Jeezus Hussein Keryst… What the fuck are they smoking at Salon?

A new golden age for fossil fuels? Huh?

If Michael Lind's intention, in his Salon article published Tuesday, "Everything You've Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong," was to throw so many bombs at once that critics would be too buried by shrapnel to respond, then he at least partially succeeded. It's hard to know where to start grappling with a column that simultaneously dismisses the challenge of global warming, declares a new golden age of fossil fuels that could last millennia, ridicules renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar while advocating a massive nuclear power buildup, and even throws in a few digs at city living and organic agriculture, just for fun. Readers who might more logically expect to see such sentiments espoused in the National Review or the American Spectator than in Salon were unsurprisingly annoyed.

The article is built on two parallel assertions. First, new technologies have unlocked vast quantities of natural gas (and will deliver a lot more oil, as well, to take care of all our energy needs into the distant future, and second, catastrophic climate change is a "low probability" event that we don't need to worry about. Let's start with the second claim, because how we think about climate change drastically affects how we think about fossil fuels.

<snip - much more at link above>

I Am Not a 'Global Warming Denialist'

In his thoughtful criticism of my essay on the future of fossil fuels and the poor prospects for renewable energy, Andrew Leonard characterizes my message as one that "we have nothing to worry about." This may be partly the fault of my presentation, because in the course of being provocative I did not make it sufficiently clear that I was engaged in analysis, not advocacy. I made the prediction that, even in the presence of global warming, the countries of the world are unlikely to allow the vast stores of fossil fuels in the earth’s crust to lie there undisturbed, when technology is making many of them ever more accessible and cheaper than the renewable energy alternatives. For the record, I personally wish that greenhouse gas emissions would stop immediately, and I personally would prefer a world of harmonious international cooperation for all time. Neither of my personal preferences is going to be fulfilled and neither affects the accuracy of my analysis.

My argument is that the replacement of fossil fuels by large-scale renewable energy is politically unrealistic, even though it is technically feasible. On questions of technical feasibility, I defer to scientists like David J.C. MacKay, professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge and the chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). His widely-praised and nonpartisan book "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" is available for free online.

<snip - again, much more at link above>

<..>

The renewable energy movement is not the only campaign that will be marginalized in the future by the global abundance of fossil fuels produced by advancing technology. Champions of small-scale organic farming can no longer claim that shortages of fossil fuel feedstocks will force a return to pre-industrial agriculture.

Another casualty of energy abundance is the new urbanism. Because cars and trucks and buses can run on natural gas as well as gasoline and diesel fuel, the proposition that peak oil will soon force people around the world to abandon automobile-centered suburbs and office parks for dense downtowns connected by light rail and inter-city trains can no longer be taken seriously. Deprived of the arguments from depletion, national security and global warming, the campaign to increase urban density and mass transit rests on nothing but a personal taste for expensive downtown living, a taste which the suburban working-class majorities in most developed nations manifestly do not share.

Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other fossil fuels that are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be forced to switch permanently to other sources of energy. These are more likely to be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion than solar or wind power, which will be as weak, diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from now as they are today. But that is a problem for the inhabitants of the world of 2500 or 3000 A.D.

In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of renewable energy following Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be living in the era of Peak Renewables, which will be followed by a very long Age of Fossil Fuels that has only just begun.