@gorillaman

Why would we need to quintuple resources by 2100 if population is only forecast to grow 50%? There is no shortage of potential arable land and more would be made room for if food prices were to rise (bringing them back down).

As I said before, I'm not debating environmental damage and climate change need to be addressed. But you address it directly, you don't attempt to reduce the world population to <1Bn ... somehow, like you propose.

No, corporations primarily do cause environmental harm, particularly climate change:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change

That's why changing their incentives directly through taxes or emission schemes is the best approach. I would almost say that attempting to reduce your carbon footprint at a individual level is an exercise in self masturbatory indulgence, which while gratifying is completely insignificant. It's the by-products of all the everyday products that you consume during the industrial process that create the vast majority or pollutants.

3rd paragraph - I've already addressed everything there several times here. You simply are not acknowledging the facts:

http://priceofoil.org/2013/11/26/new-analysis-shows-growing-fossil-reserves-shrinking-carbon-budget/
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/nov/26/why-fossil-fuel-reserves-growing-oil-carbon

Does our current reliance on carbon based energy precipitate environmental issues with regards to global warming in the future? Obviously, but an international agreement on raising the cost of it, to reduce our reliance on it, is more likely than an agreement on enforced family size limits.

@RedSky

I'd like to know how you expect to quintuple the availability of every vital resource in the next 50-100 years while somehow reducing the environmental impact of that necessary increase to what you acknowledge needs to be less than the present level. This is supernatural thinking. Corporations don't pollute, incidentally, the fundamental structure of our global society pollutes; which would be no problem whatsoever if there were fewer of us.

It's fine if you'd prefer to just keep the majority of the world in mediaeval poverty, or alternatively impoverish everyone equally; colossally immoral, but by contrast actually physically possible.

Our success as an organism has been implicitly tied to energy availability for our entire history. The bubble of economic and technological advancement we've ridden since the industrial revolution is driven by unprecedented access to energy in the form of irreplaceable fossil fuels. It requires continual investment of energy to maintain. The practical exploitability of wind, solar, wave, geothermal and hydroelectric sources combined doesn't come close, not even close to the demand we'll place on them with population on the scale you're quite comfortable to allow. Fissile materials are limited and similarly irreplaceable; we've been steadily failing to develop fusion power for sixty years.

The innovation of new sources of energy is not guaranteed, unless you have some new breakthrough in physics you'd like to share? Efficiency gains are strictly limited.

If you think we'll have the ability to support billions of people on a sustainable basis at some time in the future, well great, LET'S WAIT UNTIL WE HAVE THAT ABILITY BEFORE WE BET EVERYTHING ON IT.

Great.. but they still use fossil fuels. 50% as much is awesome, but that might just be enough to keep the petroleum companies in control of the world for a few years longer.
...and I'm guessing that the claim they can use "solar" as fuel, means that they can use solar produced hydrogen, like any other fuel cell (not that this is neccesarilly a bad thing.. just not new).

The description rather misses the point. The electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen requires a good deal of electrical power. It's not free energy--you actually get a good deal less out of it than you put into it. The advantage to hydrogen fuel is that it is energy dense and theoretically storeable and transportable much as fossil fuels are.

The problem, though, is that it is extremely hard to store and transport because it escapes so easy (hydrogen being so tiny). I'd hazard that, left alone, all of the hydrogen would escape from that car's tanks in a matter of days.

There really is no easy solution. If you could effectively store and transport hydrogen, and use nuclear power to create it, that would solve a lot of problems. It would create new ones too.

This is, of course, not to belittle what this man has done. It is a fine engineering project, and it is people like this who will, little by little, refine the techniques and solve the problems that are necessary,

Sure, anything fossil fueled will do I was just kidding!

That's why it's so great to adhere to science. Science is just the combined efforts of anyone who is inclined to understand stuff better. It looks at things and with a lack of bias only the mathematical can provide says what the likelihood of something is.

It's how the facts are then "spun" where the bullshit creeps in.

We've known for years that burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment, it's not even in question any more. We know it's bad but we keep doing it. We have the money to change it but it sits in the corporate sector bank accounts because a few would rather be richer than creosote for the duration of their life than to spread richness upon the world for the lives of those to follow.

Those to follow are me, you, your kids perhaps.

("Creosote" is a pun that my grandma uses - 93 years old - and i've seen Terry Pratchett use it as well. Creosus was very rich, creosote is a rich black tarry substance)

They don't all agree with it, which is why it's not science. It isn't proven. You believe it because you are anti-fossil fuel or some such.
Consensus, I repeat, is not science. Science is provable.
But believe whatever you desire. You probably believe that if everyone sends the gov't a nickel, they can fix it, lol.

There used to be glaciers covering most of the US, what happened to them? fossil fuel use?
Temperatures are a function of the sun more than anything else. Remember, consensus is not science.

Fluctuations in the magnetosphere are most likely to disrupt telecommunications, not cause mass extinction from cancer. At least, in the past, magnetic minimums have not correlated with mass extinctions, that I know of. I've been watching that for over a decade, it has not failed as quickly as expected, yet.
You lost me in the second paragraph. "Need" is subjective. Do you mean need to live, need to live well, or need to have anything we want? I agree, we should limit the third and try to limit the second, but some of your examples are required to keep the (over) population alive and somewhat productive. There simply isn't enough energy produced without fossil fuels to produce enough food to feed the planet, and not enough farmable land to grow enough naturally to feed everyone at this point. At least that's how it seems from here.

Hey newt, check the latest data and studies of the changing magnetic field of the planet and solar radiation may become a more pressing an issue than GW as a threat to human health-Cosmic radiation may kill us off before cyclical and human-effected climate woes.

The problem with GW responsibility of individuals could be solved in a single, collective stroke if humanity stopped buying shit they don't need-LIKE electric lights after sundown, LIKE fossil fuels, LIKE industrially manufactured bullshit for the masses. If anyone needs to pay carbon taxes it's the machine that teaches each new generation to over-extend their luxuries for the sake of the bowing at the alter of a contrived system printing the unnecessary, HARD CURRENCY.

I'm back Chingalera...I took you off ignore. It didn't seem to work anyway.
And actually yes, I can deny that... you accidentally proved the point that climate change is possibly the MOST important thing to cop to (or deny). Contrary to popular belief, the dinosaurs seem to NOT have gone extinct due to the impact, they were already in MAJOR decline and mostly extinct when it hit. The proof of that is that, in the KT boundary layer, there is not an abundance of dinosaur fossils, they are conspicuously absent. In fact, the fossil records show they had been in decline for centuries (eons?) before the impact and were mostly already gone. Climate study indicates that a climate change was likely happening to them long before the asteroid hit, this was apparently the same thing that caused the first mass extinction as well. I wish more people knew this.
To me, that means that it's not so important if you think climate change IS man driven now, one should think it's happening, it's dangerous, and it's controllable to a point, and we should probably work towards either preparing for it's effects or minimizing them, or both.

This can't be understated. If we could see the same anti-science lash back for the anti-nuclear and anti-GMO crowds that'd be great. Too bad a lot of the most vehement and vocal climate change warnings come from folks also trying to 'educate' everyone about how terrible nuclear power and GMO crops are. After all the last thing we need are energy sources and seeds that radically reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn each year.....

I think that you will find reactors don't produce weapons grade plutonium, rather, they produce a grade of plutonium known as reactor grade. Weapons grade plutonium is upwards of 95% Pu239. Reactor grade plutonium is what is known as weapons usable, not weapons ready. This is because of the high contamination factor of Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. These heavier breads of Pu have both high spontaneous fission rates (bad for your fission weapon), and considerable heat, enough so to make weapons fabrication a problem (is it bad when your closed weapons device needs ventilation to not melt itself). While these problems are addressable in advanced weapons platforms, outside of well established nuclear weapons programs, making weapons from them is very challenging.

The main trouble, however, I think is economics, and nuclear is forced to internalize many of their impacts where as other solutions, mainly fossil fuels, do not. That is a pretty key competitive disadvantage.

Also note that electricity is only a fraction of total power, total power includes many non-electrical uses, most notably motor vehicles via liquid fuels. When you look at solar in this light, it represents a sub-fraction of a percent. So 5% of annual solar electrical generation is only a small part of a larger energy picture, and picture which also needs to be weighted against the rest of the world for which solar provides very little power. This isn't an attack on solar, it is a bringing to light of how vast the gulf is to address climate issues with any one technology.

So I think you will find that he isn't off by orders of magnitude, rather, he was being pretty generous to the total amount of energy produced by solar and wind world wide, and climate issues and emissions are world issues.

Key World Energy STATISTICS IEA:

http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/kwes.pdf

(I trust the IEA's numbers)

But I share the sentiment that we need to reduce coal and gas to address climate concerns. The fact that German emissions have risen for 2 years in a row is troubling to say the least. I consider France and Sweden to be better models, lower CO2 per capita and electrical prices in both cases compared to Germany, and both heavy nuclear users...with Sweden using a fair deal more hydro power than France. Nuclear and hydro are the proven heavy lifters in the area of CO2 reductions, which is why I think his criticism of environmental groups in addressing climate issues is justified as they generally oppose both.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER 2012 IAEA:

http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/Pess/assets/12-44581_ccnp2012_web.pdf

Dragons WERE real. We don't have fossil evidence because dragon bone was a precious resource used to make legendary weapons and armor.

^ In conclusion, it is not Disney, but money that is the root of this fossilization process which you have deemed evil. I don't think this process is evil. I think money is. Remove money from the equation and you have nice things (ideas).

But people can't EVER have nice things.