> If we had cheap clean limitless power, what would we use it for? Someone asked this question in a presentation, and the cheap clean limitless power advocates didn’t have a canned answer ready to go. They eventually proposed things like improved public transit, supersonic flight, carbon capture, AI compute, geoengineering to prevent hurricanes, and city-wide air filters (really).
Seriously? No one mentioned the obvious? The thing that would immeasurably improve quality of life for whole civilizations, if only it weren't so energy-costly?
De. Sal. I. Na. Tion.
If you can make water purification cheap and abundant, at least a dozen major problems just vanish in a puff of vapor.
If you want to use solar power to remove CO2 from the air and fix it in a more solid form, you don't need high technology or cheap power to do that. Just plant a tree! Or a few thousand trees.
On a related note, the biggest contributors to the "urban heat island" effect are asphalt (turning cities almost literally into Black Bodies) and the lack of vegetation. Adding a few shade trees can reduce the scorching temperatures of a hot summer sun by more than 40 degrees F.
"Efficiency" necessarily takes expense into account. I think this is one of those situations where trying to get everything at once is the wrong strategy. Imagine if we damaged our ability to fight global warming because in order to get one billion pieces of fruit. We should let private industry create as much wood and fruit as there's demand for (which they're currently doing, in orchards and timber farms), but also pay for carbon removal at some socially meaningful rate (which would incentivize private industry to capture carbon directly, and then the industry could choose between trees and machines, and if I'm right and machines are more efficient even when counting the extra profit from fruit, they would choose the machines).
Perhaps. I guess some of it is just my own pro-fruit and pro-shade biases peeking through.
When my wife and I bought a house a while back, one of the first things we did, before the previous owners had even moved out, was go to a local nursery and buy a young fruit tree. We waited until they were gone to actually take delivery and plant it in the yard, of course, but that's how important it is to me.
This only works long term if you then cut down and bury the trees deep under the earth, otherwise the carbon is released when the tree dies and decays. Of course, cutting down, transporting, and digging mines to bury the trees is going to take a lot of work with heavy machinery that probably runs on fossil fuels, and will require a massive amount of land dedicated to the task since trees grow slowly relative to our rate of emissions. If your high tech carbon machine can make something like graphite bricks, that would be much easier to deal with logistically, and possibly even useful for some purpose, and is relatively stable so even if it ends up in a landfill won't just turn back into atmospheric carbon. I'll also note we already farm trees for wood and paper, most of than ends up in a landfill and decays at some point or gets burned, re-releasing all the carbon.
That all depends on just how long of a long term you're talking about. Building long-duration objects like houses and furniture out of wood does a pretty good job of carbon-sequestration for a decent length of time.
And trees lower surrounding temperatures. Nothing like photosynthesis to absorb energy! Just walk from barefoot from a grass lawn over to an astroturf lawn, and you'll feel the difference! The grass lawn remains coolish in the afternoon heat, while the astroturf will burn your feet.
Actually, how good and how expensive are purpose-built carbon-removal machines right now? (As Bob Frank says, there are other factors to take into account, but I'd like to get the right order of magnitude.) Compare them to, I don't know, a particularly efficient tree (or bush or weed or what have you).
To get back to the pre industrial revolution levels of CO2 we'd need to remove 1e15 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, so that's about a quadrillion dollars. To be fair your number is probably for mass of carbon rather than mass of carbon dioxide so let's call it 300 trillion dollars.
It sounds like an untenable solution, in that you can throw an unfeasibly large slice of global GDP at the problem and still fail to make a meaningful dent in it.
Grinding up CO2-absorbing rock, and dumping it in some warm part of the ocean to speed things along, could be done with current tech at a cost two orders of magnitude lower: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/
They might be eventually, but they are not cheaper yet. We're going to need both, for a lot of reasons (industrial point source capture, higher output per acre, ability to site capture where we need the carbon for utilization, and on the other side of course we still need wood and fruit).
Unfortunately, a lot of what gets sold as “reforestation” is actually trying to force a forest to exist on land that people didn’t find useful, and which can’t support trees without lots and lots of inputs and attention.
Certainly when it goes by the name of “tree planting”, which has a nice ribbon cutting, and then no one pays attention when the trees all die.
I do volunteer work with a wildlife trust (I know its not very effective altruism) and its sad how true this is. Just this week I was at a session where we were mostly undoing the harm done by a well meaning landowner trying to reforest land poorly. Boring charities like that which just do tree planting and maintenance as part of their regular operations rather than "adopt a tree bring your kids to plant a forest!!" seem to be the only ones who actually do tree planting effectively. My trust manages about a 95% survival rate with the only maintenance after the planting being removing the tree guards.
99% of that problem is planting the wrong trees in the wrong soil. Most EU for example has a fetish-like fixation on growing vast spans of pine, on soils that do not support pine at all, and for variety, force poplar, linden and decorative apple-trees in the middle of a city where they instantly get sick and die.
Meanwhile, the ecosystem of continental Europe is mostly geared towards various types of oak.
It's not that they're less efficient. It's that there isn't room for the needed amount of trees. (We can't even keep the ones we still have.)
I've got no idea whether they're less efficient, or even how you would measure efficiency in that context. Personally I find just having trees around is a net benefit. So by that measure trees are extremely efficient.
We is humanity. And I'm not sure the US is reforesting at all. I see lots of forests of dead and dying pine trees. Canada isn't the only country that's experiencing a increase in forest fires. (OTOH, it's been about a decade since I rode along 5 and saw all the dead and dying pine(?) trees. (I assume they're pine, because they're some sort of conifer, pine trees are common in the region, and I'd just been reading about the pine beetle infestation. But the exact species is irrelevant to the point. The area was still called "forest", but about half the trees looked dead or dying.)
I once calculated that the entire world’s net carbon emissions could be neutralized by planting paulownia trees in an area the size of Ukraine and burying all the resultant wood. This would be considerably less expensive than the dozens of trillions people want to spend on other methods, and not require hypothetical future tech.
It would be even simpler to plant the correct species of trees in the correct environment and let it do its thing. Sure, paulownia is the most efficient carbon grabber, but its not the easiest to grow on any type of soil. The beat solution is just to replant the logged areas with the types of trees that used to grow there before humans cut them down.
Direct air capture costs $500/ton now, and the EPA SSC at a 5% discount rate is $12/ton. It doesn’t make any sense to use discount rates lower than nominal gdp growth, because 1. any public good that increases productivity by a fixed amount forever would have infinite value. 2. Other investments can easily beat the rate of nominal gdp growth.
perhaps, but an average tree absorbs approximately 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, so a copse of trees can make up for one car. If you add all the other economic, social, psychological and environmental benefits of trees, there is no excuse why we are not spamming saplings and seeds at every available surface.
I am not a botanist/ecologist, is it true that there is tons of land where trees would naturally flourish without further human intervention if seeds were planted, and the problem is just that no tree seeds have ever gotten there through normal ecological processes?
That seems like a stunning L for evolution and ecological equilibriums, but maybe it's trivially true?
Also - since bamboo grows so fast, is it a more efficient way to capture carbon than slower trees/plants?
I think for many purposes, bamboo counts as a “tree”, because it is a tall woody plant. Basically every plant family separately re-invented the “tree” body plan, and bamboo is the grass family’s version.
A lot of tree planting initiatives fail for the reason you mention - they figure “trees are good, we aren’t using land, let’s plant some trees here” and don’t stop to think about why there aren’t currently trees on this land if we aren’t using it.
There is a more relevant plan though of finding land where humans cut down forest to turn it into agriculture or coal mines or whatever, and get people to stop using it for agriculture or coal mines and let the trees come back. Planting seedlings sometimes accelerates the process a bit compared to just letting the trees seed it (particularly if there are apex trees that used to live in the region but now only exist far away).
The number one region where replanting is needed are urban areas. Trees wont naturally replant on carefully maintained asphalt no matter how long you wait.
Yeah urban trees are great. They also have the advantage that they are often actively maintained, so they can survive even if the local climate wouldn’t support them. They aren’t that significant for carbon reduction though, since there’s so little urban land and the possible tree density is limited. They are good for human benefits though.
Hmmm, just had a thought: bamboo is carbon negative whereas concrete is carbon positive. So have a building material consisting of mostly bamboo with concrete pouted in between it.
There's an enormous amount of land that used to be old-growth forest and has been cleared by humans over the millenia. IDK how suited it necessarily is for trees *now* - in a lot of cases we've probably made the soil less fertile - but in principle it's no knock on evolution that trees aren't growing in fields we deliberately cleared of trees.
With that said, land is ultimately finite, and there's an awful lot of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust. Also, we're using some of that land for stuff.
Another area that is ripe for replanting are man made cattle ranches. I don't know what happens to feed grass growth under a canopy of trees, but there's probably some mutually exclusive dynamics going on (else, why clear the land in the first place?).
Generally a closed forest canopy doesn't allow enough sunlight for grasses to grow. And if the forest floor is carpeted thickly enough in herbaceous material like grass or ferns, it impedes the regeneration of tree seedlings.
the main issue is the water table, not the soil itself. As long as the land is the right level of moist, you can replant the trees that used to grow there since the last Ice Age, and they will beat the odds eventually.
The main problem with reforestation is the fetish-like desire to plant the kind of trees we want, not the kind that can survive there, and drying/watering the land to achieve that. Europe takes the cake here, we destroyed countless square miles of perfectly fine, soggy-soiled oak forests and now try and fail to replant them with pines. We buried miles of alder and willow-rich swamps in sandy soils to force more pine there, which promptly rots at the roots from too much groundwater.
Trees are actually generally not an effective carbon fixation method in the present environment. They used to be, in the carboniferous period, before microbes evolved which could decompose wood. But now, dead trees generally release their carbon back into the atmosphere over the course of their decomposition. Reforestation is carbon-negative, but forested land is carbon-neutral since it's in an equilibrium where it's releasing as much carbon through decomposition as it's taking in through photosynthesis. Although, you can sequester the carbon longer term if you cut the tree down and treat it in a way that makes it resistant to decomposition.
But over a long time frame, carbon sequestration is not usually a meaningful benefit of planting trees.
The point is that trees only sequester the carbon temporarily before releasing it back into the atmosphere. Forests are carbon neutral because they're in an equilibrium between trees sequestering carbon and releasing it. If we want to sequester carbon, trees don't offer a very long-term solution, unless we cut them down and store the wood under conditions that offer long-term protection from decay. Whatever other benefits trees provide, other methods come out far ahead in terms of effective carbon sequestration.
You have to bury the trees and make sure they don't decompose. But you're probably going to have to bury whatever hydrocarbons you get from carbon capture anyway, so I'm not sure how big a difference it will make in the end.
People did the calculations on that, and basically, trees don't remove enough carbon.
I ran some rough numbers. And the amount of forest we need to return CO2 to per-industrial levels worked out to be 2x earths land area. (Rough numbers.)
wonder, if there is a cheap, environmentally friendly, and technologically durable alternative to asphalt that would be white (or light gray/beige/pink/light blue whatever) instead of near black? Or maybe its just a matter of adding some white agent to existing asphalt to make it lighter in colour?
The first thing that comes to mind is concrete. It's light gray in color, abundantly available, and just as good as asphalt at most of the things that asphalt does. Unfortunately, it has well-known problems with cracking under thermal variance that asphalt does not have, making asphalt the clear winner in terms of durability. I've read about a few different groups working on solutions to this, but nothing that's commercially viable quite yet AFAIK.
I mean, the correct answer to "What do we do with clean, limitless power?" is "Literally everything". Everything that isn't a physical plot of land becomes cheaper and/or more accessible.
If the question is narrowed to "What do we do with clean, limitless power that we don't already do a lot of?", then space flight, routine terrestrial flight, desalination, and massive reshaping of the Earth's crust are good options.
Fair enough. But a lot of those would require other advances in addition to cheap energy. Desalination really wouldn't. The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Remember that we can apply purification technologies to wastewater as well as salt water.
1/3 or so of water today is used for thermoelectric power generation. That goes away in a nearly-all-solar world. Residential consumption usually goes through wastewater treatment facilities, and with current technologies implemented at scale we could get 80-90+%recovery (a lot of these systems can also be implemented in a home if you want!). Farming is the more difficult case. Can't really recapture transpiration water unless you're farming indoors... which gets a lot easier with super cheap energy. But even without that, a mostly-solar-power world can cut fresh water demand by nearly 2/3 long before you start having to worry about shipping water from coasts to farmland.
This is true, but that's mostly cutting freshwater demand from places where freshwater is already abundant enough for farming. But places like Australia, huge swathes of the Middle East, etc. would become vastly more habitable with access to cheap desalinization, much more easily than we could divert water to there from other more arable locations around the world.
Could do halfway-indoors agriculture with inflatable tents, like an enormous transparent air mattress: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/ Natural shape doubles as a funnel directing both rainwater from above, and any condensation on the underside, toward some sort of combined irrigation / HVAC machinery at the anchor points.
We know how to ship petroleum for a price of several dollars per barrel. That’s not going to be a viable price for water unless there’s a very special place that has a reason to exist even with really expensive water.
Does it? I would have thought most of the cost was actually building and maintaining the pipelines (and more importantly, tanker ships), not the energy for pumping. In any case, no one has ever transported oil at the scale that water would be transported here. The entire world’s oil consumption is only a bit more than New York city’s water consumption.
Well, I don't think you'd be shipping much desalinated water by tanker ships, you'd produce it at the nearest coastline.
In terms of flow rates, the trans-Alaska pipeline can ship 340,000 cubic metres per day, which is about 4 cubic metres per second. The flow rate of the Thames River (to pick a medium-sized river that most people will be kinda-familiar with) is about 100 m^3/s so you'd need 25 trans-Alaska pipelines to create one Thames. The trans-Alaska pipeline is only 48 inches in diameter (smaller than most TVs) so it's not hard to imagine scaling this up by a factor of 25 at less than 25 times the cost.
How much of that is because the existing desal plants were optimized for energy being expensive? A setup designed for intermittent operation, taking advantage of electricity prices down around "we'll pay you to take it," might be able to get away with far lower capital costs relative to throughput capacity.
> The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Quantity scales with water are quite a lot bigger than for petroleum,
Humans already move large amounts of water around with dams, canals, pipes ect.
It currently costs a lot to move enormous piles of dirt from one place to another, especially if you want to do it in a precise way. (e.g., not exploding a mountaintop). This is mostly because dirt, rock, and clay are heavy, which means a lot of force is required to move it. With boundless energy, you can generate the force more easily and cheaply, meaning we'd probably do a lot more customizing of medium-to-large swaths of land. Things like building local mountains, valleys, and the like. Like how in Sim City 2000 you could start with a "blank" city and then just create the rivers, oceans, and mountains you wanted. Applications include aesthetic appeal, preservation activities, and for large scale industrial efforts.
I'm sceptical that sufficient cheap energy is the main limitation towards doing things like building mountains and valleys. The engineering challenges regarding f.ex. geotechnical, environmental, hydrogeology, hydrologic issues etc. etc. would be daunting.
Cheap energy means cheap steel, allowing more and taller skyscrapers. Cheap lighting, potable water, ventilation, imported manufactured goods, so the spaces below remain pleasantly habitable. So, yes, to some extent it could.
The greater obstacle is land speculation, solution to which is a land value tax.
And the difficulty of that planning permission is deeply entangled with incentives from land speculation, which I already agreed is the greater obstacle.
abundance of free energy would do wonders solving global poverty, improve literacy and education worldwide, thus making Western Middle Class mostly obsolete, and thus, irrelevant. WMC are a bunch of specialists that we only need until we can automate them away or have developing world's lower middle class do their jobs remotely.
The gold isn't worthwhile, but the uranium might be. It seems right on the edge of practicality. (But what' you'd use it for if electricity were really cheap isn't that clear.)
Uranium would still be critical when optimizing for watts-per-kilogram, mostly meaning space travel. Gold might be worth setting aside a channel for if you're going to be thoroughly sifting and sorting all the rest of the sludge regardless.
Like Bob Frank said, it can be used. The chemical industry will guzzle it up in a lot of cases, certainly for all of the desalination plants that are geographically close to chloralkali plants that need brine as a raw material, and potentially for the ones that are further away as well depending on demand.
a pool a brine is essentially a giant battery - we could do interesting things with it.
But realistically, the amount of brine that would result from this is negligible compared to the size of the ocean. Just tow it a 100 miles off shore and dump it into the Pacific. All the post-salination brine we could ever produce would be like a single grain of salt in a bathtub when thrown into the ocean.
That would be my immediate answer too. There is hardly a more fundamental issue than access to potable water. Even in regions like Central Europe, which have never been in danger of permanent water scarcity, falling groundwater tables have been causing concern in recent years. Climate change and changing rainfall patterns will only compound that problem.
Well the point was more that water is or can be an issue just about anywhere. If it really came to a need for desalination for Central Europe though, it would be solvable in principle, for example through desalination on the coast and transporting the fresh water through pipelines.
Huh. Where did you see that? I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but what I've heard from people who are is that energy costs are the largest factor by far. If you've got solid data that says otherwise I'd love to see it.
We could have home appliances that never break. Right now, our dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. are designed to be as energy efficient as possible to the detriment of being long-lasting. *This is an excuse I've heard, planned obsolescence being unreasonably financially successful is probably playing a role here too.*
The biggest problem with dishwashers isn't energy; it's that they can't *scrub.* It's the classic "we have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher" complaint: if you put dishes (or especially cookware) in with non-tiny amounts of food stuck to them, it's more likely to end up baked on in the drying phase than cleaned off.
Adding more power won't fix that. More likely would be the outcome (admittedly exaggerated for comedic effect) memorably demonstrated in the pilot episode of Home Improvement, when Tim soups up the dishwasher with More Power™ and it ends up exploding.
Eventually you'd have to. At some point it has to be easier to recycle landfills to get at various metals than to dig up increasingly less profitable mines, right?
Seems to me the question of what we'd do with cheap or near/limitless power is similar to someone in 1970 or 1980 wondering what consumers would do with a personal computer.
I agree that fresh water is likely one of the commodities which will become much cheaper if the price of energy goes to zero.
An other example would be aluminum, where 34% of the costs are electricity costs, and another 37% of the costs are for the raw materials (alumina, etc), which would likely also drop if the prices for electricity and metals would drop.
For some plants, it might become economically feasible to grow them under optimal artificial light 24x7 (the way cannabis is sometimes grown in areas where it is illegal), thereby decreasing prices of raw food.
I'd be grateful if anyone could explain the costs of solar to me. On the one hand I see this 'Our World in Data data', which are "without subsidies", and which show that costs are already among the lowest (lower even than nuclear).
On the other hand, I keep seeing people post what we (in the UK) actually pay solar providers via "contracts for difference" (https://www.iea.org/policies/5731-contract-for-difference-cfd) and it is usually dramatically higher than any other source.
Prima facie, the figure with subsidies seem like it might be the more relevant, but it depends on to what extent the subsidies are actually necessary in order to continue receiving the energy from this source.
The purpose of CfDs is to drive investment into renewable generation by making sure they generate enough revenue, meaning the strike price will be set at a figure high enough for payback and profit generation. But in any case the UK is an awkward market to look at investment in generation assets because the planning system is so terrible.
Lazard recently published their 2024 analysis of LCOE, including a slide on costs with and without US tax subsidies. Here's the headline chart:
The chart that Scott provides shows the "Levelized Cost of Energy". For solar it is the cost of electricity delivered locally by the solar panels when the sun is shining. It includes the amortized cost of producing and installing the panels. It is not the cost of so-called dispatchable power that is available on demand 24/7 at distant locations via "the grid."
It provides an excellent, detailed, technical analysis of both renewable and nuclear energy production, looking at everything from costs and cost-curves to tax policy to land efficiency. (My own aesthetic preference is for solar to be deployed on rooftops and in urban areas and not to cover hundreds or thousands of acres in solar panels for commercial generation. Nuclear is *much* more land-efficient on a energy-unit basis. See fig. 13 of the report.) There is an interesting discussion and critique of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) metric. There is also a counter-intuitive graph showing a cost-analysis of decarbonizing California's grid using renewables with storage only versus renewables with storage AND nuclear. (Fig. 6.) I know most people won't read the report, so here is a helpful and, I think, accurate summary:
"Nuclear has an essential role in the energy transition as a clean firm complement to renewables. Nuclear provides clean firm capacity; modeling shows including nuclear and other clean firm resources with variable renewables reduces the cost of decarbonization. Nuclear can help address the power needs coming from load growth, where much of the demand is disproportionately for 24/7 electricity, e.g., data centers. Nuclear does not “displace” or “compete with” renewables; decarbonization requires both nuclear
and renewables. Nuclear provides clean firm generation that enables the increased deployment of variable renewables like wind and solar."
This is something of a battle of assumptions that will only be resolved by time. There are some reasons, however, to think that nuclear will play a critical role and that Big Tech's recent embrace of nuclear electricity generation is not an ignorant mistake.
First, aesthetics of solar farms aside aside (and the fact that one person's "cheap low value land" is another person's beautiful open space with various endangered species), transporting electricity long distances from massive solar farms on "cheap low value land" to urban and industrial centers requires large, expensive upgrades to the electricity transmission grid. Those projects are time-consuming, regulatory nightmares that rival the construction of nuclear plants before the federal government decided to promote nuclear energy. Check out the history and costs of the SunZia Transmission Project for an eye-opening example.
Second, as noted above, the Department of Energy itself has concluded that "decarbonizing the grid will be very difficult and expensive without 20-40% clean firm power. Firm power refers to power or power-producing capacity intended to be available at all times during the period covered by a guaranteed commitment to deliver, even under adverse conditions. With an increasing portion of the grid supported by renewables, the value of dispatchability provided by firm power increases. A variety of technologies including nuclear can help maintain grid stability via synchronous inertia, reactive power, and other benefits."
Third, many of the growing use cases for electricity are especially sensitive to even small fluctuations in power that make even solar-with-battery-backup infeasible. Although some Big Tech companies have claimed to use 100% renewable energy before their open embrace of nuclear, this is merely a financial claim; their data centers, especially those devoted to AI, are actually powered by the most stable "non-renewable" sources of electricity-generation (including taking power from "the grid," which is stabilized by utilities using firm power sources).
Casey Handmer's arguments are interesting, but the people at the Big Tech companies who are responsible for securing large amounts of electrical power for real world uses have looked closely at the same issues and the same straight-line graph forecasts and have decided to embrace nuclear electricity generation.
EDIT: This isn't a perfect comparison since the nature of CfDs is you pay the generator even when you don't need the electricity, which means the actual price you're paying for the electricity you use is higher. You're also paying for a lot of electricity you don't use depending on the make up of the grid. See my last paragraph for how this can work like a subsidy if you build too many renewables without sufficient storage.
The nature of electricity markets in the UK (and most/all? of the developed world) means gas will almost always be the most expensive source of electricity when purchased since it has a high marginal cost (the price of gas) so generators won't produce until there is demand that can't be met by other generators. Sources like solar have negligible marginal costs of production and will outbid gas generators as long as they have capacity available. This means gas tends to set the price of electricity during high demand periods and tends to set that price much higher than when zero-marginal cost sources have sufficient capacity to meet all demand (in the case of excess capacity, you even get negative prices which have begun appearing in the UK with some frequency).
But CfDs look kinda like subsidies under current policy which is supporting renewable construction for climate reasons. At a certain point, you've used CfDs to support overbuilding the renewable system hugely (to deal with periods of limited sunshine/wind and high demand with limited storage capacity) and have lots of excess capacity/curtailment. CfDs will almost never save a grid operator money at that point while forcing up rates for customers in the long-term.
Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is basically what you have to pay someone per-MWh to get them to build a project. It's the best we have to compare the costs of generating electricity from gas, solar, wind etc where the costs come at different times in the project lifecycle: for solar and wind nearly all the cost is that of building the plant (capex) while for gas most of the cost is the fuel. The main inputs are capex, opex and the cost of capital.
Since LCOE is a theoretical calculation, it makes sense to publish "without subsidies".
Average global LCOEs aren't particularly illuminating because, for example, the same solar panel will generate twice as much electricity in southern California as in the UK. However, it is true they have come down everywhere, mainly because solar capex has fallen drastically. In markets like the UK where solar panel costs aren't affected by import tariffs, a Watt of solar panel costs about 10 US cents today, compared with over $5 in 2005.
However, even in the UK (which is not very sunny) the Contract for Difference prices in the last round of auction were slightly lower than for wind:
(Personally I think this is not great, because the UK needs more power in the winter - it's a highly seasonal climate. But it does also have a lot of wind).
LCOE is particularly poor for judging the cost of renewable power because there are system level costs associated with it that do not exist for traditional generators. Mainly, solar and wind are not available on demand so additional backup capacity or storage is needed to support them (there are other minor costs as well, a more distributed grid which solar tends towards has higher interconnection costs for instance). You should assume the actual costs of solar/wind are anything from slightly higher than LCOE to much higher depending on the grid. At the moment, this still makes them the most economic option for additional power generation in many places (hence the solar boom). Though as more solar is added, more backup is needed and system costs increase.
Batteries do a lot to solve this problem and costs are coming down. I don't full understand why we haven't seen wider deployment of grid-scale batteries yet given the cost data I've seen and I suspect it's a lot of it is inertia. But batteries don't completely solve system costs. The current economics of batteries make storage for 1-2 weeks (think cloudy, no wind and cold in the winter for several days in a row) very expensive. Without batteries, an entire separate generator system needs to be maintained as a backup for these situations which is a huge system cost for renewables.
This seems like a solvable problem to me, although slightly more nuclear would help most grids. In the meantime, 60-70% renewable grids (excluding hydropower) seem very achievable in most places but getting much higher than that could be very expensive.
>Batteries do a lot to solve this problem and costs are coming down. I don't full understand why we haven't seen wider deployment of grid-scale batteries yet given the cost data I've seen and I suspect it's a lot of it is inertia. But batteries don't completely solve system costs. The current economics of batteries make storage for 1-2 weeks (think cloudy, no wind and cold in the winter for several days in a row) very expensive.
Any suggestions on where to look for the cost of solar + batteries, as a function of how long the battery backup is good for? I tried doing a BOTE calculation, and it looked like solar + 12 hours backup for night approximately doubled the cost, with a 10% interest rate for the capital cost of the batteries - but this was really crude. Are there good numbers available for this?
In Massachusetts I regularly got offers in the mail to switch power providers to 100% renewable sources. The quoted rate per kWh was often lower than the default National Grid rate. Solar, unsubsidized, as produced, does in fact have the lowest cost of any power in the world in most places. This is not the same as the price charged to residential customers of a utility.
Often the problems here in practice include the fact that grid operators need to provide dispatchable power on demand, and right now the cost of "firming" solar power supply is very high in many places. There are quite a lot of rabbit holes and quagmires of technology and economics and infrastructure and policy to go down to untangle that mess, and they vary a lot by location.
I also get those offers, and have been told that the gotcha is that the quoted lower price is subject to change at any time, whereas National Grid rates are guaranteed stable. OTOH, can confirm that unsubsidized solar is cheaper than National Grid, based on the solar panels on our house.
Well, in my experience from 2012-2021, those rates were not any less stable than National Grid's rates, and when they did change, it was very easy to switch providers a second time.
I do not know the law in UK well enough to explain it, but I have listened to enough people complain about the laws in the UK to know that the energy grid is subject to extremely weird and bad regulations, and nothing that happens there is anything like a natural price.
Levelized Cost of Energy is a highly imperfect metric that obscures as much as it reveals.
What is needed are comparisons of total network cost of making reliable 24/7/365 electricity ubiquitously available. LCoE does not enable such a comparison.
Solved the Twin-Nuclei problem and then post Bretton-woods. I think Eric Weinstein coined the term EGO (Embedded Growth Obligations), but I think that sums it up pretty well.
> somebody told me that the San Francisco legs of the BART - the Bay Area’s light rail, infamous for being noisy, dirty, and violent - had become comparatively safe and clean over the past few months, after the city installed fare gates that actually worked and couldn’t trivially be jumped over. Apparently the people ruining the BART for everyone weren’t even paying the fare. I always would have guessed there was a correlation between bad behavior and nonpayment, but am surprised at exactly how high the correlation has turned out to be
Psst! Don't look now, but California is about 2 steps away from rediscovering the principle of Broken Windows Policing. And they think it's a new thing they just came up with!
Also, couldn't the *Grants Pass* Supreme Court ruling have had something to do with it? I've definitely noticed a serious improvement in Philly over this past summer.
Reading the article, it seems like Grants Pass is having continued problems due to restrictions specific to Oregon and the 9th Circuit. That's really frustrating.
Meanwhile, on the east coast, I noticed improvements within a month of the decision. The Philly ACX meetups are in the old town/tourist-y part of the city near Independence Hall. There used to be lots of homeless sleeping on the sidewalk and panhandlers all over certain intersections. Now the sidewalks are all clear. There's one spot coming off the Ben Franklin bridge that still has panhandlers, but it's usually just 1-2 guys who are only there during the day, instead of an entire tent encampment under the overpass.
Downtown Atlanta was similarly cleaned up when I visited over Labor Day weekend.
(Side note - there are no apostrophes in US place names. Places like Harpers Ferry, Pikes Peak, Grants Pass, etc. are all spelled without them. There's an act of Congress banning them.)
That's good to hear. I used to live in the general area, and have been to Philly many times. It's encouraging to hear they're improving things out there.
The ambiance is improving for some, but the homeless people are still there. I believe in progress deeply, and I fully believe the Grants Pass decision is the opposite of progress. It's like sweeping guts under the rug and calling it a day.
Unfortunately, sometimes that's all you can do when too many people who believe too hard in "progress" make actual solutions impossible. The first and most significant problem by far in dealing with "homelessness" is Progressives cynically redefining a problem that has nothing to do with housing as "homelessness" so that they don't have to face up to the consequences of their failed policies in the areas of drugs and mental illness.
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
I was in the core part of downtown for DragonCon - the Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton. Andrew Young Blvd and Peachtree Street. We stayed up in Midtown and took MARTA back and forth every day.
There were some wandering homeless/mentally ill guys without their stuff around MARTA, but way fewer panhandlers or campers on the sidewalks than in past years. I lived in Atlanta for college from 2013-17, so I'm calibrated to those years. It seemed about steady for the last ten years, and then dropped off a lot this time around. I wasn't accosted by a single panhandler this year.
But I was only there for a few days, so maybe it's different in other parts of the city/different times of year. Maybe DragonCon beefed up security outside on the streets this year?
I was very amused by all the ads on MARTA this year telling people to move to Philly. I saw those and was like, yup! Philly's great!
Aha. Thank you - I live in the East Atlanta area and don't go down to the Central Business district that much. East Atlanta has seen a marked increase (and so have interstate areas from what I've seen). Greater enforcement would explain the shift.
Philly was not effected by the Grants Pass decision, so any improvement is unrelated. The ruling that the Supreme Court overruled in Grants Pass was for the 9th Circuit which covers the western US, and it never affected the east coast.
Frankly, that Grants Pass supreme court case was so disgusting that is still baffles me that some effective altruists like it. It solved nothing and only increases pain and suffering. The homeless people it affects are being offered no services, just a temporary jail stay or even just a violent eviction. It's effectively social murder. As a society we don't want to actually address homelessness because it would be expensive, but to make the Grants Pass decision make sense morally, you have to actually address homelessness.
I agree with most of this, but not the part about it solving nothing - I think that criminalising homelessness and driving all the homeless people to move to other towns probably will solve the problem of "we have lots of homeless people in this town, lowering quality of live for others".
Good objections to criminalising homelessness in order to force homeless people to move to other towns include 1) it's unethical, 2) it makes life worse for the inhabitants of those other towns, and 3) it doesn't scale, because if everyone does it you're back to square one except everything is worse.
But if your goal is purely "solve my town's homelessness problem here and now, without worrying about any of those things", I think it's probably a really effective way of achieving it.
One of the ways we address homelessness is by criminalizing homeless encampments. Most of these people are dug addicts and will slowly kill themselves unless something stops them first. Allowing these people to sleep where they want and die slowly in peace is not compassion, and making that not a live option for them is. The Grants Pass repeal will lower homelessness and help people by forcing them into the recovery and support programs we already provide, and that addicts aren’t interested in because they’d have to get clean. Well, get clean, sleep in a ditch, or go to jail: setting up a shack next to the playground at the park is no longer an option.
I think the broken windows version of this would be attempting to arrest everyone who peed on a bart and making the punishment relatively harsh. I think preventing the peeing in the first place is an importantly different thing. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone involved in this decision even believes the broken window thing that doing this one small thing will have larger knock on effects.
In the original Broken Windows program in New York City, turnstile-jumping/fare-beating in the subways was one of the things they focused on cracking down on, with significant effects on downstream crime reduction.
Un-jumpable fare gates is equivalent to removing the fare-jumpers from the population of people riding BART. Arresting the fare-jumpers would be removing them from public society. So right now only BART gets the privilege of a social environment with a significantly-reduced jackass population.
I don't think it is equivalent. There's a set of people who will jump when they can, and that set is also more likely to commit other crimes. But they're capable of paying a fare, just like they're capable of using a taxi/uber if they actually need to.
I don't think "fare-jumper" is necessarily a persistent, intrinsic property of individuals. Lots of things work more by perceived value, or back-filling excuses for decisions made on some entirely different basis.
If you're able and willing to ride for free, that sets a tone, a social context, where everyone who DID pay the fare must ipso facto be a self-sabotaging coward. Why, then, play along with any of the rest of society's rules?
On the other hand, if jumping is inconvenient enough that it's easier to pay, riding the BART becomes a privilege you've willingly paid for, so the space itself must be worth something, and thus ought to be treated with respect.
That sort of context-sensitive morality is more extreme when drunk.
The real success was that NYC discovered if you arrest fare jumpers, a lot of them already have outstanding warrants (petty theft, assault, etc). So they'd get a big unit of cops together with a paddy wagon and would sweep through the subway, arresting every fare jumper they found. Then they'd process them right there at the paddy wagon (they brought all the necessary paperwork and equipment for processing with them) and everyone they had with an outstanding warrant would go the jail and the rest would get a ticket for fare-jumping and be released. It really helped clean up the streets.
Its that thing about how arresting a tiny percentage of people would end an absurdly high percentage of crime. People who flagrantly disregard the minor laws tend to be bad people who also flagrantly disregard the more important laws.
I don't think that's actually a good example of "broken windows" because it leaves no visible effect. Littering, on the other hand, does. Arresting jumpers is a good way to grab a lot of people who turn out to be carrying illegal items and have other charges against them though (similar to traffic stops).
I think it does have a visual impact, fare jumpers are noticeable when they literally jump the turnstile and in this case they are clearly causing problems on the mass transit and removing them from it ensures a better environment.
Fare jumpers are phenotypically different as a class on average from non fare jumpers. Based on just how someone looks you can come up with a decent idea if they fare jumped. Therefore removing fare jumpers changes the average phenotype of a BART rider.
Not really, no. What we see in the Wikipedia article is commonly known as "lying with statistics," particularly the last bit, where it says:
> A 2017 study found that when the New York Police Department (NYPD) stopped aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes in late 2014 and early 2015 that civilian complaints of three major crimes (burglary, felony assault, and grand larceny) decreased (slightly with large error bars) during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. There was no statistically significant effect on other major crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or grand theft auto.
You have to be careful here or you might miss the trick. First, there's the big obvious one: the decrease in reports of crimes is "slight[] with large error bars." But then there's the much more subtle one: they're looking at the rate of *civilian complaints of* crimes, not the rate of crimes being committed. And keep in mind that this was happening in 2014/2015, at the height of Obama-era anti-police pressure tactics!
It turns out that, when people have little reason to believe that calling the police to report a crime will do them any good, they're far less likely to call the police and report the crime. (See also the broad divergence under the Biden/Harris administration between the FBI crime statistics, which are based on police reports, and National Crime Victimization Survey numbers, based on asking people if they've been the victim of a crime.)
The only crime statistics that can be taken at anything close to face value are homicide and auto theft (including smash-and-grab of stuff in automobiles). Murder, because basically nobody tries to hide the bodies, literally or statistically speaking. Auto theft, because even if you know the police aren't going to do anything you need the police report to file an insurance claim.
Everything else, reporting bias makes the error bars uselessly large. So if someone is counting "burglary, felony assault, and grand larceny", but not murder and not auto theft except as buried in the larceny numbers, yeah, suspect statistical skulduggery.
I think vibes beat statistics in this particular case. New York in the 1980s had a reputation as crime-ridden -- I remember a lot of Mad Magazine jokes about the impossibility of crossing Central Park without getting mugged. By the 2000s it was had a reputation of being remarkably safe by US big city standards.
Depends entirely on who you ask. As far as I can tell, there's still a substantial minority of people who believe in it, but they're almost exclusively conservatives who believe other things that make me distrust their judgement.
I would like the BART gate thing to be true, but I question it -- the gates are really new, only 8 stations on the entire BART system have them so far -- and one of those 8 is at the airport, which is probably not a major location for sketchy people to board. In San Francisco, only 3 BART stations have these new gates. One is Civic Center (which is less than half a mile from Powell, which doesn't have the gates) and another one is 24th and Mission (which is less than a mile from 16th and Mission, which only got the gates as of October 12th). It seems surprising that the gates could be having such a dramatic impact on the BART this early in the installation process.
Oh that you had returned to the Gender Studies comparison because in fact gender studies has been progress studies. Progress studies should include how gender has progressed, including (not to wade into anything) gender technologies.
There’s a lot of gender technologies! Everything from stiletto heels to mom jeans to the manbun to testosterone injectables to surgery is an invention that enables people to present their gender in new ways.
There's something missing here, perhaps because it is difficult to quantify: at what point do you have enough?
It is clear that, up to a certain point, economic growth in the US went hand-in-hand with progress at a more concrete and human level - becoming "richer, healthier, safer, and better-educated than our ancestors", as Scott put it. Scratch that - it's not as if it were just a coincidence - we can probably agree that the former was a prerequisite and the main engine of the latter.
Ditto in the developing world today, *up to a certain point*: you need a certain level of production if you want a middle-class society. No, it's not a sufficient condition, and yes, GDP growth can be very deceptive, particularly in extractivist economies (high GDP growth can mean that resources are being extracted at an accelerated rate by foreign company X, which got an amazing deal from subornable and/or naïve officials, and only has to pay a pittance in royalties). Nevertheless development remains a crucial part of, um, development.
But do most problems in the US really have as their necessary root a slowing-down in productivity? GDP per capita in the US is now 50% larger than it was in the mid-90s. (Note: yes, in constant dollars, obvs.) Are people really that better off? Life expectancy has barely budged. Are people much better educated than then? There are some positive trends (some cities are safer) but their relation to the rest is less than clear. Now, if a wizard were to replace the GDP per capita of our days with that from the 90s, *perhaps* the immediate result would be immense suffering, but not because we were miserable in the 90s; this is what 'growth addiction' would mean, I suppose.
There is some point (probably well before the early 70s) at which people in the US could sensibly talk about an "affluent society"; that's actually the title of a book by Galbraith from '58. That really meant a society were more than half of the population were not in any obvious material need, and their main problems were of other sorts. Jacobs/Nader (who did make us safer)/Carson (whose concerns were valid even if she was wrong on many details) can be sensibly seen as a product of those times. Whether they had any sort of macro impact (for good or for the dastardly forces of anti-progress evil) is much more doubtful, at least outside the very particular fields that they cultivated.
Looking at the big trends is useful and necessary. Looking only at productivity figures alone seems reductive and potentially self-deceptive.
(On this last note: it would be interesting to have Emmanuel Todd's books come up in the annual Book Review here. I would get into that myself, except I don't feel particularly qualified in any way - I am not a demographer, or an anthropologist, or a historian, or for that matter an economist. Of course his stuff is often rather controversial and has to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it's a good example of big-picture analysis based on a close look at quantitative data that does not stop at the level of dollars.)
My guess (haven't looked into it) is that some of the GDP per capita gains have gone to the top 1%, some of the rest have been eaten by higher housing costs, and some of the rest have been eaten by stricter regulation (or, more optimistically, been spent on safety rather than consumption). I think of the remainder - maybe 20% of the total - some of it *has* gone to things like bigger houses, more cars, more vacations, eating out more, getting DoorDash, and other things that do make us happier.
If somebody were to ask "what are the main things that make Americans unhappy?", how plausible would the following answer sound: "their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?
(An outsider wouldn't answer that, and an American wouldn't either. I know, someone will argue "but the fact that people spend money on that shows that's what their priorities lie", but no, really.)
Vacations in the US remain very short relative to the rest of the developed world (only Canada can compete in vacation shortness) - how much has that changed in the last 30 or even 60 years? The only thing in that direction I can think of is that there may be more people in the jig economy, but that's often not because they want to be.
I agree rich Americans probably don't worry about these things. But poor people are much less happy than rich people, and it seems like most problems that poor people have but rich people don't are problems with money.
Well, I'm neither rich nor poor (nor for that matter a US citizen, though I lived there for ten years), but my impression from living in non-rich areas of the US (mainly intercoastal; I've seen more than my share of square-shaped states) was that relatively few people in the US are short of *stuff*, as in, stuff you buy at the shop. Some have trouble getting to the end of the month (that's probably not very closely correlated with income level if you exclude the very top and the very bottom), but that's not quite the same thing.
Money does obviously help with access to many things that are in short supply - health care, a good education, housing. In fact what really helps there is having a lot of money. Is the root cause of that really that there's not enough money to go around? Or that not enough stuff is being produced?
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing. Yes, there should be a good monetary policy where the Federal Reserve prints the right amount of dollars to denominate the amount of wealth, but the basic and harder problem is having enough goods that they're very cheap.
Let's get the money supply question out of the way (that's an irrelevant issue that human language has somehow invited - though of that as I was about to press Enter). What I dispute is the last bit: that the basic, hard problem, *in general* is having enough goods that they are very cheap. That may make sense at certain stages in development, but it seems countersensical in a developed economy, and even more so in the US in particular.
When it comes to relatively new technology, particularly when it solves a clearly demonstrated societal need, then I agree with you: obviously we need more and cheaper solar panels (keeping an eye out for their environmental cost, which is real, if much smaller than their benefits) and ditto for batteries (there the issue of environmental cost vs. benefit is less clear; if you disagree, I'd be thankful if you could convince me - I have actually just had solar panels installed and I am trying to decide whether I ought to get batteries). And yes, this is possible because we have such a thing as an industrial economy, mass-production, etc.
It's the claim that the slowing down in the rate of growth or qualitative change in the "world of atoms" was "one of the greatest historical tragedies" that has me unconvinced. At least it's not a claim that makes itself.
Having been poor, in the absolute poverty sense of living in a pre-electrified semi-subsistence farming community where there was no municipal water and three towns shared one phone line and then later in the American sense of having way more money than 70% of humanity but less that most other americans, I much preferred the former (unfortunately, modernity has reached that part of Costa Rica, and now they have wage work, cellphones, depression and diabetes).
The thing that was really awful about being poor in the US was how precarious life was, that your shitty dodge you bought used because you couldn't afford a Toyota could blow a distributor cap (I had three rattling around in the trunk), you would miss work, you would lose your job, you would lose your house, and you would be on the street three weeks later.
Now that I have a LOT of money, I still live like I did when I was poor (other than owning my house) but with more big vacations. The extra material possessions and services (to me!) are hedonic treadmill net negative distractions from what actually makes me happy: eliminating stress, and work that isn't completely alienated in the Marxian sense, and novel experiences.
I know I am much less wigged out than my friends who have bigger houses and nicer cars by having a bullshit MBA type job, but have to worry about losing them and dealing with the existential ennui.
>"their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?
Replace 'their house is too small' with 'they can't afford a house and their rent eats 50% of their paycheck and their apartment sucks and the landlord never fixes anything,' and yes, this basically describes the gripes of a large number of my working-poor friends.
"If somebody were to ask "what are the main things that make Americans unhappy?", how plausible would the following answer sound: "their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?"
Those are real problems for poor people in America who lack those things.
I'd say that a comparison to other developed countries makes it clear that those are rarely problems if the above is taken literally - or rather what Americans have can be a problem *because of the way much of America is set up*.
- I have not yet seen a truly small American house, but of course many Americans don't live in houses. (Note: for my first four years in [major European city], I lived in 23m^2, and that was considered normal for a single academic; I had lived in much less space while in college and grad school in the states.) Compared to just about any place in Europe, American houses are not small - they are, however, impermanent (not just compared to most places in Europe, but even to most non-slum housing stock in Latin America), though that's a preference that *may* make some sense given how cheap lumber is and how much people move. Much more to the point: there is a real problem, in that access to house ownership has become much more difficult, and being a renter sucks much more than in e.g. Germany (where, to boot, places are *usually* better built and insulated, though not always).
- It seems bizarre to think that Americans don't have enough cars (what is next - their cars are too small?). What *is* the case is that the working poor sometimes have a car in good condition and live in a place in poor condition, even if they own it - they depend entirely on cars to work, in that public transportation is pretty terrible outside a couple of major urban centers (indeed, it's less useful than the chaotic, polluting, unregulated 'public' transportation (really madmen with vans) that you find in many Latin American cities - no, I don't mean Mexico City, which has a good metro).
- Eating out often is not any sort of basic need - growing up, we'd eat out once a year, after we got and showed our report cards . More of a problem in the US: a lack of corner shops (you can't run out and across the street to get a clove of garlic), plenty of people get half-hour lunch breaks (they are lucky if there is a McDonald's nearby), etc. (In France, your place of work must either have a cafeteria or give you a 'ticket restaurant' valid at a restaurant. That, together with sufficient lunch breaks, hasn't been invented in the US yet.) Also a reason why eating out feels like a basic need: a lack of third spaces which are either free or close to free. Social life *is* a need.
There is a small percentage of Americans that do suffer from not having enough in a gross material sense - people who are poorly nourished, homeless, etc. It's shameful that anybody is in that condition. There's a much larger percentage of people who have very real problems - but they are not at the level of a gross lack, though it may look at first that way, looking from inside the US, without outside comparisons. Making more stuff available more cheaply at Costco is not going to solve their problems - and these problems haven't become less serious since the 90s, when the US was 2/3 as rich in the sense of GDP per capita; some seem to have become more serious. It's less obvious, then, that the source of these problems is that American affluence has increased more slowly since the 70s.
The American preference for larger houses is because Americans are richer. Rich people in Europe live in bigger houses too.
Lots of people would be helped by America getting richer. The family that moves out of the trailer park and into a house. The 19-year-old who can move out of momma's basement and buy a car.
More Americans than Europeans are (a) able to (b) interested in imitating the lives of the rich in some ways, at least in the sense that a stage setting imitates a house or a landscape. Hence - nothing follows.
Again, GDP per capita in the US has increased (correcting for inflation) 50% since the mid-90s and has doubled since the mid-80s (to give two points of reference at which many readers of this blog were already alive). Are there really many fewer people who live in trailer parks and worse? (I'm actually asking for statistics.) What I would believe more readily is that some trailers have got larger, maybe even 50% larger, but that doesn't solve things, does it.
And yes, Scott is almost certainly right that part of the issue is new wealth being sucked up by the very top, NIMBYism, etc. What is completely unclear to me is that the solution is for the country to become richer faster, in the sense of real GDP per capita.
There is probably a stage of development at which the most important thing is arguably for the country to develop quickly - the gains obtain thereby overwhelm everything else. Developed countries, and the US in particular, would seem to be well past that stage, almost by definition.
re American houses being impermanent. I was just thinking the other day that the old morality tale of the Three Little Pigs seemed to have gone over their heads. Climate change is increasing the number of big bad wolves...
Well, improving the energy efficiency of an existing 'permanent' house can be expensive (ask me); I suppose that's one good potential side of a place where people consider a 30-year-old house to be "old" - when they build, they could build to contemporary standards. It's more that having to build from scratch every 30 to 50 years (numbers I just made up) is not in itself eco-friendly.
Yes, without a doubt, houses could be either bigger or better furnished for ~99% of Americans. Look at the furnishings in the $10M California houses: any house that's not furnished as nicely as those houses could use an improvement. Even if you live on dirt cheap land in the middle of nowhere and only need ~1000 square feet/person, you'd still need to spend at least ~$1M on furnishings/renovations alone to get the "perfect house".
As one example: if your house doesn't have a heated pool where the water can stay at 85F even in the middle of winter, it could still use some improvement.
> If we had cheap clean limitless power, what would we use it for? Someone asked this question in a presentation, and the cheap clean limitless power advocates didn’t have a canned answer ready to go. They eventually proposed things like improved public transit, supersonic flight, carbon capture, AI compute, geoengineering to prevent hurricanes, and city-wide air filters (really).
Seriously? No one mentioned the obvious? The thing that would immeasurably improve quality of life for whole civilizations, if only it weren't so energy-costly?
De. Sal. I. Na. Tion.
If you can make water purification cheap and abundant, at least a dozen major problems just vanish in a puff of vapor.
Maybe someone mentioned this and I forgot, I took pretty bad notes.
There's also the immediate use of removing carbon from the atmosphere to reverse global warming.
Scott mentions it in passing for producing carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel, but I'm talking about net removal of carbon.
Also, we need to bury those new hydrocarbons in case post-collapse civilizations need fossil fuels like we did!
If you want to use solar power to remove CO2 from the air and fix it in a more solid form, you don't need high technology or cheap power to do that. Just plant a tree! Or a few thousand trees.
On a related note, the biggest contributors to the "urban heat island" effect are asphalt (turning cities almost literally into Black Bodies) and the lack of vegetation. Adding a few shade trees can reduce the scorching temperatures of a hot summer sun by more than 40 degrees F.
I think trees are much less efficient than purpose-built carbon-removal machines.
Perhaps. But they're also much less expensive, and provide ancillary benefits such as shade, fruit, and wood.
"Efficiency" necessarily takes expense into account. I think this is one of those situations where trying to get everything at once is the wrong strategy. Imagine if we damaged our ability to fight global warming because in order to get one billion pieces of fruit. We should let private industry create as much wood and fruit as there's demand for (which they're currently doing, in orchards and timber farms), but also pay for carbon removal at some socially meaningful rate (which would incentivize private industry to capture carbon directly, and then the industry could choose between trees and machines, and if I'm right and machines are more efficient even when counting the extra profit from fruit, they would choose the machines).
Perhaps. I guess some of it is just my own pro-fruit and pro-shade biases peeking through.
When my wife and I bought a house a while back, one of the first things we did, before the previous owners had even moved out, was go to a local nursery and buy a young fruit tree. We waited until they were gone to actually take delivery and plant it in the yard, of course, but that's how important it is to me.
This only works long term if you then cut down and bury the trees deep under the earth, otherwise the carbon is released when the tree dies and decays. Of course, cutting down, transporting, and digging mines to bury the trees is going to take a lot of work with heavy machinery that probably runs on fossil fuels, and will require a massive amount of land dedicated to the task since trees grow slowly relative to our rate of emissions. If your high tech carbon machine can make something like graphite bricks, that would be much easier to deal with logistically, and possibly even useful for some purpose, and is relatively stable so even if it ends up in a landfill won't just turn back into atmospheric carbon. I'll also note we already farm trees for wood and paper, most of than ends up in a landfill and decays at some point or gets burned, re-releasing all the carbon.
That all depends on just how long of a long term you're talking about. Building long-duration objects like houses and furniture out of wood does a pretty good job of carbon-sequestration for a decent length of time.
And trees lower surrounding temperatures. Nothing like photosynthesis to absorb energy! Just walk from barefoot from a grass lawn over to an astroturf lawn, and you'll feel the difference! The grass lawn remains coolish in the afternoon heat, while the astroturf will burn your feet.
Yeah, that's what I mean by the benefits of shade. (See above, re: urban heat islands)
Photosynthesis is REALLY inefficient. What you are feeling is mostly evaporative cooling. Ie plant sweat.
Actually, how good and how expensive are purpose-built carbon-removal machines right now? (As Bob Frank says, there are other factors to take into account, but I'd like to get the right order of magnitude.) Compare them to, I don't know, a particularly efficient tree (or bush or weed or what have you).
Here's an article citing ~$1000/ton for the climaworks plant: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/08/climate/direct-air-capture-plant-iceland-climate-intl/index.html
To get back to the pre industrial revolution levels of CO2 we'd need to remove 1e15 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, so that's about a quadrillion dollars. To be fair your number is probably for mass of carbon rather than mass of carbon dioxide so let's call it 300 trillion dollars.
It sounds like an untenable solution, in that you can throw an unfeasibly large slice of global GDP at the problem and still fail to make a meaningful dent in it.
Grinding up CO2-absorbing rock, and dumping it in some warm part of the ocean to speed things along, could be done with current tech at a cost two orders of magnitude lower: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/
They might be eventually, but they are not cheaper yet. We're going to need both, for a lot of reasons (industrial point source capture, higher output per acre, ability to site capture where we need the carbon for utilization, and on the other side of course we still need wood and fruit).
Reforestation is an politically easier sell, though.
Unfortunately, a lot of what gets sold as “reforestation” is actually trying to force a forest to exist on land that people didn’t find useful, and which can’t support trees without lots and lots of inputs and attention.
Certainly when it goes by the name of “tree planting”, which has a nice ribbon cutting, and then no one pays attention when the trees all die.
I do volunteer work with a wildlife trust (I know its not very effective altruism) and its sad how true this is. Just this week I was at a session where we were mostly undoing the harm done by a well meaning landowner trying to reforest land poorly. Boring charities like that which just do tree planting and maintenance as part of their regular operations rather than "adopt a tree bring your kids to plant a forest!!" seem to be the only ones who actually do tree planting effectively. My trust manages about a 95% survival rate with the only maintenance after the planting being removing the tree guards.
99% of that problem is planting the wrong trees in the wrong soil. Most EU for example has a fetish-like fixation on growing vast spans of pine, on soils that do not support pine at all, and for variety, force poplar, linden and decorative apple-trees in the middle of a city where they instantly get sick and die.
Meanwhile, the ecosystem of continental Europe is mostly geared towards various types of oak.
It's not that they're less efficient. It's that there isn't room for the needed amount of trees. (We can't even keep the ones we still have.)
I've got no idea whether they're less efficient, or even how you would measure efficiency in that context. Personally I find just having trees around is a net benefit. So by that measure trees are extremely efficient.
Who is we? The U.S. is reforesting rapidly
We is humanity. And I'm not sure the US is reforesting at all. I see lots of forests of dead and dying pine trees. Canada isn't the only country that's experiencing a increase in forest fires. (OTOH, it's been about a decade since I rode along 5 and saw all the dead and dying pine(?) trees. (I assume they're pine, because they're some sort of conifer, pine trees are common in the region, and I'd just been reading about the pine beetle infestation. But the exact species is irrelevant to the point. The area was still called "forest", but about half the trees looked dead or dying.)
I once calculated that the entire world’s net carbon emissions could be neutralized by planting paulownia trees in an area the size of Ukraine and burying all the resultant wood. This would be considerably less expensive than the dozens of trillions people want to spend on other methods, and not require hypothetical future tech.
It would be even simpler to plant the correct species of trees in the correct environment and let it do its thing. Sure, paulownia is the most efficient carbon grabber, but its not the easiest to grow on any type of soil. The beat solution is just to replant the logged areas with the types of trees that used to grow there before humans cut them down.
Direct air capture costs $500/ton now, and the EPA SSC at a 5% discount rate is $12/ton. It doesn’t make any sense to use discount rates lower than nominal gdp growth, because 1. any public good that increases productivity by a fixed amount forever would have infinite value. 2. Other investments can easily beat the rate of nominal gdp growth.
perhaps, but an average tree absorbs approximately 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, so a copse of trees can make up for one car. If you add all the other economic, social, psychological and environmental benefits of trees, there is no excuse why we are not spamming saplings and seeds at every available surface.
I am not a botanist/ecologist, is it true that there is tons of land where trees would naturally flourish without further human intervention if seeds were planted, and the problem is just that no tree seeds have ever gotten there through normal ecological processes?
That seems like a stunning L for evolution and ecological equilibriums, but maybe it's trivially true?
Also - since bamboo grows so fast, is it a more efficient way to capture carbon than slower trees/plants?
I think for many purposes, bamboo counts as a “tree”, because it is a tall woody plant. Basically every plant family separately re-invented the “tree” body plan, and bamboo is the grass family’s version.
A lot of tree planting initiatives fail for the reason you mention - they figure “trees are good, we aren’t using land, let’s plant some trees here” and don’t stop to think about why there aren’t currently trees on this land if we aren’t using it.
There is a more relevant plan though of finding land where humans cut down forest to turn it into agriculture or coal mines or whatever, and get people to stop using it for agriculture or coal mines and let the trees come back. Planting seedlings sometimes accelerates the process a bit compared to just letting the trees seed it (particularly if there are apex trees that used to live in the region but now only exist far away).
The number one region where replanting is needed are urban areas. Trees wont naturally replant on carefully maintained asphalt no matter how long you wait.
Yeah urban trees are great. They also have the advantage that they are often actively maintained, so they can survive even if the local climate wouldn’t support them. They aren’t that significant for carbon reduction though, since there’s so little urban land and the possible tree density is limited. They are good for human benefits though.
Hmmm, just had a thought: bamboo is carbon negative whereas concrete is carbon positive. So have a building material consisting of mostly bamboo with concrete pouted in between it.
Convenient compilation of prior research on related subjects: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarcolony.php#bamboo
I think you've just reinvented wattle-and-daub.
There's an enormous amount of land that used to be old-growth forest and has been cleared by humans over the millenia. IDK how suited it necessarily is for trees *now* - in a lot of cases we've probably made the soil less fertile - but in principle it's no knock on evolution that trees aren't growing in fields we deliberately cleared of trees.
With that said, land is ultimately finite, and there's an awful lot of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust. Also, we're using some of that land for stuff.
Another area that is ripe for replanting are man made cattle ranches. I don't know what happens to feed grass growth under a canopy of trees, but there's probably some mutually exclusive dynamics going on (else, why clear the land in the first place?).
Generally a closed forest canopy doesn't allow enough sunlight for grasses to grow. And if the forest floor is carpeted thickly enough in herbaceous material like grass or ferns, it impedes the regeneration of tree seedlings.
the main issue is the water table, not the soil itself. As long as the land is the right level of moist, you can replant the trees that used to grow there since the last Ice Age, and they will beat the odds eventually.
The main problem with reforestation is the fetish-like desire to plant the kind of trees we want, not the kind that can survive there, and drying/watering the land to achieve that. Europe takes the cake here, we destroyed countless square miles of perfectly fine, soggy-soiled oak forests and now try and fail to replant them with pines. We buried miles of alder and willow-rich swamps in sandy soils to force more pine there, which promptly rots at the roots from too much groundwater.
Bamboo is considered an invasive pest by many people, because it grows so quickly in places where they don't want it.
There is a fair bit of land that was covered in forests. Then humans chopped all the forest down and didn't replant it.
A lot of that land is covered in farms, but not all of it.
The problem with trees is that they take a lot of space. There are limits to how much more of the planet we can permanently cover in forests.
Trees are actually generally not an effective carbon fixation method in the present environment. They used to be, in the carboniferous period, before microbes evolved which could decompose wood. But now, dead trees generally release their carbon back into the atmosphere over the course of their decomposition. Reforestation is carbon-negative, but forested land is carbon-neutral since it's in an equilibrium where it's releasing as much carbon through decomposition as it's taking in through photosynthesis. Although, you can sequester the carbon longer term if you cut the tree down and treat it in a way that makes it resistant to decomposition.
But over a long time frame, carbon sequestration is not usually a meaningful benefit of planting trees.
But surely the trees are not being planted in existing forests?
The point is that trees only sequester the carbon temporarily before releasing it back into the atmosphere. Forests are carbon neutral because they're in an equilibrium between trees sequestering carbon and releasing it. If we want to sequester carbon, trees don't offer a very long-term solution, unless we cut them down and store the wood under conditions that offer long-term protection from decay. Whatever other benefits trees provide, other methods come out far ahead in terms of effective carbon sequestration.
But surely, new forests are not carbon neutral compared to a past where there was no forest?
Are you assuming that any tree you plant dies without reproducing?
You have to bury the trees and make sure they don't decompose. But you're probably going to have to bury whatever hydrocarbons you get from carbon capture anyway, so I'm not sure how big a difference it will make in the end.
Or actually use the wood and then replant the trees; repeat. Are my bookcases decomposing faster than wood would in a mine?
What are your grandkids going to do with your bookcases when they inherit them, given that they probably won't care to own any books?
That’s about as likely as their not riding bikes, or having pills for dinner.
Throw them away, letting them get buried in landfills. This study says that it mostly doesn't get broken down. I think. I'm not good at reading studies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X1730942X
People did the calculations on that, and basically, trees don't remove enough carbon.
I ran some rough numbers. And the amount of forest we need to return CO2 to per-industrial levels worked out to be 2x earths land area. (Rough numbers.)
wonder, if there is a cheap, environmentally friendly, and technologically durable alternative to asphalt that would be white (or light gray/beige/pink/light blue whatever) instead of near black? Or maybe its just a matter of adding some white agent to existing asphalt to make it lighter in colour?
The first thing that comes to mind is concrete. It's light gray in color, abundantly available, and just as good as asphalt at most of the things that asphalt does. Unfortunately, it has well-known problems with cracking under thermal variance that asphalt does not have, making asphalt the clear winner in terms of durability. I've read about a few different groups working on solutions to this, but nothing that's commercially viable quite yet AFAIK.
"Carbon capture" is literally in the list that Scott wrote and the person you're responding to quoted.
I mean, the correct answer to "What do we do with clean, limitless power?" is "Literally everything". Everything that isn't a physical plot of land becomes cheaper and/or more accessible.
If the question is narrowed to "What do we do with clean, limitless power that we don't already do a lot of?", then space flight, routine terrestrial flight, desalination, and massive reshaping of the Earth's crust are good options.
Fair enough. But a lot of those would require other advances in addition to cheap energy. Desalination really wouldn't. The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Remember that we can apply purification technologies to wastewater as well as salt water.
1/3 or so of water today is used for thermoelectric power generation. That goes away in a nearly-all-solar world. Residential consumption usually goes through wastewater treatment facilities, and with current technologies implemented at scale we could get 80-90+%recovery (a lot of these systems can also be implemented in a home if you want!). Farming is the more difficult case. Can't really recapture transpiration water unless you're farming indoors... which gets a lot easier with super cheap energy. But even without that, a mostly-solar-power world can cut fresh water demand by nearly 2/3 long before you start having to worry about shipping water from coasts to farmland.
This is true, but that's mostly cutting freshwater demand from places where freshwater is already abundant enough for farming. But places like Australia, huge swathes of the Middle East, etc. would become vastly more habitable with access to cheap desalinization, much more easily than we could divert water to there from other more arable locations around the world.
100% agreed
I'm imagining a gigantic desalination plant on the Mediterranean, with the outflow diverted to the Qattara Depression.
Could do halfway-indoors agriculture with inflatable tents, like an enormous transparent air mattress: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/ Natural shape doubles as a funnel directing both rainwater from above, and any condensation on the underside, toward some sort of combined irrigation / HVAC machinery at the anchor points.
We know how to ship petroleum for a price of several dollars per barrel. That’s not going to be a viable price for water unless there’s a very special place that has a reason to exist even with really expensive water.
If the power to run the pumps on your pipeline is cheap, that cost comes down pretty significantly.
Does it? I would have thought most of the cost was actually building and maintaining the pipelines (and more importantly, tanker ships), not the energy for pumping. In any case, no one has ever transported oil at the scale that water would be transported here. The entire world’s oil consumption is only a bit more than New York city’s water consumption.
Well, I don't think you'd be shipping much desalinated water by tanker ships, you'd produce it at the nearest coastline.
In terms of flow rates, the trans-Alaska pipeline can ship 340,000 cubic metres per day, which is about 4 cubic metres per second. The flow rate of the Thames River (to pick a medium-sized river that most people will be kinda-familiar with) is about 100 m^3/s so you'd need 25 trans-Alaska pipelines to create one Thames. The trans-Alaska pipeline is only 48 inches in diameter (smaller than most TVs) so it's not hard to imagine scaling this up by a factor of 25 at less than 25 times the cost.
Desalination costs are about 1/3 power. We'd need other advances if we want to get more than 50% extra water for the same cost.
How much of that is because the existing desal plants were optimized for energy being expensive? A setup designed for intermittent operation, taking advantage of electricity prices down around "we'll pay you to take it," might be able to get away with far lower capital costs relative to throughput capacity.
I have no idea. And looking for a better source it's a third to half the cost. You're probably right that we could get it cheaper than that.
Possibly useful, though I haven't double-checked it myself: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/we-can-terraform-the-american-west/
> The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Quantity scales with water are quite a lot bigger than for petroleum,
Humans already move large amounts of water around with dams, canals, pipes ect.
What do you mean by massive reshaping of Earth's crust?
It currently costs a lot to move enormous piles of dirt from one place to another, especially if you want to do it in a precise way. (e.g., not exploding a mountaintop). This is mostly because dirt, rock, and clay are heavy, which means a lot of force is required to move it. With boundless energy, you can generate the force more easily and cheaply, meaning we'd probably do a lot more customizing of medium-to-large swaths of land. Things like building local mountains, valleys, and the like. Like how in Sim City 2000 you could start with a "blank" city and then just create the rivers, oceans, and mountains you wanted. Applications include aesthetic appeal, preservation activities, and for large scale industrial efforts.
I'm sceptical that sufficient cheap energy is the main limitation towards doing things like building mountains and valleys. The engineering challenges regarding f.ex. geotechnical, environmental, hydrogeology, hydrologic issues etc. etc. would be daunting.
The real answer is "create jobs." Everything else is detail.
We could use the limitless clean energy to rotate wheels in one direction, and then employ a lot of people to rotate them back. Problem solved.
But those jobs won't create yet more jobs. A functioning economy consists of multiple nested recursive systems, replicating themselves outward.
Yes, I know you were being facetious.
Right. It's sort of like asking "what would you do with more money?" I dunno...a bunch of different stuff, most likely.
Sufficient abundant energy and automated labor solve every other scarcity challenge. This is just totally obvious.
True, but the words "and automated labor" are doing a whole lot of work there. (No pun intended.)
It doesn't solve the scarcity of land in fashionable cities, which is the only scarcity problem that the Western middle class cares about.
>which is the only scarcity problem that the Western middle class cares about.
<mildSnark>
Well, there is also the limited number of admissions to prestigious universities. :-)
( (near)-zero sum from "prestigious" )
</mildSnark>
Cheap energy means cheap steel, allowing more and taller skyscrapers. Cheap lighting, potable water, ventilation, imported manufactured goods, so the spaces below remain pleasantly habitable. So, yes, to some extent it could.
The greater obstacle is land speculation, solution to which is a land value tax.
The current limiting factor on tall skyscrapers isn't the cost of the steel, it's the planning permission.
And the difficulty of that planning permission is deeply entangled with incentives from land speculation, which I already agreed is the greater obstacle.
The cost of building is actually significant. Look at skyscraper costs in UAE for example. It's billions of dollars.
And most of that cost isn't steel. There is a lot of labor. And a fair bit on carpeting and plumbing and some on equipment.
Ok. Everything is connected. If steel gets much cheaper, then sky scrapers get a bit cheaper, and so slightly taller. But this isn't a big effect.
abundance of free energy would do wonders solving global poverty, improve literacy and education worldwide, thus making Western Middle Class mostly obsolete, and thus, irrelevant. WMC are a bunch of specialists that we only need until we can automate them away or have developing world's lower middle class do their jobs remotely.
I thought that even with free electricity, there is a big problem of what to do with the leftover brine. It's corrosive, and toxic to ecosystems.
Well, just for starters, a lot of it is directly useful. You can extract salt, other mineral resources, and even small amounts of gold from seawater.
The gold isn't worthwhile, but the uranium might be. It seems right on the edge of practicality. (But what' you'd use it for if electricity were really cheap isn't that clear.)
Uranium would still be critical when optimizing for watts-per-kilogram, mostly meaning space travel. Gold might be worth setting aside a channel for if you're going to be thoroughly sifting and sorting all the rest of the sludge regardless.
Like Bob Frank said, it can be used. The chemical industry will guzzle it up in a lot of cases, certainly for all of the desalination plants that are geographically close to chloralkali plants that need brine as a raw material, and potentially for the ones that are further away as well depending on demand.
a pool a brine is essentially a giant battery - we could do interesting things with it.
But realistically, the amount of brine that would result from this is negligible compared to the size of the ocean. Just tow it a 100 miles off shore and dump it into the Pacific. All the post-salination brine we could ever produce would be like a single grain of salt in a bathtub when thrown into the ocean.
That would be my immediate answer too. There is hardly a more fundamental issue than access to potable water. Even in regions like Central Europe, which have never been in danger of permanent water scarcity, falling groundwater tables have been causing concern in recent years. Climate change and changing rainfall patterns will only compound that problem.
Where would Central Europe get water to desalinate from though?
Well the point was more that water is or can be an issue just about anywhere. If it really came to a need for desalination for Central Europe though, it would be solvable in principle, for example through desalination on the coast and transporting the fresh water through pipelines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline#Water
Bring back aqueducts! The future is retro!
Hours since I last thought about the Roman Empire: 0
From what I can find, energy is about a third of the cost of desalination. Getting rid of that cost wouldn't be that big a deal.
Huh. Where did you see that? I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but what I've heard from people who are is that energy costs are the largest factor by far. If you've got solid data that says otherwise I'd love to see it.
Google. Looks like my first result was this: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation
Googling around more I found this better-looking source: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation which said it's a third to a half. Do you have any sources at least that good saying otherwise? Or say the same thing. The important thing is to get accurate information.
What are the dozen major problems that desalinization would cause to vanish?
We could have home appliances that never break. Right now, our dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. are designed to be as energy efficient as possible to the detriment of being long-lasting. *This is an excuse I've heard, planned obsolescence being unreasonably financially successful is probably playing a role here too.*
The biggest problem with dishwashers isn't energy; it's that they can't *scrub.* It's the classic "we have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher" complaint: if you put dishes (or especially cookware) in with non-tiny amounts of food stuck to them, it's more likely to end up baked on in the drying phase than cleaned off.
Adding more power won't fix that. More likely would be the outcome (admittedly exaggerated for comedic effect) memorably demonstrated in the pilot episode of Home Improvement, when Tim soups up the dishwasher with More Power™ and it ends up exploding.
Desalination is already cheap and abundant.
Water Desalination is a big one, but you could also do some pretty insane recycling of materials with super-cheap energy.
Eventually you'd have to. At some point it has to be easier to recycle landfills to get at various metals than to dig up increasingly less profitable mines, right?
Seems to me the question of what we'd do with cheap or near/limitless power is similar to someone in 1970 or 1980 wondering what consumers would do with a personal computer.
I agree that fresh water is likely one of the commodities which will become much cheaper if the price of energy goes to zero.
An other example would be aluminum, where 34% of the costs are electricity costs, and another 37% of the costs are for the raw materials (alumina, etc), which would likely also drop if the prices for electricity and metals would drop.
For some plants, it might become economically feasible to grow them under optimal artificial light 24x7 (the way cannabis is sometimes grown in areas where it is illegal), thereby decreasing prices of raw food.
I'd be grateful if anyone could explain the costs of solar to me. On the one hand I see this 'Our World in Data data', which are "without subsidies", and which show that costs are already among the lowest (lower even than nuclear).
On the other hand, I keep seeing people post what we (in the UK) actually pay solar providers via "contracts for difference" (https://www.iea.org/policies/5731-contract-for-difference-cfd) and it is usually dramatically higher than any other source.
Prima facie, the figure with subsidies seem like it might be the more relevant, but it depends on to what extent the subsidies are actually necessary in order to continue receiving the energy from this source.
The purpose of CfDs is to drive investment into renewable generation by making sure they generate enough revenue, meaning the strike price will be set at a figure high enough for payback and profit generation. But in any case the UK is an awkward market to look at investment in generation assets because the planning system is so terrible.
Lazard recently published their 2024 analysis of LCOE, including a slide on costs with and without US tax subsidies. Here's the headline chart:
https://imgur.com/a/R8UJlWz
And here's the impact of subsidies on renewable energy:
https://imgur.com/a/gRtpIKn
The chart that Scott provides shows the "Levelized Cost of Energy". For solar it is the cost of electricity delivered locally by the solar panels when the sun is shining. It includes the amortized cost of producing and installing the panels. It is not the cost of so-called dispatchable power that is available on demand 24/7 at distant locations via "the grid."
For those who really want to get into the details of deploying carbon-free energy, I strongly recommend reading the Department of Energy's Advanced Nuclear "Liftoff Report." https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/LIFTOFF_DOE_AdvNuclear-vX6.pdf
It provides an excellent, detailed, technical analysis of both renewable and nuclear energy production, looking at everything from costs and cost-curves to tax policy to land efficiency. (My own aesthetic preference is for solar to be deployed on rooftops and in urban areas and not to cover hundreds or thousands of acres in solar panels for commercial generation. Nuclear is *much* more land-efficient on a energy-unit basis. See fig. 13 of the report.) There is an interesting discussion and critique of the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) metric. There is also a counter-intuitive graph showing a cost-analysis of decarbonizing California's grid using renewables with storage only versus renewables with storage AND nuclear. (Fig. 6.) I know most people won't read the report, so here is a helpful and, I think, accurate summary:
"Nuclear has an essential role in the energy transition as a clean firm complement to renewables. Nuclear provides clean firm capacity; modeling shows including nuclear and other clean firm resources with variable renewables reduces the cost of decarbonization. Nuclear can help address the power needs coming from load growth, where much of the demand is disproportionately for 24/7 electricity, e.g., data centers. Nuclear does not “displace” or “compete with” renewables; decarbonization requires both nuclear
and renewables. Nuclear provides clean firm generation that enables the increased deployment of variable renewables like wind and solar."
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/
The world has a lot of cheap low value land that is used as cattle ranch or is just sitting empty.
Nuclear uses less land, but a lot more of much rarer and more valuable resources. Namely engineering and regulatory competence.
Solar is rapidly getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a while to build, and longer to pay back.
Cost curves and economies of scale mean that once solar gets far enough ahead, nuclear becomes financially nonviable and can't catch up.
This is something of a battle of assumptions that will only be resolved by time. There are some reasons, however, to think that nuclear will play a critical role and that Big Tech's recent embrace of nuclear electricity generation is not an ignorant mistake.
First, aesthetics of solar farms aside aside (and the fact that one person's "cheap low value land" is another person's beautiful open space with various endangered species), transporting electricity long distances from massive solar farms on "cheap low value land" to urban and industrial centers requires large, expensive upgrades to the electricity transmission grid. Those projects are time-consuming, regulatory nightmares that rival the construction of nuclear plants before the federal government decided to promote nuclear energy. Check out the history and costs of the SunZia Transmission Project for an eye-opening example.
Second, as noted above, the Department of Energy itself has concluded that "decarbonizing the grid will be very difficult and expensive without 20-40% clean firm power. Firm power refers to power or power-producing capacity intended to be available at all times during the period covered by a guaranteed commitment to deliver, even under adverse conditions. With an increasing portion of the grid supported by renewables, the value of dispatchability provided by firm power increases. A variety of technologies including nuclear can help maintain grid stability via synchronous inertia, reactive power, and other benefits."
Third, many of the growing use cases for electricity are especially sensitive to even small fluctuations in power that make even solar-with-battery-backup infeasible. Although some Big Tech companies have claimed to use 100% renewable energy before their open embrace of nuclear, this is merely a financial claim; their data centers, especially those devoted to AI, are actually powered by the most stable "non-renewable" sources of electricity-generation (including taking power from "the grid," which is stabilized by utilities using firm power sources).
Casey Handmer's arguments are interesting, but the people at the Big Tech companies who are responsible for securing large amounts of electrical power for real world uses have looked closely at the same issues and the same straight-line graph forecasts and have decided to embrace nuclear electricity generation.
Is this true? RWE recently announced CfD (https://www.rwe.com/en/press/rwe-ag/2024-09-03-rwe-welcomes-success-for-onshore-and-solar-projects-in-latest-uk-cfd-auction/) in the UK for about 50£/Mwh. By comparison, average electricity costs in the manufacturing sector in the UK April to June this year (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66f3cb577e1625ee0d0c6f0b/Quarterly-Energy-Prices-September-2024.pdf) were 18.23 pence/KWh (or 182£/MWh).
EDIT: This isn't a perfect comparison since the nature of CfDs is you pay the generator even when you don't need the electricity, which means the actual price you're paying for the electricity you use is higher. You're also paying for a lot of electricity you don't use depending on the make up of the grid. See my last paragraph for how this can work like a subsidy if you build too many renewables without sufficient storage.
The nature of electricity markets in the UK (and most/all? of the developed world) means gas will almost always be the most expensive source of electricity when purchased since it has a high marginal cost (the price of gas) so generators won't produce until there is demand that can't be met by other generators. Sources like solar have negligible marginal costs of production and will outbid gas generators as long as they have capacity available. This means gas tends to set the price of electricity during high demand periods and tends to set that price much higher than when zero-marginal cost sources have sufficient capacity to meet all demand (in the case of excess capacity, you even get negative prices which have begun appearing in the UK with some frequency).
In theory, CfDs are not subsidies, they allow the government/grid operator to pay less during periods of high prices but pay more during periods of low prices. The UK saved lots of money due to CfDs when prices skyrocketed after Russian invasion of Ukraine (https://www.current-news.co.uk/wind-farms-to-pay-back-660m-under-cfd-scheme-amid-high-gas-prices/).
But CfDs look kinda like subsidies under current policy which is supporting renewable construction for climate reasons. At a certain point, you've used CfDs to support overbuilding the renewable system hugely (to deal with periods of limited sunshine/wind and high demand with limited storage capacity) and have lots of excess capacity/curtailment. CfDs will almost never save a grid operator money at that point while forcing up rates for customers in the long-term.
Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is basically what you have to pay someone per-MWh to get them to build a project. It's the best we have to compare the costs of generating electricity from gas, solar, wind etc where the costs come at different times in the project lifecycle: for solar and wind nearly all the cost is that of building the plant (capex) while for gas most of the cost is the fuel. The main inputs are capex, opex and the cost of capital.
Since LCOE is a theoretical calculation, it makes sense to publish "without subsidies".
Average global LCOEs aren't particularly illuminating because, for example, the same solar panel will generate twice as much electricity in southern California as in the UK. However, it is true they have come down everywhere, mainly because solar capex has fallen drastically. In markets like the UK where solar panel costs aren't affected by import tariffs, a Watt of solar panel costs about 10 US cents today, compared with over $5 in 2005.
However, even in the UK (which is not very sunny) the Contract for Difference prices in the last round of auction were slightly lower than for wind:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contracts-for-difference-cfd-allocation-round-6-results/contracts-for-difference-cfd-allocation-round-6-results-accessible-webpage
(Personally I think this is not great, because the UK needs more power in the winter - it's a highly seasonal climate. But it does also have a lot of wind).
LCOE is particularly poor for judging the cost of renewable power because there are system level costs associated with it that do not exist for traditional generators. Mainly, solar and wind are not available on demand so additional backup capacity or storage is needed to support them (there are other minor costs as well, a more distributed grid which solar tends towards has higher interconnection costs for instance). You should assume the actual costs of solar/wind are anything from slightly higher than LCOE to much higher depending on the grid. At the moment, this still makes them the most economic option for additional power generation in many places (hence the solar boom). Though as more solar is added, more backup is needed and system costs increase.
Batteries do a lot to solve this problem and costs are coming down. I don't full understand why we haven't seen wider deployment of grid-scale batteries yet given the cost data I've seen and I suspect it's a lot of it is inertia. But batteries don't completely solve system costs. The current economics of batteries make storage for 1-2 weeks (think cloudy, no wind and cold in the winter for several days in a row) very expensive. Without batteries, an entire separate generator system needs to be maintained as a backup for these situations which is a huge system cost for renewables.
This seems like a solvable problem to me, although slightly more nuclear would help most grids. In the meantime, 60-70% renewable grids (excluding hydropower) seem very achievable in most places but getting much higher than that could be very expensive.
>Batteries do a lot to solve this problem and costs are coming down. I don't full understand why we haven't seen wider deployment of grid-scale batteries yet given the cost data I've seen and I suspect it's a lot of it is inertia. But batteries don't completely solve system costs. The current economics of batteries make storage for 1-2 weeks (think cloudy, no wind and cold in the winter for several days in a row) very expensive.
Any suggestions on where to look for the cost of solar + batteries, as a function of how long the battery backup is good for? I tried doing a BOTE calculation, and it looked like solar + 12 hours backup for night approximately doubled the cost, with a 10% interest rate for the capital cost of the batteries - but this was really crude. Are there good numbers available for this?
Cost =/= price.
Prices are determined by local social choices - policy, regulation, politics, etc.
Costs are a function of the global economy.
If prices are divorced from costs, you have market failure in your society. Take that up with your elected officials.
In Massachusetts I regularly got offers in the mail to switch power providers to 100% renewable sources. The quoted rate per kWh was often lower than the default National Grid rate. Solar, unsubsidized, as produced, does in fact have the lowest cost of any power in the world in most places. This is not the same as the price charged to residential customers of a utility.
Often the problems here in practice include the fact that grid operators need to provide dispatchable power on demand, and right now the cost of "firming" solar power supply is very high in many places. There are quite a lot of rabbit holes and quagmires of technology and economics and infrastructure and policy to go down to untangle that mess, and they vary a lot by location.
I also get those offers, and have been told that the gotcha is that the quoted lower price is subject to change at any time, whereas National Grid rates are guaranteed stable. OTOH, can confirm that unsubsidized solar is cheaper than National Grid, based on the solar panels on our house.
Well, in my experience from 2012-2021, those rates were not any less stable than National Grid's rates, and when they did change, it was very easy to switch providers a second time.
Many Thanks! Glad to hear real data instead of hearsay.
I do not know the law in UK well enough to explain it, but I have listened to enough people complain about the laws in the UK to know that the energy grid is subject to extremely weird and bad regulations, and nothing that happens there is anything like a natural price.
Levelized Cost of Energy is a highly imperfect metric that obscures as much as it reveals.
What is needed are comparisons of total network cost of making reliable 24/7/365 electricity ubiquitously available. LCoE does not enable such a comparison.
https://www.dbresearch.de/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000528292/Costs_of_electricity_generation%3A_System_costs_matt.pdf?undefined&realload=gE~0QhqwDhR~NOPIw6AsQMD42h5HELCepAe8l7PyxtrKtFJP69xPEZ6HsXVzj1Zf
Solved the Twin-Nuclei problem and then post Bretton-woods. I think Eric Weinstein coined the term EGO (Embedded Growth Obligations), but I think that sums it up pretty well.
> somebody told me that the San Francisco legs of the BART - the Bay Area’s light rail, infamous for being noisy, dirty, and violent - had become comparatively safe and clean over the past few months, after the city installed fare gates that actually worked and couldn’t trivially be jumped over. Apparently the people ruining the BART for everyone weren’t even paying the fare. I always would have guessed there was a correlation between bad behavior and nonpayment, but am surprised at exactly how high the correlation has turned out to be
Psst! Don't look now, but California is about 2 steps away from rediscovering the principle of Broken Windows Policing. And they think it's a new thing they just came up with!
Also, couldn't the *Grants Pass* Supreme Court ruling have had something to do with it? I've definitely noticed a serious improvement in Philly over this past summer.
Perhaps, but for the moment it doesn't seem to be having too much of an effect yet, even in Grant's Pass, for various reasons: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/grants-pass-fought-to-the-supreme-court-to-clear-public-camps-so-why-are-city-parks-still-filled-with-homeless/
(Disclaimer: this article is 3 months old. Conditions could have changed since then.)
Reading the article, it seems like Grants Pass is having continued problems due to restrictions specific to Oregon and the 9th Circuit. That's really frustrating.
Meanwhile, on the east coast, I noticed improvements within a month of the decision. The Philly ACX meetups are in the old town/tourist-y part of the city near Independence Hall. There used to be lots of homeless sleeping on the sidewalk and panhandlers all over certain intersections. Now the sidewalks are all clear. There's one spot coming off the Ben Franklin bridge that still has panhandlers, but it's usually just 1-2 guys who are only there during the day, instead of an entire tent encampment under the overpass.
Downtown Atlanta was similarly cleaned up when I visited over Labor Day weekend.
(Side note - there are no apostrophes in US place names. Places like Harpers Ferry, Pikes Peak, Grants Pass, etc. are all spelled without them. There's an act of Congress banning them.)
That's good to hear. I used to live in the general area, and have been to Philly many times. It's encouraging to hear they're improving things out there.
The ambiance is improving for some, but the homeless people are still there. I believe in progress deeply, and I fully believe the Grants Pass decision is the opposite of progress. It's like sweeping guts under the rug and calling it a day.
Unfortunately, sometimes that's all you can do when too many people who believe too hard in "progress" make actual solutions impossible. The first and most significant problem by far in dealing with "homelessness" is Progressives cynically redefining a problem that has nothing to do with housing as "homelessness" so that they don't have to face up to the consequences of their failed policies in the areas of drugs and mental illness.
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
― C.S. Lewis
Which part of Downtown Atlanta did you go to? I haven't seen much difference, things are arguably a bit worse in some areas.
I was in the core part of downtown for DragonCon - the Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton. Andrew Young Blvd and Peachtree Street. We stayed up in Midtown and took MARTA back and forth every day.
There were some wandering homeless/mentally ill guys without their stuff around MARTA, but way fewer panhandlers or campers on the sidewalks than in past years. I lived in Atlanta for college from 2013-17, so I'm calibrated to those years. It seemed about steady for the last ten years, and then dropped off a lot this time around. I wasn't accosted by a single panhandler this year.
But I was only there for a few days, so maybe it's different in other parts of the city/different times of year. Maybe DragonCon beefed up security outside on the streets this year?
I was very amused by all the ads on MARTA this year telling people to move to Philly. I saw those and was like, yup! Philly's great!
Aha. Thank you - I live in the East Atlanta area and don't go down to the Central Business district that much. East Atlanta has seen a marked increase (and so have interstate areas from what I've seen). Greater enforcement would explain the shift.
The government can pry my apostrophes from my cold, dead hands!
Won't someone please think of the greengrocer's?
Philly was not effected by the Grants Pass decision, so any improvement is unrelated. The ruling that the Supreme Court overruled in Grants Pass was for the 9th Circuit which covers the western US, and it never affected the east coast.
Frankly, that Grants Pass supreme court case was so disgusting that is still baffles me that some effective altruists like it. It solved nothing and only increases pain and suffering. The homeless people it affects are being offered no services, just a temporary jail stay or even just a violent eviction. It's effectively social murder. As a society we don't want to actually address homelessness because it would be expensive, but to make the Grants Pass decision make sense morally, you have to actually address homelessness.
I agree with most of this, but not the part about it solving nothing - I think that criminalising homelessness and driving all the homeless people to move to other towns probably will solve the problem of "we have lots of homeless people in this town, lowering quality of live for others".
Good objections to criminalising homelessness in order to force homeless people to move to other towns include 1) it's unethical, 2) it makes life worse for the inhabitants of those other towns, and 3) it doesn't scale, because if everyone does it you're back to square one except everything is worse.
But if your goal is purely "solve my town's homelessness problem here and now, without worrying about any of those things", I think it's probably a really effective way of achieving it.
One of the ways we address homelessness is by criminalizing homeless encampments. Most of these people are dug addicts and will slowly kill themselves unless something stops them first. Allowing these people to sleep where they want and die slowly in peace is not compassion, and making that not a live option for them is. The Grants Pass repeal will lower homelessness and help people by forcing them into the recovery and support programs we already provide, and that addicts aren’t interested in because they’d have to get clean. Well, get clean, sleep in a ditch, or go to jail: setting up a shack next to the playground at the park is no longer an option.
+1
I think the broken windows version of this would be attempting to arrest everyone who peed on a bart and making the punishment relatively harsh. I think preventing the peeing in the first place is an importantly different thing. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone involved in this decision even believes the broken window thing that doing this one small thing will have larger knock on effects.
In the original Broken Windows program in New York City, turnstile-jumping/fare-beating in the subways was one of the things they focused on cracking down on, with significant effects on downstream crime reduction.
Right, but my point is that arresting people who do it (presumably how NYC dealt with it) is very different than preventing it from happening.
Un-jumpable fare gates is equivalent to removing the fare-jumpers from the population of people riding BART. Arresting the fare-jumpers would be removing them from public society. So right now only BART gets the privilege of a social environment with a significantly-reduced jackass population.
It also lowers their mobility, which may help keep them out of nice areas.
>So right now only BART gets the privilege of a social environment with a significantly-reduced jackass population.
There has to be a thermodynamics joke about semi-permeable membranes, impermeable only to jackasses, in here somewhere... :-)
Semi-permeable membranes are very important in the study of transport phenomena.
I don't think it is equivalent. There's a set of people who will jump when they can, and that set is also more likely to commit other crimes. But they're capable of paying a fare, just like they're capable of using a taxi/uber if they actually need to.
I don't think "fare-jumper" is necessarily a persistent, intrinsic property of individuals. Lots of things work more by perceived value, or back-filling excuses for decisions made on some entirely different basis.
If you're able and willing to ride for free, that sets a tone, a social context, where everyone who DID pay the fare must ipso facto be a self-sabotaging coward. Why, then, play along with any of the rest of society's rules?
On the other hand, if jumping is inconvenient enough that it's easier to pay, riding the BART becomes a privilege you've willingly paid for, so the space itself must be worth something, and thus ought to be treated with respect.
That sort of context-sensitive morality is more extreme when drunk.
The real success was that NYC discovered if you arrest fare jumpers, a lot of them already have outstanding warrants (petty theft, assault, etc). So they'd get a big unit of cops together with a paddy wagon and would sweep through the subway, arresting every fare jumper they found. Then they'd process them right there at the paddy wagon (they brought all the necessary paperwork and equipment for processing with them) and everyone they had with an outstanding warrant would go the jail and the rest would get a ticket for fare-jumping and be released. It really helped clean up the streets.
Now imagine having an ICE van there as well.
Its that thing about how arresting a tiny percentage of people would end an absurdly high percentage of crime. People who flagrantly disregard the minor laws tend to be bad people who also flagrantly disregard the more important laws.
I don't think that's actually a good example of "broken windows" because it leaves no visible effect. Littering, on the other hand, does. Arresting jumpers is a good way to grab a lot of people who turn out to be carrying illegal items and have other charges against them though (similar to traffic stops).
I think it does have a visual impact, fare jumpers are noticeable when they literally jump the turnstile and in this case they are clearly causing problems on the mass transit and removing them from it ensures a better environment.
Fare jumpers are phenotypically different as a class on average from non fare jumpers. Based on just how someone looks you can come up with a decent idea if they fare jumped. Therefore removing fare jumpers changes the average phenotype of a BART rider.
It does indeed appear to have changed the composition of riders for the better.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that the drug-addicted, mentally ill homeless guys on the BART did not pay the fare.
I thought Giuliani-style broken windows policing is basically discredited?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_City
Not really, no. What we see in the Wikipedia article is commonly known as "lying with statistics," particularly the last bit, where it says:
> A 2017 study found that when the New York Police Department (NYPD) stopped aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes in late 2014 and early 2015 that civilian complaints of three major crimes (burglary, felony assault, and grand larceny) decreased (slightly with large error bars) during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. There was no statistically significant effect on other major crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, or grand theft auto.
You have to be careful here or you might miss the trick. First, there's the big obvious one: the decrease in reports of crimes is "slight[] with large error bars." But then there's the much more subtle one: they're looking at the rate of *civilian complaints of* crimes, not the rate of crimes being committed. And keep in mind that this was happening in 2014/2015, at the height of Obama-era anti-police pressure tactics!
It turns out that, when people have little reason to believe that calling the police to report a crime will do them any good, they're far less likely to call the police and report the crime. (See also the broad divergence under the Biden/Harris administration between the FBI crime statistics, which are based on police reports, and National Crime Victimization Survey numbers, based on asking people if they've been the victim of a crime.)
The only crime statistics that can be taken at anything close to face value are homicide and auto theft (including smash-and-grab of stuff in automobiles). Murder, because basically nobody tries to hide the bodies, literally or statistically speaking. Auto theft, because even if you know the police aren't going to do anything you need the police report to file an insurance claim.
Everything else, reporting bias makes the error bars uselessly large. So if someone is counting "burglary, felony assault, and grand larceny", but not murder and not auto theft except as buried in the larceny numbers, yeah, suspect statistical skulduggery.
I think vibes beat statistics in this particular case. New York in the 1980s had a reputation as crime-ridden -- I remember a lot of Mad Magazine jokes about the impossibility of crossing Central Park without getting mugged. By the 2000s it was had a reputation of being remarkably safe by US big city standards.
The rest of the US followed the same pattern, so it's hard to tell if NYC-specific polices had any effect.
NYC cut its murder rate by a factor of 4 while the rest of the country cut it by a factor of 2. No, it is not at all hard to see the effect.
And then there was a called shot: Los Angeles hired Bratton and cut its murder rate by a factor of 2 when the rest of the country was stable.
Depends entirely on who you ask. As far as I can tell, there's still a substantial minority of people who believe in it, but they're almost exclusively conservatives who believe other things that make me distrust their judgement.
Fixing literal broken windows ("nuisance abatement") is the ONLY criminology intervention replicated in RCTs https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/uncontrolled/
I would like the BART gate thing to be true, but I question it -- the gates are really new, only 8 stations on the entire BART system have them so far -- and one of those 8 is at the airport, which is probably not a major location for sketchy people to board. In San Francisco, only 3 BART stations have these new gates. One is Civic Center (which is less than half a mile from Powell, which doesn't have the gates) and another one is 24th and Mission (which is less than a mile from 16th and Mission, which only got the gates as of October 12th). It seems surprising that the gates could be having such a dramatic impact on the BART this early in the installation process.
Oh that you had returned to the Gender Studies comparison because in fact gender studies has been progress studies. Progress studies should include how gender has progressed, including (not to wade into anything) gender technologies.
There’s a lot of gender technologies! Everything from stiletto heels to mom jeans to the manbun to testosterone injectables to surgery is an invention that enables people to present their gender in new ways.
Alice Evans would be an example of someone who studies both gender and progress. https://www.ggd.world/
There's something missing here, perhaps because it is difficult to quantify: at what point do you have enough?
It is clear that, up to a certain point, economic growth in the US went hand-in-hand with progress at a more concrete and human level - becoming "richer, healthier, safer, and better-educated than our ancestors", as Scott put it. Scratch that - it's not as if it were just a coincidence - we can probably agree that the former was a prerequisite and the main engine of the latter.
Ditto in the developing world today, *up to a certain point*: you need a certain level of production if you want a middle-class society. No, it's not a sufficient condition, and yes, GDP growth can be very deceptive, particularly in extractivist economies (high GDP growth can mean that resources are being extracted at an accelerated rate by foreign company X, which got an amazing deal from subornable and/or naïve officials, and only has to pay a pittance in royalties). Nevertheless development remains a crucial part of, um, development.
But do most problems in the US really have as their necessary root a slowing-down in productivity? GDP per capita in the US is now 50% larger than it was in the mid-90s. (Note: yes, in constant dollars, obvs.) Are people really that better off? Life expectancy has barely budged. Are people much better educated than then? There are some positive trends (some cities are safer) but their relation to the rest is less than clear. Now, if a wizard were to replace the GDP per capita of our days with that from the 90s, *perhaps* the immediate result would be immense suffering, but not because we were miserable in the 90s; this is what 'growth addiction' would mean, I suppose.
There is some point (probably well before the early 70s) at which people in the US could sensibly talk about an "affluent society"; that's actually the title of a book by Galbraith from '58. That really meant a society were more than half of the population were not in any obvious material need, and their main problems were of other sorts. Jacobs/Nader (who did make us safer)/Carson (whose concerns were valid even if she was wrong on many details) can be sensibly seen as a product of those times. Whether they had any sort of macro impact (for good or for the dastardly forces of anti-progress evil) is much more doubtful, at least outside the very particular fields that they cultivated.
Looking at the big trends is useful and necessary. Looking only at productivity figures alone seems reductive and potentially self-deceptive.
(On this last note: it would be interesting to have Emmanuel Todd's books come up in the annual Book Review here. I would get into that myself, except I don't feel particularly qualified in any way - I am not a demographer, or an anthropologist, or a historian, or for that matter an economist. Of course his stuff is often rather controversial and has to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it's a good example of big-picture analysis based on a close look at quantitative data that does not stop at the level of dollars.)
> GDP per capita in the US is now 50% larger than it was in the mid-90s. Are people really that better off?
Is that figure before or after accounting for inflation? Because if it's before, then we're significantly *worse* off: https://www.officialdata.org/1995-dollars-in-2024?amount=100
After accounting for inflation.
My guess (haven't looked into it) is that some of the GDP per capita gains have gone to the top 1%, some of the rest have been eaten by higher housing costs, and some of the rest have been eaten by stricter regulation (or, more optimistically, been spent on safety rather than consumption). I think of the remainder - maybe 20% of the total - some of it *has* gone to things like bigger houses, more cars, more vacations, eating out more, getting DoorDash, and other things that do make us happier.
If somebody were to ask "what are the main things that make Americans unhappy?", how plausible would the following answer sound: "their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?
(An outsider wouldn't answer that, and an American wouldn't either. I know, someone will argue "but the fact that people spend money on that shows that's what their priorities lie", but no, really.)
Vacations in the US remain very short relative to the rest of the developed world (only Canada can compete in vacation shortness) - how much has that changed in the last 30 or even 60 years? The only thing in that direction I can think of is that there may be more people in the jig economy, but that's often not because they want to be.
I agree rich Americans probably don't worry about these things. But poor people are much less happy than rich people, and it seems like most problems that poor people have but rich people don't are problems with money.
(I agree there's a sort of mystery here, which https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty gets at better than anything else I've seen, but I still think that all else being equal more money has to be good for the poor)
Well, I'm neither rich nor poor (nor for that matter a US citizen, though I lived there for ten years), but my impression from living in non-rich areas of the US (mainly intercoastal; I've seen more than my share of square-shaped states) was that relatively few people in the US are short of *stuff*, as in, stuff you buy at the shop. Some have trouble getting to the end of the month (that's probably not very closely correlated with income level if you exclude the very top and the very bottom), but that's not quite the same thing.
Money does obviously help with access to many things that are in short supply - health care, a good education, housing. In fact what really helps there is having a lot of money. Is the root cause of that really that there's not enough money to go around? Or that not enough stuff is being produced?
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing. Yes, there should be a good monetary policy where the Federal Reserve prints the right amount of dollars to denominate the amount of wealth, but the basic and harder problem is having enough goods that they're very cheap.
Let's get the money supply question out of the way (that's an irrelevant issue that human language has somehow invited - though of that as I was about to press Enter). What I dispute is the last bit: that the basic, hard problem, *in general* is having enough goods that they are very cheap. That may make sense at certain stages in development, but it seems countersensical in a developed economy, and even more so in the US in particular.
When it comes to relatively new technology, particularly when it solves a clearly demonstrated societal need, then I agree with you: obviously we need more and cheaper solar panels (keeping an eye out for their environmental cost, which is real, if much smaller than their benefits) and ditto for batteries (there the issue of environmental cost vs. benefit is less clear; if you disagree, I'd be thankful if you could convince me - I have actually just had solar panels installed and I am trying to decide whether I ought to get batteries). And yes, this is possible because we have such a thing as an industrial economy, mass-production, etc.
It's the claim that the slowing down in the rate of growth or qualitative change in the "world of atoms" was "one of the greatest historical tragedies" that has me unconvinced. At least it's not a claim that makes itself.
That's impossible with Veblen goods https://josephheath.substack.com/p/key-stages-in-the-decline-of-academic and when "good housing" is a matter of living in a "good neighborhood" with "good schools" (a function of the parents of the students), that's also a Veblen good.
Poor people and rich people are different sets of people. As an example, the upper class now work more hours, contrary to Eliezer's hypothetical of Anoxistan: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-actual-working-hours-of-different-income-levels/
Having been poor, in the absolute poverty sense of living in a pre-electrified semi-subsistence farming community where there was no municipal water and three towns shared one phone line and then later in the American sense of having way more money than 70% of humanity but less that most other americans, I much preferred the former (unfortunately, modernity has reached that part of Costa Rica, and now they have wage work, cellphones, depression and diabetes).
The thing that was really awful about being poor in the US was how precarious life was, that your shitty dodge you bought used because you couldn't afford a Toyota could blow a distributor cap (I had three rattling around in the trunk), you would miss work, you would lose your job, you would lose your house, and you would be on the street three weeks later.
Now that I have a LOT of money, I still live like I did when I was poor (other than owning my house) but with more big vacations. The extra material possessions and services (to me!) are hedonic treadmill net negative distractions from what actually makes me happy: eliminating stress, and work that isn't completely alienated in the Marxian sense, and novel experiences.
I know I am much less wigged out than my friends who have bigger houses and nicer cars by having a bullshit MBA type job, but have to worry about losing them and dealing with the existential ennui.
>"their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?
Replace 'their house is too small' with 'they can't afford a house and their rent eats 50% of their paycheck and their apartment sucks and the landlord never fixes anything,' and yes, this basically describes the gripes of a large number of my working-poor friends.
Right, but that's a different thing.
Different how? They want shelter of a particular quantity and quality, but aren't getting it, despite spending as much as they feasibly can.
"If somebody were to ask "what are the main things that make Americans unhappy?", how plausible would the following answer sound: "their houses are too small, they have an insufficient number of cars and they don't eat out enough"?"
Those are real problems for poor people in America who lack those things.
I'd say that a comparison to other developed countries makes it clear that those are rarely problems if the above is taken literally - or rather what Americans have can be a problem *because of the way much of America is set up*.
- I have not yet seen a truly small American house, but of course many Americans don't live in houses. (Note: for my first four years in [major European city], I lived in 23m^2, and that was considered normal for a single academic; I had lived in much less space while in college and grad school in the states.) Compared to just about any place in Europe, American houses are not small - they are, however, impermanent (not just compared to most places in Europe, but even to most non-slum housing stock in Latin America), though that's a preference that *may* make some sense given how cheap lumber is and how much people move. Much more to the point: there is a real problem, in that access to house ownership has become much more difficult, and being a renter sucks much more than in e.g. Germany (where, to boot, places are *usually* better built and insulated, though not always).
- It seems bizarre to think that Americans don't have enough cars (what is next - their cars are too small?). What *is* the case is that the working poor sometimes have a car in good condition and live in a place in poor condition, even if they own it - they depend entirely on cars to work, in that public transportation is pretty terrible outside a couple of major urban centers (indeed, it's less useful than the chaotic, polluting, unregulated 'public' transportation (really madmen with vans) that you find in many Latin American cities - no, I don't mean Mexico City, which has a good metro).
- Eating out often is not any sort of basic need - growing up, we'd eat out once a year, after we got and showed our report cards . More of a problem in the US: a lack of corner shops (you can't run out and across the street to get a clove of garlic), plenty of people get half-hour lunch breaks (they are lucky if there is a McDonald's nearby), etc. (In France, your place of work must either have a cafeteria or give you a 'ticket restaurant' valid at a restaurant. That, together with sufficient lunch breaks, hasn't been invented in the US yet.) Also a reason why eating out feels like a basic need: a lack of third spaces which are either free or close to free. Social life *is* a need.
There is a small percentage of Americans that do suffer from not having enough in a gross material sense - people who are poorly nourished, homeless, etc. It's shameful that anybody is in that condition. There's a much larger percentage of people who have very real problems - but they are not at the level of a gross lack, though it may look at first that way, looking from inside the US, without outside comparisons. Making more stuff available more cheaply at Costco is not going to solve their problems - and these problems haven't become less serious since the 90s, when the US was 2/3 as rich in the sense of GDP per capita; some seem to have become more serious. It's less obvious, then, that the source of these problems is that American affluence has increased more slowly since the 70s.
The American preference for larger houses is because Americans are richer. Rich people in Europe live in bigger houses too.
Lots of people would be helped by America getting richer. The family that moves out of the trailer park and into a house. The 19-year-old who can move out of momma's basement and buy a car.
"The American preference for larger houses is because Americans are richer."
Staggeringly wrong take.
More Americans than Europeans are (a) able to (b) interested in imitating the lives of the rich in some ways, at least in the sense that a stage setting imitates a house or a landscape. Hence - nothing follows.
Again, GDP per capita in the US has increased (correcting for inflation) 50% since the mid-90s and has doubled since the mid-80s (to give two points of reference at which many readers of this blog were already alive). Are there really many fewer people who live in trailer parks and worse? (I'm actually asking for statistics.) What I would believe more readily is that some trailers have got larger, maybe even 50% larger, but that doesn't solve things, does it.
And yes, Scott is almost certainly right that part of the issue is new wealth being sucked up by the very top, NIMBYism, etc. What is completely unclear to me is that the solution is for the country to become richer faster, in the sense of real GDP per capita.
There is probably a stage of development at which the most important thing is arguably for the country to develop quickly - the gains obtain thereby overwhelm everything else. Developed countries, and the US in particular, would seem to be well past that stage, almost by definition.
re American houses being impermanent. I was just thinking the other day that the old morality tale of the Three Little Pigs seemed to have gone over their heads. Climate change is increasing the number of big bad wolves...
Well, improving the energy efficiency of an existing 'permanent' house can be expensive (ask me); I suppose that's one good potential side of a place where people consider a 30-year-old house to be "old" - when they build, they could build to contemporary standards. It's more that having to build from scratch every 30 to 50 years (numbers I just made up) is not in itself eco-friendly.
Yes, without a doubt, houses could be either bigger or better furnished for ~99% of Americans. Look at the furnishings in the $10M California houses: any house that's not furnished as nicely as those houses could use an improvement. Even if you live on dirt cheap land in the middle of nowhere and only need ~1000 square feet/person, you'd still need to spend at least ~$1M on furnishings/renovations alone to get the "perfect house".
As one example: if your house doesn't have a heated pool where the water can stay at 85F even in the middle of winter, it could still use some improvement.