Over the past two hundred years the advanced world has been able to stay in business thanks to inventing technologies to successively utilize three different energy sources. We are now in need of a fourth such energy revolution with no guarantee we will achieve it. We're not sure how much time we have left nor what the new source will be. Great stakes ride on the outcome.
Up until a little over 200 years ago technology remained much the same as it had been since ancient times. Human and animal muscle power did most of the work. Wood provided most of the fuel for fires. Wind pushed ships across the sea and drove some mills. That was about it.
Then came the water power revolution. By locating near streams of running water, factories could use the force of the flow to turn wheels. This kinetic motion, transmitted through gears to intricate machinery, made possible the rise of the first textile mills, the foundation of the industrial revolution. But to expand the revolution, a mobile power source was needed, one that need not be tied to the presence of a suitable water course and that could be set up anywhere.
The steam engine was the solution. But to feed the burgeoning proliferation of these engines the primeval forests of Europe and America had to be consumed at an alarming pace. Wood was running out. A new energy source had to be found to continue with the new industrially-based society. This led to the second energy revolution based on coal.
Coal powered the steel mills, ships and locomotives of the late nineteenth century and the electrical generating plants of the twentieth. Little of the era's material progress would have been possible without it. It had problems, though. It was ungainly for small engines and caused awful pollution in industrial cities. The third energy revolution was therefore based on petroleum, or "rock oil." The internal combustion engine based on a liquid fuel made possible the automobile, the airplane, the trucking industry and long-distance shipping.
We are now in need of a fourth energy revolution. Oil is a finite resource. We may already have reached "peak oil," the point at which production will level off and begin to decline because new finds will no longer be able to replace the oil being pumped out of the ground. And we are seeing that the massive tonnage of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere is negatively impacting the earth's climate and its ability to sustain the web of life itself.
We will have to move on from oil soon enough. But to what? Nuclear power produces no carbon footprint, but uranium is a finite resource too, and in its enriched state remains devastatingly toxic for hundreds of thousand of years. Wind is free but low-yield; it takes hundreds of thousands of large turbines to produce much power. The same is true with solar, and the price of silicon for solar panels has begun booming. Natural gas remains a finite fossil fuel largely produced overseas. Ethanol is another rather inefficient source that may take as much energy to cultivate as it provides, while the massive acreage devoted to it subtracts from food production. Cellulosic ethanol would be much more efficient, but we haven't perfected how to produce it. Geothermal power is excellent but not available in very many places. Technical problems still abound with tidal. The fusion reactor remains science fiction.
It is clear that enormous strides in conservation are urgently needed. There will have to be a transition to some combination of sources like the ones mentioned above. But it's a real conundrum. The longer we wait for decisive breakthroughs the better the results may be. Or perhaps that will only leave us less time to implement them. Maybe the great breakthroughs won't come in time, or maybe not at all. It could be that we ought to be proceeding with crash programs on several of these ideas at once, or maybe one is superior to the rest and we should be moving full speed ahead on it.
Meanwhile, as we ponder these difficulties and lurch hesitantly and halfheartedly forward, the cost of fossil energy continues to rise. The clock ticks, and while we can hear the ticking we maddeningly are not permitted to see the face of the clock itself. It could be 9 P.M. or it could be 10 minutes to midnight. We need the fourth energy revolution. Tick. Tick. Tick.
2 comments:
It seems to me that if most everything is switched to electricity we could use ALL of the options you outlined to produce it. And if there is a better way to produce electricity in the future, well then great, the electric infrastructure will still work and not care where or how the electricity is produced!
I suspect you're right, John. Since we're not positive which avenue to take it might be smartest to pursue several avenues at the same time. There is safety in diversifying. If one or two then begin to outshine the rest we can reinforce their success.
The thing to remember is that this will have to be a costly priority along the lines of arming for the Second World War. The nation will need decisive leadership to mobilize the people behind such an effort. This is something we haven't had on this issue in the 35 years since it burst upon the scene.
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