Reply #13: Joules? Entropy? Enthalpy?

[dcfirefighter]

If we could trade joules, i'd trade low quality joules for high ones any day.

Joules at a high temperature are more useful than joules at a low temperature.

Energy - in and of itself, is a relatively useless 'economic' measure: energy falls on us, blows on us, etc. all the time, for free.

It's the need to get 'high quality' energy that can be readily converted to our needs that is the crux. A GJ of oil energy is worth about $10. A GJ of solar energy is worth $0.00.

Capital can be used to convert energy from one form to another: PV Cells convert solar energy to electric, Wind turbines convert wind energy to mechanical or electric.

Labor can be used to convert raw materials (Adam Smith & K. Marx's 'Land') into capital. The value of the capital is what it can be exchanged for, regardless of the amount of labor that went into building it.

Crude oil, as it comes out of the ground, has very little labor put into it, but rather millenia of solar energy. It is valuable, because it is useful to many people.

Gold nuggets, as they come out of the ground, also has no 'labor value', and very little 'energy value'. It, however, is very valuable because people find it useful as a store of value, a medium of exchange, an electronics component, and/or jewelry.

There's a large ball of string somewhere in Minnesota, that represents an extraordinary amount of labor. Despite this, it's not worth very much.

The sun has an enormous energy content. It has very little tradeable value - merely because it's difficult to exclude others from it.

What fossil fuels represent to our economy is a shortcut. A man can 'own' a chunk of this world, and charge others for it's use. He did not call it into existince, he didn't commission it's construction, and he certainly didn't form it himself. He didn't buy it from it's creator, and if he inherited it, neither did his forbears. Yet our property laws recognize it as his, and we must pay whatever he asks to use it. His greed cannot be undercut by another man's entrepreneurship - as no one can create 'Land'. So pay we must, and pay we do.

In the case of energy, we screw ourselves from the cradle to the grave, so to speak: we reduce his taxes for extracting oil from his wells; we tax the property of people who build new, energy efficient builings; we zone land use such that automobile use is virtually required; we allow the wastes from the burnign of his oil to pollute our earth; we increase the cost of labor through taxes, such labor is conserved more than oil; we shift the costs of protecting oil routes to the working man via income taxes.