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Even though my personal behaviors have changed (I drive a Nissan Leaf daily), the use of fossil fuels to make fertilizer can not be understated. People will die of starvation worldwide if the tap is turned off.

Governments don't burn oil the general public does....

srsly?

The U.S. military burns roughly 100M barrels of oil a year.[1][2][3], and so on.

Pull the other one komrade.

[1] http://www.resilience.org/stor...
[2] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_ve...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

No, I get annoyed because one isn't addressing some key points. Which have been raised numerous times by criticis:

http://bravenewclimate.com/200...

http://www.resilience.org/stor...

http://bravenewclimate.com/201...

http://www.windaction.org/post...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

One of the key points, for instance, is the economical viability of it. Let me simplify the issue: say, you have country 1 and country 2. both have judged the way to go is 100% for renewable energy, like wind. say, there is no wind in country 1. What the authors now say is: no problem, we'll create a smart grid, and that will transport it from country 2.

HOWEVER... what they then don't realise is, that if country 2 has made more or less enough windmills to get going, it CAN NOT sustain a complete other country, unless they have double the amount needed to sustain their own (assuming both countries use roughly the same amount).

Thus they need far more capacity, if they are going to provide another country. However, this also means that for most of the time, there will be a HUGE overcompensation (namely all the times there is wind). Which means half of those windmills will have nothing to do at that time, while yet having been costly to built.

The same goes for country 2 in regard to country 1. Worse, if there is a large weather-front which is wind-poor, it could be that both countries need to get the electricity from a third or fourth country. Which in turn has to provide enough electricity for BOTH countries, then. so even more over-compensating must happen, to deal with this possibility.

Now, I don't know how things go in the USA, but that sure as hell wouldn't work in Europe, where the countries are much smaller, and much more heavily populated. And it would be quite economically unsound to have a windmill-park that is much larger than needed for ones' own demand, just in case another country would fall without.

Now, I read the rosy look that "storage of heat in soil and water" will deal with that, but I just don't think that's plausible. The current best systems, don't let you recuperate the stored energy for more than a couple of hours at best.

I find such claims, and especially the lack of answers and facts in these sort of papers wholly unsatisfactory. There have been many, many valid counterarguments and criticism on it, yet I see it nowhere addressed let alone refuted by the authors of any of those pro-renewable papers.

The age of the Earth (and presumably Vanus) is about 4.5 billion years. 100 million years is about 2.2% of that. An event that takes 100 million years could happen 45 times in the Earth's lifetime. If it were a day, this would be about a half hour lunch. So more of a moderate length of time, geologically.

Compare it to what the Earth looked like 100 million years ago.

That only counts if they're not using deceptive and immoral tricks to bring in more cash. There's two really nasty things the investor class is doing that invalidates your argument.

First, they pump, dump and then get bailed out as too big to fail. They've been doing this for at least a hundred years, maybe longer. Please read this and maybe even the book it references.

Then there's the more recent phenomenon called getting "Bained". Remember Kay-B-Toys? Mervyns? They weren't failed companies. They were doing just fine. They got bought out by venture capitalists who used their good name & credit to borrow a tonne of money, pay themselves huge bonuses, and then shut the whole thing down. Ever wonder what happened to all those cool Sci-Fi anthologies from the 70s? Issac Asimov's Stories and what not. Folks didn't stop reading them, their distributor was sitting on a mountain of valuable property they weren't keeping track of. Some wealthy asshat noticed, bought them up and liquidated them. Suddenly no distributor and being small but successful they collapsed before they could get another one.

So even if I ignore the fact that just about every rich person relied on the gov't directly to make their fortune, even if I ignore the fact that they're wealth is largely build on the infrastructure and education system of our civilization, even if I ignore the commons and the meaning of natural resources. Even if I ignore _all_ that, you're still left with a bunch of dirty thieves who couldn't survive in the imaginary "real" world of capitalism that's never existed anyway.

but I'm not clever enough to explain why. Please read this. Also follow the link in the article to "This Time is Different" and read that too. We've been doing this little song and dance where banks screw up and blame the public for centuries...

When there is absolutely no mention of the U.S. military, which is the largest energy consumer in the federal government, standing at over 80% of all consumption.

You want to move away from oil dependency? Well, 3/4's of military's energy use comes from oil, and it consumed 117 million barrels of oil in 2006. (That's 320 thousand barrels PER DAY) According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden. (!)

And he's worried about the Keystone pipeline and charging fossil fuel companies higher taxes? Really?

"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Supposedly the greeks had 30 slaves per citizen and we have around 100 slaves energy wise. The topic has also been mentioned here:
http://www.resilience.org/stor...

Some food for thought :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-03/does-the-earth-need-saving

Where do you get that 30 years figure? If you consider reasonable assumptions, and not industry hype, it's rather around 4 years :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-09/snake-oil-chapter-3-a-treadmill-to-hell

Thank you for this post.
One comment though :
Fracked oil and gas is already being extracted faster than economically viable. The reason it will max out (and in about 4 years, not 20 years) is because the fracked wells, due to the geology/technology get depleted a lot faster than conventional wells.
Since you seem to be interested in the subject, I suggest you read this (and the following chapters) :
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-18/snake-oil-how-fracking-s-false-promise-of-plenty-imperils-our-future-introduction

Sigh, another bad reporting from Slashdot and Yahoo News. Those scientists are specifically talking about "_safer_ nuclear energy systems" and "_modern_ nuclear technology". That disqualifies 99% of operating nuclear reactors out there.

Now those scientists are to blame too, since they could have had thought of the media warping their message into one that seems to support the current nuclear industry, and put more emphasis on that aspect.

What I find curious is that they are making jumps in their conclusions. For instance they say that "Global demand for energy is growing rapidly and must continue to grow to provide the needs of developing economies." Energy is not only electricity. About 1/3 of energy is used in transportation and most of that energy comes from oil-derived products. If that transportation were to be severely reduced our economies would grind to a halt. And that is exactly what is going to happen during this decade as the oil supply cannot keep with it's demand and the Energy Return on Energy Invested keeps going lower and lower.
One reason why nuclear energy (past and future) is suffering is because of very high investment costs. If it's hard to economically justify building nuclear reactors now, it's going to be impossible during a collapse. And those new nuclear reactor designs are not instantly going to appear out of thin air : you need several decades of research and testing before they become commercially viable. So the time to start research and testing on those reactors was in 1990s. Now it's way too late.
So we're stuck with renewables. We'd better build as many as we can now, before they too, become unaffordable and we're back in the Middle Ages again but now with a depleted planet and a 7 billion strong population we cannot feed without tractors and fertilizers.
More on this here:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-30/snake-oil-chapter-6-energy-reality

I wonder if these scientists are not aware of this situation or are they just kidding themselves?

I'm sure this has been said before, but we probably won't come run out. It will just become increasingly expensive, until the point that other renewable energy becomes more attractive. As per the last 2 "oil ceilings" around $120 (one of many examples) WTI (or was it Brent? I can't remember), it would seem that currently energy prices for trucks, planes, and consumers can't support >$120 price.

So basically, this problem is going to solve itself, and we won't run out of oil, because we will (mostly) stop digging for it when it's too expensive, and use something else.

The only risk is that energy companies take the profits from oil and re-invest it in making cheaper drilling techniques instead of alternative energy, and then we really do run out before we can use oil to find an alternative (since most certainly any research is going to require it). But that's pretty unlikely, considering "oil" companies are already investing in alternative energy to become "energy" companies.