the availability of energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with economic growth A corollary might be that the more energy available per capita, the

the availability of energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with economic growth A corollary might be that the more energy available per capita, the greater the environmental footprint of per capita. E.g. the McMansions of the megasprawl: rolling hills of former farmland are graded and leveled off, enormous balloon-like, energy inefficient stick frame houses pop up, and twice a day their inhabitants wait in lines of SUVs on the clogged roads between the exurbs and the suburban office parks. The entire enterprise is completely dependent on vast quantities of energy being available to participants in the system. People are comfortable in their SUVs and McMansions, and aspire to this lifestyle. But the environmental footprint per capita is enormous. Without some penalty for the external costs (which are long latency and hard to measure), there is nothing to slow the spread of this pattern of economic development. In this light, when you say: Energy very well may be the 20th century's internet. The more everybody has it, the better off we all are. I suspect it is more like an upside-down U-shaped curve. People are indeed better off when we have sufficient energy per capita, but when we have a massive superabundance of energy, we negatively affect our environment to the point that real consequences start to kick in. Unfortunately, it is hard to know where we are on that upside-down U, and it is hard (impossible?) to distinguish overwrought hand-wringing about impending environmental doom from the real thing, until the real thing has started to have obvious, severe, and sustained effects.