The apartment below ours must have their heating on 80 degrees constantly. We hardly have to switch our heat on at all and our apartment is generally around 60f all the time. This month's energy bill was 60 bucks.
They must have received their first big heating bill recently, because their heat wasn't on for a couple of days. Of course, it slowly but surely went back up to 80 over the next day or two.
I'm an ex-pat Brit who moved here to marry a lovely American girl. I still don't understand the American psyche regarding energy saving. I'll wear socks/slippers/thermal underwear + an outer layer in the apartment and I'm comfortable if the apartment is 55. My wife and friends refuse to wrap up!
Not really being old enough to remember the 70s (born in '74), I have to ask: Did the UK have much more of an energy problem than the US? Is that why (at least some) UK folks will wear extra clothing to save on fuel costs? Or is it a more long term thing, stretching back to WW2?
Which leads me to my next thought: How did USians in the depression and UKians in WW2 heat their homes? I'm assuming PO will lead to similar conditions to these two periods, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned...
Speaking as an American who occasionally visits the UK...I think it goes back a lot longer than the '70s. England seems very cold compared to the U.S. I suspect it dates from WWII, or at least the post-war years. We did a lot better than Europe, since aside from Pearl Harbor, there was no fighting on U.S. ground. And until Pearl Harbor, we were selling arms to both sides and making out quite well. Oil was dirt-cheap for us back then; we were Saudi Arabia until 1970.
Everyone always says red wine is best served at room temperature. I always thought that advice was a bit odd, because it actually tastes best slightly chilled. Then I went to Europe, and realized that "room temperature" in Europe is "slightly chilled" in the U.S.
What I want to know is why British windows never have screens in them. It's a lot more pleasant to leave your windows open if there are screens to keep the bugs out.
As for the Depression...that was really still the dawn of the Age of Oil. Country folk could burn wood for heat. City folk would walk along the railroad tracks and pick up coal that fell off the trains.
Room temperature is certainly colder over here in the UK.
The brick walls and coal fires I mentioned in an earlier post mean that many houses are hard to heat. I did not live in a house with a central heating system to 1960 and it was fairly rare at the time. Although there were often fireplaces in each room by the end of the war coal was expensive and only one fire was usually lit. The boomer generation grew up in cold houses for the most part. Schools, factories and churches were likewise cold.
Older houses were even colder. The thatched timber frame houses shown in tourist books have glazed windows and ceilings. The older ones were not built that way. They had open windows with wooden 'mullion' bars across them and leather curtains across them at night. The floor was solid earth. There was no ceiling and the smoke from an open fire escaped through a hole in the roof. Such houses were common in rural areas up to 1700. Visitors to England might like to visit the open air museum at Singleton SW of London to see such houses restored to what they were like when they were built.
An acquaintance of mine is a chemistry professor at a Scottish university. He lectured once in California showing slides of his work with 12°C (54°F) given among the reaction conditions. His talk was well received but was asked at the end how he refrigerated his apparatus. It did not occur to his audience that in a cash strapped Scottish university imbued with a Calvinist frame of mind 12°C is room temperature.
Screens are not common because to our perception bugs are not common enough to cause a problem
In the days when it was quite common not have a refrigerator (up to 1965) screened larders were common but not other rooms.
54F. I hadn't thought to drop the thermostat quite that low. Right now I have it at 62. At night I use an electric blanket though, and I am quite comfortable.
I guess a lot of this is just another indication of how cheap energy has distorted our notions of 'normalcy'. I used to hear stories about people who in the summer would turn up the air conditioning because they felt like having a fire in the fireplace. These days I think (or I would hope) that more people would be inclined to just rent the video of the fireplace..
British windows don't have screens because there aren't any bugs. It's possible to leave windows open for hours or sit outside at night and never see a single bug. I find the mosquitos, deerflies and blackflies here in North America drive me mad, although the locals don't seem particularly bothered. There's just nothing like that in the UK.
Hahaha, you could be a '3 day week baby' dizzysaurus!
When the oil shock of 1973 hit (and I think there was a brief miners and / or dockers strike thrown in for good measure) there was a period of a month or two during the winter when we had planned rolling power cuts. The 3 day week was to minimise energy consumption by partially closing down industries and workplaces.
It was all quite romantic, no TV, candles, huddling together to keep warm, 'save water - bath with a friend', etc. Hence the noticeable spike in UK birth rates that followed 9 months later. :-)))
I'm trying out lower in-house temperatures. I'm surprised (spoiled Californian that I am) how comfortable I can be in the 50's. Sometimes a full day in the low 60's will get me down though.
It would be a lot less pleasant without hot meals.
I grew up in London in the 50's and 60's. Our house, built in the 1920s had old coal fire places in every room which we boarded up. We used electric bar heaters to "warm" the rooms we were in at the time. It helped a lot to be close to the heater.
No central heating.
The curtains were of a thick material to keep the warmth in the rooms. I can recall opening my bedroom curtains on many a winter morning to see ice on the INSIDE of the window.
Taking a bath in a tub of water that was hot but cooling all the time was interesting. The move from the tub to the towel through the cold air of the bathroom was the most critical move.
I don't think we were the only ones. The WSJ had a wonderful page one column several years ago about the joys of taking a bath in England in the winter.
My central heating and hot water boiler died 2 years ago and I decided to see how I would manage without it.
I have one small thermostatic fan heater which stops me from freezing downstairs, lol, and a small convector heater in my bedroom to warm my pyjamas or if it drops well below freezing outside.
Guess what? I've acclimatised. I need almost no heating. I live in a 1930s semi-detached house with minimal insulation, I'm sitting here in my pyjamas at past 3am with outside temp about 5 C (40 F) and I feel fine. You think I must be bonkers, maybe so. I guess the inside temp is about 50 to 55 F (10 to 12 C) and I would be fairly comfortable naked.
About 30 years ago there was a UK TV prog where people had to live like the late stone age - seriously, they had to grow their own food, solve their health probs, live in appropriate tech roundhouses, FOR A YEAR. Now that's what I call reality TV. They were debriefed a year after returning to modern life and the overwhelming thing they'd had a problem with was heat! They felt uncomfortable living in modern domestic temperatures.
Ice inside windows is fairly common here in Michigan if you have single-pane glass. I once had a place with a single-pane, aluminum (!) frame doorwall. My neighbor, with the same, could not use her living room in the winter.
I promptly covered both sides of the doorwall with heat-shrink plastic film, making it triple-pane. It still got some frost on the frame during the depths of winter, but overall it was far better than before. Amazing how far a little cleverness will take you.
In WW2 in the UK most folk still heated with coal. In fact being a coal miner got you out of serving in the armed forces, since it was a critical need.
Unfortunately the mines in the UK are closed and sealed and so it would be very difficult to return to those days, especially since the current estimate of reserves is not that great.
I have a similar situation. My home is atached to another and I know when my neighbors estranged husband is in town. Normally, I keep my house set at 60 during the day and am happy to wear extra clothing. Every Thursday my home heats up and I practically get a free sauna.
Our office is in an old factory with metal windows and no insulation. My boss saw another tenant all spread out at the local coffee shop just to keep warm. I guess I should find a teahouse.
Google carried headlines about prices dropping with lower energy costs. "It appears the big drop in energy prices during November has brought the overall inflation rate down considerably."
Apparantly when gas prices fall, consumer prices fall and industrial productivity goes up.
By deduction one could predict the reverse, which is that when gas prices rise than consumer prices will rise and productivity will drop. Gas prices are already headed back up, so maybe the future is not so rosy as the past month.
This still seems like an economy based on energy but I guess I'm just dense. Oh and if I digested the numbers right from the article. Inflation went up 1.2% in September but has only come back down 0.6 in October(0.2) & November (0.4) so the net is still increased prices.
I've noticed this discussion pops up occassionally on TOD, but I haven't seen a long thread about it...I recently discovered Richard Smalley, who wrote a very interesting paper in which he discusses what the GLOBAL energy needs of the world would be if all humans lived at the standard of living that N. Americans/Europeans do:
Of course, the amounts of energy the world would need for all humans to live like comfortable westerners are staggering. Yet, it seems most PO discussions focus on what WE in the west are going to do in the face of declining resources. In a sense, the world's PO predicament was exasperated by the west's voracious consumer appetite; and now most of our worry seems to be how WE are going to maintain some semblance to this standard of living - the rest of the world be damned! (Of course, nobody says rest of the world be damned - but one can argue that the lack of attention to how poor nations will fare creates this attitude anyway.) It seems grossly unfair, doesn't it? Of course I don't have any solutions here, although Smalley thinks it's possible to rectify the situation.
I find myself very preoccupied with the growing have/have-not division in the world. So what are your thoughts on this gross energy inequality? Sometimes I think that the humans will never get out of this feudal-type relationship with one other - that poor will always be around, to feed the needs of the rich...
(FYI - I discovered Smalley in one of Matt Simmons's presentations.)
Most people think about things in a relative sense - this is what my life has been like, and how will it be afterwards? Also, there is the fear issue. The big question comes down to population. If there will not be enough energy to sustain the present population (even if that is a "temporary" situation), then some percentage of the population must die. If it happens slowly, then low birth rates and natural death rates could keep it from being devastating, but I would not count on it. So how many will volunteer to be on the losing end? And truly, most Americans are only vaguely aware of the existence on the rest of the world. If you combine these things, then you get the situation you've observed.
Is it reasonable to expect that we would have a worldwide approach to the energy problem? I doubt that even the obvious basic steps will be taken in the US in time. A globally coordinated approach is probably fantasy. But look at it very long term - the American way of life is based on large quantities of cheap energy. We grew large and powerful because we had an entire continent to exploit. Having done that, we've now moved on to exploiting the rest of the world, but that requires even more energy. If it cannot be maintained, then the energy use disparity will be reduced.
I think you meant exacerbated - as in global PO was exacerbated (made worse) by wanton US overconsumption. Of course that has rightly led to the ROW being exasperated (pissed off) with US.
Regarding how poor nations "will" fare - see how they "are" faring - Eritrea, Zimbabwe - already unable to afford oil. Indonesia - former exporter, now importer, with attendant social/political/economic ills (not that they didn't have ills as an exporter...) I understand South Africa is now having "energy problems". The UK may be the first "rich" nation to suffer real PO problems. It's not a "will" problem, it's an "is" problem. Hitting poor countries first - but we don't care about them, of course. In the end, the poorest countries will be the best off, because they have come to depend less on petro infusion than we have, and have a better idea and memory of how to get along without it.
I tend to agree with you, after an initial destruction of agricultural markets, developing countries should do well for exactly the reasons you state also they will no long have to export their food because transportation costs.
just think of all those tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa plantations..
they could all be growing food for local people, also people will no longer be coated in pesticides which disable 30 million people a year and kill 1 million (see pesticide action network for details).
most of the vegans I have been chatting with are genuinly excited about the "localisation" revolution that is about to take place.
It's not just the destruction of ag markets that will impact "developing countries." This makes it sound so neat and tighty. What will happen will be destruction of lives. Millions, perhaps billions will starve to death, die from disease, or be killed in eruptions of war and civil disorder.
While it is true that, theoretically, there is plenty of ag land to allow a transition back toward self sufficiency, its not like all that land is going to be willingly redistributed back to peasants by caring governments so that they can start farming.
After a recent posting provided a link to an article about how the newly discovered methane on Titan is proof of the abiotic oil theory (no link ... sorry), I got a little upset. Bad science is one thing, but this was such a stretch that I immediately wanted to share it with someone that has the ear of the scientific community.
I considered forwarding it to JREF (James Randi Education Foundation), but they focus mainly on claims of the paranormal. That thought let me to Phil Plait, the original Bad Astronomer (www.badastronomy.com). His forte is educating the public to expose, well, bad astronomy. He goes after people that say the moon landings were a hoax, that there are ancient monuments on Mars, astrology and people that misuse science, especially astronomy.
I forwarded him a link with a brief note about abiotic oil theory and was pleased and suprised to actually receive a response today. I don't have his permission to repost, so I won't. I feel comfortable paraphrasing, though. He seemed to think that methane was common enough and easy enough to make that linking it to abiotic oil was a really, really weak argument. He stopped short of completely discounting the possibility, but that's good science at work.
With luck, if someone brings up the topic of abiotic oil with him, he'll now know about it and side with good science backed up by solid evidence, as he always does.
At the bottom of the old thread on Google's power woes, I provide a lot of numbers showing that electronics don't cost much to make or to use--as long as you're not trying to use the latest cutting-edge stuff. http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/10/121435/96#8
For example, manufacturing a square centimeter of silicon--containing enough transistors for dozens of complete 1990-era PC's--requires only half a kilowatt-hour.
Running my laptop, with its multi-GHz processor, requires less than 30 watts. If energy became ten times as expensive, watching a DVD would cost a whopping six cents.
Today, transferring information costs less than $1 per gigabyte. If energy got ten times as expensive, it would still cost less than a penny per megabyte. VOIP would cost pennies per minute.
Even if electricity became 100 times as expensive, computers would still be affordable. As long as society doesn't fall apart so thoroughly that infrastructure becomes un-maintainable, we can still have networked computers, computer-driven infrastructure, and computer-aided communications.
No previous energy-poor society has had these things. Free global press, instant global communication, and large-scale human networks for sharing wisdom and criticism, will probably all survive. This implies that the future will not be like the past, and may be quite a bit better.
And what if we decide to use that silicon to make solar panels instead?
Oh, I'm sure we'll have technology for a long time to come, but I don't think it will be sustainable indefinitely. It will unwind, in the reverse order it was built. People who can't afford food or heat are not going to buy computers or pay for Internet service. The poor will be affected first, then the middle class, and the rich last. Computers and the Internet will lose a lot of their value when there are fewer users. Eventually, they will be a toy of the wealthy, and then they'll fade away. By then, no one will miss them.
For example, manufacturing a square centimeter of silicon--containing enough transistors for dozens of complete 1990-era PC's--requires only half a kilowatt-hour.
The fabrication of computer chips is undoubtedly the most complex process in
industry. Consider a day's production in a representative modern plant (c. 1998).
The raw material input for this process consists of approximately 700 8-inch wafers
of ultra-pure silicon metal, with a total mass of 14.2 kg. Each wafer has a thickness
of 0.76 mm and a cubic volume of 8.55 cm3.
The fabrication process begins with cleaning, by means of an acid bath. The
next step is doping, by molecular diffusion. Typical dopants are silane,
dichlorosilane, phosphine, arsine, or diborane. This step is followed by surface
oxidation or epitaxy (using pure oxygen) and/or vapor deposition of a thin photoresist
film, either positive or negative. Next comes photolithography, which
`exposes' the film to light in a complex pattern representing the circuitry. This is
followed by an etching acid bath, which removes either the exposed (light sensitive)
or unexposed (insensitive) portion of the film, leaving the remainder. The
doping-epitaxy or film deposition--photolithography -- etching sequence may be
repeated many times, leaving successive layers of circuitry alternating with layers of
non-conducting oxides. Finally there is a metalization and passivation step before the
wafer is tested and cut into individual chips.
Acids (HF, HCL, HNO3 and H2SO4) and solvents are used at several stages in
the sequence. Bases (mainly ammonia and caustic soda) are used to control pH and
to neutralize acid wastes. Finally, very large amounts of neutral gases (mainly
nitrogen, but also some argon and helium) are used as vapor carriers, and even
larger amounts of purified water and air are used for a variety of purposes.
The process chemicals used in this plant, per day (not including air) are as
follows, in kg:
Gases (mostly nitrogen) 102 826
Dopants 2.15
Etchants (dry) 52.2
Acids & bases 5 372
Solvents & developers 3 274
Water (liquid) 3 648 000
Water (vapor) 81 600
Total 3 841 141
Total, excluding water 228 661
It is easy to verify that for each kilogram of silicon wafer input 161 kg of other
chemicals, not including air or water, are used and discarded. The yield of the
process is less than 100%, so, for each kilogram of usable silicon chips from the
process at least 200 kg of chemicals (dry weight) are consumed and discarded.
Now it is of some interest to consider exergies. The exergy embodied in pure
silicon metal is 30.43 mJ/kg, although the process of reduction from silica and
purification to electronic grade (99.9999% pure) is very energy intensive (about 234
mJ/kg). The exergy embodied in fabrication process input chemicals, however, is
approximately 788 mJ per kg of silicon processed, if water is not counted. (I should
acknowledge that I could not calculate the exergies of all of the organic chemicals
used, some of which are very obscure. It was necessary to make some
approximations, resulting in an overall uncertainty of the order of 10% or so.) If the
exergy of ultra-pure water is included, the total exergy embodied in the inputs is
much larger - 2100 mJ/kg, or roughly 70 times the exergy embodied in the silicon
itself. The surprise is that, because so much is required, ultra-pure water accounts
for almost two thirds of the exergy inputs to the process. (Seawater is an
environmental sink, with an exergy of zero, by definition, but pure fresh water has a
small but non-zero exergy.)
But that is not the whole story either. If, in the spirit of LCA, we also take
into account the exergy inputs to the processes of manufacturing the major bulk
chemicals. Again, I do not have manufacturing data for the solvents and photoresists,
so the totals above are significantly underestimated. Nevertheless, it is
interesting to note that utility energy (roughly equivalent to exergy) used indirectly in
manufacturing bulk chemicals amounts to at least a further 7000 mJ/kg, mostly
attributable to the energy (exergy) required to separate nitrogen from oxygen in air! In short, the micro-electronic products that are commonly cited as examples
of dematerialization are really illustrations of quite a different and less favorable
trend, namely a sharply increasing ratio of process wastes to finished goods.
Difficult to take seriously someone who calls silicon a metal.
Even with these figures the half gram of a typical microprocessor would only produce 100g of waste. I have seen more waste in the packaging of a shirt. One each for the world would only produce 650 thousand tonnes of waste. Mining produces billions of tonnes of waste a year.
The ratio of weight of waste to weight of useful product is not a very meaningful figure when the functionality of the material is increasing by orders of magnitude.
If we were forced or chose to limit the performance of computers to what they are today we could shrink the size and energy inputs to a tenth of today's values in a decade.
The less than 10mg of silicon in a 6 pin 2.7 x 2.9mm package of a 40 cent PIC microcontroller has more power than the 8088 of the original IBM PC and a score of peripheral chips using about half a gram of silicon and costing about $80 and uses vastly less power to make and to run.
I suspect the figures are waste consumption are out of date. Recycling of materials has increased greatly and many wet processes are becoming dry.
Energy limitations may limit the rampant growth in functionality but it will be a very long time before it will force a decrease in functionality.
Leanan, computer circuits are worth vastly more than solar panels. That will be true even in an era of expensive energy.
Put it this way. Suppose that, in addition to the energy used to process a cm^2 of silicon into a valuable computer, you also had to pay for all the energy that that cm^2 would gather in the next 50 years if it were a solar cell instead. That's about 1/30 watt X 8 hours X 365 X 20, or less than 5 kWh. If energy goes to $1 per kWh, the solar-cell value of that chunk of silicon can't be more than $5. A computer would let you get news from nearby towns (any robber bands heading your way?), track weather forecasts (when is the best time to harvest?), and stay in touch with family members you can't easily travel to visit.
Khebab, the fact that a cm^2 of solar cell gathers less than 5 kWh over its life (and since solar cells do repay their energy cost of manufacture) proves that silicon doesn't take much energy per square centimeter to process. Before you differ with my assertion, read my numbers and citations. I checked both a semiconductor roadmap and AMD's figures for energy used.
Energy cost per kg is a nearly-useless measure of energy cost per cm^2. Unless you find a recent source for energy per cm^2 that contradicts mine, I'll stand by my claims and figures.
People, there's something wrong if you have to argue with every piece of good news, no matter how carefully substantiated. Basic computers, a major component of modern civilization's infrastructure, and a potentially major contributor to many kinds of efficiency, will still be viable with $1/kWh or even $10/kWh energy.
Furthermore, it will be easy and fast to make computers power-efficient, as soon as peak oil hits: just downgrade the CPU's (or even just swap in slower clocks) and upgrade the software. People habitually replace their computers every few years; they won't even have to change their buying habits. Unless civilization collapses to the point that we lose technology altogether, computers will be remain affordable--personally, economically, and environmentally.
A computer would let you get news from nearby towns (any robber bands heading your way?), track weather forecasts (when is the best time to harvest?), and stay in touch with family members you can't easily travel to visit.
But only if the nearby towns have computers and Internet service, and there are weather satellites and a weather service, etc.
That's what I mean when I say it will slowly unwind. We won't lose computers overnight. We'll lose them gradually. People will cancel their Internet service because they won't be able to afford it. The computer will be worth a lot less without Internet service, so when it breaks, they don't replace it. More and more people do this, until it's like the early '80s, when computers were the pricy toys of a few geeks. Meanwhile, large sections of the Internet start to go dark. eBay and Amazon go belly-up, because shipping is outrageous, no one buys online any more and they can no longer afford to pay for natural gas for the power plants that run their servers. Many people who maintain Web sites will stop, because they can't afford the hosting fees. Web hosting companies and ISPs will start to go under. You can never be sure if you'll be able to reach a given web site or e-mail address on any given day, further reducing the value of computers. The computer manufacturers start to go out of business. Not enough people are buying to keep them in business.
I think the cost of the technical expertise is going to be the hardest to deal with. Cheap energy allowed us to build an elaborate social structure that allows specialization. A hundred years ago, 97% of the American population were farmers. Now it's the opposite: 97% of us are not farmers.
Will we be able to afford that post-peak? I don't think so. We will not have the luxury of having large sections of the population not working directly on survival. We will not have the communication and connection it takes to train and support the kind of technical specialists we have today. As Tainter points out, complexity has an energy cost. We won't be able to keep paying it once the cheap oil is gone.
It all depends how far down we go. Personally, I will cancel the cable and reduce many other services long before I give up Internet access. Knowledge is still power. In spite of being an EE, I'm no technology freak - I don't love the Internet for the technology or for the shopping, I love it for the access to information. I don't need much computing power to run a browser (a VIA C3 uses a few watts). From medical issues to real news to TOD, the Internet is my lifeline to what is really happening in the world around me. How to build a chicken coop? How to fix whatever? I'm sure it will be part of learning to garden properly. Think about how hard it was to find out about things before about 1996!
That it does. I would almost say: if the internet survives then we are safe. Unfortunately that is not guaranteed, as things unfold and if the probabilities indicate the internet will not survive, then the saving of useful information becomes paramount.
I don't think it will collapse overnight. But I do think the Internet will ultimately be unsustainable. I, too, would keep my Internet connection over, say, cable TV. But I don't expect cable TV to survive, either.
And will the Internet still be as valuable to you if those medical and chicken-coop-building sites go dark? They cost money for someone to maintain, and those people or companies will stop doing it when they can no longer afford it. What if electricity becomes intermittent, and you can never tell if the part of Internet you are interested in will be available? What if money is tight, and you must choose between, say, a water pump and a new computer, or food and your ISP bill?
A big part of the appeal of the Internet is all the free content you can get on the Web. But of course, it's not really free. Someone is paying for it. Will they keep paying for it? I doubt it.
I don't think it will collapse overnight. But I do think the Internet will ultimately be unsustainable. I, too, would keep my Internet connection over, say, cable TV. But I don't expect cable TV to survive, either.
I work for the cable company, so I have a thought or two on that.
First thought is that cable companies are dependent on fleets of trucks to service and maintain their fiber optic and coaxial cable plants. Every installation, disconnection, service call, routine maintenance, service expansion or outage repair requires someone to sit their butt in a truck and drive to where the work needs to be done. All that driving around costs big money, even without exploded gasoline prices.
Second is that most cable companies have large electric bills. Not as large as a phone system would due to cable wires not being electrified, but it is still necessary to power our headends as well as amplify the signal we send out which requires a large number of equipment connected to commercial power sources.
The third and perhaps the most disturbing is our dependence on elecricity to provide signal to our customers. The power can be on at a customer's home, but they can be without cable if our amplifiers are offline in an adjoining area. In my local office, that is currently the number one source of service outages; our service is fine, but the electricity is out somewhere in town taking key amplifiers offline.
Even if a customer has a generator, even if we run a generator at our headend if necessary, chances are that many people will not be getting their cable TV, internet, and now phone. (My company like the other big cable companies is now offering phone service.) Why? With the amplifiers between our headend and the customer's home out, no signal gets through. We do have backup generators, but not enough to fix widespread or multiple power outages. They also have to be picked up, driven to the site and powered, all of which consumes more fuel.
Will the industry survive? Time will tell. Just remember that people like their bread and circuses. And have no doubt, TV is the best circus ever invented.
Cable is a very high bandwidth pipe. I'm not surprised you need amplifiers. Phone lines need to be electrified because they're supporting decades-old standards.
My wireless hub draws 4 watts with three Ethernet cables plugged in. With better antennas, it could probably network half a dozen houses. With software, it could build a wireless mesh network. I wouldn't want to try to deliver video over such a system, but I'd certainly expect that 1990-level net services could be delivered: enough for email and Google Groups (usenet).
I don't know how much energy it would take to push 26 kbps over ten miles of POTS, but I doubt it's more than a watt or two these days.
So I'm not saying that the existing delivery systems could be preserved entire... but we still have lots of POTS wire, and our cell network is improving very rapidly (I know, I know, power to the cell towers), and there are lots of things that could be done with off-the-shelf wireless hardware.
The third and perhaps the most disturbing is our dependence on elecricity to provide signal to our customers. The power can be on at a customer's home, but they can be without cable if our amplifiers are offline in an adjoining area.
Okay, why?
The venerable phone system is based on power from the head end; the phone proper runs off power that comes down the line, and the exchanges have banks of batteries to supply them during outages. You're a cable company, you could string a second line for power or send DC power down the center conductor of the coax. WTF aren't your systems designed to do that?
They must have received their first big heating bill recently, because their heat wasn't on for a couple of days. Of course, it slowly but surely went back up to 80 over the next day or two.
I'm an ex-pat Brit who moved here to marry a lovely American girl. I still don't understand the American psyche regarding energy saving. I'll wear socks/slippers/thermal underwear + an outer layer in the apartment and I'm comfortable if the apartment is 55. My wife and friends refuse to wrap up!
Not really being old enough to remember the 70s (born in '74), I have to ask: Did the UK have much more of an energy problem than the US? Is that why (at least some) UK folks will wear extra clothing to save on fuel costs? Or is it a more long term thing, stretching back to WW2?
Which leads me to my next thought: How did USians in the depression and UKians in WW2 heat their homes? I'm assuming PO will lead to similar conditions to these two periods, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned...
Everyone always says red wine is best served at room temperature. I always thought that advice was a bit odd, because it actually tastes best slightly chilled. Then I went to Europe, and realized that "room temperature" in Europe is "slightly chilled" in the U.S.
What I want to know is why British windows never have screens in them. It's a lot more pleasant to leave your windows open if there are screens to keep the bugs out.
As for the Depression...that was really still the dawn of the Age of Oil. Country folk could burn wood for heat. City folk would walk along the railroad tracks and pick up coal that fell off the trains.
The brick walls and coal fires I mentioned in an earlier post mean that many houses are hard to heat. I did not live in a house with a central heating system to 1960 and it was fairly rare at the time. Although there were often fireplaces in each room by the end of the war coal was expensive and only one fire was usually lit. The boomer generation grew up in cold houses for the most part. Schools, factories and churches were likewise cold.
Older houses were even colder. The thatched timber frame houses shown in tourist books have glazed windows and ceilings. The older ones were not built that way. They had open windows with wooden 'mullion' bars across them and leather curtains across them at night. The floor was solid earth. There was no ceiling and the smoke from an open fire escaped through a hole in the roof. Such houses were common in rural areas up to 1700. Visitors to England might like to visit the open air museum at Singleton SW of London to see such houses restored to what they were like when they were built.
An acquaintance of mine is a chemistry professor at a Scottish university. He lectured once in California showing slides of his work with 12°C (54°F) given among the reaction conditions. His talk was well received but was asked at the end how he refrigerated his apparatus. It did not occur to his audience that in a cash strapped Scottish university imbued with a Calvinist frame of mind 12°C is room temperature.
Screens are not common because to our perception bugs are not common enough to cause a problem
In the days when it was quite common not have a refrigerator (up to 1965) screened larders were common but not other rooms.
When the oil shock of 1973 hit (and I think there was a brief miners and / or dockers strike thrown in for good measure) there was a period of a month or two during the winter when we had planned rolling power cuts. The 3 day week was to minimise energy consumption by partially closing down industries and workplaces.
It was all quite romantic, no TV, candles, huddling together to keep warm, 'save water - bath with a friend', etc. Hence the noticeable spike in UK birth rates that followed 9 months later. :-)))
It would be a lot less pleasant without hot meals.
No central heating.
The curtains were of a thick material to keep the warmth in the rooms. I can recall opening my bedroom curtains on many a winter morning to see ice on the INSIDE of the window.
Taking a bath in a tub of water that was hot but cooling all the time was interesting. The move from the tub to the towel through the cold air of the bathroom was the most critical move.
I don't think we were the only ones. The WSJ had a wonderful page one column several years ago about the joys of taking a bath in England in the winter.
My central heating and hot water boiler died 2 years ago and I decided to see how I would manage without it.
I have one small thermostatic fan heater which stops me from freezing downstairs, lol, and a small convector heater in my bedroom to warm my pyjamas or if it drops well below freezing outside.
Guess what? I've acclimatised. I need almost no heating. I live in a 1930s semi-detached house with minimal insulation, I'm sitting here in my pyjamas at past 3am with outside temp about 5 C (40 F) and I feel fine. You think I must be bonkers, maybe so. I guess the inside temp is about 50 to 55 F (10 to 12 C) and I would be fairly comfortable naked.
About 30 years ago there was a UK TV prog where people had to live like the late stone age - seriously, they had to grow their own food, solve their health probs, live in appropriate tech roundhouses, FOR A YEAR. Now that's what I call reality TV. They were debriefed a year after returning to modern life and the overwhelming thing they'd had a problem with was heat! They felt uncomfortable living in modern domestic temperatures.
I promptly covered both sides of the doorwall with heat-shrink plastic film, making it triple-pane. It still got some frost on the frame during the depths of winter, but overall it was far better than before. Amazing how far a little cleverness will take you.
Unfortunately the mines in the UK are closed and sealed and so it would be very difficult to return to those days, especially since the current estimate of reserves is not that great.
Our office is in an old factory with metal windows and no insulation. My boss saw another tenant all spread out at the local coffee shop just to keep warm. I guess I should find a teahouse.
Google carried headlines about prices dropping with lower energy costs. "It appears the big drop in energy prices during November has brought the overall inflation rate down considerably."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4531906.stm
Have they looked at the gas pumps this week?
Todays "GREAT News" on consumer prices is directly linked to the fall in gas prices. See the Yahoo headline and discussion.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051215/economy.html?.v=19
Apparantly when gas prices fall, consumer prices fall and industrial productivity goes up.
By deduction one could predict the reverse, which is that when gas prices rise than consumer prices will rise and productivity will drop. Gas prices are already headed back up, so maybe the future is not so rosy as the past month.
This still seems like an economy based on energy but I guess I'm just dense. Oh and if I digested the numbers right from the article. Inflation went up 1.2% in September but has only come back down 0.6 in October(0.2) & November (0.4) so the net is still increased prices.
I've noticed this discussion pops up occassionally on TOD, but I haven't seen a long thread about it...I recently discovered Richard Smalley, who wrote a very interesting paper in which he discusses what the GLOBAL energy needs of the world would be if all humans lived at the standard of living that N. Americans/Europeans do:
http://cohesion.rice.edu/NaturalSciences/Smalley/emplibrary/120204%20MRS%20Boston.pdf
Of course, the amounts of energy the world would need for all humans to live like comfortable westerners are staggering. Yet, it seems most PO discussions focus on what WE in the west are going to do in the face of declining resources. In a sense, the world's PO predicament was exasperated by the west's voracious consumer appetite; and now most of our worry seems to be how WE are going to maintain some semblance to this standard of living - the rest of the world be damned! (Of course, nobody says rest of the world be damned - but one can argue that the lack of attention to how poor nations will fare creates this attitude anyway.) It seems grossly unfair, doesn't it? Of course I don't have any solutions here, although Smalley thinks it's possible to rectify the situation.
I find myself very preoccupied with the growing have/have-not division in the world. So what are your thoughts on this gross energy inequality? Sometimes I think that the humans will never get out of this feudal-type relationship with one other - that poor will always be around, to feed the needs of the rich...
(FYI - I discovered Smalley in one of Matt Simmons's presentations.)
Is it reasonable to expect that we would have a worldwide approach to the energy problem? I doubt that even the obvious basic steps will be taken in the US in time. A globally coordinated approach is probably fantasy. But look at it very long term - the American way of life is based on large quantities of cheap energy. We grew large and powerful because we had an entire continent to exploit. Having done that, we've now moved on to exploiting the rest of the world, but that requires even more energy. If it cannot be maintained, then the energy use disparity will be reduced.
Regarding how poor nations "will" fare - see how they "are" faring - Eritrea, Zimbabwe - already unable to afford oil. Indonesia - former exporter, now importer, with attendant social/political/economic ills (not that they didn't have ills as an exporter...) I understand South Africa is now having "energy problems". The UK may be the first "rich" nation to suffer real PO problems. It's not a "will" problem, it's an "is" problem. Hitting poor countries first - but we don't care about them, of course. In the end, the poorest countries will be the best off, because they have come to depend less on petro infusion than we have, and have a better idea and memory of how to get along without it.
just think of all those tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa plantations..
they could all be growing food for local people, also people will no longer be coated in pesticides which disable 30 million people a year and kill 1 million (see pesticide action network for details).
most of the vegans I have been chatting with are genuinly excited about the "localisation" revolution that is about to take place.
While it is true that, theoretically, there is plenty of ag land to allow a transition back toward self sufficiency, its not like all that land is going to be willingly redistributed back to peasants by caring governments so that they can start farming.
IEA: Stupid, Manipulative or Corrupt?
Check it out.
I considered forwarding it to JREF (James Randi Education Foundation), but they focus mainly on claims of the paranormal. That thought let me to Phil Plait, the original Bad Astronomer (www.badastronomy.com). His forte is educating the public to expose, well, bad astronomy. He goes after people that say the moon landings were a hoax, that there are ancient monuments on Mars, astrology and people that misuse science, especially astronomy.
I forwarded him a link with a brief note about abiotic oil theory and was pleased and suprised to actually receive a response today. I don't have his permission to repost, so I won't. I feel comfortable paraphrasing, though. He seemed to think that methane was common enough and easy enough to make that linking it to abiotic oil was a really, really weak argument. He stopped short of completely discounting the possibility, but that's good science at work.
With luck, if someone brings up the topic of abiotic oil with him, he'll now know about it and side with good science backed up by solid evidence, as he always does.
At the bottom of the old thread on Google's power woes, I provide a lot of numbers showing that electronics don't cost much to make or to use--as long as you're not trying to use the latest cutting-edge stuff.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/10/121435/96#8
For example, manufacturing a square centimeter of silicon--containing enough transistors for dozens of complete 1990-era PC's--requires only half a kilowatt-hour.
Running my laptop, with its multi-GHz processor, requires less than 30 watts. If energy became ten times as expensive, watching a DVD would cost a whopping six cents.
Today, transferring information costs less than $1 per gigabyte. If energy got ten times as expensive, it would still cost less than a penny per megabyte. VOIP would cost pennies per minute.
Even if electricity became 100 times as expensive, computers would still be affordable. As long as society doesn't fall apart so thoroughly that infrastructure becomes un-maintainable, we can still have networked computers, computer-driven infrastructure, and computer-aided communications.
No previous energy-poor society has had these things. Free global press, instant global communication, and large-scale human networks for sharing wisdom and criticism, will probably all survive. This implies that the future will not be like the past, and may be quite a bit better.
Chris
Oh, I'm sure we'll have technology for a long time to come, but I don't think it will be sustainable indefinitely. It will unwind, in the reverse order it was built. People who can't afford food or heat are not going to buy computers or pay for Internet service. The poor will be affected first, then the middle class, and the rich last. Computers and the Internet will lose a lot of their value when there are fewer users. Eventually, they will be a toy of the wealthy, and then they'll fade away. By then, no one will miss them.
I beg to differ! from Robert U. Ayres, Leslie W. Ayres & Benjamin Warr. IS THE US ECONOMY DEMATERIALIZING? MAIN INDICATORS AND DRIVERS. page 19.
Even with these figures the half gram of a typical microprocessor would only produce 100g of waste. I have seen more waste in the packaging of a shirt. One each for the world would only produce 650 thousand tonnes of waste. Mining produces billions of tonnes of waste a year.
The ratio of weight of waste to weight of useful product is not a very meaningful figure when the functionality of the material is increasing by orders of magnitude.
If we were forced or chose to limit the performance of computers to what they are today we could shrink the size and energy inputs to a tenth of today's values in a decade.
The less than 10mg of silicon in a 6 pin 2.7 x 2.9mm package of a 40 cent PIC microcontroller has more power than the 8088 of the original IBM PC and a score of peripheral chips using about half a gram of silicon and costing about $80 and uses vastly less power to make and to run.
I suspect the figures are waste consumption are out of date. Recycling of materials has increased greatly and many wet processes are becoming dry.
Energy limitations may limit the rampant growth in functionality but it will be a very long time before it will force a decrease in functionality.
Put it this way. Suppose that, in addition to the energy used to process a cm^2 of silicon into a valuable computer, you also had to pay for all the energy that that cm^2 would gather in the next 50 years if it were a solar cell instead. That's about 1/30 watt X 8 hours X 365 X 20, or less than 5 kWh. If energy goes to $1 per kWh, the solar-cell value of that chunk of silicon can't be more than $5. A computer would let you get news from nearby towns (any robber bands heading your way?), track weather forecasts (when is the best time to harvest?), and stay in touch with family members you can't easily travel to visit.
Khebab, the fact that a cm^2 of solar cell gathers less than 5 kWh over its life (and since solar cells do repay their energy cost of manufacture) proves that silicon doesn't take much energy per square centimeter to process. Before you differ with my assertion, read my numbers and citations. I checked both a semiconductor roadmap and AMD's figures for energy used.
Energy cost per kg is a nearly-useless measure of energy cost per cm^2. Unless you find a recent source for energy per cm^2 that contradicts mine, I'll stand by my claims and figures.
People, there's something wrong if you have to argue with every piece of good news, no matter how carefully substantiated. Basic computers, a major component of modern civilization's infrastructure, and a potentially major contributor to many kinds of efficiency, will still be viable with $1/kWh or even $10/kWh energy.
Furthermore, it will be easy and fast to make computers power-efficient, as soon as peak oil hits: just downgrade the CPU's (or even just swap in slower clocks) and upgrade the software. People habitually replace their computers every few years; they won't even have to change their buying habits. Unless civilization collapses to the point that we lose technology altogether, computers will be remain affordable--personally, economically, and environmentally.
Chris
But only if the nearby towns have computers and Internet service, and there are weather satellites and a weather service, etc.
That's what I mean when I say it will slowly unwind. We won't lose computers overnight. We'll lose them gradually. People will cancel their Internet service because they won't be able to afford it. The computer will be worth a lot less without Internet service, so when it breaks, they don't replace it. More and more people do this, until it's like the early '80s, when computers were the pricy toys of a few geeks. Meanwhile, large sections of the Internet start to go dark. eBay and Amazon go belly-up, because shipping is outrageous, no one buys online any more and they can no longer afford to pay for natural gas for the power plants that run their servers. Many people who maintain Web sites will stop, because they can't afford the hosting fees. Web hosting companies and ISPs will start to go under. You can never be sure if you'll be able to reach a given web site or e-mail address on any given day, further reducing the value of computers. The computer manufacturers start to go out of business. Not enough people are buying to keep them in business.
I think the cost of the technical expertise is going to be the hardest to deal with. Cheap energy allowed us to build an elaborate social structure that allows specialization. A hundred years ago, 97% of the American population were farmers. Now it's the opposite: 97% of us are not farmers.
Will we be able to afford that post-peak? I don't think so. We will not have the luxury of having large sections of the population not working directly on survival. We will not have the communication and connection it takes to train and support the kind of technical specialists we have today. As Tainter points out, complexity has an energy cost. We won't be able to keep paying it once the cheap oil is gone.
And will the Internet still be as valuable to you if those medical and chicken-coop-building sites go dark? They cost money for someone to maintain, and those people or companies will stop doing it when they can no longer afford it. What if electricity becomes intermittent, and you can never tell if the part of Internet you are interested in will be available? What if money is tight, and you must choose between, say, a water pump and a new computer, or food and your ISP bill?
A big part of the appeal of the Internet is all the free content you can get on the Web. But of course, it's not really free. Someone is paying for it. Will they keep paying for it? I doubt it.
I work for the cable company, so I have a thought or two on that.
First thought is that cable companies are dependent on fleets of trucks to service and maintain their fiber optic and coaxial cable plants. Every installation, disconnection, service call, routine maintenance, service expansion or outage repair requires someone to sit their butt in a truck and drive to where the work needs to be done. All that driving around costs big money, even without exploded gasoline prices.
Second is that most cable companies have large electric bills. Not as large as a phone system would due to cable wires not being electrified, but it is still necessary to power our headends as well as amplify the signal we send out which requires a large number of equipment connected to commercial power sources.
The third and perhaps the most disturbing is our dependence on elecricity to provide signal to our customers. The power can be on at a customer's home, but they can be without cable if our amplifiers are offline in an adjoining area. In my local office, that is currently the number one source of service outages; our service is fine, but the electricity is out somewhere in town taking key amplifiers offline.
Even if a customer has a generator, even if we run a generator at our headend if necessary, chances are that many people will not be getting their cable TV, internet, and now phone. (My company like the other big cable companies is now offering phone service.) Why? With the amplifiers between our headend and the customer's home out, no signal gets through. We do have backup generators, but not enough to fix widespread or multiple power outages. They also have to be picked up, driven to the site and powered, all of which consumes more fuel.
Will the industry survive? Time will tell. Just remember that people like their bread and circuses. And have no doubt, TV is the best circus ever invented.
My wireless hub draws 4 watts with three Ethernet cables plugged in. With better antennas, it could probably network half a dozen houses. With software, it could build a wireless mesh network. I wouldn't want to try to deliver video over such a system, but I'd certainly expect that 1990-level net services could be delivered: enough for email and Google Groups (usenet).
I don't know how much energy it would take to push 26 kbps over ten miles of POTS, but I doubt it's more than a watt or two these days.
So I'm not saying that the existing delivery systems could be preserved entire... but we still have lots of POTS wire, and our cell network is improving very rapidly (I know, I know, power to the cell towers), and there are lots of things that could be done with off-the-shelf wireless hardware.
Chris
The venerable phone system is based on power from the head end; the phone proper runs off power that comes down the line, and the exchanges have banks of batteries to supply them during outages. You're a cable company, you could string a second line for power or send DC power down the center conductor of the coax. WTF aren't your systems designed to do that?