If you cannot understand how a huge increase in energy might be useful you should probably not go around calling other people stupid. We are not going to get carbon removal and desalination at scale to fix the already baked-in consequences of climate change by making our water heaters more efficient. Efficiency is good but there is more to life than the status quo.

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rgmerk a day ago | parent [-]

I am aware of the need for carbon removal and (some) desalination, but 1000x-ing our energy production is ludicrous stuff. The waste heat from energy production on that scale would render Earth uninhabitable.

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hdgvhicv a day ago | parent [-]

If you increase it 1000 fold it would still be less than 10% of the heat the sun provides.

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rgmerk a day ago | parent [-]

That's incorrect. It's in the order of 25% of the heat reaching the Earth's surface, or maybe 35-40 watts of heat per square metre.

That's roughly ten times the warming effect of doubling CO2.

Now, I don't have a climate model handy to simulate this in detail but I would suggest "render the Earth uninhabitable" is a close enough approximation to the actual effects to suggest it's a terrible idea and anyone seriously proposing it should be laughed out of the room until they've done their homework.

	▲	hdgvhicv 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Total energy use by mankind is about 200,000 TWh a year https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption Most of that is lost in waste heat. Total energy arriving on earth from the sun is about 1,500,000,000 TWh https://smartstep.blog/how-much-solar-energy-hits-earth-per-... 7500 times higher