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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.
Ok, thanks for your responses. I probably should stop peppering you with questions now. I'll have to think about your responses as well. I'm still not entirely sure there's a coherent line to be drawn, given the fuzziness of the value comparison you mentioned as well as whether I think the timescale of growing new trees should matter (and how timescales should matter generally; all of Earth's resources are ultimately going to be expended "one way or another/no matter what" on a timescale of the sun becoming a red giant).
The conversation on coal-eating bacteria made me wonder enough to do a quick search, though. First result I opened indicated that they're producing methane, not CO2. No idea how one would factor that in to any calculation of 'calories in', given that I guess we're doing some strange partial discounting for calories that would be expended "one way or another/no matter what", but that how much we discount I guess depends on some fuzzy value comparison. I mean, a value comparison of coal vs CO2 vs methane vs a tree? If I can't just appeal to prices, then.... ¯\(ツ)/¯
Honestly, my preliminary conclusion is probably that we just can't do this kind of 'calories in/calories out' calculation mechanically, and we'd probably need a fair amount of arbitrary lines and value judgments plugged in. Probably worse once we get further down the chain and are trying to analyse agricultural methods rather than simply power generation.
Ok I'm going to reply here because this conversation has gone on for a bit while I was asleep.
When I said human labour, I wasn't referring specifically to work performed by human muscles but to energy usable by humans. We don't need to make the wind blow or the sun shine, but if we want to get work done from that energy we have to invest energy into capturing, storing, transmitting and using that energy. As an example, we don't include the energy spent creating oil deposits in the earth when calculating EROEI - but we do include the energy costs associated with finding that oil deposit, drilling it, extracting the oil, transporting it to be refined, the refining process itself and then the energy cost of delivering that oil to where it is ultimately used. We don't care how much energy it took to get the sun ignited, but we do care about the costs of making a new solar panel and hooking it up to the grid.
To go back to farming, however, the reason that this matters is that we don't actually have infinite free energy yet. We have a certain amount of energy that we get from renewable sources, but fossil fuels are not renewable on any timescale relevant to humanity - they're a once-in-a-species lottery win. Spending 10 calories to get back 1 isn't a great deal, and you don't need to be a genius to work out what happens when a population of animals allows their population to grow to a large number on the basis of a temporary increase in available resources. That's a phenomenon called ecological overshoot, and history is full of examples of what happens when a population (of animals or humans) grows to a level that can't be sustained by the available resource base.
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