Households use about 20% less electricity today than in 1985; per person kwh is also down. But household expenditure is up by 20% in real terms and cost per kwh is up by 50%

40 years of technological progress and prices went up :(

> a very significant increase in the number and intensity of outdoor lights

I think the number of lights is about the same at least where I live in the UK, the big change is the light is now bright white not the yellow of the older sodium vapour lights.

I kinda miss that but mostly because it wasn't as bright and is what I grew up with, you can't really argue that the white light isn't more effective at it's primary goal (illumination) though.

It's the same here in Germany, and I very much dislike this development. We used to get so much beautiful fireflies in the summer here. Now they're mostly gone, and that's probably only the most visible damage.

Very appropriate nickname!

If light bulbs get more efficient, and someone uses more electricity on something else, that's not Jevon's paradox, that's a coincidence because there's a million things using electricity and some go up and some go down. There's no significant causal relationship between the two. (Mostly little fluctuations in electric prices that even out over the years as supply is built to match demand.)

Jevon's paradox is when a specific use case gets more efficient, so you do more of that use case, so much so that the extra use overwhelms the efficiency. It happens in many situations but definitely not all. You have a curve between how much you use and how much value you get, and the steepness of that curve decides Jevon's. For lighting in the past few decades, there's no Jevon's. The changes in light bulbs have caused a big reduction in electricity use. If we were stuck on incandescents we'd be using a lot more electricity total.

I personally use as much electricity as I want without care for price. It going cheaper wont make me spend more.

Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.

> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd

I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?

Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...

There are diminishing returns on more. My life wouldn't be better if I was using more electric for the things I already do. Sure I could leave my lights on all day, but by turning the lights off I save more than enough money which I can use for something else as to be worth the effort to flipping the switch when I leave the room.

All the things I see that would allow me to use more electric are not worth it - I'd rather spend my money on something else. My life would be better for an electric animated sculpture in my front year - but not by nearly enough that it would be worth building and so I don't have it.

> What is obsession with the light

It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.

" Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrification#Benefits_of_el...

> What is obsession with the light, that's like lowest consumer of electricity

It used to not be!

> What is obsession with the light

Because the comment triggering this branch suggested improvements in efficiency must imply wanting to consume more. Light is one of those things, where the rule doesn't automatically apply. It's not the only thing I mentioned, you just chose to skip the others to make your job of arguing easier.

> Heating, cooking and appliances use the most

Even there you get more for less. Induction stoves are way more efficient than the old heating elements but do you want to spend more time in front of the stove because the electricity is cheaper? Some times, but not that common. Heat pumps are way more efficient than a boiler but it doesn't guarantee that you want hotter shower water or warmer room. But more importantly, most heating isn't electric. Natural gas, oil, or wood were always far more common. In the UK today almost 75% of heating is gas. Electricity is less than 10% [0] so it contributes little to the topic of the article.

Now let's get to the confounding factors which go down the pit of ignorance. Natural gas was always subsidized almost everywhere in the world whether you know it or not. District heating is more of the same. Where I live there are still "heating electricity" plans so people get a better price if they happen to use electrical heating because the provider knows that small number of people will suffer compared to others.

Another confounding factor, the push for extreme efficiency. Heat pumps have some big limitations that nobody wants but choose to live with for the sake of efficiency and self sufficiency. Because people also install solar panels on their roof and power their appliances without anyone ever reporting how much more heating or cooking was provided with 0 load on the grid.

In reality the biggest consumers which dwarf cooking appliances are industrial ones. And there the drop is real. Manufacturing moved abroad and electricity production moved with it. Maybe mass EV adoption can push the demand/production line back up.

> Seems like you don't live in the UK.

You are correct, I do not. This shouldn't prevent me from having an informed opinion though. Much like how I can write to you in English without living there.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

The UK doesn't have basically any "peakers" (Open Cycle Gas Turbines) and I'm surprised to hear they're a thing in Germany,

Combined Cycle costs more to build but is far more efficient. So OCGT is basically a bet that fuel is cheap forever, or at least for so long you've made your money. I know that bet doesn't work in the UK and I would not expect it to pay off in Germany either.

>> There is no evidence that Boris Wave had negative impact on GDP per person while there is evidence that Brexit had significant negative impact.

It dipped at the peak of the Boris Wave, and is only now starting to creep up. Good luck proving your Brexit counterfactual.

>>Generally refugees / asylum seekers have negative impact on the budget but their number is small so overall drag is small while skilled/work immigrants have positive impact (paying more in taxes then getting back) and there are more work migrants than refugees.

When you factor in the entire extended family that an immigrant on a work visa settles in the UK, this is not true. Also, given that you can get a "skilled worker" visa for working in a kebab shop or a corner store [1], "skilled" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdg4nvz5mro

True. But they aren't as rioty.

To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.

If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.

Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.

Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.

> One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.

Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).

At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.

> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)

Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.

And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.

Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.

Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.

Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!

> And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.

It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.