Unearned5161 (u/Unearned5161)

Unearned5161 commented on Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing marineinsight.com/shippin... · Posted by u/defrost

rkomorn · 3 months ago

Not OP, but in general, while some things do improve my life (climate control, hot water, cooking), I'd say there are also plenty of things that don't.

I don't think my device usage habits or media consumption actually improve my life. I'm not sure the energy that's been dumped into producing the many gadgets I've bought over the years really improved me life.

I'd say that a lot of energy goes into distracting me in a way that I can't genuinely say is an improvement.

Unearned5161 · 3 months ago

I think the point is larger than any individual. It involves the environment in which you're located. Infrastructure changes require energy, lots of energy. Increasing quality of life for most things we've built in our world requires investing lots of energy at the state level. You reap the benefits of this by living in the state.

Unearned5161 commented on Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing marineinsight.com/shippin... · Posted by u/defrost

ofalkaed · 3 months ago

As someone whose goal in life is to be blown about the oceans by the wind, I have mixed feelings about this. With the "traditional" freighter I would have the right of way, my being a sailboat under the wisdom of the wind, they have to make allowances for me and change course, but things are different when that freighter is also under the wisdom of the wind. The same goes for things like offshore wind power, my life is made more difficult because most people expect their home to be 70F when it is 60F outside and 60F when it is 70F outside, anything else would incur undue hardship.

It is a complex situation, should I be penalized for wanting to live a life that has little or no environmental impact at cost of those who want to live in reasonable comfort while being a part of/contributing to, society? Probably not but I can't help but wonder about what happened to the first 'R' of the three R's (reduce, reuse and recycle), no one seems to reduce anymore unless technology gives them a way to do it without any inconvenience no matter how small that inconvenience is.

Unearned5161 · 3 months ago

I think "reduce" has always been pipe dream by the de-growth sector. At its core I'm not convinced that humans can ever willfully engage in managed decline. When I say this I mean societies, large groups, cities, etc. Not individuals. De-growth has a serious scaling issue. It's fundamentally incompatible with the bedrock of why humans come together.

Unearned5161 commented on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990 e360.yale.edu/digest/chin... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

rat87 · 3 months ago

Why would we ever want to revisit people like Erlich and the Club of wrong who were famously extremely off in their predictions? And when some of the writings contributed to forced

The claims that theyll be proven right /on track any day now decades after their predictions failed is hard to take seriously.

It's not the business as usual people who made sure that their predictions fail its people working to either improve the world or sometimes to make money that actually changed things. In fact it was the people who pushed neo malthusian thinking that assumed things would continue as usual and therefore get worse

Unearned5161 · 3 months ago

The conflation of Ehrlich with the LtG team is an extremely dead horse that people should stop beating. The Population Bomb (Ehrlich's 1968 book) was an entirely separate production, with separate teams, separate conclusions, and separate levels of academic rigor.

Furthermore, Ehrlich's PR stunt with Julian Simon of a bet during the peak of a commodity cycle was neither epistemologically sound nor a proof of absolutely anything other than markets do what markets do.

I challenge people who reach for the Ehrlich card whenever these growth conversations come up to reflect on what they're acting on and to recognize that the road of thought on LtG is dark and overwhelming. In fact, it ends at a destination that implies deep unflattering things about our fundamental capabilities as humans and role on this earth. It is natural, and human, to meet this with reactive fear. Keep this in mind as you read what follows.

I mention revisiting Limits to Growth because if you read the introduction[1] you would notice that they state their conclusions as follows:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustain able far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.

3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

Furthermore, if you look at their 30-year update [2] published in 2002, you can get a few more notable quotes:

"We still see our research as an effort to identify different possible futures. We are not trying to predict the future. We are sketching alternative scenarios for humanity as we move toward 2100." (p. xvii)

and most telling:

"Our most important statements about the likelihood of collapse do not come from blind faith in the curves generated by World3. They result simply from understanding the dynamic patterns of behavior that are produced by three obvious, persistent, and common features of the global system: erodable limits, incessant pursuit of growth, and delays in society’s responses to approaching limits." (p. xviii)

The story Limits To Growth is trying to communicate is still pending and will be until ~2072. Nothing has failed and their nuanced commentary on the complexity of the issue has only aged well.

[1]: https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

[2]: https://www.peakoilindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Limi...

Unearned5161 commented on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990 e360.yale.edu/digest/chin... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

BurningFrog · 3 months ago

"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.

But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.

The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!

Unearned5161 · 3 months ago

Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.

You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.

Unearned5161 commented on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990 e360.yale.edu/digest/chin... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

zdragnar · 3 months ago

The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.

Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.

Unearned5161 · 3 months ago

I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model.

People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.

Unearned5161 commented on Farming Hard Drives (2012) backblaze.com/blog/backbl... · Posted by u/floriangosse

philipwhiuk · 4 months ago

Going around to lots of stores burning fuel depriving regular consumers of inventory forcing them onto your cloud solution.

It's classic SV screw-regular-folk-as-long-as-its-not-banned.

Unearned5161 · 4 months ago

doesn't Backblaze largely do backups? as in their customer's already have the files on their own large drives and they need to back those files up, as in maybe you're reading too much into this?

Unearned5161 commented on The pivot antipope.org/charlie/blog... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

randallsquared · 4 months ago

I used “similar” to say that it hasn’t been trending clearly up (or down, thus far). The line is definitely a bit chaotic, I’ll agree, but growth is pretty flat at the lowest granularity. The argument I’m refuting is that oil prices are rising in the way you’d expect if production was becoming problematic. It seems other factors, world events, etc, are more impactful.

Unearned5161 · 4 months ago

I see what you're trying to say, the issue with this frame of mind, however, is that it appears rather oblivious to the absolutely central role that oil prices have in the economy itself. The price of oil should be viewed as a proxy for the cost of movement in an economy, and when you recall that an economy is defined by its movement, the ouroborus becomes rather apparent. Money isn't the blood of the economy, energy is, oil is.

To make this clearer we can take a look at historic prices and the journey they've taken coming to where we are now. If you squint your eyes at the crude graph zoomed all the way out, you can piece together 3 general "tiers" in the pricing, levels where prices have oscillated around. Starting with the one from 1950s to the mid 1970s, this was $3, cheap conventional plays, we were swimming in this stuff, the modern world got built with this foundation. Then there's a rise to about $20 that "stabilizes" in the 80s, the hike up from $3 came due to conventional plays peaking in the 70s just as Hubbert said they would and then Alaska came online. The price didnt go back down to sub 10's because this new oil needed a new price floor to justify commercial viability. It stayed at this $20 range. And then Alaska peaked, China industrialized, global demand surged, and you see the long rise in the 2000s, leading to the recession, then shale comes online, this is the third tier. This is where we are now. Oscillating around $55-60, this is the new floor, fracking is expensive as hell, the only way we've been able to keep production alive at all is just by incinerating money at it.

The reason you don't see a clear price increase happening is because we're still on the shale tier. The treadmill is set to fast (check out how many wells need to be drilled for shale production to stay constant). Once this tier exhausts itself, however, that's when the market will correct, the price will rise until the even harder plays become viable. That fourth tier, if it even exists, won't be at a price any of our modern economic conveniences thrive in. It's a ratchet with wiplash, not a steady climb.

Unearned5161 commented on The pivot antipope.org/charlie/blog... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

randallsquared · 4 months ago

Adjusted for inflation, the price of oil has been similar for the last 20 years[1]. As PV ramps up further, there will be less demand for oil, and therefore the price will fall and extraction will reduce. It's not clear to me if that means the peak is 2026 or 2036, but either way, there will be all the oil we need to accomplish everything we want to use it for, even as we use less and less of it.

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

Unearned5161 · 4 months ago

A bit wild to say the prices have been "similar" for the last 20 years and then cite a source that not only shows a coefficient of variation of 28% on regular prices but one that goes to 31% when you "adjust for inflation".

If your salary had a coefficient of variation above 20% I don't think you'd be saying "I make similar amounts year to year".

What part of this graph of global energy consumption [1] do you envision PV storming oil and nat gas out of? Notice how we never transitioned from anything in the past on a global scale, sure, coal tapered here in the US, but thats because we have nice oil fields to play with. Developing countries and co are trying to get the same that we got in our boom, i.e we're far from "maturing" away from any energy source as a globe.

There's also the thermodynamic note of energy density and temporal coverage, i.e oil and oil derivatives are non-fungible for a bulk of their uses, see planes, ships, and mining. That last one conviniently being the gatekeeper to most of our ideals of renewable energy sources.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

Unearned5161 commented on The pivot antipope.org/charlie/blog... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

randallsquared · 4 months ago

> Peak oil was never about "oil runing out",

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil will help, here.

Until recently when it had to be redefined to remain a relevant concern, this was the point of "peak oil": that we would run out of reserves that could be economically extracted for fuel usage, due to rising costs for extraction of increasingly marginal sources. However, given that proven (economically extractable) reserves have steadily trended higher, "peak oil" is now about when other energy source costs fall enough to make oil uneconomical by comparison, which is not politically concerning except to fossil fuel industry lobbyists.

This kind of concept creep is very common where technology or science reduces problems that were previously seized upon by political activists.

Unearned5161 · 4 months ago

Peak Oil has always and always will be about production rates, going back to Hubbert's paper in the 50s. We never solved the production rate issue, we just threw more money at it, see the shale boom of the 2010s.

Relying on "technology" and "science" gets a lot shakier when you realize that oil itself is what has largely funded the ability to do technology and science. We've been gluttonous in an age of cheap energy, the world is in no way prepared for what comes after the cheap part is over.

Unearned5161 commented on The pivot antipope.org/charlie/blog... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

unholyguy001 · 4 months ago

I mean there is certainly tons of evidence that some fossil fuels (coal most notably) are on the way out. Fossil fuels as a class? Maybe but still a bit early to make that call

Unearned5161 · 4 months ago

fun fact, the world burns more coal than it ever has. Take a look at Art Berman's talk at UT Austin, humanity has never transitioned off of anything.