Billions & Billions (19 page)

So if not fossil fuels, and not fission, and not fusion, and not some exotic new technologies, then what? In the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a solar-thermal converter was installed in the roof of the White House. Water would circulate and on sunny days in Washington, D.C., be heated by sunshine and make some contribution—perhaps 20 percent—to White House power needs, including, I suppose, Presidential showers. The more energy supplied directly by the Sun, the less energy that had to be drawn from the local electric power grid, and so the less coal and oil that needed to be spent to generate electricity for the electric power grid around the Potomac River. It didn’t provide most of the energy needed, it didn’t work much on cloudy days, but it was a hopeful sign of what was (and is) needed.

One of the first acts of the Presidency of Ronald Reagan was to rip the solar-thermal converter off the White House roof. It was somehow ideologically offensive. Of course it costs something to renovate the White House roof, and it costs something to buy the additional electricity needed every day. But those
responsible evidently concluded that the cost was worth the benefit. What benefit? To whom?

At the same time, Federal support for alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear power was steeply cut, by around 90 percent. Government subsidies (including huge tax breaks) for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries remained high through the Reagan/Bush years. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 can be included, I think, in that list of subsidies. While some technical progress in alternative energy sources was made during that time—little thanks to the U.S. Government—essentially we lost 12 years. Because of how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere, and how long their effects last, we did not have 12 years to waste. Government support for alternative energy sources is finally increasing again, but very sparingly. I’m waiting for a President to reinstall a solar-energy converter in the White House roof.

In the late 1970s there was a federal tax credit for introducing solar-thermal heaters into homes. Even in mainly cloudy places, individual homeowners who took advantage of the tax break now have abundant hot water, for which they are not charged by the utility company. The initial investment was recouped in about five years. The Reagan Administration eliminated the tax credit.

There is a range of further alternative technologies. Heat from the Earth generates electricity in Italy, Idaho, and New Zealand. Seventy-five hundred turbines, turned by wind, are generating electricity in Altamont Pass, California, with the resulting electricity sold to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. In Traverse City, Michigan, consumers are paying somewhat higher prices for wind turbine electrical power to avoid the environmental pollution of fossil fuel electrical power plants. Many other residents are on a waiting list to sign up. With
allowance for environmental costs, wind-generated electricity is now cheaper than electricity generated by coal. All of U.S. electricity use, it is estimated, could be supplied by widely spaced turbines over the windiest 10 percent of the country—largely on ranch and agricultural lands. Moreover, fuel made from green plants (“biomass conversion”) might substitute for oil without increasing the greenhouse effect, because the plants take CO
₂
out of the air before they’re made into fuel.

But from many standpoints, it seems to me, we should be developing and supporting direct and indirect conversion of sunlight into electricity. Sunlight is inexhaustible and widely available (except in extremely cloudy places like upstate New York, where I live); has few moving parts, and needs minimal maintenance. And solar power generates neither greenhouse gases nor radioactive waste.

One solar technology is widely used: hydroelectric power plants. Water is evaporated by the heat of the Sun, rains down on highlands, courses through rivers running downhill, runs into a dam, and there turns rotating machinery that generates electricity. But there are only so many swift rivers on our planet, and in many countries what is available is inadequate to supply their energy needs.

Solar-powered cars have already competed in long-distance races. Solar power could be used for generating hydrogen fuel from water; when burned, the hydrogen simply regenerates water. There’s a great deal of desert in the world that might be gainfully employed in an ecologically responsible way, for harvesting sunlight. Solar-electric or “photovoltaic” energy has been routinely used for decades to power spacecraft in the vicinity of the Earth and through the inner Solar System. Photons of light strike the cell’s surface and eject electrons, whose cumulative flow is a current of electricity. These are practical, extant technologies.

But when, if ever, will solar-electric or solar-thermal technology be competitive with fossil fuels in powering homes and offices? Modern estimates, including those by the Department of Energy, are that solar technology will catch up in the decade following 2001. This is soon enough to make a real difference.

Actually, the situation is much more favorable than this. When such cost comparisons are made, the accountants keep two sets of books—one for public consumption and the other revealing the true costs. The cost of crude oil in recent years has been about $20 a barrel. But U.S. military forces have been assigned to protect foreign sources of oil, and considerable foreign aid is granted to nations largely because of oil. Why should we pretend this isn’t part of the cost of oil? We abide ecologically disastrous petroleum spills (such as the Exxon
Valdez
) because of our appetite for oil. Why pretend this isn’t part of the cost of oil? If we add in these additional expenses, the estimated price becomes something like $80 a barrel. If we now add the environmental costs that using this oil levies on the local and global environments, the real price might be hundreds of dollars a barrel. And when protecting the oil motivates a war, as for example the one in the Persian Gulf, the cost becomes far higher, and not just in dollars.

When anything approaching a fair accounting is attempted, it becomes clear that for many purposes solar energy (and wind, and other renewable resources) is already much cheaper than coal or oil or natural gas. The United States, and the other industrial nations, ought to be making major investments in improving the technology further and installing large arrays of solar-energy converters. But the entire Department of Energy annual budget for this technology has been about the cost of one or two of the high-performance aircraft stationed abroad to protect foreign sources of oil.

Invest now in fossil fuel efficiency or alternative energy sources, and the payoff comes years in the future. But industry and consumers and politicians, as I’ve mentioned, often seem focused only on the here and now. Meanwhile, pioneering American solar-energy corporations are being sold to overseas firms. Solar-electric systems are currently being demonstrated in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan. Even the largest commercial American solar-energy plant, in the Mojave Desert, generates only a few hundred megawatts of electricity, which it sells to Southern California Edison. Worldwide, utility planners are avoiding investments in wind turbines and solar-electric generators.

Nevertheless, there are some encouraging signs. American-made small-scale solar-electric devices are beginning to dominate the world market. (Of the three largest companies, two are controlled by Germany and Japan; the third, by U.S. fossil fuel corporations.) Tibetan herders are using solar panels to power light bulbs and radios; Somalian physicians erect solar panels on camels to keep precious vaccines cold in their trek across the desert; 50,000 small homes in India are being converted to solar-electric power. Because these systems are within the reach of the lower middle class in developing countries, and because they are nearly maintenance free, the potential market in solar rural electrification is huge.

We can and should be doing better. There should be massive federal commitment to advance this technology, and incentives offered to scientists and inventors to enter this underpopulated field. Why is “energy independence” mentioned so often as a justification for environmentally risky nuclear power plants or offshore drilling—but so rarely to justify insulation, efficient cars, or wind and solar energy? Many of these new technologies can also be used in the developing world to improve industry and standards of living without making the environmental mistakes
of the developed world. If America is looking to lead the world in new basic industries, here’s one on the verge of taking off.

Perhaps these alternatives can be quickly developed in a real free-market economy. Alternatively, nations might consider a small tax on fossil fuels, dedicated to developing the alternative technologies. Britain established a “Non Fossil Fuel Obligation” in 1991 amounting to 11 percent of the purchase price. In America alone, this would amount to many billions of dollars a year. But President Clinton in 1993–96 was unable to pass legislation even for a five cent per gallon gasoline tax. Perhaps future administrations can do better.

What I hope will happen is that solar-electric, wind turbine, biomass conversion, and hydrogen fuel technologies will be phased in at a respectable pace, at the same time as we greatly improve the efficiency with which we burn fossil fuels. No one is talking about abandoning fossil fuels altogether. High-intensity industrial power needs—for example, in steel foundries and aluminum smelters—are unlikely to be provided by sunlight or windmills. But if we can cut our dependence on fossil fuels by half or better, we will have done a great thing. Very different technologies are unlikely to be here soon enough to match the pace of greenhouse warming. It may well be, though, that sometime in the next century new technology will be available—cheap, clean, generating no greenhouse gases, something that can be constructed and repaired in small, poor countries around the world.

But isn’t there any way to take carbon dioxide
out
of the atmosphere, to undo some of the damage we’ve already done? The only method of cooling down the greenhouse effect which seems both safe and reliable is to plant trees. Growing trees remove CO
₂
from the air. After they’re fully grown, of course, it would be missing the point to burn them; that would be
undoing the very benefit we are seeking. Instead, forests should be planted and the trees, when fully grown, harvested and used, say, for building houses or furniture. Or just buried. But the amount of land worldwide that must be reforested in order for growing trees to make a major contribution is enormous, about the area of the United States. This can only be done as a collaborative enterprise of the human species. Instead, the human species is destroying an acre of forest every
second
. Everyone can plant trees—individuals, nations, industries. But especially, industry. Applied Energy Services in Arlington, Virginia, has built a coal-fired power plant in Connecticut; it is also planting trees in Guatemala that will remove from the Earth’s atmosphere more carbon dioxide than the company’s new facility will inject into the air over its operational lifetime. Shouldn’t lumber companies plant more forests—of the fast-growing, leafy variety useful for mitigating the greenhouse effect—than they cut down? What about the coal, oil, natural gas, petroleum, and automobile industries? Shouldn’t every company that puts CO
₂
into the atmosphere be engaged in removing it as well? Shouldn’t every citizen? What about
planting
trees at Christmastime? Or birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries. Our ancestors came from the trees, and we have a natural affinity for them. It is perfectly appropriate for us to plant more.

—

In systematically digging the corpses of ancient beings out of the Earth and burning them, we have posed a danger to ourselves. We can mitigate the danger by improving the efficiency with which we do this burning; by investing in alternative technologies (such as biomass fuels, and wind and solar energy); and by giving life to some of the same kinds of beings whose remains, ancient and modern, we are burning—the trees. These actions
would provide a range of subsidiary benefits: purifying the air; slowing the extinction of species in tropical forests; reducing or eliminating oil spills; providing new technologies, new jobs, and new profits; insuring energy independence; helping the United States and other oil-dependent industrial nations to remove their uniformed sons and daughters from harm’s way; and redirecting more of their military budgets to productive civilian economies.

Despite continuing resistance from the fossil fuel industries, one business has moved significantly toward taking global warming seriously—insurance companies. Violent storms and other weather extremes that are greenhouse-driven, floods, drought, and so forth might “bankrupt the industry,” says the president of the Reinsurance Association of America. In May 1996, citing the fact that 6 of the 10 worst natural disasters in the history of the country occurred in the previous decade, a consortium of American insurance companies sponsored an investigation of global warming as the potential cause. German and Swiss insurance companies have lobbied for decreases in greenhouse-gas emissions. The Alliance of Small Island States has called upon the industrial nations to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases to 20 percent
below
1990 levels by the year 2005. (Between 1990 and 1995 CO
₂
emissions worldwide have increased 12 percent.) There is a new concern, at least rhetorical, in other industries about environmental responsibility—reflecting overwhelming public preference, in and to some extent beyond the developed world.