Why the falling cost of light matters

[hunter]

By Tim Harford
BBC World Service

Back in the mid-1990s, an economist called William Nordhaus conducted a series of simple experiments with light.

First, he used a prehistoric technology: he lit a wood fire.

But Prof Nordhaus also had a piece of hi-tech equipment with him - a Minolta light meter.

He burned 20lb (9kg) of wood, kept track of how long it burned for and carefully recorded the dim, flickering firelight with his meter.

--more--

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38650976

Imagine now if we all used as little artificial light as Benjamin Franklin did... a few one watt LEDs would be adequate. But that's not how it works.

There's an LED streetlight in front of our house that's crazy bright. Fortunately it's directed onto the streets and sidewalks better than the sodium vapor streetlight it replaced, which was always casting it's eerie orange glow into our house. The LED lamp is more like natural moonlight.

I've got seven nine watt LED can lights blazing down into my kitchen. They brighten up the room considerably, even when it's sunny outside, thus they are always on when I'm cooking. I value my fingers when I'm using a sharp knife, and I want to see the quality of my food.

So it's all a matter of expectations and income. I expect a bright kitchen and I can easily afford the lamps and the electricity.

Do I need all this light? No. I'm pretty sure I could live without the streetlights, without the bright light in the kitchen. I suspect I could be quite comfortable with a one amp electrical service to my house rather than a ninety amp electrical service. (This is green California. 90 Amp service is residential building code minimum, not 200.) Do I live as if I have a one amp service? No. I just put a load of clothes in the washing machine and that draws more than one amp of 118 volts electricity. But we could build a washing machine that uses less.

These questions become even stickier when we consider transportation. Are automobiles and airliners necessary things?

I don't think we are going to solve any of our environmental problems by technological improvements. If we chose to reduce our fossil fuel use then we have to reduce our fossil fuel use. That means shutting down fossil fuel power plants, and shutting down the refineries that make transportation fuels, and letting the chips fall where they may. Solar, wind, and other energy technologies are not going to magically replace fossil fuels.

I often do the thought experiment of "what would happen if solar panels were FREE? Would they replace gas fired power plants?" No they would not. There is a certain cost of installing and maintaining solar panels, and storing the energy they produce for times when the sun is not shining is not a trivial problem.

What might happen instead is that more gas power plants would be built to back up the "free" solar power as more people in the world begin to enjoy the kind of lighting I enjoy in my kitchen, and the kinds of machines that wash my clothes.

I wouldn't even call this any kind of paradox.

Instead I consider it a flaw of our economic system. This thing we call "economic productivity" is in fact a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

The sort of "work ethic" our society celebrates is killing us. These sorts of work ethics are of great temporary utility in warrior cultures and that's why they spread, but they are unsustainable in the long run.

GliderGuider has expressed the same sort of opinions in more existential terms, but mostly I'm just musing on how easy it is to become a shill for innovative technologies that won't "save" us unless we make fundamental changes in the way we approach environmental problems.

"More stuff!" is what got us into this mess. More stuff, even stuff judged good and economically desirable by certain environmental activists, won't get us out of this mess.

[ymetca]

1. I like Bob Black's solution

The Abolition of Work

It's really kind of the Buddha's solution. Or the solution outlined in the book The One Straw Revolution.

[hunter]

5. Thanks for that link.

I do believe the "Star Trek" economy is becoming possible.

What would it look like?

In Star Trek Deep Space Nine Commander Sisko's father owns a restaurant in New Orleans because he loves to cook and people love his cooking. It seems his assistant is not an employee, but a younger person who loves to cook and desires to learn more from a master cook and restaurateur.

Where does the fish come from? The rice?

Maybe such an economy evolves from a minimum guaranteed income coupled with automation. Tentative experiments with minimum incomes are already occurring in some places.

You'd begin with guys like Joseph Sisko running restaurants that people living on minimum incomes can afford. Eventually payments and distribution systems would become so thoroughly automated they disappear into the background, even to the point people stop consciously accounting for them in their daily lives.

Hungry? Let's go to Sisko's.

Maybe once a week Sisko selects the basic food stuffs he needs, all these foodstuffs produced in a highly automated manner and delivered to his restaurant. For the highlight specialty foodstuffs, maybe Sisko gets them from people who like to garden, just as he likes to cook.

Plenty of human societies have existed without money. How did they work? Is money a necessary aspect of higher technology societies such as our own?

[ymetca]

6. I forgot where I read it

but someone once suggested the equivalency of money and monotheism. That they arose together in our ancient past. A necessity, perhaps, of establishing a governing caste. The shamans and mystics and fools and entertainers that tribal peoples tolerated at first, but then later began to venerate.

I presume some of those ancient "seers", on occasion, had some really great inspiration, like harnessing fire, or the water wheel, which unburdened more people from labor, and so on it went. Hierarchies had to be established to ensure those who had useful "visions" had the leisure to come up with more useful ideas. Priestly castes had to be established to educate, and warrior castes to enforce. Pyramidal power and privilege ensued, with civilizations rising and falling, again and again, as they exploited resources enabled by technological innovation, until such resources were exhausted.

Now we face another great moment in human social evolution. Only this time it is truly global in nature. This time there is nowhere to go but outward from our mother planet. Otherwise we may destroy it all. Hence, the envisioning of Star Trek, etc.

That seems to be the conundrum we face now. The end of our prolonged, selfish, arrogant and violent adolescence as a species. We have to grow up now. But, ironically enough, only by beginning to see the world again through the eyes of a child. You know, like a Space Odyssey.

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”

― R. Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity

[hunter]

7. It always saddens me there are people who can look at a "Blue Marble" image of earth...

... and still refuse to see that we are all in this together; that all of us are neighbors breathing the same air, drinking the same water, living on the same lands.

wikipedia

How can anyone look at this photograph without feelings of wonder and curiosity, without seeing it through the eyes of a child?

[Tikki]

8. I have always pictured the Star Trek economy with a much smaller World Wide population.

I picture the Universe less populated with sentient beings.


Tikki

[hunter]

9. In my understanding of the universe the speed of light is absolute. Nothing faster, nothing slower.

We are all written upon the light.

I also trust the Fermi Paradox arises because successful intelligence is invisible to us. They migrate to more comfortable universes of their own creation, or they exist at scales we cannot see, offset by many right angles from the linear universe we humans perceive.

I'm fairly certain earth's human population in the successful human Star Trek universe is less than a billion. How we get there from here is our choice. Mother Nature's methods are rather brutal. We don't have to go down that path.

[NickB79]

10. In the Star Trek universe, the world was devastated by WWIII

600 million dead in the initial days from nuclear strikes, with more dying in subsequent years of nuclear winter.

[Warpy]

2. Maybe the focus could be on "more appropriate light."

LEDs are revolutionizing things in the off-the-grid bush by combining a single LED bulb with a mechanical energy generator, all self contained. It's an example of technological leapfrogging, people simply skipping the steps between a dim wood fire, oil lamps, candles, and power sucking ambient light.

The oil lamp, usually run on olive oil, was a great leap forward. The tallow candles that were used in northern areas where olive oil was an expensive commodity used for food were a lot more labor intensive: wicks needing to be produced and at least 100 dips in melted tallow were required to make a 1 inch candle. Rush lights were a lot easier (cut the rushes, peel down one side, one dunk in tallow) but didn't burn quite as long.

I made the conversion to CFLs 20 years ago because I hate standing on ladders and changing bulbs. I'm using LEDs for ambient lighting in areas like the kitchen. I use an LED head lamp for a great deal of task work. Ambient light doesn't need to be terribly bright, just enough to keep us from barking our shins on the furniture or tripping over pet and kid toys. Only task lighting needs to be bright and only for tasks.

Anyone who's ever tried to mend clothing in front of a wood fire knows how impossible it is, even when the fire is producing a lot of flame. Anything was an improvement, even the smelly and short acting rush light.

[hunter]

3. We had fluorescent lights in our kitchen. I switched them out to LEDs for selfish reasons.

It was fourteen magnetically ballasted PL9 bulbs which were expensive to replace and frequently irritating. It seemed there was always a bulb or two flickering. I hate flickering.

Yep, LED lamps may be similar to cellphones. Areas that never had wired telephone infrastructure jumped directly to cell phone infrastructure.

Is it possible such a thing could happen with residential electricity? I suspect it comes down to cooking. Electric skillet, rice cooker, microwave oven... Or cooking gas? Wood and other kitchen "biofuels" are not desirable from an environmental or public health perspective.

Dimethyl Ether (DME) is a cooking gas that can be synthesized from a variety of raw materials, some of them "carbon neutral" and essentially renewable. If people are cooking with DME and lighting their homes with LEDs, will they still demand the sort of very robust residential electric infrastructure we are familiar with in the United States?

http://www.lpgasmagazine.com/the-developing-dme-market-what-it-means-for-lpg

[Warpy]

4. Yes, I think biogas systems will eventually replace wood fires

but it will take a lot of investment to do so. It's also vital to stop desertification in the most vulnerable areas, like sub Saharan Africa.

It's very sobering to see the inside of a tin roofed hut there, a typical home for so many people. At least one wall is covered by peeling creosote from the indoor cooking fire and you know the (mostly) women who do all the cooking have severe lung issues from early childhood on.