Re: The End Of The Hydrogen Economy

There aren't enough resources for a build-out of renewable energy sufficient to sustain industrial civilization even at current levels, much less facilitate further economic growth.

The perpetual growth model of economics leads to collapse inevitably.

I think that article over-states the intellectual aspects and neglects the social motivations.

Most people are powerfully driven by the perceived opinions of others. That's one reason some people do what's described, but others (not to name any names) invent or even remember heroic past events that never happened.

The need for respect, and its opposite the avoidance of ridicule, is a powerful steering force for concensus, which wildly distorts those "sciences" which are not corrected by experiment.

Feynman had some good ideas. He wrote a little book called "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

It's sort of like our 45h president said - if I design a good circuit I should get all the credit, and if I design a bad circuit I should not be blamed at all.

It hasn't so far. Things just keep getting better.

You and I have lots of stuff, more than we need, so we don't need growth. We could survive without kiwifruits flown in from Chile.

There are billions of terribly poor people in the world. They need economic growth so they and their kids can avoid disease, warfare, and death.

The luckiest thing that happened to a lot of countries was being a colonial possession of the British Empire.

That is in fact a reasonable perspective. Both are better than designing no circuits.

Even bad designs often turn out to have been a good thing to do, years later. No pain, no gain.

"We all know to be true" confirms my point about thinking being distorted by social concensus. Thanks.

Because I don't care about your prissy schoolmarm opinions on spelling.

I thought the youtube bit was quantitative and interesting. I had no idea that anyone would spend multi megabucks doing anything that stupid.

That is a distortion, too; there's science, meaning knowledge and understanding, which is NOT powered by a 'force for concensus', and "science" meaning the misapprehensions of some persons and groups, who participate in the Dunning-Kruger effect.

As John Larkin said, innumeracy is always with us. We can keep on building solar cells and putting them in sunny places - we'd need to cvover 1% of the available land area to match our current energy generation. There's no resources bottle neck that would stop us getting there or getting past that.

Perhaps, but at some point we should be able to switch from quantity to quality, giving everybody all that they need, but developing by making the products nicer, rather than bigger.

The US would have to grow more food to make even more of its population grossly obese, but they probably ought to look for some other avenue of economic growth.

Read a sociology textbook. Great fun.

China may be saying the same about the Bay Area in a few decades