The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer [Greer, John Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780865716735
Google: h3-eVcJImqMC
Amazon: B004ZGZBCW
Barnesnoble: B004ZGZBCW
Goodreads: 11382620
Published: 2014-06-28T12:40:07+00:00

The Price of Energy

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tics, as they shoveled snow from their driveways for the fourth or fifth time in a row, might have started to wonder if there was something to the claim that greenhouse-gas dumping was causing the weather to go wild. Instead, seduced by our culture’s fixation on quantity, most climate advocates defined the problem purely as a future of too much heat, and those same skeptics, shoveling those same driveways, rolled their eyes and wished that a little global warming would show up to help them out.

It may be too late for climate change activists to switch their talking points from global warming to global weirding and be believed by anybody who isn’t already convinced, and so we’ll likely have to wait until the first major global climate disaster before any significant steps get taken. Still, the same confusion between energy quantity and concentration pervades nearly all of today’s discussions about renewable energy. It’s easy to insist, for example, that the quantity of solar energy falling annually on some fairly small fraction of the state of Nevada, let’s say, is equal to the quantity of energy that the US uses as electricity each year, and to jump from there to insist that if we just cover a hundred square miles of Nevada with mirrors so all that sunlight can be used to generate steam, we’ll be fine.

What gets misplaced in appealing fantasies of this sort?

Broadly speaking, three things.

The first is the usual nemesis of renewable energy schemes, the problem of net energy. It would take a substantial amount of highly concentrated energy to build that hundred-square-mile array of mirrors, counting the energy needed to manufacture the mirrors, the tracking assemblies, the pipes, the steam turbines and all the other hardware, as well as the energy needed to produce all the raw materials that go into them. It would take another very large amount of concentrated energy, regularly supplied, to keep it in good working order amid the dust, sandstorms and extreme temperatures of the Nevada desert. If the amount of energy produced

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by the scheme came anywhere close to what’s theoretically possible, this would probably be the only time in history that this has ever occurred with a very new, very large, and very experimental technology. Subtract the energy cost of building and running the plant from the energy you could reasonably (as opposed to theoretically) expect to get out of it, and the results will inevitably be a good deal less impressive than they look when presented on paper by enthusiasts.

The second is another equally common nemesis of renewable energy schemes: the economic dimension. Plenty of renewables advocates say, in effect, that people want electricity, and a hundred square miles of mirrors in Nevada will provide it, so what are we waiting for? This sort of thinking is extremely common, of course.

Mention that any popular technology you care to name might not be economically

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