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Throughout human history, energy consumption has increased along with quality of life and number of humans on Earth. Can quality of life improve with less energ

Throughout human history, energy consumption has increased along with quality of life and number of humans on Earth. Can quality of life improve with less energy consumption and less humans? I'm not too sure...

flashback2199 3y ago
Are fossil fuels the only source of energy?
- martin_drapeau 3y ago
  Absolutely not! Hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc. Tons of other options. My point is you need energy to cook food and have hospitals. Without those basic needs covered, a society can't function. If we want to continue improving our lives, we need more energy.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    During my childhood we lit our homes with ridiculous incandescent lights that were powerful enough to fry an egg (a trick my friends and I used to pull off with a floodlight.) Our entertainment came from TVs that used enormous energy-hungry cathode ray tubes. Our home PCs used dozens of times more power than the iPhone I have in my hand, despite being a million times less powerful. Today I drive an electric car that is somewhere between 2-8x more efficient than the gasoline clunkers of my childhood. I could probably go on about heat pumps, but you get the point. At the same time, nearly everything I own or use is nicer and more luxurious than the things I had when I was a kid, even though those things are rose-tinted in my memories. Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  There’s tons of energy out there. It’s not feasible to switch our infrastructure to using those forms of energy using them as effectively as cheaply as we do fossil fuels. One of the benefits to carbon taxes is unironically rationing. We will run out of oil slower. We value keeping oil in the ground WAY too lowly, that basically preserves it indefinitely for free, in a form that doesn’t result in environmental chaos. I don’t know why people don’t think of oil in the ground as a strategic reserve.
xmprt 3y ago
Increased quality of life comes from new technological discoveries and abundant resources per capita. Increased fossil fuel usage is one way to achieve that but it's far from the only way. From a high level, if we increase investment on electrification of appliances, use greener forms of transportation, and design denser cities with less car dependence while also increasing nuclear energy output, we can probably increase energy consumption and have even more people living a better quality life without needing fossil fuels.
- martin_drapeau 3y ago
  Absolutely! But if you're a third world country trying to improve your quality of life fossil fuel is the most accessible. Until rich countries make other options cheaper and readily available. Solar has made incredible strides but not sufficiently enough to replace fossil fuels. Civilian nuclear has been demonized and is not easily accessible. I fail to see how we can reduce fossil fuel increase throughout the world without viable alternatives.

flashback2199 3y ago

Are fossil fuels the only source of energy?

martin_drapeau 3y ago
Absolutely not! Hydro, nuclear fission, solar, wind, etc. Tons of other options. My point is you need energy to cook food and have hospitals. Without those basic needs covered, a society can't function. If we want to continue improving our lives, we need more energy.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  During my childhood we lit our homes with ridiculous incandescent lights that were powerful enough to fry an egg (a trick my friends and I used to pull off with a floodlight.) Our entertainment came from TVs that used enormous energy-hungry cathode ray tubes. Our home PCs used dozens of times more power than the iPhone I have in my hand, despite being a million times less powerful. Today I drive an electric car that is somewhere between 2-8x more efficient than the gasoline clunkers of my childhood. I could probably go on about heat pumps, but you get the point. At the same time, nearly everything I own or use is nicer and more luxurious than the things I had when I was a kid, even though those things are rose-tinted in my memories. Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.
faeriechangling 3y ago
There’s tons of energy out there. It’s not feasible to switch our infrastructure to using those forms of energy using them as effectively as cheaply as we do fossil fuels. One of the benefits to carbon taxes is unironically rationing. We will run out of oil slower. We value keeping oil in the ground WAY too lowly, that basically preserves it indefinitely for free, in a form that doesn’t result in environmental chaos. I don’t know why people don’t think of oil in the ground as a strategic reserve.

xmprt 3y ago

Increased quality of life comes from new technological discoveries and abundant resources per capita. Increased fossil fuel usage is one way to achieve that but it's far from the only way. From a high level, if we increase investment on electrification of appliances, use greener forms of transportation, and design denser cities with less car dependence while also increasing nuclear energy output, we can probably increase energy consumption and have even more people living a better quality life without needing fossil fuels.

martin_drapeau 3y ago
Absolutely! But if you're a third world country trying to improve your quality of life fossil fuel is the most accessible. Until rich countries make other options cheaper and readily available. Solar has made incredible strides but not sufficiently enough to replace fossil fuels. Civilian nuclear has been demonized and is not easily accessible. I fail to see how we can reduce fossil fuel increase throughout the world without viable alternatives.