The race for energy in the twenty-first century has begun.  While the big stories to follow, those that define the timeframe of our present energy crisis, involve the great powers such as the United States, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia seeking to lock up control over dwindling oil reserves around the world, the race has already become much tighter than many analysts have predicted in the area that will come to define this century: harnessing the boundless energies of the Sun and Earth.

I do not mean to suggest that the battles over finite energy supplies and other materials critical to the survival of industrial civilizations will be fought lightly.  There will certainly be casualties, and the consequences of resource conflicts will most assuredly be made more dire if political trends continue promoting scientific denialism and private industry control of governments, once again killing off attempts to break the chains of fossil energy addiction.  But it is important to keep things in perspective.  While the period until 2030 or so will undoubtedly be fraught with bitter social divisions, struggling and even dying economies, and hordes of cold, hungry people as everyday material and energy needs become impossible to meet, what lies over this horizon is still uncertain.

That we have already reached a peak in fossil energy production is undeniable at this point.  While those with ideological and professional blinders on may refuse to believe the evidence lying plainly before them or lose sight of the big picture in the daily twitches of the market, the truth is impossible to miss for those with their eyes open.  If you allow yourself to dismantle your inner capitalist contraptions and forget about dollars and cents for a moment, the trends become obvious.  It is everywhere the same story, whether we mean drilling multiple horizontal wells and fracking each well thirty-two times to produce tiny irregular pockets of oil and gas along with some of the multiple millions of gallons of water used in the process, boiling tar out of sand with steam and chemically enhancing the resulting goo to produce something resembling crude oil, or melting down the last of the forests and coal mines into synthetic alcohols and volatile oils to fuel fighter jets and excavating trucks the size of warships.  The real costs are to the health of ourselves and the other species inhabiting our present biosphere, and they are not just rising.  They are staggering.

With drilling equipment already poking around 20,000 and more feet underneath the deepest and darkest parts of the ocean, it is difficult to imagine digging a hole any deeper than we have already gotten ourselves into.  But the powers that be, eager to cash in on advertising revenue from the same dope pushers who have fought vigorously for the right to poison freely since the days of Rockefeller, continue to promote the idea that we have no choice but to push forward into ever deeper and uncharted waters in a vain quest to squeeze the last drops of flammable liquid from the crust.  Insisting that renewable energy can never possibly be competitive economically, they draw on examples such as solar power (which competes mainly with peak retail rates) and offshore wind (still a technological toddler from a commercialization standpoint) as “too expensive to matter,” never mind what actually happened to nuclear power.  A casual glance at the headline would suggest that, thanks to the Hundred Year Supply of gas just discovered a few months ago, etc., the fossil economy had just been given a new lease on life and that renewable energy could never be commercially viable.  But if you actually read the article in question, you might notice tidbits like this one:

“The ratepayers of Virginia must be protected from costs for renewable energy that are unreasonably high,” the regulators said. Wind power would have increased the monthly bill of a typical residential customer by 0.2 percent.

Those who would fight against the advance of renewable energy have a rather overplayed and quixotic way of referring to its advocates: they like to say that we are “tilting at windmills.”  It takes a fool to fail to recognize that they refer only to themselves.  With a monthly power bill on the order of $10 (not too hard in DC in November), I’d certainly like to see my two cents go toward something more productive.

All the way!