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Of course 2.3% Y/Y energy production growth on Earth is impossible. That means it won't happen. The question is how it won't happen. Malthusians assume it won'
by api 3y ago
Of course 2.3% Y/Y energy production growth on Earth is impossible. That means it won't happen. The question is how it won't happen.
Malthusians assume it won't happen in a destructive, collapse kind of way. They assume there's a wall and the system will mindlessly accelerate toward it and then, on impact, will die.
Malthusians deny the existence of intelligence, more or less. They model life as a non-adaptive physical system.
So how else might it not happen? Two possibilities, both of which could happen: decoupling of energy growth from GDP and continuing of growth off-world.
Efficiency increase could go a long way. We are not even close to efficiency limits for... pretty much anything.
- baq 3y ago> Efficiency increase could go a long way. We are not even close to efficiency limits for... pretty much anything. Hard disagree. We're within 2-3x improvement of basically everything. This hardly helps at all if growth must continue. My argument is growth can't continue and crucially it won't continue... > That means it won't happen. The question is how it won't happen. ...to the dismay of economists, but I think on that we actually agree.
- api 3y agoI'm arguing against Malthusian doomerism. I'm not necessarily arguing that growth can continue forever on Earth, though it can probably continue longer than Malthusians predict. At some point Earth has to plateau. That's fine except for the fact that all our economic systems depend on eternal number go up. I do think that will be a crisis mid-late 21st century. My hope is that our civilization doesn't eat itself because banks can't operate the way they're accustomed to operating. I personally think self-inflicted wounds are a more likely cause for our civilization collapsing than limits to growth directly. We could start to plateau (on Earth at least) and be totally fine but nuke ourselves because we can't deal with the implications for our socioeconomic systems and elect a bunch of populist imbeciles.