It is time to revise the language of energy. There is more than "renewables" and all the rest. We have at our fingertips sources of infinite energy, given the will to pursue it. What follows is one approach.
Anybody who has lived on the high plains of Wyoming knows that the wind there rarely stops. Days without wind are less common than days without sunshine, and there aren’t many of those. Local lore has it that when white people started to live on the high plains the wind drove many insane. With average speeds of about 25mph and gusts occasionally going over 100mph it is one of the windiest places on earth. By the end of the twentieth century, people realized how wind energy could be made efficiently into an important source of electrical energy. On Earth Day (April 22), 1999, the Foote Hill wind farm at Arlington, Wyoming, was inaugurated. Since then, the number of wind farms on the high plains has grown quickly.
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By chance, I attended the opening ceremony. After the project’s director finished his speech about the promise of “renewable” wind energy becoming a reality, I approached him and asked him half in jest how he intended to renew the wind. He looked at me curiously. I told him that the wind is unlimited, not renewable, and unlimited energy seemed a much stronger way to sell wind farms than by calling them renewable. “Infinite energy” is even more accurate.
It is time to re-frame the language of energy. Much energy that we call “renewable” is, in fact, unlimited—and, in a temporal if not spatial sense, infinite: wind, solar, ocean, and geothermal energy are all limited only by geological time. They also have the lowest carbon footprints.
“Renewable” is more accurate when describing biofuels and hydrogen energy, two other energy sources usually included under that term. Biofuels depend on significant energy expenditures to produce. Plants, mostly corn, switchgrass, and willows, use sunlight to grow, but making them into biofuels requires considerable energy for planting, harvesting, and processing. Chemical fertilizers create problems of runoff contamination and chemical imbalances in the soil and water. Biofuels avoid the production problems of petroleum, coal, and natural gas but still contribute significantly to carbon emissions when burned. While not as clean as “infinite” energy sources, “renewable” energy sources have advantages over “limited” energy sources.
“Limited” energy sources, primarily petroleum, coal, and natural gas, are also the dirtiest. Petroleum spills have irreversibly damaged ecosystems and as long as we pump and transport oil they will continue to happen. Coal extraction, especially mountaintop removal mining, destroys entire ecosystems. And natural gas, when extracted by hydraulic fracturing, often contaminates water tables. All three sources of energy emit enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and petroleum and coal also pollute our air and water with hydrocarbons, mercury, sulfur, and nitrous oxide, among other contaminants.
Sooner or later, the reserves of all three will peak. By then they will have contributed so much carbon to the atmosphere that the world will have higher sea levels, increased droughts, and seasonal mega-storms. There is a limit to how much carbon the earth’s atmosphere can contain before climate catastrophes will dominate our lives.
Nuclear energy is also a limited form of energy. The limits are not on the availability of nuclear fuel but on our ability to deal with nuclear waste. Short-term energy consumption of nuclear power produces long-term (as in geological time) radioactive toxic wastes that are probably more dangerous to life on earth than any other pollutant humans have produced. No more Fukushimas, please.
These are the three choices we have for energy production: infinite and clean energy, renewable but energy-consuming biofuel and hydrogen energy, and limited, toxic carbon-based fuels. If we were starting from scratch there is little doubt which we would choose. It is time to make a sane choice and stop our lemmingish drive across the cliff of global warming. We need leaders who give voice to a vision of economies powered by infinite energy sources and who can stand up to the entrenched powers of the carbon cabals.
If we could announce a program to put a human on the moon in 1961 and do it by 1969, given the political will we surely could increase our energy production from infinite sources to over 50 percent within a decade as well. Between 2007 and 2009, total carbon emissions in the United States started to fall but have inched up since. The downward trend could become permanent with a firm decision to develop our infinite energy resources. It is a choice on which national security stands. Surrender to the carbon cabals is to surrender our national security. The choice should be clear.