Hello hello, welcome back to this week's edition of Sunday Chillin'! The winter quarter is finally over and boy am I glad. Hope everyone is preparing to emerge from their hibernation.
Small Part Of A Big Whole
I find the concept of doing things at scale to be really fascinating. What I'm referring to is the idea that when systems get large enough, incremental improvements can lead to huge benefits. And conversely, bad things can turn terrible really fast. I've been thinking about this property a lot in the context of climate-related problems recently so I thought we could walk through some examples together.
Before we get into what exactly improvements at scale would even look like, here are some crazy facts that you may not have known about energy and climate issues.
Before we get into what exactly improvements at scale would even look like, here are some crazy facts that you may not have known about energy and climate issues.
- Water used in agriculture for growing crops and livestock accounts for over 70% of the total freshwater usage per year. This equates to almost 2 quadrillion gallons of water, which is enough to cover the entire United States in 2 feet of water.
- The world consumes ~600 exajoules of energy annually, which is roughly equivalent to 16 billion tons of oil. To put this in perspective, the US consumed 2.46 million tons of petroleum per day in 2021. [1]
- The amount of solar energy hitting land on the Earth every hour is 128 exajoules. If we look at all of the surface of the Earth (including oceans, lakes, etc.), this number if closer to 450 exajoules. Every hour! Compare this to the amount above that we consume per year as a species. [2]
I could go on and on about numbers like this but the point here is that these figures are too insane to even really imagine. So to make it easier for my mind to comprehend, I like to think of small subsets of these problems and contextualize what marginal improvements might practically mean.
Here are examples using the numbers from above:
If we improve our water usage efficiency by 5%, that would come out to 100 trillion gallons of water per year. That's 5.9 trillion (US) showers, which means each person in the world could take at least 750x as many showers as before and we'd still be using the same amount of water as now. I'm not sure that that number means anything at all to the average person, but mainly I'm just trying to get across that it's a big boi number. [3]
Another example: Since the world uses energy equal to roughly 16 billion tons of oil per year, if we were to improve our collective energy efficiency by 1%, it would be like if the US just didn't use oil for 65 days of the year. Think of the benefits to greenhouse gas emissions and air quality from an improvement of just 1%!
And finally, let's think about the biggest boi we know in our solar system: the sun. If we harvest 0.1% of the solar energy that falls on the earth per hour, we would collect 0.45 exajoules per hour. That means that if we just collect solar energy at this rate for 56 days of the year, we'd have more than enough energy to power all current human needs. And this is at just 0.1%! [4]
Sorry for all the numbers, but I hope this gives you some sense of how gigantic these problems and potential corresponding solutions are.
Of course, the reality is that improving things even by 0.1% at a global scale is no meager task. Because of this, the problems can seem insurmountable, especially when I'm telling you nonsensical things like visualizing the problem in terms of daily showers. But this is why it's so important to think of the (relatively) small changes that we can make that will have huge impacts at scale. This feels like something we can actually grasp.
This newsletter is already approaching my usual length limit so we won't delve into these too deeply this time around, but hopefully this gives you some stuff to ponder as you go about your lives. Where do you think humanity should focus its efforts to make the biggest difference for the future?
I'll leave you with just one more truly staggering comparison that surprises me every time I come across it. The ocean is so large that if you represented all of the available water on earth as a 100 liter volume, the amount of freshwater on earth available for use would be 0.003 liters. That's half a teaspoon out of 100 liters. Given this ratio, you can imagine how much potential there is for desalination (if we figure out the pesky hypersaline brine problem). [5]
We'll probably discuss approaches and ramifications to each of the aforementioned issues in another newsletter, but things are not as bleak as they seem! May this bolster your spirits as you go about your days.
Energy And Climate Tunes?
Of course, the real tragedy is that I don't have too many energy and climate-centric songs for you this week. I've included a song by Michael Jackson where he does just lament how much damage we're doing to the Earth (back in like 1995 no less!). But besides that, I'm just sharing songs that feel optimistic in their tone and chord progressions. Something to do with their key signature and tempo I'm told, but I never really paid attention to music theory well enough to know.
Right Time - Tuxedo
Spotify | YouTube
MUST BE - Lou Phelps
Spotify | YouTube
Surreal - Louis Futon, RKCB
Spotify | YouTube
Earth Song - Michael Jackson
Spotify | YouTube
See you all next Sunday!
suhaas
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Here are Spotify and YouTube playlists with all the songs so far.
[1] Important to note that the number for the US here represents only the petroleum consumption. We produce and consume way more energy than that in total per day, but given that most everyone has driven a car before, this comparison just seemed most relatable.
[2] It's pretty embarrassing how long it took me to find decent conversions for all of this information. It is worth noting that all of the numbers for this newsletter are from governmental sources, but I didn't peruse the actual underlying data or anything. Maybe someone forgot to carry a 1 somewhere but I wouldn't know.
[3] I thought I'd try to do the opposite of what you normally see in the media whenever they talk about water use and showers (i.e. "Taking shorter showers will prevent the needless slaughter of polar bears"). Taking a hot shower is a Top 5 Life Activity so I want you to see The Limitless Possibilities that can come from making our systems better.
[4] Unlike in a lot of uses, it actually makes sense to consider the entirety of the Earth's surface here, not just land area. The US military is currently testing floating solar panel arrays, presumably for some war-time purpose. But it turns out that floating solar panels can achieve higher efficiency than land-based panels since they're thermally regulated by the water. Some sources estimate that we could meet all the energy needs of the world by just covering our reservoirs with floating solar panels. I haven't verified this information though, so don't quote me on your next Floating Solar Panel Trivia Night.
[5] There's something that you can actually try out for yourself. Fill up your Hydroflask® with a liter of water and then scoop up half a teaspoon using your favorite teaspoon. Then imagine that you had 99 more of those liters. Now if you're truly dedicated, you can go out and buy 99 more Hydroflasks® to properly carry out this experiment. Scientific Rigor must be respected.