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0 pointsboredumb2y ago0 comments

Considering energy costs money, our economic system is literally designed to reward lower energy consumption.

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Strange, and yet we keep using more energy every year. Fun fact, we burn as much wood for heating as we did 100 years ago. What ends up happening is we consume all available energy. Economic growth is limited by energy so the whole system is incentivized to GROW energy usage, not reduce it.

I suspect you are talking about per capita energy usage. Per capita energy usage has stayed around 80 mWh per person since 1965 in the US.

But what's important isn't the per-capita usage, but aggregate usage. Because guess what, the climate doesn't care about per-capita CO2.

You have to look at it from a system level, not individual actor level. Our whole political and economic system is designed to have exponential GDP growth. And because energy is a limiting factor in GDP growth, then our whole political and economic system is designed to extract as much energy as possible to keep growth from hitting that limit.

Qwertious2y ago

>Fun fact, we burn as much wood for heating as we did 100 years ago. What ends up happening is we consume all available energy. Economic growth is limited by energy so the whole system is incentivized to GROW energy usage, not reduce it.

That's because the population has increased but poverty hasn't substantially decreased, and the poorest people on the planet tend to burn wood for heating instead of using electricity.

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