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> per-capita energy use has surged dramatically over time Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. > But if energy became arbitra

> per-capita energy use has surged dramatically over time Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. > But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt...There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. That seems to be a bizarre understanding of how the economy works. Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy. You're not going to get an inventor to say, "Hey, this new product would be too efficient, I'm not going to introduce it to the market because then energy is going to get so cheap that someone will buy it all up." And someone could already try committing energy blackmail now if they really wanted. Pepco powers Washington, D.C. and parts of Maryland, and Exelon bought them for $6.8 billion. Some one, or a group of people could pay that and try to blackmail the government. Of course, they wouldn't get anything for it but a quick trip to prison. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...

Gibbon1 7y ago
> Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. Yeah we moved a bunch of heavy industry to China and switched to low carbon finance.
jbay808 7y ago
I think we'd need to look globally, because it's easy to outsource your energy intensive activities. If I buy my bread from a baker, I can say I don't need any energy to run an oven anymore, but that doesn't imply that when the baker gets as wealthy as I am the world won't need ovens anymore.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  Chathamization linked to a graph of energy use per capita in the US, showing that it peaked in the 1970s. In 2015 it was 6804 kgoe per capita, well below the peak of 8438 kgoe recorded in 1978. CO2 emissions are a decent proxy for primary energy in our present fossil-dominated era, and when accounting for CO2 embodied in imports, the US does look worse. But it doesn't make a big difference: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import... "Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account." If the energy/CO2 really should be increased 6% to account for imports, that would put American energy consumption at 6804 * 1.06 = 7212 kgoe per capita in 2015, still lower than in the 1970s.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    It should be moved some from China to USA because of trash exports too. (Also probably Malaysia.) Anyway, it's great when you compare yourself to second worst.
deleted 7y ago
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fspeech 7y ago
“Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy.“ That wasn’t really his point. His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. If you don’t like the buying it up argument you can also think along the line of delivery cost, capital cost etc. Bottled waters are not free, e.g.
- Chathamization 7y ago
  > His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. I don't think that's true though. There are vital commodities that have been effectively free in some societies (water and salt, for example). Even energy - wind energy is free and some societies used it extensively, and biomass for burning was abundant in some places. We can argue whether or not it's likely that energy would get to be so cheap in the future, but there doesn't seem to be much basis for his claim that it's economically impossible.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    But if the entire earth's surface were covered in windmills to supply enough power for the economy at that point in growth, suddenly the energy has to have a floor price. I think the easier arguments are that transformational technologies like 1000x improvements can dramatically extend growth, even if they don't stop it, and that transformational energy technologies that don't rely on the sun would frankly imply starflight. So the timelines might be off by factors of ten, and in such timelines these things don't feel so necessarily absurd. If you're seriously at the technological stage where you can put computers with 1000x more power than ours running AI and using 1000x as energy dense of technology, expanding beyond the solar system seems pretty approximately the right place to be going. Just unlikely. And finite. Even a very long time is finite. Perhaps this is where the economist and physicist differ most.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Those examples are cheap because you can arbitrarily produce more than you need. As counterexample, consider things which you cannot arbitrarily produce more of — licensed drugs, lottery ticket combinations, shares of a company you’re not already running. In all cases, it is possible to buy enough that you’re excluding other people from buying any. In the case of licensed drugs and similar, this is why monopolies are regulated. In the case of lottery tickets, it’s one of the few “winning” strategies and (Some? All?) places forbid it. In this narrative, energy production is limited at some imprecisely defined level, so more cannot be produced.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> That seems to be a bizarre understanding of how the economy works. Right. Things only become arbitrary cheap because there is a practically infinite supply of them.
simonh 7y ago
Energy blackmail certainly was possible, OPEC did it in the 1970s. I don't think it's possible anymore though. Even for oil the supply is too diverse nowadays, and we're rapidly becoming much less dependent on oil than we were. Even if you could buy a plurality of the gulf oil, what about Russia, shale oil, etc? How do you also dominate coal, solar, wind, nuclear, etc? They are too varied, too geographically and politically diversified.

Gibbon1 7y ago

> Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. Yeah we moved a bunch of heavy industry to China and switched to low carbon finance.

jbay808 7y ago

I think we'd need to look globally, because it's easy to outsource your energy intensive activities. If I buy my bread from a baker, I can say I don't need any energy to run an oven anymore, but that doesn't imply that when the baker gets as wealthy as I am the world won't need ovens anymore.

philipkglass 7y ago
Chathamization linked to a graph of energy use per capita in the US, showing that it peaked in the 1970s. In 2015 it was 6804 kgoe per capita, well below the peak of 8438 kgoe recorded in 1978. CO2 emissions are a decent proxy for primary energy in our present fossil-dominated era, and when accounting for CO2 embodied in imports, the US does look worse. But it doesn't make a big difference: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import... "Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account." If the energy/CO2 really should be increased 6% to account for imports, that would put American energy consumption at 6804 * 1.06 = 7212 kgoe per capita in 2015, still lower than in the 1970s.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  It should be moved some from China to USA because of trash exports too. (Also probably Malaysia.) Anyway, it's great when you compare yourself to second worst.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fspeech 7y ago

“Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy.“ That wasn’t really his point. His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. If you don’t like the buying it up argument you can also think along the line of delivery cost, capital cost etc. Bottled waters are not free, e.g.

Chathamization 7y ago
> His point was that even if energy itself is cheap there’s a floor to how it is valued relative to the total economy for such a vital commodity. I don't think that's true though. There are vital commodities that have been effectively free in some societies (water and salt, for example). Even energy - wind energy is free and some societies used it extensively, and biomass for burning was abundant in some places. We can argue whether or not it's likely that energy would get to be so cheap in the future, but there doesn't seem to be much basis for his claim that it's economically impossible.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  But if the entire earth's surface were covered in windmills to supply enough power for the economy at that point in growth, suddenly the energy has to have a floor price. I think the easier arguments are that transformational technologies like 1000x improvements can dramatically extend growth, even if they don't stop it, and that transformational energy technologies that don't rely on the sun would frankly imply starflight. So the timelines might be off by factors of ten, and in such timelines these things don't feel so necessarily absurd. If you're seriously at the technological stage where you can put computers with 1000x more power than ours running AI and using 1000x as energy dense of technology, expanding beyond the solar system seems pretty approximately the right place to be going. Just unlikely. And finite. Even a very long time is finite. Perhaps this is where the economist and physicist differ most.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Those examples are cheap because you can arbitrarily produce more than you need. As counterexample, consider things which you cannot arbitrarily produce more of — licensed drugs, lottery ticket combinations, shares of a company you’re not already running. In all cases, it is possible to buy enough that you’re excluding other people from buying any. In the case of licensed drugs and similar, this is why monopolies are regulated. In the case of lottery tickets, it’s one of the few “winning” strategies and (Some? All?) places forbid it. In this narrative, energy production is limited at some imprecisely defined level, so more cannot be produced.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> That seems to be a bizarre understanding of how the economy works. Right. Things only become arbitrary cheap because there is a practically infinite supply of them.

simonh 7y ago

Energy blackmail certainly was possible, OPEC did it in the 1970s. I don't think it's possible anymore though. Even for oil the supply is too diverse nowadays, and we're rapidly becoming much less dependent on oil than we were. Even if you could buy a plurality of the gulf oil, what about Russia, shale oil, etc? How do you also dominate coal, solar, wind, nuclear, etc? They are too varied, too geographically and politically diversified.