The following is a guest post from Vinay Kumar, who lives in the small coastal town in Southern India. Vinay has a Phd in Neuroscience from M.I.T. and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University. He works as a systems engineer and volunteers on an organic farm that he helped to create. He also provides technical help to local community organizations in India that are fighting polluting industries. Vinay is a friend of one of Herman Daly's former graduate students in India which is how he came across TheOilDrum. The below essay on the implications of oil depletion for human labor is a great example of the cross disciplinary ideas that can emerge at the intersection of the internet and education .

Thomas L. Friedman: The Copenhagen That Matters

As I listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.

The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.

Not in Denmark. So I asked the Danish minister: “Tell me, what planet are you people from?”

Espersen laughed. But I didn’t. How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things — whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit — are “off the table.” They’ve been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything important but hard makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

This is a guest post by Tom Konrad, Ph.D.  This article was first published on his Clean Energy Wonk blog.

Current renewable energy technologies must be adopted in conjunction with aggressive Smart Growth and Efficiency if we hope to continue our current standard of living and complex society with diminished reliance on fossil fuels. These strategies have the additional advantage that they can work without large technological breakthroughs. 

In this post I will talk about a topic which is likely familiar: Energy Return on Investment or EROI. I will also talk about Energy Internal Rate of Return (EIRR), a measure which is similar to EROI, but reflects how quickly society gets its energy return back from its energy investment.

Energy 2.0: What Comes From After Oil

What happens after the world hits peak oil and prices skyrocket? Or when coal pushes the carbon count in the atmosphere into the danger zone? Soylent Green might turn out to be more prophetic than you thought. But, luckily, entrepreneurs are devising new ways to produce energy even beyond solar and wind. Here are some of the more intriguing and far out ones.

The December 2009 edition of Oilwatch Monthly can be downloaded at this weblink (PDF, 1.24 MB, 33 pp).

The Oilwatch Monthly is a newsletter that is available free of charge with the latest data on oil supply, demand, oil stocks, spare capacity and exports.

A summary and latest graphics below the fold.

Green Giant: Beijing’s crash program for clean energy

In the years that followed, the government pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises, on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. Then, in 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly eighty per cent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China’s future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.

In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preëmptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.”

To the uninitiated the thought of a gas or oil well is one where a pipe goes down into the ground, and out of it flows either a steady stream of oil or natural gas, that is fed straight into a pipeline and then delivered to them (often at what they consider to be an outrageous price) with no further treatment. Or the crude oil that comes out runs straight over to a refinery where (with minimum effort and maximum profit) it is transformed into the gasoline or diesel fuel that they must then again buy at great cost in order to drive in to the liquor store to buy some beer.*

The reality of oil and gas production is considerably different, and fluid that comes out of the well is not the ideal that the uninitiated imagines. So today’s topic will deal with the initial separation of a couple of the parts. This is a part of a series of tech talks that I write on Sundays about various aspects of fossil fuel production. It is a relatively simplistic explanation which seems to fit most folks needs, though it also has considerable help from those with more technical knowledge who add comments.

Aramco president: Oil demand will grow 40% by 2030

(MENAFN - Qatar News Agency) - Saudi Aramco president and CEO Khalid A. Al-Falih said during a recent visit to company markets in Asia "The developing economics of the world are at the heart of the International Energy Agency's forecast that world primary-energy demand will increase" "The forecast estimates demand will grow by 40 percent by 2030 - roughly 1.5 percent per year. And (the IEA forecast estimates that) oil will remain the single largest fuel in the energy mix," Saudi news agency quoted him Sunday.

The company's maximum sustainable production capacity is now at 12 million barrels per day - a figure that will ensure reliability of supply to meet this forecast increase in demand, he added. Even though oil and gas will be around for some time, the energy environment has changed and companies need to be prepared, Al-Falih said. As the world's energy demands increase and suppliers work to meet them, unconventional sources of oil, such as natural gas liquids, heavy oils and oils located in difficult environments, will need to be tapped, he said. "There is no shortage of oil potential but the complexity of bringing oil online increases significantly as we tap into more difficult conventional and nonconventional oil resources," he said. This - along with the fluctuating oil price - means that developing energy projects will take more time and more money.

The following is the first (long promised and awaited...;-) essay from writer/financial analyst Gregor Macdonald. Gregor is a long time reader of The Oil Drum, frequenter of ASPO conferences, and general zeitgeist monitor who lives and writes in Massachusetts. His website and newsletter are at www.gregor.us. The below "Project For A Revolution In Philadelphia", is an epistolary essay in which the author makes the case for an accelerated urban energy transition.