Beware The Quick Fix Energy Solution

In the United States we are rapidly coming to the understanding that we must have energy independence as soon as possible. We have already seen our foreign policy hijacked because of dependence on oil from abroad and face an ever worsening trade deficit besides. As more and more third world countries are industrializing, their energy demands are putting upward price pressure on scarce resources.

None of this was unforeseen. But we lacked the political will to do much about it until the situation became urgent. Maybe some of the blame can be placed on oil industry lobbyists; maybe not. But the situation has become increasingly difficult to simply dismiss as "the pessimistic forecasts of the chronic doom sayers".

The fact that we need energy independence as soon as possible (if not yesterday) has increased the likelihood that we will make some bad choices. We want the quick fixes. But we need to take some time to think through the consequences of those fixes.

Some want us to move into greater use of coal and its derivative, coal oil. We can do that. The United States has vast quantities of coal. It has been said that the U.S. is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. That would certainly make us energy independent, and we already have the technology. The problem is that it would be an environmental catastrophe.

Traditional coal mining (digging caves in the ground) is dangerous to the miners. Mountain top removal is ugly and pollutes our streams and rivers. Burning coal releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide along with other pollutants. When it comes to fuel sources, you can hardly get more carbon based than coal. We could use coal to almost completely solve the problem of reliance on foreign sources for our energy. But by doing so we could destroy our fresh water supplies and further pollute our air while simultaneously hastening global warming.

Corn farmers want us to do more with converting corn to ethanol. We already have the technology to do this. Since corn is grown, it is a renewable resource. Burning ethanol does release some carbon dioxide, but carbon dioxide is absorbed from the air by the corn plants themselves. So it sort of cleans up after itself and becomes the perfect solution, right? Wrong!

Corn is useful for an amazing number of things. So many, in fact, it is a waste to burn it up. If you walked through your local grocery store and removed everything that had corn or a corn derivative in it, you would find the shelves rather barren. If you took away animals raised on corn products, much of the meat, eggs, and dairy would disappear. Obviously, anything that increases our demand for corn is going to cause the cost of a lot of other things to rise.

There are also the fuel expenditures in raising corn and getting the ethanol to market. Furthermore, it would require all the suitable agricultural land in the U.S. just to grow enough corn to produce the amount of ethanol required to replace our need for gasoline and diesel. There would be no farmland for anything else. However, as we diminish our population through starvation, we would find our energy needs going down.

I have named the increased use of coal and corn based ethanol as but two examples of quick fixes. They are quick fixes because we possess the technology in a sufficiently developed state to implement these solutions now. There are others in this category.

Each solution has its supporters. Most of these are advocated by people with a personal economic interest in their adoption. They will emphasize the benefits and dismiss the problems. Beware the quick fix.

That's Wade's two cents.

Wade Houston
October 15, 2007

Global Warming Speeds Up - Naturally

Those who study global warming talk about a tipping point. That is, there comes a point when we have gone so far into the process of global warming, it cannot be halted. How can that be?

Well, consider the polar ice caps. The ice reflects large amounts of light and heat back into space. The world is cooler than it would be otherwise because we have these great areas of packed snow and ice. But, the ice caps are diminishing. The north and south polar regions are actually heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The Arctic is melting exposing more open sea which absorbs light and heat much more than the ice. The same sort of thing is happening to the ice shelves in the Antarctic. So, there is less ice to reflect light and heat. The planet heats up more. The melting gets faster. And so on.

Now consider the matter of permafrost. Permafrost is ground that so cold it remains frozen year round. There are several areas of permafrost around the world. Many of these are actually frozen bogs. Over the past few years, as the world has been heating up, a growing number of these sections have been defrosting. They are no longer permafrost.

The problem lies in that the frozen state of these bogs kept contained large quantities of methane gas. Methane in the environment is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere the way carbon dioxide does, but it is 25 times more powerful in its heat trapping action. As the permafrost melts it is releasing huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. This is speeding up the process of global warming.

So, with the melting of the polar ice and the release of methane with the defrosting of permafrost, we have two examples in which nature itself has joined in the process of heating up our planet. When the tipping point is reached, nature will keep the process of global warming rolling even if all of the human contributions cease. There can be no going back.

Because the polar regions are showing more drastic warming trends than the rest of the planet, the natural contributions to the global warming factors are entering the picture sooner than expected and to a greater extent. This means that the furthermost out (later in time) predictions of when the tipping point would be reached are definitely wrong. The climate change is not going to be nearly as gradual as we hoped.

That's my two cents.

Wade Houston
September 12, 2007