Making energy too cheap to meter

All energy is entropy the best way to reduce entropy is to work efficiently.

My personal inclination makes me a natural devil's advocate and skeptic of political movements across the spectrum.

To me, the average supporter of the green agenda sounds like this: We Americans / Europeans are sinful and wasteful with our conspicuous energy consumption, air conditioning and air travel. The only path to redemption is to see the light and worship the planet. Importantly, this means we must practice austerity and poverty, to be humble and pure like the poorest black and brown people of Africa and Asia. The government will tell you, for the good of society of course, what temperature you're allowed to have in your buildings on your property, or whether you're allowed to let your car engine idle at a stoplight [1].

The green agenda is only partly based in science. It has dark corners and extremes of irrationality and hypocrisy. This article's author is trying to remind those who have gotten lost in the political theater that our goal should be improving lives and easing resource constraints. Perhaps we should examine whether we're overfunding solar and wind, why we fear fission and neglect fusion, and whether it's wise to regulate, control and limit rather than innovate, build and overcome.

[1] Of course, prominent politicians and climate activists travel by air, in some cases private jets, to environmental conferences in the age of Internet videoconferencing. While they're eager enough to embrace using government force to remove freedoms of action from everybody, they balk at voluntarily following their stated principles in their personal lives when the result would be the slightest personal inconvenience. When the price of oil increases due to war, the President's staunch environmentalism disappears in the face of populist handouts to grease the midterms (a thing his party is famous about criticizing the other party for). A true statesman who actually believed the planet was in danger would urge us to seize this moment to let market forces do the hard work of weaning us off fossil fuels; it would mean sacrifices and hardship, but we should endure it to save the planet for our grandchildren. Instead, the President we've got does everything in his power to lower gas prices -- from releasing oil from strategic petroleum reserve, to fist bumping a slicer and dicer of journalists in a process of futile begging for oil. Actions speak louder than words, and in this case the PotUS's observed behavior is exactly what I would expect of a world leader who secretly believes the green agenda he publicly embraces is actually just a steaming pile of biomass.

All poverty is energy poverty.

Oh I think every political movement taps into what you might label a religious tendency that seems to be latent in most humans, especially with the mainstream religions on the retreat, creating a void that opportunists can fill. I think it's a mistake though if you're under the impression that this is only channeled into political causes. After spending some time in the tech world, I see it (unwittingly or otherwise) channeled by leaders into motivational reasoning for why their employees should work ceaselessly on achieving their companies' goals. You're not A/B testing a social media site to better addict peoples' attention to increase profit; you're changing the world for the better - that old tripe.

What I see more often now is this tryhard meme that "work is it's own reward". Consider me a skeptic. I could believe work for one's self or one's community, but leaving those off just feels like some hopelessly out of touch plutocrat boss trying to gaslight me because he thinks anyone who's net worth doesn't involve three commas is a fool.

I suppose that's my political rant. As for yours, I see certainly see it, and I understand how tuned we are to spot hypocrisy, but I don't see why someone or others' hypocrisy should affect how I judge an issue on its merits.

How do you handle the heat? At the rate we're going the surface of the Earth would glow like a light bulb in a handful of centuries.

> we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...