After $100 Million, Exxon Backs Off Algae as Fuel

[Scootaloo]

2. That we have such difficulty maintaining our energy structures is revealing

Laws of physics; you will never be able to eke out more productivity than was initially invested. Never. Our current system may create the illusion, but all we're doing is burning through the collected productivity of millions of years; think of the selfish child who uses power of attorney to blow through their parents' savings accounts, that's us.

We're nearing a point where it will take more energy to extract fossil fuels than they will provide in return; and schemes like biofuel will have similar results, and may in fact end up being even more expensive in terms of energy; they will certainly not pay for their own infrastructure!

The only certain methods of gaining energy stability is to utilize our current fossil fuel resources to create the infrastructure for constant - if slower - sources of energy. Either we collect and store energy output in the same way that carboniferous plants did all those millions of years ago (solar power) or we tap into other forms of stored energy (geothermal.) Secondary sources such as wind and wave power (both solar in origin) will remain "niche" gap-fillers, and the environmental destructiveness of large-scale hydroelectric power should preclude it as anything but a very minor and local input.

No matter what, we're going to hit a point where our current world of easy travel and global energy networks is going to fail; maybe not completely, but it will have to slow down. And this will have a very bad effect on the way we operate. The 7.5 billion people on the earth are largely reliant on the easy transportation provided by pillaging the "solar bank account" of coal and oil. Take that away, or diminish it, and the after effects will be... very unpleasant.

But it sadly seems unavoidable. The current system is simply not sustainable, and it cannot be shored up for very long. All that can happen is that it crashes. That cannot be avoided. The question we face isn't how to stop the crash, but how to shorten the fall. The less infrastructure we have in place for alternate energy paradigms, the farther the fall - and the farther the fall, the harder the crash at the end.