Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
We’re going to talk about energy today. Where do we need to start with energy?
Well, on YouTube lately, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the same thing, but I get an enormous number of ads for heaters that supposedly heat your room in seconds for next to nothing in energy costs.
They work by magic.
Yeah, exactly.
I thought, actually, this is physically impossible. There’s a very marginal difference in the efficiency of one heater versus another, because, by default, turning any power into heat is what happens when you’re trying to do anything else. I thought I’d just start with a review of what it is, why we need it, how it relates to our general prosperity, and what the prospects are given the wider picture of the exhaustion of oil, coal, and gas resources, and concerns about global warming or climate change, and so on.
Let’s start with the absolute basics. Two universal laws apply whenever one form of energy is changed into another. In its most basic definition, energy is the capacity to do work. The simplest form of work is applying a force to move something from one place to another. Or if we’re going to be more strict about it, — to either overcome resistance or accelerate something.
You need energy to get your car moving. That obviously comes from the fuel in your tank. The two laws that apply are: the first is that energy is neither created nor destroyed. In other words, the total amount of energy you’ve got inside any closed system is the same at the end of any conversion as you had at the beginning.
The total amount of energy you have at the end of your car journey, or the total amount that exists at the end of your car journey within the totality of you and the environment, is exactly the same as when you started. But of course, when you began, it existed as fuel in the tank, which enabled you to do something, i.e., go on that journey.
At the end of it, there’s less fuel in the tank. All the other energy has turned into the car’s momentum while it’s moving. By the time it’s come to a standstill at the end of the journey, all of that energy is out in the form of heat in the air, possibly some in the brake drums, perhaps some in the engine block and the radiator.
It’s either gone out of the exhaust pipe or been dissipated through the air passing through the radiator, or it’s heated the brake drums and brake discs, then cooled down by heating the air around them. That’s not available for doing any work, which is what brings us on to the second law.
The second law says that any time you convert energy from one form to another, some of it is no longer available to do anything useful with.
Because it dissipates into various forms and is no longer in a single convenient fuel tank.
Yeah, so there are two aspects to this. One is that it relates to imperfections —the shortfall from the ideal of any physical implementation you make. That’s on top of a fundamental limitation.
The fundamental limitation is that if you built the most efficient motor that you could build, it would not be 100% efficient in turning the energy, whether that’s electricity or petrol or whatever it might be, into actual movement. There’s a theoretical maximum to that.
These are called the laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is an unfamiliar word, which immediately makes people think it’s obscure and complicated. Funnily enough, this is not something which is taught in any of the school science courses until you get to a pretty advanced level. Is that your experience from what you remember?
Yeah, I was trying to think if I was taught it at school. It’s more things I’ve learned for myself as I’ve got older.
Yeah, that’s probably about right. I think that’s most people’s experience. The funny thing is, it’s really intuitive. If you see a movie, you can immediately tell whether it’s running forward or backwards. It looks completely ridiculous if it’s run backwards.
If you’ve got a glass that falls to the floor, breaks into pieces, and shatters, that is clearly absurd when you play the movie backwards: all the pieces gather, form into the shape of a glass, and jump back onto the table.
That is because the energy that you had by virtue of the height above the floor is transformed into the glass moving faster and faster as it falls. It hits the floor, it stops. Some of that energy is used in breaking the bonds that held the glass together. Some of it is converted into the movement of the glass pieces skittering around until they come to a stop due to friction.
Some of it is caused just by the directed motion of all the atoms moving together in the glass getting jumbled up and moving around randomly. Atoms moving around randomly is what heat is. I don’t even think that changing the name of thermodynamics to ‘heat and movement,’ which makes it sound a little less obscure, is really the whole story. Because this applies to any conversion of energy from one form to another, whatever that is.
For instance, if you charge up a battery, it takes a certain amount of electricity to power the battery charger. The battery charger gets warm, so some of that heat is lost. The current flows into the battery. Some of it warms the wires up slightly, so that gets lost.
When it gets to the battery, some of it is used to convert the chemical energy into stored energy. But the battery also gets warm, so that dissipates a bit. When you use that battery to run a little electric motor, once again, you’ve got the same thing. There will be a little bit of warmth in the battery as the actual conversion takes place.
There’s going to be some heat in the wires from the current flowing through their resistance. The motor itself will get a bit warm. Through those stages, the same thing applies when sunlight shines on the leaves of a plant. It converts chemicals in the plant into sugars, which store energy. When you eat those plant products, you get energy into your body.
When you think, type, ride a bicycle, or do anything, as we all know, you get hot during exercise — you sweat and lose heat.
So how does anything happen? It happens because the Earth isn’t a closed system. The Earth is constantly taking in and losing energy. It’s taking in high-quality energy—short-wavelength radiation from the sun. That is being converted in one way or another: either by plants, by warming the atmosphere, which creates air currents and winds, or by evaporating water from the ocean, which rises and forms clouds. Then that falls to the ground and runs downhill in rivers.
All of these circulations of energy are coming from the sun. Then approximately the same amount of energy that arrives every day is lost to radiation into space. Of course, the debates about global warming stem from the fact that, with a higher concentration of carbon dioxide and methane and other gases in the atmosphere, the rate of radiation into space is slower, leading to a gradual temperature rise. There are probably all sorts of different processes at work to complicate the overall picture.
Yeah, like the oceans are a big sink of carbon dioxide, aren’t they? They release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as temperatures change.
Yeah, which creates other problems because then they become more acidic, disrupting coral reefs and the functions of the algae. So you’ve got a very much more complex dynamic system.
It’s presented as a straightforward thing, but it’s not, like any complex system. It’s hard to pinpoint one strand and say, ‘ This is it. ‘
Yeah. The energy that we’re using from coal or oil, or natural gas is energy which has come through that same process, has come from sunlight, which was converted into sugars and other high-energy chemicals in the leaves of plants 300 million years ago, which are then buried under the ground and stored there for 300 million years. Then we’ve blasted through it in just over two centuries.
Once again, this is a key point because, whichever way you look at it, we have used the majority of the readily available supplies of these things. People argue, but it’s really only a matter of detail whether we start to feel the pinch in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years. But it’s obvious to all of us.
At some point, it’s inevitable as the costs of extraction increase.
Yeah, in case we were wondering, it’s clearly the case with the rises in fuel bills of all kinds over the last year, the previous year, and the previous decades. This is a process which is obviously accelerating.
It doesn’t help when we blow up certain pipelines carrying fuel from one place to another…
Yeah, absolutely. That’s dissipation of what has already been harvested before it’s even been used, which is the most extreme form of wastefulness. But the entire business of warfare and modern industrial conflict is squandering energy at a huge rate.
I was just doing some back-of-the-envelope type calculations. I looked at a figure I found for the conflict in Gaza, which was that a little over a year ago, it was estimated that about 70,000 tonnes of bombs had been dropped on Gaza by the Israelis in the course of that war. Of course, we’re now over a year further on, so that’s probably more like 100,000 tonnes.
Probably underestimated anyway.
It’s probably an underestimate anyway, but even that would be three times the number of bombs that the Germans dropped on London in the Blitz. Then you’ve got something that is obviously a similar order of magnitude in Ukraine, or probably much larger, given the area of the conflict.
But just taking that 100, that 100,000 kilotonnes of bombs: a kilotonne of explosive is equivalent to a million kilowatt-hours of electricity or of any other form of energy that you might be considering. That’s just the energy that’s actually in the explosives of those bombs.
You could at least double it for the energy used to manufacture those explosives and the capability. You could double it again to account for all of the transportation from the weapons factories to the battlefield, from the point where they’re fired to where they’re delivered by missiles or aircraft or artillery shells. So we’re now up to about 400 million kilowatt-hours in that conflict.
A typical household uses about 4,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. In other words, that conflict has burned up the energy that would power 100,000 households’ electricity for a year. Clearly, this has been wasted. Not only has it been wasted, of course, because it has destroyed the embodied energy that went into building all the houses, apartment blocks, bridges, and roads, which are destroyed by the conflict.
So we’ve got this energy squandering. At the same time, there are a lot of conversations around where people are trying to say, ‘But we really need energy for the level of prosperity that we have. We don’t want to live in poverty.’ You may not want to, but somehow or other, we’re going to have to accommodate ourselves to the realities of physics and geology.
One way or another, this means we’re going to have to live consuming an order of magnitude less energy. We’re going to need to be harvesting that from the sun —current energy flowing into the Earth —and the difference between that and the energy dissipated into space.
I contend that doesn’t mean we have to return to a lifetime of medieval or Stone Age poverty. This is something we’ll explore in the next episode —the various ways we could do that. But the short answer is that, for a start, we could stop the utterly wasteful and destructive, not to mention devastatingly inhumane, activities of warfare and destruction.
Another is that we could generally stop squandering energy by manufacturing things designed to be thrown away. We could stop wasting energy on all this febrile rushing about in individual vehicles. We’ll do some sums to work out what that could involve.
Insofar as there’s no discussion in the wider public discussion sphere about this, it is along the lines of, ‘Well, we’ll replace all of the petrol cars with electric cars.’ Well, quite apart from the fact that if we were serious about that, we’d have been going flat out to do it 20 or 30 years ago. All we’re doing is a bit of messing about in the margin.
But apart from that, I expect you, like me, manage to avoid too much exposure to driving around on motorways in the rush hour or anything like that. Is that the case, Rob?
Only when I have to, yeah.
Exactly. You mean you avoid it?
Yeah, where possible. The electric car thing is interesting because it’s advertised as zero emissions, but that can’t possibly be true. Unless all of your electricity that’s going into that has been generated by immediate sunlight, which obviously it hasn’t.
Yeah, you’ve just moved the pollution to the power station. You could argue they have a certain amount of value. When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, an electric car isn’t using anything. When it’s crawling along, it uses less energy, whereas your petrol car still uses it when you’re stalled in a traffic jam. It’s using more energy per mile when you’re crawling along at walking pace.
It also made the car very expensive in the process!
But leaving that aside, part of the total solution, which would make all of our lives better rather than worse, is to re-evaluate how much moving around we really need to make. There’s obviously great scope for getting whatever amount of work is necessary done without everybody having to rush in the same time slot to get from there.
I feel like this has happened a bit over the last few years, since all the lockdown shenanigans...
Yeah, probably 1% to 5% of the way that it needs to go.
It’s just when you go to the supermarket and you buy some apples and they’ve come from, I don’t know, South America or somewhere. We have apple trees here. So it’s not just people moving about. I’m very wary of these top-down diktats and 15-minute cities. We’re not for any of that, but especially the movements of things. If we can minimise the movement of things you’re buying locally, support things made locally, and support local industry in the process, surely that’s a big thing.
Yeah. When you buy milk and it came from another country, for instance. There’s plenty of scope here. This is something that we’re all going to have to look at.
Apart from that, I thought we’d just have a quick review of contemporary global events.
Just before we do, I was thinking about the amount of energy required to operate an AI data centre, because it appears to be quite a lot. Something like eight times as much energy is required to query an AI tool as it takes to do a Google search. There’s a big investment going on in these data centres. So again, it is a case where we’re told one thing, but then there’s unlimited energy and resources for other things, like AI and warfare. Or like travelling around in private jets. I don’t see any leadership coming from the top, which is the issue. Nobody visible is living it. They’re just telling us what to do. Until someone lives it, I can’t get on board with it.
Yeah. Or like cryptocurrencies. Yeah. Yep, fair comment.
What’s been going on this week then?
Current Events
In a way, it’s the same, the mixture of the same, except the main actors keep doubling down. We have had a much-trumpeted peace plan from Donald Trump for Israel, which is, of course, immediately violated, with each side blaming the other for the breakdown of the ceasefire and the failure to follow through. So once again, it’s the picture as before.
In Ukraine, there’s been a major development. In the two major towns, Pakrovsk and Kupiansk, there have in each case been 5,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers entrapped by being surrounded by Russian troops, or at least having all their possible escape routes and supply lines cut by Russian control.
I don’t know whether you’d heard that Putin announced he was prepared to observe a six-hour ceasefire in both cases and to provide safe passage for any Western journalists who wanted to go there and see what the immediate situation on the ground was. Had you heard that?
I’ve not, no.
A lot of people haven’t. It was not very much reported. Of course, the proposal was rejected by the Ukrainians. So we’ve been deprived of the opportunity to find out those realities. But what is interesting to me is that as I watch this, it’s pretty obvious which way the conflict is going.
The Russians have far more troops. They’re losing them at a much slower rate. They’re still recruiting volunteers without having to conscript. Whereas the reverse is the case on the other side. Ukrainian losses, by estimates, range from 7:1 to 20:1 in terms of casualties per Russian casualty.
I know that many Western outlets report the opposite, but that doesn’t add up. Plus, they’ve got very exhausted troops, whereas the Russians keep circulating them. They’ve burnt through most of the supplies of arms and ammunition and vehicles that the West have provided them with.
Although the Russians have taken losses of equipment, they’re plainly completely outproducing, in terms of ammunition and all kinds of weaponry, the entire Western group of nations put together. So there’s only one way that the conflict can go.
Once again, the Western media tries to portray the Russians as being the ones who are reluctant to talk, whereas as far as I can see, they’ve said over and over again that they would sooner settle it by diplomacy than on the battlefield. But if they can’t have what they laid out at the outset as their clear objectives —namely, that they were not being threatened by a hostile power right on their border —then there was no other eventuality up for debate.
So this is just moving on and on. The European leaders and the British leaders still seem stuck in this, a fantasy world of thinking that somehow the tide can be turned. Sooner or later, they’re going to face the reality that this is not the case. How they cope with that, or how the population in general is going to cope with that reversal in position —that acceptance of the reality on the ground. Have you got any thoughts about that?
No, it’ll be interesting to see how the narrative and propaganda around it changes. Because these people also control all of the major news outlets. You get this psychological nudge operation. You can tell when the tide’s beginning to turn. It was the same during the COVID period, when all of a sudden, medical products went from being fully safe and effective to only partially safe and effective. There was just this nudge. It transitioned over time. I see the same thing happening.
Yeah. Well, the other big thing, of course, is that Virginia Giuffre’s book, Nobody’s Girl, has been published and has become an instant worldwide bestseller. Have you followed any of the commentary about this at all?
No.
Okay, well, I bought a copy and I’ve read it. It’s a very harrowing read. There are many things that are unpleasant to face. One of them is that it’s not a matter of merely rich and powerful people having sexual escapades with young, poor, vulnerable women and girls. But it’s the brutality and the nastiness of it. It is a genuine infliction of pain and suffering, which is extraordinary.
In the circles that I’ve lived in my entire life, and I would have hoped that everybody did, sex was something which was, as one young woman put it to me years ago, a really groovy way of being nice to each other. The idea that people get a kick out of using it to be horrible to others is hard to face up to.
But regardless, the book names a number of people. It certainly highlights their involvement, whether there are particular accusations of sexual misconduct. There are very direct accusations against unnamed individuals. For legal reasons, but there’s enough information there to tie up with other public-domain details to identify those people.
This is going to reinforce the demands that all the material gathered by the FBI in its investigation be uncovered and that the people concerned be held to account. Because quite apart from people’s outrage against the nature of the crimes, the main outrage is about the one law for the rich and another for the poor syndrome. Whereby rich and powerful people can just flagrantly ignore the legal system and ignore any norms of civilised behaviour, and walk away with complete impunity.
That obviously is a kind of injustice which applies not just to sexual indiscretions, but it applies to fraud and theft on a grand scale and all manner of things. When I look at all these different threads, the conclusion I come to is that there are all manner of fault lines that have been hidden and are becoming increasingly clear.
Some people are more exercised by, for instance, the sexual scandal. Some people are more exercised by the abuses of the financial system. Some people are more exercised by the horrors of warfare. Some people are more exercised by the growing, completely unnecessary and highly destructive gap between the ultra-rich and the mass of the population.
All of these things are coming to the boil. This is quite apart from the pressures imposed by rising energy costs, declining output, vanishingly adequate supplies of raw materials from mining, and population pressures. All of these factors are coming together. One or the other will trigger an avalanche. Then it’s going to spread over into the others.
So it’s going to be pretty dramatic in the coming years, possibly even months. But my conviction is that there is at least a possibility of something much more positive arising out of this. So we do live in interesting times.
There’s a lot of negative energy about it, isn’t there? It’s very easy to get wrapped up in that. But there is an alternative route of focusing on what we do want to create or co-create and move towards. There’s a lot of positive energy around that as well. So yeah, keep standing in the light.
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