When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle).

It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming.

I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.

When you have massive interlocking systems of convection, atmospheric thermodynamics, tectonics, ocean currents and winds, all in concert through feedback loops, regulators, non-linear compression and expansion functions, multipliers, hysteresis and tipping points, you don't need to ascribe sentience, evolution or even biology to see the sum as "living".

Push here. it reacts there.

In the simplest analysis, overpopulation of "too successful" species leads to pandemics that wipe them out. Hardly a stretched metaphor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc

When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European)

Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges.

So, its no surprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources.

Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density).

So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also have some of the dirtiest power around.

Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power).

Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.