Month: July 2022

I vaguely remember reading an article a few years ago that discussed some of the effects of moving to en energy economy driven by solar and wind. Aside from the superficial environmental impact, there’s a fundamental change in moving from a world where energy plants consume fuel and therefore have high marginal costs, to a world where the marginal cost of energy production effectively drops to zero. (Apart from comparatively small ongoing maintenance costs.)

A sufficiently large quantitative change can easily flip over into a qualitative change. If electricity can be made abundantly and (effectively) “for free”, all kinds of things become possible that previously were non-viable. I think this is similar to what the availability of computing power has done in the cloud era. (Like how you can set up a tech company without owning your own racks of servers; machine learning; and, regrettably, blockchains.)

This blog post by Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries shows big ambition and presents a hopeful vision for a possible future where the bulk of the world’s hydrocarbons can be mined from the atmosphere as a result of this shift in cost:

Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas. […] As far as any of the market participants are concerned, fuel synthesis plants are less polluting, cheaper gas wells that convert capital investment into steady flows of fuel in a boringly predictable way.

There is nothing particularly special about the technological approach we’re taking. Each of the various parts is built on at least 100 years of industrial development, but up until this point no-one has considered scaling these up as a fundamental source of hydrocarbons, because doing so would be cost prohibitive. Why? The machinery is not particularly complex, but the energy demands are astronomical. Yet as our atmospheric CO2 concentration creeps steadily ever upwards year over year, our ability to extract silicon from rocks and transform it in frankly magical ways continues to progress.

One of these ways has produced the cheapest electricity ever. Electricity so cheap that in an ever growing number of markets it now makes more sense to turn solar electricity into hydrocarbons, than to burn hydrocarbons to make electricity.

Casey Handmer, “We’re going to need a lot of solar panels”

For the last couple of years Kevin Kelly has been marking his birthday with lists of pieces of wisdom he has accumulated over the years: 2022, 2021, 2020. As one reads through them, some will resonate, some won’t. I often say that I get all my best ideas in the shower, but I also get all my worst ideas in the shower as well. The hard bit is figuring out which is which.

In the light of a recent car rental, I can say that these two pieces of advice from his 2022 piece are in conflict:

• Getting cheated occasionally is the small price for trusting the best of everyone, because when you trust the best in others, they generally treat you best.

• Don’t purchase extra insurance if you are renting a car with a credit card.

All car rental companies will try to extract money from you with extra charges and inflated damage waiver insurance. You’re always better off buying such insurance separately. However, this is still no comfort when the company decides to charge your credit card for spurious damage after the fact. The sense of betrayal stings.

The lesson I feel I should have learned by now is: avoid unattended drop-offs, because they will try to take advantage of you whenever they can. Always take photographs of the car (or any other rental item for that matter) when you take receipt and when you return it.

This piece of Kelly’s advice from 2021 is also relevant:

• What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. At your funeral people will not recall what you did; they will only remember how you made them feel.

I’m more familiar with this cautionary formulation: “people remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten what you actually said or did.”

Let’s say that car rental company Easirent is on my shit list.

Wikipedia:

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Lilla Watson et al.

From Wikipedia:

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Daniel Yankelovich, “Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business” (1972).