A Plea for Gaea

This month’s National Geographic (I think it’s the August issue on newsstands) includes a cover article with a lot of fascinating information about the current landscape of world energy concerns. One of the key ideas the author used that I simply ate up was when he threw out the idea that the US is a hunter gatherer looking for new sources of fossil fuels whereas Europe is a farmer, attempting to harness the clean energy sources of the sun and wind (and even tides) through energy farms that seek to build a cheap, clean, renewable energy future. Denmark has built a few wind turbines that are more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and produce enough power for 5,000 homes. Germany has wind farms and solar farms aplenty. Meanwhile, in the US, we are more dependent than ever on dirty fossil fuels. More and more people migrate every year to the Sun Belt states, yet solar panels do not follow, and we miss out on huge potential energy projects as the government continues to overlook or veto future-oriented energy policies. While Europe tries to carve out a clean vision for the future, with Kyoto and these forward thinking energy practices (Denmark supplies 20% of its power through wind turbines; the US, less than 1%), the US and the developing world create increasing amounts of smog as fossil fuel supplies dwindle ever further and push toward global conflict over minimal supplies.

The article is packed with interesting facts that “environmental engineers” and the like will try to hide from the average consumer citizen. Consider the discovery by the NYTimes that hybrid cars in the US are no longer being developed for fuel efficiency purposes but rather as a means to increase horsepower to satisfy the comical machismo that pervades American auto culture. Of course, these cars still qualify for an environmentally friendly tax rebate… the good news is that they usually do still boost fuel efficiency, but only by, say, 2 mpg rather than 20. The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic hybrid models legitimately achieve geo-friendliness with incredible mpg ratings. The rest largely do not. Furthermore, back to the main article, the author cites how even fuel cells are not a real solution, as it takes energy to produce the hydrogen needed to run a fuel cell. Right now that energy comes largely from fossil fuels. So even if we develop zero emissions, green automobiles, we still burn fossil fuels in the creation of hydrogen….right now. That’s not to say that wind, solar, or nuclear energy can’t be used just as well. A final point: the dangers of an accident aside, nuclear power is often presented as a green choice for power supply as well. But even with further advances in technology, nuclear power depends on some of the rarest elements on earth, and there is less of a supply of them then there is of the core fossil fuels. We’ll essentially be cached out of uranium and plutonium in 50 years, maybe 75 if we accept some technological advances to improve usage. So we still have no solution….. there is the constant race to discover sustainable fusion, which has some long term hopes. And hydropower, but that is largely fully developed as well—and it has many harmful environmental consequences.

I’ll leave you with a thought from the article: In some ways, this energy dilemma is more pressing than the war on terrorism. And the US is going about it the wrong way. We can keep fighting wars and improving our exploratory efforts to find new fossil fuels, but there is only so much out there, and eventually it will all be gone. The product of solar energy beating down on life on this earth over millions and millions of years, we’re using it all up in 150-200 years. And killing the environment and changing the climate while we’re at it. But why is it more important than terrorism? With terrorism, we can always endure and press forward—look at the Brits as a model for this. Or many other people on the face of this planet… terrorism does not fully endanger our open society. It is a huge threat, but not so much as the problem with energy. The lack of clean, efficient, cheap, reliable energy will mean an end to our high tech life style. We currently depend on fossil fuels for essentially all our big energy needs, to heat and cool our homes, refrigerate our food, fly our jets, drive our cars, etc etc etc. And on top of all that, they are the source of plastics and countless other products. We will not find a panacea. But we need to start working in overdrive to find something close.


On a related note, recent previous issues of National Geographic have dealt with other global resources, like water. Consider how the American Southwest is currently in a drought exponentially worse than the famed Dust Bowl, essentially because drought is a combination of supply and demand and demand has grown at an incredible rate in that part of the country. Nonetheless, many a citizen continues to water their lawn and fill up their pool and otherwise make frivolous use of precious hydro-resources as the aquifers and water supplies are tapped and drained beyond repair. These things take thousands and thousands of years to fill up, and we’re draining them over the course of a mere few decades. Well, either the cost of water will spike and we’ll curtail our usage, just as is every so slowly happening with oil….. or we’ll adjust to higher prices until we wake up one morning and realize that there was a reason for the high prices, as our taps run dry. I don’t have the statistical resources at my disposal to hand out a timeframe like I usually try to, but we’re already seeing water issues spread across the globe, particularly in Africa, where the country of Niger and other areas of mostly Western Sub-Saharan Africa are being absorbed in to Saharan African as the desert encroaches ever farther south as poor land use, a lack of water, and overpopulation combine to allow desertification run rampant and induce horrible famines that the Western media overlooks.

With that, I close today’s post of doom and gloom. You may now return to your dinners and drinks and blissful ignorance.