abundant clean energy means we'll be using a lot of other resources inefficiently as well. You are an engineer, doesn't doing things inefficiently just make your flesh crawl? You need to understand that the goal of the environmental movement is not to send us back to the eighteenth century, to produce less goods and services, or to live frugally and cheaply with no luxuries or elegance. We don't want to live without benefits, or to exist without incurring any cost, what we want to maximize is the RATIO of benefit to cost. Surely you understand how this works with money and business, the calculus is similar in energy and technology.

In the long run, the most efficient technologies are the most cost-effective, but as you know, the market is often dominated in the short-run, by short-term profits. I approach the entire environmental movement as an engineering and economic geography tradeoff, not as some kind of pastoral return to nature nostalgia trip. We don't want cheap electricity to just lead to aluminum shortages, or to simply install batteries in our SUVs. Unless we do this, the consumption of energy will simply rise to meet the supply available, no matter how much we expand it. That is the undeniable historical trend. And it is unsustainable. Nothing can increase exponentially forever. Even if we had an infinite supply of free energy, what would we do with the waste heat generated by the incredibly inefficient processes which would suddenly become economically attractive?