I have been bad mouthing the IEEE for several years for being silent on "green energy". The IEEE is smart on technology, but not too swift on economics. Maybe that is the reason for the silence. There is an article in the July 2012 issue "A Skeptic Looks At Alternative Energy" by Vaclav Smil. I think it is a little weak on the economics an thus the logic of the whole "green energy" thing. The "End Game" is energy and food. The two are connected any way that you want to cut it.
If you are a gardener, you know that if you burn the biomass that it will not be long before you will be out of food. Biomass is not some "free" source of energy. There is a cost and that cost is less food. Any additional food production will come on inferior land that will require more energy to produce that additional food. It may be irrigation or fertilizer, but in the end it is energy. Using corn to produce auto fuel is stupid, period. Someone is going to have to starve so that you can put ethanol in your car. It might not be today or tomorrow, but the time will come and it will not be that long. I don't know why we are doing all these things that we all know will "not" cure our energy problem. At best it will delay the final "end game" and what is that? Human population growth.
If we have more people, there is only one solution, lower standard of living and lower quality of life. When I say "solution", I mean a place where the equations balances out. Remember your chemistry class? Recall that the chemical reaction equation had to "balance"? It is the same in the energy/food debate.
What we have to get used to is that there is no solution that includes a continued growth in human population. I know that a lot of people would like to think that there is some magic bullet out there that needs to be discovered, but there is not. Our population has grown geometrically for the last 250 years and we all know that it can not continue. We have used up all the cheap energy and all the cheap alternatives. From here on it is going to get very expensive. Those are the facts so get used to it.
Back to the article. I think that the editors of the IEEE Journal included this article because it was so weak. I don't think they have the guts to publish the real facts and use words like "stupid" when it comes to "green energy". I can only hope that some day we will read an article in the IEEE Journal that is honest and calls a "spade a spade". No pun intended.
