"This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. "
ROTFL. You made my day mate.
For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time.
What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.