Look forward to it? As in you can’t wait for the apocalypse??? I’m beginning to feel bad for you, John. You’re an obviously smart guy but your biases stand in the way of data gathering and analysis. You also manage to conflate some causes and effects.

You are right that modern society needs energy dense fuels but you’re just wrong in saying that “Base load generation with renewables is difficult by their very nature,” implying that there is no solution at hand. Geothermal energy capture and generation is in use today for baseload power and an authorative report from MIT says that there’s 1000 times the energy we need to replace all fossil fuels under the Rocky Mountains. The same is true in other parts of the world too.

Even wind is suitable for baseload generation thanks to the theory of large numbers — the wind doesn’t die down everywhere at once. Storage adds needless expense to the renewable equation. We don’t need storage so much as we need a true national grid and diversified generation ability.

The problems with capitalism are two fold. First, late in an economic cycle, like today, we fail to regulate its worst excesses. Second, we fail to understand that capitalism is cyclical and that it is based on booms caused by disruptive innovation and busts caused by commoditizing the innovation.

We went through a very similar era in the early 1970s inn ovations in Oil, Electricity, the first Electronics and the Automobile commoditized. But then tech kicked in. There have been 5 disruptions and subsequent commoditizations since the Industrial Revolution. We are in the very earliest stages of the age of sustainability. Get some data, think bigger and have a nice day.

Thanks for reading.