A reader asked for my opinion on this article in RealClearScience, a well-written and innocuous primer on renewable energy.

The premise: “keep pushing, but push smarter” is hard to argue with. I’m reminded of people who caution “Be careful!” when someone trips or bumps his head. Being careful (as opposed to careless) is always good advice, but, since people don’t injure themselves deliberately, such statements really don’t add much value after an accident. The situation is the same in renewable energy, i.e., no person or agency invests in technology that they know in advance to be a loser.

The article does point out a few things that are of practical importance, even if they aren’t exactly news. E.g., the long-term subsidies for oil generate enormous investor confidence, in stark contrast to the here-today-gone-tomorrow support for clean energy that has investors running away as fast as their legs will carry them. Another correct assertion: fossil fuels come with externalities that need to be considered in our discussions on cost.

The concept that we need to get smarter about renewables is completely noncontroversial, but what remains in doubt is society’s willingness to make the tough calls — starting with some of the issues we’ve been discussing here.  In particular, if there is any sincerity whatsoever in our desire to see alternative energy in our future, it will begin by manifesting itself in a level playing field on which to evaluate the relative merits of all approaches to energy.

Have you ever heard the term “clear and present danger”? … When the danger rises to an indisputable level that affects the wellbeing of everyone, we will become united and save the planet.

Larry: I’ve read dozens of your posts here, and I can see that you obviously have a keen intellect. So, given all this, you don’t think there’s a “clear and present danger” associated with the issues that surround our continued dependence on fossil fuels? You’re not on board with the 97+% of scientists in relevant disciplines who tell us that we’re headed for a fantastic train wreck with climate change? You want to wait until the level of catastrophe has affected all seven billion of us? Isn’t it possible that by this point it will be too late?

Here’s something else to consider. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, mankind is not getting smarter day by day; to the contrary, he’s shrinking, getting more plowed in, more manipulated, more drugged, less able to see what is unfolding in front of him, less able to, using your words, to “become united and save the planet.”

I thank you for your numerous fantastic contributions here, and again, I admire your intellect, but I think you’ve missed this one.  If we’re going to turn this around, it has to happen…. right around now.

The PBS special “Electric Nation” is a reasonably fair-minded and certainly non-hysterical treatment of the various modes of how we in the U.S. generate electricity. Personally, had I written the show, I would have been quite a bit more hysterical, emphasizing the utter insanity of our business-as-usual approach to fossil fuels and our failure to form a workable energy policy, even in the face of:

• Global climate change

• Ocean acidification

• Peak oil

• Empowering terrorist and other anti-American regimes

• Escalating rates of lung disease

Yet they were good enough to quote Thomas Edison’s famous simile regarding our shortsightedness when it comes to energy:

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy–sun, wind and tide.”

It seems to me that the first commenter nailed it: “the article also seems to forget warmist theory discounts the concept of local climate having any affect on the globe, only the average global temperature matters.”  Moreover, let’s do a bit of math here.  Could the waste heat produced by a wind-driven generator offset the benefit derived from not burning that amount of coal?  Forget about the negative effects of mining and transporting the coal, and think of the thermodynamics in the coal plant itself, where you have waste heat from both the burning of the coal and the generation of electricity.

Also keep in mind that climate change is only one of half a dozen reasons to migrate away from fossil fuels.

Overall, this sounds silly.  But apparently, Scientific American isn’t held in the esteem I thought it was; those comments really shredded them.

• the water for irrigation
• the fossil fuel resources to plant, harvest, process, and transport
• the chemicals necessary to fertilize
• the toxins necessary to kill an ever-evolving set of weeds and insect pests

But, we’re using plastic that comes from petroleum, and we’re using electricity, almost half of which comes from coal.

True, there is no such thing as a free lunch; everything comes with a certain environmental impact. Yet, here we have a method of growing produce that’s  many hundreds of times cleaner that farming as it appears on Earth in the 21st Century. The pump in the tower pictured here is rated at 17 Watts, and it’s shut off most of the time; it consumes about a kilowatt-hour of electricity a week. Moreover, future versions of the tower will be made of bioplastic.

At the same time, aeroponics hands you a product that is far higher in nutritional value than what you’re buying through agribusiness. It’s organic – and it’s at your doorstep.

Scientists tell us that the threat of climate change (not to mention the other issues associated with the depletion of natural resources in the face of population growth) is the most important event facing mankind in the entire history of humanity. That’s quite a thought, when you reflect on it. After 10,000 years of our living in organized society, we’ve come to the point at which our ability to limit the damage we’re doing to our environment over the next few decades will mean the difference between our success and failure as a species.

Given the urgency, can anyone believe we’re responding effectively to the challenge? Let’s take a moment and look at the balance of positive and negative forces at work here.  Let’s begin with the forces whose effect is positive (slowing population growth, limiting consumption of non-renewable resources, migrating to renewable resources), of which there seem to be two distinct kinds:

1) A minute percentage of people who make huge personal sacrifices and work tirelessly and selflessly on behalf of humanity. These include both household names like Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as many millions of other people, working in relative (or complete) obscurity, doing their best according to their lights. Of course, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and thus in this class we need to place all the scientists, writers, honest political leaders, honest business people, teachers, social activists, men of God, etc., who have shown the bravery to stand up for unpopular or unprofitable beliefs in the face of criticism — and even ridicule — in order to promote what they believe in their hearts to be right.

2) The positive effects caused by individuals and business entities working on a profit-motive, whose products happen, accidentally, to help. Here I include the divisions of the Global 500, e.g., G.E. and Siemens, that are focused on owning the world as it goes green. While we don’t ascribe a moral goodness to this, we acknowledge the fact that its effects are positive nonetheless.

Now, let’s think about the forces whose effects are negative (promoting consumption of non-renewable resources, diminishing the health and well-being of the world population, etc.) Here, famously, we have the fossil fuel industries, intent as they are, despite the contentions they make so convincingly in their PR campaigns, on extracting and selling the last drop of crude or lump of coal from the ground, at the expense of the health and safety of all living things now and in the future.

Obviously the list doesn’t end there. Why not mention the fast-food industry, aggressively destroying the forests to make room for beef cattle — groups whose ultimate effects are child obesity and malnutrition? Why not talk about the psychiatric drug industry and what it’s done to put 8 million American school children on Ritalin?

It’s quite the battle. I guess we can all root for the good guys, while hoping that more people in the middle, who compose the huge majority of the world’s population, figure out that this really IS the time when we either turn this around — or we don’t.

Frequent commenter/author Frank Eggers writes on my piece on subsidies for nuclear:

Nuclear power has been demonstrated to be far safer than fossil fuel power. Coal plants cause health problems that, while severe, are difficult to pinpoint because generally they simply greatly increase the health problems which would exist anyway whereas nuclear accidents, though infrequent, have a more concentrated and obvious effect.

Frank:  I’m not one of the hysterical anti-nuke people who grossly over-estimates the danger. Having said that:

1) The lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima tell us more than how and where not to build nukes; they tell us that there are many lessons to learn, some of them unseen as of this date.

2) We still don’t know what to do with nuclear waste. It seems irresponsible to build something without knowing how to deal with the products of its operation.

3) The cost of building a new nuclear plant at this point is astronomical. In the time required to design, permit, build, and deploy a nuclear facility (at least eight years), the cost of renewables and energy storage will have continued to plummet. This makes the whole concept of nuclear nonsensical.

Yes, I know Obama talks up nuclear. He’d talk up daisies too if the flower industry had a fraction of the money, the lobbyists, and the power wielded by the nuclear boys. There are no words or campaign promises that change the three points above. You will not see another nuclear power plant commissioned in the U.S.

I refer frequently to the writings of Professor Michael Klare, documentarian at Amherst, as I find him so lucid and so on-target in his analysis of the macro issues on energy that we face here in the 21st Century. Here, in his piece Why High Gas Prices Are Here To Stay, he notes the difference between what the oil propagandists say (“the world is awash in oil”), and the truth:  the world still contains plenty of oil, but very little “easy” oil. It’s getting harder to get to, it’s becoming harder to extract and refine, and the risks to the environment are growing with each passing year.  And who’s absorbing these costs?  Look in the mirror.