[snip thread; click link above for it]
AUGH, I made substantial progress on this reply and then I user error’d and closed the tab I was typing in.
The press release is somewhat unclear, and my first reply was also unclear. My understanding of J&D’s plan is that they reduce demand for electrical power production (i.e., watts at power plant), but assume business-as-usual (i.e., steadily increasing) power demand from users. This works, as the press release says, because generating usable energy from fossil fuels is heinously inefficient, and switching to renewables yields efficiency improvements (although how efficiency is calculated should also be different; I’ll omit this discussion here because I’m sure it’s discussed in the full J&D article, but it’s behind SciAm’s paywall, so I haven’t read it).
My gripe is with the assumption that business-as-usual power use is desirable. If, instead of taking “more [economic — i.e., GDP] growth” as our policy (or engineering design) objective, we take, say, a steady-state economy [the name can be misleading and might be usefully replaced with “steady-scale economy”, but anyway…] with fixed material throughput as our policy objective, we have a completely different problem: instead of beginning the discussion with the assumption that users will need foo amount of ‘usable energy’ (based on an extrapolation of currently existing conditions), we begin by asking how much energy use is appropriate given human needs, ecological capacities, and existing (or feasible) technological/infrastructural arrangements. I’m not saying “J&D are doing a bad thing,” but I want to call attention to some more ‘fundamental’ assumptions than they focus on. For example, instead of asking “How much energy will people need to drive around?” — which needs to be answered by an extrapolation of current travel demand and land use patterns in a traditional engineering analysis [although how J&D handle this, I can’t say; I’d love to be proven wrong if you have access to the full article] — we could be asking “Why do contemporary Americans drive around so much, and how could we develop policies that reduce travel demand?” Addressing this question might turn out to give us more long-term leverage in reducing energy demand than building thousands of solar arrays.
In practice, as you point out, the ‘ecological/technological’ question of scale, the ‘political’ question of distribution, and the ‘economic’ question of allocation are approached simultaneously, often by different actors. (When I say ‘we’, I mean, those of us who ‘care’, and happen to be ‘in the room’. If you’re reading this, I mean you.) I might even argue that the ecological economists’ tendency to idealize abstract from real-world decision making processes is part of the reason nobody listens to them. But I think the scale/distribution/allocation separation is one [useful] way to highlight the analytical and practical potential for questioning fundamental assumptions.
…I hope that’s more clear. If I skipped over really burning questions from your response, please please bring them up again and I’ll try to respond coherently.
