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109 comments on What is a Human Being Worth (in Terms of Energy)?
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Browsing through Lippincott's Medical Physiology, 2nd ed:
So for useful work* this comes down to: [600...1400]W *.25 ~
150W sustained for us mere mortals that do office work
350W+ sustained for an athlete, but probably not sustained for several days (that is several hours a day / several days in a row)
It is worth noting that at 1400+ watts the cooling becomes crucial in order to sustain that output (same reference).
*Not including machine/tool conversion losses.
150 W/h * 8 h/d * 230 d/yr = 276 kWh/year = 994 MJ/year ~ 16% of a direct thermal energy content of a barrel of oil (NB! Apples to oranges comparison!)
How much useful work is in a barrel of oil? It depends on how we use it. Sometimes it c. 1% (modern US-made ICE car with a single 85kg passenger). Sometimes it can be several times that. However, more often than not, it's closer to the low figure.
We really are throwing oil away - spending it like it just didn't matter. And because we waste oil, the human labor equivalent of a barrel of oil is really high, much higher than it ought to be.
I think Matthew Simmons is absolutely correct when he claims that oil is cheap, even too cheap. We waste things that are cheap, regardless of their intrinsic or relative value.
Thus, I conclude that oil needs to rise in price by a multiple, before we start to appreciate it's energetic value (assuming no cheap/abundant/scaling substitutes).
When the value of oil rises manifold, what happens to the relative value of human (labor)?
I think we need to compare apples with apples.
How far could a person travel on a barrel of oil using a light, highly efficient motor cycle?
And then work out how long it would take to travel that distance a) walking, b) running and c) cycling. What we are assuming here is that the value of oil is the time it saves us in performing a task.
It might be worth looking into micro light aircraft too. What is the most efficient transportation mode we have using oil? For sake of simplicity we should assume 1 barrel of refined product.
I fully agree, Euan. The best analyses I've read on these from oil all the way down to distilled products used in a vehicle are here at TOD, of course with materials referenced from elsewhere. I didn't want to rehash those, because I wouldn't have done them justice.
The challenge is with "how much useful work does X amount of primary fuel Y contain"? This boils down to what Chris brought up above: "what is the task?" and what I think Glenn touched further upon: "What is the tool/method?" (paraphrased).
My point was that from the maximum thermal potential of 6119MJ/barrel we can easily get below 1% useful work out of that potential - once we go through the "oil -> logistics -> gasoline distillation -> logistics -> ICE -> wasteful car -> wasteful driving -> single passenger" cycle - just to use the driving example.
Or in other words, we could theoretically improve this ratio an order of magnitude for many a task/tool/method.
Most TOD visitors know this, I wrote nothing new here.
My personal doubt comes from whether we have enough economic/energetic foresight to actually to radically - not incrementally - improve upon this wasteful use in practice - not on paper.
I believe (cannot prove), based on history of oil consumption, that we lack this foresight when faced with abundant availability and ridiculously cheap prices.
So, we need price rises that drive us towards more efficient use. My hypothesis is: radically more expensive prices for radically more efficient use.
After that happens, what happens to the price of human manual labor?
My assumption is that it also has to rise, but by how much and how will this affect our daily dealings? This is more of a useless systemic WHAT IF question, and does not by any means exclude your more practically oriented and useful "how equivalent in practice to activity X" question.
SamuM - my question was really a general one - I'm hoping that Luis or Chris or Nate turn up to answer.
I'm increasingly convinced of the inverse of this statement which is:
And the conclusion that those societies / countries that use energy most efficiently will be able to pay higher prices and win the bidding war.
Great point.
The more value we can get out of a barrel of oil, the more we can pay for that oil, and the better we will do in the global auction for a fixed or declining supply of available oil.
Incomes being equal, a driver of a 50 mpg econo-box, can (and will) afford to pay a lot more per gallon than a driver of a 10 mpg SUV.
However, if the driver stops going to work, his income drops, he will be less able to afford fuel.
This is the risk posed by using energy taxes to change behavior, individuals will make decisions based on the cost of those decisions, but if their decisions result in less GDP (especially exportable GDP), and/or if the government spends those tax dollars on activities that do not make our economy more productive (in terms of exports), we will be worse off than before.
Forrest
Efficiency: Maximizing production (profit) in combining labor, capital, raw materials, and technology.
We can modify the production process to use more or less of a specific input in response to changes in the relative cost of each input, only a reduction in the cost of a specific input can increase (total) production or reduce cost / unit.
Great point. For instance, if we use a velomobile w/ a small gas or electric engine for assist to commute, it may be more inefficient, strictly speaking (BTE), than using a diesel truck with 30 tons in the back, but it certainly uses far less fuel. There's a sweet spot wrt utility given the majority of use, efficiency, and overall consumption. Modern transportation via the auto has become something of a luxury/entertainment, and as such is grossly inefficient. Can we do better? Sure. Equipping vehicles in the states with properly geared manual transmissions and the drivers with knowledge regarding conservative fuel efficient driving could cut world oil consumption by a good ~5%. Saying there's plenty of room for improvement would be an understatement.
I have said this before on the Oil Drum, efficiency is not really a valid measurement for transport. Essentially all transport has an efficiency of zero since on a two way journey the average work done in the transportation exercise is zero, but fuel is used to overcome friction. The term efficacy is more appropriate as this compares the MPG.
As for the consumption of energy, we have a god given right to consume the stuff. The CEO of Centrica has just made a very sensible suggestion that we wear two jumpers, and in doing so has created a storm. Folk just don't get it.
I once estimated that it would take an athlete 30 minutes to heat enough water from 10 deg C to 100 deg C just to make a cup of tea. It was only an estimate and if my figures arn't quite to the mark it would still be hard graft and a well deserved cuppa!
All of this thread is so frustratingly nerdy. The oil is there, people have found fun ways to use it-- gazillions of trinkets of no essential value other than novelty-- and not-so-fun ways to use it, making bombs and warplanes and the like.
The entire western industrial economy is all about converting oil into money. To be sure, some of it is used for food, some for shelter -- but most of it is just useless fluff that a nerd (like me) has no way of understanding or appreciating the value of.
My theory is that the total volume of nerdiness in the world is inversely proportional to the amount of oil available.
And idleitis is directly proportional to the amount of oil avaiable.
"What is the most efficient transportation mode we have using oil?"
I have no numbers to offer, but intuition suggests that the most efficient transportation application for oil is on the bicycle chain.
Our family fleet:
Two military style bicycles, one travel/city bike. Combined annual mileage 10,000km. Oil usage: half a can of lubricant per annum.
No toeclips? You’re wasting a whole bunch of efficiency there. By using your upstroke you can gain much more power. I don’t believe safety is an issue - I’ve used them for over forty years on the streets of Chicago and can get out of them very quickly. I won’t, however, use clipless pedals such as Looks on the street. Difficult to get used to, require special shoes (try waling a long way in them when you have a flat), and in one instance I found them gone when I came out to ride my bike back home. Nice fleet. Wish my digital camera hadn’t crapped out a couple of months back I could post mine.
Power, maybe. Efficiency, no. You use energy when pulling the pedal up with your leg, energy you wouldn't otherwise use if you were just coasting with it on the up swing. Not knowing anything about anatomy and muscular dynamics, but it might actually be less efficient since the muscles in the human leg aren't meant to pull up loads other than its own weight under any evolutionary circumstances.
Anyway I use the heavy military bicycles to offset my otherwise sedentary lifestyle, so maximizing efficiency would mean I wouldn't get the same exercise as before. In fact I don't understand some cyclists with their over thousand euro super bikes with gazillion gears and carbon fiber frames. Surely if you want to get fit and be 'sporty' you should pick the heaviest bicycle you can possible peddle with? And the speeds they reach begin to be quite dangerous, at least to other cyclists. And if they want efficiency they should stick with speeds under 25km/h since above that you actually waste most of your pedaling effort into forcing air out of your way.
I didn't buy my bike to get fit. I bought it as a cheap and relatively environmentally friendly mode of transport (which also allows me to drink a couple more beers than if I was driving). For me, getting fit is just a welcome side effect.
Not that I have some sort of super bike - mine cost me £40 and has a steel frame.
Where you gain efficiency is in a smoother stroke, enabling you to maintain a spin in the 80 - 100 rpm range, very difficult to do with a free pedal. This is why the Biopace gears went out of favor, they destroyed smoothness. I used to be a gear pusher way back and experienced hurt knees, muscle imbalances, etc. This is also the reason for multiple gears to stay in an .efficient rpm range. I do have a single speed fixed gear bike when I’m in the mood to punish myself. I’m sorry, I just don’t get the mentality of a heavier bike, especially if I’m coming back from a tip against an unexpected headwind. Whatever rocks your boat. Everybody makes love to their old lady (man) different.
I haven't seen the likes of the military style bikes. I presume they have traded off weight and efficiency for robustness and reliability. It looks like they have 1.5 to 2 times as many sokes, so I suppose you could carry a very heavy load without damaging the bicycle.
Toe clips do help, the amount of extra muscles recruited are at the discretion of the rider. I used to do tons of mountain biking, on ridiculously rocky terrain, I never was unable to get out of clips when falling off. But not being clipped in, and you are likely to lose control as your feet are bounced off the peddels. At high output levels, toe clips allow you to generate more power, or less leg strain at a fixed power level. Clipins are slightly more effcient than clips, but I never mastered getting out of them -especially if I tried to stay upright until the last possible half second.
The hard core "trials riders" didn't use clips, but instead used platform pedals. They could do amazing things with their undersized bicycles. But trials setups would be horribly inefficient to ride for any sort of distance.
I have an old book about bicycles (no idea why someone tries to sell it at Ebay Poland ..).
There's a graph in that book comparing energy efficiency of different animals/vehicles. The question was how much energy is needed to move 1kg of body weight 1 kilometre far.
Top energy consumers are small animals who need more food a day than they weigh themself, such as some mice or humming birds. Then, the middle class: Humans walking, airplanes, cars, most other animals.
The top class: Seagulls, on top of them the Albatros. But he's not the winner. The most energy efficient animal on earth is: the Salmon. And then there's a large gap. And then comes: The human on a bicycle. On a bicycle humans have achieved to overcome evolution.
Any chance you could scan/photograph that in here?
There is a PDF-article called "Abenteuer Fahrrad" (adventure bicycle) on the web page of the German TV program "Quarks & Co." where you can find the graphic on page 17 (Adobe Reader page 9; there are always two pages in landscape orientation.)
BTW My quote from memory was not correct in regard of humming birds. And the text on the right says that railways at low speed use even less energy than a cyclist. If you're interested in more details from that document write me an email (dunno if you read German.)
Part of the efficiency of the average human depend upon the food the human has eaten and how "efficiently" (or, along another line of thinking, how many fossil fuel inputs) were involved in it?
If you're eating that locally grown organic food, your big picture energy efficiency is higher than if you eat an industrialized agriculture diet, with strawberries from 8000 miles away, etc.
Over a meal after an event here in San Francisco a couple years back, Richard Heinberg brought this up, saying that all things considered (the average diet) an electric bicycle actually was more "efficient" (right now) than a human powered bicycle.
This was not in any way an "endorsement" of electric bikes or condemnation of human bikes, just a statement about efficiencies in the world as it is set up.
I've thought about this as well. It would be hard to understand the total energy use of a vehicle if one needed to account for the fuel (food in the case of a bike), and the energy to obtain the fuel etc. Do we count the energy inputs in the food fed to an oil worker in the EROEI of oil? It becomes very circular.
There's an almost infinite amount of inputs we could calculate. But as we go further and further down the chain the effects of those inputs become more and more marginal. Eventually they become so small that we just ignore them.
Keeping in mind the oil needed to mine, smelt, create, distribute and maintain our bicycle chains... And then the rubber in our tires. There is no human power to contribute to the chain without a backddrop of oil.
Which is why I already have a lifetimes worth of IDENTICAL or COMPATIBLE bike spares - think ahead: "oh those - no they went bust years ago.."
Keep the tyres dark and cool. Choose your chainrings with old man muscles in mind, 1 steel one per decade of future cycling, and plenty non-indexed shifters.
I would start collecting soon, because I was buying cards of red rubber brake blocks and spare Suntour jockey wheels when they were made 25 years ago..
Many people here have missed the point I think, treating the problem from mainly the quantitative rather than qualitative point of view. Trying to compare watts with watts here doesn't bring much insight into the problem since you're really comparing apples with pears.
Rather I would start by trying to get the whole picture of what utility can be gotten from a given energy source, say a barrel of oil compared to a human being, or MWh of electricity.
And also the journalist did actually ask how does oil compare to [other energy sources, such as for example] human labour, hydroelectric plant as an energy source. This in my mind means he's interested in the whole picture of the problem: why oil is so special compared to other energy sources? This would include a much more qualitative treatment of problems. For example liquid fuels compared to ones which produce electricity ie. the infrastructure dilemma, availability, transmutability etc.
Let me first begin with the question of utility and why comparing oil and human labour is like comparing apples and pears.
The problem is simply put thus. In order to dig a hole of a fixed size in area and depth using human labour is subject to steep diminishing returns as the number of laboring humans is increased. In fact the cut-off point is reached rather soon even with complex arrangements of division of labour and strict work procedures. Simply put, men must have a minimum amount of space around them to continue digging at maximum efficiency. Now, if we allow the use of practically infinite source of energy which costs almost nothing ie. oil, we can easily keep devising ways to get the dirt out of the ground quicker and more efficiency by increasing the size and volume of the equipment using ever larger amounts of oil. For any practical level of utility (ie. hole size) diminishing returns do not yet apply and it is hard to imagine where the cut off point would be.
In short, oil is immensely scalable energy source, humans not so.
Digging holes in the ground might sound too theoretical so let us take another example with food production. Currently food for a given population produced using oil involves mining and refining of fertilizers with machinery and chemical plants, plowing and harvesting the soil with machinery, and transporting the goods to the consumers with more machinery. At every stage we have found ways to increase food availability and flow rate rather easily simply by increasing the use of oil at every stage. Only now in many areas of the world, have other limiting factors come to apply, mainly availability of arable land and water for irrigation.
Annually US uses 3.5E17 J of energy for food production (including distribution, household refrigeration etc.), much of this in liquid fuels. This is equivalent to 98TWh of energy. But what kind of energy?
Surely 'equivalent to' should mean 'being able to achieve the same', in physically reality also? Or indeed in our current situation, or perhaps even with existing infrastructure? And here lies the problem. Even if we suddenly got donated 98TWh of electricity production capacity from magic pixies, be it nuclear or solar, or any mixture thereof, would we be able to use it to produce the same amount of food without liquid fuels? Even if we upgraded the grid and threw a few electric vehicles into the mix?
Or indeed with human labour? Could we do the same with 305 million agricultural workers (the total of current US population) toiling with hand tools in the mines and on the fields? Or if we bred more people in order to meet the energy equivalence of 98TWh divided by 2000 work hours per year times 100 watts per person = 490 million people? Can a human being mine, refine and transport NPK, plow and sow and harvest the field, and finally manufacture, transport and store an equivalent food with his 200kWh of annual labour, than an equivalent in liquid fuels to his whole year's labour, a mere tenth of a barrel of oil?
In conclusion comparing different energy sources done simply by direct equivalent energy content does not produce useful information. It is like comparing apples and pears. And from the above brief glimpse at the dilemma we can observe that oil and human labour as energy sources are indeed at extreme ends of the fruit scale!
edit - PS: here at TOD we make great efforts in distinguishing between different qualities of crude oil. We don't go comparing light sweet with bunker fuel, so why is it so hard to extend the same critical thinking to comparing vastly different energy sources, such as for example liquid fuels vs. hydroelectric for example? Or wind or solar? All these should be judged qualitatively - what kind of energy do they produce, ie. how can we utilize it? What is the potential flow rate vs. investment and infrastructure needed? Do they scale and transform efficiently? Are they subject to diminishing returns or external limiting factors?
Exellent point, imho. Still we should do qualitative and then a quantitative comparison, imho.
My point was and still is this: regardless of equivalence levels, we waste oil, esp. because oil+machines scale so well (unlike human muscle power). What happens to the value of human labor if/when the value of high quality & high density available fuels multiply in price? What does that change in the value of human labor do to our societies? It's a systemic McLuhan type of question (ala tetrad).
on some tasks there is no comparison.
fossil fuels can not replace a teacher or nurse.. (yet?) if some robot surgeon is manufactured one day you may claim its construction and use is a energy comparasion issue I guess.
conversely large engineering tasks look to be impossible with human labour alone. apollo or even brute force projects
could human labour dig the channel tunnel.. without air extraction fans etc?
human beings in ancient societies can inch there way through huge building projects.. stonehenge Pyramids and that.
even those ship breakers of Chittagon guys have a fair amount of mechanically assisted help.. they are a good indicator of what fossil fuels represent not because we see the effort but we see the limitation of human/animal capability
http://www.cbsnews.com/images/2006/11/02/image2146975.jpg
I feel a direct energy comparison undervalues fossil fuel (or other) energy sources because it does not address the enabling aspect.
a huge raft of endeavors are fantasy without them.
Boris
London
Indeed the value of human labour is not often discussed here since technocopian 'solutions' are abundant and more convenient. However I agree with you that this will become an important question.
We should not to try to match our current energy use in watts equivalent with renewables because of the qualitative difference in energy sources I have just explained. If we insist on parity in energy, status quo in living standards and way of life, we end up with these requirements in order to get the same utility from renewable energy sources:
- Manufacturing of alternative energy power plants
- Infrastructure renewal for power distribution and conditioning
- Electrifying all vehicles and machinery
All of these are currently limited by available resources, manufacturing, capital and time. Under today's conditions of financial hardship, political impotence, and public ignorance, such an undertaking in such a scale is surely impossible?
However, if we combine the above changes with a radical change in our way of life we see a massive reduction in above physical requirements:
- Community based infra, manufacturing and services
- Local food production
- Local energy production
- Passive aircondition and solar/geothermal heating for buildings
- Zero energy food preservation: cans, pickling, salting, smoking, fermenting, underground storage
So rather than argue over which energy source could possibly replace oil, we should admit that none of them will really do the job and our only real choice is to produce negawatts through a change of life style.
This will be almost impossible politically, but at least it's possible - whereas living in the false hope that we can maintain our way of life with such as such technocopian infrastructure project will just lead us back to square one - a lot poorer in energy, time and human patience.
At the moment people's perception is that going back to human labour is like going back to the caves. That is why it is not being discussed seriously. However most of the world still makes its living by hand, with a few animals helping. Soon all of us will have to leave our comfortable offices and SUVs and get our hands dirty to some extent, getting at least a backyard garden going. It's like my father used to say: you either do it voluntarily or you cry and do it. Hopefully people will find ways to approach it voluntarily and find its fun and healthy too.
BTW: We have just joined hands with the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia in order to expand our efforts for our project in the Atlas mountains of Morocco for a community based zero energy local food production.
I believe this to a degree also (not a binary decision), but I admit it is a belief AND a value judgment at the same time. I also accept that other have different values and my probability guesstimator is probably way off.
Again, I'm personally in high agreement, although I think we often do not think of energies we use, when we say we use negawatts.
An example, let's take the mantra "send bits, not atoms". To do this we need a huge comms infra. According to a silly comparison again, NYT calculated that a single google search is worth burning a 100W for one hour (or somesuch). Regardless of the accuracy of that statement (and yes, it again ignores both utility and quality), the point is: when we think we are using negawatts, are we really? LCA can approximate an answer, systemic effects through the society tell the whole picture. We humans mostly just delude ourselves.
We all justify all sorts of wasteful energy expenditures based on 'well compared to X, this is much less wasteful'. The examples are endless.
Yes, I think we carry a lot of historical-cultural weight with our attitudes on these.
- Why walk or ride a bike, when you can drive?
- Why live in a 18C temp during wintertime, when you can live in 26C temp? (or 30C in summertime, when you can do 20C through cooling)
- Why drive, when you can fly?
- Why do anything that takes more effort, it it costs (in $) only a little more to avoid that effort?
Nate is probably smiling if he's reading this as it may boil down a lot to the MPP. However, I think whatever the mechanism, a lot of the perception is cultural. That is, we're not just necessarily genetically inclined to waste a maximum amount of energy. Or even if we were, we can override our genetic urges up to a degree.
I think a lot of this wastefulness boils down to not "only we do because we can", but because we are so highly disconnect from what energy is and what it means (in different forms, qualities and converted to utilities).
Some years ago a friend and I had a project where we tried to combine the paradox that we sit in front computers 8 hours a day and get all sorts of ills from it, then we go to a gym to waste energy (both from ourselves and in terms of gym cooling/lighting/sauna/etc). And we have total disconnect of how much energy it takes to even power our own computers. Why not build an exercise bike chair to power up a laptop (60W at that time) and gain back some insight, improve health, skip the gym and systemically a bit of energy? Well, you can imagine it didn't go down well with the office furniture manufacturers we pitched it to :)
BTW, what is "zero energy local food production"?