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Most problems solve themselves if you can just violate those pesky Laws of Thermodynamics.

> Summary: If energy is free and doesn't impact anything then of course you would want to use more of it.

I'm not convinced if this is always the case. I'm sure this is already a topic of interest in psychology but I guess that unless there is a reward for using the energy there wouldn't be consumption on the individual level.

As I'm writing this my CPU is at 2% and GPU at 1% utilization. I'm not actively looking for ways to utilize this even though it's (for the sake of argument) free.

I am happy to concede that there are ways to spend energy that are neutral or negative, like, say, pervasive surveillance and limitless data retention.

I think the point that energy substitutes for labor is generally fair though.

But honestly what I'm trying to state is that this characterization of environmentalists as worried about reducing energy use regardless of how much harm the source causes to be a straw man.

The point is sustainability and the health of ourselves and natural systems. If energy caused zero issues to generate then I think environmentalists would be banging the direct atmospheric removal drums harder than anyone.

My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum.

To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice austerity and poverty, to be humble and pure like the poorest black and brown people of Africa and Asia. The government will tell you, for the good of society of course, what temperature you're allowed to have in your buildings on your property, or whether you're allowed to let your car engine idle at a stoplight [1].

The green agenda is only partly based in science. It has dark corners and extremes of irrationality and hypocrisy. This article's author is trying to remind those who have gotten lost in the political theater that our goal should be improving lives and easing resource constraints. Perhaps we should examine whether we're overfunding solar and wind, why we fear fission and neglect fusion, and whether it's wise to regulate, control and limit rather than innovate, build and overcome.

[1] <politicalrant> Of course, prominent politicians and climate activists travel by air, in some cases private jets, to environmental conferences in the age of Internet videoconferencing. While they're eager enough to embrace using government force to remove freedoms of action from everybody, they balk at voluntarily following their stated principles in their personal lives when the result would be the slightest personal inconvenience. When the price of oil increases due to war, the President's staunch environmentalism disappears in the face of populist handouts to grease the midterms (a thing his party is famous about criticizing the other party for). A true statesman who actually believed the planet was in danger would urge us to seize this moment to let market forces do the hard work of weaning us off fossil fuels; it would mean sacrifices and hardship, but we should endure it to save the planet for our grandchildren. Instead, the President we've got does everything in his power to lower gas prices -- from releasing oil from strategic petroleum reserve, to fist bumping a slicer and dicer of journalists in a process of futile begging for oil. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the PotUS's observed behavior is exactly what I would expect of a world leader who secretly believes the green agenda he publicly embraces is actually just a steaming pile of biomass. </politicalrant>

Oh I think every political movement taps into what you might label a religious tendency that seems to be latent in most humans, especially with the mainstream religions on the retreat, creating a void that opportunists can fill. I think it's a mistake though if you're under the impression that this is only channeled into political causes. After spending some time in the tech world, I see it (unwittingly or otherwise) channeled by leaders into motivational reasoning for why their employees should work ceaselessly on achieving their companies' goals. You're not A/B testing a social media site to better addict peoples' attention to increase profit; you're changing the world for the better - that old tripe.

What I see more often now is this tryhard meme that "work is it's own reward". Consider me a skeptic. I could believe work for one's self or one's community, but leaving those off just feels like some hopelessly out of touch plutocrat boss trying to gaslight me because he thinks anyone who's net worth doesn't involve three commas is a fool.

I suppose that's my political rant. As for yours, I see certainly see it, and I understand how tuned we are to spot hypocrisy, but I don't see why someone or others' hypocrisy should affect how I judge an issue on its merits.

What you perceive as some weird religious thing is merely the rejection of the completely unfounded axiom that all logistic curves are exponentials if you want them to be.

From the point of view of someone who has rejected this axiom, then the slavish devotion to growth looks like a bizarre cult where the worshippers feed more and more of the very finite resources needed for humans to flourish into a machine that does nothing but bring suffering and enrich a few dozen sociopaths.

Just because a few centre-right statesmen like Biden pay lip service to the idea of not bringing armageddon as quickly as possible while lining their pockets doesn't discredit the century of science, or the very basic mathematical fact that line do not in fact go up indefinitely.

What people don't seem to grasp is that the optimal growth path isn't the fastest one, it is the one that balances speed vs longevity.

If you burn yourself out in the first 10 years of your career, your rate of growth might be impressive but your most productive years will barely even matter so your output will be low either way.

What you want to do is reach the highest possible output and maintain it for as long as possible.

Trading off speed for longevity can thereby increase total output instead of suddenly crashing.

Valuing longevity too much and speed too little will mean lower total output because you were spending too much time with low output.

This is an optimization problem where being an ergophile or ergophobe is actually suboptimal.

Alternatively, I would suggest philosophers have been arguing about what "optimal" means here for millennia. We keep learning more about the effect of our actions on the ecosystem and our own health, so I hope we are doing better over time.

If we're talking about "growth" in the sense of adding up all production before civilization collapses (to infer from your statement about individual careers), I suppose there is a perspective that says this is a proxy for how advanced the civilization can be before it collapses.

I do think maximizing total output before collapse as the main important thing may result in strange conclusions. A person's productivity famously doesn't account for happiness and the joy of going for hikes or playing video games with friends, which most would argue matter more.

You could counter by suggesting that at a civilization scale maximizing total production is the best way to guess how far along we are and since we may have initial resource limitations we need to conserve things so that we have the highest chance of getting through pinch points where things are only extremely bad instead of civilization-ending.

It's a fair point, but if you are making a metaphor to a single career's productive output it seems to imply that you assume there must be an end. Yes, there is an end to infinite growth, obviously there must be. I do think we need to worry about how to live happy lives knowing that our civilization will very probably end or stagnate. To me I don't think "productivity" in any sense measurable by energy necessarily makes me happier. Sometimes it does, but sometimes sometimes it makes me happier to not maximize my productivity.

I have to say I don't understand why energy is so expensive in Europe, and I feel it is down to politics. In UK it cost like 5 times that of Hong Kong, and with standing charges on top of that.

A major source of energy in Europe was natural gas from Russia. This is no longer available due to the war in Ukraine, causing a continent-wide shortfall even for countries that didn’t depend on it as much because now they need to share their energy.

The European gas price has since then fell by 50% or more in the last couple of months but I don't see any signs of price reduction of consumer energy

I don't know why ecofascism is such a popular rhetoric against green parties. If I look at the competition in Germany the other parties are downright authoritarian. The CDU/conservative party is known for trying to push internet surveillance laws, open lobbying and corruption, cutting taxes for the rich and general reluctance to do anything to slow down climate change.

Meanwhile the green party introduces a CO2 tax and land value tax in Baden Württemberg and suddenly it is the spawn of Satan even though it is the only party that is actively against surveillance, would rather cut taxes for the middle class and below, wants to introduce a CO2 dividend to so that everyone has an equal amount of free CO2 pollution.

If anything, internalising externalities makes people wealthier because they stop engaging in destructive behaviour and it reduces the need to micro manage the economy and the need for a nanny state like the conservative (CDU) or worker party wants (SPD).

Everyone warned of how the greens being in a government coalition would be the end of Germany but the reality is that they are barely even being listened to. The greens might be against nuclear power but do they even have that decision making power? The liberal party is constantly swinging between continue nuclear power and stop it. The conservative party is the one that actually stopped the nuclear plants ten years ago and the greens were basically only a tiny blip that is not worth listening to. They had no power.

Yeah it's the greens with their pseudo science CO2 taxes, CO2 dividends and land value taxes and lower income taxes for the middle class that are trapped in some ideological cage. We should instead listen to those who want to micro manage the country and know what's best for us.

Yeah, it's weird, but some people really do think that way, and need to be gentled along.