Worldchanging on a Moore’s law of efficiency. I wonder how much this is due to improvements in processes and how much due to shifts in value generation from the physical to the virtual.

From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of 1% / year. 1% / year yields a factor of 2.7 when compounded over 100 years.

2006-10-24: Rosenfeld’s Law

the energy required to produce 1$ of GDP has decreased by ~1% per year since 1845.

2008-02-19: Really puzzling how people can make dumb investments in “real estate” when energy efficiency has an IRR that beats most sectors.

McKinsey Global has an energy productivity plan. An additional $170b per year invested in energy efficiency can provide 17% internal rate of return and cut projected energy demand growth by 50% by 2020. We could use existing technologies to pay for themselves. It would provide up to 50% of the global greenhouse gas avoidance to get to a long term 550 ppm level of GHG in the atmosphere. This would reduce the energy demand in 2020 by 135 quadrillion BTU or the equivalent of 64m barrels of oil per day. Instead of needing 613 quadrillion btu in 2020, there would be a need for 478 quadrillion btu. (In 2003, the world used 422 quadrillion btu).

2008-05-10: Energy intensity

America’s energy intensity was falling by a 0.4% until the oil shock of 1973. It is now falling by 2% a year.

2019-10-04: Andrew McAfee is offering to take a number of bets centered around predictions and implication from his new book More From Less.

In 2029, the US will consume less total energy than it did in 2019. In 2029, the US will produce less total CO2 emissions than it did in 2019, even after taking offshoring into account. Over the 5 years leading up to 2029, the US will use less paper in total than it did over the 5 years leading up to 2019.

2020-04-24: Building energy efficiency

in the past 5 years, the efficiency of the best new and retrofit buildings improved by 2-10x, with terrific economic returns, simply because we became smarter about how to choose and combine the technologies. That can be done in vehicles and industry too: for example, 2x or 3x car efficiency at comparable cost.

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