Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

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When I go by the numbers it looks like there is easily room for enough renewable energy generation for everyone to consume energy services at "Western" rates. But a number of caveats:

Energy production is the easier part. Storage is the harder part. It seems like renewable electricity storage is just now getting to the point of maturity that solar electricity production was 10-15 years ago. [1]

The model Westerner in question is someone more like the median Dane than the median Texan. [2]

Some forms of consumption are going to be limited by constraints other than CO2 emissions from energy. Ruminants emit too much methane for everyone to eat beef like Australians. There are not enough redwood trees for the world's populations to install redwood hot tubs like Californians used to. There is not enough usable space in Luzon for most of the population to have a large detached house even if there were clean energy for all those houses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595698

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/

In the cited statistics, they may be conflating energy production/refining with consumption. In Europe, the Benelux region has much higher consumption then their neighbors. A bit surprising given similar weather, their love for bicycles and well developed train infrastructure. State side, Louisiana has a much higher consumption than rest of the deep South. Perhaps due to the small population and the oil & gas production off of the carcinogenic coast?

Louisiana has a large number of facilities that make chemicals and fuels from natural gas and crude oil. Those facilities dissipate much of the primary energy in the inputs in the course of making refined output products. I think that's where the high per capita figure comes from; it's e.g. energy losses in facilities making ethylene from fossil inputs, not the mere fact of extracting fossil fuels. Since that energy dissipation happens in facilities located within the state of Louisiana, staffed by Louisianans, I think it's fair to include those facilities in the per-capita statistics for Louisiana.

The other popular perspective is that those figures really "belong" more to the end consumer than to the producer. I don't agree, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic.

Pragmatic: it is easier to track what happens in large production facilities than to track the ultimate retail fate of every gallon of gasoline coming from Louisiana refineries. Trying to trace production to millions of consumers instead of monitoring dozens of primary producers is a recipe for getting much less actionable data.

Philosophical: producers are (IMO) more responsible for the efficiency/pollution of production than consumers are. A consumer has no way of telling at the point of sale how efficiently/cleanly the aluminum in a laptop or plastic in a bucket was produced. Primary producers reap the profits and make those process choices about production; it's also producers who should most face the criticism for wasteful or polluting practices.

The problem I have is that the statement "everyone will have the same living standards as a someone in the Texas" leaves out half the picture. If everyone has that living standard then everyone will be as productive as someone living in Texas.

I don't think people appreciate what that means.

This is an interesting notion.

Do you mean to imply that productivity increases when your standard of living does? I'd agree with that (for a definition of productive that isn't so narrowly defined as production of wealth for a private entity like a company.)

If not, we need to deal with the fact that "productivity" doesn't directly correlate with your standard of living, unless your definition of the word is just the rate at which you accumulate capital.

You might enjoy https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/how-much-energy-do...

And on the subject of energy storage: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-...

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