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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.
Questions I still don't understand:
-Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
-Do you, like Arjin, think that there is some discounting for energy sources that were going to be consumed "one way or another/no matter what"?
On to other things.
What is a "timescale relevant to humans"? Do consumption rates factor into this?
Sure, but is there any factor describing something like the probability of new discoveries, given past developments? E.g., if humans never used fossil fuels, do you think the likelihood of discovering nuclear power was lower, higher, or about the same?
Related to this is from earlier in the comment:
One could also plausibly invest much of that money in productive ventures; how is this taken into account?
This is getting far afield from the technical questions, which I still think are the core part, but I sort of have to ask - what do you have in mind when you talk about adjustment processes? A normal sort of adjustment process would be a market process - if the demand for some rare resource outstrips its supply, the market price rises. Speculators can help smooth out time-dependent processes (if they think the price is likely to rise in the future, they can buy now, pushing the price up now and implicitly conserving some of that resource for future use). We've had famous examples of the kind of vague "if you use too much stuff now, it'll be painful in the future" predictions that are unmoored from much technical analysis. Moreover, we have reason to believe that from an atoms perspective (rather than a calorie perspective), absolute use is going down even as lifestyles are going up. Are there technical reasons for why a calorie perspective is necessarily different?
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