Naturally, the most rigorous analyses are going to be heavily weighted toward historical data, but will carefully ignore predicting future breakthroughs and paradigm shifts. Any analysis that tries to highlight humanity's adaptive ability would be laughably ignored, or at least minimized as being overly speculative.
So here we sit, with our broken pessimistic models, because they're the only ones the data supports.
He imagined that the world might come to demand 20 kilowatts per capita (more than twice the present per capita use in the US) and have 20 billion people living in it. Neither population growth nor energy consumption per capita growth have kept up with his estimates. Accordingly, nuclear fuel reprocessing and the breeder reactor alike have remained niche technologies without broad industrial impact. There was never enough uranium consumption growth to economically justify complicated reactors or fuel cycles.
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
https://xkcd.com/793/ (scroll over text is on point here)
Especially when they get older, they try to apply the 'make a cow a sphere of water, one meter in radius' trick all sorts of other areas. The issue is that they can't deal with 'history' in real life. Most of life is chaotic and the initial conditions and stochastic nature of the world make it almost impossible to predict anything. Not all things can be made into neat theories, in fact, it's a miracle that anything does fit into neat little theories. Physicists don't like that. Typically, they start throwing around all sorts of math-y sounding words when they realize that their 'model' won't work at all (Oh, just take the Hamiltonian, that'll solve it). If that still doesn't work, they make an excuse to go to a bar as soon as possible.
And I think some people were... "disappointed", for lack of a better word, that this happened. That their fantasies of global collapse Soylent Green-style didn't pan out, that the lackadaisical masses who had the temerity to not give up all modern advances weren't punished by the Dread God Malthus. Call it Puritanical Luddism, call it Apocalyptic Deep Green, call it a dogmatic insistence that any system not under totalitarian control must collapse.
And here we are, not even 20 years later, and America could potentially become a net exporter of oil. economics is hard because supply and demand are incredibly dynamic, and react far quicker than anyone seems to think.
That said, a non-Malthusian ending does not mean a happy ending, or even a better world than previously existed. Huge (long overdue, IMHO) investments in the commodity markets in 2006-2009 are going to keep us going for another few decades until another cycle of underinvestment bites us again. However, each time the invisible hand flings money from one pot into another there is uncounted costs in disrupted lives, environmental impacts, and national upheaval. Capitalism is far from perfect, but--at least in terms of resource allocation in dynamic information-starved systems--its the least imperfect solution we've got.
King Hubbert was laughed at when he predicted in 1956 that USA oil production would peak in a decade or so. It did.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
In 1998 Campbell & Laherrère predicted "The End of Cheap Oil" before 2010, due to the peak of conventional oil.
http://www.oilcrisis.com/campbell/endofcheapoil.pdf
The International Energy Agency called them "pessimists" :
http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/files/2011/04/weo1998.1302253...
In 1998-1999 the price of an oil barrel fell from $30 to $20.
In 2008 it reached $160.
These days it fluctuates between $40 and $70.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
In 2010 the same IEA said that conventional oil production had peaked in 2006.
https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...
And while the USA is fairly close to be a [net exporter of liquid hydrocarbons](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/12/09/no-the-u-s-i...) (not crude oil), the future of tight oil doesn't look good - Laherrere seems to forecast peak tight oil for 2018 :
https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/lahall19march...
(it takes a while to collect the data...)
Sure, maybe we'll figure out how to economically extract even less conventional hydrocarbons (like shale oil = kerogen, which you have to "cook" before it can be used), but these will be even more expensive and polluting !
Not to mention capitalism is an umbrella term with many variants making it a works claim. As if you said "the best we have is cars".
That's part of the strength of Capitalism: You can tweak it, modify the regulatory regime, and it's still Capitalism. You don't need a revolution to modify some deep theory in order to improve how you regulate a Capitalist economy, or to adopt some ideas from the Socialist platform, like you would to modify a specific Socialist ideology.
I think its legitimate to draw a trend line ignoring the kink in the last 10% of the graph. I mean yes we could now be on a different trajectory, but that's just 'this time it's different' thinking, that's not to say it isn't a legitimate discussion, just that its a separate discussion.
No energy growth was anyway covered in a later 'course'.
Not if products are finanicalized (like equity, debt or land ownership). There's no obesity-type limit to net worth of an individual and that money allows the person to have unprecedented power to exploit actual physical resources and energy. Some, like Bezos for his Blue Origin project, decide to do so.
> We ended up with a world where widespread obesity is a problem and predicted gigadeaths from starvation did not actually happen.
This is looking at a very specific metric of human well-being. The limits of nature assert themselves in various ways. The loss of biodiversity and climate change is directly attributable to economic growth. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capita...
Physicist: "Right, if you plot the U.S. energy consumption in all forms from 1650 until now, you see a phenomenally faithful exponential at about 3% per year over that whole span."
It's not phenomenally faithful. There's an inflection point visible even in his large graph going back all the way to 1650. US primary energy consumption in 1977 was 78 quadrillion BTU (quads). At 2.9% annual growth it would have risen to 245 quads by 2017. Actual US primary energy consumption in 2017 was only 98 quads. The per capita primary energy consumption in the US was actually higher in 1977.
Physicists don't need to imagine future limits to growth. The limits are already visible in the historical record. But, contra the fears of many scientists circa 1960, the limits to growth showed up on the demand side before the supply side. We ended up with a world where widespread obesity is a problem and predicted gigadeaths from starvation did not actually happen.
For any product you can imagine consuming, there are "obesity"-type limits to how much more of that same product you can consume before the marginal utility goes negative. For any service you might use, similar limits apply since there are only 24 hours in a day.
The physicist character gives the more correct answer but his supporting evidence is flawed. The economist has the much worse answers, but only (I suspect) because he's a strawman constructed for didactic purposes. Economists generally don't make 1400 year forecasts of any sort.