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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

Consumption really can lead to the development of clean energy sources. People need to develop a growth-mindset on this issue.

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Consumption cannot scale to infinity. There's little harm in periodically taking account of the externalities of the things we value.

Perhaps not infinity, but if we manage to exploit space then it'd be close enough.

That's a big 'if'. And IMO pointless to explore seriously until we can sustain ourselves on our native planet.

I'm not talking about expansion into space (yet), but simply consuming resources from space. Energy, materials, etc.

We definitely should explore that (and are).

We don't need to it to scale to infinity. It's a weird objection. It's like saying human lifespans can't grow to infinity so we should stop trying to be healthy.

The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.

For example, the US economy is bigger than ever, yet we emit less carbon than we did 10 years ago, both total and on a per capita basis.

> We don't need to it to scale to infinity. It's a weird objection.

Is it? The proposition was that folks should have a growth mindset about consumption. Yet we're already reaching the limits of long term sustainably. I'm not advocating to stop trying to do better. Rather that we shouldn't assume we can indefinitely.

> The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.

Have we really been doing more with less for so long? Or have we just learned to extract more and more nonrenewable resources more quickly than ever before?

For example if your lifetime worth of waste had to remain in your own yard then how would it compare to those from past generations?

> The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years

It’s not truth. It’s a form of techno-libertarianism bordering on religion. I can’t find a single working scientist in any relevant field who believes this claim. Most scientists believe we are on our way out, along with the biosphere we’ve destroyed.

I know I'm not going to change your mind because that would require changing your whole worldview, but I would push back on the notion that this is a "techno-libertarian religion". It certainly has experts that endorse the view. A whole field of them. In fact, it has its own term in the discipline of economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

How likely is it that phenomena will cause a net improvement with population and per-person consumption increases?

Jevons Paradox also comes into play.

Does Jevons Paradox extend indefinitely?

What I mean is, e.g., when the cost of energy drops people's energy bills in general do not go down, the have warmer homes. That has been known for a while. But is it still true if everybody can keep their houses at 21 degrees permanently? At thatr point does a reduction in energy costs reduce their bills or do they find something else to spend the energy on?

Judging by the lifestyles of billionaires I don't think human appetites should be underestimated. Especially on a planet of billions of people.

Billionaires tbf are a self-selecting sample of people who made it past $1m, $10m and $100m, and still decided to keep going.

As a % of the population, I don't know how many have those traits - 10%? 1%? - but with a population also numbered in billions, "enough to totally screw the planet" is a reasonable guess.

Yes. They need treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

You can be an expert and a techno-libertarian ideologist, though. Particularly in economics, which is a field rife with unverifiable dogma.

Besides, considering that we are living on a finite world, we don’t need to merely decouple economy from materials, because any use at all will at some point exhaust available resources. Sure, we can say “fuck everything, I’m going to keep going on as usual because in 100 years I’ll be dead and they’ll have that one wonderful technological panacea that will change everything (be it Mars colonisation, asteroid mining, or anything else)”. I don’t know how to call that attitude except for “techno-libertarian dogmatism”.

We're living in a finite world, but we're going to have finite growth.

Engine pollution and particulates have dropped significantly over the past decade. Much of this is due to tighter tolerances and electronic controls.

Yes, and on the other hand, there are more cars on the road.

Also, let's wave the magic wand and make all cars non-polluting during operation (not even dust from the brake rotors).

Where do the natural materials which are used to make the car come from?

What about the materials which make the road network that the cars drive on?

What about the natural environments which get turned into suburbs because mobility is "easy"?

How much of the surface of the earth is co-opted for human-dominated and human-determined?

Really? Like in the next 200 years? That’s ridiculous. The scenarios from IPCC envision a future of prosperity, albeit at a reduced level than if we could somehow drastically cut carbon emissions.

We should grow the good things and shrink the bad things.

That is very easy to say and hard to know how.

I do not think that our economic system depends on economic growth in reality. (It would be sick to depend on economic growth in PPP terms for economic justice) The entrenched power structure's path of least resistance for maintaining their position is economic growth. That is a different thing.

This logic is really no different from stupid Bitcoiner logic that PoW induces demand for cheap clean energy.

Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy? I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

Or even "the cloud."

> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

Because Bitcoin literally is designed to waste electricity on proof of work. The Ethereum network has the processing power of a Raspberry Pi and wastes fantastic amounts of electricity to deliver that paltry power. Bitcoin alone uses more power than all of Google's operations.

I doubt that the total power used by the world's yachts and private jets per year is even half the power the Bitcoin network literally wastes.

Even worse: Bitcoin alone uses as much as the datacenter sector as a whole, not just Google.

energy is not wasted by proof of work, it is valuably expended to achieve the immutability of the ledger

Sorry, this is Poe's Law territory. I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic. A blockchain doesn't need some wasteful mechanism to be immutable. Boring old cryptographic signing does the same thing. But Bitcoin et al want their ludicrous "No one can be trusted! Except all the points of trust required to make the system works of course!" system.

> Doesn't civilization itself induce demand for cheap clean energy given the environmental forcing of unclean energy?

Now this is probably not a good comparison, but the first thing that i thought of was something along the lines of: "Burning tires is bad for the environment, so we should burn more tires until some factors force us to stop doing that."

Surely if there's a recognizably bad behavior, we should be able to stop doing it without being forced to, right? Where did the idea of being cautious in service of a potentially better future go? Why do we have such an exploitative mindset?

> I don't see why the bitcoin case needs to be singled out any more than the yacht, private jet, gaming rig, or hell...even personal car cases.

I don't have a yacht and i don't see why people should have them either, outside of sports or transporting many people (albeit there are more efficient ways).

I don't have a private jet and i don't see why people should have them either, maybe apart from transporting government officials in certain situations. Actually, planes in general are overused and people should rely more on trains, which are environmentally friendly.

My "gaming rig" draws around 100-200W in total under load, with a 65W CPU and a GPU that's power limited to 50% of its total power draw for longevity purposes. My homelab servers run off of 35W CPUs with iGPUs and both of them run with a total wall draw of 100W. Honestly, outside of media production, there is no reason for overpowered devices, plus the developers of games and much other software should be more concerned about doing more with less.

And i don't own a personal car, thanks to the public transportation infrastructure in my country not being crippled. I studied for both my Bachelor and Master degree in the city and never felt the need for a car due to being able to take the bus, tram or trolley bus wherever i needed to go. And even when you need a car (e.g. living in the countryside or needing to transport tools or other things), you shouldn't got for wasteful ones.

In summary, the human existence is one of excess, unnecessary luxury and waste. We absolutely should address that.

The opposite is true. People already have this unhealthy growth mindset in regards to energy production, when in fact the only possible way of averting the worse disasters of global warming at this point is to adopt a de-growth mindset. There is absolutely no way to replace all dirty energy with clean energy in the 10-20 years we have left to avoid terrible global waing (>2 degrees), and not even in the maybe 30-40 years left before catastrophic global warming (>3 degrees).

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