R8 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 8: There’s nothing new under the sun
R8 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 8: There’s nothing new under the sun
Culhane: OK… it’s the midterm… and you know what that means!
Dorian: That it’s the middle of the term. 8 weeks have gone by, 8 weeks to go.
Raj: Will there be an exam? If so, I will be woefully underprepared. I don’t study anymore… I just… do things with what I’m learning. (Holds up his notebook) and I always keep my notes with me… I don’t know what I’d do without them…
Culhane: That’s on everyone’s mind isn’t… and here we are broadcasting our Nexus Thinking philosophy into the future and potentially to everyone connected through that nexus that NTHARP calls the “web” of internetworking distributed intelligence nodes. You can only imagine that in the future with everybody connected to everyone else and also connected to these ORACLES 24/7 memorization won’t count for much.
Sarah: But what if the power goes out?
Dorian: Then we are up the creek without a paddle as they say…
Culhane: But… are we? See, that’s the thing – what power? Whose power? What if you live by a creek and you have a Harris Turbine or a Pelton Wheel.
Raj: Then you’d literally have Paddle Power!
Culhane: Exactly. What we are talking about today, and we’ve gathered the whole crew to discuss it and record it, is the advantages and disadvantages of centralized vs. decentralized power systems. I don’t want to preach it… I want your realizations to emerge. I want us to use rhetoric to persuade and see who is swayed…
Sarah: Sounds like a song coming on…”
Culhane: (Singing to the melody of Sway)
“When the river turns the paddlewheel
You know and feel the power’s real,
We’ve had solar power all our lives
Now its time to realize…
Raj: Realize what?
Culhane: (Singing the bridge) Realize that what powers our lives,
Hydropower and biogas and more…
Solar power is what makes wind and rain
Grows our food, makes us thrive!
Raj: So what you are saying is…
Sarah: Solar power is EVERYWHERE.
NTHARP, what are the learning objectives for this week?
NTHARP: Glad you asked.
Let’s see… (floats the text in the air around them)
Explain how misperceptions and disinformation about solar and solar derivatives’ (wind, hydro, wave power) intermittency hinders real progress in the deployment of truly clean technologies
Describe how decentralized production and consumption work in the energy sector.
Use Proudhonian mutualist economics to compare aggregate production across decentralized systems to compare and contrast the efficiencies of multiple energy sources with centralized energy plants.
Reflect critically on the ways in which boiling water to produce steam to drive turbines compare with direct transduction of electromagnetic and motive forms of energy into electron flow.
Sarah: And what materials do we have to explore these auspicious learnings?
NTHARP: I’ll throw the titles on the screen, and let’s hear from Culhane the elder, a voice of wisdom from the future.
📚▶️Supporting Learning Materials/Resources:
Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era. Lovins, Amory and RMI. 2011.
Octogenarian Culhane: Oh, hello youth of yesteryear and hello younger self. Glad to be part of your social annotation exercises ...and I sincerely hope that you will listen to voices from the future and try and change the past. Don’t worry about the time travel paradox – You won’t make the future I come from disappear, but merely spawn another one, hopefully a better one…and I’m quite happy with that…it seems we’re blowing well past 1.5 degrees of global warming and are on to 2.5 or worse, and this year we exceeded 8 of our 9 planetary boundaries. Things aren’t good.
So, without further ado, this book is another one of those “2 degrees of separation” sources that feel particularly appropriate for this course. I met Lovins. First, I read Lovins work in the late seventies when he was the energy advisor to President Carter and I wrote papers on his perspectives, particularly his logical aversion to Nuclear Power which I put into my paper “Atom in Eden”.
Dorian: Wait, what? You are predicting presidential outcomes now? Do you guys realize how powerful this prediction machine is? It really could change history… affect outcomes… I mean if word leaks that the Democrats are going to take the next election… I should tell my Dad… the whole investment landscape changes..
Sophia: Dorian, you infuriate me.
Dorian: Give me a break, Sophie, this stuff is important. We could change things for the better…
Sophia: You name the bone, D. I swear I will break something if you don’t change that exploitative attitude… seriously Dorian…
Raj: We will all be breaking something… Depending on how the butterfly effect goes, just having this conversation could change everything.
Octagenarian Culhane: Well, some would say that all of this has already happened and is precisely what led to where I am today. In any event, In 2010 you, Culhane, are going to have a chance to spend a weekend with him at the Aspen Environmental Forum where we will sit in a think tank round table with the military and the oil companies (I was part of a National Geographic team) and then he and I get a chance to have a private lunch together where we talk not just about Reinventing Fire (and avoiding atomic energy like the plague) but about our mutual love for orangutans which I had researched in Borneo and whose survival he funds. His writing is brilliant… especially what he will later call his hypercar concept where electric cars end up as mobile power units powering our houses and offices and be recharged by solar and its derivatives. What a future!
Culhane: All that is in my future?
Octagenarian Culhane: Well, it’s in my past, so I suppose so! It all depends on the slipstream you end up in. As I understand it… and I’m not sure I do in the least, but it has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics and how swirls of negentropy exploit the energy gradients on the way to maximum entropy or heat death.But that stuff is beyond our pay grade, so to speak. What we want to focus on for sustainability studies is continued reading and understanding of
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s (1973) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~lozada/Adv_Resource_Econ/En_Law_Econ_Proc_Cropped_Optimized_Clearscan.pdf
With an eye toward making his insights about the entropy law and the economic process form a coherent nexus with the next reading:
Proudhon, On the Coming Era of Mutualism https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/mutualism/proudhon-the-coming-era-of-mutualism/
Culhane: Why that one?
Octagenarian Culhane: Oh, we haven’t read it yet have we? Not in ‘75 when we were teaching in that city school No… this comes from readings I did a decade later when I went back to graduate school. Ever since I have been fascinated by Proudhon's ideas. Proudhon held that decentralized workshops, when federated through mutualist association, create a “collective force” that can match industrial output in aggregate—but without hierarchy, exploitation, or enclosure. The productive capacity of “Cooperatives” is prodigious and his insistence that we could rule ourselves best through the true form of “Anarchy” – not chaos and violence, duh, but politics of the people by the people for the people without hierarchy is compelling to me and jibes with my lifetime of classroom experience once I stopped trying to be the sage of the stage and recast myself as the guide on the side.. Call it “Polyarchy” if it calms your fears of out of control protestors flinging champagne in the faces of the ruling elite, but consider why we can’t seem to get our heads around true freedom from centralized control. Proudhon will help you. There was a classic debate between Marx and Proudhon wherein the former attacked Proudhon as “utopian” because he lacked a theoretical framework called “historical materialism.” All very valid points. But the promise of polyarchy holds. A great rabbit hole to go down as a Nexus Thinker.
Raj: Would you say that people’s perceptions of anarchy suffer from the same problem as their perception of chaos and entropy?
Octagenarian Culhane: Well I would, but I have the privilege of 50 years more discovery in nexus thinking. But you get the vibe – order emerges from chaos and negentropy emerges from entropy and polyarchy emerges from anarchy because order and arrangement and pattern and the capacity for receptive-responsive relationship. Maybe this poem from Dr. Alan Rayner, speaking of natural inclusion from my time, will resonate with you. He writes,
“The Turn Around (21/12/2022)
Descent becomes ascent
Out-breath becomes in-breath
And vice-versa
In momentary turn around
From one way into another
Recoiling what’s been and what’s coming
In endless circulation.
Time line from here to there
Is not time current
Rate of arrival from illumination source
Is not rate of travel
At a particular speed
Across a measured breathless distance
.
For neither time nor space
As intangible flux and stillness
Are anything in particular
Until and unless they combine
Electromagnetically
Like male and female
In co-creative, receptive-responsive relationship
Embodied in material form
Making us what we are
As natural inclusions of self in neighbourhood
And neighbourhood in self
Not one or another
But each in the other’s whorl
If we could only recognise it
And stop beating ourselves up”
The caption reads: Image: ‘Stitching In Time’ (Oil painting on board by myself, 2020) Every moment is a turning point; In ever-present current; Carrying life across the gaps;
In human memory; From future into past; Without a pause for thought; Yet dancing in the
Stillness; The play of light in void; That brings relief to form; Flowing here and there in
rhythms; Receiving and responding; In continuous relay; Throughout the day; Throughout
the night; From season into season; Without the need for reason; To divide, make whole or
keep to straight and narrow; Only dying to pass on…
Raj: It’s similar to what we are seeing in our day, as quantum physics and eastern philosophy start to reveal and mirror one another – The Tao of Physics, the Dancing Wu Li masters which we’ve talked about. So it seems you’ll keep picking at it for a half century or more…
Culhane: Like having something stuck between your teeth that you can’t get out… that’s how I see it. And it appears we’ve been having this same conversation for thousands of year. Is there no resolution?
Octagenarian Culhane: That’s for you to discuss with NTHARP and each other – these personality driven simulations take a lot of energy and CPU power and are overclocking our circuits, so I will bid you adieu… for now…
(He fades away).
NTHARP: The relevance of all this is that you are the spiraling dust motes in a ray of light from a dying star. Entropy rules but each time photons expand their reach into the cosmos they cause that “dance in the stillness”. The sun is only dying to pass on what we call life… carrying life across the gaps, do you see? Solar energy is entropy happening. Captured by algae or plants through photosynthesis the swirling in the ever expanding gradient allows for local eddies and currents that spiral into living vortices. The whole galaxy is involved in this dance… Here, check this out – a simulation of what your solar system is really doing…
The helical model - our solar system is a vortex
This isn’t a new model of physics—it’s just a dynamic visualization of heliocentric mechanics in motion through galactic orbit. Turns out the heliocentric model of your solar system – so hard won by Copernicus and Kepler and Galilieo, is also wrong. The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, but neither does the earth actually revolve “around the sun”. That notion of planets rotating around a fixed star is not only boring, but incorrect. Our solar system itself moves through space at 70,000 km per hour, and it is as if stars, as THEY revolve around galactic central, drag planets in their wake, in what is really a cosmic vortex. It might be more useful today to think of the sun as being more like a hot glowing comet that pulls all the other smaller masses along with it. Everything we know – economies, societies, environments, are the consequences of these motions as electromagnetic radiation streams ever outward and gravity pulls things ever inward… all in receptive-responsive relationship. And it isn’t just that entropic radiance of stars – they are giant balls of fusion reactions that have their exothermia. It is also the fission reactions in the dense cores of planets where heavy metals cause their own geothermal exothermia. And all of this expansion and contraction and swirling makes life possible.
Culhane: This says to me that the entire notion of an energy crisis is absurd!
NTHARP: Indeed, the gradients are always there, the delta T’s, ready to be ridden through the cosmos like the Silver Surfer.
Dorian: Now you’re speaking MY language! And if I’m understanding this at all, it means that if we were to surf sunshine and geothermal heat we’d be fine for millions more years.
Culhane: That’s what I’m getting too. And it wouldn’t be just the visible photons and infrared photons either. It would be… it should be… their DERIVATIVES. Rain is created by solar energy causing evaporation. So hydropower, whether microhydro or macrohydro, ARE solar energy. Wind is created by the sun heating up air that moves as the earth moves and changes the locations of pockets of cold and hot air with hot air always rising and cold rushing down to fill the vacuums that motion creates. So wind power IS solar energy. And all biomass, including biogas, is STORED SOLAR ENERGY – sunlight stored in hydrocarbon bonds pulled together through photosynthesis. Why even the coal and oil and gas we repudiate for the WAY they are used – burned without thought for how their oxidized and entropically dispersed states afftect our health and climate, even these “fossil fuels” are a form of solar energy – they just come with a lot of toxic and thermodynamic byproducts and disadvantages. But they all come from that massive fusion reactor in the sky, a relatively safe 93 million miles away.
As for geothermal – geothermal isn’t ‘fission’ in the reactor sense, but the heat does originate in radiogenic decay of heavy elements…so we might consider it the safest form of nuclear energy, with the nuclear reactor hundreds of miles beneath our feet heating up magma that in turn heats water into steam and is easily captured in the same kinds of turbines that transform the steam heated by fossil fuels and nuclear heat into electricity. And then there is a whole ecosystem of chemosynthetic organisms deep in the ocean at the thermal vents, churning out new life forms through their own inner and equally somewhat inexhaustible energy source – relative to the duration of life on a finite planet dragged along on a ride by a dying star.
Why we would ever try to recreate the sun or the earth’s hot core on the surface of the earth defies logic – unless, as Amory Lovins apparently told older me at that lunch and has written so eloquently about in the materials we are suggesting for you – unless the whole domestic civilian nuclear energy program is a front for getting the public to fund the creation of a never ending source of fissile material for weapons applications. It certainly isn’t “too cheap to meter”.
Dorian: Yeah, I was arguing with my Dad about that too – when you take in the costs not only of construction and operation and maintenance, but the costs of safeguards and then the cost of decommissioning the plant after 30 or 40 years and then trying to ensure the “radioactive residuals” don’t hurt anybody for hundreds of thousands of years… to say nothing of the loss of livable or agricultural land spaces where the reactors once stood. It just doesn’t pencil out when a similar subsidy for and investment in solar and its derivatives would provide risk free fuel for generations.
Sarah: Decentralized, distributed energy would and should kick the but of centralized sources…
Culhane: In aggregate. That’s what Proudhon was arguing. And he suggested that such radical decentralization, without overt hierarchical arrangements, would lead to that putative era of MUTUALISM. On the surface it looks elegant… a technological fix that fixes so many social and environmental problems.
Sophia: Well what if it really is that simple? What if fossil fuel dependency is at the heart of all our biggest problems.
Sarah: Well, you would have to go deeper to the root – I think you mean DEPENDENCY in general. We talk about our “addiction to fossil fuels” and our behavior is similar to that of alcoholics and drug addicts…and, by the way, sugar and grain addicts… irrational behavior and a complete loss of the ability to think through the nexus.
Dorian: Yeah, but can decentralized renewable energy really run our civilization? What about the intermittency problem. The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow and water doesn’t always flow – like during droughts. That spells disaster.
Sophia: You are the disaster… and if we did have a midterm exam you would fail instantly.
Dorian: How so?
Sophia: Sloppy language, sloppy thinking. Definitely not Nexus Thinking!
Dorian: (Looks around helplessly) Guys?
Raj: She’s right Dor!
Dorian: I’m still not seeing it.
Sophia: The sun is ALWAYS shining dumbass. Stars don’t just turn on and off… even pulsars are always in the on position. It’s only the rotation of our earth that gives us night and day… and the same is true of wind… wind is always blowing because the sun is always shining AND the earth is turning…
Dorian: I meant locally, where it counts. What good does it do me if it is sunny in Californian after its lights out here in New York if I’m reliant on solar panels?
Sophia: Reliant on what aspect of the solar panels… whose solar panels, where and when? I mean you are reliant on oil that comes from somewhere else. Didn’t the oil embargo teach you that the oil doesn’t always flow? Talk about intermittency – we send ARMIES overseas to try and make it reliable for god’s sake.
Sarah: And if I understand Culhane’s lessons in both materialistic and linguistic fungibility then we have to really think not of “solar” or “fossil” or whatever, but the essences of what we need – temperature gradients, electromagnetic pressures and gradients – I mean voltage and current I think – I need to brush up on this stuff… but, you know, not just the movement of photons and electrons but their temporary capitalization, stored in thermal masses and chemical batteries ….
Raj: And don’t forget gravity batteries like dams and biomass batteries like biogas…
Sophia: and then there is the interconnectivity of grids – so when one part of the country is sunny and the other is in darkness they share surpluses…heck this could operate across the entire spinning planet…
Dorian: Yeah but be practical – that would involve a level of coordination that human beings may not be capable of…
Sarah: Seriously? Then how do you explain undersea telephone cables? How do you explain international trade? Skylab? Water sharing between countries?
NTHARP: That aspect could get better in 50 years as the world gets hyperconnected through faster and improved air travel and, most especially, satellites and wireless communications. We predict everyone will be just one free video call away, regardless of where you are on the spinning globe.
Dorian: Long distance, the next best thing to being there? I spent so much money talking to a girlfriend from Australia one year that I almost wiped out my summer savings.
Raj: (sings mockingly) Summer lovin’ had me a blast…
Dorian: Zip it Raj. Anyway, capital market forces suggest that the high demand relative to the supply of telecommunications services will keep costs at a premium and keep real international cooperation to a minimum. And that’s for duplex telephony. Video calls like my Dad does are for corporations…
NTHARP: Today. But in 50 years once the infrastructure is built out you will be able to talk to your girlfriends on the other side of the planet for as long as you want for free.
Culhane: See,and that is the thing about Capitalism at its best – once you reach take off into economies of scale the marginal costs reduce to near zero. And so, just as it will be with telecommunications I imagine it will be the same with renewable energy – disaggregated local production wherever the energy gradients are optimal, distributed through electrical and gas pipe networks that span the globe. That’s what we will see, right NTHARP.
NTHARP: In some places, yes. In others, sadly no. Not because it won’t be technically a breeze to do, but because it disrupts the zero-sum game and power asymmetry dynamic that many elites and their sycophants think they depend on.
Culhane: Oh… that again. I guess we can’t escape Political Economy and Political Ecology effects.
Sarah: But we can dance around them. Like as soon as the cost of certain components comes down my Dad is taking our farm completely off grid. He’s a BRICOLEUR, a tinkerer, a DIY guy, and he already has converted his car and tractors to vegetable oil, we power our cookstove with a biodigester and he built a solar hot water system for our showers and our pool. Simple physics, local materials… He’s working on a windmill right now with blades cut from old sewer pipes attached to a dynamo from an old treadmill. Once you know the basic science and engineering, it ISN’T rocket science.
Culhane: You know, in the lab I actually have one of those Bell Labs kits that teaches you how to make a solar cell out of a wafer of silicon. So I suppose even that could come way way down in price…
NTHARP: As it will. By 1989 the cost of photovoltaic cells will drop from 20 dollars a watt to 1 dollar a watt and reach parity with oil. As soon as that announcement is made it will suddenly spike up to 10 dollars a watt and stay there for decades… but by the early 2000s it will drop to 5 then to 3 dollars a watt and by 2015 it will be down to a dollar a watt again. Then it will plunge to 30 cents per watt, mostly because of Chinese and other Asian mass production, at which point politicians in the global North will slap tariffs on it to drive it up over a dollar again, all in an attempt to keep oil cheaper. But the writing is on the wall…
Culhane: Yeah, and Thomas Edison himself predicted it. In 1931, the inventor of the light bulb supposedly told his friend Henry Ford: "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that…
NTHARP: This quote reflects his foresight about renewables, though the exact origin is debated, with first reports coming from a friend of his who was present at the time but with the quote appearing decades after Edison’s death. Another related quote attributes to him: "We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy--sun, wind and tide". But yes, the potential for solar power goes back thousands of years. More recently Antoine Lavoisier the chemist who discovered oxidation, used solar energy for scientific experiments in the 1770s, particularly around 1774, by constructing a powerful solar furnace with large lenses to focus sunlight, achieving intense heat (over 1700°C) to melt metals like platinum and study chemical reactions, showcasing early practical harnessing of solar power for high-temperature research. He is said to have hated burning fossil fuels because of the fumes and smoke. Meanwhile solar cells were first put on a roof in New York in 1884 by inventor Charles Fritts, who created the first photovoltaic cell using selenium coated in gold, demonstrating early solar power on a NYC rooftop, though it was very inefficient (1-2%) compared to today's standards.
Culhane: Yeah, and heck, everybody thinks Einstein got his Nobel Prize for this atomic formula E=mc2, when in fact he got it for describing that very photo-electric effect in 1921. Almost everybody who ever experienced or thought through the implications of PHOTO VOLTAGE – useful electron pressure from freely streaming entropy increasing sunlight bathing the earth, was far superior to the brute act of boiling water to produce steam to drive turbines, whether the heat was coming from dirty fossil fuels or deadly radioactive rocks or magma producing steam or even the sun itself heating water or sodium salts. Compared with the clean, silent, motionless direct transduction of electromagnetic energy into electron flow, nothing else competes. And then, if you have to turn motive forms of energy into electric current, tell me, would you rather use free flowing wind and water to turn the turbines with no other mechanical parts to wear out, or would you want to couple the turbines to super hot vibrating, noisy engines that run on explosions of hydrocarbons or explosive superheated steam? I mean it's a no brainer isn’t it?
Raj: So we knew all that and still got ourselves addicted to the less efficient and more dangerous options?
Dorian: Wow. Obviously if the risks were properly priced and all the negative effects internalized – everything from wear and tear to dangers and health effects and environmental effects, solar and its derivatives would be the best investment choice, all other things being equal.
.
Sarah: But they aren’t equal are they? And so we are back to the Nexus epiphany – most of our problems really stem from a callous disregard for others. We’ve always had the solutions – we just didn’t and still don’t implement them.
Sofia: It’s like they say, “there is nothing new under the sun”.
(Fade to Black)
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