This visual representation of bad forecasting is the from 2002 paper, “WHAT CAN HISTORY TEACH US? A Retrospective Examination of Long-Term Energy Forecasts for the United States” [pdf]. As you can see, every estimate can in too high with the exception Amory Lovins, who is not on this chart.
Charts like this are important because they remind us that supposed foresight should not foreclose debate about energy choices. Forecasts can be a particularly effective political cudgel and it’s the memory of these projections that should keep us from taking anyone seriously who claims too much certainty about the future.
Which is great, but where does that leave us?
I wrote the first three-quarters of a chapter happily blasting away at the energy forecasting mistakes of the past. But where does that leave us? We still need effective ways of thinking about the future. I’d like to see more descriptive scenarios, what a group of 70s researchers said lay “somewhere between a forecast and a fantasy.” And I’d like to see more normative scenarios that say, “This is the future I’d like to see more America, and this is the energy system that can help us get there.”
In the quest to find the limits that matter, be they geophysical, political, financial, or otherwise, we need more people willing to come out from behind their models’ baked-in assumptions and tell Americans why we need more X or less Y.
I’d love to see a graph that included the embodied energy of all the stuff we ship here from China.
In other words: what if all those energy forecasters were *right,* but they didn’t realize that we would outsource our entire frikkin’ manufacturing base.
This is why, for instance, I’m not convinced that California has really reduced its energy intensity: rather, California has outsourced most of the heavy industry on which it used to depend.
I’m not saying reducing energy intensity is impossible or even all that challenging. Just that without embodied energy, those graphs aren’t as meaningful as some think.
That’s a good point.
I would add, though, that world energy consumption forecasts from that era are nearly as bad… So that says something. Probably about technology?
Just to cross-pollinate from Buzz… Here’s Pierre Wack, pointed out to me by Forest Gregg, in the Harvard Business Review on scenarios:
“Scenario analysis demands first that managers understand the forces driving their business systems rather than rely on forecasts or alternatives (that is, someone else’s understanding and judgment crystallized in a figure that then becomes a substitute for thinking).”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4489875/Wack-Shooting-the-rapids
I’ll toss into the guess hat not only technology (less-wasting transistors, gas mileage, immobility of web entertainment) but economic constraints (“The Limits to Growth”, Club of Rome). See Wikipedia: “Changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book’s predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.”
After automobiles, the 2nd greatest source of greenhouse gases is bioenergy (wood, dung burning). *Dung-burning* … how many of us in the US have experienced that? (Yet.)
Whoa, dung-burning. To me, this supports the thesis that technology really can reduce the energy intensity of a global economy. That doesn’t fit with the doomer thesis, of course. Somewhere between collapse and bullshit productions of future growth lies the truth. Maybe “understanding the forces driving the business system” is the key. See also: Mason Inman and Failing Gracefully.
I’m not sure where TJ got the info on greenhouse gases. In estimates I’ve seen, power plants contribute around 20-25%, burning forests around 10-20%, and road transport about 10-15%. I believe burning biomass for cooking and heating is somewhere farther down the list. See, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png
Christopher gave a shout out to my blog, Failing Gracefully… I think. Not sure if he likes it or not. So I thought I’d say that I’m kind of a doomer… but I also believe improvements in energy intensity are real. The two don’t contradict.
One problem is that if economies keep growing faster than energy intensity falls. So total greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. That means we’re never going to tackle climate change through the kinds of improvements in energy intensity that we’ve seen so far.
It would take something more radical that separates energy use from carbon dioxide spewing—so that then we’d have to stop talking about energy intensity, and start talking about carbon intensity as the important factor.
I’m looking forward to Alex’s book, by the way…