On June 27^th, I wrote my first letter to Running on Empty Oz on photovoltaic solar energy for Australia. I published the letter in the June 27^th edition of The Dematerialist’s Journal. I plan to broaden the analysis to include estimates of green house gas emissions associated with each of the start-up scenarios with various conservation profiles. Today, July 29^th, I wrote the following:

I found the following data for 2003 on the internet:

207.6 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per quad of electricity generated from coal in US

6.6 billion metric tons of carbon from greenhouse gases (GHG), which amounts to 5.335E13 carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere in the US

I added two more columns to Scenario 1b on Sheet 1 of pv070711.xls and Scenario 4 on Sheet 1of pv.xls for yearly GHG deficits corresponding to the energy deficits and for the cumulative GHG deficits. I computed:

4.668E10 pounds of carbon dioxide deficit in the first year of Scenario 1b, which was the maximum cumulative deficit too

1.097E12 pounds of CO₂for the maximum cumulative deficit for Scenario 4, which comes in the eighteenth year of the project and is 23.5 times the maximum deficit for Scenario 1b

Not all electricity is generated from coal, which corresponds to the worst case; and, not all of the energy invested in the production of photovoltaic solar cells is electrical, but electrical generators are responsible for more carbon dioxide than other energy sources because of inefficiencies; therefore, the numbers computed by me represent absolute upper bounds on greenhouse gas production. Since neither of the above maximum deficits is appreciable compared to annual US GHG emissions, there is no compelling reason why Australia may not replace all of its fossil fuel consumption with renewable solar energy according to one or the other startup scenario depending upon conditions on the ground. As I have stated repeatedly, energy and GHG deficits should be made up by conservation and “normal” demand reduction. Of course, the real reason why this scheme or another scheme to replace fossil fuels will probably not be implemented is political intransigence.

July 27, 2007. Communism and Some Idle Thoughts on the Excesses of Capitalism

Communism v. Capitalism and Marxism v. Demateralism

Let us review the steps whereby capitalism was defeated by communism in logical argument:

I don’t know if any of the latest statements about deaths and ruined lives under so-called communist rule are true or merely another salvo in an endless war against Communism waged by both branches of the American Capitalist Party; but, this much is certain: Communism is sustainable and Capitalism, because it requires perpetual economic growth in a finite world, is not. Capitalism requires growth to retire debt incurred by fractional reserve banking, to justify economic inequality by telling the poor they will not grow poorer as the rich grow richer, to provide new jobs for workers displaced by improvements in productivity due to technological progress, and to finance industry in a stock market that would collapse if it did not grow. None of these is necessary in a communist economy despite the undeniable fact that many regimes that call themselves communist whether they are or not have encouraged economic growth. (Of course, many (undeveloped) nations should grow economically, but new growth in the poor nations must be accompanied by even greater shrinkage in the rich nations to more than compensate for it.)

It is necessary to divide the community dividend equally among the members of the community for a number of reasons:

1. Whatever advantages of intelligence, strength, ability, character, appearance, breeding, or connections one is able to exploit to acquire wealth, they are accidents of birth that are normally disallowed as justifications for worldly success.

2. It is impossible to evaluate a person’s contribution to the community until hundreds of years after that person’s death, if then.

3. Suppose that one potato in the Mark I Economy represents the amount of emergy that is required to keep one person alive for one day. The ability of the earth to provide emergy for consumption is already so limited that people are starving to death because we do not share wealth.

Thus, wealth sharing is reasonable, beautiful, and practical. However, without wealth sharing society is vulnerable to very serious problems:

1. Differences in wealth create covetousness, envy, resentment, anger, and, finally, revolution if they grow sufficiently steep or if they are perceived as patently unfair.

2. If there are differences in wealth, we have materialism with all of the horrible things people do to acquire greater wealth because of greed, because of fear of losing what they have, or to remedy personal poverty. In Chapter 9 of On the Preservation of Species, I showed that materialism is Pandora’s Box.

Materialism is the perfect transition from the debate between communism and capitalism to the debate between Dematerialism and Marxism:

Let us examine the reasons why Dematerialism has supplanted Marxism:

Marxism was supposed to have remedied the problems caused by differences in wealth; but, inasmuch as it requires people to work to earn a living, it still permits competition for wealth. Also, it does not address competition for power except by preventing huge concentrations of wealth that make fair competition unnecessary for many aspirants to political power. Even supposing a meritocracy in the distribution of jobs, political positions, and incomes, almost all of the problems of materialism will arise.

1. Dematerialism requires each person to have an equal share of the community dividend regardless of what he does or doesn’t do, which prevents all of the evils of materialism discussed in Appendix II of On the Preservation of Species.

2. It is important that people who do not work be compensated the same as those who do because most of the workforce will have to be furloughed to reduce the energy budget to that which can be supplied by renewable energy technologies only. Please see the three energy papers hyperlinked to http://dematerialism.net/ where this is explained and proved.

3. Dematerialism avoids punishment of misbehavior as well as punishment of sloth. People will do something interesting and/or useful because they need to be effective to be happy. Since Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment 150 years ago, we have suspected that punishment exacerbates anti-social behavior. Dematerialism lets go of punishment and revenge as well as other irrational and maladaptive behavior peculiar to Western culture or learned during out Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness.

Indeed, Marx, apparently, was not familiar with the Sermon on the Mount and the many fine sentiments expressed there by Jesus. We could say that Dematerialism is the New Testament of Communism and Marxism is the Old Testament.

Houston, Texas

July 26, 2007

And now for something completely different:

What they didn’t know:

1. Conservation within Capitalism could make the Die Off much worse if it postpones it while the population grows.

2. People who don't want a state- or consumer-planned economy (with equal shares of emergy for all) probably consider themselves superior to most other people and don't want to jeopardize their eminence and other advantages. A physics professor confessed, "I'm afraid you'll take away my money." This is part of the authoritarian or Type Z personality. This characterization does not apply to the many losers in the Money Game who are hopeless victims of authoritarian propaganda, such as the anti-abortion zealots who are convinced that communism is the same as abortion.

3. Capitalism is like Rock and Roll. The vast majority would reject both unless they had been subjected to merciless brainwashing. If you are susceptible to Rock, Country, Rap, or any of the other popular products that masquerade as music, you are probably vulnerable to anti-communist propaganda - especially if you have not yet recognized that every school curriculum, every major sporting event, and every television program - not just the commercials - is anti-communist propaganda.

4. It's too early to plan on what to do to save yourself and your loved ones from the coming Crash, Ochlarchy, and Die Off as in "Children of Men", which was based on a different etiology but the same prognosis. You must know where the bomb will land before you know which way to run.

5. We should all support the Bolivarian Revolution until we have a chance to go a little further along the path to a Natural Economy. Hugo Chavez will not oppose this process, the name of which is dematerialism – not to be confounded with the Ideal represented by the Natural Economy.

What he said about me:

Tom Wayburn has unsubscribed himself from the_dieoff_QA, saving myself the trouble of having to boot his commie ass off this list! <g>

Idle speculation about the inventors of monotheism:

Many scientists believe that our love of natural beauty has evolved because of the ecological importance of leaving Nature undisturbed; however, the two major monotheistic religions come from a part of the world that is hard to live in. Perhaps it’s hard to appreciate its natural beauty too. This might account for their choices of religions that do not encourage respect for the environment nearly so much as the religions they replaced, namely, pantheism and paganism. After all, if there is a god living in every stream and every tree, it might be harder to despoil it for one’s own purpose than if there were one abstract god who, regardless of what is taught, is always thought of as being somewhere else. One might conclude, then, that environmental destruction is more an artifact of one’s tribal religion than an innate characteristic of human nature. If, in fact, monotheism is the only religion that permits man to ignore the local gods of Nature, then it is no wonder that Capitalism became an artifact of monotheism, as no other political economy could leave Nature less undisturbed.

It is the spoliation of Nature, of course, that has made possible all of the miracles of technology that we, the affluent of the developed nations, enjoy daily. Today, for example, is a day that I have enjoyed as much as any I can remember. I recorded music from the cable, converted stereo phonograph records to 5.1 digital, and achieved a great deal on the World Wide Web. As I have said previously, no one is more dependent upon the capitalist mode of production than am I. I might do poorly in a Natural Economy; nevertheless, I try to be objective and realistic in my scientific and literary work.

July 19, 2007. Fifth Addendum to “Photovoltaic for Australia”

This journal entry continues the discussion of my latest efforts to solve the problem of ramping up a new energy technology with a low Energy Returned over Energy Invested ratio. Most of these technologies require a large investment of energy at the beginning that is recovered only after a rather long time; but, they are absolutely essential to the remediation of the worst effects of Peak Oil. Therefore, a scheme must be worked out to introduce them in opposition to nornal market practice.

I have fixed a number of mistakes in “Photovoltaic for Australia” and its spreadsheets, in particular one mistake that was distinctly unfair to Dave Kimble. The URLs are http://dematerialism.net/pv.htm and http://dematerialism.net/eroi3.htm, which are copies one of the other since both URLs have been given out. The two copies of the spreadsheet at http://dematerialism.net/pv.xls and http://dematerialism.net/eroi3.xls are the same too. Earlier work was done on http://dematerialism.net/pv070711.xls as discussed in the text. This has been a huge effort and the only justification I have for doing it is that I wished to discourage the attitude that such a project cannot be carried out. It can be done; and, what’s more, I think it will be done – or something very much like it.

July 12, 2007. Fourth Addendum to “Photovoltaic for Australia”

I have prepared one additional spreadsheet scenario that applies equally well to any alternative energy technology that delivers electricity with a low EROI of 3.0 and a 24-year working lifetime. The computation at http://dematerialism.net/eroi3.xls is exceptionally brief and carries only two charts. Chart 1 shows the delivered energy per year in quads from a slow beginning to a steady-state production equal to Australia’s 2003 energy budget. It generates 262.4 billion kWh/y of electricity and the rest in liquid fuels that are produced at a great disadvantage, as discussed in the paper at http://dematerialism.net/eroi3.htm. Chart 2 shows the rapid ramp-up of productivity until the steady state is reached.

In this scenario, as shown on Sheet 1, which is liberally covered with explanatory notes attached to yellow boxes, production grows at about 9.44% per year until it assumes a moving average of the past N years beginning in 2057 with N = 1 and increasing by 1 in each successive year. This results in smooth changes in production and attains the target output earlier than in previous schemes. As I said previously, the exact scheme employed will depend upon conditions on the ground and other circumstances at the time of execution. No matter what alternative energy is selected to replace oil, the ramp-up is bound to be slow, painful, and expensive. Nevertheless, it is not too early to get started.

July 9, 2007. Hanson’s Last Stand

Here is the last letter Jay Hanson addressed to me before I unsubscribed from The Church of the Killer Ape of Peak Oil:

Re: Is Dematerialism possible?

In killer_ape-peak_oil@yahoogroups.com, Tom Wayburn wrote:

Jay and Ron too,

If Dematerialism is impossible, so is War Socialism.

It probably is. It was meant as a body of ideas which, if adopted by the powers-that-be (e.g., WW2), could reduce consumption of natural resources up to 90%. Any parts of it will help and could be adopted incrementally if some sort of new systems politics were invented. On the other hand Tom, your program is nothing but updated Marxism. [http://dematerialism.wikispaces.com/ ]

Your program is fundamentally different than mine.

#1. You call for "Equality of political power." I do not. My program (or some version of it) would have to be willingly adopted and administered by the existing powers-that-be. The closest analogy would be US government rationing in WW2.

#2. You call for "nearly equal distribution of wealth." I do not. I call for rationing of those commodities which are required to prevent human suffering. Existing "wealth" can stay where it is.

#3. You call for "mandating worker ownership of the means of production." I do not. I don't care who owns the means of production.

BOTTOM LINE: Given the choice of "death by business as usual" or death by "Neo-Bolsheviks raging through the country on a new cultural revolution," then I will choose former.

Tom, peddle your political bullshit somewhere else. You are no longer welcome here. [For those of you who feel my response is a bit harsh, Tom said on the_dieoff_QA he didn't care about how words were defined, which of course, means he IS NOT qualified for membership on any of my lists.

My answer:

As any careful reader of Jay’s list knows, I said that Jay could define a word any way he wanted and I would employ his definition in discussions with him. As any intelligent reader of Jay’s list knows, Jay’s version of War Socialism will NOT save 90% of the energy because it permits the market to continue to function, albeit under some constraint, but with the myriad activities and occupations that are bleeding the earth to death daily. Instead, he is calling for a systems-engineering dictatorship. (Earlier, he called for a military dictatorship.) Jay turns out to be a fool as well as a self-deluded tyrant. Like the neo-conservatives, his preferred method of attack is to accuse his adversaries of the very faults of which he himself is guilty. For example, he will claim that I hold on to my views with irrational religious fervor, which charge applies, instead, to him, which accounts for his inability to deal rationally with opposition to his doomsday message. The same comments apply to Ron Patterson who is cast from the same mold. Make no mistake; these are bad asses; and, when running scared – and Jay is definite running scared – they will commit all sorts of abominations.

Every good student of human nature, unlike Ron and Jay, knows that the bully, and this goes for the “intellectual” bully too, lives in stark terror of someone calling his bluff. I have been dealing effectively with bullies all my life. When you stand up to them, they turn tail and run like the cowards they are. Many of us know that Jay will quit a group or simply walk away from a discussion. What very few know is that Jay, subsequently, is plunged frequently into the depths of depression. How sad!

It seems that every half-baked pseudo-intellectual bad-ass who reads Pinker or Dawkins grabs onto evolutionary psychology to justify every sort of bad behavior! Just because you have inherited a gene for a mal-adaptive, atavistic trait like barnyard aggressiveness, does not excuse the incorrigible behavior that results from lack of self-control in people of goodwill and voluptuary pleasure in evil for the rest.

I have tried very hard to stop Jay in his tracks, make him think for a change, and, finally, give him a chance to become a decent person and do the right thing. The reason people flock to Jay’s banner, of course, is they are clutching at a straw of certainty in a sea of doubt due to the flood of events in a very uncertain world. For such people it is better to trust in error than face the impenetrable mystery that surrounds us all.

Finally, I have this to say to the people I leave behind having done the best I can do for them. Things are not what you think they are, namely:

1. Conservation within Capitalism could make the Die Off much worse if it postpones it while the population grows.

2. People who don't want a state-planned or consumer-planned economy (with equal shares of emergy for all) probably consider themselves superior to some other people and don't want to jeopardize their eminence and other advantages. A physics professor confessed, "I'm afraid you'll take away my money." This is part of the authoritarian or Type Z personality. This characterization does not apply to the many losers in the Money Game who are hopeless victims of authoritarian propaganda, such as the anti-abortion zealots who are convinced that communism is the same as abortion.

3. Capitalism is like Rock and Roll. The vast majority would reject both unless they had been subjected to merciless brainwashing. If you are susceptible to Rock, Country, Rap, or any of the other popular products that masquerade as music, you are probably vulnerable to anti-communist propaganda - especially if you have not yet recognized that every school curriculum, every major sporting event, and every television program – not just the commercials – is anti-communist propaganda.

5. We should all support the Bolivarian Revolution until we have a chance to go a little further along the path to a Natural Economy. Hugo Chavez will not oppose this process, the name of which is Dematerialism – not to be confounded with the Ideal represented by the Natural Economy.

For some of my friends, I would like to call your attention to the work of Roy Bhaskar. Please see http://www.criticalrealism.demon.co.uk/iacr/. And, do yourself a favor; take a gander at http://energybulletin.net/23259.html.

July 4, 2007. Third Addendum to “Photovoltaic for Australia”

Dave Kimble answered my last post to ROEOZ privately. I will not print his letter, as he probably did not want you to see it; however, suffice it to say that he made it abundantly clear that he was prepared to treat my efforts toward the understanding of the problem he posed with utter contempt. He even asked me if I was on cocaine! That said, I am prepared to explain why Dave kept insisting that the energy barrier to supplying Australia’s energy needs with photovoltaic solar power was too formidable to ever be overcome. I made a slight adjustment to his idea, which involved changing the datum in only one cell, Cell AH2 of Sheet 1 of the spreadsheet, to obtain an entirely feasible plan, albeit a plan that will require a good deal of political push. It does not require, however, a change in political economy. This plan, which I have called Wayburn’s Idea in the titles to charts on the spreadsheet – as opposed to Kimble’s Plan, can be embarked upon without suggesting anything about what needs to happen in 70 years to forestall further Overshoot.

The spreadsheet has become just a little bit complicated lately, principally because it is so much fun to work on; therefore, it seems advisable to provide the serious student of energy with a table of contents to the various worksheets:

Sheet 1 of http://dematerialism.net/pv.xls consists of three separate computations, two of which have been used to reconcile more than one method with more than one set of data:

1. Columns A – S: This is a long calculation using Wayburn’s Idea to obtain a positive energy profit in the second year so as to begin servicing the energy debt incurred in the first year to get the operation started. After approximately 90 years, the 2003 Australian energy budget is attained. In the meantime, Australian’s will supplement solar energy with the shrinking supply of more conventional technologies, the growing supply of wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and biological renewable technologies, the diversion of exports, and strict conservation measures.

2. Columns T – AD: This is a short implementation of Kimble’s Idea using Dave’s data but Tom’s initial energy subsidy in such a way that it can be reconciled with either the first computation or a subsequent computation to be discussed next using Dave’s normalized energy units. Wayburn’s method for reporting the cumulative energy profit is employed. These numbers are greater than those obtained by Dave by the amount of the subsidy. It is assumed that no energy is returned during the first year. The energy invested is applied to the production of solar cells that are not put into service until the following year. The discrepancy resulted in Dave giving the cells a lifespan of only 24 years instead of 25 on his spreadsheet which is reproduced on Sheet 4 with the mistake corrected in Cell AA8.

3. Columns AG – AR: This is a computation with both methods for computing energy profits employed to facilitate reconciliation with Dave’s original spreadsheet and with the computations described in Items 1 and 2. Cell AH2 can be altered so as to toggle back and forth quickly between Kimble’s Idea and Wayburn’s Idea. (To simulate a steady-state economy or not, a few additional cells in Columns AH and AJ will have to be changed.) Kimble’s Idea was to employ exponential growth of the energy invested from the beginning and throughout the calculation. Wayburn’s Idea was to invest in the second year only the energy returned by the cells produced during the first year. In the third year, exponential growth was commenced. It was retained for as long as was necessary to approach the final target value for the energy delivered (ER - EI) yearly. This had the effect ensuring that the original energy subsidy is the largest deficit ever to occur. Yearly energy profit is positive beginning in the second year! In case an energy steady state is desired, depending upon the rate of exponential growth and the target energy, a year is chosen to begin assigning to the yearly production of cells a moving average of the N previous years with N = 1 in the first year and increasing by one in each succeeding year so that the first year in the moving average remains always the same. Perhaps with further experimentation, I might find an averaging method that will result in a somewhat smoother transition in productivity. This could be important if it is useful or desirable to maintain a stable work force.

Sheet 2 contains only Lawrence-Livermore’s clever chart of energy flows in the US economy. The unit of energy is the quad, which is absolutely the best choice because of extensive tables maintained by the US DOE with conversion factors to quads for nearly every energy technology for every country and for every year. See, for example, Tables c8 – c11 at http://www.dematerialism.net/usefulhyperlinks.htm.

Sheet 4 contains Dave Kimble’s original spreadsheet, which was published on the internet.

Chart 1 (Wayburn’s Idea): EI and ER for first 30 years

Chart 2 (Wayburn’s Idea): ER - EI

Chart 3 (Wayburn’s Idea): Yearly cell Production

Chart 4 (Kimble’s Idea): Cumulative profit for the first 35 years

Chart 5 (Wayburn’s Idea): Energy surplus for the first 24 years.

Chart 6 (Wayburn’s Idea): Cumulative profit for the first seven years in Kimble’s normalized energy units

I commend these worksheets to your careful inspection. Cells highlighted in yellow generally contain important messages, but occasionally may mark important variable changes for the programmers use. The paper describing this work earlier is at http://dematerialism.net/pv.htm.

July 2, 2007. Second Addendum to “Photovoltaic for Australia”

I have contrived an entirely new model under the assumption that Australia will adopt a sustainable steady-state political economy in time to prevent the worst effects of Peak Oil; therefore, the new spreadsheet holds the energy delivered constant after an assumed requirement of 7.00 quads of renewable, non-fossil energy is attained. Strangely, both Dave Kimble and I missed the most obvious defect in his model. By supplying 5% of Australia’s 2003 energy budget as an initial infusion of borrowed energy to jump start the process, the energy returned is greater than the energy invested after only one year. After only 14 years, the cumulative energy returned is greater than the cumulative energy invested; and, the one-time subsidy is paid back in only twenty years. That’s better than the average mortgage. The new scheme is presented in a completely revised version of “Photovoltaic for Australia” and the spreadsheet is at http://dematerialism.net/pv.xls.

Also, I am working on a version of the spreadsheet with a quicker approach to the energy consumed in Australia in 2003, which, according to http://www.cslforum.org/australia.htm, amounted to 5.14 quads out of a total of 10.26 quads produced. Please note that this leaves 5.12 quads for export, 0.257 quads of which, might not be missed. This is enough to bootstrap a robust photovoltaic solar energy program. This work has been stored on Sheet 1 of http://dematerialism.net/pv.xls along with Dave Kimble’s spreadsheet for 10% growth on Sheet 4 and my version of it on Sheet 3. Also, the Lawrence-Livermore diagram of US energy flows in quads appears on Sheet 2.

July 1, 2007. Addendum to “Photovoltaic for Australia”

Despite the political improbability, I offer a spreadsheet that explores the no-growth scenario for an economy that is already committed to sustainability through radical political change in a major way. The strange downward spikes in Chart 2 correspond to rows inserted after the sheet was prepared identifying the columns at least once every page. The graphing program interprets non-numeric values as zeroes. See http://dematerialism.net/pv-x.xls. Finally, a few minutes ago, I finished a spreadsheet that smoothes out the oscillations in pv-x.xls by writing the yearly production of solar cells as a moving average of an increasing time period after an initial period of exponential growth. See http://dematerialism.net/pv-avg.xls.

June 27, 2007. Photovoltaic for Australia

Today I completed a computational study of a possible scenario whereby Australia could replace all her current energy budget by 2069 after a 60 year period of austerity. Subsequently, the energy supply could grow at a robust rate for many years, but not forever! Actually, it’s a shame that she has the capacity to do so much destruction even without burning fossil fuels, but the capacity is there for better or worse. See http://dematerialism.net/pv.htm.

June 16, 2007. Jay Hanson’s War Socialism is a point on the path to the Dematerialist’s Natural Economy

War Socialism might be a safe position for a society that is not very fussy about freedom until the process of unwinding materialism proceeds further along the path from Fascism to a Natural Economy. But, unless War Socialism is adjusted to conform to the fundamental principles of Dematerialism, it is not sustainable and is guaranteed to fail. A good plausibility argument for this is presented in “War Socialism Is a Step toward a Natural Economy”.

March 29, 2007. A newly-revised version of “Energy in a Natural Economy”

I understand that one cannot adopt the sort of give-away economy I have in mind throughout a large community instantaneously. However, within a small intentional community (either concentrated geographically or distributed throughout a larger community) enough responsible people might be found to institute an economy based completely on trust with no accounting practices of any type and with the sort of resource sharing that one expects within a nuclear family - especially at the dinner table, where no one expects the mashed potatoes to be apportioned according to contribution to the household economy during the preceding week.

Nevertheless, the social, economic, and thermodynamic advantages of what I call a "natural economy" are described in a newly revised version of "Energy in a Natural Economy" that I completed only two days ago. I would appreciate a critical read-through for any remaining errors, inconsistencies, omissions, inadvertencies, and infelicitous renderings. My choice of the term "natural economy" is best explained with a story such as The Parable of the Shipwrecked Brothers.

March 12, 2007. A Report on My Recent Investigations of Solar Energy Harvested by Photosynthesis in a Controlled Environment

This research report was prepared for the Global Villages group to provide computational evidence for the capabilities of the proprietary SolaRoof technology described in part at http://www.solaroof.com/. It is part of an ongoing effort to get the best values possible for the capabilities that can be expected from renewable energy technologies in the United States.

March 1, 2007. Two wikis

Yesterday I started a wiki at http://dematerialism.wikispaces.com where I will practice writing a Wikipedia article about dematerialism. Also, at http://www.ourculture.info/wiki.cgi?TomWayburn, some friends and I all of whom feel strongly about reforming capitalism on the one hand or replacing capitalism with some sort of wealth sharing on the other. I encourage anyone who wishes to enter the debate. The wiki is open, and everything in it belongs to the ethical public domain.

January 29, 2007. Four new essays

I hope my friends will review and criticize an article called “Emergy and Population in a Natural Economy” that I wrote this morning. It is supposed to show how Dematerialism handles over-consumption by emergy accounting and over-population by sanctions if necessary.

Three other short papers are the following:

1. “Availability Balance on Earth Redux” that originated as a letter to Dave Bowman, a physicist with whom I collaborated on the original availability balance around the Earth.

2. “On Emergy”, which originated as my contribution to a paper on which I was to collaborate with Sholto Maud and Dino Cevolatti.

3. “On ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Progress’ by Lew Rockwell”, which originated as a post to the Energy Resources Yahoo group. This paper disproves a standard conservative position.

These are rough drafts that may never be finished.

January 4, 2007. Two new essays

Today I wrote “On Designing Community Currencies” and finished preparing “A Short Talk on Dematerialism” for the web.

December 25, 2006. To save the world from Dieoff

I found the best proof of the unsustainability of capitalism after I completed the current version of On the Preservation of Species. It follows from David Delaney’s nice proof that capitalism requires economic growth in Addendum 2 of “On Capitalism” that follows my own feeble efforts along that line in this early essay. The rest of the argument follows from the absurdity of infinite growth in a finite world and the immorality and infeasibility of expansion into space; but, in “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”, which was summarized in “The Demise of Business as Usual”, I placed this contention on a quantitative basis.

It remains only to note that conservation is limited by Carnot efficiency in many cases and one-hundred percent efficiency in every case whereas the production of sustainable energy is bounded ultimately by the total land area of the earth. Technology cannot possibly harvest more energy than that which reaches the earth from the Sun in real time, the gravitational energy imparted to the tides by a moon that moves slowly away from the earth, and the nuclear energy from radioactive substances in the earth’s core. Although this is an enormous amount, it must be consumed principally by the weather and geological movements without which life on the planet must cease.

Anti-egalitarian and pro-authoritarian propagandists are not likely to bring up the unsustainability of capitalism. On the other hand, they generally accuse previous attempts to distribute wealth equitably with the very faults that invariably accompany every instance of materialism in the world, the principal instantiation of which is capitalism itself. The common indictment is that communism has been proved unworkable. People who make this wild claim generally have no idea what constitutes a proof. Let’s examine what they mean by “unworkable”.

First, they say that every attempt to equilibrate wealth must end in a dictatorship. Provided, of course, that wealth is distributed equally and a democratic constitution is in place, there is no way for power to become concentrated into the hands of the wealthy as has occurred in the United States and the United kingdom and in other Western nations. If the recommendations offered by dematerialism to prevent the ascent to dictatorial power of so-called natural leaders are adopted, power is guaranteed to be distributed perfectly, that is, no one will have any power over anyone else other than the power of persuasion, which will not stand up to scrutiny unless it is based upon genuine political wisdom. This is discussed in On the Preservation of Species, especially in the section of Chapter 11 entitled The Solution to the Problem of Natural Leaders. One of things we need to live is our personal autonomy.

Second, they say that people will become dissatisfied if they cannot improve their economic well-being essentially without limit. Earlier I used the thought experiment involving a Mark I Economy to show that, in a resource limited world such as our world, unlimited accumulation of wealth amounts to the murder of those who go without. Under the circumstances that obtain in our world today, inequality of wealth amounts to murder. But, moral considerations aside, the discoveries of psychologists regarding the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation show that the exact opposite is true; namely, that people are concerned with resource dominance are guaranteed to be unhappy while people who are actually happy are concerned only with what is interesting to do. This echoes dramatically the advice of the hero of the biblical New Testament and the advice of Bertrand Russell on happiness in Part V of On Ethics, Sex, and Marriage, published by Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York.

If neither of these objections to sharing wealth is valid, we begin to suspect that anti-communist propaganda, which is anti-egalitarian / pro-authoritarian propaganda and is generally endorsed by religious fundamentalists and other personal salvationists, is precisely what is keeping us from initiating the very strategies we need to prevent Dieoff and save the world. It doesn't matter if the form it takes is the cloaking of an incorrect analysis of human nature in pseudo-scientific terms or as dire warnings about aspects of state capitalism that are shared by corporate capitalism in the societies in which we live and could not arise in a libertarian communist society or whatever one calls it to avoid inflammatory terms. Dematerialism is a gradual path from present-day fascism to democratic libertarian communism, the only true democracy. Libertarian capitalism is a contradiction in terms. Perhaps a word about the so-called free market is worth repeating:

In “Energy in a Natural Economy”, I began the study of the huge portion of our energy budget that is consumed by the free market. The adjective free refers to unfettered activity by those adept at accumulating material wealth with slavery for nearly everyone else. I do not mean chattel slavery but a much more insidious form of slavery whereby the slave imagines he is still free because he can quit one job to look for another under practically the same conditions. This is just as arbitrary as permitting those who are physically stronger or who have mastered the use of the sword to impose upon everyone else. No reasonable person imagines that the rich do not impose upon every one of limited means. This is discussed in the book. It is interesting that the "unintended consequences" of utopian economic schemes always amount to the very evils that characterize every capitalist society and always will. Thus, anti-communist propaganda describes our utopian society in terms that best describe the society we live in now.

Men can compete for anything they want so long as it is not the very things we need to live. That's unnecessarily savage.

October 17, 2006. My solution in a nutshell (from the entry for June 1, 2006)

Here is my solution:

Let us suppose for a moment that you cannot foment a revolution in the US. Your best chance to save yourself, your loved ones, and others of similar inclination is to start an intentional community with the following features:

1. Workers own economic enterprises in the sense of custodianship. Decisions are made by direct vote – one worker, one vote. (Note (10-17-06). It is important that worker ownership not extend beyond the premises of the plant where the work is done. Decentralization not incorporation.)

2. A give-away economy with no monetary system is in place wherein each consumer notifies directly the enterprises that supply his genuine needs which in turn tell him when the item or items can be picked up or will be delivered in the case of flows. These enterprises also report the emergy values of the item or items to each consumer and to a public servant if the community deems this necessary until people have learned the lesson of minimizing their consumption. Thus, the economy is consumer-planned subject only to the consumer's responsibility (a) to use no more than 1/Nth of the total sustainable dividend of the economy (measured in emergy units) where N is the number of consumers and (b) to reproduce himself only, to pass on his reproductive rights to another, or not to reproduce.

3. Each enterprise integrates the plans of its consumers into a total economic plan for the enterprise, which must notify its suppliers what things it has need of.

4. Public servants are chosen quasi-randomly, somewhat as jurors are chosen, for limited terms that cannot be followed by another such appointment. Recall is by direct vote of all members of the community whom I call citizens for lack of a better term. The term fractal government denotes a system of small communities wherein every citizen belongs to a local parliament that is tied in a loose federation with other such communities in similar parliaments that are tied in loose federations to other parliaments of parliaments. This is similar to fractal structures, except that a loose federation of the world, convened to share resources according to the Fundamental Principle of Neighborliness (FPN), can have only a finite number of sub-levels as does every representation of a fractal in the real world. (The FPN says that, if wealth is transferred from one community to another, it is transferred always from the richer community to the poorer if at all.) Notice that the only permanent members of the government are the people themselves at the community level who share political power in the sense of one-person-one-vote. Naturally some people will have more influence than others if they are widely respected, for example; but, they cannot convert this influence to greater wealth.

5. Defense is by citizen militias if necessary. The decision to bear arms is up to the citizens.

6. Please see On the Preservation of Species – especially the Preface and Chapter 11. A system of morals to be encoded into a social contract is discussed in Chapter 3.

It is recognized that the federal government is likely to suppress any effort to form an intentional community (or reform an existing community) along egalitarian lines, i. e., with a Natural Economy, as discussed in my earlier post unless collapse has already commenced, in which case the federal government will no longer be able to function because the most powerful people in government will have given up in despair and will be trying to save themselves - at least Dmitry Orlov has made a good case for this in a nice talk about the relationship between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very likely collapse of the United States American Empire:

Anyone who thinks this solution is inconsistent with human nature should read http://www.dematerialism.net/perfect.htm as well as the journal entry for February 5, 2006, below.

Finally, perhaps the best way to effect widespread change is to demonstrate a superior system locally as Ted Trainer, for example, is doing.

September 6, 2006. The two greatest problems of humanity

This material was taken from a letter in which I tried to identify the problems of the greatest importance to humanity. The letter was written because I hoped to avoid discussing the future of humanity with people who will never accept my solutions to these two problems:

The problem with allowing different income to different people based on abilities, contributions to the community, etc. – in short, anything related to the people themselves – is the devil itself because it is the cause of Overshoot.

There is no way to permit any such thing without arriving at what we have now. As soon as you open that door, you have allowed the profit motive – and, with it, greed and fear – to enter. This has been my principal discovery, namely, that artificial economic contingency (AEC) is Pandora's Box. With it, every evil; without it, none.

At this point, I must point out that my understanding of human nature is much more realistic than that of my liberal friends who would allow some differences in wealth and income and don't want to “rob the rich". And, by the way, it's not just robbing the rich, it's neutralizing them forever. We must take them out of the game. Retire them. Prevent them from becoming involved in the economic life of the world until they understand this: Human nature is good enough to live without AEC if there are no institutions (such as buying and selling or finance) whereby they can improve their position (or worsen it or the position of others); but, human nature is not good enough to live with a little AEC and not make it a part of our propensity to establish pecking orders.

This is crucial. It is fine if people establish a better reputation for excellence or virtue or establish reproductive advantages by making themselves the ones whom members of the opposite sex want to have children with or if they receive reproductive tokens from those who have them to give; but, if they can establish resource dominance, every evil will become manifest once again no matter how you equilibrate wealth at the outset. This is the one point upon which there can be no compromise. Please see Chapter 9 and Appendix II of On the Preservation of Species in which I call AEC "materialism". My claim is that, if you do not eliminate AEC, any changes made will be either irrelevant or temporary.

My course is clear. To go on establishing this as one of the fundamental principles of the universe by means of my writing but not by arguing with hostile people. Almost any person I speak to on the street at random is quick to agree with me (and not just because they think I am crazy), but "activists" who are committed to their own ideas always give me a hard time. When I hear a good idea like eMergy or homotopy, I am quick to adopt it. "Talent recognizes genius instantly; mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself."

By the way, the Mark II Economy proves that differences in wealth (in the form of higher salaries) are energetically costly *per se* but not as costly as commerce - the method by which great differences in wealth are established, which is unsustainable in the US because of Maximum Renewables. [The Mark I Economy established that to have more than others is murder in a world of scarcity like this one.]

Do you agree that artificial economic contingency (AEC) must be eliminated? That no economic system that includes AEC is sustainable? Will people who have the ability to do so try to improve their positions only a little or will some of them try to get all of the property and money they can?

The second important topic is preventing the rise of natural leaders in the sense of G. B. Shaw (Preface to The Millionairess). Elsewhere Shaw wrote:

Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts gives no idea of the extent to which flattery, deference, power, and apparently unlimited money, can upset and demoralize simpletons who in their proper places are good fellows enough. To them the exercise of authority is not a heavy and responsible job which strains their mental capacity and industry to the utmost, but a delightful sport to be indulged for its own sake, and asserted and reasserted by cruelty and monstrosity. – George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Geneva.

In any case, something must be done to prevent the rise of powerful people because the benevolent despot is never found outside of the covers of a romantic novel or a falsified history.

October 20, 2006. Latest version of “Energy in a Mark II Economy”

The latest version of Energy in a Mark II Economy has a number of corrections and improvements. The tables of macros in “Experiments in Mark II Economy” are up-to-date and almost complete.

October 16, 2006. A New version of “Energy in a Mark II Economy” is available with only two missing modules.

After one marathon session I have completed another draft of “Energy in a Mark II Economy”. Probably, I will not write a section on Methods; however, Chart 1 from the spreadsheets or from “Apology and the Principal Conclusions” should go into a section on “The Effect of Political Economy on Total Energy Budget and EROI”. In Experiment 4, with the conservation factor, ψ, at 0.522300, the total energy budget for the capitalist economy as represented by the Base Case is just equal to Pimentel's figure for Maximum Renewables whereas the Natural Economy as represented by the No-Commerce-No-Managers Case has an energy budget of 38.884% of that modest figure, an energy budget that could be met by private local efforts. With the switch to renewables reducing the basic EROI to 3.0, the Natural economy is at Maximum Renewables with ψ = 0.662664; but, the capitalist economy is still consuming 207.69% of Maximum Renewables.

Also, an executive summary is in order; but, the main results are in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Apology.html and under Exercise 1a in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Money.html which validates the idea of getting a good approximation to the energy invested from the total cash invested from the inception of the project until the last vestiges have been cleaned up after the life cycle of the installation has come to a close. One often sees a figure for the money to be invested and almost never a figure for the energy to be invested. Hopefully, that will change due to our efforts and the efforts of many others.

The link in “On EROI and Emergy” to “Balance Equations for Energy Extraction and Conversion” does not apply especially to the Mark II Economy; however, I think all of us will find it interesting; and, some of us will find it wrong. I put a lot of effort into a very short exposition; so, I hope some of you will read it; and, dare I hope, check the math. Also, please look at the tables of EROI on the spreadsheets, which are completely explained in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-EROI.html#_Toc148738711.

Finally, I wish to add that Dale Allen Pfeiffer whose new journal The Mountain Sentinel is discussed in the journal entry for September 24^th has generously offered “Energy Depletion & the US Descent into Fascism” at no cost. He would like to have us all read it.

October 13, 2006. EROI and emergy

Over the last few weeks I have been occupied principally with the determination of ER/EI, which I have decided to call EROI, following Charlie Hall, because it is so much easier to say than “EROEI”. The new approach to EROI got started when I encountered results for Energy Invested (EI) that exceeded the total energy budget in the Mark II Economy. Instead of trying to fix the bug in the older routine, I wrote an entirely new and more transparent routine for computing EI. Also, at the suggestion of Sholto Maud, I developed energy, entropy, availability, and emergy balances for extraction processes and conversion processes. This led to revising my definition of emergy in terms of availability and transformity. All of these results will be discussed in the new modular version of http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html, which currently contains only a brief Apology for the delay and the outline for the new paper. Also, I will provide an “executive summary” for the typical reader who is interested only in conclusions. Those who wish to operate, validate, or repudiate the Mark II Economy will want to read the full paper and, perhaps, some of the earlier drafts one of which is at http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Master.html. The two spreadsheets discussed in the entry for September 24^th are now available. Examples of the charts on separate worksheets appear in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html. (Note for Chart 1. Percent furloughed can be interpreted as the percent by which working hours can be reduced for everyone. In the spreadsheets, hours worked per week are shown instead.)

September 24, 2006. “What’s New” becomes part of this journal

There are now two versions of the spreadsheet for the Mark II Economy:

http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.xls in which the fractions retained for salaries are the same for each sector. In the first version of this spreadsheet, the fractions of the population that are on active duty were determined by the requirement that production per capita remain constant. In the latest version of this spreadsheet, no one is furloughed in the non-commercial sectors; however, the production per capita is reduced to shorten the work week. Either all of the commercial sector is on active duty or none of it is. The spreadsheets and how to use them will be explained in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html as soon as the revisions are complete.

http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy-CSP.xls in which the populations of each sector remain constant throughout the exercise. I have solved all of the nonlinear equations simultaneously using Newton's method directly on Sheets 2 and 3 of the spreadsheet. Also, see my first Excel charts each on a separate sheet. One sees from Chart 1 that as the economy becomes more progressive, moving from (BC) capitalism to (NM) market communism to (NC) communism with a commissar class to (NCNM) pure anarcho-communism, the population works less and consumes less energy whilst retaining the same standard of living. How much less? Enough less that a looming catastrophe becomes a sustainable economy.

Be sure to Enable Macros when you download any of these spreadsheets. I can promise that they are safe. I wrote them all. The macros are discussed in http://www.dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, who has done so much to make people aware of Peak Oil and what must be done to prevent Dieoff and who edited and provided the motivation to write "On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario" and "The Demise of Business as Usual", has begun publishing The Mountain Sentinel, a new journal with a Peak Oil orientation. Dale writes, " Upcoming issues will feature articles on tar sands, coal & uranium mining deregulation, more criticism of hydrogen fuel cells, global dimming, linking energy depletion efforts with the global warming movement, and in depth looks at permaculture, ecovillages, personal efforts to achieve self-sufficiency, and various sustainability and relocalization organizations." A link to the journal's webpage can be found under Peak Oil Hyperlinks below. It is http://www.mountainsentinel.com/.

The rest of the entries in What’s New are not so new anymore; therefore, I have decided to place them in a journal entry for September 6, 2006, and further relegate that entry to the Journal Archives. A new entry for September 6 appears below. The hyperlinks mentioned in the earlier entries to “What’s New” can be found under Ancillary Essays below. See http://www.justpassinthru.com/wayburn/ and http://faithfact.com/tom/ for backup of this website except for the latest changes

June 2, 2006. A correction to remarks about ER/EI*

Perhaps, I should reformulate the exercise discussed in the entry for June 1 in terms of a balance inequality for each experiment such that the energy produced is either less or greater than the energy required by the economy, which includes the energy required by the energy technology under investigation (ETUI). It is easy to avoid recursion because, for an experiment wherein more energy is produced than consumed, one may assume that scaling back production will not increase the overhead. Thus, sustainability will have been established. It is not possible to avoid iterations as I discussed in Chapter 2 of http://dematerialism.net/POS.html. These iterations always converge because the world is finite and the economy perforce bounded.

I should have said (and I say now) that the purpose of the analysis I have in mind (to replace standard ER/EI) is to evaluate not just the ETUI or slate of ETUIs but the combination of a hypothetical system to produce energy and a hypothetical economy. In this way, we can discover which combinations are sustainable and which are not. One cannot calculate EI under any circumstances without knowing what sort of economy it is supposed to serve. For example, in a US American commuter economy, the energy cannot be produced without an investment of energy for commuting; but, in a Natural Economy on an Earth as a Garden, the energy invested will be much, much less.

June 1, 2006. My Solution in a Nutshell

The elephant in the living room is the enormous amount of energy we waste on monetary systems and markets. I did the arithmetic in http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html using MS Excel. My latest post on Energy Returned over Energy Invested (ER/EI) follows:

It seems to me that all of the confusion about ER/EI can be eliminated by taking the Energy Invested (EI) to be the entire energy budget of the economy under investigation including the energy required by the energy technology under investigation (ETUI), which is assumed to be supplied by the ETUI as was done in the principal thought experiment in http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html. If you wish, we can call the entire energy budget of the economy under investigation EI* to distinguish it from the energy required by the ETUI, which we might call plain EI. Then, EI* includes EI. The Energy Returned (ER) is easily calculated by assuming that all of the primary energy in the economy is produced by the ETUI or ETUIs. Now, if ER/EI* is less than one, the ETUI (or the matched slate of ETUIs) is infeasible for the economy under investigation. Until one finally gets to the experiment wherein the matching problem has been solved (optimized) for an entire slate of ETUIs, we are not investigating a realistic economy. We optimize the matching technology using standard mathematical optimization. In a previous post to Energy Resources I wrote the following:

Let me consider once again the Mark II economy. This is an economy where money has a fixed value independent of time probably because there are no banks or treasury to mess with the generalized currency units (XDs). The economy is simple enough that we can choose various boundary conditions, e. g., with and without commerce, with and without a higher paid manager class, and observe what happens to the energy budget. The Main Theorem is very encouraging. I must have done something right. But, no one wants to work his way through a crude, messy, homemade model like mine. What we need is a computer whiz who can turn the Mark II economy into a scintillating computer game complete with fancy graphical user interface, animation, etc. In short, make it fun and easy to use and understand. Now, if I had the resources and the 'energy' to do it, I could apply similar techniques to much more realistic models.

Nevertheless, someone should produce a simplified model economy that looks much more like a real economy with many more sectors than four and sub-sectors and banking and profit taking and government and perpetual war etc. Then, we would have an idea what is required of a primary energy source, e. g., alcohol from switch grass or bio-diesel from algae in aquaculture, if the entire economy (including perpetual war and everything else useful or not) ran on that one primary energy source. We would be able to tell if that could be done, i.e., if the Energy Returned could power the entire economy all the energy costs of which would be included in the Energy Invested whether they contributed to producing energy or not. That's the most important single fact, isn't it? Is such an economy sustainable or not?

Then we could cut out a few of the frivolous expenses, then more frivolous expenses, and eventually get rid of parasitical businessmen and see if that results in a sustainable economy. When we were done with that stage of the experiment, we would have a good idea about what sort of economy is sustainable with that primary energy source and what sort is not. We might then repeat the same exercise with a second primary energy technology. Etc.

Finally, we would introduce multiple energy sources and solve the matching problem for a realistic economy. This would all be based on the kinds of experiments I did with the Mark-II-Economy. I nearly ruined my health with that and that's a simple economy. Clearly, I need help. And, when I was done, I could not be certain that anyone would take the work seriously for all the reasons people find NOT to do the right thing.

I can do what I can do, but I can't do everything. I hope you can see why I don't like the standard ERoEI one finds in the reviewed literature. [snip]

If we do this experiment, we will see that it is impossible to produce enough sustainable energy to support monetary systems and markets. Also, in a sustainable eco-community, who wants to waste valuable time accounting for who spent what on what? The members of the community will be pretty busy with gardens and other things they need to live. The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker will be busy enough without collecting bills, keeping books, or maintaining a cash register. (How many times have you found what you wanted in a store in five minutes but took a half hour to pay for it? Only yesterday, I walked into Home Depot knowing that I wanted 10 sheets of plywood for hurricane shutters but spent nearly an hour paying.)

Even if we don’t do the above experiment, my conclusion that the economy cannot afford markets and monetary systems has been validated by the numerical experiments in http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html that were summarized in http://dematerialism.net/demise.htm.

Here is my solution:

1. Workers own economic enterprises in the sense of custodianship. Decisions are made by direct vote – one worker, one vote.

3. Each enterprise integrates the plans of its consumers into a total economic plan for the enterprise, which must notify its suppliers what things it has need of.

4. Public servants are chosen at random for limited terms and are not permitted to parlay one such appointment into another. Recall is by direct vote of all members of the community whom I call citizens for lack of a better term.

5. The fundamental principle of neighborliness is practiced regarding neighboring communities, namely, that wealth flows always from richer communities to poorer communities or not at all. Defense is by citizen militias if necessary. The decision to bear arms is up to the citizens.

6. Please see http://dematerialism.net/POS.html for the complete story - especially the Preface and Chapter 11. A system of morals to be encoded into a social contract is discussed in Chapter 3.

It is recognized that the federal government is likely to suppress any effort to form an intentional community (or reform an existing community) along egalitarian lines, i. e., with a Natural Economy, as discussed in my earlier post unless collapse has already commenced, in which case the federal government will no longer be able to function because the most powerful people in government will have given up in despair and will be trying to save themselves - at least Dmitry Orlov has made a good case for this. Here is a URL for Dmitry Orlov's nice talk about the relationship between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very likely collapse of the United States American Empire:

http://www.cluborlov.com/ClubOrlov/ConfSlides/index.html

Anyone who thinks this solution is inconsistent with human nature should read http://dematerialism.net/perfect.htm as well as the journal entry for February 5, 2006, below.

February 5, 2006. Dematerialism Is NOT Inconsistent with Human Nature

Opponents of dematerialism should argue that, without materialism, society must degenerate to a state that cannot provide the driving force necessary to prevent further degeneration to unacceptable levels of infant mortality and early death for all but the most dominant individuals and their slaves. The argument then shifts to whether or not this is inevitable and whether or not a Natural Economy with a Rational Social Contract can be established. In "Why Dematerialism Is NOT Inconsistent with Human Nature", the first draft of which can be viewed for editing at http://dematerialism.net/onhumannature.htm, I have argued that the rational mind can overcome the mal-adaptive propensities of human nature by means of political and cultural change. This would not have been possible without language. Language distinguishes us from other animals.

January 14, 2006. Materialism Causes Overshoot

Materialism is the cause of over-population and over-consumption, therefore it is the cause of Overshoot. For all practical purposes, in Twenty-First Century America, it is the sole cause of Overshoot because, in a non-materialistic economy, if it is not possible to prevent excessive over-consumption and over-population, which are inconsistent with a social contract that is the basis for a non-materialistic society, then it will be because society has degenerated to the point where under-population and under-consumption are the problem. If materialism is restored, over-consumption and over-population will proceed. If, on the other hand, society is informed by a Rational Social Contract, people will understand that excessive procreation and excessive consumption impose upon the guaranteed freedom of other people and their posterity as shown in Chapter 3 of On the Preservation of Species. See “On Materialism” for an analysis of how materialism causes Overshoot. The entire case for the thesis that materialism is the cause of all of society’s problems is made in Chapter 9 of On the Preservation of Species. Don’t expect to see a complete case presented without some symbolic logic.

Go to the entry for February 5th above.

December 21, 2005. Rational Speech Contra Pleistocene Adaptations

If I know that my Stone-Age mind, which evolved during the Pleistocene Era, comes equipped with an innate “loss-avoidance mechanism” that might be maladaptive in the extreme in a commodity trading context, I will consciously defeat such maladaptive tendencies through rational thought. In fact, the very name “loss avoidance” is the key to the solution. Similarly, if I were driven to accumulate wealth and to dominate other men or to pursue fame in the hope of profiting thereby, I would not make the mistake of striving for a succedaneum for reproductive advantages when I can obtain what I really want directly without destroying the planet and trivializing my own life. Evolutionary psychology has given me a name for maladaptive status seeking; and, in this case, to know the name of the ‘demon’ is to defeat it.

December 6, 2005. A Direct Approach to Dematerialism for First-Time Visitors

This homemade website has been re-organized today to make it less massive and forbidding and to make the introduction to dematerialism straight-forward. The principal idea is encapsulated in the epigraph, and a short introduction appears in the next section.

September 6, 2006. Old entries in What’s New

● The very newest item on this website is a new version of the spreadsheet for a Mark II Economy at http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-BetterCases.xls. I have solved all of the nonlinear equations simultaneously using Newton's method directly on Sheets 2 and 3 of the spreadsheet. Also, see my first Excel charts each on a separate sheet. One sees from Chart 1 that as the economy becomes more progressive, moving from (BC) capitalism to (NM) market communism to (NC) communism with a commissar class to (NCNM) pure anarcho-communism, the population works less and consumes less energy whilst retaining the same standard of living. How much less? Enough less that a looming catastrophe becomes a sustainable economy.

The fraction of the population associated with each sector is held constant as one changes cases and parameters within each case. Whenever the fraction of the cash input that must be withdrawn for salaries for the furloughed employees of a particular sector becomes a negative number, it is probably necessary to move part of the population into that sector to retain decent numbers. Be sure to Enable Macros when you download it. I can promise that they are safe. I wrote them all. Speaking of which, I intended to rename this spreadsheet Mark-II-Experiment9.xls because I intend to discuss this work in detail in a section entitled Experiment 9 in http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html; but, apparently, Excel associates macros with the name of the spreadsheet and they are not transferred when one saves the spreadsheet with a new name. I don't know how to get around this, so I have retained the working title Mark-II-BetterCases.xls. Chart 2 examines the effect of decreasing ER/EI* on the total energy production for the Base Case. Energy production approaches infinity as ER/EI* approaches 1.0.

● Lately, my time is occupied with the Mark II Economy, which I have modified to indicate the two approaches to ER/EI discussed in the journal entries (below) for June 1 and June 2. The Mark-II-Economy spreadsheet cannot be used to study the energy balance equation approach to the determination of feasibility because, on the spreadsheet, the total production of energy units is exactly balanced by the total energy budget of the economy. It is easy, though, to demonstrate impracticality as the ER/EI ratio approaches 1.0 (from above). Well before the energy budget becomes unbounded the production required in each sector becomes greater than consumption by a large factor, which can be imagined to make employment unendurable. The following is taken from the essay "The Mark II Economy" which is now available at http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.html. The spreadsheet is at http://dematerialism.net/Mark-II-Economy.xls. Be sure to Enable Macros when you download it. I can promise that they are safe. I wrote them all.

The Mark-II-Economy spreadsheet can be used to show:

1. how to get the increase in the energy budget associated with a diversified monetary investment by multiplying the capital, operating, and other costs of the investment by the E/GDP ratio,

2. the difference between the standard peer-reviewed ER/EI that should be independent of the political economy in which it is embedded and a much more realistic ER/EI that includes the expenses associated with the political economy in which the energy technology is embedded such as the energy costs of doing business, of market overhead, of governmental regulation, and of private profit.

3. the unbounded increase in the energy budget (as well as increased burdensomeness of employment) as ER/EI approaches one,

4. why an energy technology with a given ER/EI is infeasible in a market economy but not in a planned economy (without commerce),

5. energy savings due to abandoning markets,

6. energy savings due to abandoning a manager class composed of 10% of the population with five times the income of workers,

7. that paying idle workers can render a society more sustainable (much lower energy budget - even if ER/EI is less too) than making everyone work for a living.

In a Mark II Economy, every converged solution balances Energy Returned with Total Energy Budget; therefore, I have not attempted to model feasibility by computing an energy budget that is less than the energy produced by an alternative energy technology under consideration. However,

8. impracticality occurs at a much higher ER/EI than does strict infeasibility.

Strict feasibility is not as important in the real world as I had imagined previously.

● I just finished a new essay entitled “The Perfectibility of Man” to answer the usual objections about Dematerialism being inconsistent with Human Nature. The essay can be found at http://dematerialism.net/perfect.htm. Thus, Dematerialism is a much more profound theory than I have formerly taken credit for. It is supposed to send Man on a path toward perfection by eliminating every significant human imperfection. “Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The material regarding the Minimal Proper Religion in Chapter 1 of On the Preservation of Species is perhaps more religious and less secular in nature than I thought it was when I wrote it. Next, read the journal entry for today, June 1, 2006, below.

May 28, 2006. Old entries in What’s New

● The journal entry for February 5^th describes a new essay on human nature that has already sparked a good deal of criticism. My critics believe that evolutionary psychology provides irrefragable evidence that, regardless of any moral consideration, our propensity to acquire resources in as great excess as possible - which is a hard-wired adaptation that arose during the Pleistocene, our Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, due to its usefulness for survival - cannot be suppressed in any manner whatever. I believe that it can be transcended through persuasion, education, indoctrination, diversion, and/or coercion. It would not be important except that the fate of the human race (extinction or not) depends upon who is right.

● The basic ideas of dematerialism can be appreciated most easily if the reader thinks of materialism simply as buying and selling. (Most people do not appreciate philosophical rigor.) Buying and selling began ‘recently’ during Man’s evolution. Animals do not buy and sell although chimps can be taught to buy and sell just as we are taught to do so. Clearly trade is consistent with other cognitive adaptations. Nevertheless, none of David Delaney’s four ‘causes’ of Overshoot can occur if buying and selling are excluded from the economy by laws enacted democratically. Delaney’s four reasons why economies need to expand constitute Addendum 2 of my essay “On Capitalism”.

● Lately, I have tried to sharpen the dialectic in the ongoing debate between Peakers and Doomers. Peakers are those who see the necessity for political change in the wake of Peak Oil, which is something that they believe in, to avoid a massive Dieoff of a large proportion of the human race. Peakers who are not Doomers believe that the probability of such a change varies between infinitesimally close to zero and certainty. (A number that is infinitesimally close to zero can be a small as you please, but it cannot be zero itself.) Doomers believe that the probability of such political change as will prevent Dieoff is precisely zero; therefore, Dieoff is inevitable.

This led to an argument with Ron Patterson, which, with his permission, is available at http://dematerialism.net/mythofsustainability.htm; and, in addition, in the files section at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_dieoff_QA/. To supplement this verbatim transcription, I have gathered some material from my usually quiet blog at http://dematerialism.blogspot.com in http://dematerialism.net/MaterialismCausesOvershoot.htm that concludes with some remarks concerning the ability of Pleistocene Man to initiate political change that subverts the maladaptive tendencies in his evolved psychology, which we refer to as Human Nature, a large slate of characteristics that all men share in common. This compendium is also available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_dieoff_QA/. Also, please see The Dematerialist’s Journal below.

● The domain http://dematerialism.net/ has been up and running for a few days now. Visitors to http://web.wt.net/~twayburn/ will be re-directed automatically to the new domain. I will continue to enjoy back-up at http://www.justpassinthru.com/wayburn/ and http://faithfact.com/tom/ courtesy of Steve King and Jay Hanson. If a hyperlink tries to send you back to web.wt.net, please replace the “web.wt.net/~twayburn” portion of the broken URL with “dematerialism.net” before pasting the URL into your browser’s address window.

Also, if anyone else is willing to host the book, I would be most appreciative. I made only a feeble attempt to publish the book through regular channels a year or so ago. I do not believe any possible advantages of such publication could outweigh the disadvantages of the copyright as well as the normal difficulties of publishing a first book, but I could be wrong.

May 12, 2005. On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario

Currently, this paper is under review.

April 16, 2005. More Work on the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario

My current work on population and energy that resulted from various responses to the off-hand remarks I made on January 29-31, 2005 (below) is a continuation of the work I had been doing on March 1, 2005 (below). I shall produce the results on this page whenever they are ready. Perhaps it is worth saying now that (clearly) a positive rate of growth (in energy consumption per capita and population) sufficiently close to zero can be sustained until any given future time. That is, if you give me a time in the future (a million years, say), I can find a positive rate of growth sufficiently small that it can be sustained until that time other factors not intervening (ten to the minus 23^rd power fractional increase per year, say). On the other hand, no matter how short a period of time is given, a rate of growth can be found that will make further growth infeasible – whether or not such a rate of growth is attainable. These are simple facts of arithmetic and are not open to political debate.

March 7, 2005. Letter to John Kaminsky concerning Peak Abiotic Oil

Reprise

Yesterday, you wrote: "Gentlemen: I'd be interested in your feedback on Dave MacGowan's new piece. http://www.rense.com/general63/staline.htm. Best wishes, John Kaminsky," to which I replied:

I have never been comfortable with the idea that so-called fossil-fuel actually came from dead organisms. I call it fossil-fuel because most people know what I'm talking about when I use the term. If you remember, I was prefacing it always with "so-called" for awhile; but, though more accurate, it seemed a little too much. I have no idea where [oil] comes from.

In any case, it is not the case that it is not finite. Even if it is being generated continuously deep within Earth, it is being generated from Earth, which is of known size and weight - both somewhat less than infinity, regardless of the units of measurement employed:-)

A number of circumstances might obtain:

1. It is generated rapidly and the process by which it is generated is hastened by the removal of product, in which case we had better start worrying about the absence of something that we are leaving behind. In Chapter 2 of my book, I discuss some of the ramifications of what I called "the horrifying plentiful-energy scenario".

2. It is generated slowly, but there is a deep storehouse that is very large.

In either of the above cases diffusion from a large, deep storehouse might be the rate-controlling step. The deep storehouse might be forever inaccessible - except under its own terms - sort of like geothermal.

3. It is generated slowly and the storehouse is not much bigger than Western analysts expect, in which case we are back at Peak Oil.

I must confess I expect this is the most likely case; however, in any case, I can take a stab at estimating the arrival of Peak Abiotic Oil. (Frankly, I like the locution Peak Oil to represent finiteness in a supply the rate of consumption of which is most likely to follow a bell-shaped curve, whereas I employ the term Maximum Wind to indicate that wind power is limited by the finiteness of the surface area of Earth and the maximum rate at which energy is dissipated by the weather.)

I made copious notes in the margin of the paper and I looked up a paper by Kenney http://www.gasresources.net/ThrmcCnstrnts.htm, so I have a lot to say …

Data

Total mass of carbon in Earth: 7.5E19 kg

http://encarta.msn.com/text_761577017_1/carbon.html

Average fraction carbon in crude oil: 0.45 (Computed from (encarta.msn.com) fact that hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil have 5-25 carbon atoms, n, where carbon fraction is n/(2n+2).)

Number of kgs of coal formed for each kg of crude oil according to Kenney theory: 8 kgs coal per kg oil

http://www.gasresources.net/ThrmcCnstrnts.htm

Density of crude oil: 0.0073 barrels/kg

Rate of increase of crude oil demand: 0.019

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/oea/index.html Table A20

World oil production 2003: 79.37 bbls/day

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/oea/index.html Table A20

Calculation of Peak Abiotic Oil

Maximum volume of abiotic oil, R, assuming all carbon that can be converted to oil will be converted to oil on demand (or faster):

R = 0.0073 bbls/kg oil_*7.5E19 kg carbon _* (1/8.45) kg oil/kg carbon = 64.793E15 barrels of oil

Time before Peak Abiotic Oil, T (far-fetched maximum):

79.37 bbls/day _*365.25 days/yr _*(1/0.019 per year)[exp(0.019T) - 1] = 0.5 * 64.793E15 bbls, thus

T = (1/0.019) years * LN[(0.019_*0.5_*64.793E15)/(79.37_*365.25)] = 1251.5 years.

Thus, Peak Abiotic Oil will come at the latest by 3255 AD as the DOE datum is for 2003.

To put this in historical (not geological nor, Heaven forbid, astronomical) context, 1251 years ago it was 754 AD during which year Pepin was the King of the Franks. Pope Stephen II sanctified him both as a king and as king of the Frankish Church. Pepin founded the Carolingian Dynasty. Also, in the same year with the death of Abu al-Abbas, al-Mansur became his successor. Al-Mansur swiftly eliminated all threats to his rule and extended the power of the Abbasid Caliphate.

The human family today is not much different from what it was then; moreover, in one and a quarter more millennia, it is doubtful that the character of man will have changed much from what it is now. Therefore, it is not too early to begin a rational power-down from a consumption and growth society based upon fear and greed as suggested by me in numerous essays at http://dematerialism.net/ and by many others more worthy and distinguished than me.

I believe I will hold additional remarks in abatement as I await the participation of others in this stimulating discussion among friends, allies, colleagues, comrades, and, perhaps, a detractor or two.

March 1, 2005. Spreadsheet calculations for the Apollo Alliance Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario

Lately, I have been trying to make an accurate and refined version of the journal entries for January 29-31, 2005 (below), which have way too many minor errors that, at least, do not alter the outcome. This project has taken me almost the entire month of February; however, I have gained a new appreciation for the power of spreadsheets, which are beginning to play an increasing role in my work ever since I received the population calculations from Peter D. Johnson of the US Census Bureau, International Programs Center, hyperlinked to the January 1, 2005, journal entry. I will provide a detailed technical version of these Conservation-within-Capitalism calculations quite soon (for technical review); and, a little later, I will do my best to make a ‘popularized’ version for non-technical people who may wish to understand my conclusions assuming I have made no fatal mistakes.

I have produced a rather large number of case studies. The latest version <http://dematerialism.net/CwC> includes a number of refinements and some concessions to oil imports, for example; and I can massage it further. I had better save my explanations for the write-up. When all questions have been resolved – and I am certain that I have been as fair as possible to the very progressive Apollo Alliance humanistic socialists (sic) – then I will take my best shot at a popularization of it. Please notice the bottom line: 22,887 nuclear power installations (NPI) of 1000 MW(e) each, which, taken together, would cover 10,728 square miles of US land area exclusive of mountains, earthquake zones, etc. This redounds to a whopping 510.67 square miles for NYC alone, i.e., a square 22.6 miles on a side!

I would like to suggest that wind and solar have very limited prospects, cf., Pimentel, Weisz, and Trainer: I am using the Pimentel et al. figure of 45.7 quads (coal equivalents) for Maximum Renewable. (I use the term emquad for one quad of coal equivalent eMergy.) The power densities for wind, solar, and nuclear (resp.) are 0.000045193, 0.0011, and 0.012245 emquads/square kilometer (resp). You can see from the spreadsheet that even nuclear will be very hard pressed to keep up with demand in capitalist Amerika. Also, you can see how pitiful Maximum Renewables is. Yet, it will take a huge effort to reach even that; so, it makes sense to encourage those who are making every effort to promote Renewables - especially if we are hoping for a soft-ene