The article claimed that it was a response to the counter reformation based on the decreased likelihood of the opening paragraphs of wills to refer to god. The claim being that people rebelled against the counter reformation.
But if the amount of available calories drops below the necessary amount, then famine occurs. How bad this is depends on how much overshoot, and how prepared the population is to find alternatives.
In Irish history, there is the "Great Famine". During the 1800s, maybe 20% of the population of Ireland and the Scandinavian countries emigrated to north america.
The current trend of global warming and increasing harvests started in the later 1800s. Then came mechanised farming, artificial fertilizers, and science.
Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" themselves against the temptations of modernity. There is no reason for this to start failing at any particular point, except perhaps when they become too much of an imposition on the rest of society, which pushes back on them.
> how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ?
He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.
It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.
> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.
> Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion
The article isn’t proving that point, and I’d argue other conditions, in particular mortality rates or living conditions in general have more of a widely accepted impact on fertility than religion.
I’d be open to see religion playing a role in this narrative, but IMHO it needs be more than an opinion or a hunch.
The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.
For your a mere 10x the price of a container ship, you can get a container across the Atlantic in 3 days instead of a week. At the level of demand for fast transatlantic shipping we see at the moment, I think you could do better than the airship on both speed and price using fixed-wing aircraft. I didn't see in the piece any argument that what people really want is slightly slower than a plane and slightly faster than a ship. If there's a sleeping giant of demand out there, I'm not seeing it.
Imagine you get home, plug your car in, the car runs your home heating for the remainder of the evening for free, then you go to sleep and the car recharges for cheap. Sounds like an attractive proposal?
Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.
Yeah, I mean if you really think about it, this sort of concept would still work very well.
If everyone has an electric car and that car is always plugged in when not in use, regardless of where you are, then car batteries are only out of grid use while they're being driven.
The electrical grid must be such a difficult thing to manage, even with cars acting as local grid storage we'd need supplemental neighbourhood/regional storage units as well as a way to handle any unexpected peaks.
I mean I know there's the whole "Coronation Street finishes and everyone turns their kettles on" thing but imagine if at x time on x day everyone collectively did turn their kettles on - literally everyone, every single household. It would blow the grid no matter what the operators tried to do.
In a way we need grid storage in the form of batteries to enable better use of green/local energy sources, but I think it would be smart to include some sort of chemical based generation capacity with that local storage, some way for us to store energy in a solid form say, then never use it apart from very unexpected peaks where the system needs to scrabble to find more juice.
Unfortunately a lot of potential fuels are also flammable, not really the best thing to have a huge stockpile of in your neighbourhood. Maybe a huge flow battery fed by massive underground tanks, if we ever manage to improve that technology...
