Down with particle physics, up with Big Energy Research!

Noah Smith argues for Down with particle physics, up with Big Energy Research! because we are facing an imminent crisis in fossil fuels. Instead of building ever larger particle accelerators, Smith argues for energy research:

Yes, I think it is very important to push the boundaries of our understanding of fundamental physics. But our society is facing huge, immediate problems - most pressingly, the imminent end of the fossil fuel era.

The blog post at the The Economist by Buttonwood that Smith refers to above argues that the persistently high oil prices are a result of a constraint in supply, not through the actions of oil speculators. There is a suggestion that oil supply has been stagnent since 2005, and that excess supply will disappear in 2015 due to rising demand. This is a manisgestation of the Peak Oil Theory.

Buttonwood sees a problem with the energy return on energy invested, or EROEI:

“What is the minimum EROI that a modern industrial society must have for its energy system for that society to survive?” ask Carey King and Charles Hall in a recent paper [“Relating Financial and Energy Return on Investment”, October 2011.]. The academics’ answer: “Complex societies need a high EROI built on a large primary energy base.”

This is an argument echoed in The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter. Tainter argues that complex societies fail, in part, when the increasing complexity overwhelms the ability to maintain that complexity.

Buttonwood concludes that:

This issue is not much considered by mainstream economists, who are too busy focusing on monetary policy, the impact of fiscal austerity or the need for labour-market reforms. But just as the industrial revolution was built on coal, the post-second-world-war economy was built on cheap oil. There will surely be a significant impact if it has gone for good.

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Buttonwood does not see the societal collapse that Tainter posits. Whereas Smith concedes the possibility when he further warns that:

At its most apocalyptic, the fossil fuel crunch threatens to yank back most of the gains our species has made in the last three centuries. Even a more reasonable assessment puts us in danger of shrinking economies, transportation breakdowns, declining living standards, and technological stagnation. And as for global warming, the only way we are going to halt climate change is by inventing clean energy sources so cheap that we simply leave coal and shale oil and tar sands sitting in the ground.

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Smith is arguing for a free-market solution to the peak oil and the climate change problems through massive government investment in energy research:

But if we are going to replace fossil fuels, we are going to have to do one or more of these hard things. There is just no other option. It's Big Science or bust. Our nation needs to be spending many, many billions of dollars - tens of billions each year, at the very least - on Big Energy research to create better solar power, better biofuels, and better nuclear power.

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And we are expected to achieve this in thirteen (13) years. Smith expects society to retrain physicists from particle research to energy research almost instantaneously. They will have to unlearn decades of knowledge acquired and retrain from scratch. Subsitution of knowledge is not easy.

The problems are so large and imminent that the free market is unable to cope. We need a radical solution in which popular democracy directs societal investment at a cost it is prepared to pay.