Energy densities of various substances and/or reactions is pretty fascinating concept.
Some of the most interesting energy analysis I've come across (Vaclav Smil and David MacKay especially) describe energy in terms of area: what are the comparable land areas which would have to be dedicated to specific sources or forms of energy or fuels, and how do those compare? One of Smil's descriptions of petroleum wells is "punctiform", which I love. A hole in the ground, only about 20 cm in diameter, can provide years to millennia of human energy output, per day.
1 litre of oil is equivalent to about 3 days of human energy output (at 3,000 kilocalories/day).
1 gallon of oil is eqivalent to about 11 days of human energy.
One of the oldest oil wells in production (the First Oil Well of Bahrain) produced 80,000 barrels of oil per day initially. That's over 1,000 years of human energy equivalent.
By comparison, the yeild of current biomass production is far, far less. The difference, of course, is that oil is biomass, accumulated, converted, and concentrated over hundreds of millions of years. We're consuming it at > 5 million times its rate of formation. (See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003).)
In terms of radioactivity, the net metabolic rate of the Sun's core is lower than that of a human, measured in energy/mass. Solar metabolism is closer to that of reptiles, about 1/5 of mamallian metabolic rates.
Chemical energy is less productive than the most effective nuclear transitions, but its shear abundance and ease of utilisation tends to weigh in its favour.
> to produce one litre of petrol it takes 1.29 kg of oil, of which 85% (1.1 kg) is carbon. And as only 1/10,750 of the carbon remains from the plants that were buried millions of years ago, our one litre of petrol is the result of 1.1 x 10,750 = 11,825 kg of carbon from ancient plants. Finally, as plants are approximately half carbon, that means that 23.65 tonnes of plants were required to make just one litre of the petrol available at your local station
What's interesting is that oil pretty much prevented the entire world from being deforested in our crazy search for fuel. It also saved the (remaining) whales when it replaced whale oil for lamps.
(I think I learned this reading "the rational optimist")
Michael Shellenberger makes a similar case [1] for many uses of plastic, too— for example, items like hair combs and eyeglass frames used to be made out of tortoise shell, and like whales, the tortoises were under major threat until plastic replaced all of that and they went back to being all but ignored by humanity.
So yes, there is a ton of unacceptable plastic waste out there, but the net effect (he argues, anyway) is still overwhelmingly positive for the environment, particularly if we can focus eco efforts on ensuring that plastic ends up safely land-filled rather than being overly consumed with reducing the upfront production of it.
And one of the nice things about this approach is that it's not an uphill battle the way guilting people about their lifestyle choices is— you can work with NGOs to lift people around the world out of poverty, and a natural part of them becoming richer will be having the mental bandwidth to look around and demand things like a safe, well-organized waste processing pipeline.
For anyone interested in more on tortoiseshell in particular, the Wikipedia article is a good starting point:
> Tortoiseshell was widely used from ancient times in the North and in Asia, until the trade was banned in 2014. It was used, normally in thin slices or pieces, in the manufacture of a wide variety of items such as combs, small boxes and frames, inlays in furniture (known as Boulle Work carried out by André-Charles Boulle), and other items: frames for spectacles, guitar picks and knitting needles. Despite being expensive, tortoiseshell was attractive to manufacturers and consumers because of its beautiful mottled appearance, its durability, and its organic warmth against the skin.
Forests, and even whales, are potentially renewable resources.
(The Inuit had hunted whales, sustainable, for many thousands of years, with oil amongst the benefits obtained.)
Fossil mineral resources are literally unsustainable by definition. Any activity described as mining, unless there is some geological process that creates new deposits faster than they are exploited, is entirely uneconomic. Extant value is being destroyed.
Fossil fuels might have served as a bridge resource to a sustainable track. To date, this has not been seriously persued or attained.
Matt Ridley is an exceptionally uninspired apologist for nonsustainable extractive practices, and is not a relaible or credible guide.
What do you mean by “is entirely uneconomic”? Of course it is economic.
What do you mean by “literally unsustainable by definition”? Sustainable does not mean supply is infinite. You can sustainably mine a finite and non-replenishable resource by utilizing the mineral or element in a fully re-usable manner.
In the absolutist sense nothing is infinitely sustainable, so start with the acceptance that the term defines a spectrum.
“Fossil fuels might have served as a bridge” - fossil fuels are the underpinning of modern civilization and indisputably have served humanity exceptionally well.
There is absolutely zero question that humanity will find a sustainable energy track, because we’ve proven the technology works and eventually it will work even better than fossil fuels.
So I’d say that fossil fuels have provided an absolutely essential and extremely effective bridge to non-fossil energy.
Prices cover costs of production. Which are ultimately costs of creation.
If extraction is drawing down a resource, then much as making a withdrawal from a bank, your cost isn't just the effort you put into the withdrawal --- say, Uber fare across town and the price of the slip on which you write the request, but the actual amount by which the account has been debited.
If 1 year's withdrawals from the Bank of Fossil Fuels represent 5 million years of accumulation, then the pricing should reflect this.
I've answered this in part in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31291706), which gets into the fact that the economic theory governing natural resources largely formed when a large contingent of otherwise intelligent people thought the Earth was no more than about 8,000 years old, and even geologist's considered opinions ranged from 30--300 million years. It wasn't until early work with radiometric dating showed that the age was on the order of one billion years, in the first decade of the 20th century, that the truth started becoming apparent. The central organising principle of geology, plate tectonics, was not officially accepted until the late 1960s.
Economic theory, public policy, and models of financing had developed under utterly fallacious understandings of reality. And they still do not, and strongly reject, reflecting the truth.
I can agree with everything that you’re saying! I think there’s one piece missing which changes the nature of the analysis.
If fossil fuel deposits were like water aquifers in the sense that they need to be protected, maintained, and replenished, that is one thing.
However I would argue this is not remotely true. We can draw down the fossil fuel reserves and never have to pay them back, if all along they way they successfully usher human civilization and technological advancement into a blooming post-petro society.
I don’t think the Earth as a habitat is worse off for not having extractable oil reserves left over by 2200 as long as human society doesn’t depend on them to function.
In essence these fuels are an essential stepping stone to technologically advanced society.
Without easily extractable high energy density liquids I don’t see how human civilization would have gotten to this point, and there’s a non-sci-fi future where we successfully move past them as it becomes economically exigent.
You "if"s and "so long as"s are doing one hell of a lot of heavy lifting here.
The alternative hypothesis is that fossil fuels have served as a form of whalefall benefitting humans, promoting a brief fluouresence of intense technological culture which will last so long as the resource is available, before fading back to the background noise level.
There's a shortage of perfect cheap, useful, abundant energy stores in the world. It would be a pity to degrade this one completely without a viable transition plan.
We are still discovering exploitable petroleum faster than we are burning it. Peak oil is going to be peak demand for oil as solar wind and batteries continue their exponential price performance improvement curve.
Unsustainability is a terrible argument against oil. The problem is the pollution, not the fact that it's finite.
"Proven" reserves are largely an accounting fiction in many foreign countries. In Saudi Arabia they change their reserve numbers to suit political purposes in ways that bear little relation to geology or extraction technology.
So have we reached peak oil yet? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure.
"Proven reserves" depend on both the actual physical resource and economically viable extraction. The latter depends on both price and technology.
Saudi Arabia's well-known manipulations are ... their own special twist, I'll admit.
There are several terms used to describe natural resources, and they're confusing to laypersons. (They're also confusing to policymakers, engineers, economists, and oil workers.)
The geological quantity itself is a resource.
The economic good is a reserve.
Resources, in order of decreasing confidence of quantity, are measured, indicated, or inferred.
Reserves, in order of decreasing confidence of quantity, are proven or proveable.
And whilst oil reserves have (generally) been increased over the past 4-6 decades, virtually all of that comes from upward adjustments of the proved reserves of existing, known, oil fields. Not from major new discoveries, which peaked in the 1950s and 1960s globally. In the 1930s for the US.
Not a world-wide hunt to support the needs of maybe 50 million people in the developed world as in 1850.
Whaling continued into the 20th Century in a big way and grew more intense in the hunting methods as time progressed, e.g. harpoon guns instead of rowing around in small boats.
In particular, Daly notes that when extraction rates exceed replacement, adding additional capital does not increase harvest. This situation has been realised in multiple fishing and marine-hunting activities, with catastrophic population collapse of fish, whale, seal, otter, and dophin populations in multiple instances.
Which is to say that your comment is in agreement with the one it responded to, though it highlights where nonsustainable practices emerge, and their consequences: nonsustainability.
I'm not finding any readily-available estimates of pre-columbian arctic native populations, though the present Inuit population is about 150,000. I'd suspect that the earlier populations would be lower.
> Fossil fuels might have served as a bridge resource to a sustainable track. To date, this has not been seriously persued or attained.
Isn’t what we are we doing/trying to do now exactly that?
I haven’t seen anybody making the suggestion to go cold turkey and go to 100% renewables overnight.
Most solar cells and wind farms are built using (mostly) fossil fuels.
Also, many countries close down coal power plants but keep gas plants running, knowing that they need fossil fuel to get to 100% renewables, but trying to minimize their impact (because of the difference in pollution effects, it’s better to end up with X MWh equivalent of coal than with X MWh equivalent of gas in the ground)
(and yes, there’s all kinds of exceptions, such as Germany closing down nuclear plants, but keeping brown coal mines open)
> Fossil fuels might have served as a bridge resource to a sustainable track. To date, this has not been seriously persued or attained.
That's why I'm pretty stoked about Germany's push to become renewable and sustainable in earnest (at least for energy), even though it's going to be brutally expensive, extremely difficult and the outcome is not at all certain (not quite the kind of move you'd expect from Germany, actually). But at last someone's giving it a shot, and if that gamble works out, wow. That might completely change our collective trajectory in a crazy good way. And Germany might just be able to pull this off, with its deep pockets and highly innovative engineering base. I have high hopes that a few decades from now, there will be renewables, storage, grid tech that'll make the current stuff look crude and primitive and crazy inefficient, like what has been achieved with CPUs/SoCs since the 80s.
> Forests, and even whales, are potentially renewable resources.
The whole focus on sustainable and renewable is a really broken way of thinking... Nothing needs to be either sustainable or renewable! (And nothing actually is, in a long/broad enough context. Live will always live off negative-entropy and that is a limited resource in the universe as a whole. You can say that itself is consumption on exhaustion of non-renewable resource at its core, our "ecological loops" are just small-time/space scale repetitions but it's all winding down in the end...)
Everything has a finite life, even our planet - we just need to accelerate our evolution so that when whatever has evolved from us needs to leave (or before that), it's advanced enough to so so and go infect/colonize the rest of the universe.
There's nothing wrong with using non-renewable resources, as long as they're not producing toxic pollutants or disturbing the balance of planetary systems like the climate. When one unsustainable resource is exhausted we'll go to the new one: soil uranium, thorium, sea-water uranium, deuterium for fusion etc.
So sure, oil is horrible, but not because it's non renewable or unsustainable. Nothing is sustainable, it's a never ending race 'till the thermal death of everything and that's the fun of it.
We need a solid experts driven approach to climate problems if we want to have any change... the current crop of eco-heads are most of them severely mentally impaired, infected with really bad ideas that they spread around to others, and focused on all the wrong priorities...
>the current crop of eco-heads are most of them severely mentally impaired, infected with really bad ideas that they spread around to others, and focused on all the wrong priorities...
In their defense, they're a hell of a lot better than the Greenpeace and sierra club types that preceded them.
There is the question of what the existence of a resource in the absence of some specific influence might be. And we can put reasonable bounds on that far better than "it's beyond comprehension".
We're on a track which hugely constrains potential viability of human civilisation, and possibly the species itself, far beyond biological, ecological, geophysical, or astronomical constraints. Ultimately, I'd suggest a goal of at least reasonably matching such potential.
In the case of both renewable and nonrenewable resources, we can look at what ultimate limits on their utilisation and/or existence might be.
Looking at timelines of the future / far future, we see a number of limiting events:
- Heat death of the universe. 10^10^120 years
- Last brown dwarfs are exhausted. 120 trillion years
- Death of the Sun / immolation of the Earth. 7.6 billion years.
- Boiling / evaporation of all surface water on Earth through increased solar irradiance: 3.5 -- 4.5 billion years.
- Freezing of Earth's core, and collapse of Earth's magnetic field, increasing solar and cosmic radiation on Earth's surface: 3--4 billion years.
- Earth's surface temperature reach around 420 K (147 °C; 296 °F), even at the poles. 2.8 billion years.
- Prokaryotic life goes extinct (lower estimate): 1.6 billion years.
- Eukaryotic life goes extinct due to carbon dioxide extinction: 1.3 billion years.
- Plant life dies out as photosynthesis is impossible, due to CO2 starvation, high estimate. 1.2 billion years.
- C4 photosynthesis impossible due to falling CO2 levels: 800--900 million years.
- Falling CO2 levels greatly disrupt most plant and animal life. Plate tectonics slow and/or stop in this period as well with tremendous impacts on mineral cycling and weathering: 500--800 million years.
- Asteroid impacts and gamma ray bursts capable of triggering mass extinctions are likely in the 100--500 million year range.
- Fossil fuel reserves may be replenished in the 50--400 million year range.
- Coral reefs and general Anthropocene extinction recover may occur in the 2--10 million year range.
- h. sapiens may further speciate by 2 million years.
- 10% of anthropgenic CO2 will still remain in the atmosphere at > 100,000 years.
- The current interglacial period will end in about 50,000 years, with a new ice age occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.
- Planned lifespan of the several "long term" projects, including the Long Now Foundation's several ongoing projects, including a 10,000-year clock, the Rosetta Project, the Long Bet Project, of the HD-Rosetta analog disc, an ion beam-etched writing medium on nickel plate, and Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault: 10,000 years.
- Maximum planned life for radioactive waste storage: 10,000 years.
At the same time, we're looking at a set of largely endogenous risks --- risks humanity has created for itself, not externally imposed --- which face humans on the timescale of decades to centuries: exhaustion of known key mineral resources, overloading of critical environmental sinks (CO2 and other greenhouse gasses being only the most prominent), mass extinctions, sea-level rise, climate change, population growth, risks of nuclear war (tremendously heightened in recent months), an AI / technological singularity (foretold by Kurzweil, Vinge, Lem, von Neumann, Turing, and arguably as long ago as the 18th century with Condorcet), co-evolving global pandemics (see especially Kyle Harper and William McNeill), among them.
A technological human civilisation should have a lifespan and planning horizon of at least 10--50k years, with plausible upper bounds of 2 million (evolutionary drift) to ~500 million (viable continuation of life on Earth).
Looking to our past, life has existed on Earth for > 4 billion years, though complex multicellular life is < 500 million years old. Mammallian dominance began 67 mya, and humanity itself diverged from common ancestors of the other great apes ~2 mya, achieved modern anatomical form ~200 kya, and signs of current levels of cognitive ability about 50 kya, coinciding with the last peak glaciation. Agriculture and written history are roughly 10k - 6k years old. There are imposed astronomical limits of another 0.5 -- 1 billion years. We're not at the dawn or midpoint of life on Earth, we're somewhat distressingly near the likely end. With a future reach of 1 billion years, putting the total duration of viable life on Earth on a 24 hour clock, it's about 7:40 pm. If only 500 million years remain, closer to 9:45 pm. With lower bounds, it's even later. And yet those remaining time periods extend greatly beyond present planning or consequence horizons.
Development of modernity, which might be placed anywhere from the Renaissance to the modern steam age (roughly 1400 -- 1800) occurred in a context in which many people believed the entire universe to be ~6,000 years old, and even geological estimates suggested age in the millions of years, ranging from tens to hundreds.
The first inkling of the true age of the Earth didn't occur until the first decade of the 20th century, when analysis of radioactive decay pointed at a timeline of a billion years or more. The currently accepted figure was not obtained until the mid-1950s, and the theory of plate tectonics was formally accepted only in the late 1960s. That is: the operative models under which the present global technological and economic system developed were profoundly wrong.
If existing wells could be economically re-activated, I've little doubt they would be.
Abiogenic petroleum formation has effectively no empirical support. Biotic origin has massive supporting evidence, including plate tectonics and fossil remains.
...but, being so cheap, it also enabled crazier ways of using fuel, like cars and airplanes, which wouldn't have been possible (or would have been possible, but not feasible at the scale we have nowadays) with wood or coal. So now our civilization is addicted to cheap oil and other fossil fuels, and the question is how we can keep up our level of civilization (or let's call it "standard of living") while beating this addiction.
> it also enabled crazier ways of using fuel
Which massively raised the quality of life most humans can live in, in various direct (we can transport a wide variety of foods quickly) and indirectly.
The question is how we can feed this "addiction" (stupid word: you're also "addicted" to breathing and eating) yet ever more whilst reducing or eliminating the negative externalities.
A low energy use society is also poor society which is also, in most of the ways you presumably care about, a bad society. And I don't mean poor as in dollars.
If I replace incandescent bulbs with LEDs, I use less energy (yes, even with elasticity of demand) yet I'm better off, not poorer. The notion that any reduction in energy use is bad is wrong.
Lighting (and computing / electronics) are something of outliers.
Electric motors haven't become remarkably more efficient --- the starting point was already quite high.
Thermal resistance heating (water, space, cooking) operates at a 1:1 ratio.
There's been some increase in refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump operations, but that's largely a marginal improvement, certainly nowhere near that of microprocessors and LEDs.
You want to look at net total per-capita consumption. And the good news is that electricity usage in the US does appear to have largely flattned out since 2000. Though I can remember a great deal of efficiency discussion in the decades preceeding that, which ... seem to have had little effect. Consumption has roughly doubled since the late 1960s.
Per capita consumption of electricity in the US went up by nearly a factor of 4 from 1950 to 1973. The increase from there to the peak (early 2000s) was less than a factor of 2. The sudden slowdown in percentage growth of consumption of electricity after 1973 (the start of the energy crisis) was a major factor in the end of the nuclear build out in the US (and the bankruptcy of WPPSS, which had bet too much on the growth continuing.)
Among the first sets of Sankey (energy flow) charts that LLNL did were backcasts to the 1950s and forecasts to 1990. Projected usage for 1990 was nearly 150 quad --- fifty percent more than we're using 30 years later.
> Electric motors haven't become remarkably more efficient --- the starting point was already quite high.
Batteries have, though. And if we're talking about personal transport, the passenger mass to total mass ratio in today's cars leaves room for huge efficiency gains in principle.
The minimum energy use for transportation as dictated by the laws of physics is zero (for round trips). All kinetic energy can in principle be recovered, and the change in potential energy for a round trip is zero. In practice, of course, there are inefficiencies, but it's not entirely obvious how large the losses must be.
There's been phenomenal improvement. Much has been in price, though power density and recharge cycles have also improved.
Ultimately, though, battery performance is bounded by chemistry. There's only so much electrical potential per unit mass and volume. It's good enough for automobiles, and lighter bikes. I'm highly dubious of trucks, though battery-assist plus some sort of catenary / third-rail feed might work. Shipping, high-capacity long-range air, and rail are likely out though.
My view is that the biggest shifts will be in land-use, and transportation and commerce patterns, as distance and transport become more expensive.
Entry-level cars were hitting the $5k price point or less (e.g., Tata, Chinese models). Tesla is clocking in at about 10x that.
Scooters, bicycles, electrfied bikes, public transit, increased walkability, seem more likely.
How is that you came to this conclusion? The larger and heavier your vehicle, the less energy/mass you need to make it move, so relatively batteries become smaller. If they work for cars, they will work for trucks with slack.
(And the correct conclusion is that no, they don't completely work for cars today. They only work in urban environments. But they shouldn't see any physical limit until they are only about 2 times as heavy as diesel (maybe they can improve further, I wouldn't know), and that limit is quite practical already.)
Boats, by their turn, have no restriction at all on batteries power density. They could use today's batteries without a problem. They are all about costs, and physics do not limit those a lot.
> and rail
And well, that one doesn't even need large batteries.
Trucks have greater total mass, but a much higher net:gross weight ratio.
Curb weight of Tesla Model 3 is 1.6 tonnes. This is about 300 kg (23%) heavier than a typical ICE automobile: Mazda 6: 1.3 tonnes, Honda Accord: 1.4 tonnes, Toyota Corolla, 1.3 tonnes.
Payload is 1.5 adult humans[1] at 0.08 tonnes each, total 0.12 tonnes. Payload:gross ratio is 7%.
Note that the additional mass of the Tesla is > 2x the payload mass. Total battery mass is 530 kg, so Telsa have lightweighted their vehicle by 230 kg and still added another 300 kg mass. Total energy storage weighs 4.4 times the human payload.
An "18-wheeler" tractor-trailer weighs about 35,000 lb empty (16 tonnes), and has a maximum loaded gross weight of 80,000 lb (36 tonnes).[2] The average loaded gross weight is closer to 20 tonnes, for a payload:gross ratio of 55%.
Personal automobiles have a vastly greater overhead of vehicle mass to payload, and can accommodate a comparatively larger batter storage pack. This added mass is partially offset by reduced motor, drivetrain, and structural elements.
Cargo vehicle mass is largely dictated by load requirements. I'd be surprised if lightweighting of electrified cargo vehicles, especially of trailers, could achieve much.
Tractor-trailer fuel capacity is typically 120--300 gallons, or 4.8 -- 12.1 MWh. Because electric motive conversion is more efficient than internal combustion, that can be reduced to about 1.6 -- 4.0 MWh.
The Tesla Model S battery stores 85 kWh in 530 kg, or 6.4 tonne/MWh. Multiplying out, we get 10.24 to 25.6 tonne battery to provide equivalent motive power, when factoring in the greater efficiency of electric traction.
Note too that fuel is burned off during travel, battery mass is not. (Air-metal batteries gain mass as charge is expended.)
Engine weight for a big rig is about a tonne.[3] I'm not finding a transmission weight, though I'll assume it's roughly comparable, and that electrification shaves 50% off this. So we lose 1 tonne electrifying the drivetrain.[4] That's ... fairly minimal.
So, our electrified truck starts with a 16 tonne dry mass, drops 1 tonne for drivetrain, and adds 10--25 tonnes of battery storage, for a total vehicle weight of 25--35 tonnes. Our maximum gross weight is 36 tonnes. We have from 1 to 11 tonnes cargo capacity, compared against 4 tonnes average and 20 tonnes maximum for a fuel-powered truck.
Increasing total vehicle mass tremendously increases roadbed deterioration, as well as traffic safety considerations. It is probably not an option.
Other alternatives are lighter loads, more trucks (and drivers, or driver automation), more frequent recharging or in-transit power supply, or battery swaps.
A separate "battery trailer" might permit reasonably swapping batteries. Otherwise, a battery integrated into navigation or trailer chassies doesn't seem reasonably swappable. I've suggested a similar option for passenger vehicles where daily vs. touring ranges could be supported through an additional "touring battery".
Alternatively, trucks could operate either entirely or significantly in a wire-fed configuration, where the vehicle is powered and/or charged from a grid-fed electrical infrastructure. For various reasons, this is probably best done at at lower speeds or when stopped --- the slower the vehicle during the charging phase, the more efficient charge-capacity per unit length of charging infrastructure. Given multiple independent ownership and maintenance of equipment, traffic-induced variances, and the need for physical contact with charging infrastructure (probably), odds are high that this will be a high-maintenance, and failure-prone option.
Other alternatives include far more efficient multimodal transport transistions, with rail used for long-haul segments and dedicated tracked trucks or trollies for local distribution. I've done some casual search of literature on rail technology developments, and in the freight realm have found virtually none. High-speed passenger rail, yes. Greater freight / cargo efficiencies, not so much.
The US freight rail system is tremendously efficient. It's still plauged with delays, congestion, theft (as noted in recent news), and other issues. It is an excellent option for large, massive, and time-insensitive loads. It's less suited to high-value or time-sensitive shipments, particularly of fresh (or even frozen) food. It's cumbersome to navigate for small-scale shippers. And it's an increasingly monopolistic / oligopolistic industry with almost all significant routes in a handful of rail lines. There are five Class I freight railroads in the US: BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway, CSX Transportation, Kansas City Southern Railway, Norfolk Southern Railway, and the Union Pacific Railroad.[5]
30 years ago my neighbours didn't have garden lighting running until midnight every night.
Today they do.
That's only one example of a lighting application which LEDs have enabled.
It's just not that we crank up the lumen output in every lighting fixture (though that happened in many cases).
It's not just that we've started illuminating parts of our houses, offices, and exteriors which were never previously illuminated (though that's also happened).
It's that activities and populations which never previously could afford to run a 60W bulb now have multiple 10W LEDs. Those might be mains or battery powered (or a combination).
There's also the reliability factor. Mains power which shuts off for hours per day is useful, but has limits.
Mains power which shuts off for only a few minutes or seconds per year is far more useful.
Access to electricity has increased from 78% to 90% of the global population since 2000.
That's nearly a billion more people with access to lighting.
Kenya is a reasonably modernised country in Africa, with 47 million citizens. Its total electric generation capacity is about 2.6 GW (roughly the equivalent of a single major US or EU power station). That works out to 55 watts of power per person. Less than a single 60W light bulb.
(Actual peak demand was 1.9 GW, November, 2019, or 40 watts/person.)
With such a limited supply, availability of LED lighting could very well lead to far more lighting, and a shift from other energy uses.
"A low energy society is a poorer society" while you're right in general, in the west we can live far more efficiently than we do without really impacting our quality of life via things like longer product life cycles, more public transport, living closer to places we need so we don't have to travel so far every day, better distribution of resources. These things could be improved if society took enough interest. Still might not be enough and we have to beware of efficiency increases getting swallowed by increased use, but my point was it's not 100% true.
There are signs that we are transitioning to all of these.
For example, demographic growth is at best neutral in everything but cities; that means people are using less land and are closer to their needs.
The problem is the pace at which this transition is happening. It’s not fast enough to stop a really bad future.
Those grim predictions were only pushed back by the exploitation of nonrenewable resoruces.
Coal-fired furnaces produced iron ploughs. Strip-mining guano from South American deserts and Pacific islands fertilised fields until Haber and Bosch discovered how to turn nonrenewable natural gas into ammonia fertiliser, and munitions. Steam-powered, and later electrified, pumps, irrigated fields regularly. Chemical pesticides eliminate insect pests (and disrupted ecosystems). Vast new farmlands in the Americas fed Europe (pity the natives who'd been there before). Powered farm equipment displaced human and animal power on the fields. Rail and refrigeration moved food across continents and oceans to hungry mouths, without spoilage.
Virtually all of that entailed utilising resources at rates faster than they could be replaced: coal, oil, gas, guano, topsoil, fertilisers, groundwater.
There were also advances in cultivar selection, in hybridisation, in weather forecasting, in general farming techniques, and the like. Many of those relied heavily on reducing defencive and other metabolic loads on crops (e.g., staving off insect pests, or sending deep roots for uncertain water) and directing more energy into producing grain yields. This is a gain in efficiency, but a loss in resilience. (See Howard Odum for more on this.)
You said the predictions that food was unsustainable just got delayed by doing other things that are unsustainable. So it sounds like you’re convinced we’re still all going to starve. I was just curious when this is going to happen.
If someone asked you at 9 a.m. on the morning of 10 September, 2001, when you thought the World Trade Centers in NYC might collapse, what would your answer be?
If they were to ask you 24 hours later, would that answer have changed?
If someone were to ask you where major earthquakes were likely to occur, might you be able to do so?
If the were to ask you when, within even decadal precision, could you?
Complex systems are ... complex. Major state changes may occur suddenly and with little warning, but also relatively unpredictably.
There's a widely-held misconception that science is specifically predictive or is based on laboratory experiments. Neither are true. Science is based on empirical observation and systemic theories, generally arriving at a causal understanding of phenomena. In the case of many complex systems, there's a long history of classification and ontology preceding a deep theoretical understanding. In specific cases such as biology and geology, scientific study existed for centuries before a core theory developed. The theory of evolution in biology, for example, does little to predict what forms of species will come to exist, but Darwin and Wallace's work, based on observation, did make several specific predictions which were subsequently born out:
- That organisms are subject to continous change and variance, and that "species" (the term has a philosophical meaning long predating its biological one) are not fixed and constant, but change, emerge, differentiate, and die out, over time.
- That there is a selective pressure exerted by the environment.
- That there is some mechanism for storing and transferring genetic information over generations, providing genetic inheritance. Darwin and Wallace's work predated notions of genes, genomes, or DNA and RNA. The general characteristics of those phenomena were, however, predicted by and consistent with the underlying theory.
The specific predictions of evolution are not generally time-based, but describe conditions and mechanism. There is some back-casting prediction based on genetic and molecular clocks which permits dating genomes roughly based on the differences which have accumulated. There is not much by way of future predictions, though we can generally presume that these will evolve in a fitness landscape (or more recently, "seascape" --- a landscape which is constantly changing itself).
Geology didn't arrive at its core principle officially until the late 1960s: plate tectonics. (I've discussed this several times elswhere on HN.)
What a complexity and systems-based analysis does provide is a framework for analysing the past and identifying patterns and correlations.
We know that the previously forecast global mass famine didn't occur, and can identify reasons why it did not: better cultivation techniques, cultivars, fertilisers, pest control, irrigation, harvesting, transportation, processing, preservation.
We can look at those factors and consider what happens if or as these are reversed. There are correlations between, for example, natural gas prices and crop yields: higher gas prices -> higher fertiliser prices -> lower fertiliser use -> lower crop yields.
Similarly, I'd expect weather disruptions (heat, drought, freezes, storms) to have measurable impacts, and unstable weather to be a factor. A major secular change (sharp global warming, sea-level rise and salt-water intrusion, major volcanic event, asteroid impact, solar variance) could have devastating global impacts, whether for a few years or millennia. The historical record shows instances of each.
A major crop disease affecting staples (maize, rice, wheat) could be immensely disruptive, especially if it crosses national borders. This is the scenario which concerns me most, especially as populations and their pathogens tend to co-evolve. See Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, which refers to human pathogens, though my sense is that our agricultural foundations, both plant and animal, are even more vulnerable.
Civil disruption and wars in major exporting regions (as presently in UA/RU) can and do have major effects. So do economic disruptions reducing purchasing power in food-precarious markets. This was a major factor precipitating the Arab Spring / Green Revolutions. It's a factor that's watched closely by global organisations such as the UN and Nato, as this has a huge impact on regional instability and migrations.
Transportation disruptions, through, say, higher fuel prices, piracy, or naval conflicts at major shipping choke points (Straits of Malacca, Gulf of Aden, Suez Canal, Bosperous, Gibralter, South China Sea) can also have a huge impact.
And as tolerances and surpluses shrink, the system is ever more susceptible to major shocks.
In the case of the WTC, what changed the prediction horizon was a major exogenous shock. In the case of the global food system, I'd suggest similarly looking at crop yield trends, purchasing power amongst the poorest states, climatic patterns, disease trends, and the like. Most likely what we'll see are a growing number of regional famines, spreading both in area and up global income levels.
The last major famines were in the early 1970s in Bangladesh. If you're old enough to recall Live Aid and starvation in Ethiopia in the 1980s ... that was mild by comparison. The list of major famines through history is sobering, particularly that there were several during the 20th century.
Historically, famines reducing populations by 10--90% within affected regions were common. A huge factor in these was the inability to either transport large stocks of grain long distances quickly or cheaply (effectively impossible until the 19th century), or to have early warning that such shipments might be required. Much current famine-avoidance occurs through global crop arbitrage. Countries which have traditionally had large agricultural surpluses (notably the United States) no longer do to nearly the extent they had a half century ago, despite advances in overall crop yields.
So, no, a precise schedule is difficult to provide. The locations and conditions under which circumstances might become rapidly perilous, however, are predictable, noted above, similar to seismic, tsunami, and climate or natural disaster risks.
In other words, bad things happen. Yep. With you there. Wars kill people, both by guns and starvation. Droughts kill people, as do floods, by preventing the growth of food.
That's a far cry from we're still all going to starve because human growth and resource use is unsustainable, which is what you were implying at first.
Here's what you said: "Those grim predictions were only pushed back by the exploitation of nonrenewable resoruces... Virtually all of that entailed utilising resources at rates faster than they could be replaced: coal, oil, gas, guano, topsoil, fertilisers, groundwater."
So, I invite you to tell me which natural resource we're going to run out of that will cause mass starvation. No timeline necessary. Or don't tell me which one, just tell me within a century or two accuracy when we will face worldwide mass starvation because of any resource being used up.
You're speaking like starvation is something out of a Roland Emmerich movie. Starvation doesn't literally kill people bing bang within a month. Mass starvation is a reduction in calorie output, which means a smaller birth rate, which our first-world countries are inoculated against.
> ..but, being so cheap, it also enabled crazier ways of using fuel […]
See:
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises as falling cost of use increases demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3]
[…]
> The Jevons paradox was first described by the English economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question. Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design.
Isn’t increasing consumption through increased efficiency (decreased cost) a crucial factor for how standards of living are raised? I don’t see how this is a paradox.
The paradox arises because cost per unit fuel does not decrease because of use-efficiency. Whether your car gets 20 miles to the gallon or 50, you pay the same price per gallon at the pump.
Therefore, in an "all other things being equal" sense, you'd expect more efficient use of the fuel to lower total consumption, since the same desired effect is achievable with less input. Switching from incandescent lights to LED lighting should lower your electricity bill.
The paradox arises because of an income effect or "standard of living" effect, as you note, and it arises as "all other things being equal" gives way to a new equilibrium. It's not guaranteed to happen -- I imagine few people's electricity bills have gone up because they use so much more LED lighting than incandescent lighting -- but it can happen.
> So now our civilization is addicted to cheap oil and other fossil fuels, and the question is how we can keep up our level of civilization (or let's call it "standard of living") while beating this addiction.
Lots of low-hanging fruit here. Most drivers of SUVs and trucks don't need such large and thirsty vehicles.
I guess we'll find out soon enough, considering what Russia's invasion has done to fuel prices.
Fuel prices have gone up way before russa attacked ukraine, and cars are not just a transporting-device, but also shelter, storage and a safety device. Electric cars would solve many things, but general unavailability of cars (wait list), general no-repair fuckery of factories (either unable to replace the battery or making it too expensive), and lack of general infrastructure (charge points) make them unusable in many cases now.
But due to fearmongering of both pro-oil people and 'green' parties we practically stopped building nuclear powerplants, which would bring power prices way down and make stuff like electric cars more viable.
The future is a further increased energy usage powered by the Sun (and energy indirectly derived from the Sun like wind and hydro), the Earth (geothermal), and the Moon (tidal).
"Automatic Transmissions and Detroit's Dirty Little Secret"
By the 1960s up to 30 million pounds of whale oil were used each year, chiefly as the main additive to automatic transmission and locking differential fluids. It was whale oil that made these devices so reliable and efficient and it was primarily the auto industry's requirements that maintained the demand for whaling during the mid-20th Century.
It was apparently environmental regulations which finally ended the use of whale oil in automobile lubricants. Not the Endangered Species Act, but pollution controls resulting in higher engine (and transmission) operating temperatures, which broke down even whale oil.
They could be put on top of the massive surface area of oil sands deposits that are currently being treated as ecologically unimportant. A lot of oil extraction isn't as 'punctiform' as it used to be.
I'd say that Sahara is an ecological disaster already, the result of ancient deforestation. Even if we might considering preservation of its ecosystem, we likely won't plan to preserve all of it.
While some ecological disasters are definitely man-made, the Sahara has been mostly the way it is today for the last 10,000 years (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#Desertification_and_pre...). Of course the current climate change will influence whether it will expand in the future, but the "core" Sahara has been there before human influence...
>>There is also no shortage of area on land or sea that is otherwise useless to us.
1) Yet. There is not yet any shortage of land.
2) There are other users of land than "us". Few would want to chop down forests to make room for solar panels. Yet we will flood those forests to power dams. Put the solar panels somewhere with no animals or plant life. Don't assume that all this land is ours to do with what we please. It isn't.
Also on oil fields: virtually all are ancient shallow fields.
The Persian Gulf region was also subjected to latitudinal compression, as the African and Asian plates collided, which further concentrate the oil by land area.
If you look at reconstructions of the world from ~150--300 mya, and look at which regions were shallow oceans, those are where you'll find present-day oil reserves (or the spent fields which have already been exhausted).
The United States had largely worked out where its own potential oil reserves might be found by the 1870s / 1880s, based both on surface evidence and geology. This even before accurate age of the earth or understanding of plate tectonics were developed.
Smil's point was more that it is possible to control a tremendous amount of energetic capacity and consequent power (industrial, economic, financial, political, ...) that literally comes out of a hole in the ground.
This also has implications when considering EROEI --- energy returned on energy input.
I mentioned the First Oil Well, Bahrain. It produced at 70,000 bbl/day (not 80k as I'd stated earlier). Typical oil well casing pipe is about 12" in diameter, let's call that 30cm, giving a wellhead area of 700 cm^2. Let's call that 0.1m^2 just to make the maths easier.
That is roughly 55GW/m^2 of continuous energy throughput.
Solar power delivers about 1kW/m^2, 10 MW/hectare, or 1 GW/km^2. Effectively, that's typically achieved for only about 1/3 of a day. I'm not factoring that into the discussion which follows.
The 55 GW of the First Oil Well are equivalent to the peak incident sunlight falling on a region 55 km^2 in area --- about 7.5 km (4.6 mi).
The net solar PV generation is a very small fraction of that, typically less than 10% net efficiency, so you'd need to expand that to 550 km^2, or 23 km ( 14 mi) on a side.
(San Francisco is 11km / 7mi square.)
Yes, oil fields are far larger, they're also far less prevalent, and unevenly distributed. Sunlight tends to be much more evenly distributed.
The notion that there's more than adequate solar energy arriving on Earth is attractive, but potentially dangerous given various factors:
- 2/3 of sunlight falls on oceans rather than land. Capturing this would prove extraordinarily difficult.
- Net of conversion, we'd do well to capture 10% of the incident energy.
- Transmission and storage further reduce energy. Transmission is surprisingly efficient. Storage has proved quite challenging.
- PV solar infrastructure has a lifetime of ~20 years. Put another way, 5% of infrastructure assuming no growth would require replacement each year.
- There are ecological impacts to very-large-scale land-use changes.
- The human population is continuing to grow, and is anticipated to do so through the end of this century.
- Roughly 5 billion people would like to achieve at least an approximation of a Western standard of living.
The US standard of living, based on ~100 quads (quadrillion BTUs) per year, and 330 million people, is about 10 kW.
The global standard of living, based on ~500 quad/yr and 8 billion people, is about 2.3kW. That's an average, and for a huge population, the net energy rate is a fraction of this.
At a US standard of living, 10 kW/person translates to 2,400 quad/year, 4.4 times greater than total present consumption.
At 0.1 kW/m^2, this is the equivalent of 802,000 km^2.
Or about 895 km on a side.
Since I mentioned net production is about 1/3 of nameplace capacity, we actually need 3x the area. So: 2,700,000 km^2, or 1,600 km (1,000 mi) on a side.
That's ... large. But not entirely infeasible.
In truth, population is projected to grow through ~11 -- 16 billions by 2100. And there are other factors which would further diminish net delivered energy. I suspect the global average per-capita power consumption by 2100 will be somewhat below 10 kW/person.
Ok, I went looking for a comparison. Looks like cities occupy ~3,500,000km^2. So that's an area similar to every urban development.
I always expected solar farms to make roof-top solar irrelevant in the future, but maybe that's not realistic. But lack of economies from scale is the worst lesson I take from those numbers, they are not very bad.
Anyway, I'm not sure ocean solar farms are that hard to build. There are many reasons to think they aren't.
The figure I recollect is that urbanisation accounts for 1% or 3% of Earth's total land area. That's in line with requirements for direct solar power.
In practice, that's not entirely appropriable (people and urban environments have some demand for sunlight other than solar PV), and you'd want some geographic distribution to account for weather, seasonality, and power demand variability (daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal), as well as other forms of interruption.
Solar is in theory largely sufficient, and with addition of wind, hydro (both power and storage), and geothermal, affords one possible route to a reasonably-sustainable, reasonably technological future, for a largish population. I suspect it still presents challenges and would probably fall below levels presently experienced in the US and Western Europe, especially at higher latitudes.
Got it! Not household use but total national energy usage divided by population.
It’s per capita energy usage but I hesitate to call it per capita consumption. Consumption would probably want take into account the massive trade deficit, and so its even higher!
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "can be carbon negative". Are you referring to sequestring some of the biomass in soil or other formations?
That's possible, yes.
The principle limitation though is net primary productivity, and the human use of that, HANPP (human appropriation of net primary productivity), a/k/a the photosynthetic ceiling.
Humans already account for about 20% of all NPP, with considerable economic impacts. Our fossil fuel consumption equates to another large share (from memory, I believe another 40 percent). The likelihood of substituting for even a small share of that is small.
Humans initially switched from biomass (wood and biowaste) to fossil fuels because rates of consumption of current biomass productivity exceeded replacement, as well as for degredation of ecosystems in which they were produced: "forests proceed us, deserts follow us".
I've yet to see a biofuel proposal which even remotely pencils out in theory, let alone when considering the likely practical obstacles. This includes woodfuel, plant-oil plantations, peat harvesting, various grasses, pickleweed (a brackish-estuary fast-growing plant), or algae farming. There's some marginal contribution possible, but even that comes at extreme cost.
Human populations, per-capita energy consumption, or both, would have to fall dramatically.
"
So, is oil really worth $100 a barrel? Another way of looking at it is to compare oil to a horse. A horse laboring a standard 40-hour work week (eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year) would have to labor for more than one year to produce the energy in a barrel of oil. Do you think a horse could be fed and maintained for a year for $100? Not likely.
Human labor is even worse. A fit human adult can sustain about one-tenth of a horsepower, so a human would have to labor more than 10 years to equal a barrel of oil.
"
"
This has been argued and debated often on TOD, mainly in response to some of my own quotes in media about 1 barrel equating to 25,000 hours of human labour (12.5 years at 40 hours per week). Ultimately the answer to this question depends highly on assumptions - but we can arrive at a good approximation. 1 barrel equates to 6.1 Gigajoules (5.8 million BTUs). Depending on the 'job', humans use roughly 100-700 Kilocalories per hour (Computer work requires an estimated 119.3 Kcals/hr). 1 kilocalorie (Kcal) = 4,184 joules. So 1 barrel of oil has 6.1 billion/4,184 = 1,454,459 kcals. Using a range of 100-700 kcals per human hour of work then results in a range 2078 and 14544 hours per barrel of oil. At 2000 hours per year (40*50), this is would then be 1.0-7.25 years per barrel.
"
"
One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel
"
Just to clarify where the original numbers came from...
The claim you are responding to: 1 liter of oil ~ 3 days of human energy output.
Energy in a liter of oil: about 30 megajoules.
Human base metabolic rate: below 100 watt. Let's say 100 watt. 1 watt = 1 joule/second.
30 MJ / 100 joules/second = 300000 seconds = about 3.5 days. So the original claim is correct in that sense
edit: Now, this doesn't mean you can get the same benefit from a human laboring for 3 days non-stop as you could get from 1 liter of oil. This is just the energy required by the human body to stay alive. Any additional useful energy output would be on top of that, and humans can only sustain a small amount of additional power for long. That's why your references seem to disagree.
Though you will really get that 100 watt from a human in the form of heat, which is why that number needs to be used when designing airco systems.
I came to understand how much power is in oil through digging a big hole. I had to do some excavation for a mountain cabin I am building. After digging by hand for a while, we bought a 1-ton micro-excavator. One bucket from the excavator is equivalent to about 10 shovels. The avg time per scoop is similar, and it burns half a tank per day, so it works out such that it does the work of about 10 men on around 10 l/day of diesel.
Thus I discovered that 1 liter of diesel can do about 1 man-days worth of dirt moving. This liter costs about $1 right now. A day laborer would cost around $160-$250.
After digging hard ground by hand where you have to fight for each shovel full, seeing the tiny excavator rip 100lbs of earth like a toddler playing in the sandbox makes you appreciate what a gift oil is. Bigger excavators with better operators are more efficient. I would not be surprised if a big one approaches the 9man-days / liter theoretical limit you calculated above.
If you want a really big multiple, use the liter of fuel to run a generator to run epyc cpus performing calculations and compare it to humans performing calculations.
The value I gave hugely understates oil's useful energy. Even so, the energy equivalents shown are huge.
But if you want greater accuracy:
A human being consumes ~2000 -- 3000 kilocalories per day.
A human produces only a fraction of that in useful work output:
- Total metabolism is only so efficient, I believe on the order of 25%.
- That 2000 -- 3000 kilocalries/day gives you 96--145 watts constant output. That's where the "a person produces 100 watts of (thermal) energy at rest comes from. About 1/4 of that, 25 watts, is required simply for your brain.
- People can work only so many hours per day, and at relatively low constant output.
The net available work is probably closer to 1/10 to 1/4 the net output. So a litre of oil -> 30 days of actual delivered effort by a human.
Of course, burning oil for mechanical energy results in about 70% losses through Carnot efficiency, so we can divide by 3 and get about 10 days of useful mechanical energy, roughly 3x greater than the raw dietary comparison I'd made above.
On the true cost of oil, I'd make another argument which is that if we consider costs to represent the true costs of production, then the fact that oil is created through an immensely inefficient conversion of ancient sunlight to biomass to kerogenic materials over hundreds of millions of years, and we're extracting it at roughly 5 million times its rate of formation, the production cost value should be about 5 million times that of present biomass.
The PeakOil discussion is looking at the net value basis. That also increases the price, but "only" by a factor of thousands, not millions.
If you look at the delivered GDP per barrel of oil (dividing national GDP by oil consumption), what you find for most countries is a value somewhere between $400 and $3,000/bbl. The lower values are for India and China. The US tends to see about $1,000 GDP/bbl, most of Europe $2,000/bbl, and Switzerland about $3,000/bbl. Some poor, low-oil-consumption nations do better (Mali did when I last looked into this), but that's more a testament to how little oil they consume rather than how efficiently they process energy in bulk.
Given valuation of $0.5 -- $5 million based on actual work / true cost of formation, use of oil as presently practiced is absolutely noneconomic. It makes about as much sense as burning $100 bills for heat. (I'm presuming non-inflated currency.)
> " One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel "
Why use humans for physical power output? Humans invented watermills millenia ago.
I struggle to understand your thinking. The point is to put energy measures in terms that are intuitively understandable by people, and the most comprehensibly to people is human-power. Perhaps when Ikea produce a line of watermills we can revisit your rather odd question.
Potassium-40 decay is also one of the largest sources of geothermal heat [0]. The cumulative energy released is within two orders of magnitude of the Earth's gravitational binding energy.
Interesting, for the curious that's ~10 terawatts of Th-232, ~9 TW of U-238, ~4 TW of K-40 and ~1 TW of U-235. Plus about 5-15 TW of primordial heat left from the earth still cooling down from when everything got real hot about 4.5B years ago.
I like the "New York's worth of bananas" unit (3e17 bananas), doing some back of the envelope math apparently if everyone ate one a year for 80 years we could significantly slow climate change [0] [1] [2] [3] [4].
[0] World electricity usage was apparently 23,900 terawatt-hours in 2019, which works to a constant 2.73 TW. If we can eliminate the mantle heat from K-40 that's 4 TW out of the way which would be lovely.
[1] ~4.9e17 kg total K-40 in the mantle, so if every human dedicated themselves to eating them in a human lifetime of 80 years would take 4.9e17 kg K-40 * 1 banana/3.9e-9 kg K-40 /7.9 billion people/80 years = 1.9e17 bananas per person per year or 6.1e9 bananas per second, (very) roughly about one New York's worth of bananas per year, what's a couple tens of quadrillions of bananas between friends anyway.
[2] If you somehow vaporized the K-40 content of the bananas as you ate them.
[3] And managed to concentrate potassium directly from the earth's mantle into bananas.
[4] I have no choice but to note that this whole idea would be... Bananas. I'm sorry.
You're confusing technological energy production (~10^13 W) with climate heating, which is two orders of magnitude larger (~10^15 W). The heat released from burning carbon fuels isn't significant. The modulating effect of the CO2 released on radiative heat transfer is far more powerful. Like a weak current driving a high-gain amplifier.
Though I've got ... questions and concerns about how certain we are that there's no large-scale heavy-element fission occurring within the Earth's core.
I'd think that within the nickel-iron core, one might find even heavier elements, that those would have sunk through the primordeal (and one presumes, not-yet solid) inner core, and would tend to have greater radioactivity.
How to demonstrate this does seem something of a challenge. Decay products and/or neutrino flux, possibly?
> That physics paper counts more coauthors than neutrinos.
And that's even before enabling Javascript.
(Javascript-enabled neutrinos will be a key feature of Web 6.0.)
(Oh, and thanks!)
Questions:
- How'd you find this? I'm suspecting something like "earth's core reactor neutrinos".
- I don't even know how to read/interpret the notation used to express neutrino counts. Though if we can divide 112 co-authors (including deceased) by annual detection rates we can come up with a neutrino-seconds equivalent of authors....
> 15 decays per second from one banana work out to a couple of picowatts of power, roughly the power consumption of a single human cell. Even if you captured that decay energy with perfect efficiency, powering a house would require about 300 quadrillion[6] bananas
> [6] Fine, I looked it up this time.
I think that's out by a factor of 1000.
Potassium-40 decays 89.28% of the time to calcium-40, releasing 1.31 MeV, and 10.72% of the time to argon-40 releasing 1.46 MeV [1]. That's .8928*1.31+.1072*1.46 = 1.32608 MeV per decay on average, which is about 2.1246e-13 Joules [2] per decay on average. 15 decays per second is 15*2.1246e-13 ≈ 3.1869e-12 Watts = 3.1869 picowatts per banana. I think Randall is using 1000 Watts as the average power usage of a house. 1000/3.1869e-12 ≈ 3.1378e14 ≈ 300,000,000,000,000 = 300 trillion bananas. Maybe he looked it up wrong?
Can anyone confirm this?
I can't find the packing density of bananas, but if it was 1000 kg/m^3, a medium banana is ~118 g [3], so 1000/.118 ≈ 8475 bananas / cubic metre, so 300e14/8475 ≈ 3.54e12 cubic metres of bananas. The New York metro area is about 12000 km^2 = 12e9 m^2 [4], so the depth of the banana pile is on average 3.54e12/12e9 ≈ 295 metres, which is indeed taller than most of the buildings, so that bit seems right.
It's half past midnight here, so I'm well into "Someone is wrong on the internet" [5] territory....
For anyone looking to get rid of fruit flies, leave a small shot glass full of some sweet vinegar (white wine vinegar, balsamic, apple cider) with a few drops of dish soap. The sugar attracts the flies and the dish soap breaks the surface tension and causes them to get trapped in the liquid. Works a treat.
Ah, but are the fruit fly eggs on the banana peel or in it?
I do have a friend who insists on washing a banana before peeling it, and washing an avocado before cutting into it. At first I thought it was silly, but it actually makes sense.
You're probably going to touch the banana with the same hands you got dirty from the peel, and the knife could push anything icky on the outside of the avocado peel into the delicious fruit.
Moreover you never know how many different hands handled those fruits and how much chemicals did it endure until it landed on your table. And you are touching that banana too.
Could the rovers be constructed to utilize power generated from the infinite supply of fruit flies that the rotting bananas would produce rather than the bananas themselves?
> A banana contains about 100 calories of food energy, and if you incinerate whole bananas as fuel, it would only take about 10 bunches per day to keep your house running.
Just at an intuitive level that sounds like very little to me. 10 bunches is what, 10 kg of bananas? That's roughly 15 euros where I live. Considering my normal wintertime heating + electricity costs that would mean using bananas for energy would only be ~1.5x more expensive than the natural gas I currently use. Does that make sense?
Kinda yes. The problem is utilizing the food energy efficiently. But if we could utilize it at only, say, 20%, that sounds reasonable to me, comparing to heating the house with wood, then 50kg of bananas should be enough.
Natural gas is just more convenient, as it doesn't require you to feed the stove/dispose the ashes.
I suppose so. After all, many people use wood to heat their homes, and dry wood has around 400-500kcal of energy per 100g while dried bananas go up to 360kcal/100g.
Natural tobacco, like I smoke, has a lot more radiation than bananas[1]. In the form of Polonium-210, mostly absorbed from phosphate fertilizers. Turns out the content is actually higher in "organic" tobacco[2].
So as I light this cigarette, I'm going to reflect for the millionth time on why I should've gotten addicted to bananas instead. But all else being equal, either cancer is cured in the next 20 years or we're all dying in a nuclear war, so, smoke up. And eat your bananas.
Its an entrenched tradition in the USA, "tobacco culture" says it doesn't taste right without added radio actives. I've not looked in a decade but it may still be illegal to produce tobacco without it here.
I think about smoking almost daily, although I haven't smoked in 20 years.
We just haven't created anything remotely comparable to smoking that looks as cool, and fills that fidget hobby space in the same way. I used to love rolling my own cigarettes, and just the act of smoking. Was hoping some sort of vitamin nicotine free vape would fill the same void, but so far nothing has.
> A large cheese pizza might be three times more radioactive than a banana
So thats why the food industry stopped using potassium chloride (known as the good salt) and continued using even more sodium chloride in their food. We have the Sodium Potassium pump in virtually every cell of the body and Sodium keeps the Potassium out of the body so you dont have to wait for nuclear decay!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93potassium_pump
Cool, high salt food stops you becoming even more radioactive.
Seriously though, I do like the way the message has been got across, things like
"every second you roll 21 dice. If they all come up 6s, you decay.", I think more people can relate to the timescales so they know just how radioactive they become. Personally I dont know why we arent all sucking Potassium Iodide lozenges considering the amount of Potassium-40 there is in the environment. Maybe thats why Whales are the longest living mammals on the planet, the sodium chloride keeps potassium out of their bodies?
It's worth noting that the idea that bananas are uniquely or unusually high in potassium is itself a myth. Many other fruits and vegetables are much higher: a cup of spinach, for instance, has about twice as much potassium as a banana, and a baked potato has even more.
What I find so beautiful about these XKCD responses is that they acknowledge conceptual problems presented but then nevertheless carry on in the spirit of the question.
One problem I think I find in comment sections, besides the epidemic of uncharitable interpretation, is this unwillingness to entertain thought experiments intended to illustrate a point in an abstract way.
Resistance to the exercise comes out in various ways, like denying the practical plausibility of actually carrying out the hypothetical, to confidently dismissing them for unpredictable reasons. What's really going on is that people are expressing resistance to participating in a hypothetical, which shuts conversation down.
The ability to maintain and participate in hypotheticals without unconscious mechanisms that protest against the exercise is kind of a personal marker I use for measuring the health of an online community that is interested in ideas.
Potassium becomes calcium?! is that observable over a long time (year?) with a time lapse microscope camera?
> There are gazillions[3] of atoms of potassium-40 in a banana. In any given second, 10 or 15 of them make that all-sixes roll, spit out a high-energy particle, and become stable calcium or argon.
Does our radioactivity play a factor in human life expectancy (I obviously don't mean in lethal or higher-than-average doses)? For example, does being around the normal amount of human radioactivity improve our health or is it a detriment? Or is it a nonfactor?
> Radiation hormesis is the hypothesis that low doses of ionizing radiation (within the region of and just above natural background levels) are beneficial, stimulating the activation of repair mechanisms that protect against disease, that are not activated in absence of ionizing radiation.
"Those who lived in higher radiation areas also were found to live the same life expectancy as those in lower radiation areas, while all residents of Ramsar had the same life expectancy as those in neighboring areas with less background radiation."
My understanding is at a pop-science level, but it seems like once again the chemical energy overpowers the radioactive energy. The "free radical theory of aging" blames mitochondria for a lot of the damage our cells sustain. Mitochondria generate an incredible voltage gradient which generates and throws off a trickle of oxidative radicals which go on to damage the rest of the cell, occasionally even damaging your DNA, damage which slowly accumulates over the decades of your life.
Since the factoid comes from nuclear engineers using the banana for scale, I do wonder a bit how it actually scales up. Is a banana more radioactive than low-level nuclear waste?
A banana is about 0.1 Becquerels/gram [0]. Low-level nuclear waste starts around 100 Bq/g [1]. Below that is another category called very-low-level nuclear waste. Disposing of the latter "does not pose any major problems" - you can put it in landfills, or grind it up and build roads with it - but it is still not recommended that you eat it in large quantities.
I suspect that the nuclear waste at Fukushima that they intend to release into the ocean is of that category very-low-level nuclear waste. 2.1gram of tritium diluted in 860,000 tons of water. Not sure how many Becquerels/gram that is, but I would be interested to know if its actually higher than the 0.1 of the banana.
Is there a minimum level for what can be called very-low-level nuclear waste?
(As a minor side note, someone should update wikipedia since VLLW does not seem to exist there as a category and waste with less than 100 kBq/kg is explicitly defined as LLW).
Surprisingly, it's a lot more radioactive than the bananas.
Pure tritium is 3.57×10^14 Bq/g [0]
It's being diluted at a ratio of 4x10^11 : 1 so the diluted mixture still has 1000 Bq/g, or four orders of magnitude stronger than the equivalent mass in bananas.
Of course, it gets diluted more after you release it into the ocean, but it would take a lot of mixing to get the water down only to banana levels.
Very interesting. Looking at those numbers, potassium-40 has 32 bg/g. Does that mean that atoms of tritium gives out 10^13 more energy every second compared to potassium-40? It would be funny to see how long a city could survive on just then 1 gram of tritium, and it does give a bit more context to the idea of running a city on potassium-40.
According to wikipedia, low-level nuclear waste "can range from just above background levels found in nature to very highly radioactive in certain cases such as parts from inside the reactor vessel in a nuclear power plant." From above chart, eating a banana is equal to about 2% of the radiation received from normal background levels in a single day.
So I would say, a banana is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude less radioactive than low-level nuclear waste.
This was a good read, but they didn't mention how much radiation is dangerous. The power output of the decay is not relevant to people who are worried about radiation. This XKCD chart is a much better representation:
6.56 kg banana flesh -> 1.5 kg dried bananas (plus about 100 g corn starch, used to prevent sticking)
Flesh pyrolised in a charcoal kiln to 0.5 kg banana charcoal. Peels -> 0.12 kg.
Charcoal burned down to 67g (flesh) and 51g (peels).
Potassium precipitated out as potassium chlorate. 33g flesh, 41g peels.
Decomposing out oxygen -> 36g potassium chloride (potash) (combined, flesh + peels). Radiation was measured at this point with a Geiger counter, at about double the background rate.
Metalic potassium produced through an alkalai converter, though only at about 50% yield: 9g produced rather than the 18g expected. The initial potassium chlorate yield was also below that suggested by FDA nutrient standards. Cody discusses this in the video.
Slow-mo exploding potassium banana sequence at end.
It was answered. You need 300 quadrillion bananas if you only use the energy emitted from the radioactive decay, or 10 bunches per day if you're willing to just burn them and basically ignore their radioactivity.
I couldn't initially find the answer because I was looking for a calculation to find the answer instead of just a sentence out of the blue with the answer
“Even if you captured that decay energy with perfect efficiency, powering a house would require about 300 quadrillion bananas, which would form a heap large enough to bury most of the skyscrapers in the NYC metro area”
Some of the most interesting energy analysis I've come across (Vaclav Smil and David MacKay especially) describe energy in terms of area: what are the comparable land areas which would have to be dedicated to specific sources or forms of energy or fuels, and how do those compare? One of Smil's descriptions of petroleum wells is "punctiform", which I love. A hole in the ground, only about 20 cm in diameter, can provide years to millennia of human energy output, per day.
1 litre of oil is equivalent to about 3 days of human energy output (at 3,000 kilocalories/day).
1 gallon of oil is eqivalent to about 11 days of human energy.
One of the oldest oil wells in production (the First Oil Well of Bahrain) produced 80,000 barrels of oil per day initially. That's over 1,000 years of human energy equivalent.
By comparison, the yeild of current biomass production is far, far less. The difference, of course, is that oil is biomass, accumulated, converted, and concentrated over hundreds of millions of years. We're consuming it at > 5 million times its rate of formation. (See Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003).)
In terms of radioactivity, the net metabolic rate of the Sun's core is lower than that of a human, measured in energy/mass. Solar metabolism is closer to that of reptiles, about 1/5 of mamallian metabolic rates.
Chemical energy is less productive than the most effective nuclear transitions, but its shear abundance and ease of utilisation tends to weigh in its favour.