alt Hacker NewsThe problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
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It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.
Yes, any shortage of energy we have today is more or less entirely voluntary on a species level.
You can blame Moloch or wall Street or whatever for making it functionally impossible for whatever multipolar market-actor reasons, but with the right choices we could have plenty of energy today, just as we could (but don't) feed everyone on Earth.
Eventually the will bea point where it does actually become physically impossible to generate that much power without melting the Earth's crust or boiling the seas, but that's a long, long way away.