All politics aside - time for reality.
Very timely and accurate article and graphics. As someone who tracks alternative energy development as part of my business, the decline in renewable "faith" is palpable in the capital market place and knowledgeable general population (yes, that would be a minor percentage).
The hard facts are that we have no completely effective re-newable solutions to our growing energy deficits in hand presently. We have a number renewable technologies that are clearly the right direction, some that are clearly the wrong direction, and a gap in both technical and economic resources to push renewable development along any faster.
Regarding wrong directions: Biofuels at significant scale turn-out to be dependent on petroleum for fertilizers, chemicals and processing energy - and as such are far from carbon neutral. Given their dependence imported NPK chemical fertilizers (US imported over half its fertilizers in 2011 - including about 15% of its phosphates from Morocco > USDA 2011 Fertilizer Import Summary) aren't even renewables and actually compete with food crops for those fertilizers. (BTW the US was a net exporter of NPK fertilizers just a decade ago.) However, biofuels fertilized by waste products are renewable. Unfortunately, the reality is that the vast majority of those waste products are not feasible (economically - logistically, spatially, climatically, etc.) biofuels. Waste generated biofuels are estimated to have a maximum potential of generating 1-3% of our nations energy needs, not counting our military needs (US military is the largest petroleum consumer in the wold.)
Solar, wind and tide are ideal sources of low CO2 renewable energy, but require an economical storage solution to effectively replace fossil fuels. How far are we from such a storage solution - look around you, what do you think? We're making limited progress, but we aren't nearly there yet functionally or economically.
In reality the bad news is there are no renewables close to being able to either technically or economically make a big dent in either petroleum or nuclear energy replacement in the near term (30 years?). The better news - of the above "bad news" is that we can get off of some of our dirtier fossil fuels (oil and coal) and switch to domestic NG and NGL to bridge our energy gap while renewable energy R&D continues to work out technical and economic feasibility kinks. Consequently we still have an energy gap of some indeterminable period of R&D to reach a renewable energy future and like it or not we are stuck with our current carbon based fuel sources a while longer.
More bad news: Yes, there will be more CO2 in the atmosphere, but there's some better news, too. Rates of CO2 increase are declining. Unfortunately, that leaves us with one minor problem - we still aren't addressing how we reduce global human population to a sustainable level. After all - all of our environmental problems have just one source - too many humans and too few resources.
