Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
very useful way of assessing the advantages and disadvantages of a given fuel or energy
source. It allows investment to be concentrated on the most economically viable sources,
6.16 Heading towards a Sustainable Energy Supply
According to Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, chairman of the governing board of the
Arab Thought Forum, “More than 40 years ago the Apollo Space Program was launched
to fulfil the old dream of taking man into outer space. Today, we have a bigger dream, to
restore balance between man and his home planet, Earth” (DESERTEC
2009
, 8).
According to the ecologist Charles Hall and the economist Kent Klitgaard, in terms of
spending power, middle-class incomes in the United States have not increased in the last
twenty years. In fact, without massive borrowing, both from its own citizens and foreign
investors in the form of government bonds, the U.S. economy would have shrunk rather
than grown in the last ten years. The same is true of many Western countries, especially
the stricken economies of southern Europe. Klitgaard and Hall put this down to politicians'
and economists' tendency to focus exclusively on growth. Economics seems to be about
money, but fundamentally it's about stuff. Indeed, what money gives us is access to food, a
roof over our heads, petrol for our car, and the car itself. All that stuff is extracted from the
Earth's ecosystems, and these, contrary to the working assumptions of most economists,
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), a series of reports on the
state of the Earth commissioned by the United Nations and involving more than 1,000 of
the world's leading scientists, “Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems
more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history,
largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This
has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth
[…]. The changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net
gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved
at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services […]. These
problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations
obtain from ecosystems” (2005, 1).
In the coming decades we are likely to see an increase in global energy consumption.
Even with improved technology and efficiency, we cannot escape the fact that energy
production always entails some kind of environmental trade-off. We may aspire to a future
in which that trade-off does not involve wars, poisoned rivers, or melting ice caps, but
