Energy has been on my mind, of late. A few forces have conspired to bring this subject to the center of my attention, with one of the most influential being the research I’ve encountered on Peak Oil.

For those who aren’t familiar with the subject, Peak Oil theory, known formally as Hubbert Peak theory, states that the rate of oil production oil follows a bell-shaped curve. In the U.S., oil discovery peaked in the 1960s and oil production peaked in the 1970s. Global oil production is expected to peak sometime this decade, and indeed, it may already have.

For a disturbingly graphic picture of what a post-oil world could look like, the August issue of Harper’s magazine is running an article entitled “Imagine There’s No Oil: Scenes from a Liberal Apocalypse.” Unfortunately, it’s not online, but if you see a copy on the newsstands, grab it. It makes several tongue-in-cheek, self-aware comparisons (the title and cover graphic being the most obvious examples) between the not-completely-unrealistic scenarios proposed in the article and the scary stories coming from the Left Behind crowd.

You can sense the panic in the people that the article sketches: mostly gentle lefties who are coming to grips with the reality that even the industrial society they spend so much time criticizing has its advantages, and that the alternative presented by a post-oil world could be much more frightening. Yet, without getting carried away, it is sobering to consider the extent to which the global economy depends on cheap oil.

It explains quite a lot, actually.

The loss of cheap energy would truly be catastrophic on a scale that no-one in history has witnessed before. It’s in our best interests to come to grips with this issue and find ways to overcome it.

The first step, as they say in those 12-step programs, is admitting that there is a problem. I won’t attempt to persuade anyone here because anyone who is not yet persuaded that we have problems on a number of levels related to our environment probably won’t ever be.

Once we’ve acknowledged this fact, however, a look at the alternatives ranges from the utterly pessimistic to optimistic but foreboding. The pessimists, mostly peak oilers, say even the alternative energy sources we are pursuing won’t be able to come online in time to replace the losses in oil we will experience. If the global oil supply declines even 3% anually, as posited in the Harper’s article, energy prices could skyrocket as a result in just a few years. It takes decades to deploy nuclear power plants, solar energy is not subsidised nearly enough, and wind power is both expensive and not free from climate consequences of its own. There is one source of energy that is abundant: Coal.

Coal is cheap, dirty, and popular. In China, it’s one of the primary energy sources being ramped up to meet the huge demand there. As oil prices rise globally, it’s becoming an increasingly popular option here, too. But it’s really, really bad for the environment. It’s one of the chief culprits in global warming. Scientific American dedicated September’s issue to combating climate change, and an entire section focuses on the damage caused by coal and what can be done to clean it up.

What’s interesting about this entire discussion is how abundant energy is on this planet. How well we make use of that energy is, according to Nikolai Kardashev - a Russian astronomer - the single most important metric for determining how technologically advanced a civilization is. He established a scale that goes like this (via Wikipedia):

• Type I — A civilization that is able to harness all of the power available on a single planet, approximately 10¹⁶ W. The actual figure is quite variable; Earth specifically has an available power of 1.74×10¹⁷ W. Kardashev’s original definition was 4×10¹² W. (Kardashev had originally defined Type I as a “Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth”, “presently” meaning 1964.)
• Type II — A civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single star, approximately 10²⁶ W. Again, this figure is variable; the Sun outputs approximately 3.86×10²⁶ W. Kardashev’s original definition was 4×10²⁶ W.
• Type III — A civilization that is able to harness all of the power available from a single galaxy, approximately 10³⁶ W. This figure is extremely variable, since galaxies vary widely in size. Kardashev’s original definition was 4×10³⁷ W.

We’re not even harnessing all the energy on this planet, so we’ve clearly got a long way to go. I hope we give ourselves that chance.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 8:54 pmand is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.