Over the weekend my sometime neighbor and constant thinker, Doc Searls posted on two aspects of our current energy paradigm- taking fuel for our economic engines from below.
His photo of ‘coal ranching’ in Wyoming illustrates the challenge we have in accepting that full costs of how we live. In the comments section, RBM laments that “affluence seems to be able to delay the inevitable pain”.
On the second post, Doc points at the LA Times editorial endorsing the failure of an unprecedented collaboration of an oil company and the famously strong environmentalists of the Santa Barbara Channel GOO (Get Oil Out).
There are, in the posts, the comments, and the issues themselves, a lot of fallacies, false choices and misstatements of the situation. First, the full costs of how we live are present all the time. While we live in the fantasy of Adam Smith’s economics, where externalities are something you don’t pay for, the physical fact is that there is no externality, no ‘downstream’ and no ‘away’. The pain is present in the poison in the fish you can no longer safely eat, the degraded health of millions, and the fact that your body right now carries and deals with various chemicals and compounds that your great grandparents never could have encountered. The only thing affluence enables is denial of these physical facts.
Second, there is more kinetic energy available on the planet right now than even ten billion of us living at western middle class standards can use. Sun, wind, and wave energy on the surface of the planet exceed our current needs. For instance the daily US energy need is equaled by the sun that falls within a one hundred and ten square mile area. Unfortunately, the current best technology we have for gathering solar requires nearly ten thousand square miles of PV glass ( not even enough to put shade over every tenth parking place nationwide) and appropriate cost effective transport and storage of such energy (other than dams for hydro) need to be developed. The amount of energy available in wave and heat differential in the oceans of the world dwarf the needs of a fully built out planet. It is estimated that just a ten square mile kinetic capture operation would supply all of California’s current energy needs.
Third, Doc sounds a note of fatalism when he says that some successor species will mine our cemeteries. Far more likely is that after some cataclysmic die off, humans will mine our land fills and junkyards for all manner of spare parts. Short of nuclear or biological warfare on global scale, or the big asteroid nightmare popular on YouTube and cable end of the world shows, people will adapt whether it be to the “Waterworld” landless conditions or the Star Wars ice planet Hoth.
Lastly, on the political front, the failed accord between an oil company and the local environmental community was exemplary example of the new world we want to live in. The oil company was going to realize a return on investment, and the community was promised an endgame to oil drilling off their shore. There were benefits to both. The state Lands Commission voted against it mostly because they didn’t believe the oil company promise to end operations in 2022. We need to study, and emulate both sides of the matter, while encouraging, nurturing and coaxing the fearful to move forward, as well as learn from their mistakes (keeping some aspects of the deal secret).
Science, as evidenced in every field today, is increasingly multi disciplinary. People crossing boundaries of every sort, coming together and talking about what they know, and what they can agree upon, is how we undo 160 years of design ignorant of the fact that the earth is a closed system. The opportunity to redesign our society to be sustainable is the biggest since the industrial revolution. It will be realized by those who break down antiquated categories and separations, and work towards common goals.
Tags: climate change, economics, energy, fallacies, global warming