In the prior post I gave a general definition and overview of peak oil for those that have yet to track this development.  Until recently, the brightest minds unencumbered by vested oil interests have strongly suggested, and with good documentation, that the world could well run out of extractable petroleum sometime around the mid twenty-first century.

Up until a year ago, this was cause for great alarm.  Most countries in the world, with the U.S. being at the top of the list, have, in the last 50 years, allowed economic development, urban planning, real estate development and transportation issues to …

Peak oil is loosely defined at the point in time when half of all the oil reserves in the earth have been extracted and burned.  This means that we are half way through the oil consumption cycle and move into extracting the remaining 50%.  Some of the most respected experts and oil geologists have long suggested that peak oil would occur in the early part of this century, that in the decade 2000-2010 we would move through it.  The expected symptoms would be a dramatic increase in price, followed by price volatility, with a long term ever upward pressure …

In my last post I wrote about GM and the presentation it made to some of us in the media about the new battery technology they are developing along with several other companies.  At the end of that post I highlighted the two distinct lines of challenging questions that have come up in response. 

I will quickly restate these two before moving on to address them.  The first challenge to GM about their commitment to creating a new battery technology for vehicles is to directly question how serious the GM commitment is.  How can the people who were identified as …

One of the most important research and development efforts in the world today is the quest for the perfect battery to power electric cars.  We all know that there is global warming, air pollution, and an increasing dependence on imported oil.  We know that petroleum is a finite resource that will be depleted in this century.  We live in a country whose culture and functionality is so dependent on the automobile that an alien might think the car is the dominant form of life.  Therefore, the solution to all of these problems and situations is to reinvent how the 200+ …