When Does Surplus = Resilience?

The Net Energy of Pre-Industrial Agriculture

Following on from yesterday's discussion, I want to make a point that seems like it must have been made before, but I cannot quickly find a good discussion of it.  That is that the net energy of pre-industrial agriculture, taken as a whole energy-gathering system, must have been low, with EROEI probably on the order of 1.1-1.6 depending on place and time.

Archdruids and Net Energy

This week's Archdruid Essay is an improvement on the ones I discussed last week, but although he's retreated a little onto higher and more defensible ground, I still think his position has some poorly defended salients that he should abandon.  In particular, I think he's still too hung up on energy concentration, and is still trying to argue that there's something physically difficult or impossible about transitioning to a renewable powered civilization.  In my view, there's nothing physically impossible about that (though I'm perfectly willing to concede that the total cultural inertia of western civilization is enormous and that worries me a lot).  The Archdruid makes two main arguments in his post, and in this post I'm going to take on the first of them (hopefully coming back to the other at some point in the future when time and interest allows).

Limits on the Thermodynamic Potential of Archdruids

I often read John Michael Greer, the Archdruid. He's a smart and thoughtful guy who worries about some of the same things I worry about, though he tends to have decided they are all hopeless, whereas I tend to see society as having a lot more options than he perceives.  He has read very widely and often comes up with interesting historical analogies that hadn't occurred to me, so he's well worth the spot in my reader.

Where he tends to go horribly wrong, and why I think his overall take on the subject is too negative, is when he tries to talk about physics. In a recent series of three posts:

• Energy Follows It's Bliss
• An Exergy Crisis
• Barbarism and Good Brandy

He has been trying to argue that there are fundamental physical barriers to society surviving the transition away from fossil fuels, and getting horribly snarled up.

Now, I am not a working physicist, but I may well be the nearest thing that will admit to reading the Archdruid - I trained in Physics, have a PhD in the subject, and then went into Computer Science.  But the points at issue are pretty elementary here, so let me try to straighten the Archdruid out, and at least place something in the record for anyone that might be confused by his arguments.

In short, there are no fundamental physical barriers to a non-fossil-fuel based economy - the main problems are social, economic, and practical, not issues of physical law.