Setting Fire To Sleeping Strawmen (now with extra Toniiiiiiiiiight, you're right, you're right, you're right)
-
doubt it. we've not even handed out a single badge in that series yet.
And I don't really plan on doing so... They were created as a sort of joke.
And this thread is nowhere near getting closed.
-
And I don't really plan on doing so... They were created as a sort of joke.
thought that might have been the case.
though i do wonder... have we actually had any threads closed with prejudice?
-
Well, it's hard to say, of course, but I'm pretty confident that it's a better idea than fucking up our energy use to make us all poorer to try to prevent this outcome.
Improving energy efficiency is the best move for a lot of people. Whether you do it because you're saving the planet or because you don't really want to give quite so much money to the energy companies, it's still often a sensible thing to do. For a lot of people, improving the insulation of their homes is the main thing they can actually do, with whether it ends up making their heating or AC more efficient depending on their local conditions.
Similarly, improving vehicle efficiency is another generally good idea. It might be better for a number of reasons, one of which is that it can allow you to go further on a single tank of fuel — or charge, for people with that type of engine — though that's not the only reason why it can make sense. And for all that, people still don't like paying lots for gas or having to buy it frequently.
At the national level, going for improved efficiency and self-sufficiency makes good strategic sense. Using appropriate renewable energy sources can make a whole bunch of sense (no, they're not the whole solution and never were) but not everything is substitutable. But you generally want to avoid getting dragged into wars to obtain resources, as that can get astonishingly expensive (and unpopular too).
At the global level? We've got one planet, and are going to have to effectively stick with that for quite a long time to come. Might as well try to live within our means…
-
Standard loon counterargument: Efficiency is useless because Jevons. Therefore proposing that it might be a good thing clearly demonstrates that you are ignorant of economics and hence don't live in the real world. Also, Mars. And how dare you deny poor people the right to drive a Hummer, you vicious sociopathic prick.
And now for a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back after these messages.
-
Improving energy efficiency is the best move for a lot of people. Whether you do it because you're saving the planet or because you don't really want to give quite so much money to the energy companies, it's still often a sensible thing to do. For a lot of people, improving the insulation of their homes is the main thing they can actually do, with whether it ends up making their heating or AC more efficient depending on their local conditions.
More money in our pockets is an undeniable win-win, provided the ROI isn't in the distant future.
Similarly, improving vehicle efficiency is another generally good idea. It might be better for a number of reasons, one of which is that it can allow you to go further on a single tank of fuel — or charge, for people with that type of engine — though that's not the only reason why it can make sense. And for all that, people still don't like paying lots for gas or having to buy it frequently.
I like savings, but I don't like the idea of taxing engine displacement. One can get some pretty impressive numbers these days anyhow. Taxing consumption is a lot fairer, as you pay for what you use.
And how dare you deny poor people the right to drive a Hummer, you vicious sociopathic prick.
Pretty sure those aren't being sold anymore.
-
though i do wonder... have we actually had any threads closed with prejudice?
ISTR the occasional one over on CS, but it's normally the users. See: MPS.
-
ISTR the occasional one over on CS, but it's normally the users. See: MPS.
That seems to be a pretty high bar.
-
Efficiency is useless because Jevons.
No, it just means you get about 2/3 of the expected savings in practice because of the increased ability to consume that the efficiency boost gives. It's still a win.
More money in our pockets is an undeniable win-win, provided the ROI isn't in the distant future.
That's why I'm suggesting insulating homes most of all, as that's got an excellent ROI.
I don't like the idea of taxing engine displacement.
Taxing gross weight or axle weight is better, with a non-linear scale. That's what does the damage to roads. Taxing fuel consumption is just a variation on a general consumption taxation; pay up or find a way to use less (which might include changing jobs or where you live, to put it brutally).
-
Improving energy efficiency is the best move for a lot of people.
Absolutely! It's the people who say we need to reduce our energy efficiency that I'm talking about.
EDIT: invisible posts are back?
-
Standard loon counterargument: Efficiency is useless because Jevons.
Useless for what? For achieving the goal of using less?
Therefore proposing that it might be a good thing clearly demonstrates that you are ignorant of economics and hence don't live in the real world.
It may be the beer, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're saying. Because you say Jevons is a "loon counterargument," but then you bring up economics. Do you think people use more of something when it's cheaper or less of something when it's cheaper?
-
Useless for what? For achieving the goal of using less?
Therefore proposing that it might be a good thing clearly demonstrates that you are ignorant of economics and hence don't live in the real world.
It may be the beer, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what you're saying. Because you say Jevons is a "loon counterargument," but then you bring up economics. Do you think people use more of something when it's cheaper or less of something when it's cheaper?
EDIT: invisible posts are back?
they appear to be. from here at least.
[edit for great visibility? - b]
-
Certainly, energy efficiency is a good thing. However:
- All processes that use energy - shit, that means all processes, period - lose some amount of energy (OK, maybe not superconduction, but that's it).
- At some point, the marginal increase in energy efficiency is not worth the increased cost to get to that level of efficiency.
- Some endeavors are so energy-intensive, that entities that engage in those endeavors already do everything possible to minimize energy usage (hopefully without sacrificing quality or lives, of course). For example, the electric bill for every industrial metal smelter on the planet is fucking enormous, so they'll naturally jump on just about any efficiency improvement - if one's available. All the easy efficiencies are done already, though.
So, energy efficiency only goes so far. You still need to produce energy - and civilization will continue to need quite a bit of it no matter how efficient we get at producing and consuming it.
-
That's why I'm suggesting insulating homes most of all, as that's got an excellent ROI.
The Australian Government rolled out a program to subsidize that very thing not long after the GFC, in order to achieve the twin aims of reducing energy consumption and stimulating employment. A hell of a lot of insulation got installed, the energy savings from which continue to this day; a hell of a lot of installers got a hell of a lot of jobs; and in conjunction with other classic Keynesian pump-priming measures including the direct return of $900 worth of tax money to every Australian adult in order to stimulate the retail sector, the Australian economy weathered the post-GFC years in better shape than just about any other.
Unfortunately, some of the people who got those jobs and some of the people employing them were dickheads, and four people got killed while installing insulation subsidized by this program; also, some of the installations were shoddy and caused house fires. The conservative Opposition of the day, led by a man with no credible opinion on AGW and ably abetted by the virulently anti-Labor and consistently AGW-denying Murdoch press, shamelessly used the deaths and fires to score political points. Once the phrase "pink batts debacle" had entered the public discourse, the program became politically untenable and had to be shut down.
The Opposition then used the economic chaos caused by the shutdown it had forced as another stick to beat the Government with.
As a result, most Australians who remember the insulation program at all still think of it as a "debacle" and evidence of the Rudd Government's utter incompetence, despite the energy it continues to save and the employment it created right when employment opportunities were most needed.
-
Do you think people use more of something when it's cheaper or less of something when it's cheaper?
If the price I pay per kilowatt-hour were cut in half tomorrow, I would not seek to double the energy consumption of my house.
-
The conservative Opposition of the day, led by a man with no credible opinion on AGW and ably abetted by the virulently anti-Labor and consistently AGW-denying Murdoch press, shamelessly used the deaths and fires to score political points.
What was the point of adding the bit about AGW denial?the economic chaos caused by the shutdown
Got some data to show this alleged chaos?classic Keynesian
Keynes himself said to save in times of surplus, and spend in times of deficit. This has been perverted to spend, spend, spend.
-
-
Posting because I don't want to have just read this entire fucking thread and have nothing to show for it. I'll start with an argument in favor (well, kind of) of global warming alarmism:
While the climate is a chaotic system, it still follows the laws of thermodynamics. Energy in equals energy out. So while we can't know exactly what form climate change will take, it seems reasonable to believe that someone could predict in very broad strokes what could happen given certain inputs. So if someone claiming to be an expert in the subject produces a bunch of charts of things that are associated with climate change and those things are changing at a very alarming rate, well, I suppose that the wisest thing, when you're not sure if what you're doing is about to cause a catastrophe, is to stop doing it. So even if they are arguing from emotion, maybe that's actually the correct emotional response to the known data.
That being said, my main question about this, or any other potential crisis, is will the internet stay on? Because I could get through pretty much anything as long I still had access to the internet.
-
Thanks, @flabdablet, I needed the laugh.[quote='Reality']Liquidity was still needed to maintain income and growth.[/quote][quote=From Keynes himself]Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid securities”. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.[/quote][quote='Reality']The insulation scheme was overwhelmingly successful. As shown at IA last week, Australia moved from the world’s 12th-ranked economy in 2007 to clearly the best-managed by 2010.[/quote]Non sequitur.[quote=Ibid.]More than a million home owners will now save an estimated 45% of heating/cooling outlays for the life of their house.[/quote]Citation needed.[quote=Ibid.]Australians avoided having to pay billions in unemployment benefits for years to come[/quote]Of course, the subsidies came from deficit spending - just like unemployment benefits would have...[quote=Ibid.]No-one labels these disasters, catastrophes and rorts. No-one condemns the governments that commissioned and financed them.[/quote]Not one person did, ever, in the history of Man?[quote=Ibid.]The Auditor-Generals report into the scheme highlighted the need for shonky installations to be redone and for the crooks to be prosecuted. Yes, that all cost time and money. But, to economists, none of that was ‘waste’.[/quote]Broken-window fallacy.
"Reality's" liberal use of the word mendacious was a nice touch also. At least you get where the writer's coming from in his "news" piece.
Cheers, mate!
-
If the price I pay per kilowatt-hour were cut in half tomorrow, I would not seek to double the energy consumption of my house.
Yes, only your strawman says that's how it works.
But people would be less concerned about, say, crazy Christmas lights displays, or keeping the thermostat lower in winter and higher in summer. Perhaps you could resist these incentives, but many people won't. The less expensive but more energy hungry refrigerator will look like a better option. Etc.
-
things are changing at a very alarming rate
ZOMG, some days it gets, like 20° hotter or colder than earlier in the day. Talk about alarming rates.
The point being, "alarming" is very subjective and it's easy to lose perspective.
-
But people would be less concerned about, say, crazy Christmas lights displays, or keeping the thermostat lower in winter and higher in summer. Perhaps you could resist these incentives, but many people won't. The less expensive but more energy hungry refrigerator will look like a better option. Etc.
This is why efficiency gains don't get you all that they might, and it's an extremely well-known effect. They do get about two thirds though (an empirically-discovered value AIUI) so that doesn't mean that it's not worth taking action on them. Domestic temperature management (heating and/or cooling) takes such a large part of everyone's energy budget that relatively straight-forward measures there can pay off; an insulated roof and some double-glazing will stop all sorts of trouble, and don't cost all that much (relative to what not acting on them costs).
Very marginal gains are probably not worth it though. You don't gain a lot by turning high-efficiency lights off, though the switch to high-efficiency lighting in the first place does help at the national scale. That's why it's the sort of thing that has been legislated on in various parts of the world. (I like my LED spotlights in the kitchen, as they give all the light without the heat, which makes them much easier to clean…)
-
the switch to high-efficiency lighting in the first place does help at the national scale
Helps at the personal scale too, if you work out the TCO for high-efficiency vs. incandescent lighting over the expected service life of the bulbs.
Of course lighting doesn't account for anywhere near as much home energy use as heating, but given the choice between paying less and paying more for the same end product (light), the rational thing to do is pay less.
Which naturally doesn't stop people pissing and moaning about CFLs being ten times the price of incandescent bulbs.
-
Which naturally doesn't stop people pissing and moaning about CFLs being ten times the price of incandescent bulbs.
Some people have so little in the way of savings that anything that is an investment in the future is difficult, even if it would help them in the longer run (where “longer run” could be “next year” or even “next month”). Their lives are shit precisely because living from moment to moment is very expensive, and it's very hard to change that (they're in a very local, very poor optimum).
-
Which naturally doesn't stop people pissing and moaning about CFLs being ten times the price of incandescent bulbs.
CFL's are pants. Just like tube fluorescents, they have a crummy lifetime when they're on for short periods at a time. The "dimmable" ones are generally terrible when not at full power, either. LED's are the real deal, enough so that I was willing to eat the cost and replace a whole bunch of incandescents in my house before they burned out.
-
TCO for CFLs was still lower than for LEDs where I live, last time I checked (about six months ago). I do keep an eye on it though. And none of my lights are on dimmers.
Are any manufacturers, to your knowledge, offering LED lighting where the LEDs are not deliberately overdriven and undercooled to shorten their expected service life? Seems to me that properly designed LED lighting ought to be good for at least several hundred thousand hours.
-
TCO for CFLs was still lower than for LEDs
My experience with CFLs starts with the fact that the lighting is awful. Not at all worth the supposed cost savings from incandescent (my experience with bulb lifetime has not been good). LEDs at least can produce reasonable looking light.
As you mentioned, lighting is really not a big part of my electric bill, and my first criteria is light that doesn't suck.
-
CFL ... lighting is awful
It was pretty ropey when CFLs were a new thing. Don't know what they're like where you live, but most of the CFLs available in Australia right now are quite reasonable. I'm getting fast startup, reasonable spectrum, the claimed light output and around 10kh service out of even $2 supermarket generics these days.
The spectrum is certainly different from what an incandescent produces (strong peak at each of several phosphor grain colors rather than smooth black-body), so a room lit with CFL has a somewhat different subjective color scheme to one lit with incandescents, but we've had CFLs in the house for long enough to evolve decor choices that now look better under those.
The LED lighting I've seen all has a really prominent spectral peak at the blue end, and personally I find that fairly unpleasant. As with CFLs, though, adding more phosphors at the redder end tends to reduce efficiency.
With any luck, by the time LED lighting is locally cost-competitive with CFL it will have had about as much maturation improvement as I've seen in CFL over the last decade or so. At that point I will happily give up my mercury-recycling chore.
-
Some people have so little in the way of savings that anything that is an investment in the future is difficult
Sure, and your point about poverty traps is well taken. But now that CFLs are available for under $5, it's pretty rare to find somebody who can afford to pay rent but can't afford to shift a couple of dollars forward in the spending cycle once.
In a house that's currently fitted with incandescent bulbs, at today's prices for lamps and electricity, it now only takes about one quarterly billing cycle for the energy savings from one CFL to pay for another. And each CFL will keep on doing that for about ten quarterly billing cycles.
Most of the pissing and moaning has stopped in this country anyway since CFLs became mainstream and incandescents got relegated to specialty items.
-
CFLs are a great example of government meddling screwing up the market. Everyone knew from years ago that LEDs were going to be better all around than CFLs ever could be. They will eventually be just as cheap, have better light output, more efficient, and longer lasting. But, the push to get inefficient lights out of the market NOW led to CFLs filling the gap because they were based on already mature technology. That split the market between a large group of price-sensitive consumers that buy CFLs and a small group of people who demand better light quality buying LEDs. This is what made it take so long for LED prices to come down - lack of production volume.
CFLs are very much like some of the alternative energy projects. Not the proper end goal and a diversion from getting to the best technology in the future.
-
On balance, I think Government support for CFLs was a good thing. Yes it probably did delay the widespread adoption of LED lighting by a decade; but LED lighting simply wasn't ready for prime time when CFLs started getting policy support. Waiting for LEDs to mature before pushing incandescents aside would certainly have represented a massive lost opportunity for total energy savings.
Not the proper end goal and a diversion from getting to the best technology in the future.
That's pretty much how I see nuclear power generation. Too slow to deploy, TCO too high, massive capital concentration required, not mass producible, centralized, non-resilient and above all non-renewable.
We're eventually going to run out of non-renewable energy options; that's what non-renewable means.
Given that renewable energy flows are inherently diffuse compared to reserves of stored fuel, the higher our total energy requirement the more difficult it will be to provide it all from renewable sources. Which means the longer we stay on a path of ever-rising total energy demand powered by non-renewable fuels, the harder and more disruptive it will become to cut over to fully renewable energy. Waiting until we're forced to do that would be utterly stupid.
It's both less costly and less difficult to make the renewable energy cutover happen as soon as possible, simply because we need to build less energy-collection plant to do it sooner than we would to do it later.
But renewable energy collection plant is relatively expensive up front; an aggressive renewable cutover policy would tend to raise energy prices in the short term. Which is why we also need aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency; the absolute price of a megajoule doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the absolute price of the end-use services provided by that megajoule. It should be possible to keep the latter pretty flat, even as the former rises.
And in fact this is the direction that the energy markets have been moving in despite most public energy policy for the last couple of decades. Renewable generation is easily the fastest-growing segment in almost every energy marketplace, and almost every piece of energy-consuming machinery is more energy efficient than comparable machinery was twenty years ago.
The amount of Government support provided for renewables is still minuscule compared to the ongoing subsidies paid to coal miners and nuclear power operators. In my view, that ought to be the other way around.
-
Everyone knew from years ago that LEDs were going to be better all around than CFLs ever could be.
The blue LED wasn't invented until 1993. Before then it wasn't clear that a blue LED could exist. So that's not at all certain.
-
See how the temperature and CO2 have been more or less tracking each other, then at the end the carbon just goes completely off the rails. How could anyone possibly create a model that both accounts for historical climate and predicts our current and future climate after a discontinuity like that?
-
@Buddy, please tell us where that graph came from.
-
Googled for ‘temperature and co2 graphs’, picked one out of a bunch of similar graphs that matched what I was thinking about.
I really hope that this isn't a prelude to you trying to disprove the fossil record. I'm not particularly invested in any particular prediction about the future -- my preference is rather to be ready for whatever may come than to try to change the world -- but I would be rather disappointed if it turns out that I've been lied to about the actual geological record (not counting all the copies of Creation magazine that I read growing up).
-
Googled for ‘temperature and co2 graphs’, picked one out of a bunch of similar graphs that matched what I was thinking about.
A direct link to the source would be swell.
-
No. I'm sorry, I just don't care enough. If you don't already know what you're looking at with that graph, there isn't going to be enough knowledge between the pair of us for any learning to occur. Either show me what you've got or don't, your decision.
-
You don't care enough, but you'd rather try to score points instead. Double standard?
Anywho, tracking down where that graph came from, I was shocked, shocked I say, to find that absolutely no link to the raw data behind the graph was available: http://www.usfspconnect.com/2001-an-ocean-odyssey/
The writer also sounds like a real winner. No, son, revolutions almost never work out the way you think they will. In fact, I can just imagine this guy wearing a CPUSA pin.
-
Double standard?
Oh my god, now you're attacking bimetallism? You just want to put more idle capital into the hands of the idle rich, don't you?
Look, the deal is, I knew that if I linked an article, you would attack the details of that article, rather than disputing the data represented in the actual graph. Like I said, I didn't read the article, I just picked a graph that matched my current understanding of the nature of the change that industrialization has effected on the carbon levels. If you want to dispute that, just dispute it, you don't need to tell me how stupid people on the internet (except myself, of course) can be.
-
I knew that if I linked an article, you would attack the details of that article, rather than disputing the data represented in the actual graph.
Anyone else catch what just happened there? I specifically call out the missing raw data, then you bitch about something else instead. You win one Internet.
-
Are you planning on disputing the graph?
EDIT: brainfart
-
I'm not planning to dispute or not dispute until I see the raw data behind that graph, any assumptions that might have been made, etc., which is what proper analysis requires.
-
Oh my god, now you're attacking bimetallism? You just want to put more idle capital into the hands of the idle rich, don't you?
Something something cross of gold?
-
what just happened there?
What's happening here is that I am trying to tell you that I am not willing to engage in an argument about the details of this data, and you are trying to make me.
I came to my own conclusion some time ago, based on a review conducted in good faith, not during a flamewar, not trying to win any argument. If my understanding is wrong or out of date, I am willing to accept any sufficiently convincing new information and update my understanding. If you don't have an opinion of your own, and are just here to criticize mine, I don't predict that being particularly edifying for anyone here.
-
That's basically the same graph, with a citation to the raw data, which has citations to the source papers. I did not chase the last step.
-
How could anyone possibly create a model that both accounts for historical climate and predicts our current and future climate after a discontinuity like that?
Yeah, my point is that clearly no one has. And that they're probably over emphasizing one thing about the system. And that we might not be able to really simulate something so large and chaotic and dynamic anyways.
-
If you don't have an opinion of your own, and are just here to criticize mine, I don't predict that being particularly edifying for anyone here.
You didn't really seem to express an opinion other than to point out that current models haven't been able to predict reality. Which is itself a simple observation. At least, no real opinions in the post with the graph.
-
Unfortunately, some of the people who got those jobs and some of the people employing them were dickheads, and four people got killed while installing insulation subsidized by this program; also, some of the installations were shoddy and caused house fires.
It seems that 90% of housing is designed and built by that same crop of dickheads -- they exist everywhere! Never mind just how little people are willing to pay for doing it right to begin with...
This is why efficiency gains don't get you all that they might, and it's an extremely well-known effect. They do get about two thirds though (an empirically-discovered value AIUI) so that doesn't mean that it's not worth taking action on them.
It sounds like this is an opportunity for regulatory adjustment -- we have a very well-known and well-studied effect as a baseline, and relatively good metrics to work with, so setting up a feedback loop to introduce the appropriate amount of compensation makes sense.
Very marginal gains are probably not worth it though. You don't gain a lot by turning high-efficiency lights off, though the switch to high-efficiency lighting in the first place does help at the national scale. That's why it's the sort of thing that has been legislated on in various parts of the world. (I like my LED spotlights in the kitchen, as they give all the light without the heat, which makes them much easier to clean…)
The major frustration is that luminaire designers are still largely sticking with incandescent-era luminaire designs that (especially for recessed fixtures) largely lack the heat dissipation ability needed to allow CFL or LED lamps to not get cooked to death by them.
-
The major frustration is that luminaire designers are still largely sticking with incandescent-era luminaire designs that (especially for recessed fixtures) largely lack the heat dissipation ability needed to allow CFL or LED lamps to not get cooked to death by them.
LED lamps get nowhere near as hot as incandescents, but they need quite a large unit to act as a voltage converter. We recently got new LED spotlights for our kitchen, and they're brighter, cooler and easier to clean than the old incandescent fitting. We like them. They're also apparently smaller, though the overall fixture is actually about the same size.
They might also save us money (we've not had them long enough to be sure about that) but that wasn't why we chose them. The technology appears to now be superior even without that consideration.
-
-
LED lamps get nowhere near as hot as incandescents, but they need quite a large unit to act as a voltage converter. We recently got new LED spotlights for our kitchen, and they're brighter, cooler and easier to clean than the old incandescent fitting. We like them. They're also apparently smaller, though the overall fixture is actually about the same size.
They're also much less tolerant of heat -- an incandescent can sit there under a broiler for its entire service life with not a whit of objection, while a LED or CFL will lose its [s]brain[/s]ballast in a hurry under the same conditions.
File:Vostok Petit data.svg - Wikimedia Commons