Big Gav

Citibank has released an interesting report on "peak coal" in China – referring to peak demand rather than any supply driven peak of production (something I view as quite far off) -The Unimaginable: Peak Coal in China. The limit to coal use appears to be how much pollution the Chinese population is willing to tolerate – a reminder that there is more than one "limit to growth".

Following on my recent post bidding Farewell to The Oil Drum, I’d like to have a look at what I view as our longer term future for energy production and consumption.

Alan Kohler had an interesting column in The Business Spectator recently (“The cars that ate Australia“) warning that as our car fleet transitions from the internal combustion to electric vehicles, local car manufacturers need to start looking to manufacture EV’s or they (and all their suppliers) will end up shutting down.

Fred Turner’s book looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.

Solar thermal is a way of harnessing the largest source of energy available to us, so in this post I’ll have a look at the upswing in interest in the use of this technology for electricity generation in recent years and look at some of the approaches being pursued to make it economically competitive with coal fired power generation.

Time Magazine recently had an article (Why the Tea Party Movement Matters) that looked at the latest manifestation of populism in the United States, with widespread discontent at the state of the US economy and the US political system, particularly the lack of transparency evident in many government initiatives ranging from the bail-out of the financial system to proposed changes to healthcare, along with discontent about costly wars in the middle east that seem to be never-ending.