The earth has so much rotational energy that we'll make almost no dent in it by launching craft into space with a space elevator. The Earth has about 2 × 10^29 J, I'm now sure what kind of speeds you'd get off the cable, but if you travelled to the very end (probably ~twice geosync unless there's a counterweight), you'd be at an altitude of 70,000km, and a speed of about 5000m/s. That means you'd have 12.5MJ/kg of mass that you sent up. In order to use just 1% of the earth rotational energy you'd have to launch 1.6 x 10^20 kg into space. That's a huge ammount, unless someone feels the need to put australia on Mars I don't think we'll have a problem...
The earth has so much rotational energy that we'll make almost no dent in it by launching craft into space with a space elevator. The Earth has about 2 × 10^29 J, I'm now sure what kind of speeds you'd get off the cable, but if you travelled to the very end (probably ~twice geosync unless there's a counterweight), you'd be at an altitude of 70,000km, and a speed of about 5000m/s. That means you'd have 12.5MJ/kg of mass that you sent up. In order to use just 1% of the earth rotational energy you'd have to launch 1.6 x 10^20 kg into space. That's a huge ammount, unless someone feels the need to put australia on Mars I don't think we'll have a problem...