331–340 of 466 posts
One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient/ optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways: -More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing. -A tendency to regulate activity such…
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The national highway system was a military not economic or social policy designed to allow for easy transport of troops in the event of a way. That is why many cities have large beltways that surround them, the idea being that if a city is nuked the highway is outside the blast radius.
Source? I've heard this, and I've heard it's a common myth / urban legend. There's a lot of similar myths, like that "interstates have a lot of straight sections to allow for an airplane to land in an emergency" I did read a well researched book (The Big Roads by Earl Swift) on the US highway and interstate system's creations, and I don't recall that being mentioned as a primary motivation. The main motivation for be…
Eisenhower whipped votes for the ‘56 Act on the basis of military mobilisation. It wasn’t a military project per se. And there were plenty of other motivations and votes. But the logic is far from urban myth. The 1910 convoys spurred the ‘21 Act, which was more limited and civil in nature.
If you're a nationalist, it's even better if the people we're impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else's Problem.
It's like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven't figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity:
- We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy.
- We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor.
(Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we'll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won't stick around until it's over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance generally helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)
Here's a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar. > There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessi...
Battery electrochemistry still has headroom, but solar is already approaching the Shockley–Queisser ceiling, which limits efficiency at about 30% for single junction and 50% for multiple junction devices. That's the absolute conversion limit, similar to the Carnot limit for thermal engines. So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only v…
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That time period in Britain didn't just see big advancements in industrialization, but in engineering, medicine, finance, and legal systems. You have to see the difference between individuals and the the society itself.
It’s kind of silly to argue the “intelligence” difference between someone who can build a nuclear power plant given a society with supply chains available and someone who with fifty or a thousand men can go into the wilderness and build a functioning city with little or no foreign input for years. They’re entirely different skill sets. Each year brings our “current” technology level further and further from “if you h…
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It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.
It's looking at total energy consumption, not electricity consumption. The UK only generates about 4500 kWh per person each year - far off that 30,000 kWh number. In the UK (not sure about the US, but it's probably similar), about 25% of our energy consumption is space heating, 30% is road transport, 10% is air transport, 11% is domestic use and the remaining 24% or so is services and industrial. We don't really do A…
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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.
To get to 2x, you'll need to assume the average BEV is substantially less efficient than a Tesla - that all gasoline is refined at the most efficient refinery - that all ICE cars get Prius mileage - that it takes 0 energy to extract and transmit / ship oil - and probably that the majority of your electricity is coming from coal.
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.
In pre-industrial times, and even modern times, those who were able to compel (or force) people to work for them – i.e. provide them energy – were those considered to have a higher social standing. Those who provided the energy were of lower social standing.
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Is participating jn an Amish village "slavery"? An Israeli Kibutz?
An amish village is a laughable anachronism that only exist in the context of a much larger whole that is antithetical to the very values and way of life it practices because no larger scale society so constructed could exist or compete with other societies practicing opposing values. It's not a healthier better way to build a city its a tiny park on a corner lot surrounded by pollution and traffic.
Second: the point is not to build "a larger scale" version of those societies, but actually to replicate the idea of localism in many different places. Less EU and one-world government and more independent nation-states, if you will.
Third: you can oppose the lifestyle and philosophy all you want, but it still is not slavery.
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Some of us prefer to live in reality
Things will get better, not worse. Just watch. Nihilists need to sit on the sidelines where they belong.