This method of potential money production from the consequences of historic energy is what drives the mining (oils and minerals) Industries.
But historic energy is not the only source of money.
The sun at the centre of our solar system provides us with about 430,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy - per hour.. That is slightly more than the current annual energy demand for the 7.5 billion humans of the planet. [2020]
This energy produces the food we convert into huge amount of money (and I know you thought it was out of some philanthropic asperation to feed the masses- but alas no! - it is solely driven by the insatiable desire to make shit loads of money, as a consequence of this energy
This method of making money from current solar energy is what drives our primary industries (agriculture, horticulture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishing and now electricity generation. - (to name but a few).
But historic energy and solar energy are not the only sources of energy available to humans.
An adult human on average generates somewhere between 6,000 to 9,000 kilojoules of energy a day, thanks to the conversion of the energy value of our nutritional intake.
Some of this bio energy (about 15%) can be converted into money.(or fat it you dont want to spend it)
And if you don’t believe me simply get a bucket and a sponge go to a carpark, offer to expend some of your surplus energy in washing someone’s car for the exchange of some dollars and before you know it you will have utilised the fundamental principle underpinning the generation of money.
Remembering however the first principal 'demand'
However, for the purposes of completeness it is neccessary to consider the acquisition of other's money without the expenditure of much energy.
While not zero it certainly has a lot lower energy demand than to initially generate/harvest it yourself.
The one thing that economists are right about is that the economy is the way that the money, (generated from energy), gets circulated.
Just like in the old days when you could take a scoop net down to your friendly estuary and scoop up a pot of prawns as they swam by, so to it is, if you develop a strategy, you can harvest some of that energy money, made by others, as it swims by.
This method of money harvesting of that existing energy money is what drives the tourist, education, health, gambling and entertainment industries, and of course Government Taxation - to name but a few.
In 2020 the world economy, according to ecconomist, produced $81 trillion (US) of GDP. That is, $10,800 for every man, women and child on the planet. (192 million₫[dong] if you live in Vietnam)
And don’t forget the GDP figure is just what the net caught. It doesn't’t measure what passed through or was able to avoid being caught – altogether!
How much of that cited GDP figure is ‘energy money’ and how much of it is ‘recycled currency’ and how much of that figure represents value that has been counted 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 times, as it continues to loop through one system or another - we don’t know.
We don’t bother to invest, in the technology we have, to harvest the data neccessary to be able to answer those questions.
I do know that Facebook has over 1 billion accounts and thereby monitors the activity of 1 billion people but the major global powers such as China, United States, Germany, Japan, but to name a few, don’t seem to have the ability or inclination to do what Google and Facebook can do, to harvest data on (money movement?) in it's large masses of society.
So! where to from here?
Well, if we need to utilise the historic and or current expenditure of energy, in order to generate money, to fuel the human economies of the planet, to meet the demands for consumption of goods and services, by the ever increasing number of humans occupying the planet, expanding at an expotential rate, with their ever increasing social lifestyles expectations, then what are the longer-term consequences for the harvesting of all this energy for the purposes of providing the money to pay for these luxuries of life that money can buy, then we need to understand that humans are not the only biomass on the planet that needs the products of energy.
We can’t actually weigh all the biomass of the planet to work out how many tonnes this represents in order to know the energy requirements of living things but what some scientists have done is to calculate the amount (mass) of carbon there is within organic cells of a wide range of Taxa.
If we accept that we currently cannot know the total biomass of the planet we can however do the next best thing. We can figure out the total amount of carbon within that biomass and then use that as a comparison for the purposes of calculating the relationship between humans use of energy for money creation in relation to other taxa needs for energy for survival.
Scientists tell us that currently the amount of carbon in the biomass of the planet is somewhere in the vicinity of 550 billion tonnes.and that biological activity on the planet is producing about 100 billion tonnes a year.
Here is the biomass relationship
As can be seen humans are about one 7500th of the biomas of plants. [Ref]
Plants have a hugh resoivoir of stored energy and according to Cornell University researcher David Pimentel
'Approximately 50% of the world's biomass is used by humans {food; lumber; pulp; fuel; medicines; support for our animals and the microbes in the natural ecosystem, essential for our survival}' [Ref]
So, we don’t know of course what of this 225Gt (50% of 550Gt) is directly consumed by humans without being purchased in order to generate their own personal energy needs and how much of it is converted into money.
We do know however that in order to produce 9000 kilojoules of energy (The daily need for an average [life time and global] human) comes from just under 600g of a mixed diet of food which needs to be consumed. [Ref] or 220kg per year per humans (Average::age, lifetime, genetics)
*However based on world production data humans grow XXXXkg per person (Sorry there is no reliable data)
That 220kg of etable food, requires just on 1 tonne (1095kg) of food production per person per year.
SO!
Apparently, there are about 140,000 farms in Australia producing both plant and meat food products.
Suppose the average farm household is 4 persons, then 560,000 tonne of food annually needs to be grown to meet the personal nutritional needs of those humans - the rest (tonnes) is for money.
In 2020 it is reported that Australia produced at least 55.6 million tonnes of food to support human life.(maybe as much as 70 million [Ref])
In 2020, in Australia, that 55.5 million tonnes of food was converted into $80 billion(au) money, That 98.9% of the energy used to produce food that year was turned onto money.
On a different issues, see how much tax the farmers paid on that income.
The Rise and Fall of Money
So now we come to climate change. More correctly the term is Climate Changed (past tense)
At presence as demonstrated above the vast amount of money that drives our economies is being produced by historic energy.
That is oil, gas and minerals but these are all finite products and eventually insufficient will remain in order for them to continue to support our massive economic demand
Of course the sun will shine for a few thousands of millions of years yet, so we will be fine there. But we will need to utilise more of the energy of the sun in order to continue to generate wealth within communities and of course most of the technology that is required under present designs to convert sun's energy into money is via the production of electricity is primarily from the particles falling on the planet or as a consequence of the function of the climate producing wind from which some of their energy can likewise be converted
However all of these depend on continued abundance of the products that are used for the manufacture of the technology.
While nobody knows exactly when we will reach the point where all the easy fruit is harvested butwe do know that eventually these products will become prohibitively expensive and thier end of availability is inevitable.
The other and far more important aspect however is the conversion of energy from the sun into food resources for the massive population of humans on the planet. An aspect that 'climate changed' is about to have a say on!
United Nations indications are that the global population of humans will peak about 2051 at somewhere in the vicinity of 8.8 billion that is unless this estimation is radically changed by global conflict or increasingly severe climate impacts.
The big take home message though, from understanding about the generation of money, which has built the massive world economies, is that this source of production of money is likely to take a severe dive over the next 100 years.
The other critical issue to be considered is the ‘destruction of money'
By money I don't mean a piece of plastic with all the fancy artwork plastered all over it, I really mean the value of the assets - money.
In purchasing a non-money asset, you take a portion of the asset 'money', that was created from energy and you converted it into a safety deposit box.
Your aspirational goal is that should ever the occasion arise you can convert that asset back into a money asset (liquidity) which can be used to meet your needs.
The problem is that the value of an asset, any asset, can rapidly change and when that happens this actually sucs out of the global economy the value of the money that was used in it's purchase.
Let's use some examples.
You buy a new Apple phone it costs say $1500. You will use energy money (15 Hours of 3kJ per hour of energy produced by the consumption of the food you purchased for $X) and convert that liquidity into a non money asset.
However, within a few years the value of that asset has all but evaporated and when that happens the energy money that was brought in to the global economy, which enabled you to purchase the phone, also has evaporated.
Another useful example is bankruptcy.
Humans have historically stored their excess money asset in repositories such as banks and banks have structured themselves so that they can use your money to harvest money for themselves from the community. They do this by lending out your money at a premium so at the end of the day when they return your money to you they will retain the harvested money.
However, the one single feature that all bankruptcy has in common is that it results in the lost other people's money.
Generally it's a bank but in a global context it's of no consequence whose money it is because just like the depreciated value of the mobile phone, that money has just dissolved into the miasma
When we do this, in global proportions, we have the capacity to destroy large stores of energy created money.
Hope you have found this useful and interesting - so far!
Warren Bolton
June 2022