Yet another Hacker News

Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For

47 points u1hcw9nx 2 hours ago 21 comments

jdlshore 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is AI. It’s not as bad as some, but it’s got that breathless enthusiasm and drones on and on without ever quite getting to its point.

roywiggins 45 minutes ago | parent

Pangram flags it. It also talks about "quietly" and "the gap". It's AI.

orwin 29 minutes ago | parent

Pretty sure it's edited AI. Honestly for dry stuff like this it's okay, if a bit tiring at the end.

cozzyd 18 minutes ago | parent

Yes, a lot of obvious tells.

bluGill 3 minutes ago | parent

AI is fine in itself. The only question are the numbers correct. I'm not sure how to validate them. The facts count the most important. The second is the article readable without being too wordy or any other such problems.

supahfly_remix 1 hour ago | parent

> The EU now runs on roughly 44 percent less energy per euro of output than it did in 1995, and more than a third of that improvement has landed since 2019 alone.

Is this really a de-industrialization story? Is manufacturing much more efficient since that time, or has the economy moved onto other less energy intensive tasks, say through outsourcing them to Asia?

delichon 58 minutes ago | parent

> Every euro of EU output now takes 44% less energy than it did in 1995, and more than a third of that improvement has landed since 2019.

This is positioned as the key fact of the whole argument, presented first and repeated. But they do not attempt an equivalent US figure. So here's mine.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_19.pdf

  Consumption per $/GDP
  1995: 7.77
  2025: 4.04

4.04 / 7.77 ≈ 0.52, so the U.S. uses about 48% less energy per dollar than in 1995, versus 44% per euro for the EU. So pretty much the same as across the pond.

karmakurtisaani 49 minutes ago | parent

And probably both of these can be explained largely by the fact that most of the energy intensive production happens now in Asia.

bluGill 5 minutes ago | parent

They used and installed a fair amount of renewable energy since then. Plus, the similar efficiency gains in the EU and the article have also happened in the US. While there hasn't been government encouragement directly, there have been a lot of things that cause it to happen anyway.

PunchTornado 47 minutes ago | parent

Good point. One could counter with the fact that US transitioned to service based and software while EU kept the heavy industry (more) while doing the change

tmtvl 42 minutes ago | parent

Interestingly you're looking at the wrong column: emissions per million USD GDP have gone from 467 metric tons to 206 metric tons. That's an improvement of about 56%. It'd be great if the politicians here in the EU could pull their heads out of their arses long enough to try and match that.

cinntaile 28 minutes ago | parent

What are the equivalent numbers in the EU? Be sure to compare the same numbers. Usually they're in MtCO2e and not in MtCO2 like in that PDF.

jskdkdkdkf 27 minutes ago | parent

Surely a directive is due

croes 9 minutes ago | parent

Does this number include the outsourcing of production to Asia and to ship the products to the US?

HWR_14 8 minutes ago | parent

Isn't this best explained by inflation. It seems like this implies that inflation adjusted GDP/energy remained pretty constant

braingravy 58 minutes ago | parent

If ever there was a time to insert a few key visuals to illustrate your point…

roywiggins 46 minutes ago | parent

ai; dr, sorry

baxtr 41 minutes ago | parent

> Gas set the price of electricity in 15% of hours in Spain this year against 89% in Italy, and when Hormuz closed, Spain grew 0.7% while Italy got flagged as the eurozone's most exposed economy.

It's a shame that Italy spent so little on solar compared to Spain. Sun shining there as well last time I checked.

Imaiomus 19 minutes ago | parent

Dont worry, if ultras wins next year election in sPain they will tax sun again, so shame levels will equalize.

megous 37 minutes ago | parent

We'll see after the winter. Industrial decline may also lead to reductions in energy use. And increased costs in coutnries where EU "exported" it's energy heavy industry may come back and bite, too.

I would not make conclusions from a short 5 month price shock.

0x_rs 22 minutes ago | parent

CTRL+F "manufacturing": 0 results for a website called "oilprice", instead it has this line: "An economy that produces more while burning less isn't stagnating…it's just getting more efficient, and there's no headline number for that, so it mostly doesn't get written about.", which is false, these are different things. EU economy shifted from manufacturing to services in the past decades and especially after the GFC (from which it never recovered in some sectors), losing millions of those jobs in the process, and an output decline in the 20% range, France leading the way with the industrialization collapse. Services are inherently less energy sensitive than manufacturing and there's no question the latter, already struggling, hit another wall in 2022 because the continent has zero energy independence. If you cannot produce your energy your manufacturing will always be at the mercy of macroeconomic events, and your consumption will always depend on another country's production. It takes 20 seconds to generate an AI article full of fabrications but orders of magnitude more to properly correct it..