Pre-industrial humans were as carbon efficient as today's natural gas (methane) burning power plants but with a couple of important differences

The basal metabolic need of an adult not engaged in any energy intensive activity is ~ 7 MJ/day. This amounts to ~1700 Cal (kcal)/day which explains why our the food labels are based on a daily diet of 2000 Cal/day. This is also ~ 2 kilo Watt hours  (kWhr) per day.

We exhale about 1 kg CO2/day

This means the CO2 intensity of our minimum daily subsistence is about 500 gCO2/kWhr

Of course, if we just subsisted by consuming food that is hunted or farmed organically with animal inputs (manure and ox for ploughing etc.) and water from rains and rivers diverted by water wheels and gravity then we are not adding any net CO2 to the atmosphere or oceans which was how it was in the pre-fossil age.

The enthalpy of combustion of natural gas or methane (CH4) is 890 kJ/mole, which translates to 55.62 kJ/gram or MJ/kg of methane. 

CH4+ 202->CO2+2H20

The combustion of methane emits 2.75 kgCO2/kg methane which translates to ~50 gCO2/MJ

However, the efficiency with which the heat energy released is converted to electricity in a modern gas turbines (without waste heat recovery or use for Combined heat and power) is about 37%, which means effective emission intensity of natural gas plants is = 481 gCO2/kWhr  (Calculation: 50gCO2/MJ *3.6 (MJ/kWhr)/0.37)

Therefore, pre-industrial humans were as carbon efficient as natural gas power plants with one important exception, the carbon they emitted was biogenic, i.e., was sequestered during photosynthesis and will be again while natural gas combustion adds to the atmospheric carbon stock. 

Another difference is that a typical gas power plant can be about 500 MW which means they generate 10,000 MWhrs/day (operating full capacity for 20 hours a day). This is the equivalent of BMR of 5,000,000 humans (Calculation: 10,000,000 (kWhrs/day)/ 2 KWhrs/day/human) 

While we could do stuff like capturing the carbon emitted and storing it underground or extracting it from the atmosphere called direct air capture but these come with a huge energy burden. As to the energy requirements for these, I will discuss in a future post. For now let me just say I am reminded of what the economist John Maynard Keynes is to have said in the context of what the government should do when stuck in a depression "If necessary, in the name of stoking demand and people’s expectations, “The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” Continuing to burn coal and then using energy to suck carbon from the air might end up amounting to that or worse for it would not even employ a fraction of the people manual hole digging and filling would.

Should 100% of public-university students be forced to pay $30 per hour for 1800 hours of instruction over four years ?

At the outset, I feel extremely lucky that a major and reputed academic institution employs me. I also am really happy that my institution ranks among the top in the nation for the percentage of students who are Pell grant recipients. But this post is about cost of 4-year college in general and how my industry (which it is after all) needs to get better at making education more affordable and not offer a one-size fits all solution. 

We all know the price of groceries and gasoline but how many of us know what we pay for say an X-ray or what we pay for a lecture in a college (let alone what is the true cost of each before insane markups both health care and our noble universities apply)? There are a lot of things we dont know the price of and that is ok and it doesn't mean we are irrational or flying entirely blind. There are good reasons why price of groceries and gasoline are prominently displayed voluntarily but not at the same granularity and transparency when it comes to healthcare or college lecture. For one the "university industry" sells you something that one cannot buy piece-meal (we used to be outraged that Microsoft shoved us a bundle of bad products along with their OS but which pales in comparison to how Apple extorts you today). It is like subscribing to a 4 year health plan at the end of the which you can see how you look in the mirror and there is no guarantee you will be any slimmer let alone healthier. But I want to just discuss the price students pay for a lecture in typical public undergraduate university in US. I wanted to know what my students are paying to learn from me.

At UCLA In-state tuition is $14,500 per year. Students need 180 units spread over 4 years, which is 45 units per year or a cost of $320 per unit. Each unit is 10 hours of instruction which implies  a tuition cost of $32 per hour. You pay the same if you sit in class of 400, 100 or 10 students which seems unfair. Clearly, in a class of 10 you get much more focussed and more personal attention from instructor yet you pay the same. Even in a cinema or concert hall you dont pay the same price (even before dynamic pricing, which makes sense but I hate as a consumer came about) then why do we make students pay the same. I am confident I offer $32 per hour worth of benefits one on one with a student, in fact even 5 students at a time and if I push it to 10. But do I provide $32 per hour per student when the student is in a class of 50 may be not, 100 and above, surely not.

So why should 100% of all students in a university be forced to spend 4 years and pay the same tuition in total irrespective of what degree they earn and what broad type of returns they can expect to derive? What percent of degrees really need 4 years of education? Also given that the class size diminishes drastically from Year 1 to Year 4, should the tuition in early years not reflect the lower cost and quality (not in the sense bad quality but lower teacher-student ratio and less advanced topics).  Start cheap in the 1st year and make the student take most credits and progressive increase cost per credit hour and require fewer credit hours. Also let people get a certificate of completion that can be used for employment and offer a proper Bachelors degree in 3 years with 80% the units of 4 year degree. I actually feel students can do 100% of the units in 3 years if they worked harder and partied less or took some summer classes. This is how  it is many other countries including India, if people with 3 year degrees and good programming knowledge can take jobs away from Americans, lets empower American students to do those same jobs in America. If they have to spend less on education debt, they can also afford less paying jobs and bring more jobs to America.

So how is this is not exploitation of our students by the industry called 4-year college? And I am not even talking what our big universities might be doing to the reputation of institutions like community colleges when we treat people from those places as less talented or qualified. Yet the option of reducing time spent getting a degree never seems to get brought up or discussed in discussions on how college education needed to change. Academics speak a lot about innovation, inequities in society and are paid to be critical of old ideas and developing new ones but how much do they really question the inefficiencies and non-competitive nature of their own enterprise because that means changing how they operate which no one wants. 

I will in a later post discuss tuition revenue per hour as compared to faculty salary per hour. You can guess or estimate what share is the latter of the former!

By the way, the cost of tuition quadruples in private universities and if wealthy folks choose to voluntarily spend more that doesn't bother me one bit.

When do career warriors of social issues reduce to white-collar mercenaries?

 What is one's responsibility with respect to these problems

• Fight against poverty 
• Fight for affirmative action or diversity 
• Fight against environmental degradation 
• Fight for minimum wage or wage increases
• Fight for preservation of cultural and religious beliefs

Let's distinguish four potential distinct perspectives from which one might need to take a stand on the above: 

1. It is an issue that you personally suffered from and are not financially benefitting from the fight 
2. It is an issue that you personally suffered from but are financially benefitting from the fight  
3. You didn't suffer from it but you are financially benefitting from working on it and you need the money - the "career warriors"
4. You didn't suffer from it and you are not financially benefitting from working on it - the philanthropists and donor class

#1 Such people are authentic even if biased and should have the greatest voice. As to whether their ideas should be accepted unquestioningly is not so obvious. For instance, some solutions they propose might impose costs on some that might also not be fair and cannot be treated as collateral damage outright. Think reparations for descendants of slaves financed by raising taxes on all not just those who benefitted the most from it.  Or think affirmative action that hurts deserving but poor white (or in the case of my original home country India the upper-caste poor) from the best public education or jobs.

#2 Such people are also authentic and deserve a lot of voice but the solutions they advocate need to be examined a little more carefully because of the financial conflict of interest.

#3 These are people who choose to dedicate their professional career to these causes because they want to be altruistic. They do not have the authenticity of #1 and #2 because they did not experience those issues but have empathy. However, they also stand to gain financially and psychologically and  have an incentive to make the problem seem larger than it is.

#4 These are the funders - philanthropists and donors who support a cause they care about and support people in category #3. They obviously should not have too much of a voice just simply because they finance it (as to why I suggest Rob Reich's book Just Giving or Anand Giridhardas's Winners take all). But given what and who they choose to fund, they end of having a lot of voice through their agents.

I myself fall under #3, a career warrior although I am anything but a warrior for I cannot take anything too seriously and when I do, it is not for too long before I am bored of it. I heard Freeman Dyson say that about himself in a different context but my level of Math is nowhere close to his .And being employed at a public university I am financed by the taxpayer and while this frees me from the need to be kind to Business or Philanthropy (although my record of winning public grants is poor) this should not mean I can say what I like simply because it can get published or because I have brand name recognition behind me. For people in this group, fighting for other people's problems makes us feel good about ourselves, but when the problems are complex such as the above and we don't have full information or capacity to process all the information available, is it responsible to do the feel good thing or the popular thing? Is it is right to say imposing costs on some for the benefit others is worth it simply because one thinks those who are harmed can bear the costs.

I can say for myself that among the above problems, my entire career has benefitted from society's concern about environmental degradation. The way I have been to escape it is by living in leafy part of a city in wealthy country which outsourced a lot of pollution to the rest of the country which has outsourced a lot of the pollution to rest of the world. Of course, while I worked really hard right through and came out of a pressure cooker environment, I also had the benefit of good luck (being born into a stable middle-class family that valued and invested heavily in good schooling), and benefitted from massive public investments in college education by a poor country (my parents paid a total of about $500 in tuition for a four year Engineering degree in one of the  most competitive and prestigious engineering schools in India). 

And sitting from a lucky yet hard-earned position, if I simply join the bandwagon and preach how capitalism is destroying the planet (which is what discussion on environment gets reduced to often) or alternatively subscribe to how enlightened capitalism can save it (the B-school variety of delusion about cliches like the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit), what does that make me? Either I dont have the guts or the intellectual capacity to call out the hypocrisy or am part of a cult.  Should putting solar panels on one's roof, driving EVs, eating organic food, and buying carbon offsets for flying 50000 miles per year, voting for higher taxes and preaching about the issue absolve one of all blame and make them feel superior to the people who are skeptical of this whole enterprise? 

We call someone who gets paid to fight other people's battles a mercenary. So aren't well-to-do people (including academics like myself) who benefit from the persistence of an issue that doesn't really affect them materially and economically not simply white-collar mercenaries? In fact aren't we worse than mercenaries? At least mercenaries put their lives on the line. What are academics sitting in western democracies with full protection for their free speech and safety and having economic security risking when they pontificate how bad the world is and keep indoctrinating their students that the system they themselves benefitted from is rigged or for that matter even those who spread optimism that everything is achievable through enlightened capitalism or more scientific progress? 

Does mere belief in a cause make us different from mercenaries? And if this too extreme, because we are getting paid to do what we like, should that not make us have less of a voice and not more? Isn't that what we ourselves want when we vote in elections?