Thanks for the very interesting summary. That of course does not explain what happened to the intra-city transportation systems.

A digression: on my last visit to California, last summer, a railroad employee explained to me how one company was consciously sabotaging for another compan, the one in charge of passenger transport -- with the aim of seizing control of that part of operations as well.

Not entirely true. We could easily supplement our petroleum based gasoline and diesel with biodiesel and gasoline derived from biomass. Unfortunately, IIRC, there exists legislation in the US that ties ethanol production to corn, which is a suitable, but neither exclusive or the best crop for bio-fuels.

The advantage of bio-fuels is that they offer the ability to transition using current vehicles and infrastructure, requiring only minor, if any, modifications.

The price of biofuels was similar to petro-fuels several years ago, before the price of petro-fuels doubled (and then some). Between disingenuous cost estimates (One side wants to ignore half of the costs involved with production while the other side wants to ignore the byproducts acquired during production.), and badly constructed legislation, there's no way of knowing how the costs really compare these days. I would be reluctant to believe the cost of biofuel production has increased at the same rate as petro-fuel.

I don't think biofuels offer a long term solution. They do, however, offer a short term solution, at least partially so, while the infrastructure of a longer term solution is being laid.

True, but doesn't biofuel generally require the use of gas/oil in its production and/or in its use? I left it out because it isn't a long term solution. In fact, its competition with food production alone could cause more problems than it would solve. I think it would be great for large corporations though. They'd love to sell each of us a consumable instead of a a wind turbine or solar panel that wouldn't be replaced for decades. We have a chance as individuals to go from renting (gas) our energy to owning (at least partially with solar/wind) it, if the technology is developed in the right direction. I have a feeling that Big Oil would prefer that doesn't happen though. They'd much rather get us hooked on biofuels or hydrogen, so they can sell us a commodity that will never be in plentiful supply nor easily produced at home.

We've wandered a long way from the original assertion (though an interesting discussion, I admit). Let me slant it slightly further:

If Global Warming is a reality (and I think it is), and if Carbon Dioxide emissions are a major factor (some dispute, but probable), then the real issue is not what we burn, but whether we burn any hydrocarbon at all.

That leaves hydrogen and nuclear power or a combination of those, since hydrogen is not wrested from water for nothing. Clearly then, in the long haul, nuclear power is the only viable primary source of energy that will reduce our impact on global warming.

Maintaining a civilization, keeping warm, lighting our living spaces, etc. requires a lot of energy and no solutions that require us to relinquish much of what we've come to expect as "normal" will be accepted no matter what any international accord says.

Realism therefore demands that we get over our 3-mile island and Chernobyl scares and get on with viable nuclear power plans. If electric trucks aren't viable, then we need hydrogen for their internal combustion engines with the energy for that coming from nuclear power.

There are alternatives -- solar power, geothermal energy where available, some wind power, tidal power, ocean wave power, etc., but none of them come close to providing the energy we consume to keep warm, keep clean, and light our homes, our transportation requirements aside. Sure we'll develop more energy efficient homes, LED or some other form of "cold" lighting, more efficient transportation, etc., but the point is that those will not be enough if we have to burn anything containing carbon to power them.

It will be a long time before folks want to build giant arcologies in which to live and work -- we like our homes the way they are. In the mid-term, therefore, nuclear power is the only real answer.

I think that we need to apply some of the lessons we've learned from computers to energy production. Distributed processing brings exponentially more power to many computing problems, and it can do the same for energy.

Solar and Wind both get their energy from the sun, which radiates more energy upon the Earth in an hour than all of humanity uses in a year. Nuclear power has its own significant energy demands, not the least of which is the energy required to safely dispose of the waste. That's a number that cannot yet be calculated, because we just don't know what the costs will be over the centuries for even the waste we've produced so far.

I'd much rather see homes and businesses producing most of their own energy with solar and wind than spend more tax dollars on building an even larger power grid to push more and more electricity over great distances. If I'm wrong and nuclear power is a solution, then it should pay for building the plants and the distribution system and the waste disposal. If it can't do all of those without any better tax break than we give to wind/solar, then it isn't an answer.

The issue is flux density, not the total: how much energy is available per square meter of collector at a given location, and at what efficiency might we collect it. In northern climes where the energy requirements are at a maximum in winter, the solar energy available is at a minimum. In places given to cloudiness and fog in the winter (like England), it simply isn't viable unless very large areas are devoted to collection. We have some solar powered LED lights on our property that glow all night in the spring summer and fall, but are off a few hours after sunset at this time of year.

Everything we do "has its own significant energy demands". Some years ago, the energy required to produce a photovoltaic cell exceeded the energy it could produce in its lifetime (they don't last forever). That's improving, but it's still a close call.

You've never been near a large windmill. They make a much lower frequency version of the whup-whup-whup sound that a helicopter makes. Here, where it's windy enough to support quite a few (the energy available from wind is proportional to the cube of the wind velocity), folks who live near them get headaches and other problems from the constant low-frequency pressure pulsation.

I'm not advocating the large ones that are used to power towns. The have the same transmission requirements as any nuclear plant, and would therefore require increasing the grid capacity. I'm talking about powering a house, or a few houses at a time, with smaller windmills scattered over a much larger area. These don't need to produce all of the energy used by homes and businesses to have a dramatic affect. Any amount they produce would mean a reduction in demand for fossil fuels.

I talked to a guy down the street who put solar panels on his house. He seemed a little disappointed that it didn't fully power the house and so in the winter months he would actually have to pay for some power. I'm thinking that if everyone were in his position, energy wouldn't be a problem!

Absolutely. I know lots of folks here in Nova Scotia who heat their hot water with solar energy and a few who have in-floor radiant heat that is solar powered or augmented, and they usually include photoelectric driven circulators as well -- we have a local company called Thermo Dynamics that sells solar hot water systems all over North America and Europe.

It is prudent, however, in this climate to have an alternative heat source in case we have a long spell of overcast skies. Nonetheless, the reduction in fossil fueled heating is sufficient to pay back the first cost in what many consider a reasonable time and here in Nova Scotia there's a government subsidy for installing them.

There are some here as well, but the big subsidies are reserved for nuclear power, Big Oil, etc. It's like farming here. The large corporate owned farm factories get the subsidies while the family farmer gets the shaft. :mad:

Same here, of course. Having said that, however, that's what the voters want, I guess. Our power company here burns cheap coal while we sell the bulk our natural gas to New England. Why? -- Because it keeps the power rates down -- the power company can get more for their allotment of natural gas than coal costs.

Having said that, though, there's a substantial movement here to buy local food -- the objective is a 100-mile dinner table; one for which all the food on it that is available locally is from within 100 miles of that dinner table. If you look around and do some menu planning, you'd be surprised at how much that can be.

Apparently Germany has a pretty vibrant solar industry thanks to a feed-in tariff system;

A Place In The Sun

I just read an interesting article in Scientific American.

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

Switchgrass can produce several times the amount of energy from the petroleum products required to grow it (tractor fuel, fertilizer, etc.). That extra energy comes from sunlight, which makes switchgrass a reasonably efficient solar energy storage medium.

The article also states:

"Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn.
…
Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles."

Is that an aspect of what used to be called bioregionalism?