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0 pointsrtkwe1y ago0 comments

Even the graph that I think is supposed to support the assertion by gesturing towards a link between GDP/c and energy consumption/c shows there's a huge range of per capita energy consumption for countries in the same GDP per capita band hidden because the graph uses dual logarithmic axes.

It's always a little hard to read logarithmic values other than those explicitly labelled but it looks like up to a 5-7x difference in energy consumption can have basically no effect on the GDP per capita!

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the84721y ago

I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a rich, energy-poor country.

rtkweOP1y ago

The articles argument is about the US moving inside the range band we see though not about the US having a 100 fold reduction in the power generated that would be required to drop us into the lower right.

I did the math on the data elsewhere in this thread [0] and in an outcome that should surprise no one there's a transition around 1970 where the ratio between power used and gdp created per capita changes drastically, in 1970 we produced .69 units of GDP per unit of energy and in 2014 we were producing 7.94 using inflation adjusted dollars and oil kg equivalent per capita. We just moved into a different type of economy and there's no data in the graph or article to back up the assertion that falling off the HA curve and consuming ~5x less power per capita our GDP is somehow 5x smaller.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222

the84721y ago

There's some wiggle room, but if you want another OOM of advancement then it appears that you also need to move an OOM up, unless you started out at the upper end of the band. And even then the next one would definitely need more.

Of course this only tells us about the current state of things, but there are lots of things that would seem ludicrous today that would be feasible if we had a lot more cheap energy. Mass desalation, carbon drawdown, synthetic fuels, electric arc furnaces etc. will all needs loads of energy.

The signum is wrong. In the long term you want it to be one, not zero.

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0 pointsrtkwe1y ago0 comments

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the84721y ago

I don't think the range matters so much as the floor. The huge blank in the lower-right corner. No such thing as a rich, energy-poor country.

rtkweOP1y ago

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392222

the84721y ago

The signum is wrong. In the long term you want it to be one, not zero.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse