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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#311

Post by colinsane »

in tech, the ever-increasing availability of computation has widespread effects that haven’t always been easy to predict.

- computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries.

- a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe.

- a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering.

- a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image everything with greater effective precision.

- a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily.

energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech/application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10/kWh than at $10.00/kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#313

Post by bborud »

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.

> And we still had rich and poor.

If you only care about there being a delta between the rich and the poor, sure, there have always been rich and poor people. But that neither usefully describes the world, nor does it account for what poverty actually means and how poverty levels have changed in the last century.

Hans Rosling used to make a joke that the top few percents of students in the Swedish educational system knew less about the world than a chimp (based on the reasoning that if you pick answers to questions randomly, you'll be right more often than the students).

I can recommend watching some of Hans Rosling's talks about poverty and reading his books. It is important to understand what poverty means.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#314

Post by betwixthewires »

> Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland.

This is my main problem with it. I'm concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#315

Post by bborud »

joe_the_user wrote: post #287
theptip wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Don’t confuse “poor”, ie relative poverty, with absolute levels of wealth ($ per household) and downstream claims about absolute levels of, say, child mortality. In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. Child mortality rates were appalling. And at the same time, there was a spectrum between relatively rich and poor, and merchants appeared “rich”. The article is so…

In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. If you measure wealth by dollars or iPhone access, this tautologically true but it's not a good measure of how life was. A wealthy person had enough food, access to leisure, a large house with luxurious possessions and probably servants. Sure, health care might have been bad and they might have died of various epidemics. Their liv…

Then why did people migrate to where the industrial jobs were?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#316

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rglullis wrote: post #305
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not having foreign-cuisine restaurants and not buying salmon from thousands of kilometers away. Cloth production should follow the same idea These isolated communities exist. Their quality of life is lower. But anyone can join them. From hippie communes to Amish communities, Luddism has a long tradition in modern society. (I’m ignoring the ethno-racial undertone in implying there can be an objective arbiter of what…

The point is not in absolute isolation, but trading away some optimization in global economic output for increased self-resiliency. Yes, overall we would be poorer on average, but we would a lot less likely to see catastrophic events and a bit more equity among members of the same community.

> point is not in absolute isolation, but trading away some optimization in global economic output for increased self-resiliency

You’re arguing for something reasonable. The commenter I’m replying to quotes Dugin and alludes to something resembling a hermit kingdom. (Attachment to birthplace. Going into the local industry, skills be damned. Blood thicker than water and no “foreign” food.)

This is a recipe for nationalistic poverty. North Korea and Russia are going down this path. They’ll be poor and uninfluential. But if makes them happy, as long as they keep it within their borders, it is difficult to advocate for a shift from outside.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#317

Post by alangibson »

_Microft wrote: post #43
alangibson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, but power is Kraft.

German "Kraft"[0] as physical term means "force" in English, while "power" translates as "Leistung"[1]. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik)

Honestly they get mixed up just like in English.

Kraftwerk for power plant, Kraftstoff for fuel. But then you have elektrische Leistung for electrical power.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#318

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

WalterBright wrote: post #269
CraigJPerry wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we're going to be charging EVs with fossil fuels for a long time Even if you never used wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. then you’d still be ahead in the BEV case. An oil power plant has around 42% thermal efficiency. A gas one 50%+ an ICE is only up to 35% but in the US it’s significantly lower on average. Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE. But we do also use wind, solar, nuc…

> Even if you never used wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. then you’d still be ahead in the BEV case. Yes, but not by much. A coal power plant averages 33% efficiency. Gas is 42%. Source: google > Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE. CO2 doesn't care where it's emitted. > But we do also use wind, solar, nuclear etc as power sources for BEV. And nowhere near the power needed if every…

> And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs.

This is pointless argument. We don't have enough EVs for everyone to switch to EVs.

It looks like the bottleneck will be EV production, not wind & solar adoption.

We only need to quadruple solar panels in the US to provide all electricity necessary for ALL cars to switch to EVs...

This looks like it'll happen within 10 years. We won't be 100% on EVs in 20 years.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#319

Post by CraigJPerry »

josephcsible wrote: post #306
CraigJPerry wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BEV’s run on coal power?

There's no magical barrier in the electrical grid that prevents charging BEVs from coal-fired power plants.

Parent is alleging 100% supply from coal since they claim there’s 70% thermal loss in the charging of BEVs

Coal is circa 20% of the supply in the US. About the same as nuclear or renewables.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#320

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

WalterBright wrote: post #233
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other reply? You talk about refining. There's 10% lost in refining. X% lost in extraction and Y% lost in transmission (shipping, pipes, etc). Solar => Grid => Car Battery is less than 10% lost usually. Obviously it can vary a lot - so can oil extraction, shipping and refining... This means Solar => Grid => Car battery is >5x as efficient as Oil in ground => Pipes => Refinery => Pipes => Gas Station => Car. Once…

Solar and wind have so far not been nearly adequate to charge existing EVs, let alone what would be necessary if we all converted to EVs. Given the reluctance to expand nuclear power, we're going to be charging EVs with fossil fuels for a long time.

> Solar and wind have so far not been nearly adequate to charge existing EVs, let alone what would be necessary if we all converted to EVs.

This is categorically false.

We already produce >10x as much wind energy alone that all BEVs in the US consume.

We already produce orders of magnitude more hydro electricity than we need for every passenger vehicle in the US to be a BEV.

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