derryl

Alternative Energy Storage for Global Warming Agnostics

In 1997 Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs and Steel, an illuminating survey of why civilizations rose where they did when they did, and not in other places at other times. In 2005 Diamond published Collapse, which surveys historical civilizational collapses and the reasons for them.

Most collapses begin by not understanding the limitations of the resources your civilization requires to continue. By the time people realize the perilous state they are in it is often too late to reverse and the society dies off or is vastly reduced in size, knowledge and technological advancement.

Where did the mighty Incas, Mayans and Aztecs go? They're still there, in much diminished numbers, but now we call them "Indians" and they're no longer mighty. In some cases they couldn't compete with Spanish guns, germs and steel, but in other failures they simply overtaxed the resources available to them through combinations of excessive population growth and excessive consumption. Diamond's chapter on the prospects for present day Montana bring this close to home.

Sometimes political factors prevent measures being taken that might have averted the collapse. One such factor is denial of realities that should have been, in retrospect, obvious.

I just read Clifford Wirth's 48 page survey of the state of the world's energy economy and it sounds like the kinds of warning signs that previous collapsed civilizations either refused to heed or were unable to do anything about.

Our civilization is built on abundant, increasing and cheap energy. Shut off our oil and nothing moves. Shut off our electricity and nothing works. High oil prices trigger recessions. Permanently higher energy prices in the face of unreversable supply shortages would require wholesale restructuring of our economy and way of life.

Optimists believe that human ingenuity will allow our way of life to go on indefinitely by developing new energy sources to replace the dwindling resources we currently depend on. Mr. Wirth surveys the current state of all these alternate energies and they come up woefully short of replacing cheap oil.

Maybe a war or plague will wipe out much of humanity and halt the growth of energy demand so there will be lots left for the survivors. Maybe someone will invent a breakthough energy technology that solves our foreseeable shortages. Or maybe we are headed toward a collapse and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

All 3 of these are realistic possibilities. I'm pretty optimistic about the technology solution scenario, but that's more hope than prediction.

In the immediate future I think we'll see breakthroughs in the kinds of energy storage systems Mr. Peterson wrote this article about, and plug-in electric vehicles would take off from there. Sooner or later it will be politically recognized that increased CO2 is beneficial to plant growth and increased atmospheric CO2 is an effect, not a cause, of planetary warming. Then our large stocks of coal will be recognized as our energy lifeline between oil and whatever ends up replacing it.

Of course politics more often contributes to collapse than preventing it, so maybe the prospect of taxing carbon or controlling a trillion dollar carbon trading market will keep the global warming bandwagon rolling all the way over the edge of the cliff.