"The Bottomless Well" was published by Basic Books in 2005. Co-authored by Peter W Huber & Mark P Mills, it was subtitled "The twilight of fuel, the virtue of waste, and why we will never run out of energy". It was a work of utter fantasy by flat earthers who claimed that mankind would never run out of energy - we would just invent some new source - endlessly forever. We would always have more and more energy and with more and more we can overcome all physical limits. The title was misleading as they couldn't really come up with exactly WHAT this wonderful new power source was. According to them it didn't matter. They just had faith that it was true. It was true because they said so. Despite all the evidence and good science that tells us the opposite. One of the authors was a former advisor to the Bush administration. It said it all.

However, in retrospect I came to think they were partially right - but for all the wrong reasons. There WILL be an energy descent. Human ingenuity is not going to solve the problem by digging up some new source of energy. Business-as-usual will not continue. There are limits. Human ingenuity will simply learn to cope without fossil fuels. There will not be more and more energy. There will be less but we will make better and better use of it with less and less people. We will settle back to our share of the Solar Energy beamed down to us. Hence all that ingenuity will be involved in engineering a human existance that lasts. Everything we do will be done with a tenth of the energy we consume today. This does mean that there will be some things we do not do.

We will not drive around in cars of fly any more in aeroplanes. However, I hope that our energy networks will devolve to local distributed systems. Photovoltaics will become cheap and ultra-efficient. Mankind will milk the sun for every drop of energy. We will learn to grow food with the sun alone and learn to control our population down to the carrying-capacity of the planet. The wind-turbines will sretch from horizon to horizon around the planet. We will learn to make these machines without fossil fuels. Our cities and buildings will change. Life will be a lot slower. Not quicker and quicker.