 Oh no, that stupid clickbait article again. Stoners. Even without the questionable quality of the drugs they consume these days, you have to wonder about their credulity. Hemp batteries are eight times more powerful than lithium scientists discover. The problem is people really don't understand energy in general, and electrical power in particular. How it is made, how it can be stored, and more importantly they really don't get energy-densed in embodied energy. My response to that article, did you know that, wait for wait, potatoes can store more energy than lithium ion batteries. How energy has been portrayed by politics in the media is inseparable from progress and technocracy, from consuming bling to nuclear energy propaganda. People are taught only to think about energy in terms of more, more of it to use, and more stuff to use it with. That whole framework for perceiving the world is willingly ignorant to the physical realities energy is based upon. The reason that clickbait article keeps doing the rounds isn't the psychoactive effects of THC, it's the impact of a far more powerful drug, consumerism. What is consumerism? It has political and economic definitions, but I prefer the psychological. The basic inability of a person to critically discern their needs and their wants, and resystematise psychological assault on their freedom to choose. In the three centuries of research we have a fairly good understanding of how energy works. The laws affirm a dynamics underpin all the sciences, and to an extent even a pseudo-science of economics. But when businesses mark a commodity to the public, or governments a solution as to the ecological crisis, the public's credulity on the physics of energy is winningly abused. The impacts of the more than 70 year psychological assault of consumerism are numerous. What they have in common is that, at all levels of society, they reinforce the values of affluence and wealth, in turn, hoping to drive their power and influence at the heart of this system. Or as a pioneer of ecological footprinting analysis, William E. Reese observed last year, more disturbingly, many ordinary citizens are all too willing to go along for the ride, trusting their leaders, buying into trivial mitigation pursuits as solutions, and thus becoming both victims and perpetrators of eco-destruction. Nowhere does this compromise view and the cognitive dissonance that gives rise to manifest itself more nefariously than in the environment movement. Of late, a backlash has arisen over the mainstream movements compromise on consumer values, and the dichotomy of words versus actions it gives rise to. More and more research demonstrates that this agenda does not save the planet. It merely seeks to prop up the consumer lifestyle against the inevitability of ecological collapse. One of the best recent explorations of this is a film, Bright Green Lies. It describes with many clear examples how environmentalism has become a front for a global industry, renewable energy. As one of the film's deep green critics of mainstream environmentalism, Derek Jensen says, It's extraordinary what you can get by with God Acclaim to Virtue, as we saw with the Holocaust, as we're seeing with the murder of the planet. I've seen environmentalists, sort of mainstream bright green environmentalists, applauding the construction of gigantic battery factories in Nevada, simply because they're for electric automobiles. And it's nuts. Environmentalists in general have historically been pretty decent on being opposed to electronics. And environmentalists historically have been pretty strong in being opposed to automobiles. But somehow, if you combine electronics and automobiles, then suddenly it's a good idea. That's crazy. Okay, what has always got to do with potatoes? When pundits or the media talk about energy, what they mostly talk about is electrical power. The fact is globally, and in the most developed states, electrical power is only a fifth to a third of the total energy consumption. And so immediately you're ignoring perhaps three quarters of the energy problem. Food is energy. It takes energy to grow it. It takes energy to harvest and process it. And then when you eat it, you get energy back as food calories. In nature, any animal that gets less calories from its food than it takes to find it will die. And the more stark that differential, the more quickly it will die. That iron rule of nature does not, currently, apply to modern humans, however. We've feasted upon the earth's inedible natural resources, turning oil, gas, and phosphate rock into food using intensive agriculture. It's that 12,000-year-old process, the contemporary of our first use of metals and the founding of technological society, which has been at the root of creating the global ecological crisis. The issue of food and energy density first came to light about 30 years ago. Researchers began to look in detail at how much energy and resources are involved in maintaining our daily lives, and the results were not good. Every day, consumer products, for example, the Apollonus Big Mac, took way more resources to produce than were delivered in the eating of them, a lot more. In the book, Bright Green Lives, Jensen says, Bright Greens are excited because lithium ion batteries can store one megajoule per kilo, and they hope someday to reach five megajoules per kilo. We think we're so smart as we destroy the world so we can make a battery. We invest in one third the energy density of a potato. Thing is, while I know Jensen's statement embodies the truth, I know it's not accurate. That's because he falls into the same analytical trap as so many other commentators, looking at what's in the commodity, not the footprint of how it is made. All batteries, from old-fashioned lead acid to the latest lithium ion cells, have a storage density, a measure of how much electrical energy they can store per unit of volume or weight. It is so often overlooked as it also takes energy to make the battery, a figure called embodied energy, in addition to charging the battery. In the same way, food has a certain amount of energy storage as food calories, and to get those from potatoes we have to grow them, then cook them, using various energy sources. Though it is said that potatoes store more energy than lithium batteries, it's more complicated than that. The figures must be expressed in the same way. The big difference is the number of times you can do this. A lithium ion battery can be recharged maybe 3,000 times. You can only eat a potato once. We need a figure for the net energy of each cycle. How much energy is output on each cycle, less how much embodied and expended energy goes into each cycle. When Jensen talks about a potato containing more energy than the lithium ion battery, he's completely correct. As he says, lithium ion batteries are routinely approaching 1,000 kilojoules per kilo of electrical power storage. And yes, that's much less than the 3,000-300 kilojoules stored as food calories in a potato. Problem is, how are each of those storage systems made? Batteries are made from many different materials, sourced from raw materials production across the world, then assembled in masses factories that have relatively few sites. All that requires a large amount of energy. Different studies put different figures on that. Estimates for embodied energy in production range from 1,300,000 to 2,900,000 kilojoules per kilo. The same is true for charging. Different factors affect how efficient a battery is to charge. That puts estimates from charging between 315 and 735 kilojoules per kilo. Assuming the battery is recharged 3,000 times, then the simplest way to distribute the embodied energy is to divide it by the number of charging cycles. So the net energy for each cycle will be the stored energy, less the energy used in charging and the fraction of embodied energy for that cycle. Overall then, each cycle supplies minus 450 kilojoules to minus 1,000 kilojoules per kilo. Hang on you say, how can a battery supply a negative value of energy? Well it can't. The system supplies it. The hidden consumption of resources which media pundits never take into account. This is why Jensen's original comment is correct, but not accurate. Like almost all of the commentators, he's focusing on the static system of the battery, not the whole battery system. The calculation for shop-bought potatoes are shown in much the same way. Again, there are a number of studies which look at the energy involved in the production of potatoes, much like the study of the Big Mac shown earlier. Just like the embodied energy of a battery, potatoes require a large input of energy in the form of tractors, fertilisers, irrigation and other artificial inputs. These are very energy dense. And just as the battery is charged, so potatoes have to be cooked so we can absorb the energy they contain. This gives a figure of minus 5,200 kilojoules per kilo. Hang on you say, how can a potato supply a negative value of energy? Well it can't. The system supplies it. The hidden consumption of resources which media pundits never take into account. Now for a completely different view, let's look at own-grown potatoes. This assumes hand-digging and harvesting, saving and reusing seed and not adding artificial nutrients. Rather than use a zero, it assumes a 1 to 10 input output ratio for subsistence farming. That's because although there's no tractor involved, there's still a lot of human energy used to grow the potatoes. These potatoes produced an actual surplus of plus 1,470 kilojoules per kilo. Hang on you say, how can a harvested potato supply more energy that goes into it? That violates the laws of physics. Well it can't. What's happened in this case is that the solar energy of photosynthesis and the nutrients supplied by living organisms, so-called ecosystem services, have provided that additional energy input naturally. Modern farming producing bulk commodities for supermarkets uses large amounts of fossil fuels and other inputs. For example, around 2% of the world's energy supply goes into making fertilizer. The nurse processing and transport on top often spread across continents. A recent study found that perhaps 40% of global carbon emissions are tied up with agriculture. This is why. A more detailed analysis of Derek Jensen's claim not only shows that he is right in the context in which he said it, but the full answer is far closer to the point he is trying to advance. The problem is not simply batters versus potatoes. It is that overall, low-tech potatoes are far better than the high-tech resource-intensive products produced by industrial society. Oh, the article about hemp batters. I'm not even going to examine it here because it's so absurd. Why the article is important is that it represents one of the key features of all technological debates in consumer society, as so distinctly put in the series The X-Files. I want to believe. People are no longer permitted to explore or to act independently. Political agency is no longer defined by interest groups seeking out the levers of state power because these levers are seen largely to be impotent or politically suspect. A matter of politics and the media operate in a way which takes this as an accepted fact. It requires people to believe what they are told and not demand evidence from politicians or pundits that confirms the claims being made. In that context, how do people battle an existential crisis? For example, is it any wonder extinction rebellion gets so little coverage? Today, campaign groups are not working to save the planet but to save our affluent lifestyle. They might talk about climate change, but their dialogue is dominated by projects or policies that replicate affluent patterns of consumption. But that in turn does not significantly change their ecological impact. People obsess about electricity and the technologies to make it. Saldo and O do they think about something as humdrum as their food, which is where Jensen's statement makes a stinging point. At its simplest, consumerism works by separating massive people from the land which could sustain them, then charging a premium to buy those goods made from the land via economic middlemen. Basically, it's a more modern, civilized form of a dangerous servitude. If you have no belief that this system can survive the realities of the ecological collapse, then you need to find your route to the exits as quickly as possible. In reality, that means being able to have a space to grow your own potatoes.