A fun and thoughtful piece by Shannon Love — examining a backwards energy policy:
…there is always a new source of energy to replace any old energy source. It just might not be the energy source we fantasize about.
Energy begets energy. Technological history has been one of using one source of energy to bootstrap the production of new and more powerful forms of energy. We started with wood, which we used to capture energy from wind and water. Then we used wood, wind and water to capture energy from coal and whale oil. Then we used wood, wind, water, whale oil and coal to capture energy from petroleum. We used coal and petroleum to start to capture energy from nuclear power. The more energy you use, the more energy you can harvest from the universe.
So why do we find ourselves running out of energy? Because we chose to.
Although the universe is stuffed with energy, with any given technology, we can only harvest energy from certain sources. Thomas Jefferson could not have made a photovoltaic power source and Caesar could not have mined coal from hundreds of meters below the ground. We have to exploit the energy sources that we can reach with the tools we have.
Our political classes, especially on the left, have forgotten, or never learned, this hard fact of life. Instead, they’ve looked over the history of our technological achievement and concluded that we can simply create any energy source we wish to. They created a set of parameters for a desired energy source that depends not on technology and science but rather on emotional social and political factors.
Technologists have been handed a list of requirements that not even Santa Claus could fulfill. In no particular order, the fantasy power source must: have no environmental side-effects, be decentralized, produce power in all locations and all environmental conditions, produce enough power to replace all carbon-emitting, hydroelectric and nuclear power. Oh, and they want it tomorrow, before the ice caps melt and kill us all!
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