Like the other posters in the thread have concluded. I don't see how you could be correct at all. Everything you've described in terms of energy inefficiency is something that describes suburbia. Cities have large energy requirements but that's due to the number of people there, they don't have high energy requirements per capita.
If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility
Our consumption isn’t about things like turning off lights in your house. In the developed countries every human consumes about 10kW. You can actually graph energy consumption per capita and a quality of life index and they will correlate basically one to one. The bulk of that energy goes to power agricultural machinery that produces the food we eat and the transportation of that food from the mid west states to the coasts. There is little you can do to reduce that consumption because geography doesn’t allow for it. Local farms aren’t much better. They often times use old pickup trucks which are way less efficient than trains to deliver food. Even if you don’t use any power at all in your life, no heat, no lights, no transportation, you still would be in the 7-9kW range as long as you eat food.
This is correct, though paradoxically people who live in cities tend to use more energy in practice, largely due to the larger average wealth in the cities. That said, I (I think like you) believe cities are the solution. We just have to opt out of using our surplus wealth, borne of efficiency, for ecologically destructive purposes.
Well okay, so I'm getting a bit off-topic with the whole "food is inefficient" argument, but if you look at the efficiency of photosynthesis it only harvests about 3%-6% of the light energy hitting the plant. A lot of that energy then goes to growing other parts of the plant that don't contribute to its caloric content (stems, roots, etc., or in the case of fruit, the entire rest of the plant besides the fruit). To get a ballpark idea of the numbers here, even biofuels have been found to be only about 0.3% efficient at converting sunlight to chemical energy, compared to solar panels which can typically harvest about 10% of the incoming sunlight into electrical energy. Plants are just not that efficient in general.
But efficiency of converting sunlight into energy isn't really what this argument is about, since we're more concerned with the CO2 output than the energy efficiency. The efficiency of human muscles factors in though, as it is only around 20%, compared to electric motors and batteries that are over 90% efficient. Regenerative braking is a big win for the electric car too, since it reduces the impact of the car's higher mass a lot. And when you look at the CO2 per calorie emitted by coal (and of course the US grid emissions are much better than this since we use many other better energy sources than coal), you get about 1.1g per calorie for coal compared to about 4.8g per calorie for fruit. So in a carbon emissions sense, food can also be much less efficient than electricity, even when that electricity comes from fossil fuels.
No single one of these factors is enough to tip the scales on its own, and of course the numbers can skew either way depending on what kind of food you eat, what kind of electricity you use, and many other factors. But I don't think the comparison is a totally crazy one.
The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.
Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
I think the sentence you take issue with suffers from poor phrasing while being essentially correct. Its a maladaptive state, which makes it 'wrong' and being energy efficient makes it, well, efficient.
The perspective I get from the article is of decentralized self sufficiency. Being able to harvest methane in their locality, and use that as fuel is quite appealing versus purchasing and installing solar panels or relying on power lines.
I’m not saying your math doesn’t check out; rather, the author is going for a different set pro/cons than just pure “efficiency”.
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.
> Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules.
If my maths is right, that's about 40,000 kcal per person per day, or about 15 times the energy consumption of an average adult.
I'm trying to figure out if that's a lot or not. On the one hand, not: this ratio is not strictly bounded in any way, and the human energy consumption is an arbitrary denominator. Still, a very rough interpretation is to say, we consume daily, on average, the fruit of work of 15 people.
Of course, that is very skewed. I wonder what the ratio looks like for an average American or European - must be much more.
It goes to show what a gilded life we live (on average!!!). Before industrial revolution, all energy basically was muscle power, and it's like for every 1 person alive, we have 15 servants turning the generator for us. I suppose some of this number is literal service providers, fed by food produced by powered agriculture.
Is there a logical upper bound to this number? Is there some energy amount we can't use given sufficient supply? Ultimately, all energy we produce is spent on humans so our energy consumption is a yardstick for human energy needs.
But that's not quite right either; a lot of energy is wasted. I wonder how much of this number is clothes that go straight from factory to landfill, AC left overnight, inefficient engines and energy storage.
I don't really have a point, other than I think this is an interesting fraction to look at.
Yes, it's obvious. There's no way a single person will consume as much energy as the whole country does today. These days, the energy use per capita goes down in developed countries, so the current energy consumption growth is mostly due to poorer places catching up.
>requires vast and increasing amounts of the world's energy
"Vast" is hyperbole, IMHO. It might in fact on net conserve energy, by, e.g., reducing the need to haul cash around in armored vehicles and the need for things like bank buildings. It takes a lot of energy to build and operate buildings.
US energy use is very high for a number of reasons and energy use will tend to drive CO2 emissions. If you just use electricity (we'll get to that) you can maybe make an order of magnitude difference and maybe if you work very hard, which we need to, two orders of magnitude but that's all you can hope for. That's from 1kg/kWh which is roughly where coal power is, to 100g/kWh and then (very hard) to 10g/kWh with power sources that produce CO2 mainly during construction then amortized over their lifetime.
So if you start out using many times more energy than other countries per capita, you'll struggle to equal them on CO2 emissions even if that's a core policy goal.
The low population density in much of the US drives increased energy usage. I will walk to the nearby grocery store in a few minutes to buy my week's groceries, many Americans will drive, perhaps as much as an hour, to buy their groceries, it's not as though eating is optional. And this low density also forces bad energy source choices (e.g. using wood fires to keep warm seems pretty reasonable when there is no mains electricity out where you live even though of course it's very inefficient)
But to be fair consumerism does not help. Americans have been somewhat resistant to energy efficiency technologies that took off elsewhere, consumption is a sign of wealth and success and so efficiency is in that sense "bad". The entire city of Las Vegas is clearly a terrible idea from an energy efficiency point of view, why would you build a city in a desert?
"Are you wilfully trying to not see the point I'm making or something?"
No, I'm pointing out that:
1) "Efficiency" isn't the only goal in life. It would be more "efficient" for the entire population to live in barracks and eat some kind of nutritional gruel for every meal, but few would choose to live that way. We do things "inefficiently" for our convenience and pleasure all the time, and there is nothing wrong with that. For instance, I'll bet you have your own computer rather than using a shared computer at the public library, even though that would be more "efficient".
2) It doesn't really matter how "efficient" the conversion of solar energy to carbohydrate is, because it's free. That matters for other energy inputs in the process (e.g., the gas burned in running tractors) but not the sun itself.
What am I getting at? We need to shrink our energy usage. Efficiency gains are linear, energy use grows exponentially.
So what do we do? Try old-fashioned solutions like a healthy dose of localism and urban/geographical planning so that we exponentially decrease our energy requirements.
Manhattan is the greenest city in America, in the sense of spending the least energy per citizen.
If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility
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