5 ms·

Focusing on energy inputs instead of resource consumption allows for more generalized approach to the idea of "limits". A material shovel produced requires ene

Focusing on energy inputs instead of resource consumption allows for more generalized approach to the idea of "limits". A material shovel produced requires energy in form of human operator. A Simpsons SD requires energy to play from the electric grid. All energy is traced back to resource consumption it's just a matter of steps involved. The laws of thermodynamics are inescapable. Energy is the value added that ultimately creates what we refer to as the economy. In summary: The "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption. That's that hard wall of the limits on growth.

lubesGordi 5y ago
Exactly. Whenever I see an article like this I think about what the world might be like with ubiquitous nuclear power. How long does the oil in the ground suddenly last you if you're not using it in cars, burning it, etc? How much easier is recycling anything when the power to do so is cheap? And so on and so forth.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Nuclear seems like the only way forward.
nostrademons 5y ago
But even within those examples, the energy use per dollar of value generated varies by large orders of magnitude. A Simpsons SD card uses a tiny fraction of a watt hour for a half hour of entertainment (valued, in theaters and DVD rentals, at maybe $3-5). Watch the same episode on an old-style CRT TV and you're looking at 50 or so watt-hours. A Google Search uses about 0.3 watt hours to get you the answer you want. The economic value of it varies based on topic, but if you divide estimated total yearly searches (a couple trillion) by Google's revenue ($257B), you get about $0.12. (Note that at average annual U.S. electricity prices, this electricity costs about 1/300th of a cent, showing the profit involved in turning energy into information retrieval.) A car commuting to work for an hour consumes about 4 kWh (about 200x a laptop watching the Simpsons, and 12,000x a Google Search), but what's the economic value added? Arguably it's economic value destroyed, compared to if we could just live closer to work, because of the lost time and productivity. That's why it doesn't really make sense to say that 'the "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption'. There are many things that generate large amounts of dollars and use very little energy, or even save energy. There are also things that destroy dollars and use lots of energy. By equating the two, you gloss over any distinction or ability to make things more efficient.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  You can't ignore energy inputs to required processing components. Those servers at Google required energy to build and humans to operate. Maybe that person in the car was driving to Google to fix a server that processes 1 million queries a day. I'd say they value added to get him there was huge. I'll just ask this: Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy? If it's not, then we're just haggling over efficiency.
  - bko 5y ago
    > Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy? Of course. Find a cheaper way to do something. For example, create a motor that is more efficient. It might cost you energy up front, but presumably the reduction in cost would more than make up for the cost (otherwise why would someone do it?)
    - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      Agreed. Unfortunately this leads to the Jevons Paradox [1] where we end right back to increased consumption again. We can't escape. Economy is energy consumption. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
      - bko 5y ago
        I don't know. US energy consumption has stayed relatively flat over the last twenty years (down if you exclude renewables) despite economic and population growth https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
        TrispusAttucks 5y ago
        You can't look at the US alone. The economy is gobal. https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-total-energy-and-real-gdp.png https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-...
infogulch 5y ago
This assumes that there's a limit to efficiency. We definitely haven't hit that wall yet.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Theoretical efficiency limits are well known. The maximum is, of course, 100%. Much as with Amdahl's Law, this imposes a diminishing returns to efficiency over time, and long-term efficiency curves over multiple cycles of technological development exist and are well known within the field. I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization for multiple instances of these . Typically what's seen within any given technology is an asymptotic approach toward limits, punctuated by newly-introduced technologies which boost the potential efficiency to a higher level. Over time, those also asymptotically approach theoretical maxima. For energy and motive systems, Carnot, Rankine, photovoltaic, and wind energy conversions all have well-known limits. In cases where efficiencies are high (hydroelectric and pumped hydro), the problem of limited potential sources and/or sites (for generation or storage) emerge. Thermodynamics means the house always wins.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards zero as modeling software enables designers to experiment with millions of potential designs with the same energy that it used to take to develop and test one.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Computation is one place where increased efficiencies seem to have only very limited impacts on other process efficiency. There's also been a tremendous tendency for gains to be eroded through additional ancillary compute tasks, as well as malevolent applications. Where do you see computation having delivered actual real-world increased efficiencies on the same order of magnitude as the increase in compute efficiencies? From 1960 to present we've seen 60 years of doubling every 3 years, roughly 20 doublings or a millionfold performance increase. What compute-driven applications have seen 1-million-times efficiency gains? What overall economic impact (GDP increases) have these created?
polar0bear 5y ago
bko 5y ago
I disagree. I think "economy" is more closely associated with energy reduction. If you can produce something with fewer resources (e.g. energy), you're adding value. Sure you get wealthier in the process and you may to choose to consume more goods even at lower energy used per good, but the net effect is not necessarily more energy consumption Think of the advancements in goods over the years. Most reduced the amount of energy used. From more efficient materials to cell phones replacing TV, camcorder, audio recorder, book, telephone, etc. It's called de-materialization and its going on even today https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy-and-climate-change https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-i...
- swid 5y ago
  There simply has to be limits to this though, because if there were not, the materials would eventually become (relatively) free. Think of it this way, if the value of output grows too many magnitudes over the inputs, then essentially the input becomes free, which violates intuition, because those resources are scarce. If the resources are free to me, I will buy them all and raise the price. Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce, or else you realize there is actually a limit to how much value the economy can derive from those resources, but fail to reach the logical conclusion that there is a limit to economic growth.
  - bko 5y ago
    > Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce The material in question is ingenuity and creativity. That is the real driver of economic growth, not some material I don't think the input has to be free or even go down in price. Just create more value. For instance, consider cars. They haven't gotten cheaper despite creating a lot more value. They're just better. More efficient, safer, more reliable, faster, etc. Creating value doesn't necessarily mean pushing prices down.
    - TrispusAttucks 5y ago

lubesGordi 5y ago

Exactly. Whenever I see an article like this I think about what the world might be like with ubiquitous nuclear power. How long does the oil in the ground suddenly last you if you're not using it in cars, burning it, etc? How much easier is recycling anything when the power to do so is cheap? And so on and so forth.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Nuclear seems like the only way forward.

nostrademons 5y ago

But even within those examples, the energy use per dollar of value generated varies by large orders of magnitude. A Simpsons SD card uses a tiny fraction of a watt hour for a half hour of entertainment (valued, in theaters and DVD rentals, at maybe $3-5). Watch the same episode on an old-style CRT TV and you're looking at 50 or so watt-hours. A Google Search uses about 0.3 watt hours to get you the answer you want. The economic value of it varies based on topic, but if you divide estimated total yearly searches (a couple trillion) by Google's revenue ($257B), you get about $0.12. (Note that at average annual U.S. electricity prices, this electricity costs about 1/300th of a cent, showing the profit involved in turning energy into information retrieval.) A car commuting to work for an hour consumes about 4 kWh (about 200x a laptop watching the Simpsons, and 12,000x a Google Search), but what's the economic value added? Arguably it's economic value destroyed, compared to if we could just live closer to work, because of the lost time and productivity. That's why it doesn't really make sense to say that 'the "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption'. There are many things that generate large amounts of dollars and use very little energy, or even save energy. There are also things that destroy dollars and use lots of energy. By equating the two, you gloss over any distinction or ability to make things more efficient.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
You can't ignore energy inputs to required processing components. Those servers at Google required energy to build and humans to operate. Maybe that person in the car was driving to Google to fix a server that processes 1 million queries a day. I'd say they value added to get him there was huge. I'll just ask this: Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy? If it's not, then we're just haggling over efficiency.
- bko 5y ago
  > Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy? Of course. Find a cheaper way to do something. For example, create a motor that is more efficient. It might cost you energy up front, but presumably the reduction in cost would more than make up for the cost (otherwise why would someone do it?)
  - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
    Agreed. Unfortunately this leads to the Jevons Paradox [1] where we end right back to increased consumption again. We can't escape. Economy is energy consumption. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - bko 5y ago
      I don't know. US energy consumption has stayed relatively flat over the last twenty years (down if you exclude renewables) despite economic and population growth https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
      - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
        You can't look at the US alone. The economy is gobal. https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-total-energy-and-real-gdp.png https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-...

infogulch 5y ago

This assumes that there's a limit to efficiency. We definitely haven't hit that wall yet.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Theoretical efficiency limits are well known. The maximum is, of course, 100%. Much as with Amdahl's Law, this imposes a diminishing returns to efficiency over time, and long-term efficiency curves over multiple cycles of technological development exist and are well known within the field. I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization for multiple instances of these . Typically what's seen within any given technology is an asymptotic approach toward limits, punctuated by newly-introduced technologies which boost the potential efficiency to a higher level. Over time, those also asymptotically approach theoretical maxima. For energy and motive systems, Carnot, Rankine, photovoltaic, and wind energy conversions all have well-known limits. In cases where efficiencies are high (hydroelectric and pumped hydro), the problem of limited potential sources and/or sites (for generation or storage) emerge. Thermodynamics means the house always wins.
- infogulch 5y ago
  There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards zero as modeling software enables designers to experiment with millions of potential designs with the same energy that it used to take to develop and test one.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Computation is one place where increased efficiencies seem to have only very limited impacts on other process efficiency. There's also been a tremendous tendency for gains to be eroded through additional ancillary compute tasks, as well as malevolent applications. Where do you see computation having delivered actual real-world increased efficiencies on the same order of magnitude as the increase in compute efficiencies? From 1960 to present we've seen 60 years of doubling every 3 years, roughly 20 doublings or a millionfold performance increase. What compute-driven applications have seen 1-million-times efficiency gains? What overall economic impact (GDP increases) have these created?

polar0bear 5y ago

bko 5y ago

I disagree. I think "economy" is more closely associated with energy reduction. If you can produce something with fewer resources (e.g. energy), you're adding value. Sure you get wealthier in the process and you may to choose to consume more goods even at lower energy used per good, but the net effect is not necessarily more energy consumption Think of the advancements in goods over the years. Most reduced the amount of energy used. From more efficient materials to cell phones replacing TV, camcorder, audio recorder, book, telephone, etc. It's called de-materialization and its going on even today https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-it-means-for-the-economy-and-climate-change https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-i...

swid 5y ago
There simply has to be limits to this though, because if there were not, the materials would eventually become (relatively) free. Think of it this way, if the value of output grows too many magnitudes over the inputs, then essentially the input becomes free, which violates intuition, because those resources are scarce. If the resources are free to me, I will buy them all and raise the price. Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce, or else you realize there is actually a limit to how much value the economy can derive from those resources, but fail to reach the logical conclusion that there is a limit to economic growth.
- bko 5y ago
  > Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce The material in question is ingenuity and creativity. That is the real driver of economic growth, not some material I don't think the input has to be free or even go down in price. Just create more value. For instance, consider cars. They haven't gotten cheaper despite creating a lot more value. They're just better. More efficient, safer, more reliable, faster, etc. Creating value doesn't necessarily mean pushing prices down.
  - TrispusAttucks 5y ago