The Energy Crisis

Energy, along with health care, is going to be one of the two biggest challenges we face in the coming decades. Oil is running out, the planet is warming up, and gasoline prices will only worsen with time.

Biofuels like ethanol and methanol are a good stop-gap measure to help us wean ourselves away from oil. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin has written an excellent book on this subject, titled Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.

Here is the crux of Zubrin's plan:

What is needed is government action to break the vertical monopoly on the automobile fuel supply currently held by the petroleum cartel. This could most efficiently be done simply by mandating that all new cars—whether of foreign or domestic manufacture—sold in the United States be “flex-fueled.” Such cars, which can run on any mixture of alcohol or gasoline, are currently being produced in the United States for little more (typically an extra $100 to $200) than the same vehicles in non-flex-fueled form. But they only command about 3 percent of the market, because there are so few high-alcohol gas pumps to serve them. Conversely, the reason why there are few high-alcohol pumps is because there are not enough flex-fuel cars on the road to warrant them. If you own a fuel station with three pumps, you are not going to waste one distributing a type of fuel that only 3 percent of cars can use.

Yet within three years of a flex-fuel mandate, there would be at least 50 million cars on the road in the United States capable of using high-alcohol fuel, and at least an equal number overseas. This would be a sufficient market to create a widespread network of high-alcohol fuel pumps. Moreover, this dramatically increased demand for alcohol fuels would greatly exceed the supply capacity of American corn-ethanol producers, which means that we could drop our current tariffs against Latin American sugar-ethanol. A similar circumstance would pertain in Europe and Japan, enabling the elimination of their protectionist measures against Third World agricultural imports. This would solve the problem of trade barriers against farm products that scuttled the recent Doha round of international trade talks, thus benefiting rich and poor nations alike.

By simply exposing the oil cartel to competition from such alternative fuel sources, we could impose a powerful constraint on its ability to run up prices. Combined with an unrelenting tariff policy favoring alcohol over imported oil, we could destroy OPEC completely, and effectively redirect over $600 billion per year that is now going to the treasury of terrorism to the global agricultural and mining sectors. Instead of sending our money to the Islamists to spread fanatical ideology, we could give our business to the world’s farmers, coal miners, and other people who actually work for a living. Instead of selling off blocks of stock in Western media companies to Saudi princes, we could be selling tractors to Honduras. Instead of funding terrorism, we could be using our energy dollars to finance world development. That’s what a serious energy policy would look like.

But as we know, biofuels are not carbon-neutral. They require land use, they require processing and refinement, and they emit some greenhouse gases when burned. That said, breaking the back of OPEC and providing us with energy independence would be a great start.

In the long run, we need to find renewable energy sources that don't have the drawbacks of biofuels. Nuclear energy comes with fear of meltdown and radioactive waste. Hydrogen power is decades away, perhaps longer. Cold fusion is a century away.

While perusing the internet, I noticed that there is already a very viable solution just waiting for us. And before you assume that this is from some loopy pie-in-the-sky enviro group, note that this information is from our very own Department of Energy:

Q: Do concentrating solar power (CSP) plants require a lot of land? How much, exactly?

A: Relatively speaking, no. Consider Hoover Dam, for example. Nevada's Lake Mead, which is home to the dam, covers nearly 250 square miles. In contrast, a CSP system occupying only 10 to 20 square miles could generate as much power annually as Hoover Dam did in one recent year. And if we take into consideration the amount of land required for mining, CSP plants also require less land than coal-fired power plants do.

It's hard to say exactly how much land is required for a CSP plant, however, because this depends on its generating capacity and the particular technology used. For example, a 250-kilowatt plant composed of ten 25-kilowatt dish/engine systems requires less than an acre of land. And a parabolic trough system uses about 5 acres for each megawatt of installed capacity. But in any case, the solar resource needed to generate power using CSP systems is quite plentiful. Imagine being able to generate enough electric power for the entire country by covering about 9 percent of Nevada — a plot of land 100 miles on a side — with parabolic trough systems!

Don't expect Republicans, particularly somebody as old and out of the loop as John McCain, to grasp onto this. Even the Democrats will need some pushing in the right direction. But if America is going to take back control of its own destiny, and save us from environmental disaster, it has to start implementing these solutions.