Why do we need alternatives?
To answer that question, we must begin by looking at fossil fuels: what they are, where they come from, how they are used, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Within this context, the pressing need for alternatives becomes quite clear.
What are fossil fuels?
Most fossil fuels are formed from the remains of long-dead creatures and plants. Buried for hundreds of millions of years, these carbon-based deposits have been converted by heat and pressure over time into combustible substances such as crude oil, coal, natural gas, oil shale, and tar sands. A smaller portion of fossil fuels is the handful of other natural substances that contain carbon but do not come from organic sources.
Producing more fossil fuels would require both the creation of a new hydrocarbon-filled topsoil and time, a long time. Given the estimates of current fossil fuel reserves around the world, it is not possible that we can wait for the problem to be fixed and continue to rely on fossil fuels until new reserves are built. At current consumption rates, reserves of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels will not last hundreds of years, let alone hundreds of millions of years.
As for creating more, experts have noted that it can take close to five centuries to replace a single inch of topsoil as plants decay and rocks wear away. Yet in the United States, at least, much of the topsoil has been disturbed by agriculture, leading more experts to the disturbing conclusion that in areas once covered by prairies, the last One hundred years of agriculture have caused America’s “bread basket” to lose half of its topsoil as it erodes thirty times faster than it can be formed.
The advantages of fossil fuels in energy production
There are many reasons why the world has become dependent on fossil fuels and continues to depend on them. For example, it has so far been relatively profitable in the short term to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity in strategic centralized parts of the grid and to deliver the electricity in bulk to nearby substations; these in turn deliver electricity directly to consumers. These large power plants burn gas or, less efficiently, coal. Since so much electricity can be lost in long-distance transmission, when power must be concentrated more in one region than another, fuels are typically transported to distant power plants and burned there. Liquid fuels are particularly easy to transport.
Until now, fossil fuels have been plentiful and easy to come by. Oil reserves worldwide are estimated to be between 1 and 3.5 trillion barrels. Proven coal reserves at the end of 2005, according to British estimates, were 909,064 million tons worldwide. Coal is also relatively cheap.
Perhaps the simplest reason the world continues to depend on fossil fuels is that to do anything else requires change: physical, economic and, perhaps most difficult, psychological. The basic technology for the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is already in place, not only in large power plants but also at the consumer level. Retrofitting factories would be cost prohibitive, but perhaps even more daunting would be to replace heating systems in every home, factory, and building. Ultimately, however, the real resistance may be our nature. We humans tend to resist change in general, and in particular those changes that force us to renounce ancient traditions, alter our ways of thinking and living, and learn new information and practices after generations of being sure that everything was “fine” with the old ways.
Why do we need alternatives?
If there are so many reasons to use fossil fuels, why consider alternatives? Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to the subject in the last few decades could probably answer that question. At the very least, most people could think of the first and most obvious reason: Fossil fuels are not, for all practical purposes, renewable. At the current rate, the world uses fossil fuels 100,000 times faster than they can be formed. The demand for them will far exceed their availability in a matter of centuries, or less.
And while technology has made extracting fossil fuels easier and more cost-effective in some cases than ever before, that’s not always the case. As we deplete easily accessible oil reserves, new ones must be found and tapped. This means locating oil rigs much further offshore or in less accessible regions; digging deeper and deeper into the earth to reach the coal seams or scraping away more and more layers of the valuable topsoil; and entering into uncertain deals with countries and cartels with whom it may not be in our best political interests to forge such compromises.
Finally, there are human and environmental costs involved in reliance on fossil fuels. Drilling for oil, tunneling in coal mines, transporting volatile liquids and explosive gases, all of these can and have led to tragic accidents that have resulted in the destruction of acres of ocean, coastline, and land, killing humans, as well as wildlife and plants. Even when properly extracted and handled, fossil fuels affect the atmosphere, as combustion processes release many pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, a major component of acid rain. When another common emission, carbon dioxide, is released into the atmosphere, it contributes to the “greenhouse effect,” in which the atmosphere captures and reflects energy radiating from the earth’s surface instead of allowing it to escape into space. Scientists agree that this has led to global warming, an incremental rise in average temperatures beyond what could be predicted from past patterns. This affects everything from weather patterns to the stability of the polar caps.
Conclution
It is clear that something must change. However, as with many complex problems, the solution to satisfying the world’s growing hunger for more energy will not be as simple as abandoning all old methods and beliefs and adopting new ones overnight. In part, this is a matter of practicality: the weaning process would require considerable investments of money, education and, above all, time. The main reason, however, is that there is no such thing as a perfect alternative power source. Alternative shall not mean substitute.
What do you need to change?
It seems simplistic to say that what really needs to change is our attitude, but in fact, the basis of a sound energy plan boils down to the inescapable fact that we need to change the way we think about it. In the old paradigm, we were looking for ways to provide massive amounts of power and distribute it to end users, knowing that while much would be lost in transmission, the benefits would also be great: power plants could be located far from residential areas. , fuels could be delivered to central locations, and for consumers the obvious benefit was convenience. For the most part, our only personal connection to the process would be calling the heating oil and electric providers, and reaching out to the pumps at the gas station. And the only time we’d think about the problem would be when prices spiked or the power went out.
There are people who have tried to convince us that there is no problem, and that those Chicken Littles who hug trees and talk about renewable and alternative energy want us all to go back to nature. More often than not, the motivations of these skeptics for perpetuating this myth fall into one of two categories: one, they fear what they don’t understand and resist being told what to do, or two, they have some political or financial interest in allowing our addiction to fossil fuels. (And sometimes both).
The reality is that, except for the alteration of our way of thinking, there will not be one major change, but many smaller ones. A complete and successful energy plan will necessarily include the following:
- Supplementing the energy produced at existing power plants with alternative energy means and converting some of those plants to run on different “feedstocks” (fuels)
- Moving away from total reliance on a few concentrated power production facilities to adding many new and alternative sources, some feeding the existing “grid” and some to meet local or even individual needs.
- Provide practical, economical, and convenient ways for consumers (residential, commercial users, everyone) to adapt and adopt new technologies to meet some or all of their energy needs.
- Learning ways we can use less energy now (“reduce, reuse, recycle”), using technological advances and simple changes in human behavior to reduce consumption without requiring people to make major commitments or sacrifices.