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All poverty is energy poverty

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341–350 of 466 posts

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us prefer to live in reality

I agree with you, but if you look at our current reality, plenty of it would've been unbelievable 100 years ago. 200 years ago and it's all magic. You have to dream a little big to innovate anything, and if it's feasible then it's a good idea, and if its not then let people try and fail.

I agree , innovation is the only way out of this mess. But progress is never a guarantee so you do as much as you can within the Current bounds of technology and change as the technology changes.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#342
post #237

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. Nuclear weapons foreclose many options.

Why assume this one Russian weapon actually works, if all others turned out to be shit? Seriously, can we really expect a country that can’t even manufacture cars to be able to refurbish nukes? Not to mention that the assumptions of MAD doctrine might not have been true for quite some time now. Which means, even if those nukes left their silos, they might not get anywhere near the targets.

> Why assume this one Russian weapon actually works, if all others turned out to be shit?

I haven't seen the new Jackass movie. Is this the plot?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nationa…

> North Korea and Russia are going down this path.

While I'm not sure which side of the argument I stand on, I do think it's pointing out that even if certain societies / countries do do the things, they unfortunately bare of the costs of others' decisions. A third of Pakistan being flooded is more likely a consequence of the West's energy usage and not due to their own doing. So it's a global effort to make these changes or limited benefits are seen.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#344
No, all poverty is organizational, one can have plenty of access or energy without the capacity to deploy it in a way that alleviates poverty or solves a problem, and the other way around plenty of technologies exist that utilize very little energy to great effect. The Soviet Union was for a long time the second largest consumer and biggest producer of energy in the world, but its society was characterized by low efficiency and relatively little output per unit of energy consumed.

Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn't necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They've gotten better not through energy consumption but better design.

In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn't necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering.

There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#345
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why assume this one Russian weapon actually works, if all others turned out to be shit? Seriously, can we really expect a country that can’t even manufacture cars to be able to refurbish nukes? Not to mention that the assumptions of MAD doctrine might not have been true for quite some time now. Which means, even if those nukes left their silos, they might not get anywhere near the targets.

You want to play Russian roulette on nuclear weapons? Are you listening to yourself right now?

We believed in Putin's bluff for the past two decades, and see what turned out.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#346
post #333

If climate change is an existential threat, we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit. If you truly believe climate change is super serious, then logically government ought to put its thumb on the scale to ensure a lot of people get priced out of energy intensive products like air conditioning, leaving their computers on at night, meat, aluminum, and so on. If you…

> we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit.

Gas prices are so high right now in EU that my fathers sister is closing her restaurant and letting go her employees. If they go even higher then what you will see is blood on the streets and right wing governments in power, then you can forger about your plans to save the planet. You think we are so slow with fighting climate change because we don't know how to do it faster? We know, just the costs of doing it are so huge that no one will take responsibility for it and they know they would lose power very quickly to far right wing party.

Every civilization is always three missed meals from revolution.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though it may seem efficient from the financial perspective of a single company or an individual The national highway system and 1950s’ surburbanisation are top-down policy choices, not emergent behaviour.

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.

That was part of the sales pitch. The main reasons were to improve travel speed into and between cities, and to open up much more land for development.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#349
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> When energy runs out, or becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries. Western society is inefficient at a macro level, even though it may seem efficient from the financial perspective of a single company or an individual. People cover huge distances to work. Companies are moving goods, components and people from all over the world. People change jobs (losing focus) and their residen…

By simply knowing in advance what to do and how to do it, and what will come, we could make a fortune of all fortunes, outcompete everyone and create a perfect utopia. Good to know!

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#350
post #101

On this: > "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully on…

For a 2.5 kW solar system would cost somewhere around $2-5K USD and the 5kWH battery would also cost $2-5K USD. I don’t think the average Rwanda citizen has $5-10K available to install just enough power to run their fridge.

It would certainly be on the low end I would expect, and only getting cheaper. It's unfortunate that Rwanda is so poor that even that is far too much :(
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