I'm not talking about it on a personal scale. I'm taking on a civilization scale. Human kind as a whole should look to only increase our power production (as long as we do it sustainably).

Also efficiency is always good as it helps increase the available energy.

This is a good point. The cost of (grid) electricity isn’t a function of “what it costs to produce”; it’s instead “what the customers will bear”.

Remember that fossil fuels themselves are, effectively, a kind of “fiat commodity”. They’re worth exactly what people will pay for them.

For decades we’ve been in a cycle of increasing efficiency and prices. We spend our own money to drastically cut our use of some resource (based upon some technological improvement), and as soon as we do so the seller cranks up prices so we’re spending more for less.

For electricity, there is a kind of endgame. At some point prices are simply so high, and our use of resources so efficient, that utility cord-cutting becomes viable. Suddenly, you don’t need a huge national grid any more. You can trade power with your neighbors, have community-based wind generation, and so on.

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That philosophy is more in line with the Kardashev scale.

If we use less energy or quality of life decreases. That's true for us, and it's true for every known living thing to have ever existed.

I don't want to use less energy. In fact most don't want to and most are not going to. So instead of wishing for something people don't want to be forced on them we do what people do want in a way that is better and less detrimental.

Will you do your part?? I’m not being a smart ass, it’s a real question. Years back a read a paper that had some excellent figures in it. It took the worlds energy output, analysed the energy requirements for various nations and then normalised the data to non dimensional units. The way it broke down was that in most of Africa people used about 0.25 of a unit of energy per day to exist, in places like the USA, Australia etc it was more like 4-5 units per day. To sustain current population growth around the world we would need to average it out to about about 1 unit per person on average. This would allow for about 10 billion people to survive at the standard 1 units provides. We hit this population number around 2050. Imagine the adjustment you need to make to go from 5 units a day to 1. Can you do it? I know I couldn’t. Which country should continue to under use so that we can keep 5 units a day? Simple fact is the world needs more energy not less. We have to find a away through that need without killing the planet. At this point I think fission is the best short / mid-term solution.

Edit: stuff.

It's not an economic thing, although it totally sounds like one. It's based on the idea that the more power we have access to, the more advanced we are as a civilization therefore we will have a higher quality of life among other things. This is also about us as a whole species, and not about any individuals. All that being said, we still shouldn't waste power and we absolutely have to transition to better forms of power.