Why would energy usage need to decline when there's a giant ball of fusion in our sky we barely make use of, and when we've just begun exploring space in the past century?
Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever.
Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406
Solar energy is the cheapest form of energy we have. Storage is a bit more expensive, but judging from the amount of metals the video proposes they want to go all-in on battery storage, whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium, precisely because the amount of resources it needs are much smaller.
>whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium
What experts? Power to gas has been really energy inefficient with little sign of improving from what I know. It can't really compete with pumped hydro even where pumped hydro makes less to no sense it seems.
Efficiency (almost) doesn't matter. Cost and scalability matters. Pumped hydro and batteries are wonderfully efficient, but they're a lot more difficult to scale than infrastructure for storing, transporting, and burning a gas.
This isn't the first time someone has predicted an end to economic growth soon because of peak raw resources having been attained. We can go all the way back to the numerous failed predictions of Elrich's Population Bomb book. The idea that we're close to the pinnacle of what technology and science can achieve is ridiculous given the immense cosmic time scales and resources available. We're nowhere near the limit of what's possible.
Wow, that was a bucket of water in my face the likes of which I’ve never felt before! We are 100% completely screwed! We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future. The picture this professor paints is so incredibly bleak that it puts the war in Ukraine and a potential war in Taiwan into perspective.
Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. And there are no lifeboats.
> We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future.
Don't make the mistake of confusing energy use with quality of life.
People like to make such alarmist statement around standard of living but we should instead ask ourselves what makes for quality of life.
A good example is planned obsolescence in technology: it greatly increases energy usage and pollution without making consumers happier (on the contrary they hate it)
Don't make the mistake of conflating carbon emissions with transportation. So much of our society is built on carbon and personal automobiles are only a part of it. Cement production, globalized shipping, fertilizers for growing food, natural gas for making steel and other heavy industry. No matter how you slice it, wind and solar can't replace any of that stuff.
