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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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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!

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".

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.

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?"

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.

After all, the sun will run out eventually. That doesn't imply that it's wasteful to use solar energy.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, that's the standard environmentalist usage, but like a lot of environmentalist rhetoric it's somewhere on the spectrum between confusing and misleading.

I just checked wikipedia and that seems to be the standard usage of the term as well. I'm all for telling society to fuck off and using language your own way, though I think you should be explicit about how you're not using the standard definition when you do.

Much like "carbon emissions" which makes people think of particulate pollution or "ocean acidification" which makes it sound like the oceans are becoming acidic.

I can agree that a lot of rhetoric is unclear or potentially misleading - I think global warming and climate change aren't terribly good labels for the phenomenon they're describing either.

Sure, oil is in decline. But as I pointed out earlier, coal isn't remotely close to running out.

Oil and coal are not perfectly interchangeable. Oil has a much higher energy density and is much better suited for large vehicles (like farming equipment). Coal similarly doesn't provide as many of the important byproducts that petroleum does. You can get around this by throwing more energy at the problem, but that makes the exhaustion issue worse. We do have a lot more coal, but coal isn't as useful a fuel, and if you replace an appreciable fraction of oil consumption with coal consumption then those stockpiles aren't going to last nearly as long.

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.

My position is neither of those - we should be moving away from coal AND oil because our current rate of usage is obscenely high, and we're pointlessly wasting vast amounts of both. There's nothing we're currently aware of that will replace them, and I believe that's why we should place a big emphasis on conservation and avoiding wastes of energy. The uranium amount doesn't matter until we can get sustainably profitable nuclear power (i.e. it has an EROEI high enough to justify its existence), which we currently cannot do.

For similar reasons, I completely disagree that we've exceeded the environment's carrying capacity, or even come close to doing so.

We are burning a non-renewable resource in order to inefficiently generate enough food calories to support current population levels. If we were not burning non-renewable energy sources at a breakneck pace, we would not be able to support the level of population we currently have, which is why I think that we are, by definition, above that carrying capacity. Each extra bit of population increases the rate at which we're burning those fuels as well! That said, I don't think there's enough political will for a real solution here, which is why I'm expecting nature to have her say (and she has a very consistent rejoinder for animals that outgrow the ability of their environment to support them).

Why is climate change not a good descriptor? What would you suggest instead?

I actually don't have a suggestion - this is a big problem and I don't have an answer for it. The reason I don't like climate change is that it doesn't really convey much information about the problem. The climate changes for all sorts of normal, natural reasons through time (it went through plenty of changes before humans even showed up on the scene) - volcanic eruptions, solar activity, floods, etc. When environmentalists talk about global warming and climate change, they're talking about a much more specific phenomenon - human activity releasing greenhouse gases being the biggest. There's a very specific process taking place here that's having consequences on the world which are already starting to arrive, and while climate change does describe what's happening, it also describes things like the Hekla 3 eruption or the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Climate change makes it sound like some inevitable and unavoidable fact of life, and while "climate change" is indeed something that's going to happen no matter what, human activity contributing to the greenhouse effect is something that people can actively take steps in their life to try and reduce.

You don't think nuclear would become "sustainably profitable" if it was nuclear or starvation?

If I had a "choice" between getting blood from a stone and starving to death, my circumstances wouldn't make the stone any more likely to bleed if I crushed it. If nuclear power can successfully give us electricity too cheap to meter, then great - that'd be a wonderful thing. But that has yet to be demonstrated at scale and I have seen no indications that this is going to change anytime soon. Nuclear power is great in a lot of ways, and it's the best power source we have for nuclear submarines/aircraft carriers, but it doesn't seem like you can profitably and sustainably scale it up to the point that you'd run a modern economy with it.

Do you not consider France a modern economy?

The French nuclear system is currently at an unsustainable level of debt and is on the verge of being nationalised because it can't make enough money to keep itself going. The state of the French nuclear energy system is something I have previously brought up in discussions on these topics as evidence for my point.

To the extent that nuclear is uncompetitive, it's uncompetitive because cheaper options exist. You're arguing that the cheaper options are going to cease to exist. I'm sceptical, but assuming you're right, then nuclear will no longer be uncompetitive.

France doesn't demonstrate that nuclear is cost-competitive with natural biofuels - it isn't. But it does demonstrate that a modern economy can run on nuclear if the money is there. And again, the money will be there if there aren't better and cheaper options available.

So this implies to me that the worst case scenario of us depleting our natural biofuel resources is we switch to nuclear resources and become like France - energy is somewhat more expensive, but it's still there, and we continue to be able to feed a large population rather than collapsing into mass starvation.

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