Robin studies climate change.
Robin
Karma: 259
By my accounts, you have implicitly agreed that all of 1-6 used to be issues, but 2-4 are currently not issues and 5 now needs the phrase “negative equity” deleted. I’m still making mana by reading the news, so don’t see that you’ve halved that claim. You’re right that whalebait is less profitable, and I now need to actually search for free mana to find the free mana markets. The fact that I can still do this and then throw all my savings into it means that we should expect exponential growth of mana at some risk-free rate (depending on the saturation of these markets), which is then the comparison point for determining investment skill. In practice there are most likely better things to do with it, and also I can’t be bothered.
I recognise the benefit of inflation as a good thing in countering historic wealth inequality, and will remark that it’s effectively a wealth tax. It unfortunately coincided with the other changes which make it harder and less rewarding to donate and worsening the time-value problem, triggering my general disengagement with the site. I agree that loans never fixed this problem, but they mitigated it partially.
The difference between this and Metaculus sock puppets is that there’s no reward for making them there. The virtual currencies can’t be translated into real-world gain, and only one “reward” depends on other people, so making bad predictions with your sock puppets doesn’t make you look that much better if people look at multiple metrics. Similarly, by requiring currency to express a belief, Manifold structurally limits engagement on questions with no positive resolution possibility—it’s cost-free to predict extinction on Metaculus, but on Manifold, even with perfect foresight (or the guarantee that the market will be NAd later) you still sacrifice the time value of your mana to warn people of a risk. This problem is unique to prediction markets. They make it costly (but potentially remunerated) to express your beliefs.
The other problem unique to adversarial prediction grading is that collaboration is disincentivised. Currently, because mana isn’t that valuable, the comments section is full of people exchanging information for social kudos. But when the market becomes financially lucrative people stop doing this—the comments on polymarket are basically pure spam. This is one of the reasons why I find the idea that Manifold should become more financialised very unwise. It’s not clear that the collaborative factor is smaller than the professionalisation factor for net predictive power (as indicated by the fact that polymarket doesn’t have that good a calibration). To make money on these things, you don’t need to beat a superforecasting team (the thing that actually beats all of these statistical aggregation methods, least we forget), you need to beat the individual whose salary the prize can support.
I don’t believe the original donation has been redistributed and donations are now curtailed by the pivot, so I imagine it will last a while longer. I know the founders believe donations will eventually come from mana purchases (or more venture capital), I’m just skeptical.
Thanks for your considered comments! I agree that Metaculus should make its best prediction more available. I also attach low importance to the self-reported Brier scores, though Manifold already excludes a tail of low-traded questions when reporting, so that’s not really a good explanation for the discrepancy.
To be clear, the paper specifies that *algorithmic adjustments* of polls out-perform markets, not that the means of polls are better than the means of markets (in line with the differences between the two Metaculus predictions). If you don’t adjust, they’re worse, as expected and seen in the Metaculus calibration data. This conclusion is clearly written in the abstract, and they didn’t try very complicated algorithms to combine estimates.
I agree (and mentioned) that recent changes alleviate some of these points. I don’t think it cures them as thoroughly as you indicate though. Firstly, the pivot didn’t retroactively apply these changes, so people who successfully asked engaging questions or caught whalebait still have huge mana supplies. If they’re not limited by engagement time, people with any positive predictive power can exponentially grow the cash injection, and the profit will naturally then be laundered into conventional markets. In practice, I don’t think top whales are exponentially growing their income most of the time—growth usually seems pretty linear, probably due to the difficulty of finding appropriate markets. But if you wanted to prove that good whalebait hunters are good predictors, you will need to demonstrate that they get a good rate of return on their investment, not merely that they have also derived M from other sources.
People can no longer go into negative equity, though you can still create accounts and transfer the M600 or make risky bets, reducing but not fixing the issue.
I just went on the site and found free mana for day-old news within the top 10 links. Ironically the pivot/transaction taxes means that there’s less incentive for people with limited M to pick up these pennies, so they’re left out for longer and mainly benefit whales. There are mechanisms to stop news-based trading (e.g. you could retroactively reverse post-news transactions) but they will create negative equity problems again.
I am generally skeptical that some of the changes made during the pivot will remain in the long term, as it seems like the number of users has trending downwards since it happened, and changes have broken some other things. Most noteworthily, there is now no force mitigating the time value of money effects, so we do not expect the market value of long-term markets to equal the expectation of that market even under ideal circumstances. Also, the transaction taxes are large, which creates market inefficiencies, lowering the precision of the market (because it’s not worth correcting a market error unless it’s wrong by a larger margin now). These problems are ones that neoliberal economists ought be aware of though, so I imagine there are plans to mitigate them.
The idea that real money improves performance is another of these neoliberal assumptions with limited evidence. There are a range of papers on this issue that come to different answers as to what, if any, conditions exist for it to be true.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1019678042000245254
https://www.electronicmarkets.org/fileadmin/user_upload/doc/Issues/Volume_16/Issue_01/V16I1_Statistical_Tests_of_Real-Money_versus_Play-Money_Prediction_Markets.pdf
https://ubplj.org/index.php/jpm/article/view/441
https://www.ubplj.org/index.php/jpm/article/view/479
It is almost certainly not true for extinction risk factors, which is a substantial EA interest for prediction-making. It could be true that there is some threshold beyond which money becomes strongly influential, but for instance, Metaculus informally finds running competitions for $1000s to harm engagement in questions.
I think you misunderstood the counterfactuality point. The counterfactuality issue of the charity program is that the EA orgs could just have given them to the charities they normally do, without putting them into Manifold bank accounts in the meantime and waiting for people to choose which ones to give to. Allowing people to take the money out as dollars is irrelevant, and just delays things more.
I’m a bit confused by this discussion, since I haven’t in any way suggested banning people from using the site. That’s a completely separate issue from managing the balance of ideologies behind the site design. As it happens, Manifold liberally bans people but mostly because they manipulate markets via bots/puppets, troll, or are abusive: this is required for a balanced markets and good community spirit, and seems a reasonable balance.
I strongly encourage people to discuss manifest elsewhere—as stated above, I didn’t go and only comment on it to illustrate the lack of thought-diversity in the site design.
The problems I outline are all caused by the fact that Manifold requires that all value be denominated in a fungible and impersonal currency* that relates probabilities to rewards, and assumes that market forces will resolve irregularities in the distribution of this currency. This assumption is what I am criticising and is a reasonable definition of neoliberal. I neither assert nor believe that bigots participating in the market make it worse (as long as they are diverse bigots who aren’t publicly abusive), I am criticising the lack of thought diversity in the design of the market.
*Yes, I know it has two currencies now which are hard to trade between one direction, but they’re not used in systematically different ways within the site. Some of these criticisms could be alleviated if, say, personal markets produced a currency that can’t be spent on political markets.
Thanks for engaging positively! You’re correct about the crux—if the resulting prediction market worked really well, the technical complains wouldn’t matter. But the number of predictions is much less important to me than their trustworthiness and the precision of specifying exactly what is being predicted. Being well-calibrated is good, but does not necessarily indicate good precision (i.e. a good Brier score), and that calibration.city is quite misleading in presenting the orders of magnitude more questions on manifold as a larger dot, rather than using dot size to indicate uncertainty bounds in the calibration.
It’s not true that markets at any scale produce the most accurate forecasts. There’s extensive literature showing that long-term prediction markets need to worry about the time-value of money and risk aversion influencing the market valuation. Manifold’s old loan system helped alleviate the time-value problem but gave you a negative equity problem. I don’t see this time value effect in your calibration data, but I suspect that’s dominated by short-term markets. Because market participation is strongly affected by liquidity, smaller markets don’t have incentives for people to get involved in them unless they’re very wrong. Thus getting markets to scale up when they’re not intrinsically controversial and therefore interesting is a substantial problem. The incentives to make accurate predictions can just be prizes for accurate individual predictions which can be aggregated into a site prediction by any other mechanism. The key feature of a market mechanism for prediction aggregation is that the reward must be tied to the probability of the event, and must be blind to who is providing the money. There’s no reason to believe either of these are useful constraints, and I don’t believe they’re optimal.
I note that many accounts are still in negative equity, and that a few such accounts that primarily generated their wealth by betting on weird metamarkets substantially influence the price of AI extinction risk markets. The number and variety of markets is therefore potentially punitive to the accuracy of predictions, particularly given the power-law rewards to market participation. While I refer to negative equity, the fact that we can still create puppets and transfer their $200 to another user (directly or via bad bets) means the problem persists to a smaller extent without anyone’s account going negative.
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
Lovely writeup! Just to flag that a handful of others refused to work on the Manhattan project in the first place, including Lise Meitner and Franco Rasetti.