Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve made some statements lately that I’d like to reprise.
• There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.
• Energy and money are inextricably linked.
• Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.
• Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.
People say, well, what about water? What if there’s a shortage of water? How does that relate to your statements above? You figure out how to manufacture water?
Figure 1. Graphene is a one-molecule-thick form of carbon, arranged in a hexagonal pattern. SOURCE
I’d like to illustrate all four of these statements with a recent news article, from Reuters:
Pentagon weapons-maker finds method for cheap, clean water
(Reuters) – A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.
The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
As you might guess, they make it out of graphene.
“It’s 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger,” said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. “The energy that’s required and the pressure that’s required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less.”
Damn … a factor of a hundred? Two orders of magnitude less energy required? Are you aware what that will do?
Well … without cheap energy, it won’t do much at all, will it? … it takes a large amount of energy to pump the seawater through the reverse osmosis filters, even new graphene filters.
But with cheap energy? It can make the deserts bloom, quite literally. Israel’s doing it now, they are currently desalinating about three hundred million (300,000,000) cubic metres of water per year. That’s seventy-nine billion gallons, (79,000,000,000). And plants are now under construction to more than double that amount.
How much water is that? Well, when the new Israeli plants are at full capacity it will be enough to cover all of Israel’s current agricultural land with about 6″ (15 cm) of water. And they’re already doing it at a reasonable cost, even before the latest development. Right now, it’s about five gallons for one cent ($0.01).
Figure 2. Cost per cubic metre (black) for desalinated water around the world. I have added the cost per 100 US gallons in blue. The four outlined plants are in Israel.
Now, with the new graphene filters, the cost of water should be dropping, perhaps even by a factor of ten, for people from Algeria and Cyprus to Trinidad and Israel. And since this is just a filter and can be made in any shape, it can be made as a pin-to-pin replacement for filters in existing desalination plants. This can only be good news for the poor of the world.
Let me look at all of that discussion of desalination in terms of my statements reprised above:
• Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.
This is at the heart of the new development of the graphene filter for the reverse osmosis desalination of seawater.
• Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.
If a country has to pay twice as much for its energy, it will pay twice as much for its water. This hurts everyone, particularly the poor.
• Energy and money are inextricably linked.
The cost of the water is a function of the cost of energy.
• There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.
If energy is cheap, then with technology many, many things are possible … including using endless seawater to turn the deserts green. On the other hand, if energy is expensive, resources are no longer economical, water costs more, and people suffer.
That’s all,
w.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Willis
I am not sure why you are getting up on your high horse. We are in furious agreement.
We both support a full cost/benefit analysis of energy use, which is what I called for in my original post.
Apart from that, you routinely ignore the costs side of your ‘cheap’ energy and I do point out some of the benefits side. As for example in my original post, which caused a stampede of angst amongst the one-eyed, in which I pointed out that a fall in world commodity prices would help reduce hunger in the world.
Re: Steven Mosher
build an impossible machine and keep three distinct customers happy.
bad idea from the start
Is it a bad idea to have a single prototype cost and common parts for all branches of the military, or is it better to have each one farm out its own contract, and maintain a unique supply chain?
JSF breaks new ground in military aviation in several areas. EVERY time that has happened in the past, it has caused schedule problems and over-budget programs. That is the nature of government procurement programs, and why they are the least cost-effective way to produce anything, except, things you don’t want to be freely available to your enemies.
That is what is predictable from the start. I suggest if you can do better, there is plenty of money to be made. Whip up a prototype and submit it to the pentagon.
Smith
That seawater desal plant is certainly worth a closer look. ‘No fossil fuel’ is, probably, a false claim.
They use plenty of fossil fuel to construct those things and then, because the cheap land and deserts are not generally where the cities are, they use fossil fuel to transport the produce a long way to markets.
That aside, with around one third of Australian being desert and with a huge coastline contiguous to desert, if the competitive cost benefits do line up by way of ROI as claimed, Australia is in a position to become even more of a massive food commodity exporter than it is now.
On a side note, and here I nod to Willis who reckons he does like to look hard at both sides of the energy balance sheet, conventional tomato greenhouses in Australia pump in CO2 to get better growth and so improved ROI. Since the example you put forward does not burn fossil fuel to control greenhouse conditions, cheap CO2 enrichment is presumably not available.
Maybe Savory will be able to move his cows into the Atacama after all.
I think you are mostly correct, but here are some comments:
“There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically.”
Indirectly, you equate space and distance here with energy, or more simply, space with energy. (I don’t think this was what Einstein had in mind with E=MC2. Ultimately, energy is related to mass, but not space (?)). E.g. if one requires a certain rare metal to run an industrial process that allows better utilisation of energy, and if that metal only exists on the other side of the world, there is a spatial shortage of the metal that the energy utilisation in the area requires to function. Getting the metal from the other side of the world does require energy, but also time (the old adage ‘time is money’, not ‘energy is money’). Moreover, because of human poiltical boundaries, which have little/nothing to do with energy, one may not be able to secure a supply of such a metal. It’s hard to see how natural variation in spatial distribution, coupled with time and human politics, doesn’t lead to a shortage of resources, independant of ‘cheap’ energy. Abundant amounts of energy does not necassarily equate to porous political boundaries.
“Energy and money are inextricably linked.”
True, but I would possibly say that resources, in all their forms, (which includes energy, as well as social, agricultural, mining, forestry and ecological resources), and money are inextricably linked.
• “Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor.”
The only cavaet I can think off hand to this, would be if there was a monopoly of energy ownership, and energy type, being utilised which distorts the prices of the available energy in that society. Making the type of energy used by the monopoly more expensive could, theoretically, drive out those distorting prices and make energy cheaper for everybody, including the poor, but only if: 1) there were other forms of energy which could effectively and economically compete with that energy without subsidies, and 2) there was a corrupt or inefficient monopoly of energy ownership inflating prices to begin with. (Both of these are linked, and therefore highly dubious if one or the other isn’t present).
“Technology is not bulldozers. It’s getting more production using less energy.”
True. A curious example of this is utilising past energy stored over long time periods which is far larger than any energy currently being produced by nature, eg oil and gas is simply past stored solar energy in the form of carbon bonds; concentrated metaliferous deposits are either past stored heat and pressure within the earth, or in other cases stored chemical decomposition, alteration and mass transfer by weather/weathering (bauxite), and in still other cases stored energy from biogeochemical breakdown/enrichment of minerals by organisms utilising solar or chemical energy over time, but the principle is the same in each case-metal mines utilise nature’s past energy which has concentrated the metals by one of other process over time.
BioBob says:
March 17, 2013 at 11:29 pm
Sorry Mark, that is incorrect.
Shortages also exist where consumption (market size) exceeds supply (production). This can be temporary (due to distortions eg hoarding) or permanent (due to commodity rarity like the supply of passenger pigeons). In the later case, no possible increase in price will increase the supply.
But there is a possible price for passenger pigeons that will reduce demand to zero.
Mark is correct. In a free market, supply and demand are always in balance. Shortages can not exist. The problem is that there aren’t too many truly free markets.
Willis, it’s not generally appreciated that a major financial burden on the developing world’s poor is the need to buy bottled water, as tap or well water isn’t safe to drink. As I have previously explained, the developing world’s poor faced with only being able to buy food or safe water, will buy safe water. Because if you buy food and drink unsafe water, you will be both sick and hungry as vomiting and diarrhea will get rid of the food.
The graphene filter promises abundant safe water. A major boon for the world’s poor. One of the most promising developments I have heard for a while.
Dodgy Geezer says: March 18, 2013 at 3:53 am
“………
1 – water is a commodity which is never ‘used’ it circulates through us as part of a cycle
2 – it can never, therefore be ‘short’. There are, and will remain, cubic kilometers of water for every person on the planet.
3 – when ‘water shortages’ are mentioned, what is really meant is that there is a shortage of water abstraction and storage capability. In a word, water infrastructure. The raw material can never be short.
4 – so discussions about ‘water shortages’ are really discussions about how much infrastructure we are willing to install and pay for. NOT about ‘saving the natural world by using less of a scarce resource’.
….[…..]….. Energy, water and many other commodities essential to life are NOT to be allowed to be cheap. Otherwise we would use ‘too much’ of them. It is this attitude, based on green activism in government, which needs to be addressed.
Dodgy … you make a really important point here – ‘shortage’ is always about the intertwined forces of economics and politics.
Do you mind if I use your 4 points elsewhere?
I like to attribute sources (“Dodgy Geezer; 18 Mar 2013 3.5AM” WUWT ? )
Shortages are a real issue when a price point is artificially fixed. Suppose you were a small town with a small water treatment plant, that was adequate for your needs. A major interstate is planned adjacent to your town, and suddenly business build facilities, and farmers expand their production, due to lower cost transportation of produce. The required volume of water increases dramatically, and due to an increase in demand the price point moves up the demand curve to reach equilibrium at a higher price. The original townsfolk complain they are not the cause of higher water use, so they should not have to pay more. The new arrivals say they should not have to pay at higher rates, than the originals.
A water shortage is born! Everyone has to stop wasting this “precious resource”.
The reality is that there are ways to produce more from a supply-side effort, and modernize equipment to counter the real tendency for prices to increase when demand increases. But not always, and it is a “public-policy” shortage that is done to keep prices artificially low, because some favored group thinks they are entitled to special treatment.
Climate Ace,
OK so everyone is for cost-benefit analysis. The benefits of carbon dioxide emissions are pretty straightforward to calculate (more available energy), and the purchase price for fossil fuels is not hard to quantify. The real issue with defining “external costs” is that they are very uncertain, or even the probability is completely undefined, and those “external costs” are mainly projected to happen far in the future. So in arguments about policy action on energy production, we are always in the situation where speculative costs, mostly projected far in the future, are weighed against clear and quantifiable current net benefits.
If we all lived to be a thousand years old, then the only rational approach would be to assign reasonable probabilities for all uncertain future costs, multiply the future costs by the probability of actually having to pay those costs, and then (most importantly) apply a reasonable discount rate for the ‘future benefits’ of avoiding those costs via current expenditure. People will disagree (of course) about the true probabilities of future events, and will also disagree about what represents a reasonable discount rate. If we adopt a discount rate of 3% per year (which I find quite low by historical standards), and consider consequences 100 years in the future, then the current cash value of US$1 in avoided costs for a future event with a 40% chance of actually happening, is about US$0.02.
Of course, as Keynes wisely noted “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” We don’t live to be a thousand; most of us don’t reach four score. People (being people) mostly do not think in 100 to 1000 year time frames. Heck, we can’t get voters to address the reality of unfunded public liabilities which will become unsustainable in 10 to 20 years; it boarders on the absurd to suggest voters will sacrifice now to address potential problems projected for 100 years from now.
If fairly and rationally evaluated on the basis of current knowledge, I think only very low current expenditures for global warming make any economic sense, and publicly funded climate science is probably already much more than can be rationally justified. You can only rationally justify high current expenditures by proving a high probability of very negative (and so enormously costly) future consequences. In light of human lifespans, expecting major current expenditures to avoid uncertain future problems is simply not realistic. Imagining that we have the knowledge to project the state of the Earth, human knowledge, and human technological capabilities 100 to 1000 years hence is hubris.
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 4:50 pm
Interesting thought, Ace. You likely meant it as sarcasm, but I’d say that given the volume of water used, versus the volume of gas extracted, I suspect the energy used to replace the water would be a small fraction of the energy recovered … could be wrong, I haven’t done the numbers.
Ironically, one of the proposed uses for this new graphene filter is to filter the water used in fracking, so you were righter than perhaps you knew …
Finally, fresh water isn’t being “destroyed in water tables”, nor is it being polluted in water tables. What does get contaminated is the water used to actually do the fracking. This fracturing is going on a kilometre below the water tables, however. Done properly, there is never any contact between fracking fluid and water bearing soils at any time.
This leaves only the problem of cleaning up the water used, which is manageable.
Like all of the processes by which we extract riches from the earth, whether coal or iron ore or copper or rare earths or oil or gas or even water, fracking has to be done properly. And done properly, no water tables are ever touched by fracking fluids.
The procedures are being streamlined and cleaned up, but this isn’t new technology. They’ve been fracking wells for five decades now, half a century. It’s not some new deal, we know what it does and how to do it right. The amount of water used is still dropping, and there are experiments going on with using a natural-gas based gel instead of water. This would evaporate and be pumped out and become part of the product stream. So it will only get better, cleaner, and more reliable … and of course use less energy.
All the best,
w.
Philip Bradley says:
March 18, 2013 at 5:24 pm
True, and something I definitely appreciate. Take a look at my post called SODIS Rules!
All the best,
w.
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 5:07 pm
Ace, you didn’t say one word about benefits. Not one. Do a word search on the page for the word “benefit” … crickets. All you talked about was costs until i mentioned it.
Now, you may indeed support a full cost/benefit analysis of energy uses, and that’s good. You’ve shown no sign of it to date on this thread, and that may be an oversight.
Unfortunately, It sounds like in addition you also support monetizing the invisible. I support the former, but not the latter.
I think that far too often an analysis that monetizes costs is 50% wankfest and 50% picking numbers out of the fundamental orifice. I have little use for the “monetize the invisible” kind of analysis. See my post “Monetizing the Effects of Carbon” for my reasons.
w.
sfitz
Thanks for accepting the basic concept of the need to look at both sides of the balance sheet when evaluting the true cost/benefits of energy and the next step which is to price energy at fair value.
But do individuals actually do apply this comprehensive approach on a routine basis? There would be several thousand posts on WUWT where ‘cheap’ energy is used as if it is axiomatic that the market operates efficiently and effectively with respect to internalizing all aspects of energy costs in the energy price.
While ever individuals use the term ‘cheap’ while refusing to internalize all the costs, they are missing their own point in a most fundamental way. As a corollary, while individuals use the term ‘expensive’ while refusing to internalize all the benefits, they are also mising their own point in a most fundamental way.
I was especially taken with your use of specified time periods for your discussions. We all know that the markets often operate in a different time frame from the externalities associated with energy use. (I offer as an example, the market value of TEPCO since Fukushima. The externalities arrived long after the short-term benefits to both shareholders and consumers).
Inter alia, this is a structural fault in market operation is exposing us to the early consequences of, and future consequences of AGW, long after humankind has consumed the short-term benefits of falsely-named ‘cheap’ energy.
Willis
‘Ace, you didn’t say one word about benefits.’
So, lead me to one place where you have said one word about the disbenefits.
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Oh, please. You claimed you were talking about the benefits. You weren’t.
I said nothing about disbenefits. You’re just trying on a “tu quoque” that isn’t fitting.
w.
Willis Eschenbach says (March 18, 2013 at 2:43 pm): ‘It’s like busting folks for saying “I could care less…” ‘
Aaaaargh! If I hear that stupid phrase one more time, I swear I’m gonna invade Poland! There’s simply no excuse for using it, irregardless of–
Oh, crap.
🙂
This topic is a pet peeve of mine too. Oddly, one area where you’d expect colloquial English to rule but where they get the math right are retail stores.
Clothing stores often have clearance sales with signs saying “80% off!” I’ve never seen a sale sign advertising “5 times less” though I may have seen something like “Your dollars go 5 times further!”
Obviously a filter 500 times thinner can’t be -499 units thick, but there are values that can go negative. For example, “2X slower” would be backing up if you follow the math. Is it the same as 200% slower? Or do both really mean “50% slower? Or simply half speed?
It seems to me that if the purveyors of out-of-season fashion can get the math right, then by golly, I’m going to live up to that standard myself.
I hate grammar Nazis – you can stack 500 of of the new filters in the same space as one of the old filters. It’s that simple and you know it. Jackasses. And since these assemblies tend to be cylinders, you can increase the diameter to huge values and use a simple wind driven centrifuge to create the needed pressure. Add tumbler vanes and you have silt scrubbers at no extra cost. Keep the silt colloidal and it can be passed through the filter several times before being cast off.
Not free, not cheap, but what is a fresh liter of water worth to you after 10 days without?
Personally I think there are lots of square miles of unpopulated oceanic islands out there with fresh water lenses that can be tapped by water tankers (200,000+ DWT converted oil tankers) that can deliver the cleanest water on earth anywhere that has enough money to buy it. If left untapped it dissipates into the sea and is lost forever. Rather like the Columbia River water here in Washington. We allow loads of the finest water found anywhere to drive out to sea as if it had no value. I don’t get that.
I couldn’t be more proud of what these people are doing – making fresh water available, creating jobs, keeping people employed rather than depopulating the opihi population not to mention all the other intertidal denizens of the islands, and the water tastes damn good considering how old it is. http://www.fijiwater.com/
Climate Ace says:
March 18, 2013 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for accepting the basic concept of the need to look at both sides of the balance sheet when evaluting the true cost/benefits of energy and the next step which is to price energy at fair value.
‘Fair value’ is Leftistspeak for what some special interest wants the price to be.
Having said that I don’t have a problem with charging for the use of the commons, and the atmosphere is the ultimate commons. And charging for use of the commons is the proper function of government, as the commons belongs to all of us, and such charges been going on a very long time (charges for use of public spaces, mining royalties, etc). And if use of the commons negatively impacted the wider population, then charges for use of the commons should reflect the costs of those impacts.
But I have to agree with Willis that the supposed costs imposed on the wider population via use of the commons (atmosphere) from fossil fuel use are extremely dubious, ie Stern etc. I’ve done plenty of costs/benefit analyses, and could easily do one that shows a trillion dollar benefit from fossil fuel use by factoring in increased agricultural yields, increased precipitation, opening up of NE and NW passages, decreased illness and deaths from domestic burning of biofuels, etc.
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 18, 2013 at 11:53 am
Technology is about getting more results for less energy.
=========
If you got 2 times the results and saved no energy it would still be a good deal. Without a doubt water, not temperature is what determines climate. Without water no place is habitable. With water no desert is too hot for habitation.
Cost/benefit works for some classes of problems. However, carried to conclusion there is a net benefit to society in eliminating the cost of caring for old people. Cigarette smoking is a net benefit to society. Not only does it bring in tax revenues, it kills off the old before they can become a burden.
Good health, begin the slowest possible way in which a person dies, is a great burden to society because it leaves large numbers of relatively unproductive elderly people alive that must be cared for over an extended period of time. It might well be argued that pollution, by killing people off early before they can become a burden through old age, has a much greater benefit and lower cost than is generally realized.
What is often overlooked in the discussion is that no system is perfect. Whatever you put in place to replace fossil fuels is guaranteed to have its own warts, and those warts are largely unknown at this time. What may look benign today may indeed turn out to be malignant tomorrow.
So while the precautionary principle may seem like a good idea, carried to its logical conclusion no technology is acceptable because it all carries risks. The newer and less tried the technology, the greater the risk. This encourages the growth of government to try and minimize the risk.
Unfortunately power has a corrupting influence on even the most well meaning of individuals, such that the promise of government is rarely if ever achieved. Many of the greatest tragedies in history have resulted from the best of intentions. Any cause that is seen as noble and above reproach holds in its hands the seeds of disaster, because it limits civil discussion of the issues.
ferd berple says:
March 18, 2013 at 10:58 pm
It might well be argued that pollution, by killing people off early before they can become a burden through old age, has a much greater benefit and lower cost than is generally realized.
======
That would certainly explain the UK’s energy solution. By raising the cost of fuel they are increasing fuel poverty. This is successfully killing off the elderly during the winter, reducing the burden on both the health care system and the pension system at the same time. While making friends of government wealthy through green energy subsidies, which will then be used to fund re-election campaigns. It is a win-win all around for the government. After all, dead pensioners can’t vote you out of office.
I do a cost / benefit analysis every time I put fuel in my tank, or food in my refrigerator, or adjust my thermostat, or save for retirement, or go on vacation. And I have been doing it long enough to know which direction things are headed in. And the costs are going up, while the benefits are going down. That is not a good direction to be headed in.
Osmotic power is limited by what would be the energy of mixing freshwater and seawater, which apparently is 0.81 kWh per m^3 of seawater (wikipedia: osmotic power). So, for instance, if one had a desalination plant within around a factor of 2 of theoretical max efficiency, it would presumably be around 1.6 kWh/m^3 or less.
Present desalination plants reportedly use up to 4 to 8 kWh/m^3 after all inefficiencies.
Electricity costs to industrial-scale users are around half or less of residential electricity prices. Industrial electricity prices can be around $0.05/kWh and in some areas less. Thermal power can be multiple times cheaper still than electrical power, and, if getting unusually creative in integration, a nuclear reactor located at the same site might relatively directly elevate water pressure without as many stages of energy conversion and transmission first.
But, for the sake of illustration, merely suppose $0.05/kWh, even though less is conceivable.
Then the energy cost of desalination becomes:
<= $0.08 / m^3 if under a factor of 2 inefficiency (likely aided by graphene filters if capital costs low enough)
<= $0.20 to $0.40 / m^3 for current desalination plants
Even the latter figure is much different from the total cost of desalination seen in figure 2 of this article ($0.50+/m^3), which would suggest that energy costs are somewhat over-hyped compared to other expenses (such as amortized capital costs).
But, conservatively and fairly reasonably, let's just guess that desalination with future technology does not cost more than $0.10 to $0.50 per m^3. After all, at the top end, that corresponds to what is already obtained.
Each cubic meter is 264.2 gallons.
That means $1 of desalinated water amounts to 530 to 2600 gallons.
The cost is $0.0004 to $0.002 per gallon of desalinated water. The cost of U.S. municipal tap water today, without desalination, is $0.002 to $0.006 per gallon (typically $24 to $73 per month, depending on the city, for a family using 400 gallons per day and using about 12170 gallons a month).
The latter includes some distribution, chlorination, and other expenses applying in any event, but desalination would add very little extra at most. In fact, being already purified by reverse osmosis, not having as many complications and variation in supply, there is not even necessarily any net cost for desalination, depending on the locality.
Average total water usage per individual American is 62600 gallons a month,* of which near 3000 gallons a month are residential usage while the vast majority is agricultural and industrial usage.
(* Based on: “in the USA the average water footprint is 2842 m^3/yr per capita.” from http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/WaterFootprintsNations )
That “water footprint” metric might be an overestimate. I’d have to check details of its definition, as the corresponding 2.3 acre-feet per person per year is suspiciously about double the figures in http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/arithmetic.html . But it certainly isn’t an underestimate. And even producing 100% of it by desalination would only add up to $1 to $5 per month per person to residential water bills, while being up to $290 to $1400 annually per capita in total (mostly embedded in agricultural costs). Those figures are actually far more pessimistic than would ever occur, because:
(1) Rainfall, rivers, and freshwater would not magically all disappear, so never would a full 100% from desalination be needed
(2) Most of the water usage is in irrigation of conventional agriculture which could be made more water efficient on average if water prices thus rose somewhat
Incidentally, what looking at these figures also illustrates is how much the supposed need for water-saving toilets is vastly over-hyped. Even I hadn’t realized quite how minor residential water usage is overall compared to agricultural water usage.
In summary, though, desalination can be plenty cheap enough.
And the article is quite right overall.
If I was going to nitpick, I’d rephrase the fourth bullet point in the article as: Technology is about getting more results for less labor.
Using more energy in the process is often done, like driving a 2000-kilogram car to transport one’s body instead of only bicycling, or air conditioning a house instead of sprinkling water on oneself while shirtless. Civilization today uses vastly more energy per person than pre-fire primitive hominids, and that is of overall huge benefit. As technology advances, human energy usage should further increase, to third world countries reaching first-world levels, to a civilization expanding into space. Energy use is only universally and intrinsically bad under the (untrue) energy religion, the assumption of many of similar politics to the CAGW movement that the several TW-average used by civilization today are fundamentally an excessive energy waste in an universe with 200000 TW of sunlight hitting Earth, trillions of tons of thorium & uranium in the terrestrial crust, and a Sun wasting 400,000,000,000,000 terawatts into empty space.
Output relative to human labor, how much someone can get done per hour of work done or time spent, is a fundamental metric of whether in poverty or prosperity.
Oh Gak! I see the Cost / Benefit scheme is being promoted again.
(Yes, I’ve done them. Yes, I know all about them. No, they don’t work as well as people think, especially when operated by an advocate).
Many of them are nothing more than exercises in cherry picking exemplars, exaggeration of speculative costs, and imaginary benefits. “Given this desired outcome, what inputs can I pick and rate”.
It is very very hard to do a valid cost benefit analysis, even if you ARE unbiased. Most of the time they are used by highly biased people with an agenda.
They can be a useful tool, but are typically corrupted into advocacy propaganda tools. Unless the thing reads like an actuarial table and has the emotional content of a leaf blower manual, with clear data points from common costing basis and with several pages of caveats, it is likely worthless and wrong.
@Ferd Berple:
Such things like the C/B of tobacco are, in fact done. It was an example in one of my Econ classes in the ’70s. We specifically looked at the issues and morality of such cost / benefit problems and “smoking and dying fast and just after productive life ends” vs “suck up valuable resources so others die of privation” was the problem.
This kind of thing is common in “Public Health”. Economists have to be familiar with it. So, for example, if you have fewer smokers, you get more old folks sucking down limited medical resources and more babies die from treatable infant diseases. If you have more smokers, more beds are available for those at the start of life. That is a valid problem. Unfortunately, there is a near infinite possible demand for medical care. It can only be dealt with by reduction of demand via pricing someone out of it (our prior model), rationing (the UK and socialized HMO medical model), or “selective dying” by things not NOT fighting smoking.
One of the classes I hated most, and learned the most.
Were I the King, given that I hate, loath, and despise smoking ( it definitely killed my father and likely killed my mother via second hand smoke – both with cancer): Would I really ban smoking, knowing that it would inevitably mean more young folks will be denied medical care? There isn’t an infinite supply. So you now get to let old rich folks buy it up (so poor farm workers kids die) or you ration it (to whom? on what basis?). You can spend your public health dollars on an anti-smoking campaign, vaccines for children and maternity care, or more beds for serious diseases and nursing homes. Which 2 do you choose? (You can not afford all three…) Will you really choose anti smoking campaign, knowing that will mean even more beds needed in nursing homes?
I’d never want to be in Public Health…
But the UK does a lot of it…
True Story:
My aunt had a knee go bad. They were trying to decide if they ought to put in an artificial knee or not. One of the concerns was that it would put more stress on her other, good, knee. They actually were proposing to replace THAT knee with an artificial one, and leave the other one ‘bum’, since then they would only need to do one in the long run instead of two…
In fact, they spent so long trying to decide that she had a stroke (it is unclear if it was subsequent to a fall from said knee, but might have been before and then the fall) and is now in a bed, with no knee replacement. This is a “plus”, as they avoided doing the knee replacement long enough to “not waste it”… she can no longer walk.
I think the UK medical system does some of the worst cost / benefit studies around. Then again, I didn’t want to do them… but somebody did…
Oh, and that kind of thing is coming to the USA too. It will be ever more frequent to tell folks “you will not be treated as it isn’t worth the cost, given your likely remaining life span.”. S.O.P. for “managed care”…
So is it better to have old folks being told that? Or being told “You enjoyed smoking for 40 years, now you have 5 months, tops. Come back when you have these symptoms and it will be your last week or two in hospital.” Damned if I know.
(Typical time to onset of cancer in smokers is 30 years after starting. My Dad got 40. So if someone doesn’t start until 30, is that OK then?… How about if they start at 50? Few live to 80 in good shape anyway…)
I really hated that class…
@Climate Ace:
Per the embedded petroleum: Unlikely there was much. Plastics mostly made from natural gas now, but can just as easily be made from plant products. Yes, there will be some transportation. Do you want to count the ’embedded petroleum’ in the bodies of the workers who built it? They eat food made with something that somewhere used petroleum…
The point? It’s a fools game to do that recursive decent into dependency hell. The common usage means “used to run the place”, not that some guys grandma moved to California in a truck in the 1930s, so some petroleum use is embedded in his existence so needs to be accounted in the songs he sings in the bar… It’s that kind of “search for any plausible link and pump it up” that makes the “green” cost benefit analysis and economic analysis look stupid.
But “most cities are not in the desert”? Who you kidding! Never hear of Phoenix? Los Angeles? (Water shipped in from N. California) Heck, most of California is a technical desert. Then there are all those resorts in Baja. And El Paso. Don’t forget El Paso… Or a large part of Chile. The reality is that folks love to live in a ‘Mediterranean Climate’ and those happen where cold water off the coast causes a desert environment just inland. So we load those places up to the limit of imported / mined water. Start having water in “desert coastal” areas, you will find another Los Angeles or Phoenix worth of people paying good money to build and move in.
It is also quite clear you have little idea what these things mean for proximal food production. The one in (I think it was) Qatar means food grown on the edge of their major metroplex (yes, another city in the desert) and transported the minimum distance; instead of shipped in from Africa or South America.
In one step, these things mean that essentially ALL of North Africa from Spanish Sahara / Morroco to Egypt and down to Somalia could have locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables (and off to Saudi and up to Turkey and around to Yemen and Iran and …) I find it astounding that you feel compelled to nay-say what has ZERO negative to it. This, believe it or not, is a Nice Green Conservation Oriented Solution. Yet you still can’t bring yourself to accept that it is a great step forward. Sigh.
Oh, for grins, look up what is used to make rayon and cellophane. Find out what is in your ‘viscous’ sponge. Plastic does not equal oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
IMHO, those seawater greenhouses are the best thing since the Earthship; (Which I’d love to live in, and hope to build one ‘someday’)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
Designed to use minimal new materials, collect their own water even in a desert like New Mexico, process their own wastes, make their own electricity, etc. etc. Essentially self contained and in many cases made from ‘otherwise trash’. (Rammed earth in used tires. Glass bottles for walls, etc.)
Real environmental advocates are in favor of that kind of progress to use resources better, and not busy nay-saying and being all paranoid about running out and using up.
Progress is a good thing. It uses less to do more and makes for a better life in the process. Mr. Negativity usually fails to make progress.
EMSmith
I note your negative comment on cost/benefit and note that so-called ‘cheap’ energy, and its consequences, makes an implicit judgement about cost/benefit.
‘But “most cities are not in the desert”? Who you kidding! Never hear of Phoenix? Los Angeles? (Water shipped in from N. California) Heck, most of California is a technical desert. Then there are all those resorts in Baja. And El Paso. Don’t forget El Paso… Or a large part of Chile. The reality is that folks love to live in a ‘Mediterranean Climate’ and those happen where cold water off the coast causes a desert environment just inland. So we load those places up to the limit of imported / mined water. Start having water in “desert coastal” areas, you will find another Los Angeles or Phoenix worth of people paying good money to build and move in. ‘
I was thinking globally. No european cities are in deserts. Most Russian cities are not in deserts. No Scandinavian cities are in deserts. The majority of chinese cities are not in deserts, although the deserts are heading for Beijing. No south-east asian cities are in deserts. No central american cities are in deserts. No south american cities east of the Andes are in deserts. Most south asian cities are in the great floodplains of the Ganges and the Indus. Of Australian cities, most are not in deserts. The middle east and central asian area might be worth a look for the balance of cities in and out of deserts, but many middle eastern cities are in the better-watered fertile crescent and the great flood plains of the Euphratres and the Tigris. Irrigation using waters sourced from distant areas has changed the patter for some cities. Oil has altered that pattern somewhat in oil producing countries. Tourism has done the same. Most African cities are not in deserts. Even central asian cities, possibly the class which is closest to deserts, often has the cities located in rangelands rather than deserts per se.
But, even if you limited the discussion to the US, most US cities are not in deserts. My definition of desert is a less than 10″ of rainfall per annum. It therefore explicitly excludes most of the planet’s rangelands. We could argue the term ‘deserts’ but there is not much point.
My original point about deserts and where people live (cities, mostly) holds. Globally, deserts are generally were people aren’t. People aren’t generally where deserts are. Human settlement pattern history is replete with the drivers.
Extremely cheap water would certainly change the future of the world.
Willis, there was no implication you didn’t understand.
An anecdote. More than a few years back I was I was on the back of a jeepney negotiating a mud track in one of the less travelled Phillippine islands. We passed a shack in the jungle and out the back of the shack was a huge pile of empty plastic bottles. I estimate the pile was close to 2 meters high and 5 meters across.
Which is, in part, the reason the Greenie obsession with reducing plastic waste, really p1sses me off.
Better, a million piles of plastic bottles like that, than 1 kid dead from unsafe water.