We have all the technology we need to make homes that produce their own energy. We know how to build high-efficiency rail and sailing ships. We know how to grow food organically and sustainably. We have the science to create economic systems that internalize all effects and operate in a beneficial manner. We¡¯ve had the quantitative knowledge for decades that we would eventually go into resource and environmental overshoot.
We certainly have the technology to build an all-electric infrastructure entirely powered by renewables. We will crack the storage problem and all the other technical problems. I have no doubt that the technology also exists to build an all-nuclear solution, or even an all-hydrogen solution.
We have the technology to recycle all our water and reclaim all our waste. We could even control our population if we had the will.
We also know what real sustainability means. I don¡¯t think I have ever seen it better put than by my friend Paul Hawken in his book, The Ecology of Commerce:
Sustainability is an economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for future generations. It can also be expressed in the simple terms of an economic golden rule for the restorative economy: Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do.
The real problem is we don¡¯t want to act that way. Virtually no business in existence meets that standard.
Technology and knowledge simply aren¡¯t the issue.
We don¡¯t want to think about having to put CO2 back in the ground after we burn fuels. We don¡¯t want to worry about the waste from our consumption. We don¡¯t like to hear about limits to anything we want to do. We don¡¯t want to rearrange our stuff, our lifestyles, so that they are truly sustainable. And we certainly don¡¯t like anybody telling us we can¡¯t have more kids.
In fact we don¡¯t even like to think about it, so when the subject comes up, we dismiss it with a flip comment like, ¡°So I suppose you want us all to be living in caves and working by candlelight?¡±
The upwelling of emotions that this topic inspires¡ªespecially fear¡ªusually makes a neutral and scientific discussion out of the question.
And from fear, most people leap to faith: faith in the perfect wisdom of free markets, faith in technology, faith in human ingenuity. No rational discussion needed.
Nor is this aspect of human nature a news flash. ¡®Twas ever so. At the suggestion of a smart hedge fund manager buddy, I recently put Thucydides¡¯ history of the Peloponnesian War in my reading queue for clues on how humanity actually performs when presented with serious fiscal and resource challenges.
I know some very smart people who are fully armed with the data on resource depletion and peak oil, and who still choose to believe in a cornucopian future where humanity acts wisely, humanely, justly, and in concert with a view toward long-term planning, solving all of our problems without any serious hardship.
This time, they contend, it will be different. After all, aren¡¯t we entering the Age of Aquarius, when humanity finally embraces unity and understanding?
Well, forgive me for being skeptical. The degree of cooperation they envisage has no precedent whatsoever in human history, and there are thousands of examples to the contrary.
In fact I was a bit shocked today when I looked back on my first opus on sustainability (¡±Envisioning a Sustainable Future¡°), published in my online magazine Better World 13 years ago, and realized that all of the problems are the same now as they were then, only worse: population, energy, water, extinction, environmental destruction, flawed economic theory, global warming, and humanity¡¯s problem with long-term planning.
It gave me pause. A long pause. Are all my efforts, and those of my fellow agitators for sustainability, simply battling human nature? And if so, what good is it?
Tantalizing Technologies and Hard Questions
At this point, 13 years later, the questions are even less tangible: How will people respond to the coming changes? Can the political support for truly sustainable solutions be marshaled? Will the economy hold out long enough to accomplish the transformation? And how will declining energy supply impede our efforts?
Certainly, in theory, we could replace 220 million light ICE cars and trucks with electric models, and heavy transport trucks with a combination of biofuels, natural gas, and hydraulic storage technologies. The technology exists. But will we have the investment and primary energy supply to build them, if we simply let the market and politics guide us?
Consider ¡°Cash for Clunkers.¡± Using data and estimates from the New York Times, I calculate that the program pays off in nine years at $70 oil, and in five years at $120 oil. In terms of effective investment in the future, that¡¯s really not too bad. (The photovoltaic systems I designed and sold in my previous career typically paid off in more like 20 years, before incentives.)
Even so, Cash for Clunkers was reviled for swapping out over a quarter-million cars for more efficient ones at a mere cost of $1 billion. What are the chances we¡¯ll have the political support to do 220 million vehicles that way? Especially if oil gets more expensive and we start having shortages and more heavy industry failures when oil goes into decline a mere two years from now?
Sure, we can run airplanes on ¡°renewable¡± synthetic diesel fuel made from green waste such as yard clippings, and early investors in such technologies will make a bundle. Rentech¡¯s (AMEX: RTK) recent announcement that it had signed a deal to provide as much as 1.5 million gallons per year of the stuff to eight major airlines sent the stock soaring over 360% in two weeks.
But 1.5 million gallons per year is nothing, and thanks to the transport and handling cost of green waste, it doesn¡¯t scale. If it requires transporting massive amounts of the feedstock with diesel-powered trucks, it isn¡¯t sustainable either. Need we even discuss recycled fryer oil?
Similar problems bedevil the alcohol fuels and biofuels, including algae. There are many interesting approaches to both in the lab, but for a long list of reasons (including water availability and the net energy of the processes), they don¡¯t scale well. I don¡¯t see any of the biofuels making more than a 50% gain from their current paltry levels for a good many years yet ¡ª and then we¡¯ll be having so many other problems with energy, water, food, and the economy, that the long-term outlook gets very murky.
Sure, we can try to turn to Canada¡¯s tar sands and deepwater heavy oil as the good cheap stuff runs out, but a cursory look at their net energy tells us that doing so is an attempt to play the oil game into overtime, not an attempt to do something sustainable. Thinking otherwise is simply denial.
A straightforward analysis of the data suggest that once we take peak oil, peak gas, and peak coal into account, there may not be enough time left to use cheap fossil fuels for the decades it would take to accomplish a transformation to true sustainability, let alone the human will to do it. And the experience of the last year gives me no confidence at all that the world can smoothly transit this inflection point in economics.
Yet I want to foster inspiration, not desperation. For most people, hope is as essential to survival as food, water, and air. And there is hope ¡ª not for business as usual, but for a much better kind of business. Not for endless growth, but for a more sustainable future.
But I am not one for false hope. I have endeavored to bring a dose of realism to this column for three years now, and I will soldier on. The opportunities to create sustainable solutions and profit from them are probably greater now than they have ever been. It¡¯s our task to find them, promote them, invest in them. . . and beyond that, hope for the best.
Buzz
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We are pricing natural resources on short term supply/demand, not on medium and longer term shortages. Therefore, we do have viable technology and solutions for clean energy and resource minimization. Unfortunately, humans are focused on very short term thinking and only truly act when a crisis occurs.
The challenges we face here in the cleantech sector in Asia are awareness (most governments in Asia are clueless), political (fossil fuel and resources related companies are entrenched) and lack of skilled people (trying to hire anyone with any form of clean energy experience is challenging).
I am, however, very optimistic about China. Green is a low cost game, and China is leading the way. Five years ago China had little in the way of wind, solar and electric vehicle production. Now, it is a leader in all three areas and is growing fast. With improvements in technology and scale that are occurring, China will continue to lead the way.
It is very frustrating to see limited action globally, but I am hopeful that we are at a tipping point in technology, scale and awareness. Hope is really all we have at this point.
I think the author places too little hope in the free market. The problem is not the will, but rather the need. Sure, I would like to see less pollution, and you can blame capitalism for corporations having the incentive not to clean up their own messes, but let me be clear: If government really worked, it would not be possible for a corporation to be able to influence government in such a way as to override everyone else's property rights. They use government to clear the path for the polluter to commit his evil. Our problem is not the free market so much as it is the corruption of the system of governance. And that corruption is very much a human flaw that is very difficult to overcome. We have too many laws and no enforcement except when it is politcally advantageous or when "the little guy" needs to be held down.
We desperately need people in government who are not communists who will uphold the rule of law, as unpopular as that would make them. Aren't there people out there who cannot be bought? Cannot be so easily swayed? We need wise governance, and all we have are a bunch of greedy baby boomers who are much too comfortable selling out at the nearest opportunity.
Fully warranted lack of hope in the free market. The free market doesn't care about the environment until it gets so bad it starts affecting sales of whatever widget it is they make. The free market in general and as a whole, plays the status-quo over innovation. Look at music and entertainment industries trying to sue their way back to a time before the internet and easily traded digital files. Look at this current economy and the number of free-marketers wishing for a permanent and rapid V shaped recovery when not a single one of them can answer what it is this economy is supposed to rebound on now that easy consumer leveraging is a thing of the past and it's consumerism that has been driving most of our economy? The market will act swiftly on 'green' projects if there's a tidy profit for them, otherwise, will in large part drag their feet kicking and screaming into the future. Unfortunately the environment is too important to simply wait around for profits to be the driving force. Hell you can't even get most people to put a COST on the health of the environment. If they did, they'd see how little effort and money we really ARE using to clean up the planet when compared to how integral it is for the survival of every living thing on it.
Geothermal heat for example is 5 to 6 ($20K +) times the cost of high efficiency heat pump or furnace.
No idea of whay solar costs if municipal codes would allow.
Energy star tax credit is $1500.00 LIFETIME credit. And that would provide very little help to offset the cost of new windows, insulation or any other improvement to an older, existing home.
And don't get me going on cap and trade......
We wait until the cheap stuff is no longer cheap (i.e. starts disappearing) and then move to the next source. It's the way history has gone all along from wood to coal to oil to gas to nuclear.
Stop shitting yourselves about 100 years into the future. You have no clue what lies ahead. Craig Vetner said we'll have artificial life by the end of this year - close behind that will be algae that sequesters CO2, microbes that eat waste and generate fuel, and all sorts of inventions your little minds would never think of.
It is completely idiotic to worry about the oil supply 90 years into the future. Don't worry - somebody will figure it out. We've done so for 1000 years.
This is true, however the advances in biotech in the last 70 years alone have tripled agricultural output in some areas (like India). Organic, which is really just a buzz word for 19th century agricultural methods, isn't exactly the most efficient in terms of land use and crop yields. If we want to play musical chairs with the world food supply, I doubt that we could count on the losers being good sports about the whole thing.
(Also, according to Norman Borlaug, we'd need 8x the amount of cows for fertilizer if the world were to go back to full organic).
Do we have the ability to do solar power and battery storage for the country? Yes, but the costs would bankrupt us.
Do we have the ability to completely eliminate our importation of oil? Yes, but again the costs are staggering.
And I disagree: if we really, truly needed to convert our economy away from oil in 5 years we can do it, although it will be painful. He's a fool to think that since we didn't do it in one we can't do it. We can, but again, the costs are immense, the disruption huge, and the economic devastation incredible. Much of our economic downturn was due to sky-high oil prices that triggered other cascading failures.
Unless he can prove he's right about the impending energy disaster what's he's proposing is a technological gamble with no payoff
And who's to say he's right about Peak Oil? I love hearing that we're at Peak Oil when we refuse to drill in vast areas of the US, the Arctic, and the like. Here in the US we're voluntarily constraining our own production through our ecological beliefs. Similarly, we're constraining our use of oil sands, and economically we're not doing the Arctic because of costs.
But you know the funny thing about rising prices? They make other technologies attractive and they can change your attitude about just what costs we're willing to subject ourselves to. But if we artificially raise our prices in this country via taxes or crap 'n trade then we lose competitiveness in the world and our other economic policies have already