Please don't get me wrong, I live in a zero energy, bio-based home, haven't owned a car for more than 2 decades and prefer the train to the plane....but.....it's always very important to keep an open and critical mind.
Ideas can only easily turn into dogmas and then can be wielded by demagogues on all sides of the spectrum. So if you can please feel free to prove me wrong.
Energy drives our economy, Hall and Klitgaard amongst others have shown how critically our entire way of life and population boom since the 1870s is tied to our access to cheap and abundant fossil fuels.
Resource exploration and exploitation follow the Hubbert curve so all fossil fuels will at some time face a diminishing energy return on investment (EROI). Fusion remains a future promise, so up to this day society doesn't have a real alternative.
That is a huge problem because the carrying capacity of a fully solar-based economy is, depending on the consumption levels, somewhere between 1-3 bln people. Nowhere near the 10 bln, we are currently heading for.
So frantically investing in alternative energy and material resources whilst reducing consumption, amongst others, is imperative.
But perhaps for that reason alone.
David Siegel has put up some interesting arguments to nuance the driver of climate change. It's changing for sure, but perhaps due to other causes and at a different speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Ln3Ou6jnc
What if he is (partly) right? Cancelling him doesn't make his arguments go away. John Stuart Mill is correct, only informed dialogue can. And it's important we have that dialogue for 2 reasons.
If he is right, it means we have a bit more time to transform and invest our high-density fossil fuels very very wisely.
The second is we then at last can stop and realise how devastating the post-fossil fuel society is really going to be. We can't shed 7 bln people overnight but in the long run, without some miracle happening, we simply will have to.
Our only choice is going to be whether it's done in a nice or nasty manner. The longer we wait the less choice we are going to have. Cancelling the messenger will only make it worse.
