"Once we reach the next fusion-fueled energy level, we will enter a new era of peace and prosperity."
Wow... I wasn't going to comment having said most of what I wanted to say in the last post, but that quote... suddenly I am adjusting my probability that MM might know what he is talking about down by quite a bit. Are current wars about energy availability? Was the period during or after the Industrial Revolution relatively peaceful?
I am all for peace and prosperity, but availability of energy, or even relative wealth increases, doesn't seem to do a great deal to keep people from killing each other. It does make us rather better at it, and allows the killing to be relatively separate from the average person, but it doesn't seem to do much to keep the total level of deaths down.
I had the same reaction. It seems to me that economists, especially free market economists, tend to overestimate global trade’s ability to prevent war. While free trade does eliminate any *economic* excuse for war, there are, unfortunately, many others: fear, envy, ethnic differences, religious differences, territorial disputes, or just a dictator’s need to distract attention away from internal problems.
Yea, free trade removes a lot of reasons for war, and that definitely is a big plus to be held up, but damn... humans have a lot of reasons for killing each other. Trade does help ameliorate some of the other problems as well, of course, but it doesn't push war to zero.
While what you say sounds true, I think the quoted sentence isn't nearly as far off as you suggest. Note that both peace and prosperity are relative terms, prosperity having no upper bound and peace only approaching it asymptotically. I think the quote can be clarified by inserting one word - INCREASED peace and prosperity.
If one looks at history, we've been on a pretty constant up slope of both peace and prosperity. A future of cheap and abundant fusion energy would almost certainly contribute substantially to peace and prosperity.
I agree there has been an upslope in prosperity, but I am not 100% sold on the peace part. Richer countries have seen more peace, mostly, but when war does erupt it causes a lot more damage, and poorer countries don't seem much better. I think peace in terms of "fewer people killing other people to take their stuff" has improved (although living near a large city, I am not so sure there either), but peace in terms of "fewer people killing other people because they want to rule them or just want them dead" might not have moved much. War is instrumental for two purposes: getting stuff and dominating other people. The former is a substitute for economic growth, but the latter is a complement if anything.
EDIT: I meant "input" in that last sentence, not "complement". People use economic growth to fund wars of domination because they want domination, whereas people don't bother to wage wars to take people's stuff if economic growth is an option (because trade is a lot cheaper than war). That's for catching that, stu!
No, good catch... that's what I get for commenting during a really boring meeting :D
What I meant was that war for the purpose of domination is uses economic growth as an input. People fight wars to get stuff because they can't get stuff through economic growth, but domination is its own end that people turn economic growth towards acquiring.
I'm still not sure I'm clear on what you are saying but I have a few thoughts, regardless of they agree or conflict.
- Colonization was about both dominating and gaining economically. I'd argue those types of wars have diminished drastically over the last 100 years or more.
- Domination was a significant part of German and Japanese objectives in WWII. Also by USSR and still by China but I'd argue this has diminished.
- I'd argue the biggest reason for war today, and maybe for much of the past, was mostly over control of land, and not so much for economic reasons though there's some overlap. It's not to dominate others but to take their land for reasons other than economic benefit. Israel-Palestine is the best example. Economically, it's all pretty crappy land.
- While a better economy provides more resources for war, it also means there is more to lose and less to gain from war. That factor against war seems more compelling to me. As you say, "People fight wars to get stuff because they can't get stuff through economic growth,". To me that suggests if they can get the stuff economically, that decreases a reason for war, not increases it.
Basic idea is that there are two goals of war: taking someone's stuff, and killing/dominating them. Some wars, probably all, do both at once, like conquering a hated neighbor and stealing their gold mine or oil fields, but those two goals are not always present in equal amounts. So if a country is wealthy they are less interested in war to steal their neighbor's stuff, especially if that stuff can be traded for. As you say, that makes war relatively more expensive.
However, with regards to domination, you can't just buy that. (Well... maybe at some specific clubs in some cities...anyway...) If you just hate your neighbors and want to kill them, wealth doesn't make it more expensive to do that, it means you can spend more on tools to do it with. Now if you are a wealthier country it might make you less interested in the risk of combat, but then it is always the poor that face the peril of war primarily. So when it comes for wars of domination having more wealth makes it easier to engage in them and cause more destruction.
For the latter point, the variety of African wars really highlight things. The areas are wealthier, but a lot of that wealth gets put into murdering rival tribes or states. It isn't on the scale of WW1 or WW2, but it is still a semi constant in many of the areas, and throwing "aid" to the areas only seems to keep the fighting going.
Regarding taking land, that's really only the case when the defeated population is removed (buried) and new population moves in. Generally when a country takes over a region from another they don't depopulate it. They want the people there to tax them and dominate them, which is a mix of "give me you stuff" and "do what we tell you to do."
Your last point is the "taking people's stuff" point: the wealthier you are, and the more you can trade, the less likely you are to engage in wars to get stuff.
So, I am not sure that there has been a reduction in war, although depending on how you measure it maybe? There might be fewer official conflicts, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the global deaths in violent conflict per capita has been relatively flat (especially if controlling for medical capacity to save the wounded.) The USA has definitely been involved in a lot of wars in the past 100+ years, even if they were never officially declared.
I think MM makes a fundamental error to the extent that he focuses on EROI. Energy used to get more energy is only important in two ways: (1) if the ratio is less than 1 and (2) to the extent it correlates and causes the cost of obtaining energy to increase.
MM says in 1950 1 barrel of oil found you another 100 and in 2010 1 barrel of oil found you another 5. That doesn't sound so good but I'm pretty sure that over that time period, the cost of oil has decreased. That is more significant.
"can’t explain why different ethnic groups have different outcomes in the same country. For that you might need to understand culture and intergroup competition."
or, you know... genetics. But you get fired for bringing that up.
EROI for solar might be 4 (ref 1). Or it might be 0.8 (ref 2). Or it might be 7-10 (ref 3). Or it might be 8.7 to 34.2 (ref 4). Whatever it is, the consensus seems to be that it's rising, if that helps.
Energy constrained economic activity would be bad for both peace ad prosperity and at some point fusion power my reduce that constraint. So not totally wrong, just a bit naive.
“MM focuses in this chapter on four factors: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution….
“I do not buy the claim that this schema of four forces is sufficient for understanding humanity. Among the forces that are left out are: the tangible elements of food cultivation, geography, and transportation; the mental elements of information, including the inventions of writing, printing, the telegraph, and the Internet; the social elements of belief systems, particularly relative to markets, trade, and innovation; and the intertemporal elements of revolutions and wars.”
Maybe you should grant MM a bit of poetic license. While geography and conflict probably should be added to his list of factors, most of the other items you mention fit comfortably under the category of innovation.
"Photovoltaic solar panels are currently in the single digits, typically no higher than [EROI of] 2 to 4 , and the higher values are really only when you add a battery."
I don't follow. Batteries don't add energy. They just store it for later. They don't make it so solar panels get more energy from the sun. Quite the opposite. They leak some of the energy. What am I missing?
Batteries store the surplus that can't be immediately used since the two sources are highly variable, thus enabling the full use of output. However, I don't even buy the assertion since batteries seem an economic dead end to me for grid-scale storage.
I am also skeptical of the 4 value, as at least when I was tangentially involved in the industry 10 years ago or so, the functional life time and name plate output for solar panels were both really exaggerated. As a result the ROI for any individual panel was quite off. Plus there is the problem of solar working very differently depending on latitude... I don't know that that is ever really accounted for.
I don't know about an EROI for solar panels and Im doubtful such a calculation even means anything. For the panels that went on my roof over the summer, a big chunk of that cost was installation labor. Anyway, EROI has surely improved significantly in the last 10 years. While I don't know about an EROI for wind either, the ratio of cost to energy output is quite a bit better than solar no matter the latitude. Solar's best use is smallish off-grid where the cost to get the windmill high enough is too much.
Note: My payback without tax credits is about 25 years based on my current electric rate, which is somewhat less than the natl avg rate. My parts warranty is also 25 years, with guaranteed degradation of something less than 10%. I also get free use of the grid to store my energy (netmetering).
I am curious, how long have you had the panels? Back in the day, it was understood that panels had maybe 10-15 years of "real" life before they broke down so much you had to replace them. That was 10-15 years ago (getting close to 20... time to buy a rocking chair) so I don't know if those are still the same values, or if panels made then really are not worth repairing by this time. I would be curious to find out what yours are doing for you in terms of longevity.
For windmills, that is apparently a REALLY mixed bag of longevity. My brother in law (wife's sister's husband) used to design and work on those, and he was interesting to talk to about them. Basically they were bad, and tended to break a lot, such that they (GE and some other company I can't remember) hardly expected any more than 5-10 years of life in practice. The things apparently are under so much strain all the time, and the designs are cheap to make them appealing, that they spend a ton to time under constant repair. He was really disappointed, poor guy. Now, those are the giant ones that you see mostly not spinning, not the ones for consumer use, so those might be different. The large scale, industrial wind turbines are apparently a bit of a con, though. Kind of a "It doesn't have to work properly forever, just long enough for us to cash the checks and change jobs or retire" kind of deal.
Like I said, I just got my panels this summer and they are warranted for 25 years.
When I said EROI for wind was better, I meant the big commercial ones.
I suspect your brother-in-law sees much more of the turbines and blades with shorter life. When I google everything I find suggests an average like of 20-25 years. This USAToday article mentions some 10 years old NREL failure rate data. My quick mental calc suggests an average life maybe not quite 20 years if 'failure" meant full replacement, which it probably doesn't.
"when new discoveries allow humans to better exploit energy, an energy surplus appears. Humans cooperate at larger scale. Eventually, the surplus gets used up, and cooperation starts to break down. We are in such a period today."
Why do you say "cooperation starts to break down"? You say nothing about this before the last sentence and I'm aware of no reason to believe this.
"Once we reach the next fusion-fueled energy level, we will enter a new era of peace and prosperity."
Wow... I wasn't going to comment having said most of what I wanted to say in the last post, but that quote... suddenly I am adjusting my probability that MM might know what he is talking about down by quite a bit. Are current wars about energy availability? Was the period during or after the Industrial Revolution relatively peaceful?
I am all for peace and prosperity, but availability of energy, or even relative wealth increases, doesn't seem to do a great deal to keep people from killing each other. It does make us rather better at it, and allows the killing to be relatively separate from the average person, but it doesn't seem to do much to keep the total level of deaths down.
I had the same reaction. It seems to me that economists, especially free market economists, tend to overestimate global trade’s ability to prevent war. While free trade does eliminate any *economic* excuse for war, there are, unfortunately, many others: fear, envy, ethnic differences, religious differences, territorial disputes, or just a dictator’s need to distract attention away from internal problems.
Yea, free trade removes a lot of reasons for war, and that definitely is a big plus to be held up, but damn... humans have a lot of reasons for killing each other. Trade does help ameliorate some of the other problems as well, of course, but it doesn't push war to zero.
While what you say sounds true, I think the quoted sentence isn't nearly as far off as you suggest. Note that both peace and prosperity are relative terms, prosperity having no upper bound and peace only approaching it asymptotically. I think the quote can be clarified by inserting one word - INCREASED peace and prosperity.
If one looks at history, we've been on a pretty constant up slope of both peace and prosperity. A future of cheap and abundant fusion energy would almost certainly contribute substantially to peace and prosperity.
I agree there has been an upslope in prosperity, but I am not 100% sold on the peace part. Richer countries have seen more peace, mostly, but when war does erupt it causes a lot more damage, and poorer countries don't seem much better. I think peace in terms of "fewer people killing other people to take their stuff" has improved (although living near a large city, I am not so sure there either), but peace in terms of "fewer people killing other people because they want to rule them or just want them dead" might not have moved much. War is instrumental for two purposes: getting stuff and dominating other people. The former is a substitute for economic growth, but the latter is a complement if anything.
EDIT: I meant "input" in that last sentence, not "complement". People use economic growth to fund wars of domination because they want domination, whereas people don't bother to wage wars to take people's stuff if economic growth is an option (because trade is a lot cheaper than war). That's for catching that, stu!
Did you just say that dominating other people is a complement for economic growth? Is that what you really mean?
No, good catch... that's what I get for commenting during a really boring meeting :D
What I meant was that war for the purpose of domination is uses economic growth as an input. People fight wars to get stuff because they can't get stuff through economic growth, but domination is its own end that people turn economic growth towards acquiring.
I'm still not sure I'm clear on what you are saying but I have a few thoughts, regardless of they agree or conflict.
- Colonization was about both dominating and gaining economically. I'd argue those types of wars have diminished drastically over the last 100 years or more.
- Domination was a significant part of German and Japanese objectives in WWII. Also by USSR and still by China but I'd argue this has diminished.
- I'd argue the biggest reason for war today, and maybe for much of the past, was mostly over control of land, and not so much for economic reasons though there's some overlap. It's not to dominate others but to take their land for reasons other than economic benefit. Israel-Palestine is the best example. Economically, it's all pretty crappy land.
- While a better economy provides more resources for war, it also means there is more to lose and less to gain from war. That factor against war seems more compelling to me. As you say, "People fight wars to get stuff because they can't get stuff through economic growth,". To me that suggests if they can get the stuff economically, that decreases a reason for war, not increases it.
Basic idea is that there are two goals of war: taking someone's stuff, and killing/dominating them. Some wars, probably all, do both at once, like conquering a hated neighbor and stealing their gold mine or oil fields, but those two goals are not always present in equal amounts. So if a country is wealthy they are less interested in war to steal their neighbor's stuff, especially if that stuff can be traded for. As you say, that makes war relatively more expensive.
However, with regards to domination, you can't just buy that. (Well... maybe at some specific clubs in some cities...anyway...) If you just hate your neighbors and want to kill them, wealth doesn't make it more expensive to do that, it means you can spend more on tools to do it with. Now if you are a wealthier country it might make you less interested in the risk of combat, but then it is always the poor that face the peril of war primarily. So when it comes for wars of domination having more wealth makes it easier to engage in them and cause more destruction.
For the latter point, the variety of African wars really highlight things. The areas are wealthier, but a lot of that wealth gets put into murdering rival tribes or states. It isn't on the scale of WW1 or WW2, but it is still a semi constant in many of the areas, and throwing "aid" to the areas only seems to keep the fighting going.
Regarding taking land, that's really only the case when the defeated population is removed (buried) and new population moves in. Generally when a country takes over a region from another they don't depopulate it. They want the people there to tax them and dominate them, which is a mix of "give me you stuff" and "do what we tell you to do."
Your last point is the "taking people's stuff" point: the wealthier you are, and the more you can trade, the less likely you are to engage in wars to get stuff.
So, I am not sure that there has been a reduction in war, although depending on how you measure it maybe? There might be fewer official conflicts, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the global deaths in violent conflict per capita has been relatively flat (especially if controlling for medical capacity to save the wounded.) The USA has definitely been involved in a lot of wars in the past 100+ years, even if they were never officially declared.
I think MM makes a fundamental error to the extent that he focuses on EROI. Energy used to get more energy is only important in two ways: (1) if the ratio is less than 1 and (2) to the extent it correlates and causes the cost of obtaining energy to increase.
MM says in 1950 1 barrel of oil found you another 100 and in 2010 1 barrel of oil found you another 5. That doesn't sound so good but I'm pretty sure that over that time period, the cost of oil has decreased. That is more significant.
"can’t explain why different ethnic groups have different outcomes in the same country. For that you might need to understand culture and intergroup competition."
or, you know... genetics. But you get fired for bringing that up.
Huh In favor of nuclear fission. That sounds right.
EROI for solar might be 4 (ref 1). Or it might be 0.8 (ref 2). Or it might be 7-10 (ref 3). Or it might be 8.7 to 34.2 (ref 4). Whatever it is, the consensus seems to be that it's rising, if that helps.
Ref 1: Weissbach, Ruprecht et al, 2013
Ref 2: Ferroni & Hopkirk, 2016
Ref 3: Raugei, Sgouridis et al, 2016
Ref 4: Bhandari, Collier, Ellingson & Apul, 2015
Energy constrained economic activity would be bad for both peace ad prosperity and at some point fusion power my reduce that constraint. So not totally wrong, just a bit naive.
You write:
“MM focuses in this chapter on four factors: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution….
“I do not buy the claim that this schema of four forces is sufficient for understanding humanity. Among the forces that are left out are: the tangible elements of food cultivation, geography, and transportation; the mental elements of information, including the inventions of writing, printing, the telegraph, and the Internet; the social elements of belief systems, particularly relative to markets, trade, and innovation; and the intertemporal elements of revolutions and wars.”
Maybe you should grant MM a bit of poetic license. While geography and conflict probably should be added to his list of factors, most of the other items you mention fit comfortably under the category of innovation.
"Photovoltaic solar panels are currently in the single digits, typically no higher than [EROI of] 2 to 4 , and the higher values are really only when you add a battery."
I don't follow. Batteries don't add energy. They just store it for later. They don't make it so solar panels get more energy from the sun. Quite the opposite. They leak some of the energy. What am I missing?
Batteries store the surplus that can't be immediately used since the two sources are highly variable, thus enabling the full use of output. However, I don't even buy the assertion since batteries seem an economic dead end to me for grid-scale storage.
I am also skeptical of the 4 value, as at least when I was tangentially involved in the industry 10 years ago or so, the functional life time and name plate output for solar panels were both really exaggerated. As a result the ROI for any individual panel was quite off. Plus there is the problem of solar working very differently depending on latitude... I don't know that that is ever really accounted for.
I don't know about an EROI for solar panels and Im doubtful such a calculation even means anything. For the panels that went on my roof over the summer, a big chunk of that cost was installation labor. Anyway, EROI has surely improved significantly in the last 10 years. While I don't know about an EROI for wind either, the ratio of cost to energy output is quite a bit better than solar no matter the latitude. Solar's best use is smallish off-grid where the cost to get the windmill high enough is too much.
Note: My payback without tax credits is about 25 years based on my current electric rate, which is somewhat less than the natl avg rate. My parts warranty is also 25 years, with guaranteed degradation of something less than 10%. I also get free use of the grid to store my energy (netmetering).
I am curious, how long have you had the panels? Back in the day, it was understood that panels had maybe 10-15 years of "real" life before they broke down so much you had to replace them. That was 10-15 years ago (getting close to 20... time to buy a rocking chair) so I don't know if those are still the same values, or if panels made then really are not worth repairing by this time. I would be curious to find out what yours are doing for you in terms of longevity.
For windmills, that is apparently a REALLY mixed bag of longevity. My brother in law (wife's sister's husband) used to design and work on those, and he was interesting to talk to about them. Basically they were bad, and tended to break a lot, such that they (GE and some other company I can't remember) hardly expected any more than 5-10 years of life in practice. The things apparently are under so much strain all the time, and the designs are cheap to make them appealing, that they spend a ton to time under constant repair. He was really disappointed, poor guy. Now, those are the giant ones that you see mostly not spinning, not the ones for consumer use, so those might be different. The large scale, industrial wind turbines are apparently a bit of a con, though. Kind of a "It doesn't have to work properly forever, just long enough for us to cash the checks and change jobs or retire" kind of deal.
Like I said, I just got my panels this summer and they are warranted for 25 years.
When I said EROI for wind was better, I meant the big commercial ones.
I suspect your brother-in-law sees much more of the turbines and blades with shorter life. When I google everything I find suggests an average like of 20-25 years. This USAToday article mentions some 10 years old NREL failure rate data. My quick mental calc suggests an average life maybe not quite 20 years if 'failure" meant full replacement, which it probably doesn't.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/08/15/fact-check-false-claim-wind-turbine-generators-only-last-3-4-years/10243903002/
"when new discoveries allow humans to better exploit energy, an energy surplus appears. Humans cooperate at larger scale. Eventually, the surplus gets used up, and cooperation starts to break down. We are in such a period today."
Why do you say "cooperation starts to break down"? You say nothing about this before the last sentence and I'm aware of no reason to believe this.