An overview of this site from various angles, mashed into one handy dandy page for your reading pleasure.

• Introduction: Mission statement! Philosophy! And more!
• Advertise: Yes, it’s true–you can reach the energy geeks of the world. Cheap!
• Spread the word: You can do a lot to help this site continue to grow and improve, and
  without spending a cent.

• About + contact Lou: In which horrible, dark secrets are revealed. Or not.

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Introduction

There are countless ways you can approach building a web site devoted to energy and environmental issues. In one form or another I’ve tried or seriously considered most of them, I think. As a result, my opinions of what this site can and should attempt to do, how it should do it, and how I can best apply my resources to those goals and methods have evolved constantly over the last couple of years. This section will describe my current position on these issues, and hopefully give you a better understanding of my intent with things you read on this site.

Mission statement

The purpose of this site and project is to help people educate themselves about energy and environmental issues so they can then make better informed decisions, primarily about consumption, that will benefit themselves and everyone else.

Philosophy

Any project of appreciable size or complexity grows from the creator’s philosophical foundation, even if the creator doesn’t realize it. As a short-cut way of helping you understand where I’m coming from, let me boil down my philosophy into a few bullet points:

• We have an obligation to future generations to leave them a world worth living in. Yes, it really is "all about the kids," the oldest, and truest, cliche in environmental circles. For me, that’s virtually all that matters. If the human race had gone sterile and those of use walking around today would be the last human beings ever to live, I wouldn’t care what we did to the planet. A high percentage of the damage we’ll do has been locked in already in the form of greenhouse gases we’ve already emitted into the atmosphere, and in the lifetime of the last, dwindling generation there’s very little we could do to make a significant difference. The entire biosphere would heal nicely long after we and our polluting ways were gone. Under those conditions, instead of working on this site I’d be shopping for a speedboat so my wife and I could have fun zipping around on the nearby lake.
• People really do want to do the right things. Yes, I know, you can find endless examples in the daily news of human beings showing the intelligence and compassion of a sack of rocks. I see and hear those reports, too, and I find them just as depressing as you do. But I also believe that these people are the statistical outliers, the people way out in one end of the probability curve who are in no way representative of the large majority of us that consists of reality based individuals who will accept and respond positively to objective evidence. People in this "rational majority" have various reasons for their responses, from the most self-centered to the most altruistic, but in time they will respond, and often in the same general way regardless of their underlying agendas.
• It’s nearly impossible to overestimate the good that people working together, even in a very loosely organized way, can accomplish. I’m an armchair historian, so I don’t need to be reminded of the horrors of group action that one can find strewn throughout human history. But look at the news coverage of any natural disaster and you’ll find reports of stunning acts of heroism and selflessness that most of us think we, and people in general, simply aren’t capable of–until we’re in that situation and we somehow, instantly rise to the occasion. None of us should underestimate for even a moment the ability of human beings to mount an extraordinary response to an extraordinary challenge. This is the primary reason why I so militantly disagree with the Apocalypticons/doomers in the peak oil community; their lack of appreciation for how the world and humanity works is simply breathtaking.

Assessment of our situation

Where do I think we are today? In short:

• Peak oil is real and imminent. I agree with the assessments of Chris Skrebowski’s Megafields Project and the ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas) that the worldwide peak of oil production will happen in mid-2011. This production includes both conventional oil (i.e. the "easy, cheap oil") as well as non-conventional oil (which includes heavy, sour crude (which is more expensive to refine), oil sands, liquid fuel made from coal, and oil extracted from ultra deep water and Arctic locations).

  As the higher cost of oil triggers conservation and the adoption of alternatives, and improving oil extraction technologies find ways to eke a little more oil out of existing wells, we will very likely see oil production remain relatively flat, the so-called "undulating plateau", instead of hitting a peak and beginning an immediate decline. Some people think we’re already on that plateau and therefore at peak oil, given that oil production has been flat since the middle of 2005, but I think it’s soon to make that call.

• Peak natural gas isn’t as close as peak oil, but it’s not far enough behind it to be of any comfort. Of particular interest is the natural gas situation in the US, as North American production peaked in 2001. This means the US will have to import an increasingly large share of its natural gas from overseas (primarily the Middle East and Russia), and that, in turn, will require many more offshore LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminals to be built in the US beyond the handful currently in operation, often over the objection of nearby communities.
• Global warming is real and is primarily caused by carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption. (Hence the oten used term AGW, meaning anthropogenic global warming.) I see no reason to doubt the IPCC reports, although as I write this there is mounting evidence that they could be significantly underestimating the impact of global warming, out of an abundance of scientific caution. At least as disturbing as AGW, and also caused by CO2 emissions, is ocean acidification. This could have disastrous consequences for marine life throughout the oceans.
• In the coming years there will be plenty of changes for everyone on every part of the political spectrum to hate. More use of nuclear power and coal (as in converting it to motor fuel) will upset the political left, while more government intervention in markets to hasten transition toward cleaner, greener technology will upset the political right.
• There will be endless debates about what the facts are, what they imply, and how we should respond individually and collectively to this compound challenge. Even the most dedicated energy and/or environmental geeks will be driven to apoplexy on occasion.
• We will see considerable social upheaval, including economic pain for many individuals, failed and struggling companies, and radical downsizing or elimination of some industries. For example, one industry that seems set for extremely hard times is passenger air travel, thanks to their complete reliance on fuel made from petroleum. There is considerable research underway to create jet fuel from coal, but the results are still far too preliminary to draw any conclusions about the feasibility, scalability, or economics of that approach.

  Not all of the economic change will be bad. While prices will be higher, people and organizations will have to do things differently, there will also be winners, such as those companies that make, install, and maintain alternative energy facilities including wind, solar, wave, tidal, and geothermal. Similarly, companies that make more efficient products, or products that reduce the energy consumption of other things we own or do (e.g. house insulation), will prosper.

  Nothing is certain except uncertainty. The age of cheap energy is quickly drawing to a close, and the age of responsible environmental stewardship is just beginning. Those two changes will literally rewrite the rules of how we live our lives and trigger a decades-long rebalancing of economies worldwide.

The Plan

So, given everything above, what’s next?

My approach with the editorial content of this site is as follows:

• Encourage readers to do their own research by providing links to source material and browbeating them into
  reading it.

• Encourage readers to take a big view of our situation. One of the easiest and most damaging mistakes one can make with energy and environmental issues is to focus too narrowly on a controversy or topic. You have to look at all the related topics–it’s not just a matter of energy, but energy plus environment plus economics plus public policy plus technology plus international relations plus who knows what else.

  Similarly, it’s ridiculously easy to become fixated on today and not look even a few years down the road. (Some would argue that’s how we created the peak oil and global warming messes in the first place.) Virtually every energy-related technology you can name is either a stepping stone to something better (e.g. starch ethanol is helping to build the infrastructure before we have the much superior technology of cellulosic ethanol production) or an intermediate step that will be discarded in time (compact fluorescent lighting that will give way to LED lighting).

  Yet another aspect of taking a broader view of the situation is rejecting the absurd notion that there’s a silver bullet solution that will solve all our energy and environmental woes. Forget it, there is no such thing and the chances that we’ll invent or discover one are negligible. The good news is that even if we don’t have a silver bullet we do have a whole pocket of silver BB’s, including conservation, alternative fuels, better public policy, and technology advancements.

• Debunk the Apocalypticons. You can find a lot of crazy people out there with Internet connections who will scare you spitless if you let them. Think I’m kidding? Anyone here remember Y2k? That was a real and serious problem, and it certainly wasn’t cheap or easy to fix. But the remediation effort, as it was called, worked. There were no blackouts, no failing banks, no "end of the world as we know it." Peak oil and global warming are fundamentally different phenomena, and they will require much longer, more diverse, more creative, and more expensive "fixes." But none of us should let the doomers influence us unduly this time around regarding peak oil and global warming as some of the same people did last time with Y2k.
• Debunk the POD People. The Peak Oil Deniers are just as dangerous, and just as wrong, as the Apocalypticons. These are the people telling us that there’s plenty of oil in the ground for decades to come, and that the whole notion of "peak oil" is just another fantasy from the doomsday crowd. The POD People are dangerous simply because when we buy into their arguments we’re delaying our own actions to make the transition away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable energy sources. We’ll have to make that transition eventually, and the longer we wait the more expensive, disruptive, and painful it will be.
• Be completely honest with readers. This is an immensely broad topic, and no one, including me, can be an expert in all parts of it. My degree is in economics, so I was trained to think in terms of the allocation of scarce resources (which is what economics is the study of, in case you were wondering). This means that I will often have to say that I simply don’t know what the right answer is to a really important question, such as what to do with the many thousands of tons of nuclear waste in the US. And I will certainly make some truly amazing, visible-from-orbit mistakes. When that happens, I’ll call attention to the error, fix it, and give the person who brought it to my attention credit.
• Wherever possible, have fun. Yes, this is a deadly serious topic. But we’re all on this roller coaster together, so we may as well have a few (nervous) laughs along the way.

Advertise on The Cost of Energy

If you’re interested in reaching an audience of people concerned about energy and environmental issues, consider advertising on this site. The Cost of Energy’s readers are active and opinionated (and I have the e-mail-induced battle scars to prove it) and most definitely passionate about peak oil, global warming, and sustainability. They care about the implications of these challenges for all levels of human activity from public policy down to individual consumption decisions.

See the links in the upper-left side of any page on this site for a link to advertising information.

Spread the word

I get a lot of e-mail which often includes questins about how people can help this web site and project. By far the easiest thing you can do is tell other people about it.

This is particularly relevant now, for two reasons:

• First, foremost, and most obviously, the more readers I have, the more people I can help to educate themselves and make decisions that benefit us all.
• Second, now that I’ve (finally) taken the leap into paid advertising for this site, more readers equals more advertising revenue equals more time I can spend on this site instead of other writing projects equals more and better free content for you and everyone else who reads this site.

(Just for the record, I also get a lot of e-mail from people sharing energy and environmental things they find online that they think I should write about. I’m always delighted to get those notes; e+e is such an immense topic and the Internet is such a perversely convoluted virtual space that I’ll gladly accept all the help I can get in finding The Good Stuff. So feel free to keep sending those e-mails, as well.)

About Lou

On the presentations I give to schools I describe myself as "economist by training, programmer, technical editor and writer, and woodworker by profession, and energy geek by genetic predisposition."

The economics training was in the form of a bachelor’s degree from King’s College, the software programming and designing work was during a nine-year stretch at IBM, and the technical editing and writing happened at various computer magazines, including Windows Magazine, Linux Magazine, and Dr. Dobb’s Journal, among others.

The energy geekitude came naturally, and has been an obsession ever since I was a kid watching cars sit in gas lines in 1973.

Contacting Lou

You can reach me at lougrinzo@gmail.com.

I welcome all e-mail about the site and energy and environmental issues, especially those that teach me something or point out an error I’ve made. But please understand that I’m not always as quick in replying as we’d both like, and sometimes e-mail does get lost in the virtual shuffle. If you don’t get a reply to something that you think deserved one, please feel free to resend it.

Photo of Lou

For those who simply must know what the bloggers they read look like, here I am:

And yes, in case you’re wondering, that is the jersey John Grant Jr. wore in the 2007 Mann Cup lacrosse championship series in Coquitlam, BC, Canada. Thanks for asking.