Today The New York Times ran two dueling opinion pieces featuring Robert Bryce, author of a number of books, and Tom Friedman, who chose this column to unleash his inner Paul Ehrlich. The latter column will make regular NYT readers anxious and depressed, the former will make them angry.

Bryce argues that though wind and solar farms do not produce emissions, they require a whole lot of land, significant natural resource inputs, and new transmission lines. He believes that these shortfalls are under appreciated by renewable energy proponents, and the scaling of renewable energy might have other environmental consequences. California appears to have plenty of land, but that is to meet a 33% renewables goal, which is unlikely to satisfy environmentalists, and California has much more land than other states. The takeaway is that all energy choices have their tradeoffs:

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management ordered a halt to construction on part of the facility out of concern for the desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.

Friedman, on the other hand, penned a bizarre column foretelling a rapture-esque doomsday if humanity does not change its cancerous, consumption heavy ways:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

…

We will realize, he [Paul Gilding, author of The Great Disruption] predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

It’s easy to get in the news through predicting doomsday (see here), but humanity has been forced to listen to this warning time and time again:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970′s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.  At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to “stretch” the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production.  But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.  Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole.

Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present affluent society.  They will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics, and economics of the 1960′s are dead.  As the most powerful nation in the world today, and its largest consumer, the United States cannot stand isolated.  We are today involved in the events leading to famine; tomorrow we may be destroyed by its consequences.

- Paul Ehrlich, 1968

And yet humanity is still here, living longer, healthier lives than the past.