All poverty is energy poverty

Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh &#x2F; fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable earlier or more seriously?)<p>The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn&#x27;t have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). And that if we did want the entire world to live a life that includes things like that, we just don&#x27;t have the energy right now.<p>EDIT: I kept thinking about this and it doesn&#x27;t stop at just basics. It&#x27;s also things like living in a comfortable, well-manufactured home. Being able to buy toys for your kids. Taking airplanes to visit family or to vacation. Enjoying the consumption of meat, or food delicacies. The list goes on as you expand the threshold from basic necessities, to comfort, to luxuries, and you can decide where you want to draw the line.

Not really.<p>A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal.<p>You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.

This article is exceptional. It may be reductive or even wrong but at least it&#x27;s trying to quantify these issues and <i>it uses actual data</i>. Not only does this allow for analysis, it also makes it, in theory, falsifiable.<p>If the article is right and all it takes is around a doubling of the current global energy, at 1.1% population growth and a global annual increase in energy usage of 2.5%, this gives around 50 years before we start producing enough energy to push poverty levels below 1%.

I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).

This is not a good take. Look at Iraq or Venezuela. No lack of energy, but plenty of poverty nonetheless.

Quibble with the numbers all you want, but there is a fundamental truth in this visible to anyone who grew up in the third world amidst poverty.<p>One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it.<p>The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book.<p>Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: &quot;we will not give up our heated&#x2F;cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market&quot;. A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;1178622119874314" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;1178622119874314</a>

Growing up in Indian small towns in the 90s, I remember how people would casually mention the number of air conditioners they had in their house.<p>The cost of the AC, while hefty, wasn’t that big of a deal. The real brag was that they could afford to keep X number of ACs running.<p>Even today, my dad switches off the AC in his room early morning to cut down on his power bills.

Or another way I like to put it - unnafordable energy = unaffordable everything.

Here&#x27;s a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar.<p>&gt; There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noahpinion.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;answering-the-techno-pessimists-part-a3b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noahpinion.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;answering-the-techno-pessi...</a>

I hope that the advent of better solar energy extraction and automation (things like Tesla&#x27;s robot) will usher us into an era of abundance.<p>Self-sustaining robot factories would give us the means of almost unlimited labor that we could task with building out all the infrastructure we&#x27;d need to lift humanity away from the reaches of nature&#x27;s tyranny.

On this:<p>&gt; &quot;There&#x27;s probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda&#x27;s annual energy usage. That&#x27;s about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda&#x27;s current primary energy consumption.&quot;<p>1) Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH&#x2F;day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.<p>2) Energy capture for refrigeration from solar in Rwanda makes much more sense than oil production does. Under full sunlight, a decent 2.5 kW solar array produces about 10 kWH per day (as the full 2.5 KW is only produced at noon, tailing off towards morning and evening). As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night, a battery capable of storing about half that output (5 kWH) would also be needed.<p>The notion that you&#x27;d want to set up an oil-burning power plant (which only converts energy stored in oil to electricity at ~25% efficiency or so) in Rwanda is pretty silly.<p>As far as claims that there isn&#x27;t enough land to set up solar panels to provide this minimal home energy supply, the roofs of most dwellings would provide adequate area. It&#x27;s also possible to grow a wide variety of crops in conjunction with wind turbines and solar panels on agricultural land (wide spacing is all).

You can be poor while easily meeting your energy needs. A classic example is remote rural areas where virtually all inhabitants own some plot of land. Even if they are poor they can feed their fireplace with some wood, for free.

in tech, the ever-increasing availability of computation has widespread effects that haven’t always been easy to predict.<p>- computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries.<p>- a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe.<p>- a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering.<p>- a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image <i>everything</i> with greater effective precision.<p>- a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily.<p>energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech&#x2F;application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10&#x2F;kWh than at $10.00&#x2F;kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.

&gt; At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average.<p>Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses about 2100kWh annually. This is in my case without gas-powered heating, and external power use (such as personal transportation, or production of bought goods).<p>I can understand if these more indirect uses of energy are included in the average, however it would be helpful for the discussion if these numbers were explained. It might for instance help to explain how the West can slash it&#x27;s energy use five fold, as the article suggests.

In order to build systems to extract and use energy requires an educated society - that is the root deficiency. And it’s a lot more than just dropping books from airplanes.

&gt; <i>In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption.</i><p>It&#x27;s infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet.<p>It&#x27;s even more infuriating now that I&#x27;ve read H.G. Well&#x27;s &quot;The World Set Free.&quot;, which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics.<p>The problems it focuses on haven&#x27;t been addressed, and we&#x27;re living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)

No, all poverty is organizational, one can have plenty of access or energy without the capacity to deploy it in a way that alleviates poverty or solves a problem, and the other way around plenty of technologies exist that utilize very little energy to great effect. The Soviet Union was for a long time the second largest consumer and biggest producer of energy in the world, but its society was characterized by low efficiency and relatively little output per unit of energy consumed.<p>Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn&#x27;t necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They&#x27;ve gotten better not through energy consumption but better design.<p>In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn&#x27;t necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering.<p>There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.

I would claim that poverty also comes from impoverished ecosystems, and lack of civil rights, so it&#x27;s really wealth = access to energy + clean environment + civil rights

&gt; the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling. Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can&#x27;t be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. There are only so many places you can put a windmill, and only so many rivers to dam.<p>Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can&#x27;t imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills between fields.

One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient&#x2F; optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways:<p>-More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing.<p>-A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable&#x2F; affordable activity.<p>-Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don&#x27;t see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.

I would say energy doesn’t just appear itself, it comes from good infrastructure+support, which comes from a well planning from the government, which also require the govt to be competent, which require a well govt structure. Therefore the energy correlation is there but not a causation.

&quot;Every time money changes hands, GDP goes up. And every time money changes hands, that&#x27;s usually becomes someone is doing something. As we&#x27;ve seen, that takes energy. So it shouldn&#x27;t come as a surprise that GDP and energy are highly correlated.&quot;<p>Which is where economics goes wrong. The working units are incorrect.<p>You&#x27;ll note that economics likes to use currency as its working denomination, when the actual underlying denominations are kWh and the labour hour.<p>Nearly all the failures of macroeconomics can be laid at the belief that there is a one-to-one correlation between moving money around and doing stuff. There isn&#x27;t and that&#x27;s the problem.<p>The issue is similar to electrical engineers assuming that true power and apparent power are always the same.

I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.

One of the most insightful quotes I ever found of HN:<p>«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.<p>We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that&#x27;s actually buildable. But we&#x27;re not using it because we don&#x27;t have the species IQ to make the right choices.»<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28232083" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28232083</a>

There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix&#x2F;mitigation for climate impacts).<p>I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don&#x27;t seem to have a vote on the approach to take.

I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.

Interesting related presentation on what is energy and how it relates to the economy from a physical point of view <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&amp;t=3367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&amp;t=3367</a><p>Note: presented in a controversial way, that&#x27;s the style of this speaker

I can&#x27;t help thinking of the &#x27;Milton Friedman&#x27; quote<p>&#x27;If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there&#x27;d be a shortage of sand&#x27;<p>expanded out to the giant unelected global bureaucracies some people would appear to want to give permission to run energy supplies.

I assumed they were just going to ignore renewables, since the kind of person who writes these things generally does.<p>But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn&#x27;t exist yet.<p>What happened to energy poverty being important? &quot;The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren&#x27;t green enough for me&quot; was not an ending I expected.<p>Is this intentional pro-fossil fuels propaganda, written with full self-knowledge of that fact, or are they just so wrapped up in lies that they think this weird rant somehow reflects reality and is helpful to society?<p>I genuinely don&#x27;t get it.<p>Is it possible to write that many words on a topic and intentionally get &quot;primary energy&quot; wrong and believe that it reflects the actual useful economic work done? They mention nuclear a couple of times, so surely they&#x27;re aware that nuclear can generate both heat and electricity and it&#x27;s the electricity that&#x27;s most helpful?<p>Quick summary from the boring stodgy IEA<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iea.blob.core.windows.net&#x2F;assets&#x2F;7ebafc81-74ed-412b-9c60-5cc32c8396e4&#x2F;NetZeroby2050-ARoadmapfortheGlobalEnergySector-SummaryforPolicyMakers_CORR.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iea.blob.core.windows.net&#x2F;assets&#x2F;7ebafc81-74ed-412b-...</a><p>&gt; In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all.<p>&gt; Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.<p>&gt; Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.<p>&gt; Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted.<p>&gt; By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.

Telephony is one of the analogies. Many developing countries&#x27; rural villages could simply leapfrog the landline telephone technology and move directly to cell phones.<p>Computers - instead of desktops, straight to smart phones and tablets.<p>Banking - instead of a lot of bank branch offices and having to travel and queue, straight to online banking (and even being very advanced compared to many western countries).<p>It could be so with refrigeration. Solar power is potentially a really good fit for that.<p>Maybe electric scooters will do a lot for mobility at some point and people can skip the whole car thing.

&gt; Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can&#x27;t be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland.<p>This is my main problem with it. I&#x27;m concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.

We need far cheaper solar panels and batteries as a starting point.

Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn&#x27;t the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math):<p>A refrigerator&#x2F;freezer running at 1.17 KwH&#x2F;day goes for about $800 USD. [0]<p>For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh&#x2F;day[1]<p>This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn&#x27;t going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators.<p>Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components.<p>Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4]<p>Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD&#x2F;day<p>Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freezer-Refrigerator-in-Stainless-Steel-FRTD2021AS&#x2F;318833857#overlay" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freeze...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystalline-Solar-Panel-for-RV-s-Boats-and-12-V-Systems-GS-Star-100W&#x2F;204211365" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystal...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;190548&#x2F;revenue-of-the-us-electric-power-industry-since-1970&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;190548&#x2F;revenue-of-the-us...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bea.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2021-advance-estimate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bea.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;gross-domestic-product-fourth-...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=53620" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=53620</a>

Also even here and Europe when price of energy goes up poor people swich to burning wood or coal. This is bad for enviroment and the air qualit in their house causing disease.<p>Alot of the policy decisions are made by people least affected by them. This also explains rise of Trump and populisim.<p>Here in Canada, in our 5 party system, Trudue was voted in by the margin of office workers in Toronto. And proceeded locked down hard, responding to their hypochondriac fears. Their suffering of laptop work from home and food delivert to their door was so bad that many wanted to extend the lockdowns indefinetly.

&quot;The Limits to Growth&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Limits_to_Growth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Limits_to_Growth</a><p>Carrying capacity <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrying_capacity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Carrying_capacity</a><p>&gt; <i>The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment&#x27;s maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.</i><p>Sustainable population <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sustainable_population" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sustainable_population</a> :<p>&gt; <i>Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth&#x27;s carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16]</i> The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] <i>The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth&#x27;s limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16]</i><p>&gt; [...] <i>The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a &quot;balance between nature and human populations&quot;.[20]</i><p>Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride <i>and</i>), <i>and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy</i>, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn&#x27;t then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater<p>Water trading &gt; Alternatives to water trading markets (*) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Water_trading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Water_trading</a><p>LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levelized_cost_of_electricity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levelized_cost_of_electricity</a><p>LCOW: Levelized Cost of Water: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levelized_cost_of_water" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levelized_cost_of_water</a><p>TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump<p>Drinking water &gt; Water Quality: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Drinking_water#Water_quality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Drinking_water#Water_quality</a> :<p>&gt; <i>Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right.</i><p>&gt; <i>About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6]</i><p>A helpful <i>risk hierarchy</i> chart: &quot;The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies&quot;: From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water<p>TIL it&#x27;s possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too<p>Also, TIL about solid-state <i>heat engines</i> (&quot;thermionic converters&quot;) with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example<p>Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines?<p><i>Any</i> exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to <i>quickly</i> purify water.

Jordan peterson made a video a few weeks ago talking about the importance of lifting poverty in context of global climate change. Super interesting<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;--QS_UyW2SY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;--QS_UyW2SY</a>

I think this article assumes that all people want the same things out of life, such as comfort and refrigeration, but this is not the case with &quot;everyone&quot;.

If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?

Well, let&#x27;s remove taxes on oil, etc! Let&#x27;s stop putting governmental barriers in place such as when recently Canada refused permission to build natural gas plants. Governance needs to step out of the way, and let the free market do what it needs to!<p>(for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)

I remember a scene in Sopranos where Tony told off his lietunants for not making a enough money for him. “This business is like a pyramid” (more or less).<p>Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough?<p>This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.

All poverty is institutional and societal poverty. People are poor not because of lack of energy, but because the societies they live in lack the inclusive institutions that can create those patterns for energy use, education, healthcare and anything else.<p>When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth.<p>Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.

If climate change is an existential threat, we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples&#x27; lifestyles take a hit. If you truly believe climate change is super serious, then logically government ought to put its thumb on the scale to ensure a lot of people get priced out of energy intensive products like air conditioning, leaving their computers on at night, meat, aluminum, and so on.<p>If you&#x27;re a nationalist, it&#x27;s even better if the people we&#x27;re impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else&#x27;s Problem.<p>It&#x27;s like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven&#x27;t figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity:<p>- We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy.<p>- We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor.<p>(Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we&#x27;ll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won&#x27;t stick around until it&#x27;s over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance <i>generally</i> helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)

More reading:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oilprice.com&#x2F;Energy&#x2F;Crude-Oil&#x2F;The-Worlds-Energy-Problem-Is-Far-Worse-Than-Were-Being-Told.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oilprice.com&#x2F;Energy&#x2F;Crude-Oil&#x2F;The-Worlds-Energy-Prob...</a><p>&gt; No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.<p>&gt; This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.<p>And Hyman Rickover&#x27;s 1957 speech on energy and scarcity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourfiniteworld.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;02&#x2F;speech-from-1957-predicting-peak-oil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourfiniteworld.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;02&#x2F;speech-from-1957-predi...</a><p>Climate change is chiefly caused by two things: uncontrolled population growth and energy consumption growth.<p>A high standard of living - and civilization itself - is impossible without high energy consumption per capita.<p>Do you see the problem?<p>I can think of solutions that would be effective, but it would involve a lot of suffering.