Germany's energy consumption per capita has dropped about 20% since its 1980s peak and has been trending down fairly sharply since 2007 [0]. AfD is polling extremely well on the back of a "stop this madness" environmental platform.
German renewable energy policies have been a failure at securing human prosperity.
The developed world has coordinated energy policy and they're all failing together. France and the US are both tinderboxes with mass riots in recent memory; likely linked to the lifestyle squeeze that poor people are undergoing. Germany and Japan are both deindustrialising due to lack of energy. Japan is accompanying this with a state of breathtakingly rapid population decline and they are still seeing per capita energy drop.
That is a graph of countries with failed energy policy. It has been a long time in the works.
Order of magnitude, what specific efficiencies do you think are causing this?
because I think that is just completely silly. Efficiencies will trigger Jevons' paradox and result in energy use rising. What we're seeing in these graphs is a squeeze as Asian nations outcomplete the developed countries combined with a series of policy failures in the West as we choke out our own energy and industrial bases.
> what specific efficiencies do you think are causing this
Depends of the place... Improvements in computers & electronics (new TV uses less than half what the old one used 10 y ago), new transportation technologies, better building insulation, diminishing meat consumption... The high energy prices and regulations are two good pushers on that.
> Efficiencies will trigger Jevons' paradox and result in energy use rising
Picking on this as the most obvious example - the first thing you mention is consumer electronics efficiencies as being linked to a reduced energy use in the last 10 years, but then you linked an article showing that German per-household electricity use rose in the last 10 years. It is a challenging to connect those things.
The issue you have here is you're pulling ideas out of your hat with no evidence. If you do some order of magnitude estimates and have any statistics on hand, you're going to find that you're just wrong. The evidence points to Europe being midway though a deindustralisation and likely going through a big drop in living standards as industrial capital starts to decay.
Their energy policies are likely to be somewhere between shattering the living standards of the poor in Europe through to plain old catastrophic as the consequences of relying on Russian gas and Chinese manufacturing start to bite.
> Overall, how do you propose to fight climate change in the coming 5 to 10 years?
I don't. The Europeans are fighting climate change and their standard of living is starting to collapse. There are riots in France and war has come to the continent again. The Chinese embraced fossil fuels and got something like 40 years of peace and prosperity where their lifestyles improved a jaw dropping amount.
The people "fighting" climate change
(1) Achieved nothing.
(2) Are suffering for it.
If they'd gone all-in on prosperity in the 80s and tried to make nuclear reactors work, ironically they would have done more for climate change and for their own citizens. Unfortunately, the environmentalists carried that battle and now everyone gets to suffer.
German renewable energy policies have been a failure at securing human prosperity.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...