The world's total energy consumption (most of which is fossil fuels) is currently estimated at 620 exajoules, or 17TWh / year.

Assuming zero growth in energy consumption (hello AI), extracting even half of that seems like it would be consequential.

10 TW * 1 year = 8,760 TWh / year. The current rate of energy production is ~42TW and slowly dropping over billions of years, so even after efficiency losses gathering 1% of what’s produced is several times current energy consumption.

I believe this is off by 5 or 6 orders of magnitude.

Looks like it's more like 200,000Twh / Yr

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

Thanks for that wikipedia link, it's fascinating!

I think they meant that as a joke.