Alternative Energy is a Viable Solution

In my last post, I posited that I think alternative energy sources and technoscientific innovation can play a major role in solving our energy crisis.  They are not the sole solutions, but we should not dismiss them as easily as the authors of The Energy Reader, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner seem to have.

There are clearly a lot of barriers at present to using renewables.  Since lack of infrastructure is one of the primary challenges, we must commit to building the infrastructure required for them.  As I write this, the US Senate is voting on a bill that would approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline.  So, clearly, the idea of building new energy infrastructure is already on the table.  Hopefully, we will choose to build infrastructure for renewables instead.

We can also expand renewable energy gathering in the form of micropower, as Butler, Lerch, and Wuerthner mentioned.  We should use programs like Solarize Troy to empower homeowners to put solar panels on their houses.  Butler, Lerch, and Wuerthner state that “algal biofuel needs just the right mix of sun, water, and nutrients and may be difficult to produce at industrial scales.”  While this is likely true, algal biofuel  could be used as a form of micropower in places where it grows easily.  For instance, Kibbutz Ketura in Southern Israel produces algae, so they could use it as a source of micropower.

Most of the possible location for large-scale hydropower are already in use, but what about small-scale hydropower production?  There may be places where there used to be hydropower (such as mills), but it is no longer there.  For instance, on this Poestenkill (a brook south of the RPI campus, in Troy), there used to be several mills powered by the water, but now the Mount Ida Hydroelectric Plant is the facility that uses it for power.  More could be built, and the same holds true for other locations.

Nuclear power is also a promising option.  At some point, we will have safer nuclear reactors.  I realize that people have been saying this for years and yet it has not happened, but I think that eventually it will.  There are still issues with nuclear power, but far fewer than with fossil fuels.

I also don’t think we should give up on the idea of technoscientific innovation helping.  It can’t provide all of the answers, but it can provide some.  Perhaps we will invent solar panels that don’t require such rare materials.  Perhaps we’ll find new ways of harnessing the sun’s energy.  Perhaps we’ll be able to harness energy from as yet unused sources, such as lightning.  And we will hopefully continue to find ways to use energy more efficiently, and perhaps to recapture energy that is currently being lost. 

Of course, we still need to reduce our energy usage and find a way to make sure population does not continue to increase exponentially, but I think that alternative energy sources and technoscientific innovation are a viable primary solution.

Is it true that transitioning to alternative energy sources will not solve the problem?

The authors of The Energy Reader, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, posit that our energy crisis cannot be solved merely, or even mostly, by transitioning to non-fossil fuel energy sources and by technoscientific innovation.  Their thesis is that no matter what we do, our growth makes relying on any current or yet-to-be-discovered energy sources impossible.  But is this truly the case?  Butler, Lerch, and Wuerthner explain why alternative energy sources like renewables and nuclear have many issues that would make relying on them difficult – low Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), intermittency, lack of infrastructure, difficulty with storage.  However, they did not provide sufficient evidence that these sources, combined with one another and with further innovation in both obtaining energy and using it efficiently, cannot provide the amount of energy that our world currently uses, or will use in the near future.  In order to be convinced that this is the case, I would need to hear about countries that had maxed out their usage of alternative energy sources and still could not use them to obtain 100% of their energy.  Of course, this does not mean that I am convinced that these sources (combined with innovations) can avert the crisis without drastic population reduction.  I believe that it remains to be seen.

At this point, I agree with Butler, Lerch, and Wuerthner that continued exponential population growth is not feasible, but I think we can do more with alternative energy sources than they give us credit for.  I think that if we make appropriate changes in infrastructure and make more discoveries, we can serve the world’s energy needs for a while to come, even accounting for the fact that countries that currently do not use much energy (such as those in Africa) will most likely increase their energy usage.  It’s important to solve the population problem, but I think that alternative energy sources can buy us time to do that, and we are not necessarily destined for disaster.  Population is actually going down in many industrialized countries, so it is reasonable to guess that when currently nonindustrialized countries become industrialized, their populations will also decrease.  So it may be that the problem of population will in some sense solve itself.  Though, of course, we cannot assume that, and must apply the precautionary principle to the idea of choosing not to do anything active about overpopulation (and, in general, should apply to precautionary principle not only to projects we are considering starting, but also to continuing to do business as usual).

The Intersection of Environmental Justice with Race, Class, and Gender

In the documentary A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet, civil rights activist James Farmer says, “If we do not save the environment, whatever we do in civil rights or the war on poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.”  He makes a good point, but I think that environmental justice takes different forms depending on race, class, and gender, and that different categories of people are affected differently by environmental harm.

Around the middle of the film, we are told about a plan in 1982 to locate a hazardous landfill in Warren County, North Carolina.  At the time, the county was 75% black, yet had no black people on the County Commission.  This, to me, raises suspicion; was Warren County chosen as a location because the white people making the decision consciously or subconsciously valued black people less?  I think it is likely, though of course there is no way to prove it.  In any case, this was not an isolated occurrence.  Black people, and poor people, are often disproportionally affected by environmental hazards.

The US is not the only place where people of color are unfairly adversely affected by things like this.  It seems to be easier for companies to exploit or endanger people in developing countries (which are often non-white) than in developed ones (which are often white); those countries don’t have structures in place to resist that colonialism, and often have less strict regulations and labor laws.  However, companies certainly manage exploit and endanger people in developed countries, as well, and I am not sure of the extent of the disparity.  This was evidenced, to some extent, in the film Big Men; Kosmos was initially able to come in and profit from Ghanaian oil.  And would Dupont have been able to get away with what they did in Bhopal, India if they had done it in America instead?  I’m inclined to think not, although perhaps they would have, given how badly the Love Canal incident was handled.

Speaking of which, one thing I noticed while watching the Love Canal segment in A Fierce Green Fire was the phrasing used in the health department’s response to the health study the residents had done.  They dismissed it on the grounds of it having been “done by housewives with a vested interest.”  This derogatory use of the term "housewife" implies that they valued the study less because it had been done by women.

So, it seems clear that environmental justice issues intersect with issues of race, class, and gender.  One of the people featured in A Fierce Green Fire mentioned that Civil Rights and Environmental groups didn’t get together for a while, but hopefully now the intersections will be taken into account and the movements will join forces.  They will both be more powerful that way.