damfino,

First to your point "The operative word in the big yellow orb is "available", which is quite different from "operational".

True, but of course nothing except raw nature is operational unless humans make it so. Coal, oil and gas are "operational" because a century and a half of decisions, investment and mental and physical effort made them so. It may be noticed that nature does not seem to exist to provide us with the energy we need. We have to extract it ourselves. So it is true for all creatures. In this, oil and gas have little advantage compared to any other energy source except that they are relatively heavily concentrated stores of energy (which can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the structure built to deal with them) and they are portable IF the infrasture is built to make them so, which took decades of intellectual and financial development.

To your reference to the BP Statistical Review and the low amount of energy produced by the renewables, this is absolutely true. The world produces barely as much energy by way of renewables as a percent of all energy consumed as it did in the 1970's. It is not "physics" that dicates this, but simply an almost complete stoppage of development of the renewables for almost three decades. The lack of renewables in energy production is simply a lack of will.

To your more interesting point, "Every alternative incarnation hastens the depletion of energy by the very nature of the pursuit. A photovoltaic device is but oil in another form."

First I am assuming you meant "Every alternative incarnation hastens the depletion of energy" was actually intended to mean "hastens the depletion of oil" or perhaps fossil fuel, because to call a photovoltaic device "but oil in another form" is almost certainly a bit of an overreach. It may involve some oil in it's construction, and or some natural gas, and or some nuclear, hydroelectric or coal. Of course the nuclear, hydroelectric or coal may have some oil in it's extraction/construction, and the food eaten by the workers that built the hydro or the nuclear plant may have some been produced by using some oil and on and on...this is the way in which EROEI is used against the alternatives to the point of infinite regression.

So based on this logic, would we say that no energy producing devices such as solar panels, windmills, or Concentrating Mirror Solar stations should be built, because they do indeed consume some resources?

If that is true, should we not forbid the construction of energy consuming devices such as autos, TV sets, home computers, cell phones, motorcycles, speedboats, washing machines, clothes dryers, on and on and on before we stop the production of energy producing devices such as solar panels, concentrating mirror solar stations and windmills? Do you honestly see that happening in the world? It would mean suicide for whole nations such as Japan, the U.S. and European nations to do so, and do we assume that the newly arrived developing nations would do likewise?

You say,
"My children, and especially my grandchildren, deserve some measured constraint." Is it "measured constraint" to cease the development of energy returning devices while continuing to build energy consuming devices? Because I assure you, even if the U.S. decided to assinate it's economy by taking the ascetic road to building nothing, many other nations would not.

You say,
"We have to embrace the only true long-term solution: power down, get small, go slow, simplify,...just get by. In time, it will be forced upon us anyway."

I think that we should reduce waste to the absolute minimum, yes. I beliew that we can afford in many cases to "go smaller". It used to be called "appropriate scale". Simple where possible is good. But there is a limit to how little we can use before we cease to exist as a culture. There is a reason far exceeding convenience that interstate highways were built, that a national electric grid was built, that a national phone system and internet was built.

Alvin Toffler once pointed out that speed of communication, travel and change are important deciders in the survival of a culture. Go too fast, and the culture flies apart. Go too slow, and it declines into oblivion, unable to retain cohesiveness, soon to be overrun by powers that continue to develop technically, culturally and intellectually. Those cultures that choose to "just get by" do not. They die.

To return to your point about the energy used to construct the renewables, I often ask people a challenging question: Do you believe that the first oil well was built using oil? Do you believe that the first natural gas well was built using natural gas? Do you believe that the first nuclear power plant was built using nuclear power? Does that make sense? Then why would such a standard be placed on the renewables? It is totally non-sensical.

I had on my other now failed computer a photo that was so charming to me, I kept it on my desktop to look at every now and then: It was a photo of an oil hauling ship, from the earliest days of the oil industry. It was not a tanker, in that the oil was still hauled in barrels, loaded by hand from wagons drawn by horses.

The ship was powered by sail.

RC