Efficiency, Renewable Energy, Changes in Consumer Behavior — All Needed At a Massive Scale
A colleague just asked me if I had seen this article in Forbes.com, whose point is that, since climate change affects businesses, businesses would be wise to cut climate-changing emissions.
I wrote back:
No I hadn’t seen that. It’s pretty good.
What would make it excellent, you ask? The concept that individual companies should cut their climate-changing emissions is correct. The implication that doing so will make the droughts go away, in and of itself, is incorrect (to put it kindly).
The author mentions the need for businesses and government leaders to work together, but what the world needs in order to address this problem is so sweeping and so far-reaching that it boggles the mind. Consider that China is building a new coal-fired power plant at the rate of one per week to deal with the transition that hundreds of millions of people are making to a consumer society. And, where China may be a good example, it’s certainly not the only one.
To deal with ecologic devastation and its consequences that we’ve brought on ourselves, the world needs massive solutions in terms of energy efficiency, conservation, renewables, and changes in consumer behavior. Turning this situation around will require an enormous effort that pulls nations together in a spirit of cooperation never before seen on this planet.
Admonitions to reduce energy usage and increase energy efficiency almost always ignore the situation in poor countries. Yes, we should, here in the U.S., reduce energy usage and increase energy efficiency, but on a global level that will make very little difference unless we somehow force poor countries to remain poor which would be both immoral and unlikely to occur.
For poor countries to lift their people out of poverty, it will be necessary for them to increase greatly their energy consumption. Considering the number of people living in poverty in China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa, and also to alleviate water shortages, it may be that to lift all the poor people out of poverty and provide them with adequate amounts of safe water will require increasing global energy consumption by THREE TIMES!! Moreover, that must be done while still practically eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
I am convinced that renewable sources of energy can, on a global level, play only a small rôle in providing for global energy needs. We will have to use nuclear power to provide most of the required energy. However, it would be folly to continue to use current nuclear technology except temporarily until it can be phased out.
Our nuclear power industry has been moribund for decades. It has tenaciously clung to a bad technology which should never have been widely implemented. Because U.S. industry is excessively concerned with short-term profits at the expense of long-term benefits, it will not, unless practically forced to, migrate to better nuclear technologies. Instead, it makes only incremental improvements to current nuclear technology. Fortunately, even if we here in the U.S. do nothing to advance unclear technologies, other countries will, but that would leave us behind and, to our detriment, force us to pay other countries for a better nuclear technology.
Although there may be other possibilities, from all I have read, it appears that the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is most likely the best nuclear technology by far. A book which I have recently read, i.e., Super Fuel: Thorium, the green energy source for the future by Richard Martin, greatly expands upon the other material I’ve read on nuclear power. I see it as an essential book for anyone to read who wants to make statements and comments on nuclear power. The book is readily available from several sources.
Frank
Always glad to find another nuclear advocate. Richard Branson and even James Hansen are pro nuclear. I too like the LFTR technology.
Thanks, Tim.
What I greatly fear is that too little effort will be put into developing better nuclear technologies until AFTER experimenting with renewables demonstrates that they are practical only in certain limited circumstances. If that happens, either we will, for a prolonged interval, be more dependent than ever on an inappropriate nuclear technology OR extreme energy shortages will result in more poverty resulting in political instability and even riots in the streets.