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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.
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.
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.
I hate to say it, but we're back to the sun. The hydrogen inside of the sun is, indeed, an expendable resource. Does it matter whether it is being 'expended' up there or down here in a lab?
I mean, doesn't it? That shit's getting burned one way or the other, and we're unlikely to stop it even if we wanted to, so we might as well put it to good use?
Ok, so I think I'm hearing that you have a "one way or the other" or a "no matter what" test. I think I take this to mean that if calories are going to be expended "one way or the other/no matter what", then we simply zero out those calories. That's a plausible route to go.
This would perhaps go the opposite way of what Nybbler said, though, where he wasn't wanting to count the energy in the fuel. Do you disagree with this and think that we should count the energy in the fuel, so long as it wasn't being expended "one way or the other/no matter what"?
Another question I have is whether something is counted as being "expended". Does it matter if, say, some rays of sun wouldn't just be dissipated as heat, but would instead likely be consumed by plants? Or, if, say, we discovered an oil or coal-eating bacteria which was using it for its own fuel?
Further, suppose we burn a tree that gets 99% of its stored energy from the sun (according to ChatGPT). Does that count in the zeroed out category? If so, is it because it ultimately came from the sun, which was going to expend energy anyway, or could it be in some part because we might think there's a high enough probability of wildfires if we do nothing, so those calories were going to be expended "one way or the other/no matter what"?
Yeah, I think the whole thesis collapses if you ignore the energy in the fuel.
I'm going with my gut here, but I want to say yes. I think we should take into account that we could be having some perfectly nice trees here, doing some quite efficient carbon capture / lumber production, but instead we have this eye-sore of a solar farm. Though it suddenly makes it complicated on how to account for the relative value of sunlight hitting a tree vs. sunlight hitting a solar panel, and I think this is the point I'll have to tap out of this particular line of questioning.
Yeah, I think that actually works... if we further hypothesize that the bacteria also expels CO2 in the process of consumption, and has no other positive impact on the ecosystem, than we're right back in the "shit's getting burned anyway" scenario, and there's no reason to not "drill baby, drill".
Yeah, burning for fuel stuff that would have ended up consumed by a wildfire also works for me. More generally I'd say you can zero it out, if you consume the energy stored in a tree over the course of time it would take to grow a new one.
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