The Low Energy Trap

The low energy, energy efficiency drive isn't a trap isn't about using less energy, it's about wasting less energy, and sourcing energy in a sustainable way that doesn't render the planet uninhabitable.

Why heat a room with your 100W light bulb when you get more light from a 7W LED alternative?

We absolutely can use more energy, but we haven't figured out how to scale out sustainable generation and storage. Right now, dumping fossil fuels is important to accomplish that second goal. Wasting less is an important part of that.

There is no trap, we're just not there yet.

Take for instance - habitat destruction due to increasing destruction of forests for farmland. I had once calculated that in an energy unconstrained world, with a few thousand sky-scraper farms, you could literally feed the whole world and let farmland return to wilderness (boosting oxygen, green cover, increasing C02 capture etc). Of course this has security implications but then the trigger for most conflict is also typically in-equality - which again you can double-click down to energy.

Similarly, in an energy unconstrained world, most pollution can be tackled with closed-cycle recycling processes. The main reason re-cycling doesn't happen is due to the energy cost of producing complex technologies to sort waste or filter chemicals out of waste-water etc.

This is why it is critical for us to figure out ways to unlock & expand energy generation capabilities at scale that minimize or eliminate collateral damage. Efficiency will help but is not the game changer.

I mean we can't. Shipping water is _hugely_ expensive. Assuming that we make electricity for free, the amount of water needed to irrigate the bit between the Rockies and Appalachians is huge. Literally millions of tons of water a minute.

All of that energy could be used to do something more useful.

Especially as we can do a few things to keep water about longer that helps stops flooding and keep ground water higher.

Yes, we need more power. Yes nuclear is the answer. However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive, and without government incentives they don't get built.

There's no law of nature that says that if we run out of oil, we will find an alternative energy source, rather that just going back to a different type of civilization with a much lower energy usage where most of the economy is just food production.

Sometimes I wonder if all the decarbonization tales are just story we like to tell ourselves to pretend we are in control, rather than just becoming much poorer because oil is running out and there's nothing we can do about it.

On the other hand, if we want to go really dirty, I guess there's always coal, but many countries only have low quality reserves.

PS. Actually France kind of did [1], but then they stopped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

You build a well insulated home with heat pump HVAC, Vs a shack that you need to constantly heat with imported fossil fuels.

Why are we supposed to celebrate the latter? Doesn't seem to benefit anyone but the people selling fossil fuels and asthma doctors.

As for massive energy deployments, go look at a graph of solar and wind deployments (it's sometimes hard to find them without hydro, which totally obscures the trend), then check the sober predictions of expected rollout.

We've already escaped the trap, and people like this were keeping us in it for no obvious logical reason, just tribal politics.

I also believe people today are too comfy and ignorant because they rely on the system fixing things for them, it's a bottomless pit. Slower pace and smarter usage seems a better path IMO. People that know how to act efficiently in groups are probably the happiest.

IMO we need to produce less, consume less, and stop destroying whatever remains of life other than the human species. More energy doesn't seem like the solution to that.

"Yes, let's consume everything, screw conservation. Drive more and bigger cars. Cage all the animals we need, and kill the rest. Trees? Cut them all. So what if that sort of thinking destroys the planet? We need to think bigger: there is a whole galaxy out there to consume, I mean explore. Humans are awesome. Woooo!"

Psychos.

Perhaps 'less'is not the answer. However, 'more' certainly is not either.

Also, a word on nuclear. People seem to ignore the fact that nuclear is by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. If you want to impoverish your country, build nuclear power stations! It's much cheaper to build renewables and use the surplus electricity to create hydrogen which can be stored indefinitely and then burnt when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

Except that the _healthy_ carrying capacity of the planet _is_ 2 billion people, assuming a vegan consumption somewhat less than a first-world level.

Put an omnivorous consumption at first-world levels, and it’s somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion.

Sure, the planet can “support” ten or twenty billion or more, but only by farming 100% of the planetary surface and making 99% of all species extinct, whereupon a complete collapse of the biosphere would quickly ensue, resulting an effective planetary carrying capacity of 0 humans for the following several million years as the biosphere recovers.