I'll tell you what we already knew. We knew how to draw an optimistic graph and confuse it with reality.
Maybe you haven't actually read the paper by the Rio Tinto/Walmart/Royal Dutch Shell/Artic Diamond Mine consultant Amory Lovins.
The Shit-for-Brains graph, showing 25% of our energy coming from "soft" technologies by the year 2000 can be found in Lovins, SFB, whoops, I mean Amory, "The Road Not Taken"
Foreign Affairs page 77, October 1976.
Yeah right.
Since shit-for-brains published that, the first of his mindless anti-nuke diatribes, 500 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste, aka carbon dioxide, about which he couldn't care less, have been dumped indiscrimately into the atmosphere.
It shows dangerous fossil fuels at being only 75% of our energy and nuclear as zero.
While shit-for-brains anti-nukes have been attempting to crow about a
dumb self fulfilling prophecy, that nuclear would wither away because it is "uneconomic," nuclear power
quadrupled on an exajoule scale, despite the whining and carping of shit-for-brains people who have no business talking about energy since they know zero about the subject. In this period, nuclear energy became the largest climate change gas free form of energy by far. It has killed zero people in the United States, but still there are lots and lots and lots and lots of anti-nukes
complaining about nuclear energy and so called "nuclear wastes" even though they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels.
Why couldn't they care less about dangerous fossil fuels. Because they spend their time looking at happy face graphs in which wind and solar grow a brazillion percent every year but never quite reach an exajoule.
Is there some reason that we should substitute happy face graphs for reality in 2007, 31 years later after the Arctic Diamond Mine whitewasher or greenwasher or whatever the hell the Oracle at Snowmass actually is, with all of our lives on the line?
Rio Tinto:
http://dte.gn.apc.org/38min.htm