Global population increases and economic development are the root cause for this spike.
No need to limit population growth if we were allowed to allocate population density more intelligently.
Further, the ultra rich don't keep building ever larger homes 1:1 as their wealth increases because walking around becomes a real limitation.
Coal has followed a similar story, up until ~2012 it was unaffordable, and since then it has merely been expensive by historic standards.
There seems to be a theory that massive price increases don't count for some reason. I'm not even aiming that at you, I just don't think people have cottoned on to how different the situation is now vs the late 90s. I've seen operations that were optimised to mine coal at a $30/tonne market price.
> as you don’t want to heat your home above a pleasant temperature for example
You are vastly underestimating how much people can do with cheap energy. There is no practical limit to how much energy a household could consume if it were available.
In the limit, if you had enough cheap electricity you could probably use E=mc2 to fabricate new matter into existence. Even without invoking that sort of silly example, there are a lot of things on the edge of possible that would happen if the electrical power power was cheap enough. More aluminum products is the easy one that springs to mind. Cheaper lightweight materials? Hundred and one uses. That would bring per capita electrical use up.
There is indeed no limit to how much energy a single person could use, if available.
I disagree that without an "artificial" source we are reduced to "collecting it the old fashioned way" unless these are elaborated upon. Do photovoltaic panels count as an artificial source? The fusion reactor is a natural gravitational confinement one, but the collection apparatus is artificial. Of course farming with hand tools is artificial too. Anything but bare hunter gatherer life with virtually no tools is artificial.
Inflation adjusted consumer electric prices fluctuate but they where lower in 2010 than 1990, 1980, and 1960.
Consumers are also surprisingly price insensitive over the vast difference in regional electricity prices when adjusted for local weather conditions.
So, in the absence of coordinated legal restrictions on emissions, the most likely effect of your personal cutbacks is for someone else to ramp up. Sad, but true.
In the US. “The proportion of the land base in agricultural uses has declined from 63 percent in 1949 to 51 percent in 2007.”
Ramp things up enough, and removing waste heat becomes more limiting than simple access to energy.