The Oil Drum

So today I dug out that green tie that marks the approach of St Paddy's Day and all that that entails.  St Patrick, lest you forget, is also the patron saint of engineers, and having now got past the 7th chapter of Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" maybe it's time for another rumination on the other problem that faces the US and Western Europe as we start to bounce along the plateau of peak oil.

If you are going to rely on technology to solve the problems of running short on various fuels, as they are currently produced, then you need certain folk (engineers, scientists and technologists), who understand the current ways of producing those fuels, to come up with that technology. It is likely that some of the new advances will come from "thinking outside the box", but generally you need to know what's inside the box first.  The problems that we have are several-fold, but let me hit just a couple, the current lack of students, and the growing shortage of faculty to teach them. (And while I write largely about the United States, much of this also applies to Western Europe.)