There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.
Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).
We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.
That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.
And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.
> That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit.
We should limit it's use to making medicines and materials instead of burning it to heat our homes and propel our cars.
Not only does the latter consume a lot more fossil fuels, it does so by dumping a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere. Plastics consume 14% of global petroleum production today [1].
We could ban all the "disposable, toxic plastic shit" tomorrow (and I agree that we should find ways to create a less disposable culture) and we would still have a huge CO2 problem caused by fossil fuel powered space heating, transportation and electricity production.
There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.
Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).
We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.
That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.
And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.
Apologies for going full doomer on y'all. https://pics.onsizzle.com/oh-i-made-myself-sad-me-irl-242092...