Waste not, want not; Jevons Paradox.

Projecting backwards from my reading on peak oil mitigation WI it was an article of faith from the start of the Industrial Revolution to squeeze every last drop from resource inputs? So industry generated electricty from it's waste heat and reused/recycled/sold its waste products, electrcity generation plants used waste heat to heat nearby buildings, these sort of synergistic things. Now before people think that greater energy/resource efficiency leads to less energy/resource use Jevon paradox states the opposite; greater efficiency leads to greater consumption.

So how do we develop in a world where there is far more electricty generation available from the get-go and more quantity/diverse outputs from industry? Would we have suffered a resource driven collapse, or transcended resurce limitations, or something else again?
 
Projecting backwards from my reading on peak oil mitigation WI it was an article of faith from the start of the Industrial Revolution to squeeze every last drop from resource inputs? So industry generated electricty from it's waste heat and reused/recycled/sold its waste products, electrcity generation plants used waste heat to heat nearby buildings, these sort of synergistic things. Now before people think that greater energy/resource efficiency leads to less energy/resource use Jevon paradox states the opposite; greater efficiency leads to greater consumption.

So how do we develop in a world where there is far more electricty generation available from the get-go and more quantity/diverse outputs from industry? Would we have suffered a resource driven collapse, or transcended resurce limitations, or something else again?

Seems unlikely to me. If the ruthlessly profit-maximizing businessmen of the industrial age weren't doing it in our timeline, that means it was probably not cost-effective. The two reasons that spring to mind that might explain it being so are first, that that kind of thing is inherently more trouble than its worth, and second, that there was a market failure, with either costs or benefits not properly internalized.

The second case is more helpful to your proposition. But even there, I have my doubts. The usual way of correcting a market failure is state intervention, which I have a hard time seeing the governments of OTL's industrial era undertaking. They lacked the intellectual grounding and bureaucratic apparatus, IMO. The term "market failure" wasn't even invented until the 1950s, after all.

As an aside, I wouldn't trust the peak oil doomers.
 
Apparently there are a myriad of laws inibiting the full extraction of value from resource inputs.

My favourite law is the US anti-trust law from the 30s that states a company which owns a regulated business like a power utility cannot own an unregulated business like a tram company. This killed the electrcity-tram synergy which made trams less competitive. Similarly there are laws in the US which make it illegal for non-utilities to provide electricity to the grid, so industry can't effectively harness their waste heat to use/sell as electricity.

What's a peak oil doomer? Someone who thinks we'll be over-run by neo-Vikings when civilisation collapes, rather than emphasising the non-oil options we have available?
 
Apparently there are a myriad of laws inibiting the full extraction of value from resource inputs.

My favourite law is the US anti-trust law from the 30s that states a company which owns a regulated business like a power utility cannot own an unregulated business like a tram company. This killed the electrcity-tram synergy which made trams less competitive. Similarly there are laws in the US which make it illegal for non-utilities to provide electricity to the grid, so industry can't effectively harness their waste heat to use/sell as electricity.

I'd be interested in hearing more details about these laws.

What's a peak oil doomer? Someone who thinks we'll be over-run by neo-Vikings when civilisation collapes, rather than emphasising the non-oil options we have available?

Pretty much, yeah.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycled_Energy_Development

Tom Casten runs this company, he says somewhere in the references that a major reason that energy isn't recycled is because it's illegal.

I can't find the bit on electricty and trams but I stumbled on it from the tram end of the argument.

BTW I'm thinking of energy recycling as a secondary arm of industry, once a plant is up and running installing a waste heat recycling boiler-generator would be a way to cut costs/increase profits.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycled_Energy_Development

Tom Casten runs this company, he says somewhere in the references that a major reason that energy isn't recycled is because it's illegal.

I can't find the bit on electricty and trams but I stumbled on it from the tram end of the argument.

BTW I'm thinking of energy recycling as a secondary arm of industry, once a plant is up and running installing a waste heat recycling boiler-generator would be a way to cut costs/increase profits.

I can't find the bit in the references, but I've only had time to glance through them. Assuming for the sake of argument that he is right, my gut feeling is that these laws would date to the late nineteenth century or later, which is quite some time after the dawn of the industrial era. If that is the case, you would probably have to shift your POD to that sort of time frame - having a different legal framework established, that kind of thing. I don't feel qualified to speculate on what form that might take.
 
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