Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

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> We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.

Let's not do that on Earth please. If you want to build a planet-sized solar concentrator in space for reasons, knock yourself out.

In fact, until we figure out how to not rely on fossil fuels, I think we're better off reducing energy use. We can do that and get more useful work done at the same time by using energy more efficiently. In many respects that will be the natural consequence of electrification of formerly fossil-fuel technology. EVs are far more efficient than ICE vehicles.

> We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.

[citation needed]

Even if true, about half the CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution happened in the last 30 years or so. The path we're on is one that leads to environmental and economic devastation and misery.

The idea of increasing per-capita energy consumption to 1,000x current American levels is so ludicrous Andreesen should immediately be laughed out of town without any further consideration.

I did some back of the envelope calculations (and obviously made a few assumptions about what he meant), but, roughly, 1,000x current US per capita energy consumption is about enough to keep you airborne in a (fully occupied) corporate jet continuously with fuel synthesised from air and water.

For all that work you did you could have used some imagination and thought about projects like Starlink + space mining.

Yes, if you imagine a world where large numbers of people live off-Earth, that kind of energy consumption is likely necessary.

But that society will not exist in the lifetimes of my children’s children’s children, and I’m not letting venture capitalists loose to create more “inventions” like NFTs on the basis that it will make it happen sooner and better.

We should not reduce energy use. Energy and prosperity are the same thing. The only way out of the climate crisis is innovation, which cheap energy accelerates. The moment we create the tesseract, the climate crisis is solved. With unlimited energy, we can purify infinite water, capture carbon, send drones into the atmosphere.

Say we cut our energy consumption and carbon emissions by 50%. This would disproportionately affect the poor and kill millions (deaths due to cold/heat), and we still have the same climate problem in double the time.

The choice is accelerate innovation OR decelerate emissions. Which has the better track record for humanity?

I don't think we should forego many of the various amenities that we use energy for, but we definitely can reduce overall energy use without causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Take transportation. Gas engines are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30% efficient; the rest gets wasted as heat. Modern electric vehicles use motors with efficiencies in the high 90's. With battery/charging losses maybe you're somewhere around 80% efficiency. It'd be nice if people drove less on average as well because traffic can be a problem, but even without that we could reduce the energy needs of transportation to less than half the energy we use now, just by being less wasteful. The transition to EVs is slow because EVs are still expensive and cars in general can have long lifespans, but we should be hitting an inflection point if we haven't already where new EVs are cheaper overall than new ICE vehicles, and in a decade or so that should be true in the used market as well.

There's similar gains to be made by using heat pumps instead of natural gas for heating.

We're going to need a lot more electricity production even in a world that uses less energy overall because a lot of the stuff that's fossil-fuel powered now will need to be transitioned to run on electricity. So, I'm in favor of vastly increasing our deployment of solar and wind farms, and nuclear.

The choice between faster innovation or do something to avert climate catastrophe is a false one. We can do one or the other or neither or both. I really hope we do something about the CO2 problem, though.

Assuming the CO2 stat is even true (that stood out to me, too, so I did a search, but couldn’t find a good source either way) I 100% guarantee it’s sophistry: carbon produced in the US per-capita is perhaps down—that’s not impossible, at least—but I’ll eat my hat if carbon released due to US consumption is down.

US embodied carbon imports are not nearly as large as is sometimes assumed, apparently in the order of 7% of total emissions:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...

"I’ll eat my hat if carbon released due to US consumption is down."

Markets will figure out how to do more with less to reduce costs, and this includes energy.

It is a bit of a strange part of the manifesto. Surely increasing energy efficiency is a better way to the same endpoint of abundance that Marc champions. After all, if we make everything 1,000x energy efficient (to use his example) we get to the same endpoint.

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