Burning Man - The Failure of the Green New Deal

This article is a collaboration with John Peach, from Wild Peaches. John Peach is an applied mathematician who held a research position at MIT Lincoln Laboratory until retirement in 2020. As lead investigator of a team of physicists and mathematicians at MIT, he spearheaded development of an atmospheric lidar propagation model accounting for scattering, refraction, and object response. This technology enabled 3D mapping of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria to locate and assess damage, expediting recovery efforts. As part of the disaster relief program, he made three trips to assist FEMA on-site with model implementation, and co-authored the paper “To Expedite Roadway Identification and Damage Assessment in LiDAR 3D Imagery for Disaster Relief Public Assistance.”

We show why the Green New Deal is a failure from the perspective of physics, economics and ecology. Along the way we set fire to several straw men.

# Executive Summary

This article critically examines the feasibility of transitioning to renewable energy systems and the “Green New Deal” through three fundamental lenses: physics, economics, and ecology. Our analysis reveals several critical findings:

Physics Constraints

• Renewable energy systems face insurmountable rate limitations, delivering energy 100-300 times slower than fossil fuels.
• Critical mineral reserves are insufficient for a complete transition, with current mining rates requiring centuries to millennia to meet projected needs.
• No renewable system has demonstrated the ability to self-replicate without fossil fuel inputs.

Economic Realities

• Despite claims of cost competitiveness, renewables currently provide only 5% of global energy.
• Increased fossil fuel consumption in the past decade exceeds all historical renewable energy production.
• Biophysical economics shows that energy efficiency improvements paradoxically increase total consumption (Jevon’s Paradox).

Ecological Impact

• We are in severe ecological overshoot across multiple planetary boundaries.
• Wildlife populations have declined 73% since the 1970s.
• Current energy consumption is 350 times what human labor alone could provide.
• Both continued fossil fuel use and attempted renewable transition will further damage Earth’s life support systems.

Key Conclusion 

The evidence suggests that a sustainable energy transition at the scale required to maintain modern civilization is not physically possible. The fundamental predicament is one of scale, rate limitations, and ecological overshoot. This analysis indicates that rather than pursuing an impossible transition, we must confront the reality of inevitable population and economic contraction.

This article provides extensive documentation and evidence to support these conclusions while examining common counterarguments and misconceptions about renewable energy solutions.

# Introduction

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
― Carl Sagan

Climate scientists have been warning the public and political leaders for decades that the Earth’s energy is out of balance, and temperatures are rising due to the burning of fossil fuels. In 1824, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier realized that the Earth was warmer than it should be considering the distance to the sun, in 1856 Eunice Newton Foote related the Earth’s temperature to the concentration of $C{O}_2$ in the atmosphere, and three years later John Tyndall independently reached the same conclusion. In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius showed that doubling the concentration of $C{O}_2$ would raise the temperature between $5.5\mathrm{°}F$ and $9\mathrm{°}F$. In 1988, climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress, saying, quote:

"Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . . In each case, more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders."

Claims have been made that we have the technology to transition to a fully renewable energy future, yet in all the time that we’ve been warned, very little action has been taken to avert the crisis. Oil companies have been blamed for campaigns of denial and disinformation, politicians for lack of concrete action, and the public for slow adoption of the supposed solutions.

But, what if the assumptions underlying the claims aren’t true? If we aren’t moving in the right direction, is the problem due to inaction, or is it more fundamental? We’ll examine three key questions and the claims associated with them:

1. Do we have the technology to sustain modern society with renewable energy systems?
2. From past practices, how do we expect society to respond to the introduction of alternate energy systems?
3. What side effects or unintended consequences might occur with the shift to renewables?

To be clear, a claim is a statement or assertion that expresses a belief or opinion that can be debated while evidence consists of the facts, data, or information that support a claim. It provides the necessary backing to validate the assertion made in the claim. In Carl Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World, he includes a chapter titled The Fine Art of Baloney Detection with a nine-point checklist (see the Appendix below).

Scientists need evidence in the form of data to validate hypotheses. Whenever you read or hear someone claim that some new device or process could be a solution to the many issues facing modern society, at a minimum you should check to see if any evidence has been provided to back up the claim.

At the end of each section, we provide the evidence that would be required to support the claims made.

# The Physics of the Green New Deal

“We know how to build renewables. We just need to make the transition happen more quickly.”

The first question to address is, do we know how to build renewable systems? Well, obviously because we have solar panels and wind turbines. But are they sustainable? What do we even mean by the terms “renewable” and “sustainable”? At a minimum, to be sustainable a system needs to produce enough energy that it can generate an identical copy of itself.

Is there any evidence to show that a solar panel can generate enough excess energy that it can mine and refine the metals and minerals needed to build another one, as well as provide the energy required to build and install it? More importantly, has anyone successfully scaled the process up to mass-produce panels?

In EROEI and Civilization’s Forced Decline, Sarah Connor says, “EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) is possibly the most important ratio to modern human existence. This measure is foundational to our civilization, yet understood by few.”

What is EROEI? The basic idea is pretty simple - living organisms need to gain more energy from food sources than they expend to attain it. The concept of EROEI was coined in the 1970s by ecologist Charles Hall. Initially, Hall’s work focused on ecological systems, particularly the energy dynamics of migrating fish. Over time, the application of EROEI expanded to various energy production technologies, including fossil fuels, renewables, and biofuels.

EROEI is important, and there have been many studies estimating the EROEI of various energy systems. But EROEI tells only part of the story. If a system has an EROEI of 20, then for every unit of energy required to construct and maintain the system, you can expect to get 20 units of energy back over the lifetime of the equipment.

In a distance $=$ rate $\times$ time problem, EROEI would be analogous to the distance, but it ignores the rate. The energy flow rate is easy enough to calculate by dividing EROEI by the lifetime of the system. When you do that, it becomes apparent that fossil fuels have a rate advantage over every other energy source.

Fig 1. Relative Energy Flow Rates

This graph shows the energy flow rates of various systems relative to the flow rate of oil (note the log scale). For example, one unit of energy required to produce gas will take 10 times as long to return as one unit for oil. Hydroelectric and wind energy take about 100 times longer to return a unit of energy and solar is 300 times slower. The only source with a higher rate than oil is coal, which has an energy flow rate almost three times that of oil.

To understand the disparities between fossil fuel return rates and everything else, you need to look at where the energy input (EI) is applied in the lifecycle. For most of the systems on the right side (Nuclear, Hydro, Geo, Wind, Solar), almost all of the input energy is applied to constructing the system which generally operates for decades. For example, Gupta and Hall estimate the EROEI of wind to be 18.1, but if the lifetime of a wind turbine is 25 years, then the rate is less than one unit returned per year for each unit input.

For oil and gas, a well needs to be drilled first, but from then on the energy input goes into refining, processing, and distribution which happens in a few weeks to at most a couple of months. Coal is even faster because it is often transported by train directly from the mine to the power station, and no processing is needed.

Improved technology won’t help either. There are known limits, such as the Betz Limit for wind power which puts the maximum efficiency at 59.3% of the available energy in the wind, and more recent analyses have reduced the maximum thermodynamic efficiency to 29.6%. Nothing can increase the energy flow rate by a factor of 100 to be able to compete with oil.

Most modern technology has three requirements: extraction (mining), energy use, and civilization. One of the primary support structures of civilization is technology use, which leverages far more energy and resource throughput than we could ever manage without it. Agriculture is one of the primary forms of technology, but what all technologies have in common is that they reduce or remove negative feedbacks which limited human population size in pre-industrial eras.

This produces the self-reinforcing positive feedback of population growth which fosters yet more technology use in a vicious cycle. Technology use has many benefits, but few people ever look at the cost of this and the effects it produces in the form of ecological overshoot.

The cost is in the destruction of the biosphere through the required extraction (mining), energy use, and the effects it produces (overshoot [and all of its symptom predicaments such as climate change, pollution loading, energy and resource decline, biodiversity loss, etc.]). In other words, what society is doing by using technology is temporarily improving conditions for ourselves but destroying the source and sustenance of our very existence by doing so. See Why is Promoting Technology NOT Good? and Do You See Technology From a Complete Perspective?.

The energy transition would also require significant inputs of metals and minerals which also face a rate bottleneck. Simon Michaux finds that critical metals and minerals reserves are not sufficient to meet the demands of an all-electric energy transition.

Fig 2. Critical Materials Availability

Of course, the resources exist, but the problem is that they tend to be power-law distributed. Power-law distributions describe a type of statistical relationship where the frequency of a mineral deposit decreases as the ore density increases. In simpler terms, if you plot the frequency of resources against their size on a logarithmic scale, the result will often yield a straight line, indicating that larger deposits are significantly rarer than smaller ones. A few locations contain a vast majority of the resource, while many locations have only small amounts.

Michaux has also analyzed current mining rates and estimated how much more rapidly ores would need to be extracted to meet IPCC goals.

Compared to 2019 rates, copper would take 189.1 years to meet the goals, lithium 9900 years, and germanium almost 30,000 years. From the start of the industrial revolution, people have used the incredible energy density of fossil fuels to extract the best resources. We’re now left with the tailings at the end of the power-law distribution.

Evidence required:

• An alternate source delivering energy reliably and continuously with an EROEI rate comparable to fossil fuels.
• Demonstration of the availability of metals and minerals required.
• Increased rates of mining to meet energy transition needs.
• World-scale continuous production of an alternate energy source without fossil fuel inputs.

# Biophysical Economics

“The cost of solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels. We’re rapidly transitioning to renewables.”

Let’s deal with the second statement first.

Fig 3. Primary Energy Consumption

In 2022, fossil fuels provided 137237 TWh (1 TWh = 1 billion kWh) while wind generated 5488 TWh and solar just 3448 TWh. Combined, wind and solar generated 6.5% of the energy produced from fossil fuels and 5% of all energy. The total amount of electrical energy ever produced by solar and wind is 56646 TWh. To put this in perspective, the increase in fossil fuel energy since 2011 was 80146 TWh. In other words, we’ve increased fossil fuel consumption more in the past decade than the total ever produced by wind and solar combined.

To be fair, the increases in fossil fuel use are approximately linear while wind and solar appear to be on exponentially increasing curves. This is probably why people believe that there is a rapid transition to renewables, but as we showed above, there is no evidence that these exponential increases can continue, and without the inputs from fossil fuels, new construction of wind and solar systems would cease.

Biophysical economics examines how human societies acquire and utilize energy and other biological and physical resources to produce, distribute, consume, and exchange goods and services. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the energy and material flows within economic systems, as well as the environmental impacts and waste generated through these processes.

This contrasts with classical economics which views everything except capital and labor to be exogenous or external to the economic system. Energy is considered an input to be paid for by the system. But, imagine removing all forms of energy from society. There would be no mining, manufacturing, trucking, or shipping. The economy would collapse, so clearly energy isn’t simply an external input - it’s a necessity to maintain our current economic system.

Tim Garrett, a climate scientist at the University of Utah, found that it takes 7.1 watts of continuous power to maintain $1000 of wealth (in 2005 U.S. dollars) and used the Laws of Thermodynamics to show that the economy is a thermodynamic heat engine, meaning that we use energy as inputs to the economy to derive wealth and create waste heat in the process (See Part 1. Physical Basis and Part 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth). World GDP is almost perfectly correlated with energy consumption.

Fig 4. Energy and GDP Correlation

Once you see that energy is a primary driver of the economy it becomes clear that many assumptions of an energy transition aren’t valid. While the cost of solar and wind may be cheaper than some fossil fuels for electricity production, this doesn’t mean that there will be a rapid switch to using them.

Energy is so valuable to the economy that if one person uses solar or wind energy, then there will be some fossil fuels available to someone else. The result is that there is no transition to any alternate energy. Instead, we add new energy sources into the economic mix as can be seen by the chart above.

A widely held assumption is that making equipment more efficient will be a step towards reducing global warming, but this idea fails for the same reason. If you operate more efficient machinery, then this leaves more fossil fuels available for someone else to use, and those fuels are too economically valuable to be ignored.

William Stanley Jevons was an English mathematician and economist who noticed that as processes became more efficient, the scale of the manufacturing process grew and with it, energy consumption. This is now known as Jevon’s Paradox and Tim Garrett says, quote:

"Increasing energy efficiency is the driving force for growing global energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions – this sounds like nonsense. Most people would guess the opposite: technological advances enable us to increase energy efficiency and less energy is required to accomplish the same economic task."

Garrett continues, quote:

"But when civilization expands it also increases its ability to access reserves of primary energy and raw materials, provided of course that they remain or are there to be discovered. Increased access to energy reserves allows civilization to sustain its newly added circulations. And, if this efficiency is sustained, it can also expand further. So, in a positive feedback loop, expansion work leads to greater energy inputs and therefore even more work and more rapid expansion."

The fundamental physics principle behind global warming is the Stefan-Boltzmann Law which relates the energy radiated from a warm object to the fourth power of its temperature. All energy consumed on Earth becomes waste heat that must be removed to maintain the Earth’s energy balance, and the only way to get rid of the heat energy is to radiate it into space. Right now, most of the thermal imbalance is due to greenhouse gases trapping incoming solar energy, but about 10% is from waste heat.

Most economists would agree that growth of 2.3% per year is a perfectly reasonable and desirable rate. The exponential growth rate of 2.3% leads to a multiple of 10 times in a century. Repeating this every century gives 100 times in two centuries, 1000 times in three centuries, and so on. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann Law it’s possible to calculate the Earth’s temperature over time as it heats up to radiate excess energy into space.

Fig 5. Exponential Energy Growth

The good news is that there isn’t enough energy to make this happen, but the consequence is that economic growth will have to end. It doesn’t matter what the source of the energy is - it all ends up as heat. Global warming is a result of both the greenhouse gases preventing radiation into space and excess energy.

Many greenhouse gases are very long-lived, so switching to a non-fossil fuel energy source would only stop the increase, not remove any from the atmosphere. But “renewables” aren’t some miracle cure that will end climate change. Physicist Tom Murphy explores the relationship between economic growth and energy in Galactic-Scale Energy and Prof. Albert Bartlett gave a talk titled Arithmetic, Population and Energy over 1742 times in which he said,

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

There have been claims that the economy can be “decoupled” from energy or that a “circular” economy can be achieved, but neither has been demonstrated. Other than biomass energy, every alternate system produces electricity, but only 20% of current energy use is electricity meaning that a rapid infrastructure change would also be required.

We agree with the geneticist and eco-activist David Suzuki that neoliberal economics is a ‘pretend science’.

Evidence required:

• Continued exponential increase in non-fossil fuel energy sources.
• Demonstrated substitution of an alternate energy system for fossil fuels.
• Jevon’s Paradox is no longer valid.
• The economy can continue to grow at an exponential rate without adding heat to the Earth’s system.
• The economy can be “decoupled” from energy consumption, or a “circular” economy is possible.

# It’s the Ecology, Stupid

“We need energy. Without energy, billions of people will die.”

Mathematician and physical chemist Alfred J. Lotka first proposed the concept of the Maximum Power Principle which ecologist Howard T. Odum described as:

During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.

The most successful systems are those that maximize their energy intake and transformation, essentially capturing and utilizing the most power possible from their environment. As a system, humans have been extremely successful at growing our numbers, at least in the short term, but it has come at the price of ecological overshoot.

“The Planetary Health Check has been created to provide a regular, comprehensive, scientific assessment of the state of the Earth system based on the Planetary Boundaries Science” developed by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows their current estimate of planetary health:

Fig 6. Key Planetary Boundaries

Ecological overshoot is the predicament behind all the other symptoms such as climate change, pollution loading, energy and resource decline, and collapsing wildlife populations. From the Planetary Health Check, they note,

• Climate Change: Atmospheric CO2 levels are at a 15-million-year high, and global radiative forcing continues to rise, with a persistent warming trend that has accelerated since the late 20th century. Global mean temperatures are now higher than at any point since human civilizations emerged on Earth.
• Change in Biosphere Integrity: The global loss of genetic diversity and the loss of functional integrity (measured as energy available to ecosystems) are both exceeding safe levels and accelerating, particularly in regions experiencing intensive land use.
• Land System Change: As a result of land use and increasingly due to climate change, global and regional forests have been steadily declining over the last few decades across all major forest biomes.
• Freshwater Change: Local streamflow and soil moisture deviations have significantly increased since the late 19th century, surpassing their respective Planetary Boundaries in the early 20th century.
• Modification of Biogeochemical Flows: The use of phosphorus and nitrogen in agriculture has exceeded safe boundary levels, driving significant ecological change. Breaching this boundary has led to severe environmental impacts such as water pollution, eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, and “dead zones” in freshwater and marine ecosystems.
• Introduction of Novel Entities: The global introduction of novel entities — such as synthetic chemicals, plastics, and genetically modified organisms — is vast, yet a significant portion of these substances remains untested for their environmental impacts.

In The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth the authors say, quote:

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.

The climate emergency is not an isolated issue. Global heating, although it is catastrophic, is merely one aspect of a profound polycrisis that includes environmental degradation, rising economic inequality, and biodiversity loss. Climate change is a glaring symptom of a deeper systemic issue: ecological overshoot, where human consumption outpaces the Earth’s ability to regenerate. Overshoot is an inherently unstable state that cannot persist indefinitely."

Wildlife populations have fallen 73% since the mid-1970s because of the stress people place on ecosystems. Susana Muhamad, Cop16 president says, quote: 

"Globally, we are reaching points of no return and irreversibly affecting the planet’s life-support systems. We are seeing the effects of deforestation and the transformation of natural ecosystems, intensive land use, and climate change.

The world is witnessing the mass bleaching of coral reefs, the loss of tropical forests, the collapse of polar ice caps, and serious changes to the water cycle, the foundation of life on our planet."

Water scarcity threatens half of the world’s food supply, as does peak potassium production. Plants and land have reached saturation points of $C{O}_2$ absorption, and now have reached a point of collapse. Melting permafrost could release pathogens that modern immune systems have never encountered, radioactive and chemical wastes, and large quantities of the powerful greenhouse gas, methane.

We’re in extreme energy overshoot. A person in good physical shape might be able to generate 100 kWh of manual labor per year, and if we exclude children, the elderly, and anyone unable to perform manual labor, the number of physically capable people might be around 5 billion. This gives a total of 500 TWh of labor that could be produced. Compare this to the 178,000 TWh total consumption of all other forms of energy to see that the ratio is over 350. We’re consuming 350 times as much energy as we could generate through simple physical work.

Many more examples of overshoot can be found, but we’ll end with one that may be the most costly and pointless - war. According to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, $8 Trillion has been spent on the U.S. military post-9/11, nearly a million people were killed in wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and nearly five times as many died due to indirect causes of the wars. The environmental damage caused by war is profound leaving water supplies contaminated by oil leaked by military vehicles and by depleted uranium from ammunition. Air pollution increases in war zones as heavy equipment releases diesel particulates, kicks up dust, and,

The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.

The war machine isn’t going green any time soon. Does anyone really believe that next-gen genocide will be conducted with an all-electric, zero-emissions air force dropping sustainable bombs on schools and hospitals?

So, yes, without energy, billions of people will die. But with energy, we will continue to destroy the biosphere and billions of people will die.

Evidence required:

• Voluntary reduction of population and consumption to provably sustainable limits.

# Conclusion

We see no evidence that a long-term sustainable alternate energy system exists or is even possible. Every alternate source has physical limits that prevent energy flow rates from being at all close to the rates derived from fossil fuels. There is no demonstrated evidence that the metal and mineral reserves can be found in densities needed for a full transition and that mining rates could be increased to meet the needs of a transition.

There is no evidence of substitution happening, and biophysical economics shows that energy is too valuable to remain unused in the current economic system. Energy efficiency could potentially increase total use, and continued economic growth is impossible in any case.

Switching to an alternate energy system might slow the rate of global warming, but there is no reason to expect a change in human behavior to preserve the biosphere or to end extractive industries.

In his article “Evidence, Please?” Tom Murphy says “Modernity is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.” Where is the evidence for so many claims for supposed solutions?

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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# Appendix: Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight.
4. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified.

# References

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36. The Long Shadow of the Tar Sands. Max Wilbert, biocentric, Oct 16, 2024.
37. Half of all global food threatened by growing water crisis, report says. David Hodari, NBC News, Oct 17, 2024
38. Peak Potassium threatens crops. Alice Friedmann, Energy Skeptic, Jun 28, 2024.
39. Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing? Patrick Greenfield, The Guardian, Oct 14, 2024.
40. Permafrost thaw could release bacteria and viruses. European Space Agency, Phys Org, Oct 25, 2021.
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