Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs died.Actually, dinosaurs were living, and dying, for tens of millions of years before then. So were lots of fish, reptiles, mammals, and huge numbers of plants. After they died, many of the remains were buried under ever-deepening layers of dirt and rock. The eons, combined with the pressures of being buried so deeply, turned these remains into coal oil, and natural gas - in other words, fossil fuels.
Lately, for only a miniscule amount of time in the history of the planet, we have been digging up those fossil fuels and burning them to provide energy for transportation, communication, illumination, and various other purposes. These fossil fuels have proved a boon to our lifestyles.
But there are two problems.
The more widely disputed problem is that are putting millions of tons of carbon back into the atmosphere every year. This carbon, combined with oxygen and other elements, causes the heat from the sun to stay in the atmosphere, rather than radiating back into space. The result is global warming, an effect that will soon have a substantial effect on human life. In the last generation, the temperature across most of Alaska has risen seven degrees. The arctic ice layer and many other glaciers are melting. The Gulf Stream - the warm Atlantic flow that keeps Europe from freezing - is slowing down.
The other problem, which has come into focus in the last year, is that we are running out of sources of oil and natural gas. In 1971, America's oil production peaked; only two years later our increasing dependence on foreign oil gave OPEC the power to cripple our economy. Today, world oil production is at or near its peak. Old oil wells are drying up faster than we can dig new ones. On the other side of the ledger, demand for oil, particularly in India and China, is rapidly increasing. Within the next few years, demand will exceed supply. The initial result will be chronic shortages and skyrocketing prices. This will be followed by a major global economic crisis, as the means to keep the industrial economies growing will be choked off.
We need to act now.
Every year, America's dependence on foreign oil increases. Every year, we become more vulnerable. Fortunately, every year we get a little closer to being able to reduce our need for oil. Unfortunately, we may not be moving fast enough.
There are two general areas in which we can reduce our demand for oil. One is to develop and utilize renewable energy sources. The other is to use our energy more efficiently. Neither is a panacea, but by aggressively combining the two approaches we can not only reduce our vulnerability, but also create the kind of jobs, and attendant wealth, that can power the American economy through the next century.
Renewable energy sources include solar, wind, water, geothermal, and biological sources. Currently, many countries are far ahead of us in development and utilization of these sources. But with a major push the United States can not only catch up, but even take the lead.
Solar power is on the verge of another technological breakthrough that might actually lower the cost to the point where it will become economically competitive with other sources. We have only begun to tap the potential for wind power; there are huge areas where wind turbines can create inexpensive, clean electricity without disturbing anyone's view. Generating electricity from water flows by using small turbines, known as "microhydro", has barely begun. Geothermal heat exchange, which takes advantage of the temperature difference between the air above ground and the soil just a few feet underground, has hardly been tapped. These clean, renewable energy sources are all either economically competitive now, or will be in the very near future.
In addition to being clean and renewable, these energy sources don't add carbon to the atmosphere, and therefore don't contribute to global warming and its potentially disastrous side effects. Unfortunately, even if we fully utilized all of these sources, they only add up to a fraction of our total energy needs. But it's a start. A major push to develop these energy sources can, at the very least, provide us with the extra energy we will require as our economy continues to grow.
Biological sources consist primarily of converting crops, such as corn or soybeans, into usable fuels like ethanol or biodiesel. Additionally, we produce an enormous amount of biological waste, and most of it ends up in garbage dumps; we can incinerate these wastes to create electricity.
The problem with converting corn into ethanol is that it is too expensive - it takes more than a gallon of corn-based ethanol to grow, process and distribute that gallon. The only reason ethanol is on the market at all is that the federal government, held hostage to the corn growers' lobby, is subsidizing it. Additionally, many of the fertilizers used to help grow corn are made from petroleum, so corn-based ethanol, far from being a solution, only adds to the problem.
We need to redirect our energies away from subsidizing ethanol production and toward developing more efficient methods for producing ethanol. In Brazil, they use sugar cane rather than corn, with tremendous results. While sugar cane requires tropical climates that don't exist in most of the U.S., other options are being developed and tested. Research into these ethanol crops should be subsidized to speed up the time when they become economically viable.
Biodiesel made from soybeans is already available at a lower cost than gasoline. If newer cars and trucks were built to handle this fuel (and many diesel models require no modification at all), we could lower - possibly even eliminate - our imports of oil within ten years. Consumers would save money, farmers would make more money, and our trade deficit would be reduced significantly.
Using biodiesel (or ethanol) instead of petroleum products also reduces the threat of global warming. Unlike gasoline and other petroleum products, where the carbon is dug out of the ground and spewed into the air, fuels from plants simply recycle the carbon. Corn, soybeans, sugar cane, and other plants pull carbon out of the air in order to grow. By burning the fuels made from these plants, we're just putting the carbon back that we took out in the first place.
Bioelectric plants, which burn biological waste to create electricity, have the same benefits. They burn organic waste, recycling carbon to create the electricity we need, and lower our need for garbage dumps. And they lower our use of fossil fuels. There are already such plants in use in the United States; there is no reason not to expand their use significantly, especially as there is such a huge supply.
There are so many areas where we can shift away from burning fossil fuels without reducing our energy supplies, where we can save money, save the environment, create jobs and keep our money at home. Furthermore, by taking the lead in this area, we can export the technologies worldwide, which can help restore our increasingly unbalanced international trade.
The other side of this coin is efficient use of the energy we have.
Recently, Texas Instruments chose to build their new plant in the United States rather than China. The reason for this choice was an energy-efficient design that would cut building and operating costs by about one-fourth. The result of their choice is 1,000 high-tech jobs that will remain in the United States, rather than being outsourced. How many millions of jobs, and how many billions of dollars, can we save simply by expanding this effort nationwide? We should find out.
Our homes can be redesigned, and new homes built, to use far less electricity than we use now. These new designs need not be much more expensive at first, and will save money in the long run. Ending subsidies for power plants and power grids will force customers to pay full price for the electricity we use, and people will be more conscious of turning off lights and appliances when not in use.
For the past few years, hybrid cars have sold faster than car companies are gearing up to manufacture them. Despite their significantly higher initial cost, demand is already extraordinary, and growing exponentially. A federal push to require manufacturers to build fuel-efficient cars and trucks will lower the cost of hybrids as mass production economies of scale take effect. This push should not be in the form of simply ramping up overall fuel economy standards - smaller cars use less gasoline, but are also less safe. Instead, the new standards should be based on the size of the vehicle, and must apply to all cars and trucks.
Additionally, manufacturers should be required to put multi-fuel engines - so-called "flex-fuel" engines - in all new cars and trucks as soon as possible. This procedure was used successfully in Brazil, enabling drivers to choose their fuel, rather than being stuck with gasoline.
Finally, rather than subsidizing individual auto use by using general tax revenues to pay for roads, we should focus more on building up the infrastructure for both inter- and intra-city mass transit. Every person who gets out of a car and onto a train saves energy.
Increased use of renewable energy sources, combined with more efficient use of the energy we produce, may not make the United States completely energy self-sufficient, but it will go a long way toward the kind of independence we need to protect our economy, our natural resources, and our national security. We can restore something close to the natural balance the earth had before we were digging up and burning fossil fuels at such an enormous rate.
Time is ticking quickly. Already we are seeing near-disastrous results of our indifference. Glaciers are melting and global air and water flows are shifting, and these changes will have long-term calamitous results. But even now we are seeing the catastrophic results of global warming. In the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, water temperatures are rising, giving power to more powerful hurricanes, like the three that caused such death and destruction last summer. There will be more storms until we reverse the trends we are creating. And the results will be more death, more destruction, and more cities and civilizations lost to history.
We can either save the dinosaurs, or become them.
Copyright 2006, Dan Jacoby
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