[roryisok]

There are so many things I could argue with here but I'm tired so I'll just pick one.

> If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind.

Why would it mean that? If we were talking about households using more and more it might, but it might not. My tv uses far less energy than the one I had twenty years ago but there's no chance I'm going back to that heap of CRT junk. Likewise all my other appliances, my car etc. My life has improved as my energy usage has decreased. But even if the opposite were true, it's not households, but industry that in this case is consuming more and more power. An industry that produces no goods, provides no service, does no research, improves only the lives of the direct owners of that industry. It's as if they're building enormous, energy sucking diamond factories, but with the added chance that diamonds might be worthless by the time they have them.

Even if I'm wrong, even if higher energy usage means higher standard of living, that's a short term outlook, because over a hundred year period it will mean a much, much lower standard of living for everyone who hasn't drowned or starved yet

[apr]

You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture.

And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change.

By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.

[jdietrich]

We're mostly being bitten on the arse by the Jevons paradox. Improving efficiency has a tendency to increase overall consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[roryisok]

> By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level

Did you not just literally say that higher energy usage is itself a good thing?

Also on your point about production: My old tv had to be built, my old car also had to be built. It cost energy to replace them, but it does not equate to higher energy usage going forward.

I do agree with one thing you said though. We're swimming in unharnessed energy right now. If we can swap all the coal plants for fusion then maybe we can afford to waste energy on generating digital money, but right now bitcoin server farms mean more carbon in the atmosphere

[robertAngst]

Its important to stop being black and white here.

You both understand each others points.

[bigphishy]

If there are other falacious points then please give evidence for their inaccuracy, otherwise it appears like you just picked an easy point to refute, but claimed the entire argument was false.

[roryisok]

No. I've got nothing to prove to you, stranger. Arguing with people on the internet is almost as big a waste of energy as bitcoin mining. If you think I'm wrong I'm not going to convince you or that guy otherwise.