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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#41

Post by avgcorrection »

I remember a scene in Sopranos where Tony told off his lietunants for not making a enough money for him. “This business is like a pyramid” (more or less).

Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough?

This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#42

Post by influxmoment »

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…

Yea it looks like most poverty now is political. Like North Korea or war torn countries. I think most countries if they had good political leadership could be wealthy

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#43

Post by _Microft »

alangibson wrote: post #30
contravariant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of interesting to note that 'work' (as in physical energy) and 'labour' use the same word in German.

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)

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#44

Post by theropost »

gizmo686 wrote: post #26

Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn't the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math): A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for a…

Good point, so you buy 4 panels for $400 USD. Next what do you need: wiring, mounting, inverter, storage - I'd like to set up a fridge at the camp, any idea the price on everything I would need?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#45

Post by SilverBirch »

woeh wrote: post #14

> At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average. Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses…

I think that basically what it's doing is saying "Here's all the energy that Britain consumes, divided by their total population". So sure, your electricity might only be 2100kWh, but did the government resurface a road nearby? Did you think about the fuel burned to transport the food you bought in the supermarket etc.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#46

Post by gizmo686 »

mcculley wrote: post #20

If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?

Taking the articles figure of 77,000 kWh per year per person. Lets call it 100,000 (10^5) kWh per year per person and a population of 10 billion (10^10) people, we are looking at 10^15 kWh/year of energy, which is about 10^14 watts. Earth receives about 10^17 watts of solar energy, so we are looking at an increase of about %0.1 of the energy budget. This is ignoring energy coming from non solar sources (there is a lot of geothermnal energy coming from within the planet, but I'm not sure what rate that makes it to the surface).

Interestingly, this still overestimates the role of our waste heat for an even simpler reason: much of it was going to be heat anyway. Waste heat generated from fossil fuels is pure extra energy (although that effect is still dwarfed by the greenhouse effect for anything beyond the very local area). Nuclear is effectively net positive on heat as the natural half life of the fuel is far longer then when it is put in a reactor. However, solar energy is by definition part of that 10^17 watts of energy that is going to hit the Earth weather we generated electrons from it or not (Granted, solar panels probably reflect less of that energy back into space). Wind energy is pulling kinetic energy out of the air that would have become heat. Geothermal is taking advantage of heat that was already there (although we accelerate how quickly it reaches the surface). Hydroelectic energy would have become heat once the water finished loosing its potential energy when it reaches sea level.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#47

Post by spicybright »

hedora wrote: post #36

> 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…

Not that story telling is the ultimate solution, but I share the frustration. So many of these old stories are essentially coming true, and there's not much discussion on it by most people.

That said, we have some very good cautionary tales like black mirror that make people think, but those are very few. In fact, most stories in this genre start with "in an apocalyptic world where people X, Y happens".

It would be nice to see some modern black-mirror quality adaptations of ideas by H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and even authors like Mark Twain would be great.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#48

Post by anovikov »

PeterisP wrote: post #34
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have the energy right now, though. And we'd have more, cheaper energy if we deployed new renewables. But the author seems to lose his interest in helping the poor if it didn't involve fossil fuels being used inefficiently.

We're on track on a big part of Europe being energy-restricted this winter, so at least right now there's not an abundance of energy even for the current needs of the first world, much less for those who cannot pay much and would need not the same amount but growth. In the long term many things are possible, but right now we don't have enough energy, and "if we deployed new renewables" is not an argument - we already…

RePowerEU plan is precisely for addressing this situation.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#49

Post by nuclearnice3 »

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...

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#50

Post by rr808 »

woeh wrote: post #14

> At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average. Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses…

The average US house is multiple times the area of UK house, so that makes a big difference. https://homescopes.com/average-home-size/ Add car sizes, public transport, less manufacturing.

Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?

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