Excellent! I love your 6-foot jump over a 20-foot crevasse – that is a great way to describe these green-washed “solutions” like burning garbage to generate power or finding “clean coal” (the ultimate green-washing, I think we’ll find perpetual motion before we create clean coal).

I think you’re absolutely correct with the “build it and they will come” mindset for creating our renewable energy future. I just hope we can overcome the shocks of oil and still maintain the ability to transition to a renewable, sustainable system. I would prefer we did it before the peak oil really creates problems. If not, hopefully the casualties will be few.

Cheers,
Joshua

Stuck on the bus – a ref to “Speed”(with Keanu Reeves) that sparked off my “Field of Dreams” ref…

Like much of what we have to do to get to a sustainable, resilient, durable civilisation, our initial strategies won’t always make complete sense measured with the yard sticks of success that we currently use.

I’ve often said that things like incineration with energy recovery, which are often touted as a green way of dealing with waste, are rather like jumping 6 feet over a 20 foot wide crevasse, on the other side of which is “sustainability”. For a while you’re heading fast towards the other side but you inevitably end up broken at the bottom. Maybe a better strategy is to go backwards for a while to get a “run up” (the French call it “reculer pour mieux sauter” to redesign stuff so that the gap can be cleared in one big jump.

Alternatively, one could take a long sideways detour around the crevasse. What we need to guard against is the siren voices that offer quick fix “six foot jump” solutions because, unfortunately such ideas are very attractive to most bureaucrats, planning and government types who only think in “jobsworth” terms of box ticking, five year strategies and electoral terms.

There’s an initial barrier to widespread replacement of fossil fuels with renewables. The extraction of materials, fabrication, transport and installation of renewable technologies, right now, is mostly powered by fossil fuels – so bean counters could point to simplistic Life Cycle Analyses (LCA’s) and play down the economic and environmental benefits, or long term value, of making the switch.

I think we should adopt a “build it and they will come” (Field of Dreams) approach to investing in production of renewable technologies. At some point the resultant renewable energy going into the grid will substitute for fossil fuelled energy and, at that point, the LCA’s will start to “flip” and both the economics and environmental aspects will transform themselves in a snowball effect.

Peaked fossil fuels will also be getting more expensive/less available during this time, so we will have an expanding virtuous circle.

I’m optimistic that the above will happen, I just have reservations about whether it will happen in time to fend off unstoppable positive feedback climate change, let alone what is already in the pipeline.

I want to agree with you, I really do. However, I have a feeling that because nearly everything in modern society comes in one part or another from oil, including the production of said renewables, this process won’t be so cut-and-dry. I think that you’re probably right in regards to power generation, but even with renewable energy – it might be cheaper to use it, yet more expensive to produce, ship, and build without cheap oil.

However is plays out it will surely be a good idea for us to work now to become less dependent on cheap oil.

Cheers,
Joshua

A side effect of Peak Oil will be that, as the price of oil derived energy rises, it will inevitably surpass the cost of renewables which will then instantly be the favoured choice of everybody without legislation, coercion, publicity or appeals to altruism.