Transition to Renewables Cannot Wait, Devotion to Carbon Fuel is Folly

Related subjects: Asia / Pacific, Carbon Emissions, China, Climate Change, Earth Policy Institute, Energy Supply, Environment & Ecology, Food Security: Africa, Global, India, J.E. Robertson, Opinion, Renewable Resources, Sustainable Development, U.S. Environment, Water: a Global Crisis, World Leader Pretend, Zero-combustion Paradigm Comments (3)

18 June 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen, as some suggest.

A quick look at Europe, which is far ahead on this, from Lester Brown, one of the most respected sources on ecological science and renewable energy, for four decades:

Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy. In its late 2003 projections, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) shows Europe’s wind-generating capacity expanding from 28,400 megawatts in 2003 to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and 180,000 megawatts in 2020. By 2020, just 16 years from now, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy the residential needs of 195 million Europeans, half of the region’s population.

Read more about this at the Earth Policy Institute. These are serious people, doing real science, and real economic analysis. Their research is read by world leaders and UN agencies. Anyone who wants to understand the global economy as we shift to a less primitive, less dangerous way of harvesting energy would do well to read their work.

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The US Department of Energy found in 1991 that Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone had enough wind “resources” to generate 100% of US domestic electricity needs. Almost 20 years later, the standard wind turbine is more than twice as tall, with much larger blades, and is able to capture a much greater supply of wind energy. Advances in efficiency and delivery mean that those three states alone could potentially account for all US energy consumption, via wind power. If the infrastructure is built, that is.

The ONLY reason it is not considered the cheapest, most efficient method of producing a reliable energy flow is because our infrastructure is designed to harvest carbon for combustion, and our government literally pays the oil companies to do what they do. If the infrastructure is built, and the subsidies shift, you’ll start to hear industry types complaining about how hard it will be to be in the oil business, and you’ll see quieter, subtler minds figuring out how to make huge profits from wind power.

In a recent debate on the issue of climate destabilization and the potential fallout from glacial melt in the Himalayas, a critic of the carbon-free vision of the future suggested that it is “alarmist” to express concern about people whose life-sustaining resources are being rapidly depleted. The Gangotri glacier, which feeds the Ganges, and a vast network of river systems across south Asia, is melting at an unprecedented rate.

We know that burning carbon-based fuels contributes to the warming of the global climate. A mere 1 degree increase in the annual average global temperature started the process. The annual average global temperature has risen another 2 degrees since that time, and in the course of just one century, the glacier, which took millions of years to form, has retreated by 70%.

500 million people rely on the river systems that are fed by that one glacier in order to survive. Bangladesh and India have already come close to armed conflict over these water resources. There are 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayan range. Over 1 billion people across the region depend on those glaciers for fresh water. Scientists estimate that at the current rate of melt, every Himalayan glacier will be gone by the year 2035. 

This is not alarmism. This is happening now. “Nature” can survive burning a little more petroleum, of course, even a lot more, but not every ecosystem and not every species will survive the changes “nature” will undergo. We knew in the 1950s that the Gangotri glacier was melting at three times the rate for the previous 200 years, yet nothing was done to prepare to make responsible changes. Even now, when the rate of melt is by far the fastest on record, there is still a prevailing skepticism about what practical measures might be taken to slow melt. 

If you study the history of the relationship between climate and human civilization, you find that relatively minor climate variations have brought an abrupt end to periods of great prosperity: ancient Sumeria is one case; ancient Egypt is another; the Mayan civilization as well; and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a man-made climate disaster. Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China also saw tens of millions each die from environmental degradation and agricultural collapse. 

Lester Brown, whom I mention above, actually helped to save hundreds of millions of lives in India, in the 1960s, by working with the UN to prevent famine. Those kind of things can only be accomplished once we learn to pay attention to the relevant facts. We have learned from those experiences, or at least some of us have, and responsible nations have established methods of preventing the collapse of harvest yields, fisheries and other environmentally sensitive sectors of the economy.

But those are just baby steps. We have not even begun to apply most of what we already know, and weaning ourselves off carbon-based fuels is part of what we need to do. Other nations may indeed continue to rely on carbon-based combustible fuels for their energy they may lag dramatically in making the shift, which would reduce the overall usefulness of efforts to cut emissions and combat climate change.

This is often cited as a reason why we should also voluntarily lag, and invest in more oil, and coal, and not in renewables. That plan is not sound economics, however. In fact, it would be like economic suicide, because we have the wealth, the science and the technology to speed our transition to renewables, so that we don’t have to compete for the overpriced oil of 10 to 15 years from now and bankrupt ourselves in the process. Doing nothing will make us far more vulnerable to oil shocks, perpetuating unnecessary economic weaknesses we could overcome by innovating now.