What We Could Do - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 25

the rules, as the federal government in Germany has done, it would be
much easier for people to shift their homes to solar energy. 50
So how feasible is a large reliance on solar and wind energy? Clearly,
we have a lot of work to do. Just building a national smart grid is already
a massive infrastructure project; to get it done, we'll need a lot of money,
greater technical expertise, and several years of concerted effort. Building
a sufficient number of wind and solar farms will also require a lot of
advance research, time to put them in place, and a lengthy effort to win
public approval. We need key technological breakthroughs to make
energy storage cheap and viable. We also need to think carefully about
exactly how much of a physical footprint we want to impose on the land
and sea for these purposes. But the declining cost of solar energy and the
possibility of producing it on the household level may make aspects of
this transition easier. Ultimately, these forms of energy could be part of
the solution, but they may not be available on a sufficiently large scale
and with a truly workable infrastructure for many years.
Let's turn for a moment to another key aspect of the question, the
reduction in energy use. As it turns out, industrial electric motors use
more energy than highway vehicles. As one energy efficiency expert
argues, a wholesale turnover to new, much more efficient motors would
cut the energy these machines use in half and pay for the new machines
fairly quickly (between a few weeks and sixteen months). 51 New meth-
ods of casting metal, new technology for industrial pumps, recycling, and
combined heat and power systems (CHP) can each have a major impact:
according to the Department of Energy, the widespread use of CHP sys-
tems, for example, which recovers otherwise wasted heat, would save the
“equivalent to the output of 40 percent of the coal-fired generating plants
now producing electricity in the United States.” 52 Increasing energy effi-
ciency in homes and buildings, in lighting and appliances, would also
save a large share of the energy we now consume. 53 All these transitions
use existing technology, would pay for themselves soon, would decrease
costs, and are already being implemented by smart businessmen and
citizens. In short, this is a no-brainer: reducing energy use in these ways
alone would make a serious difference.
But reducing our greenhouse gas emissions involves much more
than changing our extraction and use of energy. According to the IPCC,