Tom Murphy on “the energy trap”
Tom Murphy, a physics professor at UC San Diego, has an interesting post, “The Energy Mix that will help us Survive without Fossil Fuels” on Oil Price, about what our future energy mix might look like. He discusses all the available types of energy producing sources, including coal fired plants, tidal power, and breeder nuclear reactors, then incorporates them into a rating matrix. This quantitative outlook draws a stark contrast between the ease of harnessing fossil fuels compared to cleaner alternatives.
Murphy makes an appropriate analogy, likening our fossil fuel addiction to spending inheritance money. “Soon, we will see a yearly decrease in our trust fund dividend, forcing us to either adapt to less or try to fill the gap with replacements. What this post and the series preceding it demonstrates is that we do not have a delightful menu from which to select our future. Most of the options leave a bad taste of one form or the other.”
He concludes by saying:
When I first approached the subject of energy in our society, I expected to develop a picture in my mind of our grandiose future, full of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, geothermal, tidal, etc. What I got instead was something like this matrix: full of inadequacies, difficulties, and show-stoppers. Our success at managing the transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining our current standard of living is far from guaranteed. If such success is our goal, we should realize the scale of the challenge and buckle down now while we still have the resources to develop a costly new infrastructure. Otherwise we get behind the curve, possibly facing unfamiliar chaos, loss of economic confidence, resource wars, and the unforgiving Energy Trap.
Murphy’s post is a reminder that we are unlikely to make substantial progress in developing alternative energy sources until they are less costly than our current options. This is a logical business model, but it overlooks the substantial externalities of fossil fuels that obstruct human development and influences climate change. On a more optimistic note, we need to, and we can, turn this situation around. The cost to produce solar energy is now approaching cost-competitiveness with other commercial sources, especially when supported by government mandates and subsidies.
Please also see Andrew Holland‘s America’s Energy Choices white paper.
