EROI as fantasy:

Its about time somebody brought this up. EROI may or may not be valuable as a kind of heuristic to describe the problem that extraction of lower grade fossil fuel resources or so-called renewable energy must surmount--ceasing to be an expenditure of high grade fossil energy as they are now, and becoming a generator energy; however, its impossible in practical terms to actually calculate the EROI of anything. The insistence on doing just such a thing belies several fundamental errors. These errors are, first, in continuing the instrumental understanding of technology (technology is a tool that serves human desires.) Second, and related, is an attempt to sort human activity into rational-productive extraction and transmission of earth's resources on the one hand, and superfluous or "ornamental" expenditure of those resources on the other. These two errors, in turn, are reflected in two myths for EROI.

The first is the energy cost of item X. We can't isolate the costs of a particular item from the pre-existing milieu, which was built and is sustained by fossil fuels, and say "this is what is necessary to produce item X," taking into account only the costs of the materials, capital investments in the factories, etc. this is short-sighted economics that ignores entirely the notion of externalized costs, or how those materials and capital investments exist only within a wider society where it is just as important, say, to have a judge on the bench or a kindergarten teacher teaching ABC's as it is to have copper or plastic supplied to the factory. How could you ever possibly calculate those costs? Marx proved that even the chronically unemployed slum dweller forms a necessary structural component of capitalism, being part of the "reserve army of labor" that depresses wages and prevents labor organization.

The reality is that a society is crisscrossed with myriad arrangements of power that exists as a kind of a stasis that is constantly resolving itself out of the interplay of individual things, people, desires etc. and a particular practice, such as manufacturing an item, is inseparable from these arrangements. A particular process can enduring some flexing of these relations--but it cannot be isolated from any and all connection and viewed by itself.

The second myth is that can we contrast to our current conspicuous consumption a kind of fantasy of a total mobilization, along the lines of the Soviet Union in world war two, of all human activity not to war but to energy extraction, so as to provide a kind of baseline of necessary energy for the sustenance of industrial technology. Total mobilization is no baseline at all, however; much like the extravagant expenditure of fossil fuels, it chews up accumulated "social capital," leaving human relationships shattered, lives irreparably interrupted, and the populace spiritually drained.

I think these myths--that of isolating the total energy cost of a particular object, and providing a societal baseline of energy expenditure--are the myths that undergird most of the concept of EROI, or at least its application to our pet question "will industrial society collapse?" (Please God may it be so...) More than that though, they rely on this idea that these is an autonomous human desire that exists out there, independent of production, and that desire uses technology as a tool to accomplish its ends.

This ignores the fact that much of industrial activity is devoted to increasing, shaping and directing this desire, only then to (partially) satiate it. Desire itself is produced, specifically by the mass-production of symbols by machines. Humans have a very specific function within technology. Other than providing rational calculation that directs fossil fuel energy into novel forms and arbitrates between machines, we provide a time horizon--a future--for a process that is, being bereft of all ends or goals in itself, is unable to direct itself.

But by in turn being acted upon by technology in our desires, we serve to internalize this futural horizon of desire within it, and serve as a necessary element in propelling the machine forward, to further extraction and reduction of nature to energy. In other words, there is a machine that spreads across the earth that has not goal or use, but is just a pure instrumentality that swallows all desires up within it. this pure instrumentality is just the reduction of the earth to energy at hand, and then its arbitrary expenditure. Having no desire that masters it, this machine is, essentially, a desert-producing machine. a machine of pure annihilation. In this way, our desires--which naturally desire love and peace and freedom--are enslaved.