
What is energy, actually? (2011) - gorpovitch
https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-us/what-is-energy-actually/
======
nabla9
The argument is based on looking a the world as a whole.

In developed world energy intensity of GDP is decreasing even when you take
into account imports. Post-industrial economies can grow while decreasing
energy use.

What the author is suggesting is that the developing world should stop
growing. I can't agree with that. They need their electricity and washing
machines.

GDP per unit of energy use (constant 2011 PPP $ per kg of oil equivalent)

EU:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?lo...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?locations=EU)

US:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?lo...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?locations=US)

~~~
abyssin
They need their electricity and washing machine, but do they need exotic
vacations and long commutes in powerful cars? Do they need clothes that are
made to be worn for a very short time? Do they need technology that's cheap to
the point of it being wasted without an afterthought?

~~~
BjoernKW
> [...] long commutes in powerful cars?

People in developed countries don't need that either. Commuting being a hard
requirement for modern life in an industrialised country is both a fallacy and
perpetuated cargo cult.

Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but
they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because
"that's the way it's always been".

Doing away with lengthy commutes will be key to addressing many of today's
problems, including climate change.

~~~
stjohnswarts
So are you in favor of government telling people where to live and work? I've
seriously heard your position many times but no one ever puts forward a
solution to making it happen other than the government forcing people to do
it. Sounds like a dictatorship to me. and no I don't think employers are all
gonna just let people not "come in" to work.

~~~
BjoernKW
No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I argue for people to change their
inveterate, cargo cult ways of thinking about what constitutes work and the
conditions required for it.

We need a new mindset not new government policy. That change can't and must
not be mandated but has to come from each and everyone of us.

------
hliyan
Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last
year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my
opinion:

1\. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're
already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee
welfare and sometimes, the rule of law.

2\. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it.

3\. Investors demand growth because they want a certain minimum return on
investment.

4\. Investors need to invest money in instruments with a certain minimum ROI
because if they don't, inflation will erode their savings.

5\. This continuous growth requirement forces companies to compete for larger
and larger portions of market share, which in turn forces their competitors to
compete harder in response.

6\. The end result is a sort of "Red Queen" effect where everyone is forced to
compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of
living.

7\. We know that the more extreme a competition becomes, the more ruthless the
participants become, often to the point of acting immorally.

8\. Therefore, we should focus on curbing inflation to curb the pace of
overwhelming growth, and thereby restore some measure of social justice.

~~~
pjc50
Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth
because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions.

I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth _and_ no
inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a
dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That
seems likely to accelerate the lethality of the billionaries vs. hungry poor
conflict rather than de-escalate it.

> inflation will erode their savings

> compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of
> living

These are two different things. Savings are a _stock_ , "standard of living"
is a _flow_. The distinction matters here because GDP measures flows; the two
are related through the money equation "MV=PQ".

~~~
new2628
> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West.

pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of
services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased
supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products
and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Inflation is the opposite of cheapening, so I don’t see how that can be.

What you may be feeling though, and what isn’t calculated in any numbers, are
the increases in volatility, which is itself a cost. The volatility of not
living in the few economically burgeoning regions, the volatility of having to
keep moving up the ladder or else falling behind, increased years of education
and loans for what may or may not be a lucrative career, etc.

~~~
pjc50
Parent is probably referring to "shrinkflation": rather than charge 10% more
for a box of cereal, make it 10% smaller for the same price. Or otherwise
reduce the cost of inputs.

> volatility

Definitely worth having a discussion on this, although we need to define the
reference period - volatility was high in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Arguably it
was only low in the ""end of history"" period between the fall of the Berlin
wall and the 2008 crisis.

------
charlysisto
Very impressed to find Jancovici here. I've been watching his intervention for
6 months and I found he has one of the most rational approach to our coming
world. It is bleak but not desperate, although his main message is :
technology/economy (based on our consumption of fossil fuel) will not have
time to catch up on the coming catastrophies and the inevitable pic oil. We
have shaped the world to our convenience now we have to adapt to it and the
illusion of infinite resource needs to end or it will end us.

------
abyssin
French speakers, don't miss Jancovici's appearances on Thinkerview. Along with
Bihouix, his talks are clear and enlightening.

~~~
sbdmmg
And his recent (2019-11-07) interview on France Culture
[https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-
matins/tr...](https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-
matins/transition-energetique-avons-nous-encore-le-temps)

~~~
revax
Also his whole course on climate change on youtube. I'd never imagined JMJ
linked here.

------
saint_fiasco
That's easy to say from the First World, where they already traded our
(global) environment for (local) gains. But what are the people in poor
countries supposed to do? Just stay poor forever?

~~~
mrpopo
The problem of excessive energy consumption isn't caused by the people in poor
countries though.

~~~
vixen99
And who defines excessive? If you happen to be talking about CO2 emissions,
the level in the UK (1% of total emissions) has been reduced to that last
experienced in 1890. Aside from CO2 what's the problem with energy consumption
in itself? There are plenty of people in the UK who have a financial problem
in keeping warm in the winter. I see a figure of 4 million from 2016. That's
not at all likely to get smaller as renewables push up from providing 22%
(inc. non carbon) of the energy demand in the UK at present.
[https://gridwatch.co.uk/](https://gridwatch.co.uk/)

~~~
mrpopo
> Aside from CO2 what's the problem with energy consumption in itself?

I agree with this entirely. Some countries managed to reduce CO2 emissions
from their electricity production. However when you look at primary energy
consumption, including heating, industry, transportation, no country manages
to reach a low-CO2 energy profile.

> There are plenty of people in the UK who have a financial problem in keeping
> warm in the winter.

There are plenty of people in the UK who live in old, precarious buildings
with very poor insulation. Mandatory paid-for insulation in these buildings
would reduce energy consumption, CO2 emissions and increase comfort of living.
That's part of the measures pushed forward by Jancovici.

> And who defines excessive?

That is, indeed the key question of our times.

------
jstewartmobile
A lot of charts and napkin math to reach an obvious conclusion. Better
discussion would be, " _A) Why do we worship GDP, and B) how do we stop?_ "

My own answers (shared as a starting point rather than a destination) would
be:

A)

\- old westerners are really attached to the pensions they promised themselves

\- marginally-skilled people prefer the illusion of agency offered by
employment over being total dependents of the state

\- people who have never experienced certain products and services attach much
more value to them than those who already have--new toy vs old hat.

\- plutocrats are very interested in keeping the machine well-oiled so that
they may enjoy their lives in peace and keep the guillotine at bay.

and B)

\- short of civilizational collapse, I'm not sure that we can.

~~~
paganel
The elephant in the room is the continual neglect or the downright
(intellectual) hate shown to anyone who had dared mention Malthus in the last
25-30 years (his thoughts had a bit of intellectual resurgence in the 1970s,
but that was pretty much it). It seems like in the last 2 or 3 years we have
tried and tried to reach his same conclusions in very convoluted ways,
ignoring his very existence.

The good thing at least is that some of us have at last reached the conclusion
that some sort of planet-wide environmental growth limits have been reached,
even that wasn't the case until not that long ago, when any mention of a
possible limit was met with "we'll technologically surpass that, we always
have".

~~~
jstewartmobile
Malthus is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many "forbidden charts"
that people can lose their jobs over these days!

Outside of global warming--all we plebes get are Pinker-nuggets on how
everything is just fine.

~~~
enugu
Curious. Care to give some examples?

------
nickik
There is so much wrong with this.

> from 1880 to 1975, when energy per capita is strongly growing, the world
> undergoes just one major economic crisis, in 1929.

> since 1975, after the rate of growth dramatically decreased, there has been
> a crisis every 5 to 10 years: 1975, 1980, 1991, 2000, 2008, 2012, and it
> would be no surprise to have a new one in the coming years.

These statements are just totally wrong. There were many more economic crisis
between 1880 - 1975 and often those were worse then those since 1975.

These statements are just 100% opposite of every history of economics I have
ever seen.

It seems he gets the causation totally backwards.

> and recurring recessions will become something normal in our economic system

Recessions are absolutely not linked to energy supply.

------
bullen
I'm mostly commenting here to be able to find this guy again later.

But now that I have listened to him he is 100% spot on about most things.

The only problems this guys has are:

1) He's biased for nuclear because it feeds him. Nuclear cannot be built
without hydrocarbons and toxic nuclear waste is not something you can dig down
into the ground without hydrocarbons, even if the radiation is only hazardous
for 1000 years, we're not going to have enough energy to handle the waste.

2) He does not understand money enough yet. Fiat money cannot have value
without hydrocarbons. GDP is 99% debt because today money is 99% debt and
therefore neither has value. Money is something humans have arbitrarily
invented without being inspired by nature, it does not exist!

3) He does not understand that some things run and use energy whether you use
them or not. For example the routers on the internet because processors are
synchronous. The solution is async. processors, but our economic system
doesn't encourage energy saving research, at least before it's too late, which
is now.

That said, if the energy density of uranium is 1000000x that of oil, which in
it's turn is 1000x more than batteries; this guy for president?

------
acidburnNSA
Great discussion. My favorite definition of energy is that it is a replacement
for the labor and time of human beings. Energy gives us freedom to choose how
to live our lives because it does stuff for us that we don't want to do. This
is why so few of us are farmers. Energy leads very directly to high quality of
life.

As such, per capita energy usage isn't just linked to GDP, but also to Human
Development Index (a composite index to quantify quality of life that includes
GDP).

Here's what HDI vs. per capital electricity usage looks like:
[https://i.imgur.com/8otdGxP.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8otdGxP.jpg)

Bubble size is proportional to population. While correlation does not imply
causation, it's quite clear that as quality of life improves, so does energy
usage, to a point.

The striking thing is the knee. The knee is mentioned in the parent article
from a GDP point of view but I think that's only part of the story. On the
low-energy side, you can see that a little bit of energy can dramatically
improve your quality of life. At the very low end is where people are cooking
with indoor stoves and dying to the tune of 3.8 million per year from indoor
air pollution.

Then you see for places like the USA, we could cut our per capita energy usage
in half and probably not be affected from a quality of life standpoint. We're
saturated.

There is a worldwide moral imperative to increase per capita energy usage of
people at the low end of this curve for quality of life reasons. They deserve
the ability to choose how they spend their time. Doing so requires about a
2-4x increase in total world energy production.

Energy sources that can enable that kind of gain without causing more air
pollution deaths and without causing climate change are well-known. Here they
are as a function of carbon emissions (equivalent) per kWh generated:
[https://i.imgur.com/8LQFVMO.png](https://i.imgur.com/8LQFVMO.png)

------
alexnewman
It is ludicrous how few economists are willing to take thermodynamics as a
limiting theory to the economy when it's so critical in finance and science.

Not as crazy as the fact ISLM doesn't capture private debt, but still a huge
problem

------
Dumblydorr
It would make far more sense to massively increase energy efficiency across
all segments. This will further decouple GDP from emissions.

~~~
new2628
What do you mean "further decouple"? It has never been decoupled in any real
sense.

------
anovikov
[https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-
inte...](https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity-
gdp-data.html)

Yet, reduction of energy use per unit of GDP is not impossible. In the last 28
years there has been reduction by 35% overall.

------
carapace
> The term “GDP per energy unit” is nothing else than the energy efficiency of
> the economy: the more efficient the economic system is, the more GDP is
> produced with the same amount of energy. In other words, when this term
> increases, it means that for the same amount of kWh (or BTU!), we can have
> more furniture, glasses, cars, frozen peas, buildings or coffee machines.

FWIW, i want to point out that this is an often-overlooked leverage point for
improving our situation. Our systems today are grossly inefficient. For
example, something like 30%-50% of the electricity we generate (okay,
_transform_ ) is lost in the grid on the way to the consumer. Much of it is
lost after that too.

~~~
temac
> For example, something like 30%-50% of the electricity we generate (okay,
> transform) is lost in the grid on the way to the consumer.

I don't think it is that much.

Plus electricity is not our main energy consumption.

And most of our machines have actually a decent efficiency. And/or it is hard
to optimize. ICE for example have not even progressed that much in several
decades. One or two dozen % maybe? And they will also not improve much in the
future.

So we can not sustain by merely efficiency improvements. Because we are
talking about reducing the energy consumption greatly. Like x2, 3, 4. But of
course efficiency is crucially important, and part of what will be required.

~~~
carapace
> I don't think it is that much.

I can't find a good reference, and I think it's gotten better since the 70's,
but yes, depending on who you ask and how you do the accounting (and which
nation or region you're talking about) losses are from about 10% to as much as
70%.

I'm glad you're not against improving efficiency but you should check it out,
the scope for improvement _just_ in efficiency is great.

I. e., ICEs emit streamers and blobs of unburned fuel (not to mention other
still-useful chemicals that instead become pollution). You can install a spark
plug in your tail pipe and send 5m flames shooting out the back. People used
to do it for kicks, I'm given to understand. There's a whole cottage industry
of fringe-tech gadgets to atomize fuel more finely to improve cars' fuel
efficiency.

Or consider the refrigerator, it opens like a cabinet spilling cold air on the
floor every time.

We can get 2x improvement in energy consumption _just_ though greater
efficiency.

------
CraigJPerry
We make more things, but we consume less resources to do it today than ever
before. That was the essential point of Andrew McAfee's book and his
discussion on Econtalk the other week.

[https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-
less/](https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/)

That appears to be backed up here too; this article reports that the $GDP per
kWh is increasing over time.

Does this then mean that reducing GDP will have disproportionately LESS of an
effect on energy consumption than it will have on value? I.e. we will have to
take a much bigger hit on value produced to effect energy consumed.

~~~
lonelappde
You are conflating KWhr with KWhr/production. KWhr is increasing because
production is increasing faster than efficiency is increasing.

------
jhallenworld
I think there is only limited correlation between physical energy and money.
Money is directly tied with human work: wages for time and effort. Physical
energy can vary widely depending on the specific work, even when the price is
the same.

The cost of fossil fuel is low because the human work necessary to extract it
is very low- it's a problem for the ecology due to no (immediate) human work
cost for the Co2 damage. The cost of solar is even lower (which is why it's
disruptive)- once you have the solar panel, you don't need any human work.

~~~
bg117
labor that are still uneducated and do physical work like mining are plenty.
so there is not shortage of labor and that keeps wages low. When something is
produced on a mass scale, the costs gets lower and that explains why panels
are cheap.

------
austincheney
In a market economy there is a lot of deliberate inefficiency. Commercial
economies are driven, primarily, by transaction quantity, which is most
typically exchanging end goods/services for money. Exchange quantity goes up
as wages go up and unemployment goes down. Therefore it is in the interest of
companies and government that people are employed, as many as possible, even
if each person does very little to substantiate the wages earned. This line of
thinking falls apart when an economy enters a correction.

Likewise, people will require less energy when wages shrink or disappear all
together. Energy consumption is one of many indirect parts of the market
economy. When people have less money they will travel less and shop less,
which decreases the need for fuel and manufacturing.

\---

Reducing energy consumption is a very bad deliberate goal though. Energy
efficiency is a natural goal from the collision of increased demand versus
fuel cost. The economic desire to increase energy efficiency does just result
in lower prices but also cleaner fuel sources. This has trended true over the
last 150 years far before people became aware of environment consequences from
rising fuel consumption.

Since rising demand, a product of rising consumption rates, drives technology
interest in fuel efficiency it is healthier for future economies, and the
environment, to encourage greater fuel consumption at consequence to the
economy, and environment, at the present. That statement will remain true only
so long as up scaling increase of efficiency outpaces up scaling rates of
consumption over time. So far the difference in scale has shown true since the
start industrialization and there is no indication that the difference in
scale will decrease.

Another way to think about this is energy equivalence. As energy sources
become cheaper, cleaner, and more available over time they allow greater
access to energy by people with less purchasing power. A poor third world
economy can grow in ways it could not before because less investment is
demanded to achieve growth independence. These new and emerging energy sources
and distribution methods are not created for humanitarian reasons. They are
created from expensive investment to satisfy expensive first world energy
demands. The people who benefit most are those with the greatest need in
developing economies under high market pressure without the luxury of
expensive investments in infrastructure or logistics. An under-developed
economy with high market pressure is one where there is huge demand for raw
goods/resources but that economy lacks the finances to invest in itself, such
as Ghana under the cocoa industry.

------
gpsx
How do these ideas of energy relate to things like google search and software
in general? I know server farms use a ton of energy and I also am pretty sure
the human brain is by far the biggest consumer of energy in the human body.
Maybe it is just that different forms of value creation take different amounts
of energy. I suppose it takes much more energy to create a car than to add a
new software user.

------
erikbye
Why do we need public companies?

~~~
zanny
I'd more ask why we need corporate charters sponsored and endorsed by the
government. They solely exist to exonerate private persons from responsibility
for harm done.

------
reacweb
In the not so distant future, energy could become abundant thanks to solar
energy. On the other hand, physical resources (rare earths but also the
molecules contained in oil) are limited. I think it is more important to seek
better recycling, reduce waste than to reduce energy consumption.

------
tkyjonathan
All countries in the world pursue growth. Forcing them to reduce their energy
usage, is a non-starter.

Your best bet would be to reduce the energy consumption of things and have
more power sources that have no CO2 emissions like hydro-electric and nuclear.

------
wazoox
For millennia, there was no growth because available energy was strictly
limited. GDP of a country was a function of its population, itself strongly
related to its agricultural capacity.

Read ancient history; you'll see that empires, for ages, relied entirely upon
pillaging their neighbours for their own enhancement. The world economy was a
strictly zero-sum game basically forever.

The political constructions of the past reflected that state of the matter.
There was no social mobility because resource scarcity commanded that as a son
of a mason, you couldn't be anything but a mason. And of course, 90% of people
had to work in agriculture, anyway, just to feed everyone. There was no way
out. _Of course_ society was driven through rigid hierarchies.

Then at some point some guy discovered America, and a strong, growing influx
of riches began pouring into Europe. People discovered absolute, continued
growth. Then as this trend continued and England had cut down all its trees,
they started using coal, and the movement accelerated itself, and went on
until now.

As Jancovici remarks, we _always_ went from some energy source to a more
powerful, denser, more reliable one: hunting to agriculture, windmills and
hand pumps to coal, coal to oil. We never went the other way around, but at
some time we'll have to. How to cope?

Now let's talk for a minute about GDP. I had quite heated argument with people
with economics background. Basically, they say that GDP can grow eternally
because GDP is related to _value_ , which has no physical existence. So though
GDP generally implies some form of materiality (be it in the form of ore,
grain, industrial goods, or services) it's not _mandatory_ because you could
for instance build a better car using no more materials than the previous one.

However it seems to me that this quickly wanders into philosophical territory:
what is value? In economics, it seems related to human satisfaction. As the
number of human beings on earth is physically limited (we could be 10
billions, 100 billions, but not an infinity), at some point that implies that
individual satisfaction can increase indefinitely. That's a stretch, however
you see it. That would mean that two humans exchanging a given set of
resources in a closed room could increase indefinitely the satisfaction they
get from their relationship, and so any arbitrary small country with as few
inhabitants as you want could have an infinitely growing GDP, and reach
individual nirvana and beyond. BTW I fail to see the point of free trade at
this point... Standard neoclassic economics are full of such logical holes.

------
remotecool
Unless births are also somehow limited, limiting GDP growth will eventually
cause large amounts of poverty.

Nobody wants to admit that the only real way to limit energy consumption is a
horrible dystopian future.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Birth rates have plummeted around the world, the reason we have a growing
population is people living longer.

The only exception is Africa but even there the highest emitting countries
like South Africa have a birth rate barely above replacement levels.

------
jryan49
If we entirely give up growth the world's standards of living will freeze
where it is.

------
andy_ppp
I'm very very unconvinced by this, why can't we have a green jobs revolution
and sensible environmental protections and growth! These are not exclusive,
just caused by a lack of imagination.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
They may well be exclusive:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964)

------
supernova87a
Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of
people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth.

If you didn’t have growth, you’d all be waiting for your promotion at the
power plant when someone dies and frees up a position for you.

~~~
ckastner
> _Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of
> people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth._

But that's the _good_ kind of growth, you see?

I'm being sarcastic, of course. The ironic (and to me: annoying) thing about
the really vocal moralists is that the concept of self-reflection seems to be
entirely foreign to them. The problem is always with _other_ people, and those
other people just need to change, no matter at what cost.

~~~
seirl
It _is_ the good kind of growth, the dematerialization of the economy is a
major factor in the lower energy elasticity in developed countries...

~~~
ckastner
What dematerialization? Facebook's entire business model is advertising, in
other words: getting you to buy things. It used to be Google's and Amazon's
entire business model, too, until they diversified into cloud services.

It's the exact opposite of dematerialization.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not at all against these things. On the contrary. My
point is that among those people most vocal in demanding (sometimes radical)
change from others, I frequently see a complete lack of self-reflection.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It doesn't really matter whether the people calling for radical change are
hypocrites or not. That has no material affect on whether there really is a
need for radical change. It does make them rather annoying and gives those
resistant to change something to criticise them over but it doesn't alter the
facts of the situation.

~~~
ckastner
It affects the discussion of the situation and, by extension, the politics
surrounding it, and thereby ultimately the one force that might actually
effect the necessary change.

------
BjoernKW
The title is misleading in that it's not exactly the conclusion the article
arrives at.

The article has it quite the other way round: Once energy consumption doesn't
grow anymore we either need more efficient means of growth (i.e. less energy
consumption per growth unit) or we have to forego growth.

It's pre-Industrial-Age Malthus all over again: Barring paradigm shifts that
allow for more efficient production planet Earth can only sustain a maximum
number of people (roughly 1 billion around Malthus' lifetime).

However, Malthus' theory has been disproven time and time again precisely
because there have always been such paradigm shifts that allowed us to sustain
more people with fewer resources, in others words to increase GDP/NRJ as well
as NRJ/POP.

If NRJ/POP becomes stagnant either GDP/NRJ will have to grow rapidly or there
won't by any GDP growth - and by extension population growth - anymore.

I just don't get the seemingly recurring obsession with artificially limiting
growth. Yes, thermodynamically the energy available ultimately is limited but
that doesn't mean we should start to behave as if we've already reached
thermodynamic equilibrium.

What supporters of artificially limiting GDP growth often don't acknowledge is
that placing such a limit also places a hard limit on population growth or
even necessitates a reduction in population.

In fiction, one staunch proponent of such an approach is Avengers villain
Thanos, who doesn't want to decimate half of the Universe's population for a
lark or because he's simply evil but because he's on a mission to free the
Universe from growth and overpopulation.

I suggest that instead of obsessing with the NRJ/POP term in the equation we
focus on GDP/NRJ instead.

~~~
lapinot
> If NRJ/POP becomes stagnant either GDP/NRJ will have to grow rapidly or
> there won't by any GDP growth - and by extension population growth -
> anymore.

If i'm not mistaken that's a non sequitur. How do you link GDP growth and
population growth? Why would an ever growing population even be a goal?

> there have always been such paradigm shifts that allowed us to sustain more
> people with fewer resources

No, paradigm shifts have allowed to sustain more people with more resources.
Sure resources per people were smaller (eg more efficient processes), but
global resource usage has always been growing (apart from recessions and other
"bad" events where people actually died from stuff not working). This
efficiency / resource usage counter-intuitive correlation is known as
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).

~~~
zaroth
Resource usage per capita has never been _higher_ , because the goal is not to
do the same work with less, the goal is always to achieve more with more (or
at least the same).

Achieving “the same with less” at a macroeconomic level is actually
impossible. Because if you reduce your inputs, you are by definition reducing
demand for someone else’s outputs, leading to ultimately less demand for your
outputs, i.e. a recession.

The “way out” is for the increasing output to be more ecological harvested,
less polluting, and more recyclable than before.

------
cyborgx7
They can't. Capitalism can only exist in growth. To give up growth you would
need to give up Capitalism.

You should do both.

Edit: Do people who downvote me disagree that Capitalism necessitates growth
to function? Or do they disagree that we should get rid of it?

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mytailorisrich
Give up population growth. This really is key but too often overlooked.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
Not necessarily.

Africa, with 1.+2 billion inhabitants, has a tiny carbon footprint compared to
the US (which as less than 1/3 of Africa's population).

Source:
[https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf...](https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf/factsheet_africa.pdf)

~~~
mytailorisrich
They have a tiny carbon footprint because they are overwhelmingly poor
compared to the West (granted, the US have a particularly large footprint).

So either we tell them that, sorry, but they have to stay dirt poor and also
to stay away from their rain forests even if they starve, or the aim is to
eradicate poverty on the planet, but in that latter case their resources
footprint (this is more general than carbon alone) is bound to increase.

That's why the global population is a key factor in fighting climate change
and protecting the environment.

~~~
dagss
Only a (smallish) portion of the western carbon footprint is directly
correlated with having a decent life.

Yes, the entire world cannot buy larger cars than what we need them for, we
cannot fly around the world on vacations, we cannot throw away half the food
we produce, we cannot buy clothes to use them once, and so on.

Such needless things, often more related to consumption culture than living
standards, is responsible for a large portion of emissions.

Not only that, but we live in societies with an enormous capital in
infrastructure built up from previous emissions.

I think westerners should at least start thinking about not emitting CO2 just
for the fun of it, before telling others to not have too many children.

~~~
mytailorisrich
I would dispute your claim that our resources (again, it's not just about
carbon) footprint is not directly correlated to basic standard of living.

But the key issue with your reply is that this is not 'us' doing this versus
'them' doing that.

 _We_ must reduce CO2 emissions and _we_ must stop population growth. Both
'we' mean humankind as a whole.

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bufferoverflow
This is silly. You will not convince most people to abandon technological
progress.

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atemerev
“To reduce energy consumption, stop growing your net worth. Stay poor”.

It is exactly the same on the micro level.

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mikl
Funny how it’s always private spending that’s being targeted by the people who
want us to become poorer to save the environment.

And yes, becoming poorer is what giving up on GDP growth means for most of us,
since the population is growing.

How about we started cutting the fat in the public sector? All that debt-
fuelled overspending western governments engage in has a massive climate
impact.

~~~
Ma8ee
Yes! I think it is a no-brainer that we immediately cut all defense spending
to a small fraction to what it is now. If we do, we can decrease the total
public spending and at the same time provide good education and health
services to everyone.

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tyzerdak
I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas)

If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always
have not enough stuff...

~~~
ppf
Do you have an idea of your share of the embodied energy of all the items you
use in the course of your life?

~~~
ppf
To give you an idea, if you have bought a new laptop and phone, that's around
another 3000kWh already.

~~~
tyzerdak
I have 10 years old pc and bought new phone after 3 years. So
3000+3000/10+3000/3=4300

+products, so it will be 5-6k in total. Still not much.

~~~
ppf
Excellent. Now do the same for your house, your furniture, your mode of
transport, what you do for work...etc etc.

