Engineer-Poet's Journal: Can hope overcome peak oil/global warming denial?

Lots of Slashdotters don't seem to want to think about either peak oil (peak fossil-fuels in general) or global warming. These are perfect geek topics, but the naïve implications are unsettling: fewer, smaller and less-fun cars, less petrochemicals (including plastics), less air conditioning, less electricity (which hits server farms), less of lots of things. This leads lots of people straight into denial: they do not want to think of the future being less comfortable or sophisticated than the present.

But fear not. We're swimming in energy, some of it carbon-negative and the rest carbon-free. While we're going to exhaust the Chateau Lafite Rothschild Devonian, there's plenty of Beaujolais Nouveau to be had. The major problem is that our technologies for using the fossil fuels don't work well for the flows of biomass and such which form this year's "vintage"; our return on e.g. cellulosic ethanol can be less than 10%. But they're coming along, from surprising directions. With biomass alone, the USA can replace all the motor fuel we use plus all the coal and natural gas used for electricity... and replace a billion-plus tons of atmospheric carbon emissions with a half-billion tons of carbon removals. How? By refactoring our whole energy model (which is not all that difficult and can be done incrementally). Breathe a sigh of relief, O geeks; neither your rides nor your server farms are inherently unsustainable. However, the details are neither simple nor obvious; ethanol is but a bit player, to list one deviation from common wisdom. The full story is posted at The Ergosphere and is scheduled to appear at The Oil Drum on Tuesday; read and critique before the masses see it!

Sustainable in what sense?

[sdpinpdx]

While the current global energy consumption may be sustainable with expected technologies, it's doubtful the current per-capita energy consumptionin the west is sustainable as other parts of the world increase their standards of living and their per-capita energy consumption. There may just not be enough sunlight hitting the planet to run all that. See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for one treatment of the issue. Given this our cars and server farms are, in their present form, very likely not sustainable.

As in "can be done with renewable supplies, today"

[Engineer-Poet]

There may be some heavily-populated parts of the world which couldn't manage in isolation, but we've got the potential for a global trade in renewable fuels AND far greater efficiency of use, getting two to five times as much energy out of a given quantity. But that's with biofuels from higher plants, which have a very inefficient capture process up front. Other renewable supplies don't have that limitation. With wind doing as well as it is and solar coming along like gangbusters, an unsustainable area woul