This is the scenario, as I see it:
A man is standing on a trolley track and the trolley is going to hit him because he didn’t throw the switch and turn the trolley onto the other track 30 years ago. He is only now beginning to accept that he has a serious problem, in the form of a trolley bearing down on him. He has been in denial since the 1980s. Oddly, in the 1980s he was asked to solve a similar problem in which a bicyclist (CFCs in freon destroying the ozone layer) was bearing down on him and instead of switching the bicyclist to another path, or dodging out of the bicyclist’s way, he shot the bicyclist and buried him and his bicycle at the crossroads. Consequently some people, such as Carl Sagan, thought that, maybe, just maybe, our hero would react rationally. Instead, our hero listened to the important messages from the “Trolley Cars Running People Over Corporation” which led him to doubt the science and to believe them when they said they would develop CO2 extraction technology, fusion power, and AI porn in time to save the world. Oh, that’s bullshit. He didn’t doubt the science. He just decided the problem was too big and inconvenient and concluded that trolley impact might not be that bad, really; maybe it’s kind of fun. Besides, we all love trains, right?
Economists and moral philosophers insist that humans make mostly rational, informed, decisions but in this example we have a clearly rational and moral option, which was mostly ignored. I remember when the game theorists (a branch of philosophers who like stupid trolley car problems) pointed out that the obvious rational decision was to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and spend the subsidies on green energy instead because in that case the scenarios were:
- Best case: We avert planetary catastrophe and get cheaper energy and solar iPhones
- Median case: We experience a calamitous couple centuries and adapt and survive because we have much cheaper energy and solar iPhones and if you wave an iPhone really fast you can fan yourself with it
- Worst case: We spend a bunch of money and get cheaper energy and solar iPhones and it turns out the planetary catastrophe was not going to actually happen, but did I mention the iPhones can run AI porn? We all live happily ever after until we have a nuclear war
I expect that the game theorists will have quit in disgust. Who wants to be associated with a field of endeavor that is so easily blown off by the public, when they could be arguing instead that we all live in a simulation operated by Elon Musk. Oh, fuck those guys.
But, really, how can something this stupid have happened? I have decades of professional experience with stupidity and even my imagination is beggared by the magnitude of the stupidity that humanity has arrayed against this problem. Let me give you an example: The Paris Accords
For every ton of CO2 you release, this golden retriever puppy will be fed a ton of tar sands: CARBON NEUTRAL [midjourney AI and mjr]
The former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate made the comment Friday after a New Hampshire environmental activist challenged him for accepting donations from the co-founder of liquified natural gas firm.
Biden denied the donor’s association to the fossil fuel industry before calling the young woman “kiddo” and taking her hand. He said, “I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
[I very much doubt that the environmental activist “kiddo” will ever read this, but if you do please contact me and tell me how you feel about being used as a public glop sponge by a really cynical old man.]
Absolutely none of that affected the laws of physics and nature in the slightest. Let’s try another scenario: imagine you’re in a submarine and there’s a mechanical problem that’s going to keep it from surfacing for 120,000 years. There’s an American on board, and he explains that he’s going to continue to smoke his pipe, because otherwise the tobacco industry will collapse don’t you know, and that might bring down the stock markets. Instead of justifiably beating him to death and launching him out a torpedo tube, the others in the submarine calibrate their smoking as a percentage of the American’s because, I dunno, WTF.
The Maui Wowie. [midjourney AI and mjr]
I guess this is just another “why I am a doomer” piece. [stderr] because humans and their political leaders were unable to do the simple game theory thought experiment of “should I switch the trolley to another track, or become red, sticky, track-lube?” If humans and their political leaders were capable of making an obvious decision based on supreme self-interest, instead of laziness and the status quo, we’d have done it 30 years ago. I just hope we have the presence of mind to kill the rich and powerful, instead of preserving them to continue mis-ruling us, because in 2020-2 we saw a good example of what a great job of disaster handling they do when the chips are down and there’s nowhere for them to run. They just lie.
Midjourney AI and mjr “the planet is on fire, seen from orbit”
I’ve been trying to think about what a potentially sustainable society would look like. Not even really addressing the energy demands/sources, just the use of fossil fuels.
I imagine one of the major things that would have to change, is an overall incredible reduction in transportation, both for cargo and individuals. We would have to completely overhaul our retail industry, I imagine to source as much as possible locally, lots of onsite storage (as opposed to the current method of rapid, frequent deliveries that get put straight on the sales floor), with things that require longer transit to be done slowly via rail and sail.
I think that would limit cargo to really expensive stuff, really unique stuff, and make it take longer, and cost more as well.
Would our current transportation method of pallets and shipping containers still be viable? or would we have to switch to some smaller method of packaging that an average human can load/unload/carry?
I imagine air travel as we know it may have to be eliminated. Possibly airships? but those would probably be slower than trains, so they would just be a weird luxury thing.
And I imagine a lot of tasks that are done with machinery/vehicles would have to be done by humans directly, which would greatly increase the labor involved.
Even if everyone in society was deeply and honestly committed to changing to a sustainable civilization, I wonder if it would be at all possible with out some mythical non-existent near magical technology?
Not to put too fine a fine a point on it, but perhaps the most impactful thing regular people in the so-called 1st world can actually do is to abstain from having (more) children. If you absolutely must have children, then at least try to adopt first–before creating yet another human factory. Or get a dog. No unobtanium required for that, at least.
lochaber@#1:
I imagine one of the major things that would have to change, is an overall incredible reduction in transportation, both for cargo and individuals. We would have to completely overhaul our retail industry, I imagine to source as much as possible locally, lots of onsite storage (as opposed to the current method of rapid, frequent deliveries that get put straight on the sales floor), with things that require longer transit to be done slowly via rail and sail.
I agree. One of the big problems that would immediately be encountered is how to keep trade from becoming luxuries, and travel from becoming an exclusive plaything for the wealthy and powerful.
Sail ships (few, constructed from renewables) would carry mail, books of accumulated knowledge, vaccines – high value high density stuff like that.
Humanity would have to demilitarize and stop spending so much money on weapons systems and military transport. Police would be local, organized from volunteers. The SWAT team would possibly be mounted on horses or bicycles. Nobody’d want to fight them – they’d have good cardio and they’d be hot and sweaty and warmed up when they arrived.
This is a thing I nearly went into in my series on Badgeria, but our medical industry would have to collapse, too. It’s really wasteful and expensive in terms of tech and energy. We’d need a few repositories of learning – genuine universities, that were home to experts who studied and researched and published knowledge that was generally esoteric and useless for anyone who was not curious. A hospital would not be a place, anymore, where you’d get $1mn worth of interventions – it would be a place where there was a dentist, a bone-setter, a family planning doctor, and diagnosticians. If you walked in with a cancer, you would walk out with instructions on how to grow opium poppies, and not much else. A low impact renewable civilization wouldn’t be able to afford MRIs or chemotherapy – there would be a “center for disease control” which would be a few virologists and biologists at the university who might react to a pandemic with good advice on social distancing and “if you have trouble breathing, you may die.” There’s not much point preserving people who get sick. Some of this probably sounds like a republican wet dream except there’d be damn little overhead for a political class, either. If I try to figure out what a sustainable medical system looks like it sounds a lot like teaching all the kids about infection and viruses and battlefield first aid and if things get worse than that you’ll probably die.
As far as how to keep one culture from inventing imperialism and attacking others – I have no idea, short of a central Leviathan that might ultimately use one of the small supply of nuclear weapons.
Being a sailor would be a drama ticket. They’d be the folks who really traveled and their job would be incredibly important. Once the fish replenished in a few hundred years, being a fisher would be a hot career, too. Politicians and marketing people would be seen as useless wastes of flesh and there would be few interested in careers doing useless stuff because being useful is where food comes from. Perhaps there would be a few (?) emergency pilots to carry news – a high cachet job – they’re the drama crazies who launch their gliders with trebuchets and fly long lonely trips with emergency news, or carry books between the universities if there is a particularly important discovery. Glider pilots would be like astronauts were in the 60s and 70s. The story of Eddie Rickenbacker, whose glider was forced down by weather, and broke a wing, only to be reconstructed with bamboo and rawhide, would be an inspiration to kids, though few would even think about launching a glider the way Eddie did – tying a rope to a boulder and having someone tip it off a cliff like he did is a one-shot proposition. The legend has grown in telling, of course.
Journalists would benefit from the narrowing of the pipe, but they’d complain about their new role(s) as town crier. “This soapbox is not big enough” etc. Actors and dramatists would have interesting tales to tell and since there’d be no internet or television, they’d know they were carrying an important cultural legacy. And Shakespeare plays would still be performed, but there would be no Netflix unless we’re talking about the comedic tragedy by that name, written by Smol Snorrisson in 2050, which is still pretty popular and the Elon Musk character is still a scary boogeyman parents tell their kids about.
Being an explorer would be a big deal, exciting field. Mostly exploring sunken cities, I imagine. Attempts to go to Mars would be unsustainable. Besides, there’s nothing there but death.
The population would be small and reproducing would be discouraged unless there was a need for a population adjustment. Adjustments would favor reduction, unless the labor pool started to dry up. Anyone who could work would have many opportunities for it. Anyone who didn’t want to work could be a ward of the state, which meant working on the work gang for soup and bread. I don’t see how a sustainable population could support non-contributing money aggregators (formerly “capitalists”) the medical profession would medicalize their problem as a psychological instability.
Philosophers would still be unpopular.
I don’t know if we would have to completely forgo electronics, computers, and the internet. If nothing else, it may be limited to one or a couple per town center/library. I can’t see them being available to everyone, and as small as they currently are. They would have to be built for long-term usage, with replaceable, maybe even repairable components. Probably built at one or a few central plants/complexes, and broken parts would be sent back for repair/recycling.
I feel the ability of the internet to quickly spread information world-wide is too important to society to completely give up, but just because I think it’s important doesn’t mean it would be sustainable…
Most things I’ve heard about foraging/hunter-gatherer societies is that they have an abundance of free time, and a small fraction of their time is actually spent securing food/shelter/water/etc. But that requires a much smaller population size. If there would be any way to maintain humanity’s mass of accumulated knowledge, without also maintaining a highly technological, industrial society?
Have you seen the Primitive Technology/John Plant youtube channel (link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA )? I find it kind of interesting, because he’s working with just naturally available materials, but with modern knowledge, and is now at the point where he is smelting small bits of iron from bacteria gathered off of a streambank. Granted, it’s more of a hobby/weekend thing for him, and he’s not also having to survive under primitive conditions, but I think it’s an interesting experiment in possibilities, if nothing else
Tangential to the main thread, but, as a non-US reader, the only mental reference I have to ‘kiddo’ is for a world-class female assassin who kills her former leader with a single punch…
Corporate Fuck: “It’s not about how much money it’ll cost. It’s about who that money goes to. Which will be me, so call me when the check clears, I’ll be on the yacht. No, the other yacht.”
Game theoretic solution to climate change, tying together several of this blog’s themes, inspired by a recent post over at PZ’s, and incorporating the unofficial US military motto “there is no problem so big or complicated that you can’t blow it up”: just nuke a sizeable chunk of the world’s population. We massively reduce future carbon emissions, we loft a bunch of stuff into the stratosphere to provide a cooling effect while everything sorts itself out, plus there are various other possiblities I won’t spell out but which would obviously appeal to the racist fucks who own the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. It would take quite a bit of fancy modelling to work out the optimum distribution, and I’m not saying we wouldn’t get out hair mused, but I’m sure the guys at RAND would be up for the challenge. Hey, it’s still better than extincion, right? (Note, I am not actually advocating this approach.)
Bonus trolleylolology: I recently saw a good version, showing two variants of the problem… Firstly, labelled “how you think it’s going to be”, we have the standard version of the scenario – the person at the switch is labelled “you”, and there are five people on the straight track and one person on the side track. Secondly, labelled “how it’s actually going to be”, the “you” label now points at one of the five people on the straight track, while the person at the switch now has a top hat and bags of money, and is giving thumbs-up to the person on the side track, who also has a top hat and bags of money.
That’s accurate… and it’s where you immediately lose the support of most people, I think. You’re asking the population to say “no thanks” to things that will extend their lives and the lives of their loved ones, the lives of the children, things we know perfectly well how to do but you’re expecting us to just choose not to do them for the greater good. Explain that truthfully to them, and they’ll chase you up a tree and set fire to it.
You might, possibly, be able to persuade people that they don’t need a new car every three years. You might, possibly, be able to persuade people that they don’t need a new shirt/dress every week, or a new phone every year. You might even persuade them to accept a more restricted diet and more limited options for where they go on holiday. Those are things we can do without, for sure.
The only word I’d argue with there is “civilisation”, for which I’d substitute “horrible dystopia”. Good luck selling it.
@Dunc, 7:
I take issue with that last trolley problem. It’s good, but I’d tweak just one thing. It’s not “How you think it’s going to be” – it’s “how the people with the money have told you it IS”. We’ve been sold the illusion of control.
Medicine is a really tricky one… Pareto applies in spades, and there definitely is an argument to be made that we spend far too much on end-of-life interventions that aren’t actually doing much good, and in many cases are only prolonging suffering. But, given that we apparently can’t even have a reasonable discussion around assisted dying for people who are very much of sound mind and are capable of expressing their desires very clearly and eloquently, I don’t see that’s much chance of shifting the consesus any time soon. And it genuinely is a very complex and difficult matter, with a lot of really horrible trade-offs.
It’s also another area where we definitely shouldn’t use the US as our baseline. Much of the world can still derive a great deal of benefit from cheap, low-tech interventions which would undoubtely yield a net economic benefit in even the most hard-headed assessment.
One reason that medical costs in the USA are so high is that cost-effectiveness is not considered in how things are done. The medical establishment simply assumes that cost doesn’t matter, suppliers discover that what they charge isn’t a huge factor in whether they get the sale, as long as they can make it seem like their high-priced stuff is somehow better or safer than their competitors, and medical care is increasingly dominated by megacorporations — and the supposedly “non-profit” ones act just like the for-profit ones — and the only limit on anything is the insurance companies’ willingness to pay. What actually gets paid depends on the outcome of the latest slugfests between insurance companies and medical companies. (Not to mention that one way insurance companies reduce costs is by denying as many claims as possible — so the resulting medical care isn’t all that great.) For a patient, the medical-industrial complex is this huge machine in which you are just a product, and you just have to hope that it won’t grind you up.
Atul Gawande, the surgeon who has written a number of essays on medical practice, wrote one describing a medical practice in India, which through a lot of effort gets halfway decent medical care in a not exactly rich part of India. I think there are lessons there ….
@Dunc, 10:
You can make it complex, but I can make it simple. My best friend’s sister got thyroid cancer in her thirties. In the fantasy sustainable “civilisation” she’d have been given some morphine and a leaflet on getting her affairs in order, and by now her kids wouldn’t have a mother. As it is, she got chemo and she’s probably got at least another 20 years of working for the health service that saved her. Her brother said “if you’re going to get cancer, that’s the one to get”. Not if there’s no chemo, though, or diagnostics…
Now if you present me with a trolley where moving the lever kills my wife today, in front of me and our kids, and not moving the lever kills every single person in America, Asia, Africa and an Australia at some indeterminate point in the future (next week? next year? next century?), then I’m going to saw off the handle at its base and if anyone tries to weld on another one before the trolley has passed I’ll beat them to death with it. That’s your problem with telling people that medicine is going to go away. “Tough sell” doesn’t really cover it.
Sure you can – if you completely ignore what I was actually saying and instead have a different argument with what somebody else said earlier in the thread.
@Dunc, 13: fair. But in fairness, “earlier in the thread” was the actual post at the top. I don’t have any argument with what you said – you’re just… right.
I’m not necessarily advocating for a society based on the death of modern tech. I’m exploring the idea and The Commentariat(tm) is helping think through the consequences. Medicine and knowledge management, transportation ablnd warfare are the main inflection points I can think of. I guess research would stop…
FYI the model I was using for medicine is post-Mao China: “we dont have real medicine any more so how about some boji nut tea and some acupuncture.” What is an MRI?
Elsewhere I have suggested that humans could have a nice non-sustainable high tech oil burning civilization if there were only maybe a few million of us. I don’t see that working out well, either.
I think humanity’s love of warfare is what will keep us from ever being sustainable. The energy density and portability of fossil fuels make them irresistable for militaries and a renewable powered military would quickly lose to a fossil fuel powered military.
I agree. I think this is one of the reasons why it’s unrealistic for the world to actually transition away from fossil fuels. The moment anyone tries, they’ll be invaded by a neighbor that didn’t bother.
Perhaps our best bet is to point out that fossil fuels are such a strategically important resource, that we just can’t afford to burn it in power plants and such. You know: “Mr. President. We cannot allow a fossil fuel gap!”
Re: militaries and fossil fuels
When Winston Churchill was 1st Lord at Admiralty he began the transition from coal-fired navy to oil. If you read accounts of WWI dreadnought action, or the chase of the Scharnhorst, it is immediately clear that coaling was a huge strategic element. Not only did you need a depot full of coal, your men had to shovel the stuff from collier to dock, dock up gangway, then into coal bunkers. The whole time it was happy to explode if there was dust. WWI is full of accounts of crews frantically shoveling while watching the horizon. And that’s another point: coal fired ships were easily detected by the smoke plumes. Churchill’s shift to oil triggered the advent of oil as a strategic commodity and the whole rearrangement of the world into oil-controlling cartels.
That oil also powers jet aircraft is the icing on the doomcake.
tldr; today, yes. Tomorrow, maybe not.
I’m not so sure… this makes the large assumption that warfare going forward is always going to look like warfare has up to now. Just as an example, the British army no longer walks out onto an open field in broad daylight and forms nice straight lines wearing bright red uniforms shouting “Come on Johnny Foreigner, let’s see what you’re made of” because although that certainly used to work, things have changed.
I can’t predict what warfare will look like in the future, but here are just a few observations off the top of my head:
1. tech is getting smaller and more energy efficient.
2. if your energy source is renewable, it’s potentially limitless and almost free.
3. old style, early 21st century tech (jet fighter/bombers, ships, tanks…. subs?) may find itself vulnerable to mid-21st century AI-controlled drones which are much smaller and cheaper to the point that they can overwhelm a target with sheer numbers.
Recall Millennium Challenge 2002, where in a simulated exercise a carrier battle group was destroyed by an opponent employing asymmetric warfare tactics. Now imagine that exercise again, except the Red team has access to clouds of drones to mob an incoming jet fighter, fleets of autonomous boats the size of surfboards to overwhelm ship defences, and even autonomous underwater craft to track and harass subs.
Your logistic challenge changes from making sure you can get petrol/diesel out to the vehicles you’re using to making sure you can replace or charge their batteries.
————-
Of course, all the above ignores the elephant in the room, which is that we’re not comparing apples to apples here. There are two sets of militaries in the world. There’s “rest of the world”, whose military (if it even exists) is generally rationally focused on national defence, and there’s the US military, whose military isn’t rational, isn’t focused, and isn’t about national defence.
One thing is clear about the US military – they don’t/can’t learn. Since WW2 they’ve been routinely humiliated and beaten, and yet they keep on doing what they’ve always done, stubbornly expecting a different result. And there’s clearly nothing anyone can do about it. People bleat about China buggering the environment, but at least the power stations they’re building are trying to make life better for their billion-plus population. The US military is buggering the environment in the cause of having a bigger, more impressive lightsaber in a world where everyone else combined has a pointed stick. (And every time they swing their lightsaber, they end up cutting off their own foot, but hey, LIGHTSABER, DUDE!).
@18
I tend to agree with your analysis about future military tech. It wasn’t that long ago that Reagan proposed the SDI (complete with space lasers, although not necessarily Jewish ones). People pointed out how easy (and cheap) it would be to overwhelm parts of it.
Regarding the US military, well, that’s really just a money pit designed to make some people rich and get others elected, while being disguised as some sort of patriotic thingie. My opinion on the matter is that it is a primary reason “why we can’t have nice things”. The US spends well over a trillion dollars per year on the military and military-related items. Heck, a friend of mine used to work for a defense contractor as a design engineer. We have helmets for pilots that cost nearly a million dollars each. As he said, “It’s an amazing helmet, but it’s a million dollars“. And then there were the shells for the Navy’s “stealth destroyer” that cost nearly a million each. It seems like if something doesn’t cost seven figures, why bother? In any case, imagine we could cut those expenditures in half. Not zero, just half. We’d still be spending more than any other single country. But now we’d have over $500 billion per year to spend on other things. What do we want? Free college? Free day care? Expanded parental leave? National health care? Expanding and repairing our infrastructure? Mitigating climate change? What??
In various media I see a lot of talk about the world failing, but I notice a lot of it comes from USAans, and perhaps what they really mean is the failure of the USA (but they can’t separate the two).
Just to chuck another variable into the mix, there is another sustainability challenge that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: peak phosphorus.
Yes this does seem to be true of a lot of paid commentators in the USA.
And the contrast between reports of what some (anonymous) Pentagon officials think about the way Ukraine should run their war with the reality on the ground, regarding density of mines and using cardboard drones (well small drones in general) to great effect, does emhasise that despite the huge changes in tech and the tactics possible because of those changes, too many in the US military are still fighting the last war (though which lst was does seem to vary).
I’m another person with friends in the “design engineer for a defence contractor” line of work. He told me a tale about some specific weapon system that was worked on for years, at a cost of millions. Lots of men in ties gathered one afternoon on the Solway Firth and watched an aircraft approach and deploy the system… which fell off the bottom of the plane, into the sea, and sank. This wasn’t a test – there’d been, as you might imagine, lots of tests – this was the sales pitch.
I like to think of it as looking something like that bit near the beginning of the first Iron Man movie, where RDJ shows off “the Jericho”… except he delivers the punchline, raises his arms, and three miles behind him… nothing happens. And there’s just some nervous coughing and people trying not to look each other in the eye. And then some mumbled apologies and people looking at their watches and some shuffling of feet as people start to drift back to their limos.
The thing was cancelled and everyone working on it redeployed to other projects.
Or we could have built a hospital. One that worked.
@17:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sehmmzbi3UI
“World War One should be taught in our schools for the invasion of Iraq it was.”
“The Berlin-Baghdad Railway begins construction in the years leading up to the First World War. What happens is that Admiral Jackie Fisher converts the British navy from coal-fired to oil-powered ships. The German navy follows suit but they don’t have any oil-producing colonies, no place in the sun. Thus begins the ‘Drang Nach Osten’, the ‘drive to the east.’ The spine of this policy is the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. But there’s huge opposition to this plan among all the European powers Russia, France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands of Royal Dutch Shell. Britain has a special reason, over and above all the other allies, for opposing the railway. In engineering terms we cannot compete because we know that people will simply not accept the Sarajevo-to-Basra replacement bus service. And like the other powers we know that once the track is laid, there’s nothing to stop a Munich businessman alighting at the Baghdad terminus with a Deutschebank chequebook, undercutting our concession and smashing the cartel….
War breaks out, and because it’s a war to defend plucky Belgian neutrality – while Belgium was defending Congolese rubber and ivory – because of this the first British regiment to be deployed in the First World War – the Dorset Regiment – goes to Basra 1914. Where it is joined by 51 other Britsh divisions.”
Since WW2 they’ve been routinely humiliated and beaten, and yet they keep on doing what they’ve always done, stubbornly expecting a different result.
“Maybe if we spend fucking more, it’ll work!”
the first British regiment to be deployed in the First World War – the Dorset Regiment – goes to Basra 1914
… and wound up at Kut. [I read a book about that when I was a kid. It was educational.]
had a thought today about this topic.
Currently, biofuels aren’t considered a serious substitution for fossil fuels, because it would replace farming for food, drive prices for food through the roof, and lead to a lot of people starving.
But, is there a point at which a reduced population could cultivate/produce enough agricultural land to provide both adequate food, and fuel for an industrial/technological society?
really late addition to the thread, but mildly curious, and too exhausted/drained from work to be willing(capable?) to try and find any relevant numbers/stats.
I wonder if the use of Marxist as an insult is actually a ploy by climate denialists to keep people from reading basic Marxist theory. Whoever controls the means of production has greater economic power. Industry and transportation are completely dependent on fossil fuels.
If the price of gas wasn’t heavily subsidized by Governments worldwide there would be overwhelming public demand for green EV transportation, light rail projects and home scale electricity generating technology on every home.
Instead my utility gives people with central AC systems a lower rate for savers-switch programs, but me with a window unit that only gets used for a few weeks a summer (at most) doesn’t get a price break.
Policies that promoted actual energy conservation would be a good policy change. The amount of household electricity consumed by various appliances and electronics that aren’t even being used has increased significantly, but there is no official policy or incentive via the utilities to keep electric use minimal, beyond switching to LED lighting.
The military is fully integrated into the industrial complex built in fossil fuels.
Ground wars conducted by Armies and Air Force are dependent on fossil fuels but the Navy uses nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers. They would still function fine, though I suspect the munitions supply would be a problem without fossil fueled industries.
Tethys @27
The EU has which is why James Dyson (UK vacuum cleaner fame ) was so pro-Brexit: he wanted ever bigger motors in his machines…
@Tethys, 27:
Citation needed. The amount of electricity consumed by appliances that aren’t being used in my house has gone DOWN significantly compared to e.g. 20 years ago. Back then I had a “large” (28″ – hah!) widescreen CRT on standby, a big, powerful amp on standby to marshal the various video inputs and deal with surround sound, and I had the various video inputs – PS2, XBox, DVD player, VCR, all of them in a state of readiness. Today my TV is a flat screen four times the size which on standby draws WAY less than the old CRT used to, the VCR is long gone, the DVD player is presumably in a landfill somewhere as well because hey, streaming, and the PS4 draws 0.5W compared to the 3W the old PS2 drew in standby. This trend is repeated across most household electronics: what used to be already pretty low power draws in the scheme of a household’s usage (PS2 on standby for 24 hours was equivalent to the light in that room being on for just over an hour) have become so low that they’re barely worth thinking about (PS2 on standby for 24 hours is equivalent to a PS4 on standby for almost a WEEK).
What are YOU leaving on standby in YOUR house that’s LESS efficient in that state than the appliances you were using in 1998?
You appear to have not taken on board the observation already made in this very thread that what you’re talking about is how Armies and Air Forces worked in World War 2, and big ones have persisted with that ever since… and had their asses handed to them over and over and over again in places like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and lately Ukraine by what are on paper inferior forces. Ground wars are indeed conducted that way, and the people conducting them that way keep losing. You have to wonder how long they’ll keep at it.
EVERYTHING would be a problem without fossil fuelled industries. Anyone impressed by US aircraft carriers has presumably only seen pictures or video footage of them, media almost always carefully framed to show only the star, and not its enormous retinue of fossil-fuel-powered support ships, without which it is essentially a slow-moving sitting duck. Carriers NEVER move alone.
Nuclear subs are a different beast, and to my mind every nation who can afford some should have some. If they work, they’re the perfect deterrent. They’re no use for starting or winning a war – unless you’ve got dozens or hundreds of them – but if you’ve always got ONE boomer at sea… somewhere, then anyone considering fucking with the homeland has to factor into their calculations that AFTER they’ve done that, at some indeterminate time in the future, THEIR homeland is going to experience sunshine from depths. Should focus minds.
It seems to be difficult to impossible to find a good time series on standby electricity usage… Certainly, the typical energy consumption of individual devices (whether on standby on in actual use) has gone down (although it depends on when you start – if you start in 1950, “standby” didn’t exist), the number of appliances in the typical household has pretty definitely gone up. It’s an example of Jevon’s Paradox – increasing energy efficiency tends to result in increased total use, because you find more things to do with it. How many TVs, computers, consoles, etc do you have in your household as compared to an equivalent household 20 (or 40) years ago? And do you think you’re typical in that? Certainly it seems to be fairly common for people to have a TV in every room in the house (bar the smallest one) these days, and we definitely didn’t have that when I were a lad…
I have found a time series for total enery use by domestic appliances in the UK, from 2008 to 2021 (from Energy consumption in the UK 2022 , download ECUK 2022: End uses data tables (Excel), then see table U3 – although we could ask lots of questions about the methodology), and that shows 2021 as the highest year in the series at 5,727 thousand tonnes of oil equivalent, although there isn’t a particularly clear trend – next highest year is 2013, at 5,717 ktoe, and it bounces around quite a bit in between. Lighting, on the other hand, shows a really big drop for 2007 – 2008 (7,375 to 1,371, which I think must be a methodolgical thing, even accounting for the take up of low-energy lighting), but even there, it’s creeping back up in the last few years as people install ever more complex and extravagant lighting systems, even though the individual lamps are vastly more efficient.
It’s complicated.
@27
I have found that energy saving/green policies and initiatives vary by state/region. In New York State, there are several incentives available through state agencies and my utility. Over the past several years we switched to a heat pump water heater (several hundred $ incentive from the utility) over a basic resistive type. That paid for itself within a year. We dumped our oil furnace for a cold climate air source heat pump system (around $5k incentive from the utility/state). I would never go back, CCASHP is soooo much nicer. Just recently, I bought an EV ($500 from the state).
Regarding the standby draw of modern devices, that has gone down along with the normal operating draw. Low power operation has been a design goal for several years now, you read about it in all of the EE trade magazines. For example, lights and TVs now draw a fraction of what they used to. Some things have not changed much, such as toasters and electric ovens, and those are sizable draws in most homes (heating/cooling is the #1 energy draw in most homes with hot water coming second, at least in the USA).
So yes, there is a tiny draw while your TV (et al) is off, but I’d wager that if you unplugged it whenever you weren’t watching it, you would not notice a change in your electric bill because it would be swamped out by the variable use of everything else.
@Dunc, 30:
Possibly – again, citation needed – but has it gone up by a factor of SIX? (i.e. the factor by which the energy usage on standby has decreased just for my Playstation?) I doubt it.
Forty years ago? Three TVs (none with remote control, none with a “standby” mode), a couple of Z80 processor computers which were off most of the time. No consoles, we were too poor for the first wave of Atari/Intellivision and so on.
Twenty years ago? Two TVs, one desktop PC, three consoles – making up for missing out on that first wave no I was employed.
Now, ONE TV, one desktop PC, one console. And a couple of streaming speakers (although not “smart” ones). So…. less stuff? Maybe not typical.
Where the hell do you live? You know what I see nowadays, in the bit of the UK I’m in? People who twenty years ago had a TV in the corner of their dining room and kitchen and bedroom etc now have just one massive TV right in the middle of the wall in their lounge, and even when they’re watching that, half the time they’re actually looking at the phone/tablet in their lap, the screen that goes everywhere with them and barely shows up at all on their household energy budget.
———————–
I looked at that line for the lighting usage – it’s very strange indeed. I split it into two series, one between 1970 and 2007, and one between 2008 and 2020.
The first one shows a very closed approximation to linear increase year on year (R^2 = 0.988) with a gradient of 119.61.
The second one absolutely does NOT show what you say (” it’s creeping back up in the last few years as people install ever more complex and extravagant lighting systems”). In fact if you fit a straight line to the data you can see two things: first of all, the fit is RUBBISH (R^2 is 0.0139) and second it shows a slight DECREASE year on year (gradient -1.34). Another interpretation of that data is possible if you just look at all the data on one graph on the same axes, which is to say there was a steady increase until 2007, at which point it fell off a cliff and has essentially remained flat since.
Given that we didn’t actually ban incandescent bulbs until much later, and there wasn’t anything I’m aware of at least that happened in ’07 that could have had such a drastic and lasting effect on domestic energy usage, I’m inclined to give that data a serious side-eye until I hear a good explanation of how it came about.
Oh good grief, the fact that energy consumption per capita is constantly increasing doesn’t really need a citation. It’s quite self evident that a significant percentage of that consumption is driven by all the household electronic devices that did not exist prior to 1980. Your gaming stuff doesn’t draw a lot, but the cable converter boxes do, which is irrelevant to my point that there is no reward for having the smallest energy footprint possible and/or not having all those things at all.
(Manufacturing and transporting all that equipment in the first place has to be added to its cost for a true carbon footprint calculation.) Capitalism is antithetical to actual sustainable policies.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1302744/per-capita-energy-consumption-worldwide/
In a working-to-lower-middle-class bit of Edinburgh. I moved house fairly recently, so I’ve seen the insides of quite a lot of other people’s houses (or at least, other people’s two bed flats in this area), and in addition to the massive TV in the living room, there almost always seems to be another one in the “master” bedroom, often another in the other bedroom (unless it’s set up as a home office) and quite frequently one in the kitchen (when there even is a separate kitchen) as well. YMMV.
2019: 1,222
2020: 1,281
2021: 1,298
I’ll grant that we don’t know the reasons, and that “few” is not particularly specific, but I maintain that it is not unreasonable to interpret that “creeping back up in the last few years”. I’d also note that the lowest value is 1,178, in 2011. Like I say, there are clearly some questions to be asked about the methodology here, but it’s the best I was able to find easily.
And about the “what it’s going to take” discussion, maybe it will be something similar:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/deadly-humid-heatwaves-to-spread-rapidly-as-climate-warms-study
can’t plausibly deny nuthin’ when you are dead.
@33 Tethys
Your gaming stuff doesn’t draw a lot, but the cable converter boxes do, which is irrelevant to my point that there is no reward for having the smallest energy footprint possible and/or not having all those things at all.
Have you measured the standby power consumption of your converter box? Even when active they don’t draw that much (less than the typical incandescent light bulbs many of us used). And there IS a reward for a small(er) energy footprint. As I said, my heat pump water heater saves me money every month ($20 to $25), and paid for itself (with incentive) within a year. To be clear, I think you’re right that incentives need to be larger and should be consistent. It certainly isn’t optimal when these things are done state-by-state or region-by-region. I also wish the feds would stop incentivizing via the tax code and just give people checks. Tax credits are useless if you’re not making sufficient money.
@35 outis,
We don’t get extreme heat here (it very rarely breaks 90F) but this summer the humidity has been insane. Everything is sopping wet and stays that way. A typical sunrise is 65 F with > 90% humidity. I go for an easy run and I come home literally soaking wet.
@36 jimf
I personally don’t even own a TV that requires the converter box, and have no idea how to measure its draw. However I am regularly in clients homes that have such things, and that converter box is always hot to the touch even though nobody is home, and the TV is off.
It’s just so wasteful.
I absolutely agree that energy grants would make efficient appliances more accessible to lower income people like me. Heat pumps aren’t very good in my severe winter climate, and my largest energy use comes from heating.
Out of curiousity I just got a plug-in watt meter. [amzn]
I’ll measure some things and I’ll do a post.
A friend of mine audited her standby stuff and saved some $ by putting a few things on wireless switches instead of standby.
I often sleep with a fan (no AC in my house) and have wondered what it draws. We’ll know soon!
Also: I read somewhere that over 25% of China’s renewable power is going to cryptocoin mining. Every sovereign state needs to ban that crap, it’s inflationary. Humans are not wise enough to survive what is coming.
China banned crypto mining in 2021. They all moved to Texas and Kazakhstan.
I have monitored my electric use and developed the habit of unplugging every lamp or small appliance unless it’s in active use. It’s a difference of about 10-15 dollars of electricity per month vs simply leaving things plugged in 24-7. Little savings do add up. However, my electricity is produced by nuclear and wind energy, so it won’t affect carbon emissions.
My home was built in 1904, so even though it’s designed to be self-cooling in summer, it’s poorly insulated and the beautiful, irreplaceable old growth oak original windows are drafty. I’ve priced getting just the interiors windows retrofit with modern seals and it’s around 5,000. Replacing the crappy storm windows is another 14,000. Insulating to a modern standard is probably another 15,000. It would take at least 15 years for me to realize any cost savings, vs having a high heating bill. Offering me a partial tax credit is not going to change the economic reality that I simply can’t afford those costs in the first place.
@Tethys:
My parents own a 1890s building – same problem with the windows. Finally we mitred some painted plywood frames rabetted to hold glass and screwed them into the frames on the outside. Glass is heavy and unpleasant to move but rubber coated kevlar knit gloves ($19) did it. Stainless screws and its done. There were drafts downstairs and now there are none. We used a couple hundred dollars of plywood and paint and a thousand dollars of glass. It paid for itself in a year.
First assemble the frame as an L on the bottom. Then slide the glass in and add the side to form a U, finishing with the top.
Marcus
If I had carpentry tools and skills, that sounds like a good solution for the five fixed windows. 🙂.
Window shrink wrap and insulating curtains are big sellers up here in da North. They help quite a bit.
I do need to be able to easily open the exterior storms and be able to remove them for yearly cleaning.
The storms should be metal framed so any winter condensation happens on that surface, rather than on the interior wooden windows.
This is where a government sponsored weatherization program would be a much better way of reducing fossil fuel use than offering us subsidies for heat pumps on your taxes. I don’t even want to know the price to install the underground loops you would require in a place where it’s well below freezing for 6 months of the year.
Tethys:
Where do you live and how cold do the winters get? Modern cold climate air source heat pumps (CCASHP) might work for you. I had one installed in the studio in 2010 and did the remainder of the house in 2020. I love them. We live in upstate NY, close to the Adirondack Park. We average 100″ of snow and regularly get single digit and sub-zero temps. Our units have been working down to -17 or -18F (that’s about as cold as it gets here). These are not the heat pumps that were popular 20 years ago or earlier. If you get temps around -20 or colder, they can still work for you but you’d want a secondary heat source (like a wood or pellet stove) for those extreme nights.
Marcus: Please tell us how well you like the power monitor. $12 each is pretty cheap and they appear to do all the measurements you need (I note they even do power factor, not something I would expect at that price). It’s one of those things I have been meaning to buy but never got around to it.
I did some quick checking and it appears that a typical HD cable box draws around 20 watts. If it was left on continuously (no stand-by), it would cost a little over $2 per month to run (assuming $0.15/kWH, which is what I pay). I had two cable boxes and discovered that I rarely used one of them so I ditched it. Those rare times that I want to watch cable on that TV, I can do it through my laptop running the cable company’s app. I would have no cable TV at all but we live in an “antenna hole”, basically just over the top of the north side of a large hill and all of the local channels broadcast away from us and are to our south (which is where the city is, duh).
“Well below freezing for 6 months of the year”? What is it on the shoulders?
for those interested in power consumption, check with your local public libraries – one library I previously worked at had a few of these they would lone out to people, just like they did with books.
@jimf
I live in Minnesota, and my home has a natural gas fired boiler and all the original cast iron radiators. It’s wonderful heat compared to forced air systems, but just a new boiler with heat pump assist system runs about 8,000 before any installation costs.
I generally have to instruct various trades on how my house is built, because they are clueless kids who know nothing but modern HVAC.
*I should note that my basement walls (where my boiler and water heater are) are stone and nearly 2’ thick, so running anything through the walls is a difficult task.
@Tethys,
Are you looking at ground source or air source heat pumps? I would guess that you could use air source for a considerable amount of your heat (via ductless mini-splits, but how well that would work depends on the layout of your house). I don’t know what the electricity composition is in your area, but here we have a high percentage of renewable electricity (mostly hydro) so switching even part of the heating to electricity is a much greener alternative. People are doing that here because that way they get A/C for the summer (why get traditional A/C when you can get mini-splits that will also offer at least shoulder heat).
Two foot thick stone walls are not to be messed with. They certainly don’t do that anymore. Of course, they don’t do knob and tube wiring anymore, either…
@jimf
My electricity comes from nuclear and wind power, but any type of heat pump system would still require a conventional backup heating system for when Minnesota goes Arctic. My home is very far from airtight, so the most effective use of my money would be investing 25,000 into insulation, and retrofitting the interior windows with seals and installing new storm windows.
I’ve looked at both Air source and ground loop models of heat pumps that augment a boiler in a hybrid system, but am not overly impressed with either. If I’m going to spend that much I would rather build a full on solar sunspace with geothermal system that gives me complete freedom from utility bills. A noisy machine that only lasts 15 years and blows air around my house? No thanks.
I love my quiet, constant radiant heat, and have only used AC for 8 days this summer. It’s unnecessary unless we get a string of hot days where nighttime temps don’t drop below 78.
I’ve got some that’s in excellent condition right here in my attic. 😊 I am very impressed with the durability of some of the materials used to build this house besides the stone and various species of old growth lumber. Any home improvement project in a 120 year old house is a bit like archeology. I’ve got layers of old systems hiding in the walls, you never know what you might find when you start cutting holes in them. It originally had gas lighting, back when electrical power was just in its infancy.
@Tethys, 33:
Oh, well, if you’re going to be able to simply assert things and blow off the need to provide evidence, that’s great! You’ll never need to lose an argument again, since by definition anything you say is true and you WIN! Yay!
Except – then you go on to provide a citation that GLOBALLY energy consumption per capita is rising. Which, well, yeah, I’d have guessed that, because of the number of people each year moving out of poverty and into relative wealth and buying more energy-using stuff.
Except… here’s something that should be obvious even to the dimmest of dim energy saving bulbs: what I was talking about was not about global consumption, what I was talking about was about consumption over time in relatively advanced economies, and SPECIFICALLY the difference made by the people in those economies moving towards more energy efficient equipment.
If you’re not a proudly ignorant redneck, then it is far from obvious that energy consumption among such people has gone up, because although the NUMBER of gadgets they use may have increased (depending on when you start counting from), the EFFICIENCY of those things has also increased (again, depending on when you start counting from).
I made the observation that 20 years ago I had a Playstation 2, and now I have a PS4. In order to use the same amount of energy now as I was 20 years ago, I’d need to be running SIX PS4s. And that’s not taking into account things like the changing landscape of gaming, where more games are available cross-platform which means there’s less incentive (for me at least) to own ALL the systems. I’m probably using less than a tenth the energy I used to use running games machines, and I can’t be the only one.
Similarly, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that lighting has changed, and changed for the more energy efficient. Compared to 20 years ago I’m probably using less energy to light my entire house (and thanks to my wife I am more often than not lighting my entire house, she can’t use an “off” switch for some reason…) than I used to use to light just my lounge.
Just casually ignoring these improvements and simply asserting that things are getting worse, and then blowing off the idea that you’ll need to prove it, just makes you look ignorant.
Again.
I don’t feel it necessary to satisfy the rude demands of bullying assholes who think everyone else is a “ stupid redneck”, while ignoring the point. I assume rojblake is all butthurt over my pointing out his electronic toys are wasteful.
Your citation with multiple charts showing the increase of energy use per capita was provided. It covers 1965-2022.
Now, I shall return to priming, reputtying, and caulking my windows to reduce air infiltration before winter arrives.
Oh, well, if you’re going to be able to simply assert things and blow off the need to provide evidence, that’s great!
If you don’t believe Tethys, why not do a bit of research on your own?
This is one problems with the [citations needed] meme: the implication is that you are already skeptical, and need to be convinced. But it invites them to do the research and cite references that you can simply ignore or challenge as inaccurate – basically, it’s inviting them to step into your quagmire.
I’ve been meaning to do an entry in the argument clinic series on pseudoskepticism, which is what this is, and how to defeat it, which is what this is, but I have been waiting for a couple years… (yes sometimes I do that).
Anyhow, please remember that this is a comment section on a blog post and not a refereed journal. High standards of citation and research are not presumed in this environment. At the very least you should expect neither from me, though I try to be careful to separate opinion from fact-as-I-understand-it.
Er… I did. That’s rather the issue.
Tethys made a very specific assertion in #27:
The amount of household electricity consumed by various appliances and electronics that aren’t even being used has increased significantly”
And yes, I did say “Citation needed”. And your problem with that?
If that was all I’d said, well, yeah. Except… I immediately showed my own workings, and explicitly invited them to dispute them.
I looked up how much household electricity was consumed by “various appliances and electronics that weren’t even being used” IN MY HOUSE, compared with 20 years ago. I discovered that it had NOT “increased significantly”.
In fact, due to the differing technologies (e.g. streaming vs. DVDs) and design improvements in the intervening time, the energy used by devices on standby had in fact DECREASED, very significantly indeed. Hence the statement that I’d need to be running SIX Playstations to even equal the one I was running back then.
And I’m not expecting “High standards of citation and research” – I asked “What are YOU leaving on standby in YOUR house that’s LESS efficient in that state than the appliances you were using in 1998?”
And the response to that? Even ONE device name or type? ANY defence of the “it’s just gone up, mmmkay?” position? Nah.
… thus neatly and not-so-subtly moving the goalposts from their original statement as well as blowing off any suggestion they might have been proven wrong.
And I’ve been very clear: while it’s perfectly reasonable to state that GLOBAL energy usage is going up (because more people are using tech stuff worldwide – like a BILLION more people in China, for instance), because of improvements in everyday technology it is very, very far from self evident that average household energy usage in mature tech-heavy societies is going up AT ALL. Hence “citation needed”. I don’t consider it self-evident, and I consider it wilful ignorance to pretend it is.