"how can we find ways to make our society even less energy efficient for no benefit to any quality of life except making some company some money. You know, like usual, but let's make it even more on the nose."
"As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere."
I am not buying it, energy is cheap, so we waste it by shipping a pair of jeans three times across the world, to deliver fast fashion the consumer needs, so that on average they can wear some low quality bullshit made woth slave labour 7 times and then throw it away, to be shipped into some poor country for 'recycling' and have it end up in the ocean.
Or catch shrimp near our shores, ship it to philipines to be peeled, and then shipping it back.
Passivehaus standard was developed decades ago, it is several times better than the maximim energy efficiency rating in UK of 'A+'. The number of houses that meet either of these standard is a fucking 0%. Check newbuilds in Uk, half of then can't manage energy rating of C, its, disgracefull! Almost none of them have a heat recovery ventilation system or a heat pump.
We waste 20-30% of energy we generate on heating leaky homes.
My parents used to buy groceries at the market by weight, today a 300 g steak comes with 200g plastic packaging. 70% of my trash is plapackaging. The recycling rate is 9%. Efficient free market my ass.
The only place I know that sells food without plastic us an hour travel away, it's a hipster place with organic-artisian authentic beans at 1,000% markup. There is nobody who sells milk in a container I could return to them when it's empty, mo matter how much I pay.
What bancrupts an average consumer? Unaffordable housing, education and healthcare. None of these things are dictated by energy price.
> The only way to reduce per capita energy consumption is to ban people from doing things
The way to reduce energy consumption is to a have a more efficient infrastructure and more efficient consumer devices. In the private sector, public sectors and the industry.
Increasing 'efficiency' is a huge goal. This starts with using less primary energy for the production of the same amount of electricity, using so-far wasted energy (like heat from power plants), using less stand-by energy, increasing transport efficiency, use of less energy-intensive production processes in industry, ...
> I'm a fan of efficiency, but don't think "using less energy" is a particularly useful metric when that energy can come from sources with radically different costs and downsides.
That are often somewhat fungible. Using less is always good.
> I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful".
In a world where people paid for the true cost of their energy use, this argument might fly. But in most of the world today, this isn't the case, not by a long shot.
If you heated to "summer inside the house" and bought high-quality carbon offsets corresponding to your increased energy use, I think most people wouldn't call that "wasteful". "Warm" might be the adjective I'd use. :)
> Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.
This I agree with 100% but is generally not something people have been keen to do. They want to drive more, air condition more, eat more animal protein, fly to more places, etc. The last 80 years of prosperity have been driven by increased consumption. And nobody seems keen to be the generation of "less is more".
No, alternatively we radically change how we produce energy, how we transport goods and people and how we heat homes. Don't make it sound easy. Reducing consumption only buys time. We need an absolutely massive effort.
>Expending energy to cool the house that heats the planet is so counterproductive
Please don't spread this anti-environmental claptrap. Expending energy does not "heat the planet", as a quick consideration of the night side of Mercury would reveal. It's greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that heat the planet, and they'd do so even if humanity vanished tomorrow. To the extent that "energy consumption" is at all related it's purely in terms of externalities in energy generation, but we have the tools to deal with those.
There has long been this strain of moral Puritanism in environmentalist movements wherein people must suffer and "return to nature" and such to be Green. But more often then not no, we don't. So I consider that to be an anti-environmental, counterproductive stance since it creates a false choice wherein people are told everyone must give up often key parts of their lives entirely or else they're bad. Given that, it's not surprising many will plump for the status quo. But in reality it's completely fine from an environmental point of view for everyone to spend their luxury energy budget as they wish, and indeed gaining/growing that is a key bit of human progress. What needs to be done is ensure that energy budget, unlike today, is actually environmentally (and in particular GHG) neutral. Societies can work from there.
> it minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with respect to preserving the environment
The dirty secret is that plenty of technology exists that can actually increase your quality of life while lowering your energy consumption. I'm not just talking about EVs, but electric buses and trains, heat pumps, sealing up drafty houses. But these things require changing how we do things, not necessarily how much we consume of things.
> However, the idea that we should design our energy policy around maximizing new energy creation even when it's more cost effective to make our current products more energy efficient makes no sense, assuming we take economic benefit to mean wealth created per dollar spent.
Sure it does. Even if we made all of our current products us 0 energy, we might want more energy for other things than the amount saved.
BTW - is it actually more cost-efficient or is that assumed because it's convenient for some other argument?
> Efficiency has to go into overdrive or we overheat the planet.
Just the efficiency of burning fossil fuels. We can afford to be wasteful with eg solar energy. (Efficiency is still great, but not required to avoid overheating.)
> Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy?
Of course. Find a cheaper way to do something. For example, create a motor that is more efficient. It might cost you energy up front, but presumably the reduction in cost would more than make up for the cost (otherwise why would someone do it?)
> 1) Increase efficiency. Jevon's paradox makes this a fail, if you make consumption more efficient then you effectively make it less expensive and so people do it more.
I'm not sure I'd call this a "fail"; U.S. domestic energy usage per capita has actually fallen slightly since 1990, despite a massive explosion of new electronics and personal devices. (The EU has experienced a 1% per capita growth in energy consumption over the same period.)
People are certainly doing it more, but -- so far -- the recent emphasis on increased efficiency has been keeping this demand from translating into an increased demand for energy.
If improving efficiency alone can entirely halt growing demands for energy, then that's half the battle right there in reducing consumption.
> Efficiency in of itself is not a useful work product. To game theory it - if you had an unlimited source of literally free energy, no one would waste time or effort on gaining efficiency. They would be working on making new products and services.
But we don't have an unlimited source of free energy - energy efficiency has been a goal of much of the developed world since the 1970s, for example the US:
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