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Don't fall for the shale boom hype

By James Stafford - posted Friday, 28 December 2012


The batteries that we can manufacture at scale have not advanced much since Volta first invented them in the 18th century. So we need batteries, we need storage, we need to start building zero-footprint buildings. All of these things can be done, but we really are not yet doing them on a serious basis.

Saving energy is something that really gets overlooked, but it's where the biggest savings always happen to be. If I could wave a magic policy wand, I would take just one month from the Federal Reserve and I would dedicate it to a national prize to whoever can solve making batteries at scale from common materials and at a much higher energy density. The tasty prize would be $40,000,000,000, which may sound like a lot but is roughly two weeks of money printing by the Fed.

James Stafford: What role do you see renewable energy playing in the future? And do you think governments should help innovation in this area?

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Chris Martenson: Governments right now are providing more than half a trillion dollars in subsidies for oil and gas, so they're already in the business of shaping the alternative market, mainly by making their competitor's products much cheaper. So is there a role for government to play in helping to boost alternatives at this point? The answer has to be yes, because there really isn't a lot of time left on the clock. Left to its own devices, the market would deliver us an alternative energy future, but history suggests that energy transitions take a minimum of 40 years, sometimes 60 years, and we don't have that kind of time.

When we're truly threatened, such as when a nation has to go to war, we'd never think of leaving that up to the markets. When you're in a predicament and coordination is necessary--to be effective requires a collective response, not 300,000,000 individual responses.

I see the challenges to us at this date, such as declining net energy and debt markets, tuned for an energy reality that does not currently exist, being so profound that we're going to need a response along the lines of World War II times an Apollo project plus the Manhattan project. In other words, a response more complete, complex, and challenging than anything we've ever faced. So on that basis, absolutely I think we need a collective response because we are quite rapidly running out of time. In other words, a government response.

James Stafford: And what can cause this to happen? As you say, there's no political will to make these changes at present.

Chris Martenson: We need a different narrative. Right now, the narrative we're running is simply this: "We need our economy to grow." That's the first, second, third, and last piece of discussion that we ever seem to have.

It turns out we need another narrative in here which says, "Hold on. We can't grow infinitely, we know this." The question becomes, "When the remaining resources do run out, where would we like to be? What do we want the world, the landscape, and our energy infrastructure to look like?'' And that's the thing that's completely missing. We're just saying, 'Our strategy is we're just going to continue to grow.' It's not a strategy, it's a tactic.

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I am among many people who are working fervently if not feverishly to help change our narrative in time. Away from a story of growth for its own sake and towards a future shaped by design, not disaster, where we value prosperity first and growth second, if at all.

How do we do this? I really don't know the answer to that because it has never been done before at this scale. But people and cultures do change, all the time in fact, and so this is not an impossible task, just a very tricky one, which makes it both challenging and fascinating.

James Stafford: You mentioned earlier that you thought the shale boom was being oversold. What are your thoughts on America's oil and gas boom?

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This is an interview of Chris Martensen by James Stafford of OilPrice.com. It was first published on OilPrice.com.



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About the Author

James Stafford is the publisher of OilPrice.com.

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