297
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
297 points (100.0% liked)
News
24550 readers
3381 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The US has had flat energy use for over a decade now. Which is great as far as emissions go, but honestly is extremely bad as far as civilization goes. Separate from energy prices or emissions, overall usage is a measure of overall activity. If our usage is dropping while population increases, then we're dying as a civilization.
An improving situation would be increasing usage, with decreasing carbon emissions.
Nonsense. Some things have become more efficient - like swapping 60W incandescent bulbs for 9W LEDs.
Civilization isn't dying 🤣
Efficiency is great, but should make energy cheaper, leading to more usage. Again especially with a growing population. Dropping energy usage means costs increased despite efficiency, or they decreased and there was no productive capacity to put that energy to use. Either way it's bad for the country.
Efficiency should not lead to more usage but to often it does. The example above shows that at a time we should have seen massive dips in usage as you say it just sorta leveled off which would indicate quite and increase in use. Lighting after all is one of the bigger eletric usages. Or I know it was in the time of filament bulbs.
Efficiency lowers demand, which lowers prices, which should create opportunity for expansion and higher demand. Except prices have been rising, profits have been rising, and real energy investment has been flat. And you can see it across the entire western economy, not just the US. It's great that we've been moving to clean energy, the problem is that we're doing less over all as a civilization.
Think of it this way, fusion power is about to be an actual thing, making cheap clean energy on tap for the planet. And we're just going to sit and watch it glow, because no one can figure out what to do with limitless energy.
oh man. firstly using energy for energy usage sake is again a pattern but its generally due to waste and human nature. Laziness and indulgence. Secondly fusion is not about to be an actual thing. Thirdly when fusion becomes an actual thing it is not limitless energy. There are a whole bunch of limitations around the technology the will have cost. Very much the way fission was not limitless energy and its not because fissionable material is scarce its due to all the associated costs around fission. Even block hole energy won't be free limitless energy.
Ok, try aluminum. Used to be super rare, rarely used. Now you can't throw a cat without hitting some. Production efficiency went through the roof, price dropped like a rock, and suddenly there's aluminum things everywhere. Efficiency created far greater demand due to the drop in cost. Energy is even more useful than aluminum, it literally makes aluminum. And yet, we're using less, as we get more efficient at making it.
aluminum replaces other materials in its use. energy is its own thing. using more aluminum for no real reason would not be good but we replaced things we made with other materials with aluminum once it was common but we don't use it for things aluminum would not be a better material to use it for.
Energy is a base commodity, no different than aluminum, plywood, orange juice, oil or eggs. All of which increase as the population, thus demand and production, increase. And aluminum is used in a lot of structural applications where other materials would be far superior, but aluminum is a hell of a lot more affordable. It's not that it's the best material, it's the best material at that price, due to cheap efficient production.
Exactly. Its a fungible item that can replace or be replaced by other things which energy is not. And your right that increased population will increase demand but we don't want to be increasing demand of anything as all the fungible commodities while being fungible are not inexhaustable.
Lowering demand while increasing population means a lowering standard of living. That's how wars start, and we end up with extremist idiots in charge. If you want lower demand, lower, or stop growing the population. And also realize that most attempts to lower population growth will be massively unpopular. But again, the alternative is war and extremism.
Well the problem there is the increasing population which should not be happening as long as we are using more than a years worth of planetary resources each year.
Agreed, but try telling people not to breed or worse do something to stop them. That's going to end almost as badly as over breeding in the first place. The difference being it would happen right then, rather than some inevitable future date.
I don't believe underbreeding will end very badly. It means we have to handle things differently and getting back to growth is not incredibly tough. When it comes down to it we need to lower the wealth gap which will largely take care of the rest.
It's not that population decline has to end badly, it's that causing it will end badly. It's eugenics and religious and class wars all rolled into a ball of angry fun.
Knowing the solution to the problem isn't the problem, it's that billions of people don't like the solution.
nonsense. education and birth control is all that is needed.
Have you met humanity?
Leave that argument back in the 1970s where it belongs.
Can you provide a source for your flat energy use argument?
Google " total energy consumption" and pick your source. There's literally hundreds. It's an overall trend in most Western countries. Coal usage has dropped globally, renewable is up everywhere, which is all great and hopefully continues. Overall though, power consumption has stopped increasing 15 to 20 years ago.
Yes, if lightbulbs went from 60W to 7W it totally makes sense for me to put 20 of them. /s
Dumbest argument ever.
If you save a dollar a month on electricity, you save it, that means your savings rate goes up, and banks do more lending, businesses expand due to cheaper finances.
Use more than one brain cell, that one is tired.
Decades ago (half a century ago) people believed energy production and usage was directly tied to growth. If your energy wasn’t growing, neither was your economy. If your energy per person started shrinking, that’s an oh shit moment …. Or so people believed back then.
Then the last half century happened. Energy production plateaued , yet economic growth continued. Per person energy usage decreased yet the economy did well a lot of the time
It turns out that correlation may have appeared in a manufacturing economy, but it’s not at all correlated when you have huge efficiency gains while also transitioning to more of a service economy