536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.

I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.

I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.

That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.

The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.

Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.

pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.

This link has some of the same info in PDF form: http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/JPM.2019.pd...