Fungible

Repeat after me; "All energy is fungible." Is there any discussion on this point? Every joule that comes from nuclear or solar or gains in efficiency or deep sea hydrates or room temperature superconduction or regenerative interial recovery is a joule less of whatever is the most expensive energy alternative. When we stop using oil and natgas for super inefficient electric point source generation those geopetrol commodities are freed up to provide transportation fuels. Sempra Energy has a standby natgas powered peak load generator about 30km from my home. It only comes on line durring peak demand periods which in Southern California are also the brightest sunny summer days when my 50m^2 rooftop cells would be most useful. That's why I commented that it would be in the local electric companies' best interests to subsidize my solar array. Like I said, fungible. See Dilbert:
http://tinyurl.com/b7vug

I think people miss the point of my tedious repetions of the timeworn examples of Maltus, Erlich, Club of Rome Hubbert, et al. Point being; THEY'VE ALWAYS BEEN WRONG. And every time it was because of events/circumstances they never envisioned. Given 3 centuries of uniformly unbroken failure of the limits crowd it is a suckers bet to think they finally got this one right. My personal bets for their "I never thought of that" excuses are RTSC, amorphous solar, monopoles and Fullerenes. Physics has no limits. I met Buckminster Fuller once, second or third smartest man I've ever met. They just don't operate on the same plane as we mere mortals. I've no doubt that were he around to comment on global warming he'd recommend patience.

Platinum or Palladium? I expect if we run short we'll whip up a few geneticaly modified blue-green algae to extract what we need from seawater. Problem is I don't think we have enough expertise to target valuable materials and there will most likely also be collected tons of junk metals like Gold and Wolfram.