| Energy is not infinite. It requires resources to create it. The resources available to us in today's energy grid are finite, and the cheap and accessible resources produce side-effects that cause pollution and change the climate in ways we're still struggling to understand fully (but we know for sure: nett bad). If the entire US grid was using renewables, the entire stack was carbon-free and the work had been done to offset the building of those facilities and all the transmission gear between production and consumption, your argument would hold up: using energy in this scenario becomes side-effect free. Using more of it would cause the creation of more of it, and more efficiently from a capital investment perspective, and prices would come down for everyone. But that is not what is happening today. The grid is already facing capacity issues. The industry is already concerned about "congestion": adding demand via EVs and heat pumps all over the globe is going to stretch the grid as it is. The cost - both time and capital - of upgrading it all is unfeasible, so we need to find ways to reduce consumption. Add into the mix the need to complete the transition to renewables, and we're in a situation where really, Earth needs to become more conscious about energy usage and more efficient in its use. If 2.3% of the power was being used to fabricate new technologies that would change the situation - manufacturing of more efficient machinery, building new wind turbines, fabricating new solar panels - we could make the argument that while energy resource is not infinite, this process would help us move to a point of better resource management. Using it to create magic numbers that libertarians trade with each other, is just silly. It's especially silly, because they could simply switch to a less energy intensive mechanism, and still have their magic numbers to try and take down central bankers with. |