BTW, there are many browser plugins that allow you to download youtube videos (and watch as you download), and it's about to be made easy for torrents too (search for "Popcorn Time"). If I'm not mistaken, newsgroups are direct downloads anyway, so they already have this feature.

It's incredible how myopic this article and many comments are...

- World median income is about $100/month. So "most people" probably can't afford a computer, much less a DSL internet connection to their home. They probably can, however, afford a crappy TV and a crappy DVD player.

- I'm not sure that optical disks are necessarily better than flash drives. They can easily scratch or break. Plus, it would seem that BluRays (which would beat flash drives for the data capacity/price) were crippled by their DRM, and we won't be seeing them used as general purpose storage any time soon. And a crappy USB DivX player is even cheaper and more sturdy than a DVD player (probably because of the lack of moving parts).

- The only reason streaming exists, IMHO, is because the content publishers want to control the way that content is being watched and they especially don't want you to share it by yourself. Because otherwise there's no point for streaming, since you can just download the video bits in "chronological" order and watch it as you download it, assuming your bandwidth is sufficient. That's actually what your browser does when "streaming", it's just that you don't get to keep the video file as it's kept in the browser cache. And if your bandwidth is NOT sufficient, then when downloading you just have to wait until the time left to download is equal to the video duration. FYI, a 700MB movie can be downloaded in 90 minutes if you have a bandwidth with and average of 130KB/s. So in theory, even a 56K (28 hours at 7KB/s for 700MB) is going to be faster than snail mail (of course you won't like the film download hogging all the bandwidth, and there's another issue if data transfers are expensive for you).

- Netflix (whether rent-by-mail DVD or streaming) is only available in a few countries, the rent-by-mail DVD system would probably be illegal in many countries (that's probably one reason why Netflix clones haven't popped up in every first world country). Movie streaming services in general suck, even compared to regular DVD rentals, and it just gets laughable when trying to compare the diversity and quality of service of streaming services compared to "pirate" sharing systems.

- I'm willing to bet that the most profitable system for non-scarcity systems like digital distribution is a "pay-what-you-want" system (or at least a system where your average consumer considers the purchase "cheap"). Case in point : Humble Bundle, GoG and Steam. (Oh, and content distributors shouldn't insult our intelligence by trying to sell us a film download for more than a movie ticket.) But of course the MPAA won't release their control because that would be their end, so they are going to go on, kicking and screaming, until they are finally completely irrelevant...

Good points.

I was using this graph : http://earlywarn.blogspot.fr/2011/09/peak-oil-per-capita.html , but it's only oil (and you see a stagnation rather than a decline, but since the EROEI goes down, the available energy for society from oil also goes down).

Increased efficiency plays a role, but if I'm not mistaken it's about 0.5% per year. I'm not sure if a better metric than energy per capita exists : you would need to somehow sum up the transformations that this use of energy allowed. Maybe computing exergy would be better?

Then, I guess my hypothesis comes more from the feeling that we're "scraping the bottom of the barrel" with the hydraulic fracturing and tar sands, while many of western countries show signs of political rot.

Exactly. The problem is that historically, when better efficiency in energy was achieved, we didn't use less energy : we just consumed more with the same energy as before. This consumption mentality has to go if we hope to survive as a species.

I'm pretty sure that the URSS ones have been built by the government.

RTFA

Obviously, for a regulated free market you need a strong, non-corrupt government first. And you would also probably need to dismantle the megacorporations. So that is the priority. Sadly, it doesn't seem that this is something that can be quickly fixed, even though Hansen's own 350.org campaign gives some hope...

Some nuclear designs have fuel lasting thousands of years at current energy usage rate. (Whether any of those designs are feasible is another question.)

What makes you think we can't build and manage (even large) nuclear power plants without the help of large corporations?

Except that the scarcity of the fracked natural gas (which is expected to peak in 2017) isn't being priced in (like many other things). So you can't have a proper Free Market.

Sure, but to be fair, the fossil fuels would need to stop to be subsidized too. And you would need to apply the "you pollute, you pay" principle too, without forgetting the fossil fuel CO2 releases.

Yeah, it's a shame, he's losing all credibility here...
Overconfident nuclear apologists are much worse than clueless anti-nuclear activists.

You say "post-Fukushima" like it's something in the past, while the disaster is ongoing.

When you consider that in some scenarios we might have to "evacuate" Japan and some of the West Coast of USA, then the hysteria is pretty understandable :
http://www.storyleak.com/top-scientist-another-fukushima-quake-mean-us-evacuation/

So, don't you think that limiting our electricity consumption and not having to expect it to be available when we want to, but rather when it's available - is better than keeping old, dangerous nuclear reactors operating?

What makes you so sure our descendants will be better equipped to deal with this? Peak power per capita was in the 1970, our civilization is on the decline, so that seems like wishful thinking to me...

Once the general public (of the rich countries) begins to understand the nature of our predicament it will be too late, because they will only understand it once they start lacking electric power / heating / food (and even then it might be blamed on something else). By that point it will be even less politically viable to divert energy from these energy issues to plan long-term infrastructure like new design nuclear plants that only will be ready in 10+ years.

For the same reason, the lowered dependence upon fossil fuels will only happen because they will become unaffordable (hopefully that will happen before catastrophic climate change sets in). If people (and industries) were willing to reduce the fossil fuels usage, then we would already have a worldwide taxation of fossil fuels. What we have instead is a positive net sum of subventions to fossil fuels.

Some food for thought :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-03/does-the-earth-need-saving