Goldfish grow to fit their containers. Keep a little 1-inch goldfish in a bowl, it’ll stay that size. Toss it in a koi pond and in no time you’ll have something approaching the size of a housecat.

People are like this. A family might be scratching by on $40k/year. Dad gets some windfall or promotion and is making $60k/year. So did he finish out the year in the same house with $20k in the bank? Of course not, he’s paying for all the clothes and goods that he couldn’t afford before.

Ten years later he’s gotten promoted to making $120k/year. Now is there money in the bank, or are they living in a bigger house and driving a nicer car?

This is what worries me about any climate plan that is only based on clean energy. If driving, for example, gets cleaner, do we use 50% less petroleum, or keep burning the same amount of petroleum on different projects? (And what about all the non-tracked pollution caused by tire wear?)

This problem is even more stark when people talk about atmospheric carbon capture. If we're emitting X tons of carbon per year, and recapture Y tons, will we continue to emit X, or start emitting X + Y?

None of this is reason not to pursue renewables and electrification, but I think it’s inescapable that any "primary solution" has to be a reduction in consumption.