Technology

Outrageous, snarky, “madly engaging,” bileful—these are a few of the terms that have been used to describe author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. But he’s actually a great deal more than these things, as anyone who's really come to know him, even if only through his books and Internet postings, can tell you. His most personal writings reveal a human, vulnerable, wonderfully versatile, cheerful side that few people know exists.

Scientists seem to be discovering that they can't stick to the old ways any longer. After all, the quality of a paper doesn't reside on the seal of a commercial editor, it is guaranteed by the peer reviewing process. And scientists are doing peer reviewing, not editors. So, scientists tend to publish more and more in "open access journals", which just didn't exist up to not long ago. There is now an "open science movement", and a movement to boycott Elsevier, singled out among the many scientific editors as an especially bad one.

Ah, fusion. Long promised, both on Do the Math and in real life, fusion is regarded as the ultimate power source—the holy grail—the "arrival" of the human species. Talk of fusion conjures visions of green fields and rainbows and bunny rabbits--and a unicorn too, I hear. But I strike too harsh a tone in my jest. Fusion is indeed a stunningly potent source of energy that falls firmly on the reality side of the science fiction divide—unlike unicorns. Indeed, fusion has been achieved (sub break-even) in the lab, and in the deadliest of bombs. On the flip side, fusion has been actively pursued as the heir-apparent of nuclear fission for over 60 years. We are still decades away from realizing the dream, causing many to wonder exactly what kind of "dream" this is.

Where will computing go in the coming years? I thought I should find out, so I watched a roundtable and other talks and interviews on the subject (warning: it's pretty dry stuff). I came away underwhelmed. I struggled to figure out what these guys were seeing that I wasn't. I'm not sure I've figured it out. Eventually I came back to the one key issue that's missing from their roundtable conversation---and that of most conversations among engineers in the computing world---limits, both ecological and material.

Cesare Marchetti proposed hydrogen (H2) as a large-scale energy vector almost fifty years ago. The main concern then was to find a simple way to feed transport systems with what seemed to be a fountain of energy about to come from the expanding nuclear park. The nuclear dream is largely gone, but hydrogen lives on. Is this dream about to come true as a piece in the transition puzzle to a post-fossil fuel world? That's what I was expecting to find out at a renewable energy / efficiency conference the University of Lorrain.

President Obama exuberantly embraced America’s new oil and gas frontier this week in his State of the Union address. Clearly aiming to steal some Republican election thunder, he pledged to open 75% of potential oil and gas resources, and repeated claims that the US is sitting on enough natural gas to last for 100 years (see insightful commentary on the numbers behind this from Chris Nelder, and more on gas prospects from David Strahan.

Twenty years ago, German physicists erected a home that demonstrated how little energy a building would need if built with, among other things, thick insulation and airtight walls. The so-called “Passive House” (or “Passivhaus” in German) was soon replicated throughout the continent.

The latest scientific revolution is in planetary science. It seems almost unbelievable that just some decades ago people were still debating on whether extrasolar planets actually existed. Today, we are discovering so many of them that it is now believed that almost every star in the galaxy has planets.

The new science of planetary systems gives us a pretty clear view of how we can destroy our civilization by upsetting the delicate balance of the factors that keep our planet alive and friendly to us. We can do it in more than one way, but the most effective one is to continue to emit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, once you have looked at the stars, come back to Earth and start doing something because we are all in trouble.

Global oil consumption fell 300,000 barrels/day in Q4 of 2011 compared to the same period in 2010 according to the IEA's monthly oil report released this week. This was the first such fall since 2009 and reflects renewed economic weakness.

Fears of an EU recession gained ground this week with news that the German economy shrank in Q4. In oil markets this dunked oil prices to a New Year low – though they quickly recovered on Thursday in response to renewed concerns of supply disruption. In Nigeria unions threatened to escalate nationwide strikes to the oil production sector at the weekend if the government fails to reverse recent cuts in fuel subsidies.

-Josh Fox, Director of Gasland, on the Lies of Hydrofracking
-What the Frack?
-Ohio earthquake was not a natural event, expert says
-Ohio Quake Spurs Action on 5 Wells, Won’t Stop Oil and Gas Work
-Fracking Rules Show Obama on ‘Wrong Track,’ Oil Group Says

A recent thrust on Do the Math has been to sort our renewable energy options into "abundant," "potent," and "niche" boxes. This is a reflection of my own mathy introduction to the energy scene, the result of which convinced me that we face giant—and ultimately insurmountable—hurdles in our quest to continue a growth trajectory. It is not obvious that we will even manage to maintain today's energy standards...Meanwhile, requests for me to address the nuclear story are mounting. So before readers become mutinous, I should interrupt the renewable thread to present my nuclear reaction.

In this third and final article in this series, we will discuss seven new ways of living which we can adopt as economic growth fails. They are not revolutionary (revolutions never achieve their utopian visions because of something called "human nature"). Rather, they may allow us to "muddle through" the best we can right now with what we already know how to do. We will do these things because they will work -- and we certainly need to stop doing things that don't work, and find new ways that will work.

The big oil news this week was that OPEC came to an agreement – albeit a bit of a fudge– showing something of a recovery from June’s "worst meeting ever". Last time around the group failed to agree new quotas and was upstaged two weeks later by the IEA releasing strategic reserves to offset loss of production from Libya.