Get Smart on Energy

Mark Perry highlights Jeff Jacoby's highlighting a seminal point of Peter Huber and Mark Mills's fantastic book on energy, "The Bottomless Well." Perry and Jacoby focus on Huber and Mills's notion of the false economy of energy. While powerful, I think that Huber and Mills have much deeper insights than this in their book.

My past posts on Huber and Mills here and here and here. Oh, and a targentially related post here.

Poverty As Progress Reprise

I've blogged before about how uneconomic "renewable" energy boondoggles are driving populaces to burn MORE of what is supposedly bad, like coal.  Well, this piece (h/t Carpe Diem) talks about how the same is driving people to burn wood.  In that context it is worth reprising this classically insightful post from long ago.

Poverty As Progress?

Don Luskin turns us on to this outstanding post on George Reisman's blog taking the NY Times to the woodshed for its moronic blather about energy conservation Japan. Read the whole thing, but here is the distilled essence of Reisman's critique - what the the NYT describes in Japan is not conservation, it is poverty.

Reisman sarcastically praises the glorious, green future that the Times pines away for, but this vision of poverty as progress is not new. In this post, I relate the ideas put forth by Peter Huber and Mark Mills on energy to my own experience to show that less energy means we are poorer, materially and, in a sense, spiritually. Huber and Mills dubbed these 'poverty as progress' types as Lethargists and they expose their illogic as deftly and devastatingly as Reisman does. Huber and Mills:

"Slower trips, dimmer bulbs, smaller refrigerators, and such aren't more efficient; they're slower, smaller, darker - they nudge us toward a less frenetic, peripatetic, and physically expansive way of life. Perhaps it is a good thing. But it is not more efficient, it is more sedentary, calm, and quiet - in short, more lethargic."

Huber and Mills also point out that the Lethargists of the 1970s made no apologies about what they were after; they cared not one iota about efficiency, what they wanted was for us to do less. They wanted us to live simpler, less active, in essence poorer, lives. Do not mistake this for somethig other than what it is - it is our supposed betters' desire to impose a lifestyle and material conditions on us, otherwise known as tyranny, albeit petty tyranny.

Poverty As Progress?

Don Luskin turns us on to this outstanding post on George Reisman's blog taking the NY Times to the woodshed for its moronic blather about energy conservation Japan. Read the whole thing, but here is the distilled essence of Reisman's critique - what the the NYT describes in Japan is not conservation, it is poverty.

Reisman sarcastically praises the glorious, green future that the Times pines away for, but this vision of poverty as progress is not new. In this post, I relate the ideas put forth by Peter Huber and Mark Mills on energy to my own experience to show that less energy means we are poorer, materially and, in a sense, spiritually. Huber and Mills dubbed these 'poverty as progress' types as Lethargists and they expose their illogic as deftly and devastatingly as Reisman does. Huber and Mills:

"Slower trips, dimmer bulbs, smaller refrigerators, and such aren't more efficient; they're slower, smaller, darker - they nudge us toward a less frenetic, peripatetic, and physically expansive way of life. Perhaps it is a good thing. But it is not more efficient, it is more sedentary, calm, and quiet - in short, more lethargic."

Huber and Mills also point out that the Lethargists of the 1970s made no apologies about what they were after; they cared not one iota about efficiency, what they wanted was for us to do less. They wanted us to live simpler, less active, in essence poorer, lives. Do not mistake this for somethig other than what it is - it is our supposed betters' desire to impose a lifestyle and material conditions on us, otherwise known as tyranny, albeit petty tyranny.

Energy Heresy and Humanity

Numerous recents events have conspired to urge me toward this post. The first is being without power for a few days after Tuesday night's storms here in the NYC area, then the press coverage of states abandoning the 55 mph speed limit, and finally, this post I wrote about how it is that we don't 'waste' water in this country. It got me thinking about how that young woman's skewed thinking is the exact same view that pervades our thinking about energy, which prompted me to go back and reread the best book on energy I've ever read. The essence of my post on water as it relates to energy is right there on page 3, illuminating the first of Huber and Mills' seven heresies:

"'Energy supply' is determined not by 'what's out there' but by how good we are at finding and extracting it. What is scarce is not raw energy but the drive and the logic that is able to locate, purify, and channel it to our own ends."

You may have noticed that the death of the 55 mph speed limit has been getting press lately(maybe because some limits are going up toward 80 or 85 mph and safety scolds are howling). Huber and Mills put the 55 mph speed limit in its historical context as a tactic of what they dub "the Lethargists":

"...the national 55 mph speed limit slowed people down and thus limited how far we drove."

The Lethargists is how H&M describe the doomsday predictors like Paul Ehrlich and Amory Lovins that wanted to reduce energy consumption not by promoting efficiency but by mandating terms of our use of resources and thus denying us a certain lifestyle:

"Slower trips, dimmer bulbs, smaller refrigerators, and such aren't more efficient; they're slower, smaller, darker - they nudge us toward a less frenetic, peripatetic, and physically expansive way of life. Perhaps it is a good thing. But it is not more efficient, it is more sedentary, calm, and quiet - in short, more lethargic."

People paid no attention to the 55 mph speed limit almost from the get-go, but the recent headlines indicate a positive - that we have killed it off completely and in fact have metaphorically rejected its premise, we don't want lethargy. That point was driven home being without power for a few days. Sure it was inconvient but I discovered that the loss was deeper. In the sticky, humid July weather I was sluggish and sweaty, less inclined to play wrestle with my kids, less inclined to hug my wife, less inclined to do anything helpful or positive. And when the sun went down I gazed upon my family's faces illuminated by the faint hue of candles. I don't see my wife and kids all day long, I don't want to see them at night lit faintly by candlelight. I want to see those faces under blazing lights as if it were noon and I want to be cool and comfortable and ready to play wrestle, give horsey rides, hugs and all that. Slower, smaller, darker etc. is not a good thing, it, in fact, sucks.

And that, my friends, is the essence behind our pursuit of ever more abundant energy - we want to have richer, fuller lives, pack more things into our lives, travel more places, meet more people, communicate more often, save time, defeat illnesses, enhance leisure, etc. Huber and Mills:

"Humanity is destined to find and consume more energy, and still more, forever."

Lethargists are always with us. Let's continue to be on guard against them and clearminded about what they want, and clearminded about what we want. Huber and Mills's heresy is our humanity.

Solar and Wind to the Rescue? Yes, but Not How You Think

This article describes an extremely important development in the energy business - the deployment of wind and solar to technologies to extract hydrocarbon based fuels, natural gas in this case. This will come as no surprise to those who have read Peter Huber and Mark Mills's excellent book. One of the illuminating points that the book reveals is that we, as a society, use a great deal of energy looking for and extracting more energy, and that by lowering the cost of finding energy over time we have been successful at finding ever more energy. Huber/Mills also decimate the argument in favor of using solar and wind power for fuel, "yes, wind and sun are free, but solar panels and wind turbines are expensive." So, while it makes no sense economically to convert sunlight and wind into energy to heat or light our homes, that doesn't mean that it is wasteful to use these technologies to look for and extract more fossil fuels. The economic cost of wind turbines to tap into a nat gas field is an entirely different animal than the economic cost of the same turbines to replace nat gas in powering the grid. Ultimately, the replacement of fossil fuel energy with solar or wind energy as the "finding and extracting" energy holds the potential to lower the overall cost of energy in our society, both in terms of resouces and environmental impact. Just further evidence that governments should not be picking winner and losers in the energy markets, but should be letting human ingenuity tackle our energy challenges.

P.S. Huber and Mills's book is a must read for anybody who wants to talk intelligently about energy, regardless of what policy side you want to advocate.

The Lethargists Are Back

Don Surber is right, they don't want us to travel. The reasons keep changing, but the goal is the same. Travel is freedom, freedom, well, messes with the plan. Energy guru Peter Huber talked about this extensively in his fantastic book The Bottomless Well. He called the same crowd in the 1970s "lethargists." They're back although they have morphed ever so slightly.

Maybe Malthus Didn't Even Believe Malthus

I was very intrigued by this review of a new book on Thomas Malthus in the weekend section of the WSJ.  I haven't given Malthus much thought since college and, let's face it, his name is a throw-away pejorative for our ever-present self-loathing doom-and-gloomers.

Based on this, perhaps Malthus is a due further study and/or perhaps rehabilitation.

A further irony is that Malthus, over his lifetime, questioned his own principle of population and became, in many ways, its fiercest and most original critic. Malthus had an empirical cast of mind and did not turn away from contradictory evidence. He wrestled with the case of Russia, for example, where the fertility of the soil was unparalleled but poverty was extreme. ...

As time went by, Malthus was also more and more impressed by the way that population growth was proving to be a spur to innovation. Even in countries that were fully settled and cultivated, agricultural improvements kept boosting food production per acre—a phenomenon that has not since abated. Malthus could only conclude that "no country has ever reached, or probably will ever reach, its highest level of production." Rather, "it was want of industry, or the ill direction of that industry, [that] was the actual limit to a further increase of produce and population, and not the absolute refusal of nature to yield any more."

That last bit sounds a lot like this quote from modern day uber-optimist of human capacity, Peter Huber.

"'Energy supply' is determined not by 'what's out there' but by how good we are at finding and extracting it. What is scarce is not raw energy but the drive and the logic that is able to locate, purify, and channel it to our own ends."