That sentence about there are no rich low energy countries stood out. The Labour govt said it's going to invest pension money in 'things' ( can't recall what) which will benefit the whole economy.....maybe it's just the large scale manufacture of ukuleles.
There are two aspects of Net Zero. 1) The science of man-made global warming by CO2, and 2) the replacement of energy systems designed to reduce CO2 emissions.
Fundamentally Issue 1 has not ever been verified in the real world. I even FOId the government. They just pointed me to the IPCC reports even after a detailed review. There are NO basic verification reports of how the process works or if it can be applied to the real world to get 2. It also means they haven’t demonstrated safety and applicability to how it affects people’s lives.
Issue 2 is moot if Issue 1 is false. Which means those pushing the energy transformation believe that Issue 1 is real.
What we have is essentially fraud where others are affected by something you say is true but you haven’t followed the accepted and standard process to determine if it is true TO BE APPLICABLE to the real world. It also says a lot that many believe that if a scientist says it’s true or publishes a paper that this automatically means TRUE for all time to come.
The world works due to the strictness of the engineering and audit processes. Most scientific ideas never get out of the lab.
Thanks for your comment. I'd argue a third aspect: the radical global program of authoritarian citizen control positioned as the only feasible response to the confected climate crises.
On anthropogenic global warming, not only has it not been verified and cannot be verified, it is a self evidently absurd hypothesis. CO2 accounts for 10-25% of the Green House Gas (GHG) effect; we account for 4% annually of total CO2 emissions; so our effect on the weather is a 0.4%-1% annual change in GHG. 0.4%-1% of the GHG effect is an order of magnitude smaller effect than several others of the ones we know about, many of which have a strong periodic counter effect. The hypothesis therefore that all observable variation is and can only be explained by a forcing function an order of magnitude smaller than others is a self evidently absurd proposition.
Ironically, I would argue that aspect 2 (energy system replacement) is not moot. While the weather is not a rational basis for evolving our energy system, there are others. I'll be writing an essay shortly on the structure, dynamics, and trajectory of our hydrocarbon system, from which perspective it makes very good sense to begin the controlled process of transition to different arrangements. It won't alter criticism of the fundamental scientific illiteracy of trying to run industrial societies on breezes, or the bovine, suicidal stupidity of "just stopping oil". I hope you'll read it.
"Issue 2 is moot if Issue 1 is false." Right, and the problem is even deeper than that. Because it hasn't even been proven that global warming is actually harmful, whether humans are partially causing it or not.
Another engineer here. "I knew what they meant." Me too. The models are junk. Keen's Minsky approach is interesting and probably where I would start for macro. Good summary of the state of affairs. No surprises it is relevant to New Zealand. Thanks.
Great essay; finally an exposition of the economy as an energy flow. Mean solar irradiance at the Earth’s surface is 200w/sqm: this was the fundamental limit on economic development until British engineers discovered how to exploit hydrocarbons. Removing this limit allowed industrialisation and led to the world we live in. It explains why, despite complex societies with numerate and technical people existing for millennia across Europe and Asia, the world remained pre-industrial. Hydrocarbons and nuclear allow us to escape the fundamental limit of 200w/sqm. Net Zero re-imposes this limit and the inevitable result is a return to pre-industrial society. Adam Smith opined ‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation’ and I fear the damage that will be done before people realise the folly of Net Zero.
Great point, Dan. For a solar panel, the Shockley-Queisser effect then limits that to about 100W/m2, from which 90 to 110(!) watts have to be set aside to power the solar panel's global industrial manufacturing system. Leaving 10W to (-10)W per square meter for us to power our civilisation with.
A petrol tank represents millions of years of solar energy collected over millions of square miles of land, processed by quintillions of Joules of geological forces. They propose that this process can be reproduced in real time, and that doing so will reduce the cost of energy. It's a remarkably bold hypothesis.
That really is unfair to clowns. Imagine being associated with him or his goofball brother. I wonder if Rachel Reeves has thought to ask Mili for a costing yet🤔 Probably not 🤦🏻♂️
Excellent analysis proving my 15+year old opinion that decarbonisation aka net zero has always been an intentional plot to impoverish ordinary people and reduce populations - by killing us off. Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb as primary influencers of this malicious ideology, pushed by the UNEP politically, and financially aided by the IMF, World Bank, Soros and wealthy corporations. Ed Miliband maddened by Friends of the Earth is the fall guy.
As an engineer I’ve been saying for years that Net Zero is infeasible from a technical point of view. It’s good to see the same conclusion being reached through the perspective of economics.
Actually, I’m not convinced that politicians like Ed Miliband (and Sunak before him) and “neoclassical” economists who are weak on engineering can be so stupid as to not understand that trying to reach Net Zero with weather-dependent so-called renewables like wind and solar is certain to wreck our energy infrastructure and hence the whole economy.
I think they are all lying, play-acting puppets to the dark Malthusian forces who pay the piper and call the tune whose real objective is to collapse the western if not global economies. Just look at the evil they perpetrated in their Covid “plandemic”. Just look at the evil going on in the USA with the failed assassination attempt on Trump, so obviously the work of the deep state, and the sudden disappearing of Biden whose stand-in replacement is several inches too tall.
Reiner Fuellmich and his team of multi-disciplinary experts concluded in 2022 that the Covid plandemic was launched primarily for reasons of economics, namely the massive, unsustainable fiat money debts that have already been rung up (never mind by 2035) by our irresponsible politicians. The money for pensions is already all gone (and Fuellmich is in prison on trumped-up charges).
Thanks, Douglas. The matter of why they are imposing this on us is intriguing. The temptation is to assume malign intent. The problem with that is - then what? I think a more helpful approach is to recognise two aspects of human psychology that are almost certainly at work here.
The first is the "curse of knowledge". Once you understand how something works, it's very hard to remember what it was like not to know it, and therefore to imagine others not knowing it. You and I understand physics and engineering. They don't, and it's not a discipline that lends itself to guesswork. They propose running an advanced industrial economy on breezes because they don't understand at a physical level what it is they are proposing. And we find it almost impossible to imagine that they don't.
The other phenomenon is the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. There's a level of ignorance below which it's not possible to detect that you are ignorant. A weird consequence of the disability is that truly ignorant people are often extremely confident of their views. Spend some time on Twitter to see it in action. Intelligent people know that there are things they don't know. So when they meet someone who tells them something unexpected about a subject they know they are ignorant about, their instinct is to adopt a questioning attitude. It's what protects us. If you observe the ignorant for any length of time, you'll note that one quality that they conspicuously lack is curiosity.
Mix in with that the moral hazard and lobby power of a $440 trillion climate/renewables industrial complex, and you don't need malign intent to explain what's going on. Although, of course, it's not either/or.
Thanks for reading my post, and I'll read yours with interest.
The reason I say that politicians in particular can’t be so stupid as to not realise that Net Zero is certain to lead to disaster is that they have had this explained to them countless times by countless experts, usually in quite simple layman terms. They have consistently ignored all these warnings which are not difficult to understand even for those lacking in technical grounding, even dire warnings that they are going to waste £trillions to no useful purpose. I have been writing to politicians about this for about two decades but they have ALWAYS fobbed me off and NEVER once responded directly to the points I made. To me this can only mean that they are complicit in a non-climate ulterior goal.
As to the impact of psychology on the non-technical class in general, Professor Richard Lindzen has quoted CP Snow on how the “educated elite” is particularly vulnerable to being taken in by “trivially oversimplified false narratives”. Unlike the “uneducated” who tend to see through false narratives, the educated don’t want to display their own ignorance so they just go along with the usually-fake politically-contrived consensus. The globalists have spent $billions in propaganda, misinformation and censorship to exploit this human frailty: https://joannenova.com.au/2018/10/lindzen-on-why-the-educated-elites-are-so-vulnerable-to-being-fooled/.
“the one problem that technology can’t solve is a deficit of energy. “
Is that true though? I mean, say you have a car engine and you use technology to make it more efficient. Or you use software and a drone to spray your crop field rather than a tractor. You’d be saving energy and plausibly could reduce a deficit. No?
Yes it is, for a couple of reasons. You're right. With enough surplus high gradient energy to run the colossally energy intensive global industrial manufacturing system, we can manufacture those more efficient car engines, computers, and drones. But just think of all of the mining, refining, transportation, assembly, operation, maintenance, repair, and replacement we have to do to make a simple screw, much less a semiconductor. Without that vast amount of high gradient energy, we can't. Even if we could run it on sunbeams and summer breezes (and we can't), we couldn't do so with enough energy left over for us.
Why surplus? Roughly half of all humans are alive because of food grown using fertiliser made from fossil fuel. As soon as energy starts contracting, we'll have to decide whether to make drones or feed people.
This realisation is probably a shock. Our relationship with our historically continuously expanding supply of energy is like a fish's relationship with water. The fish is suspended in it, dependent on it, and totally unaware of it because it has never experienced its absence.
Thank you for an excellent article. I was wondering if you knew of any simple explainers or such for the energy gradient concept? I tried to google it, but the answers there were a bit technical for my level. I also wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for further reading that is sceptical or critical of economics? I'm an economics student, but often feel that there is a huge amount of hand-waving in it, and that often prominent economists preach beliefs coated in the technical jargon of the field, rather than things that are actually really reasoned through. Thank you!!
Ani hello - thanks for reading my article. I find typing "Explain X like I'm 12" into ChatGPT works well to get started with subjects with which I'm not familiar. So "Explain the thermodynamic concept of energy gradient like I'm 12".
For economic critique, you should read Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics". Then read a few papers on biophysical economics - try these:
Adigüzel, Yekbun. ‘Historical and Critical Review on Biophysical Economics’. Biophysical Reviews and Letters 11, no. 02 (2016): 63–86.
Ayres, Robert U. ‘The Second Law, the Fourth Law, Recycling and Limits to Growth’. Ecological Economics 29, no. 3 (1999): 473–83.
Bakshi, Bhavik R., Timothy G. Gutowski, and Dušan P. Sekulić. Thermodynamics and the Destruction of Resources. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cleveland, Cutler J. ‘Biophysical Economics: Historical Perspective and Current Research Trends’. Ecological Modelling 38, no. 1–2 (1987): 47–73.
Cleveland, Cutler J., and Matthias Ruth. ‘When, Where, and by How Much Do Biophysical Limits Constrain the Economic Process? A Survey of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s Contribution To’. Ecological Economics 22 (1997): 203–23.
Söllner, Fritz. ‘A Reexamination of the Role of Thermodynamics for Environmental Economics’. Ecological Economics 22, no. 3 (1997): 175–201.
Great article. My only difficulty is seeing any sense to your comparison of building millions of wind turbines with a skier que of millions. The wind turbines actually do capture some energy and convert it to electricity; the skiers in the que do no such thing. I also need a little help understanding the term "energy gradient" and how it applies....is it another way of talking about energy density?
Al - thank you for reading my essay, and for your comment. You read my mind! I have to go at a bit of a gallop in these essays and cut corners. I address that subject in this weekend's essay. I hope you'll read that too, and that it will make sense. And I'm here in the comments to answer any confusion subsequently.
This German author, a nuclear engineer, constantly writes about and exposes the physical impossibilities of the Net Zero scams, here some new flaws of offshore wind, which Mr.Milliband &co should know but are most certainly unaware of.
Thank you for this. This Government’s contempt for Britain is palpable. Is this year zero of Pol Pot. I have shared widely. Want to speak at English Democrats Conference in October?
“ Replacing high gradient energy sources — coal, oil, gas, and nuclear — with low gradient sources — sun and wind — vastly reduces the net amount of energy available to our economy”
Maybe I have missed it, but what is a “high gradient energy source”?
And why does using renewables reduce the amount of energy available to the economy? Sure EVs and heat pumps are vastly more efficient, so are you arguing of greater energy inefficiency? Let’s drop those pesky led bulbs, go back to tungsten filament and automatically increase GDP
That sentence about there are no rich low energy countries stood out. The Labour govt said it's going to invest pension money in 'things' ( can't recall what) which will benefit the whole economy.....maybe it's just the large scale manufacture of ukuleles.
The sentence says “no rich low energy …” yet the graph shows no rich low electricity countries
Thank you for a very thought provoking and accessible piece, I will be sharing this widely 👍
I appreciate you taking the time to read it, and for sharing it - thank you.
There are two aspects of Net Zero. 1) The science of man-made global warming by CO2, and 2) the replacement of energy systems designed to reduce CO2 emissions.
Fundamentally Issue 1 has not ever been verified in the real world. I even FOId the government. They just pointed me to the IPCC reports even after a detailed review. There are NO basic verification reports of how the process works or if it can be applied to the real world to get 2. It also means they haven’t demonstrated safety and applicability to how it affects people’s lives.
Issue 2 is moot if Issue 1 is false. Which means those pushing the energy transformation believe that Issue 1 is real.
What we have is essentially fraud where others are affected by something you say is true but you haven’t followed the accepted and standard process to determine if it is true TO BE APPLICABLE to the real world. It also says a lot that many believe that if a scientist says it’s true or publishes a paper that this automatically means TRUE for all time to come.
The world works due to the strictness of the engineering and audit processes. Most scientific ideas never get out of the lab.
Thanks for your comment. I'd argue a third aspect: the radical global program of authoritarian citizen control positioned as the only feasible response to the confected climate crises.
On anthropogenic global warming, not only has it not been verified and cannot be verified, it is a self evidently absurd hypothesis. CO2 accounts for 10-25% of the Green House Gas (GHG) effect; we account for 4% annually of total CO2 emissions; so our effect on the weather is a 0.4%-1% annual change in GHG. 0.4%-1% of the GHG effect is an order of magnitude smaller effect than several others of the ones we know about, many of which have a strong periodic counter effect. The hypothesis therefore that all observable variation is and can only be explained by a forcing function an order of magnitude smaller than others is a self evidently absurd proposition.
Ironically, I would argue that aspect 2 (energy system replacement) is not moot. While the weather is not a rational basis for evolving our energy system, there are others. I'll be writing an essay shortly on the structure, dynamics, and trajectory of our hydrocarbon system, from which perspective it makes very good sense to begin the controlled process of transition to different arrangements. It won't alter criticism of the fundamental scientific illiteracy of trying to run industrial societies on breezes, or the bovine, suicidal stupidity of "just stopping oil". I hope you'll read it.
Looking forward to that article.
"Issue 2 is moot if Issue 1 is false." Right, and the problem is even deeper than that. Because it hasn't even been proven that global warming is actually harmful, whether humans are partially causing it or not.
Another engineer here. "I knew what they meant." Me too. The models are junk. Keen's Minsky approach is interesting and probably where I would start for macro. Good summary of the state of affairs. No surprises it is relevant to New Zealand. Thanks.
Thanks for taking the time to read it, and for your comment - with which I agree. I watch events in New Zealand with much interest.
Great essay; finally an exposition of the economy as an energy flow. Mean solar irradiance at the Earth’s surface is 200w/sqm: this was the fundamental limit on economic development until British engineers discovered how to exploit hydrocarbons. Removing this limit allowed industrialisation and led to the world we live in. It explains why, despite complex societies with numerate and technical people existing for millennia across Europe and Asia, the world remained pre-industrial. Hydrocarbons and nuclear allow us to escape the fundamental limit of 200w/sqm. Net Zero re-imposes this limit and the inevitable result is a return to pre-industrial society. Adam Smith opined ‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation’ and I fear the damage that will be done before people realise the folly of Net Zero.
Great point, Dan. For a solar panel, the Shockley-Queisser effect then limits that to about 100W/m2, from which 90 to 110(!) watts have to be set aside to power the solar panel's global industrial manufacturing system. Leaving 10W to (-10)W per square meter for us to power our civilisation with.
A petrol tank represents millions of years of solar energy collected over millions of square miles of land, processed by quintillions of Joules of geological forces. They propose that this process can be reproduced in real time, and that doing so will reduce the cost of energy. It's a remarkably bold hypothesis.
Milliband is an absolute clown who is a clear and present danger to everyone in this country.
Hello Michael. I normally try to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible. But on this occasion, I have to agree with you.
That really is unfair to clowns. Imagine being associated with him or his goofball brother. I wonder if Rachel Reeves has thought to ask Mili for a costing yet🤔 Probably not 🤦🏻♂️
Excellent analysis proving my 15+year old opinion that decarbonisation aka net zero has always been an intentional plot to impoverish ordinary people and reduce populations - by killing us off. Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb as primary influencers of this malicious ideology, pushed by the UNEP politically, and financially aided by the IMF, World Bank, Soros and wealthy corporations. Ed Miliband maddened by Friends of the Earth is the fall guy.
As an engineer I’ve been saying for years that Net Zero is infeasible from a technical point of view. It’s good to see the same conclusion being reached through the perspective of economics.
Actually, I’m not convinced that politicians like Ed Miliband (and Sunak before him) and “neoclassical” economists who are weak on engineering can be so stupid as to not understand that trying to reach Net Zero with weather-dependent so-called renewables like wind and solar is certain to wreck our energy infrastructure and hence the whole economy.
I think they are all lying, play-acting puppets to the dark Malthusian forces who pay the piper and call the tune whose real objective is to collapse the western if not global economies. Just look at the evil they perpetrated in their Covid “plandemic”. Just look at the evil going on in the USA with the failed assassination attempt on Trump, so obviously the work of the deep state, and the sudden disappearing of Biden whose stand-in replacement is several inches too tall.
Reiner Fuellmich and his team of multi-disciplinary experts concluded in 2022 that the Covid plandemic was launched primarily for reasons of economics, namely the massive, unsustainable fiat money debts that have already been rung up (never mind by 2035) by our irresponsible politicians. The money for pensions is already all gone (and Fuellmich is in prison on trumped-up charges).
My two-part summary of their Covid-19 Crimes Against Humanity model trial is available here: https://metatron.substack.com/p/reiner-fuellmichs-grand-jury-court. Search for “Manookian” in that post for a summary of the economics angle.
Thanks, Douglas. The matter of why they are imposing this on us is intriguing. The temptation is to assume malign intent. The problem with that is - then what? I think a more helpful approach is to recognise two aspects of human psychology that are almost certainly at work here.
The first is the "curse of knowledge". Once you understand how something works, it's very hard to remember what it was like not to know it, and therefore to imagine others not knowing it. You and I understand physics and engineering. They don't, and it's not a discipline that lends itself to guesswork. They propose running an advanced industrial economy on breezes because they don't understand at a physical level what it is they are proposing. And we find it almost impossible to imagine that they don't.
The other phenomenon is the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. There's a level of ignorance below which it's not possible to detect that you are ignorant. A weird consequence of the disability is that truly ignorant people are often extremely confident of their views. Spend some time on Twitter to see it in action. Intelligent people know that there are things they don't know. So when they meet someone who tells them something unexpected about a subject they know they are ignorant about, their instinct is to adopt a questioning attitude. It's what protects us. If you observe the ignorant for any length of time, you'll note that one quality that they conspicuously lack is curiosity.
Mix in with that the moral hazard and lobby power of a $440 trillion climate/renewables industrial complex, and you don't need malign intent to explain what's going on. Although, of course, it's not either/or.
Thanks for reading my post, and I'll read yours with interest.
The reason I say that politicians in particular can’t be so stupid as to not realise that Net Zero is certain to lead to disaster is that they have had this explained to them countless times by countless experts, usually in quite simple layman terms. They have consistently ignored all these warnings which are not difficult to understand even for those lacking in technical grounding, even dire warnings that they are going to waste £trillions to no useful purpose. I have been writing to politicians about this for about two decades but they have ALWAYS fobbed me off and NEVER once responded directly to the points I made. To me this can only mean that they are complicit in a non-climate ulterior goal.
As to the impact of psychology on the non-technical class in general, Professor Richard Lindzen has quoted CP Snow on how the “educated elite” is particularly vulnerable to being taken in by “trivially oversimplified false narratives”. Unlike the “uneducated” who tend to see through false narratives, the educated don’t want to display their own ignorance so they just go along with the usually-fake politically-contrived consensus. The globalists have spent $billions in propaganda, misinformation and censorship to exploit this human frailty: https://joannenova.com.au/2018/10/lindzen-on-why-the-educated-elites-are-so-vulnerable-to-being-fooled/.
“the one problem that technology can’t solve is a deficit of energy. “
Is that true though? I mean, say you have a car engine and you use technology to make it more efficient. Or you use software and a drone to spray your crop field rather than a tractor. You’d be saving energy and plausibly could reduce a deficit. No?
Hello Adam - thanks for your comment.
Yes it is, for a couple of reasons. You're right. With enough surplus high gradient energy to run the colossally energy intensive global industrial manufacturing system, we can manufacture those more efficient car engines, computers, and drones. But just think of all of the mining, refining, transportation, assembly, operation, maintenance, repair, and replacement we have to do to make a simple screw, much less a semiconductor. Without that vast amount of high gradient energy, we can't. Even if we could run it on sunbeams and summer breezes (and we can't), we couldn't do so with enough energy left over for us.
Why surplus? Roughly half of all humans are alive because of food grown using fertiliser made from fossil fuel. As soon as energy starts contracting, we'll have to decide whether to make drones or feed people.
This realisation is probably a shock. Our relationship with our historically continuously expanding supply of energy is like a fish's relationship with water. The fish is suspended in it, dependent on it, and totally unaware of it because it has never experienced its absence.
Nice one Richard - I say NO to net zero
Thank you for an excellent article. I was wondering if you knew of any simple explainers or such for the energy gradient concept? I tried to google it, but the answers there were a bit technical for my level. I also wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for further reading that is sceptical or critical of economics? I'm an economics student, but often feel that there is a huge amount of hand-waving in it, and that often prominent economists preach beliefs coated in the technical jargon of the field, rather than things that are actually really reasoned through. Thank you!!
Ani hello - thanks for reading my article. I find typing "Explain X like I'm 12" into ChatGPT works well to get started with subjects with which I'm not familiar. So "Explain the thermodynamic concept of energy gradient like I'm 12".
For economic critique, you should read Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics". Then read a few papers on biophysical economics - try these:
Adigüzel, Yekbun. ‘Historical and Critical Review on Biophysical Economics’. Biophysical Reviews and Letters 11, no. 02 (2016): 63–86.
Ayres, Robert U. ‘Eco-Thermodynamics: Economics and the Second Law’. Ecological Economics 26, no. 2 (August 1998): 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8009(97)00101-8.
Ayres, Robert U. ‘The Second Law, the Fourth Law, Recycling and Limits to Growth’. Ecological Economics 29, no. 3 (1999): 473–83.
Bakshi, Bhavik R., Timothy G. Gutowski, and Dušan P. Sekulić. Thermodynamics and the Destruction of Resources. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cleveland, Cutler J. ‘Biophysical Economics: Historical Perspective and Current Research Trends’. Ecological Modelling 38, no. 1–2 (1987): 47–73.
Cleveland, Cutler J., and Matthias Ruth. ‘When, Where, and by How Much Do Biophysical Limits Constrain the Economic Process? A Survey of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s Contribution To’. Ecological Economics 22 (1997): 203–23.
Söllner, Fritz. ‘A Reexamination of the Role of Thermodynamics for Environmental Economics’. Ecological Economics 22, no. 3 (1997): 175–201.
Thank you very much for the chat GPT tip - it worked a charm - and the reading links!
Great article. My only difficulty is seeing any sense to your comparison of building millions of wind turbines with a skier que of millions. The wind turbines actually do capture some energy and convert it to electricity; the skiers in the que do no such thing. I also need a little help understanding the term "energy gradient" and how it applies....is it another way of talking about energy density?
Al - thank you for reading my essay, and for your comment. You read my mind! I have to go at a bit of a gallop in these essays and cut corners. I address that subject in this weekend's essay. I hope you'll read that too, and that it will make sense. And I'm here in the comments to answer any confusion subsequently.
Thanks - I signed up so I won't miss your next article.
This German author, a nuclear engineer, constantly writes about and exposes the physical impossibilities of the Net Zero scams, here some new flaws of offshore wind, which Mr.Milliband &co should know but are most certainly unaware of.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/das_grosse_offshore_chaos
For those who want proof that Ed's purposes are based on, not just ideology, but anti-science also:
https://www.aimspress.com/article/id/668fb539ba35de127fcb6dde
Thank you for this. This Government’s contempt for Britain is palpable. Is this year zero of Pol Pot. I have shared widely. Want to speak at English Democrats Conference in October?
“ Replacing high gradient energy sources — coal, oil, gas, and nuclear — with low gradient sources — sun and wind — vastly reduces the net amount of energy available to our economy”
Maybe I have missed it, but what is a “high gradient energy source”?
And why does using renewables reduce the amount of energy available to the economy? Sure EVs and heat pumps are vastly more efficient, so are you arguing of greater energy inefficiency? Let’s drop those pesky led bulbs, go back to tungsten filament and automatically increase GDP