You’re being really dumb here. You need to actually go and look at Perfecto’s numbers for food production, and the situation with low cost water technologies, stoves, plastic solar panels and so on.

Really, you’re just missing the point because you haven’t looked at the technologies in sufficient detail.

Vinay

You might think that the problems of the world are insurmountable – that there is not enough to eat, enough water to grow food, that the sky is on fire and falling fast.

It is not like that at all. There are really good solutions for the vast majority of the development problems of the poor. Most of these problems are in the general fields of infrastructure or agriculture.

It is not at all clear that there are good solutions to these problems. Renewable energy technologies do not rely upon energy from the sun stored over long periods of time. Rather, the sun is harvested in real time; and, since, only a fraction of the energy striking the earth can be harvested, the amounts of land required to support even a soft lifestyle are very large. Probably, without extreme political change it will be impossible to solve the problems mentioned by Vinay even long enough to permit the population to be stabilized and, then, reduced, by half or more. By the way, I don’t know how vinay intends to deal with over-population, if at all.

I have done the arithmetic for the US, but others should make similar energy accounting efforts or other countries. The papers are linked to my website principally under Energy. Begin with “The Demise of Business as Usual” and “On the Conservation-within-capitalism Scenario” at http://dematerialism.net/demise.htm and http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html .

An additional problem is that almost the full investment must be made before the first joule of energy is recovered; and, concomitantly, most of the greenhouse gases emitted will have to be emitted all at once at the beginning of the project to produce renewable energy.

Overall, however, I favor the soft development concept for the nations that require development and the soft technology concept for those that must shrink or simply sustain themselves.

Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas
http://dematerialism.net/