[toohotatopic]

>looming energy crisis

Where do you see the crisis? Unless you want to provide everybody with an abundance of energy, people need food and shelter, some electricity for electronics and some transportation once in a while.

Of course, any amount of energy can be burned for simulations and bitcoins but that's simply limited by supply. There will be a crisis when bitcoins and simulations are more valuable than human lives, but that's not changed by offering more energy.

[ovi256]

>people need food and shelter, some electricity for electronics and some transportation

Modern shelter, food and transportation means a lot of energy.

Modern shelter means operating energy for heating or air conditioning, plus embedded energy used to create its components. If the shelter is green, or "energy efficient", it means it is operating energy efficient, but it contains a huge amount of embedded energy in the insulation and heat exchange components.

Air conditioning doesn't necessarily have a worse bottom line, energy wise, than just heating. It's all about the time * temperature difference envelope. Air conditioning usually has a much lower temperature difference between the outside and the inside. If it's 40 C (as hot as it gets in places where masses of people live) outside, air conditioning has to drop by 15 C to get the inside to 25. If it's freezing (0 C) outside, heating has to heat by 25 C.

Double that for a modern workplace - office, warehouse or manufacturing, they all consume a lot of energy to keep the workers comfortable.

Modern high-speed transportation means a lot of energy too. We move crash-resistant 1500 kg structures at highway speeds around daily.

[epistasis]

However, we need less energy by the year to maintain an identical standard of living, because we are making everything far more efficient. Our energy use has been extremely inefficient up until now. Modern heat pumps alone will revolutionize heating, requiring 2-3x less energy for heating.

Moving around massive cars by burning gasoline is a perfect example of a hugely inefficient and primitive system. Mere electrification requires many times less energy.

The US depends on massive amounts of energy because we outlaw city construction that enables car free living, but that will begin to change too if younger generations can ever wrest control away from the boomers.

[tomtomtom777]

This is an odd jump you are making. Most energy isn't used just for food, shelter and some transportation, and certainly not for "bitcoin and simulations".

By far most energy is used to produce things (including the transportation requirements to do so). And as it turns out, the hunger for producing and buying new things is very hard to temper. This hunger is evident from the fact that the ways we are measuring "economic success" strongly correlates with the amount of things we produce, or even with the speed at which we are increasing the amount of things we produce.

[toohotatopic]

However, will it lead to a crisis? The hunger for new things simply dies down if they are not affordable. It's already happening. Energy is much more expensive than it used to be. Resources are more expensive so that new products have tighter margins and waste less materials.

People buy as much as they can. If they get less energy for their money, they buy less. Everybody had had-made clothes and ate organic food. Those times passed with hardly anybody complaining about receiving less.