Do you think you might be underestimating the capabilities of the statistically average person of 100 IQ?
Now, if the average voter could understand the concept of photosynthetic efficiency, and could understand a simple numerical calculation showing how inefficient corn is at converting solar energy to stored energy in ethanol, this policy choice would have been dead in the water.
There’s an obvious point you’re overlooking here.
Plants are, indeed, only about 3% efficient at converting the energy in sunlight into chemical energy, and that’s before the living plant is harvested. However, bare ground is zero percent efficient, and the sunlight is there whether we use it or not.
There are many studies − 1 to 2 dozen—showing that producing a gallon of corn ethanol takes more energy than is contained in a gallon of corn ethanol. Usually, the conclusion is that it takes n=1 to 1.4 times as much energy. There are other studies claiming the opposite; they fail to take into account factors such as irrigation and transportation costs.
I wrote to Wired magazine and to somewhere else (I forget where) to correct their outrageously-incorrect assertions about corn ethanol. (Wired underreported n by 2 orders of magnitude, which is disturbing because this wasn’t like ordinary irresponsible journalism where someone took one “expert’s” numbers uncritically. The figure they gave for corn ethanol efficiency was AFAIK much, much higher than those of even the most biased ethanol advocates.) My responses were unpublished. It’s even worse journalism when you make an extreme error on a point important to public policy, and then someone points it out to you, and gives you a dozen literature citations, and you don’t correct it.
Also, for the less wrong pedant community, phil meant that it takes 1 to 1.4 times more energy input where “energy input” EXCLUDES the solar energy that the corn plants absorb to produce 1 litre of corn ethanol than is contained in 1 litre of corn ethanol.
There are many studies − 1 to 2 dozen—showing that producing a gallon of corn ethanol takes more energy than is contained in a gallon of corn ethanol.
Well, of course. And it takes more energy to produce a gallon of oil, or an equivalent amount of coal or what have you, than is contained in that amount of fuel.
Anyone who knows the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that.
I think you may have a valid point somewhere, but it’s not being expressed properly.
We have to actually invest the energy that goes into producing ethanol. Coal and oil were produced without such intervention and all we need to do is dig them up. If people were talking about synthesizing these things, that would be a more sensible comparison to make.
I believe Annoyance’s point was that it takes more energy to create virtually any fuel than you get out of it, and if PhilGoetz meant anything further than that, he should have said so. I also did not feel informed after reading PhilGoetz’s comment, for the same reason.
The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).
Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.
Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.
Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy “production” because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.
Almost completely correct. The only quibble I have is with the claim that “Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy”.
That’s not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that trying to use corn as an industrial energy source while simultaneously growing it with methods that require artificial fertilizers (which are extremely energy-intensive to synthesize) and mechanical tillage and harvesting (which requires amounts of industrial-level fuel that are prohibitive for that task) is utterly pointless, because the total process requires more industrial-level fuel than it produces.
You can get more energy out of the corn than you invest into it—obviously. But you can’t do so with modern industrial agricultural methods, which expend lots of energy (considered in total, including fertilizer manufacture) to capture a relatively small amount of solar energy in a form that people and animals can consume.
Even when we used draft animals to do the labor required and relied on organic fertilizers only, farmers couldn’t make their planted crop areas provide all of the energy and resources necessary to keep the system going. Large areas of forage (usually grass) were needed to feed the beasts so that human-edible crops could be produced—an ‘external’ energy input for the crop areas. The farms as a whole were powered by the sun only, of course.
When humans do all of the work of agriculture, farming is far, far less efficient (depending on the methods used) and with very primitive methods has a return barely greater than the investment of (human-provided) energy.
I don’t think you understood Phil’s comment. Thermodynamics does not dictate it takes more energy to produce some fuel than is contained in the fuel. Producing fuel is energetically inexpensive—if you have sufficiently concentrated precursors.
Thermodynamics does not dictate it takes more energy to produce some fuel than is contained in the fuel.
Yes, it does. Second law. You need all of the energy that the fuel will store, plus more to run the process that creates it.
Either you’re producing lower-energy fuel from higher-energy fuel, or you’re taking base constituents and available energy and synthesizing a higher-energy configuration.
Yes, it does. Second law. You need all of the energy that the fuel will store, plus more to run the process that creates it.
It’s conservation of energy, not second law.
Either you’re producing lower-energy fuel from higher-energy fuel, or you’re taking base constituents and available energy and synthesizing a higher-energy configuration.
High-energy fuel is simply fuel that allows to restore more energy per unit of weight. Take more low-energy fuel and convert it into less high-energy fuel.
I still don’t think you understood Phil’s comment.
Presumably, you won’t be able to make sense of this either:
“In addition, production of ethanol is energy efficient, in that it yields nearly 25 percent more energy than is used in growing the corn, harvesting it, and distilling it into ethanol.”
The problem appears to be that you are incorrectly imagining that the other people in the discussion are trying to account for factors such as sunlight.
Thermodynamics has everything to do with the statement in question.
There is the sun outside this open system.
Exactly.
What I suspect Phil was trying to express was that ethanol manufacturing requires us to expend more of the desired level of fuel than we derive from the process—which is a good point—and that this rules out ethanol as a viable energy source—which is NOT a good point.
We invest more energy in building and charging batteries than we can get out of them. That isn’t an argument against batteries, because they’re a means of transmitting energy in usable form. And extremely useful ones. Carrying around a steam-powered generator to operate a flashlight isn’t an option.
Corn ethanol is a terrible net-producer of industrial-grade fuel because its production consumes more of that level of fuel than it produces, NOT because it “takes more energy to make it than it provides”, which is trivially, obviously true of any fuel.
The crux of the argument is that it costs energy to harvest the corn and process it. When you look at the numbers you see that it just doesn’t add up.
Furthermore, if you compare corn ethanol to solar power you see why the low conversion efficiency is so damning, especially when you do the math for how much land you’d have to cover with corn to serve US energy needs. Going off the top of my head, this area is greater than the whole of the US.
If people listened to intelligent and careful thinkers they wouldn’t need to understand it themselves. Whether this is an easier or harder route is unclear to me.
The problem is that, in general, there’s no good way for a layman to tell the difference between Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, except by comparing them to other people who claim to be experts in a field. A book of internally consistent lies, such as Chariots of the Gods? will seem as plausible as any book written about real history to someone who doesn’t already know that it’s a book of lies.
...there’s no good way for a layman to tell the difference between Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, except by comparing them to other people who claim to be experts in a field.
That sounds like a promising strategy to me. At least it is far better than what people currently do, which is adopt what their friends think, or ideas they find appealing for other reasons. No doubt it would be better if more people were capable of evaluating scientific theory and evidence themselves, but imagine how much better things would be if people simply asked themselves, “Which is the relevant community of experts, how are opinions on this issue distributed amongst the experts, how reliable have similar experts been in the past? e.g. chemists are generally less wrong about chemistry than psychologists are about psychology. This would be a step in the right direction.
That’s not quite true. There are ways of evaluating an expert—but people don’t like them, don’t implement them, and don’t try to find out what they are.
Many, many people who have the social status and authority of experts simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They can be detected by an earnest and diligent inquiry, combined with a healthy and balanced skepticism.
Indeed. Now that I think about it, perhaps the real problem here is that the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ is too low (perhaps even negative in some cases); in other words, IQ doesn’t buy one enough status. So the question is whether it is easier to fix this than just to raise the IQ baseline.
How does increasing “the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ” help? I’m not saying it would hurt, but it seems less direct and less important than increasing the marginal social status payoff from having and acting on unbiased beliefs about the world because this is something people can change fairly easily.
How does increasing “the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ” help?
The implication may be that persons with high IQ are often prevented from putting it to a meaningful use due to the way societies are structured: a statement I agree with.
persons with high IQ are often prevented from putting it to a meaningful use due to the way societies are structured.
Do you mean that organizations aren’t very good at selecting the best person for each job. I agree with that statement, but its about much, much, more than IQ. It is a tough nut to crack but I have given some thought to how we could improve honest signaling of people’s skills.
Do you mean that organizations aren’t very good at selecting the best person for each job.
Actually, no. What I mean is that human society isn’t very good at realizing that it would be in its best interest to assign as many high-IQ persons as possible the job of “being themselves” full-time and freely developing their ideas—without having to justify their short-term benefit.
Hell, forget “as many as possible”, we don’t even have a Bell Labs any more.
This, I think, is a special case of what I meant. A simple, crude, way to put the general point is that people don’t defer enough to those who are smarter. If they did, smart folks would be held in higher esteem by society, and indeed would consequently have greater autonomy.
That may well be right. I’m willing to accept that the distinction between “I.Q.” and other measures of “smartness” is orthogonal to the point I was making.
You’re absolutely right about corn ethanol not being much of a solution—indeed, you can’t power the U.S. on just corn ethanol, but burning corn-derived ethanol does provide a net gain in useful energy. It’s just not nearly enough energy to make a difference. Finally, the biggest problem is that there are generally better things to do with grown corn than to turn it into fuel for engines, such as turn it into food for humans or other animals...
Plants are also much better at converting sunlight into chemical energy than any system we can build.
But the issue isn’t how well they store energy, but at how efficiently we can use the energy they store. You can’t efficiently fuel an electricity-generating plant with corn—trying to use plant energy to power our civilization is hopeless.
That is totally incorrect. Plants are 1-2%. Good panels are around 20% - with experimental ones well beyond that. That’s because most solar energy occurs at wavelengths unsuitable for photosynthesis.
Good panels are only that good under laboratory conditions, and require massive expenditures of energy to construct in the first place. Plants are self-replicating.
Equally as important, they produce chemical energy directly. Without an efficient way to produce and store hydrogen using electrical power, there’s no alternative for chemical fuels.
“Plants are self-replicating”? In theory, will corn grow without our help? Sure! In practice? Not if you want it in neat, harvestable rows; not if you don’t want it to compete with weeds; not if you want it to have a high per-acre yield; not if you want to control which seeds get to turn into plants next generation; not if you don’t want crows to eat it; not if you want it to stick to your property and not take over the neighbor’s alfalfa; and not if you take all of the plant’s kernels and turn them into car fuel.
We don’t settle for the replication rate of wild plants, so it’s just not the case that they’re “free”. There’s a legitimate question of whether it’s costlier (along any given dimension or overall) to produce ethanol than to produce a solar panel which will generate the same amount of power over its useful life, and I don’t know the answer, but please let’s not extrapolate from the fact that plants sometimes grow unattended to the mistaken conclusion that corn has a negligible input cost.
But there are efficient ways to turn electricity into chemical energy, like a li-ion battery.
Best solar panel is at 50.7% efficiency as far as I know.
Plants also require energy to be produced. Solar panels harvest more energy on their lifetime than they take to produce, by a factor of about 10 I seem to recall.
Do you think you might be underestimating the capabilities of the statistically average person of 100 IQ?
There’s an obvious point you’re overlooking here.
Plants are, indeed, only about 3% efficient at converting the energy in sunlight into chemical energy, and that’s before the living plant is harvested. However, bare ground is zero percent efficient, and the sunlight is there whether we use it or not.
There are many studies − 1 to 2 dozen—showing that producing a gallon of corn ethanol takes more energy than is contained in a gallon of corn ethanol. Usually, the conclusion is that it takes n=1 to 1.4 times as much energy. There are other studies claiming the opposite; they fail to take into account factors such as irrigation and transportation costs.
I wrote to Wired magazine and to somewhere else (I forget where) to correct their outrageously-incorrect assertions about corn ethanol. (Wired underreported n by 2 orders of magnitude, which is disturbing because this wasn’t like ordinary irresponsible journalism where someone took one “expert’s” numbers uncritically. The figure they gave for corn ethanol efficiency was AFAIK much, much higher than those of even the most biased ethanol advocates.) My responses were unpublished. It’s even worse journalism when you make an extreme error on a point important to public policy, and then someone points it out to you, and gives you a dozen literature citations, and you don’t correct it.
Also, for the less wrong pedant community, phil meant that it takes 1 to 1.4 times more energy input where “energy input” EXCLUDES the solar energy that the corn plants absorb to produce 1 litre of corn ethanol than is contained in 1 litre of corn ethanol.
Can you give us some references?
Well, of course. And it takes more energy to produce a gallon of oil, or an equivalent amount of coal or what have you, than is contained in that amount of fuel.
Anyone who knows the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that.
I think you may have a valid point somewhere, but it’s not being expressed properly.
We have to actually invest the energy that goes into producing ethanol. Coal and oil were produced without such intervention and all we need to do is dig them up. If people were talking about synthesizing these things, that would be a more sensible comparison to make.
I believe Annoyance’s point was that it takes more energy to create virtually any fuel than you get out of it, and if PhilGoetz meant anything further than that, he should have said so. I also did not feel informed after reading PhilGoetz’s comment, for the same reason.
The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).
Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.
Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.
Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy “production” because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.
Almost completely correct. The only quibble I have is with the claim that “Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy”.
That’s not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that trying to use corn as an industrial energy source while simultaneously growing it with methods that require artificial fertilizers (which are extremely energy-intensive to synthesize) and mechanical tillage and harvesting (which requires amounts of industrial-level fuel that are prohibitive for that task) is utterly pointless, because the total process requires more industrial-level fuel than it produces.
You can get more energy out of the corn than you invest into it—obviously. But you can’t do so with modern industrial agricultural methods, which expend lots of energy (considered in total, including fertilizer manufacture) to capture a relatively small amount of solar energy in a form that people and animals can consume.
Even when we used draft animals to do the labor required and relied on organic fertilizers only, farmers couldn’t make their planted crop areas provide all of the energy and resources necessary to keep the system going. Large areas of forage (usually grass) were needed to feed the beasts so that human-edible crops could be produced—an ‘external’ energy input for the crop areas. The farms as a whole were powered by the sun only, of course.
When humans do all of the work of agriculture, farming is far, far less efficient (depending on the methods used) and with very primitive methods has a return barely greater than the investment of (human-provided) energy.
I don’t think you understood Phil’s comment. Thermodynamics does not dictate it takes more energy to produce some fuel than is contained in the fuel. Producing fuel is energetically inexpensive—if you have sufficiently concentrated precursors.
Yes, it does. Second law. You need all of the energy that the fuel will store, plus more to run the process that creates it.
Either you’re producing lower-energy fuel from higher-energy fuel, or you’re taking base constituents and available energy and synthesizing a higher-energy configuration.
It’s conservation of energy, not second law.
High-energy fuel is simply fuel that allows to restore more energy per unit of weight. Take more low-energy fuel and convert it into less high-energy fuel.
I still don’t think you understood Phil’s comment.
Presumably, you won’t be able to make sense of this either:
“In addition, production of ethanol is energy efficient, in that it yields nearly 25 percent more energy than is used in growing the corn, harvesting it, and distilling it into ethanol.”
http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm
The problem appears to be that you are incorrectly imagining that the other people in the discussion are trying to account for factors such as sunlight.
Termodynamics has nothing to do with this. There is the sun outside this open system.
Thermodynamics has everything to do with the statement in question.
Exactly.
What I suspect Phil was trying to express was that ethanol manufacturing requires us to expend more of the desired level of fuel than we derive from the process—which is a good point—and that this rules out ethanol as a viable energy source—which is NOT a good point.
We invest more energy in building and charging batteries than we can get out of them. That isn’t an argument against batteries, because they’re a means of transmitting energy in usable form. And extremely useful ones. Carrying around a steam-powered generator to operate a flashlight isn’t an option.
Corn ethanol is a terrible net-producer of industrial-grade fuel because its production consumes more of that level of fuel than it produces, NOT because it “takes more energy to make it than it provides”, which is trivially, obviously true of any fuel.
The crux of the argument is that it costs energy to harvest the corn and process it. When you look at the numbers you see that it just doesn’t add up.
Furthermore, if you compare corn ethanol to solar power you see why the low conversion efficiency is so damning, especially when you do the math for how much land you’d have to cover with corn to serve US energy needs. Going off the top of my head, this area is greater than the whole of the US.
If people listened to intelligent and careful thinkers they wouldn’t need to understand it themselves. Whether this is an easier or harder route is unclear to me.
The problem is that, in general, there’s no good way for a layman to tell the difference between Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, except by comparing them to other people who claim to be experts in a field. A book of internally consistent lies, such as Chariots of the Gods? will seem as plausible as any book written about real history to someone who doesn’t already know that it’s a book of lies.
That sounds like a promising strategy to me. At least it is far better than what people currently do, which is adopt what their friends think, or ideas they find appealing for other reasons. No doubt it would be better if more people were capable of evaluating scientific theory and evidence themselves, but imagine how much better things would be if people simply asked themselves, “Which is the relevant community of experts, how are opinions on this issue distributed amongst the experts, how reliable have similar experts been in the past? e.g. chemists are generally less wrong about chemistry than psychologists are about psychology. This would be a step in the right direction.
That’s not quite true. There are ways of evaluating an expert—but people don’t like them, don’t implement them, and don’t try to find out what they are.
Many, many people who have the social status and authority of experts simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They can be detected by an earnest and diligent inquiry, combined with a healthy and balanced skepticism.
Doctors are a prime example.
Unfortunately, many of those ways are equivalent to “become an expert yourself”. :(
But how do you know when you’ve become an expert?
Turtles all the way down!
Indeed. Now that I think about it, perhaps the real problem here is that the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ is too low (perhaps even negative in some cases); in other words, IQ doesn’t buy one enough status. So the question is whether it is easier to fix this than just to raise the IQ baseline.
How does increasing “the marginal social status payoff from an increase in IQ” help? I’m not saying it would hurt, but it seems less direct and less important than increasing the marginal social status payoff from having and acting on unbiased beliefs about the world because this is something people can change fairly easily.
The implication may be that persons with high IQ are often prevented from putting it to a meaningful use due to the way societies are structured: a statement I agree with.
Do you mean that organizations aren’t very good at selecting the best person for each job. I agree with that statement, but its about much, much, more than IQ. It is a tough nut to crack but I have given some thought to how we could improve honest signaling of people’s skills.
Actually, no. What I mean is that human society isn’t very good at realizing that it would be in its best interest to assign as many high-IQ persons as possible the job of “being themselves” full-time and freely developing their ideas—without having to justify their short-term benefit.
Hell, forget “as many as possible”, we don’t even have a Bell Labs any more.
This, I think, is a special case of what I meant. A simple, crude, way to put the general point is that people don’t defer enough to those who are smarter. If they did, smart folks would be held in higher esteem by society, and indeed would consequently have greater autonomy.
How should society implement this? I repeat my claim that other personal characteristics are as important as IQ.
I do not know of a working society-wide solution. Establishing research institutes in the tradition of Bell Labs would be a good start, though.
That may well be right. I’m willing to accept that the distinction between “I.Q.” and other measures of “smartness” is orthogonal to the point I was making.
You’re absolutely right about corn ethanol not being much of a solution—indeed, you can’t power the U.S. on just corn ethanol, but burning corn-derived ethanol does provide a net gain in useful energy. It’s just not nearly enough energy to make a difference. Finally, the biggest problem is that there are generally better things to do with grown corn than to turn it into fuel for engines, such as turn it into food for humans or other animals...
Plants are also much better at converting sunlight into chemical energy than any system we can build.
But the issue isn’t how well they store energy, but at how efficiently we can use the energy they store. You can’t efficiently fuel an electricity-generating plant with corn—trying to use plant energy to power our civilization is hopeless.
That is totally incorrect. Plants are 1-2%. Good panels are around 20% - with experimental ones well beyond that. That’s because most solar energy occurs at wavelengths unsuitable for photosynthesis.
Good panels are only that good under laboratory conditions, and require massive expenditures of energy to construct in the first place. Plants are self-replicating.
Equally as important, they produce chemical energy directly. Without an efficient way to produce and store hydrogen using electrical power, there’s no alternative for chemical fuels.
“Plants are self-replicating”? In theory, will corn grow without our help? Sure! In practice? Not if you want it in neat, harvestable rows; not if you don’t want it to compete with weeds; not if you want it to have a high per-acre yield; not if you want to control which seeds get to turn into plants next generation; not if you don’t want crows to eat it; not if you want it to stick to your property and not take over the neighbor’s alfalfa; and not if you take all of the plant’s kernels and turn them into car fuel.
We don’t settle for the replication rate of wild plants, so it’s just not the case that they’re “free”. There’s a legitimate question of whether it’s costlier (along any given dimension or overall) to produce ethanol than to produce a solar panel which will generate the same amount of power over its useful life, and I don’t know the answer, but please let’s not extrapolate from the fact that plants sometimes grow unattended to the mistaken conclusion that corn has a negligible input cost.
I didn’t suggest that corn has a negligible input cost.
Please do not pester us with non-sequiturs.
But there are efficient ways to turn electricity into chemical energy, like a li-ion battery.
Best solar panel is at 50.7% efficiency as far as I know.
Plants also require energy to be produced. Solar panels harvest more energy on their lifetime than they take to produce, by a factor of about 10 I seem to recall.
After getting the facts so totally wrong, you are supposed to remain in embarassed silence, not argue the toss with still more dubious claims:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficiency