Comment by epistasis

As somebody who advocates a lot for my local government to finally, please please allow people to build housing in ways to merely allow people to choose to drive less, I think you are looking at this all wrong.

Even if we went back to early days of energy use, we are burning wood (or worse) and that is going to make for a truly ugly air quality.

Nobody wants to use X amount of energy, they actually want to accomplish Y amount of energy services. Current tech has X about four to five times as Y. As we electrify, it enables tech to get X very close to Y. But we also get to use cleaner energy as we electrify.

If my government won't even let me reduce Y for those people that want to, then the idea of forcing everybody to drastically reduce Y, and leaving the X factor the same, will be truly disastrously ineffective.

I think that in the 1970s, this idea was far more reasonable. But as we have failed to make any progress on reducing the amount of energy services that people want, but we have made tons of progress in reducing the X factor, and in cleaning up energy generation, I no longer see it as a feasible or fruitful path.