>What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so.
What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
Ok - that was a doozy. Well done mr Stross. I’m going to have to chew on that for a while, but if there is one takeaway, it’s we need what might be called “radical” solutions - which frankly are just “sensible - as long as your salary is not tied up in the status quo”
In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and bigger upheavals.
Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.
The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.
So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.
He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster, the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly worse, increasingly faster.
At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better
For anyone new to Charlie Stross' fiction, here are a few links for your perusal:
Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author
In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.
The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].
Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].
The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...
Stross is at the cutoff of being a baby boomer. He thinks like one, and it is abundantly clear from his Malthusian preoccupations and overall cynical anti-establishment views regarding a system that he has personally benefited tremendously from.
Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.
The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.
If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.
He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...
His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.
If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.
There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
I used to be a huge fan of Charlie Stross. He's made exactly this kind of apocalyptic prediction many times before. When devastation doesn't materialize, or the outcome far less severe than he predicted, he doesn't update on his beliefs or say "huh, guess I was wrong about that"; instead, he moves right on to the next one.
One of his favorite subjects is Brexit. I'm not a fan either, but here's his track record:
2016: When the Brexit vote happened, he predicted imminent Scottish independence, a failure of the Northern Ireland peace, and the collapse of the London financial sector (note the "fascism is here!" Cabaret reference): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorro...
2018: he's stockpiling food and medicine to prepare for the immediate consequences of Brexit's implementation: "Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well... After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979, when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to get that bad. But then the situation will continue to deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...
2020: impending crisis, widespread shortages, deployment of the military, "added economic crisis, probable civil disobedience and unrest, a risk of the NHS collapsing, a possible run on Sterling, and then a constitutional crisis as one or more parts of the United Kingdom gear up for a secession campaign." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
... I mean, to be clear, there wasn't a no-deal Brexit. There was some confusion between a soft Brexit (ie Switzerland solution), a hard Brexit (what eventually happened, though in practice it increasingly seems to be tacking towards the softer end of hard, with the UK, well, not retaining EU laws so much as replacing them with can't-believe-they're-not-EU-laws), and a no-deal Brexit (which was averted; that's the apocalypse one), but to be clear a no-deal Brexit did not happen.
Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an ice age - it used to be hotter most of its history.
How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis?
It’s one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from freezing to normal temperature) too fast, but saying that it will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
>If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.
I noticed world peace wasn't on the roadmap. After we solve 3 or 4 of these existential crises, do we still have time for that, or are we pushing it to 2100?
I read political books from the 70s and everything is the same. It's been the same since the mid-60s. That's when the western narrative shifted from technological progress to environmentalism and the lawyer took over from the engineer as the prime mover in society. That was 60 years ago. 60 years before that was 1900 and the world was vastly vastly different compared to our world of the 1960s. 60 years before that was 1840 and the world was vastly vastly different.
I'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China is going to change things radically. Human labor will not be an economic constraint, but that won't lead to unlimited abundance because the constraint will be externalities.
Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will improve because AI is better than they are naturally at everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially if AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in the interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to solve trolley problems.
Guys, yes I get it. You’re all famous people with books on this and that and all that. But I tell you this with love - get off the Internet. It’s radicalizing you into some crazed state. You saw what happened to Elon Musk? It’s happening to you.
I know you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who tell you “yes, yes, speak truth to power!” and shit like that but this is just an angry blogpost.
Take it easy. Just take a 2 week break from social media. Read a book from the before times and don’t go on the Internet. Come back and see if you care.
I'm not sure I understand how severely this is being misinterpreted. The pivotal year of our times? Post-oil age? The AI bubble being worse than 2008? Starving to death if we don't stop using fossil fuels? Sorry but all of this is incredibly wrong.
First off, the pink elephant in the room: a PV panel is not an energy plan. A PV panel is a cheap way to generate electricity, yes. But there are many, many, many other things you need to take that PV panel and make it a sustainable source of energy on a national scale. Here's a short list: 1) a continuous production source of cheap panels, 2) a continuous demand of cheap panels (supply-demand being one of the reasons they're so cheap, but they also last 12+ years, so there is a built-in economic time-bomb when demand drops off), 3) residential and commercial equipment and processes to send the PV energy to the grid, 4) a grid that can handle it all, 5) enough batteries to store it both overnight and on cloudy days, 6) a cheap source of plentiful batteries (and again the same supply-demand issue), 7) space for the panels, and (though nobody thought this would be an issue, but apparently it is) 8) the political interest in investing in (and not intentionally tanking) the renewable sector. Each of these is a big enough deal that if they don't work out just right, there goes your PV energy plan.
We don't get a more advanced society just because it's possible; someone needs to make a profit off it first. Ideas like "B2B" and "V2G" charging, electric trucking, etc are still a pipe dream because they aren't significantly commercially viable. If it's expensive, doesn't net you an immediate return, and is risky in general, nobody does it. Let's use a very well established example: Trains. Extremely cost effective for transportation, but you'd have to be insane to build or upgrade existing track.
Anyone thinking the world is gonna get off oil or coal isn't aware that USA, the EU, and China, are not the only countries/regions on the globe. There are 6 billion other people on the planet. The vast majority of them are poor and live in poor countries. They can't even afford fucking vaccines, and you think they're all going to develop cutting-edge energy generation and distribution systems? It would take at least 50 years for most developing nations to match developed western nations.
Not only will developing countries stick to oil and coal, the US will certainly see a return to it too. Remember that there is still 3 more years for Trump to find new ways to destroy the renewables sector in the US and alienate us from foreign renewables. Texas benefits from the country being dependent on oil, not panels. Whatever feeds the political monkey wins. And from a national security perspective, it would be impossible to replace our military's vehicles with EV alternatives in any reasonable time frame, so we continue to be dependent on oil for defense. If the military needs it, then we keep making and using it. In many ways, oil (that we can continue to extract in our own borders) is a far more secure energy source than ones that depend on rare materials we might not have in abundance here.
We are not facing an agro threat. We have far more agricultural resources than is needed to feed all our people, even with higher temperatures and less water. We would simply grow fewer livestock and switch from corn to actually nutritional food. Even just tripling the amount of oats we produce (a tiny amount) would provide most of the nutrition we need. We aren't dependent on foreign countries for ag; we just like the cheap prices. And this is without talking about bioengineered crops or using more northern land for farming. (our country is fucking huge) Other countries will definitely be at risk due to climate change, but we are still rich enough and have enough resources to get along just fine. Everything will be more expensive, and people won't be happy, bu...
I appreciate the themes but find this overly conceptual. We can look at hard figures(†) and see errors in the prophecy. While yes this is a transformative period, I don't believe the author truly identifies the fulcrum; PV cells alone are proven insufficient, so society will need to turn upon many more points than just that one. The essay could be called The Pivots (plural) but then that would be less simple/sensational/optimistic and fall under the category of economics and social sciences.
I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo, corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility. "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly appreciated line.
It's worth thinking about past unprecedented humanity-wide energy transitions to get a taste of what might be in store.
Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)
This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use. Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible. Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they wouldn't.
I was nodding along until the bashing of neoliberalism, which I believe to be unfounded left-woo essentially.
If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment).
Also the view of climate change as primarily being about photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current iteration of civilization.
There's this "now that I'm exiting, you're all fucked" phenomenon that exists among older folks. Perhaps a result of optimism waning at the end of a life. I'm not young. But I guess I'm more optimistic than this.
I wonder how much is related to the aging of the population. You see the world differently when surrounded by young and children. Which is now gone in many parts of the world.
I can agree this may be a (the?) pivot year, but I don't think it is energy. It is everything. It seems weird to say the death of fossil fuels is 'not that big of a deal compared to...' but when it was only a minor news story that life on ancient Mars is a growing probability, all the political, well, everything, is beginning to look like the norm and I just spent the day talking to an AI to help me code. Well, the death of fossil fuels just seems like it is maybe only a top 10 story of this decade.
43 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 54.3 ms ] threadWhat are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission cars.
The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.
The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.
So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.
At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better
Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author
In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.
The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].
Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].
The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ [3] https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.
The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.
If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.
He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...
His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.
If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.
There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
One of his favorite subjects is Brexit. I'm not a fan either, but here's his track record:
2016: When the Brexit vote happened, he predicted imminent Scottish independence, a failure of the Northern Ireland peace, and the collapse of the London financial sector (note the "fascism is here!" Cabaret reference): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorro...
2018: he's stockpiling food and medicine to prepare for the immediate consequences of Brexit's implementation: "Current warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent; supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well... After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979, when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to get that bad. But then the situation will continue to deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the fields as the agricultural sector collapses." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...
2020: impending crisis, widespread shortages, deployment of the military, "added economic crisis, probable civil disobedience and unrest, a risk of the NHS collapsing, a possible run on Sterling, and then a constitutional crisis as one or more parts of the United Kingdom gear up for a secession campaign." https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
2021: yet more disaster predictions, including that Boris Johnson might declare war on France: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/11/an-upda...
In 2022 he once again predicted a general strike, a failed harvest, and the collapse of the UK system of government: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/08/the-gat...
And then... none of this happened. Brexit hasn't exactly been positive for the UK, but neither has it rendered it into Fallout: London.
Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an ice age - it used to be hotter most of its history.
How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis?
It’s one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from freezing to normal temperature) too fast, but saying that it will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
I noticed world peace wasn't on the roadmap. After we solve 3 or 4 of these existential crises, do we still have time for that, or are we pushing it to 2100?
I'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China is going to change things radically. Human labor will not be an economic constraint, but that won't lead to unlimited abundance because the constraint will be externalities.
Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will improve because AI is better than they are naturally at everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially if AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in the interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to solve trolley problems.
I know you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who tell you “yes, yes, speak truth to power!” and shit like that but this is just an angry blogpost.
Take it easy. Just take a 2 week break from social media. Read a book from the before times and don’t go on the Internet. Come back and see if you care.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983
First off, the pink elephant in the room: a PV panel is not an energy plan. A PV panel is a cheap way to generate electricity, yes. But there are many, many, many other things you need to take that PV panel and make it a sustainable source of energy on a national scale. Here's a short list: 1) a continuous production source of cheap panels, 2) a continuous demand of cheap panels (supply-demand being one of the reasons they're so cheap, but they also last 12+ years, so there is a built-in economic time-bomb when demand drops off), 3) residential and commercial equipment and processes to send the PV energy to the grid, 4) a grid that can handle it all, 5) enough batteries to store it both overnight and on cloudy days, 6) a cheap source of plentiful batteries (and again the same supply-demand issue), 7) space for the panels, and (though nobody thought this would be an issue, but apparently it is) 8) the political interest in investing in (and not intentionally tanking) the renewable sector. Each of these is a big enough deal that if they don't work out just right, there goes your PV energy plan.
We don't get a more advanced society just because it's possible; someone needs to make a profit off it first. Ideas like "B2B" and "V2G" charging, electric trucking, etc are still a pipe dream because they aren't significantly commercially viable. If it's expensive, doesn't net you an immediate return, and is risky in general, nobody does it. Let's use a very well established example: Trains. Extremely cost effective for transportation, but you'd have to be insane to build or upgrade existing track.
Anyone thinking the world is gonna get off oil or coal isn't aware that USA, the EU, and China, are not the only countries/regions on the globe. There are 6 billion other people on the planet. The vast majority of them are poor and live in poor countries. They can't even afford fucking vaccines, and you think they're all going to develop cutting-edge energy generation and distribution systems? It would take at least 50 years for most developing nations to match developed western nations.
Not only will developing countries stick to oil and coal, the US will certainly see a return to it too. Remember that there is still 3 more years for Trump to find new ways to destroy the renewables sector in the US and alienate us from foreign renewables. Texas benefits from the country being dependent on oil, not panels. Whatever feeds the political monkey wins. And from a national security perspective, it would be impossible to replace our military's vehicles with EV alternatives in any reasonable time frame, so we continue to be dependent on oil for defense. If the military needs it, then we keep making and using it. In many ways, oil (that we can continue to extract in our own borders) is a far more secure energy source than ones that depend on rare materials we might not have in abundance here.
We are not facing an agro threat. We have far more agricultural resources than is needed to feed all our people, even with higher temperatures and less water. We would simply grow fewer livestock and switch from corn to actually nutritional food. Even just tripling the amount of oats we produce (a tiny amount) would provide most of the nutrition we need. We aren't dependent on foreign countries for ag; we just like the cheap prices. And this is without talking about bioengineered crops or using more northern land for farming. (our country is fucking huge) Other countries will definitely be at risk due to climate change, but we are still rich enough and have enough resources to get along just fine. Everything will be more expensive, and people won't be happy, bu...
I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo, corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility. "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly appreciated line.
(†) – Vaclav Smil's work comes to mind.
Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)
This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use. Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible. Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they wouldn't.
Quibble: China's solar panels are not thin-film.
If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment).
Also the view of climate change as primarily being about photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current iteration of civilization.
Actually, no. It's healing. :)