The Great Pause Week 64: New Hope Creek Journal, Part One — Wading Back in Time

Renewable energy is unlikely to support civilization at its present scale. We know this by looking at fish in a mountain stream.

In a frantic search for some way out of the climate crisis, governments, scientists and creators are throwing time, money, and people at carbon dioxide removal by natural and artificial means. Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Johan Rockström says quite frankly, “there is no plausible chance of an absolute zero landing by 2050.” The best we can hope for is a rapid decarbonization of the economy — by half every decade — followed by Rosie the Riveter-style mass-production of carbon dioxide removal devices. “That is the pace and that is non-negotiable.”

As we race into this brave new world, we need to be mindful that every misstep, every wasted effort, every wrong turn, takes us away from the task, cuts into its unrelenting schedule, steals non-replaceable time, and should be avoided. There is a neologism (actually an acronym) that grounds our decision tree. The decisive expression is “EROI.”

In 1968 Charles Hall was trying to come up with a topic for his doctoral dissertation.

Most of us were focused on ecology with a small ‘e,’ that is, on trying to understand how nature operated…