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Making energy too cheap to meter

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Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#41

Post by carapace »

buck4roo wrote: post #29
carapace wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's beside the point. How do we handle the heat? From the same link (as my previous comment): > the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to…

Society is a heat engine. Full stop.

Yes, that's the problem.

Society's waste heat will cook us, literally, if we try to use ever-growing amounts of energy on the surface of a sphere covered by a blanket of gasses and moisture, because there is no mechanism to discard the waste heat fast enough.

In other words, society is a heat engine until it becomes a bomb.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#42

Post by neltnerb »

omega3 wrote: post #39
neltnerb wrote: post #7

Summary: If energy is free and doesn't impact anything then of course you would want to use more of it. I don't know why they think this is a unique perspective, I guess just pointing out that people don't discriminate by electricity source when they condemn extra energy use beyond what is needed to do a job. If the electricity source is free and does no harm there is no obvious way to label the electrons. I don't un…

> Summary: If energy is free and doesn't impact anything then of course you would want to use more of it. I'm not convinced if this is always the case. I'm sure this is already a topic of interest in psychology but I guess that unless there is a reward for using the energy there wouldn't be consumption on the individual level. As I'm writing this my CPU is at 2% and GPU at 1% utilization. I'm not actively looking for…

I am happy to concede that there are ways to spend energy that are neutral or negative, like, say, pervasive surveillance and limitless data retention.

I think the point that energy substitutes for labor is generally fair though.

But honestly what I'm trying to state is that this characterization of environmentalists as worried about reducing energy use regardless of how much harm the source causes to be a straw man.

The point is sustainability and the health of ourselves and natural systems. If energy caused zero issues to generate then I think environmentalists would be banging the direct atmospheric removal drums harder than anyone.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#43

Post by philwelch »

carapace wrote: post #40
philwelch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human civilization doesn’t need to stay earthbound, especially not on that timescale.

Sure (and I'm into that) but it won't help, it just delays things a few more centuries. Even if we postulate a magic FTL space drive the crunch still comes.

Free space settlements give the solar system a population capacity in the trillions or quadrillions, and once you can build free space settlements, you can build interstellar generation ships--no FTL needed.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#44

Post by carapace »

philwelch wrote: post #43
carapace wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure (and I'm into that) but it won't help, it just delays things a few more centuries. Even if we postulate a magic FTL space drive the crunch still comes.

Free space settlements give the solar system a population capacity in the trillions or quadrillions, and once you can build free space settlements, you can build interstellar generation ships--no FTL needed.

It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem.

Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves.

Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon.

Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the background temperature of space itself, accelerating the heat death.

This isn't going to take millions of years.

If it take 2500 years to reach a trillion, it takes only another 2500 years to reach a trillion trillion.

The point is that the OP's thinking is fundamentally unrealistic, in the sense that it's not real: it doesn't take into account basic thermodynamics and the structure of local space (Earth with it's atmosphere, etc.) It's a cartoon.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#45

Post by philwelch »

carapace wrote: post #44
philwelch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free space settlements give the solar system a population capacity in the trillions or quadrillions, and once you can build free space settlements, you can build interstellar generation ships--no FTL needed.

It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem. Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves. Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon. Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the backgr…

We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#46

Post by carapace »

philwelch wrote: post #45
carapace wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem. Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves. Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon. Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the backgr…

We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.

People who argue for artificially curbing ourselves are counter productive (no pun intended) but they're also not worth arguing with. (Have you met an environmentalist who doesn't wear mass-produced clothing? I've met one. One.)

The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then.

Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...)

I could go on and on.

Energy without wisdom will eventually fail.

Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board.

That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#47

Post by imtringued »

csense wrote: post #14
neltnerb wrote: post #7

Summary: If energy is free and doesn't impact anything then of course you would want to use more of it. I don't know why they think this is a unique perspective, I guess just pointing out that people don't discriminate by electricity source when they condemn extra energy use beyond what is needed to do a job. If the electricity source is free and does no harm there is no obvious way to label the electrons. I don't un…

My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum. To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice a…

I don't know why ecofascism is such a popular rhetoric against green parties. If I look at the competition in Germany the other parties are downright authoritarian. The CDU/conservative party is known for trying to push internet surveillance laws, open lobbying and corruption, cutting taxes for the rich and general reluctance to do anything to slow down climate change.

Meanwhile the green party introduces a CO2 tax and land value tax in Baden Württemberg and suddenly it is the spawn of Satan even though it is the only party that is actively against surveillance, would rather cut taxes for the middle class and below, wants to introduce a CO2 dividend to so that everyone has an equal amount of free CO2 pollution.

If anything, internalising externalities makes people wealthier because they stop engaging in destructive behaviour and it reduces the need to micro manage the economy and the need for a nanny state like the conservative (CDU) or worker party wants (SPD).

Everyone warned of how the greens being in a government coalition would be the end of Germany but the reality is that they are barely even being listened to. The greens might be against nuclear power but do they even have that decision making power? The liberal party is constantly swinging between continue nuclear power and stop it. The conservative party is the one that actually stopped the nuclear plants ten years ago and the greens were basically only a tiny blip that is not worth listening to. They had no power.

Yeah it's the greens with their pseudo science CO2 taxes, CO2 dividends and land value taxes and lower income taxes for the middle class that are trapped in some ideological cage. We should instead listen to those who want to micro manage the country and know what's best for us.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#48

Post by imtringued »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #23
csense wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum. To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice a…

What you perceive as some weird religious thing is merely the rejection of the completely unfounded axiom that all logistic curves are exponentials if you want them to be. From the point of view of someone who has rejected this axiom, then the slavish devotion to growth looks like a bizarre cult where the worshippers feed more and more of the very finite resources needed for humans to flourish into a machine that doe…

What people don't seem to grasp is that the optimal growth path isn't the fastest one, it is the one that balances speed vs longevity.

If you burn yourself out in the first 10 years of your career, your rate of growth might be impressive but your most productive years will barely even matter so your output will be low either way.

What you want to do is reach the highest possible output and maintain it for as long as possible.

Trading off speed for longevity can thereby increase total output instead of suddenly crashing.

Valuing longevity too much and speed too little will mean lower total output because you were spending too much time with low output.

This is an optimization problem where being an ergophile or ergophobe is actually suboptimal.

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#49

Post by charlieyu1 »

philwelch wrote: post #33
charlieyu1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say I don't understand why energy is so expensive in Europe, and I feel it is down to politics. In UK it cost like 5 times that of Hong Kong, and with standing charges on top of that.

A major source of energy in Europe was natural gas from Russia. This is no longer available due to the war in Ukraine, causing a continent-wide shortfall even for countries that didn’t depend on it as much because now they need to share their energy.

The European gas price has since then fell by 50% or more in the last couple of months but I don't see any signs of price reduction of consumer energy

Re: Making energy too cheap to meter

#50

Post by philwelch »

carapace wrote: post #46
philwelch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.

People who argue for artificially curbing ourselves are counter productive (no pun intended) but they're also not worth arguing with. (Have you met an environmentalist who doesn't wear mass-produced clothing? I've met one. One.) The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't…

None of these problems are the result of using too much energy. Many of them are a consequence of how we produce the energy we have. Most of them can be solved by using even more energy.

Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.

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