Tainter’s second question, can we develop new clear sources with adequate net energy, is poignant. He acknowledges the known multi-decadal decline trend in the number of innovations that could make a difference in terms of securing enough net energy. This calls for further clarification.

Figure 11, above, summarises the triple failure of the GIW since the 1950s: the failure of the BAU development trajectory that has led to the present OFDK predicament; the failure on the part of elites to anticipate OFDK despite decades of warnings; the failure to develop at least one whole system alternative to the GIW’s energy infrastructures.

The fall of production EROI for oil and natural gas combined tracks this triple failure. Figure 11 singles out three key EROI thresholds. The bare viability level for any industrial society, the horizontal red bar on Figure 11, is around 10:1. This means, at the wellhead, extracting ten barrels of oil or gas equivalent for each barrel invested — as a way of depicting what this may represent, think of present rural living in North Korea.

The next level up, 20:1, the blue bar on Figure 11, is the minimum for an industrial society of sorts to continue operating under austerity regimes for a short while (and/or massive quantitative easing of fiat currency liquidity and ever mounting debt… till the system breaks). Note that the 2008 global financial crisis, that was triggered by the unviable proliferation of “subprime”-based financial products, occurred immediately after the GIW crossed the 20:1 threshold. Hidden under masses of paper money, another form of SEP field, the 2008 crisis was fundamentally an energy crisis that heralded OFDK.

The third EROI level, the green bar on Figure 11, is about 30:1. This marks our estimate of the minimum to both ensuring prosperous living globally and addressing OFDK’s consequences, socially and ecologically.

In regard to those three thresholds, it is striking that all present technology sets fall below the blue bar and many do fall below the red bar. Many proponents of PVs and wind may object and point out the rapid decline in costs that these technologies have been undergoing in recent years. Let’s stress therefore that under OFDK what matters is whole system replacement dynamics (WSR) in the face of what we have called the heart of darkness, the RQ versus 1/RQ dilemma examined earlier. As far as we can ascertain, considered in such a dynamic sense, none of the current technologies can “cut it”. We therefore translate Tainter’s second question into whether one can rapidly shift above 30:1 using the solar direct influx.

Let’s clarify this further. Figure 11 explains why we stressed on Figure 8 that indirect solar sources cannot form the basis of a strategy to extricate ourselves from OFDK: their EROIs are far too low (they can be the bases for limited small niche markets but they cannot form a global solution to OFDK). In Part 1, we also observed that the GIW is in the process of losing access to bioenergy. Furthermore, in subsequent post we have shown how, with net energy from oil fizzling out, we are also losing access to all other forms of energy. This leaves only the direct solar influx as the sole large pool of energy humankind can possibly turn to in order to survive OFDK. This is also why we called the third scenario depicted on Figure 4 the Solar Emergency Initiative — Solar, the sole energy pool left, Emergency because of the extremely short timeframe left for action, and Initiative because of prevailing cognitive failure among present 10% wealthiest elites and lack of know-how among the 90% Remainder — only entrepreneurial initiatives may reopen Dante’s “doors of the future”.

Thus formulated, we answer positively Tainter’s question. As stressed earlier, the know-how to access the direct solar influx on a global scale with EROIs above 30:1 was developed and proven during the 1950s, but not integrated, and then largely forgotten… but not entirely. At GB we are in the process of reviving it, augmenting it, updating it, and bringing it to bear to address OFDK.

In saying the above, we also answer Tainter’s third question, concerning political will and availability of financial resources, with a no and a yes. The political will is inexistent due to cognitive failure and Tooth Fairy mythical and magical thinking. There is also no time left for developing it. Elites are slow learners. Recall again Part 7, OFDK versus the Climate: it took over 50 years for elites (and implicitly their constituents) to begin to accept the urgency to do something about climate change and still they have not yet managed to bring themselves to act about it in ways that would not be pure fantasy. As for the financial resources required to address OFDK, we have seen that they are there for the taking, over €5 trillion per year (Figure 7), subject to adopting the kind of paradigm change that we have been progressively profiling throughout this series and in the present post, i.e. using the know-how developed during the 1950s to emulate how nature harvests the direct solar influx and achieves overall efficiencies over 80% (which translates into EROIs over 30:1).

There remains the fourth question of whether one should try to achieve distributional equity concerning new energy means? The answer is implicit in what we have uncovered so far. In our view, this is a non-question. The direct solar influx is evenly distributed over the whole of Earth-Life. We have shown the thermodynamic necessity of emulating what nature does by harvesting this influx directly at the point of use with EROIs well above 30:1. We have shown that approaching matters in this fashion is the sole avenue left to extricating ourselves from OFDK’s heart of darkness. It unavoidably ensues that “distributional equity” is not a matter of yes or no. It is not a matter of “trying to achieve it” either. Instead it is the sole avenue left to humankind.

Distributional equity is built in the necessity of harvesting the solar influx directly at the point of use, in the necessity of recycling waste heat energy directly at the point of use, in the necessity of networking the harvested energy in the ways nature does, that is, in the necessity of maximising power in distributed fashion among all points of use, and in the necessity of providing resilient means of exchange, account and storage of value fully distributed and inherently grounded in the networked, installed power — all done in the simplest possible fashion.

“The agony of power”

At this point, many may object that “powers-that-be” or “capitalists” by any other name would not let what we outline above happen. To back this view they may point out, for example, how large portions of the Internet have been fenced off, recentralised for the greater benefit of the so-called GAFA and of those seeking to emulate them, or by some governments. As part of the BigMES, that some may try this kind of thing is to be expected. However, under OFDK they are bound to fail. This needs further clarification.

Throughout Looking down the barrel, I have used the notion of “globalised industrial world”, GIW, in a very critical and specific sense to designate the present global system without using any politically loaded terms. We live in a world where industry is key. Presently only a tiny minority of humans can survive wholly without industrial inputs, essentially in some remote jungles. The remainder of us depend on myriad industrial products. This complex industrial system is globalised. International exchanges are paramount. Transport means are key to the GIW. This globalised industrial system forms a world, the prevailing domain of human, social interaction. However, the point that I have not yet stressed, and stressing it now is important, is that the GIW is not a “capitalist” system.

Capitalism, whatever one may mean by this word, faded away a long time ago. This is something not many among the elites and the Remainder have yet realised — it is somewhat convenient under Tooth Fairy influence to keep “running on autopilot” and keep talking and thinking as if we were living in a capitalist world. For sure there are extremely wealthy people and huge financial organisations that are “too big to fail”. There are the 1% and the 10% wealthiest versus the 90% Remainder. This does not necessarily mean that the present global order is still that of capitalism.

What replaced capitalism, the GIW, is hegemonic. Capitalism was not. It is important to understand this notion of hegemon. Capitalism was a dominant social form. It was possible to oppose it and it was opposed, often violently, during the 18th and through the first part of the 20th century. A hegemon is something else. One cannot oppose it.

This is something I began to perceive and understand in the mid 1970s. As a young researcher I had been invited to visit colleagues at the University of Berlin on the Eastern Germany side, behind the then Wall. This was part of scientific exchanges between France and some eastern European countries. It was a way of enabling eastern colleagues to visit the West and breathe some fresh air, while in turn some of us could go and have a look at how it all worked on the other side, for a few days…

Beside numerous visits to a wide range of research institutes and factories, I had some spare time to explore on my own along streets, shops, department stores and supermarkets to observe what people were doing. One late, grey and cold afternoon, I found myself visiting a museum. Beside the guards, I was probably the sole visitor there. The place was dark, with only scant light filtering through a few windows. I had in front of me masses of Greek art, fragments of temples, countless marble statues — a large number possibly looted in Greece during last war, who knows? Being there felt eerie. The whole place, the Greek art piled up there oozed a sense of power, not the thermodynamic kind but the political, totalitarian kind. Suddenly it dawned on me. The masses of facts and impressions I had absorbed over a whole week began to fit into place within the puzzle of my research over earlier years. I saw that both East and West were two variants of the same fundamental, generic, consumerist system; simply the Western version was vastly superior while the Eastern one was bound to fail. The point was that the East side needed the Stasi and the KGB to impose itself to its citizens while the West did not — the West was achieving absolute totalitarian power.

In the West, people had already largely internalised the “law” of economic value, the exchangeability of everything with everything else along the myths of economics and its magical thinking. In the East people could and sometimes did oppose state capitalism, often at the peril of their lives. In the end the USSR collapsed. In turn, the West, that was then already largely globalised, was something else. It could no longer be opposed. It was already within almost everyone’s mind, even in the minds of those who thought they were opposing it, such as among the “left”, among people in the “third world” opposing the ex-colonial powers and their business interests, and among the then emerging “greens”.

At the time Jean Baudrillard had also reached similar conclusions and developed them much more extensively than I could have ever done. Throughout his work, from the Systems of objects (1968), through Symbolic exchange and death (1976) to his last posthumous publication, The agony of power (2010), Jean developed a systematic and thorough critique of the world we live in. From Symbolic exchange and death onwards he analysed in great detail and depth how and why it is not possible to oppose the GIW’s hegemonic character.

It is extremely hard to think outside the GIW’s all pervasive hegemony. As anyone who has ever attempted to think critically outside the GIW’s ambit will have experienced, the pressure to conform, to think, speak and act according to the GIW’s Tooth Fairy is huge. One may resist; however, this will not deviate or alter the GIW in the slightest. Almost everyone within the GIW having internalised the GIW’s “value” and “exchange” based mythical thinking, the GIW’s dynamics absorb and re-use everything and everyone seeking to oppose it. The history of the last 40 years since Symbolic exchange and death was published has amply corroborated Jean’s and my more modest analyses. For example all matters “green” and even “climate change” are now integrated within the GIW without altering its hegemonic dynamics by one iota. As we observed in Part 7, OFDK versus the Climate, under the Paris Agreement the GIW is now officially committed to “combat climate change” in order to remain below a mythical 2oC warming that we do know to be pure fantasy.

However, what Jean did also show that is now crucial, is that the GIW, like any other hegemonic order, cannot elude or avoid its own reversion. This is the core point of Jean’s last work The agony of power. He defined the hegemony of the GIW as “the ultimate stage of domination and its ultimate phase”… “Hegemony begins here in the disappearance of the dual, personal, agonistic domination for the sake of integral reality — the reality of networks, of the virtual and total exchange where there are no longer dominators and dominated.” When what was domination has reached this ultimate, extreme hegemon stage, the system continues on its trajectory out of its own momentum, “The system cannot prevent its destiny from being accomplished, integrally realised, and therefore driven into automatic self-destruction by the ostensible mechanisms of its reproduction”.

The GIW can no longer escape its own fall under its own dynamic. What Looking down the barrel shows is that OFDK is precisely this agony. OFDK was engendered by the GIW’s own dynamics and is in the process of bringing about the end of that very same GIW. In fact, with a total global debt at about €210 trillion and counting, a debt that is beyond being ever repaid, we must view the GIW as already somehow “zombifying”. As in living-dead movies, the GIW keeps staggering forward as if still alive while all actual life has already left it — no doubt it can keep staggering forward like this for sometime, however, with OFDK’s avalanche gaining momentum it is unlikely to be for very long.

This is why, in my view, the fate of the GIW is not one to worry much about. There is nothing much one can do about it. What matters instead is answering Tainter’s seemingly intractable questions, as we have done earlier, and, based on those answers, focusing on building the tools and means that we know to required for whatever is to replace the GIW.

What’s so special about our times?

Looking down the barrel has shown us that not only the GIW is agonising but also we are at an unprecedented hinge point, unprecedented since our distant ancestors left Africa about 100,000 years ago. This is what we mean by “sailing in wholly uncharted waters”.

Figure 12 — Global population growth

Figure 12 from Robert Kates (1997), using log scales, shows that the growth of the global human population has not been a smooth affair.[3] It illustrates that ever since the genus homo emerged from Africa, three main waves of demographic growth took place. In each instance, for rather long periods of time, people lived along what was for them “business as usual” (BAU), hunting-gathering using stone tools, then farming, then living in an industrial world. In each instance, what was for them BAU eventually led to major transformations that completely changed the “game”. These transformations were largely unexpected for the people who lived through them, in fact they were literally extra-ordinary — nowadays we call them Dragon-Kings, major changes, often rather abrupt, that were bound to happen but that take people by surprise and that they do not understand.

In other words, each of the above demographic waves or pulses occurred as a result of people pursuing their development within very distinct religious, cultural, social and economic confines, and along specific forms of BAU. Each BAU dynamics led to a shift to an entirely different BAU. Each corresponded to a very different mind, that is, different modes of thinking, signifying, deciding, social organising, exchanging and enterprising. Each shift occurred through transition periods that were highly traumatic and entailed major changes in the human psyche. What Looking down the barrel shows us is that we are now in the midst of one such transition.

Figure 13 — This is no longer “business-as-usual”