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Energy returned on energy invested. I don't know how much simpler I can make this! We care about fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable. We don't care about supplying the fuel required for the sun to burn, but we do care about the fuel required to build and install a solar panel. We don't care about the energy required to make uranium during the formation of the earth, but we do care about the energy required to dig it out of the ground and process it into fuel pellets. The dividing line is just the amount of energy that we actually invested.
When it comes to fossil fuels like petroleum and coal, the answer is simply that if we have some kind of horrific catastrophe that dramatically cuts population and destroys the economy, the problem will get pushed forward a few hundred years. A Carrington event, nuclear war, some other novel WMD (a biological weapon that reduces global population by 95% would qualify), a supervolcano erupting, a megatsunami, a meteorite impact... there are a lot of potential events that could cause a decrease in consumption rates enough to matter.
But in order for new fossil fuels to form it will require several million years - many multiple times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed on earth. The USA currently has issues with plans longer than 4 years - I don't trust them to accurately plan for something multiple millions of years in the future.
Energy is the fundamental unit of investment because the measure under discussion is ENERGY RETURNED ON ENERGY INVESTED. That's an appropriate measure to use when discussing sources of energy! We are talking about energy, but finance makes for a good metaphor that's easy to understand. If it makes it easier to think about, then picture an incredibly tiny power plant which costs 100 calories to build and fuel, which then generates 90 calories worth of usable power as a result.
In many cases, modern farmers actually are getting less money than they put in and are under significant financial stress. But the actual answer is that we're talking about energy rather than money, and so they don't care that modern fossil-fuel based farming practices are inefficient at the level of energy because they are much more efficient at the economic level. Financial and social pressure means that we are converting this energy to food in an incredibly inefficient way due to the immense surplus of energy that we currently have access to, but in a real-world financial sense they're doing what's rational for people in their position. I don't just think that this is a bad idea, but I think that it is a bad idea that is already bringing forth nasty consequences.
As I mentioned, I already went through that article 9 months ago. I quoted the authors because I agree with their understanding of their own results - agreeing with something doesn't mean that I just scanned through for a sentence I agree with.
So do you count the energy content of fossil fuels? Honestly, I don't know how much clearer I could make the difficulty in your current statements than I did in my last comment. You're really going to need to show at least an indicia of engaging with the question or I'll probably just have to write you off as non-responsive and give up.
I don't think your latest response actually gave me anything to go on here. I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
Ah yes, ipse dixet. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not really trying to engage.
I mean, are we? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why is energy the real topic when we're talking about agriculture?
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
Why? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why are you talking about energy rather than money or any of the other things that could be involved in the discussion?
In that case, you could probably say something relevant concerning my remarks on the data contained therein, rather than simply resting on one of their quotes.
We care about the energy content of fossil fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable. The actual energy content of the fuel is immaterial, because what matters is the usable energy we can extract from it, minus the costs of extracting that energy and converting it into a useful form. Not all fossil fuels are created equally - there are differing grades of oil, and the extraction methods required to harness them are different too. The kind of light sweet crude that burst out of the ground in the early days of America was a substantially better and more useful fuel than the output of shale fracking or deep-sea oil platforms.
I suppose this means the ultimate answer to that question is "Yes, but it is complicated." The raw energy content of a given fuel is obviously relevant when working out how much usable energy you get out of it, but it isn't the whole story. I'm not going to go to a financial metaphor because that seems to have just caused confusion, but imagine that there's a town with two oil wells. Both of them produce completely identical oil - but one of those oil wells requires complex machinery, expert knowledge and significant electrical expenditure to extract that oil, while the other well is so pressurised that it simply bursts out of the ground with so much force it costs nothing at all. Both of those oil wells are producing a fossil fuel with the same energy content, but the energy we invest to actually make it usable in each case is different.
The caloric content of food is generally considered extremely relevant information, to the point that listing it on the label is required in all first world countries. Calories are the unit we use to measure the energy required for human bodies to stay alive - and I think you're going to have your work cut out for you if you want to talk about food, diet and agriculture without bringing up calories.
Why? I agreed with their position and from where I was standing it argued against your own interpretation. It looked to me like you had simply found an article with datapoints that ostensibly supported your position rather than reading through the entire article to see what was actually being communicated - sorry if I was wrong and you actually seriously engaged with the article and interrogated the claims within seriously. I actually still agree with their conclusion - global population growth is starting to slow down, and I can look out the window right now to see the impacts of pollution on the environment.
I think there are absolutely things in these predictions worth betting on, but the problem is that the short term can be extremely noisy - a major war or climate disaster could shift the precise dates around by a few years, for instance. If you actually do want to bet on those figures, the shape of the curves in question can only really be worked out sometime around 2040, but if you don't have anything else you'll need to spend the money on in the next 16 years I'm down.
Your response is trying so hard to be unclear. My best interpretation of your "yes, but" is that you really mean, "No, we do not count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy In." And we don't really count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy Out, either; we just count something about what we've been able to harvest from the fuel. Do you disagree? I'm not sure why it's so hard to get an answer for something that you're saying is super simple and easy.
For some purposes, yes. But acknowledging that something is relevant for some purposes does not mean that it is basically The Only thing. For many folks, the protein content of food is considered extremely important, but no one would say that Protein In/Protein Out is The Metric.
Global population growth is one correct out of many. Conversely, levels of pollution in developed countries is going down significantly, and it's plausible that this will come to developing countries as they develop. The latest update pushed the pollution people significantly into the future (magically, btw, being one of the biggest differences from past predictions).
The peaks in those images are clearly pre-2025. The drops are precipitous. Why would you need another fifteen years to see the drop?
I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
I don't know how much clearer I can be given that the question doesn't have a yes/no answer. I'm not sure how communication broke down totally like this because I have never encountered anyone who hasn't been able to grasp the concept like this before. Energy returned on energy invested is just so straightforward that I don't understand how I can make it any clearer. To use solar as an example: we only account for the energy invested in creating and installing the solar panel, because we don't invest anything to make the sun keep burning and hence don't care about the energy content of the fuel (in this case sunlight). If you are putting oil into your car, you care about the energy of the fuel because that's on the "energy invested" side of the equation.
Calories are extremely relevant when determining whether or not a food source can sustain a human population, which is the purpose that matters here. If you can find someone who stays alive without any calories, please let the world know.
They changed their accounting method for pollution - the statistic they're tracking is different, which is why the curve is different. They focused much more on carbon in the atmosphere, both because that's going to be one of the most significant sources of pollution-related economic damage and because fossil fuel usage is decently correlated with activities that produce other types of pollution (plastic, nitrogen fertiliser runoff, fracking, chemical processing etc).
First of all, this particular data can be pretty noisy. Sharp spikes up and down in various numbers can happen for a variety of reasons without actually changing the longer-term trends that underlie them. There's a chance I'm extremely wrong and what we're seeing is a small dip before those curves turn back up and go exponential as humanity metastasizes across the stars - or we could get something more negative. The Middle East is currently on the verge of a large regional war, and if that war breaks out at least one side has said that their planned military strategy is to completely destroy all petroleum-related infrastructure that isn't theirs, and there's a decent chance they could actually achieve this. While it would be immensely destructive and bad for the global economy, it would have a massive impact on the depletion curve for a lot of those resources (petroleum is used in the extraction of almost all other resources and a rise in its price will have dramatic flow-on effects).
Ok here's the easy version - if it takes longer than a million years to renew itself, it isn't relevant to modern humans.
I think I'm just going to have to continue to focus on this, because either you're just so impossibly unclear that it seems like you're being inconsistent... or you're really really dedicated to being inconsistent.
I mean, I think the best interpretation of your current statement is whether we are investing anything on keeping something burning. So, like, if our ancestors had built an oil tap, and it was producing a flame, but we didn't have to do anything to keep that flame going; just the oil comes up itself with some pressures and such, and the flame keeps going, then we don't count the energy in the fuel?
Honestly, this seems really absurd and an incredibly hokey way of trying to carve out an answer to, "Do we count the energy in the fuel?" in a way that just happens to not count it for the fuel sources you like, but counts it for the fuel sources you don't like. It doesn't make any other sense whatsoever. At least when there was some chance that you legitimately just meant "we don't ever count the energy in the fuel; we just count the energy used to refine/whatever the fuel and make it usable", it was plausible. There are other plausible lines, but yours is just getting more and more strained and implausible.
Yeah, you didn't really discuss this. I like calories in a variety of ways, but I can't see why it's The Only Thing. Hell, climate alarmists were all up in a tizzy that, even though increasing CO2 increased caloric yields bigly, they slightly decreased the per-calorie content of certain micronutrients. So, should I care about that, like they tell me... or should I just care about calories? Why/why not?
Which is even debatable as "pollution". It certainly isn't the central case, and this major shift really takes a whole lot of rhetorical claims that the old predictions were actually good. Where was the spike of 'old' pollutants?! Why did we have to completely abandon the old predictions?
How can we tell the difference? What sort of test could falsify your theory?
Why do I care about "renewing itself"? I thought we were talking about how consumption rates come into play for timescales relevant to humans. How does that work?
I don't understand how communication has broken down so badly - I'll take the blame and assume it is just my communication skills failing here, because I've never seen anyone unable to grasp the concept of return on investment before. That's the line! If you are making decisions about energy usage, determining whether an activity or idea returns a net positive amount of energy or a net negative amount is extremely useful. Let's use a solar panel for example - you have to invest energy and work in order to transform a bunch of raw materials into a solar panel and then install it, so you count the cost of those inputs. While the solar panel is fuelled by the sun, you don't have to give a shit about the energy costs required to make the sun keep burning - those are entirely irrelevant. In contrast, if you set up a petroleum-based generator, you have to care not just about the costs of building the generator, but the cost of supplying it with fuel as well, because that fuel does not shine down out of the sky for free.
I just don't understand why this is so difficult to grasp or understand and at this point I'm giving up - this is my last post in this thread because this is just not productive. My line that you consider strained and implausible has been used by scientists for decades in multiple peer-reviewed papers and it is a widely accepted measure among anyone who takes the topic seriously. Your incredulity at this extremely common and well-understood concept just mystifies me.
Depends on what you're trying to do, but yes, you should care about calories - but you should care about nutrition as well. Having concerns about one thing shouldn't prevent you from having concerns about something related.
Look out the window - especially if you're near a coral reef. Were you aware that there are microplastics in your balls? In your brain? The biosphere is in crisis and there's vast quantities of trash and pollution that are degrading the environment and quality of life both. We didn't have to abandon those old predictions at all - but atmospheric carbon levels are a better proxy for that kind of activity than directly measuring all the regular pollution. You don't have to abandon that old prediction at all and you can keep studying it or verifying it if you want to - it's just that atmospheric carbon is a better measure, so we use that instead. If you want to go out and discover an actual method for accurately measuring harmful pollution, please do - it'd be a tremendous service to humanity.
You wait a bit and watch the trend-line on the graph. Alternatively, you find some explanation for those temporary shifts up and down - as an example, volcanic eruptions can have a significant impact on temperature levels across the globe, so if you can say "we're experiencing lower temperatures because this volcano erupted and filled the atmosphere with vog" that lets you work it out as well.
If you have a bank account with 5000 dollars in it and which will only be refreshed with another 5000 dollars in 10 years, there is a big difference between having a yearly expenditure of 1000 dollars as opposed to a yearly expenditure of 400 dollars.
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
You didn't address this question.
Ok, interesting. So now, calories aren't the only metric. Seems like it's starting to get fuzzy and complicated...
...why don't those things show up in the data? Where are they in the figure?
We've been waiting for decades. At what point can one conclude that a theory has been falsified?
Right. This is precisely what I've been asking about. Presumably, consumption rates matter, but it's not clear how they're coming into play in your view. It's just calories, except for when it's fuzzy not-calories, on your view. And it's only calories in compared to calories out, but that doesn't really have any term in there for a consumption rate. Is it normalized by something? How does it work?
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