Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
For a while, I taught a course in human-powered machinery for the Peace Corps. You know, bicycle powered generators, treadle powered pumps, that kind of thing. One of the very rough rules of thumb regarding human energy is that an adult human can put out about a hundred watts on an ongoing, constant all-day basis. If you were to hook up a bicycle to a generator you could generate a kilowatt-hour every day … if you were in good shape and you put in a ten-hour day. Sounds like work to me.
Figure 1. Human-powered aluminum can crusher, Burning Man 2012.
I got to thinking about this number, one kilowatt-hour’s worth of electricity for a long ten-hour day’s work, in the context of the discussion about energy costs. Some people think raising energy costs to discourage CO2 production is a good thing. I say that raising energy costs, whether to discourage CO2 or for any other reason, trades a certain present loss for a very doubtful future gain. As such, it is an extremely bad idea. Here’s why:
The existence of electricity is perhaps the one thing most emblematic of human development. With electricity, we get refrigeration to preserve medicines and foods, light to extend the day, electric heat, power to run machinery, the list goes on and on. Now, as I showed above, we can hire somebody to generate electricity for us, at the rate of a kilowatt-hour for each ten-hour day’s work. Where I live, this day’s worth of slave labor, this thousand watt-hours of energy, costs me the princely sum of about thirteen cents US. I can buy an electric slave-day of work for thirteen cents.
That is why I live well. Instead of having slaves as the Romans had, I can buy a day’s worth of a slave’s constant labor for thirteen measly cents. That is what development consists of, the use of electricity and other forms of inexpensive energy in addition to and in lieu of human energy.
Now, here’s the next part of the puzzle. Out at the farther edges of society, where people live on a dollar a day or less, electricity is much more expensive than it is where I live. In the Solomon Islands, where I lived before returning to the US in 2009, electricity in the capital city cost fifty-two cents a kilowatt-hour, and more out in the outer islands.
Now, let us consider the human cost of the kind of “cap-and trade” or “carbon tax” or Kyoto Protocol agreements. All of these attempts to decrease CO2 have the same effect. They raise the cost of energy, whether in the form of electricity or liquid fuels. But the weight of that change doesn’t fall on folks like me. Oh, I feel it alright. But for someone making say $26.00 per hour, they can buy two hundred slave-days of work with an hour’s wages. (Twenty-six dollars an hour divided by thirteen cents per kWh.). Two hundred days of someone working hard for ten hours a day, that’s the energy of more than six months of someone’s constant work … and I can buy that with one hour’s wages.
At the other end of the scale, consider someone making a dollar a day, usually a ten-hour day. That’s about ten cents an hour, in a place where energy may well cost fifty-two cents per kilowatt-hour. Energy costs loom huge for them even now. I can buy six months of slave labor for one hour of my wage. They can buy a couple of hours of slave labor, not days or months but hours, of slave labor for each hour of their work.
And as a result, an increase in energy costs that is fairly small to me is huge to the poor. Any kind of tax on energy, indeed any policy that raises the cost of energy, is one of the most regressive taxes known to man. It crushes those at the lowest end of the scale, and the worst part is, there is no relief at the bottom. You know how with income tax, if you make below a certain limit, you pay no tax at all? If you are below the threshold, you are exempt from income tax.
But energy price increases such as carbon taxes don’t even have that relief. They hit harder the further you go down the economic ladder, all the way down to rock bottom, hitting the very poorest the hardest of all.
So when James Hansen gets all mealy-mouthed about his poor grandkids’ world in fifty years, boo-boo, it just makes me shake my head in amazement. His policies have already led to an increase in something I never heard of when I was a kid, “fuel poverty”. This is where the anti-human pseudo-green energy policies advocated by Hansen and others have driven the price of fuel so high that people who weren’t poor before, now cannot heat their homes in winter … it’s shockingly common in Britain, for example.
In other words, when James Hansen is coming on all weepy-eyed about what might possibly happen to his poor grandchildren fifty years from now, he is so focused on the future that he overlooks the ugly present-day results of his policies, among them the grandparents shivering in houses that they can no longer afford to heat …
Perhaps some folks are willing to trade a certain, actually occurring, measurable present harm to their grandparents, in order to have a chance of avoiding a far-from-certain distant possible future harm to their grandkids.
Not me.
I say let’s keep the old geezers warm right now, what the heck, they’ve been good to us, mostly, and lets provide inexpensive energy to the world, and thus encourage industry and agriculture to feed and clothe people, and let the grandkids deal with the dang future. That’s what our own grandparents did. They didn’t dick around trying to figure out the problems that we would face today. They faced the problems of their day.
Besides, according to the IPCC, fifty years from now those buggers are going to be several times wealthier than we are now. So why should I be worried about Hansen’s and my likely wealthy grandkids in preference to today’s demonstrably poor children? My grandkids will do just fine. Heck, they’ll probably have the dang flying cars I was promised, and the fusion power I was supposed to get that would be too cheap to meter, so let them deal with it. We have plenty of problems worrying about today’s poor, let’s focus on that and let the future take care of their poor.
The real irony is that these folks like Hansen claim to be acting on behalf of the poor, in that they claim that the effects of global warming will hit the poor hardest. I have never found out how that is supposed to happen. I say this because the effects of global warming are supposed to hit the hardest in the extra-tropics, in the winter, in the night-time. I have a hard time believing that some homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City in December is going to be cursing the fact that the frozen winter midnights are a degree warmer … so exactly which poor are they supposed to be saving, and from what?
w.
The cliamed reduced demand in the West (from carbon taxes) won’t decrease the cost of fuel or electricity in the 3rd World. The main reason is that, while the supply isn’t infinite, it isn’t constrained by demand: when the West uses less, OPEC simply slows down their output to prop up their cash flow. The 3rd World countries, where the fuel/labor ratio is the worst, will simply get less fuel (since the taps are turned down & the costs are up), which will be even more expensive for them.
Ryan says: “Human power isn’t very efficient.”
Define “very”. A few crackers can hurl me and my bike over 20 miles, without any change in my fat store. That beats my car many times for sure. Ask anybody in the weight loss business; they do sophisticated calorimetry and can tell you how unbelievably efficient we are. You have to cut your food intake and do a lot of work to experience any significant weight loss.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/
Over-consumption of food does create a situation where you can say we’re not very efficient, but that is because the extra food we cannot assimilate gets shunted down the toilet. As long as you eat only enough to compensate for mechanical and heat losses, you are a very efficient thermal machine (compared to all we know)
@Owen in GA
Don’t need batteries, just feed in tariffs, in Oz they were quite generous at one stage, up to 68c/kWh, now less so but the cost of solar has drop like a brick, all I know is that I’ve paid for my install recently and now it’s FREE for what I’m generating, for the next 20 years, those electricity suppliers can kiss my lily white arse!
@rgbatduke
Yeah the economics keeps changing, they are cutting rebates here and the cost has gone up, but did you hear about the new stuff in China? A DIY inverter box that plugs straight into a wall socket, you just hook up a few solar panels and it’ll spin your meter back. No batteries no electrician, just DIY. Be a while before they introduce something like that here but you can kind of see where it’s headed.
I’m going to be flamed here for suggesting it but electricity suppliers are screwed, the writing is on the wall, solar will do the same to big electricity what gasoline did to steam power. Big electricity will be relegated to supplying base load, whereas solar will take the more lucrative peak, at that stage big electricity will lose market share and become expensive, then it’s just down hill fast for them.
Ian H
Your idealistic youth are not corrupted by old men, they corrupt from within. Look at all those idealistic youth from the 1960s and what they have become–they are the UN and World Government types, the carbon market makers, they are mentors to the current administration–corrupt as hell.
100 watts continuous for 24 hours (2.4 kWh) is a 2000 (food) Calorie diet equivalent which is a typical diet for humans not engaged in intensive activities. MRE’s provide for a 3600 Calorie per day diet. That means 1600 Calories of work being done over maintenance levels in a day or maybe 2 kWh – still within the ballpark of the post number, especially if a reasonable efficiency is factored in. (The needs of a soldier make a convenient reference for this, I think)
The thing to consider is the carbon footprint involved in that 3600 Calorie diet. From ‘nature’ to plate has many loads on the carbon footprint. Then there is the waste problem which also has a methane issue …
Humans just aren’t a good general purpose energy source. Since the industrial revolution got its start, there has been an ongoing focus on putting human efforts into producing in areas where they are most efficient. That has had signficant social implications both in terms of dealing with change and in allocations of labor. It’s all about leverage of inate human capabilities.
RGB, creating the silicon components for solar panels takes a lot of energy. Moore’s law doesn’t apply to solar panels as the technology for CPUs is a different requirement than that for a solar cell. The Moore’s law observation is more of a economics law than a physical law, especially since it now costs 10 billion dollars to build a plant to produce a next generation CPU. You don’t spend that kind of money unless the new chips are significantly more powerful and/or more efficient than its predecessor or your competitors products. As far as I know solar cells don’t need 14nm process node technology and 450 individual steps to produce a functional cell like a competitive CPU today does. I don’t expect solar cells to get much cheaper any time soon.
I did a presentation on solar power in the late seventies in my high school science class during the era of the energy shortage scare and ice age scare. Cheap solar was said to be just 20 years away. I’ve saved an ad from 1989 by B.C. Hydro claiming that cheap solar was just 20 years away.
There are a couple thousand forest fires a year in my province. If push comes to shove from the global cabal, my province could meet low fossil usage (we are at 94% renewable right now) by burning our wood as an energy source rather than just letting it burn as it does now.
My home is surrounded by about 100 trees on my property. Not one of those trees existed when I moved into this home in 1967. Most of those trees tower several stories above my roof. I have been saving some of the branches that have fallen off the trees and have about a chord of wood ready for when I get around to fixing my chimney, which would have been for this winter if I hadn’t of spent so much time in the summer bicycle touring the new lands opened up for me to access by new bridge infrastructure costing about 3 billion dollars. I visited Fort Langley on one of my tours, a place I haven’t set eyes on since I was a child. I would like to thank tax payers for the new bridge from Maple Ridge to Langley, but private business funded and built the bridge, and motorists are paying for it via tolls.
MorningGuy says:
January 2, 2013 at 8:13 am
Solar “might” provide “some” power to “parts” of the world “some of the time” ….. but only between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM. (And only when there are no clouds, storms, trees, dust, snow, water, ice, buildings, or other solar collectors in the way between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM that is.
What are you going to do … say, between 3:01 PM and 8:59 AM?
Storage batteries in everybody’s home?
Excellent post Willis! 🙂 I’m surprised at the low power output of the cyclist though: back in my bike activism days it was pretty strongly believed that those bike-powered engines were fairly effective. I’ve forwarded this entry to a few of my old buddies in that camp to see what they may have to add.
Ryan, you say, “Human power isn’t very efficient. You need to take in a lot of calories to power all the anciliary parts of the human body (brains for instance). Probably burning ethanol would be more efficient…..”
That makes sense, though in my case I don’t have much in the way of power-eating brains, though I *do* religiously try to supply enough ethanol for whatever *is* needed.
:>
MJM
Willis said:
“… very rough rules of thumb regarding human energy is that an adult human can put out about a hundred watts on an ongoing, constant all-day basis. “
Certain rare individuals are able to exceed that level. It has been reported, for example, that Lance Armstrong (perhaps with a ‘chemical assist’) was able to generate an average of 400 watts for 7 hours while biking in the Tour de France:
http://www.cio.com/article/29173/Lance_Armstrong_Cycling_Power
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/science/14cycl.html?_r=0
“I’ve long held the belief that if we were to finally achieve cost-effective room temp superconductor tech”
We don’t need it right away. A switch to carbon nanotube wires (not quite a production reality) would cut electrical losses by a factor of 5 over copper. In addition all that copper would be released for other uses.
Yet another place where a tech advance (combined with an engineering advance) could change everything. One of the biggest problems with solar is that people don’t live densely in the places where solar power makes the most sense, and it is “expensive” to transport electrical power over very long distances even with Tesla’s lovely step-up/step-down technology. It is therefore simply not feasible to generate electrical power in (say) West Texas and transmit it to Maine for use, no matter how cheaply you can make it in West Texas. We transport energy in the form of fossil fuels simply because it is a lot cheaper to mine and then move the oil, coal, whatever from the mine to generation facilities close to where the energy is used rather than generate the power at the mine and move the electricity.
Sadly, it isn’t clear that any superconductor technologies, room temperature or not, will manage the efficient transportation of electrical energy. The problem is that superconductors have a complex phase diagram and tend to stop being superconductors as soon as you try to jam too much current through them, and that is before worrying about their dynamical response to time varying currents. That is, you can’t just take conventional very low temperature superconductors and transmit arbitrary amounts of power long distances as things stand right now, even if you ignored the cost of keeping them cold.
That isn’t to say that there may not be solutions to this. A superconducting waveguide (if one could keep the materials superconducting in the appropriate frequency regime) might do it. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for superconducting long range transmission solutions even if somebody manages to make a superconductor at temperatures that might be cost-effectively maintained in a long distance transmission line. See for example:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/supcon.html#c1
As I understand it, in many cases the limiting current density is related to the density of lattice defects in the superconducting material (not so much for pure superconductors, but very much the case for most high-T_c superconducting lattices). The numbers aren’t particularly small, but the material is highly intolerant of any fault — one could imagine rapidly cycling across the superconducting boundary or even setting up an oscillation between superconducting and not superconducting with truly stupendous consequences (imagine a real-time EMP weapon driven by a power plant). Also, one would still have to transmit the energy at enormously high voltages, possibly DC voltages (again, I don’t know about the frequency response).
There are companies who are actively investing in building prototype power delivery systems using high temperature superconductors in venues where these restrictions don’t matter as much and there are nonlinear benefits due to the high cost of right of way for transmission lines (e.g. someplace like New York City) but I don’t think any of these are ready to deliver (say) a few terawatts from Arizona to North Carolina, or from Spain to Norway, not even at 1/10th the cost.
So stay tuned, but don’t count this as “inevitable” in the next decade, at any rate. It’s not clear that the physics itself is there, let alone the engineering, at feasible cost.
rgb
Well written and chilling. But I have one question from a simple-minded view of economics: if the West puts a tax on carbon, that should make energy more expensive for the population living in the West, hence reduce demand. If the West’s demand is reduced, there should be relatively more supply for the rest of the world, and, hence, prices for the rest of the world should go down. What am I missing here?
What are you going to do … say, between 3:01 PM and 8:59 AM
The same thing that one does now — rely on secondary power generation facilities, probably ones based on natural gas that can very quickly be turned on and off. On the good side, by tilting and orienting the solar cells one can do better than six hours, and in many places one can arrange for the peak power delivery of the solar systems coincide with the peak demand for electricity for air conditioning. Right now power companies who supply electricity to southern states have to be able to deliver a peak load somewhere between 1 and 4 pm in the summer (when the day is maximally hot) that is as much as twice as high as the rest of the non-AC load. This means that they have to build 2.5 or so times as much capacity as they need other times of the year, or in the wee cool hours of the morning. By using solar to pick up the AC load, you reduce the need to build expensive primary generation facilities as you need the most AC power precisely when solar power generation is also peaked.
Solar in this regard also has the advantage of a highly predictable cost structure. Costs in the CBA are all front loaded — capital and land investments — with no running and highly variable costs for fuel and with fairly predictable maintenance and operations costs. One can build a solar plant to help manage afternoon peak with a near certainty that it will provide a very predictable and reasonably attractive ROI.
Battery storage makes sense now or will make sense in the future in two circumstances. When people are living far off of the grid (so solar is the only alternative to oil lamps and dung fires) and no electricity at all, and if/when battery technology takes a quantum leap forward. People with sailboats often have solar panels and/or small wind generators and batteries so that they can keep an onboard refrigerator and lights at night running without a generator or fuel. People who live in cabins or remote farms in the Western US do too — solar stuff with batteries and all are featured in e.g. the Northern Tool online and paper catalog:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/category_alternative-renewable-energy
One can do better than their prices (especially for inverter/tie-in systems using monocrystalline panels), but even these prices are often worth it to people living off the grid and are still 14 year amortization in places with high energy cost and high insolation. Local companies can often get the panels at wholesale prices and mark them up less with the installation. But it is still (IMO) a factor of 2-3 too expensive to be worth it in general with a short (less than ten year) amortization/payoff time. I’d love to put the 9 kW system on my own house, but not for $30K, not for $20K. For $15K sure, I could service the debt on the monthly savings alone to pay it all off in less than ten years, then reap pure profit for the rest of the system lifetime. And $9K, or $1/watt installed, is the magic number where everybody does this as fast as they can. At that point, it costs $0.50/watt or less for a commercial installation, a half a billion dollars buys a GW near-peak generating capacity for 6-8 hours a day, and that would be enormously attractive to many power companies across the south, all of whom have a large AC burden in the afternoons and the consequent overcapacity.
rgb
rgb
Caleb says: January 2, 2013 at 7:54 am
“…After a few choice words I went and cut wood in the woods. …”
Unfortunately, depending where you are in the world, that may now be illegal in many woods/forests. Even to cut fallen or dead wood.
Or at the very least you may find you need a permit, in some cases, even if the woods/forest are on your own property! (Ha, think you own those trees you planted? Or the water that falls on your roof? Or the air you breathe? …. where does it stop?)
Politically powerful greenies will brook no interference or appeals to logic in their quest for a perfect impoverished world.
I know that Malthusian doctrine is unpopular here on WUWT.
But the only thing about today’s world that is truly “unprecedented” is the size of the human population.
Highflight wrote:
“You are spot on. Recall that in the early 1970′s the nuclear industry was talking a nuclear energy device for every household. Who needs a grid if we all have a house sized nuclear plant parked next to the garage, or powering individual industries. No loss of energy through transmission lines. No rolling brown outs or other devasting power outages.”
Actually, LFTRs won’t ever be for home use. It was an absurd notion in the 70’s that solid fuel nuclear reactors would ever be a viable for home use as they are far too dangerous.
Although LFTRs are extremely safe, with fission taking place in liquid salts (Fluoride/Beryllium) at single atmospheric pressures with no high pressure water involved, there are still very small amounts of highly radioactive wastes that must be dealt with.
LFTRS are very scaleable and can be made small enough to provide electricity for a small town or large enough for a mega city like Tokyo.
Since LFTRs don’t require water for cooling or to generate steam, they can even be built close to where the energy is needed; even in the desert.
[For those readers not as familiar as you are with that style of proposed nuclear reactor and fuel, you should define your abbreviations. Mod]
Dr Brown, I have said this many times and I feel it is still correct today. Solar and wind mills will never be of any use unless and until someone comes up with a cheap, efficient way to store the energy they produce. So, Concentrate on storage NOW and not solar and wind farms and when we have a viable solution start the process of solar farm building (not windmills). In the meantime some research on thorium reactors will provide a means of base supply for the future. I once thought that fusion was the solution but am not so convinced that it is the sensible research path at this time. It may or may not work. It is not the low hanging fruit that thorium APPEARS to be.
Hi Willis
As you say
“he is so focused on the future that he overlooks the ugly present-day results of his policies, among them the grandparents shivering in houses that they can no longer afford to heat …”
But it isn’t the shivering that really bothers me, its the actual freezing to death…
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health2/excess-winter-mortality-in-england-and-wales/2011-12–provisional–and-2010-11–final-/ewm-bulletin.html
Roisin Robertson says:
January 2, 2013 at 5:28 am
You’ll have to provide a citation for that last one, I hadn’t heard a word about that. And whether it was the “hottest” or the “wettest” or the whateverest, you’re still beating a dead horse. The majority of the heat records were in the 1930s …
In any case, weather.com says “The summer of 2012 was the third -warmest on record for the contiguous U.S.,”, so you can’t even get the immaterial facts wrong.
I don’t laugh and smirk about destruction, Roisin, that is serious stuff. I laugh and smirk at people foolish enough to blame Sandy on humans … that is funny. Heck, even the IPCC knows that the frequency of extreme events like Sandy hasn’t changed anywhere that we have looked. You really should try to keep up with the science.
You go on to say (emphasis mine)
And yet, here you come waltzing in the door to do one simple thing—to castigate me for not agreeing with you … funny how that works out.
Roisin, you would do a lot better, and get more traction, if you got your facts straight. You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. No, Roisin, Sandy was not caused by humans. No, Roisin, this wasn’t the “hottest summer in the USA this year(for the last 117 years)”. No, Roisin, the Gulf Stream isn’t in the same place every year, it moves north and south.
Here’s the thing, Roisin. Somewhere in the world, the weather is always setting a record. If it is not the wettest year in the UK, it will be the driest year in Borneo, or the coldest year in Japan, or something. As a result, you pointing out that Borneo is having record dry, or Japan is having record cold, or the UK is having record rain MEANS NOTHING. It’s always happening somewhere, so pointing to it happening is meaningless.
Wait to post until you have actually studied the subject for a bit, my friend. Read some more on this site, there’s a lot of info here. Because right now, all you are doing is revealing a profound ignorance of matters climate, and it’s quite painful to watch you flailing around and making a fool of yourself.
All the best,
w.
REL rgbatduke proposal on turning energy production over to the government….
As others have pointed out, there are serious technology limitations (e.g., demand fluctuation) that make solar, etc. not very feasible for significant amounts of people’s energy needs. More significant to me, however, is your economic naivete. To wit, the government should create a “trust” to own/ run the electricity power system for the US? Are you mad? You have heard of the Post Office, the Federal Reserve, Conrail, Amtrack… need I go on?
Equating large multinationals to government is so wrong-headed as to make me disbelieve you can be serious. Government forces people to do/ not do things because it is the sole entity with police power. Multinationals have to provide services that people can choose to buy or not. So long as there is competition, then multinationals have no real “power.” To the extent multinationals can buy government protection (which I will admit they do) to minimize competition, then you have problems. But, I would argue that trying to solve that problem by turning over economic activity to the government is a far worse solution. Have you noticed that air fares are far lower (in real dollars) than they were under CAB?
In physics, I defer to your judgment. In political-economy, I think you have much to learn.
Thanks for the perspective Willis. Your words are always a pleasure to read.
@ur momisugly daveburton
re “reduce population surplus”
I have heard similar statements (that we have to “reduce population size by murdering 99 % of the population”) from both sides, usually as allegations (from the right against the left, and from the left against the right). I cannot find any serious source for any of this. I think this needs a link, otherwise this is just slander.
oldfossil says: January 2, 2013 at 9:23 am
I know that Malthusian doctrine is unpopular here on WUWT.
=====================
Malthus deserves his place in science as a profound thinker who had insights into population dynamics.
==========================
LazyTeenager says: January 2, 2013 at 4:45 am
So I reckon carbon taxes or other measures to reduce fuel usage in rich countries will help poor countries.
=============================
Here’s what you can do to save the world from the USA and salve your conscience at the same time (assuming that you reside within this oppressor of the poor nations). It is income tax time. When you compute what you owe, throw in an extra $1,000 as a carbon tax for your use of electricity, fuel, etc. The IRS will not turn it down, I promise. Then, when you and your buddies are screeching to each other about the deplorable nasty old carbon and the deplorable nasty old USA, you can proudly thump your chest and declare “I put my money where my mouth is!”
Otherwise, shut up forever about a carbon tax.
LazyTeenager says:
January 2, 2013 at 4:45 am
….Sounds too simplistic to me.
1. If the USA demanded less fuel, prices should go down for the rest of the world including poor people.
2. But in poor countries the wholesale cost is just a small proportion of the total, so any additional due too carbon tax will have little impact.
3. The impact will be so small that there will be little need for carbon taxes to be applied in poor countries.
So I reckon carbon taxes or other measures to reduce fuel usage in rich countries will help poor countries.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As usual Lazy really needs to spend time following the north end of that south bound mule which is a HUGE step up from third world ‘industrialization’
Lazy, What the heck do you think the USA, China and India DO with all that energy produced by fossil fuels??? Watch TV 24/7?
We build and run factories that produce goods. We mine raw materials. We very efficiently produce food so you do not have to follow that mule.
So how about some hard facts.
Using A History of American Agriculture 1776-1990: Farm Machinery and Technology In 1800 in the USA Farmers made up about 90% of labor force and were using “Oxen and horses for power, crude wooden plows, all sowing by hand, cultivating by hoe, hay and grain cutting with sickle, and threshing with flail At that time (1800) the U.S. had a per-capita energy consumption of about 90 million Btu. link
Right after WWII is when there was a change from horses to tractors and frozen foods became popular.
In 1940
58% of all farms had cars
25% had telephones
33% had electricity
In 1949, U.S. energy use per person stood at 215 million Btu. link
In the modern age “…the average per-capita energy usage in the United States was 335.9 million BTUs per person, through 2006….” link
The goal of the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Obama is to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050. link
If the USA reduces its (carbon based) energy consumption by 80% it equals 45.18 million Btu. per person. That is HALF the btu. per person as was used in an era when people did not even use steel faced plows!!!
Only nuclear and only thorium at that has any hope of allowing that sort of reduction without tipping us back into savagery because people like you and the inner city blood suckers are incapable of fending for themselves, growing food or producing clothing or other handmade goods. That is not a theory that is based on my ability to work a teenager into the ground. US kids today can not even keep up with a little old lady walking across a field much less do a decent day’s manual labor. Why the heck do you think farmers use imported labor? Inner city folk would rather riot than do farm work.
oldfossil says:
January 2, 2013 at 9:23 am
I know that Malthusian doctrine is unpopular here on WUWT.
But the only thing about today’s world that is truly “unprecedented” is the size of the human population.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And the reason we have such a large human population is because third world countries were INTENTIONALLY kept impoverished by the World Bank/IMF. As soon as a third world country digs itself out of poverty the fertility rate plummets. CIA:…Global fertility rates are in general decline and this trend is most pronounced in industrialized countries… (FR=2.1 is replacement)
For 2012, India is at 2.58! Venezuela is at 2.40, Mexico is at 2.27, Colombia is at 2.12, Nicaragua is at 2.08 and so on.
Both Malthus and Machiavelli would approve of raising fuel and electricty costs. That’s a convenient way of getting rid of pensioners, who are an expense in terms of pension and NHS and entirely unproductive. So, you raise your profit on one side and cut down in expenses too. Win, win and win again.