Energy consumption increased at a record rate in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Energy consumption increased at a record rate in 2018

economist.com

80 pointsspac113 comments

From the article: “Perhaps the most worrying finding in the report is the threat of a feedback loop between severe weather events and carbon emissions. According to the IEA, a hotter-than-average summer and colder-than-average winter led to greater use of heating and air conditioning, which together were responsible for about half of the rise in energy demand in America and roughly a fifth of the worldwide increase”

In the same article it points to US and China as the worst offenders. Sure the availability of cheaper energy may cause increased consumption, but the idea of this vicious cycle is pretty scary.

> but the idea of this vicious cycle is pretty scary.

And I suspect it doesn't stop with increased air conditioning. Efforts to provide relief and rebuild communities after natural disasters will require more energy still.

Also competition over limited resources means that it is in nobody’s interests to reduce energy use first.

The only way this gets fixed is with cleaner energy mix and active carbon removal.

Historically, competition over limited resources has often led to reduction in population from warfare and disease.

A significant population reduction from the same, today, would reduce carbon emissions.

This is an observation, not a proposal, suggestion, or endorsement.

I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that a major war that kills enough wealthy people to more than offset its own carbon cost is relatively unlikely during the next ten years. Unfortunately the next ten years are what determines whether we will be able to limit global warming to two degrees or not.

Modern war also produces a lot of carbon. Tank fuel usage is measured in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon. An M1 abrams gets 0.6 mpg, a F-22 at military power gets 0.4. Now imagine the fuel usage required by two post-industrial countries having it out rather than the US running counter-insurance operations.

I suspect that even if modern war dropped populations enough to dent CO2 production, the war itself would burn enough oil to offset it.

Honestly this is a drop in the bucket compared to what normal automobile traffic produces. Not that war shouldn't be avoided, but carbon emissions are the last of the reasons we'd want to worry about.

It’s more than a drop. The world produces a bit short of 100 million barrels of oil per day, and the US military alone consumes a bit north of 100 million barrels per year (109). This means that the US military consumes a bit over one days worth of oil consumption alone in just fuel. This isn’t even accounting for the 30,000 GWH they consume in electricity, and what carbon emissions they might produce.

And remember, the US military is not running at full speed. It’s currently involved in a few counter insurance missions, which while not cheap are a far cry from the resources required for 2 modern nations having it out. There are fewer than 20,000 soldiers in hot spots as of 2017, out of the 1.3 million active duty personnel available. You can bet if the US were to go against China or Russia our oil usage would go through the roof.

I wonder what the peak energy usage was in WW2, say in 1941, when both the European and Pacific fronts were still ongoing.

A lot.

I couldn’t find hard numbers, but the range appears to be about a billion barrels of oil per year for the US, maybe higher.

Interestingly, we used a lot less fuel per soldier then. The normal back then was 1 gallon per soldier per day. By desert storm we were up to 4, and by 2007 we consumed 16 gallons per soldier per day[0].

Now obviously we have a smaller army now, which goes a long way to explain the lower total consumption than in WW2, but it is mildly terrifying to consider what a WW2 sized engagement would consume at 16x the per-soldier fuel consumption.

0: https://www.forbes.com/2008/06/05/mileage-military-vehicles-...

> I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that a major war that kills enough wealthy people to more than offset its own carbon cost is relatively unlikely during the next ten years.

A nuclear war will:

1. Kill hundreds of millions of wealthy people.

2. Is the most likely kind of 'real' conflict between wealthy people.

Nuclear war may or may not be the "most likely" kind of war, but it's still, as the person you're responding to said, "relatively unlikely."

(I would say it's very unlikely.)

Given how many close calls we have had, and given how there's thousands of nuclear weapons, pointed at eachother, on hairtrigger alert, and given that a number of countries allow themselves to use nuclear weapons in a first-strike scenario, I strongly feel that the possibility of a nuclear war in any given year is ~1-2%.

1. The US and Russia are currently doing their best to antagonize eachother.

2. The US is currently doing its best to extract itself from the tyrrany of MAD (By building ICBM defenses.) [1] If MAD breaks down, the whole house of cards that justifies the existence of nuclear weapons as a guarantor of peace collapses.

3. The Russians have an automated retaliatory-strike system - should they be attacked, it will end the world. Hopefully, there aren't any bugs with it. (But knowing how software projects go, of course there are bugs with it.) [2]

4. The decision to launch, once made by either country's leadership, cannot be second-guessed by saner subordinates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

I mean, I'm not trying to be rude, but it doesn't really matter what you "strongly feel" -- your estimate of 1-2% is just a wild guess.

I "strongly feel" it's not very likely, whatever very and likely mean, so there.

> possibility of a nuclear war in any given year is ~1-2%

If it were that high, we'd likely have had one by now. I think it's an order of magnitude lower than that.

Well, nuclear weapons have been around for 74 years, and there's been either zero or one nuclear war, depending on your definition. So ~1% and ~1‰ chance per annum are both supported by the data; 1% is more likely if you're in the "one" camp and 1‰ if you're in the "zero" camp.

But much more importantly, we've all been discounting the cooling effects of nuclear winter.

This is the poster child for survivorship - in its most literal sense - bias.

I don't think that 2) is true, and I don't think a conflict between wealthy people is going to happen in the next ten years.

Except that we have 6.5 billion excess people, killing off a a couple hundred million won't change the fact that the permafrost is melting and will start spewing massive amounts of carbon and methane into the upper atmosphere.

The collapse of Yemen (which is running out of water) may be considered the first of these.

Europe is actually reducing energy use though, it's amazing looking at the difference between the US and Europe on that chart, given Europe is a similar sized economy, with a larger population. If the US increase is half down to a.c. and heating, perhaps it reflects that US is just far more exposed to the impacts of climate change.

As you say, we need to push zero carbon technologies in, and break the link between increased energy use (which looks inevitable) and increased carbon use.

The worry is that even if we do manage to get up to a large percentage of the electricity grid using nuclear or renewables, and electrifying transport and heating, which together would be a monumental task, it will just leave us with a glut of gas, coal and oil on the market. Reduced demand will just lead to lowered prices because of massive sunk investments in exploration and production (for instance: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/09/the-truth-about...).

In other words, to make this transition without government intervention, renewables and/or nuclear don't just need to go below the total cost of production for fossil fuels, they need to fall below even the marginal cost of production. It is a massive gamble on the ability for technology and economies of scale to reduce the costs of alternative technologies to that extent. In fact even if that happens, with someone like Trump in charge, there's a serious chance the government will try and bail out the companies that have made these bad investments, and still burn the fossil fuels even if they are uneconomic.

From what I've seen, most people keep their houses far cooler than necessary in the summer.

I keep my house at about 80 degrees in the summer. AC basically keeps the humidity under control. I don't understand keeping the house at 70 degrees.

Necessary and comfortable are two different things. As long as the true external costs of keeping your house at a comfortable temperature are not included in the actual cost of air conditioning, people will choose comfortable rather than necessary.

That suggests the best way for efficiency is to build it to high standards and ideally to last in the first place - not only for disaster resistance but energy efficiency.

>Sure the availability of cheaper energy may cause increased consumption...

But those cheaper alternatives should also be safer alternatives.

Besides the obvious "save the world from destructive climate change," the reason I want renewables to overtake petrochemicals is the I am sick of living in a world where energy=bad.

My mind's eye future has floating buildings, undergound beaches, offworld tourism, subterranian transport grids and iron man suits. All that stuff requires energy.

I don't like the "energy austerity" trend. We need more energy, not less. We just need it to be clean.

Even without global warming from greenhouse effects, there are limits.

Starting at current world energy use of about 5e20 joules/year, and a modest 2% yearly growth, it would take only about 500 years to get to the level of power that the Earth receives by the sun, about 5e24 joules/year. We'd be in trouble long before that.

Because if all that comes from renewables on Earth, there'd be no sunlight left for the biosphere. If it comes from nuclear or offworld sources, then per thermodynamics all that energy becomes waste heat and you have a second sun worth of heat to deal with.

That's the spirit!

So... You're saying we can increase energy consumption by 20,000X before we encounter hard engineering problems like building an offworld heat waste dump? As far as the sun being insufficient, nuclear.

I like the moxy, but let's go for a modest 1,000X by 20x0.

> So... You're saying we can increase energy consumption by 20,000X before we encounter hard engineering problems

No, I think we would run into serious issues already at 100 times current use, or "1% of an extra sun" worth of power.

And that's only 230 years away at 2% growth rate. Or even just 60 years at 8% growth rate. (That's what oil growth was like before the oil shocks in the seventies, so plausibly what would happen if we got something like cheap fusion.)

Ok I'll take 100x for now. We can renegotiate later.

>Because if all that comes from renewables on Earth, there'd be no sunlight left for the biosphere. If it comes from nuclear or offworld sources, then per thermodynamics all that energy becomes waste heat and you have a second sun worth of heat to deal with.

Suck enough greenhouse gasses out of the air and you'll need that waste heat

Energy consumption is tightly correlated with wealth and living standards.

We should move to nuclear power and invest more in energy research like at ITER.

The alternatives are population control or condemning swathes of the globe to poverty - neither of which are tenable.

And energy efficiency is tightly correlated with wealth and living standards.

Laptops vs. Desktops. (I have this fear about computers donated overseas that cost more to run in electricity than buying new(er) laptops).

A 95% efficient furnace costs more than the 85%.

A heat-pump water heater costs more than the standard immersion element type.

A new fridge will pay for itself in electricity savings when replacing a 25 year old unit.

Insulation costs money.

Building with 2x6s costs more than 2x4s.

A digital thermostat that keeps track of whether you’re at home or not costs more.

LED light bulbs cost more than incandescents (but the difference has shrunk).

With a carbon tax to replace income/sales taxes, we’ll properly target those that have oversized or poorly designed homes (even if they are “efficient” per square meter).

Cars have the same things going on: LED headlights, electric everything instead of mechanical on the serpentine belt. Hybrids. Stop/start.

And I don’t care what anyone says about how complicated and computerized cars are getting: it’s nice to have the car tell you what’s wrong and be able to google it.

Otherwise I would never have known my mom’s gas cap was faulty, or her intake manifold gasket was what was causing the high rev rpms and occasional stall.

A laptop contains so much embodied energy that you're probably better off running an old laptop that consumes 50 Watts longer instead of buying a new laptop that consumes 25 Watts.

The United States also needs to make real sacrifices to our standard of living. We are by far the most prodigious users of energy per capita in the world. During WWII we changed the way we lived in substantial ways. We should be prepared to make similar changes. The stakes are every bit as high. And just as in WWII, the sacrifices need to be made by the middle and upper class as much as, if not more than, by the lower class.

We (by example, and the way we communicate) need to paint an alternative picture that makes this alternative look, not like making a sacrifice, but is fundamentally better.

- I drive my car less, because my employer encourages working from home. Don't you like working form home, get rid of that slog of a commute!

- hey bub, your new electric car is bitching cool. Quiet, doesn't rattle, instant powah. I want one too now.

- yeah, I downsized to a smaller home. Still 3 bedroom, 1800sqft, enough for my family of four. But much less space to clean. Also, heating bills are much lower. Also, damn, I actually can furnish this home with bespoke cabinetry instead of that disposable crap from IKEA. Badass!

- Nah, are you nuts, I'm not flying across the world just so I can take a selfie with other tourists taking the same selfie. I'm vacationing in driving distance, can do without the drag of air travel, that's for losers without inspiration anyway.

- yeah, I'm walking to the small grocery store a couple of times a week, instead of driving. Cost a little more, but get some exercise, plus, my food is fresh, and get to buy meals on a whim more. Living large, daily!

A life without burning fossil fuels can be aspirational. We need to talk up what we gain, not what we lose. And what we lose is not critical anyway. Cheap fossil fuels just enable us to waste space because of convenience, and an imaginery convenience at that.

Transport and home comfort are #2 and #3 in the list for your average US citizen for production of carbon output. #1 is food, so in your list, we need to include meat consumption as one of the sacrifices that we must make. This is, stunningly, one of the harder ones for people to adjust to, based on anecdotal evidence.

Changing out your car is easy, as long as you still have a personal vehicle (I think that this logic must change too). Your house needs to be more efficient, but that's fine as long as you have a single family home (I think that this must change as well).

It just seems that there is a logical leap in the list of sacrifices that people have a lot of difficulty with.

I'm curious what your source is for this, because it isn't matched by the ones I'm finding. The EPA[1] says that 9% of emissions come from agriculture while 28% comes from transportation with about half of that being from passenger vehicles. Also this article[2] says that giving up a car for transportation is higher impact than giving up meat.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/14/1596354...

http://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/21/lifestyl...

There are a number of others, but many of the studies that show largely meat free living vs. living with meat have ignored Biomass Transfer Efficiency. Giving up meat, as a society, would reduce the amount of plant matter that we need to grow by a huge amount, allowing large tracts of land to return to nature, locking up carbon and reducing the amount of fertilizers that we need to use, by a huge extent.

However, I do think that we get here just as well with a hefty carbon tax, as we watch meat prices jump through the roof.

>yeah, I downsized to a smaller home. Still 3 bedroom, 1800sqft, enough for my family of four. But much less space to clean. Also, heating bills are much lower. Also, damn, I actually can furnish this home with bespoke cabinetry instead of that disposable crap from IKEA. Badass!

I actually live comfortably in an 1800 sq foot house with a family of nine. 1800 sq feet would be far too large for just 4 people.

I think a big part in communication lies in moderation. Instead of dumping a huge list of things someone can do differently, give it to people in small, easily doable chunks. It makes it much easier to change when the change is small. Work slowly towards the end goal and it should hold more people to the actual change. It would be hard to get people to just give up air travel/their car just outright.

Hey! I actually like Ikea stuff.

I don't know any other company that would replace 25 year old kitchen cabinets with new ones due to warranty. After 25 years you might wanna update your kitchen anyway.

Also, even though the cabinets may be "cheap" the design can be really clever. Plus the hardware on the kitchen stuff is high-end and you won't see it until you spend big bucks.

I agree with your other points. I can afford a big house, yet I bought a 1500 sq ft home in a nice neighborhood. No high ceilings and should enough for a family of 4.

That isn’t true according to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...

We are up there but a number of countries, Bahrain, Qatar, Singapore, and several other nations all rank higher in per capital energy consumption.

From the page you quoted -- first bar graph on the page.

Energy use per capita, US is #1 -- Kilograms of oil equivalent (2011)

Where are we going to get the resources to make planetary levels of power using nuclear technology?

global power consumption today [2011] is about 15 terawatts (TW). Currently, the global nuclear power supply capacity is only 375 gigawatts (GW). [..] Abbott estimates that to supply 15 TW with nuclear only, we would need about 15,000 nuclear reactors. In his analysis, Abbott explores the consequences of building, operating, and decommissioning 15,000 reactors on the Earth, looking at factors such as the amount of land required, radioactive waste, accident rate, risk of proliferation into weapons, uranium abundance and extraction, and the exotic metals used to build the reactors themselves.

“A nuclear power station is resource-hungry and, apart from the fuel, uses many rare metals in its construction,” Abbott told PhysOrg.com. “The dream of a utopia where the world is powered off fission or fusion reactors is simply unattainable. Even a supply of as little as 1 TW stretches resources considerably.” [..]

at the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years. Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years.

- https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...

Build some breeder reactors and you can stretch the Uranium by about a factor of 100.

We should have invested more in nuclear and ITER... thirty years ago. Starting to build new nuclear plants today is unlikely to be enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. According to the IPCC, we need to cut our emissions by at least 40% compared to 2010 until 2030 and become completely carbon neutral by 2050 if we want a chance of staying below 2 degrees. Building reactors takes too long.

Well, the best time was 30 years ago, the second best time is today.

I mean it's not like we have much of an alternative although I agree with you on the scale of the challenge.

Has the IPCC ever been wrong?

I wonder at what point the relations are so tightly correlated that we can safely say it is causative. At this point, can't we say the link between energy consumption and wealth is pretty much causative. Or at the very least, energy consumption is one of the necessary causative conditions for wealth and rising living standards.

From the US to Japan to Germany to China, energy consumption is the most glaring predictor of rising wealth and standards of living. I suspect this is also hold true for India, ASEAN and Africa in the coming decades.

Either they are going to start consuming a lot more energy or they are going to be stuck in poverty. I don't see how can justify keeping billions of people in poverty.

A quick glance at the chart tells me that most of the consumption increase came from gas (seen as cleaner compared to other sources) and renewables, it reminded me of the Jevons paradox [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Jevons paradox is less relevant with energy as you don’t want to heat your home above a pleasant temperature for example. US per capita electricity use has dropped over time with increasing energy efficiency.

Global population increases and economic development are the root cause for this spike.

The temperature people set their thermostats to hasn't changed, but the volume heated and cooled has increased dramatically and will continue to increase, and new uses will start to become common. For example, sidewalk heating to melt ice.

Surface area is more important than volume in that case.

Further, the ultra rich don't keep building ever larger homes 1:1 as their wealth increases because walking around becomes a real limitation.

Unless the NIMBY’s are able to restrict new home construction. Of course that would require limiting population growth in the US and that’s a political problem.

Kinda the other way around. NIMBY's prefer, and advocate for more single-family housing which tends to consume drastically more energy (per person) then more efficient multi-residential buildings, which they oppose.

No need to limit population growth if we were allowed to allocate population density more intelligently.

US per capita electricity use may have dropped, but the chart FTA shows that the US total energy increase in demand constitutes around one third of the global increase in total energy demand. So to characterize this as due to population increase and economic development seems to let the US off the hook for what is presumably a per capita increase far more than any other country in the world.

Are you sure US per capita electricity use hasn't dropped with the vastly increased cost of coal & oil? 2008 is more than a decade ago now, but it also coincided with the highest oil price per barrel in modern history, both nominal and real dollars. The prices since have not exactly been low.

Coal has followed a similar story, up until ~2012 it was unaffordable, and since then it has merely been expensive by historic standards.

There seems to be a theory that massive price increases don't count for some reason. I'm not even aiming that at you, I just don't think people have cottoned on to how different the situation is now vs the late 90s. I've seen operations that were optimised to mine coal at a $30/tonne market price.

> as you don’t want to heat your home above a pleasant temperature for example

You are vastly underestimating how much people can do with cheap energy. There is no practical limit to how much energy a household could consume if it were available.

In the limit, if you had enough cheap electricity you could probably use E=mc2 to fabricate new matter into existence. Even without invoking that sort of silly example, there are a lot of things on the edge of possible that would happen if the electrical power power was cheap enough. More aluminum products is the easy one that springs to mind. Cheaper lightweight materials? Hundred and one uses. That would bring per capita electrical use up.

Coal and oil price changes have little impact on consumer electricity prices. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=p...

Inflation adjusted consumer electric prices fluctuate but they where lower in 2010 than 1990, 1980, and 1960.

Consumers are also surprisingly price insensitive over the vast difference in regional electricity prices when adjusted for local weather conditions.

As sci-fi writers cottoned on to long ago, energy is the driver of progress. With energy, anything is possible, any lifestyle. With enough of it, you could build diamond space towers for a hobby. Without an artificial source, we're reduced to collecting it the old fashioned way - subsistence farming, with hand tools.

There is indeed no limit to how much energy a single person could use, if available.

You would be limited by your heat sinking ability. That energy doesn't disappear when you consume it, it disperses. At the point where you're 3D printing diamond towers, you're going to have to start being concerned about how quickly you can shed heat into space.

Ultimately you're probably right about there being no demand limit, but I think there is context here. There probably are demand limits on Earth, and demand limits certainly exist at any point in time.

I disagree that without an "artificial" source we are reduced to "collecting it the old fashioned way" unless these are elaborated upon. Do photovoltaic panels count as an artificial source? The fusion reactor is a natural gravitational confinement one, but the collection apparatus is artificial. Of course farming with hand tools is artificial too. Anything but bare hunter gatherer life with virtually no tools is artificial.

The Jevons paradox probably applies the strongest to energy, actually. Even if the typical home consumer isn't responsive to energy efficiency, energy is highly fungible, and, at any given moment, there will be many industrial projects just "waiting in the wings" for a tiny change in energy prices to flip back into profitability.

So, in the absence of coordinated legal restrictions on emissions, the most likely effect of your personal cutbacks is for someone else to ramp up. Sad, but true.

Little need for “probably” as you can look at actual data. While generally ignored, farming is the #1 consumer of energy via photosynthesis (everything else combined is a rounding error in comparison). As effecency increases less farm land is cultivated up to population limits. Modern suburbs waste a vast bounty of energy in modern economies.

In the US. “The proportion of the land base in agricultural uses has declined from 63 percent in 1949 to 51 percent in 2007.”

I think your thinking on this is constrained. There is no limit to how much energy we would use if we could harness it. We would terraform planets and conquest the universe.

Space exploration removes several other constraints that allow for the utilization of more energy. But, energy on it's own is only so useful.

Ramp things up enough, and removing waste heat becomes more limiting than simple access to energy.

We are going over the cliff with both eyes open.

It's depressing. The US still has a chance for transformation, but just think of the "megaproject" of the past 20 years and what could have been.

$6-12 trillion dollars spent on killing millions in middle eastern wars with nothing to show for it. An amount that could have rebuilt this country.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-military-spending-cost-wars https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

Imagine if the response to 9/11 was energy independence from oil through decarbnonization and renewables research. Where would we be today?

Don't let anyone tell you we can't afford a version of a "Green New Deal".

Don't let anyone cram a "government jobs for all" program into a climate-preserving Green New Deal. That provision took my support from nearly-unwavering to nearly-non-existent.

So, given the option of:

1. An economic plan that you disagree with, that would avoid catastrophic climate change.

2. An economic plan that you agree with, that leads to catastrophic climate change.

You prefer #1?

3. A climate change management plan that doesn't have an unrelated jobs giveaway embedded within.

I'm willing to hold my nose and tolerate #2 in the meantime.

Why not hold your nose and tolerate #1? At least if it goes wrong, you merely inherit a local economic disaster, as opposed to a global, planet-scale, food-security disaster.

In my judgment, #2 is far more reliably likely to end up in #3 and represents the lower total summed weighted risk of disaster.

This is an extremely irresponsible and selfish choice given the stakes, and probably most would prefer not sharing a planet with others with that mindset; thus the downvotes.

Most of us are not in a position of power, and a lot of these issues can only be fixed at the top-down systemic level.

So it's more like the bus is going over the cliff, and the people in the driver's seat are refusing to change course.

Because a very noisy section in the back insists that there's no cliff. It's only the few in the front rows that see the cliff, the rest are too busy with their spitballs.

Seems to be letting "us" off a little lightly. At least in the US the passengers (or I guess the passengers sitting in half of the bus seats) voted for the bus driver who said the problem was all a hoax.

I know of no party anywhere in the world that has a solid plan to limit global warming to below two degrees. Who should I vote for?

pro nuclear democrats

Building reactors takes too long and is too expensive. It's too late to go all-in on nuclear.

compared to what?

This is alarmist thinking that's not really based in anything other than politics and nimbyism.

If you truly believe the world is going to end because of climate change, nuclear is literally the only path to massively decrease carbon output and still meet the world's energy needs. Is it expensive? Of course. Is it going to take years? Of course. But you're never going to get there with solar or wind -- they simply cannot meet the requirements -- ever.

We stopped essentially all research and design of nuclear power plants after TMI, solely because of nimbyism -- had we not done that, we would probably be 90+% nuclear and there would be no more coal plants.

I'm pro nuclear. But just the construction time for a new plant is fairly close to a decade. That doesn't include planning. I'd also assume that we simply don't have the capacity to build thousands of reactors in a decade, for example because the manufacturing of pressure vessels is a fairly specialized industry.

We have about ten years to cut our emissions by at least 40% compared to 2010 and twenty more years to become completely carbon neutral. We need to invest massively into solar, wind, and storage. We need to insulate our homes. We need to ban cars from cities. We need immense reforestation projects. If we have the resources to also build nuclear plants while we're doing all the other things, great, but it can't be the option with the highest priority because they're expensive and take forever until they're done.

It takes far, far more resources to build out wind and solar than nuclear. The obstacles to nuclear are primarily political, regulatory, and psychological. There actually isn't a hell of a lot of money to be made in nuclear. The real reason that wind and solar are taking off is a successful market intervention from governments to spur investments there and make it profitable. But make no mistake, wind and solar are a massive ecological boondoggle. They do more environmental damage than good, and they simply do not displace fossil fuel sources of energy, just add. Hell, the data is right in the first set of charts in the article--gas is displacing everything else, but still growing faster than coal is shrinking. This basically means that renewables are just additional build-out. Which is where people move the goalposts and talk about how they supposedly displaced new coal or gas--which they clearly did not.

No, we should have invested in nuclear power in the 1950s. We'd be probably fine today.

Our choice now is: do we reduce the energy intensity of our economies and completely displace all of our fossil fuels with nuclear, or do we go over the cliff?

As I said in my OP, we're going over the cliff.

You said it significantly better than I did. Absolutely correct in almost everything you said from my perspective.

The only caveat I would make is that I think we're farther from the cliff than people tend to say -- that's not to say we shouldn't do things to mitigate our impact on the environment, I absolutely believe we should, but only that I don't see it as dire as some make it out to be.

I think your belief that those other options would be tenable in the time frame you believe in is misled. They generate tiny fractions of the energy most people believe, and they generally never pay for themselves over their entire lifetimes.

Where do you think the batteries come from? There's a finite supply of lithium. "Ban cars from cities" is a pipe dream in north america -- it's like talking about colonizing Neptune. Not going to happen in our lifetimes, probably not in two hundred years -- maybe not ever. The entire infrastructure of the american continents and huge amounts of Europe and Asia as well is built around vehicular transport.

You argue those things are necessary, but then argue against the only thing that could make even a dent in the issue because it's expensive and takes time.

We don't need thousands of reactors, and we don't necessarily need the ones we do build to be like the ones we use today. Had the environmentalist nimbys not stopped all R&D and construction in the 70s, we would have fixed this problem by now. There are multiple reactor designs that are safe and effective and inexpensive to run -- but nobody's building them because they think solar is going to save the world and nuclear is scary. That's what needs to be fixed.

I see that Bill Gates is lobbying for new reactor designs and construction -- I really hope he's successful.

I'm trying to do my part. I live in NYC, I don't own a car, and I very rarely take any method of transport that isn't walking, biking, or subway. Even my heating in winter comes from the steam system, which is co-generated with electricity (i.e. it uses the waste heat from power generation).

A huge part of my CO2 footprint is thus probably eating meat and airplanes.

"The real problem is that [we] spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times"

How much money do you spend per year? The money you spend eventually goes into the hands of someone whose lifestyle is much less green than yours, and will get spent accordingly.

This analysis doesn't make sense to me. It matters greatly what you do spend your money on. And if you don't spend it, then someone else will (e.g. your bank will loan it out). Are you suggesting attempting to remove value from the economy entirely?

No, I'm suggesting that significantly reducing the world's energy consumption is intractable: at an individual level, our choices don't matter, because the slack created by a single person's efforts will eventually be picked up by someone else. At a national level, the slack created by one nation's efforts will eventually get picked up by another country. At the global level, well, good luck getting the entire world to agree to severe GHG emission reductions. We can't even get the highly developed nations to agree to that, let alone the developing nations. In short, I'm convinced that we're screwed.

Yeah, we're screwed. No technofix is going to save us this time.

>Much more encouragingly... Natural-gas consumption in the United States increased by 10% last year...

So, I wouldn't say that statement is absolutely encouraging since any unburned Natural Gas releases methane (i.e. "methane slip"), which is 80-times more potent than CO2 in terms of planetary greenhouse effects. (1)

Though, at least there's a solution: completely burn your natural gas. But is this to much to ask of the consumer? It's not necessarily in their control. I imagine it will take a healthy amount of regulation of gas consuming products, but I know that every time I turn my crappy gas Kenmore (""elite"" - don't buy one) range, the gas runs for 3-4 seconds without burning, and my gas heater pilot has a few second delay before the flame catches, and god only knows how efficient these actually are burning the gas when operating. Multiply that by several million (2), and I cringe at the prospects.

The further we go, the more attractive Nuclear becomes to me. Looking at the plot, I think the U.S. should work (invest - even at a loss) directly with India to establish Nuclear plants ASAP as their hunger for energy grows with an already massive population. It's going to get ugly if we don't.

1.) https://www.edf.org/media/new-study-finds-us-oil-and-gas-met...

2.) https://www.statista.com/statistics/221447/gas-range-and-ove...

We can do some simple math here to determine that it's probably not a big deal.

What is the average length of time that your Kenmore stovetop is on? Assuming it's, say, 15 minutes (which frankly could be short depending on what kind of cooking you do), then it's emitting CO2 for 900 seconds with each use and emitting methane for 3 seconds with each use. If we want to normalize that to CO2-equivalent, then it's 900 CO2-seconds plus 3*80 CO2-seconds for the methane -- a non-trivial amount to be sure, but still only 27% more.

Likewise, how often does your gas heater re-ignite? And are you sure that it's releasing gas at full pressure prior to ignition? From what I remember of mine, it releases a slow stream of gas, has a sensor to determine that the flame has caught, and then cranks on the full stream of gas. It might be dangerous to jump straight to full stream before verifying ignition, so you can imagine why that might not be done. Again, assuming a typical 15 minute load cycle here (which might be low), and a much lower pressure before the flame catches, it's probably a negligible amount.

Overall I'm more worried about gas leaks in the distribution pipelines, as those are everywhere and run 24/7, not just in the few seconds before a flame catches.

That's a good back-of-the-envelope assesment, thanks. Also, very good point about the infrastructure leakage. I didn't know much about the issue, so I took a quick look (1). Iagree - that persistant problem is probably a much bigger issue than intermittent end-use leakage.

My basic point was simply that the U.S. using more natural gas isn't necessarily "great news".

A condensing (“high-efficiency”) extracts something like 95% of the heat with consistent blue flames. The efficiency is definitely there.

Newer gas water heaters have a similar efficiency.

If you want to improve your cooking efficiencies, pre-thaw your frozen stuff in the fridge, pre-heat it using the microwave and/or use a pressure-cooker.

Cool multiple meals in one big batch and then portion them out for the week.

They're referring to combustion efficiency, not thermodynamic efficiency, i.e. what percentage of the natural gas is completely combusted and released into the atmosphere as CO2.

And I’m running on the assumption that a furnace that’s designed to squeak out the energy within the steam from combustion will also ensure a good continuous flame that starts almost instantly.

If it takes 3 seconds to start, and runs for 15 minutes, that’s 0.33% of time spent starting, and it’s probably more of a flare for those first 3 seconds than unmetered gas escape.

Overall I agree with you that it's likely not significant, but the OP is using figures stating that methane is 80X worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2. So you're missing some critical figures in your math; that 0.33% of the time spent starting could represent a much higher emission volume (though in practice I don't think it does because I don't think full flow is triggered until the flame sensor is triggered).

This is probably because of higher energy efficiency:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energ...

That's specifically adressed in Figure 2, "One step forward..."

Higher efficiency would lead to lower consumption.

You might think so, but... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Thanks. Do you know if there are a list of these paradox or counter intuitive theory?

Wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes

as energy becomes cheaper and cheaper it will certainly be used in greater amounts. one side effect that may still be of concern is all the waste heat from its use.

I look at it this way, as computer capability increased we never ceased to find ways to use more of it.

True. The same with highways.

Only if demand remained the same. Higher efficiency can low prices, and thus increase demand.

I wonder how much of this was due to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency mining...

[ Probably bad calcs below: ]

From the article 2018 saw an increase of 300 million tonnes of oil equivalent of primary global energy demand.

Which is[1] equal to 3489 TWh.

Taking the worst case from one of the most inaccurate reports about bitcoin's estimated power consumption (which is also the highest estimate I've found) is 61.4 TWh annually.

So the total power consumption of bitcoin seems to be the ~1.7% of 2018's total increase on the global power demand.

Take it with a grain of salt, I most probably I have something wrong.

[1]: https://www.unitjuggler.com/convert-energy-from-toe-to-MWh.h...

Probably not a lot.

The estimates I’ve seen for bitcoin energy usage puts it at 1% world energy usage. That’s a lot of power, enough to run a country like Ireland, but it’s not enough to explain the jump in the chart.

progress towards type 1 civilization is good.

Maybe, but this is not that.

Shut down Bitcoin and regain all that lost solar capacity. Seriously, Bitcoin now eats more more power than all the PV on the planet can produce.

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