He's also provided my all-time favorite quote about how to think productively about the environment: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
This is mostly a gimmick, though, because other people who uses arithmetic as he says manage to go to near opposite conclusions. His website is written such as his conclusions are claimed to logicallly follow the data, at least that's how I read it, and I think this is slightly disingeneous. For example, David Mc Kay and his website/book(http://www.withouthotair.com/) are mostly based on data in a similar fashion, and his consequences are radically different.
His conclusions are the same; the difference is in how he reacts to them.
> If fast reactors are 60 times more efficient, the same extraction of ocean
uranium could deliver 420 kWh per day per person. At last, a sustainable
figure that beats current consumption! – but only with the joint help of two
technologies that are respectively scarcely-developed and unfashionable:
ocean extraction of uranium, and fast breeder reactors.
It's great that people use arithmetic to argue the opposite point, and it's a very worthwhile discussion. Unfortunately, this discussion, which should be pursued and decided on the hard cold facts, is usually pushed to the sidelines by all the people screaming "our guys have the right arithmetic and you are all a bunch of dangerous idiots".
