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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#241

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #229
nine_k wrote: post #145

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.» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083

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 t…

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

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#243

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #217
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ener…

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

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#244

Post by eli_gottlieb »

bluetomcat wrote: post #200
izend wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe has the resources to produce cheap energy they just decided to not exploit it and import their energy from Russia and others.

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 hegemony of rampant worldwide liberalism

You gonna define "liberalism" precisely? It's overloaded with mutually contradictory meanings.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#245

Post by scratcheee »

mellavora wrote: post #68
coldtea wrote: post #22

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…

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.

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#246

Post by eli_gottlieb »

bluetomcat wrote: post #231
KptMarchewa wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Political_Theory

>He refers to this ideology as a 'timeless, non-modern theory' valid for all time.

Rubbish.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#247

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

>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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#248

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#249

Post by manholio »

WalterBright wrote: post #227
manholio wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 govern…

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.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#250

Post by bluetomcat »

goatlover wrote: post #213
bluetomcat wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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