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Comment by tomtomtom777 | Hacker News Reader

This is an odd jump you are making. Most energy isn't used just for food, shelter and some transportation, and certainly not for "bitcoin and simulations".

By far most energy is used to produce things (including the transportation requirements to do so). And as it turns out, the hunger for producing and buying new things is very hard to temper. This hunger is evident from the fact that the ways we are measuring "economic success" strongly correlates with the amount of things we produce, or even with the speed at which we are increasing the amount of things we produce.

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However, will it lead to a crisis? The hunger for new things simply dies down if they are not affordable. It's already happening. Energy is much more expensive than it used to be. Resources are more expensive so that new products have tighter margins and waste less materials.

People buy as much as they can. If they get less energy for their money, they buy less. Everybody had had-made clothes and ate organic food. Those times passed with hardly anybody complaining about receiving less.

What on earth are you talking about, shortage of energy would be a total ecobomic collapse, not just a crisis.

6 months of people staying at home are causing economic crisis.

Large cities literally depend on cheap energy to survive, to bring in food and move away the trash. If there is no power for a week, London and every other megacity turns into a mass graveyard

It's a crisis because it is happening abruptly. The price for hydrocarbons will rise much slower, like the increased consumption of the growing population of the world. Meanwhile, more renewable energy will be installed.

There will be energy in the future, even if there is not the abundance of nuclear fusion. So I don't see why there is a looming crisis.

> People buy as much as they can.

That reminds me of something I heard early on in the pandemic.

"The economy is collapsing because people are only buying the essentials".

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