[bismuthcrystal]

That is 100% correct. Energy is never enough. Increase production capacity and people will adjust their lifestyle accordingly and they will not go back.

>>people would say that at some point it’ll get so cheap that it won’t be worth running a meter to track customer usage

A similar case was made about automation. On the first half of the XX century people argued that by year 2000 we would only need to work 1 hour a day, because machines would do the rest. How that turned out? So i'm always very suspicious of arguments where the future holds some sort of cornucopia.

[mellavora]

May I suggest you read "The Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber (may he rest in peace). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...

He argues that we've built a giant bureaucracy, most jobs are bullshit jobs (he created that term), and most work is a scam.

We could have UBI and most people working just a few hours per week, but that much freedom is dangerous. Politicians might loose power.

More seriously, watch The Century of the Self (Adam Curtis), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04, which describes the creation and rise of marketing as a social force in the 1900s; how the consumer-based society was created.

A large driver of this was the need to "control the masses", because if they weren't controlled bad things happened. Like world wars or crystal nights.

Bullshit jobs and an all-encompassing bureaucracy, keeping people working all the time and unable to think, is our current social technique for controlling the masses.

[sangnoir]

> We could have UBI and most people working just a few hours per week, but that much freedom is dangerous. Politicians might loose power

This strikes like reaching, when a simpler explanation will suffice: automation improves productivity, but the owners of capital have decided that it is better to pocket the profits than to reduce the working hours or provide UBI.

[MerelyMortal]

> crystal nights

Are you refering to something like Kristallnacht, or is it something else?

[mellavora]

exactly that.

[tuatoru]

I don't know about "enough". There are a lot of things we need to do: fertilizer, iron smelting, off-road machinery fuel production, plastics, lubricants, shipping and airplane fuel, ...

I do know that when energy is produced domestically, then your energy can't be held hostage by OPEC or the Russian Federation.

That is the promise of renewables: freedom from geopolitics.

[polotics]

The big question with renewables is how much would they cost if their whole production chain were using only renewables: cheap mining, cheap trucking, cheap maintenance, cheap money, all courtesy of cheap hydrocarbons to burn...

[PeterisP]

Those factors matter, but from that perspective you can treat renewables as "stored cheap hydrocarbons" - because for actual hydrocarbons you're vulnerable to short-term fluctuations (e.g. you may have gas now, and some gas stored, but in the case of a supply shock you need a fix within a year) but if you've got some renewables which were made with cheap hydrocarbons now, then you can be sure that you'll have that energy for many years in the future even if hydrocarbons get expensive or unavailable due to supply disruptions.