Parihaka, point taken that you were refering, confusingly, to crop reduction due to carbon-emmisions reduction, not to crop reduction due to building of solar power satellite infrastructure, which sort of was the topic were were on. I have never advocated anything like the former, so I don't understand why you insist on putting that question to me.
Interesting and informative discussion of orbital geometry you provided. I appreciated reading it. I do not claim to know the optimum way to build and place orbital panels, any more than I have plans for a $10/lb-to-orbit spaceship in my pocket (though there are those who say they do....) The point is, it does not stike me as necessairily outlandish to believe such problems could be solved. BTW, if SPSs could be deployed in a way to reduce insoliation of earth, there's more than one reason to suspect that might be a feature, not a bug.
What I don't really get is why you feel orbital solar power is an 'enemy idea' that must be ridiculed and destroyed. Contra's tactical assessment seems rather on point, I'm afraid.
SPS simply represents, in my view, a relatively near term payoff to the long-term strategy of expanding the human economy off the planet. A huge payoff, that is. If getting from here to there is expensive, so are resource wars down here. For a trillion or two, that is, within the scale of the Iraq debacle, we could accomplish quite a lot I expect....
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First, we kill all the abstractions....
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