The Question of Energy: And why the answer is not a simple one

Katie D.

November 28, 2008 - 3:42 PM

I am entering into adult life at a very interesting moment in history. There seems to be an infinite list of issues, campaigns, imminent disasters, and humanitarian concerns that are worthy of my time and attention. I feel compelled to take part in efforts to end war, poverty, hunger (here and abroad), human rights abuses, and on and on. There are new ideas I'm excited about and new causes I support. I have taken classes in Feminist Theory, Systems of War and Peace, and Mexican Migration. I hope to use all this information in my adult life to effect change in the world.

But this term I am also in a class on the global energy crisis and systems of energy production that has dramatically shifted my perspective on this issue. Energy production and resource consumption are issues that affect everyone on the planet, either directly through the need to heat our houses and power our cars, or indirectly as we continually power our lives through environmentally damaging means that results in damage to everyone's quality of life. There are a myriad of solutions being offered to these problems, taking into account a huge variety of factors. This issue is something that has interested me for a long time, but is also one that I never felt I understood in-depth, possibly due to my humanities-based education. It has been hard for me to understand the science behind all these issues, without having a true grasp on the important scientific factors.

The class is called Principles of Global Energy Production, and what I am learning is that our energy future is much more complicated than I had imagined. The question of energy production and consumption is not determined solely by our energy needs, or by the demands of the environment, but also by market forces, economic concerns, individual conceptions, and, most importantly, the political angle. As our existing energy base is both running out and destroying our global environment, we are unable or unwilling to take the drastic measures to implement the technologies we must in order to survive as a nation and as a world. This class has helped me explore some of the angles of this problem, starting with the basic limitations of our physical world.

The most basic physics problem we face is that we live on a planet with limited resources. For example, we are effectively out of copper. Any and all future technologies that require copper will have to recycle existing copper sources. That is a serious problem for our future as resource users, and one that could have been foreseen. We face a similar problem with other earth metals, such as platinum, which is essential for current models of fuel cells for powering automobiles. Super efficient solar panels have been developed, but cannot be implemented because we lack sufficient reserves of the required rare earth metals.

The basic problem is that we have rapidly overdeveloped our world, both in terms of land use as well as basic materials available to exploit. We have developed ourselves into the uncomfortable position of needing a massive investment of money and materials for re-creating an energy infrastructure and being less and less able to do so as time goes on.

Human beings often have trouble planning on the grand scale. We build wind farms that power 100 houses when what we really need to do is invest in the infrastructure and facilities to enable a single wind farm to power the entire Northwest. This is something we have the technology and resources to do; and wind energy is something that can be produced cheaply and requires minimal upkeep and monetary investment after the initial setup. Everyone talks about the startup cost of a wind farm, when really this amount is vastly less than that of a nuclear facility and can be brought online in one tenth of the time. (Aside from environmental and health concerns, nuclear power plants are a problematic solution because a large-scale nuclear reactor requires 10-12 years to build.) Wind is actually a very inexpensive resource, once the electrical grid has been set up to transport the power.

Infrastructure is the largest barrier to implementing energy structure changes. Most of our electrical grid is about fifty years old, which leads to all kinds of maintenance and efficiency problems. But replacing and expanding the grid now requires a huge investment of money: approximately one and a half million dollars per mile. This presents a real problem for a resource like wind, which has most energy potential located in areas like the Midwest, while the country's population centers are on the coasts. Despite the necessity of updating the system, it is politically risky to mandate such a huge monetary investment, and the market has been unwilling to see this as something that must be done, regardless of the initial costs it is something that our energy future and lifestyles demand. Instead of moving toward large-scale change, we have collectively focused on small-scale model projects that are helpful in proving we have the technological capacity to make a change, but do not make a substantive difference in our energy problem.

I have a whole term's worth of statistics and examples I could write out, and maybe I will come back to this topic at some point. But here's the Cliff Note's version of this course:

1. We are running out of time.
2. Seeing that we are running out of time, we have to focus our investment in change on large-scale efforts. The world does not quantatively care if one house is energy- or carbon-neutral. It does not care if one city is "green." We have to stop investing in pilot projects and make sweeping change possible.
3. We, as a country, cannot continue to depend on fossil fuels for our energy. That means more than shifting away from oil, it means that we cannot keep going the direction we are headed in, which is a new reliance on natural gas imported from Russia and Iran (how do we think this will help?).
4. We cannot physically solve this problem in ten years, much as we might like to. This is something that will take huge quantities of time and money and resource shifting to fix.
5. We have to base our decisions on science to make intelligent investment and implementation decisions. That means that we have to have studies done on effectiveness of fuel sources as a whole, and not each industry advocating for their own brand of national salvation.

But the most important conclusion we can draw is that our world's resources are a shared commodity. We cannot continue to structure our society as though all the world's petroleum is ours for the buying. There needs to be a world-wide understanding of energy as something we all need and all deserve access to. We have to begin to think and act like we are citizens of a world ecosystem and a world supply of resources, and that these must be developed carefully and respectfully.

It is within the power of our society today to solve problems like the global climate crisis and energy demands. But these solutions must be carefully considered, and must be made despite their immediate effects on politics or market prices. Somehow we must restructure our conceptions of problems to include their long-term implications, as well as their impacts on the larger world. Hopefully as more people come into a more complete understanding of our global problems we can move toward sweeping and effective solutions.

This ten week long class on Principles of Global Energy Production course has enabled me to begin understand the complexities of the problem and the true requirements of a solution. This is my generation's great problem to solve. I hope we'll be ready, and I hope I can somehow contribute to the solution.