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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

One thing that is astonishingly glossed over again and again is energy. There is no activity, no economy of any sort without energy. Energy availability therefore is absolutely central to any economic activity. Energy availability is not infinite, or infinitely elastic to demand. You cannot either infinitely yield more output from a given amount of energy. In last resort, we could say that all money is an energy debt (every dollar amounts to some energy quantity that varies). Making untenable promises by printing large amounts of money doesn't change this (promising that in 20 years, we'll have x% more energy than today doesn't help making this actually happen).

In a finite world, you can't grow economy infinitely, period. Frigging laws of physics.

See for instance

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/

Or start here for more

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/

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Grantham on finite growth: https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/i...

Grantham on finite resources: http://www.theravinaproject.org/JGLetterALL_1Q11.pdf

There was a nifty quote in Green Mars. Think it went something like "need to shift from sustainable development to sustainable prosperity".

And just for giggles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

Steve Keen is doing some interesting stuff incorporating energy into economics - here's some of his older stuff - http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2016/08/19/incorporating-... - if you google a bit I think he's developed that further (probably some of his lectures which are available on YouTube are where the newer stuff would be - I'm not sure if he's published much of it yet)

Energy availability is effectively infinite if you can plan for what you need and invest in the necessary infrastructure.

Total insolation for the Earth is around 170 petawatts. If you need more than 1% of that, space-based solar will be cost-effective.

The long-term problem with energy is getting rid of your waste.

Apparently you didn't make the effort to read the article I linked to. You're talking the usual, wishful-thinking nonsense that'll bring us into the entropy wall full speed, real soon now.

Yep, this is exactly the point economist Julian Simon made in his essay, "Can the Supply of Natural Resources - Especially Energy - Really Be Infinite? Yes!" [1]

This exert from the conclusion sums up his argument well:

> Incredible as it may seem at first, the term "finite" is not only inappropriate but is downright misleading when applied to natural resources, from both the practical and philosophical points of view. As with many important arguments, the finiteness issue is "just semantic." Yet the semantics of resource scarcity muddle public discussion and bring about wrongheaded policy decisions.

[1] http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...

This is utter BS. It relies on bad analogies and not physical reality. The example given (copper) is absurd; recycling implies using energy (and disposal of waste heat), therefore you substitute a resource (copper ore) for another (used copper and energy). The analysis supposes that every resource is substitutable (they aren't), and that energy is infinite (it isn't).

We don't know for sure that the universe isn't infinite, but we do know that it is at least tens of billions of light years across. We aren't going to run into actual laws of physics making growth impossible for a long fucking time.

Only provided we leave earth and we harvest energy in a more efficient way. One of the reasons I'm supportive of renewable energy is not for environmental reasons; rather, that it's energy that would otherwise have been lost. Extracting hydrocarbons removes the total amount left, but extracting energy from sunlight doesn't lower the amount of sunlight that'll be emitted. Renewables are a responsible long-term energy play, and not just for the planet's health.

Yeah sure, if we suppose that we have nearly infinite resources (energy and material and science to propel billions of humans off the Earth and across the galaxy), we have no short-term resource problem. However we're already constrained (average OECD countries energy availability has been falling since 2006), so you can't exactly hand-wave the problem away.

> Frigging laws of physics

I seem to remember something about nothing being created or destroyed and only transformed but maybe I am wrong.

You’re right, but the transformation is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The useful work you can do is diminished, and you’re left with entropy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but we don’t care about how much waste heat we have available, because nothing can be done with it.

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