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1% of the jetstream's wind power could supply all US electrical demand. Also, one of the main complaints about wind power is its intermittency--the wind doesn't blow all the time, and so (according to Sky Windpower), most wind farms are only operating at their peak capacity 19-35% of the time. The wind is much steadier at altitude, so you get even more advantage over ground-based wind power. A final advantage is ad-hoc generation: devices with a reasonably simple tether-system do not have to be permanently installed in one place, they could be trucked out to any location that needed them.

biggest lightning rod you've ever seen.

The obvious question is safety. What happens if one of these things falls out of the sky? The proposed design has quadruple-redundancy in the propellers used to hold it up and generate power, and the units could be located away from population centers, so that seems reasonable. What about planes running into them, or more likely, their tethers? They would fly in restricted airspace. Sky Windpower points out that there are already many high-altitude tethered balloons in the US that have not had problems, and that enough installations to generate 100% of the US's power needs could fit in 1/400th of the nation's airspace. What about birds getting killed? They say that the flying windmills could make noise that would keep birds away; this would be prohibitive for ground-based turbines, but at high altitude no people will be around to be annoyed by it.

Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally with local solutions.

It's a daunting agenda, all right. And some of you are probably wondering how you are supposed to remain hopeful in the face of these enormous tasks. Here's the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities.

We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational.

We'll have to make other arrangements for transporting people and goods.

We'll have to reorganize retail trade by rebuilding networks of local economic interdependence.

And a harsh reality indeed awaits us as the full scope of the permanent energy crisis unfolds. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production peaked in December 2005 at just over 85 million barrels a day. Since then, it has trended absolutely flat at around 84 million. Yet world oil consumption rose consistently from 77 million barrels a day in 2001 to above 85 million so far this year. A clear picture emerges: demand now exceeds world supply. Or, put another way, oil production has not increased despite the ardent wish that it would by all involved, and despite the overwhelming incentive of prices having nearly quadrupled since 2001.

Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the "non-negotiable" American way of life.

The popular idea, expressed incessantly in the news media, is that if you run out of energy, you just go out and find some "new technology" to keep things running. We'll learn that this doesn't comport with reality. For example, commercial airplanes are either going to run on cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuels or we're not going to have commercial aviation as we have known it. No other energy source is concentrated enough by weight, affordable enough by volume, and abundant enough in supply to do the necessary work to overcome gravity in a loaded airplane, repeated thousands of times each day by airlines around the world. No other way of delivering that energy source besides refined liquid hydrocarbons will allow that commercial system to operate at the scale we are accustomed to.

If you really want to understand the U.S. public's penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the "housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial "inputs," and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.

The reality of our modern economy is that we attach no monetary penalty to throughputs, the toxic by-products and environmental damage that result from industrial manufacturing. But because we have settled for a linear, throughput economy where the byproduct of energy is waste, that waste must be taxed. There must be a cost for polluting streams and rivers with mercury and choking them with sediment; there must be a cost for pumping sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the air. Because natural capital such as coal is a limited resource, it must be taxed as such. In other words, market prices must reflect social and environmental costs. To have an economy based solely on the short-term growth of our gross domestic product follows a dangerous and absurd logic -- that we can have infinite growth based on the use of finite resources.

It was 1988 before the state of Kentucky added a constitutional amendment stating that coal operators had to have a landowner’s permission before mining on their property.

Not just the environmental devastation but also the economic devastation that I saw in the coal mining regions. If coal was the engine of prosperity, as many coal industry people I spoke with kept insisting, why were the regions it is mined so poor, why was the state’s median income among the lowest in the nation, why were so many young people leaving the state in search of a better future elsewhere?”

Eco-extremism [is] one of those political code words used to refer to a mostly mythical group of people who don’t understand or deny the link between fossil fuel consumption and civilized life and who, more importantly, value the health of the planet more than they value the health and prosperity of human beings. Politically, the term is a winner. By deploying the straw man of eco-extremism, coal advocates are able to cast themselves as humanists -- as people who are in the business of burning coal because it helps the poor and the vulnerable. Thus, if you take a position that impinges in any way on the free and unfettered consumption of coal, you’re an extremist who elevates the birds and the bees above the success of the human race.

“I wanted to try, as best I could, to illuminate what goes on behind the light switch -- to shine my journalistic spotlight on the incredibly complex chain of events that goes into keeping the lights on in America.”

The main problem is that many people don’t see the connections -- they don’t see that larger homes in Tampa mean blowing up mountains in Kentucky.”

a lot of it simply has to do with the way our industrial economy runs: we do all we can to keep unpleasant facts at a distance. We don’t want to see what goes into making our food -- when was the last time you had a glimpse inside a slaughterhouse? -- and we don’t want to see what goes into making of our electrons, either.”

myth of cheap energy

According to Goodell, “Energy-wise, the world faces two huge issues, the end of cheap fossil fuels and the coming of global warming. How we deal with these challenges may well determine not just our future economic prosperity, but our fate as a civilization. So change is not an option.