Dear Sir/Madam: I'm writing to you who control our government now -- that is, the big corporations of the world. Let's not pretend it is otherwise. Thanks to a system in which money buys elections, nearly all of our politicians are in your employ. Thanks for wrecking everything. If I were a Millennial, this might not surprise me or even be worthy of mention. They have … [Read more...]
Energy
Sorting out the wheat from the chaff of new energy ideas, while paying close attention to energy-efficiency and conservation.
Is Greece planning to print energy?
Over the past couple of months the story keeping many people on the edge of their seats has been the ongoing dilemma of Greece's detested debt burden, its Great Depression-worthy 25% contraction of its economy, and its voluntary or even forced withdrawal from the eurozone – the fabled "Grexit." For about five years now, heavy austerity policies (cutbacks in government … [Read more...]
2014 biggest year ever for solar, but oil price threat looms
In 2014, record low prices for solar panels fueled a solar boom. The U.S. alone installed 30% more solar photovoltaic capacity than in 2013, making last year the biggest ever for solar PV, according to the 2014 Year-in-Review Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Industry analyst Tam Hunt argues that in a few years, … [Read more...]
Dollars are worthless without crude oil
In my previous post I drew some parallels between energy and money – and more specifically, energy and banking – and pointed out that when money is at stake, the presence of energy is likely lurking somewhere in the shadows. It was mostly hypotheses and observations I was throwing around about energy and banking, but when it comes to energy and money, one can hardly overstate … [Read more...]
If solar has gotten so cheap, why isn’t there more of it?
Some people who worry about peak oil like to point out that renewable energy won't save us. That is, given the amount of fossil fuels that the world uses today, it would take an unrealistically large increase in the amount of renewables available now to make up the difference as oil, natural gas and coal start to deplete. So we might as well resign ourselves now to a future … [Read more...]