energy
all the hilarity of Peak Oil
In this episode of The Bugle, John Oliver and Andy Zaltzmann give a great comedic run-down of the problem looming with peak oil. Mainly covering the fact that the stone-age wasn’t that bad, and that painting yourself blue in a post-industrial future will be a lot more socially acceptable.
technological salvation won’t be “just around the corner”
Ten years ago, energy expert Amory Lovins predicted that by 2010 hybrid and fuel cell cars would make up between half and 2/3rds of all the vehicles in the US. Today, no fuel-cell are on the U.S. market, hybrids are well under 5% and the efficiency of the US transportation fleet isn‘t much higher in [...]
wind power generation connected via transmission spanning the atlantic
A recent study proposes a solution for one of the biggest problems facing large scale wind power generation, the intermittence of wind leading to a generation profile that’s difficult for utilities to manage. The authors propose wind turbines all along the Atlantic coast of the US connected via transmission to mitigate this problem.
confronting collapse
I first learned of Mike Ruppert through a chilling trailer for his then upcoming movie, Collapse. Ruppert has a long history as an investigative journalist that began when he broke away from the mainstream after his excellence in the LA police led him to be actively recruited by the CIA for running cocaine through South-Central [...]
the plot from the prequel to James Cameron’s Avatar
Energy analyst and author Michael Klare has the plot for the prequel to Avatar all written out, It’s the torrid summer of 2144, just a decade before Avatar begins. (That movie takes place in summer 2154, after a flight from Earth that, we’re told, involves six continuous years of sleep, which helps us backdate Jake [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
