The things that seem largely missing from such articles:
1. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.
2. Passive solar design.
We have created a world highly dependent on various energy inputs. It has gone a long way towards killing off walking, cycling and vernacular architecture (where passive solar is a historic default).
Those technologies still exist. They can be brought back into more mainstream use.
I fully support those things for health reasons. We would be so much more healthy, physically and mentally, if we had good local connections and comfortable, pleasant public spaces to occupy.
They aren't relevant to the problems of making steel or non-ferrous metals or cement or plastics, or to the problems of shipping things around over long distances. Which we cannot avoid, while maintaining a high-tech civilisation.
If you don't need to drive around in a car then you are 1) not burning fossil fuels to drive and 2) not needing steel and other materials to manufacture said car. Energy efficiency saves energy to use it where it's really needed.
This does not matter if it's one Potemkin village but it matters on the level of states and can be seen in statistics like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... where probably every EU country is much lower than the US, for example.
National energy consumption figures should really include the embodied energy of imports, minus that of exports. Consumption is not the same as production. Consumption of goods (not just storage and passing-through) should also count.
I think this is backwards. Everyone assumes people are lazy because of the cars. I propose that cars were made because people are lazy (or, in reality, have no time in this dual income era we live in - walking takes a lot of time, even if it is very enjoyable).
If you make walk-able, mixed-use neighborhoods there is no guarantee people will use them.
In contrast, I bike over 1000 miles a year and walk several times a week. Yet I am not in a walk-able mixed use neighborhood nor have any interest in living in one.
> I think this is backwards. Everyone assumes people are lazy because of the cars. I propose that cars were made because people are lazy (or, in reality, have no time in this dual income era we live in - walking takes a lot of time, even if it is very enjoyable).
> If you make walk-able, mixed-use neighborhoods there is no guarantee people will use them.
This isn't supported by the evidence. We see huge increases in the numbers of people walking and cycling when the infrastructure is adjusted to support them.
I'm not against infrastructure to support walking and/or cycling. I'm an avid cyclist. I thoroughly believe people will bike/walk more if there is support for it in their neighborhood.
But is it serving as a car replacement for those people? I'd wager not due to a variety of factors. But I'd be curious if there was evidence it was for any significant percentage of them.
How could it not be? What kind of evidence would you want to see? There are certainly other factors that affect changes in car ownership rates, but the ease (or otherwise) of making journeys by other means must surely have an impact at the margin.
Laziness is efficiency. People drive because they are lazy and driving is the most efficient use of their resources. People also walk because they are lazy and walking is the best use of their resources. Driving is so prevalent because 1) we don’t incorporate the full cost (social, environmental, etc.) into driving, 2) driving is often the locally (individually) most efficient choice while being globally (socially) the suboptimal. We should engineer and environment where the globally optimal choice is the lazy choice.
Cars were made for game theoretic reasons: As long as few people drive, cars give drivers extreme advantages. When a critical mass of drivers exist, the advantages deminish, but infrastructure investements (now politically viable!) can delay the process. As soon as most people drive most of these advantages disappear regardless of further infrastructure investments, but people who don't drive now suffer from extreme disadvantages that didn't exist before car-centric infrastructure.
> As long as few people drive, cars give drivers extreme advantages.
I don't know about that. I'm living in London right now, and I'd hate to have a car. It would mean need a parking space all the time for it, for something I wouldn't use most days because almost everything I need say-to-day is a 10 min walk away, and if it isn't then it's a quick bus or tube ride away.
But assuming that few people drove, you could move a dozen kilometers out of London, enjoy clean air, peace and quiet, low rents etc and still have everything you wanted ten minutes away. Just by car.
Most libertarians believe some taxation is necessary.
I was hoping that my phrasing made it obvious that I don't believe in the most extreme interpretation of that slogan. But I do believe there's truth in it.
Back to the infrastructure cost problem. I painted an insidious picture. Of course suburbanites are not mustache-twirling villains. They're just asking the government to maintain the infrastructure they use.
The problem is they're not willing to (vote for politicians who make them) pay for the true cost. When the cost is borne by other people, how is this not robbery with majority votes (and thus state power)?
You are an outlier which sure exist, but just look at examples where it is provided. Always surprised to see so many people (including juveniles from age of 6 or latest 8 without adults, til far beyond 60 or 70) bicycling around here, so many that I often get overrun while walking around daily for usually 30-60 minutes a day (which I also didn't do as much prior moving here), its amazing.
(from one of the green districts in Berlin, where walkable neighborhood is far from complete and too many cars around still, really wonder what it could be like in fully designed districts).
Just providing it has a huge impact on a lot of "maybe" people and I think practice proofs this is not backwards thought at all. Not guaranteed, but a huge impact on most, nothing is binary as always.
> In contrast, I bike over 1000 miles a year and walk several times a week. Yet I am not in a walk-able mixed use neighborhood nor have any interest in living in one.
So really like to know, why is that. I can only imagine you are living rural, and now wouldn't understand why anyone living in a dense city would want to have it different.
Because it wouldn't be that useful. I'd grow tired/bored of the same restaurants all the time. When we go shopping once every week or two, we hit up a lot of different stores. It's doubtful they could support having all those stores in walking proximity to everyone in my city. Each brand has about one store in my city.
Basically it would not provide much value to me as I'd still use a car all the time.
> In contrast, I bike over 1000 miles a year and walk several times a week. Yet I am not in a walk-able mixed use neighborhood nor have any interest in living in one.
You do realize that, statistically, you are a MASSIVE outlier - right?
> If you make walk-able, mixed-use neighborhoods there is no guarantee people will use them.
Statistics disagree here. Look up walking commute rates in walkable neighborhoods vs random suburbs. Look at vehicle ownership rates. Look at gasoline sales per capita, etc, etc.
> I propose that cars were made because people are lazy (or, in reality, have no time in this dual income era we live in - walking takes a lot of time, even if it is very enjoyable).
What's been proven is that people have set limits for how long they are willing to commute. If cars could drive 2x as fast, people who are willing to commute by car would live farther away from work. Ditto for train riders, bikers, or walkers.
The goal is to shrink the distance people who DON'T want to own a car have to live from work by building more housing and making nearby neighborhoods more walkable and bikable.
Many people in cities would rather not drive if the option was realistic.
Many people in America LOVE their cars, and will go to their grave defending car culture. But many people who drive cars do so out of necessity and would rather not.
You are looking at a massive outlier as well. Those people who are fortunate enough to be able to move within walking distance of their employment, and live in an area rich enough to have a wide variety of restaurants and shops in walking distance. This is just not practical when scaled to the masses. Many compromises would need to be made.
I visit dense cities all the time and have friends that live in them. Even though they are walk-able, we are always driving across the city to visit that one shop, restaurant or park.
Okay - so why do you have to be rich to live somewhere walkable in the US - but not rich pretty much every other country in the world?
The vast majority of Madrid and Paris and Berlin are walkable. Sure, there are expensive neighborhoods. But most people can afford to live in walkable areas of pretty much everywhere beside London, some Asian outliers, & anywhere in the US.
Not sure where you are, but a large amount of places are easier to walk than drive in. I live in Edinburgh, and driving through the city, (and even worse, parking in the city) is an absolute nightmare. Walking or taking a bus is a no brainer. Similarly, Glasgow (less so), Dublin, and most major European cities are all significantly more difficult to navigate by car.
Edinburgh is exceptional though - as well as being one of the most beautiful cities in the world it also has a fairly compact city centre with pretty good public transport links.
Hard to believe that we almost got Glasgow style inner city motorways:
NB I lived in the centre of Edinburgh for over 30 years before moving across to Fife and commuting in by train - which is generally a pretty pleasant experience.
Edit: I very rarely drive into Edinburgh - its generally a nightmare.
I live in a major EU city and even though they really try hard to make driving unbearable, it's still the best option in many cases. And you don't have any other option if you're going to a less major town nearby - even with worlds' best public transport infrastructure, it's still not good enough. Makes me very sceptical about mass transit.
I don't know about Paris, Barcelona etc, but Berlin has 1.4m private cars for 3.6m people living in roughly 2m households, clearly people aren't giving up their cars just because you can walk to the corner store.
I get that he does not call out your exact favorites in there but the last few paragraphs talk quite a bit about the potential for energy demand going down for reasons that could be extended or even include yours.
Also I would say passive solar design is only one part (and seemingly becoming less important) of Passivhaus way of building. Why not include all energy efficiency improvements?
Let’s not forget how incredibly relatively efficient Otto and Diesel engines are. Doing the same work with actual horse or ox power would produce considerably greater emissions.
> People think you can’t throw GPUs at solving an energy shock but in the medium term you really can if those GPUs are used by civil and chemical engineers and not to mine shitcoins.
I suspect 1 is usually missing because the obvious conclusion is that excess (and increasing) production capacities will mean people have more choices regarding their lifestyles. If you want walkable, go for it!
I think this writing needs a bit more organization - it reads like a stream-of-consciousness flow from the author, and while that's okay for literature, for complex energy issues it's hard to parse.
If the issue is the European energy market over the next six months or so, then at least quantify all the possible inputs more systematically. There's LNG tankers coming from the USA, there's whatever Eastern European pipeline capacity, there's Middle East and North Africa production of crude oil, there's the issue of whether crude oil is being imported to be refined, or refined products, etc. France's nuclear output potential is uncertain at best over the next six months. In addition, a rough calculation of the total input of wind and solar over the next six months would also be part of the picture.
Jumping from there into lithium battery production for vehicles doesn't make much sense (and note there are many other storage technologies for feeding solar/wind into the grid in a controlled steady manner that don't have the small volume footpring that lithium provides).
"I have been reading a lot of thinkpieces by (non-technical, political) people who 1) don't understand the difference between a stock and a flow, so equate a billion dollars spent on making lithium batteries (which last 20 years) with a billion dollars spent on pumping oil, which lasts days[1]; and 2) don't understand the trends in PV/wind/battery prices and think that we are doomed to expensive energy forever, rather than the likely situation of imminent massive electricity overproduction."
"Those people are wrong, and extrapolating from Europe's gas shortage to a global crisis is wrong even in the short term."
-----
1. We saw a lot of this stock/flow confusion (or capital/consumable confusion) with Falcon 9 reusability. Lots of people thought space companies were all about rockets: they didn't understand that those companies don't sell rockets; they sell launches to orbit. Some people still don't get this.
"
Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh. No recycling, no tech improvement, full market penetration, no savings from autonomous vehicles or the like and it is 3.8 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - market price assuming today’s lithium price of $60k works out to $230bn, or the dollar equivalent of 23 days of global oil consumption. Assume more normal lithium pricing of $20,000 and you get 8 days of current run rate oil consumption for a year’s worth of lithium vehicles at 100% market penetration. This is existential for commodity trading houses longer term: they can sell more lithium, copper and nickel but the core businesses they are in are big, lucrative and going to shrink and there is no certainty that lithium is not going to disappear into vertically integrated supply chains that do not need freewheeling intermediaries or “financialized capital”.
[...]
This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is the latest from the Sadoway lab - if we are going to use primarily sulphur and aluminium for batteries they will be laughably cheap. A tried and tested way to make money in materials science is to “do it better, with more available materials and less energy” - this is all three if commercialized. Over the last few years cobalt demand estimates have been crushed by developments in cathode chemistry due to cost and performance improvements in simpler chemistries - I am sceptical that this is the last time that today’s “unobtainium” becomes tomorrows chopped liver. Maybe new nuclear works, even if at low levels of total energy provided simply for stability and security reasons? Perhaps we can do a lot more pumped hydro than we thought? All the while the solar wafers get thinner and more efficient and use less materials…. the preponderance for everyone now calling for longer term structural energy inflation when papers like this are coming from Oxford which take account of these dynamics seems deeply unwise if you are doing anything but playing quarterly revisions.
"
> This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos?
This is a key point.
There are several chemistries, at least, that are near competitive in various applications with lithium despite being manufactured in much smaller quantities and so being much earlier in their learning curves. Off the top of my head:-
Vanadium redox flow - been around since the 1980s at least as an idea, now being realised by various people.
Ambri's molten calcium salt batteries.
PolyJoule's organic polymer-based batteries (based on chains of carbon atoms as the "ion").
CATL's sodium-ion batteries.
Iron-air, aluminum air, aluminum sulfur, lithium metal, sodium metal, various alloys.
The point is that sticking with lithium is the worst case. It only happens if all the alternatives fail, despite them all being in commercial use today. It's all upside, with a known and mild downside. By which I mean that batteries can only get cheaper, either very quickly, or only quickly.
I found this quoted passage quite interesting too.
> An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table.
One thing I'm not sure about -- do we actually have enough lithium to sustain ~ the current price at much higher consumption levels?
We have colossal known amounts of lithium available as deposits [1], plus many orders of magnitude more in seawater, which likely could be harvested along with its desalination.
Also, lithium, like most alkaline metals, is pretty easy to extract and recycle. Batteries are not yet built for easy recycling though [2]; I can expect this to change as the scale grows.
So it sounds to me like we're relying on recycling or some major new discoveries to actually be able to sustain the current prices used for that estimate (or of course new battery chemistries). I really don't have a feel for how fast new deposits are discovered; I'd be interested to know how fast new reserves of oil were being discovered prior to peak oil.
With current technologies, extraction from seawater is definitely uneconomical. This is because nobody invested in improving the process.
Compare the efficuency of producing gasoline in 1900 and in 1930. Same with solar panels in 1990 and 2020. Demand-driven research repeatedly demonstrated driving costs down a couple orders of magnitude.
Recycling is already a key focus, as batteries are very mineral rich, and at scale much cheaper to refine locally than to mine & import with long supply chains.
For those that doubt it's possible to collect spent batteries; recycling rates for lead acid car batteries is already 99%. They virtually never end up in landfills.
Lithium abundance in battery waste is probably higher than in natural deposits. I doubt that huge landfills of battery waste will exist for very long as Lithium demand continues to soar.
I strongly suspect you might be disappointed. Battery collection and recycling - even as “raw ore” - should be easily profitable with plenty of motivated parties eventually. In the meantime, redwood materials will probably make quite a bit of money.
The current high price of lithium carbonate (an input into batteries) is due to a shortage of lithium refining capacity, not crude lithium mining capacity or of resource available.
Good to know. Looks like about the same capacity per mol too. Looking up production, 15GWh/yr before hitting a substantial portion of current production is nothing to sniff at, but isn't really a global solution so scratch that of the list of hopefuls.
There's still SIB, AlS, LiS (4x the capacity per mol of lithium), Fe-air and Al-air
Please break up your thesis into paragraphs, its quite hard to read en masse.
You might like to qualify your stats - eg annual vehicle sales are 90M - where? worldwide or US or lol. 50kWh for a car battery? Where did that come from?
Please slow down a bit and bring us outsiders in on your vision for energy usage.
> This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people–every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing–was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;–this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.
- H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914), speaking of the consequences of the coming availability of limitless energy production.
This book was about 100 years ahead of its time, in my opinion. It predicted the world wars, atomic weapons, and cheap clean energy would all arrive at once, in about 1950. It even has an insightful passage on gender identity, and one of the villains is clearly based on Putin.
I found it to be difficult to follow. My assumption was that the intended audience was for people who are much more familiar with these things than myself, who wouldn't need (or want) expanded context.
Yep, you need quite a bit of background knowledge, imho. And it's poor writing--just "notes to self".
If you have time look at the charts in the linked paper, "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition"[1]. The "experts"--the International Energy Agency IEA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories NREL, etc.--are getting things badly wrong, because of the limitations of their modelling software.
I see this as a good example of the results of normalcy bias[1]. Europe hasn't even finished cutting itself off from Russian energy imports. German industrial infrastructure is centered around massive quantities of cheap natural gas. It is used as chemical feedstock for a number of products. The higher prices of LNG supplies from further and more costly suppliers will carry through making their products far less competitive.
The supply shock has occurred. What's happening now is a process of adaptation, which will go on for months, if not years. Higher costs will certainly see changes in industry. But I fail to see how this article exhibits normalcy bias
The supply shock is still in progress. Unless a miracle occurs Russian oil which is still flowing overland to Europe will be cut soon by someone, there's a lot of people with motives.
At some point, maybe ten or twenty years from now, we're going to have a lot of bankrupt companies around the hydrocarbon economy. Everything from gas stations to oil rigs is going to have non-trivial costs to decommission. The sooner we understand this and plan for it with specialized funds[0] that can handle it the better. Right now we're in the established candle makers versus upstart electric bulb manufacturers part of the story. The difference for us is the sheer scale of this transition. We already have petrol stations in Canada that are run at a yearly loss because the estimated costs of disposing of the surrounding soil are high enough that it's cheaper in net value accounting terms to lose money year by year.
[0] I imagine something like an escrow style fund where payments into the fund are paid back with interest after a predefined period of time if there is no cleanup from the entity or its subsidiaries, including subsidiaries that have been sold off to new owners. That way it aligns incentives and rewards good actors that take preventative steps to ensure less costly decommission.
One of the moonshot ideas I'd love to advance in my lifetime is just a real estate investment fund that buys up contaminated properties like said gas station, rehabilitates them slowly using inexpensive methods like bioremediation, and rolls sales of cleaned land into more contaminated properties. The cost to lock up that much capital for that long tied to that much liability would be significant of course, but starting an endowment it would be a huge public benefit that, eventually, could pay for its own operations.
Interesting, I'm Canadian so I hadn't known about that. It looks like the Superfund uses traditional (expensive) remediation methods, but there are probably a lot of similarities to what I imagine.
Interesting to see the commodity traders take on this, freaking out about a boring, predictable energy supply system not needing them as middle men.
> An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table.
Tragic that it took a war to accelerate the right thing, but better than people using the chaos to do their usual disaster capitalist thing, like the UK tried and surprisingly had to retract.
This is no better than the belief in rain deities that used to be widespread in more traditional societies. No, "machine learning engineers" won't magically make (and especially transport and store) energy out of nothing. We've taken this "de-materialisation" thing to the next level, to our detriment. Not everything can be fixed and even less created with the use of software.
He is simply referring to the fact that if you can predict either the weather or power demand better than others you will have an advantage in power markets.
> If this can continue along with the current weather forecast this winter does not look that bad and gas prices should move towards a stable level albeit materially higher than before the Ukraine invasion, likely around 100 euro for TTF
The average price before all this inflation took off was of about 15 euros for TTF. When, last October, the price had reached 130 euros for TTF (meaning the current level), the EU was all up in arms against the "speculators" [1]. All this to say that even a 100 euro per TTF price won't do any good in the medium to long term for most of the European industry, meaning they'll have to go bust.
As long as global governments are comitted to consumer capitalism there is now doubt that for the richest countries energy abundance will not be a problem. The question is at what long term ecological cost that energy abundance will come.
Certainly. If the biosphere cannot stand in the way of economic progress in a free society, what chance does it stand when stacked against the high moral ambition of lifting all of humanity out of poverty at the behest of a totalitarian state.
In the end, the Soviet Union intended to develop it's own consumer capitalism, albeit heavily mediated through the state. You can see late Soviet propaganda which attempts to entice the public's support through pictures of families in the newest apartment projects with TVs and cozy new clothing.
Perhaps not, but since nobody has ever tried something else on a large scale, and there seems to be an almost taboo on speculating on those forms of society due to accusations of Utopianism.... what are we left with?
I, for one, am not willing to support a revolution without a plan for the day after. It may be an OK thing to be an anti-capitalist, but if one defines desired outcomes only in terms of what not to be, it's pretty damn uninspired.
Revolution isn't the mass uprising of violence. That only happens at the end when the existing system initiates violence.
Revolution is building and implementing the stuff that happens afterwards. It's building parallel power structures and systems that aren't part of the current one. Things like mutual aid networks and unions (real unions, not controlled opposition).
A non-capitalist revolution looks like the Zapatistas or Rojava, not like larping the red army killing all the socialists. They generally get shut down by external violence followed by the people who enacted the violence saying "see! It ddn't work!".
Another place to look is the formation of fascist states. Night of the long knives is not what made the nazi state, nor was Trump's failed insurrection what will lead the US the rest of the way into fascism. The actual work is the last ten years of undermining the education system with things like praeger U.
> Revolution is building and implementing the stuff that happens afterwards.
That's not a definition of revolution that I have ever heard a person use, or come close to capturing what anybody who I have heard advocate revolution speaks of, whether that's in historical text or contemporary discussion.
It's exceptionally rare that a revolution is about building the new system, it's actually about shifting the power structure.
But I want a solid description of what sort of democratic control could replace the economic system of capitalism, by building it. Until then, incrementally changing but by bit seems like the only feasible way to discover better systems.
> It's exceptionally rare that a revolution is about building the new system, it's actually about shifting the power structure.
So it's not about shifting the power structure, it's about shifting the power structure? You can't shift power onto a structure if that structure doesn't exist.
> But I want a solid description of what sort of democratic control could replace the economic system of capitalism, by building it. Until then, incrementally changing but by bit seems like the only feasible way to discover better systems.
The things that were democratic and non-capitalist that we've already had and are losing.
Unions, (functioning non-capital-serving) universities, well managed utilities, co-ops, cohesive communities, public blue-sky science institutions, public mass transit, collective healthcare, mutual aid networks, a functioning commons, libraries, public education.
Moreover, the important bit is not using every bit of economic, military, propaganda, and espionage power available to destroy the more radical experiments that people try in various parts of the world, and then using your own warcrimes as some kind of gotchya against the systems they're trying.
There's an absolutely massive difference between the power structure that takes hold in a revolution and the rest of the system that comes afterwards, and that's the entire problem with so many of them.
And that other part of the system is the whole thing that needs to be explained.
Absolute bullshit. Not that communist countries were particularly environmentalist. But the US has mastered the art of offloading negative externalities to the third world while pretending to care about the environment. On the whole, the US is probably the most disastrous nation state to ever exist in terms of environmental damage.
There is a main problem, IMHO.
The more energy we consume, the more heath we transfer to the environment.
After greenhouse gases (like COx and NOx), that's a huge underestimated problem.
So, producing more electricity will in the end lead to more waste heath going to the environment (mainly the atmosphere and the sea).
Better plan would be to consume less and better. Aw, but then we have the industry which wants exactly the other way around...
1. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.
2. Passive solar design.
We have created a world highly dependent on various energy inputs. It has gone a long way towards killing off walking, cycling and vernacular architecture (where passive solar is a historic default).
Those technologies still exist. They can be brought back into more mainstream use.