A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [141]
We have a shortage of time and a long way to go. Considering how much damage carbon dioxide is doing to our atmosphere and ocean, it would be unwise to simply assume we won’t need nuclear energy. We in the United States already get about a fifth of our electricity from nuclear, and nuclear plants provide similar proportions for several other countries. (In one sense, all our energy is nuclear, since the sun itself derives its energy from hot nuclear fusion reactions similar to those in a hydrogen bomb.) It might be necessary to accept the drawbacks of more nuclear as a bridge to cleaner energy. But the dangers with nuclear’s spent fuels and potential weapon-building materials make nuclear hard to swallow. The economics are difficult, too: construction and decommissioning costs remain quite high, likely too high. Things can go wrong with nuclear in ways that simply can’t happen with other zero-carbon-emissions sources. (Terrorists can’t do much with windmills and solar panels.) Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about nuclear energy. My conclusion is that our attention ought be firmly focused on clean renewables.
Solar energy delivers power enough to meet our projected future energy demands all by itself. But today solar electricity is just 0.1 percent of total world electricity production and solar heating, a similar 0.1 percent of world energy production. For wind to generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity, we’d need almost ten times the capacity we currently have and we’d need to build 100,000 new turbines.
Replacing just half the power generated today by oil, coal, and gas would require 6 terawatts; renewable energy sources now generate only half a terawatt. But transitions have always been forced by shortages. Necessity is the mother of innovation. During the War of 1812, wood shortages around Philadelphia prompted residents to experiment with burning coal. When Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States, in 1858, whale oil was already getting harder to come by.
One problem with clean fuels is the perception that “they don’t offer new services; they just cost more,” as one analyst has said. Wrong on both counts, but the statement reveals our inability to understand the effects and costs of energy. The new services are the elimination of toxic pollution, risk, and the climate change and ocean chemistry change that fossil fuels cause. The costs of those things are enormous. The fact that the costs are not in the fuels’ at-pump price is a failure of our economics, not a drawback of clean fuels. We are already paying, and we will pay enormous future costs for the effects of climate change on agriculture, coastal cities, coral reefs and fisheries, security, and the abundance and diversity of wildlife worldwide.
Those costs are serious. A moral and practical answer is to engineer the transition. Shifting massive and guaranteed subsidies away from fossil fuels and into clean renewables would be a big part of the way to accomplish what’s needed.
But because we don’t understand the difference between price, cost, and value, we can’t seem to get our minds unstuck and move beyond or around the idea that we simply don’t want to “pay more” for better energy. On June 20, 2010, at the height of the agony in the Gulf, a CBS News / New York Times poll found that 90 percent of people agreed that “U.S. energy policy either needs fundamental changes or to be completely rebuilt” but that just under half of them—49 percent of people responding—supported new taxes on gasoline to fund new and renewable energy sources. If people don’t want to pay more at the pump, the best thing we can do to save money and buy time until we have better options would be to conserve energy and improve efficiency.