[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 05:12:58AM -0800, Ben Zaiboc wrote:

> This is my greatest fear (well, this and rabid chihuahuas), 
> that we will learn to make do with less, and less, and 
> less, all the way down to the freezing in the dark scenario.  

That's a perfectly possible scenario. And it's all our fault.
We wasted the last 40+ years. What we're doing is two orders
of magnitude too little, at least two decades too late.

Look into the bathroom mirror. There's your culprit, right there.

> We need expansive, /extropian/ thinking, not this defeatist, 
> depressing 'sustainability' attitude.  There is no such thing 
> as sustainability, we either expand or contract, win or lose, live or die.

Uh, sustainability is exactly about not dying.
It doesn't mean no exponentials, but this physical
universe does not carry exponentials for very long.
 
> All the more depressing when you realise that there is such 
> a huge abundance of energy and material just floating about, 
> doing nothing, begging to be used, yet most people seem to 
> want to turn their back on it and slump into a slow extinction.

Right, and so many of them are on *this* mailing list!
An evil fairy snuck in sometime a decade ago, and turned
its readers into reactionary dinos. Ugh.