or how I learned to stop worrying and love the word generator
This short essay is a very narrow way to define how I see ethics with regard to personal energy use. It is highly reductive. Still I think it's valuable to talk about.
Politics always boils down to resource distribution. Your family has some money. You have certain skills, that the community has allowed you to develop, by schooling, providing places to train, health care, drinking water, mobility and so forth. You have your time. There is only a certain amount of space in nice places for people to live. All of this has to be distributed somehow. This is politics.
If you want the street to be clean, the trees to be cut correctly so the trees don't endanger your life when it storms, somebody needs to do the work. Maybe there will be a cool machine to help with the work, but ultimately there is a guy or a gal, climbing into the branches, spending their time and limited energy.
Now, any ethical framework that is based on "take only as much as you need, and give what you can" has to acknowlege this. Especially when paired with "everyone has the right to free self-expression", it follows that we must grant every person the right to some of the resources we all share.
Luckily, we have the means for rough calculations of this resource use, in the field of Economics. Economics can calculate how resources are distributed, and politics will decide how to distribute these resources.
I don't want to simplify things too much, but at the lowest magnification the most generic way to represent anything related to resource use is to convert it to useful energy. The pure physical Joules, but also on a more metaphorical level "the energy a human has to spend in his or her lifetime", regarding mental or physical work.
For the purpose of this argument, I will focus on the pure physical unit which allows us to convert it into useful work, and we have found many smart ways of doing work this way, and converting from one state of energy to another.
This is signified by the many units we use to describe the same physical unit:
The first insight: you can convert all of these units into each other. You can heat your home with gas, with heating oil, or with electricity.
The second insight: you do not really have to care about the specific energy required to drive each of these mechanisms to figure out how many of societies resources are used by a certain energy use. Because you can convert all of these into monetary units. And this is where my main point comes into play.
I do not own a car. I do not need one. I chose my place to live to be close enough to anything I care about to go there by bicycle. In the seldom case I do need a car, for example to transport something, I use a shared car system my city provides. For this I pay a base fee of about 10€ per month. Which is included in my transportation ticket of roughly 50€ per month, which I use very little, because as I said, I take my bike everywhere.
This is coming from the perspective of a healthy adult of course, but I think many people in our society might choose to live this way.
I eat meat. I am trying to reduce the amount of it that I eat, but I still do. I drink milk and eat cheese and eggs. I am probably not going to stop doing that.
All of this has implications on my resource use. Eating meat will increase the amount of energy required to produce my food by a large amount, not counting ethical concerns.
But by far the biggest impact is that I don't have to physically move to go to work.
I live in a small city in Bavaria (Augsburg), and I know a lot of people here drive to work every day to the capital, Munich. This is a 100km roundtrip, roughly 200 times per year. We can count the amount of fuel used (2000 litres of gasoline per year), but it is easier to compare cost. A commute like that will set you back about 4000€ per year in fuel prices. Add another 500€ in insurance, 2–5000€ for the maintenance and depreciation of your car itself; lots of people here drive very fancy BMWs, go figure. So you will spend about 7 to 10k€ per year for driving from and to work. I am not counting the human energy used to steer a car in heavy traffic. A person driving 100km will spend around 10,000€ per year in resources to reach their place of work.
I pay Anthropic 100€ per month for my use of Claude Sonnet. That translates to 1200€ per annum in subscription cost.
The German state heavily subsidizes the use of cars for commuting, the tax office will reduce the taxes you have to pay by 30cts per kilometer driven to and from work. The German state also heavily subsidizes the buildout and maintenance of street infrastructure to enable people to get to work.
US Venture Capital heavily subsidizes the buildout of datacenters for the training and operation of Large Language Models. Let's conservatively say they subsidize my subscription with another 400€ per month. This would mean I use 6000€ in resources per annum on LLM inference.
Economics is the science of measuring resource use.
At the end of a very complicated value chain, a 45 year old white collar worker might sit at the helm of their BMW, driving on the Autobahn to Munich at 220km/h. They will cost our shared planet and humanity resources valued a certain amount.
At another end of an even more complicated value chain, a 30-something white, cis, programmer dude with a run-down trekking bike will sit in front of their PC and ask Claude to write silly little code for silly little projects that probably go nowhere. This, too, will cost our shared planet and humanity resources of a certain, calculable amount.
Make of that what you will.