this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Reducing usage is not cost effective because we use energy for valuable things.
Maybe if energy’s actually being wasted, that helps. Reducing energy waste is a good thing. But I mean like reducing drag on vehicles, not just shutting down what people are doing with energy, categorizing their activities as “waste”.
That's eminently debatable, and I even think an argument could be made that if it were exclusively true we probably wouldn't be in this situation.
But even if I grant that premise, reducing usage (even energy usage on "valuable things") can still be cost-effective. We can select times to perform heavy-load activities (such as AC cooling and vehicle charging) when the load on the grid is lower, we can replace lower-efficiency devices with higher-efficiency devices, we can employ vernacular architecture and better arborism to reduce HVAC usage, we can promote better transit and build 15-minute cities and continue developing electronic vehicles and e-bikes. There are any number of ways to reduce usage without causing disruption, especially as we develop better technologies that utilize energy more efficiently.
I guess you could just be saying "we can't eliminate usage, we can only eliminate waste, because if it was able to be eliminated we didn't need it anyway" but then we're really just in a semantic argument; and one I'm not particularly interested in having.