Even if energy becomes incredibly cheap, there's a certain cost to dealing with waste that for now we haven't baked into economic models (because we could simply throw it away). If energy usage, no matter how cheap, keeps on growing, waste will also keep on growing.
Especially since it repeats a line of reasoning, whose premises clearly apply to labor, but whose conclusions are clearly incorrect in the case of labor.
"So the price of energy must continue to drop" simply does not logically entail from the preceding premises.
Are we supposed to accept this? Because I do not. I think the way that we allocate resources towards energy collection/generation/consumption is a bigger constraint than what physics can currently allow.
This is a raw physical limitation. How we use and how we generate the energy are irrelevant details. The only thing that matters is Earth’s ambient temperature, the additional wattage being used planetwide, and the Earth’s radius. Past a certain point, Earth’s equilibrium temperature will rise well past current levels, and rapidly.
Just as irrelevant as assuming the basis behind current growth rates where it is impossible to mitigate agaisnt "literally saturating the Earth’s capacity to radiate excess energy as heat into space".
All of this is based on assumptions. You can't just accept one set of assumptions that underlie a model and throw out others that could refute it (well one could, but it isn't intellectually honest).
For instance you can't disrupt the 2nd law, so at some point it's actually true that it is impossible to mitigate overheating and you won't be able to improve Stefan-Boltzmann law (except for increasing our emissivity, at night I'd guess). You can try to play with mass transfer but more thermal escape is not a good idea and a heat exchanger with extraterrestrial masses won't work.
I know it's hard to take and that physicists sound arrogant when they do this, but that's how it is.
We're talking about macroscopic systems here. The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages. It doesn't matter that somebody in nanowhatever claims a deviation from the macroscopic behaviour, that's their job. You still have a macroscopic Earth. An Earth brimming with grey goo would still obey the laws of thermodynamics.
I referenced wikipedia and cited an example of such from my experience in physics lab in college nearly a decade ago… I don't get why people try to use some "law" built upon a particular set assumptions that work on a particular set of circumstances expect their leaky abstractions on top of it to govern everything that could ever be possible…
>The laws of thermodynamics depend on the law of large numbers (if you take the stat mech route), they can be considered laws about statistical averages.
On systems operating under certain assumptions… just like navier-stokes predicting singularities from a specific set of IC's in theory that don't happen in real life from said IC's, which have to be handled with a bunch of corrections and adjustments that are more accurate… we're still working out the math as to why that is…
Conservation of momentum is a physical law, that is, we're not making that up, we always see it. The Navier-Stokes equation is a continuum mechanics model of fluids with interesting mathematics, but it's not fundamental, it relies on conservation of momentum and additional reasonable assumptions about the fluid, in the same way that for instance the van der Waals equation is reasonable but it's not a law, you find deviations and there are better models.
As far as we can tell the laws of thermodynamics are laws indeed, that's why no one is proposing perpetual motion machines of the second kind any more.
(Look at the CMB spectrum —and refs therein—: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cmbr.svg)
"Oh but we haven't observed it in the cosmos from our cherry picked backtested 'sufficiently black' ones so it doesn't matter"
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The author is saying that physics puts a fairly solid cap on the amount of power we can produce on earth. That's the basic point.
What does a finite energy-consuming, exponentially growing economy look like?
If we accept that all economic transactions consume some energy, and the economy is growing (so the number or the value of economic transactions is increasing), then once we've hit our physical constraint on power generation, how does growth continue? Only if the energy required per unit of transaction-value continually decreases. So the price of energy must continue to drop, measured by the relative to the value it provides.
The author then points out that this is a contradiction because the price of energy would have to rise, and therefore that the problem is in the assumption of continuing exponential growth.