Alex Epstein is intelligent and well spoken and makes some good points. He is intentionally extreme and still a bit clumsy with some of the facts and numbers but will mature. His view point has been woefully lacking in the conversation lately and the truth of it is shocking to the under informed just leave it in the ground crowd.
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Embodied energy is the major part of everything around us and everything we need and do as a society. Fossil fuels provide 80% of the primary energy that we need to avoid a sharp crash. Wind and solar still only provide 2% and have almost zero storage on a world scale. Sticks and dung for cooking and heating over open flames in the house still provide several times more energy than wind and solar. Such a long way to go. And a short time to get there before liquid fuel becomes prohibitively expensive for building big things.
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I hope when people see this chart, they understand the the increased population didn't start using more fossil energy. It's the other way around. Increased availability of energy after we discovered fossil fuels enabled the population to grow via greater food production and technical advances and medicine.
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There are still some efficiency gains to be made, but energy/ economy (as a measure of human well being) and population, are still nearly 1:1:1.
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If energy goes down, the others must go down. And the population is set to increase a further 30% before it can humanely start going down in 70 years.
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