askchapo

I agree with your first and last statements: everything takes energy of some sort, and labor is the primary mechanism by which we convert potential energy into value.

But there's a lot of rhetorical jumps in-between; to say that there is a linear relationship between energy consumption and quality of life is simply not a rigorous statement.

• South Korea consumes a lot more energy than North Korea. Does the average South Korean have a QoL several times higher than the average North Korean, or not so much?
• How about Cuba versus its neighbors?
• Some countries have climates that simply require more energy for indoor climate control than others; are they measurably better off, or do you have to correct the "E vs QoL" function by a climatic constant?
• A 2500-kcal carnivore diet has over 10 times the trophic energy of a 2500-kcal vegan diet, letting alone embodied labor and energy; does the carnivore have 10 times the quality of life of the vegan?
• Since the early 20th century we have had economies based on overproduction and generating demand to catch up to that overproduction, with all the waste that comes with it. Are we really better off when we make things that no one really needs, or when we heat empty buildings, or when we spend 10-15 hours a week just to afford an automobile?

All of these things poke huge holes in the assertion of a linear relation between energy consumption and quality of life. Qualitative sweeping descriptions simply don't hold up.

You could possibly get away with saying that the relationship between energy and QoL is a monotonic function. But that is such a wide category as to include linear, polynomial, exponential, and logarithmic functions. Based on what we can clearly observe about energy consumption and QoL both longitudinally and cross-sectionally, it would look a lot more like a logarithmic function, with decreasing marginal returns on higher increments. This would be somewhat corroborated by the data on GDP per capita versus life expectancy, where GDP per capita is always plotted logarithmically on an axis and life expectancy is always plotted linearly, and we still see a clear asymptote.

I would argue that after a certain point, energy consumption becomes totally uncoupled from quality of life, much like the cutoff point around $80-90k where increased wealth no longer correlates with increased subjective well-being.

We can also ask what it takes to have a good quality of life. It is possible to list good food, lack of pollution, access to other people, access to information, ergonomic working conditions, and access to healthcare as parts of it, but we have to admit that the concept is not all that well-defined. If we're not careful, we can find ourselves falling for the simplistic ideological trap of the capitalists, which is to claim that the measure of a dollar is the only thing that means anything. It would be economic relativism (liberalism) to say that anyone's dollar spent has the same utility as anyone else's. I think it's overwhelmingly possible to have a good quality of life without Western standards of income or even energy consumption.

I could have a "mud hut", with a fan blowing through a tunnel in the ground, riding a bike and consuming on average 200 W, and still live much better than the average American in a mortgaged suburban hollow gas-heated air-conditioned stick-frame house driving a car and consuming 2000 W.

Interestingly enough, when we bring this back to the solar boom and its prospects, we can conclude that solar PV production is way higher than we really need, and with a wise allocation of resources and production, from the present day onward it would be possible to secure a good quality of life for several billion people on Earth basically indefinitely, without ever crashing. Or we could fixate on "building up the productive forces", without ensuring conversion to human well-being, just to compete with capitalism on capitalism's terms. Economic crashes directly come from perpetually wanting more than we need.