I thiiiiink this book makes some important mistakes, judging from a quick glance.
So, for instance—he asks how much power the regular car-user consumes. He says that energy use per day per person is distance travelled per day, over distance per unit of fuel, times energy per unit of fuel. He plugs in numbers, gets 40 kWh / day / person. Significantly, he says that a liter of petrol (dude seems British) has about 10 kWh in it (which Google seems to confirm) and that a typical car gets 12 km / liter (ok, seems fair, haven’t double-checked, whatever). So his figure of 40 kWh / day / person, implicitly involves a car gets 12 km / 10 kWh, or 1.2 km/kWh.
And later he uses these numbers, together with numbers that purport to show that if we covered all English roofs with solar panels you only get 5 kWh / day / person, leaving us with a significant shortfall of the 40 kWh / day / person. (http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_39.shtml)
But, um, here’s the problem. Electric motors are waaaay more efficient than internal combustion. Wikipedia informs me that a Model S gets about 3 miles per kWh, according to the EPA, which converts to about 4.8 km / kWh. (This isn’t a floor by any means. Model 3 looks like it is better, although not by a ground-breaking amount. And this is why electric cars have stupid-sounding [to me] numbers applied to them like “100 miles per gallon of gas equivalent”.) So, anyhow, approximately 4x more efficient, which leaves us with notably smaller shortfall, although one that still means that solar panels are insufficient for our total energy needs for driving. Ah well, haven’t looked into the numbers of how hard it is to get sufficient solar power. 4x off isn’t thaaaaat bad for a Fermi estimate, I guess.
Anyhow, I might have made elementary mistakes in the above. The only reason I bothered with this comment was that I saw his figures that seemed to assume we’d require the same total energy for our electric cars as for our petrol ones, and I was like “That seems wwaaaaaaay” off. And even if I hadn’t done the math I’d still have that overall impression.
Thanks for asking this question. I have come down with something—I’ve been feeling increasingly bad for the last 4-5 days, since I took a train out of NYC. In retrospect, I should have done so earlier, or not done so at all, but hindsight is 20-20.
I’m not certain I’ve got C19, but I’m trying to take actions that would help me if I do.
--A lot of fluids, obviously.
--I’m taking vitamin C in large quantities. There’s currently a clinical trial which is testing this; I don’t know if it will work out, obviously, but I might as well. (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04264533)
--Vitamin D, for much the same reason.
--I’m sleeping / resting / staying in bed, pretty much continuously.
--I have, of course, a oximeter—so far, all my readings >= 94, usually 96-97, which seems fine. I might order a second in case that seems innacurate.
--I’m planning to get licorice-tea, and drink it in enormous quantities. This will, in fact, raise my blood pressure, but apparently licorice contains some antiviral agents. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4629407/)
--One thing that’s difficult is that I’m noticing that it’s getting harder to think. I’ll need to make provision for my future inability to make good decisions.
If people have further ideas, I’d be interested in them. It’s a frightening situation for me, although I’m reasonably healthy and in the 30-39 age bracket. I realize that some of the above actions have very small probability of substantially helping, but it’s hard to dig up better ones, especially because so many of the drugs used to fight this require a prescription, and currently you cannot get a prescription until you’re already basically at deaths door.