The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [93]
If there was one area where we might want to pressure our elected officials to support one energy transition over another, it would be for natural gas over corn-based ethanol. Hands down, natural gas is the winner due to its massively higher EROEI. Unless we get serious about making this transition, and soon, there’s not much hope that natural gas will ever do more than play “catch up” with a receding oil horizon.
Conclusion
Together, nuclear, coal, and the alternatives will definitely play a role in our energy future. But none will be the energy savior that some are hoping for (or even counting on). Perhaps if we had started transitioning to these alternatives 10 or even 20 years ago, they could have slipped more comfortably into a lead role, but just like oil, none of them could have provided exponentially more energy forever. That is just the basic reality of living on a finite planet with finite resources.
Unfortunately we did not even begin mentally transitioning away from oil in the decades before its imminent peak, let alone structurally or economically. In order to have facilitated any kind of soft landing, several decades of preparation would have been required, given the realities of time, scale, and cost involved.
A set of structural, wrenching, and possibly disruptive changes are on the way. At this point, I’m confident that we will rely more heavily on nuclear, coal, and alternative energy sources in the future because we will have to, but I’m also just as confident that these resources will never be able to fully plug the gap left by depleting oil. We may hope that they might, but we shouldn’t count on them. The numbers are too large; the math doesn’t work.
The most probable outcome, given the level of funding priority and other actions by various world leaders, is for these alternative sources to play limited, albeit important, roles in our energy future. Nuclear, coal, and the alternatives can help to mitigate the impacts, but they cannot prevent them.
The implications of this are profound. The economy that you and I have come to know and love—the one predicated on a constant flow of ever-increasing quantities of energy—will have to operate on less energy. Even though having a few percent less energy instead of a few percent more sounds relatively minor, for an intertwined set of economic, financial, and monetary systems that are all based on perpetual exponential growth, the potential impacts are enormous.
CHAPTER 18
Why Technology Can’t Fix This
By now, some of you are probably thinking I’ve seriously underestimated the role that technology and innovation will play in our future. Perhaps I have, but my background as a scientist keeps intruding into my optimism about the ability of technology to solve the predicaments we face. In truth, I love technology and what it has brought us over the past centuries and will bring us in the future. I will stand up and applaud new discoveries and new advances louder than anyone in the crowd—when they are rolled out. But we need to face a few facts and assure ourselves that we haven’t placed too much optimism where it doesn’t belong.
Fact 1—Technology Does Not Create Energy
Because technology seems to produce so many miracles, it’s sometimes easy to forget what it can and cannot do. Technology can help us do things more efficiently and effectively than in the past, and it can help us do far more