Aug
7
How to Make an Energy Policy
August 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment
There is an important need for sensible government energy policy that can maintain and improve our standard of living, reduce the costs of economic growth and enable energy use for all of the people living on our planet. It’s not as hard as you might think.
The problem, both from an economic burden and a political perspective is using very old carbon and reintroducing it into the planet’s carbon cycle. Without jumping again into the global warming campaign, the fact is mankind has inserted itself way to deep into the planet’s carbon cycle by digging up the carbon fuels of coal, oil, and natural gas. Using these fuels reintroduces carbon sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago, thus a distortion has occurred in the planet’s natural carbon cycle time frame.
The only long-term solution is for mankind to participate in the planet’s carbon cycle on a current basis rather than on a hundreds of millions of year’s basis. That solves the petroleum problem, the CO2 idea about global warming, and can lead to a huge growth in economic expansion worldwide. It is just that simple, and it’s the only solution that has any prospect of benefiting the planet’s inhabitants.
Its not CO2 being the problem, CO2 is your means of existence, the problem is in the timing of the roles that CO2 plays during the planet’s carbon cycle that makes for a good solution.
The real problem is how to change the course of mankind’s choices in capturing energy and producing fuels. Lets have a brief look at our assets.
There is a major source of fusion power showering our planet constantly. We can use the incredible resource of gravity from the planet and the moon. Mankind has learned much about the physics of nature and innovated astonishing engineering skills and techniques, with much more to come. We have resources available to us right now and with ingenuity can vastly expand the usefulness of our resources.
Today we catch solar energy with solar voltaic panels. These panels have gotten to more than 40% efficiency and we have no programs to promote a percentage of your roof being used to make some electricity. A nation using its 1000 square foot roofs with only 100 square feet of collector at 40% efficiency would make a big difference.
We catch solar energy with plants to make ethanol for displacing crude oil made into gasoline. Yet butyl alcohol offers 33% more joules per gallon and solves several problems with the technology readily available. The August 1st post looks at a study about the potential to displace all of the oil used for transportation fuels with innovative chemistry making fuels that use biomass for recovering the carbon from the current carbon cycle and solar or nuclear power to isolate hydrogen.
Mankind is packed with knowledge, innovation and creativity. There are at least four viable means to design a fusion reactor. But we Americans are funding the research and design of only one.
Much is made about our “financial innovation,” the notion to tax or fee or some such, for using carbon. But the idea is silly in its simplicity. Far better to say the fee would be for using old carbon, and that fee would be paid for using current carbon. One might ask an energy or oil company economist, what would the fee on a barrel of crude oil need to be when paid for the production of an alternative fuel for one to cancel the other out? There is where the policymaking gets clever, looking for the balance, or the tipping point if you will for an economic transition.
I suspect that the ripostes to today’s post will argue the carbon issue. Just keep in mind that you are personally carbon fueled. You will die quite shortly without adequate blood sugar, a hydrated carbon. Here in our planetary system carbon is the high-density energy form. As desirable as a hydrogen energy system might seem it can’t be so readily substituted for carbon because it would throw overboard so much current investment and the problems in its nature remain quite daunting.
So here are the questions to ask when reading or listening about the energy and fuel issues. Do the writers and talkers identify the actual problem of getting current in the planet’s carbon cycle and offer solutions to solve it?
