All poverty is energy poverty
omnibudsman.substack.comInteresting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable earlier or more seriously?)
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.
> Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable?)
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
> When energy runs out, or becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries.
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.
> wasted resources and duplication
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.
>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?
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.
How would you propose to realize that utopian vision? And please don't waste our time with any cryptocurrency BS.
Planned economy. It did wonders! Just look at the USSR.
> even though it may seem efficient from the financial perspective of a single company or an individual
The national highway system and 1950s’ surburbanisation are top-down policy choices, not emergent behaviour.
The national highway system was a military not economic or social policy designed to allow for easy transport of troops in the event of a way. That is why many cities have large beltways that surround them, the idea being that if a city is nuked the highway is outside the blast radius.
It can be all of those things.
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.
That was part of the sales pitch. The main reasons were to improve travel speed into and between cities, and to open up much more land for development.
Source? I've heard this, and I've heard it's a common myth / urban legend. There's a lot of similar myths, like that "interstates have a lot of straight sections to allow for an airplane to land in an emergency"
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.
> 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
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.
That being said, highways are terrible for mass mobilization, mostly because they also represent pretty easy targets to bomb (for either attack or defense), and also because of how quickly they become congested.
They were amongst the first targets of the war in Ukraine, for instance.
I suspect that is what people wanted as well (not only governments).
Europe has the resources to produce cheap energy they just decided to not exploit it and import their energy from Russia and others.
Exactly, it's not like the energy supply decreased overnight due to natural scarcity.
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).
Per capita energy consumption in the EU is lower than the US mostly because they are poorer (on a GDP per capita basis). Europeans would consume more energy if they could afford it.
Mostly incorrect take. Two points for your consideration:
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.
Shutting down all the nuclear?
The conflict between Russia and the west is deeply rooted on the hegemony of rampant worldwide liberalism which creates the problems I described. It's a meat grinder which consumes not only excessive energy but people's livelihoods, too. It is certainly not a world I would want my son to live in.
The interesting thing isn't even your assesment of "west", but what values you assign to russia. They are absolutely wrong. It's (for someone, paradoxically) extremely individualistic slave nation with very deep hierarchies of power.
>He refers to this ideology as a 'timeless, non-modern theory' valid for all time.
Rubbish.
I can't tell if this would be the motivation of a Metal Gear Solid villain, or the motivation of a multi-disc JRPG final boss.
The conflict between Russia and the West is that once upon a time they represented competing similar power spheres of influence with the most important singular difference being which country would sit at the top and all other ideological differences being secondary.
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.
The conflict is between one-person/one-vote and a cartel that has hijacked a nation.
> It is certainly not a world I would want my son to live in.
What world? The one where Russia is shunned?
What does liberalism mean in concrete terms and why is it bad?
I guess the world you want your son to live in is one of planned economies and great leaps forward. I for one do not. I would rather that innovation and competitive forces lead into the future of societies. As Stalin used to say: no people no problem.
The options are not as pure as you make it sound. There is a considerable amount of planning in the free market economies. This ranges from developing transportation networks to deciding upon funding for scientific research. Businesses that control a disproportionate amount of the market also make planning decisions to shape the market. When they make the wrong decisions, there are negative consequences. Arguably, that is what we are seeing at the moment with the supply chain problems. The question is how do you ensure that no single actor gains too much control over a segment of the economy? In many cases, the fallback is central planning. For example: one of the greatest reasons for public highway networks was to diminish the role of railway barons. In other words, centrally planned infrastructure supported a less centralized economy.
It’s not a planned central economy. It is self-reliant local communities within regional bounds, like a fault-tolerant distributed system. They would trade primarily with adjacent regions stuff that they don’t or can’t produce locally. Knowledge, information and education should flow freely everywhere, enabling peace. People should feel comfortable living in their birthplace and should have no motivation for economic migration.
How do you produce airplanes and silicon chips exactly?
Why do you need an airplane in a local community? Also, silicon chips aren't exactly the type of thing that you constantly need to buy every single day nor are they expensive to ship. Using the same phone or laptop for years instead of buying a new one every single year is highly viable.
Your present local community relies on massive quantities of silicon chips and other specialized goods that are ultimately brought in by planes trains and automobiles which themselves depend on specialized goods.
What's the better alternative?
A better alternative would be to have localised production and localised consumption of food and most basic goods. Stuff like not having foreign-cuisine restaurants and not buying salmon from thousands of kilometers away. Cloth production should follow the same idea. People should feel more attached to their birthplace and the goal should be to develop their skills locally with one company preferably. Strong bonds with the local extended family which provides an additional safety net. If your region produces cars, you should be more likely (through education and culture) to become an automotive engineer and live there for your life. Trade for more advanced goods should still be there, but it would be more inter-region and less inter-global.
> not having foreign-cuisine restaurants and not buying salmon from thousands of kilometers away. Cloth production should follow the same idea
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.)
The point is not in absolute isolation, but trading away some optimization in global economic output for increased self-resiliency. Yes, overall we would be poorer on average, but we would a lot less likely to see catastrophic events and a bit more equity among members of the same community.
> point is not in absolute isolation, but trading away some optimization in global economic output for increased self-resiliency
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.
> North Korea and Russia are going down this path.
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.
"Yes, overall we would be poorer on average"
You first.
Already did it, twice. First time by leaving my (relatively rich and comfortable) upper-middle class life in Brazil and moving to the US. Also have absolutely zero regrets about leaving the US and coming to Europe. Salaries are lower, the tax burden is greater and I'm losing the opportunity of "wealth" generation, but the amount of money I left on the table will never be enough to buy the quality of life my family and I have here.
Now, your turn.
God, I’m glad I wasn’t born in the designated car production region, what a horrible thing to be forced to devote my life to.
You are describing a world of slaves. How many people are you willing to sacrifice to achieve you vision?
Is participating jn an Amish village "slavery"? An Israeli Kibutz?
An amish village is a laughable anachronism that only exist in the context of a much larger whole that is antithetical to the very values and way of life it practices because no larger scale society so constructed could exist or compete with other societies practicing opposing values.
It's not a healthier better way to build a city its a tiny park on a corner lot surrounded by pollution and traffic.
First: yes, it is healthier for those living inside the park, compared to the alternative.
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.
Can it survive against a larger-scale opponent that wants to take its resources, though? Without a friendly superpower enforcing peace with an extraordinarily powerful military, that is.
Switzerland managed to do it for centuries already.
Switzerland's wealth is built on plunder and money laundering. That's not a model we should want to replicate anywhere else.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/reading...
Thats a primitive way to look at things, and incorrect on so many levels it would take few pages to list them all. To sum it up - their wealth is based on precise high quality manufacturing, and secondly on tourism. Banking is not even up there in top revenues for state.
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.
Well, good thing that I am not using them as example of "how to get rich", but only on "how to keep yourself small and still avoid being invaded by a stronger power".
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.
There certainly aren't many, but Finland would certainly qualify.
Switzerland isn't by the prior analogy a park its a normal modern nation. It's a complete non sequitur
It's a modern nation that had very mighty expansionist empires on their borders. It's also the only country in Western Europe that never intended or desired to join the EU.
Yes but lest we entirely lose track of the thread its not an isolationist nation that foregoes the fruits of globalism or corporatism its merely been willing to do business with everyone including letting nazis bank the gold literally yanked from the mouths of murdered jews.
It's neutrality even in the face of abject evil has nothing whatsoever to do with any topic being discussed.
And this is how you arrive at needing walls and guns to keep people in - because we tend to vote with our feet and leave such sick authoritarian "utopias" at the price of risking our life - freedom is worth it.
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.
You are still arguing the extreme version of a position of the argument, when I was arguing for the less radical side.
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.
Then nobody prevents you having what to want even today. This is the beauty of capitalism: it’s perfectly fine to have other forms of organizations inside it. There are communes and kibbutz you can join right now.
No, there aren't. I am not Amish nor Jew.
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".
There are many secular intentional communities you can join, right now. I used to live on one; it was great!
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.
If you're not allowed to leave, YES.
They are allowed to leave, dude...
You appear to be ignorant of basic economics such as Ricardo's law of comparative advantage.
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.
Please edit swipes like "you appear to be ignorant [etc.]" out of your posts to HN. They break the site guidelines, and you can make your substantive points without them.
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.
It is cheaper, but less robust. One ship blocking the Suez Canal means that billions of people are not able to get their food and medicine on time, because everyone is too specialized to do anything that is not a desk job.
>the hegemony of rampant worldwide liberalism
You gonna define "liberalism" precisely? It's overloaded with mutually contradictory meanings.
Ha? This is even dangerous! You're basically yearning for an authoritarian regime. With simplistic argument and some false assumptions you conclude it's more efficient bcz it does not waste basically trial/error. However, this has been proven times after time that such "alternative political philosophy" will defeat its purpose and become highly corrupt. Furthermore, we're in a incomplete information game, evolution is a must, and you can not 'design' things apriori.
Western societies, at least when it comes to political philosophy, are far more efficient than their eastern counterparts if you meant it.
> adopting a new political philosophy
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.
The market forces won't make many nice decisions if you don't let them. No negative interest rates mean companies and workers need to create artificial scarcity to pay the artificially high costs of financial capital.
By simply knowing in advance what to do and how to do it, and what will come, we could make a fortune of all fortunes, outcompete everyone and create a perfect utopia. Good to know!
That is a very naive viewpoint. You might think that economic central planning could allow us to maintain quality of life while increasing efficiency, but in reality that approach failed everywhere it was tried. That is historical reality, not mere political philosophy.
The benefit of this political philosophy is its fractally-flexbile. If we've solved every problem and the most efficient of everything is found, then "fully-automated space communism" is the most "efficient" because everything is directed rigidly in exactly the most efficient way.
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.
Let me guess what your alternative proposal is: everyone should live how you want them to live.
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).
Don't call it a free market. It is anything but free.
> becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries
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...
LCOE does not take most important thing of renewables into account - when the energy is actually available. Turns out it's extremely unstable, not only in the day/night cycle, but also around the year. December is black hole in Poland, less than hour of sunlight a day and weak wind.
Nitrogen Fertilizer production is a base for the modern world that billions would die without, and with no identified economic replacement. It relies on fossil fuel to be produced. It is produced in the 100s of millions of metric tons a year.
[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.
>The western way of life is totally dependent on an abundance of cheap energy
Eastern too
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
All life is dependent on cheap energy. It's the currency of the universe.
The Warlock series had this as the intergalactic currency - the kwaher or kilowatt/hour.
Recommended read?
The one by Stasheff? I didn't remember that detail, but haven't read it in a while.
Not just countries, inside the United States. It's amazing how Americans will turn a sympathetic eye and ear to other nations but not other states.
> The western way of life is totally dependent on an abundance of cheap energy.
Western?! What about cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Beijing, Johannesburg, Singapore?
Tbfh, he's wrong. The modern (read: based on electricity and fossil fuels) way of life is dependent on cheap energy. China is currently the biggest emitter in the world. Not because they're particularly wasteful necessarily, no. Surprise, an enormous amount of energy is required for a modern society to sustain itself, especially when that country is home to 1.4 billion people. They've built more nuclear reactors than all other countries combined in the past decade, and they're still heavily reliant on gas and coal (62% coal, 5% nuclear). Nobody knows how to efficiently and cleanly generate that much energy.
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.
EROI is a physical measure, it doesn't deal with price at all so I don't get what it has to do with your first paragraph?
It is rather an economic measure to my understanding. Lower EROI will tend to raise energy prices. According to the Wikipedia article, it has been argued that falling EROI has been responsible in part for the collapse of the Roman empire. It has also been linked to inflation.
EROI doesn't tell you how much total energy you can extract nor how fast you can extract it, it just tells you how much of the energy you extract is usable.
One thing I’ve learned over time is that it’s just really, really difficult for most people (including me!) to reason about things that they haven’t directly experienced. Even harder to have empathy. So it’s very hard to engage with an argument or discussion that’s about the world as a whole, because all of us have such difficulty properly weighting and evaluating the things we have no experience with (which by definition, for everyone, is most of the world).
My father grew up in a small village in western Africa. Visiting there as a child, with no running water or electricity, was such an impactful experience for me. It is very hard to imagine if you haven't experienced it, but it is certainly possible.
While difficult, it's I think within the reach of just about every individual in the developed world to empathize with and extend a helping hand to those who were merely unlucky to be born into poverty.
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.
Does Giving What We Can have a pledge to continue spending money on humans in extreme poverty? No animal welfare, no AI risk, etc.? Unfortunately the effective altruism branding has become toxic for me in the past few years due to the fact that they are deciding not to focus just on poverty.
I'm sorry to hear effective altruism (EA) rubs you the wrong way. Giving What We Can predates EA and does not insist on where you give your money, only that you do it in good faith, focusing on "improv[ing] the lives of others".
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.
From what I can tell you can choose where your donations go, so you can focus on poverty and let skynet exterminate us humans if you'd want.
Weighing in on things you have no experience with is a Dunning-Kruger News… er, I mean Hacker News pastime.
We do have the energy.
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?
What is more efficient than all the cars is electrified rail. That is an order of magnitude more energy efficient, more if you can manage to get near capacity high frequency trains.
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.
>> We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything
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.
Some of us prefer to live in reality
I agree with you, but if you look at our current reality, plenty of it would've been unbelievable 100 years ago. 200 years ago and it's all magic. You have to dream a little big to innovate anything, and if it's feasible then it's a good idea, and if its not then let people try and fail.
I agree , innovation is the only way out of this mess. But progress is never a guarantee so you do as much as you can within the Current bounds of technology and change as the technology changes.
Things will get better, not worse. Just watch. Nihilists need to sit on the sidelines where they belong.
I'm not a nihilist, I believe in technological progress. It's just not a magic pill that absolves us of all responsibility.
People always forget that it isn't a question of leaving American cities as-is and expecting everyone to give up cars. The solution starts with building walkable cities that have public transportation.
Public transit boosters usually understand that pedestrian friendly street design and higher density housing is also needed. The problem is NIMBYs who resist anything but single family house zoning. Not even duplexes are ok for these people.
I think trying to retrofit existing single family into urbanism is kind of a lost cause. Everything is built for it, and nothing is built for urban density and transit, at some point you might as well just stake a new city in the middle of nowhere (preferably off a major interstate and rail line that has water access) and build from scratch rather than having to bulldoze everything thats already there.
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.
100%. These things have not happened by accident or in a vacuum.
The trend is net migration from north to south, and east to west. Unfortunately this means more automobile dependent cities.
> BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
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.
Being EXTREMELY generous to gasoline and ICE - and realistic that most BEVs aren't charging using 0% fossil fuels - you can get to 3.14x.
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.
That's about right from my arithmetic, assuming you charge from a fossil fuel grid. I charge from onsite solar. Still, 2x is a big improvement.
>> A much more realistic figure is 2x
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.
See my other reply.
What other reply? You talk about refining. There's 10% lost in refining. X% lost in extraction and Y% lost in transmission (shipping, pipes, etc).
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.
Solar and wind have so far not been nearly adequate to charge existing EVs, let alone what would be necessary if we all converted to EVs.
Given the reluctance to expand nuclear power, we're going to be charging EVs with fossil fuels for a long time.
>> 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.
> Even if you never used wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. then you’d still be ahead in the BEV case.
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.
> And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs.
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.
>> CO2 doesn't care where it's emitted
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?
Is asthma affected by CO2?
> 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).
Tailpipe emissions are far more harmful than only CO2 - which i suspect you know. I’m beginning to think you’re arguing in bad faith here
And you're going to get around 80% from your EV after round trip through a battery. EVs powered by oil power plants is not a good use of energy.
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?
>> around 80% from your EV after round trip through a battery
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.
It is not a 40-50% process. Coal plants run around 33%.
Power supplied is a blend of coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables and some other smaller sources.
40-50% is a conservatively low number.
> Solar and wind have so far not been nearly adequate to charge existing EVs, let alone what would be necessary if we all converted to EVs.
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.
> This is categorically false.
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.
To be fair, Californians were asked not to charge between 4pm and 9pm. There’s plenty of capacity over night.
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.
Which then ignores the efficiency of the generation of gasoline, which takes lots of energy input to refine it into the form useful for ICE vehicles..
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.
My google doctorate says that energy efficiency of refining is 90%. And you ignored the energy efficiency of mining coal.
> 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.
But only around 30% of the refined fuel’s energy transfers into useful work done with the ICE vehicle.
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.
> But only around 30% of the refined fuel’s energy transfers into useful work done with the ICE vehicle.
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%.
>> 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?
Thermodynamic efficiency. Google says coal electric power generation is 33% efficient.
BEV’s run on coal power?
There's no magical barrier in the electrical grid that prevents charging BEVs from coal-fired power plants.
Parent is alleging 100% supply from coal since they claim there’s 70% thermal loss in the charging of BEVs
Coal is circa 20% of the supply in the US. About the same as nuclear or renewables.
It's 10% or less for solar, wind, nuclear, etc...
You can either pump a kWh of oil out of the ground, or you can collect a kWh of solar energy with a PV panel.
There is about no way what you wrote can possibly be true; with 5x efficiency gain we wouldn't need a mountain of EV subsidies to get companies to manufacture them and people to buy them.
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.
> we wouldn't need a mountain of EV subsidies to get companies to manufacture them and people to buy them
The consumer captures these purported gains, not the manufacturer.
this is key- peiple often think market will just magically adjust to most efficient solution, bur incentives must alight.
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
This compares gas -> motion with battery -> motions. To close the loop, we’d have to incorporate the generation efficiency. That will still yield an impressive number, but not 5x.
Solar => Car battery you only lose about 10% of energy.
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...
When you're that poor do you need a fridge, or do you 'just' need access to a fridge? It's a massive waste if you're living on such a little and you literally only need to keep a handful of things cool.
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.
You’re thinking too far down the line. The article mentions this but its worth repeating: even the people producing and selling food don’t have access to refrigeration so a lot of the food they have spoils and goes to waste. That’s the first thing that needs to change. After that better roads and transport networks would help even more. Those things can at least get them out of food poverty and will also have second order effects that will increase economic output and put more money into people’s pockets.
Household appliances come much later after you’ve established a working economy and infrastructure.
Is it economically possible to make these investments?
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?
Check out the railways that currently exist in Africa and the ones that were built by China and get back to me on that.
The problem is storing and moving the energy. We could theoretically capture lightning strikes (electrostatic discharge) and store those to power things.
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.
It's good to remember how starved for resources some places are.
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...
The most interesting statistic I've heard recently is that the United States uses more energy just for its AC than the entire African continent does for literally everything combined.
The gap is incredible.
that's an amazing stat, so I went looking for a primary source - what I found so far was a blurb in this Guardian article that links to another Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/how-amer...
"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).
Vaclav Smil has written extensively and extremely well about this subject. His latest "How the World Really Works" goes into great detail regarding the importance of energy (and especially fossil fuel) in everything that keeps things going.
That's what carbon pricing is about. Of course it must be high enough.
But at least carbon pricing allows us to visualize the problem.
> 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
Heck, within our own nation. [uncomfortable silence]
The American dream was never sustainable.
We do have the energy right now, though.
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.
We're on track on a big part of Europe being energy-restricted this winter, so at least right now there's not an abundance of energy even for the current needs of the first world, much less for those who cannot pay much and would need not the same amount but growth.
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.
> especially if look at the market share of renewables in total energy which includes not only electricity but also heating and transportation.
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 see your point, however, I've seen a lot of local renovation projects for energy efficiency and my conclusion is that while they should be done (because they're cost effective), that is the slow, long-term solution since that effectively requires reconstructing much of the housing stock, which is going to take decades - so that's not a plausible solution for any short term problems, filling the energy gap with more generation is faster.
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.
On Europe:
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.
Who had outlawed wind-farms and where? There are offshore installations and I see wind turbines everywhere in the UK.
https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/uk-government-lifts-suppor...
> 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
Thanks for the link, but 'government choosing not to financially support installations' and 'installations banned' are very very different things.
> We're on track on a big part of Europe being energy-restricted this winter, so at least right now there's not an abundance of energy even for the current needs of the first world
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.
Another way to fix the problem would be to help Ukraine a bit more and forcibly take the gas from Russia as reparations. At this point it’s obvious their military was all bluff.
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.
> Another way to fix the problem would be to help Ukraine a bit more and forcibly take the gas from Russia as reparations.
Nuclear weapons foreclose many options.
Why assume this one Russian weapon actually works, if all others turned out to be shit?
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.
> Why assume this one Russian weapon actually works, if all others turned out to be shit?
I haven't seen the new Jackass movie. Is this the plot?
You want to play Russian roulette on nuclear weapons? Are you listening to yourself right now?
We believed in Putin's bluff for the past two decades, and see what turned out.
> forcibly take the gas from Russia
Surely, you're not suggesting invading a nuclear power to seize their natural assets.
Of course not - it’s Russia who invaded the West. It would be merely a defense and peacekeeping.
Or, more likely, Europe capitulates some time this winter and part of Ukraine goes to Russia. It seems pretty likely that Russia is betting they can survive sanctions longer than Europe can survive without gas. They don't have to actually win in Ukraine; they just have to insert chaos long enough for Europe to freeze.
There is no assumption that Europe would freeze this winter. The aspects I'm complaining about are the inconvenient and costly measures that would be required to ensure that the currently stored and otherwise available energy is sufficient to not freeze and not be pushed to make deals Europe does not want. And while Europe does need gas in the long term (as it's a key industrial resource, not only a source of energy), this is the last winter with a dependency on specifically Russian gas, the ongoing capacity building for alternate sources (e.g. LNG terminals) combined with other investments IMHO would be sufficient to not freeze in the next winter even if the war goes on for years, which I believe it won't.
There is plenty of gas in Europe, it is just mostly used for industrial purposes not residential heating. Somehow people assume that houses will go cold before factories will slow production.
RePowerEU plan is precisely for addressing this situation.
We're not deploying new renewables "pretty much as fast as we can". We're not even close to doing that. In actuality, we have ludicrously-rich power centers which are actively subsidizing fossil fuels and warring against renewables. Imagine if all that effort were redirected.
> Imagine if all that effort were redirected.
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.
Right now, we have enough energy.
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...
Can you elaborate why you're saying that right now we have enough energy ? Because to me it's obvious that the third world has far from enough energy (like, they'd need multiple times more to reach a first world stanard of living), and even in first world there's not really enough at the moment, as indicated by the EU energy crisis.
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?
See my other comment for details.
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.
> If every home was insulated and had a heat pump, we'd all be richer.
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?
>If every home was insulated and had a heat pump, we'd all be richer.
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 it does?
The author seems to advocate for renewables and while we have plenty of energy available capturing it still needs work done. Some of the energy we could use now needs to go mining an manufacturing then we need physically build the infrastructure. The author is saying we should do all those things, that they need done, that the total amount of energy humanity uses should grow not shrink
> The author is saying we should do all those things, that they need done, that the total amount of energy humanity uses should grow not shrink
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.
> It's unbelievably naive how some believe humanity should somehow start using _less_ energy.
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.
Efficiency is not the same as negative growth.
There are actual, real-life proponents of policies that would have us shrink our economies and decrease the standard of living.
That's not because they hate energy but because they think it's not worth to tolerate the negatives associated with production of energy.
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.
Yes, those that would rather subsidize fossil fuels than efficiency and cheap renewables. They're suprisingly prominent and running many major economies.
As it stands, we do not have the ability to both raise living standards and solve climate change. We just are using too many resources for it to be sustainable. Having all of India's population reaching a European level of CO2 expenditure (about 4 tons / person / year) kills us. And renewables would only account for a very small reduction of that.
I don't want to jump on the bandwagon too much, but I think if you want to argue for decreased energy use you have to do it in a way that has a vision for quality of life improving. You might for example point out how much more efficient cities are, or how wasteful consumerism is and argue that people can grow to love having less. I'm not sure, but you definitely shouldn't basically say the only solution is to keep the developing world down and maybe shrink the pie in the developed world too. That just isn't a realistic option.
Also like the other commenters I'm not at all sure renewables can't do the job. Prices have fallen fast
> As it stands, we do not have the ability to both raise living standards and solve climate change. We just are using too many resources for it to be sustainable
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.
Thankfully, I don't really give a crap about your opinion of me, but thanks for the info.
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.
Well we have enough uranium reserves to increase the world's energy output by several orders of magnitude and still last hundreds of years.
Right. And we could actually create a reliable grid vs. a shitty patchwork of unreliable power sources that require us to massively overbuild generation capacity.
I guess we don't do this because too few bureaucrats can grift if we build nuke plants?
No grid is 100% reliable, but in the present situation where renewables are cheaper than nuclear it's not hard to see why they're being preferred. You'd need a story where that price difference is artificial or temporary (both possible)
Renewables are cheaper than nuclear mostly because of large state grants and tax reductions. Ultimately, if you want to handle all of your load with only renewables, you're going to need to build about 3x what's needed, just to account for wind turbines not running, sun not shining, etc, and you're going to need to replace most of it in 15 years, with rare earth materials that will start costing a lot of money. Needless to say, it's a waste, and the solution that most competent people agree on is to have a nuclear/renewables mix. Nuclear is necessary to provide a massive, stable base load. Renewables provide people some temporary independence and the overproduction could be sold. But, go for too many renewables, and suddenly you're back to burning gas at night to keep producing.
>> Renewables are cheaper than nuclear mostly because of large state grants and tax reductions.
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.
> Ultimately, if you want to handle all of your load with only renewables, you're going to need to build about 3x what's needed, just to account for wind turbines not running, sun not shining, etc, and you're going to need to replace most of it in 15 years, with rare earth materials that will start costing a lot of money.
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.
Building renewables requires mining for precious metals and rare earths though, which is very energy-intensive. So to deploy these non-polluting renewable energy sources, you first have to pollute a lot. And it's not even clear if there are enough resources on Earth to do this.
Solar panels, batteries, wind mills and such do not appear out of thin air.
Renewables are great and are absolutely the future, but energy security and current needs demand fossil fuels as well. We cannot simply shut off these sources and hope to make it. The transition includes keeping lots of legacy capacity before we wind anything down.
See Europe now for an example of how over-reliance on intermittent generation with no storage yields incredible energy instability.
Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
That is not Europe's energy problem today. Their current problem is that a significant amount of their energy infrastructure relies on continuous imports; but a major exported has decided to stop selling to them for reasons that have nothing to do with technology. This dynamic has been a defining feature of geopolitics for the past half century or so. Whenever you hear talk about "energy independence" you are hearing talk about mitigating a problem that is almost exclusive to fossil fuels.
That's not the case? The big issue in europe is that electricity is expensive, not unreliable. With more renewables the current price spikes in fossil energy wouldn't hurt so much (or, admittedly, more local production capability of fossil energy).
You sure about that?
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.
> expect fewer price spikes.
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).
I don't think solar would be very useful in Europe during the winter. Maybe in the countries furthest to the south, but there's really no point in the Nordics.
Much less than in summer. Luckily wind turbines generate more during winter.
Not really.
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.
Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution levels of tech.
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 misses the point of the article. Yes, the world has had, and will always have, rich and poor. But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy.
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.
Right. Don’t confuse “poor”, ie relative poverty, with absolute levels of wealth ($ per household) and downstream claims about absolute levels of, say, child mortality.
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.
In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants.
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).
Then why did people migrate to where the industrial jobs were?
You know my comment said some people, wealthy people lived better in some ways than present day impoverished factory workers? Farm hands, Eastern European serfs and so-forth did not live better by any means.
As other have noted, the industrial revolution also got much of it's impetus from peasant being driven off the land they cultivated.
Maybe the alternative, whatever it was, seemed to be more horrible. Agriculture for example is really vulnerable to weather and other environmental factors. But the factory is always there, summer or winter, wet or dry season.
Because rich people fucked with their livehood, and even passed laws to indirectly force them to become industrial workers. And there was furious battles against that current...
> But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy.
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.
> And we still had rich and poor.
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.
Isn't social order ultimately just a proxy for access to energy?
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.
The rich/poor divide does indeed exist and has always existed, but that floats separately to the poverty divide. changing one does not change the other. Imagine an ancient communist utopia where all the bread is split evenly - and the 20% who aren't making bread spread their more interesting items across the population equally. Maybe you'll get some nice pottery. By any modern measure of poverty, you have created a utopia of poverty, everyone would be below the modern poverty line.
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.
Yes and no. Given a specific definition of "not impoverished", there is a threshold of energy availability below which energy is fundamentally limiting towards achieving that definition.
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).
Yea it looks like most poverty now is political. Like North Korea or war torn countries. I think most countries if they had good political leadership could be wealthy
Corruption is the enemy of social progress.
Have you spent much time in an energy-poor country?
This article is exceptional. It may be reductive or even wrong but at least it's trying to quantify these issues and it uses actual data. Not only does this allow for analysis, it also makes it, in theory, falsifiable.
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%.
I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
The book Windup Girl [0] is a SciFi novel set in a universe where climate change has completely altered the world. Fossil fuels are no longer available, so production is limited by genetically engineered products or human/animal labor to charge in-universe batteries. Calorie cost of items becomes front and center to many activities.
Really interesting book -- in part because the "calories as currency" isn't even its primary focus, rather merely one part of the backdrop. Recommended, for sure.
Paolo Bacigalupi is fantastic if you're into eco-disaster sci-fi. The Water Knife[1] is also excellent, and with the extreme drought in the western US, feeling more and more prescient.
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife
There's excellent theoretical and empirical support for this idea
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:
In the Alpha Centauri game setting, energy is literally money ("energy credits").
And that's what PoW crypto currencies are: sacrificed energy.
The word sacrifice suggests a religious connotation that seems worth exploring...
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?
Yes, but more like power than energy. The main problem is that energy can't really be stored, so energy cannot be saved like money can (sort of). So it is really power that money buys, not energy, and only supposing power is available.
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
Stores of energy are frequently called fuels.
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.
You don't get energy and materials back out of building things for which there is no demand.
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.
Energy storage can be challenging. It is far from impossible.
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.
Storing a year's worth of U.S. electric production in a way that one could then get it back in a similar time span is not merely challenging. It is infeasible. For one, because of the efficiency issues you mention, we'd need a lot more than a year's worth of electric production to "charge" the "battery", and since we can't dedicate all our energy production capacity to charging that battery, we can't charge it in a reasonable amount of time. Further, we'd need to have the production capacity that could consume that battery, if that battery were fuels made from CO2, say, and we'd have to have it idle except when we need it on an emergency basis -- that or we'd have to use the same kind of fuel as our primary source of electric power under normal conditions, but we're not really allowed to. Moreover, we cannot re-create fissile fuel, so this wouldn't be very dense fuel -- it would have to be chemical fuel meant to be oxidized with atmospheric oxygen. Chemical fuels are not dense enough that we wouldn't notice the storage facilities for them -- they would be enormous, consuming enormous amounts of materials and labor to build. The economic cost of all of that would be staggering -many many times the cost of equivalent amounts of energy that we currently produce-, and that cost is what makes it infeasible.
There's no need to store a year's worth of electrical production. In most cases, a few hours is more than sufficient. Widespread shortfalls are better addressed via grid supply than storage. It might be necessary to have bridging power for a few days, possibly a few weeks, but this is still far from annual-scale in either fraction of production or duration of utilisation.
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.
Always thought that currency should equal J/K, the unit of entropy. It's the one thing we 'use up'.
There's a long history of this.
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).
That would be interesting - but then how to rectify the fact that so many currencies have different values?
Joules can be converted to Bitcoin.
Money is an exchange medium through which any transactable commodity, good, service, or asset may be exchanged for another.
The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
Have you read Marx?
Kind of interesting to note that 'work' (as in physical energy) and 'labour' use the same word in German.
Labor is just labora- latin for work.
As in Russian (and I guess in Ukrainian).
In Ukrainian: work - робота, labour - праця.
in french too
Yea, but power is Kraft.
German "Kraft"[0] as physical term means "force" in English, while "power" translates as "Leistung"[1].
Honestly they get mixed up just like in English.
Kraftwerk for power plant, Kraftstoff for fuel. But then you have elektrische Leistung for electrical power.
He is probably thinking in sense of “Atomkraft”
And English.
clarification: those words are 100% exact synonyms. (Native speaker, of American at least.)
In Italian too (lavoro)
And in English.
I was about to write a comment about energetic Marxism and the Energy Theory of Value
And, perhaps equivalent, I've long suspected that all wealth ultimately comes from the earth.
This is not a good take. Look at Iraq or Venezuela. No lack of energy, but plenty of poverty nonetheless.
You raise an interesting point - Venezuela has an abundance of oil, but also blackouts and a general shortages at the same time.
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.
Energy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wealth.
The energy must be spent within the region to count. Those countries export it.
Why do they export it then? Because abundance of energy is not the only kind of poverty there is.
In Venezuela's case it's because they don't have refineries that can process their heavy crude. What else would they possibly do other than export it?
Because of corruption and foreign interference, same as with any other form of asset. I don't see any conflict with the thesis of the article.
If a country in a temperate climate has valuble natural resources to drive it's economy and doesn't depend on mass skilled labor then governments that don't care about citizens are more easily established and last longer. The number of interest groups that any leader has to keep satisfied to stay in power is much smaller.
Interesting point. I guess the issue with these countries is that their energy reserves are simply used to enrich the state and a small elite, instead of being shared widely with their citizens.
Iraq is the perfect example of being resource-cursed. So, yes.
Quibble with the numbers all you want, but there is a fundamental truth in this visible to anyone who grew up in the third world amidst poverty.
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
Growing up in Indian small towns in the 90s, I remember how people would casually mention the number of air conditioners they had in their house.
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.
Or another way I like to put it - unnafordable energy = unaffordable everything.
Here's a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar.
> 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...
Battery electrochemistry still has headroom, but solar is already approaching the Shockley–Queisser ceiling, which limits efficiency at about 30% for single junction and 50% for multiple junction devices. That's the absolute conversion limit, similar to the Carnot limit for thermal engines.
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.
The Shockley–Queisser ceiling describes the limit of energy per unit area. It says nothing about the efficiency in terms of energy per unit money.
Manufacturing (and installation, operations, and maintenance) efficiencies are more likely governed by Wright's Law, a/k/a Experience Curve Effects, which holds that there is about a 20% efficiency gain with each doubling of output.
<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...>
50% is near to the current lab demonstrated limits for multi-junction, the theoretical max (with infinite layers) is around 88%
I hope that the advent of better solar energy extraction and automation (things like Tesla's robot) will usher us into an era of abundance.
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.
I love the idea of self-sustaining AI driven automation. But unless the system is capable of 100% recycling, it needs raw materials. Some of those are going to become contested.
On this:
> "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).
I think the point is explained further below - the author is making a reference to the amount of energy required if the world had a developed standard of living, not saying that we would ever use natural gas down there.
> 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.
> Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.
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.
What explains the big difference?
Cold air likes to go down. When you open a fridge door, the cold air pours out at the bottom. When you open a chest, it stays in the chest.
Also, a freezer probably has better insulation than a fridge to begin with, since it's designed to hold bigger temperature differential.
Fridges should probably be designed with multiple sections rather than open shelves?
I don't think the author suggests to set up an oil-burning power plant, that number is just for visualization. And I guess you could even go without a battery at night by converting the energy from the daylight directly into cold.
> As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night
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.
This.
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.
For a 2.5 kW solar system would cost somewhere around $2-5K USD and the 5kWH battery would also cost $2-5K USD. I don’t think the average Rwanda citizen has $5-10K available to install just enough power to run their fridge.
It would certainly be on the low end I would expect, and only getting cheaper. It's unfortunate that Rwanda is so poor that even that is far too much :(
Well that system would produce maybe 9X what the fridge needs so you'd have a lot of extra power for other uses, like AC, lights, cooking, online gaming...
Had to check, our fridge model advertises about 0.8kwh/day. I guess while operating it with the ECO -mode.
Those numbers assume a climate controlled environment, though. If you live somewhere hot without air conditioning, the fridge has to work a lot harder.
That’s why the typical middle America “garage fridge” is such an energy hog.
You can be poor while easily meeting your energy needs. A classic example is remote rural areas where virtually all inhabitants own some plot of land. Even if they are poor they can feed their fireplace with some wood, for free.
There’s an awful lot of the world where there isn’t wood available to do that.
Like the plains of the US, even in Native American times trees were too precious to burn.
Sure, but your standard of living will be lower. The energy needs he's talking about include all usage, including that which you get from burning wood on your land.
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
in tech, the ever-increasing availability of computation has widespread effects that haven’t always been easy to predict.
- 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.
> At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average.
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.
I think that basically what it's doing is saying "Here's all the energy that Britain consumes, divided by their total population". So sure, your electricity might only be 2100kWh, but did the government resurface a road nearby? Did you think about the fuel burned to transport the food you bought in the supermarket etc.
This.
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.
That makes sense. The definition might get a bit fuzzy when you have to account for the energy use of producing imported products, but I probably am getting a bit pedantic at this point. The overall point The article tries to make - poorer countries need more energy to get out of poverty - seems good.
Yeah, I think the whole thing about being modelled on Britain is deeply flawed - be like Britain, have a relatively small population in a temperate climate with lots of coast line for off-shore wind and tidal energy, and off-shore all your heavy manufacturing processes.
Who is going to tell Floridians they need to be like Britain and turn off their AC?
We've over populated the planet, surely, we would otherwise have the option to readily move to an area with more suitable climate and plenty of space for refugees.
The average US house is multiple times the area of UK house, so that makes a big difference. https://homescopes.com/average-home-size/ Add car sizes, public transport, less manufacturing.
Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?
It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.
It's looking at total energy consumption, not electricity consumption. The UK only generates about 4500 kWh per person each year - far off that 30,000 kWh number. In the UK (not sure about the US, but it's probably similar), about 25% of our energy consumption is space heating, 30% is road transport, 10% is air transport, 11% is domestic use and the remaining 24% or so is services and industrial. We don't really do AC here - I imagine that's a big chunk of use in southern US states.
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.
We have stats on that, from the same source as the article uses:
In order to build systems to extract and use energy requires an educated society - that is the root deficiency. And it’s a lot more than just dropping books from airplanes.
What if that's mixing cause and effect?
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.
Educated societies existed before refrigeration and manufacturing so those aren’t prerequisites.
The real prerequisite is an ‘educated society’ so there’s a bit of a bootstrapping/chicken/egg problem which is super difficult to solve.
Cooled areas existed before refrigeration too.
What changed is the incentives and relative ease of different ways of cooling
> If you have energy, you have refrigeration.
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.
In the present day, yes, that's true. However, once we develop AGI, this deficiency could* go away permanently.
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.
Access to electricity is a major driver of educational attainment.
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:
Number 3 is your strongest point, but the bottleneck there is really teachers not energy. On a scale needed to pull a society out of poverty you need not just a massive amount of imported teachers, but collegiate level teachers as well, and for decades.
I found this policy note that provides a decent overview of the research linking energy and educational. Results are mixed. I am still biased towards the link being there (study finding no link studies 200 students over 3 months, whereas the study finding a link was over 3 years with 10,000 students).
https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/40418-poli...
And if the people educated can leave for better lands, they often will. There aren’t easy ways to prevent that.
Well, there's a circular dependency here - or if you're more optimistic, a virtuous cycle.
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.
18th and 19th century Brits who first built these systems were not very educated by our standards. Many of them, in fact, were uneducated tinkerers.
That time period in Britain didn't just see big advancements in industrialization, but in engineering, medicine, finance, and legal systems. You have to see the difference between individuals and the the society itself.
It’s kind of silly to argue the “intelligence” difference between someone who can build a nuclear power plant given a society with supply chains available and someone who with fifty or a thousand men can go into the wilderness and build a functioning city with little or no foreign input for years. They’re entirely different skill sets.
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.
No one person knows everything needed to build a nuclear power plant, but as long as there's enough people who understand the different principles and disciplines required then yea they could restart with just hand tools. Knowledge is the key, the tools are not.
> In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption.
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.)
Not that story telling is the ultimate solution, but I share the frustration. So many of these old stories are essentially coming true, and there's not much discussion on it by most people.
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.
It’s a failure of education, and in many ways a deliberate one because of the primacy of industry over the past century.
It's a systematic failure of government going back at least two centuries. In 1913, people were making identical complaints about the government and courts (especially regarding IP) as they do today.
I agree — I think often where there is a prolonged failure of democratic government it is a result of insufficient attention to updating the education of the voting population.
well if you want to see how “let’s use less power” can look like, look at Europe this winter. Will be fun to watch.
Nuclear Winter can stop Global Warming with room to spare, so, maybe, Russians do the right thing when they are shelling Ukrainian nuclear power plant. Maybe, Ukrainian just need to return the fire.
No, all poverty is organizational, one can have plenty of access or energy without the capacity to deploy it in a way that alleviates poverty or solves a problem, and the other way around plenty of technologies exist that utilize very little energy to great effect. The Soviet Union was for a long time the second largest consumer and biggest producer of energy in the world, but its society was characterized by low efficiency and relatively little output per unit of energy consumed.
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.
I would claim that poverty also comes from impoverished ecosystems, and lack of civil rights, so it's really wealth = access to energy + clean environment + civil rights
I'd say more human rights than civil rights. Human rights are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Nah man, we need more rights of course. Forget about liberty and shit, we just need more
> the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling. Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. There are only so many places you can put a windmill, and only so many rivers to dam.
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.
No, it isn't close to true; there are more than enough roofs and unfarmable plots of land.
Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
Thanks, I thought so. The article proposes an interesting relationship between energy and basic humanitarian needs, but takes a sudden sharp turn on renewables and nuclear.
One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient/ optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways:
-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.
Regulation is short-sighted? You say this in a world that's burning up because no one imposed on emitters the cost of the externalities of those emissions... Now that is short-sighted.
The saying I recall is: "You can't save yourself rich"
I would say energy doesn’t just appear itself, it comes from good infrastructure+support, which comes from a well planning from the government, which also require the govt to be competent, which require a well govt structure. Therefore the energy correlation is there but not a causation.
"Every time money changes hands, GDP goes up. And every time money changes hands, that's usually becomes someone is doing something. As we've seen, that takes energy. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that GDP and energy are highly correlated."
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.
You are giving way too much credit to moving money = doing stuff as the cause of failure of macro economics. There's so much wrong with macro. Check out Steve Keens' The New Econmics: A manifesto for some of the major things wrong with macro.
I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.
Any sort of link or title that you can recall or find?
I don't think that was one of the talks that was live streamed, so there won't be a recording. I'm traveling today so I'll have to look for it when I get back. Henry may have a website, I'll look for that too.
Thanks, I'd appreciate it.
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.
One of the most insightful quotes I ever found of HN:
«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.»
I'm not sure "collective intelligence" gives the right feel. We have the intelligence, we're just organised by a few people who have power directing labour towards making those few people even more insanely rich, whilst many people continue without direction and a larger few attempt to direct resources towards the benefit of the majority.
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.
but we dont have the intelligence
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
If this site is filled with high-IQ individuals then that just proves how limited intelligence is. You need more traits.
It all being about IQ is truley the archetypical HN comment.
What's your take on the capacity the deficiency of which prevents us, as a species, from making right choices that are going to improve the well-being of everyone? E.g. from harvesting abundant energy our star rains on our planet, when we already have the technologies to capture it?
Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?
Much of it boils down to coordination problems, local optima, game-theoretic outcomes, and the like. Politics, in a broad sense.
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>.
If we were smarter we would just exploit each other/“the Earth” harder because we use our intelligence for selfish and short-term gain.
So yes we lack kindness to put it mildly.
The whole problem is exactly selfish short-term gain that eclipses longer-term common gain. Lack of understanding it, and lack of the ability to create a social system that works better towards it, to my mind, is directly related to our (limited) intelligence as a species.
Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
Selfishness is about intent. Not about doing self-serving things because you lack the intelligence to do more altruistic things. That’s just my perspective.
Even from a completely mechanical, machine-level rationality point of view, a lot of things we humans do is against our best long-term interest, because poorly contained impulses of short-term interest ruin that.
There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix/mitigation for climate impacts).
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.
Per the article, this is a false dichotomy. If we increase energy production by 1%, and use it for carbon capture, then we will have a carbon negative economy.
Increase energy production using fossil fuels?
I'm sure there's a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.
More energy and other life's amenities that are enabled by it can go a long way alleviating the intellectual and emotional poverty.
It's pretty hard to be intellectual and kind when you toil for subsistence every day and barely have enough food.
(As someone who doesn't agree with the article's conclusions), someone living in poverty does not have the resources to address intellectual and emotional poverty. If you can't afford to own or run a refrigerator, do you really have the time to (for example) tutor your kids outside of school hours, see a therapist, spend time relaxing on the weekends and in the evenings? No. You're probably working three jobs.
As energy availability goes to infinity, labor demand goes to zero, so leisure time for education, hobbies, art, etc. increases.
Interesting related presentation on what is energy and how it relates to the economy from a physical point of view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&t=3367
Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
I can't help thinking of the 'Milton Friedman' quote
'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.
This is the ultimate truth that, for whatever reason (emotional/egoic as far as I can tell), gets conveniently ignored.
Truly sad to see humanity limit/destroy itself over and over when there are perfectly viable options available.
The reality is that politicians and large businesses always want to centralize everyone around their single core to control the market/services etc, whether 'left' or 'right', and their propaganda/pr is always subtly pushing problem/reaction/solution to further those goals...
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'
I assumed they were just going to ignore renewables, since the kind of person who writes these things generally does.
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.
The article has a fair dose of paternalistic exceptionalism regarding countries in Africa. Rwanda is not what people think it is, there is much to learn from how things are being done in Rwanda, however, they don't think they need their colonial masters to rule them any more. Hence, unless you seek out first hand accounts or visit the place, you would never know how wonderful the place is.
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.
> the only people serious about alleviating poverty…
Please provide some data to back up this assertion?
Telephony is one of the analogies. Many developing countries' rural villages could simply leapfrog the landline telephone technology and move directly to cell phones.
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.
> Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland.
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.
We need far cheaper solar panels and batteries as a starting point.
Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn't the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math):
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-...
You also need to install all this equipment somewhere protected from theft.
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rwanda-today/news/power...
You ignored inverter, battery, battery replacement, and installation costs. All that has to be amortized along with the interest rate or opportunity cost of tying up your capital.
There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
The elements ignored in OP only further amplify the point that capital in addition to energy is required.
This makes gizmo686's argument stronger, not weaker.
Good point, so you buy 4 panels for $400 USD. Next what do you need: wiring, mounting, inverter, storage - I'd like to set up a fridge at the camp, any idea the price on everything I would need?
Also even here and Europe when price of energy goes up poor people swich to burning wood or coal. This is bad for enviroment and the air qualit in their house causing disease.
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.
"The Limits to Growth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
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.
100°C will sterilise water but it won't purify it if there are inorganic pollutants in it.
Jordan peterson made a video a few weeks ago talking about the importance of lifting poverty in context of global climate change. Super interesting
I think this article assumes that all people want the same things out of life, such as comfort and refrigeration, but this is not the case with "everyone".
Yeah I think the market for people who want to be uncomfortable is huge. /s
If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?
It's not a significant issue.
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.
"A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1]
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).
Yes and no.
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.
Taking the articles figure of 77,000 kWh per year per person. Lets call it 100,000 (10^5) kWh per year per person and a population of 10 billion (10^10) people, we are looking at 10^15 kWh/year of energy, which is about 10^14 watts. Earth receives about 10^17 watts of solar energy, so we are looking at an increase of about %0.1 of the energy budget. This is ignoring energy coming from non solar sources (there is a lot of geothermnal energy coming from within the planet, but I'm not sure what rate that makes it to the surface).
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.
I am amused by the optimism of these responses. Nobody is concerned that if we end up with cheap nuclear fusion that humanity won’t use a lot more of it? Would humans stop building resorts in deserts?
Deserts are a wonderful place for resorts, assuming it is man made desert (like the Sahara) and infinite energy to desalinate and recycle water in an ecologically sound way.
We just aren't to that point yet.
I am completely a proponent of humanity using cheap energy to elevate our standard of living to ridiculous levels. I’m just wondering what we will do with the waste heat. I cannot believe that we will limit ourselves to current levels of consumption.
I was unaware that the Sahara was man-made.
Yep; we overfarmed the crap out of it in prehistoric times, apparently.
Given that the desert formed > 2 mya and human agriculture originated ~12 kya, this seems unlikely.
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...>
Article from 2018 referencing the study I was referring to:
https://www.sciencealert.com/green-sahara-early-holocene-agr...
Right.
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.
We can't even get a stable grid, decent infrastructure, or stocked supermarkets... let alone fancy technology. I would't hold my breat about that going forward.
Well, let's remove taxes on oil, etc! Let's stop putting governmental barriers in place such as when recently Canada refused permission to build natural gas plants. Governance needs to step out of the way, and let the free market do what it needs to!
(for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)
I remember a scene in Sopranos where Tony told off his lietunants for not making a enough money for him. “This business is like a pyramid” (more or less).
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.
All poverty is institutional and societal poverty. People are poor not because of lack of energy, but because the societies they live in lack the inclusive institutions that can create those patterns for energy use, education, healthcare and anything else.
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.
Was Man of the Hole poor?
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.
Poverty is by definition a relative notion. A middle class occidental has access to culinary diversity, healthcare, transport speeds and indoor plumbing that not even kings could dream of a few centuries ago. Poverty is defined relative to the technological frontier - what is known and achievable in a certain age with reasonable effort and access to common resources.
> 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.
So, if you choose to define poverty as relative, that works. Checking via dict.org, the first given definition however is: "The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need." The second allows for a possible relative measure, in proposing both need and desire as conditions: "Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas." (Based on 1913 Webster.)
<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.
And ... further thought.
(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.
The discussion is undoubtedly framed developmentally, the author clearly compares affluence among contemporary societies and tries to propose economic and technological determinants for those outcomes.
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.
Mind: though I've strong sympathies with elements of TFA's argument, I also have problems with its absolute line that all poverty is energy poverty. It's possible to think of counterexamples extending in both directions --- those who are energy-rich and still impoverished, and those who have little access to energy but live relatively well-off, with basic needs and securities addressed. I've been holding off on a longer reply to TFA itself as I think through this, and have largely lost the useful comment window on this particular article.
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.
You are of course correct that energy is a master resource that powers all physical transformations that drive economic development. You are in fact so correct that the claim is almost meaningless: we are awash with potential sources of energy, vast amounts of solar energy bathe the planet while huge reserves of fissile nuclear material lay in the crust, at the limit all matter can be converted into gargantuan amounts of energy - if only humanity learns how.
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?
I suspect you'll miss this and our commenting window will close soon, but...
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.
> The resource curse is that easy riches drive out honest efforts elsewhere.
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.
It's not inclusive institutions, it's the people don't have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I.e. free markets.
Markets are just an abstraction that's built on strong institutions: property rights, an inclusive justice system that can settle commercial disputes and punish the antisocial, a state that can tax that commercial activity and reinvest the proceeds into infrastructure.
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.
Free markets require a government, and a government acts as guarantor of the rights needed for the free market to function.
A free market is not a market without a government.
Some form of government exists in any place on Earth - lest that territory is claimed by some other government. Yet, a large number of such entities are unable to guarantee those rights.
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.
You can have free markets without inclusive institutions. Free markets require the government to guarantee rights to do what one wants to do, as long as it does not harm others. It also requires a government to enforce contracts and property rights. It requires equality under the law.
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.
> require the government to guarantee rights to do what one wants to do, as long as it does not harm others. It also requires a government to enforce contracts and property rights.
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.
> punish the antisocial
What do you mean by that?
If climate change is an existential threat, we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit. If you truly believe climate change is super serious, then logically government ought to put its thumb on the scale to ensure a lot of people get priced out of energy intensive products like air conditioning, leaving their computers on at night, meat, aluminum, and so on.
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.)
> we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit.
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.
Hypothetically, assume gas prices doubled again via a tax increase, but the government used the proceeds to give everyone a free heatpump + induction range and built out so much nuclear / solar that electric bills halved.
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.
More reading:
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.
That first article just reads like scare porn, calibrated to maximize clicks, while being light on actual substance.
It looks like the author has a history of writing like this. I wonder what her track record of being "right" is?
You might be pleased to learn that the Malthusians have a nearly 200 year record of being wrong.
Malthus was right. He was just ahead of his time. There are too many people in the world and it's the cause of climate change and almost every problem.
But that isn't the cause of climate change? The cause of climate change is a small number of those people releasing a gigantic amount of carbon
Do they indeed? They appear to be getting proven right on a daily basis, lately.
Technology increases productivity. Not all energy destroys the earth, see nuclear energy. More technology has enabled us to feed the earth with less people devoted to food production. Etc.