Energizing America

[Jcrowley]

Energizing America
Fossil fuels burned brightly in their day, but now it's time to make the leap to safer, cleaner, climate-friendly alternatives
by Bill McKibben
January/February 2007


EXPLORERS USED TO AMUSE their European audiences by telling of heathen tribesmen who would panic when an eclipse rubbed out the noonday sun. The natives would scream or pray or make ritual sacrifices to appease the god on whom they had always depended, a god now acting so irrationally. Our chief deity--the cheap energy that has made our lives rich and easy--is about to be eclipsed as well, and the sounds you hear (motorists moaning about the price of gas, politicians loudly insisting that sacrificing wilderness in the Far North will save the day) are no different. Except that solar eclipses pass quickly. This change is forever; fossil fuel was a onetime gift--and the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can go about the realistic task of doing without it.

Much of what passes for discussion about our energy woes is spent imagining some magic fuel that will save us. Solar power! Fusion power! Hydrogen power! But such wishful thinking hides the basic fact of our moment in time: We've already had our magic source of energy. Fossil fuel was as good as it gets: compact, abundant, and easy to handle and transport. All you had to do was stick a drill bit in the ground or scrape off a few feet of soil above a vein of black rock and you were set. Learning to use coal, gas, and oil kicked off the Industrial Revolution and, in subsequent centuries, underwrote the chemical revolution, transportation revolution, agricultural revolution, and electronics revolution. (Right now, even as you read this, fossil fuel is producing hundreds of billions of revolutions per minute.) Pretty much every action of modern life involves burning hydrocarbons, and it's modern life that we've come to like.

So it's no wonder that we start to get a little jittery when we contemplate the coming end of the fossil-fuel age. The growing recognition that we're approaching a peak in oil production is the most obvious sign, of course--our supply of petroleum is now measured in decades, and as each decade passes, that supply will become harder to find and more expensive to pump. The world's four biggest oil fields are in decline. We're using oil five times as fast as we're discovering new reserves. And just as those of us already in on modernity would like to start hoarding the remaining supply, the Chinese and Indians and lots of others are discovering that they'd enjoy taking their cars out for a spin as well.

If all we were faced with was peak oil, we might be able to keep the circus going. We could figure out ways to replace many uses of gasoline with coal, which is abundant as long as we don't mind removing all the remaining mountaintops in the southern Appalachians (a sacrifice, I predict, we would bring ourselves to make--or rather, we would bring ourselves to call upon Kentuckians and West Virginians to make). But we've got a far deeper problem than that, one coal can only make worse. Global warming, as we've come to understand in the past few years, is not a speculative, distant, or easily managed threat. It's not one more item on the list of problems, somewhere between global terrorism and failing inner-city schools. It's the first civilization-scale challenge humans have managed to create (the second, if you count nuclear weapons, but so far we've managed to keep that one under some kind of tenuous control). And global warming has pushed us into a corner: Everything frozen on Earth is melting, huge storms are growing steadily huger, seasons are shifting, forests are dying. Since the 1950s, we've more than tripled emissions of the gas most responsible for global warming: carbon dioxide. The latest estimates conclude that the catastrophic tipping point that might commit us to huge sea-level increases may be reached at atmospheric concentrations of CO2 as low as 450 parts per million. And since we're already at 380 ppm, and increasing faster than 2 ppm annually--well, you can do the math. NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, said in 2006 that his modeling showed we had ten years to start putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or we'd create "a very different planet." And he's an optimist. British scientist James Lovelock says that by his calculations, we have already waited too long and that billions will die as a result before the century is over. Lovelock has company among those peak-oil theorists who forecast a future of angry residents of crumbling suburbs searching for scarce gasoline and fighting over the bones of our past affluence.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200701/energizing.asp