Consider that are dealing with a bias metric. California's weather makes it the least energy intensive state. In 1975 about 50% of the homes in my state had air-conditioning. Now its about 95%. Similar story with heating modern systems. Even in the 70s, older generations dealt with a much colder home in the winter than most people would normally allow today. The days that require climate control in my state are something like 2-3x the average number of days in California and at a much higher intensity.

Additionally, California has exported much of it's energy use to other states and countries.

We're talking about the growth rate of energy usage. California's weather has not changed since 1975 in a way that would reduce per capita energy usage.

I'm not talking about the weather changing. I'm talking about the growth of climate control using electricity in states that aren't California has led to continued energy demands.

Honestly your reply is frustrating because you sound like you don't understand my point. Please re read my comment from before.

Even in your scenario, we wouldn't expect per capita energy usage to increase faster than population growth (as the physicist claimed) because now everybody who wants climate control has it. The whole point is that per capita energy usage isn't growing exponentially in the developed world.

The point I made was regarding electricity usage in california from 1975 until now and how that comparison to the rest of the country isn't valid because it's a bias measure. In 1975 everyone who wanted climate control didn't have it, and that slowly changed to everyone being able to afford year round climate control. That drove huge growth in energy demands in most of the country. In that scenario we would certainly expect per capita energy usage to increase faster than population growth.

Your original claim about California doesn't hold because it's bias.

> In that scenario we would certainly expect per capita energy usage to increase faster than population growth.

But it won't continue to grow now, which is what I showed with California. You have fundamentally misunderstood my example. The physicist claimed exponential per capita energy consumption growth, but California shows that isn't happening.

The decoupling argument breaks down when imports are considered.

"The material footprint of nations", Thomas O. Wiedmann, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzen, Daniel Moran, Sangwon Suh, James West, and Keiichiro Kanemoto

PNAS first published September 3, 2013; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1220362110

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110

https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/https://newsroom....

That study shows zero growth in resource consumption instead of the negative growth observed without their methodology. This does not match the exponential growth in per capita consumption that the physicist assumes.