I basically agree with all of the first part of this, but towards the end it seems to miss a very important point. You say
we should coordinate to do more and better natural resource extraction because doing so will cause more wealth and human flourishing to exist
but some natural resources are in fact limited (with hard limits and/or soft ones where the costs go up drastically as you try to extract more), which means that doing more natural resource extraction now may mean having to do less in the future, and the damage done by running out may be less if we do it more gradually starting earlier.
Historically, people arguing for limiting resource-extraction have tended to turn out to have been too pessimistic about the limits, but that doesn’t mean there are no limits.
For instance: you showed that graph of crude oil extraction. A crude fit to the bit before 1971 is daily_megabarrels = 0.323 exp(0.070(year-1900)). If we suppose that the only reason reality stopped matching this is that “elites stopped being competent, unified and benevolent” and imagine continuing on that trajectory, then by the year 2100 the total amount of oil extracted (since 1930) would be about 2 quadrillion barrels. The actual figure to date is about 1 trillion. It does not seem plausible to me that there is 2000x as much oil extractible at any cost as the total amount we have extracted so far. Even by 2022, the model suggests ~8 trillion barrels extracted, or about 8x what actually has been; it seems highly plausible that that’s more than there is, or at any rate more than can be extracted at reasonable cost.
(Is the exponential model unreasonably pessimistic? Well, your own description of what was happening before 1971 was, specifically, “exponential growth in energy”. If we don’t mind using 4 parameters instead of 2 we can get about as good a fit as the exponential above—daily_megabarrels = 4.73 + 1.96e-5(y-1921.6)^3.74. In that case, total extraction to 2100 would be “only” 70x what we have actually extracted to date.)
(Is it unreasonable for me to be talking specifically about oil when what matters is total energy? It might be, if I were arguing specifically that we shouldn’t be aiming to get a lot of energy. But I’m not arguing that; perhaps we should be aiming for that; my point is just that specific resources may be meaningfully depletable, and that that means that some things under the heading of “more and better natural resource extraction” could actually be bad ideas.)
So we should definitely coordinate to do more efficient resource extraction, and to find ways to use effectively-unlimited resources like sunlight, but for resources we might realistically run out of some time in the foreseeable future there’s a tradeoff between prosperity now and possible collapse later and in some of these cases we may instead need to coordinate on extracting less.
(Important complication: extracting more now may help us with figuring out ways to be more efficient, finding new resources, and mitigating the damage when we run out, in which case we should be extracting faster than simpler models of the tradeoff would suggest.)
I’m friendly to basically everything you’ve said, gjm ;-)
Once we are thinking in terms of collecting certain kinds of important resources now versus saving those important resources for some time in the deeper future…
...we’re already working with the core premise: that there ARE important resources (and energy is one of the most important).
Details about early or late usage of this or that resource are (relatively speaking) details.
Oil and coal are not things I’m not particularly in love with. Thorium might be better, I think? The sun seems likely to be around for a LONG time and solar panels in space seems like an idea with a LOT of room to expand!
There has to be “ideas” here (jason’s OP on ideas is right that they matter), but I think the ideas have to be ABOUT energy and atoms and physical plans for those ideas to to turn into something that makes human lives better.
(Image source!) In practice, right now: oil and coal are our primary sources. For Earth right now, solar is still negligible, but if eventually we have asteroid minining and space solar arrays, I’d expect (and hope!) that that stuff would become the dominating term in the energy budget.
The idea of just “putting an end to all that fossil fuel stuff” in the near future seems either confused or evil to me. EITHER people proposing that might be UNAWARE of the entailment in terms of human misery of halting this stuff without having something better ready to go, OR ELSE they might be AWARE of the consequences and misanthropically delighted with the idea of fewer humans doing fewer things?
I’m pro-human. Hence I’m pro-energy.
I think climate change might be an “elephant in the room” when it comes to energy policy?
But I’m also in favor of weather and climate control if we can get those too… Like my answer is “optimism” and “moar engineering!” to basically everything.
Controlling the climate will take MORE resources to accomplish, not less! If, for example, humans are going to reverse the desertification of the Sahara, and use the new forests as carbon sinks, that will be a HUGE project that involves moving around a LOT of dirt and water and seeds and chemistry and so on. I’m not precisely sure that fixing the Sahara would be the specific best use of resources, but I do think that whatever the right ideas are, they have to be ideas about resources and atoms and physical reality.
I basically agree with all of the first part of this, but towards the end it seems to miss a very important point. You say
but some natural resources are in fact limited (with hard limits and/or soft ones where the costs go up drastically as you try to extract more), which means that doing more natural resource extraction now may mean having to do less in the future, and the damage done by running out may be less if we do it more gradually starting earlier.
Historically, people arguing for limiting resource-extraction have tended to turn out to have been too pessimistic about the limits, but that doesn’t mean there are no limits.
For instance: you showed that graph of crude oil extraction. A crude fit to the bit before 1971 is daily_megabarrels = 0.323 exp(0.070(year-1900)). If we suppose that the only reason reality stopped matching this is that “elites stopped being competent, unified and benevolent” and imagine continuing on that trajectory, then by the year 2100 the total amount of oil extracted (since 1930) would be about 2 quadrillion barrels. The actual figure to date is about 1 trillion. It does not seem plausible to me that there is 2000x as much oil extractible at any cost as the total amount we have extracted so far. Even by 2022, the model suggests ~8 trillion barrels extracted, or about 8x what actually has been; it seems highly plausible that that’s more than there is, or at any rate more than can be extracted at reasonable cost.
(Is the exponential model unreasonably pessimistic? Well, your own description of what was happening before 1971 was, specifically, “exponential growth in energy”. If we don’t mind using 4 parameters instead of 2 we can get about as good a fit as the exponential above—daily_megabarrels = 4.73 + 1.96e-5(y-1921.6)^3.74. In that case, total extraction to 2100 would be “only” 70x what we have actually extracted to date.)
(Is it unreasonable for me to be talking specifically about oil when what matters is total energy? It might be, if I were arguing specifically that we shouldn’t be aiming to get a lot of energy. But I’m not arguing that; perhaps we should be aiming for that; my point is just that specific resources may be meaningfully depletable, and that that means that some things under the heading of “more and better natural resource extraction” could actually be bad ideas.)
So we should definitely coordinate to do more efficient resource extraction, and to find ways to use effectively-unlimited resources like sunlight, but for resources we might realistically run out of some time in the foreseeable future there’s a tradeoff between prosperity now and possible collapse later and in some of these cases we may instead need to coordinate on extracting less.
(Important complication: extracting more now may help us with figuring out ways to be more efficient, finding new resources, and mitigating the damage when we run out, in which case we should be extracting faster than simpler models of the tradeoff would suggest.)
I’m friendly to basically everything you’ve said, gjm ;-)
Once we are thinking in terms of collecting certain kinds of important resources now versus saving those important resources for some time in the deeper future…
...we’re already working with the core premise: that there ARE important resources (and energy is one of the most important).
Details about early or late usage of this or that resource are (relatively speaking) details.
Oil and coal are not things I’m not particularly in love with. Thorium might be better, I think? The sun seems likely to be around for a LONG time and solar panels in space seems like an idea with a LOT of room to expand!
There has to be “ideas” here (jason’s OP on ideas is right that they matter), but I think the ideas have to be ABOUT energy and atoms and physical plans for those ideas to to turn into something that makes human lives better.
(Image source!) In practice, right now: oil and coal are our primary sources. For Earth right now, solar is still negligible, but if eventually we have asteroid minining and space solar arrays, I’d expect (and hope!) that that stuff would become the dominating term in the energy budget.
The idea of just “putting an end to all that fossil fuel stuff” in the near future seems either confused or evil to me. EITHER people proposing that might be UNAWARE of the entailment in terms of human misery of halting this stuff without having something better ready to go, OR ELSE they might be AWARE of the consequences and misanthropically delighted with the idea of fewer humans doing fewer things?
I’m pro-human. Hence I’m pro-energy.
I think climate change might be an “elephant in the room” when it comes to energy policy?
But I’m also in favor of weather and climate control if we can get those too… Like my answer is “optimism” and “moar engineering!” to basically everything.
Controlling the climate will take MORE resources to accomplish, not less! If, for example, humans are going to reverse the desertification of the Sahara, and use the new forests as carbon sinks, that will be a HUGE project that involves moving around a LOT of dirt and water and seeds and chemistry and so on. I’m not precisely sure that fixing the Sahara would be the specific best use of resources, but I do think that whatever the right ideas are, they have to be ideas about resources and atoms and physical reality.