> The way to address the real problems behind ergophobia is, counterintuitively, more energy. With enough cheap energy, we could literally pull excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it again.
With cheap energy, we could literally pull excess carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen out of the air and make fats, carbohydrates and amino acids. No need for agricultural land.
But then it will end up in the atmosphere again shortly after. I think the idea is to achieve a reduction in CO2. However, is there a process that sucks out CO2 more effectively than trees doing photosynthesis?
You can do both, producing hydrocarbon fuels and carbohydrate calories, and also sequestering carbon. Maybe as diamonds, instead of soot to bury.
Yes, you absolutely can trap much more CO2 per unit of collection area with photovoltaics than trees can manage. The trees are cheaper per unit of carbon capturing capacity, but what they bind the carbon into is less useful.
That said, wood can be burned in such a way that only the hydrogen oxidizes, leaving charcoal that, powdered, can massively improve soil quality particularly in rainforests. Up until 500 years ago there was a thousands-of-years-long project doing this in the Amazon, interrupted by plague and collapse.
Yes. Multiple promising direct air carbon capture technologies exist. At scale, they will cost about $1 to recapture the C02 released by a gallon of gas.
None are at scale yet. There is a lot of hand wringing about the cost (negligible compared to annoying Putin or OPEC), and some moral arguments from the greens about how it is unethical to expect our kids to spend electricity to clean up our mess (even though the cost of electricity production is currently dropping faster than it has in our lifetimes).
Those processes, once developed, would probably use less energy than existing industrial agriculture. So far, the only progress I've heard of in this front is Solar Foods' protein powder
Why do so many sites pop the "sign up for our newsletter" modal a few moments after you've begun to read TFA? It is jarring and disrespectful, and I feel the need to leave without reading further.
Summary: If energy is free and doesn't impact anything then of course you would want to use more of it.
I don't know why they think this is a unique perspective, I guess just pointing out that people don't discriminate by electricity source when they condemn extra energy use beyond what is needed to do a job. If the electricity source is free and does no harm there is no obvious way to label the electrons.
I don't understand why they see it as harmful to use less energy to do the same job, as long as the job is done the rest is a bunch of words to confuse the issue. Use less energy = generate less heat = use less heat sink = more compact device, it's all coupled and biased towards using what we have effectively.
I think perhaps the point of the article is its strawman that people want "constant energy use" which as best I can tell is just made up? I'm literally the child of professional environmentalists and I have never heard anyone focus on "constant energy use" -- it's always about reducing waste (obviously landfill space is an issue beyond energy...), reducing pollution (containment would still be an issue beyond energy...), and improving health (maybe energy can help a little but I mean, mostly beyond energy...).
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.
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.
> 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.
I agree we should aim for energy abundance, but for what? For a more intense version of the 20th century, with offices, commutes, dinner with the boss, etc? Bah, we need a bolder vision.
We could use abundant energy to largely remove agriculture from the environment. It is the second biggest greenhouse emitter even only by official figures, and by far the most damaging to the overall ecosystem. Grow or culture our food in factories, maybe at sea, and leave the land to nature.
> In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. [0]
Perhaps it is the largest industrial category with the largest % of its output turned directly into CO2 and methane? (food waste placed into the landfills instead of composted.)
> I like an analogy I heard recently […] If a man is coming at you with the intent to do you harm, it hardly matters what technology he employs: hammer, gun, knife, mace, sword. The technology is neither the problem nor the solution. The fundamental problem is the intent of the assailant. Unless we radically change our intent on this planet, “unlimited” energy—by any technological means—only accelerates our demise. I think of it this way: if every jackass on the planet has access to cheap and abundant energy, what do you think they’ll do with it? Will they use it to restore ecosystems, or hack more of it down for their own short-term gain?
Why are there so many fatalities on our roads or from interpersonal violence? Did these people not attend the mandatory education about not killing people?
This is interesting as free/cheap and abundant doesn’t mean unlimited. I think we’d have to work out systems where no one has to pay for an electricity bill and we have replicators but we don’t have enough energy to replicate a barrel of chlorine gas.
Of course, if the person with intent to do you harm is motivated by a dispute over energy then making energy much more available would change his intent. For instance, who will fight oil wars if the price of oil is 10x cheaper? Who will fund global terrorism if Saudi Arabia has to build an actual economy? Who will kill their neighbour to steal bread when the price of bread is much lower because cheap energy means cheap fertiliser, cheap irrigation, cheap transportation etc and the price of bread is suddenly very affordable?
On the other hand, we could ignore energy and just hope for a sudden unexpected change in human nature and economics?
How do you handle the heat? At the rate we're going the surface of the Earth would glow like a light bulb in a handful of centuries.
> we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.
Seeing people talk about unlimited carbon free energy with the exact same logic as rejections of climate change from a century ago with the exact same ratio between total energy consumption and armageddon is incredibly frustrating.
> the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
Society's waste heat will cook us, literally, if we try to use ever-growing amounts of energy on the surface of a sphere covered by a blanket of gasses and moisture, because there is no mechanism to discard the waste heat fast enough.
In other words, society is a heat engine until it becomes a bomb.
Sure (and I'm into that) but it won't help, it just delays things a few more centuries. Even if we postulate a magic FTL space drive the crunch still comes.
Free space settlements give the solar system a population capacity in the trillions or quadrillions, and once you can build free space settlements, you can build interstellar generation ships--no FTL needed.
It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem.
Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves.
Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon.
Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the background temperature of space itself, accelerating the heat death.
This isn't going to take millions of years.
If it take 2500 years to reach a trillion, it takes only another 2500 years to reach a trillion trillion.
The point is that the OP's thinking is fundamentally unrealistic, in the sense that it's not real: it doesn't take into account basic thermodynamics and the structure of local space (Earth with it's atmosphere, etc.) It's a cartoon.
We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.
People who argue for artificially curbing ourselves are counter productive (no pun intended) but they're also not worth arguing with. (Have you met an environmentalist who doesn't wear mass-produced clothing? I've met one. One.)
The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then.
Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...)
I could go on and on.
Energy without wisdom will eventually fail.
Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board.
That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?
None of these problems are the result of using too much energy. Many of them are a consequence of how we produce the energy we have. Most of them can be solved by using even more energy.
Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.
With enough cheap power, can we build AND POWER enough heat pumps & A/C's to permit people to continue to live in their current abodes rather than migrating towards the hills, mountains, and poles ?
Why does efficiency work against having more energy or more stuff?
I'm sure there were a thousand efficiency improvements needed to make the aluminium foil that is mentioned, we didn't just plug a lump of bauxite into the mains and scream "more power!" like a mad scientist in a horror film.
51 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadWith cheap energy, we could literally pull excess carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen out of the air and make fats, carbohydrates and amino acids. No need for agricultural land.
Yes, you absolutely can trap much more CO2 per unit of collection area with photovoltaics than trees can manage. The trees are cheaper per unit of carbon capturing capacity, but what they bind the carbon into is less useful.
That said, wood can be burned in such a way that only the hydrogen oxidizes, leaving charcoal that, powdered, can massively improve soil quality particularly in rainforests. Up until 500 years ago there was a thousands-of-years-long project doing this in the Amazon, interrupted by plague and collapse.
None are at scale yet. There is a lot of hand wringing about the cost (negligible compared to annoying Putin or OPEC), and some moral arguments from the greens about how it is unethical to expect our kids to spend electricity to clean up our mess (even though the cost of electricity production is currently dropping faster than it has in our lifetimes).
I don't know why they think this is a unique perspective, I guess just pointing out that people don't discriminate by electricity source when they condemn extra energy use beyond what is needed to do a job. If the electricity source is free and does no harm there is no obvious way to label the electrons.
I don't understand why they see it as harmful to use less energy to do the same job, as long as the job is done the rest is a bunch of words to confuse the issue. Use less energy = generate less heat = use less heat sink = more compact device, it's all coupled and biased towards using what we have effectively.
I think perhaps the point of the article is its strawman that people want "constant energy use" which as best I can tell is just made up? I'm literally the child of professional environmentalists and I have never heard anyone focus on "constant energy use" -- it's always about reducing waste (obviously landfill space is an issue beyond energy...), reducing pollution (containment would still be an issue beyond energy...), and improving health (maybe energy can help a little but I mean, mostly beyond energy...).
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This reads like the jetsons.
I agree we should aim for energy abundance, but for what? For a more intense version of the 20th century, with offices, commutes, dinner with the boss, etc? Bah, we need a bolder vision.
We could use abundant energy to largely remove agriculture from the environment. It is the second biggest greenhouse emitter even only by official figures, and by far the most damaging to the overall ecosystem. Grow or culture our food in factories, maybe at sea, and leave the land to nature.
Perhaps it is the largest industrial category with the largest % of its output turned directly into CO2 and methane? (food waste placed into the landfills instead of composted.)
0: https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/a-climate-love-story/
Fortunately, we already have systems of mandatory education in place. Just add Responsible Energy Use 101 to the curriculum.
On the other hand, we could ignore energy and just hope for a sudden unexpected change in human nature and economics?
> we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
How do we handle the heat?
From the same link (as my previous comment):
> the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
Full stop.
Society's waste heat will cook us, literally, if we try to use ever-growing amounts of energy on the surface of a sphere covered by a blanket of gasses and moisture, because there is no mechanism to discard the waste heat fast enough.
In other words, society is a heat engine until it becomes a bomb.
Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves.
Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon.
Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the background temperature of space itself, accelerating the heat death.
This isn't going to take millions of years.
If it take 2500 years to reach a trillion, it takes only another 2500 years to reach a trillion trillion.
The point is that the OP's thinking is fundamentally unrealistic, in the sense that it's not real: it doesn't take into account basic thermodynamics and the structure of local space (Earth with it's atmosphere, etc.) It's a cartoon.
The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then.
Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...)
I could go on and on.
Energy without wisdom will eventually fail.
Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board.
That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?
Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.
FWIW, I'm not against using energy, I'm against wasting energy.
Why does efficiency work against having more energy or more stuff?
I'm sure there were a thousand efficiency improvements needed to make the aluminium foil that is mentioned, we didn't just plug a lump of bauxite into the mains and scream "more power!" like a mad scientist in a horror film.