As I mentioned before in that blurb on consciousness, energy is a weird thing.
Energy is a very strange concept. In high school you’re taught that is has something to do with that force thing that Newton came up with which is mass times acceleration. And then if you multiply that force by a distance you get something called work, which is energy. Then in university you’re taught that energy has something to do with vibration or frequency… like blue light is higher energy that red light because it’s frequency is higher. Then in grad school energy is all about symmetry between space and time which was the work of Einstein’s favorite mathematician Emmy Noether.
Energy Terms Don’t Mean Anything To Us:
If we happen to read that the world uses 100 quadrillion BTU’s, or 15000 MTOE’s (million or mega tonnes of oil equivalent) or 580 million terajoules (that’s 580 peta joules lol) it means nothing to us. What meaning is for us, is how much our electric bill is this month (measured in kilowatt-hours which is the same as the energy unit called a joule except much bigger…like….3.6 millions times bigger). The other meaningful thing is how much a tank of gas costs (yes, EV people… in Alberta they still use gas when the freakin’ temperature is minus a million….Celsius vs Fahrenheit doesn’t matter here folks!).
Here’s a few pics that might help.
There are scads of nice energy graphics that show how much oil, or coal, or wind or whatever we use. Like this one.
One can easily see that if you go back hundreds of years, not much happened. Then, all of a sudden, we leaped from wood carbon, to coal carbon, to hydrocarbons to methane (four hydrogens on each carbon). That is now what we call civilization. Some refer to it as the fossil fuel pulse.
As the popular saying now goes, civilization is not really dependent on energy, civilization IS ENERGY. And EACH of the sections of the circle has its good and has its bad.
We take this energy and use it for residential, commercial, industrial, and transport uses.
Physics Terms Don’t Mean Anything To Us:
In the end physics wins. This is a well worn-by-time physics quote. Actually in the end it’s the engineering that wins (especially wars), but I’m just nitpicking. We especially don’t understand the different scales of energy.
There is a great Wikipedia page on energy orders of magnitude that you can check out.
I got my “numbers” from repeatedly questioning GPT4. Yes, that is a big rabbit hole. Yes, there are assumptions but it gives you the scale about what we are talking about (at least, here on planet Earth). I will only give you the number for the number of zeros after the 1 in the number of Joules. So a light bulb is 10^5 yearly if you turn it on for a few hours a day ….energy use of humanity yearly is 10^20…..total energy in fossils in the earth is maybe 10^23….the amount of sunlight that hits the earth yearly is 10^24….the amount of geothermal energy in the earth is 10^31.
Here are some cherry picked quotes from Samo Burja when he was on the Jim Rutt Show to provide some entertainment. He was talking about geothermal.
Some of this is leftover heat from the formation of the solar system. Some of it is when you have lots and lots of rocks smashing together, they heat up, right? And a lot of that energy still remains inside the earth, hasn’t radiated out. Another source of energy is basically the decay of radioactive elements, the minuscule amount of heat that happens to be produced there, the energy that’s produced there just gets sort of trapped in the planet.
The total heat in the earth, including the core and mantle, is something like 10 billion zeta joules or nearly 16 million times the total amount of fossil fuel energy. And now depending on what the truth is of where this heat is coming from, we could think of the earth as a giant reservoir of fossil heat leftover from the creation of the solar system basically. Or we could think of it as a naturally occurring nuclear battery or even a nuclear reactor. Well, I said earlier that the heat in the earth, including the core mantle is estimated to be 10 billion zeta joules. That is 60 million times the total amount of fossil fuel energy. However, solar energy is also extremely abundant, but there’s only 2,700 zeta joules that reaches the earth’s surface, yet that is still 5,000 times more than global energy consumption.
The Density Solution:
Solar and wind are nice BUT they take continents of land for installation, for digging up the materials to make stuff, and for transmitting that energy (from the desert, in solar’s case) to the cities where it is needed. This “cost of solar” is rarely taken into account when activists talk about the “ledger” of expenses to us plebeians. And this energy is not as concentrated as good ol’ fossiles.
The increase in energy density will be where solutions come from as that has always been the case. You can drive maybe 400 miles on a tank of gas and all that’s left is carbon after you “burn” the hydrogen. Sorta. A tank of uranium that you “burn” will be a million times that 400 miles as the ratio of the energy of chemical to nuclear reactions is a six zero at the end of the number increase. So 400 million miles is two driving trips to the sun and back. We don’t, as linearly thinking humans, get this exponential increase thing. Let’s just ignore the fact that you can’t drive a car to the sun through space, for the moment. LOL.
So one would have to give the green light nuclear?
The Cut The Waste Solution:
Since the late 70’s we (the western world anyway) have had really cheap oil and decreasing interest rates which means that the great capitalistic system has done its thing. This has entailed a 7% on average annual stealing of money by governments from their citizens from inflation. This has been offset by a more than 7% deflation due to technology over that time. The smart people have borrowed tons (in effect shorted the currency) of printed money and bought real assets (land, house, gold, etc) with that fiat currency which gives this “inequality” that politicians scream about to get votes. But they don’t tend to condemn voters for wasting big chunks of the energy on which this is based.
It is entirely analogous to Tesher's two hours showers. The water had to be pressurized and heated with energy for two hours vs. two nanoseconds if Tesher lived on Arrakis. Lunacy.
Consider the “Just Stop Oil” FCKING MORONS who throw paint on the Mona Lisa. Their clothes are made with oil, their paint comes from oil, and the car that brought them to the Louvre ran on oil. I would call that wasteful?
Generally people don’t change behaviour until they have to. True capitalism does this with costs but there never really has been a free market; has there?