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Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future ReviewWith Power Hungry, energy journalist and Austin apiarist Robert Bryce marshals lots of accurate numbers in context to make plain how modern culture exacts power from energy to save time, increase wealth, and raise standards of living. He also dispenses common sense to citizens and policy makers for an improved environment, a better, more productive economy, and more enlightened civil society. Inspired by the environmental economics of Rockefeller University's Jesse Ausubel and the University of Manitoba's prolific Vaclav Smil, he makes the case for continuing down the path of de-carbonizing our machine fuels--a process begun two hundred years ago when we turned from wood to fossil fuels and huge reservoirs of impounded water. As the world's population continues to urbanize, people will inevitably demand cleaner, healthier, environmentally sensitive energy choices.
Today, the world uses hydrocarbons for 90 percent of its energy, getting a lot of bang for its buck. Bryce offers convincing evidence that, over the next several generations, particularly since broad energy transformations require much time and financial investment, relatively cleaner burning natural gas will provide a bridge to pervasive use of nuclear power--" the only always-on, no-carbon source than can replace significant amounts of coal in our electricity generation portfolio." And if nuclear ultimately becomes the centerpiece for the electricity sector, which constitutes about 40 percent of our total energy use, this development would accelerate the de-carbonization of the transportation and heating sectors as well.
His narrative transcends the current climate change debate. He thinks the evidence on either side is equivocal, at best provisional, and, even if it could be proven conclusively that humans were responsible for precipitously warming the earth by producing a surfeit of carbon dioxide, there is little that could be done about the situation now that would be consequential or practical, except embrace imaginative adaptation approaches.
Bryce organizes his ideas around four interrelated "Imperatives" that serve as a prime motif for human history and explain much contemporary circumstance: power density, energy density, scale and cost. He shows that, although energy is the ability to do work, what people really crave is the ability to control the rate at which work gets done--power. Performing work faster means more time to do something else. This begets an appetitive feedback loop, where more power unleashes more time to produce more power. As the scale of this process increases, costs are reduced, making what power creates more affordable.
In terms of economic efficiency and improved ecosystems, producing the most power in the smallest space at a scale affordable by all is what present and future enterprise should ensure.
The power density of fossil fuels, expressed in watts, BTUs, or horsepower, has been the lynchpin of our modernity, although they will eventually become depleted, perhaps over a few centuries or much sooner, as various peak oil and coal scenarios suggest. (Bryce shows that worldwide oil's marketshare has fallen over the last 35 years and the rate of decline will likely continue.) And they do have negative environmental consequences. Particularly coal, with such environmentally treacherous extraction techniques as strip mining/mountaintop removal, and toxic emissions. But their overall benefits at present outweigh the negatives in a comprehensive cost benefit analysis. Which is why they're so popular.
Hydrocarbons lift people out of poverty, literally empowering them to better health, wealth, and productivity. "The key attribute of hydrocarbons is their reliability," a precondition for coordinated economic and social convergence, which is the very hallmark of modern life. Planning to replace their capacity successfully will demand great ingenuity and the most advanced technology--not hyped-up premodern gadgetry like industrial wind technology.
Over the first seven chapters of his book, Bryce lays out the gargantuan scale of our energy consumption, bound on the one side by the existence of nearly seven billion people and the thirst for increasingly denser power supplies on the other. He shows why, if oil didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. Deploying helpful charts and graphs throughout, he demonstrates that we will not, indeed cannot, quit using hydrocarbons any time soon, since our daily consumption is equivalent to 226 million barrels of oil, equal to the total daily output of twenty-seven Saudi Arabias.
The world consumes nearly 7 billion horsepower a day, albeit unevenly, since Americans consume energy at 18 times the rate of people in Pakistan and India. America leads the world in reliable horsepower and produces about 74 percent of the primary energy it consumes. Moreover, it has more hydrocarbon reserves than any other nation. Yet, despite all this power, the United States leads the world in energy efficiency and per capital carbon emission reductions over the last fifteen years.
So why are so many willing to trade the high power density of coal, natural gas, and oil for such unreliable, low-power-density sources as wind and solar? Part II, The Myths of Green Energy, attempts to answer this question. Bryce looks closely at the claims for wind especially and debunks them all as mainly the result of snake oil, a too-gullible public suffused in scientific illiteracy, "happy talk" from media (viz, Thomas Friedman), and self serving bombast from industry pundits like T. Boone Pickens. Thinking that wind technology, for example, could put a dent in the use of fossil fuels as an "alternate" energy source is just plain goofy, akin to believing that a book of matches could melt a glacier. Believing that corn and cellulosic ethanol are friends of the environment and consumers is downright Orwellian. In truth, they reduce efficiency and performance while damaging machine engines, and raise the cost of food by shrinking food supply while depleting millions of acres of soil and siphoning off a sea of water. For shame.
Bryce reinforces the theme of his previous book, Gusher of Lies. The energy business is so vast and intricately global that it dooms any nation's quest for energy independence. Those who think more hybrid cars, wind machines, and solar cells will free the United States from its dependence on imports will be shocked to discover that those technologies hinge on rare earth elements obtainable almost exclusively in China. Which fact largely explains why the Chinese are rapidly becoming a dominant manufacturer and exporter of "green" technologies.
Bryce relishes challenging flimflam. Power Hungry demolishes the notion that oil is dirty; that carbon capture/sequestration schemes can be globally effective; that cap-and-trade/taxation/renewable energy credit ideas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions can do anything but worsen the situation, at the expense of tax and ratepayers; that plug-in electric cars will soon revolutionize the transportation sector; and that efficiency, desirable as it is as a means of conservation, can change the world.
Bryce's conclusions about better policy follow the logic of Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." By eliminating the imposters and exposing the disingenuous, he is then able to engage in rational discourse about the genuinely probable technologies that will in future slake our ginormous craving for power.
He states the problem in a way that suggests solutions. If society seeks cleaner air and water, if consumers seek cheaper energy, if environmentalists seek open vistas and large swaths of untrammeled nature, if politicians seek a significant reduction of greenhouse gasses while maintaining, even expanding, the power requirements of modernity--then the future of energy conversion for electricity must hinge on increased use of natural gas in the near term while the world prepares for nuclear power over the long haul. Given the magnitude of the situation, anything else is hope. And prayer.
Recounting the sorry recent history of natural gas supply, Bryce explains how pandering politics and the coal industry combined to reduce its availability, making the public think the resource had been exhausted, However, new discoveries of extensive shale deposits in the United States, along with improvements in extraction technologies, now make natural gas much more available. That it burns 50 percent cleaner than coal, emits no toxic particulates, and is so versatile, make it the ideal transitional fossil fuel for the next generation or so. As more supplies become available, costs will continue to drop, making natural gas more appealing to consumers. To protect against damaging the ground water and pollutant leakage through gas lines, the industry would have to be carefully regulated, particularly in remote areas during the extraction process.
Still, as good as they are, carbon-based fuels, even those as beneficial as oil and natural gas, continue to put us at odds with our potential for informed stewardship of the planet. Our best scientists tell us we must do better in achieving goals of sustainable biodiversity and healthier ecosystems. To do so, we should sooner than later move beyond sloganeering and heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
As Bryce says, "nuclear goes beyond green." It provides two million times the power density of fossil fuels and can be contained in a small area, preserving the countryside. Concerns about its safety because of exaggerated news accounts of the damage inflicted by the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl accidents, along with the dramaturgy wrought by...Read more›
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