The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Many Shapes of the Carbon Pulse | Frankly #44

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

In this Frankly, Nate describes the Carbon Pulse - a one time massive consumption of fossil hydrocarbons at a pace millions of times faster than they were created. He outlines the many shapes that this pulse could take, as well as some shapes it will never take. Compared to previous carbon pulses that led to mass and minor extinctions, how does the modern pulse compare?  What can what we know about ecology and human behavior tell us about the most likely paths into descent? Can thinking about these graphs on such grand geologic time scales help guide us away from the Precipice and towards a more Sapient Future?    For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/44-the-many-shapes-of-the-carbon-pulse   To Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/BjG7a58Y0Ig

Greetings. I just got back from a bike ride. I changed shirts, but this is fresh in my mind. I don't want to lose my train of thought. So I'm going to talk today about the carbon pulse featured in our little animated movie, The Great Simplification. We are all alive during a few hundred year period out of the 300,000 years that our species has been Homo sapiens. where we are drawing down ancient carbon 10 to 20 million times faster than it was sequestered. We don't think about it. We don't talk about it. But what is the carbon pulse and what is the shape of the carbon pulse viewed from a long-term perspective or from a couple hundred-year perspective? Is the shape a preordained conclusion, or can the shape be changed?

That's what I'd like to speculate on today. So the carbon is in concentrated form. Oil and gas, which were algae, phytoplankton diatoms in ancient seas and oceans that died, went to the bottom. And over millions, tens of millions of years were with heat and pressure, were condensed and refined into oil and gas, which we find in reservoirs around the world. Coal was biomass from a carboniferous period hundreds of millions of years ago. That was trees and dinosaurs, some, mostly trees and plants. that were also condensed into carbon. And so we have been since the mid-19th century pulling up this ancient carbon,

which is incredibly powerful and adding it to the rise of the machines and humans to do things that humans used to do manually or with draft animals. before I talk about the current carbon pulse, let me briefly talk about previous carbon pulses on Earth and how they came about and what happened. This graph shows many of the mini and mass extinctions in the last 300 million years. The blue spikes show the percentage of the genus level extinction of species on Earth. The Permium and extinction. 260 million years ago was a big one. Also the KT extinction shown on the far right.

These were caused by lovel basalt, CO2 generating huge volcanic provinces that spewed CO2 for tens of thousands of years into the environment. and they resulted in eventual massive heating and die-offs of global systems on earth and in the sea. So this graph shows that during those events, when volcanoes were outgassing for tens of thousands of years, there was about 1.7 pettagrams of carbon per year, whereas today we're releasing 25 pedigrams a year. So what we're doing is much, much larger per year, but it's only happened over 100 or 200 years.

So we are effectively acting like volcanoes of the past with our Volkswagen's, our volvos, our vacations, our Viagra. And basically, we are doing the role that historic magma and volcanoes, volcanic eruptions did at a large scale with our industrial system. So the shape of this carbon pulse from a couple hundred years will look like something like a normal curve. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. From a 20,000 year standpoint, it's going to look like an EKG pulse. from a million-year standpoint, or let's say 600,000 years, 300,000 years that we've been a species and 300,000 years in the future, it's going to look like a vertical line that is very, very brief because this carbon will never exist again.

It is a one-time magic power bonanza that we're extracting, very rapidly, not thinking about its finiteness, and it will take tens or 100 million years in the future for this battery to be trickle-charged again by daily photosynthesis and biogeochemical processes. There is no creamy Nuget center of oil continually regenerating in the earth. It does not regenerate on human timescales. this shape look like? And how is it impacted? Well, the shape grows as we have technology and inventions that get more fossil carbon added to the system in tandem with other energy, in tandem with machines and technology and innovation and commerce and globalization and

networking and it grows the whole system. That accelerates if we have productivity added to the embedded productivity in fossil carbon itself. We have other things like AI or some new invention that makes something more efficient and it gives us more surplus to funnel back in and get the next most costly tranche of this very powerful energy system. source. Again, we're not paying, I think the biggest flaw in macroeconomics is that we confuse cost with value. It costs us 50 or 60s or 70 dollars a barrel to get oil fully processed, refined out of the ground to the consumer. The value is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for what it does for us. So what we do is we keep adding more and more to the system.

We can change the shape of the whole curve by adding debt. Debt allows us to have the spike go higher. But what it does is we spend the debt on real things, which creates a higher infrastructure demand for energy in future years. And eventually the musical chairs debt situation, we won't be able to. The government bond markets and the currency markets will not allow profligate central banks and governments to continue

printing money from based on prior productivity without the energy and materials to support it. So then there's a whoosh. So the higher we go, the faster or the steeper the first drop is. So the shape is changed by interconductivity, social contracts, productivity, productivity, debt, and other things. So why does the shape of the carbon pulse look like a normal distribution, a normal curve? So let me briefly describe this. So in population ecology, there's something called an S curve, which shows that animal populations grow. But then as they have more babies, the babies and the larger population competes for finite resources, and it ends up. tapering off and maximizing at a certain level. It's called an S curve. It's also called a Verholst

curve, which because in biology it was observed on populations. If we, not to get too math it here, if you take the first derivative of the S curve, it looks like a Gaussian distribution, like a kind of like a normal curve. A normal curve is somewhat mathematically different in statistics, but They're pretty similar. So when we see these peak oil graphs on the internet, they're usually represented by this normal curve. So I'm going to talk about four basic shapes of the carbon pulse and why this is relevant to the great simplification, to our futures, and to our work.

So before I start to describe what the possible shapes of the carbon pulse are, and, Let me describe what's not possible. The area under the curve is the amount of coal, oil, and natural gas that humans will ultimately extract and burn. The area itself is really capped. It can be smaller than the maximum, but it cannot be larger than the maximum. There is a constraint on the amount that is extractable. We can have better technology.

We can have more credit. It allows us to have a bigger straw to suck the carbon forward in time. But here are four potential shapes that are not possible. The carbon pulse keeps climbing slowly for centuries. No, this is not possible. It levels out at its current value indefinitely for centuries. No, this is not a possible outcome. It ramps down linearly over the next thousand years or so.

This also is not possible. We're already well through the first half of this ancient carbon. It drops to, say, 10% of our current 19 terawatt level and holds indefinitely for thousands of years. 10% doesn't sound like a lot. Thousands of years is a lot. That is also not possible. The amount of carbon that we have is constrained, and it will be a fraction of what we currently have later this century. So given that, what four shapes are possible for the carbon pulse?

So the first shape, I'm just going to, for lack of a better term, I thought of this 17 minutes ago on my bike ride. Let's call it a palindrome, which is a palindrome is a word that is spelled the same, backwards or frontwards. So palindrome would be a mirror image of the last 150 years up, would be a mirror image on the 150 years down. I think this is incongruent with human behavior because there are so many nonlinear aspects of our system. There are wars and there's, like I said before, there's credit creation and different international organizations and infrastructure and things like that, it is highly unlikely that we're going to grow fossil carbon 6% a year up to 1970 and then 3% a year after that and we're going to mirror that on the way down.

So this is more like a theoretical, educational way of thinking about it. The second shape is what I would refer to as a stair step down or a series of miniature pulses, which is we maximize out. Right now, we're at 19 terawatt global energy metabolism, 190 billion 100 watt light bulbs turned on 24-7. And all expectations are this is going to grow in the future. Because of debt, because of globalization, because of complexity, I don't think we can grow much more on that, though we will certainly try. But since we use credit and have been borrowing from the future in this way, eventually there comes a point where all this infrastructure that we've built, expecting to maintain and grow it again in the future period, there will be a deflationary pulse

where we won't be able to afford that and we have to shrink our living standards, shrink entitlements, shrink our spending, a lot of businesses go out of business, people earn less money, they can afford less. And there is kind of a precipitous drop. in our energy use, not that it's no longer available. It's no longer affordable and our system can't have that amount of complexity. The default scenario then is after this decline, we are going to bootstrap ourselves and hopefully a bend, not a break scenario, which I'll talk about in a second. And we rebuild to some degree and have another little growth

spurt, another little pulse for 10, 20, 50 years, I don't know, and then another decline based on largely the same reasons until we bounce around and there's very little of the fossil carbon left 100 years ago from now or something. I think that's quite plausible, something like that, a giant first pulse followed by some lower peaks and smaller. The third category is what I would refer to as the precipice, which is we kick all possible cans to grow the economy because we are only looking for the short term and not thinking about the long term. And we add so much systemic risk to the system that something happens, an EMP pulse, a nuclear exchange, something that can't quite. be predicted, but it cascades in the downward sense. And the built complexity, it's not like Argentina has a currency collapse. It's the whole world does at the same time. And in that scenario,

it's very difficult to bootstrap the diesel generators that back up nuclear plants and getting people to work and the inner connectivity of the system. And this could be a very, very steep Wiley Coyote straight lying down for the carbon pulse. Ken DeFays, who I met once, was one of the early peak oilers. And his definition of peak oil was not the maximum production. But his definition of peak oil is when we use 50% of the oil that will ever use. And he said that was Thanksgiving Day 2004 or 2005. I can't remember.

And everyone says he was wrong. Well, in a precipice sort of situation, he could still be right because we might only use the same amount of oil that we used before 2005 if a precipice situation should arise. The last category is, of course, the category that our work is hoping is the case. and I'll just call it the sapient. The sapient is where we use oil and gas in lower amounts as seed corn to midwife a different civilization, a different society that is working in tandem with renewable energy, has different governance, different aspirations, different values. And we consciously push down the pulse so that,

that this fossil magic can be used for something of value in coming centuries and millennia. And this pulse or this shape really could have some used in a thousand years or 10,000 years or 30,000 years from now. A truly sapient species in this paradoxically age of increasing ice ages, believe it or not, would use Carbans. to forestall and ice age. But this is like Isaac Asimov Foundation type of stuff. I don't hold out much hope for that. But what is at stake right now is our culture recognizing we are at the peak of the carbon pulse. There is a dissent coming.

How do we wisely internationally, nationally, nationally, individually contribute towards something other than the default stair step or the precipice. And that's not all. What I'm talking about here is the carbon pulse. But each of these graphs behind it is the shadow of hundreds of other graphs that accompany it like human population, like GDP per capita, like CO2, like the viability of the oceans, like the number of mammal populations on earth or the number of mammal species. The carbon pulse affects everything. Everything in our

society and our environment are impacted by the shape, the affordability, and the pollution from the carbon pulse. I'm going to add some graphics here. There are researchers out there that have looked at low case, mid case and high case scenarios for coal oil and natural gas in the coming 150 years. When we look at geology, it's almost like the best case. The geology gives us the best case because all of the human social governance and politics is overlaid on top of the geology and the finance. So this is just a brief reflection on we are all alive during the carbon pulse. Ask your friends. Ask your family. What do they think about the carbon pulse? They've probably never heard of it. It is the central issue of our time. And we've been riding the up slope of a

roller coaster all of our lives and what it looks like, what the downslope looks like, how steep it is, how much is left for future generations. Hopefully a lot of coal is left in the ground and not used from an environmental perspective. Maybe we get to a point where we must, use coal similar to how Germany and other countries have responded, at least initially responded to the Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipeline. Okay, I got it off my head and I hope this made sense and more to say next week. Thank you.