Gristmill: A blogful of leafy green commentary

Visit GristMill

It's not about the fuel

Posted on June 17, 2008

By Sean CastenThose of us who care about energy and environmental policy have a bad habit: the lazy but rhetorically convenient tendency to refer to energy issues as if they were fuel issues. From solar to coal to uranium, we have developed a shorthand that uses these words to describe a whole fuel-chain, from raw fuel extraction/recovery to end-use consumption. But the language is dangerous. What matters is efficiency -- true, fuel-agnostic efficiency, applied equally to every possible fuel-chain we know. Not because efficiency is an alternative to any given fuel, but because any other en...

Original article link


biomass , clean air , clean air act , co2 , demand , economic , economy , electric , electric vehicles , emissions , energy costs , energy efficiency , energy policy , ethanol , ev