How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production
~ Jason Crawford from, https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
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The nature of the problem: Insufficient total, global energy.
How insufficient? Even if the United States magically cut its energy use in half, and then magically distributed that saved energy to some other countries… the world would still be far short of the energy we need to lift everyone up to even the EU’s per-capita energy level. When you factor in continued population growth, the problem—the amount of new energy we need to find—only gets bigger.
Set aside what you know about how, or where, we might get additional energy. The problem currently faced by the human race is not: How do we reduce our per-capita energy consumption? The problem is not: How do we change equal units of energy from old sources to new, or even renewable, sources.
The problem we face is…
How do we INCREASE the available energy for the entire planet by a factor of 4, or possibly even 5?
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