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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.

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Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.

The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?

Cadbury's creme eggs.

They sold those to America 15 years ago.

The numbers today in the developed works don't back it up. It's Jevons Paradox btw, the person that came up with it was called Jevons, not Jevon.

The US has a lot of wiggle room because it uses almost 2x electricity per capita than e.g. Germany. People don't need electricity, they need light and cooling. If you do the math, that is hundreds of GW of free "new" capacity just by getting the same value for less energy. Obviously you can't do 1/1 comparisons, a lot of people in the US use AC whereas they don't in Europe. But overall the US could get more efficient in energy use. People buy new appliances all the time, make them be more energy efficient. Or don't and let the market sort it out. "The solution to high prices are high prices".

"It comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use"

Yest it is. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0811.1855

"a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades" Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Same with AI. It is becoming much more efficient and cheaper. This will result in a much, much higher demand. Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.

That the energy demand is sinking is based on the fact that most industries got outsourced to China.

> Expect Netflix to render a movie based on your wishes in real time.

Blech. I don't have wishes I want netflix to fulfill. I want to see the dreams of another human before me and be entranced/enchanted.

I wonder if this will become increasingly niche if people grow up with systems that can spoon feed tailored content and monitor feedback

No, it is not. For example, gasoline use per capita in the US peaked in 1978 and the economy went up around a gazillion percent since then. There are now millions of EVs in Europe and electricity use has declined in the last twenty years and this has nothing to do with the hand wavy "deindustrialization". Why would it not? The light bulbs I have today use 10x less electricity, the induction stove I have uses significantly less energy, I bought a fridge last year that uses 3x less electricity than the previous one, the TV died three years ago, the new one uses an estimated 50kwh per year of normal use, and the old one used 200. The EU has new standards where the devices on stand by are not allowed to draw more than 3kwh (I think) etc. And obviously manufacturers will not make efficient stand by devices for the EU and then make inefficient ones for the rest of the world in purpose. The same is true for other forms. My building replaced the gas boiler used for heating and warm water in general. The winter was tougher than the one before, I switched to working from home and heated a lot more. My gas use stayed flat.

When your logic collides with hard numbers I would stick to the numbers and reconsider the logic. Here is an idea: will I run my dishwasher 3x more often just because it is now 3x more efficient? Will I run my fridge more often because it is more efficient? Difficult, it already runs 24/7. Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?

So as you see although there is obviously some validity in the OBSERVATION that is Jevons Paradox, it is not a hard rule. There comes a point where it stops being true.

„Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption“, Slide 3: “This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods.”

https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/the-ap...

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/10/18/the-approaching-us-ene...

"Will I keep the lights on when I sleep because they are 10x more efficient?" Nope. But now you have a computer, maybe two, a cell phone, an ebook reader, a tablet, take international flights and use Bitcoin and AI.

Article title: A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account

Article link: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling?ref=ufuksno...

Your anegdotal evidence falls on its face as well: I have two TVs now instead of one, and my electricity consumption went down. This includes moving mid year from an office to work from home. So one laptop charging every day, and one monitor. I even bought a printer which I did not have previously. That's because the two TVs combined, made 2023 and 2025, use less electricity than the one I had before, made 2011. The addition of a laptop, monitor and printer were negligent compared to the savings I made with my new fridge.

I think you have 1. anecdotal evidence and 2. understood neither of my arguments.

Your argument was Jevons Paradox, that consumption goes up as use gets more efficient. My counter argument was that my fridge got more efficient, but it will be difficult to use it more often since it by design runs all the time. Your counter argument was that I will now have more computers and whatnot and will still use more electricity. I replied to you that even this anecdotal evidence falls on its face because I actually have the data and that my electricity use went down despite moving to full time work from home. I think this sums it up nicely.

I also stated previously that we have the data even on a large scale. Electricity use in the EU went down in the last 20 years and this even with millions of EVs now compared to then. Even Norway which now for years sells almost exclusively EVs has had just a mild bump in electricity use compared to a decade before. This implies that The efficiency savings made elsewhere held. My hypothesis would be it's because at a certain point it's impossible to use something more than you already are (see fridge, dishwasher, induction stove, computers, TVs etc) and thus efficiency gains there will hold. The same pattern is observed with American gasoline use -- as the gas guzzlers of the 70s died off during the oil crisis, per capita gas use fell and practically never recovered. This despite the fact that this use case is quite comparable to coal and you could easily argue that with better mileage people will drive more. And they probably do, but still the gasoline use fell.

You argued further that developed countries need to account for energy use of products they offshored, but I offered data that says otherwise. Additionally the argument can't be used for gasoline use which as stated did not follow Jevons Paradox.

So obviously, Jevons Paradox did not hold in these substantial cases and should not be viewed as law of nature. It's an interesting observation that makes sense, but obviously has its limits.

There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.

To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:

"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."

Driving energy costs to near zero drives down the cost for literally every other process, manufacturing or extractive or services. A 1000x increase in energy practically lets you extract so much material for cheaper that the cost of materials, and the associated logistics, goes down.

That is self-evidently true but misses the point.

The point of using energy is not to use energy. What matters is the services that energy delivers, be it a hot shower, a drive to the grocery store, a new house, a squillion tokens of AI computation. If we can get the services we want more cheaply by energy more efficiently, this is a good thing, not a disaster for humanity.

For completeness, I acknowledge that there are people for whom energy usage is inherently bad, which is equally silly. What matters are the downside impacts of the energy use, not the energy use itself.

My point was that even if you drive costs to 1000x, you're not somehow magically going to reduce consumption. Human output will match those efficiency gains in other forms. Imagine things like synthetic diamond jewelry being the norm, thermal pyrolysis of methane and CO2 into plain carbon, mining deeper underground for precious minerals, etc. A person in the 1890s could not have envisioned the things that would happen just 30 years later, enabled by cheap electricity.

And my point is that life has gotten better for 30 years despite Energy Line Goes Sideways, and what we care about is the life getting better part, not which direction the line goes.

If you want to see true evidence of this, look at the rebates power companies offer.

In all the places I’ve lived there are generally large incentive programs to convert air conditioners and old heaters to heat pumps, and other efficient appliance replacements, install better insulation, etc. because that rebate dollar stretches a lot further than building new power plants, transmission lines, etc.

If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.

I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.

If you increase it 1000 fold it would still be less than 10% of the heat the sun provides.

That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.

That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.

Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.

Total energy use by mankind is about 200,000 TWh a year

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Most of that is lost in waste heat.

Total energy arriving on earth from the sun is about 1,500,000,000 TWh

https://smartstep.blog/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth-per-...

7500 times higher

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