The statement.
1. An economy can expand without an increase in energy consumption.
is not the same as
2. An economy can expand to an unlimited degree without expanding energy consumption.
Although I suppose Statement #2 is possible in theory, even if wholly unlikely in the real world. On the other hand, Statement #1 is entirely true. GDP can in fact increase without an increase in energy consumption for a given time period.
What else was said recently that confuses you?
The economy can't expand without raising energy consumption too even in the shortish kind of term.
You need to create more products and services in order to introduce more money supply without causing inflation (real wealth growth).
And how do you create more products or services? Bet you can't do it with your electricity consumption
stagnating/falling for years certainly.
Yeah, you can also I guess count various financial engineering creations as GDP, like Bob sold some virtual Tesla shares to Steve, Goldman Sachs bought a virtual ES futures contract from Citadel, but that is just
illusionary,
Ordinary people get no standards of living increased from that. Only 10% of elites get richer through void assets and fund returns.
But that is the whole point, force people to buy assets, to boost the elites, through inflation.
An economy can only expand through
productivity, not from virtual accounting differences.
How can you prove they had any productivity rising through energy utilization improvements,
When their exports are falling, and production of all key materials and industrial products (the end results measures) is also falling too, etc.
Of course, shutting off production plants (deindustrialization) in favor of more law offices will lead to less energy consumption.
The US didn't get better at "being more efficient" at utilizing energy like you keep saying, but it simply changed the structure of the economy.
So, just because they changed the structure of the economy doesn't mean that they can now "grow" without energy.
It simply meant that they could decline more and more. All the while their media tell you about their "giga GDP".
That is because, with every new useless financial or litigation transaction, or bullshit job, they are one step away from surviving past another 5 years.
You are confusing real economy (productivity) growth, with GDP and GDP growth, which is an accounting interpretation.
This topic on power consumption vs economy growth has been beaten to death a few times. Power consumption is a good metric for manufacturing based economies like China. But the US economy is service based. It takes far less energy to create a trillion dollars in GDP in the US than to create seven trillion yuans in China.
For example, the healthcare sectors in the US economy added 1.8 trillion dollars, IIRC, to its GDP in 2023. How much more energy would it have required to produce 1.8 trillion dollars worth of cars, cellphones, and washing machines? I bet it would have been a lot more whether it was in the US or in China. And we are not even touching the financing sectors that probably use even less energy than the healthcare ones on a dollar to dollar basis.
In a sense, the US is indeed more energy efficient in growing GDP than China.
It didn't "add" anything my friend. It just made basic human health needs more expensive to people because private mega-corporations can rent-seek through regulatory capture and monopolization more and more effectively as time goes on (price gouging).
The same is true for education, utilities, telecommunications, insurance, housing, pharmaceuticals, even childcare, etc, etc... That's why you have
ordinary people going mental over the costs of living in that country whereas virtual GDP bros continue to bullshit hard.
When we are talking about "services industry growth" in the US, that's what we really mean. Private equity firms and mega corporations eating all the other smaller corporations up, in every corner of the country, and then price gouging more effectively for profits.
I subjectively believe that for the majority of ordinary people growth stagnated a few decades ago and their real standards are now already declining for a few years.
The pie didn't grow, the elites just took a larger and larger share of it and convinced sheep of "GDP growth", and "line going up - it's all good".
