WastedEnergy

So it seems things have approached full circle.  The public has long been blind(ed by the powers that be) to the consequences of unfettered subservience to both the power and the constraints of the fuel that had exploded and ignited a growth spree as the world’s population of humans zoomed upward to seven billion, nearly tripling in less than fifty years.  The consequences, though, had recently become too monumental to deny or effectively hide any longer, as BP stock dropped just about as fast as a Wall Street trader’s jaw the day he saw a thousand points evaporate from the Dow thanks to a “computer glitch.”

The fuel to which I am referring, of course, is money.  What, you didn’t think the modern economy was powered by oil or other fossil fuels, did you?  These industries certainly embody considerable force exerted upon the collective choices of humanity, but they are just one part of the game of money in politics that paves the road on which we all travel.  Automobiles are far from alone: if you like self-perpetuating money-powered machines of dominance that demean and destroy humanity, try these guys on for size.  How do you like that spike since the Reagan years got started?  In any case, while there may be a case to be made for the Calorie as humanity’s universal unit of currency, today it is money that talks and buys influence.  Or was all that changing, as it became evident that accumulation of what amounted to a stand-in for real wealth could no longer materialize endlessly more and more for the Earth’s inhabitants to consume out of the ether and caused more than a few problems of its own with its pyramid schemes of money insuring money traded for money backed ultimately by nothing?

You can put me out on the streets, put me out with no shoes on my feet, but put me out, put me out, put me out of misery!

To get back to fossil fuels: it might surprise you to learn that the general lack of support for science in the public interest extends well beyond fossil-fuel-funded payouts to sow doubt about the fundamental workings of climate change and supply depletion, into the Public Interest Research Group itself and the public agency into which it and like-minded organizations feed whose mission is to “balance” the public’s interest against the interests of money in industry’s endless profit game, the U.S. Excusing Polluters Agency (EPA).  But despite what so-called “experts” employed by nonprofits and government agencies might tell you, more than a few “scientists” have signed onto statements endorsing stated political positions and ignored newer and better research or refused to conduct it themselves.  You can thank these Planeteers for the one-size-fits-all Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, which treats a 100,000 ton-of-CO2 –per-year waste-to-energy plant that generates primarily renewable electricity the same as a 3-million-ton-per-year coal-fired behemoth and imposes the same monitoring requirements and costs on both.  You can also thank them for setting fuel economy standards for automakers that allow, for instance, a sale of a hybrid to cancel out the sale of a gas guzzling pickup truck or sport utility vehicle, or for allowing an E-85-capable light truck that burns only 4 gallons of ethanol per year to count as a low-carbon vehicle.

Fortunately, these guys aren’t the only fools on Planet Gaia with ideas for how to move forward with changes that would actually benefit humans and quite possibly their animal friends as well.  And since these are public agencies, it might be possible for us, the public, to correct them where they are wrong and set the record straight on what science has to say about, for instance, both the causes and (both economically and environmentally) effective ways of mitigating anthropogenic climate change.  Here’s what a few real experts have been saying lately about the real powers that be, and what they might just have in store for us in the coming century, assuming we stop letting politicians get us drunk on ethanol and move on to the real viable technologies that can protect the world from…well, at least the worst parts of the comedown after a fossil fuel binge, if not the whole thing.  First, though, fair warning to those who might fear the influence of money in politics: some of these ideas might yet turn out to be (or already are) quite profitable!

So what are we waiting for?  Let’s get our heads out of the tar sand and come up with some viable alternatives that can help transition us off unsustainable energy sources, shall we?  And I mean to do so without having to transition back to beasts of burden.  I summon the power of…

Earth: Electrified Rail

If you need something hauled over land, whether you are trying to get your own rear across town or move a piece of junk across the country, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of a train.  In the United States, we sorely lack a high-speed passenger rail network for regional travel, something that exists in virtually every other part of the industrialized world.  The U.S. also depends on trucking for long-distance freight hauling far more than Europe or Japan, and the freight rail network in the U.S. is almost entirely diesel-based, while Europe and Japan have connected most of their rail networks to the electric grid and use electricity to power transportation of both people and goods.  The advantage of rail electrification is the same as that of using non-petroleum automotive fuels: it helps to decouple the cost of transportation, and the embedded transportation costs of goods, from the volatile price of oil.  In theory, an electric-powered rail network could almost entirely replace the current petroleum-dependent highway transportation system and would synergize with the replacement of the existing electric generating capacity with renewable energy sources.  Electric rail transit and hauling are also more energy-efficient than trucking and automobile transport, and often cheaper.  While a world with extensive electric rail would likely still depend on trucks for short-haul transportation and automobiles for personal transportation in remote locations, it could also displace the vast majority of fuel consumption (urban commutes, long-distance passenger travel and freight hauling) such that it might even be possible to decouple the rest of the automotive transport sector from petroleum dependency via electrification and use of alternative fuels.

There’s a reason knowledgeable investors like Warren Buffett are getting behind rail transport, and electric rail in particular, as the wave of the future.

No need to use diesel power for freight: there’s room for some junk in that trunk.

Next up, we have…

Water: Upgraded Hydropower

Hydroelectricity already provides some 5-10% of all primary energy to humanity, but it has the potential to provide more, and perhaps more importantly, it provides two important services that few or no other renewable energy sources can, both of which bring reliability to the grid: baseload power and energy storage for load balancing.  Hydroelectric infrastructure is already widely implemented in many parts of the world, and it can provide nearly the entire electric demand for an area with rapid elevation changes and abundant water resources, e.g. South America or the Pacific Northwest.  It is possible to open and close portals and effectively increase or decrease flow to the turbines at any point so long as sufficient head exists in a hydroelectric reservoir.  Much of the global hydroelectric infrastructure today is aged, and significant potential exists for upgrading and retrofitting existing reservoirs to produce more electricity, directly replacing aged coal-fired generating stations for baseload power.  Such upgrades can often be done at minimal cost if the upgrade merely involves adding more turbines and generators to existing infrastructure.  Reservoirs of sufficient capacity can also be built for large-scale energy storage capacity via pumped-storage hydropower, wherein off-peak or excess electricity is purchased and used to pump water upward back into the reservoir.  Such systems can also be built using seawater.

Did someone say “aging critical infrastructure?”

OK, we’ve got earth, water, what’s next…

Wind: …Wind Power?

Here in these United States, we happen to have a lot of wind.  I know this one is going to WHOOSH right over the heads of those who like to make absurdly out-of-context claims about impacts on wildlife and all that jazz, but the facts also say that it is in fact capable of spinning a fan in reverse to generate power, and that it comes pretty cheap these days.  In any case, if you live in the Midwest, a Rocky Mountain state, or along the East Coast, the process goes more or less like so: Step 1 – Build wind turbine.  Step 2 – ???  Step 3 – you know the drill.  Now rinse, and repeat…a LOT.

Do I have to spell it out for you?

Fire: Kicking it Up a Notch

There has been a good deal of hubbub over “biofuels” in the media over the last several years, from observers like Tom Friedman jumping to demonize any and all uses of a tree for energy as a rape of our poor virgin planet, to rightly deserved skepticism of the value of cornstarch ethanol and other conventional biofuels, particularly when one considers the large quantity of land and resources required to be diverted for production of such a small quantity of fuel.  One result of the problems with heavily subsidized, expensive and inefficient “first-generation biofuels” has been a rush for bio-energy developers to issue press releases proclaiming that they hold the key to “next-generation cellulosic biofuels.”  Don’t hold your breath.  One of the unfortunate truths about the U.S. Department of Ethanol (DOE) is that its biomass program has endlessly promoted such fuels and subsidized research for cellulosic ethanol (at a cost of $30 per gallon) while ignoring the simplest and most cost-effective uses of biomass: as a reliable, renewable source of base loading power, and to provide heating power for homes, businesses, and industries.  In combination with energy conservation and uprating hydroelectric power, and especially with a strong commitment to utilizing waste biomass materials as an energy source, it would be feasible to replace a significant portion of our existing coal-fired electric generating capacity, which represents half of all electricity generated in the U.S., with renewable resources.  In combination with wind power’s continued expansion, there might be enough electricity available through renewable resources alone to head off the worst effects of fossil fuel depletion and prevent a total collapse of services essential to survival.

If we are to clear our forests in order to grow energy crops, we might do well to consider the energy value of those forests themselves, and the value in conserving them so that they can be harvested sustainably to continually support our energy needs.  And someone please tell Mr. Friedman: they grow back.

Earth to Congress and DOE: It’s “Burn, Baby, Burn,” not “Distill, Baby, Distill.”

And last but, though diminutive, not least:

Monkey Power: Kicking the Habit

So what can you, yourself, do to finally make good on our (and our politicians’) collective promise to ourselves to get off oil and other fossil fuels?  For one thing, we can use a whole lot less of them.  Over the long run it is probably a good idea to figure out alternatives to virtually all our uses of oil, but in the short run personal transportation is the biggest part of the problem.  But not all people can or will get by without automobiles, and so we need to have something better than the gasoline-powered behemoths we use today (and probably some alternative to asphalt roads) if we are going to keep cars as an important part of our transportation system, particularly in rural areas where fewer rail lines exist and transit services are less available.  So we have the alternative being promoted to replace, or at least begin to phase out, the gasoline powered internal combustion engine: electric vehicles.  Here we have a pair of problems: gasoline is too expensive and polluting to remain reliant on it, but electric vehicles suffer performance deficits or drastically elevated costs compared to conventional automobiles and lack both the charging infrastructure and the renewable energy production to back such a system.

Is there a solution to the above dilemma?  Well, perhaps the first option is to attack the ICE-versus-electric question from the side.  Why not a little bit of both?  Specifically, if electric vehicles are unable to compete with ICE-powered vehicles in today’s market, absent some external cost being imposed on gasoline or the price being raised somehow, but gas prices are still high enough to hit consumers in the part of the wallet where it hurts most (specifically, the price of groceries), why not work to improve upon the low efficiency of conventional automobiles, including trucks?  Between the low conversion efficiency of internal combustion engines, particularly conventional gasoline spark-ignition engines as compared to compression-ignition diesel, and the sheer bulk of most automobiles, some 98% of the heating value of gasoline is wasted moving a single driver in an car.  We can make a good start by (substantially) reducing unnecessary weight from automobiles, using more cars and trucks with energy storage systems to capture lost energy from the wheels in braking or going downhill, and making our vehicles more aerodynamic.

There are all kinds of ways to use fewer fossil fuels that require no sacrifice, save money, and demand nothing more than a little mindfulness, like remembering to turn out the lights when you leave a room.  If we learn to live with less, it will hurt less as peak oil burns holes both in our wallets and in the seafloor.

Eliminating wasted energy: that’s no sacrifice!

I think with all this in place, we might just be OK, for the time being at least.  So with that said, I’ll hand it back over to you, the reader, to see where you fit into this puzzle.  You have to make the choice.  The Environmental Protection Agency won’t protect you.  What will you do next?

The Power Is Yours!