This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Thanks for clarifying, but I still don't quite understand this. I'm guessing from context that you mean something like that you mean to refer to "the calories required to make energy usable by humans"? Or are you just making a distinction between calories that aren't usable by humans and the calories that are usable by humans?
Obviously. We never will.
There are huge timescale questions here. What is a "temporary increase"? When we discovered how to convert fossil fuels into human-usable energy, one might say that it's "temporary", but I'm not sure what the criteria is for being "temporary/not temporary". When we discovered how to convert uranium into human-usable energy, how would I go about computing whether it is "temporary/not-temporary"? How does future discovery of other methods to convert things into human-usable energy come into play? Can new discoveries retroactively convert prior methods from being "temporary" to being "not temporary"? If I had to guess, given the bold starting sentence to this paragraph being that we don't have infinite free energy, I think maybe the line is that any source of energy that is not infinite is "temporary", but that would mean that literally all sources of energy are "temporary", and I think we're maybe stuck concluding that all uses of energy are bad in some way.
Yes. The term that I care about is called EROEI - energy returned on energy invested. That really just says it all.
The existence of easily accessible fossil fuels. If you want to use a financial analogy, they're a massive inheritance that gives us a supply of money far greater than we can actually earn ourselves, which meant that we can live a lifestyle more expensive than our income can support... for a while.
Whether or not it is renewable on a timescale relevant to humans. Fossil fuels take millions of years to accumulate and concentrate, so once we use them they're effectively gone.
If their EROEI is positive to the extent that it can justify using those methods, great! But you can't just assume that we're going to discover these things when making assumptions about the future, because there's no guarantee that a great new energy source will just appear.
This is a question of values - but to go back to a financial metaphor, every single expenditure of money drains your bank account. But you're not accumulating money just so you have a bigger number, and we don't accumulate energy so we can have a bigger number. We want to use that energy or money in ways that are productive, enjoyable and beneficial to us, and we want to avoid doing things that cause giant problems in the future. Living a lifestyle that your income cannot support is a choice that leads to very predictable consequences, consequences which are substantially less pleasant than adjusting your expenditures before you go bankrupt. Personally I think that a lot of our current energy expenditures aren't really worthwhile in the long run (mountains of plastic garbage, melting the icecaps, long work commutes, war in the middle east, etc) - but that's a different discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link