We're very far from exceeding the limits of available energy on Earth. Between enormous reserves of carbon (the U.S. has an insane amount of natural gas in proven reserves), nuclear, and solar, we're good for a long time. Of course, I am considering that negative population growth is baked into the world population pyramid, which means that we'll see some slowing of energy demand growth in a couple of decades. I think most people would be very happy with 15-20KWh/day, which is roughly what Americans are used to.
> I think most people would be very happy with 15-20KWh/day
'640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' - Bill Gates (apocryphal, apparently he never said this)
When the Jones' are using their energy-sucking teleporter to travel instantly to work and taking summer vacations to the Moon, when their kitchen is fitted with exotic self-cleaning metamaterials and they tolerate no natural discomfort in their lives, I would think that their neighbors would not be caught dead one step behind them. You can achieve happiness with less - but you can achieve happiness today with much less than your number as well, and most people measure themselves against their neighbors, not some theoretical absolute level of energy usage.
Energy consumption in the developed world tends to increase.
U.S. consumption has been around 22KWh/day/capita for a long time. The rest of the world is much lower. The 22KWh/day/capita includes gasoline and diesel. I don't see Americans wanting to consume 30KWh/day for current uses. Do you?
According to OurWorldInData[0] the number is closer to 220 kWH/capita/day, although it does show the usage as stable or even declining over the last decade.
According to the US Energy Information Administration[1] total energy usage seems to have increased. That particular chart stops at 2009, but this tool[2] using their data shows 1. stable usage since ~2007 and 2. roughly 10% increase since 1995, and a 3-fold increase since the start of the data in 1950. By a long time, did you mean since 2007?
Current growth rates need an exponential increase in resources.
Even if we -after some technological singularity- could expand a sphere of influence that brings everything in the expanding bubble to complete subatomic level of control, this would mean at most sustainable cubic growth (available resources are growing cubically).
So our current situation is exceptional and not steady state and can't continue indefinitely (wasn't going to anyway).
I think his main most valuable point is that the status quo can't - and that stands.
Personally chasing constant growth doesn't sound like what we need to be aiming at anyway.
It would be saner to be engineering some long term stable state that we adjust as soon as new potentials become available.
Like aiming at a fixed upper limit maximum human population on earth with an acceptable minimal standard of life as opposed to letting blind growth search out the natural feedback loops instead.
I think they are talking about "economic" growth rates, which are independent of population growth rates.
This actually makes me lean towards saying that the economist is right, money is arbitrary anyway so if the argument is actually that the economy can increase forever I see no reason that can't happen physically. It's not real, it can't be real in the future and it's barely real now.
Well, if we are going to talk about nominal growth, I'll throw this in.
Our money system does need endless growth just to function properly but it only needs endless nominal growth. If inflation is high enough then real interest rates are negative. No need for real growth.
Numbers going up does not mean increased productivity and there are human (and technological) limits to that, even if you make everyone into work slaves. Which would be completely immoral.
Maybe we are far from exceeding the limits of available energy regarding the inputs of the processes, but our most immediate problem is the output energy, which is released as heath in the environment.
Ok, but CO2 is another output of human activities, can we increase energy expenditure while lowering CO2 emissions? (it’s not a rethoric question, I don’t know the answer)
