[eternityforest]

There's no pollution free energy. Even solar is not perfect, there's only so much land that is suitable.

If you don't focus on efficiency they might just invent new ways to use energy that don't really improve standard of living.

It's a lot easier to switch to renewables if you don't need as much energy in the first place.

[jjk166]

This is a false equivalency - fossil fuel consumption produces gas and particulate pollution which causes severe and irreversible damage to health and the environment on a planetwide scale indiscriminately, solar takes up a small area of unused land in a location which can be arbitrarily chosen to avoid harm and the space can be reclaimed at any time. Yes, solar isn't free, but we as a civilization could be consuming many hundreds of times more power than we currently use with no meaningful issues if it were all coming from solar energy.