The roots of the subprime crisis | 71 comments (71 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The roots of the subprime crisis (4.00 / 4)

I'm with you on a lot of this. This diary is a cross-post from the Daily Kos, and there I replied to a comment similar to yours. Let me see....

Ah! Here--something I said in the Daily Kos diary in reply to the point that an information econony doesn't use a lot of matter and energy]

The limiting case is probably "information worker"--people who get a living by moving pixels around. To do that takes some matter (the computers are made out of something) and energy (electricity, heat or AC, food), but the value added seems much larger than the physical inputs.
Some people say that services are layered atop the traditional extractive, matter-and-energy work of the economy, which never went away in a real sense. We in the U.S. might tend to forget that, since many of the "smokestack" industries of yore have gone overseas; but we still depend on them. We use more steel than we did three decades ago, but we make way less steel than we did then.
...
I wrote in reply to someone in the other diary that I linked to this one that an alternative way to view factors of production is to see them in these three categories: matter, energy, and intelligence. Certainly products (and services, like medical services) in which a high degree of learning/design/information/knowledge is embedded have a higher value-to-matter/energy ratio that stuff like, oh, iron ore. But just about everything partakes of all three. Growth in the intelligence/design/knowledge part of everything will let us save matter and energy, and let us achieve efficiencies that reduce (or slow the growth in) the ecological footprint of economic activity.

Henry George, airbrushed from history: yes. Interesting that he was advocating a single tax on land, as the prime productive asset. Land is the great net by which we capture current solar income, which (eventually, I believe) we will have to learn to live within. And some people advocate a single tax on low entropy, or on carbon: get rid of the income tax and tax the thing that leads to externalities, the extraction of valuable matter and energy from nature.

Industrial society is not sustainable. Unsustainable systems change--or disappear.

by Eric Zencey (Eric dot Zencey at UVM dot EDU) on Tue Mar 11th, 2008 at 03:45:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The roots of the subprime crisis (none / 1)

Eric Zencey:

Land is the great net by which we capture current solar income, which (eventually, I believe) we will have to learn to live within.

On living within the means of solar income, see Order of Magnitude Morality: An order of magnitude solar energy / world energy comparison

`The earth receives more energy from the sun in just one hour than the world uses in a whole year'. So, does that mean that we can convert to solar and everything is going to be fine?
No: I show that the current rate of power consumption of the `developed' world is unsustainable. The `developed' world must cut its consumption by at least a factor of 10, and must put all possible resources into developing solar energy technology, which, along with hydroelectricity, is the only^* significant source of sustainable power.
^{* - Some conditions may apply! See below for details}

It'd be nice if the battle were only against the right wingers, not half of the left on top of that — François in Paris

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 12th, 2008 at 06:23:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Solar input (none / 1)

yeah, I've heard that thing about "the earth receives more energy from the sun in one day than the whole world uses in a year." What are the assumptions behind that? I am pretty sure that one assumption is: the EARTH receives the solar input, and what it's compared to is the amount of energy that HUMANS use. As in, if humans expand their niche to take more solar income, there will be less solar income for the rest of nature to use. If we use wind power, I can imagine that we would't be stealing solar energy from other life forms. But if we cut down forests in order to plant things (plants, solar photovoltaics) that bring solar power into our economy, we're not decreasing our ecological footprint by going solar.

Biologists say that humans are currently using 40% of the Net Primary Productivity of the planet. That ratio is not sustainable, and has to be--will be--reduced in the future.

I'll check out that link.

Industrial society is not sustainable. Unsustainable systems change--or disappear.

by Eric Zencey (Eric dot Zencey at UVM dot EDU) on Thu Mar 13th, 2008 at 12:15:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Solar input (none / 1)

Biologists say that humans are currently using 40% of the Net Primary Productivity of the planet. That ratio is not sustainable, and has to be--will be--reduced in the future.

While the 40 % figure is undoubtedly true, the primary photosynthesis uses only about 2 % of the incident solar energy (and that is only over land - over ocean, the number is considerably lower). The rest is either reflected or goes straight to (mostly) unrecoverable heat (only mostly so, because it is this heat that drives the climate system - i.e. the wind and ocean currents that we can exploit for energy).

In this sense, the only difference between solar and wind is that solar taps into the greater reserve of free energy - ultimately, both wind and solar exploit the remaining 98 % of incident solar radiation. The chopping down of trees to accommodate wind farms or solar panels is thus more an issue of limited space (and the current low conversion efficiency) than limited free energy.

There are limits to the scale of any energy capture technology that we can safely deploy without changing weather patterns (irrespective of whether we are talking wind or solar), but at the moment the relatively modest conversion efficiency of the technology in question makes that a moot point.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Mar 14th, 2008 at 06:38:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

The roots of the subprime crisis | 71 comments (71 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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