Generation & Transmission Losses.

“Reasonably” afford to pay seems the bit we a struggling to define - the cost of rehousing all the folks whose lands become uninhabitable over here instead may be very high, at the level of warfare, rather than just the lights going off or an argument about planning permissions and greenbelt land.. 

Be careful what you wish for - look at the problems associated with pushing a few migrant boats in the channel, this is a small no of people mostly displaced by the economic collapse of conflicts,  or persecution for political/ religious belief .  If you let it grow to the state when you get whole countries full on the move, because their lives will end if they do not, it will be a game we cannot win. Those of us in the comfortable places who cannot manage without our drinking water and nice housing at the moment will not be able to handle it.

And the reason we are 9bn more compared to ~ 1 in the 1800s, is mostly down to hygiene like drains and drinking water, and then better medication and understanding of disease both our own, and for plants/livestock. Some of that has certainly come hand in hand with rising energy consumption, but the Victorian plumbing was largely installed by manual labour, not dug by machine and planned by computer, and my grandparents generation thought of ploughing by horse as normal.

If you are over 50, you have probably lived though the burning of about half the oil on the planet that has ever been burnt so far, and unless you think your childhood was particularly energy deprived, it is not clear that it was really necessary.

Mike.

“Reasonably” afford to pay seems the bit we a struggling to define - the cost of rehousing all the folks whose lands become uninhabitable over here instead may be very high, at the level of warfare, rather than just the lights going off or an argument about planning permissions and greenbelt land.. 

Be careful what you wish for - look at the problems associated with pushing a few migrant boats in the channel, this is a small no of people mostly displaced by the economic collapse of conflicts,  or persecution for political/ religious belief .  If you let it grow to the state when you get whole countries full on the move, because their lives will end if they do not, it will be a game we cannot win. Those of us in the comfortable places who cannot manage without our drinking water and nice housing at the moment will not be able to handle it.

And the reason we are 9bn more compared to ~ 1 in the 1800s, is mostly down to hygiene like drains and drinking water, and then better medication and understanding of disease both our own, and for plants/livestock. Some of that has certainly come hand in hand with rising energy consumption, but the Victorian plumbing was largely installed by manual labour, not dug by machine and planned by computer, and my grandparents generation thought of ploughing by horse as normal.

If you are over 50, you have probably lived though the burning of about half the oil on the planet that has ever been burnt so far, and unless you think your childhood was particularly energy deprived, it is not clear that it was really necessary.

Mike.