The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [91]
The story with wind power is much the same as solar. Yes, these technologies can play a role, but the idea that they could somehow replace oil—even ignoring the fact that they are sources of electricity, not liquid fuels—is simply not rooted in the reality of the scales involved. Further, wind power only works when the wind is blowing, solar electricity only works when the sun is shining, and wave power only works when the waves are a certain height. The problem with electricity is that it needs to be constantly supplied to be useful, especially to noninterruptible processes such as those found in hospitals and manufacturing. If we could ever find a convenient large-scale way to store electricity, it would certainly help, but so far success has eluded us in this matter.
One area that deserves an enormous input of resources is the advance of batteries. The biggest game-changer out there isn’t to be found in developing a new energy source, but in figuring out how to store electrical energy more effectively. If we could store electricity better, a host of issues could be resolved. Right now, it’s sad to say, most batteries in use are little changed in design from the one invented by Allesandro Volta in 1800. If ever there were an area that deserved a massive government investment, electrical storage would be it.
The other point to make here is that 95 percent of all energy used to transport things within and across the global economy is supplied by petroleum-derived liquid fuels. Even if we obtained massive amounts of electricity from alternative sources and figured out how to store it effectively, we’d still have to retrofit our entire transportation fleet to run on electricity. Again, we need to raise the prospect of the time, scale, and cost of such an elaborate undertaking.
Biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, were both initially presented as viable energy sources and ecologically protective products. This introduction turned out to be overly optimistic. The net energy returns from corn-based ethanol is a paltry 1.3, give or take a little, and requires the constant and unsustainable application of fertilizers and other industrial interventions to achieve the desired yields. If the United States were to try to completely replace its oil imports with corn ethanol, it would require nearly 550 million acres of farmland to be put to use,29 representing 125 percent of all the cropland in the United States (which totals ∼440 million acres). Anything that requires more than 100 percent of your arable land cannot supply your demand for liquid fuel (or anything else).
In Europe, where a lot of biofuels are used, concerns have mounted about the destructive practices associated with such enterprises as Indonesian palm oil plantations, resulting in significant and legitimate controversy on ecological grounds. It turns out that the way the Indonesians produce the palm oil is to grow it on peat bogs, which has the unfortunate result of both destroying sensitive ecologies and liberating more CO2 than if oil alone had been burned.30 Where people initially thought biofuels represented a “green” alternative with the lowest impacts (if any), now they are more aware of the quite significant environmental costs of biofuels that sometimes even exceed those of fossil fuels. We may someday discover a free