I really liked this paragraph:
“Whatever you may think about an afterlife most of us want a pleasant life on earth. At the moment much of our pleasure comes at the expense of the world often at the expense of other people. We want big houses fast cars and cheap labour. Long term survival on the other hand suggests that the most appropriate pleasures are those arising from maximum information and meaning for minimum global impact.”
But his argument about using solar and wind energy raises again what seems a fundamental issue with the physics of ‘sustainable energy’. Both solar and wind energy are ways that we use to trap the sun’s energy here on Earth. For solar we use black absorbant screens that trap it rather than reflect it back into space. With wind (created by the sun’s heat on the air) we trap the embodied solar energy from the moving air that would otherwise have dissipated back into space. Surely we are on yet another pathway of trapping heat within the Earth’s atmosphere the same problem from a different cause that is causing global climate change?