Dana Blankenhorn

The Downside of Energy Abundance

The first half of the last decade was marked by an energy gold rush.

Fracking made the USA energy independent for the first time in decades. Outside its impact on the environment, the boom was short-lived.

By 2014 demand was beating supply, and the boom has now turned to dust.

It wasn’t solar and wind power that killed the boom. It was efficiency and technology. LEDs require a lot less power than fluorescent bulbs. Intelligence added to warehouses and stores reduces the need still further. Insulation means you need less electricity for heating. New appliances are more energy efficient. The cloud is super-efficient, and the excess energy can be recycled. Laptop technology means this took less power to write than it would have then.

The oilpatch did its bit to kill the boom, too. There are now huge oilfields off South America and Africa that we didn’t know about before. The eastern Mediterranean gas fields have made Israel independent of Arab energy. Things like fracking and boiling the Alberta tar sands aren’t just environmentally destructive. They’re economically worthless.

All these things have put a thumb down on energy prices. That thumb is getting bigger over time. As I predicted in 2010 (based on Department of Energy research) we have now achieved “crossover,” the point where renewable energy costs less to exploit than fossil fuels. It’s hard today to justify a new natural gas plant. Soon, solar will cost less than gas fired in an existing burner.

The result is going to be another energy boom, this time a renewable energy boom.

But this one, too, has a sell-by date.

Resources and the New Era: What the Best Futurists Got Wrong

This coming year represents the start of a new era.

It’s an era defined by technology, as much as the previous era was defined by resources.

I’ve written here many times that the gating factor for technology is human capital. The more trained, empowered, and willing human minds you can bring to bear, the more you can grow. Contrast this to the resource era, where the key to growth was control, over the land and what lay on or beneath it.

The politics of 2020 were defined by the clash of these two economies. It was expressed throughout the culture. But the market made its verdict clear, and it was a true landslide.

Biden’s Solar Problem

Assuming Joe Biden wins Tuesday, he has a problem.

If he doesn’t win, America and the world have a bigger problem, one I don’t think we can overcome. So, let’s assume the world goes on for a moment.

Joe’s solar problem is something the computer industry faced around the time when I was becoming a reporter, in the late 1970s. Until then, computers were capital goods. They were either leased or purchased over time with loans. Even my first PC purchase, in 1982, was with a loan.

Loans and leases built a business model that was smashed by the PC era. Both loans and leases carry huge external costs and margins. My Massapequa neighbors had nice houses and cars. Their fat sales or engineering salaries were paid for by IBM customers, who compared the cost of having IBM handle their problems to the cost of doing things manually and signed their names to lines that were dotted.

In 1981 IBM didn’t just start selling a PC. It became a computer products company. It licensed the likeness of Charlie Chaplin, who had died in 1976, from his estate. It used the rose he offered his amour in City Lights, painting it a bright red. Then it distributed the PC through computer stores, who placed it on shelves alongside the printers and other peripherals. By the 1990s you wouldn’t think of hiring a “computer specialist” to sell you stuff, unless we were talking about a networking expert who got his own hands dirty.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

Creating Demand

Right now, the biggest problem for the U.S. economy is a lack of demand.

We didn’t go on vacation. We didn’t go out to restaurants. We’re not getting on planes, or trains. We’re not even using our automobiles much.

This service sector of the economy, where today’s unemployed were working before the pandemic, has been crushed. It remains crushed. It will remain crushed until the pandemic is over.

The only solution offered has been to subsidize spending. That subsidy ended in September. Trump’s people stole the money, and the Fed pumped trillions into Wall Street investors who didn’t need it. The result is the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy and, indeed, to the ultra-wealthy.

Blessings of the Pandemic

The economy has tanked.

We are all in our homes, scared out of our minds.

But there are blessings amid the ruins.

The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. It is quieter. Animals have come out of hiding around the world. People have re-learned the value of family. Science matters again. Community matters again.

There were pictures posted, early in April, of Venice with water you could see through, of LA without smog. Those were retouched. Things aren’t that good.

Still, they’re immeasurably better than they were.

The climate crisis doesn’t have to destroy that progress. Unless we have a death wish.

After the War on Oil

As the war drums beat post-war planning isn’t given a second thought. (To the right, the Air-Gen, which pulls energy directly from the air.)

We can do better. We need to do better regarding the War Against Oil.

Make no mistake. The War Against Oil, which I first wrote about over a decade ago, is behind our current crises. Saudi efforts to destabilize the Middle East are funded by oil. Russian efforts to destabilize the U.S. are built on oil. Trump is all about oil.

But oil is losing. Oil is doomed. The coronavirus, COVID-19, proves it. The International Energy Agency now sees falling global demand for oil at the end of the year.

We should have seen this coming. While Democrats were arguing about “banning fracking,” the frackers were flaring off more natural gas than ever before. Even with that, they couldn’t get $2/mcf for it. The UAE recently said it found a giant pool of gas, close to its export terminals. Texas gas is losing what markets are left.

2020: The Crisis

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

Thomas Paine (right) died penniless in 1809, the forgotten Founder. He died that way because he was a writer, not a politician. His writing was a demand, not a request or a negotiation. The words above were read to Washington’s men before they crossed the river at Trenton. Paine made ours a revolution, not just for the patrician, but the working man. Not just for the General, but for the private. Not just for those who would lead, but those who would die. 

Every crisis has casualties. The year 1968 was marked by terrible casualties. The Great Depression and the following war killed tens of millions of people. The Civil War killed 2% of this country’s people, mostly young men in the prime of life.

Compared to that, the Crisis caused by Trump should be easy to overcome, its casualties minimal. But that won’t be. His Presidency reeks of all the worst in our history. It combines the greed of those around Warren Harding, the weakness of James Buchanan, and the racism of Andrew Jackson. The crimes are all done in plain sight, as Nixon’s crimes were done.

We’ve had some bad men in the White House, but never one whose soul belonged to another country. Trump is Putin’s man. It’s that simple. We beat Russia in the Cold War, but revenge is a dish served cold, and Trump is Russia’s revenge.

The year to come will be all about Trump. It can’t be about anything else. Can America throw off a foreign dictator when he’s already in the White House? Will we stand, once again, against the racism, the misogyny, and the brutality our forefathers fought against? Are we Americans or docile Soviets?

Against the Mullahs, against Moolah, against the militarists, the three arms of the triad that has kept the developing world in bondage for centuries, it seems we have only words, faith, and hope. The question seems simple. Whose side are you on – America’s or Russia’s? But those who fear the loss of their power over other races, and over women, won’t be swayed by words. It’s going to take the hard work of all of us to win this, and even if we win the battle the war to save the planet will have just begun.

Where Have You Gone, Al Gore?

The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

Yet in 2019 California’s electricity was still running through a centralized system that was obsolete 20 years ago, when then-Vice President Al Gore coined the term “enternet,” predicting renewables could make the energy grid resilient. 

Now that his vision is possible, he’s silent.

Ordinary people are now way ahead institutions of this. Residential solar is growing at 30% per year.  The fastest growing occupation over the next decade is expected to be that of a solar power installer.  Old solar panels are even recyclable, into anodes for new solar panels.

The 2020s: A Future in Three Parts

Moore’s Law accelerates change. Aging accelerates time.

Hard as it may be for me to believe, the 2010s will be over in less than 5 months.

In technology the last decade has been a Golden Age for clouds and devices. So, too, in business and in politics. The refusal of cloud companies to lock-down their technology elected Donald Trump. The result has been a march toward civil war, global war, trade war, the biggest crisis since the late 1960s.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Moore’s Law of Health means I may live much longer than my parents did, long after history should have rolled over me. At least that’s true in those places where people can afford medical care. The likeliest replacements for Donald Trump are both older than he is. Al Gore is younger than either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. We’re still debating Woodstock, 50 years on.

We’re going to start turning the page on the current era in 2020. The hold of the autocrats is weakening. It’s weakening in Russia. It’s weakening in China. It’s weakening in Texas.

Moore’s Law continues marching onward, better and better, faster and faster, reaching further and further afield.

In this decade it has made Africa accessible to global markets, made India as well as China an economic power. Over 1 billion people have entered the middle class this century – they have homes, some material comforts, and they have hope.

What might the next decade bring? If I make it to the end of this decade, I’ll be 75, so this may be my last shot at predicting the future.

But here goes.