Making energy too cheap to meter
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
Fortunately, we already have systems of mandatory education in place. Just add Responsible Energy Use 101 to the curriculum.
On the other hand, we could ignore energy and just hope for a sudden unexpected change in human nature and economics?
> we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
How do we handle the heat?
From the same link (as my previous comment):
> the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
Full stop.
Society's waste heat will cook us, literally, if we try to use ever-growing amounts of energy on the surface of a sphere covered by a blanket of gasses and moisture, because there is no mechanism to discard the waste heat fast enough.
In other words, society is a heat engine until it becomes a bomb.
Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves.
Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon.
Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the background temperature of space itself, accelerating the heat death.
This isn't going to take millions of years.
If it take 2500 years to reach a trillion, it takes only another 2500 years to reach a trillion trillion.
The point is that the OP's thinking is fundamentally unrealistic, in the sense that it's not real: it doesn't take into account basic thermodynamics and the structure of local space (Earth with it's atmosphere, etc.) It's a cartoon.
The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then.
Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...)
I could go on and on.
Energy without wisdom will eventually fail.
Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board.
That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?
Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.
FWIW, I'm not against using energy, I'm against wasting energy.
With cheap energy, we could literally pull excess carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen out of the air and make fats, carbohydrates and amino acids. No need for agricultural land.
Yes, you absolutely can trap much more CO2 per unit of collection area with photovoltaics than trees can manage. The trees are cheaper per unit of carbon capturing capacity, but what they bind the carbon into is less useful.
That said, wood can be burned in such a way that only the hydrogen oxidizes, leaving charcoal that, powdered, can massively improve soil quality particularly in rainforests. Up until 500 years ago there was a thousands-of-years-long project doing this in the Amazon, interrupted by plague and collapse.
None are at scale yet. There is a lot of hand wringing about the cost (negligible compared to annoying Putin or OPEC), and some moral arguments from the greens about how it is unethical to expect our kids to spend electricity to clean up our mess (even though the cost of electricity production is currently dropping faster than it has in our lifetimes).
I don't know why they think this is a unique perspective, I guess just pointing out that people don't discriminate by electricity source when they condemn extra energy use beyond what is needed to do a job. If the electricity source is free and does no harm there is no obvious way to label the electrons.
I don't understand why they see it as harmful to use less energy to do the same job, as long as the job is done the rest is a bunch of words to confuse the issue. Use less energy = generate less heat = use less heat sink = more compact device, it's all coupled and biased towards using what we have effectively.
I think perhaps the point of the article is its strawman that people want "constant energy use" which as best I can tell is just made up? I'm literally the child of professional environmentalists and I have never heard anyone focus on "constant energy use" -- it's always about reducing waste (obviously landfill space is an issue beyond energy...), reducing pollution (containment would still be an issue beyond energy...), and improving health (maybe energy can help a little but I mean, mostly beyond energy...).
To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice austerity and poverty, to be humble and pure like the poorest black and brown people of Africa and Asia. The government will tell you, for the good of society of course, what temperature you're allowed to have in your buildings on your property, or whether you're allowed to let your car engine idle at a stoplight [1].
The green agenda is only partly based in science. It has dark corners and extremes of irrationality and hypocrisy. This article's author is trying to remind those who have gotten lost in the political theater that our goal should be improving lives and easing resource constraints. Perhaps we should examine whether we're overfunding solar and wind, why we fear fission and neglect fusion, and whether it's wise to regulate, control and limit rather than innovate, build and overcome.
[1] <politicalrant> Of course, prominent politicians and climate activists travel by air, in some cases private jets, to environmental conferences in the age of Internet videoconferencing. While they're eager enough to embrace using government force to remove freedoms of action from everybody, they balk at voluntarily following their stated principles in their personal lives when the result would be the slightest personal inconvenience. When the price of oil increases due to war, the President's staunch environmentalism disappears in the face of populist handouts to grease the midterms (a thing his party is famous about criticizing the other party for). A true statesman who actually believed the planet was in danger would urge us to seize this moment to let market forces do the hard work of weaning us off fossil fuels; it would mean sacrifices and hardship, but we should endure it to save the planet for our grandchildren. Instead, the President we've got does everything in his power to lower gas prices -- from releasing oil from strategic petroleum reserve, to fist bumping a slicer and dicer of journalists in a process of futile begging for oil. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the PotUS's observed behavior is exactly what I would expect of a world leader who secretly believes the green agenda he publicly embraces is actually just a steaming pile of biomass. </politicalrant>
What I see more often now is this tryhard meme that "work is it's own reward". Consider me a skeptic. I could believe work for one's self or one's community, but leaving those off just feels like some hopelessly out of touch plutocrat boss trying to gaslight me because he thinks anyone who's net worth doesn't involve three commas is a fool.
I suppose that's my political rant. As for yours, I see certainly see it, and I understand how tuned we are to spot hypocrisy, but I don't see why someone or others' hypocrisy should affect how I judge an issue on its merits.
From the point of view of someone who has rejected this axiom, then the slavish devotion to growth looks like a bizarre cult where the worshippers feed more and more of the very finite resources needed for humans to flourish into a machine that does nothing but bring suffering and enrich a few dozen sociopaths.
Just because a few centre-right statesmen like Biden pay lip service to the idea of not bringing armageddon as quickly as possible while lining their pockets doesn't discredit the century of science, or the very basic mathematical fact that line do not in fact go up indefinitely.
If you burn yourself out in the first 10 years of your career, your rate of growth might be impressive but your most productive years will barely even matter so your output will be low either way.
What you want to do is reach the highest possible output and maintain it for as long as possible.
Trading off speed for longevity can thereby increase total output instead of suddenly crashing.
Valuing longevity too much and speed too little will mean lower total output because you were spending too much time with low output.
This is an optimization problem where being an ergophile or ergophobe is actually suboptimal.
If we're talking about "growth" in the sense of adding up all production before civilization collapses (to infer from your statement about individual careers), I suppose there is a perspective that says this is a proxy for how advanced the civilization can be before it collapses.
I do think maximizing total output before collapse as the main important thing may result in strange conclusions. A person's productivity famously doesn't account for happiness and the joy of going for hikes or playing video games with friends, which most would argue matter more.
You could counter by suggesting that at a civilization scale maximizing total production is the best way to guess how far along we are and since we may have initial resource limitations we need to conserve things so that we have the highest chance of getting through pinch points where things are only extremely bad instead of civilization-ending.
It's a fair point, but if you are making a metaphor to a single career's productive output it seems to imply that you assume there must be an end. Yes, there is an end to infinite growth, obviously there must be. I do think we need to worry about how to live happy lives knowing that our civilization will very probably end or stagnate. To me I don't think "productivity" in any sense measurable by energy necessarily makes me happier. Sometimes it does, but sometimes sometimes it makes me happier to not maximize my productivity.
Meanwhile the green party introduces a CO2 tax and land value tax in Baden Württemberg and suddenly it is the spawn of Satan even though it is the only party that is actively against surveillance, would rather cut taxes for the middle class and below, wants to introduce a CO2 dividend to so that everyone has an equal amount of free CO2 pollution.
If anything, internalising externalities makes people wealthier because they stop engaging in destructive behaviour and it reduces the need to micro manage the economy and the need for a nanny state like the conservative (CDU) or worker party wants (SPD).
Everyone warned of how the greens being in a government coalition would be the end of Germany but the reality is that they are barely even being listened to. The greens might be against nuclear power but do they even have that decision making power? The liberal party is constantly swinging between continue nuclear power and stop it. The conservative party is the one that actually stopped the nuclear plants ten years ago and the greens were basically only a tiny blip that is not worth listening to. They had no power.
Yeah it's the greens with their pseudo science CO2 taxes, CO2 dividends and land value taxes and lower income taxes for the middle class that are trapped in some ideological cage. We should instead listen to those who want to micro manage the country and know what's best for us.
I'm not convinced if this is always the case. I'm sure this is already a topic of interest in psychology but I guess that unless there is a reward for using the energy there wouldn't be consumption on the individual level.
As I'm writing this my CPU is at 2% and GPU at 1% utilization. I'm not actively looking for ways to utilize this even though it's (for the sake of argument) free.
I think the point that energy substitutes for labor is generally fair though.
But honestly what I'm trying to state is that this characterization of environmentalists as worried about reducing energy use regardless of how much harm the source causes to be a straw man.
The point is sustainability and the health of ourselves and natural systems. If energy caused zero issues to generate then I think environmentalists would be banging the direct atmospheric removal drums harder than anyone.
This reads like the jetsons.
I agree we should aim for energy abundance, but for what? For a more intense version of the 20th century, with offices, commutes, dinner with the boss, etc? Bah, we need a bolder vision.
We could use abundant energy to largely remove agriculture from the environment. It is the second biggest greenhouse emitter even only by official figures, and by far the most damaging to the overall ecosystem. Grow or culture our food in factories, maybe at sea, and leave the land to nature.
Perhaps it is the largest industrial category with the largest % of its output turned directly into CO2 and methane? (food waste placed into the landfills instead of composted.)
Why does efficiency work against having more energy or more stuff?
I'm sure there were a thousand efficiency improvements needed to make the aluminium foil that is mentioned, we didn't just plug a lump of bauxite into the mains and scream "more power!" like a mad scientist in a horror film.