Growth economics also ignores physics. It treats the planet as just another variable. Energy is simply one of those things that is provided to us free of charge, according to neoclassical economics. But it isn’t like that. Energy is not substitutable. You cannot deregulate sunlight. You cannot financialise thermodynamics. Limits exist, whether markets like them or not. And infinite growth in this world is a fantasy. You cannot, literally, grow forever on a finite planet. That’s not pessimism, it is arithmetic. Ignoring this reality has created crisis and denial.
We anywhere close to the limit of insolation that we can use? No? Then it’s an irrelevance to current decision making, isn’t it.
Renewables diversify the control of energy; we could all make our own.
I’ll just knock up my own solar cells, shall I?
Distribution matters more than accumulation in that case, and energy transition is social transition. It must be planned, it must be just, and it must be democratic.
Ahhhh. Everyone must therefore do it the Solanum Way.
Ummmmm… The entire “Green Transition” is about “financialising thermodynamics”. At the cost of more traditional and more reliable thermodynamics.
Quite a large trough, actually…. One that the Solanum has been trying to get a place at for ages…
It’s funny how Mother Nature ( the biatch ) has already solved that “problem”, and very much can..
Species, both micro and macro that are quite literally immortal, and keep multiplying/growing.
The only thing that stops them from flooding the planet is that all of them are on the menu of other critters.
y’know… that “consumption” and “recycling” bit people like Solanaeus Maximus always forget about.
He’s living proof of the maxim regarding the devil and idle hands. I tried reading through his comment which drove your other ‘RonR’ post but it’s rather like listening to the ‘Mr. Blobby’ song. You can’t do it too frequently or you risk losing your sanity and becoming a threat to yourselves and others.
Boiling his post down from whatever wordslop AI has created from his past utterances it seems to amount to energy being rationed according to his definition of who needs it. Of course given his genius he will have back up generators to the extent he needs them but everyone else must shiver in silence. That’s his definition of ‘just and democratic’.
Belated Merry Christmas to the various denizens on here and I hope your Boxing Days are going well!
“I’ll just knock up my own solar cells, shall I? ”
while that is fairly difficult – especially if you want reasonable efficiency – you could knock up a home-brew electricity generation system. Classic focussed mirror(s) heating a blackened tube(s) carrying water sorta stuff. Steam powered generator. Mechanical governor etc etc. Victorian engineering in all its splendour!
And they said that Steampunk was pure fantasy…. 😉
It’s amazing what you can do with the neodynium magnets from old hard drives, scrap iron, and copper wire.
Easy to make your own mini-birdchopper.
It’s also not that hard to build a reasonably efficient Stirling engine…
Loads of options, really…
Of course… only “free” if you ignore the knowledge and labour sunk in gathering the materials and equipment to build it…
And… I doubt the Solanum can even properly use a screwdriver… He’d be neck deep up excrement creek if he’d actually had to build something from scrap..
Oh, I’m not so sure, if he makes his own model layouts. That skill certainly hasn’t taught him anything, though.
I’ve actually done that one. Routed slots in lengths of plastic waste pipe then solvent welded it to ends of multilayer polycarb roofing sheets. Few plumbing fittings & yes, painting the panels black*, produced a hot water system.
*If you don’t paint everything black you’ve built yourself an algae farm.
Yep, when replacing my roof in 1995 I observed that the slate-black erm slates absorbed sunlight really efficiently and even in winter the inside roof space was always warm, and in summer baking hot. So I planned to run piping under the replacement slates to collect heat to warm up water to reduce the imported energy consumption for the heating system. Unfortunately, the local company that I was going to buy the equipment from had just gone bust due to lack of demand. Before our time.
I’ve solved all my energy problems at my place. I have racks of buttered cats rotating slowly. This may sound strange but is my invention for sustainable energy.
The idea is simple:
Fact 1- buttered toast always lands buttered side down
Fact 2 – a cat always lands on its feet.
So take one cat, apply a liberal amount of butter to its back and drop it…………..
voila!!!
Because it doesn’t know which way up to land it just spins, approximately 1 foot off the ground.
Attach a dynamo and a pulley system and you have free (I steal the butter and the cats) sustainable power. Each cat is worth approximately half a patio heaters worth of electricity and I have 17 patio heaters in and around my house for warmth. You do the maths.
Please keep this to yourselves though as My dad has a cardboard wind turbine on his allotment and earns lots of money off Ed Davey and if this got out it would ruin him.
H/T to someone from around 2015………
“Renewables diversify the control of energy; we could all make our own.”
I have a vision of the portly Prof astride an exercise bike hooked up to a dynamo to power his Christmas tree lights.
Merry Christmas to one and all!
But if Murphy should read this, fvck off you repellent cvnt.
“Renewables diversify the control of energy; we could all make our own.”
Or perhaps, rich people could make their own. Then they wouldn’t need to be connected to the energy grid. This would leave the poor relying on it and, eventually, in the cold and dark when it fell apart. Merry Christmas!
Energy is not substitutable.
Would have thought that’s been disproved ever since Ug rubbed two sticks together. Just look at the car industry. Family saloon in the early sixties got about 25 mpg. Current models get about twice that. The energy value of the fuel hasn’t changed so what’s been substituted for half a gallon? Whole load of tech added to ICE’s. And that’s just the ICE. Hybrid can raise it to near 70 mpg.
Or back to Ug. The invention of the chimney over halved the firewood required to provide usable heat. And for light? I’d guess the energy in a candle, would produce 8 hours of illumination, passed through an LED would give you about 6 month’s worth of the same.
No doubt eventually we’ll be fusing hydrogen rather than burning it as hydrocarbons like firewood. So what’ll be the ratio of hydrogen>energy difference? It’s all substitution.
Dyson sphere time! Capture all of the sun’s output.
Now, who’s putting their hand up for chair of the energy redistribution sub committee?
Dyson! You can’t say that name! He’s a Tory!
“it must be democratic”
Ok, I’ll use my democratic voice to say “NO!”.
You know he’s using “democratic” in the sense of German Democratic Republic….
One of Man’s greatest achievements – led by Britannia – is centralized power generation. The economy of scale has made us wealthy beyond 19th century comprehension.
Yep. Decentralization of power generations will crush society.
Note that the government’s drive to implement renewable energy is in fact an attack on centralized power generation. Renewables have fatal flaws. The public will not be able to rely on them for power. Britain faces a dystopian future as the masses struggle to find power, denied them by government. Winter blackouts will be just the beginning of the collapse.
Sounds a bit tricky, perhaps we should start by getting people to make their own pencils first?
When I was less than half my present age I went mad and blew two months’ nett salary on a Seagate 80mb hard disk drive. Today the same amount relatively speaking would buy at least twenty million times the capacity. That’s not infinite, but still a pretty large multiplier.
At roughly the same time, Steven Pinker wrote that sight processing by computer was an intractable problem, incapable of being solved through reverse engineering. Today AI is so smart that it can instantly tell you if an image is a deepfake generated by AI.
Murph earns five to ten times more from his YT channel than he ever did as an economics lecturer. Is he being entirely candid when he claims that there are limits to growth?
Actually, AI is so smart it can convincingly lie to you about whether the picture is and AI fake – computationally that was the easier problem for the engineers and programmers to solve;)
Yep. With solar insolation at 20MW per person on this planet we are quite some way from the limit. And even that limit will soon be extended as we put data centres in space giving us even more “finite” resources to play with.
That might be the first thing he’s said that is correct.
We could all make our own.
Except . . . Costs and physics put that out for each of most people.
How many square meters would the average Elyman need of solar panels to run their trains sets in a warm home with a nice cup of choccie in the winter and keep the place snug over night?
Probably more than an end terrace in Ely has. And for several tens of thousands of pounds that most people don’t have lying around.
Pratchet pointed this out several times – rich people and poor people, over time, pay the same for boots. But rich people can put out up front for a couple pairs of good ones while the poor have to shill out for a cheap pair that wears out in 6 months and do that repeatedly.
“Energy is not substitutable”
I don’t know what he means by that, but I can’t come up with any possible meaning that makes sense.
If he means one sort of energy can’t be substituted for another, then that’s clearly nonsense.
If he means you can’t substitute anything else for energy, then (as BiS points out above), increased mpg from cars means we’ve substituted better manufacturing and better design for about half the energy.
And, as our host frequently points out, the history of the 20th century is producing more value with fewer inputs – although only in capitalist countries.