In case someone says if only we had known remind them that fifty years ago Adm. Rickover gave a prescient address on this subject.

"For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today's unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account. Oil and natural gas will disappear first, coal last. There will be coal left in the earth, of course. But it will be so difficult to mine that energy costs would rise to economically intolerable heights, so that it would then become necessary either to discover new energy sources or to lower standards of living drastically."

I asked an on-line friend who knows a good bit about Peak Oil to give me some advice to get up to speed.

I'll share his suggestions verbatim for anyone else who wants to contribute to this topic.

For the moment, I’d start with The Oil Drum website. Good lead article today on “The Shape of Oil to Come,” but it’s helpful to know where the decline rate figures come from. Get too far into it and terms like reserve growth, ultimate recoverable reserves (URR), cumulative production (Q) and various other jargon become meaningful.

Good introductory pieces are tabbed at the top of The Oil Drum website. Look out, or search for any articles by Stuart Staniford, “Khebab”, Westexas (Jeffrey J. Brown) and his Export Land Model, Euan Mearns, Ace, Heading Out, GailtheActuary (Gail Tverberg). Also Robert Rapier, who has his own blog, R-squared (or something like that). Kenneth Deffeyes’ second book is great (Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak) and Richard Heinberg’s “The Party’s Over” is useful.

The article by David Rutledge of Caltech (on TheOilDrum) is my source for the intersection of peak oil and global warming. Check his website for a video of his lecture on that subject.

For terrific background on growth (just review for you I’m sure, but some great things on population and energy at the end) is Albert Bartlett’s video lecture called “Arithmetic, Population, & Energy.” You can find it on YouTube sliced up into 8 parts. Careful, because some segments are posted that do not have the graphics. When you see “Part 2 of 8,” or something like that, you’ve got the right videos.

It looks like I've got some learning to do, starting with http://www.TheOilDrum.com

Care to join me?

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)

Barb -- the energy cost of extracting petroleum from oil shale is greater than what you get out of it, making it ineffective no matter how much money the oil companies are making.

The true and only feasible solution to our oncoming energy crisis is solar: with technology quickly advancing, solar panels now liberated from silicon chips (google nanosolar), and thus with prices very near dropping an incredible amount, it is very easy to see an economy with a surplus of energy coming from the ultimate clean and renewable source. Just the same solar is ideal for the consumer, as energy becomes completely free, unlike how it would be were we to transition to biofuels, hydrogen, fuel cells, or any other consumable technology. As an added benefit, the surplus of readily available energy will likely have a remarkable effect on "displacement," wherein more "work" will be done, allowing mankind to progress at our increasingly increasing(!) pace.

The danger is of course what happens if we don't transition fast enough. With oil prices skyrocketing over a relatively short time, as is required by the law of supply and demand couple with Hubbert's peak oil theory, the entire world economy would effectively crash with a pronounced snowball effect--lacking the SINGLE source of fuel that allows for products (think food, but everything else as well) to be transported.

We have fusion power already... with gravitational confinement and a Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of 5 billion years. It's called the Sun.

The problem with using solar power to supply the needs of an industrial society is concentration and environmental conflict. The energy flux density is low by industrial standards, but HUGE compared to our total needs. To gather enough of it to supply industrial needs would require covering ever growing square miles of land.

Indirectly we already to this on an industrial scale though agraculture. But agraculture is already diverting every growing square miles of land to feed our growing population. This has already severely distorted the natural ecosystems of much of the world. If we further burden it with 'bio-fuels' (which we have been using since we became proto-human... in the form of firewood), we are making a choice between food, fuel, or nature. The recent trendiness of calling bio-fuels "green energy", as in ecologically sound, it a lie.

Biofuels are simply not the answer for an industrial society... or even a pre-industrial society of more than a few hundred thousand people. The Middle-East was once forested, before the need for firewood consumed them.

Even direct solar to electrical conversion via solar cells on the ground is an illusion in the long run. Although I strongly support using them where possible, they won't supply enough energy for our industrial needs. To bring the entire human population up to the standard of living of the US, would require paving thousands of square miles of land with solar cells. This would spell environmental catastrophy.

Going into space would solve the environmental problem. Orbital solar mirrors, kilometers wide, but thinner than plastic wrap, would concentrate the energy onto solar cells or a heat engine to generate the electricity... then beam the power down via microwaves. A bit expensive to start-up, but doable. Freeman Dyson predicted that this would be the way that an advanced civilization would proceed, with the ultimate result that they/we would eventually build a sphere around the star, called a "Dyson Sphere" to capture all of the star's energy output.

Alternatively, we can gather energy through other means. We already gather solar energy indirectly through water power. The energy to deliver the water to the mountains that give us the water head to power turbines was originally solar. But there are only so many rivers to dam (and damn) and that has its own environmental costs.

Wind power is also really solar... but there are only so many places where local geography creates the funnel effect needed to concentrate the wind for surface mounted turbines. There is however, large wind resources higher up in the atmosphere. Geostrophic winds, commonly called the "jet-stream" has much more energy available and is presently accessable with current technology using tethered auto-gyro wind turbines. In the short run, this is a very viable option for generating electricity.

But, it won't be enough in the long run. The world economy is growing at 2% per annum. Interestingly, so is our demand for energy. The two are linked. At that rate, we will need far greater resources than even geostrophic winds can provide. So where else can we get energy?

One source is the earth itself. Ah... you're thinking I'm refering to geothermal... no... that isn't very useful, save for a few lucky spots on the world, which we should indeed be taking advantage of, especially for heating our cities. No, I was refering to the kinetic energy stored in the earth's rotation. Already some places on the earth allow for capture of some of this energy through tidal flow. One can dam or simply use a wind-mill like turbine to capture the energy in the flowing water. Actually, that geostrophic wind I mentioned above gets part of its energy from the earth's rotation... as does a hurricane or typhoon. But what if we could directly, industrially, tap the earth's rotation?

This isn't as nuts as it sounds. The possiblity exists using the same momentum transfer that helps a hurricane speed up its rotation. Any rapidly spinning object that is forced to change is axis transfers the energy used to force the change of axis into speeding up its rotation. There is an excersize "toy" available that can demonstrate this effect. Some even have generators and LED lights to demonstrate that it can convert external rotation to electrical power. Imagine the possibilies of engineering giant, high speed, artificial hurricanes, perhaps using liquid helium in cryogenically cooled pipes, kilometers in diameter... converting the earth's rotation into electrical energy directly.

-- Candice H. Brown Elliott

Mr. Cook raises a common suggestion for clean energy.

Fusion power, in theory, seems like an ideal solution. In fact, in 1977, I worked with a group of excellent physicists and engineers who hoped to get a contract to design a test facility. The contract went elsewhere, but I have been watching developments before and since that time.

The science is fairly well understood, but the technological and engineering problems involved in confining and sustaining a plasma long enough to draw more energy out than you put in have been daunting. To use a bumper-sticker phrase, it's like trying to make a sun in a bottle.

In the 1970s, engineers were predicting that a practical fusion power plant was 30-40 years in the future. These days, although there has been continuous R&D work in several countries, including international collaborations, the most optimistic researchers are still saying it will probably take a few decades for fusion to be a practical source of power.

Now no one can predict a breakthrough in such a circumstance, and I certainly advocate continuing research at its current level (at least). But we certainly can't rely on fusion.

It remains "the power source of the future." The only problem is we don't know when that future will be.

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)

I know very little about this important topic, so I'm glad to hear that you will be taking it up. Again, from what little I know, as oil prices climb due to scarcity, it becomes feasible to extract oil cost effectively from shale and such. So what I've heard is that, although oil is of crucial importance, it's not as if we all suddenly run out and then there is a crisis. Oil will simply become more and more expensive. Of course, this will drive innovation even as it creates problems. I'd love to hear discussions about this idea and whether it is right or wrong--or even relevant.

Barb Oakley

It is striking that the ultimate (potentially) energy answer has been not only ignored, but not even brought up as an option in the oil-coal-nuclear fission-nuclear breeder-wind/solar/tidal mix: Fusion is simply not discussed any more.

True, it is not producing energy yet, but equally, it remains possible. No theorectical or fuel-source problems remain - only the "simple" engineering problems of getting it to work.

I'd much rather retain oil, coal, and natural gas for their real value (plastics, drugs and paints and clothing and dyes and medicines and lubricates and the milllions of other products) that we have absolutely NO other chemical source can be substituted.

To burn our future's resources for "the carbon value" is indeed, being fuelish.

Oil is just recent in Human History. We had wondurful civilazations with out a drop of oil. It will be great when oil vanishes, and countries who just sit idle, will have to work.