in case you think there’s an alternative energy

John Michael Greer’s latest blog post has some information for you. Our energy problem and societal decline isn’t occurring only because we are losing net energy rapidly (energy returned on energy invested), global civilization is in rapid decline because all our alternatives to oil are much less energy dense. From the blog post,

my thoughts on the Bloom Box

Over the last few days, I’ve received emails from several friends requesting my thoughts on Bloom Energy. The Bloom Box looks interesting but the piece from 60 Minutes was incredibly misleading. The celebrities, the press releases and all the hype has looked like little more than just posturing for social capital in a competitive silicon [...]

the latest on peak oil

Today I was listening to this great rundown of the global oil supply situation on the Financial Sense Newshour with guest Jeffrey Brown VP of Global Oil Supply Analysis for Logi Energy (featured on the first 48 mins of this audio track.
Some key facts I learned from the podcast and elsewhere:

25% of the worlds oil [...]

what I struggle with when I consider a career in clean energy technologies…

…is Jevons’ Paradox.
From a recent post on The Oil Drum,
In his 1865 book “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines,” English economist William Stanley Jevons made the observation “Of the Economy of Fuel” that when improvements in technology make it possible to use [...]

permaculture: a short film

Jane and I just finished watching this outstanding short film on the problems facing the UK (and ultimately the world) in supplying food while facing the reality of declining energy supplies. Unfortunately so much of the dialogue around peak oil centers on “Collapse” but the more I learn about permaculture, the more I think the [...]

a Copenhagen recap

I was fortunately able to ignore most of the hype about the Copenhagen climate talks while they were occurring. The world’s governments will never be able to find a solution to climate change because it is simply too large for any consortium to decide upon and enforce. However, I’m glad I read through Richard Heinberg’s [...]

entering the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

As of September 2008 we’ve officially entered the end of the oil age. Our economic system based on infinite growth has run into the limits of the physical world. Now that our social systems must rapidly adapt to a new reality of energy scarcity, we must pay special attention to the humans within those [...]

Renewable Energy Won’t Save Us

Renewable energy is often touted as the future because it has lower CO2 emissions or “can solve our energy scarcity problems because it will replace oil”. Unfortunately, renewable energy is far from solving those massive problems. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc… all require tremendous amounts of oil to get their infrastructure up and running, emitting [...]