This sort of shit is like a machine - it pumps out grey fodder for those who've given up on God, and have no outlet for their apocalyptic tendencies and general despair over humanity.

Where do you start in rebutting this sort of bilge-water? These are the sort of clods who go on (and on) about science, then start lecturing about "entropy" and such.... and ignore the fact that the Earth is an open system. Jeremy Rifkin, but without the class.

The same types who drone on (and on) about the energy return on investment, and refuse - point blank - to look at the hard, brass ass, all in economic costs of wind and solar. Lemme put it this way. If I can produce endless quantities of wind and sun at 6-10 cents/kwh, I couldn't give a sweet Fanny Adams about how hard it is to get oil.

Oh, but then they go on about life-cycle analysis and embedded energy... and transmission grids and line losses... and what about cars!!! I wonder sometimes if they've ever hacked their way through an actual LCA and seen what the real numbers show for wind and solar and batteries and such. Because... it's actually quite good news. Or if they've ever actually looked at transmission grids, and the line losses involved. I mean, Minneapolis gets power from Gillam, Manitoba, which is over 1000 miles North, same as NYC does from James Bay. 

But what about cars, they say. Well, just as an example, a car being driven 10,000 miles a year, on battery-power, can expect to use 2,000-3,000 kwh's each year. A 2.5 MW wind turbine - that's just one turbine - can expect to generate 6,500,000-8,766,000 kwh's each year. Do the math, and you can see that erecting just 1 turbine will provide sufficient energy for 2,000-4,000 cars. A 100 MW wind-farm will therefore provide enough juice for 80,000 to 160,000 cars. 

But apparently.... it can't be done. Because something something... our fossil heritage... blah blah blah... entropy.... a flow is not a fund... whatever.

The real world good news - which most soft lefties don't want to hear anymore - is that this shit, a Clean Energy Transition, is walk in the park doable. Go read Jacobsen's latest, the guy from Stanford. It's the same sort of thing the WWF study shows. The data and the trends have been there for years, people were just AFRAID of how bright it was.

And above all, they don't seem to have gotten that it takes TIME to create new technologies, to do new science, to bring the costs of doing new things within human reach. They shout labels at you like "techno-optimist" and then think they've somehow destroyed the reality being debated. They're shriekers. Because I've never been a techno-freak. When I did a big energy strategy for a jurisdiction in 2002, I left the chapter ion Transport open, blank, because I said there WAS no obvious solution. Chapter 10 - Blank. But I came back in 2005, and said, now there is. Plug-in hybrids are gonna make it. Their cost is low enough, and falling fast enough, that it's almost impossible for the major auto companies, even backed by the oil companies, to stop it. And someone will break ranks with the others, because they're doing poorly, and adopt it. And once that happens, the cost will fall even faster. 

It just took some time.

I wonder sometimes if anybody in these gloomy despairing rooms the author of Flow/Fund inhabits has ever read anything about the learning curve? You know, the rate at which the cost of new technologies DECLINES? It's really useful, and let's one take a look at today's cost of wind/solar/batteries, how far and fats they've fallen, and then... pretty much ballpark where it's going. No, you won't get the date exactly right. But you can easily sit down and say, hmmmmmm, if the cost of li-ion batteries keeps falling, then... the cost of a c.2013 Toyota
Plug-In Prius is likely to be.... scratch scratch... carry the nought.... Oh yeah, around $25,000. Which is what their VP has now said. 

Clearly then, this is enough to pitch the world in a Dark Age. Obviously, nobody can afford this, this brutal cost of transition.

Definitely, we're all gonna die.

My new bumper sticker =

100 MPG for $25,000. WE'RE DOOMED!