There is actually an apparent upper limit on energy usage once countries reach a certain level of development. See for example [1] and [2]. Total energy consumption in Western countries has been level or dropping for years as devices that use energy become more efficient.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39092

[2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/eu-at-risk-o...

Yeah, that's until the price of solar reaches a point where desalination becomes economic. The fact that today is not a day when it's profitable to cover the world in solar panels means as little as the fact that today oil can be more profitable.

This is mathematically impossible. The entire world could be powered with 200,000 square miles of solar panels.

Since 1990 we’ve lost ~2.5x that amount of land to deforestation, approximately zero of which was due to building solar.

We have a deforestation problem, but it has nothing to do with solar.

Using present-day numbers to say that solar deforestation will not be a problem is just as fallacious as using today's temperature to say that global warming is not a problem.

That is a flawed comparison, and a poor argument.

Present day worldwide energy usage is a real metric which allows us to calculate the present day 200,000 sq mile figure. Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.

I assumed you were being hyperbolic and thought some readers might be curious about the hypothetical area of panels required to meet the entire world's energy demand. It's an interesting figure to put things in perspective.

But a claim that widespread solar power will be a leading cause of deforestation is entirely devoid of evidence and fails the basic napkin-math test.

Energy usage will increase over time. Interestingly, so does solar panel efficiency. And most solar panels won't be built in forests. And the Earth will never be 100% powered by solar.

But most compellingly, even if you did have to build solar farms only in forests, and even if you did need to provide 100% of the Earth's demand for energy through those farms, you could do it today with only 40% of the deforestation that's already occurred over the last 25 years.

It's also nice to consider that solar panels built in deserts can even be beneficial to local flora and fauna (although not universally). [1]

[1] https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/04/can-desert-plan...

Existing deforestation is already done to collect solar energy, to power crop growth.

>Today's temperature doesn't allow calculating anything relevant to global warming.

Yes it does, it allows us to calculate the extent to which global warming has progressed... to date. Just like the current global energy usage lets us calculate the progress of energy use growth, to date.

Where there is forest there is rain. Where there is rain there are clouds. Where there are clouds there is less sun. Any large scale Oil replacing energy production with solar will be more efficient in places where there is no forest or crop production. Hence the threat for the forest due to solar is not that high. Also where human settle there is no forest afterwards but there are roofs, where they can put PV on. By the way there is a dicusion to make that mandatory.

You've just demonstrated that it's not mathematically impossible.

If the entire world used 100x the amount of energy we're currently using, then now it's 20,000,000 square miles that have to be covered.

"Physically improbable", maybe. "Mathematically impossible", no.

That is extremely unlikely. You need to cover single digit percentages of the world with solar panels (depending on latitude) to cover all our energy needs.

What about our energy needs several decades from now? Falling prices make new applications possible which raises demand.

There are still more than enough deserts that we could fill with solar panels.