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Comment by ballooney | Hacker News Reader

If you enjoyed this sort of first-order quantitative reasoning about energy use and production, can I recommend the book 'Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air' by the late Prof David Mackay? It's essentially 300 pages just like the grandparent post, about making an energy policy that adds up, given various bounds of allowable CO2 emissions etc.

Free online, and a the best seller physical book in the field: https://www.withouthotair.com/

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His comments about the viability of PV are always to be understood to be about the insolation in the UK. Some people like to generalise from them to say PV can't work in Australia or North Africa.

His comments about scale are true, but also aren't entirely complete. You probably can't replace the entire economy we have with lower intensity sources of energy without also having to reduce energy consumption, is his key argument.

But, striking out the worst ones with the best ones we can invent is still interesting.

It's a good read, but it's not holy canon. Parts are contestable and parts are highly contextual and parts are conjecture. Actually.. that makes it quite like holy canon.

It's very specifically not a holy book because it does not hide any reasoning or ask you to take anything on faith. Quite the opposite - all of his working is shown, every assumption is stated, and you are very explicitly given the tools to calculate and update his work as new advances and considerations emerge. There is a whole chapter on not-the-UK, and how the math changes. The reason the book was such a global success is not because it was a statement of opinion about UK energy policy, but a proper treatment in how to thing about energy production and use, the tools for which can be applied anywhere.

...and then the other side of the deal, which is the widespread use of the text as a giant cudgel to belabour people with in an argument: in that situation it's exactly like hitting people with the Bible, wooden cover, locks and all.

Also the Do The Math blog -- https://dothemath.ucsd.edu -- which does the math of many environmental ideas by a UC San Diego physicist who got his degree at Caltech.

Dammit. I didn't know he had died. He was twelve years younger than me.

The book is brilliant, we need more people like him.

Hugh Hunt started a climate lecture series in his honour: https://www.climate-series.eng.cam.ac.uk/

Yes! I've read it a long time ago. Brilliant book.

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