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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#421

Post by rglullis »

nradov wrote: post #416
bluetomcat wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better alternative would be to have localised production and localised consumption of food and most basic goods. Stuff like not having foreign-cuisine restaurants and not buying salmon from thousands of kilometers away. Cloth production should follow the same idea. People should feel more attached to their birthplace and the goal should be to develop their skills locally with one company preferably. Strong bonds wi…

You appear to be ignorant of basic economics such as Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as... What you have proposed is worse than what we have in every way. Transporting food and basic foods over long distances is cheap and very energy efficient. In fact it's more efficient than having a bunch of tiny factories in every city. People shouldn't be stuck li…

It is cheaper, but less robust. One ship blocking the Suez Canal means that billions of people are not able to get their food and medicine on time, because everyone is too specialized to do anything that is not a desk job.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#423

Post by yboris »

telotortium wrote: post #303
yboris wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While difficult, it's I think within the reach of just about every individual in the developed world to empathize with and extend a helping hand to those who were merely unlucky to be born into poverty. Giving What We Can is a community of thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to the most cost-effective charities they can find (consider GiveWell.org for research). I'm a proud member and hope…

Does Giving What We Can have a pledge to continue spending money on humans in extreme poverty? No animal welfare, no AI risk, etc.? Unfortunately the effective altruism branding has become toxic for me in the past few years due to the fact that they are deciding not to focus just on poverty.

I'm sorry to hear effective altruism (EA) rubs you the wrong way. Giving What We Can predates EA and does not insist on where you give your money, only that you do it in good faith, focusing on "improv[ing] the lives of others".

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge

Just because some EA people give to causes you don't agree with, why should it detract from or discourage you from joining the general mission: "focus[ing] on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations." You don't have to call yourself an effective altruist, but I hope you too recognize that focusing your efforts on what you have the most ability to control (informed by evidence you seek with an open mind) is a good thing to do.

I'm happy to chat more about this - it's one of my favorite topics.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#424

Post by dang »

nradov wrote: post #416
bluetomcat wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better alternative would be to have localised production and localised consumption of food and most basic goods. Stuff like not having foreign-cuisine restaurants and not buying salmon from thousands of kilometers away. Cloth production should follow the same idea. People should feel more attached to their birthplace and the goal should be to develop their skills locally with one company preferably. Strong bonds wi…

You appear to be ignorant of basic economics such as Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as... What you have proposed is worse than what we have in every way. Transporting food and basic foods over long distances is cheap and very energy efficient. In fact it's more efficient than having a bunch of tiny factories in every city. People shouldn't be stuck li…

Please edit swipes like "you appear to be ignorant [etc.]" out of your posts to HN. They break the site guidelines, and you can make your substantive points without them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you about this many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30120252 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29598017 (Dec 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935223 (Jan 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18774141 (Dec 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175756 (Jan 2018)

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit? We ban accounts that keep breaking them. I don't want to ban you, but we need you to fix this.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#425

Post by rootbear »

dredmorbius wrote: post #363
rootbear wrote: post #170

I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.

Any sort of link or title that you can recall or find?

I don't think that was one of the talks that was live streamed, so there won't be a recording. I'm traveling today so I'll have to look for it when I get back. Henry may have a website, I'll look for that too.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#426

Post by nickpp »

rglullis wrote: post #420
nickpp wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is how you arrive at needing walls and guns to keep people in - because we tend to vote with our feet and leave such sick authoritarian "utopias" at the price of risking our life - freedom is worth it. Pretty much how all similar communist experiments had to change their country into a prison so that a "dreamer" such as yourself can have his "perfect" society.

You are still arguing the extreme version of a position of the argument, when I was arguing for the less radical side. I am arguing for localism. Democratic governments that give more power to its people and their representatives in the lower spheres of power. People can (and should) vote with their feet, and communities can (and should) collaborate with each other.

Then nobody prevents you having what to want even today. This is the beauty of capitalism: it’s perfectly fine to have other forms of organizations inside it. There are communes and kibbutz you can join right now.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#427

Post by agapon »

nradov wrote: post #396
imtringued wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does it involve telling people what constitutes "quality of life?" Why does this "new" political (in fact: economic) philosophy so often devastate so many lives? No it doesn't. It involves abolishing inflation and unemployment, inequality and endless runaway debt growth while simultaneously increasing wages, lowering the cost of living, discouraging corruption and rewarding long term thinking and human effort. >Even…

How would you propose to realize that utopian vision? And please don't waste our time with any cryptocurrency BS.

Planned economy. It did wonders! Just look at the USSR.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#428

Post by MagnumOpus »

nradov wrote: post #398
nextos wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's not like the energy supply decreased overnight due to natural scarcity. Peak oil might be a reality, but it's not the cause of current problems in the EU. Also, per capita energy consumption in the EU is 1/2 compared to the US due to more efficient commuting and buildings (still far from optimal though).

Per capita energy consumption in the EU is lower than the US mostly because they are poorer (on a GDP per capita basis). Europeans would consume more energy if they could afford it.

Mostly incorrect take. Two points for your consideration:

1. All European countries tax gasoline far more heavily than the US, usually to the tune of 100-200% of the wholesale price. That is an intentional policy to lower gasoline consumption, governments could easily remove it if they wished for more energy consumption.

2. Not all European countries are "poorer" than the US even by a GDP measure. Norway which is a petrostate has about half the energy consumption of the US (measured by per capita carbon emissions), Switzerland about a quarter! If anything richer countries in Europe are better than the poorer Eastern neighbour as well as better than the US in minimizing energy waste -- better-insulated housing, better rail and subway networks.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#429

Post by cryptonector »

dredmorbius wrote: post #352
cryptonector wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Stores of energy are frequently called fuels . 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.

You don't get energy and materials back out of building things for which there is no demand.

There is no way to store natural gas to meet one year's demand.

There is no way to store electric power to meet one year's demand. Not even one month's.

There is no way to store wind or solar power (see above).

Nuclear fuels, of course, can be stockpiled, but you can't demand more power than the nuclear plants that exist can produce, so having 100 years' worth of enriched uranium alone wouldn't help you produce extra power in any particularly hot summer / cold winter. Fuel is not the form in which we want energy when we turn an electric light on!

> Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.

That's not possible. You've paid too much attention to Holdren.

You cannot make people alternate sleep/wake cycles so that we can have steady base load and no peak load. Or whatever else you have in mind for "varying demand" to match supply, unless that's rolling power outages.

Electric energy cannot be saved in any significant amount, full stop. Excess supply can be sent to ground, but excess demand cannot be met except with power generation using fuels that can be throttled very quickly (and that's essentially only natural gas). That means that electric power supply has to match demand or we must constantly run base power generation at peak demand rates and send excess to ground -- a tremendous waste!

There's no way around this.

Even if we did have batteries that were a) small, b) cheap, c) had enormous capacity, those would essentially be -when charged- coulombic bombs that have to be kept from exploding. Indeed, there are physical limits to electric energy store density where you can trivially get that energy back as power. For example, we've all seen that smartphone batteries are small explosives (recall the Samsung Galaxy fiasco), so now scale that way up and imagine what that would mean.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#430

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #243
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who had outlawed wind-farms and where? There are offshore installations and I see wind turbines everywhere in the UK.

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/uk-government-lifts-suppor... > The UK is set to lift its controversial ban of onshore wind projects from government support, in a major u-turn by the ruling Conservative Party over a policy that sent new turbine installation figures plunging

Thanks for the link, but 'government choosing not to financially support installations' and 'installations banned' are very very different things.
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