Achieving Sustainability Doesn’t Require Laser-Precise Accuracy

Let me begin by offering this two-minute video that I think you’ll find worthwhile.

The reason I showed you that is so I could tell you this:  What we need to do to achieve a sustainable civilization does not call for anything like that level of precision.  In particular, the sun bestows 6000 times more energy each day than all seven billion of us consume.  Thus, in all our efforts to capture this energy in the form of solar PV, concentrated solar power, wind, hydro, biomass, etc., we can make a few mistakes here and there, as our overall efficiency needs to be no larger than 0.00013.  That’s not a huge number.

One could argue, for instance, that the Germans have gotten too aggressive with the integration of huge amounts of solar into their grid mix, and is struggling to keep things stable.  One could also argue that it is foolish of them to abandon nuclear just because we’ve had a few problems with designs that are 70 years old, and that they’ll probably have to reverse course on this at some point.

In fact, all the individual decisions to implement a certain technology in a certain point on Earth pale in comparison to the overall commitment to one over-arching proposition: The approach that our civilization took with respect to energy in the 20th Century will, if simply repeated and expanded to meet out needs in the 21st Century, will have lethal results.

There may be 100 ways to address the many thousands of individual decisions to be made along the way, but none of them is of great importance as long as we don’t lose sight of the basic principles, i.e., global commitments to:

• Methodical phase-out of fossil fuels, beginning with coal

• Energy efficiency and conservation

• Sustainable ag that reduces environment footprint of the growing of food

• R&D aimed at better and cheaper forms of renewable energy

• Population control, based on education of the world’s women

If humankind can keep itself focused on these macro areas, we’ll find the micro issues will have little meaning.