Tossing Mullet

I just saw a commercial from the oil and gas industry proclaiming the availability of domestic hydrocarbon-based energy for the next 60 years. Great big whoopee! For God’s sake (and She should know) I’ve lived over 60 years and express daily wonderment at the wonders of my computer and cyberspace in general. How did we get along without them?

But the implication that we should rejoice in the prospect that we can count on our own petroleum-based energy sources for the span of a single generation – and be damned proud of it, is just beyond belief. I suspect that the commercial on prime time during the national news was pricey to say the least.

The submerged message is that we should immediately begin extracting all of the oil and gas from the Alaskan Arctic and the coast of Florida if we expect to make it through this next generation. It’s great comfort to know that my grandchildren will die happy with their Hummer left behind in the driveway. I won’t know their children very well, so the hell with them – we’re going to be OK.

Really though – even I, as an absolute profligate and expanding carbon footprint planter, am thinking twice about hopping into the car to run to the neighborhood grocery store to get tomatoes for homemade salsa because of the cost of gas. I would gladly walk if, as is suggested, we lived a 10 or 15 minute walking distance away or about a half mile. As it is we don’t and last year this time I would have hopped away without a moment’s hesitation.

Now it occurred to me that they could wait until tomorrow for the homemade black bean salsa since it’s not much without fresh tomatoes and I probably can manage to think of two or 20 other items, either at or on the route to the grocery store, which I can much more efficiently acquire tomorrow. Of course it won’t be long before it will have to be next door to me before I can walk there – if I remember what it was I wanted and where the store is!

The point, of course, is that quite a few of us have begun to take the energy crisis a bit more seriously now that $4/gallon gasoline is staring us in the face and our homes may not be worth what we have borrowed against them over the past 10 years. Houses near transit routes are selling like hotcakes in those enlightened cities that have invested in the availability of public transit.

I work largely from home now, but if I should get onto some kind of work downtown I have determined I can get downtown on the bus for something like $5-6 dollars round trip. That would take me 2-3 gallons of gas in my ill-advised 5-year old pickup truck, which was purchased for a variety of excuses that sound like excuses. As most of the pundits proclaim, it’s too late to try and trade down now because nobody is dumb enough to buy a truck at more than 10 cents on the dollar. At any rate, the economics behind riding the bus are beginning to look pretty good.

But in the meantime it is becoming obvious, even to the current administration, that other sources of energy should be reviewed and given a hard look. The laws of energy in the two Laws of Thermodynamics, unfortunately, deserve some consideration. I say unfortunate since 99 percent, no, 99.5 percent of the general population’s eyes glaze over at the very thought of something so complex. Yet these fundamental principles drive every aspect of our lives and should be the one thing that “everyman” should comprehend, at least, qualitatively.

A.D. Kirwan has done this for you in a very short and readable book entitled “Mother Nature’s Two Laws: Ringmasters for Circus Earth” published in 2000. He describes energy, which we all pretty well get, and does a good job with entropy, which is where the eye-glazing begins. For the simplistic moment, just think of it as the waste products from using energy. For the sake of this discussion it isn’t immediately important.

What Dr. Kirwan does do is trace the history of energy and complimentary efficiency from the beginning to the present, or end, depending on your perspective. The two appear to be getting closer. Coal replaced wood as a source of energy for steam engines because coal has about twice as much useable energy per pound. The conversion from coal to petroleum is largely due to the fact that petroleum is even more efficient and is much less polluting. This is a major factor in the shift towards natural gas also, but these latter two are not considered renewable and only available from foreign sources once we get past the next generation.

Kirwan does address the most common alternative sources beginning with a familiar one for us – hydroelectric. If you take the trouble to make the calculations, pound for pound, the conversion of the gravitational energy in water to work is about 300 times less efficient than converting the chemical energy in oil. It would take a long time and an awful lot of water to pull that off. Furthermore environmentalists have documented the negative impacts of dams over and over – still might be better than sweltering in the summer.

Solar and/or thermal is an interesting gambit but there is an issue with storing the energy in batteries, which have to be stored as well as disposed of somewhere down the line. These are major issues that haven’t been fully resolved. I’ve given some qualitative thought to the use of wind or ocean current sources and the wind thing seems to be gathering some steam. Even Kirwan doesn’t raise the issue that both are major factors in redistributing heat all over the globe. If we start sucking a bunch of energy from these major climate drivers, could there be even more radical changes in climate and weather?

Quite remarkably, Dr. Kirwan accurately predicts the fallacies that have emerged in the wake of the corn-based ethanol dilemma that the administration has so vigorously embraced. The emotional problems with nuclear power are well understood, but this is the most efficient of all. The amount of energy released from uranium approaches Einstein’s theoretical limit of the conversion of mass to energy. Clearly this option deserves serious consideration if we don’t want to return to the inefficiencies of ancient times – but we have a good 60 years to get it done!

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George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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