All poverty is energy poverty • Hacker News Board

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#121

Post by generalizations » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #106

golemotron wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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.

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#122

Post by sunjester » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

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".

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#123

Post by aeternum » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

weberer wrote: post #112

ciconia wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#124

Post by cinntaile » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

ciconia wrote: post #83

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #15

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 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). An…

> 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…

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?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#125

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

ciconia wrote: post #83

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #15

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 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). An…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#126

Post by jibe » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

geysersam wrote: post #64

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#127

Post by weberer » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

ohgodplsno wrote: post #103

bequanna wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

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.

Well we have enough uranium reserves to increase the world's energy output by several orders of magnitude and still last hundreds of years.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#128

Post by nkmnz » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

I'm sure there's a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#129

Post by PeterisP » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #115

PeterisP wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#130

Post by lostapathy » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

mkl95 wrote: post #87

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.