@jgkoomey @nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green thanks for the recommendation Jonathan. I’ll explore that. I’m aware of the point you make about not needing to replace fossil energy completely.
I defer to your scholarship. From my much more limited awareness it sure looks like the scarce commodity is time. There’s what is possible in principle and what’s possible within the less-than-a-decade of Paris budget we have left
@nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green I agree that for consumer end-use, renewable* power is waaay preferable to fossil-fuelled equivalents. But that’s just part of the problem.
We absolutely need them at scale to buy us time though.
*renewables are more properly thought of as re-buildables
@ajsadauskas @green is it not worse than that?
There is more or less a 1:1 correlation between energy use and GDP.
We don’t have the time to build out the scale of renewable infrastructure that would replace our current energy use.
We need to use much less energy which means much smaller and therefore radically different economies
@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green As with your other reply, I defer to your scholarship and understanding but unfortunately I don’t have an Elsevier subscription.
I’m aware of many scholars whose analysis suggests really significant decoupling is at best extremely doubtful. I guess we’ll know in years to come who was right.
From my layperson’s perspective the immovable constraint would appear once again to be time…