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 ASES
has been promoting renewable energy development as an antidote to
global warming, and justifiably so.
An equally compelling argument for renewable energy is global
peak oil — the reality that when an oil field is about half drained
its production begins to decline. The concept was described in 1956
by M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist for Shell Oil, and oil companies
now acknowledge that the world has reached that point. Half the oil
has been pumped, and what remains is increasingly expensive to get
at. The supply of fossil oil can only dwindle in future.
The public is now at least generally aware of the global warming
danger, but is relatively clueless about peak oil, partly because
free-market advocates have long said that the market would
“naturally” balance fuel supply, demand and price. Now, rapidly
escalating gasoline prices are an indicator that something’s out of
balance. Oil at $135 is a pretty strong market signal. Even
free-market advocates can understand that when the price rockets
toward orbit, it means the supply is inadequate to meet fast-rising
demand. Shell oil has begun to admit publicly that they can’t get
enough of the stuff, and are not likely to in future. Peak oil is
here, and the market knows it. Even people who don’t believe in
global warming know they’re paying too much for fuel.
Now some American oil companies and their political allies claim
that there’s plenty of oil left in the ground. All we need to do to
get cheap gasoline again, they say, is to open access to some
smaller, environmentally sensitive oil finds. Geologists point out
that there isn’t enough oil in those fields to make a difference in
the price of gas, either in the short term or long.
The real long-term solution to both global warming and peak oil
is to quit burning fossil fuel. That’s a matter of scaling up the
use of renewable substitutes while moving to efficient practices.
This should be an easy message to put across to the public. In fact,
poll after poll show that the public believes strongly in renewable
energy. But for several decades, lobbyists for fossil energy have
delayed meaningful public action on a large scale, and they continue
to do so. As we’ve long seen, corporate-owned media feel obliged to
balance the findings of the knowledgeable scientific community with
the voice of extractive industries.
For the past year, the fossil fuel industry has been running ads
touting the virtues of “clean coal” and natural gas. Natural gas is
about as “clean” as a fossil fuel can get, but it too is a declining
resource, in short supply worldwide. In the first half of this year,
the price of natural gas rose 78 percent. For renewable energy, this
is good news: it makes wind and solar power competitive with gas,
with or without subsidies.
When oil prices really start to soar and gasoline climbs toward
$10 a gallon, the American driving public will demand that the
government take action to provide affordable liquid fuel, no matter
the climatic effects. Liquid vehicle fuels can indeed be produced
from coal but at an environmental cost of about twice the CO2
released into the atmosphere. More productive transportation
alternatives are electric drive (plug-in hybrid cars and trucks, and
rail lines) and biofuels. These alternatives can be sustainable.
Meanwhile, the nuclear power industry proposes to take a role in
electrifying our transport system. They want to resume construction
after a three-decade lay-off following the Three Mile Island
accident. The industry promotes its “carbon-free” technology and
skates over the serious environmental impacts of uranium mining,
radioactive waste and water use. The new generation of
potassium-cooled fast reactors, described in the April 2008 issue of
Scientific American, produce less waste but create significant
quantities of plutonium — and that poses problems of weapons
proliferation and terrorism. Nuclear plants cost far more to build
and operate than equivalent wind plants, and take far longer to
build. This isn’t just talk, it’s real: worldwide installed wind
peak power at the end of 2007 was nearly 100 gigawatts and will
reach 172 GW by the end of 2010. This compares to 164 GW of
installed nuclear capacity in France and the United States combined.
Wind and solar installations can double capacity every two years,
filling the power gap left by the disappearance of fossil fuels.
Nuclear power has not, and cannot do that.
Clearly, ASES as an organization, and individual ASES members,
should talk and write about peak oil as another reason to adopt
aggressive renewable energy policies. We need to contact our elected
officials, write letters to the editor, and give speeches to civic
organizations and other opinion-shapers. The challenge is daunting
and the time for meaningful action is rapidly dwindling.
Steve Sargent, Ph.D.,
is a former renewable energy program manager for the U.S. Department
of Energy, and mechanical engineering professor at the University of
Maryland, where he initiated a solar energy course for architects
and engineers. He has been an ASES/ISES member since 1963 and served
in numerous ASES capacities.
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