Podcast from “This Green Earth”

As promised, here is the podcast from my appearance on yesterday’s edition of “This Green Earth,” from NPR affiliate KPCW in Park City, Utah.  I’m sure you’ll agree that hosts Nell Larson and Chris Cherniak did a stellar job.

As I expected, they really wanted a fair and well-balanced presentation, and their questions led me in that direction.

There was a question I couldn’t answer specifically: what percentage of fossil fuels will we need to eliminate in order to have a sustainable approach to energy?  I’m sure the Bill McKibbens of the world could address that; in fact, I think I’ve seen the figure, but I couldn’t recall it.  I explained that eventually, all of this is going away.  I believe that the amount of coal we’ll be burning in the year 2050 is zero.   I put it in perspective as follows: we receive 6000 times more energy from the sun each day than all seven billion of us are using.  I.e., we need a solution that harvests that tiny fraction — 1/6000 — of the sun’s energy, and we can all go home and forget we ever heard about coal and the other horrors.  I have to think we’ll achieve that.  The questions are when, and how much damage will we have done in the process?

And the interesting thing, to me at least, is that literally nobody knows.