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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

Sadly he's still at it. To save people from subjecting themselves to all of his tortured logic, here's just a sample from the article you linked:

> The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years.

Basically his conclusion is that at some point in the next 400 years, the predominant economic system on Earth will have to change in some way (and that economists are short-sighted for not believing this).

The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)"

[0] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-inte...

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That's the entire point though.

For economic growth to continue, the economy must completely decouple from all necessary resources.

At that point all real commodities are not part of the economy which is growing so the thing with the commodities in it is the real economy which is static.

The inevitability of the conclusion is ironclad. The only matter is which limiting resources necessitate moving to a steady state economy.

Speculating about what the "real economy" will look like in 400 years is as meaningless as asking what the most valuable website was 400 years ago (or 4 million years ago, if we're assuming progress is exponential).

Again. The point is a reductio ad absurdum on exponential growth.

Exponential growth in a static environment is impossible. This is provable.

With that conclusion ironclad you no longer get to tapdance around the point. Which is that we must end reliance on growth.

There are other much sooner limits. Thermal forcing becomes as important as GHG forcing within a century, for example. Similarly you can't assert light water reactors as a solution (including idiotic ideas like making depleted fuel permanently unavailable) because there is not enough uranium to maintain exponential growth for more tha 80 years or so at 3% burnup.

Without exponentially increasing energy you don't get exponentially increasing resource extraction.

'The pie will grow exponentially fast forever so it doesn't matter that I'm stealing an exponentially larger share of it' is a lie.

There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.

> There are other much sooner limits.

Yes, that's my point. Arguing about the economic problems of the 25th century is at best a toy exercise in sci-fi mathematics/physics, and at worst a dangerous distraction from solving real problems that exist today.

> There are enough resources for everyone to thrive, we just have to stop giving them to liars as a reward for already having some.

This I agree with 100%, and it would have made a much more productive topic for an article.

Then the article isn't for you.

It's for the overwhelming majority of people who don't understand that "line go up will fix everything" is neither possible nor a solution even if it were.

The people who believe "line go up will fix everything", need an article that doesn't give them false hope that the problems we face won't really become serious until after their lifetime.

The ocean not boiling isn't 'not serious'. Everything dies long before that point.

If you don't start by eliminating 'line go up forever and big line means space magic will save us' then they tapdance around the same idiotic points as ever about how it's not zero sum and iphone means we all live like kings and then deflect any criticism with banal comments like

> The analysis also seems to completely miss how the global economy's energy intensity has been falling for 20 years, according Enerdata[0]: "Global energy intensity (total energy consumption per unit of GDP) ... historical trend (-1.5%/year on average between 2000 and 2019)"

We must end growth or physics will end it for us. And if we pick the latter option then the result is not going to be pleasant for anyone. We have about a century (roughly the time people have been trying to sound the alarm on climate change).

'Growth' is 'coming to an end'?

"The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . . And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union."

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-yo...

How is energy consumption per GDP measured? All the relevant currencies are inflationary in policy. 2020 proved you can grow the economy at any rate despite any circumstances so long as you are willing to accept out of control inflation.

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