[JumpCrisscross]

> Hopefully another large part of the reduction will come from people adopting less wasteful living, transport, eating etc behaviours and preferences

Zero chance. This would require reductions in quality of life. Even minor fuel tax increases have spawned capital-freezing protests from the Arab world to Paris.

[throw0101a]

Buildings are responsible for 40% of the total amount of energy needed (US, EU). Mandating better air tightness (<1 ACH@50) and raising insulation levels would go a long way to reducing that.

Residentially, you can built a 5000 square foot (500 sq. m) home that needs only 1500W (1.5 kW)—basically a hair dyer—to heat/cool:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA

Using an HRV/ERV with an air filter per ASHRAE 62.1 and 62.2 gives you very good air quality.

[fulafel]

There's a lot of low hanging fruit, eg electricity consumption per household is ~3x in the US vs the EU. I feel it's quite likely that the coming voter and decisionmaker generations have increasingly developed consciences about these things.

Regarding fuel tax protests, I think your anecdotes are actually pretty unrepresentative. In the EU the fuel tax increases have been going on for a long time. And there haven't been any Arab world spanning protests recently from my memory.

[acdha]

Less wasteful is a huge, unsupported claim contradicted by many examples. As a simple one, think about how much electricity the 1990 PC user consumed compared to one today – EnergyStar encouraged that but it had basically nobody cared about it enough to whine about it, much less riot. Lightbulbs did have some efforts to turn them into a conservative rallying point but even Trump supporting it wasn’t enough to get traction because only the most diehard ideologues are going to say they want to give more of their money to the utility company.

The real lesson here is that the best way is to give people clear price signals. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel consumption and suddenly people will make less wasteful choices in many areas. We saw this in the US before fracking took off, when fuel economy was creeping up because $4/gallon gas was enough to get people thinking about whether they really needed a Suburban to take 1-2 people grocery shopping.

The Arab & French protests did involve fuel pricing but that was more in the sense of being the last straw than an unavoidable cause. If the French government hadn’t been using that to lower taxes on the wealthy, for example, or simply been less unpopular before it started, it wouldn’t have flared up like that. It’s a valid concern but I wouldn’t generalize too much from a more complex scenario than it might appear. Especially in the US, where the average family could make substantial energy usage reductions with simple, low-impact changes (combining trips, reducing food waste, insulating houses, replacing antique appliances, etc. are not the stuff of revolution).

[arrosenberg]

In large parts of the US, this isn't necessarily true. Our cities and suburbs are designed around individual auto use. Re-designing these areas to be more pedestrian and mass-transit oriented would likely be a quality-of-life increase for most people.