It's the Jevons paradox. When halogen and florescent lights were invented, electricity was not saved, but our environments got a lot brighter. That brought a human benefit, but no climate benefit. When LEDs came in the world was already bright enough and at last energy consumption for lighting went down.

Now plane engines get more efficient every year. We pack seats closer together on planes to save fuel too. Does this mean we're using less aviation fuel? No, we're flying more people, more often and using much more fuel. And most of the world has never been on a plane so there's lot of room for the sector to grow further.

What about other high emissions sectors? Meat and concrete? Clearly lots of potential for the world to increase its consumption to European or American levels and create more emissions.

So what's the answer? Taxing emissions to the point that we continue to improve the efficiency of flying and meat, but making it so expensive that consumption doesn't increase- and for the heaviest users decreases. That isn't something that I see happening in a democracy. Especially not one run by the high emissions lifestyle elite. Who in Congress doesn't associate frequently flying with success and fulfilment.

> You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?

I somewhat am. It's far more correlation than direct causation, but the added energy equivalent of an entire second world country such as Iceland doesn't just spring out of nowhere, especially when considering nearly zero-sum fossil fuel utilization. Assuming that fossil fuel mining/drilling/refining didn't massively increase over the same years (and statistically it hasn't, it mostly appears "constant"), much of the energy that things like cryptocurrency mining have used have by simple matter of fact come in part from efficiencies gained elsewhere in the overall energy ecosystem.

It's not entirely a zero sum game of course, because there has been an increase in renewable energy sources (hydro, solar, and wind especially), but it certainly awfully looks like it is still close enough to zero-sum or possibly even (pessimistically) negatively weighted sum, with regards to carbon output, when even given huge increases in renewable energy mixes across the world we didn't see net decreases in things like coal-fired power plants at the scale we should have. We keep collectively finding ways to use roughly all of the available fossil fuel energy extracted each year, despite focuses on renewables and despite efforts at using less energy overall in average households.

Is that a perverse outcome of well-intentioned policies? I'm not entirely sure. Cynically, it certainly feels like it.

Positive motivation would be great to have, you are correct. I don't think we have enough of it in current policies. (We needed carbon caps, not [just] credits/offsets. We needed carbon taxes to internalize to markets externalities they don't actually care to watch. We didn't get those things. We still seem unlikely to get those things.)

The best positive motivation I'm aware of that we're finally seeing "just in time" some of the effects of a greatly healed Ozone layer, which proves the concerns about Ozone depleting chemicals in 80s and 90s had the desired effect and the efforts to eradicate them were not hyperbolic and were definitely necessary (and that climate change would be much, much worse in most of the world had we not made those changes; though Australia and its strict sunscreen regimens can still tell us how much the remaining Ozone damage is a present threat in anthropogenic climate change).

I still sometimes worry that we needed (years ago) an attitude like that towards things like a possible ban on cryptocurrency energy usage if we actually wanted to bend the curve, but in the 2020s the fact that things like fighting for the Ozone succeeded "quietly" almost dastardly make it harder to fight for political will now because "people already did their part and sacrificed for 'nothing' and are exhausted".