351–360 of 466 posts
You can be poor while easily meeting your energy needs. A classic example is remote rural areas where virtually all inhabitants own some plot of land. Even if they are poor they can feed their fireplace with some wood, for free.
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
Yes, but more like power than energy. The main problem is that energy can't really be stored, so energy cannot be saved like money can (sort of). So it is really power that money buys, not energy , and only supposing power is available . This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
> the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling. Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. There are only so many places you can put a windmill, and only so many rivers to dam. Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can't imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills bet…
Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
> In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption. It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet. It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy ta…
It’s a failure of education, and in many ways a deliberate one because of the primacy of industry over the past century.
I'm sure there's a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.
I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
Always thought that currency should equal J/K, the unit of entropy. It's the one thing we 'use up'.
I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914).
(That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>)
The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics.
I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...>
My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves.
Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
In the Alpha Centauri game setting, energy is literally money ("energy credits").
There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix/mitigation for climate impacts). I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to h…
I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
Joules can be converted to Bitcoin.
The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The Shockley–Queisser ceiling describes the limit of energy per unit area. It says nothing about the efficiency in terms of energy per unit money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects>
This was first observed during WWII in aircraft and ship manufacture.
Note that this tends to be gains toward some ultimate efficiency limit, so remains bounded.
I've mentioned the concept a few times in earlier HN comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>