Once you realize how much more efficient solar panels are (compared to plants) at capturing energy from the sun, the next logical question is: could it make sense to synthesize food with the help of electricity from solar power?
There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
Efficiency is a funny thing to argue here; Plants do a lot more than just produce food for humans. Also, I'll wager that whatever "produced protein" is manufactured will be only edible/palatable with other additives and processes.
It would be cool if we spent more time understanding our soils and all of the things living in them more instead of finding ways to require more artificial energy to sustain our civilization.
If we reduce land use for food production, it's not like that land will turn into a parking lot. Other plants will grow there, hopefully with richer biodiversity than an agricultural monoculture.
You are both ignoring the "soils" part of my comment; Even deserts have things growing in their soils.
Putting solar panels into these places disturbs the natural soils. Transporting that energy requires infrastructure that also messes with habitats. Using it on-site requires different infrastructure and activity that is also disruptive.
Just because the land is "virgin" or "barren" doesn't mean nothing is there biologically. Part of biodiversity is biodiversity in the soil itself. Much of that diversity hasn't been officially studied/documented. ie: We don't even know what we are killing off.
Solar panels do have an ecological cost. Expanding to cover the entire planet is the wrong approach (IMO.) We have plenty of urban space and existing infrastructure that we can cover with solar without disturbing farm land or what's left of natural habitats.
Beyond all of this, TFA was comparing corn vs solar. That implies we are talking about farmable land.
Big farmland is effectively dead. It must be tiled and heavily fertilized to produce anything. It does NOT have healthy soils.
And remember the context: were talking of replacing corn grown for energy, monoculture with no insect or plant life, with the same land covered with solar panels, time for soil to recover, native plants to germinate and grow.
Putting solar panels instead of the industrial corn production is partially rewilding it - there are projects in the hotter countries where increased humidity and decreased sunlight actually allows for the more plants to thrive. There are projects using goats to trim the greens under the panels. Etc, etc.
Almost anything is better for the soil, biodiversity and life than industrial corn production.
Worth noting you don't have to spray solar panels with pesticides and herbicides either. Nor do they require fertilizer. All of these have real negative effects.
Pesticides are causing a decline in insect populations and the animals that eat them. Herbicides what can say more than that. Fertilizer causes algae blooms and hypoxic conditions in lakes and streams. All three cause ground water pollution.
I'm a broken record, solar is 30 times more productive per acre than ethanol corn.
Farm land is heavily disturbed. All the fertilizer and other chemicals used, soil destroyed by all the things we do to it, and downstream disruption due to fertilizer runoff, animals that are fed and then we have to manage the manure, water that is depleted etc. Placing solar panels on farm land is actually very close to returning it to the nature (of course depending on how exactly you do it, how tightly placed they are, how high etc., but it's also possible to still grow trees under them like some pilot projects in southern Italy or to place them over animal pastures).
Obviously it won't work for everything but appears to be workable enough to do more of it.
That said, I absolutely agree that soil science and husbandry is dearly need to avoid depleting arable land. Farmers are catching on to this and with more support could hopefully make doing this a no brainer based on economics alone.
Farm land has less healthy soil than if you stop tilling, fertilizing and pesticides and put solar panels on it. I also think you’re overestimating the area needed to cover our energy needs.
> If we reduce land use for food production, it's not like that land will turn into a parking lot. Other plants will grow there, hopefully with richer biodiversity than an agricultural monoculture.
If current trends old, it will turn into data centers.
I think it would be pretty cool if we could urbanize food production. Turning farm land back into wilderness would go a long way to reducing our impact on the environment.
AIUI plants are actually only responsive to a few wavelengths of light for most of their growth. I've wondered, if solar panels can collect energy over a broader spectrum, if it could actually be more efficient to drive LEDs tuned to just what plants need, driven by broad spectrum solar power. In this way you could, theoretically, power a 3d growing operation based solely on the solar panels on the roof.
Every vertical farming company says this in their advertising. That didn't stop them from going bankrupt.
Conventional agriculture works much better. You can build acres of greenhouses and make a profit.
Vertical farming is such an abject failure that every single vertical farm is biomass constrained, meaning that they have to stretch their biomass with water. This is why vertical farms generally only sell "leafy greens", a marketing term that tries to sweep the inherent technical failure of vertical farming under the rug.
Solar panel captures energy from an 800nm wide range (300-1100nm)
Plant captures energy from a 300nm wide range (400-700nm)
The solar panel could reproject and amplify the 300nm range at (800/300=) 2.7X more power than the sun
The reason plants capture energy from this range is because that's where most of sunlight's energy is concentrated, which is going to drop this quite a bit further. Glancing at a solar radiation spectrum curve makes it look a lot closer to ~1.5x. Combine that with inefficiencies of both the panel and the LEDs and it really doesn't look that good.
Thanks, this is exactly the comment I was looking for. In addition to the 70% loss due to the solar panel efficiency, I think we should also lose some efficiency in the conversion to light via leds (although I expect that’s much more efficient, perhaps at like 80%).
I’m curious what is physically possible, if we assume we can achieve the max possible efficiency. I’m guessing there’s behavior like a Carnot engine, and the energy transfer can only be up to ~86% efficient (but please correct me if I’m wrong!!). In that case, conversion from light to energy via solar panels -> conversation back to light via leds should be 0.86*0.86 = 73% efficient in best case. And the full effect should be (800/300)*0.73 = 1.94, about twice as good as growing plants with the sun’s direct light. I’m surprised that seems possible!
p.s. My efficiency guesses are probably wrong. Please correct me.
By using multiple junctions and stacking them, top one converting the most energetic photons, then the second-most etc, one can approach the theoretical limit of about 95% or whatever it is. However in practice it's very expensive and difficult as I understand. AFAIK the current state of the art is about 6 stacked junctions at around 60% efficiency, at great cost.
And as you say the LEDs aren't 100% efficient either, though both deep red and bright blue are among the most efficient, about 85% there.
So that leaves you with about 50% overall just from those two.
I love this idea and it's one of those ideas I categorize into the bucket of "when all the other lower hanging fruit has been picked", just because it's more complicated.
When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.
I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.
“Crop plants protect themselves from excess sunlight by dissipating some light energy as heat, readjusting their systems when shadier conditions prevail. But the photosynthetic systems do not adapt to fluctuating light conditions as rapidly as a cloud passes overhead, resulting in suboptimal photosynthetic efficiency. Kromdijk et al. sped up the adaptation process by accelerating interconversion of violaxanthin and zeaxanthin in the xanthophyll cycle and by increasing amounts of a photosystem II subunit. Tobacco plants tested with this system showed about 15% greater plant biomass production in natural field conditions.”
There's also a startup that claims you can turn fossil fuels directly into butter and use less fossil fuels than you would going through the traditional process of farming.
The first part we know is true, the Germans in WW2 fed some troops up to 800 calories a day of coal butter, which was black margarine synthesized from coal.
Using less than needed for fertilizer for farming though seems unlikely, coal butter was born from desperation for immediate calorie source, not because it was cheaper or more efficient.
I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum.
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).
US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.
So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).
There is so much hydrocarbons and coal underground we would transform the Earths atmosphere to hell, if we would mine and burn it all.
"Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves, which are the most abundant, roughly 150 years at current consumption levels."
In case of uranium, it's possible to extract it from seawater. This technology was developed and tested, but at current low prices of uranium it's cheaper to mine it.
Australia’s uranium resources are expressed as Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR), Subeconomic Demonstrated Resources (SDR) and Inferred Resources. Refer to Appendix 3 for definitions of these terms and further information on the National Classification System for reporting of Identified Mineral Resources.
Based on 2023 production rates, Australia’s uranium reserves have an estimated life of 71 years.
What's all this fuss about words? What are resources, what are reserves? Do we really only have 71 years worth of uranium in Australia?
I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
> humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.
I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".
Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/
The reserves of any mineral are basically the amount someone spends the effort to find and document. And spending that effort is an economic decision. There's little economic incentive to find reserves beyond a certain period of time so the reserves of any mineral are going to be only fairly limited amount of years out.
No - asphalt is bound together by bitumen, a sticky, waterproof byproduct of petroleum refining.
eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up
There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.
Indeed. There are also paths to tackling the impacts from concrete, from steel making, from livestock generating methane, etc.
The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.
The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).
>I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum. From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
From what we know it's a very lumpy distribution. Most of the fossil fuels were created in a few specific points of history
> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.
The next obvious question is where do they come from since presumably there weren't dinosaurs and plants dying there 300 million years ago.
Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.
> gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow
See Figure 2 [1]. Protons, electrons and water ions from space dissociate, in the presence of sunlight, nitrogen and methane. Those combine into intermediate-mass hydrocarbons that produce complex organics. The part we don't understand is how those complex organics, e.g. benzene and naphthalene, turn into large organic particles.
"abiogenic oil" is a fringe belief that I just can't stop myself from giving some credence to. I know all the experts say it's not true, and I'm not crazy enough to deny the evidence, but there's still the niggling doubt in the back of my mind. There's so many hydrocarbons out in space.
I thought they discovered at least decades ago that our oil is actually largely inorganic? It's not dinosaurs & ferns but a direct chemical & physical process. I know a lot of people still say it's just a competing theory but they have found many large deposits in places where it's not possible for it to have been organic. (too deep, in the middle of pure granite with only raw volcanic material and no other organics, etc)
Oil is fluid, so it will not necessarily stay where it is formed, but it will flow through the rocks until it is stopped by impermeable rocks, like granite.
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
As far as I understand it, people looking for oil using theories that oil is formed from organic processes have had significantly more success than people looking for oil using inorganic theories, and not for lack of trying on the latter side.
It's pretty common for hydrocarbons to migrate down from source rocks down into basement along fracture lines or surface weathering, no abiogenesis required.
I'll take the opportunity to share this beautiful sci-fi video that is (ostensibly) about oil extraction on the exoplanet Solstice-5:
https://youtu.be/Gl2hTmgG18k
Switchgrass isn't all that uncommon in parts of the US that process corn into ethanol, and it is more efficient but less subsidized, so corn beats it out. Sugarcane is even more efficient, but it doesn't grow in most of the US.
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
I agree with most of your comment except for this one:
> Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes
While airplanes are slightly more efficient than cars at transporting passengers on a distance/energy basis (and only if you exclude electric cars), trains are still much more efficient by about 30%. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
With respect to carrying freight, cargo ships are the most efficient of all.
I'm talking about the physics, not the logistics. Logistics are a present challenge, but physics are a hard limit, so load capacity and power conversion losses don't really have the same insurmountable bearing as rolling resistance and drag. Drag increases with the square of the speed, so fuel efficiency is really only comparable at a given speed.
Water is extremely viscous, so it creates a lot of drag, and cargo ships must scale to huge sizes and stay under 20 knots to have high efficiency. Trains are only flowing through air, which is much thinner than water, so freight trains and most passenger rail go double or triple that speed. High-speed rail doubles to triples the speed again, but is much, much less efficient than rail traveling at freight speeds, because it has no means of avoiding the added drag.
If you were to try and increase high-speed rail by another two to three times, you'd need a rarefied tunnel to make it approach being practical, which is basically what Hyperloop proposed. It's much more practical to use the already existing rarefied atmosphere at high altitudes, which is why airplanes have unmatched efficiency for travel at those speeds.
When travel time going into days or even weeks doesn't matter, e.g. for cargo, all that matters to efficiency is how slow you can go. When time is taken into consideration, as speeds go up rail becomes more efficient than boats, but they top out and airplanes are more efficient than rail. Eventually sub-orbital rockets become more efficient than airplanes, but there isn't a lot of travel needed at those speeds.
That’s ignoring a lot of other losses. Like in air travel you’re instantly losing 10-15% of your fuel generating lift, then you have to add in the fuel used for carrying the other fuel required throughout the flight. Whereas with high speed rail, rolling resistance (which we could say is the equivalent of lift in aircraft) is less than 1% from a quick search, and for a lot of passenger rail and almost all high speed rail you don’t need to carry fuel which is supplied as electricity from an overhead line.
Hyperloop of course was always a non-starter because the kind of energy that would be required to pump down such a huge volume would be ludicrous, maintaining the low pressure extremely difficult, and the amount of materials needed for the tube would be ridiculously large.
Yeah, you only get out something like 30% more energy than you put in[1]. So this isn't so much about how great solar is but is more about how bad corn ethanol is...
It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever.
Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
> Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production.
I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost.
> Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security.
Preserving farmland and maintaining a one- or two-year reserve supply of crucial cereals makes sense for food security. In the event of a global food crisis, getting fallow land under plow should be relatively straightforward. It isn't like manufacturing where the skills and jobs and factories just went overseas. Farmers and farming aren't going away.
Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security.
Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process.
Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
Growing corn for ethanol is mostly political. Iowa grows a lot of corn, and as the first state in the political primary process, it gets way more attention than it deserves.
So the corn farmers are sacrosanct. We can make various mumblings about energy independence and surplus food capacity, but we all know that the real reason it remains is that anybody who proposes doing otherwise would get massacred. (Not just individually. Their entire party would take the blame.)
But you're right. It's entirely political. It's not clear why it needs to be. Can farmers really swing that many elections?
Why not pay them to fallow land instead? I remember Catch-22 had a passage describing it, but I have no idea if that's true IRL. It preserves farming skills, labor, and farmland, and gives farmers free money. Political slam-dunk and a boon for food security.
I think that's why we don't just do more of that: it's kind of embarrassing. Farmers don't want to hear just how little they actually matter.
That still doesn't explain why we're so busily kowtowing to farmers. I suspect a fair bit of it is inertia: it's the accepted wisdom that insulting farmers is bad (and telling them that they don't actually need their subsidies is an insult). There may well be a day when some political candidate goes to Iowa and says, "Eff you and your stupid caucus. I'm going to spend my time in New Hampshire, and tell them how I'm going to cancel corn subsidies and use the savings for maple syrup subsidies".
Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem.
Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money?
I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it.
The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet.
I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat.
As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
This is very true, but unfortuantely most people don't have portion control and they don't eat the right lean unprocessed meat.
I'm skeptical that we can grow meat with significantly reduced environmental consequences. Like unless you're talking about some technologically advanced and not yet ready for mass production lab grown meat kind of thing it will always be more ecologically friendly and cheaper to just grow food that humans eat instead of growing food for animals to eat which are then eaten by animals. That thermodynamic reality just isn't going to change.
If food security were a motivating factor in policy, we would be diversifying away from corn, because drought and aquifer depletion are threatening the ability to continue to grow it.
Nope, that's the cover story. The US subsidizes production, not capacity, which results in lots of excess crop that gets dumped on the market and depresses prices and impoverishes competitors. The ethanol mandates were created partly as a response to the problems that this created. But they are mandates for blending in a certain amount of ethanol, producing artificial demand, and putting us in the ridiculous situation where 40% of corn production goes to ethanol that nobody needs. It's the dumbest thing ever and makes no sense, but is very popular with farm states for obvious reasons.
If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn).
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
I think the theoretical idea is that we want to ensure that there is always a very large domestic corn supply, in the event of war or something. Corn is a crop that has a lot of uses; it can be refined into sugar, it can be used as flour, it's relatively energy dense food-wise, and it can be fairly easily converted into fuel if necessary.
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
I would say it is even worse, it is a scam to feed $ to the rich due to Gov subsidizes.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
Joules per acre seems an odd thing to maximize. Solar and corn don't require the same land. And we're not running out of land.
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
I recall reading a research piece a few years ago that basically said you’d need a ~$5-6 gas price (RBOB - ~$3.5 today) for biofuel to be profitable on an unsubsidized basis. Not directly comparable but it highlighted that it wasn’t really that good an idea.
31/1 is kind of wild and its hard to justify corn ethanol on efficiency alone; so it looks like this exists mainly because of the policy and not because it’s actually a good way to produce energy
It's not just the farm lobby, it's baked deep into the constitution and the political geography so that vast empty land stretches have hugely disproportional political power.
Leasing land for solar installations is popular with rural land owners. Or at least popular enough that there's rarely an issue finding enough willing owners to develop a new project.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
Have you seen the logistics required to move the output of 15,000 acres of food to the consumer?
A 15,000 acre solar farm generates 6000GWh a year, which can be moved via a single high voltage pylon.
Of course you don't need to move it to California, as you can power an Iowa data centre, or Chicago, instead.
People may pay more to ship "Florida Oranges" or "California wine" across the country. They won't with electric, they'll just buy locally, and if prices reduce then people will use more (building new data centres is the current vogue, but factories and other industry)
Iowa being a net energy exporter means more economic opportunities for Iowa
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
operating at median loads, transmission losses over a distance of 1,000 miles generally range between 6% and 15%
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
No one electron goes the 1600 mile distance. An increase of cheap energy supply in one place lowers likelihood of production elsewhere, but it is more diffuse than selling Iowan energy in California.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
The last point is what they mean. The Senate causes a number of problems with it's setup. But even the House and how small it is causes further problems. The number of reps there needs to go up by many many times.
And that's not baked into the Constitution—it was set by law in the early 1900s, and could be changed by law.
If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)
> If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
Nice and proportional, but a completely unwieldy number of representatives. 700 reps for 500k people each would be more manageable.
(of course, that means very little if (a) they're only from two parties and (b) all 7k districts are gerrymandered six ways from sunday)
I believe the grandparent is referring to the US Senate, which was designed as the state's representation in the federal government, and where each state gets 2 senators.
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
I have a different reason why the conclusion doesn't follow: while it's true that less populous states have outsized influence in the senate, the constitution doesn't require (and in fact, originally discourages) the federal government to engage in the kind of activities being discussed here. These activities should be the domain of the states. But a long history of expanding federal power (and various supreme court decisions affirming those expansions along, in my opinion, dubious interpretations of both the constitution and various statutes, especially the commerce clause) has led to this issue.
The fact that North Dakota has a lot more influence in the US Senate than California on a per capita basis shouldn't be that big of a deal, because the US Senate should be doing a whole heck of a lot less than it is, and states should be picking up that slack.
The more power and responsibility we have given the federal government, the more the issues appear....because it's doing things never intended or envisioned by the founders.
> The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
I'd say it's partially that, but it's also priorities.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago, they didn't want to work in factories like their parents had, and they didn't want to pay the prices necessary to pay American workers to make goods in an environmentally-responsible manner.
So they gladly bought things made in China where - at the time - the average person would rather work in a factory than on a peasant farm, the labor was cheap, and whining about things like "air quality" and "potable water" were either not a high priority, or would get you dealt with by the local Party representatives who had been told that putting that new factory in was the difference between them advancing up the ranks or being sent to a re-education camp.
If anything, China was the ultimate caterer to special interests, those being the Western companies who wanted to do business there without having to deal with hiring Westerners.
While the young Bill Gates did many disgusting things, after retiring he behaved quite decently in comparison with other similarly rich people.
In any case, he would have been an infinitely better president than people like Bush Junior or Trump. Probably also better than people like Biden, who is not remembered for doing something good, but only for not being so bad as his predecessor and successor.
I did not follow this affair more thoroughly, but the link provided by you shows only a suspicious relationship between Nathan Myhrvold and Epstein, without saying anything conclusive about Gates.
It's not that our leaders are uniquely bad (do you think the CCP leaders are better?) but that the incentives for that kind of economic development aren't there.
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
I think phrases like 'love China' set this up as an emotional argument when it isn't one.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
At a 30,000 foot view the purpose of politics is to keep corrupt people and stupid people away from the levers of power. Voting is one possible way, fiat is another.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
It’s not about what I want. The view I shared above was shared the Founding Fathers of the US, and the writers of its constitution. For example Federalist 57, 68, and 76.
So I’m not talking about “politics” as an emergent social phenomenon I am talking about the deliberate process of setting up a government.
> judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
It is possible both to be impressed by China's accomplishments over the past 30 years while remaining critical about its imperfections (and America's as well). It's not about "loving China;" it's about being open-minded, objective, and thorough in considering the matter.
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
There's an invisible tradeoff here. The US has an extremely expansive view of free speech, so you get a very noisy picture of its politics, half of which is Infowars-level insane lies. This is a large cause of its problems. China absolutely does not have free media, and if it did it wouldn't publish primarily in English, so its negatives are very hard to see. Even for Chinese speakers.
I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.
I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.
You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.
The For Profit Penal System (tm) and the resulting recidivism rates associated therewith, while not technically slavery, isn't exactly not slavery either. Anyway was there something specific you're trying to defend here or is this merely an exercise in performative nitpicking?
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
The same can be said without irony about the current administration in the US so there is that. Anyway it's perfectly reasonable to point out the ways in which the CCP is outperforming western governments. If that bothers you then I'd say you may want to contact your representatives.
My statement was descriptive not prescriptive. I make no claims about, in a vacuum or for all situations, whether a technocrat is better than one who is not, just that many of their government is made up of them and they seem to be doing well.
> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
How much CO2 is released tiling, planting, spraying, sowing, spraying, watering, spraying, harvesting, processing, storing, transporting, processing and finally fossil fuels use in the ethanol production?
That's only CO2, but let's not forget about nitrogen oxide, emitted in the huge quantities due to the use of fertilizers.
And that's without mentioning the pollution with pesticides, killing the wildlife and turning the soil into a dead concrete. Dead soil sequesters no co2.
And that happens/worsens every time with corn, while with solar panels you emit co2 only once during their lifetime.
Watch this TC video, he's much better at the details.
Very good, but you only did half the work for a reasonable comparison. Now figure up the costs for solar panel production, installation, operation, and disposal, and compare them.
> How much CO2 is released producing, shipping, and installing the solar panels?
Or maybe you wanted someone else list all the steps.
I was simply helping you with the part you missed:
> GP is right: you gotta consider all the variables
The fact you seemingly missed the fact that growing and processing corn keeps emitting GHG (not only co2), and that producing, transporting and installing the solar panels costs *once*.
I already mentioned the video that covers this specific relationship and details, the actual costs and benefits of growing corn for ethanol vs generating electricity: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
It depends on what you're doing. Steam turbines are absolutely full of exotic alloys. But I tend to agree that large-scale geothermal would be an important component of our all-of-the-above energy policy, which would profit from our existing expertise in punching holes in the ground.
I do not believe anyone will be running 100 year old turbines in a geothermal plant. Those things have fairly serious lifetime maintenance requirements.
Once you realize how much more efficient solar panels are (compared to plants) at capturing energy from the sun, the next logical question is: could it make sense to synthesize food with the help of electricity from solar power?
There is a company called Solar Foods which is exploring exactly that: they use solar power to produce hydrogen, feed that hydrogen and CO2 to Xanthobacter bacteria, and harvest the produced protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016777992...
Efficiency is a funny thing to argue here; Plants do a lot more than just produce food for humans. Also, I'll wager that whatever "produced protein" is manufactured will be only edible/palatable with other additives and processes.
It would be cool if we spent more time understanding our soils and all of the things living in them more instead of finding ways to require more artificial energy to sustain our civilization.
If we reduce land use for food production, it's not like that land will turn into a parking lot. Other plants will grow there, hopefully with richer biodiversity than an agricultural monoculture.
Also some locations do not have climates great for agriculture, but may have climates suitable for solar panels.
You are both ignoring the "soils" part of my comment; Even deserts have things growing in their soils.
Putting solar panels into these places disturbs the natural soils. Transporting that energy requires infrastructure that also messes with habitats. Using it on-site requires different infrastructure and activity that is also disruptive.
Just because the land is "virgin" or "barren" doesn't mean nothing is there biologically. Part of biodiversity is biodiversity in the soil itself. Much of that diversity hasn't been officially studied/documented. ie: We don't even know what we are killing off.
Solar panels do have an ecological cost. Expanding to cover the entire planet is the wrong approach (IMO.) We have plenty of urban space and existing infrastructure that we can cover with solar without disturbing farm land or what's left of natural habitats.
Beyond all of this, TFA was comparing corn vs solar. That implies we are talking about farmable land.
Big farmland is effectively dead. It must be tiled and heavily fertilized to produce anything. It does NOT have healthy soils.
And remember the context: were talking of replacing corn grown for energy, monoculture with no insect or plant life, with the same land covered with solar panels, time for soil to recover, native plants to germinate and grow.
Putting solar panels instead of the industrial corn production is partially rewilding it - there are projects in the hotter countries where increased humidity and decreased sunlight actually allows for the more plants to thrive. There are projects using goats to trim the greens under the panels. Etc, etc.
Almost anything is better for the soil, biodiversity and life than industrial corn production.
Worth noting you don't have to spray solar panels with pesticides and herbicides either. Nor do they require fertilizer. All of these have real negative effects.
Pesticides are causing a decline in insect populations and the animals that eat them. Herbicides what can say more than that. Fertilizer causes algae blooms and hypoxic conditions in lakes and streams. All three cause ground water pollution.
I'm a broken record, solar is 30 times more productive per acre than ethanol corn.
Precisely. We both forgot to mention nitrous oxide, very potent GHG released due to the fertilizer use.
> without disturbing farm land
Farm land is heavily disturbed. All the fertilizer and other chemicals used, soil destroyed by all the things we do to it, and downstream disruption due to fertilizer runoff, animals that are fed and then we have to manage the manure, water that is depleted etc. Placing solar panels on farm land is actually very close to returning it to the nature (of course depending on how exactly you do it, how tightly placed they are, how high etc., but it's also possible to still grow trees under them like some pilot projects in southern Italy or to place them over animal pastures).
Agrivoltaics is a viable path to have it both ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
Obviously it won't work for everything but appears to be workable enough to do more of it.
That said, I absolutely agree that soil science and husbandry is dearly need to avoid depleting arable land. Farmers are catching on to this and with more support could hopefully make doing this a no brainer based on economics alone.
Farm land has less healthy soil than if you stop tilling, fertilizing and pesticides and put solar panels on it. I also think you’re overestimating the area needed to cover our energy needs.
> If we reduce land use for food production, it's not like that land will turn into a parking lot. Other plants will grow there, hopefully with richer biodiversity than an agricultural monoculture.
If current trends old, it will turn into data centers.
I think it would be pretty cool if we could urbanize food production. Turning farm land back into wilderness would go a long way to reducing our impact on the environment.
AIUI plants are actually only responsive to a few wavelengths of light for most of their growth. I've wondered, if solar panels can collect energy over a broader spectrum, if it could actually be more efficient to drive LEDs tuned to just what plants need, driven by broad spectrum solar power. In this way you could, theoretically, power a 3d growing operation based solely on the solar panels on the roof.
Every vertical farming company says this in their advertising. That didn't stop them from going bankrupt.
Conventional agriculture works much better. You can build acres of greenhouses and make a profit.
Vertical farming is such an abject failure that every single vertical farm is biomass constrained, meaning that they have to stretch their biomass with water. This is why vertical farms generally only sell "leafy greens", a marketing term that tries to sweep the inherent technical failure of vertical farming under the rug.
Back of the envelope math:
The reason plants capture energy from this range is because that's where most of sunlight's energy is concentrated, which is going to drop this quite a bit further. Glancing at a solar radiation spectrum curve makes it look a lot closer to ~1.5x. Combine that with inefficiencies of both the panel and the LEDs and it really doesn't look that good.
But solar panels are only about 30% efficient, so that kinda kills any gains.
Thanks, this is exactly the comment I was looking for. In addition to the 70% loss due to the solar panel efficiency, I think we should also lose some efficiency in the conversion to light via leds (although I expect that’s much more efficient, perhaps at like 80%).
I’m curious what is physically possible, if we assume we can achieve the max possible efficiency. I’m guessing there’s behavior like a Carnot engine, and the energy transfer can only be up to ~86% efficient (but please correct me if I’m wrong!!). In that case, conversion from light to energy via solar panels -> conversation back to light via leds should be 0.86*0.86 = 73% efficient in best case. And the full effect should be (800/300)*0.73 = 1.94, about twice as good as growing plants with the sun’s direct light. I’m surprised that seems possible!
p.s. My efficiency guesses are probably wrong. Please correct me.
By using multiple junctions and stacking them, top one converting the most energetic photons, then the second-most etc, one can approach the theoretical limit of about 95% or whatever it is. However in practice it's very expensive and difficult as I understand. AFAIK the current state of the art is about 6 stacked junctions at around 60% efficiency, at great cost.
And as you say the LEDs aren't 100% efficient either, though both deep red and bright blue are among the most efficient, about 85% there.
So that leaves you with about 50% overall just from those two.
I thought that efficiency was governed by the wavelengths they absorb? Ie absorb all wavelengths == 100% efficiency.
So that would imply they are inherently more efficient just looking at the figures provided.
I love this idea and it's one of those ideas I categorize into the bucket of "when all the other lower hanging fruit has been picked", just because it's more complicated.
When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.
I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.
Maybe present it as proving out technology that could be helpful in building a self-sustaining Mars colony?
DARPA’s “Cornucopia” program has the same goal.
https://www.darpa.mil/news/2023/food-air-water-electricity
Another next logical question is whether we can engineer plants to get better at capturing solar energy.
Turns out we (somewhat) can. See for example https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aai8878:
“Crop plants protect themselves from excess sunlight by dissipating some light energy as heat, readjusting their systems when shadier conditions prevail. But the photosynthetic systems do not adapt to fluctuating light conditions as rapidly as a cloud passes overhead, resulting in suboptimal photosynthetic efficiency. Kromdijk et al. sped up the adaptation process by accelerating interconversion of violaxanthin and zeaxanthin in the xanthophyll cycle and by increasing amounts of a photosystem II subunit. Tobacco plants tested with this system showed about 15% greater plant biomass production in natural field conditions.”
It isn’t certain that we can make this work at scale, though. See https://gmopromises.org/article/enhancing-photosynthesis-wit...
Caves of Steel, here we come!
There's also a startup that claims you can turn fossil fuels directly into butter and use less fossil fuels than you would going through the traditional process of farming.
The first part we know is true, the Germans in WW2 fed some troops up to 800 calories a day of coal butter, which was black margarine synthesized from coal.
Using less than needed for fertilizer for farming though seems unlikely, coal butter was born from desperation for immediate calorie source, not because it was cheaper or more efficient.
Corn cyborgs, the future
sounds delicious
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I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum.
From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
If that is the case, then just the electrical energy harvested from solar panels in the UK could convert air into fuel at a faster rate than the WHOLE earth (on average over geological time scales) (as long as the fuel conversion/production was at least 1% efficient at converting electricity to fuel).
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1owp09/if_oil_t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209624951...
The thing is that the supply of fossil fuel depends one's willingness to spend effort finding it. There's a virtually unlimited amount of methane on the ocean floor but harvesting it is not economically viable (fortunately).
US fracking technology allows otherwise unavailable heavy oil to be harvested but naturally at a higher price than Saudi light crude.
So solar tech, as it declines in cost, will replace a larger and larger portion of fossil fuels but not the entire spectrum of these some come out of the ground close to the form we need them in (solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies).
There is so much hydrocarbons and coal underground we would transform the Earths atmosphere to hell, if we would mine and burn it all.
"Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves, which are the most abundant, roughly 150 years at current consumption levels."
https://www.energyencyclopedia.com/en/physics-mysteries/147-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_rese...
In case of uranium, it's possible to extract it from seawater. This technology was developed and tested, but at current low prices of uranium it's cheaper to mine it.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/regalbuto2/
> Natural gas and oil could last for about 50 years, uranium for around 100 years, and coal reserves
Out of interest, what common basic error is being made by Jaroslav Kores, Ph.D. from your link, aside from not showing his working or sources?
It's something worth getting on top of.
Here's an alternative link regarding Australia; https://www.ga.gov.au/aecr2025/uranium-and-thorium
couple of extracts:
What's all this fuss about words? What are resources, what are reserves? Do we really only have 71 years worth of uranium in Australia?For example better discussion about oil reserves: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/how-much-oil-is-lef...
I just wanted to signify that there is so much available hydrocarbons and coal underground that humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
> humanity will run out of atmospheric CO2 budget before it runs out of hydrocarbons.
I agree that is very much all that's needed to be said.
I confess to a shuddering dislike of statements of the form "we only have {x} left", a dislike exceeded by my revulsion to statements of the form "we have {X} amount left in the crust or ocean - we can just use that".
Call it a side effect of a couple of decades of geophysical exploration work across the globe :/
The reserves of any mineral are basically the amount someone spends the effort to find and document. And spending that effort is an economic decision. There's little economic incentive to find reserves beyond a certain period of time so the reserves of any mineral are going to be only fairly limited amount of years out.
> solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies
Arguably asphalt is exactly the sort of application we should be using petroleum for - keeping it sequestered in earth instead of burning it.
No - asphalt is bound together by bitumen, a sticky, waterproof byproduct of petroleum refining.
eg: You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up .. and inevitably increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up
There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.
1. https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/resources/features/july-2016-gr...
Indeed. There are also paths to tackling the impacts from concrete, from steel making, from livestock generating methane, etc.
The figure that has to watched, reduced, and ideally if possible made negative for a time is the rate of CO2 addition to the atmosphere; pulling up additional hydrocarbons already sequestered will always(?) lead to some amount of additional CO2 being set free as a gas.
The very existence of any bitumen (derived from buried hydrocarbons) is just a sign of the horse (previously sequestered CO2) having already left the stable (buried for millenia).
>I'd love to see an investigation into fossil fuel accumulation over geological time scales - especially petroleum. From what I've seen, 10,000 barrels per year is a reasonable guestimate.
From what we know it's a very lumpy distribution. Most of the fossil fuels were created in a few specific points of history
Random question and memes-aside, is there oil on other planets?
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.
Titan:
> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_and_rivers_of_Titan
The next obvious question is where do they come from since presumably there weren't dinosaurs and plants dying there 300 million years ago.
Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.
> gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow
See Figure 2 [1]. Protons, electrons and water ions from space dissociate, in the presence of sunlight, nitrogen and methane. Those combine into intermediate-mass hydrocarbons that produce complex organics. The part we don't understand is how those complex organics, e.g. benzene and naphthalene, turn into large organic particles.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10961852/#fig2
"abiogenic oil" is a fringe belief that I just can't stop myself from giving some credence to. I know all the experts say it's not true, and I'm not crazy enough to deny the evidence, but there's still the niggling doubt in the back of my mind. There's so many hydrocarbons out in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
Does Titan have enough oxygen to allow the combustion of hydrocarbons?
> Does Titan have enough oxygen to allow the combustion of hydrocarbons?
Titan's atmosphere "is a largely anoxic environment, with little oxygen to cause the termination of complex organic reactions" [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10961852/
No, otherwise the first meteorite to hit would have caused the whole thing to go up in a massive conflagration.
This would make a great plot point in a space opera.
I thought they discovered at least decades ago that our oil is actually largely inorganic? It's not dinosaurs & ferns but a direct chemical & physical process. I know a lot of people still say it's just a competing theory but they have found many large deposits in places where it's not possible for it to have been organic. (too deep, in the middle of pure granite with only raw volcanic material and no other organics, etc)
Oil is fluid, so it will not necessarily stay where it is formed, but it will flow through the rocks until it is stopped by impermeable rocks, like granite.
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
As far as I understand it, people looking for oil using theories that oil is formed from organic processes have had significantly more success than people looking for oil using inorganic theories, and not for lack of trying on the latter side.
Wikipedia seems to disagree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Abiogenic_petroleum
It's pretty common for hydrocarbons to migrate down from source rocks down into basement along fracture lines or surface weathering, no abiogenesis required.
I'll take the opportunity to share this beautiful sci-fi video that is (ostensibly) about oil extraction on the exoplanet Solstice-5: https://youtu.be/Gl2hTmgG18k
Well, there are a lot of planets, and a lot of time.
So I would say yes.
On average though, I would say no.
We can't be sure, but probably not on the solar system.
10,000 barrels per year seems super low. Some figures I found of google
estimated total fossil fuel in the earth 1.90E+16 tons (all the hydrocarbons, not just easily extracted)
say it got there over a billion years that would be approx 2E7 tons/yr or 1E8 barrels.
ie. 100,000,000 barrels equivalent a year.
Source?
Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen?
At any rate, this is why I would like to see a better investigation of the subject
Better Kerogen wiki: https://wiki.aapg.org/Kerogen
Source this https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=92529
No idea if it's correct.
solar panels dont convert air into fuel
Thank you?
Solar panels don't convert air to fuel directly, but you could use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
H2 is already a fuel
Solar panels generate energy which can be used for a variety of purposes. One of those uses is converting air to fuel.
If it helps you, think of it like money. You cannot eat it or be sheltered beneath it, but you can use it to purchase food and shelter.
Of course they do. They convert anything you want into anything else you want.
Technology Connections covered this a few months ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM - from about 22m to 38m
Switchgrass isn't all that uncommon in parts of the US that process corn into ethanol, and it is more efficient but less subsidized, so corn beats it out. Sugarcane is even more efficient, but it doesn't grow in most of the US.
The real question isn't about using biofuels in place of electric power, it's most important in place of other fuels in applications where electrification isn't possible, like air travel.
Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes. If jet fuel derived from sugarcane or switchgrass becomes cost effective, airplanes can be solar powered for cheap.
I agree with most of your comment except for this one:
> Air travel is not only the fastest form of travel in common use, it's also one of the most efficient, due to the thin air at cruising altitudes
While airplanes are slightly more efficient than cars at transporting passengers on a distance/energy basis (and only if you exclude electric cars), trains are still much more efficient by about 30%. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
With respect to carrying freight, cargo ships are the most efficient of all.
I'm talking about the physics, not the logistics. Logistics are a present challenge, but physics are a hard limit, so load capacity and power conversion losses don't really have the same insurmountable bearing as rolling resistance and drag. Drag increases with the square of the speed, so fuel efficiency is really only comparable at a given speed.
Water is extremely viscous, so it creates a lot of drag, and cargo ships must scale to huge sizes and stay under 20 knots to have high efficiency. Trains are only flowing through air, which is much thinner than water, so freight trains and most passenger rail go double or triple that speed. High-speed rail doubles to triples the speed again, but is much, much less efficient than rail traveling at freight speeds, because it has no means of avoiding the added drag.
If you were to try and increase high-speed rail by another two to three times, you'd need a rarefied tunnel to make it approach being practical, which is basically what Hyperloop proposed. It's much more practical to use the already existing rarefied atmosphere at high altitudes, which is why airplanes have unmatched efficiency for travel at those speeds.
When travel time going into days or even weeks doesn't matter, e.g. for cargo, all that matters to efficiency is how slow you can go. When time is taken into consideration, as speeds go up rail becomes more efficient than boats, but they top out and airplanes are more efficient than rail. Eventually sub-orbital rockets become more efficient than airplanes, but there isn't a lot of travel needed at those speeds.
That’s ignoring a lot of other losses. Like in air travel you’re instantly losing 10-15% of your fuel generating lift, then you have to add in the fuel used for carrying the other fuel required throughout the flight. Whereas with high speed rail, rolling resistance (which we could say is the equivalent of lift in aircraft) is less than 1% from a quick search, and for a lot of passenger rail and almost all high speed rail you don’t need to carry fuel which is supplied as electricity from an overhead line.
Hyperloop of course was always a non-starter because the kind of energy that would be required to pump down such a huge volume would be ludicrous, maintaining the low pressure extremely difficult, and the amount of materials needed for the tube would be ridiculously large.
Corn ethanol fuel has been a known scam for decades.
Yeah, you only get out something like 30% more energy than you put in[1]. So this isn't so much about how great solar is but is more about how bad corn ethanol is...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
Corn is grown for food security as far as I'm aware. Corn ethanol fuel is just an outlet so that the corn grown doesn't go to waste.
Ethanol corn is the same as the corn grown for animal feed. https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fu... It isn't human-grade corn.
It’s not sweet corn, but it’s still edible.
It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever.
Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
> Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security.
A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production.
I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost.
> Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away.
That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security.
Preserving farmland and maintaining a one- or two-year reserve supply of crucial cereals makes sense for food security. In the event of a global food crisis, getting fallow land under plow should be relatively straightforward. It isn't like manufacturing where the skills and jobs and factories just went overseas. Farmers and farming aren't going away.
Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security.
Er… it’s the same corn used to make corn syrup, corn flakes, and many other things.
It’s just not sweet corn like you’d eat with corn on the cob.
What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food.
Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process.
Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
But what is this system trying to secure against?
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
Growing corn for ethanol is mostly political. Iowa grows a lot of corn, and as the first state in the political primary process, it gets way more attention than it deserves.
So the corn farmers are sacrosanct. We can make various mumblings about energy independence and surplus food capacity, but we all know that the real reason it remains is that anybody who proposes doing otherwise would get massacred. (Not just individually. Their entire party would take the blame.)
You made a "mumbling" about surplus food capacity yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47869026 :-D
But you're right. It's entirely political. It's not clear why it needs to be. Can farmers really swing that many elections?
Why not pay them to fallow land instead? I remember Catch-22 had a passage describing it, but I have no idea if that's true IRL. It preserves farming skills, labor, and farmland, and gives farmers free money. Political slam-dunk and a boon for food security.
We absolutely did and do pay farmers not to farm. Today we call it the "Bridge Assistance Program", to avoid admitting what it really is.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/12/...
I think that's why we don't just do more of that: it's kind of embarrassing. Farmers don't want to hear just how little they actually matter.
That still doesn't explain why we're so busily kowtowing to farmers. I suspect a fair bit of it is inertia: it's the accepted wisdom that insulting farmers is bad (and telling them that they don't actually need their subsidies is an insult). There may well be a day when some political candidate goes to Iowa and says, "Eff you and your stupid caucus. I'm going to spend my time in New Hampshire, and tell them how I'm going to cancel corn subsidies and use the savings for maple syrup subsidies".
> Meat is hugely inefficient
wondering if there is a strong evidence for this?.. What is more efficient?
Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem.
Efficiency is a long term issue, especially water efficiency.
Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money?
> Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals
this statement is very disputable. What alternatives are available in your opinion?
Producing and eating less animals.
I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it.
The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet.
I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
> health consequences of a meat heavy diet.
my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat.
As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
This is very true, but unfortuantely most people don't have portion control and they don't eat the right lean unprocessed meat.
I'm skeptical that we can grow meat with significantly reduced environmental consequences. Like unless you're talking about some technologically advanced and not yet ready for mass production lab grown meat kind of thing it will always be more ecologically friendly and cheaper to just grow food that humans eat instead of growing food for animals to eat which are then eaten by animals. That thermodynamic reality just isn't going to change.
Between the ethanol and the animal feed, we are encouraging growing way more corn than is needed for food security.
If food security were a motivating factor in policy, we would be diversifying away from corn, because drought and aquifer depletion are threatening the ability to continue to grow it.
Nope, that's the cover story. The US subsidizes production, not capacity, which results in lots of excess crop that gets dumped on the market and depresses prices and impoverishes competitors. The ethanol mandates were created partly as a response to the problems that this created. But they are mandates for blending in a certain amount of ethanol, producing artificial demand, and putting us in the ridiculous situation where 40% of corn production goes to ethanol that nobody needs. It's the dumbest thing ever and makes no sense, but is very popular with farm states for obvious reasons.
If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn).
It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles.
(Iowan)
We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).
Just another handout. Ironically many of the recipients of said hand outs oppose social welfare programs.
I think the theoretical idea is that we want to ensure that there is always a very large domestic corn supply, in the event of war or something. Corn is a crop that has a lot of uses; it can be refined into sugar, it can be used as flour, it's relatively energy dense food-wise, and it can be fairly easily converted into fuel if necessary.
I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it.
right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel.
it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.
I would say it is even worse, it is a scam to feed $ to the rich due to Gov subsidizes.
Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence".
Socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor -- MLK
If the solar panels are movable we can go back to the Middle Ages formula where some of the land is left fallow each year to improve yields!
Joules per acre seems an odd thing to maximize. Solar and corn don't require the same land. And we're not running out of land.
We know that ethanol isn't really energy efficient. We do it partly because we like having way, way too much food capacity (as a matter of security), and partly because we love to fetishize farmers (especially the ones in Iowa, who get a lot of attention every four years during Presidential campaigns).
I recall reading a research piece a few years ago that basically said you’d need a ~$5-6 gas price (RBOB - ~$3.5 today) for biofuel to be profitable on an unsubsidized basis. Not directly comparable but it highlighted that it wasn’t really that good an idea.
31/1 is kind of wild and its hard to justify corn ethanol on efficiency alone; so it looks like this exists mainly because of the policy and not because it’s actually a good way to produce energy
Its more efficient energy-wise, but isn't the issue that energy from solar panels can't power gas cars?
You're almost there :)
The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
Leadership that caters to special interests instead of the overall, long term benefit of citizens and organizations.
Nothing illustrates this better than energy policy and the foibles thereof.
Ethanol is a particularly bad idea that only came about due to the farm lobby.
Solar and renewables are progressing despite policy oppostion.
Cheap energy offers a significant competituve advantage --- that USA policy openly and stupidly rejects.
It's not just the farm lobby, it's baked deep into the constitution and the political geography so that vast empty land stretches have hugely disproportional political power.
The more acres you have, the more kWh you can generate each year
Why wouldn't land owners want to farm the sun?
Leasing land for solar installations is popular with rural land owners. Or at least popular enough that there's rarely an issue finding enough willing owners to develop a new project.
The problem is typically their neighbors agitating against allowing the actual land owners to sign leases. It's the rural equivalent of activists who fight apartment complex construction in the name of "preserving neighborhood character."
> Farm the sun
Fantastic messaging! I could see this being a great way to market this, especially with something mentioned in the article:
> Farm the sun to make 3X more money
Energy can't be moved as easily as food. If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Energy can't be moved as easily as food
It can be moved much easier. Electricity moves at the speed of light (through an ideal conductor).
If you generate electricity in Iowa you can't easily sell it to California.
Within the Eastern and Western grids, power generated anywhere can be easily sold anywhere else within the respective grids. For example, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah has historically supplied a significant portion of electricity to Southern California.
Moving power between these grids is a little more complicated --- only because the grids are not synchronized. But this too is technically possible and could be made easier if there was more demand to do so.
Have you seen the logistics required to move the output of 15,000 acres of food to the consumer?
A 15,000 acre solar farm generates 6000GWh a year, which can be moved via a single high voltage pylon.
Of course you don't need to move it to California, as you can power an Iowa data centre, or Chicago, instead.
People may pay more to ship "Florida Oranges" or "California wine" across the country. They won't with electric, they'll just buy locally, and if prices reduce then people will use more (building new data centres is the current vogue, but factories and other industry)
Iowa being a net energy exporter means more economic opportunities for Iowa
The Eastern and Western grids are interconnected.
Yes, but you can't just inject 100s of megawatts into the middle and hope it magically gets to the coasts. There are a lot of losses on the transmission lines and each step has a max capacity.
Talking about losses is a sign of ignorance. Generally a comment making that point can be ignored. Losses are a point that people repeat: maybe because it "makes sense".
Other constraints are what matter - especially if any links are close to their capacity.IAAEE
Yes, that's why I mentioned the capacity issue as well. While losses aren't significant, they do matter. Especially when we are talking about a 1600 mile distance.
No one electron goes the 1600 mile distance. An increase of cheap energy supply in one place lowers likelihood of production elsewhere, but it is more diffuse than selling Iowan energy in California.
Sure, it's not a trivial exercise, but neither is food transport. That's a much harder problem that's been solved because we had to. The main reason we don't have a continental grid is because we don't need one.
How do you think energy policy is baked into the Constitution?
People vote, so how does land have political power? Presumably you mean people in low population density get disproportionate representation in USA?
The last point is what they mean. The Senate causes a number of problems with it's setup. But even the House and how small it is causes further problems. The number of reps there needs to go up by many many times.
To add, there are many proposals[1] for Senate[2] reform[3]. Even a cursory glance reveals[4] an abundance[5] of different[6] suggestions[7].
1. https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1378&con...
2. https://casten.house.gov/imo/media/doc/senate_constitutional...
3. https://democracybillofrights.org/how-and-why-to-reform-the-...
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626...
5. https://casten.house.gov/media/press-releases/casten-introdu...
6. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI...
7. https://electoral-reform.org.uk/when-it-comes-to-fair-votes-...
And that's not baked into the Constitution—it was set by law in the early 1900s, and could be changed by law.
If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
That would effectively eliminate the disproportionate advantage small states have there. (It would not, of course, do anything about the Senate; that would have to be addressed separately.)
> If we were to uncap the size of the House of Representatives, and instead change so that each district contains 50k people (or close to it), we would have roughly 7k representatives in the House.
Nice and proportional, but a completely unwieldy number of representatives. 700 reps for 500k people each would be more manageable.
(of course, that means very little if (a) they're only from two parties and (b) all 7k districts are gerrymandered six ways from sunday)
I believe the grandparent is referring to the US Senate, which was designed as the state's representation in the federal government, and where each state gets 2 senators.
This means that California gets 2 senators but so do Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc.
Now, the conclusion of the grandparent does not follow in my opinion.
Nothing in the constitution mandates the current state boundaries. California could break itself into multiple states (there is a population minimum) and gain more representation in the senate if it wanted.
But there are trade offs. California is a huge prize in the electoral college and has been a safe Democrat win for quite some time. Splitting into multiple states could jeopardize that. Being large also allows them to lead the way on regulation in a way that smaller states couldn't.
The US government is quite the game theory problem.
I have a different reason why the conclusion doesn't follow: while it's true that less populous states have outsized influence in the senate, the constitution doesn't require (and in fact, originally discourages) the federal government to engage in the kind of activities being discussed here. These activities should be the domain of the states. But a long history of expanding federal power (and various supreme court decisions affirming those expansions along, in my opinion, dubious interpretations of both the constitution and various statutes, especially the commerce clause) has led to this issue.
The fact that North Dakota has a lot more influence in the US Senate than California on a per capita basis shouldn't be that big of a deal, because the US Senate should be doing a whole heck of a lot less than it is, and states should be picking up that slack.
The more power and responsibility we have given the federal government, the more the issues appear....because it's doing things never intended or envisioned by the founders.
People are represented by Representatives, real estate is represented by Senators.
> The real reason why the USA can't compete in global manufacturing --- poor leadership.
I'd say it's partially that, but it's also priorities.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago, they didn't want to work in factories like their parents had, and they didn't want to pay the prices necessary to pay American workers to make goods in an environmentally-responsible manner.
So they gladly bought things made in China where - at the time - the average person would rather work in a factory than on a peasant farm, the labor was cheap, and whining about things like "air quality" and "potable water" were either not a high priority, or would get you dealt with by the local Party representatives who had been told that putting that new factory in was the difference between them advancing up the ranks or being sent to a re-education camp.
If anything, China was the ultimate caterer to special interests, those being the Western companies who wanted to do business there without having to deal with hiring Westerners.
When the Boomers were coming of age 40 years ago
When the Boomers were coming of age, there was no trade with China.
there was tiawan and japan for your cheap junk fix. Both are not known for cheap junk anymore
In other words, they were the ones who made it a reality.
Which really was the dumbest geopolitical move in American - and maybe Western - history, but whatever. Too late now.
How about Bill Gates as US's Benevolent Dictator For Life?
While the young Bill Gates did many disgusting things, after retiring he behaved quite decently in comparison with other similarly rich people.
In any case, he would have been an infinitely better president than people like Bush Junior or Trump. Probably also better than people like Biden, who is not remembered for doing something good, but only for not being so bad as his predecessor and successor.
> after retiring he behaved quite decently in comparison with other similarly rich people.
Well, except for that whole Jeffrey Epstein thing: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/gates-f...
I did not follow this affair more thoroughly, but the link provided by you shows only a suspicious relationship between Nathan Myhrvold and Epstein, without saying anything conclusive about Gates.
It's not that our leaders are uniquely bad (do you think the CCP leaders are better?) but that the incentives for that kind of economic development aren't there.
Largely due to, as you point out, special interests.
EDIT: judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
I think phrases like 'love China' set this up as an emotional argument when it isn't one.
I have no idea what China or Chinese leaders are like. I have no relation to China.
However, I can say that their policy choices on these technical issues are better than ours. The only emotion I feel when saying this is disappointment in my own country, rather than pride in China. I wish America had more energy production. Almost all American problems are the result of lacking energy production capacity.
> do you think the CCP leaders are better?
Based on their public statements and policy actions, absolutely. America these days sounds and behaves like a country being run by absolute cretins.
At a 30,000 foot view the purpose of politics is to keep corrupt people and stupid people away from the levers of power. Voting is one possible way, fiat is another.
Readers can assess for themselves the degree to which the U.S. government has done this, as well as the CCP.
By the way Sortition, which is picking random people to run government for a period of time, would probably be better than what we have now in my opinion. We are worse than random.
What you want out of politics is not the purpose of politics. Politics is an emergent phenomenon that appears naturally within groups of people.
People/groups engage in politics to exert control over the social environment.
It’s not about what I want. The view I shared above was shared the Founding Fathers of the US, and the writers of its constitution. For example Federalist 57, 68, and 76.
So I’m not talking about “politics” as an emergent social phenomenon I am talking about the deliberate process of setting up a government.
> judging by the comments everyone here seems to love China
It is possible both to be impressed by China's accomplishments over the past 30 years while remaining critical about its imperfections (and America's as well). It's not about "loving China;" it's about being open-minded, objective, and thorough in considering the matter.
"do you think the CCP leaders are better?"
Yes, unambiguously. They appear to be aggressively investing in collaborative foreign policy projects globally, have a stellar track record when it comes to not starting random wars around the world, and their economic planning and engagement with decarbonization efforts massively outshine the US.
There's an invisible tradeoff here. The US has an extremely expansive view of free speech, so you get a very noisy picture of its politics, half of which is Infowars-level insane lies. This is a large cause of its problems. China absolutely does not have free media, and if it did it wouldn't publish primarily in English, so its negatives are very hard to see. Even for Chinese speakers.
You just need to stomach slavery, violent repression of political dissidents, live organ harvesting and a handful of other unpleasantries.
I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.
We still have a lot to answer for.
If it's already changed don't you think it's answered for? What level of performative apologetics will make it better in your estimation?
I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.
You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.
The For Profit Penal System (tm) and the resulting recidivism rates associated therewith, while not technically slavery, isn't exactly not slavery either. Anyway was there something specific you're trying to defend here or is this merely an exercise in performative nitpicking?
I made clear that some of these were past (and they reverberate still today), and some are present: "America still has or once had"
> exaggerating the scale of things that are still present
What am I exaggerating, exactly?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/nx-s1-5734051/measles-outbrea...
> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes
In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:
https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_school_curricula...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-whats-behind-the...
Yeah, people here are insane to believe the CCP is some kind of technocratic benevolent autocracy.
The same can be said without irony about the current administration in the US so there is that. Anyway it's perfectly reasonable to point out the ways in which the CCP is outperforming western governments. If that bothers you then I'd say you may want to contact your representatives.
It helps that they spend billions to manipulate public perception on forums like this one
CCP leaders are largely technocrats unlike in the US. There are many engineers and doctors in the upper ranks.
Well, Xi Jinping and his lackeys are known for their poor educational background, maybe not quite well known in the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSYQpaAI90A
Many of us have personal experience watching good engineers become bad managers.
Politics is harder than it looks.
In theory an engineering background should help make better politicians. In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
In practice it isn't the slamdunk you imply.
In practice, China is very different from the USA. For example, China doesn't have open presidential elections.
My statement was descriptive not prescriptive. I make no claims about, in a vacuum or for all situations, whether a technocrat is better than one who is not, just that many of their government is made up of them and they seem to be doing well.
> roughly 12 million hectares of US farmland—an area the size of New York State—is currently devoted to corn crops that are farmed not for food, but for fuel.
2.6M - 5.7M hectares (10,000-22,000 sq miles), less than half of this ethanol land, would power all electricity in the US:
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
For other comparisons, there are roughly 0.8M hectares of rooftop in the United States (table ES-1 here, 8.13e9 sq m https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf).
Looking at LLNL's flowchart of energy in the US:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
that solar will produce ~13 quads of energy. That's out of a total of only 32.1 quads total of all energy services delivered. When electrifying from fossil fuels to electricity, we only need to (roughly) meet that 32.1 of services; EVs very efficiently deliver electricity to the purpose of movement, ICE are like 20%-30% at best. Burning fossil fuels for heat is ~99% efficient, but heat pumps give you 300%-400% efficiency because they move heat rather than convert electricity directly to heat.
So converting all ethanol land use to solar would power the entire US; that's ignoring all the wind power we generate, all the hydropower we generate, all the next generation geothermal that will probably come online over the next decade. And at the base of it all, storage is super cheap these days!
The transition is possible now, it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, and the longer we let fossil fuel misinformation deceive us, the more we will waste on expensive energy.
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How good are solar panels at converting CO2? How good is corn?
It'd be wise to look at all the variables.
This particular corn is converted into ethanol that immediately releases the captured co2 back.
How much of co2 can be trapped in the soil and biomatter if we let native plants live underneath the panels?
How much CO2 is released producing, shipping, and installing the solar panels? GP is right: you gotta consider all the variables.
Technology Connections did the maths.
How much CO2 is released tiling, planting, spraying, sowing, spraying, watering, spraying, harvesting, processing, storing, transporting, processing and finally fossil fuels use in the ethanol production?
That's only CO2, but let's not forget about nitrogen oxide, emitted in the huge quantities due to the use of fertilizers.
And that's without mentioning the pollution with pesticides, killing the wildlife and turning the soil into a dead concrete. Dead soil sequesters no co2.
And that happens/worsens every time with corn, while with solar panels you emit co2 only once during their lifetime.
Watch this TC video, he's much better at the details.
See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931354/
and also: https://wisconsinwatch.org/2025/12/corn-clean-energy-ethanol...
Very good, but you only did half the work for a reasonable comparison. Now figure up the costs for solar panel production, installation, operation, and disposal, and compare them.
Haha, but you did that already:
> How much CO2 is released producing, shipping, and installing the solar panels?
Or maybe you wanted someone else list all the steps.
I was simply helping you with the part you missed:
> GP is right: you gotta consider all the variables
The fact you seemingly missed the fact that growing and processing corn keeps emitting GHG (not only co2), and that producing, transporting and installing the solar panels costs *once*.
I already mentioned the video that covers this specific relationship and details, the actual costs and benefits of growing corn for ethanol vs generating electricity: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-geothermal-energy/...
Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
It depends on what you're doing. Steam turbines are absolutely full of exotic alloys. But I tend to agree that large-scale geothermal would be an important component of our all-of-the-above energy policy, which would profit from our existing expertise in punching holes in the ground.
I do not believe anyone will be running 100 year old turbines in a geothermal plant. Those things have fairly serious lifetime maintenance requirements.