Energy is overrated
Sometimes people talk about how important energy is to human flourishing. For example, the plot of Watchmen involves using Dr. Manhattan to create unlimited clean energy, which is expected to lead to a utopian future. And given how many wars have been fought that seemed to relate to oil and natural gas, I can see why that seemed like a sensible idea. (No more shortage of energy would obviously lead to no more wars over energy.)
The importance of energy also comes up in climate-change-related discussions. For example, I remember Vivek Ramaswamy tweeting this when he ran for president:
The 3rd item is “Human flourishing requires fossil fuels”. I think most of these are kind of shibboleths for him to prove how republican he was (e.g. what the is he talking about with #9??).
The random thing I saw that motivated this post was this quote from the book “fossil future”:
Regardless of what you believe about the impacts of rising CO₂ levels on the planet’s future, if you are knowledgeable about the state of the world today, you must acknowledge that more human beings are flourishing than at any point in history — and if you’re at all knowledgeable about the ways fossil fuels power our world, you must recognize the use of these fuels as a major contributor to our unprecedented level of human flourishing.
Side note: This quote is actually a good test of rationality skills, because what he wrote here is 100% literally true, but when I first read it my brain refused to process it properly because it seemed to be arguing for an obviously untrue notion (that we will/should continue using fossil fuels in high amounts). Remember that even if the premise of an argument is true, it doesn’t mean the conclusion is too.
I remember I once asked an energy policy wonk guy, what would be different if we had unlimited cheap energy. And he told me that there were obvious things like desalination, which is very energy-expensive (getting one cubic meter of freshwater out of the sea takes about 1 kWh). But he said that on a broader scale we would find uses for energy that we can’t even imagine now because they would be far too expensive. And the example he gave me was that we could replace our septic systems with a simpler system that converts our wastewater into plasma.
But is it energy?
Okay, I agree that a lot wars have been fought over energy resources, and that plasma toilets would be cool. But it feels like we’re actually not that energy-limited. Like, when I think about the things I enjoy in life, I don’t feel like energy is a particularly scarce input to any of them? Food requires farmland, agricultural workers to work it, and then transportation to move the food to me. Transportation is probably the only part of this that really takes that much energy. And if you raise the stakes to restaurant food, that requires a nearby restaurant, which in my case has to pay extremely expensive SF land rents and has to pay people to prepare the food when they could be doing all manner of other profitable SF activities.
I also like movies, TV shows, and videogames, and I think it’s obvious that energy is not a big cost driver for any of those.
I also like music festivals, which mostly happen outside, so they just require a big space to be set up, stages to be constructed, food to be brought in, trash to be cleaned up, and of course the musical acts need to be paid. Maybe the plasma toilets would simplify the portapotty situation, but I honestly don’t think that much of the cost of a music festival is going to energy.
I asked my girlfriend what she would spend a decent amount of money on if she could choose, and she said lashes, nails, botox, going out to dinner more, and going to more concerts. Obviously, not a ton of energy involved here.
I also like air travel, and air travel does seem like it requires a lot of energy. But according to a quick google search, jet fuel is only about 20-30% of a typical airline's total operating cost. Can you imagine? “Thanks to Dr. Manhattan, we now have unlimited clean energy. A transcontinental flight that was previously $300… will now be $200!” It’s a bit of a letdown, right? Ok, fine, demand for air travel is probably pretty elastic so that would probably really effect how much people travel, but still.
Okay, I think that demonstrates in an okay manner that most of the stuff I want wouldn’t get that much cheaper if energy was much cheaper. But energy-defenders might just say say “ah, but energy is already cheap, thanks to fossil fuels. That’s why it doesn’t show up as a big cost in any of the stuff you like.” And I don’t want to get into a fossil fuel debate, but it really just doesn’t feel like the stuff I like takes that much energy. Even our biggest use of energy, staying warm in the winter, we do in a comically inefficient way. We heat the entire volume of our house, using natural gas, which has a coefficient of performance of 1, which is the worst possible coefficient of performance of any way of warming anything. Instead, we could use things like heated blankets, which warm only you, or heat-pump based home heaters, which are many times more energy efficient in the right climates.
I honestly think people who pontificate on this stuff need to play some factory games like factorio or mindustry. Obviously those are just games and not real life, but they mimic the human condition in that the objective is to set up factories to extract resources and produce higher-value products. And It honestly seems like the main limiting factor in those games is almost never any particular resource, it’s always just human effort. Okay, I guess it’s kind of a foregone conclusion because making a game where you were limited by a certain resource no matter how much effort you put in wouldn’t be fun. But still, I think real life is like that to. Like, if it were a national priority to have much more energy available to us, we could do it. We could build a fuckton of nuclear reactors or solar panels and batteries. It would be a big project but it wouldn’t even be that hard. Boeing built about 1,500 747s, which was a double-decker four-engine jet, and they designed the plane back in 1968, when you had to design everything using paper and pencil. Meanwhile the US has less than 100 nuclear reactors total. It cannot possibly be that hard. Now, it’s not fair to infer from “we haven’t done it” to “it wouldn’t be that important to do”. But I don’t think it would usher us into an age of abundance, and in fact I think we could pretty easily use much less energy than we use now without much sacrifice.
So if I look at what we need more of, I wouldn’t say energy springs to mind. I’d first say human effort, housing, and good institutions. So to change the world, focus on giving us an unlimited amount of that.