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I like reading Scott Adams' blog. He has a fairly ascerbic sense of humor which I mostly enjoy. Sometimes he says things just to yank people's chains, I think. Somtimes he comes up with some very interesting insightful comments.
He has a recent post about energy independence (going off the grid and so on) and how he doesn't think that it's going to be driven by government incentives. He thinks independence will be driven by cost ultimately because living that way will be so much more efficient.
He makes a great point, but it's just a lead-in without the rest of the argument. In discussions like this, about what are better for the world and what people should be doing, I often feel that the discussions should have much more facts. I honestly don't know the facts are about this issue, but presumably someone does. If I were going to become politically active, I think my thrust would be to inject as much quantitative analysis into lawmaking and legal proceedings as possible.
For instance, in talking about going off the grid, and interesting quantity would be measure what area of solar panels would be required to do that. That would be a moving number, depending on the efficiency of energy storage and solar panels and the time of year. Or even less than that, what's the area of solar panel required to run 100 Watts (one bright light bulb) 24 hours a day. For people interested in that technology, that would give them a ballpark idea of how much solar power would be required for them to run which appliances off-grid.
The other end of this equation is to set a number of the maximum sustainable population density given a certain technology level and latitude.
I wonder how hard it would be to find these numbers. I should try to look some of this up.