alt Hacker NewsIt comes from an idea that economic progress is coupled with increased energy use, a fallacy that hasn't been true for decades, even for fossil fuels. It's well established that the cheapest additional capacity is efficiency. One of the reasons I am not so concerned about the AI energy needs, especially because the US has a lot of wiggle room.
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Well given that cheap energy follows Jevon's paradox, it makes complete sense. If each unit of energy becomes cheaper to produce (which renewables are driving today), then you should see more consumption of that cheap energy into economic activity. Economic progress is easily coupled with increased energy use.
The US has a lot of wiggle room wrt energy consumption because it has ceded the role of being the world's factory to China. At the same time, the US is the world's data center and software development hub, and the world's finance hub, and the world's bank. What does the UK have in comparison?
There's a lot of HN and YC-aligned people who don't believe this, despite the empirical evidence of the last few decades.
To take the stupidest version of the argument (not going to sugarcoat it, I think it was embarrassingly stupid) there was Marc Andreesen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto where he called for a 1000x increase in energy production from nuclear fission and fusion. I quote directly:
"We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well."