Published on Resilience (   Published by BC Sustainable Energy
Association on 2014-08-21 Original article: by Guy Dauncey  Read
Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.  Back in July, in my quest to
see whether British Columbia could become a 100% renewable
energy region, I looked at personal transportation. This week I
take on the far more challenging task of long-distance trucking,
boats, ferries and planes.  Ponder this: a typical eighteen-
wheeler truck has a 400-horse-power engine. It burns stored
solar energy from ancient, 300-million-year-old marine
organisms. If you used horses to pull that much load, you’d need
400 of them, and 400 hectares of land to keep the horses
pastured.  Which is Better: Slaves, Horses or Fossil Fuels?
Alternatively, you could use 4,000 humans—and a hundred
overseers with whips to keep them pulling. Maybe this is why
slavery was so common before we discovered the concentrated
energy of fossil fuels—the true ‘concentrated solar.’ Any
particular coalmine, gas-field or oil-well might em