So, I'm listening to a show on KUOW about peak oil, and you know what bugs me? I'll tell you.
You often hear a single person make the following two claims:
- Clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar "just aren't developed enough" now to meet our energy needs. Just not dense enough in their energy output. Take up too much darn space. "Maybe someday," they say wistfully, "but not today."
- Although we're running out of conventional sources of oil, magical new technologies and methods will allow us to extract oil economically from deep water, tar sands, shale, the moon, god knows what. "Never underestimate human ingenuity," they cry, "technology shall save us!"
In other words, the argument against moving from oil to clean energy depends on discussing renewable energy technologies as though they are frozen in time, while at the same time painting a picture of a Jetsons-esque future for oil extraction technologies.
Me, I love technology, and I have great faith in human ingenuity. But if brainpower and billions of dollars of investment can transform oil extraction technologies, why can't they make clean energy technologies orders of magnitude smaller, more efficient, and easier to use?
Keep an eye out for this slight of hand. If current oil technology and current clean energy technology go head to head (and environmental consequences are taken into account), clean energy technology wins. If they go head to head based on the assumption of brilliant new technological advances, clean energy technology wins.
Clean energy technology wins.
Comments
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jmcstras Posted 4:33 am
12 May 2005
I'm dealing with similar arguments at sustainablog in terms of nuclear power -- I've had Eric McErlain from the Nuclear Energy Institute (the industry's lobbying group) approach me via email, and we've got a discussion going both at sustainablog and on the NEI's Nuclear Notes blog. It's interesting how on one hand they'll discuss those inevitable technological developments, and then turn around and argue that renewable technologies aren't "mature" enough.
Sustainablog: http://sustainablog.blogspot.com
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odograph Posted 5:09 am
12 May 2005
As an easy illustration, compare the "future" predicted by decades of Popular Science covers to the "future" we got.
Both futures are weird and advanced, but not exactly in the ways people predicted.
And sometimes ... no matter how much we wanted flying cars, jet packs, or hydrogen fuel cells ... they were always just a few more decades away.
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Ana Unruh Cohen Posted 5:59 am
12 May 2005
There was an op-ed contribution to the New York Times at the end of March that really got me steamed as well. Clean coal advocates tried to bolster their technology by knocking down various other technologies. Their two sentence dismissal of solar was especially egregious. I wrote this letter to the editor in response. The NY Times didn't bother to print it so I'll take the liberty of reproducing it here in full. Maybe it will help others expose some of the logical fallacies of clean energy opponents.
To the Editor:
While supportive of new, emerging coal technologies and carbon capture and storage, I believe Thomas Homer-Dixon and S. Julio Friedman were unduly negative - and potentially misleading - about the potential impact of established solar power technology in their recent op-ed. (`Coal in a Nice Shade of Green,' March 25, 2005). They dismissed solar power as needing too much space and being too costly. According to the authors, in order to meet our current electricity demand, the United States would need 10 billion square meters of photovoltaic (PV) panels - a big number indeed, but one without context. Did readers know that the land area of the conterminous 48 states is over 8 trillion square meters or that the built environment in the U.S. covers almost 30 billion square meters? Probably not. Unlike carbon capture and storage, PV panels can be used today on rooftops and integrated into buildings to produce power on site and without carbon dioxide emissions. Costs are still high, but continue to decrease, especially when PV panels replace other building materials like windows or shingles. Over the next 25 years, we will add another 20 billion square meters to the built environment - much of it in the sunny South and West - offering a prime opportunity to build a bridge to a clean energy future.
Sincerely,
Ana Unruh Cohen, Ph.D
Associate Director for Environmental Policy
Center for American Progress
Washington, DC
"The book of nature is always open." - Louis Agassiz
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Thomas Palm Posted 2:02 am
14 May 2005
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amazingdrx Posted 9:54 pm
14 May 2005
Misleading use of statistics is usually part of the sophistry against renewable energy. And many liberals like Kristof are falling for it.
It was surprising to see Stewart Brand and James Lovelock doing this also.
If one were to add up all the area polluted by mines, refineries, processing plants, waste sites, generating plants for fossil fuels and nuclear power, and the exponentially expanding plumes of toxins in groundwater, rivers, lakes, and air from these energy sources...
Then compare that to the 50 foot diameter area needed for each of 30,000 thousand foot scale wind machines needed to equal the present electrical generating capacity of the US....the picture looks a bit different.
And consider not only rooftops for solar electric power, but also space over parking lots that need shading anyway. And solar cogeneration that produces not only electricity (which absorbs only 10% of the solar power available), but heating and cooling capacity and water/waste recycling or desalinization from the same collectors. Water is the oil of this century.
By substituting heat pumps for heating instead of fuel oil and natural gas, and hybrid plugin vehicles that use mostly electric power on short trips (the vast majority of driving miles), that electric capacity created by wind and solar power can substitute for expensive greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels.
For instance,20% of oil is burned to provide heat energy for refining oil, a huge waste. Easily replaced with clean solar heat or wind and solar electric power driving heat pumps.
Do we really need 30,000 20 megawatt wind machines on the high apeed wind areas of the great plains? Yes because a switch to heat pumps and hybrid plugin vehicles will require even more electric generating capacity.
With the added capacity from solar electric panels on rooftops, and over parking lots wind and solar could economically replace fossil and nuclear power for transportation as well as heating, cooling,refining, and manufacturing.
The old fossil fuel plants would serve as backup and a kind of battery to smooth out variable output from wind and solar and variable loads in the power grid. Eventually they could be replaced by superconducting energy storage rings and maybe someday with fuel cells.
With hybrid plugin vehicles averaging 80 miles per gallon, biofuels could replace imported oil. As battery technology, backup generators, and eventually fuel cells increase in efficiency and drop in cost, those biofuels, like methanol, ethanol,and biodiesel could totally replace oil.
None of this is as farfetched as a nuclear plant with pebble bed or other research level technology actually overcoming the problems of uninsurable risk for siting, fuel mining and manufacturing, and waste transportation, processing, and storage (20 to 30 tons per year per nuclear reactor).
Coupled with nuclear fuel expected to triple in price over the next few years, and the fact that wind and solar have no fuel or waste costs...it all paints a very different picture of energy policy.
We need to push hard for this energy policy that would revive the US manufacturing base, tax base, and provide good jobs for american families.
The export markets created for our clean energy technology would power an economic boom based on real productivity increases, rather than an economic bubble from speculation.
Let's have an ENERGY revolution!!!
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