All poverty is energy poverty
omnibudsman.substack.com
omnibudsman.substack.com
The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn't have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). And that if we did want the entire world to live a life that includes things like that, we just don't have the energy right now.
EDIT: I kept thinking about this and it doesn't stop at just basics. It's also things like living in a comfortable, well-manufactured home. Being able to buy toys for your kids. Taking airplanes to visit family or to vacation. Enjoying the consumption of meat, or food delicacies. The list goes on as you expand the threshold from basic necessities, to comfort, to luxuries, and you can decide where you want to draw the line.
And we'd have more, cheaper energy if we deployed new renewables.
But the author seems to lose his interest in helping the poor if it didn't involve fossil fuels being used inefficiently.
Solar panels, batteries, wind mills and such do not appear out of thin air.
In the long term many things are possible, but right now we don't have enough energy, and "if we deployed new renewables" is not an argument - we already are deploying new renewables pretty much as fast as we can, and even if we would deploy them twice as fast, it will still take quite some time to get to where renewables can create all the energy we need - especially if look at the market share of renewables in total energy which includes not only electricity but also heating and transportation.
Well, we'd get there faster, of course. But that's still not right now, that would be still many years, especially for the third world which can't afford the investment.
If every home was insulated and had a heat pump, we'd all be richer.
Why havent we done that?
Why, when the initial Ukraine invasion in 2014 caused a gas price spike, did Bjorn Lomborg and other climate change deniers write an article very much like this one, in which he advocated against more renewables, and instead said we needed to invest in research to find the real solution.
So here we are again, 8 years later, and we're doing the exact same thing? Fool me once...
Perhaps the currently available energy is sufficient to meet all the needs in a fictional world where every home was insulated and had a heat pump, but I don't live in that world. Perhaps in some future after many years of infrastructure buildup I could live in that world, but that's not right now. And perhaps in a fictional world where 8 years ago more effort had gone into renewables, there would be enough energy for the current consumption, but I don't live in that world either - in the world I live in, the currently installed and immediately available capacity as of 2022 is far from sufficient for meeting our current needs, and if you're saying "Right now, we have enough energy" I am really struggling to understand what exactly you want to say with that. Are you implying that we should curtail our energy use to what's currently available (or less) and feel satisfied at that?
People are trying to confuse matters by talking about Primary energy as if your quality of life has a 1:1 relationship with fossil CO2 released.
So, if we are actually talking about "primary energy" then we would have enough if we used it efficiently. But we dont. Because our politicians prefer burning gas to heating homes. Gas burnt gets them a kickback, warm homes don't.
Hence why all the solutions to this gas price crisis that don't involve burning even more gas get drowned out.
You can say "well we don't have well insulated homes now", yes I know. But maybe you should be asking "Why don't we have well insulated homes?" because that answer will explain more about how the energy crisis plays out than thermodynamics does.
I live in an insulated house and am getting a heat pump, but of course, I can already afford my bills. My saving on my energy bill doesn't redistribute the energy to someone else.
Yes of course. If every person had a flying car we'd all be richer too.
> Why havent we done that?
Perhaps because the (energy, work) cost of digging heat pumps for every home is too high for us to afford?
How much energy is necessary to create a heat pump and how long does it take for it to pay off?
That's self-inflected and the result of poor choices. In a just world, Merkel would get more blame for cozying up to Russia, and the rest of Europe would as well for choosing austerity. As world events have shown, austerity is not robust in the face of events you can't control. It leads to a fragile energy system prone to catastrophic failure.
Poor choices, poor results. Europe can do better if they learn from this travesty.
This doesn’t even change the final outcome, it just speeds it up - USA won’t allow Russia to become China’s asset, and there aren’t that many options to guarantee that.
Nuclear weapons foreclose many options.
Seriously, can we really expect a country that can’t even manufacture cars to be able to refurbish nukes?
Not to mention that the assumptions of MAD doctrine might not have been true for quite some time now. Which means, even if those nukes left their silos, they might not get anywhere near the targets.
I haven't seen the new Jackass movie. Is this the plot?
Surely, you're not suggesting invading a nuclear power to seize their natural assets.
You missed my point. If that existing non-renewable energy was used efficiently, like a Germany and UK that used heat pumps for domestic heating powered by the exact same gas they squander now in poorly insulated homes with a COP 1/5th what they otherwise could have, the energy would be enough.
My second sentence was that on top of that we could have had even more cheap energy if they'd not basically outlawed wind farms, the cheapest form of energy for the last decade in Europe.
"All poverty is energy poverty" remember? So why did the government's not insulate and use efficient heating systems? Why did they "cut the green crap".
I think our shared point there is that all these things require years of infrastructure buildup - there is some blame on why earlier it hasn't been done as much as it could be (while it definitely has been done a lot over the last decade!), and a good argument that it must be increased.
But as soon as we're talking about "energy right now" (let's be generous and say within a year or two) then we need rapid solutions, and "becoming energy efficient" is not one of these, that's for a 5-10 year scale even if we're optimistic.
A second point is that effective heating and insulation is a big factor for the relatively northern parts of first world, however, it's not really relevant for the huge "energy poverty" of the third world, where most of the population is in warmer climates. For them, avoiding energy waste is not sufficient, they simply need more energy (much of it "embedded" in consumer goods that they would like to get) to go beyond their current standard of living, which they rightfully consider insufficient.
All the sensible responses to this crisis involved rolling out insulation in the short term.
REPowerEU: A plan to rapidly reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels and fast forward the green transition
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_22_...
> Energy savings are the quickest and cheapest way to address the current energy crisis, and reduce bills. The Commission proposes to enhance long-term energy efficiency measures, including an increase from 9% to 13% of the binding Energy Efficiency Target under the ‘Fit for 55' package of European Green Deal legislation
A 10-Point Plan to Reduce the European Union’s Reliance on Russian Natural Gas
https://www.iea.org/reports/a-10-point-plan-to-reduce-the-eu...
> 4. Accelerate the deployment of new wind and solar projects
> 7. Speed up the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps
> 8. Accelerate energy efficiency improvements in buildings and industry
> 10. Step up efforts to diversify and decarbonise sources of power system flexibility ("A portfolio of options will be required, including enhanced grids, energy efficiency, increased electrification and demand-side response")
What does conflict in Ukraine mean for UK energy?
https://eciu.net/analysis/briefings/uk-energy-policies-and-p...
> Despite not importing much Russian gas directly, a drop in global supply – Russia is the second largest gas producer (17% of global output in 2020) – will affect the international gas markets that impact the UK.
> As a result, bills in the UK (and likely globally) will soar because of conflict in Ukraine, potentially up to £3,000 in October 2022, (a £600 increase from previously expected levels). However, some doubt that bills will get this high as there are still significant data gaps needed to forecast future bill levels.
> Energy efficiency is an obvious near term step, as it could reduce the UK’s total gas demand by 7-8% and imports by 15% while delivering bill savings to households.
On Africa:
if they don't have the energy now, they need to build it. What is the cheapest available source of new energy? What is the best way to make that energy go furthest? None of these basics things are discussed, because tha article wants to shill for fossil fuels, and actively make these problems worse in Europe and Africa.
> The UK is set to lift its controversial ban of onshore wind projects from government support, in a major u-turn by the ruling Conservative Party over a policy that sent new turbine installation figures plunging
Well...yea.
It's unbelievably naive how some believe humanity should somehow start using _less_ energy. If they actually got their way, we would see a recession/depression that would be the most painful of our lifetime.
We should be focused on raising the standard of living for ALL people. We can work towards that goal by generating as much energy as possible with the caveat of doing so intelligently and responsibly.
This is defeatist bullshit.
No one is arguing that the whole world needs to immediately live exactly like the richest citizens.
Your attitude really disappoints and actually enrages me. Luckily, I can take comfort in knowing how counter to human nature it is. Humans will not accept a declining standard of living because a few people want to virtue signal. Try to force it on them at your own peril.
I am not calling for declining standards of living, or saying that, fuck it, let poor people be poor. I'm the first person to push for more nuclear power plants, more renewables. Simply reminding people that the whole technobabble bullshit about how new things are going to save us is wrong. We're not going to save ourselves. We're going to raise our standards of living, and kill ourselves in the process. Good luck with your human nature.
I guess we don't do this because too few bureaucrats can grift if we build nuke plants?
You're getting downvoted for living in the real world and opposing the approved climate messaging.
It is really a shame to see all the people that have been bamboozled by the "renewable energy" propaganda and refuse to see the obvious (very negative) implications of following through on that policy.
That is simply not true, already in 2017(?) PV and wind was cheaper in utility scale kWh prices, un fixed project auctions and without subsidies, than the then most modern nuckear plant in Europe, Hinkley C in the UK. Those utility scale PV and wind parks are faster to build as well.
Until we figured electricity storagebout on a scale big enough to sustain our needs nuclear beats coal by lightyears so.
Also like the other commenters I'm not at all sure renewables can't do the job. Prices have fallen fast
Nothing naive about it, there are costs associated with production of energy and spending less energy is simply about lowering the associated costs.
Europe being big on energy savings and efficiency is now better off compared to what would have had happened if they lost the Russian energy without the achieved efficiencies.
There are actual, real-life proponents of policies that would have us shrink our economies and decrease the standard of living.
Energy production often impacts negatively the surroundings of the production area and that's why even those who boast for energy production at all cost are also NIMBY folks. Notice how wealthy prefer to live away from energy production sites, in prestine environment? turns out the poor and the middle class want that too.
Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
You can't replace base load with intermittent generation sources and expect fewer price spikes.
Ya'll better get busy building those nuke plants like NOW.
No. But depending on what you're replacing with how much capacity, you can get cheaper electricity on average (for example removing coal). And the nuclear exit in europe, apart from germany, happened (and is happening) more to the lack of replacement capacity than expectation of direct replacement by renewables. In germany, the exit was more-or-less driven by fear. New NPPs are really (and I mean really) expensive and there is little expectation that with conventional NPP that can significantly change.
And stability & price are not the same.
> Ya'll better get busy building those nuke plants like NOW.
Have you looked at construction times in Western Countries, even pro-nuclear ones like france? That's like the worst idea. It'd take at least 20 years with conventional technology. Modular reactors aren't ready right now (and I'd be surprised if they solved the issues that are leading to the reduction in nuclear generation we're seeing around the world, but that question doesn't have a firm answer yet).
The solution is building out renewables and investing in storage. Hydrogen and P2G both don't have any fundamental difficulties, the will to implement them on a large scale just isn't there right now. Even regular electrochemical cells should be doable if needed. Due to wind turbines producing more in winter, you only have to bridge the normal day-night cycle and low-wind periods in winter across the EU.
We'd already be in a better position if we'd have invested more in electrifying stuff, since that usually improves the efficiency (even end-to-end when looking at gas power plants).
Giving What We Can is a community of thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to the most cost-effective charities they can find (consider GiveWell.org for research). I'm a proud member and hope more people join.
I'm happy to share thoughts on how to cultivate the empathy and gather motivation to act to help others as well.
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
Just because some EA people give to causes you don't agree with, why should it detract from or discourage you from joining the general mission: "focus[ing] on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations." You don't have to call yourself an effective altruist, but I hope you too recognize that focusing your efforts on what you have the most ability to control (informed by evidence you seek with an open mind) is a good thing to do.
I'm happy to chat more about this - it's one of my favorite topics.
Hear hear. The point is, for those of us living in developed countries, is that all wealth is energy wealth. The western way of life is totally dependent on an abundance of cheap energy. When energy runs out, or becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries. That's why Europeans are currently terrified.
For those wishing to go a bit further than nitpicking the article, look up the following two concepts:
- Peak oil [1] - Energy returned on energy invested [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
Eastern too
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
This is wholly unsustained. Yes, marginal luxuries will become less accessible, though not inaccessible. Flying, food variety, et cetera. But the sustainable cost of clean energy, and industrial processes running at those levels, is within traditional fuels’ long-term error bars [1]. The discrepancy in access to that energy will persist between the developed and developing worlds.
(EROI is difficult to calculate. Once you take into account shipping costs, the EROI of PV approximates that of oil.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nitrogen_fertilizer_con...]
The closest non-fossil fuel alternatives are various types of hydrolysis, which at current natural gas prices on the US are 3-10x more expensive per kg of hydrogen produced.
If you want world population to drop precipitously, make it expensive to produce THAT.
Western society is inefficient at a macro level, even though it may seem efficient from the financial perspective of a single company or an individual. People cover huge distances to work. Companies are moving goods, components and people from all over the world. People change jobs (losing focus) and their residence often, companies go bankrupt because of competitive market forces. This means a lot of wasted resources and duplication.
You can decrease the energy consumption significantly without affecting the quality of life in case of adopting a new political philosophy which considers these realities.
It's not a healthier better way to build a city its a tiny park on a corner lot surrounded by pollution and traffic.
Second: the point is not to build "a larger scale" version of those societies, but actually to replicate the idea of localism in many different places. Less EU and one-world government and more independent nation-states, if you will.
Third: you can oppose the lifestyle and philosophy all you want, but it still is not slavery.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/reading...
But even if you want to talk about wealth of the countries, I'd be extremely eager to hear any example of any wealthy nation with a comparatively better moral ground than the Swiss.
Or, to put it in similar fashion - the wealth of US is based on plunder. The wealth of all western Europe is based on centuries of plunder.
See, the way you frame your posts leads down the conflict immediately. I've checked some of your posts, and kudos to consistency - you are not interested in rational discussion, just consistent trolling and largely baseless conflict.
It's neutrality even in the face of abject evil has nothing whatsoever to do with any topic being discussed.
Pretty much how all similar communist experiments had to change their country into a prison so that a "dreamer" such as yourself can have his "perfect" society.
I am arguing for localism. Democratic governments that give more power to its people and their representatives in the lower spheres of power. People can (and should) vote with their feet, and communities can (and should) collaborate with each other.
Anyway, that is besides the point. No one is arguing against "capitalism". The argument is against Globalism and Corporativism. Capitalism, by itself, is amoral. The problem is, e.g, Disney and the NBA kow-towing to the Chinese because of the "Chinese market".
But you can’t actually achieve what you call localism for the majority of the population without severely constraining the options for that majority.
And it’s exactly those constraints, which you seem to repeatedly ignore in this and other threads, that people are objecting to. It gives people actually working towards a satisfying localism a bad name, being associated with involuntary ideological constraints.
As it happens, I would be happy to argue against capitalism. I agree no one should argue against markets, but capitalism isn’t markets, it’s entrenched power assigned to those who have accumulated capital for themselves, often justified by “it’s just markets!” when in reality the laws are helping the big capital holders more than is required by just “markets”.
But I won’t argue for localism as a power structure. More local control, OK, maybe, but you seem to think that would lead to more local self reliance. I doubt it.
These isolated communities exist. Their quality of life is lower. But anyone can join them. From hippie communes to Amish communities, Luddism has a long tradition in modern society. (I’m ignoring the ethno-racial undertone in implying there can be an objective arbiter of what counts as true local cuisine and culture.)
You’re arguing for something reasonable. The commenter I’m replying to quotes Dugin and alludes to something resembling a hermit kingdom. (Attachment to birthplace. Going into the local industry, skills be damned. Blood thicker than water and no “foreign” food.)
This is a recipe for nationalistic poverty. North Korea and Russia are going down this path. They’ll be poor and uninfluential. But if makes them happy, as long as they keep it within their borders, it is difficult to advocate for a shift from outside.
While I'm not sure which side of the argument I stand on, I do think it's pointing out that even if certain societies / countries do do the things, they unfortunately bare of the costs of others' decisions. A third of Pakistan being flooded is more likely a consequence of the West's energy usage and not due to their own doing. So it's a global effort to make these changes or limited benefits are seen.
You first.
Now, your turn.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...
What you have proposed is worse than what we have in every way. Transporting food and basic foods over long distances is cheap and very energy efficient. In fact it's more efficient than having a bunch of tiny factories in every city. People shouldn't be stuck living their whole lives in one place working for one company making shitty cloth or whatever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you about this many times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120252 (Jan 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29598017 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935223 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18774141 (Dec 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175756 (Jan 2018)
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit? We ban accounts that keep breaking them. I don't want to ban you, but we need you to fix this.
Rubbish.
What world? The one where Russia is shunned?
You gonna define "liberalism" precisely? It's overloaded with mutually contradictory meanings.
Their ecomic and military power collapsed but their ambitions did not. In a more rational world they would do what other former great powers do and talk shit but actually align their actual behavior with their factual strength because it doesn't pay to pick fights you can't win. Because their leadership has a unrealistic idea of their actual power they are locked in an immoral and unwinnable struggle to subjugate peoples and lands over which they have no moral or legal rights because that is what Moscow does they subjugate people that ethnically aren't Russian enough loot their treasure and use them as cannon fodder to murder other people they would like to subjugate.
Making this a response to liberalism is just complete nonsense. It's a last power grab by an immoral and acquisitive power who sees theirs draining away.
Peak oil might be a reality, but it's not the cause of current problems in the EU.
Also, per capita energy consumption in the EU is 1/2 compared to the US due to more efficient commuting and buildings (still far from optimal though).
1. All European countries tax gasoline far more heavily than the US, usually to the tune of 100-200% of the wholesale price. That is an intentional policy to lower gasoline consumption, governments could easily remove it if they wished for more energy consumption.
2. Not all European countries are "poorer" than the US even by a GDP measure. Norway which is a petrostate has about half the energy consumption of the US (measured by per capita carbon emissions), Switzerland about a quarter! If anything richer countries in Europe are better than the poorer Eastern neighbour as well as better than the US in minimizing energy waste -- better-insulated housing, better rail and subway networks.
That's exactly its fatal flaw though: it's so rigid (and what you call inefficiency is called autonomy by others). People change jobs for many reasons, often because they want something better. Companies go bankrupt often because they are less effective. On a macro level, when the terrain is unknown (as it is for our reality), more autonomy means more flexibility and finding efficient solutions faster.
The national highway system and 1950s’ surburbanisation are top-down policy choices, not emergent behaviour.
The existence is a military policy. The fact that many of them cut through and decimated minority businesses and neighborhoods rather than just solely going around cities in a beltway fashion (as is done in Europe and was Eisenhower's original intention) was an intentional social policy to remove "blighted" areas.
I did read a well researched book (The Big Roads by Earl Swift) on the US highway and interstate system's creations, and I don't recall that being mentioned as a primary motivation. The main motivation for beltways and such really was just "alleviating congestion"
I didn't bother looking this up yet again to reconfirm I'm not misremembering, but I think the onus is on you here since it's a weird claim even if oft repeated.
Edit: I immediately looked it up anyway. Military thinking did factor in in early planning/rabblerousing regarding highway construction, but this was very abstract and DECADES prior to the main effort of highway construction. There is not really a strong historical connection, and the military did not play a leading role or even much of a supporting one, at the time the interstates were actually built much later.
At the time most interstates were built, the main justification for Congress to spend the money was civilian use for alleviating congestion, which is why (Eisenhower famously was baffled by this) the focus was on intracity expressways, not intercity ones.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Plan...
I would guess the biggest reason for this myth is they were built under the executive sponsorship of Eisenhower, who at some point mentioned the anecdote that as a young man he had coincidentally been involved as a junior officer in an experimental military convoy from coast to coast in the 1910s. Ironically, Eisenhower's connection to both was peripheral. In one he was just one of many cogs in the machine, in the other, decades later in life, he was just the guy who did the politically expedient thing and signed on the dotted line for plans that had been developed and advocated by others. But there was no causal relationship between these two events.
Of course, people love a good story, so this quickly mutated into "General-turned-President Eisenhower remembered how bad the roads were for the military and masterminded the interstate system to fix that problem" which is a complete mischaracterization. He was a very, vey popular figure in his day so modest mistakes like that that made him look better were not likely to be corrected. For one of the main generals who "won world war two" it would have been a believable claim, as well as something one would _want_ to believe.
The reality is the big roads came about for the boring reason that cars were becoming more popular.
Eisenhower whipped votes for the ‘56 Act on the basis of military mobilisation. It wasn’t a military project per se. And there were plenty of other motivations and votes. But the logic is far from urban myth. The 1910 convoys spurred the ‘21 Act, which was more limited and civil in nature.
They were amongst the first targets of the war in Ukraine, for instance.
No thanks, I'd rather let market forces make that decision eventually.
All imposed political philosophy that run contrary to market forces and human desires will run into massive inefficiency and grift.
This is 19th century zeitgeist.
It failed to recognize fulfillment of human needs as an evolutionary process. "Waste and duplication" -- trial and error -- is necessary. You can't design for what you haven't discovered.
Here's a picture that always humbles me, representing one infinitesimal aspect of human thriving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#/m...
> You can decrease the energy consumption significantly without affecting the quality of life in case of adopting a new political philosophy
Does it involve telling people what constitutes "quality of life?" Why does this "new" political (in fact: economic) philosophy so often devastate so many lives?
Even if you presume to run human civilization as an ant colony (How dare you?), even with honest intentions, centralization is a bad idea. It lets you pretend you're making informed decisions based on a complete model, and not just running an experiment with global risk.
No it doesn't. It involves abolishing inflation and unemployment, inequality and endless runaway debt growth while simultaneously increasing wages, lowering the cost of living, discouraging corruption and rewarding long term thinking and human effort.
>Even if you presume to run human civilization as an ant colony (How dare you?), even with honest intentions, centralization is a bad idea
Well, good thing the solution doesn't require more centralisation but rather the opposite, extreme decentralization of power and decision making in the hands of everyone rather than the privileged and special interests groups.
> It lets you pretend you're making informed decisions based on a complete model, and not just running an experiment with global risk.
We've been running the same failed experiment over and over again and it has always resulted in the same predictable outcome. We should instead face reality instead of sticking our heads into the sand.
Thanks but no thanks. Even ignoring the untold riches & quality of life improvements that free market capitalism has produced, it's just a more free and thus moral system.
Edit: also you don't need to be a philosopher or genius to see that. Pretty much everyone moving out of free Western societies is rich or getting rich (e.g. paid well tax free in Dubai), and most of them keep a backup plan (Western citizenship to be able to come back).
Western societies, at least when it comes to political philosophy, are far more efficient than their eastern counterparts if you meant it.
Western?! What about cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Beijing, Johannesburg, Singapore?
For comparison, France, which produces 78% of its electricity with nuclear, only generates about 380 TWh per year with nuclear power plants (2019). China generates ~350 TWh/year with nuclear. 5% of their energy production produces as much as close to 80% of France's energy sector.
And before anybody chimes in with "but they produce everything for everybody in the West": Only around 10% of their production is exported. They have the biggest domestic market in the world and they have the largest middle class population in the world. They have money too and they consume like any other economic actor.
And all this is before considering things like how energy-intensive producing fertilizer is, and fossil fuels are a required part of getting the necessary ingredients.
This can't be solved by consuming/producing less unless a part of that solution is wiping out a significant part of the human population and getting rid of modern civilization. Solving the energy issue (and by extension poverty, resource conflicts, etc.) requires us to actually figure out how to generate enough cheap and clean energy for 8+ billion people.
The US spends enough energy on transportation that the entire world could have refrigeration.
The US spends 28% of total energy consumption on transportation. 93.33 Quadrillion BTUs x .28 / 3142 (BTUs per kWh) / 365 (days per year) = 22.8B kWh per day.
BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
We could have the same standard of living and just not use gas-powered vehicles and save ~22.8B kWh per day.
If I'm doing my math right, that's more than enough energy for 3B households to have refrigeration.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough energy.
The problem is that most of the world is really poor.
In the simplest of terms - you can't get much cheaper energy at scale than $0.10 per kWh. A lot of households are living on $2 per day. They can maybe afford 5% for refrigeration - but a refrigerator only lasts 7 years or so and costs $200+. That's another $0.08 per day. That's pushing 10% for refrigeration. I don't think they can afford it.
And when you're that poor - you're probably not going to be able to get electricity reliably for $0.10 per kWh...
When you're that poor, $0.18 = close to half the calories you need for the day. I don't think you can just shift that to refrigeration. What are you going to refrigerate anyway?
I've seen this figure before. It ignores the efficiency of the generation of electric power to charge the EV.
A much more realistic figure is 2x.
You can play this game all day long, depending on which figure you want to land on. Efficiency is nice but the reason it hasn't mattered at all is that it is more about what is readily available and cheaply exploited.
> You can play this game all day long
And you should, to be serious about CO2 emissions reduction. Otherwise, we're all just fooling ourselves.
If the BEV is running with their 2kw heating turned up full blast in addition to running down the road, and there was a heat loss of around 2-5% while charging the car then We’re still at around 3x more efficient in the BEV vs the ICE.
Then there’s the electricity supply which ranges from 0 refinement loss and 50% thermal efficiency (natural gas fired power plant) to NaN% for nuclear, wind and solar.
A BEV charging right this minute in the UK is consuming energy originating from 25% gas, 25% nuclear, 25% wind, 5% solar (its 6:30pm).
It could be more than 5x when you compare with ICE fuel supply / refinement / storage / delivery.
Right. Now factor in the losses in thermodynamic electric power generation to fuel the EV.
> We’re still at around 3x more efficient in the BEV vs the ICE.
Don't neglect the losses from generating that electricity, which is about 70%.
What? There’s 70% loss in the process of generating electricity? Where does that occur?
Coal is circa 20% of the supply in the US. About the same as nuclear or renewables.
That sounds well off.
How much energy is required to refine fuel suitable for use in an ICE vehicle? Gas and oil fired power plants use a far less refined fuel.
How much energy is required to get the fuel to the vehicle? Gas and oil plants are usually connected via high efficiency transport mechanisms like pipelines rather than ships or road transport.
Vehicle engines are only in the region of 20-35% thermal efficiency but the average across all gas fired plants in the uk is 50% and drops to 42% for oil fired.
I don’t know for sure but only 2x smells to me.
Solar => Grid => Car Battery is less than 10% lost usually. Obviously it can vary a lot - so can oil extraction, shipping and refining...
This means Solar => Grid => Car battery is >5x as efficient as Oil in ground => Pipes => Refinery => Pipes => Gas Station => Car.
Once the energy is in the car, we know the BEV is 5x more efficient.
We also know Solar => Car is SUBSTANTIALLY more efficient at transferring BTUs into the car than the gasoline infrastructure.
In reality, it's probably closer to 10x as efficient than 2x.
Given the reluctance to expand nuclear power, we're going to be charging EVs with fossil fuels for a long time.
Even if you never used wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. then you’d still be ahead in the BEV case.
An oil power plant has around 42% thermal efficiency. A gas one 50%+ an ICE is only up to 35% but in the US it’s significantly lower on average.
Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE.
But we do also use wind, solar, nuclear etc as power sources for BEV.
Fortunately, that's not what we are doing. I just wish EV proponents would stop pretending it is.
Is there a term for a self-inflicted straw-man?
I didn't follow this part, there’s an energy loss in the process of charging the battery and there’s a loss in the process of converting from dc battery to ac traction motor, but it’s well shy of 20%. The high amperage involved in both charging and discharging mean losses are low (because if they were high, you’d generate so much heat as to make the system unusable)
>> EVs powered by oil power plants is not a good use of energy
It’s a huge step forward from ICE. You’ve cut disease rates in the population by moving tail pipe emissions away from population centres. You’ve swapped a circa 30% efficient process for a circa 40%-60% efficient process. Not to mention the emissions benefits of LNG over Gasoline or diesel.
40-50% is a conservatively low number.
Yes, but not by much.
A coal power plant averages 33% efficiency. Gas is 42%. Source: google
> Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE.
CO2 doesn't care where it's emitted.
> But we do also use wind, solar, nuclear etc as power sources for BEV.
And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs.
Disease rates (e.g. asthma) in the population do though
>> And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs
You’re saying that if demand for electricity goes up, it won’t be met? Why?
> You’re saying that if demand for electricity goes up, it won’t be met?
Yes.
> Why?
Because government does not price things based on supply&demand. Therefore, you get shortages (rolling blackouts).
This is pointless argument. We don't have enough EVs for everyone to switch to EVs.
It looks like the bottleneck will be EV production, not wind & solar adoption.
We only need to quadruple solar panels in the US to provide all electricity necessary for ALL cars to switch to EVs...
This looks like it'll happen within 10 years. We won't be 100% on EVs in 20 years.
This is categorically false.
We already produce >10x as much wind energy alone that all BEVs in the US consume.
We already produce orders of magnitude more hydro electricity than we need for every passenger vehicle in the US to be a BEV.
Yet California urged customers to not charge their EVs during peak hours because there isn't enough electricity available. And EVs are still only a tiny percentage of cars.
> hydro
is a doomed power source, because rivers are drying up, suitable sites are rare, and no new ones will be built because of environmental concerns. Existing ones get blown up.
https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/dam-removal.htm
BTW, a lot of PNW hydro power gets sold to California, which still has to tell people not to charge their EVs.
If we’d built car-to-grid infrastructure, EVs would be helping load shift, and they’re already not hurting in most cases, because we’re mostly not charging during peak consumption hours.
To get to 2x, you'll need to assume the average BEV is substantially less efficient than a Tesla - that all gasoline is refined at the most efficient refinery - that all ICE cars get Prius mileage - that it takes 0 energy to extract and transmit / ship oil - and probably that the majority of your electricity is coming from coal.
If there was a net energy gain going to EV, the adoption rates would be through the roof rather than ~1% we are seeing currently.
You lose more than that in refining oil to gasoline. And a lot more when factoring in extraction + transportation + point of sale.
Closing the loop makes solar => car even more efficient, not less.
Sure, if we want to be dumb and extract oil to power inefficient turbines to generate electricity this becomes a talking point. But not many people are building new oil power plants for a reason...
The consumer captures these purported gains, not the manufacturer.
For example UK is one of the richest countries in europe, it has the most expensive housing in europe and it has the worst insulation in europe.
Landlord has no reason to imprive insulation, the tenant pays for utilities
A lot of our energy expenditure is lifestyle satisfying. Asia and the better cities in Europe demonstrate you can build dense cities with excellent transit as an alternative to car dependency, but the US fairly universally rejects it from both sides - white flight to suburbs and their perpetual expansion and the inability to actually build dense and transit oriented housing, hell most places use zoning codes to actively prevent its development.
We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything, but the willpower is very much not there, largely because of corporate interference that bred this climate that transit is for poor people and to own a car is to "succeed" in life. Its such an awful, backwards culture perpetuated by the profit motive over possibly the survival of the society.
You are absolutely right, zero emission private aircraft would be much better. Let's build a world where everyone can have that if they want instead of placing nihilistic limits on things.
The Northeast US cities have the bones of urbanism still. Their grids were often laid before the car, so you have the narrow streets, housing without setbacks, capacity for mixed use and density to justify good transit infrastructure. The problem is outside New York the cities proper all depopulated - Baltimore and Philly peaked decades ago and have seen mostly population decline since mid last century. The problem is turning these places around requires a lot of investment to rebuild the decayed urbanism that is there and they both (the whole corridor) needs more transit that what it already has to support real urbanism growth when it starts up again.
These are places that have been systemically paracitized for a long time. Taxes are higher in Boston, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, etc than anywhere else in their respective states, and the actual cities are some of the only property tax revenue positive places anywhere - all that suburban sprawl is dependent on outside money to sustain all the roads and infrastructure in ways these cities are not. But that outside money often came from these cities, and we saw huge white flight last century as wealth fled to sprawling suburbs.
None of these places can really turn around the economic sackings they have endured on their own. Even NYC has huge budget problems supporting its metro. But good luck getting the broader fed to reinvest in cities in the 21st century... there are defense contractors pocketbooks to pad, companies to bailout, and techbros to give tax exemptions to.
There's plenty of renewable energy out there, we just can't capture it efficiently, store it very efficiently, or move it around very efficiently. As such as rely on power sources that provide output rates were good at capturing energy from: fossil fuels stored as energy, nuclear fission, solar (fusion, sort of, we're not that efficient at it), hydroelectric (kinetic/gravity, solar/nuclear from the sun), and geothermal (which is just partly just fission again).
A lot of stuff just dissipates into the environment and we only capture a small bit of it. With all that said I think humanity will always grow beyond its means in terms everyone having a desirable amount of energy and materials to meet a certain standard of living.
I wonder if you can have a community fridge with different sized compartments so you can pay for access to the amount of space you need; to me those is like using a launderette rather than paying for a washing machine.
Household appliances come much later after you’ve established a working economy and infrastructure.
Something makes me think when you're this poor - investing in better roads isn't viable.
For one, wouldn't rail be way more efficient?
The gap is incredible.
"US statistics are bracing. A nation with 318 million people accounting for just 4.5% of world population consumes more energy for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. It uses more electricity for cooling than Africa, population 1.1 billion, uses for everything."
I'd love to see some charts that break this down visually (energy consumption by region/type).
It's bad to take that resource starvation as the only/primary cause of poverty. The example I like using is that the life expectancy in counties in Alabama has been less than that in Bangladesh for a while. Here, individual's lack of access to resources which exist in the area is more the issue.
One of many articles on this: "Life Expectancy in Some U.S. Counties Is No Better Than in the Third World" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/life-ex...
Heck, within our own nation. [uncomfortable silence]
But at least carbon pricing allows us to visualize the problem.
A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal.
You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.
And we still had rich and poor.
Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.
I think this article also does a good job in emphasizing country-level poverty is what's really important to think about. That is, in the US, since we already have the infrastructure of a rich country, even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration (but even then it's not evenly distributed, e.g. much has been written about "food deserts" in the US).
But, in say, Nigeria, they are so undersupplied with refrigeration trucks that making it possible for the poor to get reliable access to safe food would take a massive investment, which would mean a lot more energy.
In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. Child mortality rates were appalling. And at the same time, there was a spectrum between relatively rich and poor, and merchants appeared “rich”.
The article is solely about absolute wealth levels, and is making empirical claims about energy requirements to get there. Concerns about wealth inequality are orthogonal to this set of claims. You could have incredibly equal or unequal societies, but none of them can (with current technology) produce low child mortality rates with very-low per capita energy usage.
If you measure wealth by dollars or iPhone access, this tautologically true but it's not a good measure of how life was. A wealthy person had enough food, access to leisure, a large house with luxurious possessions and probably servants. Sure, health care might have been bad and they might have died of various epidemics. Their lives would have been far more appealing than the life of, say, someone working 60 hours per week in a factory (who has some health care but risks on the job injury and is worn down by the stress and routine - even if their cheap Android would have worth a trillion dollar in 1800).
As other have noted, the industrial revolution also got much of it's impetus from peasant being driven off the land they cultivated.
Or to direct the energy differently, e.g. shift some of it from rich users to poor ones.
> in the US … even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration
Poor people are living homeless in tents and cars. They can not afford safe refrigeration and many do not have good access to safe food.
The rich of ancient times had to scrape their wealth from the labour of _so many_ people.
Meanwhile, if we tried applying the ancient poverty line to a modern rich society, we'd have trouble defining it clearly, even homeless people might sit above it, it barely makes sense.
If you only care about there being a delta between the rich and the poor, sure, there have always been rich and poor people. But that neither usefully describes the world, nor does it account for what poverty actually means and how poverty levels have changed in the last century.
Hans Rosling used to make a joke that the top few percents of students in the Swedish educational system knew less about the world than a chimp (based on the reasoning that if you pick answers to questions randomly, you'll be right more often than the students).
I can recommend watching some of Hans Rosling's talks about poverty and reading his books. It is important to understand what poverty means.
In pre-industrial times, and even modern times, those who were able to compel (or force) people to work for them – i.e. provide them energy – were those considered to have a higher social standing. Those who provided the energy were of lower social standing.
Above that though, there are other factors, and IMO, there are only two other fundamental ones: cognition (the capacity/time to perceive and manipulate the world by directing energy towards goals) and social capital (society allowing you to direct energy towards your goals, and/or supporting your goals through application of their energy and cognition).
If the article is right and all it takes is around a doubling of the current global energy, at 1.1% population growth and a global annual increase in energy usage of 2.5%, this gives around 50 years before we start producing enough energy to push poverty levels below 1%.
Kraftwerk for power plant, Kraftstoff for fuel. But then you have elektrische Leistung for electrical power.
clarification: those words are 100% exact synonyms. (Native speaker, of American at least.)
Indeed, sooo much energy is utterly wasted; but there's no getting through to the followers. You can scream and roar, wheedle and persuade, but they won't give up the idea that their sacrifices are necessary for the cosmic wheel to keep turning.
BTC (and other PoW) maxis are the priest class; bag holders are the wealthy funders getting the temples built. Missionaries get rewarded for bringing new acolytes into the fold.
Will the brutal religion survive? Or will it fall to a New Testament upstart?
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife
The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
How persistent is civilization growth? (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635
Can we predict long-run economic growth? (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102
Modes of growth in dynamic systems (2012) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039
Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (2013) https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis (2014) https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth (2015) https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015
Global wealth n years after 1801 (2015) https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185
See also:
I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914).
(That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>)
The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics.
I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...>
My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves.
Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
There is no way to store natural gas to meet one year's demand.
There is no way to store electric power to meet one year's demand. Not even one month's.
There is no way to store wind or solar power (see above).
Nuclear fuels, of course, can be stockpiled, but you can't demand more power than the nuclear plants that exist can produce, so having 100 years' worth of enriched uranium alone wouldn't help you produce extra power in any particularly hot summer / cold winter. Fuel is not the form in which we want energy when we turn an electric light on!
> Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
That's not possible. You've paid too much attention to Holdren.
You cannot make people alternate sleep/wake cycles so that we can have steady base load and no peak load. Or whatever else you have in mind for "varying demand" to match supply, unless that's rolling power outages.
Electric energy cannot be saved in any significant amount, full stop. Excess supply can be sent to ground, but excess demand cannot be met except with power generation using fuels that can be throttled very quickly (and that's essentially only natural gas). That means that electric power supply has to match demand or we must constantly run base power generation at peak demand rates and send excess to ground -- a tremendous waste!
There's no way around this.
Even if we did have batteries that were a) small, b) cheap, c) had enormous capacity, those would essentially be -when charged- coulombic bombs that have to be kept from exploding. Indeed, there are physical limits to electric energy store density where you can trivially get that energy back as power. For example, we've all seen that smartphone batteries are small explosives (recall the Samsung Galaxy fiasco), so now scale that way up and imagine what that would mean.
And of course, all energy conversions involve losses.
Most generally, excess electrical generation can be stored as fuels. The round-trip efficiency is low (~15--20%), but the storage time is proved to multi-hundred-million-year duration.
I've looked into the literature on one variant of this which dates to the early 1960s:
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...>
Your other assertions are ... similarly flawed. Again, yes, challenges, but not outright impossibilities, and there are a number of other alternatives (flow batteries, molten-salt and other batteries, pumped-hydro, CAES) which you fail to consider at all. Several of those are already implemented at grid scale, others ... are at least technically possible, and may well prove viable.
Synfuels (petroleum analogues), again, though round-trip inefficient are sufficiently energy-dense and long-term storage stable that they might serve for emergency long-term standby capacity. It's useful for other needs (industrial feedstocks and transportation fuels in aviation and marine shipping) so that some supply would likely be necessary regardless. Having standby / idle generation plant would be a capital and maintenance factor, but not impossible. There's well over a century of experience in storing strategic reserves of petroleum in both artificial and naturally-occurring storage facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_blackouts
So you need energy but also stability. And minimizing corruption helps as well.
Air dropping barrels of oil, or solar panels without regard for social, civil, and technical infrastructure isn't that helpful. But there are a lot of areas that are primed and would benefit from just adding energy.
One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it.
The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book.
Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: "we will not give up our heated/cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market". A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1178622119874314
The cost of the AC, while hefty, wasn’t that big of a deal. The real brag was that they could afford to keep X number of ACs running.
Even today, my dad switches off the AC in his room early morning to cut down on his power bills.
> There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessi...
So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects>
This was first observed during WWII in aircraft and ship manufacture.
Note that this tends to be gains toward some ultimate efficiency limit, so remains bounded.
I've mentioned the concept a few times in earlier HN comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Self-sustaining robot factories would give us the means of almost unlimited labor that we could task with building out all the infrastructure we'd need to lift humanity away from the reaches of nature's tyranny.
> "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda's current primary energy consumption."
1) Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.
2) Energy capture for refrigeration from solar in Rwanda makes much more sense than oil production does. Under full sunlight, a decent 2.5 kW solar array produces about 10 kWH per day (as the full 2.5 KW is only produced at noon, tailing off towards morning and evening). As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night, a battery capable of storing about half that output (5 kWH) would also be needed.
The notion that you'd want to set up an oil-burning power plant (which only converts energy stored in oil to electricity at ~25% efficiency or so) in Rwanda is pretty silly.
As far as claims that there isn't enough land to set up solar panels to provide this minimal home energy supply, the roofs of most dwellings would provide adequate area. It's also possible to grow a wide variety of crops in conjunction with wind turbines and solar panels on agricultural land (wide spacing is all).
> It can be done. In the near term, it is conceivable that already-common sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power can meet most of the need. Things would be easier if existing nuclear power technologies were expanded, or at least if we avoided shutting such plants down prematurely.
> But the more fanciful world described above—the one in which, thanks to plentiful energy, the world has eliminated want—is possible only with continued innovation. In the long term, the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling.
There's a number of people experimenting with converting chest freezers to chest fridges using an external thermostat. Apparently, these can be extremely efficient - people are reporting 10-20% of your 1.1kwH/day number.
Of course, the typical downsides of a chest freezer apply to a chest fridge - they're typically much more limited in size compared to their upright counterparts due to ergonomics, and the larger they are, the more difficult they are to fully utilize.
But they're a lot better than no fridge at all.
Also, a freezer probably has better insulation than a fridge to begin with, since it's designed to hold bigger temperature differential.
That’s why the typical middle America “garage fridge” is such an energy hog.
My experience with power failures is that the refrigerator will keep the food cold enough overnight if you don't open the door.
Even so, the refrigerator could make ice during the day and be an ice chest at night. No need at all for a battery.
There are numerous heating/cooling applications in which excess capacity at peak capabilities is banked for later use. Thermal energy storage for thermal energy applications is exceedingly efficient as there are no further conversion losses.
Solar power refrigeration which chills an ice block to an arbitrarily low temperature then relies on that to maintain the chilled-compartment temperature during periods of low or no power would be the obvious option.
Like the plains of the US, even in Native American times trees were too precious to burn.
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
- computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries.
- a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe.
- a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering.
- a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image everything with greater effective precision.
- a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily.
energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech/application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10/kWh than at $10.00/kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.
Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses about 2100kWh annually. This is in my case without gas-powered heating, and external power use (such as personal transportation, or production of bought goods).
I can understand if these more indirect uses of energy are included in the average, however it would be helpful for the discussion if these numbers were explained. It might for instance help to explain how the West can slash it's energy use five fold, as the article suggests.
The big thing that the article doesn't mention is that "developed" western countries outsource vast amounts of manufacturing energy usage to other countries. The UK is especially bad for this. We don't make most of our steel, aluminium, plastics or chemicals - so the many kWh required to make them isn't reported in our statistics. China does that for us.
Who is going to tell Floridians they need to be like Britain and turn off their AC?
Similar to measures of mean national income (GDP/population) or other such aggregate measures.
Note that direct consumption is often a small fraction of total consumption, and household measures of consumption of one form of energy (e.g., MWh of annual electrical use) neglect not only the shares of commercial, industrial, and governmental usage, but of other forms such as natural gas and vehicle fuel.
Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?
If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.
Not without having invented and scaled manufacturing for the refrigerator is the point. It is clearly not a given that access to energy results in the existence of certain technologies, although it does increase their probability of existence.
All of these things intermix. Having energy is a cause and an effect.
The real prerequisite is an ‘educated society’ so there’s a bit of a bootstrapping/chicken/egg problem which is super difficult to solve.
What changed is the incentives and relative ease of different ways of cooling
Each year brings our “current” technology level further and further from “if you have some hand tools you can restart”.
And it’s not clear to me that importing everything into a country is a better method than letting them build their own infrastructure using what they have locally (eg only import knowledge). See the “clothing and food dumping” problems in Africa.
People who have to fetch water by hand and wash clothes manually don't have time to read books on nuclear power plant design.
And societies with poor education can't build and maintain complex power infrastructure like nuclear power plants.
1. Access to lighting at night means students can actually do their homework.
2. Access to internet also boosts students attainment.
3. Having access to electricity means you are able to retain the best teachers as they won’t stay for long without all the mod cons.
We’re trying solve both problems at the same by teaching kids electronics by building a solar charge controller:
https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/40418-poli...
An "educated society" just means a "necessary amount of trained cognitive power to direct energy towards the goals/purposes we value". Currently that's exclusive domain of the human brains within our workforce. However, there is absolutely no fundamental requirement for the cognitive power to be human. Once AGI is achieved, artificial constructs could rapidly (no 20-30 year training cost per single unit!) take over the vast majority of cognitive burden from humans.
I personally believe that we will achieve AGI on a timescale far far shorter than any kind of mass attempt to improve education across the world.
*Whether AGI is used to usher in a utopic civilization, or one of many possible dystopias, will of course depend on what groups end up being in control of it.
It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet.
It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics.
The problems it focuses on haven't been addressed, and we're living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)
That said, we have some very good cautionary tales like black mirror that make people think, but those are very few. In fact, most stories in this genre start with "in an apocalyptic world where people X, Y happens".
It would be nice to see some modern black-mirror quality adaptations of ideas by H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and even authors like Mark Twain would be great.
Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn't necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They've gotten better not through energy consumption but better design.
In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn't necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering.
There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.
Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can't imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills between fields.
Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
-More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing.
-A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable/ affordable activity.
-Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don't see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.
Which is where economics goes wrong. The working units are incorrect.
You'll note that economics likes to use currency as its working denomination, when the actual underlying denominations are kWh and the labour hour.
Nearly all the failures of macroeconomics can be laid at the belief that there is a one-to-one correlation between moving money around and doing stuff. There isn't and that's the problem.
The issue is similar to electrical engineers assuming that true power and apparent power are always the same.
Often talks of such nature even if extemporaneous or unrecorded are based on on a line of development that leaves traces elsewhere.
I'm not finding a homepage or blog. None is mentioned in his Wikipedia bio.
«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.
We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»
Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?
So yes we lack kindness to put it mildly.
Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
These are not solveable through popular rhubrics such as "market mechanisms", as those markets are quite often what have produced the conflicts or underlying frictions in the first place.
The work of William Ophuls has largely been dedicated to describing these problems and attempting to find ways out (as well as pointing out approaches doomed to failure). See especially Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, 1992) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/25026105> and Plato's Revenge (2011) <https://www.worldcat.org/title/753684198>.
Maybe intelligence is about organisation (of neurons) but still, organisation towards a common goal that isn't further enrichment of the most insanely greedy seems like our major problem on a species level.
even this site filled with supposedly smart educated individuals is filled to the brim with prejudices; jingoism; hate; intolerance; short-term thinking and huge cognitive blind spots
I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to have a vote on the approach to take.
It's pretty hard to be intellectual and kind when you toil for subsistence every day and barely have enough food.
Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
'If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand'
expanded out to the giant unelected global bureaucracies some people would appear to want to give permission to run energy supplies.
Truly sad to see humanity limit/destroy itself over and over when there are perfectly viable options available.
The panopticon controls enabled by AI & IoT can easily be used to meter/control energy (and separately water) to individuals. This is of huge concern around 'smart meters'
But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn't exist yet.
What happened to energy poverty being important? "The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren't green enough for me" was not an ending I expected.
Is this intentional pro-fossil fuels propaganda, written with full self-knowledge of that fact, or are they just so wrapped up in lies that they think this weird rant somehow reflects reality and is helpful to society?
I genuinely don't get it.
Is it possible to write that many words on a topic and intentionally get "primary energy" wrong and believe that it reflects the actual useful economic work done? They mention nuclear a couple of times, so surely they're aware that nuclear can generate both heat and electricity and it's the electricity that's most helpful?
Quick summary from the boring stodgy IEA
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7ebafc81-74ed-412b-...
> In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all.
> Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
> Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
> Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted.
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
Nigeria still has the colonial yoke and problems of corruption, corruption and more corruption. Which is necessary for resource extraction, which serves to keep the country in poverty.
The World Bank/IMF and other big organisations have had the best part of a century to lift afflicted African nations out of poverty but they saddled them with debt instead.
The only people serious about alleviating poverty are the Chinese. They believe in peace and prosperity and we call them Communist. China has taken hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. We have got the numbers and those numbers are a good basis for how much energy the world needs.
Personally I think this topic is best understood with a petri dish and a bloom of mould. We are that mould and when the energy supply is exhausted our presence on the petri dish diminishes.
Please provide some data to back up this assertion?
Computers - instead of desktops, straight to smart phones and tablets.
Banking - instead of a lot of bank branch offices and having to travel and queue, straight to online banking (and even being very advanced compared to many western countries).
It could be so with refrigeration. Solar power is potentially a really good fit for that.
Maybe electric scooters will do a lot for mobility at some point and people can skip the whole car thing.
This is my main problem with it. I'm concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for about $800 USD. [0]
For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh/day[1]
This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn't going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators.
Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components.
Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4]
Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD/day
Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do.
[0] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freeze...
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystal...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190548/revenue-of-the-us...
[3] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-fourth-...
There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
This makes gizmo686's argument stronger, not weaker.
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rwanda-today/news/power...
Alot of the policy decisions are made by people least affected by them. This also explains rise of Trump and populisim.
Here in Canada, in our 5 party system, Trudue was voted in by the margin of office workers in Toronto. And proceeded locked down hard, responding to their hypochondriac fears. Their suffering of laptop work from home and food delivert to their door was so bad that many wanted to extend the lockdowns indefinetly.
Carrying capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
> The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.
Sustainable population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population :
> Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16] The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth's limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16]
> [...] The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a "balance between nature and human populations".[20]
Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride and), and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn't then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater
Water trading > Alternatives to water trading markets (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading
LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
LCOW: Levelized Cost of Water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_water
TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump
Drinking water > Water Quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Water_quality :
> Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right.
> About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6]
A helpful risk hierarchy chart: "The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies": From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water
TIL it's possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too
Also, TIL about solid-state heat engines ("thermionic converters") with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example
Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines?
Any exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to quickly purify water.
All renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, biofuels) comes from the sun anyway and the only difference if that sunpower goes into 'waste heat' immediately or gets temporarily used for work before turning into the exact same amount of waste heat.
Fossil fuels are releasing energy that was taken from the sun millions of years ago, but the direct heat outcome of burning all that is dwarfed by the greenhouse effect of emitted gasses - small changes to how much Earth radiates into space matter much more than the heat produced by burning that fuel.
The same applies for nuclear, which does generate extra waste heat but it is not significant compared to the greenhouse effect.
Interestingly, this still overestimates the role of our waste heat for an even simpler reason: much of it was going to be heat anyway. Waste heat generated from fossil fuels is pure extra energy (although that effect is still dwarfed by the greenhouse effect for anything beyond the very local area). Nuclear is effectively net positive on heat as the natural half life of the fuel is far longer then when it is put in a reactor. However, solar energy is by definition part of that 10^17 watts of energy that is going to hit the Earth weather we generated electrons from it or not (Granted, solar panels probably reflect less of that energy back into space). Wind energy is pulling kinetic energy out of the air that would have become heat. Geothermal is taking advantage of heat that was already there (although we accelerate how quickly it reaches the surface). Hydroelectic energy would have become heat once the water finished loosing its potential energy when it reaches sea level.
We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).
If GDP is as tightly-coupled to energy use as data suggest, and we presume, say, 4% annual growth rate, then we have a slight issue.
10,000 times is just over 13 doubling periods' worth of growth. And 4% annual growth rate means doubling every 13.3 years, roughly.
In which case, humans would cut into that 10,000-fold margin in slightly over 230 years.
Which suggests that there are in fact limits to growth.
We just aren't to that point yet.
Modern humans themselves originated only 200 kya.
<https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.513..401Z>
<https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1886/origins-of-world-a...>
https://www.sciencealert.com/green-sahara-early-holocene-agr...
We do know that the climate of the Sahara differed and it was grasslands in portions for a time.
But it wasn't farmed (your own article notes that the seeds found were wild), and the processes which re-asserted the pre-existing desert landscape were not human-induced.
(for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)
Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough?
This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.
When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth.
Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.
Without those institutions, markets cannot exist, you are just at the whim of a connected competitor, local gang leader, extractive and corrupt government official or unavoidable private monopoly that will fleece everything you create. Therefore you don't waste energy investing and creating for the market, and focus on extracting from someone else.
A free market is not a market without a government.
The gap between the minimum common denominator of a state - ability to claim and hold a territory - and the stable an advanced state is made up by inclusive political institutions.
Note that when I say "requires" I don't mean absolutely. The closer to this a society is, the more free market it is, and the better the free market performs.
That's far from sufficient for sustained economic growth. Most feudal societies had strong property rights - as long as you were on the good side of your king at least, and in times of peace. The population had strong individual autonomy and could even sell themselves into servitude, a right no modern state recognizes. But because all productive capital (land) was controlled by an extractive elite, and alternate forms of capital (human, technological) were undeveloped, such societies were not market economies in the modern sense and living in them was hell for most except select few.
Freedom to do and own anything means nothing when you own nothing.
> It requires equality under the law.
A fair justice system is one of those fundamental inclusive institutions I talk about. We have problems achieving that goal even in the most developed countries.
What do you mean by that?
Was that a social poverty?
And if not that specific instance, consider a theoretical lone hermit or tribes (say, the Sentinelese), not subject to any social pressures or constraints, but lacking in the necessities of a thriving life. Or similarly isolated peoples in preindustrial times.
I'll allow that much poverty is socially imposed, particularly since the Industrial Revolution. I balk at the claim that all poverty is.
> Was Man of the Hole poor? > Was that a social poverty?
Yes, he was. He may have chosen poverty freely, as was his right, but there is no doubt he was materially poor compared to most his contemporaries.
Furthermore, the main reason for that poverty was social - he lacked the very foundation onto which to build a productive economy, namely other people in his community. He was also constrained by repressive social institutions - his own life experience and culture and the unprovoked aggression by the farmers - and thus excluded from participating in the larger productive economy.
We can of course speculate about his reasons and worldview, but IMHO it's very plausible he may have wanted not to die relatively young of some preventable disease.
<http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=poverty>
That's limited support for the relative definition you propose, unless one chooses relation to survival and thriving itself, though your definition would suggest a societal relation.
I'll accept that Man of the Hole's circumstances being contemporary and having interactions with the broader human community introduce a social element. My intent was to consider his circumstances independent of that relation, which was why I'd proposed alternatives clearly absent that aspect. You've not addressed those in your response.
(Which, I'll note, is because I'm trying to sort my own thinking on this, not to pick on your own explanation, which I find interesting...)
The opposite of poverty is typically considered to be wealth. And that also has at least historical and etymological roots connoting health and well-being.
Again, from dict.org, wealth: "Weal; welfare; prosperity; good."
Weal, a somewhat archaic term which I feel deserves revival: "A sound, healthy, or prosperous state of a person or thing; prosperity; happiness; welfare."
The etymology of wealth:
"mid-13c., "happiness," also "prosperity in abundance of possessions or riches," from Middle English wele "well-being" (see weal (n.1)) on analogy of health."
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/wealth>
Which again suggests that the argument for a purely social connotation ... at the least goes against historical usage.
In that limited frame, my assertion is that all poverty is determined by societal and institutional factors, and is also, by economic definition, a relative notion.
As for the economic development of isolated tribes, we can of course speculate about different historic and economic paths they could take. There is an interesting field of inquiry that proposes an alternative history where the Roman empire sees an industrial revolution in the 1st-3rd centuries. As interesting as those speculations are, they are of little help to someone living in a corrupt and dysfunctional state, unable to benefit from the fruits of an industrial revolution that long since happened. Saying to that person "you are poor because you don't have enough energy" is disingenuous, when the real cause is oppressive and extractive power structures that could easily be dismantled.
In both cases, I'd argue that simplistic reductionism isn't accurate and is probably not especially useful.
I would agree, however, with the following statements:
- Energy is something of a master resource, in that given sufficient energy shortages of virtually any other input can be compensated for. That said, energy works through capital, material inputs, knowledge, and labour to produce goods and services.
- Much actual poverty observed today is far more a matter of inequitable distribution, and virtually all of that socially imposed.
- At societal levels (city, region, state, globally), there's a strong relationship between total net well-being and net energy access, though this probably shows strong threshold effects and rapidly diminishing returns after a point.
- There are alternative service modes which might address needs in low-energy regimes. To take the article's discussion of refrigeration and food spoilage: yes, refrigeration is one way to provide sufficient and high-nutrition foods to populations, but there are other options, including dried bulk grains and pulses, freeze-drying and canning (both require energy in food processing but don't have the hard requirements of a reliable cold-chain distribution and storage network), UHT (ultra-high temperature) milk pasturisation (which permits unrefrigerated storage for months), fermentation, and conventionally dried fruits and vegetables (more texture/nutrition loss than freeze-drying, but less energy intensive), as well as other preserving methods. Fresh produce might be locally sourced fresh where possible.
But as W. Brian Arthur has noted (he's both appeared and been quoted on the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity podcast recently), at a certain scale, economic systems require something analogous to a heart as an active circulatory system to ensure that all people get access to resources and financial capital necessary for survival.
So the story of "access to energy" is in fact the story of economic development itself, the story of how packs of primates structure themselves to shape the world using knowledge in the form a transmissible and inheritable culture. Focusing on energy, a loosely correlated intermediate output of this process, is missing the finer details of that structure. As you observe, energy efficiency is just another way a well structured society can improve their well-being despite relative scarcity of raw energy inputs - the welfare effects are primarily the results of structural reasons, not energy reasons.
The well known "resource curse", which I hinted at in my top level comment and which downvoted me to "-1", is a perfect illustration of this principle:
-> We are given an advanced technological frontier AND given a large, free resource that is relatively valuable within that frontier (which we can loosely equate with energy, since you can trade any resource on the world market for oil, gas, uranium etc. or the implements necessary to transform them into energy).
-> There is strong empirical precedent to suggest that, on the long run, the inhabitants of that particular political unit risk decreasing welfare, lower real wages, and curtailed individual freedoms, unless their society is well structured (say, like Norway)
This is why I abhor explanations like "energy poverty": if energy was the real reason, then how can getting more energy make you worse off? Why should we abstract away the very essence of the problem staring us in the face - the political system in the most general sense, culture, social relations etc. - and pick some loosely correlated variable that's neat and makes us sound insightful?
Thanks for noting points of agreement. That's rare and appreciated.
I'm pretty familiar with the energy-lens-of-history model --- see Vaclav Smil (Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization and Manfred Weissenbacher Sources of Power, among others which are ... slipping my mind at the moment). I do agree that it explains much.
Energy, in the form of either flows (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal) or stocks (wood, fossil fuels, nuclear fissibles or fuseables) must be accessible and convertible. The ancient inhabitants of Appalachia, Great Britain, the Arabian peninsula, the Permian Basin, China, and Australia ... were living on top of the fossil fuels we've tapped over the past 200 years or so. But even where they were aware of them, they couldn't access and utilise them effectively. Much as we're presently not fully able to do with the solar and geothermal potential of the Earth, or with potential nuclear fuels. The pieces that have to come together are ... complicated, and the question of why the Industrial Revolution did occur where and when it did, and not at some other time or place is a popular one amongst academics and others. I suspect it's a bit like several of the biological milestones, say, emergence of eukaryotic (mitochondria-bearing) life, etc., in that the advantage conveyed and the spread of the pattern are both so overwhelming that the transition can only occur once. Contrast, say, the agricultural revolution which, though massively significant did not spread within a century or so around the globe as industrialisation did, but rather took many thousands of years.
The resource curse / Dutch Disease ... is another complex issue. My sense is that it's closely linked to Gresham's Law, in that the mechanism is one of how exchange values differ amongst goods, markets, places, or times. In the case of fossil fuels, there's a profound difference in the cost, price, and value of fuels. Humans do not immediately pay the full costs of either provisioning or utilising fossil fuels. The provisioning being the hundreds of millions of years and massive amounts of primordial plant matter which go into their creation (see Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003) <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686>). If we did, the market price would be higher by a factor of millions. Utilisation costs include both short-term/local and long-term/global pollution effects, including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
Oil extractors, even if undercompensated as I've noted, receive far more than enough to cover their own immediate costs, however, so they drill for and pump oil. And those of us who use it gain access to cheap, convenient energy useful for heat as well as motive and electrical power, amongst other uses. In a market, low price dominates most other factors, and such products tend (usually) to drive out others. (Geffen and Veblen goods being exceptions.) The resource curse is that easy riches drive out honest efforts elsewhere. That, combined with the long-term provisioning and utilisation costs, as well as other systemic risks, are among the reasons why more energy can in fact make you worse off. Not immediately, but over the long term. Which may come sooner than you expect.
Thank you for the response, I believe this is an oversimplification. The resource curse is not your typical creative destruction typical of free markets.
If, say, a large part of the population was employed with collecting dung and firewood as energy sources, an abundance of energetic resources will surely collapse output and employment in those sectors. So yes, those people will be worse off in the short run, but the economy as a whole will drastically benefit from access to more energy per unit of labor, produce more, grow and improve real wages across the board, which in turn will create opportunities for the former dung collectors. They stopped collecting dung because that's exactly what should happen as the economy develops, a honest effort (or even an extreme one) in a low productivity role is a waste if more efficient - and possibly less "honest" - alternative exits, such as stock brokers or lawyers.
To unfold this entire cycle we need to assume some type of competent government that will exploit the resource and either distribute it to the citizens (protectionism), or, much more effectively, sell it on the world market and reinvest the proceeds in high growth opportunities. Yes, even in that scenario you can see some exchange rate distortions (Dutch disease) that harm other sectors in the economy, so care must be exercised, but overall we see net welfare increases in the long run, at least if we discount the ecological and provisioning costs you bring up.
But those effects are not a substantive part of the "resource curse" in my view. The real issue is the dramatic effects easy accessible cash resources have on the political structure. An easily extracted rent once you gain power means you are no longer dependent on tax revenue or a functional economy to maintain your grip on power, see for example conflict minerals. There is a strong and well known correlation between oil reserves and authoritarianism. This can place countries in bad equilibria where the oil revenue is funding their own economic stagnation.
To unlink growth from a political structure interested and capable of promoting growth is a gross western-centric bias. It reminds me of the "Washington consensus" economic approach promoted by the IMF in the 90s, that encouraged eastern European countries to adopt market reforms that they weren't institutionally capable to implement, such as privatization of state-owned enterprises lacking a well consolidated stock/capital market and strong regulators. The ensuing economic collapse and widespread fraud has political consequences to this day, there are people dying in Ukraine as we speak due to the democratic backsliding induced in Russia by failed economic reforms that ignored the social and institutional realities.
If you're a nationalist, it's even better if the people we're impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else's Problem.
It's like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven't figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity:
- We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy.
- We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor.
(Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we'll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won't stick around until it's over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance generally helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)
Gas prices are so high right now in EU that my fathers sister is closing her restaurant and letting go her employees. If they go even higher then what you will see is blood on the streets and right wing governments in power, then you can forger about your plans to save the planet. You think we are so slow with fighting climate change because we don't know how to do it faster? We know, just the costs of doing it are so huge that no one will take responsibility for it and they know they would lose power very quickly to far right wing party.
Every civilization is always three missed meals from revolution.
I'd argue that would be a good outcome. However, it can't happen over night. The frustrating thing is that the necessary technology has been available for 50 years, but the right wing governments you allude to are exactly the reason they haven't been deployed at adequate scale. (Well, them and the anti-nuclear greens.)
Sorry to hear about the restaurant. That really sucks.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Prob...
> No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.
> This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.
And Hyman Rickover's 1957 speech on energy and scarcity: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predi...
Climate change is chiefly caused by two things: uncontrolled population growth and energy consumption growth.
A high standard of living - and civilization itself - is impossible without high energy consumption per capita.
Do you see the problem?
I can think of solutions that would be effective, but it would involve a lot of suffering.
It looks like the author has a history of writing like this. I wonder what her track record of being "right" is?