[p2p-research] [Open Manufacturing] Addressing Post-Scarcity Pitfalls

[Stan Rhodes]

Eugen, three points:

1) Negawatts are effectively nonsense because of the Jevons paradox.
Bradish challenged Lovins to offer evidence against the Jevons paradox for
power use, and it's never appeared.  The same challenge goes for anyone
mentioning negawatts.  Increasing efficiency lowers relative cost but tends
to increase consumption (rebound effect).  It happens with coal, gasoline,
and electricity, to name a few.

2) Your claims of current PV viability "across the scale" included no
supporting data, and, having looked at the data for solar, I do not believe
them.  Solar cannot be used for baseload power, generally stated to be
30-40% of consumption over the year.  Seems reasonable given use graphs I've
seen.  Solar generates very little power per sq km, and efficiency gains in
the technology cannot make up for variable weather, which is a ceiling the
technology can never break.  Storage options attempt to get around this, but
are incredibly expensive.  The same applies to wind, although wind can
produce more power per footprint (carbon or land) than solar.

3) Kevin's point on industry power stands.  Industry power needs are
everyone's problem.  They're a part of the global socioeconomic system, and
I see no evidence suggesting that will change in the years ahead.

Kevin:

Reduced demand cannot be achieved through efficiency.  See above regarding
negawatts.  Crunch the numbers, look at the literature, particularly more
recent discussions of the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.  Energy economists are
trying to figure out what the hell to do without having efforts politically
hamstrung.

Lately you've made increasingly extraordinary claims, which require
extraordinary evidence.  Where are the data supporting efficiency gains of
80%?  Surely you can understand my skepticism, particularly when the
statement is so general.  Renovating cities isn't free: consider the power
cost to do so in diesel alone.  Even if the Jevons paradox somehow didn't
apply, how much energy would be required to renovate US infrastructure to
reduce consumption by 80%?  Now consider material and labor costs.  Now
consider transaction costs of renegotiating property laws and rights,
municipality by municipality.

The only solution direction I see is an increasing transition to taxing
resource use, built into the socioeconomic system, and thus most of my
research since mid-2008 has focused on mapping that concept space with the
insights of behavioral economics.  Governance structures must include
mechanisms to adjust for these externalities, but when they do, they're
likely to be out-competed by entities that ignore those mechanisms.

-- Stan
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