Discussion
Diminishing returns:
Hukki's 1962 conjecture is that the energy consumption of grinding an ore (to extract its target metal) increases as the particle size diminishes.
We used the richest and easiest ores first. The particles left are much smaller.
And today in the world of digital comminution…
“ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million and ChatGPT-5, costing $5 billion, was delayed and when released wasn’t noticeably better than the last version.”
…However, the financial system views itself as the whole system. But it’s not.
All of it, and the energy and material flows it facilitates, sits atop a functioning ecosystem.
And when that destabilises (which is modernity’s current project), “the pyramid doesn’t just wobble, it implodes.”
…Nate goes on to dissect the latest oil and gas report from the IEA and it’s another story of diminishing returns.
It’s well worth a watch. I’ll post some extracts of its story of extraction here
…First up, the picture of where oil and gas has been.
At the base here in the darker blue is the essentially flat rate of production of what has historically been considered conventional onshore oil.
To that we have added shallow water oil in light blue and deepwater oil in darker green. All of this is ‘conventional oil’ with the highest BTU content per barrel. It’s just that some of it is harder and therefore more expensive to get.
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…Yesterday, I learned via Nate Hagens of the inverted Exter pyramid, a conceptualisation of how when financial crises coalesce, capital flows down diminishing tiers of commodities in search of greater security.