I can't find the article on the Mother Jones web site, but the new issue has a piece by Paul Roberts (author of the terrific book the End of Oil, and the forthcoming "End of Food")on the 7 Myths of Energy Independence. In it, he makes the point that one of oil's great advantages is that it exists in a sort of economic isolation. If you use more oil, you don't have less of anything but oil. Trying to replace oil with another energy source, however, has huge, rippling impacts. Biofuels, like ethanol, mean you suddenly have a whole lot less corn, which means you have less food. Windmills mean a lot less land, whole most solar strategies are chemically intensive. In other words, nothing really exists as an easy swap, because ramping up to a full energy economy will have huge, and possibly unexpected, impacts downstream. The only strategy that doesn't gave this particular tradeoff is conservation, but since that's neither very exciting nor obviously profitable, you're seeing relatively little in the way of coordinated efforts to cut -- rather than replace -- energy usage.Update: Here's the Roberts piece.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flick user Jowo.) ENERGY TRADEOFFS.
I can't find the article on the Mother Jones web site, but the new issue has a piece by Paul Roberts (author of the terrific book the End of Oil, and the forthcoming "End of Food")on the 7 Myths of Energy Independence. In it, he makes the point that one of oil's great advantages is that it exists in a sort of economic isolation. If you use more oil, you don't have less of anything but oil. Trying to replace oil with another energy source, however, has huge, rippling impacts. Biofuels, like ethanol, mean you suddenly have a whole lot less corn, which means you have less food. Windmills mean a lot less land, whole most solar strategies are chemically intensive. In other words, nothing really exists as an easy swap, because ramping up to a full energy economy will have huge, and possibly unexpected, impacts downstream. The only strategy that doesn't gave this particular tradeoff is conservation, but since that's neither very exciting nor obviously profitable, you're seeing relatively little in the way of coordinated efforts to cut -- rather than replace -- energy usage.Update: Here's the Roberts piece.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flick user Jowo.) 
