New Book Available - Life After Fossil Fuels




A new book is now available from Springer by author Alice Friedemann titled Life After Fossil Fuels - A Reality Check on Alternative Energy.

The really great thing about this book is the fact that it explains so much about not only how society is powered today, what products are made from this energy, and what the future will look like, but also precisely WHY alternative energy from technological devices will fall way short of the mark with regard to powering society once fossil fuels become impossible to extract because the net energy they provide is equal to the amount of energy required to extract them (making them an energy sink rather than an energy source).

Alice J. Friedemann is the creator of energyskeptic.com. Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for her book When Trucks Stop Running – Energy and the Future of Transportation published by Springer, and Peak Soil, which was edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of Geodestinies).

This book is a reality check of where energy will come from in the future. Today, our economy is utterly dependent on fossil fuels. They are essential to transportation, manufacturing, farming, electricity, and to make fertilizers, cement, steel, roads, cars, and half a million other products.

One day, sooner or later, fossil fuels will no longer be abundant and affordable. Inevitably, one day, global oil production will decline. That time may be nearer than we realize. Some experts predict oil shortages as soon as 2022 to 2030. What then are our options for replacing the fossil fuels that turn the great wheel of civilization?

Surveying the arsenal of alternatives – wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, nuclear, batteries, catenary systems, fusion, methane hydrates, power2gas, wave, tidal power and biomass – this book examines whether they can replace or supplement fossil fuels.

The book also looks at substitute energy sources from the standpoint of the energy users.  Manufacturing, which uses half of fossil fuels, often requires very high heat, which in many cases electricity can't provide. Industry uses fossil fuels as a feedstock for countless products, and must find substitutes. And, as detailed in the author's previous book, When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation, ships, locomotives, and heavy-duty trucks are fueled by diesel. What can replace diesel?

Taking off the rose-colored glasses, author Alice Friedemann analyzes our options. What alternatives should we deploy right now? Which technologies merit further research and development? Which are mere wishful thinking that, upon careful scrutiny, dematerialize before our eyes?

Fossil fuels have allowed billions of us to live like kings. Fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, we changed the equation constraining the carrying capacity of our planet. As fossil fuels peak and then decline, will we fall back to Earth? Are there viable alternatives?

Update: While on my recent trip, I was able to read this book within the first four days of my trip. Sure, I could have extended the amount of time by reading less per day, but I couldn't put the book down. Spoiler Alert: Will we fall back to Earth? Yes. Are there viable alternatives? Short answer: No. Not to keep society functioning as it is today. We are about to travel down the Seneca cliff through perpetual degrowth caused by a lack of surplus energy. I don't want to spoil any further details for anyone who wants to investigate this book further, as it WILL keep anyone interested in energy and resource decline or ecological overshoot or any of the myriad symptom predicaments on the edge of his or her seat! This truly is an exceptional book!




Comments

  1. bruce mederApril 18, 2021 at 6:43 PM

    This looks to be an interesting and timely book. But the price of purchase is ridiculous. Way, way, way beyond my means.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why The "War" on Climate Change is Bipolar

Image
  One thing which has become more and more clear as time has moved forward is that the messaging on climate change is bipolar (contradictory; incongruent; hypocritical) in its assessment. More and more articles talk about how we need this and how we need that in order to "fight" climate change DESPITE the facts that climate change is caused by ecological overshoot and building more products (especially building materials) only increases ecological overshoot. Some articles discuss ideas which have already been proven by science to be impossible . Of course, people who deny reality will utilize optimism bias to attempt said impossible anyway. I could continue posting link after link to article after article regarding this same scenario, as there are hundreds of articles which contradict each other in what we need or what we must do or how much it will cost and on and on ad nauseum. So, why is it that there remains this huge disconnect with society? Much of it has to do
Read more

Welcome to Problems, Predicaments, and Technology

Image
Welcome to my new blog - titled Problems, Predicaments, and Technology -  because that is the title to a short article I wrote over a year ago to point out the difference between problems and predicaments (often called dilemmas ) and explain the role technology use (and the culture surrounding it) has had in creating most of the predicaments we face today. While this blog is mainly focused on Ecological Overshoot, Abrupt Climate Disruption ( ACD ) and Energy and Resource Decline (generally associated with peak oil and collapse), there are a myriad of other predicaments closely associated with these three that will also be covered. Many scientists focus a large amount of their lives trying to figure out how to solve these predicaments as if they are problems in the hopes of coming up with a way to at least mitigate some of the harm society is doing to life on this planet. My efforts here are to point out that in a very real sense, this has been rooted in denial of reality  and opti
Read more

What Would it Take for Humanity to Experience Radical Transformation?

Image
Today we shall investigate this question: What would it take for humanity to experience radical transformation of individual and collective consciousness within the next decade? This picture looks inviting, doesn't it? But does it realistically represent the world we collectively live in today? In one word, NO. One look at the news stories of today can easily show how individuals, groups, corporations, and nations of all stripes are arguing and fighting for attention, for purposes, and for goals and strategies. Look at social media and it is ripe with every flavor of disagreement known to society. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there are few things everyone can agree on, and even when one IS found, nobody can agree on the ways to solve what everyone agreed the problems are. Now, throw in a PREDICAMENT instead of a problem and guess what happens? From my experience, when a predicament is put into the mix, most people still look at it from the same standpoint the
Read more

Denial of Reality

Image
  In my last written post (to clarify the difference between the files, which contain only links to outside material), I mentioned denial of reality. You might wonder what this has to do with climate change and extinction. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful mental issues that affects humans. Rob Mielcarski explains the evolution of how this came to be, quote: " The singular emergence of human intelligence, and its ability to write and read this paragraph, evolved in a gene controlled machine with an unusually powerful computer, that was created by an improbable simultaneous adaptation for an extended theory of mind with denial of reality, and whose complexity was enabled by the increased energy per gene provided by mitochondria, that resulted from an accidental endosymbiosis of two prokaryotes, powered by an unintuitive chemiosmotic proton pump, that originated in an alkaline hydrothermal vent, on 1 of 40 billion planets, in 1 of 100 billion galaxies, and that plane
Read more

Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales

Image
  Advertisement from the mid-20th century I have often used this expression (the title) to describe many things people tend to think of as solutions for one thing or another that either are not solutions or are unrealistic at best in terms of actually solving something. For anyone just joining these articles, this post  will help get you started so as to be able to comprehend what this article is about.  As I have expressed before, my deep passion is to help explain where we are (as a species), how we got here, why we are in this mess, and what can and/or cannot be done to "solve" these predicaments. My very first post explained the difference between problems with answers or solutions and predicaments (or dilemmas) with outcomes. In it, we discovered that predicaments don't have solutions, and that every solution proffered for a predicament winds up causing new problems and/or predicaments or comes with unacceptable costs or just simply doesn't solve anything. The re
Read more

More Cognitive Dissonance

Image
  In my last post , I expressed my concerns regarding methane emissions along with the growing speed which our collective predicaments appear to be gaining. Then I explained precisely why we have thus far not made any real progress on these predicaments based upon our collective denial , which has a considerable amount to do with our basic human psychology. In conclusion, the reality is that very few people are actually paying an ounce of real attention. What they are paying attention to are all the distractions - the hype, advertising, marketing, and propaganda. Today I bring more evidence of the increasing speed of these predicaments as I recall some of my articles which I had privately hoped might be a long way off into the future. I'm not one to try to evade uncomforting news. If I was, I most certainly wouldn't be reading and watching these articles, reports, studies, videos, and other media to try to understand and comprehend fully where we are and where we're heade
Read more

What is NTHE and How "near" is Near Term?

Image
I distinctly remember my first introduction to the initialism (or abbreviation or acronym) "NTHE" which ushered me into a whole new set of exploration. I was a member of a climate change group on Facebook at the time (which I had been a member of for quite some time) and I saw a post which was discussing it. I hadn't seen this abbreviation before and wondered what it meant, so I did a search and a whole list of links was presented (as usual) along with the spelled out version, Near Term Human Extinction. I clicked on one which took me to a website blog by Dave Pollard . I started reading and was introduced to another person, Carolyn Baker, with whom Dave had a video interview with. Through this video, I was introduced to another person, a professor by the name of Guy McPherson. A video of him presenting information at an Indiana university, DePauw, where my grandmother attended, was available; so I watched it. The information was stark and I noticed the looks on the ki
Read more