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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?

Fossil fuels. Fossil-fuel based fertilisers allow us to largely ignore the damage we've done to the environment, and fossil-fuel powered farming vehicles and techniques give us even more energy to make up for it. Petroleum-based agriculture is hideously inefficient compared to traditional farming techniques (because this caused confusion on here in the past, I am using efficiency to refer specifically to calories in vs calories out), but petroleum is such a dense source of energy that for the short-term period where we have access to them we can inflate the global population to thoroughly unsustainable levels. We've just been throwing oil and energy at the problem, which is why we haven't actually noticed.

I don't think it's unsustainable, we could use solar for all our current energy consumption if we had to.

because this caused confusion on here in the past, I am using efficiency to refer specifically to calories in vs calories out

Now, if only we could get you to stick to that definition of efficiency when talking about nuclear power.

I'm totally fine with adopting that as a metric - you just have to include all the calories that go into refining the fuel, building the plant, etc.

Why do we care about calories in?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed? Sure, I get that you're going to somehow compute all the calories that go into manufacturing the thing, but then, how do we get calories in from the sun? Is it just the local radiance captured? Is it net of some heat output? Is it actually total solar radiance on Earth's surface (since we're inefficiently only capturing a portion of those calories)? Do we actually compute the calories that go into the fuel of the sun's fusion reactor? Is there some different calculation used for a fusion reactor 'up there' compared to one we might make 'down here'? If so, why?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed?

Because the metric you actually, seriously use is energy returned on energy invested. We don't have to invest any extra energy into the sun to make it shine, nor do we have to make the wind blow ourselves. All we actually care about is the return on the energy we invested to capture that energy. The reason we care about sourcing uranium/nuclear fuel is because it takes human labour to convert uranium from ore to fuel pellets.

because it takes human labour

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'? If so, then it's a bit strange to think that modern agriculture is less efficient than in the past, since in the past, we had >90% of the population performing hard labor to produce a sustenance level of food product, whereas now, we have about 1% of the population producing an incredible surplus. There is obviously some additional human effort in building the machines and gathering the fuel, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that if we were to tally that all up, the agriculture-specific human caloric input would be anywhere close to 90% of the workforce.

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'?

I think he means "total" caloric expenditures, not just "human". That is, we're cheating by having oil do all the work for us. The sun doesn't count because it will be hitting the Earth no matter what, so we're not "expending" anything. The work that would go into building solar panels would count, though.

I was hoping to get a nice distinction somewhere along those lines that I could probe to see if I could make it consistent, but what I got was "because it takes human labour". If @FirmWeird would like to clarify and say that it's not about human expenditure and about something else instead (maybe some sort of "no matter what" test that I'd want to probe for details), then I'd be very pleased to investigate.

I dunno, it makes some intuitive sense to me, so I probably could go pretty far defending the idea, though I'm not sure if I can formally define the distinction.

The general idea that expendable resources should be accounted for as being expended. Expressing that as calories / KWh is just to have a common denominatior, we do the same when we calculate the stuff in USD, you don't count sunlight in USD either.

So why KWh and not USD? I could see an argument that denominating everything in USD obscures certain material realities, which units of energy do not.

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For EROI, you don't count the solar input for a solar plant, only the energy used in building and maintaining the plant. For the same reason for fossil fuel plants you don't count the energy in the fuel, but you do count the energy extracting and refining the fuel.

Using EROI at all for agriculture is just kinda weird.