The Alt Fuels Distraction

The Alt Fuels Distraction
David Roberts
May 25, 2006



David Roberts is a staff writer at Grist Magazine. His blog is http://gristmill.grist.org.

In the next 50 years, give or take, those of us in the United States will face two challenges. We must wean ourselves off of oil and we must cut our carbon-dioxide emissions by around 60 percent. Either would be difficult in isolation; together, well ... imagine patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time, only with trillions of dollars and millions of lives at stake. And with one arm tied behind your back.

What's the best way to meet these challenges? If you were the proverbial Martian, visiting our planet to dispassionately assess our options, what would you find most promising?

Would it be nuclear power? "Clean coal"? Ethanol? You'd only decide on those options if you happen to be an uncommonly gullible Martian (or one in the pay of big industry—but more on that later).

Substantially increasing the amount of electricity we get from nuclear power would mean building dozens of expensive new plants, none of which would be completed for at least 10 years. Each would be a huge risk for investors and virtually uninsurable without government assistance—and once it had run its course, would cost a fortune to decommission. Each would produce tons of waste—when we don't even know what to do with the waste we already have—and each would produce fissile material that could fall into the wrong hands. By some estimates, the CO2 emitted in the full lifecycle of a nuclear plant—taking into account the oil burned mining, transporting and processing uranium, not to mention constructing the plants themselves—would be only a third less than that released by a coal-fired plant.

more...

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/25/the_alt_fuels_distraction.php

:kick:

FIFTY years? Even if you "take", David Roberts is far too optimistic about the state of our energy use. We're locked into a 3% per annum energy growth requirement imposed on us by our economic system, and Roberts thinks we can fix the problem not with alt-fuels, but with tax tweaks.

This is a dynamic system that is quickly approaching a critical point. And the frustrating part is that we've been able to see it coming for over 30 years, and have done little other than to browbeat our children into turning off the lights when they leave a room.

We need to make wholesale, world-wide changes in the way we use energy, and we need to do it fairly soon. I certainly agree with many of Roberts' suggestions, but unless a broadly socialized, heavily capitalized, and fairly fast re-build of our entire physical lifestyle takes place, we are not going to make it without some heavy-duty suffering and misery. In much of the world, "suffering and misery" will mean starvation, war, and death.

Whether you support nuclear energy or not, remember NNadir's magic number: 450 exajoules. That magic number will have to double every 24 years to prevent economic collapse given our current way of doing things. If we can't sustain 450 EJ this year, and 3% more each year every year after that, we're sunk. And yet, when we finally "fall off" the Peak Oil Plateau, the decrease in usable energy supplies will easily exceed 5% per annum.

We need an extra 3%, but we'll be losing 5%. That's and 8% gap. It means we lose half our economic power every nine years. That's far worse than even the economic collapse in the ex-Soviet Union after the fall of Communism. But it's exactly what we'll be facing.

For example, let's say the collapse hits this year. We're on track to use about 450 EJ of energy. In nine years, we would need about 650 EJ, but we'll only have 325 EJ. That would be disastrous. Yet, if we continue with the Same Old Same-Old, that's exactly what we can expect, the only numerical changes being based on the date the contraction starts.

Even a more hopeful scenario, where we need a mere 2% annual growth, and the oil contraction is better managed and results in a 1% yearly contraction of total energy supplies, we've simply reversed the growth we've sustained since the 1800s. Reversals of any kind usually bring economic collapses. We can then take comfort in knowing that the collapse will happen slowly.

OR we could make the changes we need to run a high-tech society with a big population on relatively low energy. The easy way will still be difficult. Our choice is whether we want that "difficult" to be the challenge to build a better world, or the struggle to numb the pain while most of us die in misery.

Considering that we have the brains, the can-do attitude, and still have enough working capital and sufficiently inexpensive energy, I think you know what I'd prefer we do.

--p!

"visiting our planet to dispassionately assess our options", the "option" I would find most promising would be reducing the human population down to a few tens of thousands, perhaps trapped on Australia as a "preserve" in order to protect the rest of the planet.