3 ms·

> You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statem

by stale2002 3y ago

> You can't blame a physicist for computing that 2.3% yoy energy production growth boils off Earth's oceans in 400 Yes you can. Because baked into this statement is the false premise that energy use (on earth or otherwise. Maybe the concept of energy itself is wrong) would be the limiting factor on economic growth. Just like how if someone did a simple mathematical calculation on horses would be wrong to predict transportation doomsday, so too wrong the physicist may be for predicting energy doomsday.

baq 3y ago
There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.
- api 3y ago
  > I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country Past performance usually doesn't predict future results. I'm not aware of any good or service that is not subject to diminishing returns from increased consumption. Keep increasing energy consumption and you start hitting other limiting factors like the availability of other resources, labor, population growth, food, etc. Energy can help with some of those but not all of them and not in a linear relationship. Eventually you hit the ultimate limiter: diminishing marginal utility of wealth itself. At some point you start to max out as a human. There are countries that consume more energy than the USA that are actually poorer and their higher consumption is a function of either climate (lots of HVAC) or the use of old inefficient technology (in which case poverty actually increases consumption). It really looks like the ultimate limits to growth (on Earth) are demand side limits to growth due to leveling off of population. Humans have fewer kids when they have more wealth and/or see more humans around.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
You call it a false premise, but you make no effort to show how it's false(besides building a strawman). How?
- stale2002 3y ago
  > but you make no effort to show how it's false I actually did show it, but I am happy to elaborate and explain further. A common thing that malthusians do is just take one single metric, then extrapolate it out, and then yell about a doomsday based on that one metric. One such example is horses. Many decades ago, there were people panicking about an extrapolated line related to horses and transportation. Cities were supposedly going to fall apart, because of all the problems that an ever increasing amount of horse usage would cause. We know this to be false, of course, because as our transportation usage increased, we used technology to switch to a new form of transportation (cars), which allowed us to continue to increase our transportation usage, without any of the problems that were predicted via a nieve extrapolated line. The obvious parallel and point to such an analogy, would be that an extrapolated line based on one single metric, is the wrong thing to worry about because it doesn't take into account that we can switch to a different thing. So, just like we switched from horses to cars to fulfill increasing amounts of transportation, we also might be able to switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth. This is relevant to the topic because I was responding to someone who was also extrapolating out lines a whole 400 years into the future. Ergo, that's why I criticized and disagreed with the concept of line extrapolation far into the future, which is something that malthusians like to do a lot.
  - baq 3y ago
    400 years in the future is not that much time in human scale. It's more than a generation, but with some luck your grandchildren's grandchildren will live then, it only takes a few anti-ageing advances, after all. > switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth. There's techno-optimism, there's sci-fi and there's... I sincerely hope our need for economic growth can be completely satisfied before we need to move on from energy to something else.

baq 3y ago

There's literally nothing about economics in what I wrote/quoted. That said, if you can figure out how to decouple planetary economic growth - as in, people's lives on the planet getting better, which is the point of having an economy at all, I guess - from planetary energy production growth, I'm listening. I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country; I know that past performance does not predict future results, but we can comfortably say that people need to consume energy in advanced economies to move themselves and goods around, to heat homes and to run their factories and there are certain theoretical thermodynamic efficiency limits to all those things. In some cases, we already have technology operating close to those limits.

api 3y ago
> I've yet to see an economy-rich energy-poor country Past performance usually doesn't predict future results. I'm not aware of any good or service that is not subject to diminishing returns from increased consumption. Keep increasing energy consumption and you start hitting other limiting factors like the availability of other resources, labor, population growth, food, etc. Energy can help with some of those but not all of them and not in a linear relationship. Eventually you hit the ultimate limiter: diminishing marginal utility of wealth itself. At some point you start to max out as a human. There are countries that consume more energy than the USA that are actually poorer and their higher consumption is a function of either climate (lots of HVAC) or the use of old inefficient technology (in which case poverty actually increases consumption). It really looks like the ultimate limits to growth (on Earth) are demand side limits to growth due to leveling off of population. Humans have fewer kids when they have more wealth and/or see more humans around.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

You call it a false premise, but you make no effort to show how it's false(besides building a strawman). How?

stale2002 3y ago
> but you make no effort to show how it's false I actually did show it, but I am happy to elaborate and explain further. A common thing that malthusians do is just take one single metric, then extrapolate it out, and then yell about a doomsday based on that one metric. One such example is horses. Many decades ago, there were people panicking about an extrapolated line related to horses and transportation. Cities were supposedly going to fall apart, because of all the problems that an ever increasing amount of horse usage would cause. We know this to be false, of course, because as our transportation usage increased, we used technology to switch to a new form of transportation (cars), which allowed us to continue to increase our transportation usage, without any of the problems that were predicted via a nieve extrapolated line. The obvious parallel and point to such an analogy, would be that an extrapolated line based on one single metric, is the wrong thing to worry about because it doesn't take into account that we can switch to a different thing. So, just like we switched from horses to cars to fulfill increasing amounts of transportation, we also might be able to switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth. This is relevant to the topic because I was responding to someone who was also extrapolating out lines a whole 400 years into the future. Ergo, that's why I criticized and disagreed with the concept of line extrapolation far into the future, which is something that malthusians like to do a lot.
- baq 3y ago
  400 years in the future is not that much time in human scale. It's more than a generation, but with some luck your grandchildren's grandchildren will live then, it only takes a few anti-ageing advances, after all. > switch from earth based energy usage, to non earth based energy usage, or to even switch away from the concept of "energy" itself to fulfill increased economic growth. There's techno-optimism, there's sci-fi and there's... I sincerely hope our need for economic growth can be completely satisfied before we need to move on from energy to something else.