[A1kmm]

Innovations which reduce the amount of human effort needed to do things also reduce the amount of human effort that is directly or indirectly needed per unit of goods or services consumed, and so to fund the same total consumption, less work per individual is needed.

There are three sides of the triangle which can move - the percentage unemployment, the number of hours per employee, or the total amount of consumption. Historically, people have simply consumed more - luxury is addictive, and people measure each other relative to what others in their community have.

However, there is a major counterbalancing force to efficiency gains - that there are only finite natural resources, and many easily accessible reserves are becoming depleted. Reserves of fossil fuels and high grade ores are declining fast, so increasingly more labour is required per unit of energy or metal - and the cumulative effects of pollution rise with accumulation over time and a rising population, more labour is required to prevent pollution.

[stretchwithme]

There are only finite natural resources if you're talking about a fixed number of atoms of each variety being available on the earth, but we don't have finite resources. We are creating new things all the time that lessen our need to consume natural resources. And if we stopped subsidizing consumption, we'd see even more such creativity.

Any natural resource that gets scarcer even as demand for it increases naturally gets more expensive. This gives people incentives to avoid its use, either by being more efficient or substituting alternatives.

This has even worked for land itself. As land gets more expensive as more people wish to live in an urban area, buildings add stories, using the same land over and over again.

[tome]

As use of a resource becomes more efficient the rate of consupmtion actually increases not decreases:

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

[stretchwithme]

It is true that when a resource is difficult to use and produces little, its not in great demand. And when more efficient and productive ways to use it are found, the resource is more widely used.

But this doesn't mean that it will not become more expensive as it gets used up and more careful use of it will be made. Human nature will continue to function.

[danielharan]

It's an unproven proposition, and usually only applied to industry. If my refrigerator is more efficient, I won't buy a second one. A more efficient car might give me an incentive to drive more, but that seems really marginal.

[eru]

People who hadn't brought refrigerators before, might be a first one, though. And if there are extremely efficient, we might even switch to living inside refrigerators [1] in summer.

[1] Some people already do.

[danielharan]

That triangle ignores worker productivity and resource efficiency.

To prevent pollution, we need workers producing LED lights instead of wasteful incandescents or mercury-laden (and ugly) compact fluorescents.

[tomjen3]

Have you actually used an LED light?

I have - and they are insanely expensive (okay thats to be expected) but what is worse is that they give very, very little light, not enough to light even a dinner table, let alone a small room.

Those compact fluorescent lights? Yeah not only do they flicker (which is bad for your eyes, even though it is not fast enough that you can see them just like the old CRT monitors) and there is some evidence that they may be linked to eye cancer, but even if they aren't they take about 30 seconds to turn on fully, which means I have to walk the corridor in the dark (what then is the purpose of lightning? fuck if I know). We don't need LED lighting, we don't need compact fluorescent lighting, we need actually useful lighting, which means incandescent light bulbs for at least the next 30 years.

Call me back in 2040 and we can try again.

[rdl]

You're right that LEDs aren't there yet in terms of price, but in new installations where you build LED lighting in rather than trying to retrofit existing incandescent fixtures with LED bulbs, you can get some amazing lighting with LED which isn't possible any other way.

On the environment, the low hanging fruit is to make electricity incredibly cheap -- I want PV solar and wind for grid resilience, but huge nuclear fission (U-233/Thorium, or reprocessing of U-235/Pu-239) using standardized designs in large quantities.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This is a problem with LED lights, but it's not a problem with the technology.

LED are expensive now, but the price/performance ratio and efficiency are improving rapidly. And as the other poster said, when designed in properly into new installations they can have excellent performance. But their lighting and heat dissipation characteristics are so different that they really don't do well when retrofitted into fixtures that were designed for incandescents or fluorescents.

The problem is that most of the "LED bulb replacements" and fixtures available to the consumer now are low-efficiency, expensive incandescent replacements that only exist to capture the buyer's money, not to offer better performance.