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What is energy, actually? (2011)

jancovici.com

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Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#271

Post by BjoernKW »

jodrellblank wrote: post #262
gpanders wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been". It is not just the employers — I’ve worked with many people that think nothing of commuting an hour to work ONE WAY (in their pickup trucks and SUVs no less), even when living closer to work is a perfectly valid option (this is part…

I imagine there's a big difference between a 15 minute commute with a tiny car that doesn't have time to warm up and ends in a crowded parking lot, and an hour in a comfortable roomy Cheverolet Movie-Theater SUV with music playing and heated seats and no family or work or pedestrians and being in the biggest vehicle on the road. A big SUV is one of the most expensive, most luxurious, nicest things, nicest places to s…

There's a difference but even driving just 30 minutes per day in a tiny car that otherwise just sits around doing nothing is still a tremendous waste when you could just not drive at all and work from anywhere.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#272

Post by BjoernKW »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #264
BjoernKW wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] long commutes in powerful cars? People in developed countries don't need that either. Commuting being a hard requirement for modern life in an industrialised country is both a fallacy and perpetuated cargo cult. Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been". Doing away wit…

So are you in favor of government telling people where to live and work? I've seriously heard your position many times but no one ever puts forward a solution to making it happen other than the government forcing people to do it. Sounds like a dictatorship to me. and no I don't think employers are all gonna just let people not "come in" to work.

No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I argue for people to change their inveterate, cargo cult ways of thinking about what constitutes work and the conditions required for it.

We need a new mindset not new government policy. That change can't and must not be mandated but has to come from each and everyone of us.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#273

Post by BjoernKW »

wazoox wrote: post #270
BjoernKW wrote: post #88

The title is misleading in that it's not exactly the conclusion the article arrives at. The article has it quite the other way round: Once energy consumption doesn't grow anymore we either need more efficient means of growth (i.e. less energy consumption per growth unit) or we have to forego growth. It's pre-Industrial-Age Malthus all over again: Barring paradigm shifts that allow for more efficient production planet…

"There have always been paradigm shifts, therefore there will be more", isn't that the very definition of wishful thinking? Jancovici's proposal isn't to artificially limit growth, it's to do realistic accounting. When you pull out a barrel of oil from the ground, you gain something (in GDP, etc) but you also lose something. If you never account for the losses in biodiversity, resources, clean water, etc then you can…

> "There have always been paradigm shifts, therefore there will be more", isn't that the very definition of wishful thinking?

It'd be wishful thinking if there was no evidence to back up that claim. However, these paradigm shifts have happened in the past: hunter-gatherer society -> nomadism -> husbandry -> agriculture -> crop rotation -> industrialisation -> information age / green revolution -> digitalisation

Extrapolating from that there's no reason to assume this will suddenly end.

I'm in favour of doing realistic accounting. However, the original title was something along the lines of "In order to reduce energy consumption we need to give up growth.", which turns Jancovici's conclusion on its head.

Not taking into account or neglecting the GDP/NRJ part of the equation and solely focussing on NRJ/POP is tantamount to falling for the same defeatist Malthusian fallacy that we're doomed anyway.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#274

Post by BjoernKW »

lapinot wrote: post #129
BjoernKW wrote: post #88

The title is misleading in that it's not exactly the conclusion the article arrives at. The article has it quite the other way round: Once energy consumption doesn't grow anymore we either need more efficient means of growth (i.e. less energy consumption per growth unit) or we have to forego growth. It's pre-Industrial-Age Malthus all over again: Barring paradigm shifts that allow for more efficient production planet…

> If NRJ/POP becomes stagnant either GDP/NRJ will have to grow rapidly or there won't by any GDP growth - and by extension population growth - anymore. If i'm not mistaken that's a non sequitur. How do you link GDP growth and population growth? Why would an ever growing population even be a goal? > there have always been such paradigm shifts that allowed us to sustain more people with fewer resources No, paradigm shi…

> How do you link GDP growth and population growth?

GDP growth and population growth are inherently linked: In order to provide sufficient resources for a growing population resource production has to increase, either by more energy input or by more efficient production.

If on the other hand population growth suddenly stopped and consumption per capita remained the same the only way for GDP to continue to grow would be to increase output per unit of work (i.e. the GDP/NRJ term from article).

> Why would an ever growing population even be a goal?

It's not as if someone purposefully sets this as a goal. Population growth given sufficient resources up to a point seems to be a naturally occurring phenomenon.

If on the other hand we decide to deliberately constrain the availability of resources this in turn means putting a constraint on population growth as well. Ultimately, this means deciding who gets to live and who doesn't.

If for whatever reason population growth stops naturally there's no need to establish growth as a goal for its own sake. However, artificially constraining growth seems inhumane to me.

I can't remember the exact quote but somewhere in the epilogue of the first Dune novel Frank Herbert has planetary ecologist Liet Kynes say (or rather write because he's penning guidelines for educating the Fremen) something along the lines of: "Life is its own tool for ever more efficiently making use of the energy available within a system."

In my opinion, that's a profound insight.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#275

Post by lukasLansky »

saurik wrote: post #163
lukasLansky wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation, using the usual definition, cannot be 'masked by technology' as technology is one of the things that legitimately determine general price level. Inflation counts and always counted general price level with effects of technology advancements taken into account. So the poster you are replying to has it right: inflation is low.

I think the argument is that technology "should have" led to a massive deflation as the price of a bunch of goods and services crashed due to automation; but, instead, that value has been being captured by a combination of people "at the top" simply making more money (hiring fewer people but keeping prices the same somehow, maybe due to supply chain oligopolies or intellectual property barriers <- this is all ancilla…

I agree that technology advances would have lead to massive deflation without all the money printing. The point of money printing is to do precisely this, so that the measure of economy does not get out of sync with the size of the economy. https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/... is a great book that touches the topic -- it also shows this discussion is not new.

I also agree that the chosen transmission mechanism of money creation (buying bonds and stocks by central banks) might have lead to worsening inequality. I like the Yudkowsky treatment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tAThqgpJwSueqhvKM/frequently... .

But I still think that the inflation is low and if we want to describe the problems that are happening even though it's low, we should create new language, not shift the current one.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#276

Post by wazoox »

BjoernKW wrote: post #273
wazoox wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There have always been paradigm shifts, therefore there will be more", isn't that the very definition of wishful thinking? Jancovici's proposal isn't to artificially limit growth, it's to do realistic accounting. When you pull out a barrel of oil from the ground, you gain something (in GDP, etc) but you also lose something. If you never account for the losses in biodiversity, resources, clean water, etc then you can…

> "There have always been paradigm shifts, therefore there will be more", isn't that the very definition of wishful thinking? It'd be wishful thinking if there was no evidence to back up that claim. However, these paradigm shifts have happened in the past: hunter-gatherer society -> nomadism -> husbandry -> agriculture -> crop rotation -> industrialisation -> information age / green revolution -> digitalisation Extra…

> It'd be wishful thinking if there was no evidence to back up that claim.

Sorry but no, this is a hint at best. This not evidence. Everything comes to an end, eventually.

Regarding the GDP/NRJ ratio: the coupling is somewhat less strong, however we're far from the strong negative coupling that would be necessary for our coming energy landscape. As Jancovici said (in this article or another), we always went from an energy source to a better one ( hunting to agriculture; muscles to wind to coal to oil); we never experienced going back to less concentrated ones.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#277

Post by carapace »

temac wrote: post #252
carapace wrote: post #239

> The term “GDP per energy unit” is nothing else than the energy efficiency of the economy: the more efficient the economic system is, the more GDP is produced with the same amount of energy. In other words, when this term increases, it means that for the same amount of kWh (or BTU!), we can have more furniture, glasses, cars, frozen peas, buildings or coffee machines. FWIW, i want to point out that this is an often-…

> For example, something like 30%-50% of the electricity we generate (okay, transform) is lost in the grid on the way to the consumer. I don't think it is that much. Plus electricity is not our main energy consumption. And most of our machines have actually a decent efficiency. And/or it is hard to optimize. ICE for example have not even progressed that much in several decades. One or two dozen % maybe? And they will…

> I don't think it is that much.

I can't find a good reference, and I think it's gotten better since the 70's, but yes, depending on who you ask and how you do the accounting (and which nation or region you're talking about) losses are from about 10% to as much as 70%.

I'm glad you're not against improving efficiency but you should check it out, the scope for improvement just in efficiency is great.

I. e., ICEs emit streamers and blobs of unburned fuel (not to mention other still-useful chemicals that instead become pollution). You can install a spark plug in your tail pipe and send 5m flames shooting out the back. People used to do it for kicks, I'm given to understand. There's a whole cottage industry of fringe-tech gadgets to atomize fuel more finely to improve cars' fuel efficiency.

Or consider the refrigerator, it opens like a cabinet spilling cold air on the floor every time.

We can get 2x improvement in energy consumption just though greater efficiency.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#278

Post by jodrellblank »

BjoernKW wrote: post #271
jodrellblank wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine there's a big difference between a 15 minute commute with a tiny car that doesn't have time to warm up and ends in a crowded parking lot, and an hour in a comfortable roomy Cheverolet Movie-Theater SUV with music playing and heated seats and no family or work or pedestrians and being in the biggest vehicle on the road. A big SUV is one of the most expensive, most luxurious, nicest things, nicest places to s…

There's a difference but even driving just 30 minutes per day in a tiny car that otherwise just sits around doing nothing is still a tremendous waste when you could just not drive at all and work from anywhere.

No, I mean, it's no surprise to me that people would enjoy an hour commute in a huge vehicle; not seeing it as "ugh an hour out of my day" but instead "yay an hour of luxury time and escape from life".

Yes in many terms it's a "waste" but your suggestion of not driving and working from anywhere changes a morning from "get up think about home and family, escape to comfortable car for an hour think about anything, start working for customers" to "get up and think about family, immediately pressured to start working for customers". I'm trying to frame it as daily psychological experience, rather than cost of hydrocarbon burning. Driving is at least "a change is as good as a rest", and on low-traffic big roads, pretty low effort too; and if it's "forced upon you" by circumstance, well geez I just have to go sit down and listen to music for an hour while you're stressing out, what can you do, y'know, byeee. Driving as socially acceptable rest without accusations of laziness.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#279

Post by [deleted] »

hliyan wrote: post #97
pjc50 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because each year the economy is still adding its GDP even if it is not growing Er .. "economic growth" and "increasing GDP" are usually considered to be synonyms? Do you have alternative definitions?

If your GDP is $100 billion and your growth rate is 0%, you're still adding $100 billion to the economy every year (assuming that not all wealth is not consumed within the same year).

[deleted]

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#280

Post by [deleted] »

hliyan wrote: post #97
pjc50 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because each year the economy is still adding its GDP even if it is not growing Er .. "economic growth" and "increasing GDP" are usually considered to be synonyms? Do you have alternative definitions?

If your GDP is $100 billion and your growth rate is 0%, you're still adding $100 billion to the economy every year (assuming that not all wealth is not consumed within the same year).

[deleted]
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