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You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy is not enough, but it is necessar

You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy is not enough, but it is necessary to be rich.

hinkley 2y ago
But sometime in the 90’s if not sooner a lot of us started valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of the usefulness of the product. We want things that are the same but less intense, or that are much better at a fractional increase in input. And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.
- tmnvix 2y ago
  A lot of us, maybe. But my impression is that a lot of us also choose to consume more stuff more frequently (larger vehicles and homes, less durable items replaced more frequently, etc). I would not be surprised to learn that our direct energy use - such as vehicle fuel and electricity for heating - has increased with longer commutes and larger homes. Compared to just 50 years ago, I would say that our lifestyles are on average vastly more consumptive, despite being more environmentally aware. We seem unwilling to make the sacrifices that really matter. I think that some time in the future, our time will be seen as one of massive entitlement. As technology makes things possible, we feel entitled to make use of it if we can afford it. How many people in the 50's were using trucks to drag boats and horse floats around in the suburbs? These are the kind of reasons people will give for their consumption. e.g. "this is the lifestyle I want, it's possible, and why am I not entitled to it if I can afford to pay for it?" (in the financial sense only of course).
  - GardenLetter27 2y ago
    Higher consumption = higher standard of living. We have nuclear power (and soon nuclear fusion) - we can completely decouple energy production from environmental damage. And trying to force degrowth on populations just makes matters worse, as their economy collapses (Europe), or they resort to even worse forms of energy production like deforestation and wood burning (Sub-Saharan Africa and remote South America).
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  > And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous. We just need to use nuclear power.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    No that’s bullshit. 70% of the energy of any steam driven plant ends up in the immediate environment. Free power is not free, especially if you focus on it instead and ignore efficiency improvements on the consumer end. If you had a magic wand and created 100 TW of nuclear power tomorrow then the papers would fill with stories about Heat Pollution.
morepork 2y ago
Having more things certainly is good for GDP. But I don't know about you, but I'm pretty saturated on things already, with a bunch of stuff that I've purchased and barely use. Perhaps this comes down to a quality of life vs GDP per capita not being identical. While I could use more energy to consume more, I don't have a very strong desire to go much above my current level of consumption. But outside of the wealthy there is still huge latent demand for energy and what comes with it.
- empiricus 2y ago
  But does your city have beautiful things? Do people try to create new amazing places? Does your city have working underground transportation? High speed trains? Japanese gardens everywhere? You need an excess of energy for these to be possible.
  - chgs 2y ago
    You need an excess of energy to build a car centric city as it uses far more energy to shift a million people by car than by underground transport or high speed train Not sure how much energy a garden can use, could you elaborate?
emporas 2y ago
Energy is necessary, but the better the intelligence applied to any problem, the less energy is required. I was wondering if there was any way to bring 10.000 Einsteins online. Einsteins who know all about physics, programming, math and so on, cranking up ideas days and night. If the Einsteins never sleep, that would be ideal.
rtkwe 2y ago
Sure but that amount is not monotonically increasing.. We figure out new ways to make the same thing with less energy or new things that require less energy to make relative to their value. I did the rough math [0] and we get 10x as much GDP out of each kg oil equivalent used as we did in the 1970s when the article bemoans us falling off the HA curve. That was one of my core problems with their point, the amount of energy used is not directly tied to the economic value of the output. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812

You need energy to make things. Houses, roads, cars, food, many services. Basically without energy you are poor. Having energy is not enough, but it is necessary to be rich.

hinkley 2y ago

But sometime in the 90’s if not sooner a lot of us started valuing items that had a lower embodied energy as a ratio of the usefulness of the product. We want things that are the same but less intense, or that are much better at a fractional increase in input. And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous.

tmnvix 2y ago
A lot of us, maybe. But my impression is that a lot of us also choose to consume more stuff more frequently (larger vehicles and homes, less durable items replaced more frequently, etc). I would not be surprised to learn that our direct energy use - such as vehicle fuel and electricity for heating - has increased with longer commutes and larger homes. Compared to just 50 years ago, I would say that our lifestyles are on average vastly more consumptive, despite being more environmentally aware. We seem unwilling to make the sacrifices that really matter. I think that some time in the future, our time will be seen as one of massive entitlement. As technology makes things possible, we feel entitled to make use of it if we can afford it. How many people in the 50's were using trucks to drag boats and horse floats around in the suburbs? These are the kind of reasons people will give for their consumption. e.g. "this is the lifestyle I want, it's possible, and why am I not entitled to it if I can afford to pay for it?" (in the financial sense only of course).
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  Higher consumption = higher standard of living. We have nuclear power (and soon nuclear fusion) - we can completely decouple energy production from environmental damage. And trying to force degrowth on populations just makes matters worse, as their economy collapses (Europe), or they resort to even worse forms of energy production like deforestation and wood burning (Sub-Saharan Africa and remote South America).
GardenLetter27 2y ago
> And we really need it if we want a planet worth living on fifty years from now. So to ignore this desire is dangerous. We just need to use nuclear power.
- hinkley 2y ago
  No that’s bullshit. 70% of the energy of any steam driven plant ends up in the immediate environment. Free power is not free, especially if you focus on it instead and ignore efficiency improvements on the consumer end. If you had a magic wand and created 100 TW of nuclear power tomorrow then the papers would fill with stories about Heat Pollution.

morepork 2y ago

Having more things certainly is good for GDP. But I don't know about you, but I'm pretty saturated on things already, with a bunch of stuff that I've purchased and barely use. Perhaps this comes down to a quality of life vs GDP per capita not being identical. While I could use more energy to consume more, I don't have a very strong desire to go much above my current level of consumption. But outside of the wealthy there is still huge latent demand for energy and what comes with it.

empiricus 2y ago
But does your city have beautiful things? Do people try to create new amazing places? Does your city have working underground transportation? High speed trains? Japanese gardens everywhere? You need an excess of energy for these to be possible.
- chgs 2y ago
  You need an excess of energy to build a car centric city as it uses far more energy to shift a million people by car than by underground transport or high speed train Not sure how much energy a garden can use, could you elaborate?

emporas 2y ago

Energy is necessary, but the better the intelligence applied to any problem, the less energy is required. I was wondering if there was any way to bring 10.000 Einsteins online. Einsteins who know all about physics, programming, math and so on, cranking up ideas days and night. If the Einsteins never sleep, that would be ideal.

rtkwe 2y ago

Sure but that amount is not monotonically increasing.. We figure out new ways to make the same thing with less energy or new things that require less energy to make relative to their value. I did the rough math [0] and we get 10x as much GDP out of each kg oil equivalent used as we did in the 1970s when the article bemoans us falling off the HA curve. That was one of my core problems with their point, the amount of energy used is not directly tied to the economic value of the output. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rtkwe#41391812