Energy Literacy Advocates Newsroom

For those confused about the scientific facts behind climate change this article offers a good primer. It also touches on possible solutions...

________________________________________________________
The CO2 from fossil fuels lingers in the atmosphere, so global warming can't be undone. But catastrophe can still be averted.
By Bill McKibben
National Geographic Magazine, October 2007
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/carbon-crisis/carbon-crisis.html


Here's how it works. Before the industrial revolution, the Earth's atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That was a good amount–"good" defined as "what we were used to." Since the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat near the planet's surface that would otherwise radiate back out to space, civilization grew up in a world whose thermostat was set by that number. It equated to a global average temperature of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit (about 14 degrees Celsius), which in turn equated to all the places we built our cities, all the crops we learned to grow and eat, all the water supplies we learned to depend on, even the passage of the seasons that, at higher latitudes, set our psychological calendars.

Once we started burning coal and gas and oil to power our lives, that 280 number started to rise. When we began measuring in the late 1950s, it had already reached the 315 level. Now it's at 380, and increasing by roughly two parts per million annually. That doesn't sound like very much, but it turns out that the extra heat that CO2 traps, a couple of watts per square meter of the Earth's surface, is enough to warm the planet considerably. We've raised the temperature more than a degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degrees Celsius) already. It's impossible to precisely predict the consequences of any further increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. But the warming we've seen so far has started almost everything frozen on Earth to melting; it has changed seasons and rainfall patterns; it's set the sea to rising.

No matter what we do now, that warming will increase some–there's a lag time before the heat fully plays out in the atmosphere. That is, we can't stop global warming. Our task is less inspiring: to contain the damage, to keep things from getting out of control. And even that is not easy. For one thing, until recently there's been no clear data suggesting the point where catastrophe looms. Now we're getting a better picture–the past couple of years have seen a series of reports indicating that 450 parts per million CO2 is a threshold we'd be wise to respect. Beyond that point, scientists believe future centuries will likely face the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and a subsequent rise in sea level of giant proportion. Four hundred fifty parts per million is still a best guess (and it doesn't include the witches' brew of other, lesser, greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide). But it will serve as a target of sorts for the world to aim at. A target that's moving, fast. If concentrations keep increasing by two parts per million per year, we're only three and a half decades away.




So the math isn't complicated–but that doesn't mean it isn't intimidating. So far only the Europeans and Japanese have even begun to trim their carbon emissions, and they may not meet their own modest targets. Meanwhile, U.S. carbon emissions, a quarter of the world's total, continue to rise steadily–earlier this year we told the United Nations we'd be producing 20 percent more carbon in 2020 than we had in 2000. China and India are suddenly starting to produce huge quantities of CO2 as well. On a per capita basis (which is really the only sensible way to think about the morality of the situation), they aren't anywhere close to American figures, but their populations are so huge, and their economic growth so rapid, that they make the prospect of a worldwide decline in emissions seem much more daunting. The Chinese are currently building a coal-fired power plant every week or so. That's a lot of carbon.

Everyone involved knows what the basic outlines of a deal that could avert catastrophe would look like: rapid, sustained, and dramatic cuts in emissions by the technologically advanced countries, coupled with large-scale technology transfer to China, India, and the rest of the developing world so that they can power up their emerging economies without burning up their coal. Everyone knows the big questions, too: Are such rapid cuts even possible? Do we have the political will to make them and to extend them overseas?

The first question–is it even possible?–is usually addressed by fixating on some single new technology (hydrogen! ethanol!) and imagining it will solve our troubles. But the scale of the problem means we'll need many strategies. Three years ago a Princeton team made one of the best assessments of the possibilities. Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow published a paper in Science detailing 15 stabilization wedges"–changes big enough to really matter, and for which the technology was already available or clearly on the horizon. Most people have heard of some of them: more fuel-efficient cars, better-built homes, wind turbines, biofuels like ethanol. Others are newer and less sure: plans for building coal-fired power plants that can separate carbon from the exhaust so it can be "sequestered" underground. (See Illustration "How to Cut Emissions.")

These approaches have one thing in common: They're more difficult than simply burning fossil fuel. They force us to realize that we've already had our magic fuel and that what comes next will be more expensive and more difficult. The price tag for the global transition will be in the trillions of dollars. Of course, along the way it will create myriad new jobs, and when it's complete, it may be a much more elegant system. (Once you've built the windmill, the wind is free; you don't need to guard it against terrorists or build a massive army to control the countries from which it blows.) And since we're wasting so much energy now, some of the first tasks would be relatively easy. If we replaced every incandescent bulb that burned out in the next decade anyplace in the world with a compact fluorescent, we'd make an impressive start on one of the 15 wedges. But in that same decade we'd need to build 400,000 large wind turbines–clearly possible, but only with real commitment. We'd need to follow the lead of Germany and Japan and seriously subsidize rooftop solar panels; we'd need to get most of the world's farmers plowing their fields less, to build back the carbon their soils have lost. We'd need to do everything all at once.

As precedents for such collective effort, people sometimes point to the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon or the Apollo Program to put a man on the moon. But those analogies don't really work. They demanded the intense concentration of money and intelligence on a single small niche in our technosphere. Now we need almost the opposite: a commitment to take what we already know how to do and somehow spread it into every corner of our economies, and indeed our most basic activities. It's as if NASA's goal had been to put all of us on the moon.

Not all the answers are technological, of course–maybe not even most of them. Many of the paths to stabilization run straight through our daily lives, and in every case they will demand difficult changes. Air travel is one of the fastest growing sources of carbon emissions around the world, for instance, but even many of us who are noble about changing lightbulbs and happy to drive hybrid cars chafe at the thought of not jetting around the country or the world. By now we're used to ordering take-out food from every corner of the world every night of our lives–according to one study, the average bite of food has traveled nearly 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) before it reaches an American's lips, which means it's been marinated in (crude) oil. We drive alone, because it's more convenient than adjusting our schedules for public transit. We build ever bigger homes even as our family sizes shrink, and we watch ever bigger TVs, and–well, enough said. We need to figure out how to change those habits.

Probably the only way that will happen is if fossil fuel costs us considerably more. All the schemes to cut carbon emissions–the so-called cap-and-trade systems, for instance, that would let businesses bid for permission to emit–are ways to make coal and gas and oil progressively more expensive, and thus to change the direction in which economic gravity pulls when it applies to energy. If what we paid for a gallon of gas reflected even a portion of its huge environmental cost, we'd be driving small cars to the train station, just like the Europeans. And we'd be riding bikes when the sun shone.

The most straightforward way to raise the price would be a tax on carbon. But that's not easy. Since everyone needs to use fuel, it would be regressive–you'd have to figure out how to keep from hurting poor people unduly. And we'd need to be grown-up enough to have a real conversation about taxes–say, about switching away from taxes on things we like (employment) to taxes on things we hate (global warming). That may be too much to ask for–but if it is, then what chance is there we'll be able to take on the even more difficult task of persuading the Chinese, the Indians, and all who are lined up behind them to forgo a coal-powered future in favor of something more manageable? We know it's possible–earlier this year a UN panel estimated that the total cost for the energy transition, once all the pluses and minuses were netted out, would be just over 0.1 percent of the world's economy each year for the next quarter century. A small price to pay.

In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of life? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively–and with a maturity we've rarely shown as a society or a species. It's our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.

Labels: environment, oil supply/demand

A very well put article explaining the urgency of our current energy situation...


The Energy Emergency
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Posted 9/2/07
U.S. News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/070902/10edit.htm)

Oil is America's Achilles heel. WE are addicted to it. Every American consumer burns about double what a European consumes—26 barrels a year for us, 12 for Europeans. We have 5 percent of the world's population and consume 25 percent of the world's oil, and we have only 3 percent of the world's reserves. If you think there is a gas crunch now, marked by the largest oil price spike in a generation, it will be a bagatelle when China and India bring a couple of billion more people on to their highways: They are replicating our love affair with the automobile. Expect them within a generation to buy 80 million cars.

We are in a new world order. The balance of power has shifted between the fuel-guzzling West and the oil-rich producing countries. They have increasing leverage over us, with political, economic, and military consequences. We are literally over a barrel.

Here's how the chips fall. After World War II, the oil world was dominated by the "Seven Sisters," the name given to the oil companies controlling Middle East oil. These have shrunk to four: Chevron, British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. They have been pushed aside by seven state-owned national companies, Seven Brothers, if you like: Saudi Arabia's Aramco, Russia's Gazprom, CNPC of China, NIOC of Iran, Venezuela's PDVSA, Brazil's Petrobras, and Petronas of Malaysia. The Seven Brothers control almost a third of the world's oil and gas production and more than a third of its total oil and gas reserves. By contrast, the survivors of the Seven Sisters control only about 10 percent of output and hold just 3 percent of the reserves. The Brothers are the rule makers, the international oil companies the rule takers. It is not going to change. In the next 40 years, 90 percent of new supplies, according to the International Energy Agency, will come from developing countries. Thirty years ago, 40 percent came from the industrialized nations.

Massive consequences. Nor is oil discovery keeping pace with demand. In 1930, we found 10 billion new barrels of oil and used 1.5 billion; in 1964, we discovered 48 billion barrels and consumed approximately 12 billion; in 1988, we found 23 billion barrels and used 23 billion barrels; in 2005, we found 5 billion to 6 billion barrels and consumed 30 billion barrels. With countries like China and India now in the mix, worldwide demand is growing by an average of 2 million to 3 million barrels a day every year. The world has to discover a new Saudi Arabia-size oil supplier every five years to meet this demand. But it's just not going to happen. These overwhelming numbers could produce oil prices above $100 a barrel in short order, which will ultimately have massive consequences for the world's economy and the way we live our lives. They might well cause a global recession.

How will we in the West cope when by 2030 the IEA nations will have to import 85 percent of their oil (it's 63 percent today)? None of the oil companies are investing enough. Big Oil in the West is allocating as much as 60 percent of profits to dividends and stock buybacks and reinvesting only about a third in the oil business. And the Seven Brothers are keeping an ever tighter leash on both production and investment.

They have the money, all right. Revenues have roughly doubled in the past four years. But their governments see high prices for us as meaning more income for them, while they see investment in new capacity as risking the kind of sharp price decline that occurred in the 1990s. So the national energy firms are obliged to dedicate a big chunk of their profits to support national treasuries and various political constituencies.

Mexico has treated its oil company as a national bank vault; Hugo Chavez of Venezuela spends two thirds (that's now about $7 billion) of PDVSA's budget on populist social programs; Gazprom spends the majority of its money on nonenergy activities such as banks and media companies. Even worse, because these national companies have become a source of political patronage, they are short of skilled workers and experienced managers. National pride inhibits them from relying on the technological skills of the western companies, so they don't have the professionals needed to grow their production (with the exception of Saudi Aramco and, to some extent, Petrobras). We can no longer count on the Middle East to act as the world's energy shock absorber, raising output to meet a shortage.

So much for supply. Simultaneously, the oil-producing countries are consuming more of their own production. While China's energy appetite has grabbed the headlines, by the end of this decade alone, domestic consumption will reduce the oil exports of the producers by as much as 2.5 million barrels a day. And they are guzzlers. How could they not be when gasoline prices in places like Venezuela, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East are as little as a tenth of U.S. domestic prices, averaging between 20 and 80 cents a gallon?

The net effect of all this is that the world is going to be even more energy dependent on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia. Keeping oil safe for the West once meant safeguarding supply lines from the Middle East. Now we have to build alliances and deploy ships and troops to protect other supply routes outside the Middle East, going as far as the Caspian Sea, the Andean region of South America, and West Africa.

There are other political complications inhibiting new supplies. In many countries, environmental issues have become absolutist. They conflict with the capacity to tap additional energy resources in Alaska, not to speak of the continental shelf in the waters off the lower 48 states, which, according to a recent study by the National Petroleum Council, contains enough oil to provide gasoline for 116 million cars for 47 years. Some trade-off is going to have to be considered, and this will roil the political scene forever.

As for conservation, it is not enough for the West to improve its own energy policies. Countries such as India and China must also do so. We don't know how fast these countries can and will reduce the energy intensity of their own rapid economic growth. How are we going to maintain our efforts to fight global warming by curtailing carbon dioxide when consumers in developing countries thirsting for oil will want to resort to abundant national sources of coal? They will argue that they are entitled to a phase of cheap (that is, coal) energy-intensive economic development. Is it fair, they argue, to penalize them for coming late to the development party when rich countries, during their period of rapid growth, were allowed to use as much energy as they wished with no restrictions?

Political purposes. Then there are the implications of state-owned companies in countries like Russia and Venezuela that are not just responding to market forces but are using their pricing and power for political purposes. The income generated by oil exports has supported their authoritarian regimes, which means that political reform and liberalization may suffer as the oil wealth is used by leaders in producer states to buy off their opposition. The oil revenues have clearly helped Vladimir Putin in Russia, Chavez in Venezuela, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Indeed, they deliberately seek control of the energy sectors to make sure that they themselves are the source of opportunity and wealth for their people. So how is our policy of promoting democracy going to work when this oil wealth tends to empower authoritarian elites?

The big winners will be countries like Russia and the Middle East oil producers, including Iran. The big losers will be the poorer countries. The wealthier countries can absorb higher prices because of the continuing declines in the energy intensity of their growth. But poorer countries will be disadvantaged even more. Look at a poor country like Pakistan, which doesn't have oil and may lose as much as 10 percent of its gross domestic product over the next 25 years to higher oil prices. Pakistan's economy doesn't work well even today, and its demographic curve shows a continuing rise in population.

In America, the energy crunch will intensify a lot of old political issues and bring in some new ones. We have witnessed the bipartisan failure to institute a vigorous program of conservation. We have not even been able to enact an adequate, graduated program of targets for automobile and truck gas mileage. Despite their public advocacy and political promises, the Democrats in Congress have failed to take steps to deal with these issues. In fact, we live in a political culture where neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wish to ask Americans to make sacrifices, including taxes to reduce our consumption of gasoline. Just think: If our cars had the same energy efficiencies as Europe's today, we could save 4 million barrels a day-the equivalent of Iran's total production.

This whole question of energy should be a central issue in the presidential campaign. But which of the candidates has the nerve and ingenuity to devise a way of meeting environmental concerns while seeking reliable domestic production of energy at home? We certainly cannot assume that alternative energy sources will have a major impact on an acceptable cost basis. We can build as many wind farms as we like, or as many ethanol plants, but it is not going to be possible to make much of a dent at an acceptable cost, because of the enormous volume of our daily imports of oil.

We are facing a world of higher prices and increasingly tighter supplies, creating a growing gap between worldwide demand and worldwide production, at a time when non-OPEC energy production is peaking within a few years. Eventually, this will make us even more dependent on OPEC?with all of what that means. We also can't seem to develop an appropriate energy policy that by definition will take years to implement, so that delays are only postponing the higher costs to the next generation.

It is we who are placing our own country over a barrel now.

Labels: National Security

Although a bit harsh on a few industries, the following is an excellent article framing the lack of energy literacy in America.



Energy Literacy - What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
By Erik Curren
The Augusta Free Press

Monday 26 June 2006

It seems that everybody's got an opinion these days about how to fight high gas prices. Punish price gougers. Tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Drill in protected areas in Alaska or off the Atlantic coast.

And then there's the chain e-mail urging a consumer boycott of one brand of gas station at a time until each company cries "uncle" and agrees to lower its price to, say, $1.59 a gallon.

Normally, Americans don't give energy a second thought - and it shows. We'd much rather argue about such nonissues as flag burning, gay marriage and when it's finally time to ban the Spanish language.

But when the price of gas, electricity or heating oil goes up, then we can hardly talk about anything else besides energy. And of course, we all think we're experts. But, boy, are we wrong.

The sad truth is that Americans know much less about energy than we think, according to a study released last September by the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation in Washington, DC:

Just 12 percent of Americans can pass a basic quiz on awareness of energy topics.


130 million Americans believe that hydropower is America's top energy source, though it accounts for just 10 percent of the total.


Most Americans agree with the myth that "America uses pollution-free energy," when in fact energy use is our biggest single source of global warming gases and other pollutants.
To compound the problem, "three Americans in four rated themselves as having 'a lot' or 'a fair amount' of knowledge about energy," says Kevin Coyle, former president of the NEETF and the study's author, "even though just 12 percent passed our quiz. This gap between real and imagined knowledge could stand in the way of Americans realizing a more energy efficient future."

With gas prices rising and peak oil here at the same time that we start to feel global warming's first effects, it will be crucial to the world's future that Americans, who use the most energy and create the most pollution, make smart decisions about energy.

But to do that, we need to begin by realizing how little we know and how much we have to learn. "Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge," said Alfred North Whitehead.

We should start to learn about energy. And we should take it seriously - as seriously as we take learning about how to manage our money.

What Is Energy Literacy?

We already know that we need a basic level of financial literacy to balance our checkbooks, to use credit cards wisely, to invest for our kids' college funds and our own retirement and to avoid financial scams. We also need to form intelligent opinions on taxes, government spending and monetary policy.

In tough economic times, money knowledge is more important than ever, as we have seen in the depressions and recessions of the past.

Today, we may not be facing our toughest economic times. But we may soon see the toughest energy times we've ever known.

With levels of greenhouse gases higher than they've been in a million years, we have little time for business as usual if we want to avert dangerous global warming. At the same time, petroleum geologists say the peak of world oil production is immanent. From now on, fossil fuels will likely enter a period of volatility and price spikes, which means lack of supply will force us to change our ways, global warming or not.

Thus, today it's more important than ever we should develop basic energy literacy. It's the only way each of us can make smart decisions about our own energy use - decisions such as SUV or hybrid, big house or small one, gas or electric heat.

We must also be energy-literate to contribute in a positive way to the national and international dialogue on solutions to global warming and peak oil. Should we squeeze Iraq for more oil or try to save gas at home? Should we build more nuclear plants or subsidize clean coal? Should we regulate emission of global-warming gasses?

We've heard a lot about developing new energy sources - wind, solar, biomass to increase supply. But the fastest and cheapest way to solve our energy crunch (and slow global warming) is to reduce our demand for energy. Why haven't we heard more about conservation and energy-efficiency?

If we know more about energy, we can ask these questions, and we can understand the answers.

What is energy literacy? It's knowing the basics about where our energy comes from, how much it costs, how much we use, and what are its impacts on the environment and people at every stage, from production to distribution to end use.

Learning about energy doesn't need to be one more chore in our busy lives. In fact, it can help us make more sense of today's complex world.

"Here we're in an age of data overload, so if you learn about energy, you're addressing three concerns at once, national security, the economy and the environment," says Harvey Sachs of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy based in Washington, D.C.

To further the cause of energy literacy in a modest way, I've put together a list below.

Five Big Things Americans Should Know About Energy

1. There's no civilization without energy.

"No economic activity today can take place without the consumption of some energy," says John Tobin, executive director of the Energy Literacy Project based in Evergreen, Colo. "We need energy to heat homes, drive to work, electrify offices - to simply live."

But most people don't realize the importance of energy until something goes wrong. "One of the scariest examples of how people rely on energy came in pictures from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean from a few years ago. We saw people lined up for hours to get fuel oil just to boil water so they could drink it and cook their food. It shows how energy is essential to people."

Americans might remember the gas lines of the seventies.

Energy is so important that wars have been won and lost by access to energy sources. An ample supply of coal to feed its armament industry helped the Union win the Civil War. Coal also helped Imperial Germany build a fleet to challenge Great Britain and start World War I, while switching its own navy from coal to oil helped Britain prevail in that conflict. In World War II a lack of oil stopped Rommel's tanks in North Africa and docked much of the Japanese fleet in the Pacific.

Today, most international tension revolves around access to oil, whether in Iraq and Iran, in Nigeria and throughout Africa, around the Caspian Sea or in the South China Sea.

2. There's no 28th Amendment.

Because energy is so crucial to our lives, Americans have developed an expectation that all forms of energy will always be cheap and plentiful. "The American public is accustomed to having abundant energy available at all times," Tobin says. "They expect to fuel their vehicles with gasoline, heat their homes with natural gas and have electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."

Tobin says that the public often seems to act as if there were an extra amendment to the US Constitution: "The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall be fueled by cheap and abundant energy."

But energy is no more a right today than it was in the past when our ancestors had to scrounge for firewood in the forest or pull their own plows. Just because we've enjoyed cheap energy for the last 50 years - the time of the Oil Age, which is fast running down - does not mean that it's guaranteed forever. Indeed, today we've reached a turning point.

Only if we are informed of the ways that energy is connected to the economy and to the environment can Americans make the difficult tradeoffs necessary to protect our way of life and the natural systems that sustain life on earth. "In Iraq and Afghanistan every day, the allies are burning 25 gallons of gasoline per soldier," Tobin says, as an example. "It's a price that citizens have to pay, and we should be aware of it."

3. There's no free lunch.

"People need to recognize that they're connected to the environment," says Diane Wood, Coyle's successor as president of the NEETF. "Everyday choices are connected to the natural environment. We should stop, pause, and learn more about it to make healthy choices for the environment."

Like Tobin, Wood thinks Americans need to go beyond myths about energy. "What surprises me is how much incorrect information people have and how strongly they hold to it. That often comes from a visual, like the Exxon Valdez, which makes people think that industry is the main source of pollution. In fact, more pollution comes from oil leaking out of millions of individual cars."

Americans are good at passing the buck for pollution and energy prices hikes to business, but this won't solve our problems. Instead, we should start to take matters into our own hands.

On a personal level, we should work to control our energy use and to know its consequences. Melanie Lord of the Energy Center of Wisconsin in Madison thinks that Americans should know such facts as how much electricity and gasoline we use, where those sources come from, their impacts on the environment and how to reduce the amounts we use.

Of course, we should certainly demand that industry and government do their part. Particularly, Congress should require automakers to produce cars and trucks that get better fuel economy. With global warming and $3 gas, there's no excuse for letting Detroit sell a Hummer that gets 12 MPG.

4. There's no silver bullet.

You'll hear this phrase from those who are skeptical of alternatives to replace our current use of fossil fuels. A main concern is energy quality - a measure of the amount of economic activity required to extract or produce energy - according to Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University.

"In history, major advances in civilization have occurred when societies have jumped from low-yield to high-yield energy sources," Cleveland says.

Thus, humans have moved from using the lowest yield sources - wood, water and wind - to progressively denser sources - coal and then oil and natural gas. Today's industrial society is built on cheap, abundant sources of high-quality energy. It would be a serious setback for us to transition back down to lower-quality energy sources, even if they are clean and renewable.

Gasoline is polluting, but from an economic perspective, it is a very high quality energy source. A gallon of gas provides as much energy as a human working full time for three weeks, according to David Pimentel, professor of agriculture and life sciences at Cornell University. More dispersed sources like solar, wind or biomass can't hope to match that kind of power in such a small package.

In addition, alternative energy has many problems of its own. Solar power and hydrogen fuels are decades away from viability, if they ever get there. Wind power may now be competitive on price with nuclear energy, but communities from Nantucket Sound to Appalachia have refused to welcome the industrial installations featuring dozens of 400-foot high wind turbines required to make wind profitable.

And many other alternative energy ideas sound like little more than science fiction, such as launching satellites with giant solar panels to beam electricity down to earth from outer space.

But the public can be easily taken in by fanciful schemes because we are not used to analyzing alt-energy sources critically. Just as we are quick to put the blame for all our energy problems on industry, so we are perhaps even quicker to ascribe to that same industry supernatural powers to solve those energy problems.

"Tap water," muses a woman in a recent cartoon by Roz Chast in The New Yorker offering "Free Ideas for Alternative Fuels." "Why can't cars run on tap water? What about steam engines? There must be a way."

5. Can't live with it, can't live without it.

"The only thing worse than running out of oil," says Charles Hall, professor of systems ecology at SUNY-Syracuse, "is not running out of oil." Oil is the lifeblood of industrial civilization, and 97 percent of all transportation relies on oil, with no viable substitute on the horizon. But burning oil and other fossil fuels creates more dangerous global-warming gasses than any other human activity.

Will peak oil save us from global warming? That is, will running out of cheap oil slow down the rate at which humans release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere? Probably not. Left to their own devices and without government regulation of carbon emissions, simple economics of supply and demand will encourage us to replace cheap oil with the easiest affordable energy source. In America's case, this is coal, of which the US is said to have a 250-year supply at current usage rates.

The industry is already working on ways to profitably liquefy coal to replace gasoline, diesel and even jet fuel. And that's bad news for the environment, since coal is much dirtier than oil, even burned using today's technology. And today's way of mining coal, through aggressive strip mining and mountaintop removal, is actually more destructive to the environment than the deep mining of the past.

As to tomorrow's technology of clean coal, so far it's nothing more than speculation from an industry with little history of doing anything safely or cleanly.

Become Energy Literate Now for a Better Future

"In the larger scheme of things, it's a matter of survival to learn about energy," says Kevin Coyle, who now serves as vice president of education with the National Wildlife Foundation in Reston. "In the immediate term, all of our lives will be better if we are aware of energy used, energy spent, global warming and a variety of other key issues."

Coyle says that as a nation we should get our energy priorities straight. First, we need to increase conservation and energy efficiency. Then, we should look for alternatives to fossil fuels. Finally, we should rely on fossil fuels, used as cleanly and sparingly as possible, and only when there are no practical substitutes.

"I think it's going to be a long, hard road," Coyle says. "If you look at the immediate past, there doesn't seen to be much room for optimism. But now there are increased opportunities for energy efficiency. We have labeling programs like Energy Star, green power and an awareness of global warming."

The Department of Energy says that just by using the "off the shelf" energy-efficient technologies available today such as Energy Star-rated appliances, we could cut the cost of heating, cooling and lighting our homes and workplaces by up to 80 percent.

Perhaps the hardest part of getting started is getting energy-literate. Don't worry if you didn't learn about energy in school. Most schools do a poor job of covering energy, according to the NEETF report, and Americans get most of their information about energy from the media.

Tobin of the Energy Literacy Project has called on the Secretary of Energy to take a leadership role in raising Americans' knowledge. His group wants Washington to convene a conference of representatives from industry, government, education and the nonprofit sector to formulate a national plan to coordinate the hundreds of existing education programs which, so far, have not led to any appreciable gain in Americans' energy literacy.

In the meantime, you can take the time to educate yourself about energy so that you can be part of the solution to leave a livable world to our children and grandchildren.