[SGVLUG] Off-topic - home guerrilla solar systems

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 12:25:05AM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> 
> Are you sure that it actually saves energy?  It takes a lot of energy
> to make solar-voltaics and no one knows how much.  That's partly
> because we don't know how to account for human energy.  I don't mean
> just metabolic energy but all the fuel energy to provide food,
> clothing, shelter, education, and recreation to workers and enable
> them to reproduce.  It all needs to be sustainable.

Why do I even reply to these things?  I don't know.

I've said this before, but one more time--this obsession of yours with
human energetic costs is nonsense for the purpose it is applied to,
energetic costs of goods (this time) or means of transportation (last
time).  The quantity being calculated is not relevant to that desired.
Your idea amounts to the assumption that new people are manufactured to
create solar cells, and therefore must be debited to that account.
"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in
barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more
valuable than they?"

In fact the people exist, will work at other jobs if not making solar
cells, will consume roughly the same amount of food no matter which job
they are in (most of it is to maintain body temperature and feed glucose
to an energetically ravenous brain).  None of that changes based on
whether or not someone uses solar cells.  "The Sabbath was made for man,
and not man for the Sabbath."  In fact solar cells are made for people,
people are not made for solar cells.

In fact people have an energetic cost and an environmental impact--but
it has to be credited to a different account.  It is the cost of
population, independent of what they are doing.  Given the same
lifestyle, their impact is roughly the same no matter what they do--it
is their *existence* and lifestyle that cost.  If you count the inherent
cost of the population, then counting it as part of labor is
double-counting.  If you do not count the cost of labor, then you are
fallaciously counting their cost of maintaining body temperature,
structure maintance and repair, and brain activity as part of the goods
they produce.  By that logic people who do not work do not impact the
environment (because the energetic cost of their existence isn't being
counted toward any good or service).

Since you like to miss the point and get lost in details, I will note
explicitly that all of the above is true to the accuracy that can be
achieved in such calculations, and assumes jobs typical of the
overwhelming majority of the population.  It would not be true of highly
trained professional athletes, who *can* consume significantly more than
they would if they were not employed as athletes.  And notice that this
cost can't be attributed to any good which they produce, as they produce
no goods (but could be said to provide a service).  It still would not
apply to amateur athletes as any additional energetic cost is properly
part of their *lifestyle*, not their job.

For an amusing reductio ad absurdum consider a teenage boy during his
growth spurt who is part of a paid study on how various TV shows appeal
to varioud demographics.  He has, in effect, a Saturday job watching
television.  Your logic would debit the enormous cost of feeding a
growing teenage to watching television, which is in point of fact just
about the least energetically costly thing anyone can do.

> It would take many more paragraphs to explain all this and I'm still
> not sure about some aspects.  Anyone willing to read over my article
> on this when I get it done?

Absolutely not, unless it says "the energetic costs of human labor are
not significant for evaluating the environmental impact of goods."

Dustin

-- 
The small binary attachment on every message I send is my PGP digital
signature, not a virus.  If you don't know what that is, you can ignore it.
If you do, my keyserver is pgp.mit.edu.
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