Charles A S Hall

College of Environmental Science and Forestry , The State University of New York · Biology, Environmental Science

Energy companies, like companies more generally, routinely have to make investment decisions by comparing alternative investment projects. In the face of the uncertainty of the current energy transition, traditional economic tools, such as discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, that depend on long term cash forecasting, offer limited, deterministic a...

New biophysical theory and electronic databases raise the prospect of deriving fundamental rules of life, a conceptual framework for how the structures and functions of molecules, cells and individual organisms give rise to emergent patterns and processes of ecology, evolution and biodiversity. This framework is very general, applying across taxa o...

This paper assesses how much oil remains to be produced, and whether this poses a significant constraint to global development. We describe the different categories of oil and related liquid fuels, and show that public-domain by-country and global proved (1P) oil reserves data, such as from the EIA or BP Statistical Review, are very misleading and...

The Limits to Growth was a remarkable, and remarkably influential, model, book and concept published 50 years ago this year. Its importance is that it used, for essentially the first time, a quantitative systems approach and a computer model to question the dominant paradigm for most of society: growth. Initially, many events, and especially the oi...

Here we review and extend the equal fitness paradigm (EFP) as an important step in developing and testing a synthetic theory of ecology and evolution based on energy and metabolism. The EFP states that all organisms are equally fit at steady state, because they allocate the same quantity of energy,~22.4 kJ/g/generation to the production of offsprin...

Here we review and extend the equal fitness paradigm (EFP) as an important step in developing and testing a synthetic theory of ecology and evolution based on energy and metabolism. The EFP states that all organisms are equally fit at steady state, because they allocate the same quantity of energy, ~22.4 kJ/g/generation to production of offspring....

Here we review and extend the equal fitness paradigm (EFP) as an important step in developing and testing a synthetic theory of ecology and evolution based on energy and metabolism. The EFP states that all organisms are equally fit at steady state, because they allocate the same quantity of energy, ~22.4 kJ/g/generation to production of offspring....

Many parts of the world are currently facing unprecedented social turmoil. Few understand that most of these “exploding” situations have a biophysical basis in patterns of consumption and the ratio of number of humans to resources available. Most “solutions” proposed are political oppression or, for the lucky, economic development, usually led by c...

We resurrect the metabolic life table (MLT), a combination of life table and energy budget that quantifies how metabolic energy is acquired and allocated to survival, growth and reproduction over the life cycle. To highlight its broad implications and utility, we apply this framework to John Brett’s classic data on sockeye salmon. In the life cycle...

A metabolic life table (MLT) is a combination of energy budget and life table that quantifies metabolism and life history over an entire life cycle. It provides a conceptual framework for integrating data on physiology, demography and ecology that are usually the subject of discipline- and taxon-specific studies. Our MLT for sockeye salmon revives...

Cities are a common and natural characteristic of both nature and human cultures over the last 10,000 years. Ecologically, both natural and human cities are regions of concentrated animal life, intense energy consumption (respiration, or R), and concentrated material accumulations and flows. They require much larger regions of net production (P) ou...

This is a chapter in a book copyrighted by Springer. The whole book: Energy and the wealth of Nations : and introduction to BioPhysical Economics is available from Springer or Amazon etc. If you want some of the published academic papers form which it wsa developed send an email to : chall@esf.edu Charlie Hall

We report energy stocks and flows, as well as other ecosystem properties, measured in Little Sandy Creek in Upstate New York as part of an intensive class project in a graduate-level Systems Ecology course at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Our study synthesizes information on Little Sandy Creek both as a whole system and th...

To meet the COP21 2 °C climate target, humanity would need to complete a transition to renewable energy within the next several decades. But for decades, fossil fuels will continue to underpin many fundamental activities that allow modern society to function. Unfortunately, net energy yield from fossil fuels is now falling, and despite substantial...

Most plant, animal and microbial species of widely varying body size and lifestyle are nearly equally fit as evidenced by their coexistence and persistence through millions of years. All organisms compete for a limited supply of organic chemical energy, derived mostly from photosynthesis, to invest in the two components of fitness: survival and pro...

This is a chapter in our book "Energy and the wealth of nations" available from SPringer. Springer owns the rights.... If you get it make sure its second edition. If you want to plead poverty email me at chall@esf.edu and we shall see what we can do......

Our story starts with investments. The concept of investment, of using resources already in hand to attempt to get more in the future, is familiar and essential to the human condition, indeed to all of life. It can explain a tremendous amount of our behavior. At the level of ourselves, our families, our communities, our nation or our world everythi...

Most people do not think much about it, but energy and its effects are pervasive and ubiquitous in our life. Most of us eat three meals a day to get the energy to run ourselves, but we do not usually think about this in terms of energy. We fill our car with gasoline but rarely think about its energy content, where it came from or whether our childr...

I repeat: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973). This chapter is about energy and evolution. We start with a brief review of Darwinian evolution, then build on that by first considering another important question in ecology relating to the distribution and abundance of species. I do this thro...

The principal energy sources in antiquity were all derived directly from the sun: human and animal muscle power, wood, flowing water, and wind. About 300 years ago the industrial revolution began. It brought an exponential increase in the energy available to humans to do economic work. This revolution began with stationary wind-powered and water-po...

To chemists Frederick Soddy and William Ostwald, anthropologist Leslie White, archeologist Joseph Tainter, historian John Perlin, systems ecologist Howard T. Odum, sociologist Frederick Cottrell, economist Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, energy scientist Vaclav Smil and a number of others in these and other disciplines, human history, including contempor...

The concept of EROI was introduced in Chap. 6 and applied there to issues of biology and evolution. But the concept is pervasive, and certainly applies very much to modern industrial economies. The following three chapters introduce the concept, show how it is derived and applies it to the American and world economies.

Neither the first nor the second laws of thermodynamics address the rate at which energy transformations or processes occur. But the rate of energy use is critically important, as is obvious in a foot race. In a competitive world, it is important to not only “out energy” one’s competition but to do it fairly rapidly, that is before the resource is...

Perhaps the most important issue facing mankind is whether or not our civilization is sustainable (e.g., Heinberg and Fridley 2016). While most people do not think much about this topic, there certainly is enough information and literature to make us understand that this is a real issue of potential enormous importance.

Humans as biological organisms must operate within the basic laws of thermodynamics. But starting with Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1880s, many great thinkers have delved more deeply to see that life itself, and all of biology, is essentially about obtaining and using energy. In other words, all of life is about making energy investments to gain more en...

We have defined energy as that which is responsible for any motion. Since the world we live in is mostly dynamic, not static, this means that energy is in and being used by essentially everything around us: the wind blowing clouds and trees, your pets or friends or family around you, all of the appliances and micro appliances that surround even the...

This chapter gives the basic methodology for calculating EROI, discusses some controversial or unresolved issues and confronts a number of critiques that have been laid against the technique, both generally and with respect to particular applications. EROI analysis is not precision science, but with attention to the problems and uncertainties I bel...

In order to understand what energy is, it is necessary to understand the laws of thermodynamics. The most important step in this process is unraveling the relation of heat to other forms of energy. Thus we start with an historical perspective of how the human understanding of heat and energy evolved from mystical to increasingly scientific. Much of...

• Download high-res image (296KB) • Download full-size image Charles A.S. Hall is a Systems Ecologist who received his PhD under Howard T. Odum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1970. He was professor over the past 45 years at Cornell University, the University of Montana, and the College of Environmental Science and Forestry o...

Hominins are smaller, slower, and weaker than most large mammals, yet they have been eating meat from freshly killed large mammals since before the invention of sophisticated weaponry. It is thought that they could have achieved this seemingly impossible feat through persistence hunting, a practice powered by endurance running. Essentially, one or...

This authoritative but highly accessible book presents the reader with a powerful framework for understanding the critical role of the energy return on investment (EROI) in the survival and well-being of individuals, ecosystems, businesses, economies and nations. Growth and development are fundamental and ubiquitous processes at all scales, from in...

This book takes you on a unique journey through American history, taking time to consider the forces that shaped the development of various cities and regions, and arrives at an unexpected conclusion regarding sustainability. From the American Dream to globalization to the digital and information revolutions, we assume that humans have taken contro...

Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, the U.S. economy transitioned from a largely rural society, still based predominantly on agriculture and renewable resources, to an urban society dependent to an increasing extent on non-renewable resources and cheap fossil energy, and a globalized industrial agricultural and manufacturing system. The shift...

Everyone is aware of nature. It is all around us. Nature is the weather, sunshine, winds, rain, flowing rivers, and the tides on the coast. It is also the living world, including forests, grasslands, wetlands, and farm fields. There is also much that we don’t see, from microscopic organisms such as protozoans, bacteria, and fungi to the many chemic...

Everyone has heard a lot about the topic of energy lately, and many people have an opinion on such issues as “U.S. energy independence,” “renewable energy,” “peak oil,” “fracking,” “nuclear energy,” “coal,” and so on. Often where one stands on these issues relates to where one sits politically, with politicians and a compliant media constituting th...

Manifest Destiny is the sine qua non of American history. At one time almost every American child was toilet trained on this idea of inevitable expansion of European settlement to blanket the continent. In 1833, the author Horace Greeley is reputed to have said “Go west young man.” He expressed the widespread feeling at the time that America was a...

In Chaps. 5–9 we reviewed the major megatrends that will affect society in the twenty-first century. Now, let’s take a look at how these trends may affect the cities and regions that we discussed in Chap. 4. The sustainability rankings are based on the following key factors and trends, and how they are expected to vary across the American landscape...

On May 9, 2013, the earth’s climate system reached a notable milestone. The concentration of carbon dioxide, or CO2, at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii passed 400 parts per million (ppm) when averaged over a whole day. This is the first time in more than 3 million years that the concentration has been this high. The CO2 concentration has increa...

Food is a major preoccupation of all animals, and people are no exception. The number of magazines, whole sections of newspapers, and shows on television attest to our delight in food and cooking. An incredible diversity of restaurants, with many celebrity chefs, offer their services in the U.S. today. There are probably more people who know who Em...

In the preceding chapter, we discussed the growth of the United States from 1790 to 2010 as the population expanded and spread across the continent. People did not diffuse evenly across the land. Population centers developed in resource-rich areas near the coast and along waterways where farming first dominated the landscape and along trade routes...

Just before his death in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish mathematician and astronomer, published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), one of the most important books in the history of science. By showing that the sun—rather than the earth—was at the center of the universe (actually the solar syste...

What is our vision for the future? The analysis in this book strongly indicates that systemic change is inevitable and that the rising affluence (of some, but certainly not all) during the past century cannot be sustained. This understanding is not new. For most of the history of mankind, humans lived mainly on the annual solar energy input that po...

There is nothing more critical to human existence than food. While a proper climate and water are arguably as important as food, they are usually present, but food shortages from population expansion, climatic extremes, conflict, and concentration of output in the hands of the powerful are a nearly constant characteristic of one part or another of...

This chapter examines the causal relationship between disturbance, succession, and ecological changes by considering the biotic feedback mechanisms. It also provides an outline of rippling effects of natural phenomena, agricultural clearings, river flooding, and human-induced disturbances to the Luquillo Mountains and other tropical ecosystems in t...

Although the English term ‘ecosystem’ was coined in 1935 by Tansley, ecosystems have been the subject of human inquiry for millennia. The first written records that survive include the work of Aristotle, an insightful and knowledgeable natural historian, and especially his student Theophrastus, who was interested in how different species of trees g...

Current liquid-fuel supplies in the United States are derived primarily from relatively inexpensive fossil fuels. The low cost and widespread availability of petroleum has, over the last 150 years, facilitated enormous growth in the U.S. and global economies, in their respective human populations and resource consumption, and in their attendant imp...

We examined data on fuel consumption and costs for the years 1950 through 2013, along with economic and population data, to determine the percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) spent each year on fuels, including fossil fuels and nuclear ore, and the growth of the economy. We found that these variables are inversely correlated. This suggests...

For the past 150 years, economics has been treated as a social science in which economies are modeled as a circular flow of income between producers and consumers. In this "perpetual motion" of interactions between firms that produce and households that consume, little or no accounting is given of the flow of energy and materials from the environme...

We have found that human welfare, as measured both by economic standard of living and by various quality of life indices, is highly correlated with energy, especially when availability, energetic efficiency (Energy Return on Investment at a societal level, EROISOC) and equity of distribution are all considered (in the Lambert Energy Index, LEI). If...

We discuss the sustainability of natural and human systems in the United States in relation to 21st century threats associated with energy scarcity, climate change, the loss of ecosystem services, the limitations of neoclassical economics, and human settlement patterns. Increasing scarcity and the decreasing return on investment for existing conven...

Early cities depended on local, solar-based energy resources for their metabolism. Over time, cities have become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly, as they facilitate exploitation of solar resources from much farther away. Alternatives to fossil fuels, typically generated locally, often provide lower surplus energ...

The near- and long-term societal effects of declining EROI are uncertain, but probably adverse. A major obstacle to examining social implications of declining EROI is that we do not have adequate empirical understanding of how EROI is linked, directly or indirectly, to an average citizen′s ability to achieve well-being. To evaluate the possible lin...

Oil and related products continue to be prime enablers of the maintenance and growth of nearly all of the world’s economies. The dramatic increase in the price of oil through mid-2008, along with the coincident (and possibly resultant) global recession, highlight our continued vulnerability to future limitations in the supply of cheap oil. The very...

All forms of economic production and exchange involve the use of energy directly and in the transformation of materials. Until recently, cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed most of society to ignore the importance of contributions to the economic process from the biophysical world as well as the potential limits to growth. This...

Traditional life cycle analysis and energy payback time studies on solar PV systems often give estimates that appear quite favorable—that the energy invested in building solar collectors can be paid back by the device within 1 or 2 years (e.g., Fthenakis and Alsema 2006; Fthenakis et al. 2011). If the collectors last for 25 years (the usual assumpt...

All forms of economic production and exchange involve the transformation of materials, which in turn requires energy. Until recently cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed many to ignore the important contributions from the biophysical world to the economic process and potential limits to growth. The report that follows, commissio...

In China, there are many who know that while oil production has increased steadily for several decades that oil is a finite substance whose production at some point cannot continue to increase. When will that time come? There have been a number of attempts to predict that as is developed in the next section.

China’s oil industry has developed more than 60 years since the establishment of China in 1949, creating many achievements in exploration, development and production to meet the increasing needs for oil. What is the current situation of the Chinese oil industry? The next section analysis that.

Whether or when peak oil occurs there is another, related issue that we think may be as or perhaps even more impactful, and certainly more general. This is a suite of specific concerns that surround the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI). We turn to this next.

This book provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the Chinese oil industry, its four historical phases and its role in the industrialization of China. Resources and exploration, pipeline development, refining and marketing, petroleum and natural gas pricing policies, and international cooperation are all addressed, as are conservation, re...

No substitute for petroleum has yet been developed that can deliver energy at the scale, quality, or within the time frame required to replace decreasing availability. Most alternative energy sources provide much less energy than petroleum and do not have its high energy density. The interplay among shrinking resources, energy scarcity, economic cr...

Sustainable development of the coastal zone is a complex topic involving social, economic, bio-physical, ecological, and legal components. Nevertheless such complex topics must be explained in a relatively simple way to avoid incorrect analysis in studies by students and decisions by policymakers. In general, the usual procedure is to set up social...