A recent diary by Jerome a Paris included a link to Engineer Poet's Magnum Opus, "Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy", a 9000+ word essay detailing a proposal that in my humble opinion, if acted upon in good part, will literally save our planet, our country's economy and light the way to a future era of sustainable prosperity. Do I have your attention? Read on.
Here's a taste:
Other, less-serious problems have been dealt with far more competently. The USA had a plan for achieving the goal of saving the peregrine falcon and bald eagle from DDT, and another for saving the world's ozone layer from halocarbon emissions. Both of these were carried forward both domestically and internationally, with considerable success on both programs. Given the last ten years of concern about global warming and three decades of concern over energy supplies, you would expect something similar would be in the works for those also. Something broad-based and serious:
* A self-sustaining system which replaces petroleum-based fuels in the short term, and all fossil fuels eventually.
* Productivity high enough to eliminate the displaced fuels without major land-use or other changes.
* A shift toward a neutral carbon and GHG balance, or even a negative net balance.
You can look through our initiatives from last year's energy bill through the previous three administrations, and you wouldn't find anything like this. Nothing in our current energy "policy" even aims squarely at these goals, let alone has a prospect of meeting them (though Carter and Clinton/Gore do deserve credit for thinking about it).
It looks like we could do a lot, with the right engineering backed by supportive policies. What would you say if I told you that we could use biomass to:
* Replace all the petroleum used by the ground-transport sector (55% or more)?
* Replace all the natural gas used by the electric-generation sector (about 1/3 of US natural gas consumption)?
* Replace every pound of coal burned for electricity (about 90% of all US coal consumption)?
* Eliminate over 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions (4.4 billion tons of CO2) from oil and coal.
All that, and have some left over. I believe we could, and I'll illustrate how (with numbers!) below. But to understand where we need to go, we should first see where we are and how we got here.
What his proposal boils down to is a massive harnessing of the carbon cycle but in the right way, a way that corrects the mistakes of the past. Right now we dig stored carbon out of the ground and spew by-products like CO2 into the atmosphere like there's no tomorrow. The best you can say about this state of things is that we do it these days a little more efficiently than we did fifty years ago. To correct matters, we have to leverage the most exciting technology on the drawing boards today - the direct carbon fuel cell - an invention that approaches 80 percent efficiency - and use the correct carbon neutral fuel which is biomass. As a society we also have to reward good behavior - by taxing greenhouse gas emission and paying biomass producers to sequester carbon in the ground.
Engineer Poet describes himself as a "small l" libertarian and a Goldwater conservative. Don't let that put you off. He may not be very patient with some of us wishy-washy liberals but he loathes global warming deniers, innumerate Luddites and bullshit-artists of all political stripes. He backs up his energy policy arguments rigorously - with numbers.
Read this essay. You won't regret it. Take a long swim in the sea of information, but don't stop there. Read some of his comments on the essay over at The Oil Drum and Gristmill. E-P has really done his homework. This essay may be just a start.