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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Comments here seem to be missing a key detail

>including embodied energy

Which is

>Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself.

I'm far below the 2k limit on mains energy usage, but I suspect after factoring in above it'll be comically far off. Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...

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If this chart is accurate, it seems like there are bigger problems than plastic. It's bad, but I'm guessing a lot of people don't even see some of their biggest resource intensive purchases as an issue, while feeling guilty or criticizing stuff that isn't as bad as they think.

Disposable stuff in general is a big issue, but lots of natural fiber clothes get landfilled too without much thought.

https://www.eupedia.com/ecology/carbon_footprint_consumer_pr...

Plastic is a great carbon sink, and could be quite carbon negative if it is used as feedstock for carbon capture (either bio-capture or artificial). Micropollution is why plastic gets such a bad rap.

Genuine Question: how is it a carbon sink, if we left the crude oil in the ground instead of turning it into plastic, wouldn't that be better for our carbon budget?

It would only be better for our carbon budget if the thing you were previously making out of plastic has a substitute with a better carbon footprint. (And you can make plastic out of other things than crude oil)

Plastic is made from oil, so at best it could be carbon neutral (assuming all energy used to process and recycle it is carbon neutral).

Plastic can be made from bio-oil or from synthesized hydro carbons.

Not in this economy

In an optimal economy it would be.

Climate change will cause many tens of trillions of dollars in damages and/or mitigations.

Halting climate change would cost < $10T.

A world that was spending $10T to stop climate change would be incentivizing carbon capture, among many other things. It would also disincentivize oil production. If you were paid substantial money to store atmospheric carbon and oil was really expensive, then turning atmospheric carbon into stable plastic could be highly profitable.

You mean, if captured carbon is used to make plastic? That's the only way I can make this make sense.

Absolutely. I've just done a naïve calculation, and Apple's self-reported 33kg CO2 emissions for a new Apple Watch Series 8 45mm Aluminium, at an equivalent power level of "0.85 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh" from my first result on Google, suggests 85.6 kWh embedded energy, or 9.772 W if the device only lasts one year before replacement (divide according to expected lifetime).

It's not the watch, it's your house... and the roads, sewer, power etc. It's the $$$s!

Furthermore, don't forget your investments! Those are earning money BECAUSE they are consuming power. The workers build more houses, drive more cars, and consume more power to go on vacation to Tahiti. Profit is reinvested to consume more power. You own/rent it, you're responsible.

On the investments, isn't that double counting? The people buying the products/services are counted once, then the owners of the factory (etc.) are counted for the same energy a second time?

Yeah. Also, energy is very very similar to money (spending power). Both represent the ability to transform your environment.

This connects to the formula for estimating "net worth of a country": one has to add up net worths of just people and non-profits (and govt infrastructure), because everything else is 100% owned.

Well, who are the owners of the factory (not the products they generate), because the infrastructure energy cost (concrete, aluminum, steel, semiconductors) is huge? Are we just counting the people... and if we're counting corporations, shouldn't it be the people who own those corporations. Aren't stocks ownership? Debt is a bit more complex since that lien could be double counted (if it was ever all paid off), but in most cases more money just gets created by banks and few growing companies lower their debt burden over time when you count commercial paper.

Infrastructure and other energy use would be counted as part of the product in the form of embodied energy[1] of the end product. This isn't about distributing blame. It's about getting average energy use per person to <2000W on a societal level.

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

It's not about blame. Stock/debt ownership isn't just an opportunity it's also a responsibility. You own the means of production. The customers do not.

If you want to embed the capital costs (and not just the marginal costs of production) into products you have a much bigger amortization problem. Do you do it on the first sale so the first Tesla generates a billion metric tons of carbon, the first 10 years, the first million, retroactively?

What about companies that never sell a product, but consume billions of $$ in R&D? Do the employees own that, or the owners, or society as a whole?

you run into the same amortization problem with the means of production. When and to whom is the imbedded energy cost assigned? Does it follow each stock sale? Does some of the energy stay with someone if they trade a stock for a profit? Is it continuously updated in real time as more energy is consumed by the company?

If you can figure all of that out for the owner, you can certainly recalculate the carbon footprint of a tesla in real time.

In my opinion, carbon footprint follows the inventory. It is on your books until someone buys the good or service.

No amortization problem, it follows the ownership/stock sale, just like your house or your car, a gallon of gasoline, or anything else you buy/sell. So when you sell your stock the embedded value/energy goes with it. If you received dividends, and spent it then that probably had some embedded energy too. If you have money in the bank, then that earns interest which you'll spend/save, and if you own Gov bonds then you own part of the government, which has spent lots directly on concrete and oil. None of that concrete is free (you could argue they should get credits for all the un-cut trees grown on federal land though).

Even donations to charity have carbon footprint. Imagine you give to a charity that pays gas bills for poor people. Those people didn't buy that oil/gas. The one giving to charity did.

You earn money, you spend money, you save money, you give away money... that money gets spent on objects with embedded carbon. Unless you want to say that corporations get a free pass, or the government gets a free pass, or banks get a free pass, or wealthy people get a free pass. Just like taxes... maybe the monarchy gets a free pass?

Now there's still a way to game it, which is to have your company pay for everything. Just like cheating on your taxes, if you have no income and everything is held in a corp, then whoever holds the corp owns your carbon production.

I just don't buy it.

By that logic, as long as I don't own a company I have no carbon footprint if I drive a Hummer everyday, have my meals flown in from France, and lease a power hungry mansion.

After all, the Hummers carbon footprint belongs to the auto manufacturer and oil company, the footprint of the flights belong to the airline company, and the owner of the mansion is responsible for my extravagance. I'm not responsible for my carbon because the companies are the ones that sold me all these things I enjoy

In order to talk about one person's energy use we do have to come up with a system of assigning each piece of energy use to a person - a.k.a. blame.

Yep, the flow of money is almost perfectly correlated with flows of energy and material. Fuel/material consumption and GDP are basically measuring the same thing ("useful work accomplished") with a different quantitative lens.

Absolutely. For many (perhaps most) people in the rich world, embodied energy in the stuff we buy is our greatest source of energy consumption.

Very rough breakdown here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/

That calculator is super helpful! Thank you! Is the water usage meant to encompass energy to heat said water?

Also, this sadly puts even my household's meager (by US standards) car mileage (6k miles/yr) as the bulk of our energy usage. Cars are such a waste of life, energy, and space...

I'm having to adjust the energy use for heating fact some of that heat actually goes into hot water. So the calculator is figuring how much heat is needed to heat the water you use for washing, and subtracting that from the total amount on your energy bill (the remainder of which is heat).

Yeah - one of the things i learned building this is the huge amount of energy it takes to move humans anywhere (in cars/planes). News articles often mention trivial things like turning off phone chargers, when the energy consumption from car use dominates total energy use from electricity for most households.

Electric cars are genuinely a lot better in this regard, and the payoff period for the embedded cost of manufacture is lower than many people think: https://www.robinlinacre.com/carbon_electric_car/

That is neat.

Not sure how to quantify taking a bus to work.

Making plastic stuff is energy cheap, relatively, that’s why plastic is cheap. Plastic packaging uses a lot less energy (to produce, ship, and dispose of) than metal, wood, etc. Though of course with cheapness comes increased usage, so the net effect is probably difficult to determine

> Though of course with cheapness comes increased usage, so the net effect is probably difficult to determine

Induced demand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand.

Right. So it’s hard to say. Stuff that you’d buy anyway (like food, cars, etc.) it’s probably a huge environmental win. Cars are sooo much lighter now, I have to imagine plastics are a part of that. A whole lot of a car is plastic, fiberglass, etc that used to be metal, so probably big savings both in manufacturing and fuel. When you refloor your house with LVP instead of ceramic tile might be another example.

But people buy cheap plastic garbage they throw out that probably just would not exist if plastic didn’t.

I’d guess overall it’s a win for the environment, though it’s very unevenly distributed in any case. It’s obviously much worse for pollution in the ocean, for instance.

Also fun fact: it was originally developed to replace ivory in billiard balls and without that we probably wouldn’t have elephants left.

Plastic is also cheap because it draws down on a stockpile of oil that nature has been saving for us for the last few million years.

It won’t be so cheap when we have to synthesize the feedstock.

We'll probably use it, but much less. Plastic is literally a wonder material, literally unobtainium, except that it's quite obtainium thanks to the sacrifices of ancient dinosaurs.

>Making all this plastic stuff can't be energy cheap...

Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.

Edit: Google tells me that a laptop takes 4500MJ to manufacture. If you were living in a 2kW society, you'd have to save up 1250kWh, or about a month, to get your laptop.

Obviously personal car ownership is right of the question.

> Plastic is relatively cheap, energy-wise. Your embodied energy usage is dominated by semiconductors.

Given how energy costly cement is, and how much quantity we use, I'd be really surprised if it didn't dwarf semiconductors by several orders of magnitude.

Concrete takes 1.1MJ/kg to manufacture[1]. So, you get ~4000kg of concrete for one laptop's worth of embodied energy. Amortised over the expected lifetimes of the items in question, manufacture of high-density electronics still represents our greatest usage of energy.

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

Thanks for this. Something to keep in mind - concrete weighs an awful lot and comes in at 2.2-2.5 tons per cubic meter. That 4000kgs is less than 2 cubic meters of concrete.

If it’s reinforced steel the energy usage leaps up.

Building is incredibly energy intensive and very wasteful.

Thanks for your link, it’s really interesting.

Yeah, concrete is dense and we use a enormous amount of it! We're making 4 billion tons of concrete each year, nnd without even counting the energy needed for transporting it (which is also high, because of the enormous mass involved), concrete production represent 8% of the total CO2 emissions!

https://www.archpaper.com/2019/01/concrete-production-eight-...

I'm wondering whether the 1.1MJ/kg takes into account that the heat used for cement production is often used for heating nearby households.

If a laptop lasts 5 years then a month doesn't seem too bad. That's only 1/60th of your allowance. It shows the importance of continued software support for old hardware though. It's a hell of a lot better if a laptop can be used for 10 years rather than 5.

In the future, you'll take out a 5-10 year energy mortgage that eats up 1-2% of your daily energy allotment just to get a single laptop.

There's a vision we can all get excited about.

But lots of people have multiple devices. Laptop, phone, maybe an ereader or tablet.

Well maybe they'll have to have less, or keep them longer. Or we'll have to get better at prioritising energy consumption in manufacturing, and creating products that can be used for longer. Seems to me that there's no reason an ereader shouldn't last for 20 years or longer for example.

I definitely agree. Just wanted to point out how the personal computer energy challenge might have a larger scope than just laptops.

I just picked laptop as a convenient example, and because it might remind people that they probably have a house full of similar gadgets (and with a similar level of embodied energy).

You can get a rough estimate based on cost (not perfect but it can be usable) and then own the thing long enough that the energy cost to make drops to negligible. A made in USA toolset from USA sourced materials is unlikely to cost less than the energy needed to make it.

Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

> Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.

Wouldn't years of function (potentially scaled with remaining effectiveness) he a better proxy where it's calculable?

Isn’t that already approximated by the purchase price of a used item? There’s some weird transients where a 45-day old car is artificially cheaper (because why would someone sell a 45-day-old car if it wasn’t a lemon?), but that seems to average out pretty quickly.

It might slightly underprice used electronics, but if the alternative destination is a landfill, that slight underpricing seems fine to me.

Price is a good stand-in for it, and it helps encourage "landfill rescue" - buying a shirt at goodwill that would otherwise go into the grinder is better than almost any other option for acquiring a shirt, even if it's a relatively crappy shirt.

Part of the issue with it is that what is "most energy efficient/best for the planet" for a single user may not scale up to what is best for everyone to do.

There's also a problem in that future years of function cannot be estimated well or reliably; the average American kitchen will last 40-60 years, but be remodeled in 10-15 years. Since you cannot control what happens after your house is sold, you are better off using another calculation (or assuming that the purchaser of your house will bulldoze it or something).

I tend to pull lots of materials and appliances out of scrap and trash piles. Do I get to count those as zero?

I think you do, but the point is to have a society where on average we're all under the limit. In such a society we would ideally have stopped throwing away usable items that were energy-intensive to make.

The "embodied energy" calculation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary based on what one wants to include. With more or less relevance.

E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *

But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".

You're double counting that 20% the 100W is thermal output of a resting human, not work done. As evidenced by not needing 5000 Calories a day just to survive

It's still about 50-150kW average of sunlight for the absolute minimum to sustain a person with a mostly closed ecosystem (this will also feed numerous insects/bacteria/fungi/etc). A very optimized hydro setup might do it with 2~kW based on C4 photosynthesis being about 4%.

But yes, excluding sunlight of a reasonable amount of agricultural and urban land seems sensible.

> ... double counting ...

Thanks for catching that. Sedentary lifestyle is around 2000kcal/day, ca 100W.

I assumed the ca 20% efficiency was for efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the food (on average, varies a lot between carbohydrate, protein, fats) to storage as glucose/fat before we run it to ... > AMP > ... > ATP & NADH.

But that should probably already be taken into account by the output calculations from the agricultural production. Right? (so my original comment was wrong).

Embarrassing that I don't know this off the top of my head. I used to be good at it. Need to dust off the books. Or probably buy new ones since the field has progressed since last I dug around in it.

I was thinking more in terms of inputs to known systems.

There are small scale farming methods that feed one person on about 400m^2 with some experience and almost no inputs other than water, or up to 6 people on a quarter acre/1000m^2 block with minimal inputs.

160m^2 in a very good climate is very roughly 50kW average including day/night and some weather.

So a hundred or so kW seems like a pretty reasonable total budget to aim for, with 10% used by things that aren't plants (which would come to ~2kW of work at current efficiencies).

Re. the idea that I'd believe 2kW was possible (if beyond current methods):

These methods generally dedicate around 30% of the land to energy limited crops like potato, and of that land maybe half is covered by a leaf.

You can beat sunlight->photosysnthesis in efficiency by only producing photons that plants use well (currently the best is blue+phosphor white LEDs), and I'm willing to believe without evidence that precisely scheduling and dosing your light could double output again. As could switching to some king of genetically modified corn or sorghum from potatoes. Recycling nutrients on a budget of a few hundred watts plus whatever is in discarded leaf matter seems somewhat scifi but not impossible.

In the (2008) Swiss example, the 2kW are already spend on public infrastructure, food and consumer discretionary alone. So even somebody living in an unheated cottage without electricity, using only public transportation, would exceed the 2kW as long as they otherwise eat and spend like the average Swiss.

(though I would assume public infrastructure to use less energy now, with the efficiency improvements in lighting)

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