SM said;
Most of us on this thread accept that something has to be done about reducing GHG emissions

As I have said many times, I believe the energy crunch is too close
to worry about global warming. It is now irrelevant and together
with the solar/wind system it is now time for a total rethink.
Just received the HSBC bank's report on peak oil.
It appears to be saying that it is here now.

http://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view?usp=sharing

Aaaarrrggghh this is better;

http://tinyurl.com/jgbklnp

I will come back, tomorrow probably and give a report.
HSBC is one of the world's largest banks. So it does have to be taken seriously.

There are 54 pages of it so I have not got far into it.
Seems the upshot is the Bank expects that the margin between production
and demand will fall to 1% this year.
They expect the decline rates from this year will be 5% to 7% per year.
That seems a high figure to me but that is their opinion.
The Bank believes that peak all liquids oil is now.
Any disruption to supply will probably cause high prices and shortages.
Quote:
We believe a range of decline rates of 5-7% (on post-peak
production) is probably reasonable. This represents around 3-4.5mbd
of potential lost production every year over the next few years – far
more than unplanned production interruptions could take out in any
given year.

That is a pretty big slab of production.
Quote:
Decline rates key to oil supply picture; and set to become an issue
for investors as spare capacity tightens again in 2017e-18e
Declines on conventional production (ex-shale) means non-OPEC
production won’t grow from 2016e to 2020e
In the longer-term, a supply squeeze is likely to happen well before
oil demand peaks.

It seems Australia with our almost 100% import of transport fuels
should be making some urgent decisions on our non-compliance storage
commitment to the OECD. Still the government has confidence in our
commercial arrangements. Oh dear.

Several times there has been mention of small modular nuclear stations.
I came across this item today.

Small modular reactors inch forward. Oregon-based NuScale Power LLC
submitted documents to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, looking for
the nuclear watchdog to certify its small modular reactor (SMR)
design. Typical nuclear reactors have a capacity of as much as 1,000
megawatts; the NuScale design would only have a 50 MW capacity.
The SMR concept is been heralded as a cheaper and faster way to build
nuclear power. Still, any certification of the design would be years
away.

The rising cost of oil predicted is why we must electrify city transport ASAP and reduce our dependence.

The only scalable and reliable way to do this without emissions, long term, is nuclear.

The EROEI of oil is falling and may become unity soon enough, making the EROEI of coal fired electricity plus storage (lithium vehicle batteries) competitive. So, until we have (modular) nuclear we should be looking towards coal, initially, and nuclear thereafter.

This is so bleedingly obvious, yet our leaders are failing to encourage any move in this direction, being fixated completely on subsidizing renewables. Why are our politicians so dumb, and why doesn't our Chief Scientists lead them out of their stupidity?

Is battery storage even feasible ?
Somebody somewhere calculated that if all the car batteries and all
the mobile phone batteries in the world were hooked up to the world
grid they would maintain the grid for -- wait for it -- NINE SECONDS.

Even if you could maintain one day, how about five overcast still days in a row ?

I'm not for a second suggesting battery storage matched with renewables, but with thermal energy (nuclear, coal).

The EROIE of mining oil to petroleum to vehicular motion is nearing that of mining coal to battery to motion. Electric cars are already out there but we should hurry it along, IMO, with subsidies to support building the infrastructure, including home charging stations.