When I published the results on The Oil Drum of my New World Model, based on World3 (the “Limits to Growth” model) – see here, many of the questions and issues that people had were around EROEI. So I’m writing this article to clarify how the model uses EROEI and the results in some alternative scenarios where EROEI is changed in different ways.

Total energy production and industrial output in the New World Model.

Tall ships are the embodiment of the fascination we feel for the free and abundant energy of the wind. Already at the time of the sailing ships, it was recognized that it was important to catch the wind at the maximum possible height. So, the main mast of a tall ship could go up to 30 meters. Modern wind turbines reach heights of a hundred meters or more. But Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) can tap winds at heights up to thousands of meters. The present post is a more in depth examination of AWE after a previous post that I wrote on The Oil Drum and which generated a lot of comments and of reactions. (Image from the Imperial College Yacht Club.) .

How much of our freedom is related to 'cheap energy'? Last I checked, the average American uses over 60 barrel of oil equivalents of the 3 primary fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) per year. Depending on ones assumptions (and occupation), this is in the neighborhood of hundred(s) of years of manual human toil supplanted by cheap ancient sunlight. (At $20 per hour, a human laborer makes over $40,000 per year so even an energy subsidy of 100X p/a equates to $4 million in dollar terms.) Do our social freedoms emanate from the nature of our socio-political system, or the reverse - is our socio-political system a byproduct of the resources we acquired and used after finding this land? What is freedom, anyways? And what will freedom look like in the future? On this the birthday of the United States of America, let's discuss energy and freedom around the Campfire.

My next essay(s) will detail why our current crisis is manifesting in credit/finance, but has origins in and implications for energy, ecology and equity. I thought it would be helpful to first frame this situation from an academic perspective, by highlighting a recent Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences paper: "Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies", written by a group of colleagues (professors and students) at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. It is a long paper but covers issues worthy of discussion - most notably an academic framework for averting collapse - a tall task. What say you? (Note: some of the authors may be reading/responding to comments, but it's finals week.)