Deliberate obfuscation or what?

MSNBC presents this collection of articles written by John Schoen and titled, After Oil: What to do when the oil runs out. [John Schoen is a senior producer at MSNBC who helped launch the site.] Among the articles, Mr. Schoen points to the recent urgency to develop hydrogen as an energy source but later says 'hydrogen is what’s known as a “secondary” energy source' and then 'almost all of the hydrogen produced today is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that is already in short supply'. The truth is that hydrogen is not an energy source at all (unless used in nuclear fusion - another subject altogether), but merely a repository for energy, like batteries.

Another important example of imprecision is Mr. Schoen's article on alternative energy where finally acknowledges that ' Some researchers say that these biomass fuels require more for fossil energy to make than they produce

Further on the energy cost of energy produced, see this blog entry based on this article. Besides the environmental degredation:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

In another article , Mr. Schoen refers to the role of efficiency as breathlessly propounded by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Mr. Schoen includes a caveat: 'some' assert that 'the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency has already been picked'.

Scientific American in its September theme issue, Crossroads for Planet Earth, published an article by Mr. Lovins entitled, More Profit with Less Carbon. Scientific American could have done much better where the fate of people (and science) on the Earth is concerned.

• The article regards climate rather than oil depletion as the main problem. There's no reference to Scientific American's important March 1998 article, The End of Cheap Oil.
• Mr. Lovins' arguments are hollow and unconvincing. As Vice-president Cheney has recently pointed out: we're twice as efficient as we were X number of years ago. So why then are we using twice as much oil?
• Mr. Lovins' article doesn't square with another article in the issue, Economics in a Full World: Society can no longer safely pretend the global economy operates within a limitless ecosystem. (See also this sidebar from that article.)
  

Scientific American's September issue is subtitled, 'The human race is at a unique turning point. Will we choose to create the best of all possible worlds?' This is reminiscent of Jared Diamond's book title, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. What choices do we really have?