Could Unlimited Clean Power Have Problems? Not Compared with Today’s Energy Problems
I have been having trouble getting my head around this article in the New Scientist: Power paradox: Clean might not be green forever (h/t WSJ TechEurope). Basically, what they’re saying is that the waste heat from all the energy we use will cause warming itself. The thesis is that all energy production and use give off some heat as waste. I have no problem with this; its true, but it is so small as a part of the total heat that the earth takes in from the sun and radiates away into space that we don’t contemplate it.
The article says that if we forever generate more energy – so long as it is external from the solar energy that the Sun sends us, like nuclear fusion or fission or fossil fuels – then that waste heat will eventually cause global warming on its own, regardless of greenhouse gas emissions. Again – this is true, but so far in the future that its really not worth contemplating. In the science fiction world that this article is creating, it claims we could have access to almost limitless energy (they posit a world that uses 5000 Terwatts per year; we use 16 TW now).
My problem is that this is so far beyond any reasonable time horizon that it’s not worth contemplating or planning for. If humanity is able to generate more than 300 times as much energy as we use now, then we’ll also have limitless energy to build the giant mirrors to reflect some sunlight away or some such geoengineering scheme.
To compare – if, say scientists in Edinburgh in the 1750s had determined that all the coal they were burning was going to cause global warming in the first half of the 20th Century – 250 years ahead – would they have planned for that? I don’t think so. Let’s focus on the problems of today: energy security, economic instability, and environmental sustainability. We’ll let our great-great-great-great grandchildren deal with these consequences.
