GAFAM+: Dismembered by the early 2030s?

In 2011, Prof. Michael Klare, pointed out that the industrial world entered into something akin to a new 30-year war:

“It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s... but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet... Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations that supply them, and the countries that run on them.

The question will be: which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century?

The winners will determine how – and how badly – we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result. The losers will be cast aside and dismembered...”

Forty years later, about midcourse in his anticipation, one may wonder. Was he one of these pundits so often soon proved wrong by history? After all, oil majors, power utilities, oil, gas, and coal extraction are doing great; and there is even a renewal of interest in nuclear… and greenhouse gases (GHGs) keep going up and up.

And why the GAFAM+ anyway?

What do we mean by GAFAM+?

Well Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and a few more like Tesla and the Musk empire, OpenAI, etc… Altogether, the GAFAM+ total market capitalisation is in the order of US$12 trillion. By comparison, that of the oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Total, BP, Shell) is in the order of “only” US$ 3.2 trillion. Especially in the midst of the AI craze, the GAFAM+ appear in full light at the top of the global industrialised world (GIW), indestructible, running the show. They control most of the GIW’s Information and

Communications Technology Infrastructures (ICT).

However…

CISCO data tells us that the global data traffic is over 5 Zettabytes/year; increasing quasi-exponentially towards 16 Zb/y by 2030, possibly much more if the current AI craze continues unabated. This alarms those of us thinking in thermodynamic terms. Global ICT is already over 12% of global power. It trends towards 50% to 100% of global power by 2030: an impossibility!

In the meantime we also know for sure that the total cost of getting energy (expressed in multiples of Joules, not dollars) is already very close to the total energy obtained (also expressed in Joules) and that this total energy cost is increasing exponentially, i.e., very fast. That is, by the early 2030s the net energy available globally is expected to become nil. In thermodynamics, this is called Dead State, when it is no longer possible to obtain any work from a system. In fact, this is an optimistic outlook. We know that our data give floor value estimates for the total energy costs. Which means that the time horizon for when the GIW irretrievably plunges to Dead State may well be sooner.

The threat of Dead State is bound to take most readers by surprise. How could this be? Never heard of such a thing…

“The future was yesterday”

In fact, the matter has been underway since the very early 1970s as the chart below shows.

Figure 1

The real “Peak Oil”, the only one that really matters, occurred around that time. The whole of the GIW runs on net energy from oil, more particularly in the form of gasoline and those middle distillates that enable some 95% of all global trade (diesel, kerosene, etc.) and this includes the production, installation and maintenance of so-called “renewables”.

As shown in the chart above, by now, crude oil is no longer a net energy source. It remains valuable solely as a source of high energy density molecules that are a far more attractive form of energy storage than Lithium and all other material used in batteries. However, to keep accessing those attractive molecules some other source(s) of energy are required, natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass. All are being used to continue supplying oil in what has become a Big Mad Energy Scramble (BigMES).

Scramble, because there is a “glitch”. Accessing net energy from these non-oil sources requires high energy density molecules from oil and accessing these molecules in turn requires net energy from non-oil sources… BigMES is like a dog running madly in circles trying to bite its flea infested tail… The intractable problem here is that thermodynamics precludes any perpetual motion machine. By around 2030 the mad dog will have run out of breath…

BigMES is bound to morph into "Dead State" in short order.

And what about the Climate Emergency then?

By the time Dead State is being reached, in the 2030, de facto, the climate is bound to sort itself out all by itself… Dead State means everything grinds to a halt.

The Olduvai Gorge background in Figure 1 is in recognition of Dr Richard Duncan’s initial Olduvai Scenario. The Olduvai Gorge is where Mode 1 Olduvan stone tools, among the most ancient found, and a range of 1 to 2 million years old Homo remains were found. Duncan anticipated that a civilisational collapse akin to a “return to the Stone Age” was bound to happen at the end of the Oil Age. His mistake was to keep “counting barrels of crude” instead of focusing on net energy from oil… We corrected this, and the prospect in thermodynamic parlance is a point called Dead State.

By that point GHG emissions stop. As the joke goes, “the operation was successful, unfortunately the patient died”… At this stage, the future is truly behind us.

The famous Clinton 1992 re-election campaign motto, “It’s the economy, stupid”, completely missed the defining challenge of our time.

Our actual predicament is “It’s the thermodynamics, stupid!”

0 + 0 = 0

At this level of aggregation, the picture becomes clear: at current rates, 50% to 100% of global power will be demanded by ICT by 2030 when around that time, or a bit before, the global energy supply and use system (GESUS) is bound to be disintegrating towards Dead State…

This brutal reality forces us to reconsider ICT in a new light. The global infrastructures we all rely on are set to break rather abruptly.

In fact, in operational terms, the Internet is breaking up already. This is happening along private app ecosystems, along totalitarian lines with firewalls increasingly set up by regimes controlling China, Russia, etc., that isolate these countries and install systems of surveillance that control their citizens, along political groupings, along umpteen paywall fences, etc… And of late, some countries are taking up dragging anchors and cutting fibre optic cables and HVDC power cables…

However, we must now also come to terms with the fact that global ICT infrastructures are even more in danger physically in thermodynamic terms.

Some 486 underseas optic cables carry 99% of global Internet communications; the massive amounts of Zettabytes quoted earlier. The GAFAM+ already control over 64% of those cables and are investing in 70% of the new cables being laid down and the satellite networks. Not only is the fate of the GAFAM+ intimately dependent on the fate of the global ICT infrastructure but they also own most of it.

It should be clear to all who care to look that the most likely fate for the GAFAM+ is to have disintegrated, or be in the process of disintegrating by 2030, possibly before… and that global ICT infrastructures are set to undergo the same fate. This does not mean merely carved into a raft of smaller businesses (e.g., as in anti- trust rulings). It means in the process of vanishing altogether, along with oil majors – over US$16 trillion disappearing like mist in the morning sun… and, of course, much else besides.

It does not have to go down this way

Put in colloquial terms, the overlooked necessity is that “Bandwidth requires juice and juice requires bandwidth”. In other words, surviving Dead State requires a complete re-thinking of both how we access and use energy and of how we communicate and compute. This translates into a shift away from the current centralised duality (on the one hand central power stations, solar farms, wind farms, etc., dispatching electrons and on the other hand massive data centres and hierarchically structured communications infrastructures) towards codependently arising, integrated energy and information systems.

This is what the Fourth Transition Initiative (FTI) developed and coordinated by Lichen Engineering Ltd is about.

FTI’s focus is the development and global deployment of the Cool Planet Internet of Energy™ comprising finely distributed point-of-use power generation, the nGeni GreenBoxes™ incorporating heat pump functionality and energy storage, integrated into non-hierarchical, meshed, Intelligent Energy and Communication Networks (IECNs), the nGeni nS.O. ™, combined with crypto-token energy and information trading, the nGeni energy backed eSol™ token system.

It only takes some daring

FTI calls the dismemberment and disintegration of the GAFAM+ an "NO". NO, in the sense that the GAFAM+ ongoing existence is an impossibility. And NO as in Necessary Opportunity:

• It is necessary to anticipate the disintegration in order to, at the very least, mitigate a global catastrophe in the making and in order to build something else with vastly superior performances; and

• It is an amazing opportunity because presently almost no one else sees it and no one else is able to do anything about it.

  
  

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult” - (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, letter 104, section 26, line 5).

As the ICT disintegration takes place, the ICT-GAFAM+ NO involves retrieving the best of global ICT infrastructures and converting them into a global IECN, the nGeni Cool Planet Internet of Energy™. Seizing this NO over the next five years is perfectly feasible technically. It only takes some daring.

All considered, it seems that back in 2011 Prof Klare was insightful. Rather than a war we call what is happening the BigMES and yes, what is now unfolding is that “The losers will be cast aside and dismembered”.

He concluded his analysis:

“Were I to wager a guess [for a range of most beneficial solutions], I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralised, easy to make and install, and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment.

For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s. The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.”

This is what FTI’s nGeni is about. The laptop analogy is fitting in that nGeni integrates seamlessly accessing and using energy, networking, computing, and trading, all eventually 100% solar, 100% sustainable and affordably.