Doing something

In the last post, I reviewed a book whose author sees a coming energy crunch as we pass peak oil and enter a post-oil age where globalization fails, localization becomes the dominant trend and we enter a perpetual economic depression. It's a pretty gloomy scenario, because the author is also highly sceptical about the alternatives to fossil fuels in terms of sustaining the kind of life we have now.

By contrast, two other books I've read recently offer hope that a post oil world might be considerably better than the current energy reality in which we live. In Our Choice, Al Gore offers a summary of many of the things he's learnt at various 'Solutions Summits', held since his movie An Inconvenient Truth came out. In the introduction, he notes that 'despair is simply another form of denial, and it invites inaction. The solutions are available to us! We need to make our choice to act now.' (p. 13).

The book details various solutions, including wind, wave, geothermal and solar power and, most importantly the modernization of the electric grid worldwide into an 'electronet,' where power is generated in hundreds of different ways locally and in distributed form, rather than as it is currently in a system dominated by large, centralized plants. He also looks at nuclear power, and its attendant problems -- which seem significantly more pressing in the light of what's happening in Japan.

The second book is a few years old now, but also offers a roadmap to 'throw off the fossil fuel supply chains, and move to 'solar economy.' In the The Solar Economy, Hermann Scheer explains how the cards are heavily stacked in favour of the fossil fuel system, which is maintained by huge subsidies but is really very inefficient because it relies on very long supply chains between the source and the point of consumption. This situation cannot last forever -- or even very much longer. Scheer notes that even as the technological change supported by oil 'continues to accelerate and permeate ever more aspects of our lives, the modern age is already obsolete....[it] is already fossilized at heart, built on discards and relics. It has no real future. We are living in a fossil economy.' [p.2]

Step by step, he demonstrates how we can rebuild our energy systems in a distributed, localized way that does not depend upon the centralized technocracy that we have now. This means that we do not generate our energy by engineering mega-projects, which have to be centrally managed, but again in myriad local ways according to demand. He points out that, unlike fossil fuels, solar is a 'resource that is universally available across the planet without recourse to extended supply chains.' [p.84] So the logic of power supply would differ in an alternative energy world.

In my view, none of the reasons/rationalizations supplied for continuing the fossil age have ever seemed totally convincing. (For example, in yesterday's Times, Matt Ridley commented that alternative energy was far to expensive, and anyway we needn't worry because the US has found lots of natural gas. This is a nice example of blinkered, short-term thinking.) To me, these sorts of comments have always seemed more like excuses for inaction and are almost always supplied by those with a stake in the current status quo. In any case, the issue of energy becomes increasingly pressing as each year passes, but I for one, will not mourn the passing of the fossil fuel age.