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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#151

Post by 8note »

bottlepalm wrote: post #55
ebiester wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#152

Post by WalterBright »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #147
WalterBright wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> 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…

See my other reply.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#153

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> 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...

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#154

Post by [deleted] »

bequanna wrote: post #89
space_fountain wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

[deleted]

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#155

Post by zbrozek »

WalterBright wrote: post #95
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ~…

> 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.

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#156

Post by mrtksn »

bequanna wrote: post #89
space_fountain wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#157

Post by PeterisP »

generalizations wrote: post #121
trasz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#158

Post by woeh »

SilverBirch wrote: post #45
woeh wrote: post #14

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#159

Post by space_fountain »

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.

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

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#160

Post by 8note »

Victerius wrote: post #24
pickovven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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
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