This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
500 Years Of (Mostly Rising) Energy Prices
Via Ralph Dillon of Global Financial Data,
In today’s markets, when we discuss Wood/Lumber prices as a commodity, it is often related to home building and used by some as a economic indicator as a strength or weakness in the home building segment.
What most don’t realize however, is that Wood has traded as a commodity for over 5 centuries as an Energy source. It wasn’t until Coal and Oil became common place for the commodity to lose it appeal as a major traded commodity.
Wood has been and still is today, a primary source of energy. From cooking and heating to producing steam, we have seen its role change throughout our history. As the use for wood grew, more Europeans discovered uses for the commodity especially after they started using it in furnaces in the steel making process. As the uses for wood continued, Europe began to see rapid deforestation especially from the 15th -18th century. What became clear in Europe, is that the trend of the deforestation simple could not continue. By the 1550’s, the English Parliament began passing laws that restricted the use of Wood as a fuel source. In addition, when England went to war with France in 1620, wood and lumber began to show signs of a severe shortage. In order to build its fleet of ships to continue its war efforts, England had to import all of its wood from Scandinavia and from the colonies in the America. Spain who was also active in ship building and war, felled huge sections of its forest to build the famous Spanish Armada. Once the fleet was lost, Spain didn’t have enough to rebuild it and sought out new supplies of wood from all over the world.
By the middle of the 18th century, Europe was in an energy crisis and sought out new energy sources. As the process for extracting and refining coal became more efficient, more European countries began relying on Coal more and hence its demand increased. The exact same could be said of Oil.
For the very same reasons that coal replaced wood, Oil became a primary source of energy and the commodity of Wood lost its luster as a primary energy source. In 1870, Wood prices stopped being recorded as Oil and Coal replaced it. It wasn’t until the last few decades that they started tracking Timber prices to reflect wood as a home building product and not as a primary energy source.
Below we take a look at 513 years of Energy sources... Starting with Wood from 1500 to present day Coal and Oil prices.
(click image for larger legible version)
»
- 17204 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
EPIC Santelli rant on the Fed - "what is the Fed a day trader" "What do Journalists think Fed press releases written by god?"
We've not advanced at all in thousands of years, man still worshipping man-god kings.
Now, get back on those machines and BUY BUY BUY!! Mangodking Bernank commands it!
Chart the trajectory and (non)volatility of oil prices (absent some serious geopolitical episodes such as the 1979 Iran Hostage situation) since the passage of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999.
Throw all the bullshit about BRIC demand driving prices so much higher in real terms since 1999 - do you see it? In the that chart? It's patently clear.
I believe oil to be one of the most precious and critical resources in the world, and that this will be true 100 years from now (no matter what the "pundits" predict in their blah-blah-blah spasms), but there's no denying that the the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (passed by a bought & paid for Congress and signed into law by a bought & paid for executive branch) created a situation whereby a huge component of the real price of oil (and all of its derivatives, and there are few things that oil is NOT used in or to manufacture) is due to financial gaming of a critical asset not based on true supply and demand fundamentals, but rather, due to the epic Ponzi schemes of yet another area of rigging brought to your wallet by the parasites of Wall Street.
And these same principles now infect prices on everrything from wheat to aluminum to titanium dioxide, and eveything in between.
tesla
Dunning-Kruger
pedantic fratboys
Trolling boetian....
So what do you think oil prices should be? $35?
It only costs $5 to get it out of the ground, doesn't it?
"So what do you think oil prices should be? $35?"
Here's a novel idea: Let's find out by letting a truly free market, based on the actual needs and demands of both buyers and sellers, shape that price curve.
If oil were free to find it's market price at this point - I have a feeling it would cycle like a spring without a shock absorber between boom and crash. Price action like that would kill energy investment (infrastructure spending is already dead), compounding our current slow-motion economic disaster.
Being that the chart is a log scale - it doesn't look quite a ominous as it is. Both oil and coal are generally on a parabolic rise - and we've just gotten to the point where it is turning vertical. Wonder where wood will be when it picks up where coal and oil leave off? . . .
Add some demographics, remove one or two ponzi schemes you get some very explosive geopolitical situations.
SHIT, the NSA probably flagged this conversation as a potential bomb receipe.
delete
i hope you guys pay attention to the buy and sell signals given behind him ( santelli) near the end of his walk....their is always a gesture of fuck you by a floor guy...wonder whom its directed at? if u have dvr go back and look at guy in organge..this is not the first time...hy fuckin styerical
500 years of (mostly) rising energy demand
Bingo, you need energy to do anything. 7+ billion people, and growing, plenty of demand.
That 7 + billion is about to decrease...by alot
...and I thought I was the pessimist.
I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. We have been living off of cheap energy and abundant food which can not go on forever. The resource wars have begun and it will get worse.
I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optometrist!
have to side with the good Dr. It's just math. This moment was innevitable. Mankind is pretty stupid and selfish and has done just about everything wrong to prepare for it. The phrase "resource wars" is almost redundant. We're just the lucky ones, born just as it's heating up
That 7 + billion is about to decrease...by alot
I have been doing a lot of flying lately and when ever I look out the window I see the mark of man on almost every square inch of earth (Detroit to Omaha anyway). No need to worry, Mother Nature will clean this up and she always wins.
Priced in what? Prices are largely irrelevant. Think in terms of calories or Joules. If it takes 10,000,000 Joules to produce some oil that is only worth 10,000 Joules, then the game is already over, it just takes time for the sheeple to figure it out.
Long black markets, solar (via plants) and sharecropping...
If it takes 10,000,000 Joules to produce some oil that is only worth 10,000 Joules, then the game is already over,...
That's a very big "if" at this point, but you're absolutely correct. Interesting article though. Wood had more than one use back in the day, i.e. ship building for war efforts. Oil could be seen that way as a necessary ingredient to produce strategic mineral resources, metals, fabrication, etc. and not just propulsion.
Think it's time to replace the 3 phase electric powered hot tub in the backyard with an outdoor pizza oven and using the trimmings from the fruit trees in the chiminea as an outdoor entertainment center instead. http://watchesser.com/brick-oven-building-plans/
"That's a very big "if" - Are you stupid? 100 years ago farmers built wooden derricks in their fucking fields to recover oil. Now we have to drill miles below an ocean.
Tell me dipshit, how much energy went into building and deploying that wooden derrick compared to the modern monsters we use now. There is no fucking "if" about it.
Apparently the people that "drill miles below an ocean" think that the energy (measured in dollars) spent is worth the energy recovered (also measured in dollars).
Your comparisons are non-sequitur.
One might even point out that there isn't a great deal of actual "thinking" going on, at least not enough to accurately assess the externalities they routinely leave off one side of the balance sheet.
Your comparisons of real quantifiable resources in terms of imaginary vehicles like money are invalid.
Some won't understand that until their dollars don't buy shit.
they're measuring in dollars and don't care what oil they burn to get more so long as they get dollars. They flat out don't care.
Same as how many gold miners care more about the dollars than the gold. Soon they'll both be forcefully corrected.
Same as how many gold miners care more about the dollars than the gold...
I haven't spent as much time researching and accessing reliable information on the topic as NSA / CIA types can and likely have, but the fulcrum of diminishing returns of energy spent vs. energy returns as the magic mover of the market is essential in any and all trade, imo.
There's been a row on SA recently between a few folks debating on the true "cost" of gold mining. I would still like to know more about the artificial 90% purity rule / law regarding dore / smelting material as it applies to taxation requirements and how these products get calculated in the derivatives vs. sales / delivery of "final" product to investors and / or the market.
It would seem soveriegn taxes imposed on their operations and end product by the host country a mining company operates in would have more than a slight affect on their bottom line, but I have found little written about this topic.
There are so many variables to consider in determinig the potential profitability of a mining company I'm sometimes astounded values can be assigned at all. They operate in the true essence of fluidity, imo.
Not to take away from the importance of farming, family and foods, but an analysis of a mining company's future prospects can be anything but certain.
It seems the better the future prospects a mining company has is more a barometer of the host country's future prospects. Mining companies (especially gold) are the tell, not the end. jmo.
If you pull up a historical chart of gas prices you'll find that it's been increasing approximately 10% per year for over a decade now. But the Fed says inflation is below desirable levels. Why, because they want the Too Big To Survive banks to persist.
Not true! Gas prices, adjusted for inflation or amount of debt, have not increased substantially. It costs me LESS minutes of labor to buy a gallon of gasoline now than it did 50 years ago.
Dollars have gone DOWN IN VALUE. Gasoline has stayed about the same. Ergo, it requires more dollars to buy that gasoline, but not more WEALTH.
agreed. I hear your anger. Just saying, though, while the guy doesn't have your hold on the scale and numbers, he was still arguing in your direction, just skeptical because we can't all be geniuses on every topic. Problem is on this issue we better all get clued in at expert level or we're gonna all be in serious civilization collapse, hence the anger being fairly justified. It's just such a shock to those who aren't awake, including those who think they are but really have missed this biggest of big problems. It's one of those big events that can turn our near future into The Road.
I would like to see this chart adapted to price the wood, coal and oil in silver, rather than in GBP.
I suspect people's wages priced in silver will take a dramatic fall in the not-too distant future.
EROEI … spot on. I am amazed at the amount of people who don’t get that. I think it is generally accepted that it takes 10 calories of energy to get back 1 calorie of food – this is all fine and dandy when you got oil spewing out of the ground……… but if the math doesn’t add up… well you know how this will end. Once again, just a hunch, but I think Mother Nature will take care of this.
Kind of funny commenting about the laws of physics with LawsofPhysics.
Another scary measure of energy is BTUs per capita (global pop). That peaked in the 70s. Since that point, the rise of any particular population's energetic standard of living has been at someone else's expense.
Production costs will never be that high because you can MANUFACTURE oil for less than that. Much less. Just like it once became cheaper to pump oil out of the ground (and refine it) than to extract it from whales, it will become cheaper to synthesize it from other abundant energy sources than to pump. Once that becomes normal, we will look back on pumping oil out of the ground as only slightly less barbaric than squeezing it out of whale carcasses.
The key is removing regulations preventing new energy sources from coming online. Thorium will let you make oil for use as fuel or as chemical feedstock. Thorium pushes the clock back by hundreds or thousands of years (or more). That is enough time to get access to things like fusion. Not to mention that it lets us burn the 97% of energy remaining in our nuclear "waste".
so you say right now but some wells are already showing a negative rate: a decreasing return of joules extracted for joules input to get the substances.
Perhaps if people follow Oslo's example of turning garbage into energy, and converting it to liquid oil & gas, http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil , then maybe situations will improve.
Exactly - Does anyone have a clue of the caloric content of an English cubic foot of wood? Does the author understand that a cubic foot of pine burns like paper compared to oak?
The author doesn't understand the difference between his ass and fat meat, let alone the caloric values thereof.
All three of the sources; Wood, Oil and Coal, are not sufficiently specific as they can vary greatly in energy density between grades. However, the chart does demonstrate trend in price over time, so it still works to show that energy is getting more expensive when priced in GBP / USD.
However, are GBP and USD really a good pricing mechanism over >500 years? Does this chart actually show energy getting more expensive, or does it show loss of purchasing power?
Energy Flux Density bitchez.. that's counts.
And at one point, you didn't have to pay anything for lumber, you went and chopped it down yourself when you wanted it.
Precisely, no middlemen. Fuck the motherfucking paper-pushers.
Chopping wood and tending the wood burner is paying quite a bit in time and energy.
No shit sherlock. Are you contending that it is better to be freezing in the gutter? What is your fucking point exactly?
Ya'll are talking like the days when wood was free were so glorious. Screw those paper pushers and burn wood to cut out the middle man!!
I'm contending that I'll turn the dial on the thermometer and burn the natural gas that those evil big businesses delivered.
So will I, for as long as it can be actually delivered. Just like physical PMs, it's the "taking delivery" bit that will cause the levy to break. My point is to always hedge accordingly.
If free markets and free banking isn't turned to when the world monetary ponzi implodes, you may want to hedge on getting the heck out of dodge.
Going where exactly? You will also need a dependable tribe.
The US will likely fair the worst because the US will have to actually produce what it consumes. Southeast Asia maybe.
Stumpage stills runs about 25 cents cubic meter here, basically free if your are a forest company.
Your attitude will sharply change when that delivery stops.
Why would I still be here if I can't even get heat?
you won't - it's coming and soon.
Quite a lot of zerohedge will probably go dark. They may get servers back up but the participants will be too busy with important things like survival from looters.
OK so you believe that working a 60 hour week so you can pay someone else to chop and burn your wood is a better 'time and energy' tradeoff? I guess that's your opinion.
It's all about the opportunity cost. Yes, many can find a more valuable use of their time than chopping wood and tending the burner.
Well isn't that exactly our problem today? People now sit and play X-Box all day (more valuable use of time in modern times) while paying their utility bill with a credit card.
Maybe humanity was much better when people were providing for themselves....better living for those with the gumption to do it, better genetics pool when all the lazy do-nothing tards die off.
People here aren't playing X-Box all day. They (incl. you and me) are playing 0-Hedge. Why aren't you chopping wood instead? Is 0-H a more valuable use of time?
Population density is too high now to allow most people to provide for themselves. Kill about 95% and maybe you can get back to the Good Old Days of chopping wood and carrying typhoid infected water.
+1 for typhoid infected water
Humanity is never better off providing for themselves in the sense that you mean here of making everything themselves that they consume. Trade is what makes humanity better off. Doing what brings you most value and trading for what you want to consume is what's best, not going out to chop wood when there's already a pipe that flows natural gas right into your house.
Edit: Maybe by gumption you mean stubornness and stupidity thinking that hard work is a good thing when the goal should be to do the least amount of work possible. It's being productive that's the goal, not working a lot harder than the next guy to produce the exact same thing. So, again, I'll turn the dial on my thermometer to get that heat.
Your end of the pendulum doesn't make any more sense than theirs; some things are worth doing for yourself (fixing a carburetor), some things are better done by others with less skills (putting my gardener out of work doesn't help the economy), some things are better left to people more qualified (medical care, in some, but certainly not all cases).
But there's a diminishing return to the fantastical powers with which you've embued capitalism and trade; having the freedom to choose that balance for yourself is important, but not if the trade-off involves being exploited (think Chinese FoxConn workers making iPads) or ripped off (Bernie Madoff's clients, come to mind).
Producing for production's sake alone doesn't seem a very sensible way to run an economy, but what do I know? I think GDP is a made-up number.
I'll laugh next to my fire when your HVAC goes out and you can't afford to pay someone else to fix it for ya!
Of course producing for production's sake alone isn't sensible...that's called being a slave. What's sensible is to produce for consumptions sake, for the only reason to produce is to consume.
that's not the story that history tells: that's why there's always a mix of self-sustaining producers and a mix of people who only have something of skill to trade & who fall on bad times when that skill is not of any use to the market.
Doing the least work is NOT the goal.
The goal is getting the most VALUE of the work.
Some of that value is immediate use. SOME of it is FUTURE availability, and that references RISK of being cut off a grid (market) by war, famine, earthquakes, floods, etc.
That's what the market does...it reorganizes resources when certain skills and trade become unprofitable and then those peole must spend their time and energy learning to do something else that the market rewards them for.
Yes, I did not state that the best and the real goal is getting the most utility out of life, whatever that means for you. The optimal combination of working the least in order to consume the most (in whatever form and at whatever time that may be) is part of the picture.
Most times i agree with you SJ, but on that front you are wrong. Opportunity cost is a misnomer.
I suppose you think thinking on the margin is a misnomer too.
Can I ask what you measure opportunity in?
Clearly, you don't know what opportunity cost is. Here's a lesson if you need one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkEiHZAtoro
Is it similar to poisining water supplies for cheap nat gas?
No, that's a negative externality.
Same as fuck thy neighbour.
aka "The tradgedy of the commons."
Pollution is different than the tragedy of commons.
See:
"The cause of any tragedy of the commons is that when individuals use a public good, they do not bear the entire cost of their actions. If each seeks to maximize individual utility, he ignores the costs borne by others. This is an example of an externality. The best (non-cooperative) short-term strategy for an individual is to try to exploit more than his or her share of public resources. Assuming a majority of individuals follow this strategy, the theory goes, the public resource gets overexploited."
and
"Modern equivalents
Modern equivalents are pollution of waterways and the atmosphere, logging of forests, overfishing of the oceans, tossing of trash out of automobile windows, poaching and e-mail spamming. The contribution of each actor is minute, but summed over all actors, these actions degrade the resource."
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Thank you, I always assumed the tragedy of the commons was equated to the taking of public resources (overfishing of the oceans) as opposed to pollution.
Originally it probably did - but the concept of "wasting" got expanded over time as industrial pollution became more of an issue than it was in the 1700s.
Going for wood and taking it I still do, using free fuel for getting there.
One of my hobbies (pay is very low but i don't care).
"And at one point, you didn't have to pay anything for lumber, you went and chopped it down yourself when you wanted it. "
Pretty much still the case my side of the woods, even though we trade plenty of favors, I do not have to ask
for permission to clean up storm/snow/slide related
spoiled trees. Could leave the storm havoc for better wild life cover but I`m expected to somehow keep the forests
in "order" where I hunt.
you guys better start reading about admirality law.
http://www.barefootsworld.net/admiralty.html
When you have a well-read and intelligent populace, such nobel ideas work. Unfortunately, that is not the case now and now that fraud is the status quo, possession is the law.
whose possession?...at the end of the day everything you own can be bailed in.....they used all assets in this country as collateral to the fed way back when
the gun-enforced kind of possession - courts won't be referenced at all except as a post-event whitewash.
Thorium Bitchez!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Been around for 20+ years, show me one city using it.
I'm thinking the next twenty years...
You are free to hold your breath if you like, I won't be holding mine.
Wood for energy has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Show me one city using it.
There are whole countries using it.
Also see, e.g. wiki:
Some European countries produce a significant fraction of their electricity needs from wood or wood wastes. In Scandinavian countries the costs of manual labor to process firewood is very high. Therefore it is common to import firewood from countries with cheap labor and natural resources[citation needed]. The main exporters to Scandinavia are the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia). In Finland, there is a growing interest in using wood waste as fuel for home and industrial heating, in the form of compacted pellets.
In the United States, wood fuel is the second-leading form of renewable energy (behind hydro-electric).[14]
AustraliaAbout 1.5 million households in Australia use firewood as the main form of domestic heating.[15] As of 1995, approximately 1.85 million cubic metres of firewood (1m³ equals approximately one car trailer load) was used in Victoria annually, with half being consumed in Melbourne.[16] This amount is comparable to the wood consumed by all of Victoria’s sawlog and pulplog forestry operations (1.9 million m³).[citation needed]
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/perspectives.cfm has some interesting breakdowns for energy usage also.
It's "been around" since the 60's. You know, when it was killed in favor of inefficient reactors that could make nuclear weapons.
We don't have it for the same reason we don't have flying cars--government interference in the marketplace.
Cliffie, are you still making shit up? What you don't know about nuclear fuel cycles fills many text books, I suggest you open one.
Do you really think that flying cars don't exist because of the gubmint? Even for a libtard that is too much...
wrong question: show me why we CAN'T. The right answer: politics & war.
That doesn't stop us from overcoming the barrier (dumbfucks) and doing it (energy prosperity for a few more hundred or thousand years). It won't put to zero our need for liquid & gaseous chemical fuels but it will allow a giant offset. We won't need to run many generators off diesel for cities when we have a large number of much safer, lower cost power plants using thorium. Then we can worry about gas for cars, camping, emergency generators, maybe even robots, whatever.
I wonder what "good delivery" of a wood contract would be in the 1700s.
Not rotting or sitting in a puddle?
"I wonder what "good delivery" of a wood contract would be in the 1700s."
Having been floated down a river as a means of transport
and conservation, you could safely take delivery now if still in storage or built into some medieval kind of building in old Europe.
No joking, historical buildings spot inferior woods
or smaller sized beams just as the chart implied.
Good delivery of construction type wood just died some 50 years ago, firewood is our local advantage but subject
to inflated wood fiber prices. Paper as derived from real wood still requires old growth rain forests being cut down
and make an elaborate scheme of certification make sure the very sheet you are using is from outside total commodity supply.
Coincidentlally, I just posted this else where:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Here is an excerpt:
Wow... there are some really dumb people in this world. Putting the issue of energy use aside, I fail to understand why these people want perpetual growth, beyond the obvious need to support the fiat currency. Clearly they must see that perpetual growth is destructive in the long run...then again after a statement like that...maybe not.
The moral of the story is to show that Economists can be very smart and simultaneously intellectually bankrupt...
A second moral is to show that the Growth paradigm is flawed on so many levels that it is not even funny...
A real physicist knows that energy is not a limited resource. The universe is full of it.
Why don't you read the article before making a complete fool of yourself like last time....
Actually, the universe is pretty empty in case you didn't notice. Could you provide a list of "nearby" sources of usable energy? We all know the CMB exists but it ain't usuable for much....
Pretty empty compared to what dipshit?
Compared to anything....
pretty empty compared to EVERYTHING. As in ZERO, no matter, no energy, no substance, nothing to touch or draw any heat from. Literally nothing.
IF you're lucky in that vast space compared to the minute volumes of matter, you can witness a virtual particle-antiparticle pairing which vaporizes itself in a trillionth of a second.
The space between your ears is part of that universe. If you say it's zero, no matter or energy, who am I to argue?
so when is your icon changing to Duck Dodgers, universe-spanning energy-hunter?
The universe is full of a finite amount of energy (first law). Yes there may be lots of it, unfortunately, you are in a closed system called earth. You only have access to the energy coming into that system (from the sun-which will also go out one day). More importantly, you only have access to the matter on earth or that which hits earth (asteroids etc.). This is the tricky bit, because if you turn all of the earth's matter into ipods, then you have nothing to eat. More over there are numerous global cycles that must keep going and converting the elements (matter) from one oxidation state into another (for example, plants cannot use nitrogen in the gaseous form, energy is consumed to reduce the nitrogen to ammonia). It takes energy to do this, most derived from solar. If any one of these global cycles slows or stops, life on earth will change dramatically. The fossil record is very clear on this point.
Speak for yourself. I'm in a closed system called "the known universe".
You and The Dipshit seem to think that everything important that is to be known about physics, especially sources of usable energy, is already known. I take the other position.
Maybe homo sapiens will figure out the way out of their energy dilemma before they die out. Or maybe not.
"When you wish upon a star".....
"... we know which economist you are ..."
http://fascistsoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/KrugmanHappyLOL2.jpg
are you daffy duck or SCROOGE McDuck? The daffy one thinks he's Duck Dogers and can travel all over the fucking universe. THE SMART ONE knows our finite planet has a finite pool of energy & a limited rate of incoming SOLAR energy and we can not get anything beyond this. The rest of the universe is off limits to us. Change your picture or get with reality.
The energy game is really what human kind is playing. The economics is an artifact of that game. When the plug it pulled it's back to cave man days. If you have a crop of turnips that will be growth.
Economist is right if Bernake puts forever, no put the physicist is right.
Just goes to show, economics isn't a real science, physics is. Thank you for illustrating the dominantly stupid run things.
Somewhere, Karl Popper just smiled. . .
Want to use a common denominator like BTU? I'm pretty sure a barrel of oil has a lot more energy than a cubic foot of wood. Do that and the price is declining to steady.
Plus, check this shit out, I'm not felling a tree, choping it, stacking it, storing it, then lugging back into the mud hut. I just flip a switch and my house is warm.
Maybe he can price out whips for us. "when we think about whips now, we generally think 'kinky sex'. But did you know it was one of the primary ways to get your ass in gear to plow those fields?"
"Want to use a common denominator like BTU?" - NO, because it varies with the compund. Use calories or Joules, period. Calories invested versus calories recovered.
That's fucking retarded. It mostly certainly does not depend on the compound.
So the BTU for oil (an energy dense liquid) is the same for natural GAS. You are indeed retarded.
BTU per pound or BTU per cubic foot? If per cubic foot, then at what pressure? It matters, BTW.
it matters for costing, storage, infrastructure but a BTU is a BTU.
No. A btu of oil has by definition the same energy content as a btu of natural gas. Or wood. Or whatever you're using as an energy source
You don't seem to understand what "BTU" means.
A British Thermal Unit is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit, if I recall correctly.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius, if I recall correctly. You can look it up.
A kilocalorie, aka a (nutrition) "calorie" is 1,000 calories, as I recall.
It is a measure of energy content. The person above is comparing the prices of different weights and contents of different energy sources. His scale is completely off.
Best to use an energy equivalent measurement.
Is that so difficult to understand?
The amount of energy needed to warming up cold British blood is immeasurable.
The British Thermal Unit is a fairy tale of rationalism,
meaning they still feel cold while others do all the work.
P.S. not to score against the few brave Britons on here,
but how you put the anemic to work ?
A barrel of oil also weighs more than a cubic foot of wood. Do you think a barrel of oil has more energy than a ton of coal?
Your question is not relevant.
I think it is.
JFC! A pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of lead. If you're talking about relative energy density of various fuels, than you need to specify that. What are you guys actually trying to measure?
Feel the heat, burn them feathers...
why all the different weights to argue over?
Go by equal BTU's then compare efficiency of burn, waste left over, solid, liquid or gaseous, and decide what suits you best.
How about propane?
Today quite a few other people are, are showing how to do so on youtube, are suggesting this personal energy independance is important for survival. They're probably right: with enough land & trees they are self-sustaining.
Self sustaining is me barking for 6 months and eating my self out the remainder of the year by chewing tree bark.
Takes some habitat and resources to do so, brilliant finding.
it would be good to have that in inflation corrected currency units though admittedly, data for inflation are sketchy.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
About a cubic foot, more or less.
correlation between energy prices and freedom is strong in this chart thats because freedom causes wealth which lowers prices. no freedom redsitributre wealth which raises prices.
Put your hands in the air and step back from the syllogism...
PS Could you point out what axis in the graph was in units of "freedom"?
Eh......
Much of the wood came form Ireland in the early 1600s.
Coal was burned in many peoples homes (including Ireland) in the 1500s.
In the west post Cromwell & his sheep - both very little wood or coal was available.
We burned peat.
I was blown away when I saw "home heating" briquettes made of peat or somesuch at gas stations when I visited there last year...
Apparently not blown far enough away. Like dandruff, you keep returning. And like dandruff, about the same amount of intelligence.
Yawn....
We're glad you are still here Flakmeister.
Yes - that is machine dried and compacted turf - its easier to transport and stuff.
The entire peat thingy is under attack by the Euro Mullahs though........
The place is a very pure colony.
We cannot even cut turf now,
Its all very sad really..............we do the sad stupid act better then anybody else on Earth.
Its our special gift.
You've had a lot of experience. And between the English and The Church, you've been well trained by the carrot and stick system with extreme preference of the trainers to the stick.
Linear chart, please.
I second.
We don't have an energy problem, we have a liquid fuels problem.
We also don't have a liquid fuels problem, we have a cost (finance) problem.
As we slowly ride our way into the era of Peak Cheap Oil, we will find that first certain segments of the world population get priced out. Eventually whole countries may be priced out.
The rising costs of liquid fuels will eventually force this allocation to priority needs, like govt, military, transport, farming et al. The urban commuter will be hosed.
Check out the book "The Coming World Energy Mess" written by the guy who wrote the Peak Oil paper for the Bush Admin (which was promptly shelved) to get a realistic scenario of where we are headed.
And while you await your copy, ask yourself WHY the price of W. Texas is in the $90's on avge, and Brent higher if a world economy that is clearly not expanding but actually contracting. And what might that price be if we had a 'normal' recovery?
As a farmer I use lots of fuel. I grow soy that feed lots of pigs that feed lots of people as well as wheat that feeds lots of people. I went into farming to (partially) be further up on the fuel allocation chain. Starving people bring down governments.