After Gutenberg

Subtitle: De Gristmill boyz and grllz been sniffing dat sage grass agin

Remember! Only you can apply precautionary thinking in your communities.

It now seems clear to Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation, that the coal and oil industries will prevent the United States from taking steps to mitigate global heating. In a guest essay for Gristmill, he presents the logic of this observation.

Simple physics tells us that the way to minimize the human contribution to global warming is to leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground — stop mining them as soon as humanly possible.

Doing so requires a Power Shift to renewable energy. Montague advocates that, as quickly as we can, we should re-direct our nation’s industrial prowess to the development of “solar power in its many forms.” More exactly, we need photo voltaic solar power wherever it is suitable.

This blog previously relayed to your the hard facts, as the National Petroleum Council sees them, to wit, “Coal, oil and natural gas will remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth.”

He then argues convincingly why this will fail to occur in 2007 or, most likely, until it is too late and we are grasping for extreme solutions.

Look at the relative size of our current government investments in solar vs. fossil fuels. In 2007 the federal Department of Energy spent $168 million on solar research. On the other hand each year since 1991 the U.S. government has spent 1000 times that amount — $169 billion — subsidizing the flow of oil from the Middle East, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our top military planners. And that figure doesn’t include what consumers paid for the oil itself. If our solar investment remains one-tenth of one percent of our investment in oil, there will be no solar power to speak of in our future.

I believe that Amory Lovins and others might disagree, instead arguing that money talks, and more and more investors see the future failure of fossil fuels and the improved economic prospectus for improved, renewable energy sources, e.g., thin-film, BIPV (Building Integrated Photo Voltaic systems). Still, they might agree that there is a powerful profit incentive motivating fossil fuel corporations and that politicians have aligned themselves with this centralized power infrastructure.

Unfortunately, any plan to shift from fossil fuels to solar has three fatal flaws, from the viewpoint of Big Oil and Big Coal:

1. The fossil fuel corporations have an enormous investment in fossil infrastructure and they own vast quantities of fossil fuels that they plan to exploit with little real effort over the next 50 years. They have been making excellent profits for a century and, as fossil fuels get scarcer, prices will only rise. In 2006, ExxonMobil reaped profits larger than any other corporation in history ($39.5 billion). If the U.S. does not invest seriously in renewable alternatives, we’ll have no choice but to pay whatever price the fossil corporations demand. Just a few days ago oil hit $90 a barrel; eight years ago it was selling for $10 a barrel. No wonder ExxonMobil now has a book value larger than the national budget of France. Naturally, they intend to maintain their market share, even if it means doing everything in their power to thwart progress.

2. The fossil fuel business is 100 years old and fully understood. No surprises lie ahead. But renewables? Who knows which renewables will win out in the marketplace of ideas? If Uncle Sam were to invest as much money in solar power as it has so far invested in the Iraq war (roughly $800 billion), who knows what new technologies would emerge? (Incidentally, if we maintain our current solar research budget at $168 million per year, it will be 4761 years before we have spent as much on solar research as we have, so far, spent in Iraq.) New technical innovations could be very unsettling for complacent industries like coal and oil. For them, innovation spells trouble. Innovation could render them irrelevant in a decade or two and they could disappear just like the makers of whale-oil lamps and buggy whips 100 years ago.

3. Coal and oil are highly centralized. It’s their nature. Whoever owns the fossil fuels, the big central power plants, and the distribution systems can call the shots. But solar? The sun shines everywhere and it’s free. Suppose some woman at MIT develops a solar panel that you paint onto your roof (from a can you buy at Home Depot), attach some wires, and start generating your own electricity? Central control disappears. This would be like tossing a hand grenade into the current corporate / political structure. Of course even right- wing politicians love lefty-sounding slogans like "power to the people," but they don’t mean real power like electricity or hot water or home-made hydrogen for transportation fuel. (Check out the Nova TV program, "Saved by the Sun," which briefly mentions paint-on solar panels.)

With our survival at stake, concludes Montague despairingly, “isn’t this a classic and urgent case for applying the precautionary principle?”

Gristmill commentator greyflcn refers the reader to some Q&A with Professor Kammen in “Down to a Science – Biofuels 8 of 10″:

BP is great and scientific inquiry survives at Berkeley, k?