Ideas don’t build sky scrapers energy does. If you don’t believe me you can look up the per capita energy consumption per American and observe that it is basically stagnant since 1970. Which is also curiously the date since when the American dream started to fade.
We got around this by outsourcing some activities to economies with a low energy intensity, loading up on debt and improving the energy efficiency of our devices. But these cannot result in the kind of step change improvements that we got used to over the last century.
Why have we seen such amazing progress in computing and the internet ? Moores law allows us to extract twice as much compute for the same energy every 18 months. The energy burned by a transistor scales with its area. This is nothing short of miraculous. It’s as if your car doubled its mileage every 2 years. This has allowed computing to cheat the stagnation in energy we have been seeing elsewhere. When compute gets cheaper transporting information gets cheaper as well as it is computers that transport the information. Hence the biggest growth industry continues to be technology and the internet. Batteries or solar panels do not double every 18 months. Batteries have barely moved in comparison. The newer iPhones feel heavier after they made the battery bigger.
There was a fear for a time that “Peak Oil” would lead to some kind of a total collapse. The reality is more of a slow burn stagnation as we wring the oil out of ever deeper deposits.
The much heralded green transition got a dose of reality this year in Europe as they realized how reliant they are on natural gas to not freeze to death.
Building tens of thousands of Nuclear plants is far from trivial although it is in theory possible.
We will in general struggle to maintain the standards of living we currently have especially as we expand it to the broader population. This is a harsh truth many don’t want to confront. Perhaps the elites realize this and have decided to squeeze every last drop out of the orange so they can experience the growth that was once the norm for all first worlders. The elites being the top 2-5 %.
The entire third world that was looted and colonized is also now stepping up to claim its fair share of global resources. The more they develop the higher energy prices will go. And yet it is inevitable.
Hence I struggle to see how first world living standards will not stagnate even in the presence of interesting new technologies and breakthroughs. The meta verse might be the answer as a simulation of prosperity may be cheaper than actual prosperity. It might also explain why everything is moving into the virtual world. Energy constraints apply a lot less here.
And don’t get me started on Climate Change.