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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely there are thermodynamic limits to energy "use" on the planet.

But isn't it obvious that we will expand into space stations and then eventually onto other planets?

> But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt.

This segment contained a number of logical leaps that I can't agree with. It is possible for energy cost to fall arbitrarily low without reaching zero. And you can imagine an arbitrarily low price that would skyrocket quickly if someone actually tried to buy all the energy.

> So once our fixed annual energy costs 1% of GDP, the 99% remaining will find itself stuck. If it tries to grow, energy prices must grow in proportion and we have monetary inflation, but no real growth.

I'm not able to follow the claim here. Can anyone shed some light?

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I think it's a condensed version of saying:

If we have finite energy at a fixed price (of say 1% of GDP in total cost), then either the rest of the GDP (which is not energy) does not grow, and so the demand for that energy (and so its price) remains the same, or it tries to grow (and cannot "is stuck") because growth will increase demand for the energy and therefore drive up prices, but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth.

> but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth.

Oh ok... I see why I got lost. In my head I didn't hold the assumption that "all growth necessarily must consume more energy". This is assumed throughout the article until the Epilogue.

But if you drop this assumption, then I don't think the "it's just inflation not growth" holds anymore.

I had to parse that part a few times to get it myself, when I saw you didn't get it too I could relate.

Then I had to think a few times about what you gave in response! It seems this part of the topic is quite involved. I think I get some of it now.

If you drop the assumption that grow takes energy, then no extra demand on energy from growth, then no price increase on energy, then no inflation, and so it's just growth, not inflation. Agreed.

But when you and me are examining it like this...the whole situation described by that sentence starts to seem a little contrived to me. Seems there's a lot of error bars on each of the assumed connections in that causal chain, that could lead that path to branch at each of them into many other possible paths, rather than just the one path that condensed sentence proposes.

I still have a hard time imagining a growth that doesn't use more energy (except the one defined in that article as "development", which seems to be a more sophisticated/involved use of existing resources, rather than extracting/creating more new (primary) resources.)

If you could elaborate some more on your images of growth that don't consume more energy, I'd find it helpful to understand this whole thing better.

> I still have a hard time imagining a growth that doesn't use more energy (except the one defined in that article as "development", which seems to be a more sophisticated/involved use of existing resources, rather than extracting/creating more new (primary) resources.)

Can’t you imagine efficiency gains leading to an increase in output (GDP) for constant inputs (resources)? That’s growth. (Note that the article talks about development as something different from GDP growth.)

Right, I think the article was saying development is GDP stagnation but increasing quality nonetheless, does that about match your understanding of it?

I still can't really imagine the other scenario because when I see efficiency gains I think they will lead to growth and more energy usage. Examples like "increasing CPU power should have led to faster software, but instead it lead to slower languages and larger software". Same for memory and bandwidth. Our websites keep expanding to fill the next generation of network capacity.

So the gains from efficiency are quickly consumed by increasing growth and energy use. Maybe you could help me imagine some that are not like that? I'd like that.

It's easier for me to imagine the examples like in the article (more fancy dessert, same ingredients) that are there classed as development, distinct from growth. But growth as defined there, with static energy, I can't imagine right now.

> I think the article was saying development is GDP stagnation but increasing quality nonetheless

I don't know what the article is trying to say, really. It talks about "improving the quality of life" but I'm not sure if that includes factors that are already considered in GDP calculations (https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/papers/P2006-6_0.pdf) or it's about immaterial quality of life improvements (more hapiness or whatever).

> But growth as defined there, with static energy, I can't imagine right now.

Say you have a factory producing 1000 widgets per day and you improve the efficiency of the process and now you produce 1100 widgets per day using the same quantities of labour, raw materials and energy. Don't you agree that this is growth?

Cool link, thanks I'll read it.

I'm not actually sure right now. Somehow I think that if you make those extra widgets without using more energy, then the extra people who buy and use those extra widgets will end up using more energy in doing so, and their extra purchase and use will, however incrementally, grow the economy as a whole a tiny bit, which will use that much extra energy.

So if it's growth, then it can't be static energy.

But somehow also I think that you can have static energy and not call it growth, but development, or something else like someone said before (maybe you).

What's development? I don't know. But maybe it's something like we produce 1000 widgets with more intricate decorations on them. And use no more energy doing so.

I grant that it's pretty confusing. And that's how it seems to me right now.

Thanks

The economy is a complex system, the only way to be sure that when you change something somewhere the energy consumption will remain constant is to put a constraint on it. You could set quotas, increase/decrese taxes to drive it to the desired targets, etc.

Imagine the system is at equilibrium at a certain output and energy usage and you discover a device than increases efficiency in the use of energy by 10%. The system could produce the same output as before using 10% less energy. But the new equilibrium won't be the same output at 10% less energy consumption, because some resources will be freed in the energy generation sector and the price of energy will go down resulting in some activities that were not economically viable before becoming viable. Maybe desalting sea water was too expensive before, but with lower energy prices and higher efficiency it does make sense, for example. You will have an increase in output but whether the new energy consumption is below or above the original level depends on the details. The latter is more likely, I guess.

Thank you for explaining / taking me through that. I totally agree that it's in the details.

My factory now makes the same amount of sneakers but uses less energy, and I have more profit which I can spend on more things, maybe making new markets viable. And in the macro picture, that extra energy, lower prices, makes some things become viable. And what happens from there regarding energy depends on the details. Very interesting and good, semi-detailed discussion.

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