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Notes -
That's a bit nitpicky. Storage is a better objection to this hypothetical than transmission losses (which are well understood and not very important) . But it's a theoretical, order of magnitude discussion . He claimed that just by "seeing how much space you'd have to fill up with solar panels in order to supply the energy", it would seem absurd, and it doesn't. Solar panels are a 'cut-out-the-middleman' form of agriculture, and look how much space that takes up.
But assuming doomers can get past this theoretical argument, I want to highlight just how incredibly extensive their claims are, and how far they are from proving their thesis. Before we run out of food, the oil will have to run out, the coal will run out, all the other fossil fuels will run out, nuclear will fail, solar will fail, all the renewables will fail. And not just ‘oh we couldn’t make it to 100% world energy consumption on just this one thing’, every single one has to fail completely: it’s not just that they each don’t scale, they all somehow don’t work anymore.
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