Power Hungry

by Robert Bryce

  Gore may be right. It’s also possible that he’s wrong. In many ways, Gore’s opinion doesn’t matter, because no matter how much the United States may want to lead the effort to reduce carbon emissions, it cannot, and will not, be able to substantially slow the increasing global use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Why? There are simply too many people living in dire energy poverty for them to forgo the relatively low-cost power that can be derived from hydrocarbons. (I will discuss carbon dioxide emissions at length in Part 2.) For proof of that, consider the per-capita carbon dioxide emissions in the world’s most populous countries. From 1990 to 2007, the per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States fell by 1.8 percent. But during that same time period, per-capita emissions soared in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Pak-istan. Those five countries contain more than 3 billion people, and their energy-consumption patterns are being replicated in nearly every major developing country on the planet.

  FIGURE 2 Percentage Change in CO2 Emissions Per Capita in the Six Most Populous Countries, 1990 to 2007

  Source: International Energy Agency, “CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion 2009,” http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/co2highlights.pdf, 90–91.

  That reality was reflected in Copenhagen in December 2009 when leaders from 192 countries met for what the Associated Press called “the largest and most important UN climate change conference in history.”21 After two weeks of wrangling and lofty rhetoric, the meeting ended with an eminently predictable result: no legally binding agreement on any reductions in carbon emissions, only a promise to reduce emissions “individually or jointly,” and an agreement to meet again a year later in Mexico City to discuss all of the same contentious issues one more time.22

  In short, all of these concerns, from worries that we have reached (or will soon reach) a peak in oil production and are (or will soon be) entering a period of inevitable decline, to the alarmist cries over impending global warming—and the supposed solutions to them—hinge on the belief that the transition away from hydrocarbons to renewable resources can be done quickly, cheaply, and easily.

  That. Is. Not. True.

  Tomorrow’s energy sources will look a lot like today’s, because energy transitions are always difficult and lengthy. “There is one thing all energy transitions have in common: they are prolonged affairs that take decades to accomplish,” wrote Vaclav Smil in November 2008. “And the greater the scale of prevailing uses and conversions, the longer the substitutions will take.”23 Smil, the polymath, prolific author on energy issues, and distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba, wrote that while a “world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable ... getting there will demand not only high cost but also considerable patience: coming energy transitions will unfold across decades, not years.”24

  Indeed, energy transitions unfold slowly and are always under way whether we recognize them or not. Between 1973 and 2008, the amount of electricity generated in the United States with nuclear reactors increased by more than 800 percent. Nuclear power now accounts for about 20 percent of the electricity generated in America. But for the average homeowner whose immediate interest is in sweeping the carpet or baking a pie, that transition has been invisible. For the consumer, the electricity that comes out of the wall socket is a commodity. How it is generated is of little interest. The key concern for the consumer was, and continues to be, that electricity remain cheap and always available.

  The $5-trillion-per-year global energy business dwarfs all other sectors of the economy.25 Given its size, and given that any major energy transition will take decades, we must carefully analyze the various energy sources to determine which ones can satisfy the Four Imperatives: power density, energy density, cost, and scale. Using those metrics will help us to confront the brutal facts, winnow out the pretenders, and increase the consumption of the winners.

  But before we begin that winnowing process, we must take a look back in order to understand how we got to this place in U.S. energy history. That requires calling out some of the energy posers who claim to have the answers while also taking a hard look at the underlying causes of America’s energy unease. And much of that unease comes from three factors: guilt, fear, and ignorance—the deadly trio that has been incarcerating the human mind for millennia.

  CHAPTER 2

  Happy Talk

  THE TELEVISION NEWS industry has a great term: “happy talk.” Producers work to make sure that every second of TV airtime is filled with scripted content. But try as they might, they often find themselves with several seconds of unfilled air time that must be made to look purposeful. On some occasions, in an effort to make their newsreaders appear more likeable to viewers, TV producers may ask the talking-heads to engage in some friendly banter to fill the airtime between news segments and commercial breaks. These chummy bits of patter are called—you guessed it—happy talk.

  Over the past few years, Americans have been inundated with energy happy talk. And it has come from personalities ranging from Dallas billionaire T. Boone Pickens and former vice president Al Gore to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and media darling Amory Lovins, the chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based think tank.

  For Pickens, the bogeyman to be slain is foreign oil. For Gore, the villain is carbon dioxide. And while the sin to be cured varies with the preacher, the message of deliverance is largely the same: Repent. Give up those evil hydrocarbons and embrace the virtues of renewable energy before you face the eternal damnations of foreign oil, global warming, and a carbon footprint that’s bigger than Boone Pickens’ ego.

  Lovins is among the most quoted purveyors of energy happy talk. In 2007, he wrote a short piece called “Saving the Climate for Fun and Profit” in which he said that curbing carbon dioxide emissions “will not cost you extra; it will save you money, because saving fuel costs less than buying fuel.”1 In 2008, he claimed that the issues of “climate change, oil dependence, and the spread of nuclear weapons—go away if we just use energy in a way that saves money, and since that transition is not costly but profitable, it can actually be led by business.”2 Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is another veteran happy talker. In May 2006, Khosla claimed that making motor fuel out of cellulose was “brain dead simple to do” and that commercial production of cellulosic ethanol was “just around the corner.”3 Ten months later, Khosla was once again hyping cellulosic ethanol, saying that biofuels could completely replace oil for transportation and that cellulosic ethanol would be cost-competitive with corn ethanol production by 2009.4 Alas, Khosla’s crystal ball turned out to be somewhat cloudy. By late 2009, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in venture-capital investment in cellulosic ethanol companies, not one of those efforts had been successful in producing significant quantities of the fuel for commercial use.

  In July 2008, Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, declared that the United States should “commit to producing 100% of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.”5 Four months later, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Gore said the nation must replace “dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.”6

  About that same time, Gore, along with a coalition of environmental groups called the Alliance for Climate Protection, launched a $300 million media campaign designed to stop global climate change.7 That campaign is backed by a number of websites, including Wecansolveit.org, Climateprotect.org, and RepowerAmerica.org. By early 2009, more than 2 million people had joined and had agreed to the statement, “I want to Repower America with 100% clean electricity within 10 years.” The “grassroots partners” behind the effort include the National Audubon Society, the Evangelical Environmental Network, and other groups.8

  And then there’s Pickens. The Dallas-based energy mogul is one of a long line of super-wealthy Texans endowed with a Messiah complex who have luxuriat
ed in the national limelight by promising to deliver—pick one or more of the following—better football (Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys); better basketball (Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks); a better president (H. Ross Perot, 1992 and 1996); better football (Boone Pickens, Oklahoma State University); and better energy policy (Pickens, again). On July 4, 2008, Pickens launched a $58 million media campaign aimed at promoting the “Pickens Plan.”9 The campaign launch included a barrage of TV ads starring the Texas energy baron, who begins the pitch with a syrupy drawl: “I’ve been an oilman all my life.... ” The centerpiece of the Pickens Plan: “By generating electricity from wind and solar and conserving the electricity we have, we will be free to shift our use to natural gas to where it can lower our need for foreign oil.”10

  The public loves the idea of renewable energy. On November 19, 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org released a poll of nearly 21,000 people from twenty-one nations. The findings: Seventy-seven percent of respondents believed that their country should “emphasize more” use of solar and wind energy.11

  In December 2008, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) sent out an e-mail asking voters to sign a petition that was to be sent to President-Elect Barack Obama. The LCV’s board is a Who’s Who of American environmental groups, including representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund.12 The petition told Obama that it is:Time to Repower, Refuel, and Rebuild America. We need to get our economy moving by building a clean energy future. We applaud your efforts to make energy a top priority, and look forward to working with you to achieve these goals:• Move to 100% electricity from clean sources such as wind and solar;

  • Cut our dependence on oil in half;

  • Create 5 million new clean energy jobs; and

  • Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80%.13

  In April 2009, during the telecast of the Miss USA pageant, the show’s emcee, Billy Bush, and cohost Nadine Velasquez declared that the silicone-and-swimsuits soiree was, in fact, environmentally friendly and was therefore part of NBC’s initiative, “Green Is Universal.” The slogan is a play on the name of the TV outfit’s parent company, NBC Universal, a subsidiary of industrial giant General Electric.14 Following the corporate plug, Velasquez said that “Miss USA will be awarded a brand new, more eco-friendly green crown, because green reigned here.”15

  Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Chu, who now serves as the U.S. secretary of energy, has made his own glib pronouncements.16 In mid-2009, Chu appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and said, “We want energy but we want it carbon-free.”17

  “Carbon-free” energy appears to be such a selling concept that even pimps have begun hawking it. In 2005, Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam” who gained notoriety in the mid-1990s after she was arrested and convicted on attempted pandering charges, announced that she was planning to open a “stud farm” in Nevada that would cater to female customers. 18 But in 2009, Fleiss announced that she had dropped plans for the bordello and was instead focusing her talents on alternative energy. “That’s where the money is,” she said. “That’s the wave of the future.”19

  From Gore to Chu and Miss USA to the Hollywood Madam, Americans are being carpet-bombed with energy happy-talk. And that happy talk has contributed to a widespread sense of guilt.

  Here’s an exercise: The next time you hear someone say “We are addicted to oil” or “We are addicted to coal,” try this: Substitute the word “prosperity” for “oil” or “coal.”

  I don’t offer that idea to be flippant, but rather to point out just how disconnected America’s rhetoric about energy is from the perspective of the 2 to 3 billion people on the planet who live in dire energy poverty. At the same time that many of those people are still relying on biomass (such as wood, straw, or dung) for their cooking needs, and spending large chunks of their time and labor procuring those fuels every day, most Americans live in a world of energy abundance with access to cheap fuels that their counterparts in places like South Africa, Sudan, Laos, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Pakistan can only dream of.

  While most of us certainly appreciate the many blessings of prosperity, there’s a growing sense that U.S. citizens should sign up for Jenny Craig or an Atkins Diet for gasoline and electricity. Conflating energy use with addiction—sex addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, Internet addiction—has facilitated a growing sense of anxiety in Americans.20 Add in fears about global warming—which many scientists believe is being caused by, or at least exacerbated by, the burning of hydrocarbons—along with claims about energy shortages and terrorism, and that guilt becomes ever more easily exploitable by politicians, pundits, and erstwhile capitalists looking to suckle at the federal teat. On top of all this, Americans feel guilty about their prosperity, particularly when compared with the grinding poverty that is common throughout the world.

  In mid-2009, a Canadian energy analyst, Peter Tertzakian, published a book called The End of Energy Obesity that tapped into these themes of guilt and addiction. In the first chapter, he declared that “we have become increasingly addicted to energy because we thoroughly enjoy the standard of living that energy-consuming devices and services make possible.” 21 Tertzakian’s claim echoes the worldview espoused by Barack Obama in early 2007 when he officially announced that he was running for president. The United States, Obama proclaimed, must break free of the “tyranny of oil.”22

  Huh? Billions of people would dearly love to be tyrannized by oil in exactly the same way most Americans are. Consider India, a country of 1.1 billion people, where the average resident consumes about 0.11 gallons of oil per day.23 The average American consumes about twenty-four times as much. And yet, over the past few years, many Americans have become increasingly ambivalent about their energy use. In some circles, people who drive SUVs are subjected to ridicule; conversely, fuel-efficient cars such as the Toyota Prius confer on their drivers a certain amount of environmental cachet, or “eco-bling.”

  The growing Western obsession with carbon dioxide has even led some consumers to buy “carbon credits”—a type of get-out-of-jail-free card, an environmental indulgence—that theoretically allows them to offset a certain amount of the carbon dioxide they are responsible for emitting. The promoters of these indulgences promise buyers that their money will go to “green” projects, such as a system that captures methane gas from a Chinese landfill, or perhaps the construction of a dam in India.24 But by 2008, the market for carbon indulgences had grown to some $54 million per year, and the Federal Trade Commission was advising consumers to be wary of the potential for fraud when buying them.25 And in late 2009, a British travel company, Responsibletravel. com, announced that it had quit offering carbon offsets because, in the words of the company’s founder, they had become the equivalent of a “medieval pardon” that allowed buyers “to continue polluting.”26

  Along with carbon credits, Americans have been barraged with claims about the desirability of being “carbon neutral.” In 2007, Al Gore’s followers held Live Earth, a global series of concerts that claimed it was “carbon neutral” because, among other things, it had purchased carbon credits to offset the air travel done by concert organizers and performers. 27 At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic National Committee created a “green delegate challenge” that asked each of the 5,000 delegates who were going to the convention in Denver to pay $7.50 for a “carbon offset.” The money was to be funneled to NativeEnergy, a Vermont outfit that promised to invest the money in various renewable energy projects.28

  It’s not just the Greens and the Democrats. One of history’s most prolific purveyors of indulgences, the Roman Catholic Church, has begun equating carbon dioxide emissions with sin. In September 2007, the New York Times reported that the Vatican was aiming to become “the world’s first carbon-neutral state.” In pursuit of that concept, the Vatican paid to plant a convent-load of trees on a 37-acre tract of land in Hungary. The pl
ot was to be renamed the Vatican Climate Forest, and once the trees were in place, the Vatican would, in theory, have an atmospheric dispensation for all the carbon dioxide emissions that came from its cars, its offices, and, presumably, the hallowed lungs of the Holy Father himself, Pope Benedict XVI.

  The Times quoted a Vatican official, Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca Alameda, who averred that buying carbon credits was akin to penance. The monsignor did not advocate sackcloth and ashes, but he implied that believers may avoid eternal carbon damnation by “not using heating and not driving a car, or one can do penance by intervening to offset emissions, in this case by planting trees.”29 Of course, there’s no sin in planting trees. But can the trees in Hungary really offset all of the Vatican’s carbon output? And for how long?

  It’s interesting to ponder what Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist, might have thought of all this. Maslow originated the idea of the “hierarchy of needs,” the concept that humans, as they increasingly satisfy their physiological needs—food, water, sleep, clothing, shelter, sex, and so on—begin seeking to fulfill more complex needs, such as love, esteem, and “self-actualization.” Using Maslow’s template, it appears that many Americans have become so wealthy, so sated with living well—in a way that is made possible by using large quantities of cheap hydrocarbon-driven power—that their successful self-actualization depends in part on how much guilt they feel about consuming the very commodities that allow them to prosper.