Your Thoughts On Energy?

[omega minimo]

Aha! you say-- thoughts ARE energy. May I pick your brain?

This quote came up in a thread on Peak Oil and Capitalism. This reply struck me for it’s very universe-is-a-giant-pinball-machine POV regarding “energy.”

I thought I would ask the Environment/Energy-prone DUer for some insight on this. What do you think?

"Wealth is not a form of energy, and instead is created by every improvement in process, technology, and design. Value is not measured in joules, nor by how much labor went into a product or service."

[Ready4Change]

1. Hmmm.

"Wealth is not a form of energy, and instead is created by every improvement in process, technology, and design. Value is not measured in joules, nor by how much labor went into a product or service."

I think I'd say that somethings value is measured by the effort one is willing to expend to get it. A diamond may be beautiful, but a starving person has no interest in it. Tell that starving person that a rich person will pay enough money for that diamond to feed his family for a year, and that starving person will expend a lot of effort to obtain it.

So, wealth is not a form of energy in itself. It is instead an indication of potential energy.

[omega minimo]

2. So maybe value IS "measured by how much labor went into a product/service"

[Ready4Change]

3. That's putting the cart before the horse.

Cost is what much be paid to create an item. Value is what someone else will pay for the completed item.

It is possible the cost to create an item may exceed its final value.

[omega minimo]

5. One never puts Descartes before the horse

[Ready4Change]

10. Is that because...

A horse always needs someone to clean up after it? (kidding.)

Back to the subject. It seems to me that "value" is what we think something is worth. Cost, on the other hand, is more factual.

Take a photograph, for example. It can be low cost. Throw away camera: $10. Development costs: $15. Total costs: $25. For about 25 photos that's a final cost of about $1 per shot.

One of those pictures is of a beloved grandparent, smiling joyfully, a beam of sunlight shining while she sits in her favorite chair.

That photo only cost $1. But what is its VALUE?

What happens to that photo's value when that grandparent dies?

What if that photo is the only one in your possession in which she is smiling and happy?

I think that while cost can usually be boiled down to joules, value may sometimes be more ephemeral.

[bananas]

4. Do you have a link to the thread?

Why do you say "Value is not measured in joules" is a "universe-is-a-giant-pinball-machine POV"?
Do you think value is measured in joules?

[omega minimo]

6. Oh I referred to the whole reply, not just that one bit

Better to not link and bother the person. That was the whole reply, in the context noted in this OP.

I was curious if many DUers viewed "energy" and "value" in such mechanistic terms.

[bananas]

7. You are being mechanistic if you think value is measured in joules

Do you think value is measured in joules? It's a simple yes or no question.

That's a bullshit reason for not providing a link, if anyone "bothers" him that's an issue for the moderators. What's your real reason for not providing a link to the thread? It sounds like an interesting discussion, I' d like to read it, PM the link to me if you don't want to post it here.

[omega minimo]

8. Too simplistic to deserve reply

And with the 'tude, don't expect a PM :hi:

[skids]

9. It depends on how much you stretch things...

...especially your definition of energy.

It cannot be denied that, for example, a killowatt hour of electricity constitutes more value to a community where everyone has been educated to be parsimonious in energy use. It costs that community very little for it's members to spend an extra three seconds turning the lightswitch off when they leave the room, and stretches that kWh further in truns of value realized. Now the question is whether the education of that population which causes them to turn out lights when they leave a room was gotten through energy. There is this school of thought that economically everything boils down to energy, even knowlege -- and that the effort of educating the population must have required the attention of someone who themselves has an energy intake. Thus there is a cost in energy that has been leveraged by that community to make their energy worth more.

At what point this school of thought becomes ridiculously pedantic and one must recognize that something else, let's call it good intelligence, exists that defies full quantification in units of energy -- well that's entirely a matter of personal preference.

[bloom]

11. That reminds me of this article

(People might need to get over that he was referencing Kerry - the article is mostly about energy - not Kerry)

A couple snips:

The Warning Shot

"Energy... is certainly linked to, or behind almost any international event, crisis. war, military adventure or environmental catastrophe that we are forced to witness almost any day," points out Andrew McKillop, a founding member of the International Association of Energy Economists, "and which are due either solely or mainly to our urban industrial civilization and fossil energy habit...Attack of New York's Twin Towers can best be thought of as a warning shot. Three airplanes crashed into three nuclear power plants will produce three Chernobyl catastrophes--this true catastrophe being deliberately downplayed, even lied about by such UN agencies as the World Health Organization until 2002 nearly 16 years after the event, because nuclear power, absurdly, is still 'believed in' as a solution to expensive oil and gas. As with so many of the myths of the neoliberal age, the myth of nuclear energy being 'cheap', and oil and gas being 'expensive' is the complete opposite of reality."

McKillop puts his finger on the fact not only that nuclear is expensive and dangerous, but that the question of energy itself is so basic, so all pervasive, so universal, so widely misunderstood, so misrepresented by capitalists and their professional publicists, and so profound in its implications if we are to be at all serious about it, that we have to rely on independent macro-analysis of energy to put the issue in some kind of context.

The Centrality of Energy as a Geophysical, Economic, Social, and Political Issue

"Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that many people hope for--a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology."

- Joseph A. Tainter

The failure to grasp the full significance of energy is based largely on our understanding of it as a seemingly endless commodity. I turn the ignition key, and the car starts. I flip the switch, and the lights come one. But we cannot understand the significance of energy, or how our consumption of it is irrevocably changing the entire biosphere, without understanding energy in a more basic and essential way.

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff08132004.html

[omega minimo]

12. Brilliant!

Wow, thanks Bloom :yourock: What a great reference.

This relates to why I got curious about some DUers apparent hard-edged view of "energy":

"...the question of energy itself is so basic, so all pervasive, so universal, so widely misunderstood, so misrepresented by capitalists and their professional publicists, and so profound in its implications......"

"Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future."

"The failure to grasp the full significance of energy is based largely on our understanding of it as a seemingly endless commodity."

And I wondered how many see it as a "commodity" at all, like a barrel of pork or the infamous "joule." Energy is energy, right? :shrug: It's a force, as far as I know....................................................

:hi:

[dcfirefighter]

13. Joules? Entropy? Enthalpy?

If we could trade joules, i'd trade low quality joules for high ones any day.

Joules at a high temperature are more useful than joules at a low temperature.

Energy - in and of itself, is a relatively useless 'economic' measure: energy falls on us, blows on us, etc. all the time, for free.

It's the need to get 'high quality' energy that can be readily converted to our needs that is the crux. A GJ of oil energy is worth about $10. A GJ of solar energy is worth $0.00.

Capital can be used to convert energy from one form to another: PV Cells convert solar energy to electric, Wind turbines convert wind energy to mechanical or electric.

Labor can be used to convert raw materials (Adam Smith & K. Marx's 'Land') into capital. The value of the capital is what it can be exchanged for, regardless of the amount of labor that went into building it.

Crude oil, as it comes out of the ground, has very little labor put into it, but rather millenia of solar energy. It is valuable, because it is useful to many people.

Gold nuggets, as they come out of the ground, also has no 'labor value', and very little 'energy value'. It, however, is very valuable because people find it useful as a store of value, a medium of exchange, an electronics component, and/or jewelry.

There's a large ball of string somewhere in Minnesota, that represents an extraordinary amount of labor. Despite this, it's not worth very much.

The sun has an enormous energy content. It has very little tradeable value - merely because it's difficult to exclude others from it.

What fossil fuels represent to our economy is a shortcut. A man can 'own' a chunk of this world, and charge others for it's use. He did not call it into existince, he didn't commission it's construction, and he certainly didn't form it himself. He didn't buy it from it's creator, and if he inherited it, neither did his forbears. Yet our property laws recognize it as his, and we must pay whatever he asks to use it. His greed cannot be undercut by another man's entrepreneurship - as no one can create 'Land'. So pay we must, and pay we do.

In the case of energy, we screw ourselves from the cradle to the grave, so to speak: we reduce his taxes for extracting oil from his wells; we tax the property of people who build new, energy efficient builings; we zone land use such that automobile use is virtually required; we allow the wastes from the burnign of his oil to pollute our earth; we increase the cost of labor through taxes, such labor is conserved more than oil; we shift the costs of protecting oil routes to the working man via income taxes.