COMMENTARY Possible Energy Futures, Part 1

AMERICA CAN SOLVE PROBLEMS

Rising gasoline prices and Japan’s nuclear calamity remind us that we have an energy problem.

I recently attended a two-day conference at the University of California at Berkeley on “The physics of sustainable energy: Using energy efficiently and producing it renewably.” I returned with renewed optimism that America can solve its energy problems.

But the real question is: Will we adopt the smart solutions that are available, or will we continue muddling through with old nonpolicies - mainly “drill baby drill” - until the environment and our economy are ruined?

Several conference talks underlined the scientific consensus that global warming is a threat that must be incorporated into any serious energy analysis.

I was reminded of this anew while reading Bryan Lovell’s excellent book Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change. Lovell, a geologist, academic, and industrial oil man, adds to the mountain of evidence supporting global warming.

He compares the present era with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 55 million years ago, when natural processes caused massive carbon releases from the pores of rocks beneath the ocean floor. This pumpedgreenhouse gases into the atmosphere at rates similar to those induced today by fossil fuel consumption.

Since greenhouse gases trap the sun’s heat, this warmed Earth by 8 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to severely affect life and bring on a new geological age: the Eocene. Excess greenhouse gas remained in the atmosphere for 170,000 years. For comparison, Homo sapiens has been on Earth for 200,000 years.

Today, human greenhouse gas emissions total about one-third of the amount that caused the PETM warming, and are rising rapidly.

This is direct evidence, if more were needed, that fossil fuel emissions are nearly permanently changing the face of our planet. America is blessed with ample and relatively benign renewable energy resources, mostly solar and wind, assisted by biofuels, hydroelectricity, and geothermal. Furthermore, we have a huge and entirely benign “virtual resource” in the form of energy efficiency. Here, the bad news is that America is flagrantly wasteful: On a per-capita basis, Americauses twice as much energy to create a dollar’s worth of goods and services as do other industrialized nations. The good news is that this implies we could double our goods and services without increasing our actual use of energy, simply by following other nations. As I’ve preached frequently (see physics.

uark.edu/hobson/) the easy and market-oriented way to do this is by requiring energy industries to pay for their environmental and health overhead, via fees and taxes. This would for example raise the price of gasoline to the $8 per gallon that other industrialized nations pay and triple the cost of fossil-fuel-generated electric power. It would also solve our oil problems, solve oil-related security problems, end our foreign oil payments, protect the environment, solveglobal warming without requiring cap-and-trade, level the playing field for renewables and efficiency, and bring in a good trillion dollars annually to the U.S.

Treasury - money that could reduce income taxes and the national debt. But are we smart and bold enough to make such gamechanging moves?

The Berkeley conference and similar analyses elsewhere convince me that America can switch to an energy economy based on renewables and energy efficiency while nearly phasing out not only fossil fuels but also (if we decide it’s a good idea) nuclearpower by around 2050. One way to do this was spelled out in an authoritative and detailed January 2008 Scientific American article titled “Solar Grand Plan.”

The bulk of the plan’s energy would be solar.

America has 250,000 square miles of land in the sunny Southwest that’s suitable for large solar installations.

Some 30,000 of these square miles (equivalent to a square 170 miles on a side) would accommodate photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight directly to electricity. A smaller area would accommodate solarthermal arrays that focus sunlight reflected from long curving mirrors onto a fluidfilled pipe; the heated fluid then runs through a heat exchanger to produce steam that turns a turbine to create electricity.

The plan requires new direct-current transmission lines to get electricity to the rest of the country, and large facilities to store energy near power plants. With intelligent energy research and development, these goals are reachable.

This shows what we can accomplish with sufficient will and brains.

But realistically, American politics appears (at least today) unlikely to have either the will or the brains to do anything like this. Stay tuned for a less ideal but more politically viable plan in my next column.

ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 04/03/2011

Upcoming Events