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A comment on What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?. Parent comment

Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by pygy_ on Friday November 25, 2016 @05:50PM (#13040416)
The constant supply solar of energy (and finite supply of mineral energy sources) also means that we won't be able to grow the economy indefinitely and need to find a way to transition to a system that thrives at equilibrium.
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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by beat on Friday November 25, 2016 @06:37PM (#13040719)
I'll leave that problem to my great-great-grandchildren. For now, I'm more concerned with pulling off the fossil-to-solar transition without breaking down in the process.
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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by morgante on Saturday November 26, 2016 @04:08PM (#13045865)
Right now we're using a very small percentage of the total supply of solar energy to Earth. [0]

We could grow our economy by literally 1000x and still not have any worry of running out of energy coming from the sun.

Your comment sounds like someone who says we shouldn't bother doing anything due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...

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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by stale2002 on Friday November 25, 2016 @10:06PM (#13041476)
Why would we have to worry about that now?

The economy can grow by a million X before we start running into physical limitations on solar energy.

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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by nhaehnle on Friday November 25, 2016 @06:56PM (#13040809)
The rate of CO2 emission per GDP is already decreasing thanks to technological advances. There's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't happen to the ratio of energy use per GDP. So finite supply of resources is not a problem per se, and certainly won't be within our lifetimes, which is what we need to deal with.
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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by pygy_ on Friday November 25, 2016 @07:24PM (#13040928)
You can't be more than 100% energy efficient, so, while there may be some headroom in that direction, there's a hard limit as well.

Edit: Also, while there seems to be a positive correlation between GDP per capita and energy efficiency, the most efficient nations in the world have a very low GDP per capita... I wonder why it is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity#Economic_ener...

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Re:What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? by pdonis on Friday November 25, 2016 @10:01PM (#13041454)
> You can't be more than 100% energy efficient

Yes, you can, practically speaking. The amount of energy needed to produce a given amount of value to humans is not fixed; it can be decreased, and in principle can be made as small as we like given sufficient advances in technology. That means the amount of value to humans that can be produced with a fixed amount of energy can increase, in principle as much as we like. That's what the parent to your post was saying.

Obviously it will be a while before we have technology advanced to the point where, say, the amount of value currently being produced per year on Earth can be produced with one tenth or one hundredth or less of the energy it currently takes. But we also have a while before we hit any hard limits of the sort you are referring to.

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