The Nature of Tomorrow: A History of the Enviromental Future by Michael Rawson

Author:Michael Rawson [Rawson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300262773
Google: Hq9FEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B09HKQ8S1Y
Barnesnoble: B09HKQ8S1Y
Published: 2021-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Promise of Unlimited Energy

Harrison Brown believed that the immediate limitation facing humankind was less the absolute amount of resources available in the earth’s crust and more the availability of enough cheap energy to develop them at a reasonable cost. With an unlimited and inexpensive power source, it would be possible to extract coal from the narrowest veins, metals from the lowest grades of ore, and oil from shale and tar sands. It might even be possible to extract more energy than one spent: Brown’s team at Caltech calculated that the four grams of uranium present in a ton of granite, once removed, could provide more than enough energy to perpetuate the mining process. Discoveries like that led Victor Cohn to predict “a new Stone Age” by the year 1999 that would see huge machines ceaselessly grinding away at the world’s mountains and extracting valuable substances from the rubble. The technology needed to carry out such work did not yet exist, of course. But the knowledge that it was theoretically possible, combined with a faith in progress, enabled advocates of continued growth to argue that the idea of resource scarcity was nonsense.35

Scientists, however, expressed considerable doubt that any of the known sources of energy could meet the growing demands of the future, either alone or perhaps even together. The belief that fossil fuels would eventually run out remained widespread. In 1956, that expectation was strengthened even further by the publication of M. King Hubbert’s theory of “peak oil,” which predicted that oil production in the United States would begin to decline as soon as 1970. In fact, belief in the eventual exhaustion of fossil fuels was so pervasive that, when the citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere in a time capsule in 1957, they also buried ten gallons of gasoline so that those digging up the car fifty years later would be able to drive it. Renewable sources of energy like wind and solar did not seem to provide a way out: engineers continued to make advances in the necessary technologies, but investment lagged and progress remained slow.36

In the absence of more promising sources, the English physicist Charles Galton Darwin mused about a distant day when the world’s few remaining manufactories might cling to renewable sources of water power, trading with a world that had otherwise returned to agriculture. “Anyone who disagrees with my forecast,” he warned, “must try to get beyond a vague optimism, which merely expresses the confidence that ‘something will turn up.’ ”37

Partial salvation seemed to arrive in the surprisingly rapid development of atomic power after the war. Scientists had been working toward it for decades, but in just the four years from 1954 to 1957, first the Soviet Union and then Britain, France, and the United States built their first working nuclear power plants. Nigel Calder, a British science writer and editor of the magazine New Scientist, considered the quick progress in nuclear technology to be an extraordinary bit of good luck.

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