Audiobook Recommendation: The Science of Energy
freyr_design
| Posted in General Questions on
I wanted to recommend this audiobook as I just finished it (for second time) and think it gives some really interesting base knowledge on energy and its production. If you have ever wondered where your energy comes from or how much energy the world actually uses you should take a listen.
Fun take away, it’s more efficient to drive a gas car somewhere (by yourself) than it is to walk if all you eat is meat (obviously farmed meat).
https://www.audible.com/pd/B01BVPXR7K?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
Some parts are getting a little long in the tooth, but most is still relevant.
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"it’s more efficient to drive a gas car somewhere (by yourself) than it is to walk if all you eat is meat (obviously farmed meat)."
This seems more than a little loaded. Is the suggestion that the extra calories needed to support someone walking vs sitting in a car, if provided by meat, are more intensive, mile for mile, than burning gas in a car?
I've done long distance hiking, and I did have a fairly voracious appetite, but I would be surprised if the increased caloric intake (increase over someone who drives places) would add up to that much energy. Especially seeing as not everyone who 'sits in a car' eats the bare minimum of calories needed to sustain just sitting there.
Also there is the issue of time, in that walking 3000 miles would take over half a year or so, hence over half a years worth of food will have been eaten while a driver will have eaten only several days of food. But that's hardly an apples to apples comparison.
Or is it saying a vegetarian (vegan?) who drives an average (average American?) distance per year is better off than a meat eater who drives X less miles? How many less? How big does X need to be?
Or...
The great triumph of the polluting industries was rephrasing the environmental movement in terms of personal responsibility and individual choice, away from regulating polluting industries.
They knew that people like hot showers and cold drinks and love their cars, and if you phrase environmentalism in terms of making people give those things up voluntarily, nothing was ever going to happen.
So yes, it's good to be an informed member of society. But relying on people to make informed choices that optimize societal benefit is a fool's errand. If polluters are made to bear the full cost of their environmental exploitation, that cost gets built into the prices of things, and consumers can make the personal choices that please them most without worrying about the impact on everyone else. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
Ha I knew that would rile people up. So I think it was actually specifically speaking to beef and it was a calculation of the energy required to move a given distance. Given the energy required by the person walking, plus the actual energy required to provide the calories in the form of food (beef) it required more energy than driving.
There was no judgement or recommendation that you should drive instead of walk, just an interesting tidbit.
The majority of the book does not talk about what we should do, just speaks to how things work and the actual numbers involved. It was pretty interesting throughout
I'm less concerned about any sort of implicit judgement and more concerned it's not an accurate statement in any real world sense.
If it's just saying that gas powered cars can convert energy to locomotion efficiently (and with lower CO2e) compared to the meat powered human considering the upfront carbon emissions of the meat processing ... well then ok. That's actually not that surprising. But it's also not really the same as claiming that someone driving everywhere is having less carbon equivalent impact as someone walking. We are not machines with the end goal of getting from point A to point B, but are people that go about daily lives and eat regardless of how far we travel. I'm dubious of any math that tries to decouple the calories used for X distance of locomotion from general caloric intake.
And again, there is a time bias. Someone who walked everywhere their entire life would probably travel orders of magnitude less distance than someone who drove everywhere. Thus the walker would have a huge environmental advantage in terms of total emissions even if efficiency per unit of distance was lower.
It had nothing to do with co2, it was a calculation of joules required to travel a distance when factoring in the efficiencies of converting joules to work. And again, it was not discussing environmental impact, it was an energy calculation.
It was not about the distance someone travels in their life, again, it was an energy used per distance calculation.
And lastly, I do feel like I’m starting to repeat, it was not recommending driving over walking or that we are machines, it was an energy calculation. People decouple energy used based on activity all the time, it is actually a very well established science.
I think you are assigning bias and other factors to the statement and so it seems untrue. It had zero to do with environmentalism.
Makes sense to me. I am trying to think of a similar comparison that wouldn't risk as much misinterpretation...
My mistake on the CO2 part. I think the reference to meat threw me off, since it invokes embodied carbon.
The statement, in isolation, lacked clarity to me-- that is all. Perhaps I needed specificity or at least context. Efficiency is often used colloquially to refer to efficiency of actions vs efficiency of task accomplishment.
(Reply to tim, #6)
I once looked at the cost of a good pair of walking shoes, and how many miles I could get out of them, and realized it was cheaper to drive than to walk.
Yes… perhaps the phrasing was a bit suggestive…