Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.
There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…
Continue ReadingW. S. Jevons in his early day recognized a central problem of windpower for powering machinery–intermittency. The wind does not always blow, and it cannot be known when this will occur, making an even flow of power (as from conventional sources) impossible short of cost-prohibitive battery backup.
What about the other renewables of the day: water power, biomass, and geothermal?…
Continue ReadingThe blogosphere has been much abuzz about the implications of the finding reported last week in Nature magazine that Antarctica, on average, has warmed over the past 50 years.
An author of the report explained to the Associated Press that their findings were especially significant because “contrarians” had latched onto the idea that Antarctica has been cooling, and thus “bucking the trend [of global warming].” The “contrarians” meanwhile, caught somewhat off-guard, mounted a seemingly confused defense focused on attacking the methodology employed to reach such a conclusion rather than the actual contention itself.…
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