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Energy is the ability to do work. Work is the moving of mass by force through space. Typical work doing things such as loading bricks, driving trucks along interstate highways, and operating wheat combines, is typically done by muscle power and petroleum power. The Amish have a lock on muscle power in America. The rest of us primarily burn petroleum products to get by. Most other forms of transport, sailing ships for example, are a hobby. Solar cars are college science experiments. Coal-fired steam engines are museum exhibits. What else is there? Flights of fantasy like the hydrogen fuel cell hallucination? Ethanol? Whatever burns grain, whether horses or ethanol plants, cuts into the food supply. It's probably unlikely that many new nuclear plants will be built, despite their theoretical possibility.
A more personal comparison can be made on the basis of per capita energy consumption, because it lets us compare variation, the Chinese with the Americans for example. By this measure we see also that, on average, more petroleum must be extracted and burned every day just to stay even with the increasing population. A few gorge in this environment while many starve. This disparity allows humanity another option; widening the gap between rich and poor. That is, resources are less limited for the few when they are distributed inequitably. Of course most people wind up in the wrong class in an Aristocratic Oligarchy, but the oligarchs have it pretty sweet. Ever since people started burning petroleum, rock oil, that flammable stuff that seeps out of the ground in places, we've been running out. And the doomsday crowd has been crying "doom" since the dawn of the modern petroleum era in 1859. Yet oil production has increased nearly every year since, except for a setback in 1974 and again from 1979 to 1983. The pessimists are always wrong. Or are they? Oil production peaked in the U.S. in 1970 and has been going steadily downhill since. |
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Now the U.S. is gambling that military force will keep oil flowing and the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The military machine is gluttonous for oil. At the same time the world production is peaking as new discoveries fall behind depletion of producing fields. It looks to me like the Pentagon's Plan is to cover every known oil deposit with oil-guzzling war machines.
What's your plan? It will probably have a local focus, whether you like it or not, because of the supply-demand situation in transport fuels.
As geography would have it, locally here in Newberry Springs we have a virtual Saudi Arabia of alternative energy. The Mojave Desert leads the nation in solar radiation. Sure photovoltaic is expensive, but likely to get even more so. Photovoltaic gives you reliable water pumping, refrigeration and lights but helps not at all with transportation other than walking. Direct solar water heating is also a good idea. People have lived on direct solar radiation for most of our 200,000 year history and probably will once again after the anomalous few centuries of the oil era are past. Barstow is a day's journey by horseback.
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