Anyone besides me looked at the Rolling Stone article?

I say better efficiency and smart alternatives are a far wiser response to peak oil than any kind of distributed electricity, let alone nuclear technology.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/15051506/global_warming_a_real_solution

Global Warming: A Real Solution
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
"In early May, 100 of the nation's top business leaders gathered for a summit at a private resort nestled on 250 acres in California's Napa Valley. The attendees, gathered at the invitation of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, included CEOs and other top executives from such Fortune 500 corporations as Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble and BP. They had been invited to discuss ways to end America's fossil-fuel addiction and save the world from global warming. But in reality they had come to make money for their companies – and that may turn out to be the thing that saves us."

“For three days, the executives listened as their colleagues and business rivals described how they are using new technologies to wean themselves from oil and boost their profits in the process. DuPont has cut its climate-warming pollution by seventy-two percent since 1990, slashing $3 billion from its energy bills while increasing its global production by nearly a third. Wal-Mart has installed new, energy-efficient light bulbs in refrigeration units that save the company $12 million a year, and skylights that cut utility bills by up to $70,000 per store. The company, which operates the nation's second-largest corporate truck fleet, also saved $22 million last year just by installing auxiliary power units that allow drivers to operate electric systems without idling their vehicles. In a move with even more far-reaching potential, Wal-Mart has ordered its truck suppliers to double the gas mileage of the company's entire fleet by 2015. When those trucks become available to other businesses, America will cut its demand for oil by six percent.”

“ …. "We haven't even touched the low-hanging fruit yet," Kim Saylors-Laster, the vice president of energy for Wal-Mart, told the assembled CEOs. "We're still getting the fruit that has already fallen from the trees." “

I hadn't read it until just now, but I've been a fan of Amory Lovins since I read an absurd article about five years ago claiming that the Internet was boosting greenhouse emissions by increasing the demand for coal-fired electricity -- and adducing the California energy crisis of 2001 as evidence.

Lovins' contribution to the security and efficiency of the electricity supply industry in California is huge. The regulation that governed that state's private and municipal electricity suppliers from the 1970s until the mid 1990s was partly based on his work. He bitterly opposed "deregulation" in the 1990s, and not long after the 2001 heist by the energy cartel, the state turned back to RMI for advice.

California has the lowest electricity intensity of any state in the USA, and despite its disproportionate reliance on the motorcar it also has the lowest per capita carbon emissions. It is also the centre of technological innovation, including the Internet, which has contributed to a tremendous improvement in economic resource intensity (and slowed the growth in coal-fired electricity consumption) by reducing the need for motorised transport in a modern economy.

Not sure what you mean by saying "distributed electricity" is less wise than "better efficiency and smart alternatives". One of the biggest opportunities for improved fuel efficiency is distributed cogeneration: generating electricity from heat recovered from thermal industrial processes, and burning fuel to generate electricity close to the site of electric demand while finding uses for the "waste" heat from generation.

Or did you mean electricity delivered via a network, as opposed to distributed generation? Electric networks are here to stay, and indeed they will grow, because the only viable fuel-free generation options involve collecting ambient energy over a wide area from wind, waves, tidal currents, and sunlight.

This is also worth a read. Very promising:

http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/energy-policy-renewable/330

Vivor and Xoddam remind me of the mad artilleryman in 'War of the World's'.

My take on their slavish respect for modern CEO's rants:

ARTILLERYMAN: Course we can't win against peakoil. It's now we've got to start fighting - but not
against them 'cos we can't win. Now we've got to fight for survival, and I reckon we can make it.

I've got a plan:

Its all about electicity. But not just any electricity. Electric networks are here to stay, and indeed they will grow, because the only viable fuel-free generation options involve collecting ambient energy over a wide area from wind, waves, tidal currents, and sunlight. Today we have a few miles of coverage, tomorrow we'll cover the whole planet with energy collection devices. Then our womenkind can breed and breed till we reach 100's of billions of people so we can make women, property developers and wooly executives richer & happier than ever. There's no need to stop. This planet can breed and sustain humans till eternity. You wait and see. The technology will arrive. Dont fear. Bigger wind turbines & practically the whole planet covered with solar panels. A trillion strong global marketplace and labour force by 2200. How wonderful it will be

"Slavish respect"? Them's fightin' words!

Lovins is more philosopher than salesman: it's taken "captains of industry" and the Pentagon decades to start listening. We don't have to like them to be pleased that their money is now promoting sustainable energy technology.

The energy technology market is booming with ideas. Even if some projects turn out to be bulldust and some CEOs nutters, the rest have an excellent chance of success. There are many more players in renewables, doing more innovative things, than in nuclear power.

Here are my pertinent opinions, as they relate to peak oil and energy economics:

* Unrestrained population growth and continued economic growth at the pace we're used to are unsustainable. The economy can grow in a finite world only by becoming more efficient, not by consuming more.

* Peak oil will not be an unmitigated disaster; economy and even population will contract, but not suddenly. Minor catastrophes will harm only the poorest, as today in Burma.

* If abrupt climate change from positive feedbacks isn't averted, *that* will be globally catastrophic.

* Biofuels can be produced cheaply enough and in sufficiently great quantity to supply the services for which we now rely on petroleum and natural gas, if fuel consumption is also dramatically improved. It will be.

* The environmental consequences of fuel cropping will be grave, but not as bad as global warming.

* Ambient energy is inherently cheaper and more sustainable than nuclear power. Net land use for renewable electricity is less than from fossil fuels or uranium: ever seen an open-cut mine on a farm, out at sea, or on an urban rooftop?

* Cheap bite-sized renewable generators are available *now*. Every year the bites get juicier, while each new "generation" of nuclear reactors takes decades of dreaming, trial and error.

* Nuclear fission will be useful for the countries which are already committed to it. It doesn't have to distract the rest of us from the main game, which is sustainability.

* Hydrogen as an energy carrier is cute, but purely optional, and easy to obtain with or without nuclear power.

Xoddam, I was in a hurry and should have done a final edit for good sense. My concern is about highly centralised generation, as opposed to more distributed generation in a network.

But the link below makes the 30+ year old point that solar-heated hot water is a far more efficient source of low-grade heat (eg scalding hot water) than is an electric hot water heater. An additional point is that turning down the thermostat on an electric (or gas) hot water heater could still deliver scalding hot water, and might cut cold water usage as well (since people use cold water in baths and showers to temper the hot water). That was the sense behind my ‘efficiency’ phrasing; another tune to the theme of “every little bit helps”.

The point is made elsewhere, for example see:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2007/1920362.htm
Solar rebates - value for money?

The excerpt below highlights a very interesting rebate strategy working in Germany:

[Gavin Gilchrist] “ … What's worked for the solar electric industry in Germany is there is a feed-in tariff. That is, if you put solar electric systems on the roof of your house in Germany, you get a special price. You get more than just the normal price of electricity in the market at that time.”
“Geraldine Doogue: So they're favouring this sort of electricity?”

“Gavin Gilchrist: You get an absolutely huge bonus, to the point where in Germany, companies have been going around, getting satellite images of the roofs of Germany, to find out who's got a roof that faces south, (being in the Northern Hemisphere) that doesn't already have a PV system, and ringing them up and saying, 'We want to buy your roof'”.

The German buy-back rate is currently 5x the retail electricity cost. Still cheaper than building a new reactor.

Yes, KAEP, I’m “fighting the good fight”. And I’m glad to see the aliens didn’t steal your sense of humour when they abducted you. That’s why they keep abducting us, you know: they can’t figure out what makes us laugh. PS your ocean altimetry evidence is totally fabulous.

*At peakoil when the largest demand for green energy infrastructure kicks in, the oil that provide plastics and energy to manufacture that infrastructure will dry up.
The dream of green alternative energy is just a dream Like ZENO's paradox. The closer you get to the goal the further away.

*People stupid enough to forego nuclear power and nuclear deterrence will have 'weakling' tatsed across their forehead. The law-of-the-jungle will PREVAIL without a nuclear program that is politically federalised, distributed and protected by a robust nuclear-based military. There is no other way to maintain realistic law&order and avoid ancient zeitgeists emerging to wreak 3-out-of-every-4 mayhem after peakoil.
There were 2 billion people before oil and there will be 2 billion people after peakoil. That's thermodyanmic law and is inviolable. THINK harder about nuclear.

*The trigger for peakoil will be $10/litre petrol. Without nuclear supporting our societies, peakoil fear and uncertainty will cause women to want more children to avoid uncertainty. That cvertainty will complicate peakoil to an extent, that as unthinkable as it is today, will neverthless make genocide a televised sport. Anti nuclear proponents know NOTHING of THERMODYNAMICS & the baser fundiments of human nature and survival.

*Even the Romans had nuclear power. Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli powered Romans to a Crescendo that came crashing down when Vesuvius blew out and Geotherml energy tracked into subsidence. Competing societies at Greece, Egypt, Carthage had no hope of competing with those Regional Thermodynamics, very much akin to a human hurricane in modern terms. In fact Vesuvius was for many centuries the equivalent of having a free-and-safe fluidised Pebble-Bed-Reactor in Rome's backyard.

To assume we today, with temporary but effectively infinite oil and energy supplies, are morally superior to the falling Romans or the Germans pre WWII in an overcrowded and under-resourced Europe, is a mistake that will be paid for at peakoil in a way, currently unimaginable, that was perhaps best described in the post WWII literary epiphany, "Forbidden Planet":

"But the Howard Government forgot one thing John .... Monsters .... Monsters from the ID (Immigration Department)"