Robin studies climate change.
Robin
Karma: 207
More grants for community destruction
Good analogy. Note that environmental statements made by oil companies cannot be trusted even for a few years when expected profits increase, even when costly actions and investment patterns appear to back them up temporarily. E.g.
https://www.ft.com/content/b5b21c66-92de-45c0-9621-152aa335d48c‘BPs chief executive Bernard Looney defended its latest reversal, stating that “The conversation three or four years ago was somewhat singular around cleaner energy, lower-carbon energy. Today, there is much more conversation about energy security, energy affordability.”’
Do current person-affecting ethicists become longtermist if we achieve negligible senescence? Will virtue-ethicists too if we can predict how their virtue will develop over time? Do development economists become longtermists if we develop Foundation-style Psychohistory? We don’t have a singular term for “not a virtue ethicist” other than “non-virtue ethicist” and there’s no commonality amongst nonlongtermists other than being the out-group to longtermists.
Neartermist = explicitly sets a high effective discount rate (either due to uncertainty or a pure rate of time preference) should not include non-consequentialists or people with types of person-affecting views resulting in a low concern for future generations.
On your new document: I think I generally nod along to the peak oil and efficiency stuff. The renewables section is unconvincing, as you might imagine from our discussion above. You are right that there are a bunch of problems with IAMs making simplifications, but you don’t demonstrate that any of the factors they are missing would seriously change the results of them. It’s good to see that some of your arguments have grown more nuanced, but it also makes reviewing it more complicated and I don’t really have the time to debug the report in detail. I’m somewhat (pleasantly?) surprised that at the end of this all you’re suggesting that energy depletion might be good for reducing extinction risk though, I don’t know to what extent that flips the whole of this conversation—maybe you are actually the optimistic one!
These studies show that mineral requirements for clean energy grow rapidly. But they don’t show that the requirements are actually that high in most cases, as they state the ratios “for energy technology”. Currently we don’t use a lot of minerals in energy provision, so a quadrupling of that amount sounds dramatic but doesn’t represent a particularly large global consumption increase. Quote from the IEA: “There is no shortage of resources. Economically viable reserves have been
growing despite continued production growth… However, declining ore quality poses multiple challenges for extraction and
processing costs, emissions and waste volumes.” So the problem is still one of energy, rather than actual availability, which is why power is more important than minerals. So really the minerals question is still a renewables question.Of the minerals shown here to require more than 100% of their current levels in 2050, only lithium would not be fairly easy to replace or produce for a small efficiency penalty (graphite is just carbon, indium is used in solar cells but can be replaced with graphene https://www.azonano.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=3942, cobalt & vanadium are used in batteries and and all have known substitutions). There’s some good stuff in this twitter thread, although it doesn’t have citations for everything it needs.
The historic examples you give are of the resource curse; societies becoming dependent on extracting commodities. I’m looking for examples of societies falling because they can’t buy commodities. E.g. I might have expected the increase in guano price to have created a food shortage and thus civilisational collapse, but as far as I know we didn’t see that; similarly, the rise in fertiliser prices you mention don’t seem to have had a rise in fascism so far—indeed, the elections so far since the invasion started have gone better for the left than might be expected.
I reiterate that debt economics aren’t my field, but I’m skeptical that they provide a barrier comparable to physics. There is clearly a secular trend towards rising debt, but I think you’re overestimating it; this IMF graph of global debt-to-gdp only grows at 1%/year from 2000-2018.
I feel like the majority of people I know don’t really have personal finance growth as their primary objective in life, and I don’t see how our society does either—it’s almost an accident of economics at this point.
I hope that virtualisation and renewable power means we can happily all bring on the great stagnation!
Yes, that is the “arguably”: do you require agency in your definition of trade, and at what level. There is a mutualistic relationship with the honeybee hives that produce honey and pollinate well, hence their levels are rising during generally declining numbers of other bees. Similarly, we have traded with the genomes of domestic animals, increasing their number, even if the individuals that hold the genes have a worse life because of this trade. There are several stages and timescales to these interactions. The bees trade labor for nectar with the flowers, but the flowers can only establish the deal over evolutionary timescales and rely on bees to have agency in a given lifetime. Similarly we trade our labor and syrup for the bee’s honey, but their only alternative is to swarm off/attack and probably the hive will. In my view an exploitative exchange is still a trade.
Agree. We don’t trade with ants but we do trade with monkeys, both in experiments https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=675503 and when tourists have things stolen https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/monkeys-bali-swipe-tourists-belongings-and-barter-them-snacks-180963485/. It seems to me that communication is all that is really required. Arguably all domestication is a trade that’s become established over evolutionary timeframes. (Domesticated) honey bees are therefore both trading with us and with flowers when they pollinate and produce honey.
I’m sorry your situation has deteriorated from the FTX scandal, that must be very difficult. A lot of people have it much worse than me!
I don’t see this as an argument between “everything will turn out fine” and “things will end badly”, but “things will go badly for very specific reasons to do with materials accessibility” and “materials accessibility is not the limiting factor”. I consider something a lack of imagination where every aspect of the solution exists, but for cost reasons we don’t currently combine them in most supply chains. Entirely electrified car factories already exist https://www.hyundai.news/eu/articles/press-releases/gone-green-hyundais-first-factory-powered-by-100-percent-renewable-energy.html. I haven’t read Alice Friedmann’s book, but her website seems replete with the time-lacking EROI error that we discussed above, as well as an inability to see that our current production chain is not the only way we can go about manufacturing things (for instance, there are plenty of sulfur sources appart from oil, it’s just we currently exploit a byproduct of oil manufacture). I think I’m still waiting for historic examples where a material shortage has resulted in anything more than temporary economic slowdown and protests against corrupt regimes. The gilet jaunes protests are the closest I can think of, which hasn’t come close to civilisation-threatening. Maybe if there were a clearer pipeline from this to fascism.
Coal is a plentiful resource, and in the worst-case energy crunch, would be used as a substitute for oil and gas. We see some of this happening in electricity in Europe at the moment. You can make a near-kerosene product out of coal, which with some lubricating materials should be adaptable for diesel use in extremis https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/04/19/39349/clean-diesel-from-coal/. This would be environmentally devastating and somewhat expensive, but not really more civilisation-threatening than climate change in general. The general point, that models need to account for a huge range of ways we can substitute one material for another, is the fundamental weakness of this argument.
q1) There are an number of studies showing that replacing the a very large fraction of the grid with variable energy is achievable with current technology, some are summarised in this metastudy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00695-4. Notably all of these studies suggest a lower cost than the current wholesale cost of electricity in Europe! The pace at which this can be done is a normal subject for the IAMs that you so distrust, which at least in some models is done before 2050, though it’s very inconsistent—many scenarios aiming for 1.5C that never reach 70% electrification. They usually reach more than 70% renewable though, soon after 2040. I may have mislead you above with my focus on electrification; several areas of society are projected to remain liquid-based (if biofuel/hydrogen) for some time in a lot of IAMs, though I’m personally skeptical about this. I’ve plotted the fraction of energy from renewable sources and the fraction of energy use from electricity in the AR6 database of scenarios classified as C1 (low overshoot of 1.5C) below.
The question normally is whether society will accept the costs of bringing about change at the necessary speed, but since in your scenarios the cost of FFs is much higher than most IAMs assume, the answer is basically “yes, though not through free choice”. The fact that we restrict FF use because of lack of availability rather than a carbon tax shouldn’t make a big difference to the difficulty of decarbonising.q2) Yes, I think a lower rate of growth is likely than in an ideal world without material/oil constraints. But it’s not clear that growth is negative, nor that slower growth, particularly in developed nations, is that bad. Would high resource costs trigger civilizational collapse? Even with higher fuel prices, the declining fraction of wealth spent on food has a ways to go before we reach anything comparable to, say, the 1950s, so I find it hard to see a mechanism for anything dramatic. While energy is used in making food, it’s not the dominant factor, and over long time periods we see the correlation between oil price and food price is not that strong https://ourworldindata.org/food-prices. Economically unfortunate, sure, but not an extinction risk.
Other than specific problems with lithium and copper, it’s not clear to me that we have a problem with total material lack, simply that we don’t recycle enough or make use of agricultural waste. More effort would go towards plastic recycling if the price point of oil were higher. Similarly there is a plentiful supply of plant-food minerals that are currently pumped from rocks to our faeces to the sea.
Backups to provide food in the event of a protracted energy crash is an interesting question. As above, I don’t expect anything like a 1:1 relation from the cost of energy, but in combination with climate variability and geopolitical factors it’s possible to envisage a real crunch on availability. I feel like the solutions are very dependent on how long we want to do this for and what fraction of the world needs to be sustained this way. But the discussion of various forms of permaculture and nutrient-recycling, while interesting, should probably be handled elsewhere (and by people who know more about it than I do). Generally, working on better recycling does seem like an under-utilised EA cause area that would solve a number of these problems, and is probably cheaper to begin sooner rather than later. I don’t think I need to agree with very many of your above points to agree with this as the process is energy-saving and also protects the environment/enables more agriculture by avoiding mining.
You may be glad to note that on several occasions when writing my responses I have had cause to exclaim “he’s less wrong than I thought!” I think this is all anyone can really ask for in an internet argument.
I’ve been quite stressed, for reasons other than lack of materials! How about you?
I’m not particularly impressed by the podcast. It seems to lack any imagination in working out how to decarbonise the construction of renewable energy itself, which is not generally regarded as a fundamental problem (as opposed to being slightly expensive to transition).
I encountered this twitter thread which I think explains better than I did why EROI isn’t that useful: https://mobile.twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1341730308060831744
Exponential energy consumption increase cannot be delivered for long, by any means. But renewable power can easily sustain a doubling of current power consumption.
We have a diesel crunch at the moment in Europe, meaning we are eating into our stockpiles, however all countries still have more than 61 days of consumption or import stockpiled, so considerably more than a week! Some states are less than the 90 days of imports required though. We would see factories shut down due to cost long before we started killing off food transport, so in practice this would last longer.
Agree that the rollout of electric vehicles will be expensive and will take time. But I hope that we will also reduce the number of cars required by carsharing, which autonomous vehicles makes easier. As we transition to renewable power, the prices of fossil fuels stabilises as demand is reduced. This makes greening harder, but diffuses the problem you foresee with food distribution.
5Tb an hour of data doesn’t seem like that much, particularly after Moore’s law kicks in! A fully renewable grid well realistically require some fossil backup for the next few decades while we get hydrogen sorted. However there price of this should also stabilise, as above.
I guess I’m unclear what the lifeboats you suggest are. I agree that on the margin more people should stockpile food, and possibly more in general. I don’t know that it’s true that stockpiling, say, copper or lithium is likely to be a wise investment: probably the market is already aware of the needs for these in the future, and to make an appreciable price signal to mine more would be very expensive. There are government stockpiles of quite a few things in developed nations; while developing nations should also stockpile more I am an ideal world, it’s not clear how high a priority that is compared to tackling current, definite problems.
Yes, I’ve also been busy and I think the conversation is getting hard to follow and delivering diminishing returns. But to address a few points:
I think we are mostly in agreement that these scenarios are both bad and plausible, but disagree about the badness and plausibility. However on the second point, the paper you quote is simply not providing enough evidence of its point. Potentially 40 or so years of constant consumption would pass this test, but you should not assume that consumption of energy or resources is constant per GDP, as it simply hasn’t been in recent history. The growth in energy consumption the last few decades seems to have been linear rather than exponenetial, but forcing it into exponential form gives an average 1.7% average growth this century https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution. Material consumption of, e.g. cement seems to have flatlined recently (as it is mostly done in China), and is also not exponential for any real stretch of time https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844.
I don’t know very much about supply chain disruption, but I definitely don’t feel you’ve demonstrated that they can persist for many years. There’s quite a strong financial incentive to sort them out and most of the disruptions I can think of seem either based on sanctions or to resolve in around a year. I’d be interested to see any historic examples you have. My historic counter-example would be guano, a slowly-renewing natural resource that was required agriculturally and at risk of depletion, but saved by the invention of the Haber process https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-the-western-world-ran-on-guano.While I agree that France would struggle to go renewable all on its own, I am sure it can go renewable without the aid of any single other continent, given the diverse range of ways of building renewables. I don’t really see a situation where Europe would be cut off from all continents even if perhaps a few countries would put up trade barriers. As we see with oil from Russia going to India now, every time you impose a trade barrier, the price of the goods shifts and to tempt other countries to participate in trade.
Analyses of the cost comparison of electric trucks are still crude, but do exist already. The possibly-biased-electric ICCT concludes that in many European cities we may be at price parity (due to existing subsidies) under reasonable assumptions about electricity and diesel prices https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/tco-battery-diesel-delivery-trucks-jun2022.pdf. While battery swapping isn’t yet a thing, it probably will be soon for large trucking firms, which eliminates the charging problem. I don’t understand why the lidar data needs to be stored, most of the work can be done locally and you can overwrite it minute-by-minute, can’t you?
I don’t really know what to think about this banking problem, it feels like it can be treaded as a separate issue to the materials problem in a digital economy though.
I think the result shows the Cherp paper is over-keen to lock in often temporary bottlenecks. This doesn’t mean that growth will never slow, but casts significant doubt on our ability to predict it. It’s worth separating out actual generation (weather-dependent) from capacity with wind, which has still risen by 2.5% for the last two years https://www.statista.com/statistics/421797/tracking-wind-power-in-germany/. That isn’t great but is hardly stagnation! Solar has been doing better and it looks like it will be up more this year https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/01/germany-deployed-3-2-gw-of-pv-in-first-half-of-2022/.
I think the emerging technologies (electric trucks etc) have extremely high (but variable) growth rates because they have such low current penetration. But the combination means that we can’t estimate the long-term trends very well. Cherp’s technique, quite wisely, doesn’t even try.
I fundamentally don’t think that the energy economics of a solarpunk post-scarcity future will necessarily have much in common with pre-agrarian society. We are not primarily talking about the EROI of food production here, which would dominate this consideration.We do indeed agree on your final points. I definitely don’t look towards a business-as-usual future! More work developing other futures is very valuable. I just think it’s important to be clear when you’re discussing a worst-case scenario verses a likely scenario, and to realise that society has a lot of self-repair mechanisms that toy models miss out.
Three scenarios where we do not make a green transition:
Firstly, we are structurally prevented by government forces, for instance, in many countries there is difficulty in obtaining planning permission to get renewables in place, or have perverse tax incentives (gas cheaper than electricity for instance) that make the transition difficult. Both of these are currently happening in the UK, but not enough to resist the pull of renewables completely!
Secondly, energy demand takes off so quickly (perhaps due to AI) that we expand green power without reducing FF, until the sort of problem you indicate occurs.
Third, something disrupts the global supply chain that renewables currently depend on.
However all of these seem likely to be self-limiting because if the situation really got that pressing, you’d assume governments and society would adapt to fix them unless there’s a bad actor or civilizational collapse.International trade between allies does very well in a war though, and even enemies keep trading through many wars. I’m not entirely sure who the enemy is in this case.
Currently true, but the more true it is, the stronger the incentive will be to switch over quickly when oil prices rise. I anticipate a very quick switchover because it looks like the advent of affordable electric trucks will align closely with (and usually combines with) the advent of driverless technology, meaning the two biggest costs of trucking can be slashed simultaneously by changing over
Oh right—yes, this is because production can be freely moved within reason. Basically we’re not yet in the regime where oil is being treated as a scarce resource. We may indeed regret this in centuries to come, though I suspect we’ll find replacements.
The big legislation is the Besel III rules, which have been continuously strengthened since the crash, regulating the fraction of money banks need to hold in different forms. It’s not perfect (some people think the classification of money doesn’t really match the risks) but it’s definitely tighter than it was https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2020-may-supervision-and-regulation-report-banking-system-conditions.htm
There are also lots of stress-tests carried out on institutions to see if they’d collapse in particular circumstances, which should account for inter-departmental ignorance in banks. I haven’t read that book though and can’t comment in detail.There clearly are limits to the extent of renewable deployment, but I’m unconvinced that they have been seen so far. Halstead is inaccurately reading Cherp et al 2021, since he restricts his analyses to only the solar PV data for only the subset of samples that are classified into these three categories. The study analyses 60 countries and fails to classify the majority of them for either solar or onshore wind. In addition to the 5 accelerating PV countries there are 6 different countries accelerating onshore wind. The table remarks that 4 stable onshore wind countries have substantial offshore wind, but does not investigate this in detail.
In criticism of the study itself, the three “poster-child” countries with stalling renewable energy deployment in 2019 all showed a notable deployment in the supposedly stalled renewable energy by 2021. (New Zealand onshore wind: 2.26 → 2.64 TWh; Spain solar 15.1 → 26.8 TWh – an 80% increase in 2 years; Germany solar: 44.9 ->49.0 TWh, OurWorldInData). This happened during COVID, and against the long-term trend of these countries reducing overall electricity usage. When deployment becomes variable, for sociopolitical or megaproject reasons, the sigmoid function assumed in this study only allows for negative temporary deviation from exponential growth and assumes that any deviation is locked in indefinitely. In reality, laws restricting e.g. onshore wind can disappear, returning us to an exponential growth phase.
Yes, I agree there are practical problems with basing society on 1.1 EROI solar cells. A lot of this discussion is really “how can we work out the actual EROI from the quoted EROI only looking at a bit of the system”. Infrastructural costs should definitely be included in these analyses, however I think they’re also quite hard to estimate because you need to know how long your infrastructure will last both from degradation and from being made irrelevant.
Thanks!
Yes, I think our exchange has been fruitful and thought-provoking.
Battery-wise: I think this is why I focus on energy cost variability rather than absolute energy cost, energy may well have a negative cost at some times but very large at others. The analyses of the effects of these are different.
Civilisation requires a large energy surplus, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the EROI specifically needs to be any value above 1. If I change the unit of the solar cell (let’s say EROI 10) to a solar-powered solar cell factory (EROI = 100 because the first 10x is all reinvested) then that same physical system suddenly passes your test. I don’t see what research you were citing here in the first place, but suspect it still suffers this problem.I think both my comments about a war-footing and comments about China are similar: the Chinese government basically does what most governments do during wartime all the time. If it became obvious that the economy required us to do more government-led organisation (which I gather you think it does), I think we would. Climate change can have the same impact as an external enemy in these considerations, and there’s some evidence that it psychologically does act this way.
I think I got what you were trying to say, but I haven’t tended to respond fully to your comments on oil prices because I want to get out of oil in basically all cases, avoiding this problem altogether. As above, I don’t think we are dependent on oil to make the transition (it’s a very expensive form of energy anyway). It strikes me incidentally that your too-low/too-high price analysis won’t hold up to including inflation.
I guess most of these are criticisms are correct statements, it’s just very easy to list effects that models of the global economy don’t have but hard to evaluate which missing factors are really important. I don’t fully understand the objection to the use of price as a medium of scarcity, but it’s also not my field.
The finance system changed tremendously in Europe, the level of regulatory oversight it faces hugely increased and the worst actors were chased out of the field. It doesn’t seem to have had much of a boom since! https://www.statista.com/statistics/871556/uk-financial-sector-gross-value-added-share-of-total-economy/
It’s also just generally a bad idea to generalise from a single historic event to the entire future.Because I come at this from a climate change perspective, my baseline assumption is that we will have to decarbonise everything in about the next two decades anyway, which solves many of these problems. Your angle on this is essentially a side-concern that happens to pull in the same direction There will probably be some cost to this decarbonisation, as you say, but actually not that much to the whole of society. There are even arguments, somewhat related to your points about the scarcity of resources for existing infrastructure combined with the fact that renewable energy is less constrained by this, that the cost of transition is actually negative, as in this study https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X. The first-mover cost on industry is overcome by combining carbon tax with carbon border adjustments, hopefully the EU will impose these both soon and other states will follow. I sincerely believe we can do this transition, starting now!
Getting closer, anyway. Maybe we will have to
We already know how to solve the blackouts problem via dedicated generation (or storage) for high-impact sectors. In a renewable economy, very large amounts of energy are available very cheaply at certain times, so for instance a factory with a 1-day battery that can produce at night before sunny days is able to work nearly as efficiently as they do now. You aren’t actually relocating very much of the economy (only very heavy industry) and this constantly relocates towards incidentally-sunnier countries anyway for labor-cost reasons.
I’m not an economist so I don’t know that it’s pointful to get into a long debate about economics, but it’s pretty clear from how governments can reshape the economy during wartime implies that they have tremendous capacity to restructure the economy when they want to. Your analysis doesn’t make sense to me because green tech is something that makes energy; it’s an energy loan, not an energy expenditure.
Investment in a green transition solves much of the long-term underinvestment problem at the same time, so the historic underinvestment is not really an additive factor.
Good IAMs don’t take GDP as an external input, and the fact that one you cite does is a bad sign. I had not heard of this IAM before (I work around IAMs professionally but don’t code them myself), but it doesn’t seem to understand the basics of the laws of supply and demand, assumes fixed demand and then complains when this can’t be fulfilled. This means it supports your point that GDP is suppressed, but doesn’t qualify by how much. It also assumes, for instance, that it is impossible to increase recycling rates. The possibility of recycling largely solves your point c), since recycling requires no additional land and less energy than we currently spend making plastic—it’s simply that the processing is not financially incentivised by the low cost of oil.
The GTK report isn’t an academic document and doesn’t have an obvious IAM attached.I’m unclear why you jump from cars to plastic. At any rate, only the waste fraction plus the growth in the number of vehicles (or plastic) requires new material, the rest can be recycled. There appears to just be a disagreement between two models over the number of vehicles in existence at the moment, not a modelling discrepancy.
I don’t think its wise to generalise from 2008 to the future of the world, but I also don’t know enough to argue about this.
Factories constantly update and move anyway, following cheap labor, as discussed above. China seems to hope to seriously bulk out its energy grid for renewables in about half a year https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-state-grid-invest-22-bln-ultra-high-voltage-power-lines-report-2022-08-03/
I think we’re getting closer to an agreement. I would be more tempted if your thesis were “energy will become much more expensive at some times of day/year, as will certain minerals, and this will depress GDP compared to naive expectations.” It’s not obvious to me that low energy storage does more than require heavy industry to relocate to more consistent climes and/or stop for a few days each year, which would depress GDP but hardly to the level of existential threat.
I think most of these are economic points about how expensive it is to make the transition, rather than showing it’s impossibile. It certainly won’t be cheap in any individual sector, but as a fraction of the global economy we aren’t necessarily talking very large amounts of investment for these changes, and many governments already have plans and incentives to make this happen. A lot of this analysis feels like you trying to make a new Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) from scratch without writing down equations, and I think the disagreements you have with existing IAMs are not as substantial as you think. Things like land use constraints for biofuels are typically included in good models, as is the inefficiency of hydrogen, e.g. based on IEA values in [1]. You might dispute the numbers but they’re fundamentally reasonable. Land use is a problem if you want to power a large fraction of the world this way, but not if you just want to power a few small sectors like aviation, and provides some defence against renewable variability. The truth is there is no silver bullet for these transitions, but a range of viable portfolios that are hard to calculate without numbers.
I am more techno-optimist than you, and therefore think that we can sustain a mild continuous increase in energy use from only the improvements in the efficiency and affordability of renewable energy (as in the Ren scenario) and this enables a large increase in GDP, if that’s something society wants. I don’t think this is indefinitely required anyway; I don’t think it’s a particular problem for society if GDP grows subexponentially in 50 years time, or even remains constant at a high level for everyone.
I think you would like this paper [2], which makes a similar point regarding energy investment requirements. Although a lot of IAMs don’t include this, for small modular technology like solar cells and wind, it’s not that big an issue (whereas it is for nuclear). This is also why bioenergy is so popular in spite of the low efficiency—no adaptations required to use it. As stated above, I believe the inefficiency of green hydrogen is accounted for in good models.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261922002501#b0170 for hydrogen, https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/institute/departments/activities/land-use-modelling/magpie for land use models
[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaz8060
These are not new technologies—thin film and primarily-organic PV have been commercially available for decades. They don’t out-compete silicon based on price point/efficiency, not unviability [1-2]. The organic films are again very thin, so very little land is required to grow the material to make them (the question would be how many times over a piece of land could produce the feedstock to cover itself in a year, I’m sure it would be tens of times). Similarly, the volume of copper and zinc mined in a year is enough to put a few nanometers around the world, and a few years of that would generate a fair amount of power already (not that I recommend doing this). Also, silicon itself isn’t scarce, just the dopants, which are required in extremely small quantities.
You can already buy electric trucks [3] and smelt iron by hydrogen [4]. Planes (much harder to decarbonise) can already be powered by biofuel [5].
Their properties are less good but if they were much cheaper we would spend more money researching them to make them better. The comparison between manufacture energy requirement and storage energy requirement is irrelevant because the storage happens cyclically more than 100 times once you’ve got 100 batteries you use the to make the 101st. You don’t address iron oxide batteries in your work, nor do you investigate things like compressed CO2. Several of your arguments substitute technological challenge and economic considerations with material ones, most notably your section on hydrogen, which for grid-level storage does not suffer from any of the fundamental-material problems your work otherwise attempts to demonstrate.
While the total energy requirements of the world increased, they increased much more slowly than GDP; this is sufficient to demonstrate decoupling. The decoupling I showed is for global values, so commenting that someone has to produce things somewhere doesn’t pose a problem. For point c., you must be using a very weird measurement of efficiency (do you mean the fraction of GDP spent on oil?). Graphs like this [6] show that the energy required per unit GDP has been declining. The direction of the link between energy consumption and GDP is disputed [7, 8]. The main Giraurd document you cite arguing energy → growth does not appear to be peer-reviewed, and both it and the peer-reviewed Ayres document end their analysis before renewable energy becomes a notable fraction of the total.
Paris-compatible targets are all well low fossil fuel supply except possibly the NEG scenario. They don’t model specific mineral use because they understand that technology on that granular a level changes more quickly than it can be integrated into the models, e.g. the handwringing over the need for cobalt in batteries is getting pretty dated [9].
[1] https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/organic-solar-cell-market-101555
[2] https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/thin-film-solar-cell-market
[3] https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/electric-trucks.html
[4] https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/steel-hydrogen-low-co2-startups/99/i22
[5] https://newatlas.com/aircraft/airbus-a380-biofuel-first-flight/
[6] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-gdp-data.html
[7] https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/IRERE-0121
[8] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-021-00090-x
I think a deeper look at several of these points shows that it’s not as bad as it seems.
1) It is already quite possible to make solar cells and batteries without any particularly rare metals [1], and some solar cells can be constructed either from films with active areas only nanometers thick (meaning only a few million tons are required to coat the world in them) or entirely out of organic components [2]. Similarly, while the most commercially viable batteries at present may involve somewhat scarce metals like lithium, it’s possible to make them out of most substances, including iron, which is the 4th most abundant element on earth, as well as storing energy in compressed air or capturing hydrogen from water. When materials get scarce, technology is directed to solve these problems; there is not a physics-based limit on human energy consumption at anything near our current level.
2) Energy use per person has been falling in many developed nations for some time as GDP per capita rises, and energy use per person globally has not been rising that fast (about 12% over the last 4 decades) [3], whereas GDP per capita at PPP has > doubled. So, assuming that population stagnates as currently predicted and computational advances continue to deliver about as many efficiency savings as they cost in energy, I see no reason to assume an ever-increasing energy requirement. Obviously an AI explosion could unsettle this, but is not inevitable. The flipside of this, as you comment yourself, is that stagnant energy supply places some sort of limit on the development rate of AI in its current architecture, although historically energy requirements for compute have halved every few years, so not necessarily a very strong limit. As compute takes over more of the economy, it’s even possible to argue that we expect the energy requirements of many sectors of it to decrease at this rate.
3) How exactly one transitions to largely renewable (carbon-neutral) future is an extensive area of research, but it is safe to say that there are a huge variety of plausible ways to do this, many of them allowing for moderate growth in total energy use. For instance, here is total energy use under the IPCC IMP emissions scenarios, all constructed by different socioeconomic modellers and but the first two leading to under 2C of warming [4 and figure below].[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ente.201402153
[3]
[4] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_Chapter_03.pdf
Strong agree, and part of this is just that EAs should be more modest about how much their assessments of sector impact out-perform other people’s. In the long term, weird second-order social impacts of interventions matter a lot more than the direct impact. For example, the (disputed) effects of abortion on crime rates https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272721001043?via%3Dihub and female employment/social engagement https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-004-1028-3 may create social spirals that continue long after the medical harm of the pregnancy and therefore considerably bump abortion rights up the virtual list of longtermist goals, but these effects are very hard to assess in simple models.
I respect you immensely for writing this, but some degree of altruism is required for being an effective altruist—not an infinite duty to self-sacrifice, but the understanding that you can be trusted to do so on big things, and costly signs you will do so are helpful. 10% giving is one such costly sign and it’s not required that you do all of them (I also think you overestimate the fraction of EAs who are vegan). However I think the disjunction between wanting the best for the world and wanting to have a high profile by improving the world occurs everywhere; in the fairly plausible world where AI alignment is impossible, your most effective action is probably either not working on AI or being subtly so bad at it that the field suffers, neither of which will win you much status (assuming you can’t prove that alignment is impossible). This is a general instance of the problem outlined here: “I am most motivated by the prospect of creating a radically better world as opposed to securing our current one from catastrophe”. A biased motivation combined with the unilateralist’s curse can easily give your actions negative expected utility but positive expected status-payoff: you don’t lose face if everyone goes extinct. There are lots of plausible real examples of this, like geo-engineering or gain-of-function research. Which way you’d fall on these questions in practice is a much better test of whether you’re “actually EA” than whether you buy cheap things.
On a more institutionally level, it is unhelpful for EA to become associated with narcissism (which in some circles it already is). Since the cost is borne by the movement not the individual we expect misalignment until being EA is harmful to your reputation, so some degree of excluding narcissists with marginally positive expected personal impact is warranted.
For those abroad unfamiliar with quite how unpopular Dominic Cummings is, here’s an article arguing he was the most unpopular man in the country at the time
and here’s a poll from May 2021 showing only 14% of people trusted him on government handling of COVID, by comparison with 34% for the prime minister. https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/iszcru07g6/TheTimes_Coronahandling_Cummings_Results_210520.pdf
This is an incredibly important question. It is also an incredibly dangerous one. There are many real EA whose views on this topic constitute either an X-risk or an S-risk to EAs with only subtly different assessments: people who, given a truly aligned omnipotent AGI would either wipe out the majority of humans or create many lives others view as unhappy. Historically, well-intentioned eugenicists have killed many people who self-identify as having worthwhile lives.
I also think there is a miscalibration in the creation test; many humans instinctively view people similar to them as competition, and either like or dislike the idea of clones of themselves for other reasons. The advantage of the suicide test is that you are centering your judgement on a real person who can express their actual preferences in the moment, rather than a hypothetical case. That seems worth a lot of offset error to me.
This article isn’t an exclusive list of the countries that celebrate it, merely a list of how it’s celebrated in 11 noteworthy nations. It’s also celebrated in Iran, China, Germany…