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 -
How is food waste an environmental issue? It's all biodegradable organics.
Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.
Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.
Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00
(edited solely for spacing/readability)
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.
Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
Not only can they do it, but solar or nuclear could do it all alone if everything else vanished. Not that it's going to be necessary. What is your basis for saying this? Is it some flimsy extrapolation like: 'Based on current consumption , If we go 100%, we'll run out of some rare mineral in 2 years, or landfill space to put old windblades'.
That's due to safety regulations. If we went back to good old rugged soviet standards, it would be dirt cheap.
Payday comes every month like clockwork. The proven reserves of oil keep increasing, to say nothing of the stuff we haven't learned to harness yet.
Does it bother you that you could have said the same thing every year since at least the industrial revolution, and be wrong every time?
Solar can't do it - solar power is great and you can do a lot with it, but solar energy is not capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels without substantial decreases in energy consumption. You can work this out by looking at how much energy society spends, and then seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply it (the answer is "too much").
Why haven't China or Russia started mass producing nuclear powerplants then? The Chinese give absolutely zero shits about safety/not cutting corners, and yet they continue to use fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, despite the massive geopolitical gains that would be associated with no longer being reliant on fossil fuels. The "safety regulations" conspiracy that somehow covers the entire globe and lets Greta Thunberg dictate energy policy to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping strikes me as substantially less realistic than current nuclear power technology being largely unprofitable.
Global oil and gas discoveries hit their lowest level for 75 years in 2021. They've since gone up, but 77% of recent oil discoveries have been off-shore (harder to access, more energy investment required to extract). Proven reserves of oil are increasing, but they're not increasing as quickly as consumption is, and that's going to be a problem when those two lines intersect. The stuff we haven't learned to harness yet... we haven't learned to harness yet, so there's no point talking about it. I don't get to claim my financial problems don't exist because the zero point energy in my completely empty wallet would be extremely valuable if I sold it.
No? Hubbert was wrong about the actual peak of conventional oil volume, but he was very close on the timing. Similarly, the world has been tracking the World3 model from the Limits to Growth study fairly well, and that predicts a halt to global GDP growth sometime in the next two decades. If you've got a convincing refutation of that model and the predictions it is making I'd love to read it.
I was under the impression that they are?
More options
Context Copy link
The answer is 10 000-20 000 sq miles(for electricity in the US), which is the size of lake erie. For all the energy in the entire world, it's going to be a small fraction of the sahara.
They are vastly expanding their nuclear capacity as we speak. .
In 1939 the department of the interior projected that oil would last only 13 more years, and again in 1951 it was projected that oil would run out 13 years later. In Limits to growth (1972), Gold was supposed to run out in 1981, silver and mercury 1985, zinc 1990, oil before 1992. In 1992 they published the revised ‘beyond the limits’, where they pushed it all back a few years, as they always do. And 30 years later they’re still doing the same thing, like a broken record – oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now… oh sorry, I meant 10 years from now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Aside from the question of how long that state would persist if we run out of alternatives, there's also the question of "so what?". Let's imagine that the government will have to subsidize energy production until the end of time, how is that not sustainable?
Generating power at a profit sans subsidies means that it produces energy at a price that society can reasonably pay and continue to support. If the power plant needs government subsidies to continue as a going concern then there's a decent chance that it isn't actually a net positive in terms of energy once you factor in maintenance, having to pay for nuclear scientists etc. The point of stressing profitability is to make sure that you don't have government money disguising what is actually a net energy loss (like encouraging farmers to burn oil growing corn, then turn the corn into a less efficient and less convenient fuel).
Money is not an energy unit, though. Aren't you the guy explaining how energy inefficient modern farming is? But it's perfectly profitable. I see no reason to assume lack of profits means energy inefficiency.
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
Seems way too soon to worry about natural biofuel use being "unsustainable". We have centuries worth of coal left.
I don't think time is a good way of measuring resources like this, because there's so much variability in future patterns of consumption. How much of that stored coal is uneconomical to extract, and how much more of it will be burned to make up for shortfalls elsewhere? Fossil fuel usage also contributes to pollution and environmental damage, and while you can ignore those costs on a corporate balance sheet (or at a country level, for a while) they eventually come home to roost and show up elsewhere. Rising sea levels are going to require an awful lot of energy expenditure to deal with, for example, and they're already starting to show up. The problems and costs associated with fossil fuels aren't far off in the future - they're already here, and they show no sign of going into reverse.
I also wasn't talking about biofuels at all, assuming you're using the term technically as distinct from fossil fuels. Nobody cares about biofuels because they're largely wastes of energy - why burn 13 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food which then gets converted into fuel and hits efficiency again? You can get a bit of return from working with used cooking oil, but that's not exactly the sort of energy base you can power an industrial civilisation with.
I use the term "natural biofuel" for oil, coal, and gas because it's a more accurate term than "fossil fuel". Oil is not fossilised. It's also distinct from e.g. manufactured ethanol because it has been produced by nature - thus, "natural biofuel".
I do think that if you're going to talk about "unsustainability" in terms of "we're going to run out", then I think it's very fair to ask "when?" After all, the sun will run out eventually. That doesn't imply that it's wasteful to use solar energy.
On the other hand if you want to talk about costs vs benefits, that's also fine, but you do need to weigh both sides of the equation. I think the costs of natural biofuels are greatly overstated, but even granting those, they come with the benefit of... feeding 8 billion people. Seems like a very positive cost/benefit ratio to me!
You'll have to forgive me here because I'm actually an environmentalist and these terms have more specific meanings in those discussions - the term biofuel usually gets used for things like biodiesel. Fossil fuels aren't actually fossils, but that's how people generally refer to coal, oil and natural gas, and so in the interest of comprehensibility that's how I use the word as well.
That's a really complicated question. I don't think we're ever going to actually run out, but that's because there's a bunch of fossil fuels that aren't economical to extract, and if it costs 10 units of energy to dredge up 1 unit of oil that's not something you can use to power a society. There are some really nasty fossil fuels out there that just aren't worth extracting, so they probably won't be. Peak conventional oil extraction was in 2005, and peak unconventional oil extraction is forecasted for somewhere in 2030 to the best of my knowledge. If you're asking about when the economic consequences hit... peak conventional domestic oil production in the US came during 1970, and caused major economic troubles. Peak conventional oil happened in 2005, and in 2007 we had a global financial crisis that several metrics are yet to recover from. These problems aren't some issue for future generations to deal with - they're here, now.
I don't disagree with this, although I will point out that the sun was already switched on and burning fuel when we got here.
If you recheck my last post, I don't technically disagree with using that energy to feed 8 billion people - as long as you stretch it out over time. What we've done instead is consume this once-in-a-species windfall of energy and used it to overstretch the natural resources our population and civilisation is based on. My position is not that we should have just not burned fossil fuels and lived in rags building more stonehenges, but that fossil fuel usage should have been much more carefully budgeted and managed in order to allow for that energy to last much longer. Yes, we have 8 billion people now - but we've exceeded the environment's carrying capacity by using a temporary resource. That story happens in nature all the time, and the way it ends is very consistent. I think it would have been better if global population grew at a much slower rate and fossil fuels were conserved to a much greater degree. My argument is essentially that the lottery-win of fossil fuel reserves that our civilisation found in the Earth should have been saved and invested rather than spent in a profligate orgy of consumption. Feeding 8 billion people right now is nice, but feeding 20 billion over a longer time-scale with fewer economic dislocations, less environmental overshoot and more of an energy reserve for dealing with difficult problems seems like it'd be quite a bit nicer to me.
Sure, that's the standard environmentalist usage, but like a lot of environmentalist rhetoric it's somewhere on the spectrum between confusing and misleading. Much like "carbon emissions" which makes people think of particulate pollution or "ocean acidification" which makes it sound like the oceans are becoming acidic.
Sure, oil is in decline. But as I pointed out earlier, coal isn't remotely close to running out. So if you want to argue we should be moving away from oil and towards coal that's a reasonable position. But if you're arguing we should stop using coal because we're using up the oil, that's just nonsense.
For similar reasons, I completely disagree that we've exceeded the environment's carrying capacity, or even come close to doing so. Even when all the oil is gone, we'll still have centuries worth of coal. And even when all the coal is gone we'll still have millennia worth of uranium. It's all good.
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
According to the chart, the lion's share of this modern energy expense on food is storage, services, transportation and processing. But do we not save energy on the convenience? It makes some sense that we spend more calories on growing food because we use few people and many machines, as opposed to 90% of people plowing their own (or not exactly their own, but details) share of a field. But is the freed manpower accounted for?
Uh, no. We waste copious amounts of food making sure that you can get whatever you want no matter the season/location of origin. "Storage, services, transportation and processing" ARE the convenience!
No. Why would it be? Do you account for how many horses are no longer required to carry people long distances when working out the economics of cars?
No, because I'm not a horse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At the Malthusian limit, the amount of non-solar energy put into food is equal to the energy necessary to sustain every human being (all of whom are working directly or indirectly to produce that food), and that is equal to the amount of solar energy put into the food times all the efficiencies involved minus wastage. Humanity has often been near there.. so yeah, the freed manpower is absolutely enormous.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link