There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous one.
Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent that we should always be looking for ways to increase the energy available to us.
Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a manner as possible, but it's long past time to accept that energy usage will go up, not down.
Plus we're nearing peak populations, after which the number of humans will be going down.
I agree more with the second point; the way that I'd say that is humans as a species will never self-moderate energy use.
For example, increasing fuel efficiency of cars does decrease energy use, because fuel cost is not the limiting factor foe most car travel. Similarly, more efficient lighting, more efficient home space heating and water heating, and better weatherization of homes, all increase energy efficiency and decrease energy use.
There's only so much lighting I would ever want to use, only so much heat, only so much time I want to spend in a car. Energy efficiency is one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce pollution, because it makes all the other things easier.
1. Elimination of resources
2. Excessive waste product (in this case, excrement and bodily wastes; pollution)
MPG from passenger car didn't decreased since 1976 despite huge advancement in fuel efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CAFE_mpg_curve_from_NHTSA...
1) land use decisions are pushing people further from workplaces
2) consumers are switching from the "car" class of vehicle to "light truck" which is negating fuel efficiency improvements [1]. There's a lot going on here, from people getting larger vehicles for perceived safety, to better comfort, to just having more money to spend on larger vehicles. Plus, all those people who think they need a truck despite using the bed once or twice per year.
3) Demand for gasoline is incredibly inelastic in response to price, with huge price spikes having almost no change in gallons of gasoline even as consumption in dollars spike [2]
[1] https://thenextweb.com/shift/2021/01/12/despite-ev-growth-ga...
It’s likely our industrial needs will continue to increase even with a smaller population
I'm all for aiming for high energy availability in the long run, but the idea that we can just keep increasing our usage monotonically (without a temporary reduction to get our shit sorted out) seems like the dangerous pipe dream to me.
Edit because I think maybe the tone sounded a bit short/unfriendly: I see a carbon tax as a necessary step in taking care of our issues, and my expectation is that this would reduce usage of fossil fuels quite significantly, temporarily. It seems likely that our energy budget would move more towards high-value-per-joule activities such as information technology and away from things like transportation. And I think this is a necessary step - people are currently quite careless about energy, especially about usage of fossil fuels, and I think if they become aware of its cost across a variety of activities they will adjust accordingly.
There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous one.
Agreed. There would need to be crushing totalitarian rule over everyone on Earth to prevent progress, and that wouldn't be stable long term. Otherwise, competition by competing powers will inevitably result in a Kardashev 2 civilization. Here's why:
Space solar power and fusion power are a couple of serious tech/economic inflection points. Once humanity's technology and our self-organization reach that level of capability, we are literally within striking distance of threatening any star system in our galaxy with huge destructive energies. We only need one of the two for this to be the case. Fusion is unnecessary at this point. If someone can establish large-scale industry on the Moon and the asteroids, solar power will be every bit as good as fusion in many regards. (At large enough scales, solar power is fusion power, basically.)
Modern geopolitics are dominated by the logistics of energy transport and production. It has been this way since before World War II. The logistics of fueling factories, ships, then tanks and airplanes has absolutely dominated strategic thinking since even before that time. The lengths to which the allies went to provide the fuel to run the invasion of Europe were absolute feats of engineering, planning, and intelligence/disinformation. So just think ahead a bit: what if, instead of having to fuel your military, you could instead beam power to outposts, which would use that power to synthesize fuel? The side that can do that would have huge logistical advantages, which would also be strategic advantages. (There's a compelling reason why submarines and aircraft carriers are nuclear powered.)
Going further, once we are at the level of space industry at scale, the Earth becomes just one location in a much larger context, whose available energy dwarfs the available energy on Earth by many orders of magnitude. At those levels of available energy, we could build things like Shkadov thrusters and Nicoll-Dyson beams. At that point, we'd have the hypothetical ability to move stars and build devices that could fry the biospheres off of planets in the bulk of our own galaxy.
sure there is. reduce the population by a factor of 10.
you rang?
> In either case the solution is ...
well, thinking about it, no solution is also a good solution.
Estimated 30-50% mortality rate for babies and 1% per birth mortality rate for moms (times say 12 kids). Lotta innocent babies gotta die to achieve your goals.
While this may sound tongue in cheek or a gotcha. I do think people underestimate how terrible, hard and brutal it was to live in those cultures as a human. We definitely create our share of travesties as modern humans (factory farms, anthropogenic mass extinction events, global climate change making the world uninhabitable). It remains to be seen if we can use technology to out pace some of these problems we've created, but I'm somewhat hopeful that we can, and find a path forward to live humanely and sustainably.
So yes, scaling down is de facto against our moral values.
If we stopped that, and just consumed the food that nature spontaneously produces, it supports maybe 50M people. So first you'd have to kill 7000M people.
Even after that, I don't know how you'd stop people from reinventing agriculture.
So on balance, I recommend against this :)
There is a lot of excessive waste / inefficiencies due to energy being -- relatively -- cheap.
If energy prices soar, many inefficiencies will get more attention. Like, if food becomes more expensive we would stop throwing away 1/3 of it. (And more houses would get proper insulation. And so on.)
How would you get everybody to agree to accept all the limitations and ills of their non technological lives without wanting to reinvent modern civilization?