Renewable hx

Every economic boom in history, from Uruk onwards, had ended in bust because renewable sources of energy ran out: timber, crop land, pasture, labour, water, peat. All self-replenishing, but far too slowly, and easily exhausted by a swelling populace. Coal not only did not run out, no matter how much was used: it actually became cheaper and more abundant as time went by, in marked contrast to charcoal, which always grew more expensive once its use expanded beyond a certain point, for the simple reason that people had to go further in search of timber. 

By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million labourers. It was as if each worker had twenty servants at his beck and call.

 

Not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that – in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat – it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rainforests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor.

But since Americans are in effect being taxed thrice over to pay for the ethanol industry – they subsidise the growing of maize, they subsidise the manufacture of ethanol and they pay more for their food – the ability of American consumers to contribute to demand for manufactured goods is actually hurt by ethanol, not helped.

Meanwhile, the environmental benefits of biofuels are not just illusory; they are negative.

So the question is: how much fuel does it take to grow fuel? Answer: about the same amount.

Drilling for and refining oil, by contrast, gets you a 600 per cent energy return or more on your energy used. Which sounds the better investment?