Energy: We Need Everything. Now.

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy:  sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body.  Anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

What do you do with a dead chemist?  Barium.

I remember way back in high school gym class when I was a freshman.  One day we showed up in the gym and saw a roughly six-foot diameter ball in the middle of the gym floor, as if a majestic bird the size of Alec Baldwin had left an egg for us.

That was new.

Coach said, “Welcome to Push Ball.  Wilder and Jones, you two are captains.  Pick your teams.”  Jones and I were on the football team together, so we divvied up the rest of the boys.  I think the girls were doing something like advanced couch-sitting that day.

Coach followed up:  “Here are the rules.  No rules.  If your team pushes the ball into the opposing team’s bleacher, you get a point.”  Technically, that was a rule, but I decided not to argue.

Pretty quickly I divined that part of the point of Push Ball was to burn up a lot of energy on a game that was very hard to win.  Probably “something, something teamwork blah blah blah”.

But then I looked at the ball.  It was filled with air, not Baldwin-DNA-soaked egg yolk, so it wasn’t all that heavy.  But it was way too big for any one person to grab.

It wasn’t entirely smooth, though.  There were laces.

These laces were like those on a football, except the gap between the laces was big – big enough to slip my fingers through.  I developed a plan.  I told my guys, “It’s gonna get easy – we’re gonna win.  When I say go, get in front of me and block.”

Alternate meme text:  “When the weather tells you to dress for the 100’s.”

As we played, I concentrated on rotating the laces towards me.  When they were right there about shoulder height, I slipped my fingers in the gaps between the laces, and got a good hold.

“Now!” I yelled.

With the leverage of the handhold, I could easily use the opposing team’s force to pop the ball back towards me, and up.  And with the ball gone, my guys got in front and blocked.  I ran, holding the absurdly large ball over my head with one hand and slammed it into the retracted bleachers causing the wood to reverberate under the mighty force, scoring the first point.

“THIS. IS. SPARTA!” I yelled.  Okay, no I didn’t, it sounds way cooler to pretend that I did.  And I sure as hell felt like Thor (not the fake Marvel® one) slamming his hammer and making the lightning crash.  Our team really did high five.

Coach blew his whistle.

“Okay, we now have a rule.  You can’t do that.”

We had a really good weightlifting facility.

Weirdly, this post is the second one about energy.  In one sense, our world is like that game of push ball.  We work to innovate and create breakthroughs to better use the energy we have.  The number of cars are up in the country, but the miles per gallon are way up, too.

Government would love to take credit for it, but it’s really not the case.  Sure the CAFE standards have led to higher mileage, but a lot of that is due to innovation that occurred outside of those standards.  When I read that the Trans Am® in Smokey and the Bandit only produced 200 horsepower, I realized that most of the cars I own have more power under the hood, and get better mileage.  I always wanted a car with a T-top like the Trans Am™ in high school, so my dates could have had more legroom.

I was considerate that way.

We have become more efficient at using energy, and that’s great.  But we find more uses for energy, too.  If I lived in the same house today in 1977, right now there would be zero power usage outside of the fridge and the freezer.  As it is, I’m watching a silly movie on a huge television while I type on a laptop with alarm clocks that don’t tick from springs winding down.  I’m happy for that, because if the alarm clock would go tic-tic-tic all night, it would keep The Mrs. awake and she’d want to toc.

Is my house using a lot of energy?  No, but there are a lot more devices in a home today using energy passively, like charging cell phones and security systems and “always on” televisions and computers and garage door openers on low power mode.

I drove up to my garage and saw someone had painted a “3” on it.  I thought, “That’s odd.”

Even industry is more efficient, generally, at using energy.  Modern manufacturing plants are expert at using what would have been waste heat in all sorts of ways to save energy, which in turn saves money.  I mean, don’t be an engineer if you’re not so hot in thermodynamics.

But at the base of all modern industry, energy is crucial.  It is the ultimate leverage.  One analyst noted that $20 billion in Russian natural gas was used by Germany to create $2 trillion in economic output.  That’s stuff made.  It’s amazing leverage – $1 in natural gas was the basis for creating $100 worth of added value.  Germany would like to start a war, but the rule is that it’s three Reichs, and you’re out.

Energy is that important.  And energy usage isn’t a linear progression – it has been exponential.  The problem is that energy usage is growing nearly exponentially.  If you look at any short-term graphs, it doesn’t quite show it, but here’s one that puts it in perspective.  I got it at Our World in Data (LINK) and it’s reused by CC (LINK).

If Ebola grew as fast as the world energy consumption, it would be called Hyperbola.

I think this one graph alone should be tattooed backward on the head of every Leftist who says BuT MUh ALtERnaTivE EneRgy.  Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.

The world population right now is 7.97 billion people.  In 1920, the population was closer to 1.9 billion, which is roughly the number of people on a typical airplane nowadays.  In 1920 electricity was only in 35% of homes.  In the United States.  Most people in the world in 1920 had no electrical power usage at all, heated their homes with firewood or coal, and only saw electrical lights at the picture show.  Also, they were, sadly, almost sixty years too early to see Smokey and the Bandit.

Let’s go back to Germany (not the 1920 version) but today.  Just $20 billion in natural gas costs $2 trillion in value added.  Population is growing exponentially.  Energy use is growing exponentially.  We’re setting ridiculous ideas that we’ll be all-electric by 2030 by changing rules to limit innovation and declare winners.  It’s like Coach not allowing innovation in Push Ball, but this time with real-world consequences.

But those electric cars.  They’re powered by . . . what, exactly?  Seriously, look at the chart.  What?  Nuclear we haven’t built?  Solar which is so small it can’t be seen?  Hydropower which is in decline because it can’t be built?  Wind?  I can’t see wind outside, and I also can barely see it on the chart.

Looks like the Green Energy Plan is free of charge.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who is not realizing that the Leftist energy pipe dream won’t lead to the greatest suffering that mankind has ever seen, even more than anything Global Warming® could ever cause, even more than both of the World Wars, combined, is deluded.

We need more innovation in energy, and we need it now, because the exponentials in energy use and population require investment to keep ahead of the game.  Exponentials are funny that way, you have to be like Alice’s Red Queen and run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The Leftists that want to bring it all down?  They deserve to be put into a Push Ball filled with Alec Baldwin’s DNA-soaked yolk.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

44 thoughts on “Energy: We Need Everything. Now.”

  1. Winter is coming. Get your priorities straight: insulate yourself (e.g., expect to wear “outdoor clothes” indoors), insulate your core spaces (e.g. insulating window shades, as much fluff in the attic as you can fit), isolate parts of your home to leave unheated (but too bad if you have an “open plan” house with cathedral ceilings; should have expected energy prices to rise). Only after you’ve exhausted the conservation options should you worry about the input options (gas/heat pump/wood stove). And, eventually, the cost of energy will squeeze everyone’s budgets, so “Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush”. See efficiencyiseverything.com for radical savings on household expenses.

    Speaking of winter, rumor has it that recent volcanic activity will have a measurable effect cooling the Northern hemisphere this winter.

    1. Also, not a bad idea while Lowes is open to figure out a way to drain your plumbing as to prevent frozen pipe destruction if your unable to maintain above freezing in your home or are forced to combine housing with a friend.

      Happily, my house was built to be a summer home so draining the plumbing is a garden hose affair.

    3. Be careful about leaving areas of your house unheated or underheated. The warm moist air from other areas can find its way into those cold areas, the moisture will condense on the walls, and you will grow a nice crop of black mold and mildew. Ask me how I know this…

      1. Ah, here in Michigan winter air in the house isn’t moist, it’s dry like a desert.

        Without a humidifier, my house would have 14% humidity during a normal winter with propane heat.

  2. As for electricity being in 35% of homes in the 1920s, that was concentrated in the major metro areas and the Northeast/Great Lakes. To the best of my memory, states like Montana and Mississippi didn’t reach that threshold until the early 1950s.

    As things break down (per the WEF Plan), “dependable” electricity will fall back to the 35% level soon. And, don’t look for much recovery. Kinda like the onshoring manufacturing myth.

    1. That is very, very true. I’m not sure we’d be able to support even that level. Perhaps no non-critical uses of electricity?

      Crap. I just gave them ideas.

  3. Math time. Earth has a surface area of 5X10^14 square meters, which is 500 Terasquaremeters. Solar irradiance averages 340 watts per square meter. There’s 365*24=8760 hours in a year. So the total amount of solar energy entering the Earth atmosphere is 500*340*8760 = 1,500,000,000 TWh per year. All of human energy use eventually gets converted to heat – per the chart above, around 150,000 TWhr of heat. (A real scientist and not a hack like me would use joules and not TWhr as the unit of energy; for the record there’s 3.6X10^15 joules in a TWhr.) My main point, however, is that direct global warming effects from human energy use is only one-ten-thousandth of the total solar energy injected into the Earth’s environment by the Sun.

    The next effect beyond direct global warming from waste heat is the rise of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from burning fuel and agricultural activities, which change the reflectance characteristics of the atmosphere and so change the amount of solar energy reflected back out into space. Start trying to estimate this and you wade into the murky climate debate. Who knows what the answer is on the true effects of greenhouse gases? Personally, I think change in average global cloud cover (caused by land use?) probably has a bigger effect on this than “heat trapping” by the gasses themselves, but what do I know….

    I think you gotta overlook the current climate arguments and take the long view. This leads to multiple truisms.

    First, I personally think every single hydrocarbon bond on the planet humans can get their hands on will ultimately be burned for energy. The only question is when. Human civilization spans thousands of years, and on a civilizational time scale we’re gonna run out of coal/gas/oil. Soon. Period.

    Second, there’s no way solar/wind/biofuels can generate the kind of power we are generating today with coal/oil/gas, much less what we would need for a egalitarian worldwide utopia. It’s all about concentration / dilution. Coal/oil/gas represents energy that was CONCENTRATED for our current use over literally MILLIONS OF YEARS. Solar/wind/biofuels represent energy that is DILUTE scraped from the environment that we are in MOMENT TO MOMENT RIGHT NOW. We are currently HUNTERS of energy – we hunt for mighty coal and oil and gas. When hydrocarbons run out, we will be GATHERS of energy – scavaging from what weak energy sources we have left. Moving as a civilization from being HUNTERS to being GATHERS represents a civilizational decline.

    Third, it don’t gotta be like dat. We be smart. Maybe we ain’t smart enough to master elusive fusion of light hydrogen and helium, but we sure as nuclear hellfire can master fission with heavy thorium, uranium and plutonium. Whether we have the wisdom to do so is not likely. Current light water reactors are exercises in bureacracy and cost overrun profit-making; building more of them is not the solution. Pebble bed reactors are 100% safe and can yield limitless energy but are too inefficent to make much of a profit and so may never be built at scale. But with potential nuclear energy salvation will always come potential nuclear destruction. Atomic/hydrogen bombs will always be far greater threat to us than climate change. As we may very well be reminded yet again if a humiliated Putin nukes Kyev out of spite as our current slow-motion WW3 progresses…

    Fourthly, in the long run we’re gonna wish for global warming. We are literally in the middle of the fifth ice age – the Quaternary – and we currently live in the Holoocene interglacial period. Humans have been around surviving for 180,000 years in ice ages before our current 5000 years of civilization in a temporary warm “Spring”. The glaciers will be back before you know it.

    https://xkcd.com/1225/

    Finally, remember Pogo.

    http://www.blastoffcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/nohow.jpg

    1. Excellent points! And, yup, we’re in an interglacial period – some think it will be getting much colder, very soon.

    2. Putin: he is going to lose. The West needs to come to terms with that fact. Idiot Brandon only eggs on the war. EU idiots are on the same path. The result is not going to be pretty. WWIII is likely understanding the situation.

      China is passed with Putin because the Ukraine War interferes with their Belt and Roads plan.

      Way too sides in this mess.

  4. My “college” “educated” daughter-in-law theorized recently that her house uses less electric power than mine because she has fewer wall outlets.

    My wife’s sister unplugs table lamps when they are not turned on to “save electricity”.

    In our sprawling home with single-zone HVAC, my wife sets the a/c down to the point where meat won’t thaw on the kitchen counter and then wears a hoodie indoors with a blanket on her lap.

    I am detecting a pattern here. Call it AOC syndrome.

    1. Can’t you gently explain things to them? I’ve had good results with my wife. As in: “you don’t need to turn up the thermostat just because it’s cold outside; the JOB of the thermostat is to make the furnace run more when it’s cold outside. Thermo – temperature; stat – constant. Thermo-stat keeps temperature constant.” “Oh! OK.”

      Or, “you don’t need to run so much water when you change from hot to cold to fill the pitcher.” “But what about all the hot water in the pipe between the heater and the kitchen?” “That hot water stays in the hot water pipe. You’re taking water from the cold water pipe that comes right to the kitchen. The valve is right under the sink.” “Oh! OK”

      1. I wish I had a dollar for every time I tried to explain to my wife that setting the thermostat ten degrees higher or lower will not heat or cool the house any faster than setting it two degrees higher or lower (which is the temperature point she wishes to reach).

        There are just some things that the women in my life are simply not programmed to understand. A biggie is tilting horizontal blinds to preserve privacy. Tilt them down on the upper floors to prevent anyone outside looking up and seeing you. “It’s simple, sweetheart. If you can peer down through slats angled upward and see them, they can peer up through the slats and see you.”

        Nope. Rocket science.

          1. I am generally quite tolerant of lame puns, and rather enjoy making them, myself. But that one made me groan audibly. So much so that the wife perked up and wondered aloud if it’s ‘showtime’ (“One more serious infarction and it’s payday, Jack!”)

            Wasn’t that beer ad a little before your time, JW? I was just a sprout myself when that jingle jangled endlessly on the wireless. Between Fireside Chats. From President Millard Fillmore.

          2. It was. It was refreshed by MST3K back in the 1990s. I have even had two Schlitz, but I bought ’em when we lived in Houston in the aughts.

  6. Sir,
    This is the part of this whole mess that bothers me the most… it is the fact that my government, and yours, and nearly everyone’s, are making policy decisions and effecting systemic, societal-level changes, that are based on premises that are demonstrably… well, false. Appallingly so. Really, really wrong. I mean, just not true. As President Reagan said, ‘It’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so’.

    My government is particularly guilty of this. There are policies being made, laws being struck, and measures taken that defy reason and logic, every damned day. It seems bafflingly, mind-numbingly stupid.

    Except….

    The media continue to portray these things as matters of ignorance, using phrases like ‘out of touch’ and ‘misinformed’ when describing possible explanations for the latest patently ridiculous government measure or public pronouncement. As if those in government are entirely unaware of the effects being borne by their actions. As if our political betters were ignorant of how things really work, on the ground, down here in the mud.

    How is this possible?

    Of course, to suggest anything else, like their actions are deliberate attempts to destroy our culture and society, and replace us with immigrants more amenable to the machinations of those in power, will get you de-platformed and possibly arrested, so those conclusions are of a more private nature than not.

    Consider: if gun control had anything to do with logic, reason, or common sense, we would not still be arguing about it. Similarly, trying to tell anyone with even a mere moiety of comprehension of matters thermodynamic that EVs are how we fight climate change, is a stupidity beyond my limited ability to accurately describe. The fact that, in spite of the obvious reasons why the forgoing is ridiculous, my government continues to pursue such an end, is overwhelmingly suggestive that reason and logic are not wanted on this voyage. There is an agenda being pursued, and it will be such, until that pursuit is interrupted by something (or, God save us, no longer required), and logic and reason be damned.

    This pursuit, mind, will destroy us. Period. It is already happening. The signs, both direct and subtle, are all around us, and you aren’t allowed to discuss it openly without consequences both varied and dreadful.

    This cannot be borne for much longer.

    Mike in Canada

    1. If they’re not stupid, they want you and I dead, and they want us to suffer, and they want to watch. That’s really the only other explanation.

  7. I remember a game that we played in school called ‘crab soccer’, using that six-foot diameter ball. You got down on ithe floor on your hands and feet, facing the ceiling, then moved around like a crab and tried to kick the ball to the wall to score points. Great fun.

  8. I remember playing pushball during PT in Army ROTC. We’d play the Marine ROTC.
    don’t remember any score but remember bruises broken bones and bloody noses.

      1. yeah, ok, so I over simplified. Unlike your LED, most industrial machines are intended to produce to capacity, the more they produce the greater profit. Eventually you saturate demand, but by improving effeciency, you lower cost, increasing demand. The result is higher consumption. This has historically been the result seen when industrial energy consumption becomes more effecient.

        Even your LED, being more effecient, lowers the cost of lighting, which increases the use of lighting.

        1. Which is what happens when science conflates behavior of the machine with the behavior of the user.
          One is engineering, the other is sociology.

          And “modern” anti-science is all about prognosticating about sociology, about which they are wholly ignorant, rather than sticking with that boring engineering, chemistry, and physics, here they have some bare expertise.

          This is why they should be branded on the forehead with a hot poker the first time they try that, and shot on sight the minute they try it the second time.
          Then learning would occur, and from that learning, Wisdom would proceed forth.

          As Our Host noted, there always need to be Rules.
          The difference between ordinary dictators and technocrats is about 100M dead.

      1. Thank you for that ! I was unaware it had a name! Now I must cross reference what I have… 😀

  10. Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.

    That’s the goal, and after they achieve it, they’ll ban fire. We need more innovation in preventing leftists from setting policy, and we need it now, because the exponentials in leftism require investment to keep ahead of the game.

      1. EPA currently regulates wood stoves to reduce emissions.

        Numerous cities regulate fireplaces especially when AQMD issues a warning. Likely ticket magnet.

        1. I know that they ended up with that catalytic nonsense. A good used, Earth Stove . . . and no air regs around Modern Mayberry. You can burn anything short of asphalt-filled tires and it’s all good.

    2. I think that would take you back *well* before 1920, certainly before trains. Somewhere in the 1700’s I’d think… only really, due to the collapse of civilization, and of trust itself, likely *far* further back still.

  11. Our energy infrastructure s being destroyed…. deliberately. The people who refuse to accept that fact are delusional. The people DOING it are evil. It’s tough to do anything about the willfully delusional. Dealing with the evil people is simple. Unpleasant and violent…..but simple. Accept that reality and the first step toward fixing the problem has been taken.

  12. “I think this one graph alone should be tattooed backward on the head of every Leftist who says BuT MUh ALtEnaTivE EneRgy. Eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas, and you have a world that, roughly, has as much energy as 1920.”

    Natzsofast. They don’t want you burning firewood, peat, or buffalo chips either.
    The Left is pushing for energy consumption levels from 19,200 BC.

    When life was so simple even a cave man could do it.

    The cure for this is opening their minds.
    158 grains at a time.
    They’ll figure that out, but about 3 feet of ballistic travel too late.
    Bummer.

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