The Magical Power of the Kilowatt-Hour
Guest essay by Tom Scott
The typical follower of this blog is likely more knowledgeable in math and the sciences than the average reader, so many of you will find the following quite obvious on an intellectual level, but the facts below may still stimulate a new awareness of just how powerful is the concept of energy available at the flip of a switch.
The incentive to write down these brief thoughts came while reading from Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog the other day. There I came across this stupefyingly dumb quote from our White House Science Advisor, John Holdren . In a 1975 newspaper article in the Windsor Star, entitled “Too Much Energy, Too Soon, a Hazard”, he wrote:
“Finally, less energy can mean more employment. The energy producing industries comprise the most capital intensive and least labour intensive major sector of the economy. Accordingly, each dollar of investment capital taken out of energy production and invested in something else, and each personal consumption dollar saved by reduced energy use and spent elsewhere in the economy will create more jobs than are lost.”
To evaluate the above quote, consider the difference in productivity between the solar and coal power production industries. Both industries support about 174,000 jobs in the U.S. while coal provides about 150 times more power at this time (about 0.25% to about 39%). Hardly a winning substitution.
But can’t we (or the third world) live just as well without electricity?
To answer this, lets start with the term “horsepower” as it is rooted in real-world imagery. One horsepower is defined as 550 pounds of force displaced one foot per second. In other words, with one horsepower at hand one could start at sea-level and lift a 550 pound weight 1 foot higher every second. It was thought that a horse could do this kind of work on a reasonably regular basis, thus the name. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a human generating this kind of power for more than a few seconds at a time.
It so happens that a kilowatt is about 1.34 times “larger” than a horsepower, or about 737 lbs raised one foot each second, or 100 kg raised 1 meter each second. If we assume than our electric motor and transmission are about 75% efficient (1/1.34), we would be right back to an output of 550 ft-lb of useful work from each KWH purchased. For each KWH we pay about 0.10 to $0.15 at retail prices here in the U.S.
The U.S. median household income is about $50,000 per year, which spread over 2,000 work hours would be $25 per hour. Historically an employer has loaded costs of about 1.4 times the pay rate, so the cost to the employer would be about $35 per hour. How does that wage compare to the work which can be done by the kilowatt-hour? At a price of 10 cents per unit, an employer could substitute 350 KWH for each man-hour of payroll. Assuming 75% efficiency, this equates to lifting almost 8000 one hundred pound bags of concrete 40 inches (one meter) each hour, eight hours per day, 250 days per year. For the rest of the world that is about 7,200 fifty-kilogram sacks raised one meter each hour. Would you be able or willing to do such work for 30 years in order to modestly raise a family and fund a small retirement? Not if you are human because it would be physically impossible.
So the next time you hear someone suggest that killing a job in the coal-based power industry and replacing it with one in the solar industry will lead to a better world, realize that each job so displaced will come with vastly reduced productivity. And the next time you hear a green advocate suggest that you can do manually what we are currently doing with the “help” of evil electricity, consider your child’s working life spent lifting 8000 one hundred pound sacks every hour for 25 or 30 years. Or until he/she dies trying.
Such is the magical power of the kilowatt-hour.
Lemme voxsplain what Holdren is saying. When there’s not enough energy, we’ll have to open up the labor camps for the nonbelievers.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what the Marxists in DC are planning.
Thank you for your input Tom Scott but you need to read up on marginal utility before you comment on economics.
?Explain. I’m trying hard to think what relevance that has.
oldfossil, do you have any useful commentary regarding the matter, or did your anonymous jab do it for you?
The arrogance is he thinks he, Holdren, is better able to balance the marginal utility of economic assets better than the free market. Typical communist.
I think the general concept is to eventually force all white males into energy generation slavery, this would eliminate sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, pollution, war, hate speech, climate change, drought, malaria, halitosis, hammer toe, NASCAR, science, innovation, sanity etc. This appears to be the goal, they have started by eliminating men from higher education. In the sixties the sexual makeup of universities was about 60-40 men-women, that was outrageous, woman demanded equality, fair enough. Universities scrambled to attract young women to enroll by inventing new areas of studies that are nothing but academic hogwash, eg. Gender awareness studies, if you make it to university age and have to take a course to be aware of your or anyone else’s gender, you have a lot more development to deal with before your education begins. Now the sexual makeup of campuses is 70-30 women-men, and the impression I get is the men are all rapists and need to be eliminated all together. Another example of a group that begins by asking for equality, but the real motivation is revenge.
Sounds like the movie “The Matrix”–human batteries abound.
There may be a method to this madness (Or maybe I’m giving Holdren too much credit) but is true that productivity is increasing, while the labor component in productivity is being intractably reduced. In fact, productivity is increasing because the labor component is being reduced (by, among other things, the advances in robotics and “AI” which are making serious incursions in to white collar jobs as they did with blue collar jobs 30 years ago.) In America (and perhaps elsewhere, for all I know) this has wrought many marvelous Fox Butterfield moments, in news headlines like “Profits increasing though jobs still scarce.” In fact, the profits are increasing because the economic downturn gave companies the opportunity to shed all those unnecessary makey-work jobs by which we as a society redistributed wealth. Perhaps Holdren realizes we are close to a moment in history where most people will not have or need a job and thinks would be a bad thing. A Luddite indeed.
And one day we will have to confront this. IMO the simplest and most scalable way to do so would be to go first to a four and a half day work week, then to a four day work week, etc, while rescaling salaries and wages and benefits to remain roughly the same as technology continues to reduce the need for humans to do work at all. That is, there will be increasing need to ensure that there are jobs enough to go around that pay a living wage rather than concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer pockets while increasing the unemployment and hence the social network burden.
This is itself probably too simple a solution and would require tweaking, but IMO we are still going to eventually have to deal with the problem. We are rapidly approaching an era where human work will simply be superfluous in many contexts. Within the next three decades, we are likely to reduce the cost of electricity by a factor of 2 to 4 in real dollars whatever Holdren fantasizes and in spite of (perhaps even because of) the best efforts of the warmists and energy companies to artificially inflate the cost of energy. I’ve been following the science news pretty carefully, and I think there is a rather good chance that fusion really truly is just around the corner at last. And then there is still LFTR, which sounds too good to be true, but isn’t, given the solution of just a few engineering/technical hurdles that we KNOW can be solved with a tiny bit of effort. The combined and easily mineable energy content of thorium and deuterium in the accessible part of the Earth’s surface (land and ocean) is enough to power civilization at 10x its current per capita energy consumption (or more) for the indefinite future (millions of years), and then there are the resources of the entire solar system waiting to be exploited after that. We probably won’t be burning coal anyway in thirty years, in other words, and yet energy will cost less than 1/4 of what it costs now in constant dollars.
With that sort of price on energy, sustained, robotic and other technology will gradually create a world where we need to employ only perhaps 10% of the human species in order to enable all of that species to live like royalty. Either we employ everybody 10% of the time, so we all work a half-day a week or so, or we employ 10% full time and everybody else is unemployed, or somewhere in between. Or we invent new definitions of “work” and make the workforce even more of an Army of Oz than it is now (a whole company of generals, colonels, majors, captains and lieutenants all to command a single actual private that does all of the work:-).
But in the sort run, the worst thing in the world is to bump the cost of electricity, artificially, mouthing crap like “it will increase employment”. I just finished reading a lovely article in National Geographic where they bemoaned the fact that Africa lives poised on the edge of starvation much of the time because fertilizer there is so expensive and all of the farms are the usual tiny sustenance farms of a poor culture. And fertilizer — why exactly is it so expensive? Because it is made with electricity — lots of it, to fix nitrogen. And electricity in Africa is a scarce resource. And why is that? Because the coal-generated electricity worldwide is probably a factor of 2-3 more expensive than it would be without the global warming fiasco. Follow the money, and you’ll find that energy companies are among the biggest recipients of the Global Warming bonanza.
rgb
Matt McGinn had the answer quite a while ago.
Look and listen!
The gravest problem is not that the total amount of work is shrinking, but that the remaining work becomes ever more demanding. In order to be employed, you have to beat the robot at something, and with ever cleverer robots, an ever greater proportion of the population will find itself without any job prospects at all.
+10
It isn’t often I find much to disagree with in rgb’s alwayss well-constructed comments, but this time he surprises us by suggesting that society is going to need a new way of dealing with the flood of cheaper energy and the wealth that it creates.
There would seem to no reason to think that these advances will not quite naturally find a solution. The 4 day week will likely replace the 5 dayweek, just as the five day week replaced the six and seven day week. The entry-cost of living (buying food and services) will fall to undreamt-of levels, and folks can choose whether they want more cash or more leisure. And other folks will employ themselves finding new goods and services to milk the cash and occupy that leisure. It will just happen, as it always has. Though, doubtless the politicos will have a field day vying to convince us that they know how best the goodies can be distributed, it can resolve without coercion/central direction, as it always has previously.
The greater danger I see is that the mindset of our current leaders is to adopt a green-leaning stance that will deter and delay this progress quite unnecessarily. We don’t need to encourage them by suggesting that it is time for them to intervene before new-found wealth corrupts us!
Boy rgb, I’m glad you are on our side. Your assessment of future cheap and plentiful energy helps put me at ease for our future generations. I think your concerns for government or some entity to concern themselves with future employment are unnecessary. The concerns of people being replaced by machines have been around for a long time and have been unfounded for a long time. One of the best examples is in farming. Many people were for the most part were happily replaced by machines all without the need for government action. None of the old farmers I know long for the good old days. The entertainment industry (I include sports) has done much to take up the excess labor. Sports in my very minority opinion the biggest waste of time and effort there is. There are plenty more time and effort wasting activities to take up the excess labor.
I totally disagree with rgb. We . . . WE . . . don’t need to do anything. People and the marketplace will deal with all.
In many countries the transition to a 3 day working week would likely only occur after mass unemployment and ever growing riots, perhaps some of the Scandinavian countries might handle it better. I suspect the UK would be amongst the worst.
In fact France could move to a 4 day week now and still be better off than the UK.
I read in the economist magazine recently that the French produce more in 4 days than the English do in a week.
The government could create a policy where employers will face a great penalty if they give their workers more than 30 hours a week. What’s that, 3 and 3/4 days a week?
They could call it something like . . .
Obamacare.
My company introduced a 37.5 hour week in the early 70’s. We even tried 35. Never really worked. The busy folks still worked 60+ and the ones that didn’t have to liked the overtime pay. Only period where it sort of worked was the recession in the 80’s.
It could work now or some time in the near future with cultural shifts and 24 hour on line access. Even in the middle of uninhibited parts of the Utah and Nevada deserts there is Internet access 24/7.
Ugh, just so much wrong with this. We don’t need to dictate any changes to the work week, that’s why we need free markets. If I can produce sufficiently in 20 hours to make my employer (possibly me) and me (definitely me) the amount of return to live the lifestyle I want, then that’s what we will negotiate. Now if the employer finds that they can make even more money by running their capital with another worker for the next 20 hours, they’ll contract that out and away we go. If I decide that I want more, then I’ll take those extra 40 hours.
The reality is today we make (per capita GDP) about 6 times what we made in 1938 when the 44 hour work week was first implemented. Why are we still working? The simple answer is that as we get more we want more (to a point). Apparently for most people greed is indeed good. I certainly approve of making all you can through honest, mutual exchanges.
So that leaves us with the far, far off utopia of personal fabers which eliminate most household item needs. Again, these are far, far, far off. There’s a lot of useful and promising stuff coming out of 3D printing land, but we are light years away from The Diamond Age or the rest of Drexler’s snake oil.
And that’s without mentioning all of the other labor that we will still want. By the time we solve those problems there won’t be a need to worry about the unemployed because the capital base will be so large that they will still live comfortably.
rgb says:
IMO the simplest and most scalable way to do so would be to go first to a four and a half day work week, then to a four day work week, etc, while rescaling salaries and wages and benefits to remain roughly the same as technology continues to reduce the need for humans to do work at all.
I trust that was sarcasm?
Holdren’s right. For example, North Korea has zero unemployment, while still using a small amount of energy.
Let them eat grass.
And there’s always the dog food industry.
Each dollar taken out of energy production and invested in something else… without energy production there would be no ‘something else’.
sure …what about slavery?
The fetters and chain industry supports it strongly.
Aha! That’s who is behind all this, Big Fetters and Chains. And all this time we thought it was Big Oil.
Talking of Egyptian grain (see above), if you fly over the Nile Delta, you will see that there is a farm (a hovel) every 100 meters or so. Whereas if you fly over Illinois, you will see a farm every ten kilometers or so. And the Egyptians and North African Muslims will still blame American wealth and prosperity on the Great Satan stealing their resources.
On the contrary, the difference is oil vs slavery once more.
The Egyptians are happy to use 5,000 times as many people, to farm the same acreage as are employed on the plains of Illinois. But to make those farms economically viable, the Egyptian workers need to be paid slave-wages. Which they are. And anyone on slave-wages is effectively a slave. In great contrast, Illionois will employ gas-guzzling combine harvesters, that were themselves made by gas-guzzling machines in factories. And so Illinois will employ one farmer to do the work of 5,000 Egyptian slaves, and pay a thousand times the salary.
The choice is obvious. If John Holdren wants to get rid of oil-slavery, he will have to reintroduce human-slavery. But if he wants that, why does he not just stand up and say so?
.
Farming in Egypt. This is what John Holdren wants for the USA. But as long as he does not have to do the work, and his food-bill remains the same.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZedhONwaPjI/TOy8-4KHNoI/AAAAAAAAAKM/_pMeNYqkxAg/s1600/399.JPG
Farming in the USA. The Greens think this is inefficient, because there is only one driver. (Actually, the combine is on GPS autopilot, with auto steering).
http://www.bushywood.com/farming/farming_pictures/combine-harvester-new-holland-cr1090-heavyweight-world-champion.jpg
A combine harvester does not “carp” on the land, an animal does, thats the difference!
Brilliant !! And how many oxen would it take to fertilise a 600 acre field in that fashion? That is why the West uses man-made fertilisers, made from fossil fuels I might add. And extra CO2 in the atmosphere, of course.
If you want 6 billion on the planet you need the food to feed them – and ox-ploughs and a cow-pat every 100m will just lead to famine. Utterly useless, unless that is what John Holdren wants, of course. The Green culling policy, that Holdren will not admit to.
Large scale mechanised farming also has it’s problems and can lead to food production and growing problems. The EU is a good example of this, destroying land quality requiring expensive man-made fertilisers creating food mountains and lakes that no-one can sell, consquently, ending up in landfil. It is extimated that, in the UK alone, up to 40% of food grown, which includes fertliser, fuel, energy, transport and labour, is simply wasted. A smaller farm model is vefry much in favor.
I don’t know why the government want to push solar so badly….with all the problems associated with. I’ve roughly calculated that if you wanted to power the world by solar panels you’d have to kill all the plant life in something like the state of Colorado. I wonder what the tree huggers would think about that. looks to me that our only real hope is if ITER is a sucess
I don’t know if your calculation is correct, but it gives food for thought. If building over Colorado could provide sufficient power (at least by day in summer) to service the world, isn’t that surprising, at those poor efficiencies? Just another indication how big the world really is and, once again, how the world is nowhere near as stressed for resources, or space, as most people, if asked, would guess. The big Malthusian lie always finds a welcome in people’s hearts.
world energy usage – 1.43e17 watts 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
say 1.5e17 watts now
suns irradiance average this value was just a pick..i used 5 kwh/m2/day http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/average-solar-radiation
multiple this by 365 days…say 1,600 kw/m2
convert to sqft. 160 kw/sf
say the usable energy efficiency and usable is 30% in the panel..(probably very high)…don’t know if a number exists for this on such a mass scale…..
so that’s bout 80 kw/sf
1.5e17 watts / 5e4 watts/sf = 3 e12 sf /5280^2 = about 108,000 square miles
Colorado is 104,000 sq miles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_area
since all the suns energy is used for power….the plants get no sunlight and die…..
this would be a ecological catastrophe
Make solar panels with holes – then use them like a shadecloth in high-sun areas to help plant growth underneath.
Conventional energy doesn’t present enough opportunity for graft.
When I visited China 5 years ago…lots of cheap labor, very few power tools, most done by hand, low wages, early retirement, government pension.
You left out the poverty of those doing labor by hand with very low tech. Which is why so many travel extremely long distances in order to get a better (higher tech-more energy dependent) job.
You forgot to add “years of hard labour, grinding poverty, a broken body, and a subsistsnce-level pension.”. If you think the Chinese system is so wonderful, why don’t you move there? Ah, yes, I know, because life in a technological, mechanised America is much nicer……
A friend also visited a Chinese factory, just after the cultural revolution, and reported seeing two people operating a simple, old press. Well, one to operate the press, and one to return the press tool to its first positon, because a spring was missing. My friend offered to send them a 5 cent spring to replace the missing part so that it could be returned to its design production rate, but was roundly condemned by his hosts, who pointed out that this would put the second operator out of a job. Holdren would clearly have been at home.
He should spend some time in, oh I dunno, Ethiopia, to understand what he is implying.
Yup. That is one of the places I worked… See upthread.
Yes, this (Holdren’s remarks) are the dumbest things I’ve heard from the mouth of a public official since the day the secretary of the interior said that there was no need to preserve the natural resources locked up in our national parks and forests because the Rapture was coming any day now and we would no longer need them.
In one sense, he is perfectly correct. If electricity went away, think of how many candlemakers would be employed to replace the light we use in a single evening at home!
Think of how many travelling actors and musicians would be employed to provide the entertainment we take for granted.
Think of how much more food we would have to grow since we could no longer refrigerate food before we ate it or keep our leftovers. Think of how much more land area we would have to clear and plant to grow even the same amount of food we use now without the labor-saving fertilizers made with electricity.
Think of all of the people we could employ raising horses to pull the carts that delivered our milk, and how many more people we could employ to remove the natural byproduct of horse-drawn transportation from our various streets.
Think of how we would cook dinner — no electrical stoves or microwaves, and sadly we use electricity to pump and deliver and meter natural gas, and most modern stoves use electricity to avoid the need for pilot lights. It would be back to cooking over wood or charcoal.
Think of how many people we would have to employ as nurses and doctors as the instrumentation they use to monitor the sick no longer functioned. Think of how much work they’d have when the medicines they rely on (all made using electricity, out of materials mined with electricity, and delivered by means of vehicles that require electricity in many contexts to run) are no longer are available.
Think of all the secretaries we could once again employ when word processing was no longer available.
Think of all of the postal employees we’d need when mail once again meant pieces of paper carried by hand and horse across vast distances.
Think of all the gravediggers we would employ to bury the vast, vast numbers of dead created by the collapse of the social order and civilization itself, with our huge cities unable to be fed by any means whatsoever given the distance between the city and the farm. Even if we built coal burning non-electrical trains (without using electricity at any point to mine or deliver or mill the steel) as fast as we could, we would never be able to do it in time to feed the millions who live in places like downtown Manhattan, isolated from the farmland that feeds them by hundreds of miles.
In fact, I think Holdren should hold up gravedigging as an example of the real growth industry in a world with less electricity.
Some people tend to idealize “civilization” in the era before electricity — praising the Jeffersonian fantasy of the gentleman farmer, or some sort of self-sufficient educated rural population living in balance with the land. They ignore the fact that this was a fantasy even in Jefferson’s time, and that Jefferson’s efforts to create it in his own life relied on enslaving humans instead of electrons. They ignore the fact that life in the 18th and 19th century sucked. They ignore the fact that almost all of our luxuries, all of our necessities, all of the many components of our comfortable lives are directly due to the invention and universal delivery of cheap electricity!
Even the poorest members of our society are wealthier than the richest humans in the world in the 18th century. They enjoy luxuries that simply did not exist — the luxury of foods from all around the world, of superb health care and dentistry, the luxury of light after dark, the luxury of music, books, art, and diverse entertainments available at any instant, the luxury of transportation farther in an hour than humans could travel in three days for less cost (in terms of income) than the food a human would consume in a single meal along that long trek on foot, the luxury of cold beer and hot soup prepared in a clean kitchen at the touch of a few electrical buttons, the incredible luxury of not living at or near the ambient temperature of the environment, the luxury of life free from soot.
Even the personal freedoms they enjoy are largely due to electricity. Rapid communications are a tool, if not an absolute requirement, of personal and political freedom. The Arab Spring movement was mediated by cell phones! Electronic information penetrates the bamboo curtain China still (somewhat pathetically) tries to erect between its citizens and the rest of the world. My physics textbook helps students in India, and China, and South America, and Saudi Arabia, to learn things that they wouldn’t even know existed without the constant flow of electrons and photons carrying the information back and forth across the oceans.
I just wish that idiots who make statements like this with an obviously self-serving political cast to them and that are at such incredible odds with reality would be forced to live the life of “increased employment” they advocate as a result of increased costs for electricity, or better yet, be forced to live a life without the use of any electricity or any goods or services produced with the use of electricity at all, for a year or two. If they survive they can come back and tell us about the virtues of life in the 17th century, using handmade paper, handmade ink, and a printing press where they get to set the type using hand-cast letters, and where they can hand-deliver the resulting document to us, one at a time, on horseback.
rgb
Think of how many people we would be able to employ as gravediggers as
One of my “fondest” memories of Holdren came from 1976. At that time, he was advocating for clean coal over nuclear, claiming that with the right technology, the largest number of deaths from coal would come from people being killed at railroad crossings. The quality of his analysis is reflected by his assuming that no steps could or would be taken to reduce crossing fatalities.
Seems to me that he is an activist who pretends to be a scientist in that he adjusts his analysis to fit his thesis, rather than adjusting his thesis to fit an objective analysis.
One quibble: how many graves will be needed when amoral starving masses created by the regime start eating the dead?
Nothing new here:
“On September 13, 1935 William Aberhart gave a speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto. He recounted an anecdote in which he delivered a version of the saying:
One of the school graduates came to me to pay his respects to the school; he told me he was in charge of helping on one of the Dominion air ports. I said to him, “I suppose you use modern machinery in your air ports?”
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he said, “if we used modern machinery in the establishment of air ports there would be very little need of men to help us to do it, for they would do it so rapidly and easily that there would be no need of man labour. We give them picks and shovels and put them out to do it in the old-fashioned way.”
I smiled and said to him: “It would probably be just as well to give them spoons and forks; it would take them still longer to do it.” It seemed to me so ridiculous; we let modern machinery rust at the road side or air port and make those men bend their backs in order to give them the purchasing power to buy the necessities of life, and hardly that.”
Other variants attributed to Milton Freedman.
Charles G. Battig
This is true, think about how many jobs there were just in farming before electricity and fossil fuels! Ahh the good old days…
Your post reflects even more on the change in a woman’s life because of cheap, ready, and steady electricity. In times past sans electricity, home life kept a woman working far more hours than men. The labor was physical, often caustic, and usually led to an earlier grave than that of men. It was also the reason education outside the home was a luxury for children, not a mandate. Children were needed to spread the work else a woman was in her grave before child bearing years were over.
And lots of them were in their grave from child bearing. Old graveyards in Kentucky will bear that out: A headstone for a young woman with a rock right next to it. The rock marked the resting place for the stillborn infant.
Yep. My great-grandfather was left to raise a newborn and older children due to childbirth maternal mortality. His second wife whom he married a year later, much younger than he, went on to bear more children. It was through her, especially her father (originally from Springfield, Illinois) that connected my ancestors with Abraham Lincoln. Our written history in centennial biographies from two states identifies my great-great-grandfather as having a personal as well as political, though on opposite sides, friendship with President Lincoln prior to his presidency. However, the point is that in addition to long working hours in a western pioneer town, his first wife was not able to withstand the combination of daily work and child bearing. While she and earlier children survived birth, her deteriorated physical condition after such a hard life, bore down on her and eventually took her to an early grave.
All this is to say that any woman with an ounce of sense, would never, ever, advocate for a watermelon lifestyle devoid of the advantages of cheap electricity. That women do such things is beyond my comprehension. All I can say is that someone, somewhere in her family, forgot to tell her what it was like in years past and have not made her visit the graves of women who came before her.
Graphs here …
http://ourworldindata.org/data/health/maternal-mortality/#maternal-mortality-ratio-per-100000-live-births-over-the-long-run-max-roserref
Pamela you make good points, but the main reason women went to earlier graves than men was giving birth.
When Holdren wrote that reducing energy allows capital to be invested in more labor intensive
industries, increasing employment levels, he is probably essentially correct, but only if energy reductions are accomplished thru cost-effective energy conservation. That frees up (mostly) consumer money in
the same way that reduced gas/gsoline prices have in the recent past. More money spread around means more jobs, how many more and what kind depend totally on where the increased consumer spending goes. A lot of it will increase employment in China and elsewhere, something Holdren apparently isn’t aware of. But Holdren’s observations were hardly newsworthy or something everyone didn’t already know.
MY opinion is that the guest blogger is confused as to what Holdren said – he did not say that human labor can replace the physical work that energy can accomplish.
Cost effective energy conservation is already employed. Government aims at reduced energy consumption cannot, by their nature, be cost effective because, if it was, it would’ve been done in advance of regulations. For instance, in the factory of the company I worked for sodium vapor lamps were used for low energy lighting; not because they were required, but to reduce costs. A major window manufacturer recycled the sawdust through boilers to heat the plant. A major outboard motor manufacturer had an arrangement with a major brewery to supply them with used beer cans which were recycled into aluminum engine blocks. A junkyard is a recycling facility. None of these actions were imposed on these entities.
Therefore, it seems highly likely that any government scheme to reduce energy consumption will come about through non cost effective regulations or through a deliberately imposed reduction in the supply which, by the laws of the Universe itself, will drive up price. And that will not free up consumer money. Quite the opposite really.
The rest of the world would be shocked to know that the average US household consumes about 11,000 KWH per year.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
If each household eliminated half of that usage at $0.11 per KWH, then it would take the savings from 115 households to pay one $50,000 annual salary plus 40% overhead. There are about 140 million US households so you could free up the equivalent of 1.2 million such salaries. But if you consider labor content as 25% of the goods you buy, then its only about 300,000 jobs. Except you would eliminate many jobs in the energy industry and increase the cost per KWH due to reduced productivity of the generation and distribution system. If cost per KWH doubled, as our president wished, then there would be zero dollars freed. If the cost went up 50%, then only about 150,000 jobs could be funded, less the jobs lost in the energy sector and less the increased costs reflected in all other sectors. So maybe as few as zero (or less) new jobs could be funded if costs per KWH increase by 50% and consumption was halved. And we have not discussed the cost for each household associated with halving its use of electricity.
Using less energy is a great idea, if done in a cost-effective way, but the idea that doing so will create an avalanche of productive jobs is a mirage.
Don’t forget, the utilities will raise the rates to cover their lost revenue. You are not going to win.
Occasionally I ask someone what the state with the highest per capita energy consumption is. Nobody can answer it. It’s not an old industrial state. Nor is it Nevada with the gleaming lights of Las Vegas. The state with the highest per capita energy consumption is Alaska. Could that possibly have anything to do with the weather. The U.S. has some of the harshest weather in the world: extreme summer heat throughout much of the continent; extreme winter cold throughout about 1/3rd of it. Could that alone have something to do with the electrical consumption? Let’s cut the U.S. a little break here.
I calculated my Horse-Power output on the back exercise machine at the Gym. It’s the one I’m best at. I can put out about 1/4 horse-power for about a minute (it would be 1/2 horse-power but half of the cycle is letting the weight back down – that doesn’t count). It takes me 10 minutes to recover from that exercise.
A kilowatt is a unit of power, energy expended over time, kW = 3,412 Btu/h.
A kilowatt hour is an energy unit, 3,412 Btu to be precise.
For example, 500 megawatts is a power plant’s capacity, aka horsepower. Operating that power plant at that capacity for one hour generates 500,000 kWh or 1,706 E6 Btu of energy.
Your utility bill has a demand change for capacity, $/kW, whether you use it or not.
The utility bill has an energy charge, $/kWh, for the energy that you actually used.
The general public & MSM don’t know the difference.
John Holdren and his buddy, Paul Ehrlich, never get tired of being wrong and never get held accountable, either.
Both Holdren and Ehrlich were young and stupid when they made most of their famous remarks. They are much older, now.
Dang. Forgot my sarc tag.
In many cases, with age comes wisdom. However, they may be older but they are no less stupid.
You see, Taphonomic? I didn’t really need the sarc tag, after all. You obviously got it.
Nothing really new here:
“On September 13, 1935 William Aberhart gave a speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto. He recounted an anecdote in which he delivered a version of the saying: 4
One of the school graduates came to me to pay his respects to the school; he told me he was in charge of helping on one of the Dominion air ports. I said to him, “I suppose you use modern machinery in your air ports?”
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he said, “if we used modern machinery in the establishment of air ports there would be very little need of men to help us to do it, for they would do it so rapidly and easily that there would be no need of man labour. We give them picks and shovels and put them out to do it in the old-fashioned way.”
I smiled and said to him: “It would probably be just as well to give them spoons and forks; it would take them still longer to do it.” It seemed to me so ridiculous; we let modern machinery rust at the road side or air port and make those men bend their backs in order to give them the purchasing power to buy the necessities of life, and hardly that.”
Other variants attributed to Milton Freedman.
Charles G. Battig
Holdren fits Obama’s mindset and unfortunately the mindset of way to may liberally educated.They are the ivory tower people. They live in a (model) reality, not the reality based on facts, which is why they fall for the most idiotic ideas.
We’re so stupid in Oz that this is policy too. “Green jobs” – already employing more in infrasound generators than mining coal. (And for 1/100 the result.)
It seems like the Administration is listening to Holdren and following his advice for the the plan submitted to the UN to dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions. Since an alternative fuel is not viable in the next 10 years, the backup is to dramatically change our economy.
Wouldn’t be more simple an executive order by Obama administration stating that every one is only allowed to work with one arm instead of two?
I am sure Obama would absolutely be on board claiming current models project immediate doubling of employment. He would probably leave out the part where real world results would be massive unemployment because consumers couldn’t afford the subsequent doubling of the cost of production.
rgbatduke: Yes, this (Holdren’s remarks) are the dumbest things I’ve heard from the mouth of a public official since the day the secretary of the interior said that there was no need to preserve the natural resources locked up in our national parks and forests because the Rapture was coming any day now and we would no longer need them.
You have remarkable ears, Dr. Brown, since you can hear things that were never said.
I never said it. Never believed it. Never even thought it. I know no Christian who believes or preaches such error. The Bible commands conservation — that we as Christians be careful stewards of the land and resources entrusted to us by the Creator.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/20/AR2005052001333.html
Christians believe whatever they want to believe whenever they want to and so that is why there are 40,000 denominations and God the absolute eternal entity evolved over time; note the grand character arc of God from the old to the new statement. Fortunately every single denomination can be certain they have the correct belief since no evidence beyond faith is required to support said belief. Same for the Muslims, Hindus, Jews, etc.
Belief in God and religious dogma are two VERY different things but you cannot to point anything fundamentally bad about either one. (excepting one form of the latter that preaches killing non-members ).
Hi Alx.
Be glad to discuss theology with you on an appropriate forum. But that’s not my purpose here, which is to point out that James Watts probably never said the things that were attributed to him. But of course people other than Christians can also believe whatever they want to…