Do the Math

Another great one, at least the earlier stuff was 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ Was all about just doing the math on energy transitions. He wasn't anti renewable technology but did want to point out how scale is a problem that few understand. My favorite number of his is, that at 3% growth year over year, we would need all the energy of the Milky way galaxy by the year 13,000. As the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, this would defy physics itself.

I really recommend Tom Murphy's (one of the paper's authors) blog about energy and our possible future https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

I found Do the Math really good, especially the posts assessing various energy sources' abilities to provide mankind with its energy needs. There hasn't been a new post in quite a while but the ones there are well worth a read. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

I'l borrow a phrase from the world of finance: past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Technology and resources are constrained by laws of nature and specific mechanisms of effect. They're not governed by past lucky breaks, though there's a shape to those (Ophuls discusses this, hint: sigmoid functions feature heavily). He also specifically addresses space-based solar power. I'll refer you to his comments in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity for that. My own first encounter with that notion was in T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, which I read with wide-eyed enthusiasm shortly after it was first published. My eyes and enthusiasm have narrowed somewhat in the intervening decades. I've mentioned geothermal previously. Consider that the Yellowstone supercaldera might be good for a few GW of continuous output, at considerable impact to the National Park associated with it. I'm somewhat in favour of that exchange. It's still only a small fraction of present US electrical consumption, though as a reliable baseload / dispatchable source, it would be a valuable contribution. Tom "Do the Math" Murphy's series exploring various alternatives remains excellent: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ The super-abundance of solar power (terrestrial, or with the addition of orbital power) still leaves us with a finite energy budget on Earth, if only through thermal shedding. The terrestrial surplus is far less considerable when increasing standards of living for…

The author of the book is Tom Murphy, a Caltech-trained physics professor at UCSD, author of the Do The Math blog https://dothemath.ucsd.edu. The book compiles that blog into a textbook for a course for non-science majors. I've had him as a guest on my podcast https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy, but otherwise my only stake is that I consider the book valuable on the issue of our species. The link is to my review of his book. You can download the book itself free: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions. ---- Here is an excerpt of the review: He taught a course to non-science undergraduates on the subject, called Energy and the Environment. He used the course to compile his posts, polish them, and make a self-contained comprehensive book. As far as I know, the only one like it, possibly because mathematics is the language of nature, so equations abound, but he explains them, so people who haven’t taken science or math classes since high school can follow. Showing the math means we don’t have to take his word for it. We can do the math too and think, judge, and act for ourselves. No matter our politics, age, industry, etc, we can access this book equally. The environment involves many branches of science, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, systems, and more, as well as fields including engineering, history, politics, philosophy, and more. Murphy brings them together like no other resource I’ve found. Many will shy away from devoting the time…

Sounds like you may also have read https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/.

CO2 is a red herring. > What are you basing this on? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/can-modernity-last/ worth a read, goes into much more detail than I can. Your comment implies that one can simply disconnect the factors that affect human livability and other life livability. As you predict yourself biodiversity will - is - going down. Extinction rates are at more than 1000x the baseline. Humans are part of the complex systems that makes up the community of life. What do you base your claim on that we can simply define us into another category and avoid the myriad causes that makes life miserable to the point of extinction for countless other species?

Tom Murphy over at Do The Math[1] argues that we would not be able to reboot modernity after an apocalypse. The short version of his argument is that we long ago mined/drilled/farmed/harvested the easy resources that can be gotten with pre-industrial technology. The raw materials we are extracting today require modern methods and materials. We can't bootstrap ourselves from human and animal muscle power back to industrial capacity because it is inadequate to the task. We might have the theoretical knowledge to do it, but we'd be unable to build out the infrastructure. And no, scavenging won't solve it because the energy and technology required to recover the raw materials again requires industrial processes and materials we won't have the ability to harness. 1 https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

It’s based on extrapolation of current trends, so I doubt it’ll actually happen. Besides, we’d all die before it got to that. But here are some sources that describe it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4 (commentary from Sabrine Hossenfelder, highly recommended) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01652-6.epdf https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

An excellent blog post on this idea: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

He's a fictional conversation [1] between an economist and physicist where they discuss this very premise: Economist: Hi Tom, I’m [ahem..cough]. I’m an economist. Physicist: Hey, that’s great. I’ve been thinking a bit about growth and want to run an idea by you. I claim that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely. Economist: [chokes on bread crumb] Did I hear you right? Did you say that growth can not continue forever? Physicist: That’s right. I think physical limits assert themselves. ... the rest in the link ... [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

Yes, it’s something that has been posted many times, but many people miss out a little gem from this article. Near the end of the article there is a link for another blog post, discussing the energies of nuclear fusion and fission. It’s from 2012 but I highly recommend it if you want to dive in into the energy calculations of fusion (and a proposed alternative: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/

> I like an analogy I heard recently […] If a man is coming at you with the intent to do you harm, it hardly matters what technology he employs: hammer, gun, knife, mace, sword. The technology is neither the problem nor the solution. The fundamental problem is the intent of the assailant. Unless we radically change our intent on this planet, “unlimited” energy—by any technological means—only accelerates our demise. I think of it this way: if every jackass on the planet has access to cheap and abundant energy, what do you think they’ll do with it? Will they use it to restore ecosystems, or hack more of it down for their own short-term gain? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/a-climate-love-story/

Ohh, I loved this blog - glad to find it again! Particularly remember https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/recipe-for-climate-change/ - an understandable back-of-the-envelope calculation of how f*&ked we are with CO2 emissions.

Eventually, yes. Right now waste heat is a tiny fraction of excess greenhouse heating, but if we kept multiplying our energy usage by a couple percent per year, we'd boil the oceans in four centuries. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ If we invent fusion, I think we could grow exponentially for quite a while, but it'll mostly happen in space. Controlled fusion makes a really great rocket.

This is such pointless pedantry. Heat pumps having an efficiency greater than 1/100% is well known, well publicized, and you're trying to make some artificial distinction here that added nothing to this thread/context/discussion. See: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489467/can-a-heat-pump-hav… https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/ I won't be further responding to this sub-topic, since it has nothing at all to do with the UK's inflation/energy prices. Plus frankly I feel like you're trying to confuse people rather than inform, I'd point people to the Department of Energy link above if they want to understand the benefit that modern heat pumps could offer to energy usage.

recommended read https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

I love this somewhat tangentially related article: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

Rock isn't very thermally conductive. Geothermal plants work great where the crust is thin, but for the rest of the planet you have to do a lot of drilling to get not much heat. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geothermal/

No one is giving you numbers for why this is wrong, so let me ballpark. Typical solar irradiance is 1000W/m^2. Mean sunshine hours where I live is 3000hrs/y. Assuming 100% efficiency, 100% solar irradiance, perfect angle etc for those 3000hours, we get ~10^10J of energy. Those are bad assumptions, but very generous. In a gram of deuterium, per e=mc^2, we get ~10^12J. There is 100x more energy in a single gram of deterium than a year of intense sunshine. Deterium is far from rare -- 1 part in ~10,000. Consider the vast amounts of deterium in the oceans and realize if fusion becomes a reality, nuclear, solar, oil, wind etc all become irrelevant overnight. I recommend this https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/ for a layman's introduction of the energy scales involved here.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ i heartily recommend the whole series. i made a mistake in the post before - the post assumes 2.3% yoy.

Your argument establishes that a free lunch is desirable, not that a free lunch is feasible. There is a very good essay I came across relating a discussion between a physicist and an economist on the question of neverending economic growth: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ It's worth reading in its entirety regardless of which side one stands on.

Frankly, I'm not even sure you need to regulate against natural gas. Product-wise & economically, it's already lost. Electric heat pumps are fantastically more efficient [1] and work both for heating & cooling. Electric water heaters are cheaper/better to operate. Induction stoves are so fast and precise. I don't know about a commercial building, but for a home, you'd probably save $10K+ in piping, installation, and connection fees. [1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/

I did a quick search on the Energy Returned on Energy Invested calculations. The following site https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ gave an ERoEI of 10:1 for solar panels on earth vs ERoEI of 4.2:1 for solar panels in space. Which would indicate that we would still be better laying solar panel on the ground as long as we got the appropriate empty space. What did I missed? Have we realized enough progress since 2012 energy-wise, that the threshold has been crossed, or does it only make sense economically due to lower launch prices.

With a large enough collector, you don't fry birds. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ The recommended transmission strength would be 230 W/m² in the center of the beam. This is about a quarter the strength of full sunlight, and is thought to be a safe level through which aircraft and birds can fly. At this level, our 3.6 km diameter collecting area would generate about 40 GWh of energy in a day, at an assumed reception/conversion efficiency of 70%. By comparison, a flat array of 15%-efficient PV panels occupying the same area in the Mojave Desert would generate about a fourth as much energy averaged over the year

Is "beyond a shadow of doubt" the standard of proof we need to take action? I would advocate for an actuarial standard. (i.e. estimate the probabilities and costs/benefits of various outcomes and take the path with the best expected outcome, while continually updating your probability estimates with new information.) The issue with climate change is not that it is 100% certain, but that the responses require globally coordinated action where every nation is incentive to cheat; and as with other types of economic transition, there are huge inefficiencies if we try to transition too fast (i.e. global recessions required to build the necessary infrastructure as in https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/). So the downside risk if we fail to act and climate change is real is tremendous.

Here is a good read of exponential Economist that meets Finite Physicist, economist with exponential growth vs Physicist and the law of thermodynamics. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

Look, no matter what we do, eventually ALL the oil will be extracted fro the ground. Alternative energy just isn't going to replace the oil fast enough. Carbon credits or not, it doesn't matter. And under President Trump, the US will be developing all the fossil fuels it has. Great for economic independence and paying back sovereign debt. Bad for the environment. The best thing to do at this point is to invest in ways to capture the carbon once it is released into the atmosphere. Then of course there is this: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

By definition, growth is unsustainable in the long term. GDP growth is totally, completely correlated to energy consumption. In the future, energy availability will at best plateau, or more probably decline. GDP growth then will be a blip in a long trend of stability, and steep decline is ahead to fall back to a sustainable level (i.e. entirely from renewable resources, as it was for the past millions of years). Data speaks for itself, see many article from a physicist here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2015/03/bbc-questions-indefinite-g… See immense resources from a specialized engineer here: http://manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/kaya_equation.h…

As usual, Tom Murphy has a great top-down analysis of why cars don't get 100 mpg: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/100-mpg-on-gasoline/ Spoiler alert: it's mainly because cars are shaped like cars, not fish.