At what point did we become "unsustainable?"

[Arwon]

Not at all, just as I would not have a central planning scheme for shoes or pineapples. We have no plans for shoes or pineapples yet there is no shoe crisis, nor is there a pineapple crisis. The crises are always in those industries that the government sticks its ignorant, brutish, troglodyte hands on.

Shoes and pineapples don't have multi-billion dollar capital costs with low rates of return, planning and construction lead times measured in years or decades, almost prohibitive early-mover disadvantages, or a delivery structure whose reliability depends on the entire system being tightly managed and run as a single entity. Shoes and pineapples also don't form the basis of literally everything else economies do.

The thing is energy needs to be managed both physcially and financially. The two don't go together naturally - for electricity and gas in particular, the "market" is a post-hoc accounting fiction almost entirely separate from the physcial management of the system which happens on a realtime basis and is only interested in "total load" and "total supply". The price mechanism works very well as a day-to-day allocative efficiency mechanism in electricity generation and electricity retail, but is next to useless in ensuring that the electricity system continues to exist and operate effectively, in physical terms, over a period of years.

I can't even fathom how you'd run a grid without a single mandated central dispatch process or without externally-determined caps on revenue and investment for the natural monopoly transmission and distribution entities. I don't think it's coincidental that the most hard-core Thatcherite types never tried either. Markets are one thing, but engineering is another. If you don't want government to have regulatory control over electricity, you basically don't want to have reliable, affordable, universally-available electricity at all.

 

[Singularity]

Ever since we learned how to fell a tree or kill an animal we've been living at various degrees of unsustainable lifestyle. Same could be said for a simple microbe or giant whale. We're just doing it on a grander scale, and more skillfully today(population is still thriving).

Resources and species vanish all the time, and this is how it has been for as long as the biosphere has existed. Allocating all blame on humans or believing that modern man is unique in living an unsustainable life is a huge fallacy. This is how it will be untill the last iota of life is extinguished when our biosphere comes to an end sometime in the future.

Modern man is however uniquely capable of knowing both when it is living unsustainable and inventing new ways of tapping into new resources. So you could argue that we're both brilliant at adapting our lifestyle and extremely ignorant in continuing our explotation of an overtaxed resource despite the warnings that we'll risk both a collapse of the resource and our own population as a result of our unsustainable ways.

 

[Dachs]

1880.

Why then?

 

[Leoreth]

Not at all, just as I would not have a central planning scheme for shoes or pineapples. We have no plans for shoes or pineapples yet there is no shoe crisis, nor is there a pineapple crisis.

Shoes and pineapples are also replenishable and not the backbone of our whole economic system that will be hard to change when the shortages actually appear and the price mechanism begins to take effect.

The crises are always in those industries that the government sticks its ignorant, brutish, troglodyte hands on.

I really don't know if the smiley or smiley would be more appropriate here.

Your argument falls apart though in that there will be no crisis. The number of barrels of oil remaining for access, not including changes in consumption, new discoveries or new and improved methods of acquiring or using oil, is measured in decades. The market prices scarcity rationally, and this is not based on faith, but reality as it happens all around us, now and forever.

You're saying that there will never be a crisis because we'll find new ways to prolong the current system?

 

[Cutlass]

Not at all, just as I would not have a central planning scheme for shoes or pineapples. We have no plans for shoes or pineapples yet there is no shoe crisis, nor is there a pineapple crisis. The crises are always in those industries that the government sticks its ignorant, brutish, troglodyte hands on.


Your argument falls apart though in that there will be no crisis. The number of barrels of oil remaining for access, not including changes in consumption, new discoveries or new and improved methods of acquiring or using oil, is measured in decades. The market prices scarcity rationally, and this is not based on faith, but reality as it happens all around us, now and forever.

There will be periodic crises. That is the inherent nature of the system, and nothing can ever prevent it from being the inherent nature of the system. And the reason for that is the lack of rationality. Which is another inherent nature of the system.

Oil is a peculiar market. Even if you work with the assumption that for all intents and purposes the world will never run out, from that premise you do not get the conclusion that there will not be economic disruptions due to supply and demand mismatches. Oil in the short run is not very elastic in either supply or demand. There are attempts, by governments, to hold a reserve of production against the many, many things that routinely disrupt supply and cause changes in demand. However price fluctuates wildly despite that because longer term supply and longer term demand have very long lead in times. So there is not, there can not be, a smooth transition between different levels of supply and demand. That is why the price if oil fluctuates so readily, and disrupts the rest of the economy when it does.

Letting oil be entirely "market controlled" is choosing to have an economy that suffers frequent sever disruptions.

 

[LucyDuke]

But we are sustaining ourselves. I feel like I'm arguing this point too much.

Only if our population was decreasing would I say we are not sustaining ourselves.

Definition of SUSTAINABLE

1
: capable of being sustained
2
a : of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged <sustainable techniques> <sustainable agriculture>
b : of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods <sustainable society>


Definition of SUSTAIN

transitive verb
1
: to give support or relief to
2
: to supply with sustenance : nourish
3
: keep up, prolong
4
: to support the weight of : prop; also : to carry or withstand (a weight or pressure)
5
: to buoy up <sustained by hope>
6
a : to bear up under
b : suffer, undergo <sustained heavy losses>
7
a : to support as true, legal, or just
b : to allow or admit as valid <the court sustained the motion>
8
: to support by adequate proof : confirm <testimony that sustains our contention>

You are talking about the RED meaning. This thread is about the GREEN meaning.

 

[Arwon]

Actually, I suppose the best prospect for a less centrally-controlled electricity grid would be everyone having solar panels and central dispatch just handling the balance by calling up flexible outputs like gas and hydro. Renewable energy probably has a greater capacity to be dominated by genuinely private and independent companies than fossil fuel generation (or nuclear power) ever does. Less enormous projects means less need to socialise risk to make them viable. And whilst capital is most of the expense (rather than fuel) per unit of output, the outlay for each installation is still smaller than an enormous power plant.

 

[Ayatollah So]

No way to know. The problem is that we humans are always discovering new stuff that changes the equation.

Oh no, I agreed with BaketCase again! Two more times, and a singularity will form and swallow the earth! This pattern is unsustainable!

 

[BasketCase]

Only if our population was decreasing would I say we are not sustaining ourselves.

Hate to make things complicated, but this isn't necessarily true. Humans sometimes voluntarily try to reduce or avoid population growth; if we were unsustainable, our population would indeed be dropping, but that doesn't mean population shrinkage always means unsustainability. On the contrary--voluntary reduction of human populations helps improve sustainability.

The problem with humans is, the populations that most badly need to do that (generally poor Third World nations, most of whose problems stem from population growth to begin with) are precisely the ones who aren't.

 

[Cutlass]

Actually, I suppose the best prospect for a less centrally-controlled electricity grid would be everyone having solar panels and central dispatch just handling the balance by calling up flexible outputs like gas and hydro. Renewable energy probably has a greater capacity to be dominated by genuinely private and independent companies than fossil fuel generation (or nuclear power) ever does. Less enormous projects means less need to socialise risk to make them viable. And whilst capital is most of the expense (rather than fuel) per unit of output, the outlay for each installation is still smaller than an enormous power plant.

The process of going from not economically viable to viable is taking pretty heavy subsidies. There wouldn't be enough capacity installation to achieve economies of scale or to support the science of improving the tech without government support.

 

[Abegweit]

The process of going from not economically viable to viable is taking pretty heavy subsidies. There wouldn't be enough capacity installation to achieve economies of scale or to support the science of improving the tech without government support.

To put it more accurately, massive waste of resources would not be possible without government theft.

 

[Arwon]

The process of going from not economically viable to viable is taking pretty heavy subsidies. There wouldn't be enough capacity installation to achieve economies of scale or to support the science of improving the tech without government support.

Oh I know that, I'm talking about a hypothetical future grid after those investments have been made.

To put it more accurately, massive waste of resources would not be possible without government theft.

Yeah, but enough about how our existing electricity generators and networks came into existence.

 

[Abegweit]

Oh I know that, I'm talking about a hypothetical future grid after those investments have been made.

Investments? Just how exactly does theft equate to investments?

 

[Arwon]

Hahaha dude really this is where extreme libertarianism disappears down the rabbit hole. You talk as though our existing wide area synchronous grids and large-scale generators are some wonderful product of a free market absent government involvement.

Building it all took billions in government investments and still requires the heavy hand of regulation to run it, so of course changing how it works will also require this.

 

[amadeus]

If it's taken by force, what is it? It didn't belong to the state, so it can't be said they're taking back stolen property.

 

[Abegweit]

Hahaha dude really this is where extreme libertarianism disappears down the rabbit hole.

Actually it is where push comes to shove. Let me repeat. Just how exactly is theft an investment? Reply or stuff off.

 

[Singularity]

You can thrive and grow while using a renewable resource in an unsustainable manner. Unsustainable doesnt have to be fatal for the exploiting party as long as they have alternative means to sustain themselves when one resource dries up.

I honestly don't know if you could apply the term "sustainable" to the extraction of fossile fuels - since the mechanisms of renewing that resource is measured in geological periods and not years. By that definition the nomads using oil to fuel their lamps thousand years ago was also living unsustainable since they would be depleting local resources of surface oil and that if it ever is replenished locally would be many geological era's in the future.

 

[Arwon]

Actually it is where push comes to shove. Let me repeat. Just how exactly is theft an investment? Reply or stuff off.

Naw man naw dude. "All tax is theft and therefore illegitimate" is your little semantic hobby horse, not mine. And I think it is a silly and incredibly reductionist philosophy. And I think its silliness is quite effectively illustrated by how magical and wishful the thinking becomes when applied to hard realities like the delivery of adequate and cost-effective energy to all.

 

[Abegweit]

Naw man naw dude. "All tax is theft and therefore illegitimate" is your little semantic hobby horse, not mine. And I think it is a silly and incredibly reductionist philosophy. And I think its silliness is quite effectively illustrated by how magical and wishful the thinking becomes when applied to hard realities like the delivery of adequate and cost-effective energy to all.

Oh I see. Theft is necessary for "adequate and cost-effective energy to all". Just how is that working out?

 

[Arwon]

Pretty well actually. Everyone has electricity and has done for a number of decades. Thanks to state investment and regulation!