You and I use a lot of energy. Every second of each day and night we devour 100 times more energy than we need to live. If I were to eat that much energy as food, I would be a 50-foot long bull sperm whale, weighing 40 tons. There are 300,000 sperm whales worldwide, half of them bulls (females are much smaller), and 300,000,000 Americans (females are about the same in size). Our Earth cannot feed and protect 300,000,000 male sperm whales. She is simply too small. Our voracious appetite for energy must be either extinguished or quenched with local sources of energy (and, no, wind turbines and PV cells are too small to provide even single ample energy meal per day). So here are some of the choices we have: We can drill and hydrofracture deep gas wells, and produce natural gas closer to where we live, or we can go after coal leftovers. We can also opt not to use fossil fuels and live differently, more Amish-like. For example, we can opt to live in the well-i...
In this blog, I continue to write about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity, and humans. Of particular interest to me are human self-delusions and mad stampedes to nowhere.