Currently reading The Long Emergency. I have read more cheerful books. I knew it wasn’t going to be upbeat, but it’s plenty grim.
I found the earlier parts about the history of the oil economy to be pretty interesting. If the predictions are accurate about Peak Oil, we may find out the meaning of the Chinese proverb about living in “interesting times.”
The descriptions of the energy economy, of oil vs nuclear vs a variety of alternatives that really aren’t was informative, but the discussions of plagues, epidemics and large-scale die-offs are no fun.
[composed and posted with ecto]
I have wondered at time is the Industrial Revolution was an aberration, if the simple agrarian/mercantile culture of the late 1700s was the high-water mark of sustainable human civilization: if the trillion or so barrels of oil we stumbled onto 150 years ago, much of which has been consumed in the past 50 years, were a one time windfall, we may be returning to the time of the Founding Fathers within a century. The world will get larger as we learn that distance has not really been eliminated, merely temporarily subjugated.
What could be an interesting exercise would be to produce an interactive energy budget and let people decide what needed increasingly scarce energy resources. If the choice comes down to driving to the store vs keeping the lights in a hospital burning, are people ready for that?
Another part of this for me is the Tragedy of the Commons: if I decide to become one less car (as Josh has done), I have to realize that this doesn’t save me anything. It’s not like I am banking any energy for later use. All I’m doing is leaving more for others, and by the looks of things — as the roads are crowded with SUVs and I see cars in parking lots with their motors running — why should I do that? It seems sometimes that running out of dinosaur juice sooner would be better.
Another thing I had often wondered about was the storage of energy, how generating it is one thing but storing it is another. We can generate hydro power here in the Northwest and the Sun Belt could probably turn sunlight into power as the costs go down, but how to store it if we want to capitalize on peak conditions or somehow move beyond a “just-in-time” model? Turns out that oil is an ideal energy store. Dense, inert at ambient temperatures, requires no special handling, and relatively easy to refine into a number of products. Oh, well.
And why isn’t the airline industry — both manufacturers and carriers — lobbying hard for conversion of cars and other land and sea-based transport systems to move to other power sources, electric, fuel cell, whathaveyou? Air travel doesn’t exist without fossil fuels. We had rail, ship, and auto travel without petroleum, but not powered flight. Those boneyards in the desert might get a lot more crowded in 50 years or so.