In four decades of debating energy issues I can’t avoid noticing one stand-out sociological phenomenon – for every possible energy source you will find an enthusiastic bunch of what I term ETMWHDTUTs – Earnest Thoughtful Men Who Have Discovered The Ultimate Technology.
Just mention hot rocks, fuel cells, ocean thermal, adiabatic gas, cold fusion energy….. you name it…. and up pops a nice guy who can be classified as a devotee. In the main these are intelligent, reasonable people who genuinely care about the state of the world and believe they have stumbled upon The Solution. Many of these men folk become so enraptured that their belief takes on a religious dimension, and so I find it can become hard to argue numbers and put the debate into a broader perspective.
Personally, I like to support the enthusiasm that is there, because we need hard core enthusiasts to push new technologies that have a chance of becoming viable. Some of them will, most won’t. I also believe that on energy matters there’s space for mature, dialectic and respectful debate about different supply choices and technologies.
But the above phenomenon is partly what goaded me to write the general backgrounder articles that head up this discussion, because amid these debates we will always have to come back to a certain knowledge that there is no silver bullet or holy grail.
For those interested in the broader question – can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs? – it’s worth going to Richard Heinberg’s “Searching For A Miracle”: http://richardheinberg.com/searching-for-a-miracle
Addressing that broader issue should not render us totally cynical about interesting and elegant technologies that can partially contribute to society’s needs, we just need to be mindful that society’s core problem is much bigger than any simplistic, popular notion that all we need to do is switch energy sources and keep charging on. Our core problem is a multi-dimensional cultural one, not technological.
To put a figure on it, maybe 10 percent of our civilisation’s sustainability problem is to do with technology and energy supply. We can’t ignore that 10 percent of the problem, it is very important, but it is just 10 percent (or thereabouts). Energy supply can’t be divorced from the bigger questions to do with resource limits, asymptotic growth and the immutable laws of thermodynamics.
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