If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste.

You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped.

It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet.

Not everything is Bitcoin.

You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees).

> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.

> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.

> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.

> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.

So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.

How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace