Preface to “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”.

You can find the book here.

Fellow shareholders in the future of the planet Earth, I am not going to sugarcoat it.  We have trouble ahead.  In this book, we are going to be looking at the outlook for substitute, alternative energy resources come the day that fossil fuels decline. This is not going to be a quarterly report where we look ahead three months. Rather, we are going to be peering through the proper end of the telescope, focusing on the viability of energy alternatives for the years ahead, for the next generations.

Humanity has made inconceivable progress in the past 500 years. Books once were created one at a time by hand. The printing press opened a door to a revolution of knowledge. Cement and steel created the foundations of modern civilization. Wooden ships have been replaced by container ships that cross the oceans bringing fish from Chile, wines from France, automobiles from Japan, and everything from China. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad crossed America, and 100 years later, the first human stepped foot on the moon.

Imagination and invention are the sparks that illumined this path. We humans can pat ourselves on the back for that. Ah, didn’t that feel good!  Yet all the while, our progress was fueled and enabled by something not of our own making, fossil fuels.  From the Industrial Revolution, fired by coal, to today’s global technology society, fossil fuels have been the indispensable element.  Economies are about work, and one barrel of oil does the work a strong human can do in four and a half years.

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