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 -
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?
If the fuel is something that humans have processed and worked in order to make it useful, yes.
No, because I don't believe in that kind of inevitability. All that matters is energy returned on energy invested - we didn't invest anything to turn the sun on, and so we don't account for it in calculating EREOEI. We do, however, have to build solar panels - so the EROEI on an individual solar panel is actually a relevant and useful question.
Consumption rates could factor into this, but the process of oil/fossil fuel generation is so slow that it really doesn't matter. Our existing fossil fuel deposits took many times longer to accrue than humanity has even existed, and so proposing that we wait another several million years for new oil deposits to form isn't really going to help us deal with any problems that we have right now.
We have a rough estimate of how oil discovery rates will go, but if you mean in terms of discovering a new energy source... that's one approach, in the sense that if you are rapidly burning your lottery win to support an unsustainable lifestyle "hope you win the lottery again" is a strategy that someone might pick. But the consequences of getting that wrong are incredibly severe - and what if it turns out that the discovery we make requires an infrastructure investment that we can no longer afford to make because we spent all that oil growing vast quantities of corn and making artificial islands in the Middle East?
You could do that - and it is taken into account in the sense that we haven't done that. EROEI is a method for working out whether or not those ventures are actually productive, and in most cases the answer is that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
When I said adjustment there, I meant taking steps to prepare for a future with less available energy and more climate disruptions. That means making your home and lifestyle more energy efficient, using less energy and reducing your reliance on large supply chains. Living a lifestyle with less free energy has some challenges, and you're much better off facing those challenges when you still have access to those global supply chains and massive amounts of energy. You'll also, in some way, contribute to fighting the problem by reducing energy expenditure and pollution creation as a result.
There's nothing vague about these predictions - they're based on the technical analysis done for Limits to Growth. To the best of my knowledge we're still following the World3 projections fairly accurately. We're on track for growth to go into reverse in about ten years, give or take, and I haven't seen any really robust criticism of the Limits to Growth studies. They were shockingly accurate for 1972.
I'm confused again. Does "built a solar panel to process and work the energy from nuclear fusion" count as processing/working to make it useful?
We also didn't have to invest anything to create fossil fuels, so...?
How?
I prefer "invest the proceeds of my previously productive business venture into a new productive business venture". If it's argument by analogy, then I don't see why this analogy isn't just as valid.
I mean, is it? That's kind of the question I started with. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Or are other human values involved in some way?
Got it. You just define adjustments at the type that you like. But the good news is that market prices will cause people to take those steps anyway. Sounds like we're all good here.
Whelp, let's not talk about any of the theoretical problems with this work... or the failed price predictions. Let's just bask in the update. Oh Figure 3, how glorious you are. We were apparently wildly off on our estimate of how many resources there were (again, ignoring the theoretical problem with definitions here), but surely, we're right on tract to get exactly back in line with the old predictions... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future. So what if pollution hasn't taken off like predicted? It'll surely surely happen in the future, but now it looks significantly decoupled from the rest of the subsystems, so what the hell is the point of that again? Population might be coming to a peak; we'll see. And so what if we've done better at industrial output and food production; they're also surely to suddenly and precipitously collapse.... basically exactly in the politically-convenient near-future.
In the 70s, maybe this wasn't all that bettable (except for the bets that were made and were lost by the degrowthers). But now, this chart is suuuuuuper bettable. It's predicting sharp and rapid collapses from peaks that are pre-2025. Certainly, the data will be in to confirm this by, say, 2030. You should formalize the predictions from this model and put them on a popular prediction market. At least if society is going to collapse, you can make some money to mitigate the individual pain.
Solar panels do not appear out of the ether, fully formed. They are physically made, by people, out of raw materials and processed parts. You have to do useful work and invest energy into a solar panel in order for it to then return usable energy to you. We only care about the energy cost of building the solar panel, because that's what it takes to actually use it. To go back to fuel, we don't care about the energy that went into making uranium ore in the ground, but we do care about the energy investment required to turn a mountain with uranium in it to a bunch of usable fuel pellets for a nuclear reactor.
Wrong. Petroleum products go through substantial refining processes, and we have to build large facilities to extract and export those fossil fuels. There's a substantial amount of human labour that has gone into the petroleum that fuels a modern combustion engine, even if nature has already done most of the real work of creating living beings and then compressing them over millions of years.
If we dramatically lower our consumption rates, the resources we do have will last longer.
It is valid. You can invest the proceeds of your previously productive business venture into a new one. But that's exactly what I am advocating for and we aren't doing! Your analogy is valid in the sense that it is a perfectly good approach to the problems we're facing - it just isn't what we're actually doing. We're spending those resources on military conflicts, poll numbers (see Biden draining the SPR), happy meal toys, artificial islands in the shape of a sheik pissing money away and making as many Americans as obese as possible for as long as possible. Did you know that modern industrial farming techniques require 13 calories of energy to create 1 calorie of food? THAT is the kind of investment we're making - and I don't think I'd call an investment productive if it had a -92% return.
You get more out of it than you put in. If I build a powerplant for 100 dollars, and it generates 90 dollars of power before needing to be scrapped, I would have been better off not building it.
Calories is a convenient and easily understandable way to measure energy - I'm not sure how much more basic I can get here.
No? People could easily make bad adjustments and use energy even more wastefully if they want - but I was talking about potential adjustments people could make to try and solve the problem.
Are you for real? The market absolutely will not cause people to take those steps, and even a cursory look at the state of the world (let alone history) makes it exceedingly obvious that market prices and forces are not capable of preventing financial crashes, collapses and recessions that result from human malinvestment/bad budgeting decisions. The process that market forces actually inflict on societies in these conditions is called "catabolic collapse" and we've seen it play out multiple times in history. Homo sapiens is not homo economicus, and every single prediction made on the basis that they are has failed. You can play whatever games you want with financial numbers - if there's no more economically/energetically viable oil to extract, no amount of money will be capable of conjuring more of it out of the ether.
Did you actually go and read the article you posted? Here's a section which I think you might have missed.
Thank you for posting this great evidence in favour of my own argument - "alarmingly consistent with the most recently collected empirical data" isn't really the sort of thing you would say about an inaccurate prediction! As an aside, this is actually the second time someone has posted this exact link to me in a conversation about this topic on the motte - https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/167149?context=8#context
You're losing track of the thread.
I had asked:
You had responded:
Then, I asked:
Now, here, you say:
But this doesn't make sense, especially in contrast to how you seem to still think in the subsequent paragraph that we do count the energy content of fossil fuels, because we do work on it.
You need to choose one or the other option. We do work on both things to make them usable. Either we only count the work we do on it, and we do not count the energy content of the fuel, itself... or we do count the energy content of the fuel, itself, because we do work on it. Please clearly pick one standard to apply evenly.
The second point you've made also lost the thread. I had asked:
You responded:
I then asked:
Your current response doesn't tell me anything about how I go through the process of factoring in consumption rates. When I'm determining whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans", I need to do some math on some numbers, and one of the variables I have is, possibly, consumption rates. How does that variable fit in?
I could make an even longer list of things I don't like about the world, but I don't see how any of these things are really relevant to the questions at hand. In fact, why didn't you just start with that in the first place? Just start with saying that we're totally ruined because we're squandering resources on all these things, then we don't even have to get into any tricky questions about how to measure real things.
That tells me a lot about the relative value of those forms of calories. Which also tells me that, unlike in one's personal diet, a calorie is not just a calorie, so it's surprising and weird that you want to make the measure be about unlabeled calories.
Ok. Do you think modern farmers are getting less money than they put in?
You can tell me, in basic terms, why energy is the fundamental unit of investment. You didn't seem to think that it was just one sentence ago. You seemed to think it was dollars for some reason. So I ask again. What is "productive"? Is it some measure of calories (which seems to be more confusing to measure with every comment that goes by)? Is it dollars? Or are other human values involved in some way?
Yes, I am for real. If your predictions are correct, the price of certain resources will rise, and we have very clear results about price elasticity. Do you think price elasticity is bullshit, fake science? Short term financial crises/recessions are in a completely different category on completely different timescales.
I did. But rather than just trust the words that potentially-motivated authors wrote to describe their own interpretations of the data, I actually went and looked at the data myself and drew my own conclusions. Did you actually go look at the data or even bother to read my alternate interpretation, then think about the data that you've seen and consider how to judge the differing interpretations? Or is the standard literally, "One author wrote one sentence of interpretation in a published article, so therefore it is revealed truth"? If so, I'll need a few minutes, but we can find some, uh, alternate revealed truth that might make you uncomfortable.
Sort of hilariously, just yesterday, Practical Engineering took a little run at one of the slew of modern myths about us running out of this or that resource. Focus special attention on his discussion of adaptation. And no, just because sometimes, there are fuck-ups and some bridge collapses somewhere or something, that does not mean that it is impossible for price changes to drive adaptation.
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