[A-List] The Innovation Fallacy

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (September 12 2007)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


The core concept that has to be grasped to make sense of the future
looming up before us, it seems to me, is the concept of limits. Central
to ecology, and indeed all the sciences, this concept has failed so far
to find any wider place in the mindscape of industrial society. The
recent real estate bubble is simply another example of our culture's
cult of limitlessness at work, as real estate investors insisted that
housing prices were destined to keep on rising forever. Of course those
claims proved to be dead wrong, as they always are, but the fact that
they keep on being made - it's been only a few years, after all, since
the same rhetoric was disproven just as dramatically in the tech stock
bubble of the late 1990s - shows just how allergic most modern people
are to the idea that there's an upper limit to anything.

It's this same sort of thinking that drives the common belief that
limits on industrial society's access to energy can be overcome by
technological innovations. This claim looks plausible at first glance,
since the soaring curve of energy use that defines recent human history
can be credited to technological innovations that allowed human
societies to get at the huge reserves of fossil fuels stored inside the
planet. The seemingly logical corollary is that we can just repeat the
process, coming up with innovations that will give us ever increasing
supplies of energy forever.

Most current notions about the future are based on some version of this
belief. The problem, and it's not a small one, is that the belief itself
is based on a logical fallacy.

One way to see how this works - or, more precisely, doesn't work - is to
trace the same process in a setting less loaded with emotions and mythic
narratives than the future of industrial society. Imagine for a moment,
then, that we're discussing an experiment involving microbes in a petri
dish. The culture medium in the dish contains five percent of a simple
sugar that the microbes can eat, and 95% of a more complex sugar they
don't have the right enzymes to metabolize. We put a drop of fluid
containing microbes into the dish, close the lid, and watch. Over the
next few days, a colony of microbes spreads through the culture medium,
feeding on the simple sugar.

Then a mutation happens, and one microbe starts producing an enzyme that
lets it feed on the more abundant complex sugar. Drawing on this new
food supply, the mutant microbe and its progeny spread rapidly,
outcompeting the original strain, until finally the culture medium is
full of mutant microbes. At this point, though, the growth of the
microbes is within hailing distance of the limits of the supply of
complex sugar. As we watch the microbes through our microscopes, we
might begin to wonder whether they can produce a second mutation that
will let them continue to thrive. Yet this obvious question misleads,
because there is no third sugar in the culture medium for another
mutation to exploit.

The point that has to be grasped here is as crucial as it is easy to
miss. The mutation gave the microbes access to an existing supply of
highly concentrated food; it didn't create the food out of thin air. If
the complex sugar hadn't existed, the mutation would have yielded no
benefit at all. As the complex sugar runs out, further mutations are
possible - some microbes might end up living on microbial waste
products; others might kill and eat other microbes; still others might
develop some form of photosynthesis and start creating sugars from
sunlight - but all these possibilities draw on resources much less
concentrated and abundant than the complex sugar that made the first
mutation succeed so spectacularly. Nothing available to the microbes
will allow them to continue to flourish as they did in the heyday of the
first mutation.

Does this same logic apply to human beings? A cogent example from 20th
century history argues that it does. When the Second World War broke out
in 1939, Germany arguably had the most innovative technology on the
planet. All through the war, German technology stayed far ahead of the
opposition, fielding jet aircraft, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles,
guided bombs, and many other advances years before anybody else. Their
great vulnerability was a severe shortage of petroleum reserves, and
even this area saw dramatic technological advances: Germany developed
effective methods of CTL (coal to liquids) fuel production, and put them
to work as soon as it became clear that the oil fields of southern
Russia were permanently out of reach.

The results are instructive. Despite every effort to replace petroleum
with CTL and other energy resources, the German war machine ran out of
gas. By 1944 the Wehrmacht was struggling to find fuel even for
essential operations. The outcome of the Battle of the Bulge in the
winter of 1944-5 is credited by many military historians to the raw fact
that the German forces didn't have enough fuel to follow up the initial
success of their Ardennes offensive. The most innovative technology on
the planet, backed up with substantial coal reserves and an almost
limitless supply of slave labor, proved unable to find a replacement for
cheap abundant petroleum.

It's worthwhile to note that more than sixty years later, no one has
done any better. Compare the current situation with the last two
energetic transitions - the transition from wind and water power to coal
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the transition from coal
to petroleum at the beginning of the 20th - and a key distinction
emerges. In both the earlier cases, the new energy resource took a
dominant place in the industrial world's economies while the older ones
were still very much in use. The world wasn't in any great danger of
running out of wind and water in 1750, when coal became the mainspring
of the industrial revolution, and peak coal was still far in the future
in 1900 when oil seized King Coal's throne.

The new fuels took over because they were more concentrated and abundant
than the competition, and those factors made them more economical than
older resources. In both cases a tide of technological advance followed
the expansion of energy resources, and was arguably an effect of that
expansion rather than its cause. In the 1950s and 1960s many people
expected nuclear power to repeat the process - those of my readers who
were around then will recall the glowing images of atomic-powered cities
in the future that filled the popular media in those days. Nothing of
the kind happened, because nuclear power proved to be much less
economical than fossil fuels. Only massive government subsidies,
alongside the hidden "energy subsidy" it received from an economy
powered by cheap fossil fuels, made nuclear power look viable at all.

Mind you, uranium contains a very high concentration of energy, though
the complex systems needed to mine, process, use, and clean up after it
probably use more energy than the uranium itself contains. Most other
resources touted as solutions to peak oil either contain much lower
concentrations of energy per unit than petroleum, or occur in much lower
abundance. This isn't accidental; the laws of thermodynamics mandate
that on average, the more concentrated an energy source is, the less
abundant it will be, and vice versa. They also mandate that all energy
transfers move from higher to lower concentrations, and this means that
you can't concentrate energy without using energy to do it. Really large
amounts of concentrated energy occur on earth only as side effects of
energy cycles in the biosphere that unfold over geological time - that's
where coal, oil, and natural gas come from - and then only in specific
forms and locations. It took 500 million years to create our planet's
stockpile of fossil fuels. Once they're gone, what's left is mostly
diffuse sources such as sunlight and wind, and trying to concentrate
these so they can power industrial society is like trying to make a
river flow uphill.

Thus the role of technological innovation in the rise of industrial
economies is both smaller and more nuanced than it's often claimed to
be. Certain gateway technologies serve the same function as the
mutations in the biological model used earlier in this post; they make
it possible to draw on already existing resources that weren't
accessible to other technological suites. At the same time, it's the
concentration and abundance of the resource in question that determines
how much a society will be able to accomplish with it. Improvements to
the gateway technology can affect this to a limited extent, but such
improvements suffer from a law of diminishing returns backed up, again,
by the laws of thermodynamics.

Innovation is a necessary condition for the growth and survival of
industrial society, in other words, but not a sufficient condition. If
energy resources aren't available in sufficient quality and quantity,
innovation can make a successful society but it won't make or maintain
an industrial one. It's worth suggesting that the maximum possible level
of economic development in a society is defined by the abundance and
concentration of energy resources available to that society. It's
equally possible, though this is rather more speculative, that the
maximum possible technological level of an intelligent species anywhere
in the universe is defined by the abundance and concentration of energy
resources on the planet where that species evolves. (We'll be talking
more about this in next week's post.)

What we're discussing here is an application of one of the central
principles of ecology. Liebig's law - named after the 19th century
German agronomist Justus von Liebig, who first proposed it - holds that
the maximum growth of a community of organisms is limited by whatever
necessary factor in the environment is in shortest supply. A simpler way
of stating this law is that necessary resources aren't interchangeable.
If your garden bed needs phosphorus, adding nitrogen to it won't help,
and if it's not getting enough sunlight, all the fertilizer in the world
won't boost growth beyond a certain point.

For most of human history, the resource that has been in shortest supply
has arguably been energy. For the last three hundred years, and
especially for the last three-fourths of a century, that's been less
true than ever before. Today, however, the highly concentrated and
abundant energy resources stockpiled by the biosphere over the last half
billion years or so are running low, and there are no other resources on
or around Earth at the same level of concentration and abundance.
Innovation is vital if we're to deal with the consequences of that
reality, but it can't make the laws of thermodynamics run backwards and
give us an endless supply of concentrated energy just because we happen
to want one.

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