It is possible to grow economically within a constrained energy budget, as the lever metaphor suggests. With efficiency, it is even possible to double the population…
But I find it very hard to believe in a continued economic growth simultaneously with a declining energy budget, especially when the economic aspect is facing a cliff of massive debt.
The only way out is good ole industrialism on a massive scale in such a scientific way to keep cooking dinner and not spoil the garden.
Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
101–110 of 174 posts
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the great thing about thermodynamics, you can determine bounds for a few magnitudes in a physical system ignoring all the details about its evolution. For instance you can't disrupt the 2nd law, so at some point it's actually true that it is impossible to mitigate overheating and you won't be able to improve Stefan-Boltzmann law (except for increasing our emissivity, at night I'd guess). You can try to play wi…
"Wavelength- and subwavelength-scale particles,[1] metamaterials,[2] and other nanostructures are not subject to ray-optical limits and may be designed to exceed the Stefan–Boltzmann law."
Oh well, if you come up with magic materials you can do anything, of course.
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Wavelength- and subwavelength-scale particles,[1] metamaterials,[2] and other nanostructures are not subject to ray-optical limits and may be designed to exceed the Stefan–Boltzmann law."
Oh well, if you come up with magic materials you can do anything, of course.
Its magic when you say embed Au angsrtom scale layering in an Si structure in order to control the wave plane? Any decent E&M research lab can pull out many examples of magic then…
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh well, if you come up with magic materials you can do anything, of course.
Its magic when you say embed Au angsrtom scale layering in an Si structure in order to control the wave plane? Any decent E&M research lab can pull out many examples of magic then…
I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand.
We're talking about macroscopic systems here. The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages. It doesn't matter that somebody in nanowhatever claims a deviation from the macroscopic behaviour, that's their job. You still have a macroscopic Earth. An Earth brimming with grey goo would still obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth. Oh ok... I see why I got lost. In my head I didn't hold the assumption that "all growth necessarily must consume more energy". This is assumed throughout the article until the Epilogue. But if you drop this assumption, then I don't think the "it's just inflation not growth" holds anym…
I had to parse that part a few times to get it myself, when I saw you didn't get it too I could relate. Then I had to think a few times about what you gave in response! It seems this part of the topic is quite involved. I think I get some of it now. If you drop the assumption that grow takes energy, then no extra demand on energy from growth, then no price increase on energy, then no inflation, and so it's just growt…
> I still have a hard time imagining a growth that doesn't use more energy (except the one defined in that article as "development", which seems to be a more sophisticated/involved use of existing resources, rather than extracting/creating more new (primary) resources.)
Can’t you imagine efficiency gains leading to an increase in output (GDP) for constant inputs (resources)? That’s growth. (Note that the article talks about development as something different from GDP growth.)
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#106I read through the comments expecting the typical HN takedown of the whole bogus idea that energy must become cheaper as a fraction of the economy in order for it to keep growing. But surprisingly, nobody more economically literate than me has done so, so I guess it falls on me. We already have experience with an economic input which is required for practically all production becoming less important to the economy as…
I'm not sure this is quite a takedown of the author's point. In fact, I'm surprised at how many people on HN seem to be misunderstanding this. The author is saying that physics puts a fairly solid cap on the amount of power we can produce on earth. That's the basic point. What does a finite energy-consuming, exponentially growing economy look like? If we accept that all economic transactions consume some energy, and…
The price of energy and the energy intensity of an economy are not the same thing. This is because the price of energy is the cost at the margin: the cost of producing one additional unit of energy. Since a rational economy exploits cheap sources of energy first, this price is necessarily no less than the cost of production of each unit of energy actually consumed. So there is no contradiction.
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its magic when you say embed Au angsrtom scale layering in an Si structure in order to control the wave plane? Any decent E&M research lab can pull out many examples of magic then…
I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand. We're talking about macroscopic systems here. The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages. It doesn't matter that somebody in nanowhatever claims a deviation from the macroscopic behaviour, that's the…
> I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand.
I referenced wikipedia and cited an example of such from my experience in physics lab in college nearly a decade ago… I don't get why people try to use some "law" built upon a particular set assumptions that work on a particular set of circumstances expect their leaky abstractions on top of it to govern everything that could ever be possible…
>The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages.
On systems operating under certain assumptions… just like navier-stokes predicting singularities from a specific set of IC's in theory that don't happen in real life from said IC's, which have to be handled with a bunch of corrections and adjustments that are more accurate… we're still working out the math as to why that is…
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand. We're talking about macroscopic systems here. The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages. It doesn't matter that somebody in nanowhatever claims a deviation from the macroscopic behaviour, that's the…
> I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand. I referenced wikipedia and cited an example of such from my experience in physics lab in college nearly a decade ago… I don't get why people try to use some "law" built upon a particular set assumptions that work on a particular set of circumstances expect their leaky abstractions on top of it to govern e…
You're mixing up laws with models.
Conservation of momentum is a physical law, that is, we're not making that up, we always see it. The Navier-Stokes equation is a continuum mechanics model of fluids with interesting mathematics, but it's not fundamental, it relies on conservation of momentum and additional reasonable assumptions about the fluid, in the same way that for instance the van der Waals equation is reasonable but it's not a law, you find deviations and there are better models.
As far as we can tell the laws of thermodynamics are laws indeed, that's why no one is proposing perpetual motion machines of the second kind any more.
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy.“ That wasn’t really his point. His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. If you don’t like the buying it up argument you can also think along the line of delivery co…
> His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. I don't think that's true though. There are vital commodities that have been effectively free in some societies (water and salt, for example). Even energy - wind energy is free and some societies used it extensively, and biomass for burning was abundant in some places. We c…
Those examples are cheap because you can arbitrarily produce more than you need. As counterexample, consider things which you cannot arbitrarily produce more of — licensed drugs, lottery ticket combinations, shares of a company you’re not already running. In all cases, it is possible to buy enough that you’re excluding other people from buying any. In the case of licensed drugs and similar, this is why monopolies are regulated. In the case of lottery tickets, it’s one of the few “winning” strategies and (Some? All?) places forbid it. In this narrative, energy production is limited at some imprecisely defined level, so more cannot be produced.
Re: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still don't get why people do this. You can't use snippets of Wikipedia to make a point you don't understand. I referenced wikipedia and cited an example of such from my experience in physics lab in college nearly a decade ago… I don't get why people try to use some "law" built upon a particular set assumptions that work on a particular set of circumstances expect their leaky abstractions on top of it to govern e…
You're mixing up laws with models. Conservation of momentum is a physical law, that is, we're not making that up, we always see it. The Navier-Stokes equation is a continuum mechanics model of fluids with interesting mathematics, but it's not fundamental, it relies on conservation of momentum and additional reasonable assumptions about the fluid, in the same way that for instance the van der Waals equation is reasona…
The law I was referring to in this case was Stefan–Boltzmann law (heavily reliant upon assumptions on a given black body that break down under certain circumstances, that people like to hand wave away because they haven't had to deal with the complexities of said circumstances before), which may as well as be a model as far as I'm concerned.