Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

Helium would like a word with you.

actually they are generally below replacement level, which (if not augmented by immigration) would itself lead to a collapse as people leave the workforce and there are fewer laborers to replace them. But people think we manage this labor shortage with technology, which leads us back to the requirements for more energy and capital development to maintain the same lifestyle.

> Also lifting everyone to the living standard of highly developed countries will require significant amounts of resources and significantly increase energy consumption, this however is also more like a one-time expense and I would therefore ignore it, too.

why do 'highly developed' countries need vastly greater resources to maintain this living standard if its a one-time expense? the greater standard of living your referring to requires continually expanding quantities of inputs in terms of energy and labor, aka 'economic growth'.

> How does dependence on technology demand growth?

its more related to the specific technologies we've chosen to build our society upon, but this technologies generally depend on these improvements to sustain themselves. For example, electric cars require batteries which require raw materials to be mined, recycling batteries requires chemical industry that is predicated on all sorts of inputs, themselves coming from nonrenewable sources.

world population is leveling off because we're approaching many of these limits to growth and that's affecting the enabling factors for continued population growth.

> The author also assumes, incorrectly, that GDP--money spent on goods and services--is the right measure of overall wealth. It's not. The author even discusses "decoupling", the fact that many types of wealth require little or no physical resources to produce, but fails to realize that the long term outcome of this will not be to raise monetary GDP more and more, but to make monetary GDP less and less of an accurate measure of wealth production.

I agree with this.

> "A limited life-essential resource will always carry a moderately high value." This is a common misconception. An obvious counterexample is air: air is a limited resource (Earth's atmosphere contains only a finite quantity of it), it is life-essential, but it is free. Why? Because it costs nothing to produce.

you conflate value and price here. obviously atmosphere is not currently metered. That doesn't mean we don't place a high value on clean air.

> And if the cost of production of other life-essential resources, like food, were reduced, those things would also become cheaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Which is extra good as this offsets other parts of the world. I would also guess that it is probably easier to provide incentives for people to have more children once this becomes necessary than trying to prevent them from having too many children, but that is not much more than a gut feeling.

But people think we manage this labor shortage with technology, which leads us back to the requirements for more energy and capital development to maintain the same lifestyle.

If we permanently fall below replacement-level fertility, we will just die out and no amount of investment will fix this. The only solution is to match replacement-level fertility which will provide a stable population and workforce and hence require a stable amount of economic activity to achieve a stable lifestyle. The obvious caveat is of course that the economic activity must not deplete any non-renewable resources.

why do 'highly developed' countries need vastly greater resources to maintain this living standard if its a one-time expense? the greater standard of living your referring to requires continually expanding quantities of inputs in terms of energy and labor, aka 'economic growth'.

The one-time expense is to lift someone from say 2,000 kWh/a to 40,000 kWh/a which requires adding the difference in production capacity. After that this person will of course consume 40,000 kWh every year and we will have to produce those 40,000 kWh every year, but I don't think that constitutes economic growth. Economic output is quantified as absolute output over some period of time, not as cumulative absolute output.

For example, electric cars require batteries which require raw materials to be mined, recycling batteries requires chemical industry that is predicated on all sorts of inputs, themselves coming from nonrenewable sources.

I still don't see how this requires continued growth if we assume constant output.