Post #2701712

2026-05-05 19:54 UTC

@schmaker Because progress and prosperity requires lots of energy. Progress was so exponentially accelerated in the past 200 years because of access to huge amount of cheap energy. It's of course good to be more efficient, but it still means using more energy overall, because you can the more and more stuff at the same time.

Replies (1)

@schmaker@schmaker.eu 2026-05-06 03:37

@Mac_CZ@mastodon.macsnet.cz I can agree with you at this point, the efficiency can do huge differences though. Imagine how much energy is just wasted when transporting crude oil and it's products instead of just using power line. So much work-hours, so much energy for transporting energy and so on (and I'm not even trying to talk about enviromental externalities 😀 ) When we are talking about efficiency, the idea behind "do not use car when not need to" is easy: - transporting myself using bicycle (about 100 kg of load) to work and back is like <1 kWh of energy max (same goes for eScooter) - transporting myself using car (about 1500 kg of load) to work and back is like 1-2l of gasoline. Thats 10-20 kWhs that could have been used much better elsewhere. And it also means more than 90% efficiency difference. It's not steam vs gasoline engine efficiency difference, it's huge I wonder if public transportation has also such good efficiency... Power density source: chemistry.beloit.edu/edetc/Sli…

Open ##2701713