Sunday, May 22, 2022

The Joy of Doomerism -- Denigrating Solar Energy.



This is a comment received on Facebook yesterday. It is curious how some people seem to be their duty on this Earth to express themselves as ancient monks and preachers in terms of "repent, sinners, your time is nearly over" These people seem to live in a world of their own, and the most impressive thing abut them is their dull certainty: "renewable energy cannot work because it cannot work, and that is the way it is." I guess they are best ignored, but the lines below are just for fun.  


Going odd (correction: off, but it's funny enough) the rails is not an alien thing to Ugo Bardi, sadly. For all his wisdom, he still seem caught up in some pleasurable fallacies, such as energy transition.

It's worth noting that the mere concept has not scientific grounding (cf Vaclav Smil).

It's the last refuge of the bourgeois: pretending that there *is* a solution, if only we would listen...

Preach, brother. Defend your turf. But what is your turf exactly? minimizing human suffering OR cutting humanity at the knee before we do too much damage?

This is one or the other. Unless you abandon all your own observations.

And sorry to say but "renewable energies" are a mirage. At *best* (disputable) those energy converters will only help us extract more fossil fuels (cf Vincent Mignerot, "L'Énergie du déni").


2 comments:

  1. Hi Ugo,
    I globally agree with your point of view, but also note there's a variant : "The Joy of Doomerism -- Denigrating Nuclear Energy".

    By the meantime, we see countries (like Germany) heavily pushing RE also developing fossil energy infrastructure (methane terminal, gaz power plants, coal mines, ...) and hopping that hydrogen produced thousands of km away will solve the electricity storage issue.

    Building a sunflower society is required - but more low carbon energy we will have, better will be our chance that it happens and avoid collapse. Doomerism is a matter of bayesian probability.

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  2. There is too much dualism or dichotomous choice bias--it has to be one or the other, rather than both, or rather than and. The future to me looks like plenty of doom and gloom--there will be die-offs. They are already happening (famines in Africa, wars, COVID). They will get worse. But building out the solar transition should be accelerated, not paused, because the problem seems impossible to solve. Projections of rates of change in Kaya Identity terms (C = C/E x E/Y x Y/P x P where C=emissions, E energy, Y output and P population) show that with Y/P x P growing at about 3% annually, doubling time 24 years, it is very hard to build enough solar panels (16 times more per century, doubling every 25 years). Not that bad because E/Y gets better, and maybe C/E too eventually. But demand growth has so far kept emissions going upwards. That is a hard fact to paper over with optimism. So maybe we are treating symptoms and the real problem is humanity too big for the planet. We need to reverse both population growth and economic growth. Another set of difficult problems, but not as difficult as infinite growth on a finite planet.

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