A while back I tried to figure out whether we can keep running things the way we're running them: do we need to transition off of fossil fuels, how fast, and would we be able to provide today's level of energy supply using alternatives? I didn't include many of the details in that post, so I'd like to consider a few additional questions and look at this topic in greater depth.
Specifically:
- How fast do we need to transition off of fossil fuels?
- What industrial capacity is available today for different alternative energy technologies and what is likely to be available in the future?
- What might we do if we can't replace fossil fuels with alternatives fast enough, and what might the consequences be?
I finally got around to re-doing these calculations (so I could present them in a talk last week), and wanted to go through the numbers.