PhilGoetz comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong

17 [deleted] 15 June 2009 07:35PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 16 June 2009 12:14:42AM 2 points [-]

Do you think you might be underestimating the capabilities of the statistically average person of 100 IQ?

Now, if the average voter could understand the concept of photosynthetic efficiency, and could understand a simple numerical calculation showing how inefficient corn is at converting solar energy to stored energy in ethanol, this policy choice would have been dead in the water.

There's an obvious point you're overlooking here.

Plants are, indeed, only about 3% efficient at converting the energy in sunlight into chemical energy, and that's before the living plant is harvested. However, bare ground is zero percent efficient, and the sunlight is there whether we use it or not.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 June 2009 06:18:57PM 4 points [-]

There are many studies - 1 to 2 dozen - showing that producing a gallon of corn ethanol takes more energy than is contained in a gallon of corn ethanol. Usually, the conclusion is that it takes n=1 to 1.4 times as much energy. There are other studies claiming the opposite; they fail to take into account factors such as irrigation and transportation costs.

I wrote to Wired magazine and to somewhere else (I forget where) to correct their outrageously-incorrect assertions about corn ethanol. (Wired underreported n by 2 orders of magnitude, which is disturbing because this wasn't like ordinary irresponsible journalism where someone took one "expert's" numbers uncritically. The figure they gave for corn ethanol efficiency was AFAIK much, much higher than those of even the most biased ethanol advocates.) My responses were unpublished. It's even worse journalism when you make an extreme error on a point important to public policy, and then someone points it out to you, and gives you a dozen literature citations, and you don't correct it.

Comment author: Annoyance comment score below threshold [+] (10 children)

Comment author: Alicorn 16 June 2009 07:06:56PM 6 points [-]

We have to actually invest the energy that goes into producing ethanol. Coal and oil were produced without such intervention and all we need to do is dig them up. If people were talking about synthesizing these things, that would be a more sensible comparison to make.

Comment author: thomblake 16 June 2009 09:01:44PM 1 point [-]

I believe Annoyance's point was that it takes more energy to create virtually any fuel than you get out of it, and if PhilGoetz meant anything further than that, he should have said so. I also did not feel informed after reading PhilGoetz's comment, for the same reason.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 16 June 2009 10:28:52PM * 4 points [-]

The core distinction here is between energy production and energy storage, and confusing the two is the sort of thing Roko was complaining about (I am not saying anyone here is confusing them).

Ethanol is a valid means of storing energy, although producing it from corn is a terribly suboptimal way of doing so anyway.

Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy, but it is often presented as if it was, and the inability of the general public to understand this is the heart of the matter.

Fossil fuels, like other non-renewable energy sources, are energy that was stored in advance by natural processes, and are only useful for energy "production" because the energy cost of extracting them is far lower than the energy they store. Corn ethanol is just a very silly way to store solar power.

Comment author: Annoyance 17 June 2009 01:26:35PM * -1 points [-]

Almost completely correct. The only quibble I have is with the claim that "Ethanol is not in any useful way a means of producing energy".

That's not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that trying to use corn as an industrial energy source while simultaneously growing it with methods that require artificial fertilizers (which are extremely energy-intensive to synthesize) and mechanical tillage and harvesting (which requires amounts of industrial-level fuel that are prohibitive for that task) is utterly pointless, because the total process requires more industrial-level fuel than it produces.

You can get more energy out of the corn than you invest into it - obviously. But you can't do so with modern industrial agricultural methods, which expend lots of energy (considered in total, including fertilizer manufacture) to capture a relatively small amount of solar energy in a form that people and animals can consume.

Even when we used draft animals to do the labor required and relied on organic fertilizers only, farmers couldn't make their planted crop areas provide all of the energy and resources necessary to keep the system going. Large areas of forage (usually grass) were needed to feed the beasts so that human-edible crops could be produced - an 'external' energy input for the crop areas. The farms as a whole were powered by the sun only, of course.

When humans do all of the work of agriculture, farming is far, far less efficient (depending on the methods used) and with very primitive methods has a return barely greater than the investment of (human-provided) energy.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 June 2009 07:39:07PM * -1 points [-]

Anyone who knows the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that.

Termodynamics has nothing to do with this. There is the sun outside this open system.

Comment author: Annoyance 17 June 2009 01:16:30PM * -1 points [-]

Termodynamics has nothing to do with this.

Thermodynamics has everything to do with the statement in question.

There is the sun outside this open system.

Exactly.

What I suspect Phil was trying to express was that ethanol manufacturing requires us to expend more of the desired level of fuel than we derive from the process - which is a good point - and that this rules out ethanol as a viable energy source - which is NOT a good point.

We invest more energy in building and charging batteries than we can get out of them. That isn't an argument against batteries, because they're a means of transmitting energy in usable form. And extremely useful ones. Carrying around a steam-powered generator to operate a flashlight isn't an option.

Corn ethanol is a terrible net-producer of industrial-grade fuel because its production consumes more of that level of fuel than it produces, NOT because it "takes more energy to make it than it provides", which is trivially, obviously true of any fuel.

Comment author: timtyler 17 June 2009 08:59:12AM 0 points [-]

I don't think you understood Phil's comment. Thermodynamics does not dictate it takes more energy to produce some fuel than is contained in the fuel. Producing fuel is energetically inexpensive - if you have sufficiently concentrated precursors.

Comment author: Annoyance comment score below threshold [+] (2 children)

PhilGoetz comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong

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