Cheaper Energy Quotes

…For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last 40 or 50 years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent to some extent on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably – could even have improved it. Now, we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress. Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world, in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world. And that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable. An economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature, or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it. The world I knew as a boy was flawed surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

Is it really that easy? Can I really save the world? Sure. I just called a friend of mine who is a chemist. He has a technology that might improve the way we get energy. Make it cheaper. Less pollution. I have no idea about chemistry. But just talking to him and encouraging him I felt like I was helping the world.

CHEESE Cheese is the result of microbes such as bacteria or fungi competing for a food source. Each microbe attempts to use chemicals to convince other forms of life not to eat that food source. Sometimes we call those chemicals antibiotics or mold toxins; other times we call them “delicious.” As your liver works to process cheese toxins, your Labrador brain demands energy, and you are likely to experience food cravings as a result. This is why so many people simply love cheese—they eat it, and then they crave more. Mold toxins in cheese and dairy come from two places. The first is indirect contamination, which happens when dairy cows eat feed containing mycotoxins that pass into the milk. The more contaminated animal feed is, the cheaper it is, so producers don’t normally strive to eliminate toxins from animal food. The second source of toxins in cheese comes from direct contamination, which occurs when we accidentally or intentionally introduce molds to cheese. The most common mycotoxins that are stable in cheese are citrinin, penitrem A, roquefortine C, sterigmatocystin, and aflatoxin. Some others, like patulin, penicillic acid, and PR toxin, are naturally eliminated from cheese. Sterigmatocystin is carcinogenic.22 I’m not trying to be alarmist. Unless you have severe allergies, cheese is not going to kill you today. But it may cause inflammation in your skin and joints and brain, and it may make you fat. You choose whether or not to eat it.

The environmental thought leaders’ opposition to fossil fuels is not a mistaken attempt at pursuing human life as their standard of value. They are too smart and knowledgeable to make such a mistake. Their opposition is a consistent attempt at pursuing their actual standard of value: a pristine environment, unaltered nature. Energy is our most powerful means of transforming our environment to meet our needs. If an unaltered, untransformed environment is our standard of value, then nothing could be worse than cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. I’m saying that if fossil fuels created no waste, including no CO2, if they were even cheaper, if they would last practically forever, if there were no resource-depletion concerns, the Green movement would still oppose them.

We tend to cling to what we know and resist what is new—even when the new brings tremendous benefits. Opposition to onshore wind turbines in the UK is a good example. Even though onshore wind is now the cheapest form of energy6 (cheaper than coal, oil, gas, and other renewable sources), rural landowners have significantly resisted it, keen to preserve the appearance of the countryside. When the Conservative Party (which derives much of its support from these rural communities) came to power in 2015, it slashed subsidies and changed planning laws for onshore wind—leading to an 80 percent reduction in new capacity.7 Only now, with climate change awareness rapidly rising among the UK public, is support for onshore wind starting to outweigh an attachment to yesterday’s aesthetics.

psychologists have shown that an individual’s choices and behavior can be influenced by “priming” them with particular words, sounds, or other stimuli. Subjects in experiments who read words like “old” and “frail” walk more slowly down the corridor when they leave the lab. Consumers in wine stores are more likely to buy German wine when German music is playing in the background, and French wine when French music is playing. Survey respondents asked about energy drinks are more likely to name Gatorade when they are given a green pen in order to fill out the survey. And shoppers looking to buy a couch online are more likely to opt for an expensive, comfortable-looking couch when the background of the website is of fluffy white clouds, and more likely to buy the harder, cheaper option when the background consists of dollar coins.11

The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. Passion is divine fire: it enlivens and makes holy; it gives light and yields inspiration. Passion is generous because it’s not ego-driven; addiction is self-centred. Passion gives and enriches; addiction is a thief. Passion is a source of truth and enlightenment; addictive behaviours lead you into darkness. You’re more alive when you are passionate, and you triumph whether or not you attain your goal. But an addiction requires a specific outcome that feeds the ego; without that outcome, the ego feels empty and deprived. A consuming passion that you are helpless to resist, no matter what the consequences, is an addiction. You may even devote your entire life to a passion, but if it’s truly a passion and not an addiction, you’ll do so with freedom, joy and a full assertion of your truest self and values. In addiction, there’s no joy, freedom or assertion. The addict lurks shame-faced in the shadowy corners of her own existence. I glimpse shame in the eyes of my addicted patients in the Downtown Eastside and, in their shame, I see mirrored my own. Addiction is passion’s dark simulacrum and, to the naïve observer, its perfect mimic. It resembles passion in its urgency and in the promise of fulfillment, but its gifts are illusory. It’s a black hole. The more you offer it, the more it demands. Unlike passion, its alchemy does not create new elements from old. It only degrades what it touches and turns it into something less, something cheaper. Am I happier after one of my self-indulgent sprees? Like a miser, in my mind I recount and catalogue my recent purchases — a furtive Scrooge, hunched over and rubbing his hands together with acquisitive glee, his heart growing ever colder. In the wake of a buying binge, I am not a satisfied man. Addiction is centrifugal. It sucks energy from you, creating a vacuum of inertia. A passion energizes you and enriches your relationships. It empowers you and gives strength to others. Passion creates; addiction consumes — first the self and then the others within its orbit.

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets." -Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett Early Travels, p. 93

The average efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting fuel into a car’s forward energy ranges from about 14 to 30 percent. For the electric car, it’s about 90 percent. But the real difficulty for anyone arguing the case for gasoline cars is found in the economics. We are fast approaching a time when gasoline cars will no longer be able to compete with electric cars on price. To date, the number one factor holding Tesla back from offering cheaper cars has been the energy cost per unit of its lithium-ion battery packs, which is why it started by selling only high-end vehicles in which the cost of the battery could be absorbed by the premium price point. Tesla has never revealed exactly how much of its cars’ costs can be attributed to the battery pack, but in 2013, chief technology officer JB Straubel told the MIT Technology Review that it accounts for less than a quarter of the cost of each vehicle—which for the eighty-five kilowatt-hour Model S, at that time, would have put the battery pack somewhere in the $18,000 to $25,000 range (assuming Straubel was factoring feature-rich versions of the car into his calculations). That would have put the cost per kilowatt-hour of the battery pack at anywhere between $210 and $300.

both Tesla and GM think battery prices will come down fast enough for electric cars to be more affordable than equivalent gasoline cars by the early 2020s. The Chevy Bolt sells for less than $35,000, after subsidies. Tesla plans to be producing Model 3s at a rate of hundreds of thousands a year by 2019. Other electric car companies, new and old, are developing competitive strategies. It is still difficult to predict how quickly the sales of electric cars will overtake those of gasoline vehicles. Even assuming all goes well for Tesla and their electric competitors, it could take years, or decades. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s study estimated that electric cars will account for 35 percent of new car sales by 2040. That’s based on battery prices decreasing at a slower rate than Tesla and GM anticipate. But, as noted earlier, gasoline cars will face the difficult task of competing with electric cars that are both cheaper and better.

Feebates make efficient autos cheaper to buy and inefficient autos costlier.79 Buy a fuel hog and you’d pay an up-front fee, right on the price sticker, that climbs as its fuel economy declines. But choose a fuel sipper instead and you’d get a rebate funded by others’ fees: the more efficient the auto, the bigger the rebate.

In May 1901, Edison formed the Edison Storage Battery Company. Edison had big plans for his new battery, which he thought could be used by trolley companies and others. To extend the viability of his invention into the countryside, Edison even proposed that small windmills be attached to electrical generators. Together, they would be used to recharge batteries in cars while homeowners were asleep in a manner that would be cheaper than gasoline.25 This model of decentralized household distributed energy plus electric car is being revisited today in the Honda House of the Future on the University of California, Davis, campus, again raising the prospect that we lost what could have been an opportunity to do things differently one hundred years ago.

Nitrogen fertilizer is a significant contributor to the world’s carbon footprint. Its production is energy intensive because the chemical process involved requires both heat and pressure. Depending on the efficiency of the factory, making 1 ton of fertilizer creates between 1 and 4 tons CO2e. When the fertilizer is actually applied, between 1 and 5 percent of the nitrogen it contains is released as nitrous oxide, which is around 300 times more potent than CO2. This adds between 1.7 and 8.3 tons CO2e to the total footprint,11 depending on a variety of factors.12 Here’s how the science of it goes. All plants contain nitrogen, so if you’re growing a crop, it has to be replaced into the soil somehow or it will eventually run out. Nitrogen fertilizer is one way of doing this. Manure is another. Up to a point there can be big benefits. For some crops in some situations, the amount of produce can even be proportional to the amount of nitrogen that is used. However, there is a cut-off point after which applying more does nothing at all to the yield, or even decreases it. Timing matters, too. It is inefficient to apply fertilizer before a seed has had a chance to develop into a rapidly growing plant. Currently these messages are frequently not understood by small farmers in rural China, especially, where fertilizer is as cheap as chips and the farmers believe that the more they put on the bigger and better the crop will be. Many have a visceral understanding of the needs for high yields, having experienced hunger in their own lifetime, so it is easy to understand the instinct to spread a bit more fertilizer. After all, China has 22 percent of the world’s population to feed from 9 percent of the world’s arable land. There are other countries in which the same issues apply, although typically the developed world is more careful. Meanwhile in parts of Africa there is a scarcity of nitrogen in the soil and there would be real benefits in applying a bit more fertilizer to increase the yield and get people properly fed. One-third of all nitrogen fertilizer is applied to fields in China—about 26 million tons per year. The Chinese government believes there is scope for a 30 to 60 percent reduction without any decrease in yields. In other words, emissions savings on the order of 100 million tons are possible just by cutting out stuff that does nothing whatsoever to help the yield. There are other benefits, too. It’s much better for the environment generally, and it’s cheaper and easier for the farmers. It boils down to an education exercise... and perhaps dealing with the interests of a fertilizer industry.

Shale gas was proving to be cheaper than conventional natural gas. In 2000 shale was just 1 percent of natural gas supply. By 2011 it was 25 percent, and within two decades it could reach 50 percent.

Mastered lawyer drunk driving Low energy consumption is a legal offense contributed to. Yourself in your car yourself, your motivation is both drunk and high, legislators were arrested. Immediately, even if swallowed or drugs control objects will be on standby to receive official guide to recognize. Beverage is drunk in the car, you have a DUI, and a person can be arrested after giving back the screen seems to have in your account. On its own, perhaps you package your position towards the direction of history experts to see their own drunk driving laws. You have a job, so it s an individual fashion experts correctly arrested and drugs leads to the prohibition of alcohol, you can count on to symbolize the imprisonment of offenders. DUI attorney activity, of course, left processed Depending on the circumstances of the mother, yet can be challenging, it seems less complicated. Genuine opportunities towards the direction of the state s largest population of collateral to meet the effects of crime lawyer. Faith, the license stopped, well, it s prison, meaning it is possible. His lawyer, conditions or proof of common sense dilemma for filing in the direction of small retail and phrases can contribute. It is perhaps as a result of a beverage production when assessing the validity of the law on the application will be able to guess. They also arrested over the implementation method is able to challenge. That is, in the direction of the thyroid, has been arrested by the security feature is expert in court incarcerated illegal acts that are affected are different. Experts Security Act, regulatory proceedings and litigation proceedings direction needs to include a comprehensive practical experience. In some cases, likely to be able to identify crime suspects personal consultant. You in the direction of the shell can not pay a lawyer to prison, but in different situations, legal documents, expert internal 1. The most simple laws of the city, the cheaper the price it is not possible to obtain, some, Most pay $ 200, from them, while the money. Counsel further in the direction of a person with the effect is related to a clear penalty. This transformation actually recorded during the experiment on their own, depending on the direction is probably to show what has been done. Major customers fully understand the technical inner courtyard. These people are working for a few weeks of study; you can organize a series of public hearings. The long years you may be disappointed, upset. Criminal matter while showing visitors the direction services.

If it is energy services that we really want, why not measure and regulate utilities in these units rather than kilowatt-hours? Suppose, for example, that instead of setting a maximum rate utilities could charge per kilowatt-hour we allowed them a maximum rate per lumen of light delivered, including the cost of the bulb and fixture along with its input power? Under this approach, if a more efficient light source came along, so that the bulb and input power were cheaper for the utility to provide together than the existing, less-efficient combination, the utility would automatically have the incentive to install the more efficient technology.

Corporations have a unique role to play in creating a cleaner environment, and they also have economic incentives to use energy more efficiently as demand and costs rise globally. If every company in the S&P 500 voluntarily reported and disclosed its energy costs, clearly and explicitly as a line item on the balance sheet, there would be pressure to reduce that cost, just as there is for every other expense item. This would result in analyst and investor pressure on corporate executives to be more efficient with their energy output and to source cheaper and alternative sources, which would have a far greater impact on carbon emissions and pollution than any political treaty in history. As an added advantage, reducing costs increases profitability, which provides the appropriate incentives for corporate executives to act in their shareholders’ best interests and effect positive social change. According to PwC, 98 percent of the S&P 500 companies surveyed can link investments in emissions reduction to value creation.55 As a result, these corporations are discovering new ways to enhance efficiencies, create new markets, and build a competitive advantage.

Utilizing wind energy to fuel data centers would be equally problematic. To demonstrate that, consider the Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, which needs 28 megawatts of power.46 The areal power density of wind energy—and it doesn’t matter where you put your wind turbines—is 1 watt per square meter.47 (I will address wind energy in a later chapter.) Therefore, just to fuel the Facebook data center with wind will require about 28 million square meters of land.

Eating Primal Blueprint style for the rest of your life is much cheaper than long-term prescription drug regimens or extensive doctor visits or hospital stays for cardiac bypass surgery or cancer treatments.

Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect.

About half today’s production cost is for precursor material—96% of which is polyacrylonitrile made from oil (propylene) or natural gas (propane), both of which have volatile prices. Carbon-fiber manufacturers are starting to make their own precursors and expect to cut their costs by about 20%. But much cheaper precursors are emerging. Their strands of carbon atoms are commonplace; the trick is removing the other elements and forming the remaining carbon skeleton into long, pure strands. Solve those problems, and carbon fiber could be made from biomaterials like plant fibers, or even from recycled plastic trash. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) believes these alternatives could potentially cut carbon-fiber costs by up to 90%,

Wealthy white southerners, obligated with provisioning their indentured servants and enslaved people, considered corn to be the most appropriate, and often only, source of food for their charges. Enslaved people often had cornbread three times a day, sometimes with fat pork or salt herring on the side. Not only was corn cheaper and easier to grow than wheat, but Europeans thought that it provided more energy for working people.

The price collapse was slowing the development of new supplies. Low prices were also stimulating demand. In 2015, the growth in world oil consumption was more than twice what it had been in 2014. With cheaper gasoline, the share of SUVs and light trucks sold in the United States rose from under the 50 percent it had been in 2012 to 60 percent in 2015.

The problem is, while conversion of the energy grid to solar would make a lot of money for the companies building and installing solar panels, the total carbon footprint and environmental impact may not be so much better—if at all. The sun may be a renewable energy source; solar panels are anything but. They don’t grow on trees, but require the mining of aluminum, copper, and rare earth metals, already in low supply. The manufacturing of solar panels is itself an extremely energy-intensive process that involves the superheating of quartz into silicon wafers, vast quantities of water, and large quantities of toxic byproducts and runoff. The solar panels themselves begin degrading just a few years after installation, and need to be replaced every decade or two. Solar panel disposal creates a host of other toxicity and environmental problems, and as long as it remains cheaper for manufacturers to dump them as landfill, we won’t be seeing a robust recycling program for them anytime soon.

They also needed a name: Manchin toyed with calling it the Energy Security Act. Together they dubbed it the Inflation Reduction Act. The moniker didn’t really capture the contents of the bill, or its grandeur. But the tax credits and health care provisions would make life cheaper. That might be a touch disingenuous, and it certainly wasn’t a title that would echo through the ages, but it had the feel of good politics. —

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.

In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages. Tomatoes and broccoli are far more expensive on average than they used to be for American shoppers. Energy-dense foods such as cakes and burgers have become far cheaper now in comparison to fruits and vegetables.

On the subcontinent, Pakistan has passed the point where solar power is cheaper than a lot of electricity that comes from diesel generators,and India is upping its target from 20 to 33 gigawatts to be installed by 2020

Now compare both with the energy industry. First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you

An intolerance of bureaucracy Small companies feel different to big ones. I have worked at both. In large companies, if I am travelling for work I will be forced to use some admin staff to book a hotel with a corporate travel provider. Perhaps eight e-mails will be sent to me with various approval chains and updates, my boss will be asked to agree, a business reason is noted. Some systems will talk to others, and my assistant will orchestrate the whole thing. It will take perhaps 10 minutes of my time, 30 minutes of my assistant’s, and likely an hour of other people’s in back offices. All this to book a hotel stay for $200 that on the Hotel Tonight app I could book in around three seconds and for $100 cheaper. Why is it I can call an hour-long meeting with 20 people, costing perhaps $2,500 of time and nobody cares, but I need to ensure I use approved agents to get a hotel room? Every company, large and small, needs to reject bureaucracy and busy work. We worry a lot about seniority and protocol, but often it is an excuse. I love a memo sent out by Elon Musk, in which he says: ‘Anyone at Tesla can and should e-mail/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me.’ He goes on to say, while realizing the challenge and opportunity ahead and what they have against them, ‘We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility’ (Bariso, 2017). Get better at knowing when to call and when to e-mail, when to pop over for a chat, which partner meetings to never accept. A lack of bureaucracy doesn’t mean chaos, it’s about focusing on the best way to make a difference and sometimes that means anarchically barging into a meeting to get someone to make a decision. I often think teams are too big. We’ve long heard about two pizza teams, but let’s be more flexible. Tom Peters talks about the need to recruit the very best talent and pay the world’s best compensation. Steve Jobs was widely reported to have stated that a small number of A+ people can outperform any large teams of B players (Keller and Meaney, 2017). I see a lot of time and energy spent bringing people into the loop, people being part of things to look important and not adding clear value.

NET-ZERO offers not only a solution to climate change and air pollution, but an opportunity to create a cheaper, more resilient energy system, a more productive economy, and a better quality of life for all

When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimated the cost of silicon panels that could supply electricity for a typical middle-class home at $1.43 million (about $13 million in today’s dollars). It would be cheaper to cover the entire roof in gold leaf. Daunted by the economics, most researchers gave up on photovoltaics until the oil shocks of the 1970s revived peak-oil fears—and hopes that the sun might be the way to escape them. The numbers seemed so overwhelming, so alluring.

It was general knowledge, then, that whales were overhunted in whaling’s so-called golden age, their populations declining. The US whaling fleet had reached its maximum extent in 1846, with 736 ships totaling more than 233,000 tons burden.2 Whale oils were a depleting asset, inherently limited by their limited source: far more gallons of camphene and burning fluids than of whale oils were produced for lighting in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Castor, rape, and peanut oils, tallow and lard were widely used as well, as were wood and grain alcohol. But camphene, at 50 cents a gallon, was cheaper than whale oil at $1.30 to $2.50 a gallon, and cheaper even than lard oil at 90 cents a gallon. Burning fluids included naphtha and benzene, both distilled from coal. Camphene was distilled turpentine. The most common burning fluid was a mixture of high-proof grain alcohol blended with 20 percent to 50 percent camphene to color the flame and deodorized with a few drops of camphor oil.

Early gas pipelines in Pennsylvania were cast iron, screwed together and caulked. Wrought iron replaced cast iron in the last decade of the century. 19 But natural gas was far cheaper than coal and its heat more uniform, qualities which made it desirable for process heating in Pittsburgh’s many glass factories and steel mills. The Great Western Iron Company was the first in the Pittsburgh area to use natural gas, around 1870.20 Many other manufacturers followed. By 1885, Pittsburgh had acquired about five hundred miles of natural-gas pipelines. 21

Cheaper types of coffee cost less because they not only use lower-quality beans, but also include a higher percentage of damaged beans, which are more susceptible to mold toxins. You won’t see these mold toxins—they are an invisible by-product of shortcuts coffee producers take when processing green coffee beans. The processing techniques add flavor but unintentionally amplify the amount of toxins in the coffee.