High-level thoughts on energy

One thing that seems to be coming out of the current oil "crisis" is that people have been talking about alternate fuel sources for transportation. "Oh," they say, "if only we had electric cars, or hydrogen fuel cells, or ethanol, and all of our oil problems would be solved!" Petroleum's one big advantage is that, if only you can dig it out of the ground, it's already made of stored energy in chemical form; of those other things, they're really just ways to transport stored energy (ethanol least so, but effectively in the current world) and the energy ultimately has to come from somewhere.

Wikipedia's World energy resources and consumption article is pretty informative if you're starting to think about this sort of thing. It claims that current worldwide energy consumption is 0.0005 yottajoules/year, with 86.5% coming from fossil fuels, and that 0.4 YJ of fossil fuels (not just petroleum here) are remaining to be mined. Add in nuclear, which is still non-renewable, for another 2.5 YJ; other articles on the subject claim that both mining and producing power from uranium is quite a bit behind equivalent technology for oil, so one interesting technological option that adds on several hundred years to what we can dig out of the ground is moving towards more nuclear power. That some Wikipedia article claims that all renewable (principally solar) power together could add up to 3.8 YJ/year, which makes it seem like the obvious direction to go, ignoring concerns about how much of the planet's surface we'd need to cover to capture that energy.

This still all means that "somebody" needs to spend effort on improving alternate technology: improved nuclear is interesting if not permanently sustainable, improved solar is interesting, useful ways to turn electricity into stored energy into transportation seem essential. The US government, in my mind, has a horrible track record and just the wrong scale, since paths that reduce gasoline prices in the near term are more likely to lead to re-election than paths that will eventually get us off of oil entirely. TV commercials from oil producers aside, I'm not really convinced the free market has incentives to change either. We are seeing a couple of encouraging trends, like far-suburban real estate and SUVs not selling (20 miles at 50 mpg is much better than 50 miles at 20 mpg in a day-to-day sort of way).

Maybe the next administration will start thinking hard about energy policy, and transportation policy, and oil policy specifically, and maybe people will start thinking harder about useful urban design. I'm not holding out huge hopes.