Preface
What this book is
This book is about how to solve our energy problem. It presents the facts concerning our energy needs, desires, and supplies, and the environmental and human effects of obtaining and using energy. It also includes calculations and analyses based on these facts. The purpose of the book is to provide U.S. citizens and our elected representatives with information that will enable us to make rational, economically and environmentally sound decisions.
What is our energy problem, and why do we have it? Some people believe that energy is a problem only because continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to undesirable global warming. But even without that possibility, the people of the world, and especially the people of the United States who use more energy than any other nation, have an energy problem: The need and desire for energy will increase faster than it can be provided from standard sources. As the world’s population grows, and as living standards and expectations rise, people around the world will want more energy. Meanwhile, petroleum is limited and, according to estimates by petroleum geologists and economists, is likely to become so rare by 2050 that it may be too expensive for most energy applications. Pollution from fossil fuels will also continue to be a problem and is likely to worsen with increased mining and use. As the human population continues to grow and as quality-of-life expectations rise, competition for land and water will also increase. For the United States, military and economic security are also strong reasons for seeking energy independence, or as close to that as possible.
Some believe that we should become energy minimalists, each person using as little energy as possible. This book takes a different tack. It assumes that we should use energy as efficiently as possible, but that abundant energy is necessary for the quality of life that people today expect. Minimal energy would be that required to provide food, water, shelter, and access to medical care. Civilizations require more. People need to be educated; funds are needed for arts, humanities, sciences, and for recreation and entertainment. Life should be joyful, and music, dance, and the graphic arts don’t come energy-free. If people have such limited energy available that they can only focus on the bare necessities of life, they don’t have time to think about who to vote for, how to organize and run a political campaign, go to town meetings, and so on—the things that we take for granted but are necessary for a democracy. Thus it also may be that democracies benefit from, or even require, more than the minimal energy required for the barest human survival.
Of course, there is a wide range between just enough energy to get food, water, and shelter, and to have everything anyone could ever want—and the decision about what is a quality of life and what is extravagance is a question that goes far beyond this book. My point only is that we cannot have peace, culture, joy, and civilization, let alone freedom and democracy, without energy that allows us to do more than just survive. In the last chapter, I consider various scenarios, some of which contrast very great differences in per capita energy use.
And abundant and superabundant energy can be used for evil as well as good, fueling wars, vast armies, oppressive dictatorships, and terrorism, the worst of man’s actions. But without enough energy, no one can work for what is good about and for people. Energy is the key. Physicists define energy as the capacity or the ability to move matter, which means it is necessary for a human being to do anything, including those things that are worthwhile and good.
The good news is that our energy problem can be solved: Today’s technology can solve it. America can be energy-independent—our nation can provide a sufficient and sustainable supply of energy with relatively little change in the quality of our lives or in our overall standard of living. Indeed, done with great care, it will result in a better environment and an improved quality of life for most of us.
The tough news is that achieving this energy independence will be expensive and will require a national commitment that is unusual for a democracy, although not unprecedented. Examples of such commitment in our past include the expansion of European-based civilization westward with the Louisiana Purchase, the response of the nation to the Great Depression of the 1930s and to World War II, and our success in putting a man on the moon ten years after we decided to do so. However, such concerted national efforts are rare. Mostly, we tend to muddle through, often waiting to rebuild a bridge until the old one finally collapses.
The solution requires informed citizens and informed politicians. It requires political will and individual personal commitments in ways that we have not chosen to seek in past decades. A necessary and important part of energy independence is clear thinking, rational, science-based analysis. It requires innovation, creativity, invention, and entrepreneurship. This book is meant to be a foundation for the path to energy independence.
What this book is not
Two energy-related topics that are mentioned but not discussed in depth are carbon offsets and subsidies. The subject of subsidies is so big and complicated that a separate book would be needed to analyze the subsidies for each source of energy from cradle to grave—from discovery, invention, and exploration, to use and the problems of dealing with the wastes and land conversions. The same holds true for carbon offsets. By seeking a way to replace all fossil fuels, this book does point the way to reducing the production of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. It just does not deal with the particulars and differences in carbon dioxide releases among different energy sources. There is no intention to minimize the importance of either of these topics.
The focus here is on how energy supply can be obtained technologically in a way that is as environmentally beneficial and benign as possible. Although I do discuss costs to some extent, this is not a book primarily about economics. My hope is that this book will provide a basis from which economists and others can consider in much greater detail the economic consequences of difference choices and the ways that a society and individuals can be motivated to choose and work toward a specific solution.
The energy solution has become a major political and ideological debate, and obviously a great deal of money, influence, and direction of our society is at stake. During the past few years, I have been asked to discuss the solution to energy supply in a number of forums, sometimes as part of a panel discussion or debate. It should not be surprising that many approach this important topic from a specific political and ideological goal, which leads them to pick the facts that support these goals and ignore those that don’t. I believe that this approach is a road to failure. Of course, no one can be completely free of prejudgments and emotional assumptions, but to solve a large-scale technological problem like energy supply requires a rational approach. We have to be careful to see this as more of an engineering problem, solidly based in science, than an expression of a political philosophy or ideological conviction.
Why I wrote this book
As an ecologist with a background in physics, and as chairman of the Environmental Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have long been interested in how energy is obtained and used in natural ecosystems, how energy from our environment affects us, and how we affect our environment in our pursuit of energy. For my work, I had to keep up with energy issues, and in doing so noticed some odd contradictions that began to occur around 2002. Solar and wind were already providing energy in many parts of the world, but environmental economists I worked with kept telling me a different story. “The conventional wisdom,” they said, was that solar and wind power can never amount to anything.
At that time, my son, Jonathan, worked for a company called PowerLight, which manufactured and installed some of the largest solar energy facilities in the world. (He had previously worked for U.S. Wind-power.) Deciding it might be interesting for all involved, I set up a series of telephone conferences between the environmental economists and the PowerLight engineers. Each time one of the economists asked a question about solar power and was answered by an engineer, the economist would reply, “But according to conventional wisdom, solar and wind energy can never amount to anything.” This went on for three weeks of conference calls, until finally the engineers and I gave up, discouraged because nobody seemed interested in the facts.
Soon afterward, the New York Times published an interview with James Lovelock, the famous British chemist and environmentalist who came up with what he called “the Gaia Hypothesis,” an expression of the idea that we are all connected to all of life by a planetary system. Commenting on the energy problem, Lovelock said, “If it makes people feel good to shove up a windmill or put a solar panel on their roof, great, do it. It’ll help a little bit, but it’s no answer at all to the problem.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people in developing nations were buying or building cheap solar and wind devices to provide them with enough electricity to cook their food, run computers and some small home appliances, and thereby join the modern age. It wasn’t just making them feel good; it was improving the fundamentals of their lives.
With all the debate about our energy supply, the end of the era of cheap and abundant oil and gas, and concerns about global warming, I decided to look at each form of energy: how much is available, how much we now use, how much we will use in the future, and what our options are to move away from fossil fuels. The approach would be the same one I have used for all scientific problems: looking at the most reliable data available and making the obvious calculations and analyses. In the past, I’d always been surprised by what the facts revealed, because so often what they told me contradicted the conventional wisdom. In many cases, the facts—especially quantitative information—necessary to reach a conclusion are completely lacking because nobody ever bothered to get them, and without these, of course, even the simplest calculations and analyses haven’t been done.
With so many people talking and writing about the energy issue, why should you pay attention to this book? Because to the best of my ability I have hunted down the most solid facts and information and analyzed them as carefully and as free of my personal biases as possible, searching out the facts, doing the calculations, and checking those measurements and calculations with experts in their fields. You will surely find some of the results surprising, and I hope you will also find them helpful.