Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying: less energy consumption pretty much directly translates to less human flourishing. You seem to be arguing that this is a good thing (which I disagree with), but you keep supporting my claim with more evidence, so please, concede this.
> Costs are human construct. Money is just a record in someone's database. Goverments can make as much as they want. It means nothing.
This is not so. If that was the case, poor countries could become rich by their governments printing more money. Zimbabwe tried, they did get more money, but did not get any wealth.
The point here is that money represents something very real and significant, which a claim on value produced in the economy. If you just “change records in someone’s database”, you’ll only have more money chasing the same amount of goods, ie. inflation. If you, however, force people to use different, more expensive sources of energy, the impact is very real: less of stuff in total gets produced, and so the society gets to consume less in aggregate. This means less flourishing.
