Mark,
>If you look on the CrashList website, check out Cutler,
>Cleveland et al. They show that although energy efficiency may increase through
>time (i.e., energy per unit of GDP falls), overall energy consumption INCREASES
>and the secular growth of energy consumption is always far more than any
>nominal savings through increased efficiency.
It's not the first time that you're saying that some piece on your website or
elsewhere shows something and that after looking I find out that the piece talks
about something else. Am I really dumb or are they confonting different methods of
aggregating energy consumption?
As to what they show, what can they show when relying on stuff like "market prices
reflect the marginal product of input and thus its economic usefulness". I guess that
this must please some of the orthodox LTV fanatics, but it's dead wrong because it
ultimately relies on the very notion they are attacking, namely that one can
substitute one energy source for another (or it may rely on neoclassical modelling
assuming notably that consumers have no needs and infinite desires so that prices
of end products reflect utility or it may rely on another even more extraordinary
assumption: that there is no such thing as scarcity of energy sources). I don't want
to devalue their work even if I don't like their economics and if I think that their
sense/statistics rato is too low. It's important that someone does this, but this
sounds like exploratory work. They aren't *showing* much. BTW, I'd like to see
economists do the same work that they're doing. If they did, we wouldn't have to
rely on such crap as GDP and such. At least, I'd like people to recognize how
crappy GDP is. It depresses me to see scientists refine measures of energy use
with such crappy economic instruments.
Incidentally, using the preferred method of Cleveland & co., energy per unit of GDP
is NOT decreasing ... so I wonder if we read the same paper. They say that not
because overall energy consumption increases but because more "high quality"
energy is used.
>What's more, it HAS to be like this, because in order to win those efficiency
>increases, you have to have more widescale, complex, diverse and heavily
>capitalised scientific and technological infrastructures, in other
>words, you have to have a more complex, and overall more energy intensive,
>social system and productive process.
This sounds so passe, Mark! Are you really arguing that "bigger is more efficient"? I
won't even discuss such vulgar positivist slant. Look around you, folks! Even the
paper you cite refutes that.
>The history of industrial capitalism clearly shows the trend towards drastically
>improved energy efficiencies but always in the context of absolute increases of
>energy consumption.
This is true, but isn't it because the energy availability was increasing or even
apparently infinite but not the other way around as you suggest?
Antother thing Cleveland & co. say is that, with their preferred method and lots of
statistical voodoo which notably eliminates the influence of increased use of labour
and capital (!), GDP growth doesn't imply increased energy used but the other
way around. Interestingly enough, without their bizarre adjustment (which negates
what is likely to happen as the petroleum depletion hits), they say that there's no
statistical causality between energy use and GDP.
Julien
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