[pasabagi]

The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on.

Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offenders (uninsulated houses) the raw drop in energy consumption is such that even if everybody starts leaving their lights on all the time, usage will still drop.

[roenxi]

Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.

In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.

It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (<narrator: it wasn't a coincidence>), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Oil_Production.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[pasabagi]

I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I read GP as saying that energy usage will always meet whatever capacity you can generate. I don't think that's true: if the economic return from energy usage doesn't cover the cost of producing the energy itself, then production will fall.

I also don't think the UK's role as a fossil fuel exporter/producer is relevant at all. The UK was essentially de-industrialized in the 80's for political reasons, and the energy usage is inefficient, also for political reasons. Many countries have never been fossil fuel exporters, and do not have the UK's sky high energy costs.

The biggest single cause of waste (and thus high prices) in the UK is uninsulated homes. This is caused by a lack of sensible building codes, which in turn is caused by a lack of sensible politics.