Let’s Be Realistic About Green, Energy, and Your Future

I am always sad to see pictures of polar bears floating out to sea on an ice berg.

I have become some what immune to how many people are starving in the world.

I believe that humans should have concern for the planet they have wrecked by creating a smaller carbon foot print and buying the right light bulbs. I am not sure that humans or natural causes are creating global warning but I believe it is happening and we are contributing.

But let’s look at a few facts. Global population is supposed to increase by 40% by 2050. That means we are going from 6.3 billion to around 9.5 billion people; a high percentage are moving to the cities. Hundreds of millions now live without energy and are starving.

Energy as Robert Price kindly defines in “Power Hungry” is the ability to do work and power is the rate at which work gets done. Energy sources have power and energy density which is their ability to supply the power we need for the tasks we have to complete.

90% of the global power today is supplied by oil, coal, and gas. Nuclear is growing. We don’t have enough power yet to supply electricity to half the world’s 6.5 billion people. India says 400 million of its people don’t have a light bulb in their homes. India has coal and it says it will use it. Who is going to tell them to stop?

The U.N. says to keep people from starving we need to grow more food than we are currently growing. The main food sources are wheat, corn, soy, and rice. Weather as much as anything interrupts our food production. We need arable land, water, and energy to feed the world. As we have seen recently, people riot when they don’t have food.

Solar, wind, and biofuels are green but don’t deliver much power and require a lot of real estate. For an easy example Robert Price says compare the power you may get out of a bucket of leaves compared to a bucket of gas. The several hundred million people in poverty are cooking with sticks, leaves, and dung. The fumes are killing them and they spend too much time gathering their fuel.

Teslas and Volts are great but they are expensive and don’t go very far. The real problem in scale is that batteries don’t produce much power for their size. Electricity won’t power planes, ships, and big trucks. The issues with solar and wind power is that they are dependent on sources that are not reliable, cannot be stored, and need a lot of real estate.

If we wanted to substitute bio fuel from switch grass or corn to cover 10% of U.S. gasoline needs we would need land comparable to the state of Oklahoma. Then we would be reducing our food production, which we export by that 62,000 square miles.

When this next 3 billion people arrive on earth and move to the cities, they will need more energy and more food. As Lawrence C. Smith points out in “The World in 2050” as nations develop like the BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India, and China they need energy to increase productivity. You should also include Indonesia, Pakistan, and East Asia.

Energy consumption is directly correlated to economic output. Eric Janzen argues in “The Post Catastrophe Economy” that we need more energy to employ the 400 million globally unemployed and equal amount of people living in starvation. Employment increases consumption which also brings people out of starvation.

Coal produces a million BTU for about $1-$2; Oil and gas for about $6-$12. Countries that have coal are going to continue burning it. Developing and impoverished nations need cheap and available energy to increase productivity. The cheaper the fuel, the more competitive their exports.

Only about 30% of oil is used for gasoline. The balance is refined for other uses. The U.S. is the world’s top refiner and has net exports of 1.9 billion barrels of refined petroleum.

The reality is we will continue to process oil, coal, gas, and nuclear energy while we make ourselves feel better by contributing financing to the alternative sources of energy. The truth seems to be that for the next several decades, there will an increased demand for the fuels that produce power at the cheapest possible rates.

Even if we hit peak oil, peak gas, and peak coal we will continue to use them. Some experts say we have already hit peak oil and peak coal.

The U.S. leads the world in hydro carbon resources which are oil, coal, and gas. The U.S. has about 970 billion barrels of oil equivalent resources in oil, coal, and gas. Russia is second with about 955 billion barrels and China third with about 466 billion barrels. India is further down the list.

The U.S. is second in natural gas resources behind Russia and ahead of China.Global Natural gas “resources” are estimated to approximate 5.4 trillion equivalent barrels of oil and the U.S. is first in those resources with enough to equal about 350 billion barrels of equivalent oil. That’s bigger than Saudi Arabia.  Resources are probable supply, not proven surveyed supply.

The cleanest most productive energy could be supplied by natural gas and nuclear energy. They don’t require much land and they produce a lot of power and they are relatively cheap. Most nations are ramping up nuclear productivity.

The stark reality is that we need plentiful, powerful, cheap energy.  Oil, coal, gas, and nuclear are the way the world is going to continue getting it. Most people won’t accept lower productivity to make the planet green. Surveys show people are not willing to add $100 to their electric bills to go green.

Industry is not going to provide the mechanisms to harness green energy because they know it is not scalable and cannot replace existing fuels. Green energy will be developed, however, because governments are willing to fund it.

Natural gas and nuclear are relatively clean. Oil, gas, and coal are relatively cheap. That is the real direction we are headed. When you listen to the arguments and evaluate the realities, I think you will see that green is necessary but the demands of a growing population are going to defer its real impact for many decades.

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Power Hungry by Robert Bryce

The World in 2050 by Lawrence C Smith

The PostCatastrophe Economy by Eric Janszen

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