Do the Math

I'l borrow a phrase from the world of finance: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

Technology and resources are constrained by laws of nature and specific mechanisms of effect. They're not governed by past lucky breaks, though there's a shape to those (Ophuls discusses this, hint: sigmoid functions feature heavily).

He also specifically addresses space-based solar power. I'll refer you to his comments in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity for that.

My own first encounter with that notion was in T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, which I read with wide-eyed enthusiasm shortly after it was first published. My eyes and enthusiasm have narrowed somewhat in the intervening decades.

I've mentioned geothermal previously. Consider that the Yellowstone supercaldera might be good for a few GW of continuous output, at considerable impact to the National Park associated with it. I'm somewhat in favour of that exchange. It's still only a small fraction of present US electrical consumption, though as a reliable baseload / dispatchable source, it would be a valuable contribution.

Tom "Do the Math" Murphy's series exploring various alternatives remains excellent: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

The super-abundance of solar power (terrestrial, or with the addition of orbital power) still leaves us with a finite energy budget on Earth, if only through thermal shedding. The terrestrial surplus is far less considerable when increasing standards of living for…

The author of the book is Tom Murphy, a Caltech-trained physics professor at UCSD, author of the Do The Math blog https://dothemath.ucsd.edu. The book compiles that blog into a textbook for a course for non-science majors.

I've had him as a guest on my podcast https://joshuaspodek.com/guests/tom-murphy, but otherwise my only stake is that I consider the book valuable on the issue of our species. The link is to my review of his book. You can download the book itself free: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions.

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Here is an excerpt of the review:

He taught a course to non-science undergraduates on the subject, called Energy and the Environment. He used the course to compile his posts, polish them, and make a self-contained comprehensive book. As far as I know, the only one like it, possibly because mathematics is the language of nature, so equations abound, but he explains them, so people who haven’t taken science or math classes since high school can follow.

Showing the math means we don’t have to take his word for it. We can do the math too and think, judge, and act for ourselves. No matter our politics, age, industry, etc, we can access this book equally. The environment involves many branches of science, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, systems, and more, as well as fields including engineering, history, politics, philosophy, and more. Murphy brings them together like no other resource I’ve found. Many will shy away from devoting the time…

Is "beyond a shadow of doubt" the standard of proof we need to take action? I would advocate for an actuarial standard. (i.e. estimate the probabilities and costs/benefits of various outcomes and take the path with the best expected outcome, while continually updating your probability estimates with new information.) The issue with climate change is not that it is 100% certain, but that the responses require globally coordinated action where every nation is incentive to cheat; and as with other types of economic transition, there are huge inefficiencies if we try to transition too fast (i.e. global recessions required to build the necessary infrastructure as in https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/). So the downside risk if we fail to act and climate change is real is tremendous.

Tom Murphy over at Do The Math[1] argues that we would not be able to reboot modernity after an apocalypse. The short version of his argument is that we long ago mined/drilled/farmed/harvested the easy resources that can be gotten with pre-industrial technology. The raw materials we are extracting today require modern methods and materials. We can't bootstrap ourselves from human and animal muscle power back to industrial capacity because it is inadequate to the task.

We might have the theoretical knowledge to do it, but we'd be unable to build out the infrastructure.

And no, scavenging won't solve it because the energy and technology required to recover the raw materials again requires industrial processes and materials we won't have the ability to harness.

1 https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

No one is giving you numbers for why this is wrong, so let me ballpark.

Typical solar irradiance is 1000W/m^2. Mean sunshine hours where I live is 3000hrs/y. Assuming 100% efficiency, 100% solar irradiance, perfect angle etc for those 3000hours, we get ~10^10J of energy. Those are bad assumptions, but very generous.

In a gram of deuterium, per e=mc^2, we get ~10^12J. There is 100x more energy in a single gram of deterium than a year of intense sunshine. Deterium is far from rare -- 1 part in ~10,000. Consider the vast amounts of deterium in the oceans and realize if fusion becomes a reality, nuclear, solar, oil, wind etc all become irrelevant overnight.

I recommend this
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/

for a layman's introduction of the energy scales involved here.

This is such pointless pedantry. Heat pumps having an efficiency greater than 1/100% is well known, well publicized, and you're trying to make some artificial distinction here that added nothing to this thread/context/discussion.

See:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/489467/can-a-heat-pump-have-efficiency-greater-than-100

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/

I won't be further responding to this sub-topic, since it has nothing at all to do with the UK's inflation/energy prices. Plus frankly I feel like you're trying to confuse people rather than inform, I'd point people to the Department of Energy link above if they want to understand the benefit that modern heat pumps could offer to energy usage.