Written by William F. Pickard   

If you are a prominent political figure, maybe the most vital parts.

During the last electoral cycle, our candidates for Federal office hammered one another’s shortcomings, denounced low growth and high unemployment, diffidently skirted the nuts and bolts of economic policy, and barely mentioned the do-or-die importance of a reliable supply of Sustainable Energy. In fact, both presidential candidates, when given an opportunity to discuss the importance of Sustainable Energy, responded without so much as murmuring that awesome S-word, and were discreetly silent concerning the financial pain that ensuring energy sustainability will entail.

Sometimes, in science, it takes a while for ideas to catch on. But it is now more than eighty years since the Nobel Laureate Frederick Soddy remarked “If we have available energy, we may maintain life and produce every material requisite necessary. That is why the flow of energy should be the primary concern of economics.” This long ignored idea might even be correct: in fact, the present demand for primary power in America is (Surprise!) around 10 kW per person, and therefore big enough to have a whopping economic effect if it were to changed abruptly. Except there’s not that much any one of us can do about that power draw: most of it goes into “essential” transportation of people and goods, powering the very industrial activities we’re trying so hard to save, and operating the enterprises we love to patronize. It is embodied where we never ever think about it; and even ratcheting our per capita use back to where it was two centuries ago wouldn’t help that much -- because we always were power gluttons; and, at the outside, our per capita power use has increased only by a factor of four over the past two centuries. Besides, cutting back isn’t a real option: the energy we used in 1810 came from America’s seemingly endless virgin forests, which, first, aren’t around anymore and, second, never could have supported our present population.

It’s not the economy that’s dysfunctional. It’s our consumption of stuff we choose not to produce, stuff for which we export the dollars we need here at home to develop our civil and educational infrastructures. It’s our heedless use of natural resources, without a clue either of how we’re going to replace them or of where our future resources will come from. Chief among those resources is an energy carrier, petroleum.

Now we have a newly elected president, gifted by historical events beyond his control with, first, a growing national debt that has overtaken the GDP and, second, a world energy situation that seems destined to deliver both an increasing energy demand and, by mid-century, a situation of precipitously decreasing oil, gas, and coal production. The days of Fossil Fuel are numbered.

Assuming, quixotically, that our looming fiscal crisis induces neither rigid nor flaccid paralysis of the body politic, our president’s first order of business should be to act decisively on Energy Sustainability. In America’s two previous revolutions of its energy supply, wood-to-coal and coal-to-petroleum, it took on the order of fifty years for the supplanting source to go from 1% of the supply to 50%. It would be splendidly optimistic to expect a switch from fossil to renewable fuel to proceed significantly faster. And, in synchrony with this shift, it will be necessary not only to renew most of our electricity infrastructure but also to solve our long-intractable problem of the safe and permanent disposal of civilian nuclear waste.

Gifting our descendants with a robustly sustainable system for clean renewable energy is the least that we owe them. After all, by century’s end, we shall have inflicted a passel of damage on the environment, exhausted scads of mineral deposits, and utterly dissipated our dowry of fossil fuel. Our descendents deserve from us some something more tangible than just the abstract knowledge we generated during our technological miracle.

Article by William F. Pickard
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