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Recent Posts
- Ramping up wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles can’t solve our energy problem
- 2023: Expect a financial crash followed by major energy-related changes
- The economy is moving from a tailwind pushing it along to a headwind holding it back
- Today’s Energy Crisis Is Very Different from the Energy Crisis of 2005
- Why financial approaches won’t fix the world’s economic problems this time
- Ramping Up Renewables Can’t Provide Enough Heat Energy in Winter
- Why No Politician Is Willing to Tell Us the Real Energy Story
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Academic Articles
- An analysis of China's coal supply and its impact on China's future economic growth
- An Oil Production Forecast for China Considering Economic Limits
- Analysis of resource potential for China's unconventional gas and forecast for its long-term production growth
- China's unconventional oil: A review of its resources and outlook for long-term production
- Financial Issues Affecting Energy Security
- Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis
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Tag Archives: solar energy
Why No Politician Is Willing to Tell Us the Real Energy Story
Politicians want to get re-elected. They want citizens to think that everything is OK. If there are problems, they need to be framed as being temporary, perhaps related to the war in Ukraine. Alternatively, any issue that arises will be discussed as if it can easily be fixed with new legislation and perhaps a little more debt.
Most high-level politicians are aware of the energy supply issue, but they cannot possibly talk about it. Instead, they choose to talk about what would happen if the economy were allowed to speed ahead without limits, and how bad the consequences of that might be. Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy, Financial Implications
Tagged limits to growth, solar energy, wind energy
4,427 Comments
How Energy Transition Models Go Wrong
I have written many posts relating to the fact that we live in a finite world. At some point, our ability to extract resources becomes constrained. At the same time, population keeps increasing. The usual outcome when population is too high for resources is “overshoot and collapse.” But this is not a topic that the politicians or central bankers or oligarchs who attend the World Economic Forum dare to talk about.
Instead, world leaders find a different problem, namely climate change, to emphasize above other problems. Conveniently, climate change seems to have some of the same solutions as “running out of fossil fuels.” So, a person might think that an energy transition designed to try to fix climate change would work equally well to try to fix running out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the way it works.
Posted in Energy policy
Tagged fossil fuels, low oil prices, solar energy, wind energy
3,781 Comments
Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible
It seems like a reset of an economy should work like a reset of your computer: Turn it off and turn it back on again; most problems should be fixed. However, it doesn’t really work that way. Let’s look at … Continue reading
Posted in Energy policy
Tagged EROEI, EROI, low oil prices, peak oil, solar energy, wind energy
2,650 Comments
The Approaching US Energy-Economic Crisis
I was recently asked to give a talk called, “The Approaching US Energy-Economic Crisis.” In other words, how might the United States encounter problems that lead to a crisis? As we will see, many of the problems that could lead to … Continue reading
We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix it
This past week, I gave a presentation to a group interested in a particular type of renewable energy–solar energy that is deployed in space, so it would provide electricity 24 hours per day. Their question was: how low does the … Continue reading
Posted in Financial Implications
Tagged electricity price, financial crash, oil price, peak oil, renewable energy, solar energy
1,585 Comments
