Reddit reviews Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy

All resources and economic activity tie directly into energy.

Food, fiber, goods, tech, it all has energy inputs and cost is determined largely by the cost of the energy needed to produce and move these things.

I'm working through a really good book on this subject called Environment, Power and Society for the 21st Century on this subject which lays it all out very well.

It's pretty technical about how to model energy flows through systems such as ecosystems, human civilizations, economies, etc.

Something really interesting was that the author claims that around 1973 we saw the US economy move from an era of superacceleration into an era of slow growth (and even stagnation), and that this had largely to do with energetic underpinnings of slower and more difficult extraction of oil, as is seen clearly on this graph (you can see the clear transition from exponential growth to slower linear growth).

That really caught my eye as I had long been interested in why there was a sort of sudden shift economically around the early '70s where wages stopped growing and inequality began growing very quickly. Kind of interesting to see that correlation.

The author is a big proponent of investing energy resources now into the energy resources of the future, and basically shows that it gets more expensive as time goes on, so those who are investing strongly in energy transition now are at an advantage.

There are smart things to do during each phase of what is going in the global energy scenario. During the acceleration and growth phase the US capitalized very well on the situation. But now we're in a stagnation phase and there will come a time soon where we must go through a bit of energy descent, until hopping on a more stable income of renewables.

What the US is trying to do is to grasp at policies that worked in the superacceleration phase, but which are not wise in the current phase we're in.

For example, under Trump we're talking about literally subsidizing the old methods that aren't worth it anymore so they can work again. This is also something that is mentioned in the book as a sort of dysfunctional loop of investing more and more energy into extracting forms of energy that are dying out, which ultimately just wastes energy and thus wastes wealth.

Really a fascinating perspective once you begin getting it more and more.

No problem at all. A lot of people disagree with this and fight it, because the implication is that the only real solution to our problem is to force everyone to move towards the equator so they consume less energy for heating/cooling, have less kids, quit driving, basically accept a sort of 2nd-world lifestyle. Obviously this will never happen, I suspect humans will basically keep going down this path until their demise.

Here are a few things I'd recommend on the subject:

http://energy-reality.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/09_Energy-Return-on-Investment_R1_012913.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XQGQEPWX5X3VJY0B5S63

This professor writes a lot of good stuff on the subject:

http://www.esf.edu/EFB/hall/#publications

I guess the key concept in what you are asking about, is energy return on energy invested (EROEI). This is imo one of the most important concepts all people need to understand about energy generation. Something is only a resource, if you get more energy out of it, than what you have to put in to extract it. So for example, if it takes a gallon of oil in energy to pump one gallon of oil out of the ground, then that oil in the ground is no longer a resource.

There is a lot of debate about the true EROEI of these different types of energy production. For example this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Spains-Photovoltaic-Revolution-Investment-SpringerBriefs/dp/144199436X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358872742&sr=1-2

In which the authors do a complex analysis on the true EROEI of solar and come up with a much lower return on energy invested than others often claim. They find that in amazingly sunny areas like Spain, the EROEI is only around 2, where in less sunny countries like Germany, it is between 1-1.5, which is absolutely abysmal.

You can see this is already becoming a problem with nuclear, in particular. There have been a few nuclear plants recently that were abandoned halfway through the project, because they blew so far over the budget, and the energy/money they were putting in to build the plant to modern standards, with all of the safety regulations, etc, made it a net loss to finish the plant. So it would never generate anywhere near the energy that it would take society to build it to spec. This will likely be a trend we see as technology gets more and more complex - things just require too much of societies resources to build, to the point that it is a net loss.

Another book on this subject is from Joseph Tainter:

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X

...who argues that the reason all societies eventually collapse, is because increasing complexity provides diminishing returns. Eventually things get so complex, that society doesn't have the energy and resources to maintain everything and to keep solving the harder and harder problems that complexity inevitably creates.

Some good starting points

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Mattered/dp/0865716730/

https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Economic-History-Geerat-Vermeij/dp/069112793X/

https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Civilization-History-MIT-Press/dp/0262035774/

https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886/

https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878/

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X/

http://bpeconomics.org/

https://biophyseco.org/