Fuel

I came across the following, and I am interested in your input. On the one hand, James Howard Kunstler has written a book entitled "The Long Emergency." In it he discusses the coming end of the era of cheap gasoline. As he said in a Rolling Stone article:

No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.

The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.

Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.

While our society is somewhat Pollyannish as a whole on the future of energy, I question whether it is as bad has he suggests. His thesis includes a return to small, rural economies centered around small cities and towns. In other words, it is the ideal of the leftist collective.

On the other hand, there are those, like the Auto Alliance, who suggest that the hydrogen economy is, in fact, a very possible reality. Where is the truth? Like all things, this issue is highly politicized. And, both Kunstler and the Auto Alliance are trying to sell something, in the latter's case it is cars, in the former's, books.

Personally, I have faith in human innovation. While I do not doubt there will be rocky times ahead, I will bank my grandkids' future on the likelihood that, 100 years from now, we will still live in a powered world.