Tag Archives: Energy

The point of government isn’t just to spend money

It’s election season, so I’m being inundated with election spam on every social media and traditional media I use. I know election posts probably aren’t people’s favorites, but this is the streams of my consciousness and I just wanted to vent.

To start with, some of the twitterati are pulling an absolute masterclass in doublethink. Centrists in the commentariat have been crowing for the last 4 years about how Biden has pumped more oil than any president in history. They’ve been dunking on Republicans about how despite Trump and the GOP’s rhetoric, Biden is more carbon friendly than Trump was.

Now, every words of this is true. I pointed out years ago how despite a small pandemic dip oil production has steadily increased during both Biden and Trump’s presidencies. Biden has inherited a fracking boom, and has not done anything to clamp down on it, so record-setting oil production is to be expected.

But the same commentariat that will crow about Biden’s oil boom will screech in anger and confusion when climate groups like the Sunrise Movement announce they won’t support Biden’s re-election. How can they do that? How can they refuse to support the president who has pumped more oil than any other in history? Gee, maybe because Democrats have said that Climate Change is an existential threat for years, and these folks actually believe it? Seems pretty obvious to me why the Sunrise Movement and other climate groups wouldn’t be happy with Biden’s energy policy.

As a defense, the commetariat likes to point to Biden’s massive spending bills. Billions and billions of dollars are being pumped into the green energy sector, and Democrat columnists are producting hockey-stick graphs comparing Biden’s green spending to previous presidents as proof of his climate success.

The problem with this is that the point of the government isn’t just to spend money. The point of the government is to get results. How much has that billions of dollars actually achieved?

For example, we all know that switching to electric cars is hard when there’s so few charging stations. Biden’s climate bills were supposed to build charging stations across the country to combat this. How many charging stations have Biden’s Billions actually created? As of May this year, just 8. But don’t worry, that number is growing! In March it was just 7! With a rough estimate of 1 charging station every 2 months, can anyone say these billions (trillions!) of dollars are being well spent?

This is exactly the kind of thing that If We Can Put a Man on the Moon… discussed. Politicians are incentivized to declare victory immediately for their re-election campaign. This leads to them touting metrics like “amount of money spent” instead of something actually useful like “miles of track laid” or “amount of actual EV infrastructure.” And since “money spent” is the only metric politicians are focusing on, that money gets spent extremely badly.

Years later, when the money is all spent and the infrastructure is still crumbling, a new campaign will of course arise, saying we now need to spend even *more* money to fix this thing that should have been fixed with the first tranche.

Let me be clear: I believe that climate change is a problem we need to address. But I do not think government spending is the best way to address that. In the last year, Tesla has built around 40 times more EV charging stations than Biden’s infrastructure bill, and they didn’t use taxpayer money to do it.

So why does it *have* to be government spending? I think it’s honestly because a lot of politicians don’t believe that companies can ever accomplish things. When you spend your entire life in government, every problem looks like a taxpayer-funded nail.

The government *can* solve these problems, but it doesn’t need to spend billions to do so. You really want to improve charging infrastructure? Tax gasoline. Tax oil. Tax every step of the refinement process. You will see how quickly consumers shift to electric cars, and how quickly companies spring up to service those electric cars. Hell, a network of gas stations already exists all across the country. If gas was taxed and consumers switched to electric cars, those stations would quickly be forced to switch from offering gas to offering fast electric charging.

You may say that a gas tax would hurt American consumers, but it would hurt them no more than the spending-fueled inflation that America has right now.

Here’s the funniest thing: politicians have adopted the language of the market and claimed that government spending is an investment. We are investing in green energy. But investment expects a return, and if the return on billions of dollars investment is 8 or so EV stations, that isn’t an investment, it’s a ripoff.

Biden chose to keep oil cheap and burn money on 8 EV charging stations. Is it any wonder climate activists don’t appreciate him? When success if measured in dollars spent, then failure is assured.

Energy Return on Energy Investment, a very silly concept

Today I’d like to address one concept that I read about in Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth, Energy Return on Energy Investment or EROEI. The concept is an attempt to quantify the efficiency of a given energy source, and in the hands of Heinberg and other degrowthers it is a way to “prove” that we are running out of usable energy.

EROEI is a simple and intuitive concept, taking the amount of energy produced by a given source and dividing by the amount of energy it costs to set up and use that source. Oil is a prime example. In the beginning of the 20th century oil extract was easy since it just seeped out of the ground in many places. Drilling a small oil well won’t cost you that much, hell you can probably do it with manpower alone. In that case the oil gushing forth will easily give you a good energy return.

In the 21st century however, things have become harder. Oil wells require powerful machines to drill (which costs energy), and the amount and quality of the oi you get out is often lower. Add to that the fact that modern wells require huge amounts of metal and plastics, all of which cost energy to produce and even more energy to transport to their location, then add the energy it took to find the oil wells in the first place using complex geographical surveys and seismographic data, and taken together some people claim that the EROEI for a modern oil well is already less than 1, meaning that more energy is being put in than the energy we get out.

And oil isn’t the only fuel source heading towards and EROEI of less than 1. Modern mining techniques for coal require bigger and bigger machines, natural gas requires more and more expansive facilities, even solar panels require minerals that are more and more difficult to acquire. It seems everything but hydro power and (perhaps) nuclear power are becoming harder and harder to produce, sending energy returns down further and further.

This phenomenon, where the EROEI for our energy sources is less than 1, is supposed to presage an acute energy crisis and the economic cataclysm that degrowth advocates have been warning us about. If we’re getting out less energy than we’re putting in, then we’re really not even gaining, aren’t we? The problem is, I’m struggling to see how EROEI is even a meaningful way to look at this.

First let me note that not all energy is created equal. Energy in certain forms is more usable to us than in others. A hydroelectric dam holds water which (due to its being elevated above its natural resting place) acts as a store of potential energy. The release of that water drives a turbine to produce electricity. But you can’t fly a plane using water power nor keep it plugged in during flight. Jet fuel is another source of potential energy, and it has a number of advantages versus elevated water. Jet fuel is very easy to use and transport, you can fill a tank with it and move it to wherever your plane is, then fill the plane’s tanks from there.

If the only two energy sources in the world were jet fuel and hydroelectric power, we would still find it beneficial to somehow produce jet fuel using hydroelectric power even though that would necessity an EROEI of less than one. Because although this conversion would have less total energy, the energy would be in a more useful form. People would happily extract oil using hydroelectric power, then run refineries using hydroelectric power, because jet fuel has so much utility. This utility means that (supply being equal), jet fuel would command a higher price than hydroelectric power per unit of energy. And so the economic advantages would make the EROEI disadvantages meaningless.

This is the fatal flaw of EROEI in my mind. The fact that some forms of energy are more useful than others means we can’t directly compare energy out and energy in. The energy that is used to run a modern oil well comes to it from the grid, which is usually powered by coal, solar, wind, or nuclear, none of which can be used to fuel a plane. Converting these forms of energy into oil is an economic gain even if it is an energy loss. Furthermore EROEI estimates are generally overly complex and try to account for every joule of energy used in extraction, even when those calculations don’t really make sense. Let me give you an example:

A neolithic farmer has to plow his own fields, sow his own seeds, reap his own corns. Not only that, but the sun’s rays must shine upon his fields enough to let them grow. Billions of kilocalories of energy are hitting his plants every second, and most of then are lost during the plants’ growth process because photosynthesis is actually not all that efficient to begin with. The plant will have used billions of kilocalories of energy, and from them the farmer gets a few thousands of kilocalories of energy. Most of the energy is lost.

This is the kind of counting EROEI tries to do, applied to farming. When you count up every joule of energy that went into the farmer’s food, you find his food will necessarily provide him with an EROEI of less than one thanks to the first law of thermodynamics. But this isn’t a problem because Earth isn’t a closed system, nor are our oil wells. We are blasted by sunlight every minute, our core produces energy from decaying nucleotides, our tides are driven in part by the moon’s gravity, there is so much energy hitting us that we could fuel the entire world for a thousand years and never run out. The problem is that there are some scenarios where that energy isn’t useful. You can’t fly a plane with solar or geothermal or gravitational energy, but you can power an oil well. So we happily use the energies we have lots of (including our use of solar power to grow useful plants and animals!) and use that energy to help us extract the energies with greater utility.

I think EROEI failed from the very beginning for this very reason. It ignores economic realities and the massive amount of energy that surrounds us, and instead argues from the first law of thermodynamics. Yes in any closed system energy eventually runs out, but it isn’t even clear that our universe is a closed system, and the earth definitely is not, so we need to face up to economic reality on this.