Without speaking to whether or not it's valid conjecture, it's become necessary to treat any Germany is dying material with a little extra skepticism due to it being used as a polemic talking point about what happens when you go all in on renewables, etc.

It’s also probable per capita energy usage will decline no matter what we do because affordable fossil fuel stocks are due to collapse before the population does. Increasing per capita energy usage as a policy goal seems profoundly unwise to me, even without accounting for global warming, and if we do it becomes even less wise.

I don't know how much, in Germany's case, but some fraction of energy usage is wasted.

We saw European customers start paying attention to wasted consumption almost overnight when electricity prices hit the news and some of those changes have persisted for now.

That's without considering efficiency improvements. Both would drive down per capita without implying reduced output

Throughout human history, increases in per capita energy consumption have been directly coupled with increases in living standards. Perhaps we will see some decoupling between those metrics, but I doubt it.

And while there are good environmental reasons to reduce fossil fuel use we are in no danger of running out of affordable stocks. Alarmists have been predicting "peak oil" for decades but the extraction industry keeps improving their technology.

I think if the future of affordable oil relies on us continuously inventing ourselves out of the problem, that implies a great deal of danger.

Just because the shale revolution embarrassed the peak oil crowd doesn’t guarantee shale revolutions happening over and over. If you ignore shale and look at conventional oil reserves several of the peak oil alarmists were essentially correct in their timing. Now shale production is seemingly plateauing.

Maybe we’ll end up with a bitumen or natural gas revolution next but I’m sceptical. I think we’re kind of fucked honestly and only attacking this on the demand side will save us, I don’t see green energy as saving us or nuclear either.

It serves as a good signal, it makes it easy to know who you can simply ignore.

The US has also lost its lead in manufacturing during the same time period.

> US has also lost its lead in manufacturing during the same time period

On a relative basis, yes. In absolute terms we are close to our pre-financial crisis peak [1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMNTO01USQ661N

Do you happen to know what "Total Manufacturing" means in practice? I can't figure out what that series is measuring. It seems to be OECD data of some sort, but it doesn't have enough context to interpret.

One of the problems with US manufacturing is that it can be equal by, say, amount of money spent but get much worse productivity than Asia. And I'd believe it is a sophisticated method that accounts for that somehow, but I want to check it.