Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences
and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.
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“Running servants replaced running water”—I'll never forget that.
THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: CHEAP, PLENTIFUL, RELIABLE, SCALABLE
If our ability to act to improve our lives depends on energy, we have an epic challenge.
There are 7 billion people in the world, but 1.3 billion have no electricity.
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Over 3 billion are classified
as not having “adequate electricity”—a threshold that is far less than we enjoy and take for granted.
8
For
everyone to have as much access to energy as the average American, the world's energy production would
have to quadruple.
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And we Americans would benefit greatly from even more cheap, plentiful, reliable
energy.
So where are we going to get it from?
In this chapter and the next, we're going to examine every major energy technology, including all the
non-fossil fuel sources of energy, to get an idea of how much they can contribute to energy production
going forward. This is important because, assuming you can do it safely, the more energy production, the
better and also because there are concerns about the future supply of fossil fuels and the present and future
risks
of fossil fuels. We'll cover future supply in the next chapter and in chapter 8, and the risks in chapters
4-6, but as a matter of principle, anytime we are worried about the risks of one way of doing things (here,
using fossil fuel energy) we need to know the benefits and risks of the alternatives.
Nineteenth-century coaltechnology isjustifiably illegal today.Thehazardoussmokethatwouldbegen-
erated is now
preventable
by far more advanced, cleaner coal-burning technologies. But in the 1800s, it
was and should have been perfectly legal to burn coal this way—because the alternative was death by cold
or starvation or wretched poverty.
By the same token, the degree of risk we would theoretically be willing to accept from fossil fuels will
depend in large part on
what the alternatives are.
Let's say—and I am completely making this up—we
could prove that burning fossil fuels will cause ten times more hurricanes for the next fifty years. Should
the government take action? Well, if there is a technology that is more affordable and can scale to produce
cheaper, more plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people, then quite possibly. But if there is no equal or
superior alternative, then any government action against fossil fuels, let alone the 50-95 percent bans over
the next several decades that have been proposed, is a
guaranteed early death sentence
for billions—we
would be willing to accept ten times more hurricanes if we had to. Energy is that important.
To get a sense of where things stand today and where they stood in the past, when “renewables” were
predicted to be the future, let's look at how much energy use comes from what sources.
Figure 2.1: The Truth About Global Energy Use
