Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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Absolutely none of that is true.

The UK has the highest energy prices of any country in Europe and - not coincidentally - its energy companies make the highest profits.

The UK could have promoted renewables, and did for a while. But the current government - like you - is actively hostile to decentralised solutions that work, and prefers to promote corporate choke points over energy supply that have put the entire population at risk of fuel poverty.

It's been the same story across most of the privatised industries. The concept of the common good has been replaced with an oligarchic dystopia in which a few corrupt winners shake down everyone else.

The root cause is neoliberal dogma, which has been aggressively promoted to the population since the 1970s. It was sold as "freedom". But it's only ever been used to justify increasingly extreme economic apartheid and incredibly poor strategic planning.

The UK is not a poor country. It's not even an energy poor country. But it's on course to having the poorest working population in Europe.

That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.

> It's not even an energy poor country.

Looking at the tabulated data [0], in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure). In fact, on a per-capita basis the UK is neck-and-neck with China. Nearly, actually it is slightly behind.

It looks a lot like an energy poor country.

> That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.

I'm not suggesting that. I assume it was decades of policy where people were asking "how do we kill off our cheapest source of energy", consistent with other western states. The UK - like everyone else - should have been focusing on how to secure cheap fossil fuels, how to bring down the cost of nuclear energy and loosening the regulatory state to accept that energy is needed despite NIMBYism. If the market says wind and solar are cheap then build those too, but only if they are cheap enough to make stand-alone economic sense.

Instead I suspect policy attempted to achieve an unachievable level of environmental non-interventionism and look like they are paying the price.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

POSTSCRIPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production... - mission success! Fossil fuels being phased out without a ready replacement. A country becoming energy poor in one graph. Of course there'll be some political tension with these sort of fundamentals.

> in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure)...

> It looks a lot like an energy poor country.

I'm not sure that follows. Couldn't you also say "it looks a lot like an energy efficient country"?

The Core i7 in my laptop uses a fraction of the energy of the Pentium III in a desktop a couple of decades ago, but I certainly don't want to go back to the P3 today.

Do you reckon you have reduced your energy substantially since the 2000s? With no lifestyle compromises? A 25% drop is a lot more than a Pentium.

They're poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#History covers most of the actual argument (and evidence) on why energy efficiency doesn't work that way. In an energy-rich environment the efficiency gains would go in to charging phones and tablets, or running extra cores and graphics cards. Or using electric vehicles. Something. Consumption wouldn't be dropping.

Personally, yes -- I have significantly smaller gas and electric bills despite being in a larger house in a colder climate as a result of better construction and insulation and more energy-efficient appliances. I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.

I'm not claiming this is the case generally across the UK -- I'm in the US and don't know the situation there. Just that it doesn't automatically follow that "I'm using less energy" necessarily equates to "less energy is available for me to use".

Heh, ouch. Hopefully that is a lesson to me in phrase my questions more carefully.

However, I don't think that is quite enough to show that Jevons' paradox has been avoided - you'll find that with the savings from paying less for heating and your car you have a bit more money left over - what happened to it? Because it represents the energy that was freed up. It isn't enough to say "Well I spent less energy on heating and petrol so total energy consumption went down". Maybe you consumed the energy as a capital good, or maybe it just got shunted to someone else to use.

It is really difficult to convince an economy to use less energy without some sort of legal or physical barrier. We'll find that you haven't actually caused a reduction in energy overall once the dust settles - because you haven't done anything to reduce the amount of energy production so it isn't obvious why it would have dropped.

The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on.

Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offenders (uninsulated houses) the raw drop in energy consumption is such that even if everybody starts leaving their lights on all the time, usage will still drop.

Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.

In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.

It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (<narrator: it wasn't a coincidence>), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Oil_Production.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I read GP as saying that energy usage will always meet whatever capacity you can generate. I don't think that's true: if the economic return from energy usage doesn't cover the cost of producing the energy itself, then production will fall.

I also don't think the UK's role as a fossil fuel exporter/producer is relevant at all. The UK was essentially de-industrialized in the 80's for political reasons, and the energy usage is inefficient, also for political reasons. Many countries have never been fossil fuel exporters, and do not have the UK's sky high energy costs.

The biggest single cause of waste (and thus high prices) in the UK is uninsulated homes. This is caused by a lack of sensible building codes, which in turn is caused by a lack of sensible politics.

> . I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.

That's not an efficiency gain though, which is to his point.

This is one point out of many in their post.

I want to say - I did consider that as a counterargument but it is too weak. Moving closer to where your daily tasks take place is a reasonable way to make a lifestyle more energy efficient. It isn't necessarily a step down (why should we want to spend time in cars anyway?). It is potentially scaleable too, there are lots of examples of cities where people get packed in very tightly.

The issue is more that, while fader has demonstrated that they use less energy for heating and transport, they haven't actually demonstrated that they use less energy - what happened to the energy not going to those highlighted examples?

The key observation behind Jevons' paradox is that there is no reason for the aggregate energy production to go down just because some way of using energy gets more efficient. Since the payoff for the same amount of energy is higher, there is no economic incentive to produce less. Quite the opposite. Nothing in this example sits in contradiction to that, so there isn't a need to try and poke holes in a reasonable example of someone making their personal life more energy efficient to make the basic argument work. Plus there is the obvious practical evidence that economies only use less energy when there is an energy shortage, it is nigh impossible to find counterexamples that end well. The UK polity isn't acting like they have abundant free energy to play with.

Double or triple glazing, insulation, mandatory energy efficient building codes, fuel efficiency standards, energy efficient light bulbs.... 25% reduction is certainly plausible. I'm surprised it isn't more, but I guess some industries remain high consumers. The lifestyle compromise is more expensive buildings, which hurts at least in the short term.

The "neoliberal dogma" has made America the most prosperous country in the world. Your thesis doesn't compute.

Specifically it has made a small group of US citizens extremely rich.

As a country, looking at all citizens, the US isn't exactly a stellar example of wealth distribution, median outcomes, education, or health delivery.

except it really hasn't. America was dominant after WW2 and has mostly been costing downhill since. in the past 2 decades inequality has increased, life expectancy is stagnant, obesity is up, cost of healthcare and education is up. public transit is worse than it was in the 1950s. it's pretty hard too find a metric on which the US is doing better on than Europe at this point

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