Energizing America

Fossil fuels burned brightly in their day, but now it’s time to make the leap to safer, cleaner, climate-friendly alternatives

In the following pages, Sierra explores what our nation can do to meet the challenge of global warming. “Everything hinges on our ability to somehow gracefully make the jump from fossil fuel to … something else,” says author Bill McKibben in our opening story. But to what? Shorter articles sift through the current controversies. What about “clean coal”? How much can we rely on energy efficiency? Is it time to reconsider nuclear power? How do we address wind power’s problems? Then we preview the Sierra Club’s “energy road map,” a 50-year framework for a brighter–and cleaner–energy future. Here’s the big news: Using American ingenuity and determination, we can ensure our grandchildren clean air and water, rich wildlife and wildlands, healthy communities, and a stable climate. Turn the pages, follow up on the Web, and find out how.

EXPLORERS USED TO AMUSE their European audiences by telling of heathen tribesmen who would panic when an eclipse rubbed out the noonday sun. The natives would scream or pray or make ritual sacrifices to appease the god on whom they had always depended, a god now acting so irrationally. Our chief deity–the cheap energy that has made our lives rich and easy–is about to be eclipsed as well, and the sounds you hear (motorists moaning about the price of gas, politicians loudly insisting that sacrificing wilderness in the Far North will save the day) are no different. Except that solar eclipses pass quickly. This change is forever; fossil fuel was a onetime gift–and the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can go about the realistic task of doing without it.

Much of what passes for discussion about our energy woes is spent imagining some magic fuel that will save us. Solar power! Fusion power! Hydrogen power! But such wishful thinking hides the basic fact of our moment in time: We’ve already had our magic source of energy. Fossil fuel was as good as it gets: compact, abundant, and easy to handle and transport. All you had to do was stick a drill bit in the ground or scrape off a few feet of soil above a vein of black rock and you were set. Learning to use coal, gas, and oil kicked off the Industrial Revolution and, in subsequent centuries, underwrote the chemical revolution, transportation revolution, agricultural revolution, and electronics revolution. (Right now, even as you read this, fossil fuel is producing hundreds of billions of revolutions per minute.) Pretty much every action of modern life involves burning hydrocarbons, and it’s modern life that we’ve come to like.

Sierra Club