is some kind of rope. The third feels the trunk and decides that it must be some kind of tree. Another feels a flapping ear and thinks they must be dealing with a giant fan. The last one feels a tusk and concludes the bellowing noise is coming from some sort of pipe.

When the blind men get together again they cannot agree with one another at all about what they have encountered. Because each one of them had felt a different part of the elephant’s anatomy they all had a different subjective explanation for the phenomenon. Different traditions tell different versions of the story. In one, the king laughs at the blind men and tells them “You are all correct, and yet you are all wrong.” In another the blind men work this out for themselves and collaborate to build up a picture of the whole elephant based on the subjective experience of each one of them, thus obtaining an objective whole.

The story of the elephant works as a nice analogy for our understanding of the world. Each one of us is blind in so many ways and yet we all have to feel the elephant of reality. Our blindness is often educated into us, or sometimes it is because of a lack of experience. Some people see the world in terms of economics and finance. They are always talking about monetary policy and central banks and the value of currencies and commodities as if these things are the only aspects of any worth. Others see it primarily in terms of competition and threats. There are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and allies and enemies. To their mind the world is just a stage for conflict, where the victorious and the defeated dance a tango until the end of time.

Then there are the religiously blind. These are the people who feel that everything can be explained through their own ‘one true faith’ and that the people of other faiths have got it all wrong. They say that God created the elephant in a magical flash.

For the greater part, most people can’t even be bothered to feel the elephant. "Roaring noise, what roaring noise?" they say. They are too busy listening to the snake charmer playing his flute, and they walk towards the sweet music, unaware of the cobra coiled in the basket.

And perhaps it’s dangerous to stand there for too long feeling the elephant. If one blind man were to run his hands all over the elephant’s body he might suddenly realise he was dealing with an immense beast that had the power to put a tusk through him like a toothpick going through an olive. And even if the beast didn’t do that and he ran back to his blind friends, who were all arguing about whether it was a fan or a pipe or a pillar, shouting “It’s a giant beast and it’s going to trample us!” they might all assume he had been at the shisha pipe too much and tell him to shut up.

The elephant analogy is often used to illustrate the concept of systems thinking. Thinking in systems gives us a wider perspective and allows us to see things more clearly, and to make predictions based upon this. If more people thought about the important systems that sustain them there’s a good chance that our problems as a species would be lessened. They might, for example, realise that pouring pollutants into the biosphere in ever greater amounts would inevitably lead to the biosphere being degraded and unable to support them. Instead, and given that we tend to be ruled by short-term economic thinking, we are told that the economy has a greater value than the biosphere, even though it is a tiny subset of the latter. An intelligent species would reorganise human economic affairs so that they complemented the natural processes of the Earth. Instead we get fracking, nuclear power and excessive fossil fuel burning.

But systems thinking has its limits too. Because humans are not robots we tend to be irrational in our actions and thought patterns. The conceit of many an intelligent systems thinker is that the boundaries of their mental model are wide enough to incorporate ‘enough of reality’ so as to make the stuff that lies outside of their model irrelevant. This can be a fatal error in a world of chaos theory because what you don't know or can't see can hurt you.

That's why the more intelligent branches of systems thinking recognise the limits of both knowledge and understanding. So, for example, someone practicing permaculture on a piece of land may have come up with what they consider to be the spiffiest design that incorporates natural cycles and organisms right down to the earth worms and the mychoorizal tendrils that transport nitrogen from plants' root nodules to nearby trees. If they are a good permaculturist they will know that their model is not infallible, that they can never know about the millions of different microscopic organisms that make up the soil and how they will interact with one another. They will do their best to create some system resilience by piling on organic matter, by not using industrial poisons, and by encouraging a diversity of life to flourish. But at the forefront of their mind will be the thought that they are merely the baton-waving conductor of a vast orchestra in which most of the musicians don’t even have eyes. They know the boundary of their perception and they hope things will work out. They observe and they make adjustments, but they can never play God. 

I was thinking about this recently in terms of renewable energy. Renewable energy, such as solar and wind, is abundant and free and relatively non-polluting. And yet, when you get down into the nitty gritty and feel the elephant, it looks a lot less feasible than its proponents claim. There are any number of grand claims that renewables can power an ever-expanding industrial civilisation in such a way that we don’t need to make any cutbacks in our usage. But, to me, these claims look highly dubious because they take little or no account of many of the major factors that make industrial civilisation - and therefore the production of these renewable energy systems - tick. Where would the investment capital come from to transform the world’s energy systems – which have taken over a hundred years to build and are eminently designed to burn fossil fuels and distribute the resultant energy from centralised generating plants? Where would the materials to do so come from? How will the political will to do such a thing be garnered in the face of such stiff opposition from powerful players? How would you convince the majority of people – most of whom either do not regard energy depletion or climate change as a problem - that the huge subsidies fossil fuels enjoy should be switched to renewables? There are plenty of parts to this elephant.

So, having felt the renewable energy elephant, the picture I get in my head is that barring some kind of miracle there will not be – cannot possibly be – a worldwide rollout of renewable energy to replace the fossil fuelled infrastructure in any time frame that could realistically be achieved. It’s simply not going to happen.

But then …

But then I consider that whatever opinion I might have reached on the matter doesn’t feature at all in the calculations and daydreams of those who claim that it is possible. And thus we get memes spreading around the internet like wild fire claiming things such as ‘Denmark produced 140% of its electricity from wind power in one day’ and ‘X square miles of solar panels in the Sahara could power the whole of Europe.’

So then I have to add in another factor to my mental elephant, namely that: even if I think, based on some pretty extensive feeling, that this beast is an elephant, everyone else is claiming that it’s a tiger. And what happens if something you think is an elephant is widely considered to be a long-nosed tiger? Will people be feeding it live chickens and admiring its imaginary stripes? Or will, on some metaphysical level, the elephant turn into a tiger?

Put more prosaically, will the fact that so many people believe a worldwide renewable energy grid could work – despite physical reality seeming to say otherwise – actually lead to its creation? Or will it lead to some kind of half-realised dream or, worse, will we end up with a tusk through our chest? When I pointed out the absurdity of Denmark’s claim to a friend he responded curtly “Yes, but at least they are trying.” It has a certain logic to it: trying is better than not trying.

So maybe that’s what will happen. Perhaps if we try hard enough we’ll produce enough renewable energy infrastructure to take the some of the sharp edges off the soon-to-be precipitous decline of fossil fuels (precipitous because we are can't dig 'em up cheap enough for our growth-wired economies to function). Perhaps at that point people will realise that renewables are great for some things and lousy for others but that we don’t really have a choice any more because of the nature of entropy. What will happen then? No doubt some will still hold onto their dreams of limitless energy and flying cars and cities on Mars, but by that point they will be in the minority. Perhaps then – and not until then – our shared predicament will mean we can start to agree on a consensual version of reality once again.

***

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24 comments:

  1. I remember the day of the 140%. I don't know if the claim is accurate, although it was on the news - it doesn't matter. It was insanely windy, not just gusty, as it usually is. With strong, steady baseline winds all over the country, probably at night when the usage was down, they got records amount of energy - but it was an extraordinary situation. A flash flood would spin the heck out of a water mill, too.

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  2. "A flash flood would spin the heck out of a water mill, too."

    Precisely. And the domestic system would not function at all if it wasn't for balancing from other countries using hydro and fossils. But if the meme gathers steam maybe it is another blow for fossil fuels ... hence my disclaimer about not being able to feel the whole elephant.

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  3. Hoping is different than trying. Mostly what I see out there is hope, hope that renewables will work, hope that TPP isn't the fascist takeover it looks like, hope that leaders will show up for whom Hope will not be some cynical lie. Otherwise most people I know are trying to pretend they don't have any responsibility to do anything about it but hope. Which pretty much makes certain that civilizational decline will be rough and ugly as any of us inclined to ponder it, can imagine.

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    1. I have heard it said that mass human belief in something can cause it to manifest in different planes of reality ... but unfortunately not the physical one where we live.

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  4. Hi, Jason:

    Wonderful post! Gives me a wonderfully clear picture of thinking in whole systems. Thanks!

    Pam

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    1. Thanks. I always recommend people to read the book Thinking in Systems, by Donella H.Meadows for a great primer.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. Tom Murphy over on his Do the Math blog has done a very thorough job evaluating all the alternative energy schemes commonly trotted out and arranged them into a matrix which nicely summarizes all the pros and cons and then finally given them a score.
    His conclusion, don't expect alternative to replace fossil fuels to a level that will keep our eternal growth economy alive.
    Having started out life doing with less, I would like to recommend that as an alternative approach. It's not so bad as it appears.

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    1. "Having started out life doing with less, I would like to recommend that as an alternative approach. It's not so bad as it appears."

      Indeed.

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  7. Jason

    A lot of the current renewable energy schemes seem to rely on government subsidies of one kind of or another, and then there is the question of where the energy comes from to produce the solar panels or wind turbines etc. If your solar panels were made in China, then their production was largely powered by coal...

    I think our future will be powered by renewables, but not the hi-tech type - I believe that ultimately we're going back to the sort of pre-industrial technologies that were around in the 18th century.

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    1. Fossil fuel subsidies outnumber renewable energy subsidies a thousand to one - which is the key reason so little electricity is generated from the latter. If the situation were to be reversed (which is entirely possible as investors realise that fossil fuel producers have a lot of stranded assets on their books).

      As it happens, I think we should use a proportion of our remaining fossil fuels to make new renewable energy capacity. It's better than burning it as aviation fuel for the tourism industry, or what have you. In the longer run, of course, we'll be right back in the 18th century. Human civilisation has been around for about 100,000 years and we've only had wide scale usage of fossil fuels for 100 years i.e. only about 0.1% of our experiment.

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  8. In all the excitement, I forgot to give the link to the Do the Math blog.
    http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

    speaking of math, I have a friend who sends me glowing predictions on alternative energy all the time. None of them ever mention efficiency, cost, or any other numbers that would give you a basis for judging what kind of future these alternatives would have. The main thing in his opinion, I think is to hope.

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    1. Yes, his website is an invaluable resource. Anyone suffering from cornucopian delusions should read his most popular posts.

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  9. It is not the production of renewable energy that is so much the issue, but the storage of that energy. When you use fossil fuels to produce electricity, you use the fuels as you need them. As evidenced that they sat around underground for a really long time before we dug them up, you can store them.

    When you directly create the electricity, you must either use it right away, or find some way to store it. There are some ways to store the energy (eg. steam, ice, hydrogen) but none have been found viable enough to substitute in a real way for how we currently use fossil fuels.

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    1. Yes, that's the case with electricity for sure. I used to run power tools and a washing machine directly off solar panels during very sunny weather when we lived in Spain. But more generally, our ultra-complex billion watt civilisation can only run when there's a massive energy surplus - and as that energy surplus slips away year by year, so does our societal complexity, including our ability to manufacture technological marvels.

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  10. ...Just as I bought a copy of Odin's Lake! But have to say, I don't regret that one tiny little bit; an excellent, thought-provoking & entertaining read. Thank you!

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    1. Sorry ... it seemed that sales had dropped off to zero permanently, and I wanted a few more people to read it before it disappeared into oblivion. Anyway, thanks for buying and I'm glad you enjoyed it.

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  11. Hi Jason,

    Not more claims about a transition to an industrial world based on renewables again? Seriously, who are these people making these claims? I probably need to get out more. On an interesting side note, I've offered to discuss renewable energy realities on national radio, but I don't think they're interested because it is not a message that people generally want to hear: Here's this guy who says: "We're f****d" - it is a tough sell for sure. !

    OMG Dude! Solar photovoltaics de-rate in really hot conditions like a desert. Don't these people no nuffin (sic and sic). And don't get me started about transmission losses - Some of the cable runs here are over 100m and no one other than myself would ever want to have to pay for the heavy duty copper cables employed in that particular scenario and it's only 100m as distinct from another continent. What's wrong with these people?

    By the way, it's an elephant in the room. So what if Denmark produced 140% of its energy needs on one single day. And what about the other 364 days of the year? Matching electricity output to demand is a serious problem which has not ever been solved. Natural systems provide great surpluses of energy, it is just that the surplus is provided when nature decides to produce that surplus and not one minute before or afterwards and you cannot bargain with nature. Incidentally, my winter solar PV statistics should have been of interest in this discussion and it is still light and warm enough that I can grow greens outside during that winter light – how about most of northern Europe?

    How's your place going and when are you going to give us all an update? Hehe! Sorry, I'm being cheeky now, but this topic sends me off on a rant because I live with this stuff.

    Your mention of permaculture was spot on the money. Few plans survive engagement with the forces that be anyway. I try to manage this place with an easy hand and watch and see what happens. Nature is an interesting and instructive travelling companion.

    Oh yeah, no matter what else happens, or what anyone says, we will transition to a renewable economy because eventually fossil fuels will become unavailable or unaffordable and renewables like photosynthesis will be all that we have.

    Hey, thanks for the heads up on elderberry - do you know that I had no idea about the possible uses for the plant. Thanks. There is just so much to know about plants and there are hundreds of different species here...

    Before you ask, I've almost finished the complete Conan chronicles (it was well over 1,000 pages thanks very much!) and your book is next on the reading list.

    Cheers. Chris

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    1. Thanks for the dose of reality. I seriously don't think that most people realise the amount of industrial activity (and the energy and resources it consumes) need just to support the lifestyles that most of us currently enjoy. I look forward to the time when there is a greater understanding of the limits, and hopefully a bit more common sense.

      As for Fox Wood - all is well and I'll do a long-overdue update shortly (I have quite a pathetic excuse as to why they are so few and far between - the fact of the matter is that I'm having technical difficulties downloading pictures from my camera onto this Mac. It seems to have developed artificial intelligence - and not in a good way).

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  12. Renewables may work OK with a 99% reduction in the population of Homo Sap. Fewer Blind Men groping Elephants solves a lot of problems.

    Which also brings you round to the relativity problem of the Observer and the Observed. Does the Elephant really stand there and do nothing when one of the Blind Men yanks his tail? Somehow I doubt this.I also doubt the Elephant would do nothing when one of the Blind Men yanks his Penis. lol

    You may be able to observe parts of "reality", but as soon as you observe it, that changes the reality.

    Finally, Elephants are not Economic Systems, they are Elephants. Elephants are real living things (at least fo a short while longer anyhow), the Economic systems we have running are an abstraction, once or twice removed from reality at least. So even if you grasp them, you don't grasp the Elephant, only a dim shadow of the Elephant.

    RE

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    1. True - don't go yanking any elephants and not expect a reaction :)

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  13. Hi Jason,

    A quibble most readers' subconscious seems to have filled in, but I think you're missing an important 'not' in this sentence:

    So, having felt the renewable energy elephant, the picture I get in my head is that barring some kind of miracle[,] there will [not] be – cannot possibly be – a worldwide rollout of renewable energy to replace the fossil fuelled infrastructure in any time frame that could realistically be achieved.

    Great piece and great blog.

    Derek in Seattle
    dex3703.wordpress.com

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    1. Thanks Derek - I have now fixed it. My problem is that I write these things off the cuff, read it over once, hit publish and then move onto something else. Perhaps I should give them a second glance ...

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  14. Also, I finally bought your book. Sorry for the delay. :)

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I'll try to reply to comments as time permits.