I like the comparison concept. It's like that "order of magnitudes every programmer should know" list, but applied to anyone who cares about energy.

That said, and hot take: people shouldn't worry about energy independent of what they pay for it. The whole point of a price is to fold a complicated manifold of scarcity-allocation into a set of scalars anyone can rank against each other. Appealing to people's sense of justice or duty to get them to use less energy than they'd otherwise be willing to buy is just asking them to lead a less utility-filled life than they can because you think you can allocate scarcity better than the market. I can't, and you can't either. Nobody can.

If you claim that people should listen to moralized pleadings and not the market because prices don't internalize certain externalities, duty is on you to get those externalities accounted so they can properly factor into prices, not apply ad-hoc patches on top of markets by manipulating people's emotions.

As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else. If you propose policy X and you can't get X enacted, perhaps it's because X is a bad idea, not because the system is broken.

Not everyone anyone claims is an externality is, in fact, a cost we must account. We should have a prior that costs are accounted and need evidence to rebut it --- and any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals. What specific costs are unaccounted? How large are these costs? Through what specific mechanism are they escaping existing accounting mechanisms? "I feel like we're using too many electrons for X" is not a valid argument for the existence of an unaccounted externality.

That is, unless there's some specific reason to believe otherwise, we should believe market get it right, especially with fungible commodities like kWh.

How do you propose to convince people to get those externalities accounted without emotions? How do you convince people of the value of externalities that are far away in place or time (but not less real)?

Sure, by your own argument, you should somehow increase the price of people telling other people what to avoid spending money on

How am I as an individual supposed to get externalities priced in?

And given that right now they are clearly not, what’s your plan until then?

Your dismissal of moral concerns is not convincing.

Imagine a world where the only energy you do is use was generated by a stationary bike you had to ride yourself. You would, generally speaking, use that energy differently than energy you would pay for--you would generally reserve your effort for worthwhile things, and would be averse to farming energy yourself just to power frivolity or vice. How you determine what to put your energy into would explicitly be a moral question.

Instead in our world we an abstractions conceals the source of the energy. But if the moral concerns from the first world had any weight, they haven't lost it now; if energy is anything short of completely free we should by the same logic be averse to expending energy on worthless work or vice. The human being is not a utility monster, but something very different, and moral questions of this sort are central to how it navigates the world, they should not be dismissed.

> As for getting externalities internalized: as a society, we call the procedure for updating rules "politics", and it's as open to you as to anyone else.

Ok so I do need to worry about energy so that I can identify these unaddressed externalities and work towards updating the rules. You can to care before you can get involved in this stuff. You can't tell me not to worry about it and then also say that it's basically my fault for not getting involved if the price is wrong.

> any such rebuttal must involve numbers, not emotional appeals

Who are you arguing with? You're commenting about a website that has strictly numbers and nothing else.