Post #3913903

2026-07-18 15:25 UTC

Here’s another example, from a blog that has been recommended to me a couple of times. The author, Tom Murphy, aspires to “do the math” in the sense of approaching the climate crisis from a rigorously scientific approach. Murphy cites data on the material costs of building photovoltaic, wind, and other renewable energy generation to make the argument that, in essence, solar and wind power are just as bad as burning fossil fuels. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-11-renewable-salvation/ The problem with Murphy’s sources are that a) they’re more than a decade out of date at this point, missing some massive efficiency gains over the last few years, and b) leave out the material costs of all the oil, gas, and coal extracted to generate energy from fossil fuels, all in order to make renewables seem just as bad as coal and oil.

Replies (1)

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social 2026-07-18 15:31

Murphy’s answer is, of course, for all of humanity to adopt a forager lifestyle, because anything more than that is unacceptable. Here he is advocating for higher rates of infant mortality as “part of a healthy ecology” that “makes each living child twice as valuable,” in contrast to trying to save the lives of infants, which is “human supremacist.” https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/accepting-loss-as-fair/ This is what I mean when I talk about people who seem actively disappointed at the explosion of renewable energy that, for the first time in my life, offers a plausible mechanism for mitigating some of the worst effects of the climate crisis while avoiding the deaths of billions of people that a global return to foraging would entail. Humanity sinned and this is our collective punishment; trying to weasel out of it by building solar panels must also then be sinful.

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