No ancient emperor ever lived so well
December 12, 2019 10:02 AM   Subscribe

 
You could also talk in terms of eMergy - the units proposed by Howard Odom of The Technocracy Movement. They had some channeling of the idea of machines doing more work would mean more free time for Man and therefore the world would be better and what's more of an energy slave than that dish rtobot or the 2 clothes robots people aspire to.
posted by rough ashlar at 11:09 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


I think putting energy consumption into an approachable human-scale unit has a lot of merit. (Not sure I would have gone with the nomenclature of "slave", necessarily...)

Years ago I read an argument that posited that what we see in hindsight as civilizational 'progress' is really just a function of the energy a person controls at their disposal. For the vast majority of human history, a person only had their own muscle power to accomplish tasks with, assisted by simple machines. Then some groups of people found they could domesticate and use animals as prime movers, and extract energy from the movement of wind and water, and finally came the development of heat engines that use fossil fuel. The story of civilization is really a story about energy. All the nice things that we associate with advanced civilizations, including social advances, are afforded by these flows of energy, and very well might regress if the energy tap was shut off. We don't know, because it's never really happened at scale.

What remains to be seen is whether we can find a way to keep this going -- can we find enough non-fossil energy sources to allow the per capita energy budget to continue to increase? Or do we have to, for the first time ever, figure out how to make industrial civilization feel like it's still advancing, with per capita energy expenditure decreasing? That would be a real trick.

Personally, I don't think we need to actually make do with less energy per person; there's enough renewable energy in the biosphere that we can extract to maintain current per capita energy budgets, without tapping into fossil fuels, if we used fossil fuels to bootstrap those renewable sources. Which we plainly aren't doing. But we could, and if we did, we wouldn't have to find out whether industrial civilization can survive a reversal of the last several thousand years' worth of per capita energy usage trends, without the wheels falling off.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:31 AM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


It's not the case that our current energy usage is above the "renewable solar income budget" and needs to be "thinned"--the incoming sunlight has much more energy than we are currently using.

E.g., according to this article, a solar farm in the Sahara desert produces 2000 kWh/year, so we could replace the entire energy consumption of the world with a 300km x 300km solar farm. If you draw such a square on a map it's not very big, it's about the same size as the island of Ireland, 1% of the area of the desert, and 0.016% of the area of the earth.
posted by youzicha at 11:48 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


No. Don't resurrect this concept.

Never use a master/slave metaphor for machines. It implies enslaved people are obedient the way machines are, feeding the fantasies of exploiters.

Enslaved people have agency and exercise it to shape their circumstances, however exploitive. Power imbalance is not powerlessness, while the machine metaphor pretends they are the same thing. It is an insidious intellectual device. Don't use it.

Even major computing projects recognize this
. My comment lacks novelty.
posted by head full of air at 12:14 PM on December 12, 2019 [28 favorites]


Bucky surveyed the cityscape and found himself surrounded by Mr. Show with Bob and David references.
posted by furious-d at 12:26 PM on December 12, 2019


Using the word "slave" really rubs me the wrong way here. It's such a visceral and loaded term, it's like calling 100 kg of CO2 "a Nazi" and trying to push environmentalism by asking how many Nazis your non-environmentally aware choices put into the atmosphere today. It's so visceral, the intended message bounces right off everyone who isn't already a hard-core environmentalist.

Another thing is using those kinds of utterly repulsive terms and units makes it so that the only way to make "good" choices is to do absolutely nothing. To sit in the woods all day, to not do anything. That is simply not practical at all and if even sails on ships count as energy slaves, then it hasn't been possible to not be involved with "energy slavery" for thousands of years.

Energy usage in itself isn't a bad thing, burning oil and releasing carbon is the bad thing. Humanity is nowhere near running out of energy. All the energy all of humanity uses in a year is equal to just a few minutes of all the sunlight that shines on Earth.

I'm not here to just crap all over things. I think there should be a tax to incorporate the cost of the impact of the carbon involved. That would set things on the right path. I also support nuclear power because the uranium is already in the ground, slowly decaying anyway, and it can produce lots of electricity without releasing carbon.

The reason we use oil for energy is because it is the cheapest, biggest thing. We stopped using horses for transportation when cars and their maintenance became cheaper and more pleasant than horses and horse stables. We will stop using oil when there's a cheaper alternative. Additionally it's not like gas will be $2/gal one day and then completely gone the next, suddenly destroying civilization. It'd get gradually more and more expensive once there really is less of it and then there would be an organic transition to something else (the issue is how much global warming will occur before that point). The price of solar and wind have come down dramatically in the last decade and that trend will likely continue. I've heard something like by 2030 the cost of solar will be comparable with the grid.

Another thing I don't like about all this is that even if you're a great environmentalist (or guilted into it) and you don't run your AC, don't turn your lights on, only eat veggies you grew in your garden and then compost the waste, etc.--you do everything perfectly--you're sacrificing your personal comfort to achieve not very much in the end. 15 of the biggest cargo ships in the ocean release more pollution than all of the cars in the world.
posted by Blue Tsunami at 12:32 PM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]


In Pratchett's Making Money, Moist von Lipwig moved Ankh-Morpork's economy to the golem standard, which is pretty much what is being proposed here.
posted by SPrintF at 12:33 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


I've heard something like by 2030 the cost of solar will be comparable with the grid.
At this point solar would have to increase in price to be comparable with other grid sources. Solar PPAs are at $20/MWh in quite a few states now. Variability's the problem, not the cost.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 12:48 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


can we find enough non-fossil energy sources to allow the per capita energy budget to continue to increase?

Yes. But at the moment the ability of the known and mass publically acceptable* alternatives are variable and not as "portable" as liquid fossil fuels.

And some industries need 24X7 power - a high temp furnace lasts longer if kept hot or the papermills with their big spinning drums become functionally out of round and need to be re-machined if they stop turning. If you don't keep water/sewage pumps powered up you need to contact the power plant so they can manage the surge when you spin it back up.

Batteries will need improvements or the attitude of consumers will need to be adjusted to the energy consumption options drop when the collecting device is in a limited collection status.

*The masses are not accepting of fission based nuclear because of the results of demonstrated failures in that space. Fusion is not publically demonstrated as working in such a way as to produce the level of power a commercial venture needs.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:01 PM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


You're sacrificing your personal comfort to achieve not very much in the end. 15 of the biggest cargo ships in the ocean release more pollution than all of the cars in the world.

The largest container ships use something like 15,000 gallons of fuel per day. That's less fuel than a medium sized suburb in the U.S. uses in a day.

Absurd "facts" like this are used to make any personal contribution to conservation seem useless. It's not helpful.
posted by JackFlash at 1:10 PM on December 12, 2019 [7 favorites]


Batteries will need improvements

Currently, the portion of the Australia energy market "not" covered by renewables or baseload coal is instead covered by hydro - dams release water during periods of high demand.

Hydro is interesting, because there are dams and reservoirs already in place that can serve as pumped water storage - Snowy Hydro 2.0 (planned at a cost of A$3.5 to A$4.5 billion dollars) is projected to not only increase generation capability from 5.5 gigawatts to 7.5 gigawatts, but also provide pumped storage of 350,000MWh, or enough to power 3 million homes for a week straight - essentially, it's a power station that's also a huge battery.

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Snowy-2-Project-Update_DECEMBER_2018_web.pdf
posted by xdvesper at 1:12 PM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


Absurd "facts" like this are used to make any personal contribution to conservation seem useless. It's not helpful.

It is in fact the other way around. Calls to personal responsibility are a tactic to grind individuals down and make real, substantial change harder. Just think about the ink spilled on straws alone.

Legislation (laws, regulations, taxes) are how these things need to be managed. Right now people can try to be environmentally friendly at high cost to themselves and make little impact. If we change the systems, economies of scale kick in, and even the worst of us lives a greener life just by going with the flow.

This is not to absolve the individual completely, but any amount of scolding you ever do to another individual is better spent writing your representative or scolding large corporations. If I compost, it is a small impact. If I convince my city to start a composting program, it has a much larger impact (and makes composting easier for me!)
posted by explosion at 1:26 PM on December 12, 2019 [12 favorites]


It is in fact the other way around.

You're saying its okay to tell the public absurd lies? When people repeat absurd exaggerations about climate, it is easily debunked by the enemy and destroys credibility. If you want to make progress, you have to deal in facts.
posted by JackFlash at 3:09 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


Nice Texas Chainsaw Massacre ref about halfway through (panel starting "When fossil fuel energy slaves were newly shackled...").
posted by doctornemo at 3:11 PM on December 12, 2019


Slavery is a helpful (though odious) analogy as it surfaces the burden our economic system casts on the Earth. Just as slaves are a false economy (people as expendable and cost-free), so is oil\gas as it
- is seriously undervalued*
- borrows from the future (and destroys the likelihood of any future)
- inflates human population to unsustainable levels - pre oil\gas was circa 1.5 billion Vaclav Smil.

* On a personal basis a typical car trip I make has a gearing ratio (versus walking it and all the costs entailed including loss of earnings during) of sixty-five times. Today's spot price should be US$3120 (Bucky's forty-eight) to US$4225 (my figure) not $65 as on today's market.

As energy is undervalued so it drives all economic decisions; how we make things, how we heat\light our homes, how (and where) sewage is processed, where we buy and sell things, how far we live from work, even how war is waged. With ample energy 'slaves' none of these choices require much effort.
posted by unearthed at 4:32 PM on December 12, 2019


Unearthed's misconceptions about slavery prove my point.
- Enslaved people are neither expendable nor cost-free; they were the single largest capital asset in the pre-Civil War US.
-The value of human labor was and is well-understood. Exploitation isn't based on a misunderstanding, and saying it is is giving a free pass to exploiters.
-unearthed's points about borrowing from the future or inflating human population seem to have nothing to do with slavery; it's clearly hard to even stick with the metaphor for even four bullet points without drifting.

The metaphor is terrible, it promotes and depends on an odious and inaccurate understanding of slavery. Give it up.
posted by head full of air at 5:25 PM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]


The largest container ships use something like 15,000 gallons of fuel per day. That's less fuel than a medium sized suburb in the U.S. uses in a day.

Contrary to the current focus, carbon is not the only pollutant released by burning fossil fuels, nor is that the only way cargo vessels pollute. Modern cars release (individually) miniscule amounts of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and all the other crap that is released by burning fossil fuels unless much effort and expenditure is made to optimize combustion and clean up the effluent.

We would be a lot better off had we put all that money and effort into something other than cleaning up an entirely unnecessary mess when we could have just not made it in the first place.

Nearly anything a person says can be nitpicked in some way or another. Our susceptibility to being fooled that such nitpicking actually invalidates the entire statement is one of the things that is trapping us in this increasingly dystopian cycle of bullshit. When we play the "gotcha!" game, we all lose.
posted by wierdo at 7:56 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]


This article clarifies that the cargo ship = 50 million cars line relates specifically to sulfur emissions. (And is, according to the author, about 9 million cars low.)
posted by Not A Thing at 8:38 PM on December 12, 2019


That's still a meaningless comparison. Gasoline fueled cars emit only minuscule amounts of sulfur dioxide. Gasoline has very little sulfur in it. You may as well compare ships to Teslas.

The real sources of sulfur dioxide are power plants - coal and oil. Here is a graphic that shows a better picture. Look at figure 1 on the left for the world.

You see that at present, autos contribute almost zero to sulfur dioxide. Shipping is a minor, but significant contributor, about 15%. All the rest of it is coming from power plants and industrial plants.

My complaint is with the original statement: "You're sacrificing your personal comfort to achieve not very much in the end. 15 of the biggest cargo ships in the ocean release more pollution than all of the cars in the world."

That just isn't true and leads to the faulty conclusion "you're not achieving very much" with conservation because ships are doing it all.
posted by JackFlash at 9:18 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


Gasoline only has minimal amounts of sulfur in it because we were being choked by pollution and, at the time, we were politically willing to tell the oil companies to get their shit together. Individual action on most pollution issues does little. It isn't self-restraint that has slowed the growth of household energy use, either, the Energy Star (and related requirements) program did that.

But yes, let's shit on each other over true but incomplete statements. It has been working so well for us lately that we would have to be morons to change our tactics.
posted by wierdo at 9:28 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


I found this comic really useful in how it illustrated the people-power equivalents for the energy we use every day. It made the concept stick for me, along with the idea that we need to put all that concentrated-beyond-normal-capacity people power to use now to help us stop using so ridiculously much of it, while that's still an option.

In spite of how impressed I was by the comic and the clear depiction of what we're doing when we use fossil fuels (and I have been visualizing crowds of fractional people everywhere for months now and it is weird), I did not post it here because I didn't like the slave framing and the fat-shaming toward the end, neither of which were necessary. If we need the Buckminster Fuller intro for completeness or to give credit for inspiration, at least switch to a better phrase immediately afterward.

Thinking about how energy storage and use works in terms of human-scale units is useful. We can do that without slavery, even if it is purely rhetorical.
posted by asperity at 11:30 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]


if using the word slave is contentious to the point of distracting folks from discussion of the core ideas here, then by all means, let's find a better word. Because we do need to discuss these ideas. Buckminster Fuller is one of those names (and voices) that I wish to hell WAY MORE people didn't just recognize, but grasped in terms of what he was on about. He was, of course, on about all matter of stuff, but in terms of our current predicament here on Spaceship Earth (Fuller's turn of phrase by the way), I keep coming back to his 1970 pronouncement that scarcity was officially over. That is, due to various emergent and evolving technologies, there was now enough food, shelter etc for every human being on the planet, and the means for distribution, and the means for communicating in this regard. Up until 1970, that hadn't been the case ... and thus inevitable wars, conflict etc. But since 1970, all scarcity has been manufactured, a failure of political-social-humanitarian will.

That was forty-nine years ago. Time we grasped that future.
posted by philip-random at 8:15 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Thinking about how even riding my bicycle, which is powered entirely by one unit of people-power, relies on having had parts manufactured and transported by more fractional units of concentrated people-power than I can even figure out how to count makes my head hurt.

Thinking about how making exactly the same trip by private automobile relies on some enormous multiple of those energy units both to power that trip and for everything required to make it possible—that makes me [let's elide the many definitely useless and unhealthy responses here and skip to] fight for something better.

Even our sustainable choices about energy consumption rely on being able to use that sweet, sweet concentrated energy as a start. If we're going to radically reduce our use of it, we need to be wiser about what we do with it now.
posted by asperity at 9:23 AM on December 13, 2019


Given that we literally have the technology to produce concentrated energy with nothing more than farm waste, and that process creates enough oil to power itself and still have plenty left over, the only thing keeping us where we are is us.

We don't actually have to rejigger our entire economy. We don't have to stop flying in aircraft. What we have to do is stop burning shit we dig up out of the ground. The bridge is there, but we insist on fording the river instead, drowning little Timmy and half of our oxen in the process.
posted by wierdo at 10:20 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Divesting from fossil fuel extraction would be rejiggering our entire economy. That's why so many people are reluctant to do so even when they accept that it might be a good idea.
posted by asperity at 1:20 PM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


Not really, since the entirety of the downstream part of the business would be essentially unchanged and the midstream sector would merely need to build a few pipelines, which is something they already do.

Drillers might be a bit sad, were they not all working on gas wells these days. The only people it would really hurt are Halliburton and others like them who supply fracking fluid and field services, and even then, building process plants is well within their wheelhouse.

It's entirely stubbornness and the fucked up tax code that makes extraction of product artificially cheap compared to manufacturing the same product that keeps the status quo in the oil industry going, not any rational economic forces.

Even if it was true that it would be a more significant change in the business than fracking was, it's a hell of a lot less rejiggering than moving away from hydrocarbon fuels entirely. It may well be that their stubbornness has doomed them to irrelevance already. Renewables are cheaper than extraction already, and that genie ain't going back in the bottle. Unfortunate that the transition has proven too slow to avoid trillions of dollars in climate change related losses already baked in unless we start sequestering carbon in the next decade or so.
posted by wierdo at 4:53 PM on December 13, 2019


I mean hell, you could in many cases literally build the processing plants in existing oil fields with sufficient pipeline infrastructure and have them reasonably near good sources of feedstocks, since so many oil producing areas are near the kinds of farms that produce good raw materials, further reducing the disruption to the existing order. It really is simple stubbornness standing in the way.
posted by wierdo at 11:05 PM on December 13, 2019


Carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere isn't the only negative externality associated with our use of hydrocarbon chains. There are plenty of reasons to drastically reduce our reliance on them as the feedstock for everything that don't directly affect the climate.
posted by asperity at 8:18 AM on December 14, 2019


But yes, let's shit on each other

Moral purity seems to matter - while trying to find an alternative phrase to the attempt to quantify energy in terms people would have more of a connection with than a horse I came across a site that more than a few Blue members might like: Corporateknights.com with the promising tagline of "The Voice for Clean Capitalism".

The hot-take on a different use of the words being declared problematic

In fact, Nikiforuk makes a solid case that our dependence on oil is the physical, if not quite the moral equivalent of slavery. Our dependence on oil has defined the way we live and made us who we are.

He argues that fossil fuels are also the root of all evil, including the population explosion. ....(go read the link) .... This is an extremely telling and troubling paragraph, in which Nikiforuk dismisses much of western civilization and most of his readership. It would appear that for Nikiforuk, most of the wonders of the 20th century, from longer lives to equal rights for women, are problematic as they are built on the backs of our energy slaves. He never acknowledges the benefits that replacing human labour with energy slaves has brought society, only the excesses.


If one accepts the language that a man used in the 1940's and want to declare the words as truth then you can end up in the place outlined in the link and that place is rather troubling.

Another moral absolute ends up taking Greta Thunberg and her POV getting more press claiming the press failed because they were not moral enough linked here. And as satire - it is crap - if satire was being attempted. And that link was being pimped on pocket so it would show up in Firefox with its click-bait title and one of the ideas was to push real news as I understand things.

So, not only should the 'shit on each other' happen, but unless an action will not offend anyone AND support everyone's POV the action should not happen?

But if the framing of the energy usage developed in the 1940's was done to have people come to an understanding and that framing is creating the not-moving-the-ball-forward talk about the words or the book above what should be a framing people could connect with in a world where manual labor is less and less of a thing? The energy that gets you a youtube video? Your pre-packaged food? Follow the ideas put forth who want Joules to become money?

eMergy as an idea tries to combine the importance of humans, the human brain, and the base of our world - photons - hasn't caught on.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:34 PM on December 14, 2019 [1 favorite]


Carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere isn't the only negative externality associated with our use of hydrocarbon chains. There are plenty of reasons to drastically reduce our reliance on them as the feedstock for everything that don't directly affect the climate.

AGW is an emergency, right? Yes, there are other problems with using many oil-based products. That is not an argument against doing the thing that could most rapidly reduce the carbon pollution of those products, which despite our hopes and dreams (and enormous effort, too!), are not going away anywhere near quickly enough to avert disaster.
posted by wierdo at 6:28 AM on December 15, 2019


Maybe do an FPP about the magic beans approach to fighting climate change? Would like to learn more.
posted by asperity at 8:08 AM on December 15, 2019


There already has been more than one over the years. Were there something new to report, it might be worth doing. Sadly, nothing has really changed since the last one. It worked, and nobody has bothered to do anything with it since because the tax code advantages drilling and turning corn into ethanol.
posted by wierdo at 11:08 AM on December 15, 2019


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