The Oil Drum

Over at PO-NYC, peakguy (along with commenter apsmith) has posted about John Darnell's speech from the Petrocollapse conference.

I'm going to hold off on David Pimentel for now, since my notes turned out to be more incomprehensible than I'd thought. In the meantime, this Cornell publication is a decent summary of some of the points he made in this talk about the (non-)practicality of ethanol.

Dr. John Darnell PhD., Roscoe Bartlett's energy advisor, gave a 35 minute presentation on adaptation lessons from the Apollo 13 mission that we could apply to the problem of peak oil. Overall he struck me as being the most optimistic person that spoke at the conference and that's not saying much since in any other room, he would be considered an alarmist. His style was low-key and less dramatic than Kunstler, but no less effective at conveying the magnitude of the problem and the need to take immediate action to reduce demand.

His proposal is to reduce demand is a controlled annual 5% reduction (worldwide I assume) ahead of the geological decline rate to provide a hydrocarbon cushion for the future to help transition to a low energy economy and give time for alternatives to ramp up. He gave several examples of an energy self sufficient house, a 300 mpg car and other ways of reducing energy consumption.

More about the Apollo analogy and what he told us about Roscoe's meeting with President Bush below the fold.