Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

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This is not wrong but it is only true because the US outsources energy hungry productions to China.

It's true that the US effectively imports energy via foreign goods, but I don't think that effect accounts for all the decline in US energy consumption per capita.

Carbon dioxide emissions are an imperfect but (IMO) good-enough proxy for energy, since the world's energy supply is still dominated by fossil fuels. If the US counted imported goods toward its CO2 emissions, as of 2016 they would be 7.7% higher:

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

Primary energy consumption per capita peaked in the US in 1978:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-capita?tab...

It was down to 79,056 kWh/capita as of 2015, compared to 98,139 kWh/capita in 1978. If you adjust the 2015 number up by 7.7% it's 85,143 kWh/capita -- not down as much, but still down. That's lower than the average for the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. (And China didn't really become an export powerhouse until after it joined the WTO in 2001.)

"It's true that the US effectively imports energy via foreign goods"

Not only this. Apple designs IPhones. iPhones are produced in China, some may be shipped to the US, some may be shipped to Europe. If you do this via HK, you basically pay zero Tax on the profits. This leads to:

1. High profitable US tech companies

2. Little tax revenues

3. As a side effect, the US and Europe have a trade deficit with China since an iPhone shipped to the US or Europe appears in the export balance sheet of China. There is a paper, I think from 2007 about this, that calls this "dark matter in accounting" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=878096

Based on google (it shows me a graph: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+energy+use+per+capita )

I would call the per captia consumption basically constant from the 80ies to 2008. After that is is shrinking.

Please also see:

Is it really possible to decouple GDP Growth from Energy Growth?

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/11/15/is-it-really-possible-...

EDIT: Added the link the the dark matter paper

I saw Gail Tverberg's writings regularly back in the Oil Drum days. I don't think that she is a credible prognosticator. Like some other people on The Oil Drum, her theme seemed to be that industrial civilization was facing an imminent crisis from energy supply contraction. Did she ever go back and explain why she was so wrong the first time around with predictions like these?

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/what-is-peak-oil/

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/is-this-a-false-alarm/

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/08/06/peak-oil-whats-ahead/

Did she make more cautious predictions going forward, after making such badly failed predictions 13 years ago? If she did, I didn't see it. It looks like Our Finite World is still a drumbeat of predictions about crises just ahead. If she's eventually correct about a specific prediction it will be a case of the stopped clock showing the correct time by chance.

That doesn't mean that I'm unconditionally optimistic about the future. The "Galactic Scale Energy" post is exactly right. The problem is that constraints like "growth can't go on like this for another 1000 years, because of physics" can't provide much guidance for the next 15 years. And predictions from the Peak Oil crowd from 15 years ago about what would happen in 15 years were mostly wrong.

My personal take: after the 1960s, people basically stopped inventing more energy-intensive goods and services that could achieve mass market adoption. Jet air travel was the last big energy intensive service to reach the mainstream. The diffusion of energy-intensive lifestyles continued in the United States and is still diffusing throughout the world, so we're rushing toward a global warming disaster faster than ever. But GDP growth per capita in the developed countries has slowed. Energy consumption per capita in the developed countries has stabilized or reversed.

Small efficiency improvements in existing technologies accumulate without enough new energy-intensive technologies being invented to push up the per-capita demand from the median American. We are encountering the per capita "limits to growth" in highly developed nations but the limits showed up on the demand side before the supply side.

Global warming also -- and unfortunately -- seems unlikely to be curbed by supply-side fuel constraints any time soon, since we don't need any new energy-intensive technologies to blow out the global carbon budget. All we need for that is for the rest of the world's population to try to live like Americans circa 1990.

Well, her prediction is pretty close for conventional oil: https://www.postcarbon.org/new-u-s-record-level-oil-producti...

How sustainable the production of non conventional oil is, has to be seen, taking into account: costs of production and ROEI.

"And predictions from the Peak Oil crowd from 15 years ago about what would happen in 15 years were mostly wrong."

I am not sure about this either. The limits of growth projected the problems into the 1st half of the 21th century. This would end 2050, in 30 years. The questions is: Are the roller coaster oil prices and negative interest rates we are seeing the pre-curser of problems ahead or just a funny coincidence?

"My personal take: after the 1960s, people basically stopped inventing more energy-intensive goods and services that could achieve mass market adoption." This is wrong. Most people would like a flying car or a trip to the moon. Bitcoin consumes energy too.

This may be an overstatement: By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/25/semiconductor_indus...

Please also consider jevons Paradox. A more efficient use of resources leads to faster depletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"We are encountering the per capita "limits to growth" in highly developed nations but the limits showed up on the demand side before the supply side"

I doubt that either. In this book scientists explain there most dangerous ideas: https://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Dangerous-Idea-Unthinkable/...

One idea was: Purpose of live is energy dissipation. Consequently, I remember a scientist saying, in what to look for in extraterrestrial live: Look for an entropy source.

She wasn't just predicting conventional oil declines. In her 2007 posts she explicitly considers and rejects the adequacy of unconventional oil sources (Canadian oil sands, American shale) to prevent oil from peaking imminently [1].

Most people would like a flying car or a trip to the moon.

That's possible. But the technology to offer those to the mass market hasn't been invented! If the only problem with flying cars was that they burned a lot of fuel, millions of high-income people would be flying around in them today. I'm not saying that we can never invent more energy-intensive devices that reach the mass market. But I have observed that nothing like this has reached the mass market in 50 years. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for routine Moon vacations or flying cars.

I find that the Jevons paradox is cited more often in online discussions than it is understood. The Jevons paradox can be considered a special case of the energy rebound effect. Energy rebound is the tendency of people to use more of an energy service when that energy service can be supplied more efficiently. For example, replacing incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs saves energy, but some of that energy savings is negated if people also install brighter bulbs when they switch from incandescent to LED. The Jevons paradox is the unusual case where the rebound effect is greater than 100% -- like somebody installing 20 new LED lights for every incandescent they replace. It's remarkable enough to get its own named paradox because it is a surprising, rare situation. The far more common case is that energy saving technology really does save net energy, without inducing enough new demand for a 100%+ rebound.

[1] Is This a False Alarm? https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/is-this-a-false-alarm/

Arguing with the Peak-Resource crowed is beyond pointless. These people have not except basic economic arguments for 200 years, and every 15 years they come up with a new crisis that gone happen in the next 15-20 years.

The was a lot of Peak-Coal talk in 1800 Britain as well. Now they seem to have moved on to 'rare' earths (that aren't that actually rare).

They always excuse every individual wrong prediction with 'well this factor we couldn't predict and nobody could have' so we were right. No matter that that does not make sense and is exactly the point the other side makes.

The Club of Rome and the 'Population Bomb' are some of the most mainstream example. The author of the 'Population Bomb' was often on mainstream TV.

The 'Populationbomb' crowed for example wanted limit growth of population in India, and wanted to US government not to trade with them or help them with agriculture. Their logic was that millions were gone die anyway, not helping them might kill them sooner and that will limit growth, much more humane. There is a long history of that thinking.

The Club of Rome of course hilariously came back back and said 'we were actually right, juts off by multiple 100%'. Great, thanks guys, I'm defiantly gone listen to you now.

People who think in zero sum games will never understand how a non-zero sum game works. These are the most dangerous people in the world. The earth is not threatens by limited resource, but rather people who believe resources are limited. The biggest catastrophes of the modern happened because of people who believed in zero sum games.

Even if Jevons paradox were always true, there is no issue with growing energy use for the next couple 100 years, or even couple 1000s. There are plenty of energy sources around. As long as we have energy, food is not an issue either.

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