No magic bullet for energy crisis

We live in a truly magical time. With the flick of a finger, the power of 10 horses flows from a small wire in the wall of our homes to clean our carpets. We go to the local market under the pull of hundreds of horses and fly across our continent with tens of thousands of them. Our homes are warm in the winter, cool in the summer and lit at night. We have the technology and the economic possibility to elevate the living conditions of much of humanity to heights well beyond the dreams of Roman emperors. We never had it so good.

Enjoying life as energy users has been made possible by our increasing ability to exploit abundant sources of energy. The worldwide consumption of energy has nearly doubled between 1970 and 2001. By 2025, it is expected to triple. The extraction of oil, our most precious energy source, is predicted to peak sometime in 10 to 30 years, and most of it will be gone by the end of this century. What took hundreds of millions of years for nature to make will have been consumed in 200 years.

Natural gas will follow a similar fate. Other forms of fossil fuel (coal, shale oil, tar sands and methane hydrides) could last for another several hundreds of years.

There is, however, a catch. The cost of keeping the equivalent of a billion horses working for the world 365 days a year has a modern-day equivalent of cleaning the stables. The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the Earth is warming, and the mostly likely cause is our emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Global warming has thus made new investments in conventional coal-burning plants questionable.

Midland Daily News