More Energy Stuff

In a recent Salon article, James Howard Kunstler (who I last mentioned here) slammed Amory Lovins and the idea of "hypercars", Lovins' idea of radically more efficient cars based on light-weight carbon fiber bodies combined with fuel cells to deliver radically better cars, that would incidentally be extremely environmentally friendly.

Well, Lovins didn't like that so much, and they get in to a bit of a catfight here. (It's a Salon piece, so you have to click through the ad to read it.) Lovins and Kunstler seem to talk past each other a bit - but that's standard to my eyes.

For my part, I've been a longtime fan of the Lovinses, but I'm growing increasingly skeptical about the possibilities of us actually meeting the rather high goals they set. Especially troubling is that Vaclav Smil, a Manitoba academic whose research on energy and food issues is top-rate, thinks that Natural Capitalism (the best of Lovins' books) is crap. You can read Smil's none-too complementary review here (warning - PDF file.) I've read a lot of Smil's stuff in school, and he's not the usual green-basher. In any case, he raises a number of problems with the standard green utopia, and he's hard to dismiss.

Meanwhile, with the Globe and Mail running a weeklong series on Peak Oil, I'm more convinced then ever that we need to think of new energy solutions. Sadly, the Globe's position seems to be that we need more oil, which is problematic if oil is running out. I'm still not sure that I buy Kunstler's doomsday scenario, but I'm less optimistic then I have been.