[nitrogen]

Though really, all this says is that even under a renewables scheme, we're not going to be able to provide power at the level some have come to expect for the population we've now got (7 billion) or are projected to have (10 billion).

This is best viewed as an engineering problem; those are much easier to solve than social problems.

[dredmorbius]

It's not an engineering problem to the extent that you've got populations whose very existence depends on these energy streams.

At that point, it becomes a rather pressing existential problem.

You cannot simply "engineer" more energy into existence.

Yes, there's quite a bit more energy striking Earth every day from the sun than humans use today. However it's not in forms we can utilize directly, other than simply basking in it. The most widespread process for converting sunlight into useful energy is about 1% efficient, we're already using 14% of all its productivity on the planet, and using it to replace existing fossil fuel uses would require another 21%. That's plants, and for humans to directly utilize 35% of all net primary productivity strikes me as manifestly infeasible.

Source: Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine"

http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...

And the lack of an engineering solution means that this is a social problem -- that's the fundamental conflict here: deciding how to allocate scarce resources.

[nitrogen]

Well, either we find a way to give people what they want, through efficiency or new energy sources, or America keeps bombing the Middle East. And I expect viable fusion to be easier to solve than the politics of a world running out of energy.

[dredmorbius]

Bombing the Middle East is going to be producing markedly diminishing returns by and by. It's not a permanent solution.