Let’s talk energy (or: Dan starts lecturing again)

President Bush’s State of the Union speech was, for the most part, business as usual. He linked Iraq with 9/11, questioned the patriotism of those who oppose the war, attacked judges who defend the Constitution, called for more tax cuts for the wealthy and made a few hollow calls for bipartisanship, which he clearly has no interest in himself. It was like a gag reel from speeches past.

Except for one part. One part was very interesting...

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President Bush the gas tycoon told Americans we are addicted to oil and need to get off the stuff. He made pleas to direct more funding to alternative and renewable energy sources, especially ethanol, and to spend less on importing oil from other countries. Of course, he stopped short of asking Americans not to buy gas-guzzling SUVs or live in places where they have to drive 5 miles to buy a loaf of bread, but few politicians from either party would have the testicular fortitude for that, so we should be happy with baby steps.

The thing that makes oil special is its extreme energy efficiency. That is, for every unit of energy you put into producing oil, you get many more units of energy from it in return. Other sources, particularly the so-called “green” ones, are far less efficient. For example, despite popular sentiment, solar and wind are far from “free”. It costs a lot, in both dollars and energy, to set up and maintain the photovoltaics and wind turbines, which in return only produce a trickle of power. Solar and wind power haven’t caught on in the mainstream for the very simple reason that they operate at an overall loss as frequently as they do a gain, and even in the best circumstances are far less efficient than traditional methods.

Ethanol, highlighted by President Bush in his speech last night, faces similar problems. There is a lot of disagreement over just how energy efficient ethanol is. Some studies find it horribly inefficient, some more efficient than oil and others somewhere inbetween. But even if it turns out to be more efficient than gasoline, ethanol and other biodiesel fuels are incapable of completely replacing oil for a very simple reason: There isn’t enough arable farmland in the world to both power our cities and feed our people. No amount of wishful thinking will change that, and I dunno about you, but I like to eat.

The promised hydrogen economy is a non-starter. Hydrogen is only a way to store energy, not produce it, so it solves nothing. We’re pretty much out of places to build dams, geothermal options are extremely limited, and natural gasses are running out as quickly as oil. What does that leave?

Get ready to cringe, environmentalists, because it leaves us with two options: coal and nuclear. Bush mentioned them both as ways to get off our oil habit, and he’s right. They’re both tremendously efficient. We have at least another 100 years worth of coal left and could easily use it to run our cities. Nuclear power is an even better option, as it is both cleaner and safer than coal. It gets a bad rap, but most of it is undeserved. All the radioactive waste ever produced in the history of nuclear power production in the United States could be stored in a space the size of a high school gymnasium – as long as you put it somewhere remote it is not as big an issue as people make it out to be. It is certainly far less harmful to the environment than the massive amounts of carbon pollution spewed into the atmosphere by coal plants and oil refineries. Nuclear is also safer. As our safety protocols are far more advanced than the Russians’ were at Chernobyl, no one has ever died as a result of a nuclear accident in the United States. The same cannot be said for coal. And for the record, Five Mile Island was a near catastrophe, not an actual one. Our safety protocols made sure of that.

There’s clearly a problem with coal and nuclear power, though. You can’t run them small-scale. Coal is horrendously dirty and spews carcinogenic levels of soot wherever it’s burned, and obviously there would be safety issues with equipping every car in America with a nuclear reactor, never mind the cost. Coal and nuclear have to be produced centrally and then piped out to consumers via an energy grid. They’re great for powering homes, but not so good for cars.

But we are getting somewhere. If you produce your energy centrally in coal or nuclear plants, you could use hydrogen or batteries to store that energy and power cars. But predictably, there are problems. To retrofit our auto infrastructure to run on hydrogen would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. In the period after World War II, when American hegemony was at its height, we spent most of our accumulated national wealth building that auto infrastructure. With our empire in decline and another hegemonic rivalry due in about 20 years (for an intro to hegemony theory find a copy of Long Cycles in World Politics by George Modelski – I can’t find an adequate link to describe it), it’s not likely we’ll have the money to turn every gas station into a hydrogen depot. Garage outlets for electric cars can be built much more easily, but as everyone knows, electric cars take a long time to charge and run out of battery quickly. Plus they’re not much fun to drive.

So, ten paragraphs later, let’s wrap up. It’s super that President Bush is thinking outside the oil box, but alternative fuels are not going to save us, at least not in the way we hope. We will continue to have plenty of electricity and some combination of hybrid/electric/ethanol energies will keep cars on the road long into the future, but nothing is going to stop driving from becoming a lot more expensive and lot less fun. Like it or not.

Tags: politics society technology urbanism environment