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Current Events » in reply to Renewable Alternatives To Oil Viable At $60/barrel

re: Alternatives
Tom Brosz — (archived)

There are many options when oil gets expensive enough. I suspect that some of them will catch us by surprise. Aside from nuclear:

- Simply decentralizing energy production can do some interesting things. this article is in the current Skeptical Inquirer.

The end point of this is if home fuel cells (cracking and burning natural gas, most likely) and solar go into large scale production. Transmission losses = zero.

- While things like wind, and tides, and geothermal aren't good for every place, they are good for some places, and every place that works is another conventional power plant you don't have to build. Beat Ted Kennedy unconscious with a dead fish and build that wind farm.

- If the hybrid trend takes off, I could see a year where U.S. automobiles start consuming less fuel in total. Not soon, though.

- Pournelle points out that we could probably have built solar power satellites for what we have spent in the past decades on military efforts in the Middle East.

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