April 4, 2013 |
The following excerpt is reprinted from the new book Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner, published by Post Carbon Institute and Watershed Media, in collaboration with the Foundation for Deep Ecology.
Energy
conservation is our best strategy for pre-adapting to an inevitably
energy-constrained future. And it may be our only real option for
averting economic, social, and ecological ruin. The world will face
limits to energy production in the decades ahead regardless of the
energy pathway chosen by policy makers. Consider the two extreme
options—carbon minimum and carbon maximum.
If we
rebuild our global energy infrastructure to minimize carbon emissions,
with the aim of combating climate change, this will mean removing
incentives and subsidies from oil, coal, and gas and transferring them
to renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal. Where
fossil fuels are still used, we will need to capture and bury the carbon
dioxide emissions.
We might look to nuclear power for a
bit of help along the way, but it likely wouldn’t provide much. The
Fukushima catastrophe in Japan in 2011 highlighted a host of unresolved
safety issues, including spent fuel storage and vulnerability to
extended grid power outages. Even ignoring those issues, atomic power is
expensive, and supplies of high-grade uranium ore are problematic.
The
low-carbon path is littered with other obstacles as well. Solar and
wind power are plagued by intermittency, a problem that can be solved
only with substantial investment in energy storage or long-distance
transmission. Renewables currently account for only a tiny portion of
global energy, so the low-carbon path requires a high rate of growth in
that expensive sector, and therefore high rates of investment.
Governments would have to jump-start the transition with regulations and
subsidies—a tough order in a world where most governments are
financially overstretched and investment capital is scarce.
For
transport, the low-carbon option is even thornier. Biofuels suffer from
problems of high cost and the diversion of agricultural land, the
transition to electric cars will be expensive and take decades, and
electric airliners are not feasible.
Carbon capture and
storage will also be costly and will likewise take decades to implement
on a meaningful scale. Moreover, the energy costs of building and
operating an enormous new infrastructure of carbon dioxide pumps,
pipelines, and compressors will be substantial, meaning we will be
extracting more and more fossil fuels just to produce the same amount of
energy useful to society—a big problem if fossil fuels are getting more
expensive anyway. So, in the final analysis, a low-carbon future is
also very likely to be a lower-energy future.
What if
we forget about the climate? This might seem to be the path of least
resistance. After all, fossil fuels have a history of being cheap and
abundant, and we already have the infrastructure to burn them. If
climate mitigation would be expensive and politically contentious, why
not just double down on the high-carbon path we’re already on, in the
pursuit of maximized economic growth? Perhaps, with enough growth, we
could afford to overcome whatever problems a changing climate throws in
our path.
Not a good option. The quandary we face with a
high-carbon energy path can be summed up in the metaphor of the
low-hanging fruit. We have extracted the highest quality,
cheapest-to-produce, most accessible hydrocarbon resources first, and we
have left the lower quality, expensive-to-produce, less accessible
resources for later. Well, now it’s later. Enormous amounts of coal,
oil, gas, and other fossil fuels still remain underground, but each new
increment will cost significantly more to extract (in terms of both
money and energy) than was the case only a decade ago.
After
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 and the Middle East–North
Africa uprisings of 2011, almost no one still believes that oil will be
as cheap and plentiful in the future as it was decades ago. For coal,
the wake-up call is coming from China—which now burns almost half the
world’s coal and is starting to import enormous quantities, driving up
coal prices worldwide. Meanwhile, recent studies suggest that global
coal production will max out in the next few years and start to decline.
New
extraction techniques for natural gas (horizontal drilling and
“fracking”) have temporarily increased supplies of this fuel in the
United States, but the companies that specialize in this
“unconventional” gas appear to be subsisting on investment capital:
Prices are currently too low to enable them to turn much of a profit on
production. Costs of production and per-well depletion rates are high,
and energy returns on the energy invested in production are low. Recent
low prices resulted from a glut of production produced by rampant
drilling in 2005–2007, which only made economic sense when gas prices
were much higher than they are now. All of this suggests that rosy
expectations for what “fracking” can produce over the long term are
overblown.
Exotic hydrocarbons like gas hydrates,
bitumen (“tar sands”), and kerogen (“oil shale”) will require
extraordinary effort and investment for their development and will
entail environmental risks even higher than those for conventional
fossil fuels. That means more expensive energy. Even though the resource
base is large, with current technology the nature of these materials
means they can be produced only at relatively slow rates.
But
if the hydrocarbon molecules are there and society needs the energy,
won’t we just bite the bullet and come up with whatever levels of
investment are required to keep energy flows growing at whatever rate we
need them? Not necessarily. As we move toward lower-quality resources
(conventional or unconventional), we have to use more energy to acquire
energy. As net energy yields decline, both energy and investment capital
have to be cannibalized from other sectors of society in order to keep
extraction processes expanding. After a certain point, even if gross
energy production is still climbing, the amount of energy yielded that
is actually useful to society starts to decline anyway. From then on, it
will be impossible to increase the amount of economically meaningful
energy produced annually no matter what sacrifices we make. And the
signs suggest we’re not far from that point.
In one
sense it matters a great deal whether we choose the low-carbon or the
high-carbon path: One way, we lay the groundwork for a sustainable (if
modest) energy future; the other, we destabilize Earth’s climate,
shackle ourselves ever more tightly to energy sources that can only
become dirtier and more expensive as time goes on, and condemn myriad
other species to extinction.
However, in another
sense, it doesn’t matter which path we choose: With human population
numbers growing and energy constraints looming, we will have less energy
to burn per capita in the future. Plot any scenario between the
low-carbon and high-carbon extremes and that conclusion still holds,
which means less energy for transport, for agriculture, and for heating
and cooling homes. Less energy for making and using electronic gadgets.
Less energy for building and maintaining cities.
Efficiency
can help us obtain greater services for each unit of energy expended.
Research has been proceeding for decades on how to reduce energy inputs
for all sorts of processes and activities. Just one example: The
electricity needed for illumination has declined by up to 90 percent due
to the introduction first of compact fluorescent light bulbs, and now
LED lights. However, efficiency efforts are subject to the law of
diminishing returns: We can’t make and transport goods with no energy,
and each step toward greater efficiency typically costs more. Achieving
100 percent efficiency would, in theory, require infinite effort. So
while we can increase efficiency and reduce total energy consumption, we
can’t do those things and produce continual economic growth at the same
time.
Humanity is at a crossroads. Since the
Industrial Revolution, cheap and abundant energy has fueled constant
economic growth. The only real discussion among the managerial elite was
how to grow the economy—whether in planned or unplanned ways, whether
with sensitivity to the natural world or without.
Now
the discussion must center on how to contract. So far, that discussion
is radioactive—no one wants to touch it. It’s hard to imagine a more
suicidal strategy for a politician than to base his or her election
campaign on the promise of economic contraction. Denial runs deep, but
sooner or later reality will expose the delusion that endless growth is
possible on a finite planet.
Sooner or later we must
make conservation the centerpiece of economic and energy policy. The
term “conservation” implies efficiency—building cars and appliances that
use less energy while delivering the same services. But it also means
cutting out nonessential uses of energy. Rather than continuing to
increase economic demand by stimulating human wants, we must begin to
think about how to meet basic human needs with minimum consumption of
resources, while discouraging extravagance.
If we move
toward renewable and intermittent energy sources, a larger portion of
society’s effort will have to be spent on processes of energy capture.
Energy production will require more land and a greater proportion of
society’s total labor and investment. We will need more food producers,
but fewer managers and salespeople. We will be less mobile, and each of
us will own fewer manufactured products—though of higher quality—which
we will reuse and repair as long as possible before replacing them.
The
transition to a more durable and resilient but lower-energy economy
will go much better if we plan it. Wherever it is possible for
households and communities to pre-adapt, and wherever clever people are
able to show innovative ways of meeting human needs with a minimum of
consumption, there will be advantages to be enjoyed and shared.
Much
of the current public discussion about our energy future tends to turn
on the questions of which alternative energy sources to pursue and how
to scale them up. But it is even more important to broadly reconsider
how we use energy. We must strategize to meet basic human needs while
using much less energy in all forms. Since this will require major
societal effort sustained over decades, it is important to start
implementation of conservation strategies well before actual energy
shortages appear.
With regard to our food system, it
is essential to understand that lower energy inputs will result in the
need for increased labor. Thus the energy transition could represent
economic opportunity for millions of young farmers. Agricultural
production must be adapted to substantially reduced applications of
nitrogen fertilizer and chemical pesticides and herbicides since these
will grow increasingly expensive as their fossil fuel feedstocks rise in
price. And higher transport energy costs mean that food systems must be
substantially relocalized.
Transport systems must be
adapted to a regime of generally lowered mobility and increased energy
efficiency. This would most likely require widespread reliance on
walking and bicycling, with remaining motorized transport facilitated by
car-share and ride-share programs. Electric vehicles and rail-based
public transport systems should be favored, and new highway construction
halted.
Reduced overall mobility will require
substantial changes in urban design practice and land use policies.
Neighborhoods within cities must become more self-contained, and cities
must be reintegrated with adjacent productive rural areas.
Buildings—including tens of millions of homes in the United States
alone—must be retrofitted with insulation to minimize the need for
heating and cooling energy. New buildings must require net zero energy
input. Incentives for installing residential solar hot water systems,
and using solar cookers and clotheslines, should be effective and
widespread.
Most new sources of energy will produce
electricity—and in the cases of solar and wind, electricity will be
produced only intermittently. Electricity storage systems (such as
pumped water or compressed air) must be built to overcome at least some
of the problems of intermittency. Reconfiguration of electricity grids,
distributed generation, and alignment of household and industrial energy
usage patterns to fit intermittent power availability are other
strategies for adaptation.
The historically close
relationship between increasing energy use and economic growth suggests
that the global economy probably cannot continue to expand as world
energy production falters. Therefore, adaptive measures must include
efforts to restructure the economy to meet basic human needs and support
improvements in quality of life while reducing debt and reliance on
interest and investment income. Family planning must be encouraged, as
adding more people to a stagnant or shrinking economy simply means there
will be less for everyone.
The costs to ecological
integrity and to human health of the ever-increasing scale of society’s
production and transport systems have become the subject of broadening
concern in recent decades. Air and water pollution, resource depletion,
soil erosion, and biodiversity loss are just some of those costs. With
reduced energy use must come the realization that the scale of our human
presence on the planet must be appropriate to the Earth’s limited
budgets of water, energy, and biological productivity.
Altogether,
this will constitute a historic shift away from continual societal
growth and toward conservation. It will not be undertaken except by
necessity, but necessity is inevitably approaching. Barring some
technological miracle, we will have less energy, like it or not. And
with less energy, we will no longer be able to operate a consumer
society. The kind of society we will be able to operate will almost
certainly be as different from the industrial society of recent decades
as that was from the agrarian society of the nineteenth century.
But
suppose this analysis is wrong, or that a new miracle technology
appears, and energy proves to be abundant rather than scarce. Even then,
conservation makes sense: Increasing energy use leads to greater
consumption of natural resources of all kinds, and the degradation of
wild natural systems. Sooner or later we must rein in consumption—and
since signs of ecological decline are already frighteningly prevalent,
sooner is clearly better than later.
The shift to a
conserver society could hold benefits for people as well as for nature.
As we begin to measure success not by the amount of our consumption, but
by the quality of our culture, the beauty of the built environment, and
the health of ecosystems, we could end up being significantly happier
than we are today, even as we leave a far smaller footprint upon our
finite planet. But those benefits will be delayed and diluted for as
long as we deny the conservation imperative.
Richard Heinberg is
a senior fellow at Post Carbon Institute and the author of numerous books including The End of Growth: Adapting to our New Economic Reality (June 2011), Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis (2009) and Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007). He's a contributing writer to the new book, Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth.
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