Energy: Science, Policy, and the Pursuit of Sustainability

By Lloyd Orr and Randall Baker

In the early 2000s, energy prices have fluctuated wildly, from historic highs in the winter and spring of 2001 to the lowest wholesale prices in decades a few short months later. As the largest user of fossil-fuel energy, the United States is the key player in the world's energy markets, and our nation's energy policy (or lack thereof) has become a subject of increasing concern.

Energy: Science, Policy, and the Pursuit of Sustainability is an essential primer on energy, society, and the environment. It offers an accessible introduction to the "energy problem" -- its definition, analysis, and policy implications. Current patterns of energy use are without question unsustainable over the long term, and our dependence on fossil fuels raises crucial questions of security and self-sufficiency. This volume addresses those questions by examining the three broad dimensions of the issue: physical, human, and political-economic. Chapters consider:

• the laws of nature and the impacts of energy use on our physical and ecological life-support systems
• the psychological, social, and cultural factors that determine how we use energy
• the role of government actions in adjusting costs, influencing resource consumption, and protecting the environment
• how markets work, and the reasons and cures for market failures in responding to long-term environmental and energy problems

Energy links energy use with key environmental issues of population, consumption, and pollution and offers readers a range of material needed for an informed policy perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597262484

Book preview

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Introduction

The Energy-Environment Problem

Everything that happens in both the living and the nonliving world is due to the flow and transformation of energy. Energy drives the economy, and all living creatures require it. Indeed, from a thermodynamic perspective, humans are just very complex organisms for processing energy. There can be no more fundamental question than fueling our existence.

What we often think of as development has been a process of moving out of the struggle to secure food (basic energy) for our subsistence to creating an energy surplus by harnessing the power of animals, wind, water, and other local resources. With the Industrial Revolution, the increase in productivity derived from mechanical energy is now heavily dependent on nonrenewable energy resources. Currently, most energy use in the developed world is for purposes other than basic subsistence.

There is growing concern in all nations about the long-term sustainability of the energy-intensive lifestyle that the industrialized world has developed and, moreover, whether the earth can ever support this level of development for the majority of the world’s people. These concerns stem from the pressures of continuing growth in population and in energy use per capita on a planet that has finite resources and a finite capacity to assimilate wastes.

Experts do not agree on how many people the earth can support for an indefinite period, but a commonly quoted range is somewhere between 4 and 16 billion. The true number will depend on the quality of life that future generations are willing to accept and on unforeseeable technological change. How to stabilize human numbers and natural resource consumption at levels that are compatible with the earth’s long-term carrying capacity—and human aspirations—is one of the most challenging problems facing humankind. Rich countries have stable or declining populations as a consequence—directly or indirectly—of greater prosperity and security. The same path to population stabilization may not be feasible or desirable in poor countries because of limited energy resources and environmental constraints. Approaches that combine prosperity with reductions in fertility rates by other means and over a shorter time span are more likely to be successful for developing nations.

World population is now at 6 billion and growing at the rate of about 1.5 percent a year, adding around 80 million people (roughly one-third of the population of the United States) to the earth annually. If this growth rate were to continue for another fifty years, world population would reach 13 billion in the year 2050. United Nations projections, under reasonable assumptions of reduced fertility, are that world population could reach between 8 billion and 12 billion in the year 2050. While some industrialized countries are currently experiencing low population growth rates—and a few, actual population decline—this has little impact on global trends because these countries hold less than 15 percent of world population. Over 95 percent of population growth is occurring in the world’s least developed countries.

To see the absurdity of unlimited population growth, consider that if world population were to continue to grow indefinitely at the current rate of about 1.5 percent a year (corresponding to a doubling time of forty-seven years), the average population density on all continents of the earth, including Antarctica, would reach one person per square meter in 676 years!¹ Clearly, life-support systems would collapse long before this.

World economies have grown even faster than population, averaging 3.7 percent growth per year from 1950 to 1997. The World Energy Council projections for economic growth rates in the next few decades are 2.4 percent a year for developed countries and 4.6 percent a year for developing countries, with a total average of 3.3 percent a year. The global demand for energy, the essential engine of economic development, is expected to grow at similar rates. Physical growth rates such as these, corresponding to doubling times of fifteen to twenty-nine years and an average of twenty-one years, cannot continue indefinitely on a planet with finite space and resources.

Growth in world energy demand of 3.3 percent per year could not be met for long. A steady growth rate of 3.5 percent per year, corresponding to a doubling time of twenty years, would result in five doublings in one hundred years and ten doublings in two hundred years, corresponding to increases in energy demand by factors of 32 and 1,024. Meeting such large increases in energy demand in environmentally acceptable ways would not be feasible with existing or foreseeable technologies.

The question is not whether there will be limits on specific physical growth rates of this sort. It is, rather, what will be the nature of these limits and their consequences for ecological systems and human well-being?

The world is already beginning to feel the effects of the finiteness of oil and natural gas resources. It is projected by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists that global production of oil—currently the world’s largest energy source—will peak early in the twenty-first century and decline permanently thereafter and that oil reserves recoverable economically by existing and foreseeable technologies will be close to exhaustion by 2100. Natural gas will not last much longer, because the amounts of energy stored in the earth as oil and natural gas before extraction began in the middle of the nineteenth century were about equal. To date, we have used less natural gas than oil, but the rate of natural gas use is increasing as oil reserves decline. Coal reserves are large, but there may be severe environmental constraints on the rate of coal use.

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Many earlier predictions of oil and other resource production peaks and exhaustion times have been proven wrong because of unforeseen discoveries and technological developments, which during the last two centuries have always been more rapid than resource depletion. But this pattern cannot be expected to continue indefinitely—there are limits to how long nonrenewable resources can last. In the case of oil, the limit will be reached when the energy required to recover a gallon of oil is greater than the energy content of the oil. It may become economical to switch to substitutes long before that point is reached. Renewable substitutes, such as solar and wind energy, have effectively unlimited lifetimes but are nevertheless limited sources of energy because they are so widely distributed and low in concentration compared to fossil and nuclear energy. As a result, they require very large collection areas (the equivalent of one-third of the state of Wyoming to supply the current U.S. total energy needs).

Energy and Sustainability

Sustainability is necessarily a vague term, and the definition is not always clear. The most widely accepted general definition of sustainable development is that given by the United Nations’ World Commission on Environmental Development:

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.²

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate and author of The Quark and the Jaguar, offers the following definition of sustainability:

The achievement of quality of human life and of the state of the biosphere that is not purchased mainly at the expense of the future. It encompasses survival of a measure of human cultural diversity and also of many of the organisms with which we share the planet, as well as the ecological communities that they form.³

An economist’s definition of sustainability is given in Chapter 6:

The preservation for future generations of a set of economic and social opportunities that are at least as rich and diverse as our own. It is not a specific goal so much as it is a process of continuous change and adaptation.

Many other similar definitions of sustainability exist that vary somewhat depending on what it is one wants to sustain. The focus of this book is energy sustainability, but since everything that happens in the world—all life and physical processes—involves the flow and transformation of energy, energy sustainability clearly is at the core of all sustainability issues; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for sustainability in its broadest sense.

Overview

Given the critical, broad, and challenging issues discussed above, we set out in this book to contribute to the definition, analysis, and policy implications of the sustainable energy challenge in a manner comprehensible to those who are not specialists in the relevant disciplines.

As we might expect with such fundamental issues, they do not reside easily within any one of the disciplinary boxes into which the sum of human knowledge has been divided. Although the individual chapters have been written by specialists and practitioners in a variety of academic fields—some of which are not always immediately associated in everyone’s mind with the energy problem —this work has developed from its inception within a strongly interdisciplinary framework, thus—we hope—avoiding some of the worst aspects of edited studies in terms of style, homogeneity of purpose, and integration.

Resisting the normal temptation to think of the natural sciences as the hard sciences and the social sciences as the soft sciences, we examine the uncertainties of forecasting anticipated life spans of fossil fuels. We then ask why the warnings of science are often ignored and why people behave as though some miracle cure will always spring from the unlimited ingenuity of humankind. Why—given the history of building modern society on depletable assets and a historically rapid expansion of consumption—do we not have adequate policies that recognize this condition and steer us toward an alternative resource base and consumption pattern?

Humankind’s unwillingness to respond to the warnings of resource exhaustion is partly due to a history of predictions about the life spans of certain strategic minerals and other resources that proved to be wrong. For example, copper, instead of disappearing in a welter of stratospheric prices as predicted several decades ago by Meadows and Meadows in Limits to Growth, ⁴ is now at historically low prices because technology (plastics in plumbing, fiber optics instead of electrical cables, and satellites) has rendered it obsolete for some of its historically most important purposes. Technology was the joker in the pack, and so there is a reasonably well founded tendency to sit back and have faith in the technology gods.

Meeting world energy needs in the twenty-first century is only half of the energy problem. The other half is finding ways to do this in environmentally acceptable ways. As world oil and natural gas resources become exhausted (or too scarce to be economical), we will be forced to turn to alternatives. Coal and nuclear energy are two short-term possibilities, though both have serious environmental impacts. A more environmentally friendly long-term solution to the energy problem will require greatly expanded development of renewable energy sources—primarily solar and wind—coupled with worldwide improvements in energy efficiency and reduction of energy waste.

We attempt throughout this book to use the terms efficiency and waste consistently. In the thermodynamic sense, efficiency is defined as the fraction of energy input that is converted into useful work. Waste refers to energy lost due to extravagant lifestyle choices—for example, driving a 14 mpg vehicle to work instead of using a 50 mpg vehicle or taking public transportation, walking, or riding a bicycle when the latter are feasible and preferable from an energy and environmental standpoint.

This book’s most important mission is to provide the reader with the range of material needed for an informed policy perspective. Of course, most people will immediately respond by saying that they do not make policy or that they are just some small cog in a gigantic machine. However, the message of the past fifty years has been that policy comes from a groundswell of popular concern and anxiety. Rachel Carson did not create the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but she did express the real concerns of many people. Unfortunately, it all too often takes, in addition, some form of crisis to make change happen, and this usually leads to less than optimal, often ill-conceived short-run policy actions.

The chapters concern themselves with the two dimensions of the energy sustainability problem: the physical dimension and the human dimension. Chapters 1 to 3 deal with the physical dimension of the energy sustainability problem: the physical laws of nature that humans must live by and the daunting challenges of finding ways to provide the world with the energy it needs to sustain and advance human well-being worldwide while simultaneously dealing with the environmental consequences that threaten human health and ecosystems. Chapters 4 to 7 deal with the human dimension: the psychological and cultural factors that determine how we use energy, the political and economic factors that determine its governance in a democratic society, the limits of markets in responding to environmental and long-term energy problems, and the ethical problem of motivating people to protect future generations. Although there are no absolute laws such as those in the physical sciences that govern human and social behavior, there are effective laws of human nature that limit what people are willing and able to do in specific personal and cultural situations. These limits can be just as constraining as the laws of