Jim, Rob...
Great discussion, folks. Marginalization and suffering wouldn't occur over a weekend. It's a more gradual process, one that I suspect will be more abrupt relatively speaking than many would feel comfortable with. But the species will adapt moving-window style as it always does. The focus of the last couple of posts in this thread centered heavily on transportation and supply-chain economics. Elsewhere, earlier today on another discussion list you, Jim, made similar assertions about Internet. I maintain that Internet is relatively benign environmentally and energywise. It doesn't consume near as much as you ascribed to it. Transmission systems are ultra efficient today, relative to the per megabit costs (financial and environmentally) of earlier systems. It's the data centers you have been referring to, those that comprise and support the Web's super-apps, the digital substitutes and evolving clouds that perform brick & mortar substitution, many of which are being used arbitrarily in ways that sometimes have a mitigating effect on energy consumption, but all too often also have the direct opposite effect by exacerbating, and as you noted, accelerating the problems associated with inefficient behaviors of many types. The Web is not Internet, and data centers used for commerce and trade are not Internet. To borrow from a popular saying, The Internet doesn't kill people, people kill people. When leveraged properly, Internet could put a heavy dent into all of the ills you listed where energy is being used foolishly. The Internet should not be confused with the appendages that exploit it.
FAC
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