thesun

 THE SUN AND BEYOND 

     In the earsplitting clamor over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial man in the street. 

     One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. 

     The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on nonrenewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expensive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. 

     Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Sea-brook or Grohnde. The Tar|ger^|pstinn is whether apy^ energy base designed for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in frSTtoTfiT. the answer is inescapable. 

     Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire world's energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, briefcase-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. 

     Statistics vary. Disputes rage over how long the world has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predictions now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas and oil back into the earth to replenish the supply. Whether the end comes in some climactic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ead=. jigg. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Vene-IzueTans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades.) 

     However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today's world it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. 

     In a matter of decades energy may once more become abundant and cheap as a result of startling technological breakthroughs or economic swings. But whatever happens, the relative price of oil is likely to continue its climb as we are forced to plumb deeper and deeper depths, to explore more remote regions, and to compete among more buyers. OPEC aside, an historic turn has taken place over the past five years: despite massive new discoveries like those in Mexico, despite skyrocketing prices, the actual amount of confirmed, commercially recoverable reserves of crude oil has shrunk, not grown—reversing a trend that had lasted for decades. Further evidence, if needed, that the petroholic era is screeching to a halt. 

     Meanwhile, coal, which has supplied most of the remaining third of the world energy total, is in ample supply, though it, too, is ultimately depletable. Any massive expansion of coal usage, however, entails the spread of dirty air, a possible hazard to the world's climate (through an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), and a ravaging of the earth as well. Even if all these were accepted as necessary risks over the decades to come, coal cannot fit into the tank of an automobile nor carry out many other tasks now performed by oil or gas. Plants to gasify or liquefy coal require staggering amounts of capital and water (much of it needed for agriculture) and are so ultimately inefficient and costly that they, too, must be seen as no more than expensive, diversionary, and highly temporary expedients. Nuclear technology presents even more formidable problems at its present stage of development. Conventional reactors rely on uranium, yet another exhaustible fuel, and carry safety risks that are extremely costly to overcome—if, indeed, they ever can be. No one has convincingly solved the problems of nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear costs are so high that until now government subsidies have been essential to make atomic power remotely competitive with other sources.

      Fast breeder reactors are in a class by themselves. But while often presented to the uninformed public as perpetual motion machines because the plutonium they spew out can be used as a fuel, they, too, remain ultimately dependent upon the world's small and nonrenewable supply of uranium. They are not only highly centralized, incredibly costly, volatile, and dangerous, they also escalate the risks of nuclear war and terrorist capture of nuclear materials. 

     None of this means that we are going to be thrown back into the middle ages, or that further economic advance is impossible. But it surely means that we have reached the end of one line of development and must now start another. It means that the Second Wave energy base is unsustainable. 

     Indeed, there is yet another, even more fundamental reason why the world must and will shift to a radically new energy base. For any energy base, whether in a village or an industrial economy, must be suited to the society's level of technology, the nature of production, the distribution of markets and population, and many other factors. 

     The rise of the Second Wave energy base was associated with society's advance to a whole new stage of technological development. And while fossil fuels certainly accelerated technological growth, the exact reverse was also true. The invention of energy-thirsty, brute technology during the industrial era spurred the ever-more-rapid exploitation of those very fossil fuels. The development of the auto industry, for example, caused so radical an expansion of the oil business that at one time it was essentially a dependency of Detroit. In the words of Donald E. Carr, formerly an oil company research director, and author of Energy and the Earth Machine, the petroleum industry became "a slave to one form of internal combustion engine." 

     Today we are once more at the edge of an historic technological leap, and the new system of production now emerging will require a radical restructuring of the entire energy business—even if OPEC were to fold its tent and quietly steal away.

Ahh, just download the PDF, The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler