Did you assume that the cost of side services, maintenance would not grow with the oil price?

At the ballpark resolution we're looking at here, that doesn't even get you to a rounding error.

Please estimate the solar energy budget for Finland in winter months. How many transcontinental flights can then Finnair make?

As for how many flights you could power on the load balancing surplus from that strategy, I'm gonna go with 'enough.'

Of course this is an insanely wasteful way of powering Finland. Nobody would actually do anything like this in the real world, because vastly superior options exist. But the point here is to demonstrate that energy, in and of itself, is not a serious constraint on economic activity. If energy looks like it is a serious constraint, under the present state of technological achievement, then you have lost the plot somewhere along your train of thought.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

can we continue to provide bread and circus vacations to Hawaii and Italy for the middle class before they turn to political unrest instead?

Interesting choice of countries as examples! ;)

People are turning to political unrest, it's just for the moment mostly polite and inadequate in the first world, (and pretty easily squelched through mass digi-surveillance knowing protestor plans in advance).

In other parts of the world it is so far equally inadequate, if much less polite.

ISIS notwithstanding... Their protests (and Boku Haram's) are scary and have grabbed headlines, but the idea of a Caliphate is far from new, and will probably not fly long term unless one or two things happen. One, the levels of social collapse exceed Egypt's or Palectine's (or Yemen's, or Somalia's), or seconfly the first world violently over-reacts (again) and continues the kind of of dumb-brute, collateral damage-rich campaigns to reduce Muslim population willy-nilly through attrition and superior firepower.

Tony Blair's solution (to pretty much everything.)

Or, we could draw silly lines on a map and watch the consequences unfold as Islam goes through its tortuous schisms while we engage, enable and enrich corrupt elites in order to plunder their territories' fossil fuels.

Oh, wait...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty