[1053r]

The entire book falls apart because of two facts, both of which are in the book itself!

"Hands down, solar is the only renewable resource capable of matching our current societal energy demand. Not only can it reach 18 TW, it can exceed the mark by orders of magnitude." (Section 13.9)

"We would likely not be discussing a finite planet or limits to growth or climate change if only one million humans inhabited the planet, even living at United States standards. We would perceive no meaningful limit to natural resources and ecosystem services." (Section 3.5) An energy source that is thousands of times more abundant than fossil fuels is basically equivalent to having one one thousandth the population.

While I must acknowledge the truth that converting things to run on electricity will be a large engineering and logistical challenge, and that battery production must be scaled up (as well as converting some loads to run where the sun is shining), both of these challenges pale in comparison to the money part of that first quote: "exceed the mark by orders of magnitude." In other words, even if we could only store electricity at an efficiency of 1%, we'd be fine. (In actuality, we ALREADY store electricity at efficiencies over 80 times that.)

Ecosystem services, availability of raw materials, and many other challenges exist as well. However, all of them are meaningless in the face of "we would perceive no meaningful limit to natural resources." Having an energy source that is thousands to millions of times more abundant than the ones we use today lets us substitute energy for basically all of our needs. (Need clean water? Energy + dirty water = clean water. Need more steel? Dirt + energy = steel. Need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere? You can do it, at only the cost of several times the energy you got putting the CO2 into the atmosphere, which is only a few % of the future energy budget from solar. Think of it this way. In the past, we relied on cutting down forests for heat. Putting the forests back would have seemed like an insurmountable task, because our fuel came from the forests. But now that we run on fossil fuels, which are approximately 100x more abundant than forests, putting the forests back is a matter of politics and land usage discussions, not one of practicality.)

In other words, we are the only ones we have to blame if the future is not MUCH wealthier than the past, both per person and also for our total economy.

[justbrowsingthx]

I'm not sure I understand your point. Perhaps you disagree with the author on the desirability of a future in which virtually unlimited energy is available to humankind in its current state (see the upshot on nuclear fusion p. 269, for example). His cautious take on our collective ability to manage our energetic needs[0] does not seem unwarranted to me.

Regardless, I think the book remains useful for its intended audiences as a quantitative assessment of available energy sources given our growth path.

[0] "The rookie mistake here is assuming that adults are in charge." (p. 134)

[stouset]

"Virtually unlimited energy" is where the argument completely falls apart. It's a myth we need to stop spreading. As I said elsewhere, we have only a bit over 200 years at our current 2.3% annual growth in energy usage before we start raising the temperature of the Earth purely from a thermodynamic perspective.

Completely blanketing the Earth in solar panels gets us a few hundred years more (thanks to the fact that that solar energy is already hitting the planet whether or not we use it for electricity), but that's assuming we've developed panels with magical levels of efficiency and we're okay with 0% of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface.

Four hundred years of sustained energy growth at current levels is the most that could happen on this planet under comically-implausible circumstances, and when we reduce the absurdity even just a bit (greenhouse gases still exist, we won't blanket the planet in perfectly-efficient solar cells), we optimistically might get two hundred years more before we hit an energy wall that cannot be overcome without a complete overthrow of thermodynamics as we understand it.

Is that still a lot of growth? Sure. But it's about the same window of time as the industrial revolution until now.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/