> This, to me, is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two (essentially, the GWP curve from before).
The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason.
Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda:
> Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure.
He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag.
He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution:
> In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations
> The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
Land, energy, and other finite resources are zero sum.
Unless the amount of land required to have a good quality of life exponentially decreases then the following holds.
If your system permits me to increase the amount of land I control in direct proportion to the amount of land I control (ie. it is possible to profit).
Your rising tide isn't lifting all boats, it's lifting the superyacht while all the small boats are chained to the bottom.
The argument that 'affluence' or 'quality of life' is a zero-sum game with nature seems to have become popular recently.
It has some very dark implications if you accept it, and some of the people pushing it seem to think those dark implications are better than not burning fossil fuels for some reason.
Yeah, reading on this is just fossil fuel progapanda:
> Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure.
He may just be well meaning and wrong, but writing an Energy textbook copyright 2022 that claims PV is too expensive is a big red flag.
He also gets some of the basic physics wrong, which is supposed to be his main contribution:
> In total, the basic physics of a PV cell is such that 20% efficiency is a reasonable expectation for practical implementations
No, it's not.
https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/most-efficient-sola...