The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [112]
Oil, coal and gas are finite. But between them they will last decades, perhaps centuries, and people will find alternatives long before they run out. Fuel can be synthesised from water using any source of power, such as nuclear or solar. At the moment, it costs too much to do so, but as efficiency increases and oil prices rise, then the equation will look different.
Moreover, it is an undeniable if surprising fact, often over-looked, that fossil fuels have spared much of the landscape from industrialisation. Before fossil fuels, energy was grown on land and it needed lots of land to grow it. Where I live, streams flow free; timber grows and rots in the woods; pasture supports cows; skylines are not scarred by windmills – where, were it not for fossil fuels, these acres would be desperately needed to power human lives. If America were to grow all its own transport fuel as biofuel it would need 30 per cent more farmland than it currently uses to grow food. Where would it grow food then? To get an idea of just how landscape-eating the renewable alternatives are, consider that to supply just the current 300 million inhabitants of the United States with their current power demand of roughly 10,000 watts each (2,400 calories per second) would require:
solar panels the size of Spain
or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan
or woodland the size of India and Pakistan
or hayfields for horses the size of Russia and Canada combined
or hydroelectric dams with catchments one-third larger than all the continents put together
As it is, a clutch of coal and nuclear power stations and a handful of oil refineries and gas pipelines supply the 300 million Americans with nearly all their energy from an almost laughably small footprint – even taking into account the land despoiled by strip mines. For example, in the Appalachian coal region where strip mining happens, roughly 7 per cent of twelve million acres is being affected over twenty years, or an area two-thirds the size of Delaware. That’s a big area, but nothing like the numbers above. Wind turbines require five to ten times as much concrete and steel per watt as nuclear power plants, not to mention miles of paved roads and overhead cables. To label the land-devouring monsters of renewable energy ‘green’, virtuous or clean strikes me as bizarre. If you like wilderness, as I do, the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power. Just one wind farm at Altamont in California kills twenty-four golden eagles every year: if an oil firm did that it would be in court. Hundreds of orang-utans are killed a year because they get in the way of oil-palm biofuel plantations. ‘Let’s stop sanctifying false and minor gods,’ says the energy expert Jesse Ausubel, ‘and heretically chant “Renewables are not green”.’
The truth is, it was western Europe’s incredible good fortune that just when humankind began to bear down on its landscapes and habitats most heavily, instead of ecological disaster as happened in Babylon, there appeared from underground a near-magical substance so that the landscape could be partly spared. Today you do not have to use acres to grow your transport fuel (oil has replaced hay for horses), your heating fuel (natural gas for timber), your power (coal for water), or your lighting (nuclear and coal for beeswax and tallow). You still have to grow much of your clothing, although ‘fleeces’ now come from oil. More’s the pity: if cotton could be replaced by a synthetic substance of the same quality, the Aral Sea could be restored and parts of India and China given back to tigers. The one thing nobody has yet figured out how to make in factories using coal or oil is food – thank goodness – though even here natural gas