I'm currently working on the article to respond to this claim... but obviously procrastinating because I'm responding to your comment and not LOCKED IN.
Interesting post. A Dyson sphere would be a monumental task and maybe not even worth it if we discover more hax in the coming 700 years, But I can see solar power becoming the most prominent energy source on earth within our lifetimes. I knew a big solar advocate on ifunny a while back. He was a Nazi, who became an Accelerationist, then a Tankie, and then a diehard neoliberal Keynesian who is also bisexual. I hope for his own sake that he’s at least become a Hananiite by now, as he knew a lot about economics but seemed to be an amnesiac when it came to hereditarianism. I still don’t really trust most claims of “clean by 20XX” but be opened my eyes a bit to the potential of solar to be economical. Under this lens Nuclear is not really that worth pursuing even though it has become a new meme among conservatives. It’s really expensive to build nuclear plants so if solar is gonna take over the market in half a century it might not be worth it.
Solar is quite good! Not sure how the price would be without subsidies (in China and the West), but probably still a good deal. Nuclear's costs is mostly a function of excessive red-tape and very lackluster economies of scale. Nuclear could (and to a certain extent will) decrease in cost, but I agree it will still be very niche. A good option for portions of Europe or would be far flung space habitats. For most use cases though (including Moon stuff that might be around the corner) Solar will take the crown.
To a first approximation though, it seems correct to say that energy *usage* is the main limiter to growth. Especially the sort of growth that everyone loves to see, with faster transportation and better infrastructure, less cost disease, etc. etc. All the economic growth since the early 1970s has been low in energy intensity, and also sort of crappy, which I don't think is entirely a coincidence (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
You actually do need applications for the cheap energy to translate to energy-intensive growth though. I suppose coal and petroleum were pretty cheap back when they were just things you could burn for heat, but without the internal combustion engine, they weren't ever going to unlock much economic growth.
If energy became free and unlimited tomorrow, some companies, like airlines, would see their profit margins expand, but you're more or less correct that not many things would change all that much right away. That's why I said the key is combining cheap energy with applications for that energy. A lot of these applications we can't fully predict, just as the developers of early internal combustion engines didn't know that they would lead to jet planes.
Rockets are an example of an application for energy usage. Though another near-term application is just downscaling all the effort that is put into conserving and extracting energy. Rail doesn't make sense as an application, because it's an example of an energy-conserving means of transportation. If energy were free, we would use rail and cargo ships less, aircraft and rockets more.
All that said, I don't really have that much hope that there's a high-energy future ahead for us, but I can see why if there's any cause for optimism for a new Industrial Revolution, it's going to involve increased energy intensity. And I do think the fact that energy usage per capita flatlined in ~1970 has a lot to do with the question of "WTF happened in 1971?"
Sure -- though given differences in velocity, the gap in throughput isn't as large as the gap in capacity. But the largest container ships still have more throughput than a cargo plane ever will, at least from port to port. Shipping inland is another story: trucks also have considerable mass and volume constraints.
Ships and rail never go away (just as trucks didn't replace rail), but in free-energy world, we would use them less on the margin, and less and less over time as air transport saw more economies of scale and new optimizations.
When energy is a large cost of something, there are diminishing returns to optimizing the other costs: energy will just take up more of the pie. So over time, with free energy, it would become more worthwhile to invest in optimizing something that today is highly energy-intensive, like air transport.
In free energy world, I could imagine more facilities like the Gigafactory relying primarily on an on-site airstrip to ship in most of the supplies and ship out most of the finished product, as opposed to having to ship them into a port and then truck them into the desert. I think a lot of optimizations could happen if more of the world's manufacturing happened in clusters of giga-scale facilities with their own airstrips, that could ship components directly from Point A to Point B. But you're never going to ship ore this way.
3% economic growth would require a massive reversal in the currently declining global fertility rates
I suppose I need to get to work on the economics of population growth.
I think the general idea is that population growth is the primary explanatory variable to GDP growth
I'm currently working on the article to respond to this claim... but obviously procrastinating because I'm responding to your comment and not LOCKED IN.
😂 I left out productivity growth, that can of course always offset population decline
AI will easily solve this in the long run, if our societies don't collapse before
AI will solve nothing if there isn’t an exponential buildout of the energy infrastructure
Define “long run”
Interesting post. A Dyson sphere would be a monumental task and maybe not even worth it if we discover more hax in the coming 700 years, But I can see solar power becoming the most prominent energy source on earth within our lifetimes. I knew a big solar advocate on ifunny a while back. He was a Nazi, who became an Accelerationist, then a Tankie, and then a diehard neoliberal Keynesian who is also bisexual. I hope for his own sake that he’s at least become a Hananiite by now, as he knew a lot about economics but seemed to be an amnesiac when it came to hereditarianism. I still don’t really trust most claims of “clean by 20XX” but be opened my eyes a bit to the potential of solar to be economical. Under this lens Nuclear is not really that worth pursuing even though it has become a new meme among conservatives. It’s really expensive to build nuclear plants so if solar is gonna take over the market in half a century it might not be worth it.
Yeah, I am anti-nuclear and need to write a controversial article on it which will make people hate me so I can get lots of engagement.
Solar is quite good! Not sure how the price would be without subsidies (in China and the West), but probably still a good deal. Nuclear's costs is mostly a function of excessive red-tape and very lackluster economies of scale. Nuclear could (and to a certain extent will) decrease in cost, but I agree it will still be very niche. A good option for portions of Europe or would be far flung space habitats. For most use cases though (including Moon stuff that might be around the corner) Solar will take the crown.
For most people, sure. There are still type-As who'd use it to increase societal productivity. I don't see why either is bad, necessarily
To a first approximation though, it seems correct to say that energy *usage* is the main limiter to growth. Especially the sort of growth that everyone loves to see, with faster transportation and better infrastructure, less cost disease, etc. etc. All the economic growth since the early 1970s has been low in energy intensity, and also sort of crappy, which I don't think is entirely a coincidence (https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/).
You actually do need applications for the cheap energy to translate to energy-intensive growth though. I suppose coal and petroleum were pretty cheap back when they were just things you could burn for heat, but without the internal combustion engine, they weren't ever going to unlock much economic growth.
If energy became free and unlimited tomorrow, some companies, like airlines, would see their profit margins expand, but you're more or less correct that not many things would change all that much right away. That's why I said the key is combining cheap energy with applications for that energy. A lot of these applications we can't fully predict, just as the developers of early internal combustion engines didn't know that they would lead to jet planes.
Rockets are an example of an application for energy usage. Though another near-term application is just downscaling all the effort that is put into conserving and extracting energy. Rail doesn't make sense as an application, because it's an example of an energy-conserving means of transportation. If energy were free, we would use rail and cargo ships less, aircraft and rockets more.
All that said, I don't really have that much hope that there's a high-energy future ahead for us, but I can see why if there's any cause for optimism for a new Industrial Revolution, it's going to involve increased energy intensity. And I do think the fact that energy usage per capita flatlined in ~1970 has a lot to do with the question of "WTF happened in 1971?"
Sure -- though given differences in velocity, the gap in throughput isn't as large as the gap in capacity. But the largest container ships still have more throughput than a cargo plane ever will, at least from port to port. Shipping inland is another story: trucks also have considerable mass and volume constraints.
Ships and rail never go away (just as trucks didn't replace rail), but in free-energy world, we would use them less on the margin, and less and less over time as air transport saw more economies of scale and new optimizations.
When energy is a large cost of something, there are diminishing returns to optimizing the other costs: energy will just take up more of the pie. So over time, with free energy, it would become more worthwhile to invest in optimizing something that today is highly energy-intensive, like air transport.
In free energy world, I could imagine more facilities like the Gigafactory relying primarily on an on-site airstrip to ship in most of the supplies and ship out most of the finished product, as opposed to having to ship them into a port and then truck them into the desert. I think a lot of optimizations could happen if more of the world's manufacturing happened in clusters of giga-scale facilities with their own airstrips, that could ship components directly from Point A to Point B. But you're never going to ship ore this way.