Thoughts from the shower: Upside-down energy production

My morning shower, hot water flowing down my body, started a mental review of where our energy comes from. After some thought, I determined we have an "energy pyramid" available to us, but that to a large degree we invert the pyramid, drawing a large share of our energy from small, nonrenewable sources.

I believe we derive usable energy for our society from only five sources. In order of abundance, these are:

1. Solar
2. Tidal (lunar gravitational)
3. Geothermal
4. Nuclear
5. Petrochemical, coal, and natural gas

Of these, solar easily accounts for the vast majority of the energy we use. Hydroelectric plants, windmills, and campfires are three obvious examples of energy derived from solar power. Most schemes for increasing energy availability focus on maximizing the use of solar energy, either directly (through solar panel technology) or indirectly (through such transport media as wind harvesting or plant growing). This is reasonable, since solar power is far and away the most common source of energy available to us.

But once we get past solar, the vast majority of our energy is provided by the least abundant source: petrochemicals, coal, and natural gas. These are commonly called "fossil fuels", and are thought to have their origin in very early prehistoric collections of algae, plankton, and other biomass that were covered with mud and exposed to heat and pressure over tens or hundreds of millions of years. In effect, oil is a form of stored solar energy -- but unlike other forms of solar energy we use, oil is effectively unrenewable.

Petroleum is remarkable in other ways, too. It's the ideal material for making plastics. In our day, we don't realize what miraculous materials plastics are; we take them completely for granted. Our great-grandparents would set us straight in telling us that their shocking lack of iPods, air flight and ground travel technology, refrigeration, and even central plumbing was due not to basic technological deficiency, but primarily to the difficulty of working the needed materials -- difficulty which has largely been swept away by the versatility of plastics.

(Before you argue that iPod technology is not merely plastics, and that the "silicon revolution" was unknown to our great-grandparents, consider: What materials advances made the computer age possible? Was it just the semiconductivity of silicon that drove the process? Not at all; it was the increasing availability of plastics.)

In petroleum, we have the perfect starter material to make all variations of the fabulous, miraculous stuff called plastic, enough to last us and our descendants for literally tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So what do we do with it? We put it in our gas tanks and burn it up. Not a wise use of resources, methinks.

Coal, too, is an amazing material. It is composed of fossilized, carbonized plant material dating from 300 million years ago. Much coal still has the perfect impressions of its constituent ferns. In coming years, we will doubtless figure out how to examine coal and determine important bioinformation based on its structure. Coal beds probably constitute one of the best, most valuable textbooks into understanding the Earth's early history from hundreds of millions of years ago, a textbook we are only barely beginning to be able to read. It's utterly irreplaceable, replete with information we don't even know to ask about yet and cannot even dream of today. So what do we do with it? We dig it up and burn it to keep our houses warm. Surely I'm not the only one who finds this appalling.

In former times, people burned amber, not knowing what it was, but enjoying the beautiful pine scent it provided. Today we know that amber is fossilized tree resin from many millions of years ago. It commonly contains pollens, spores, and even whole insects from ancient prehistoric times, long before humans walked the earth. For all those years, our ancestors were burning up irreplaceable treasures, their information irretrievably destroyed, because it smelled nice.

Of course, our ancestors didn't know. But we do.

So what to do about this? We can't mandate zero fossil fuel usage starting tomorrow, unless we want to witness widespread starvation, rioting, and the fall of civilization as we know it. (Our modern farming methods, using gasoline- and diesel-powered tractors and combines for planting and harvesting vast acreage, are the science of turning petroleum into food. Take away the petroleum, and soon we all starve. Food storage, anyone?)

But we can start taking immediate, positive steps to wean ourselves from petroleum usage in two generations. If harvesting solar power is not enough, let's figure out ways to use tidal energy. Iceland uses geothermal; maybe we can find ways to make that more viable worldwide. In any case, we can certainly use uranium to drive fission (nuclear) power for the next hundred years, to take the edge off our energy hunger while we figure out how to wean ourselves from burning up our irreplaceable petroleum.

Of course, some among us are hungry for political power, as well. This deplorable power hunger means that, for example, OPEC will seek to stop any lessening of petroleum usage. Politicians (yes, Republicans as well as Democrats) will cynically and shamelessly use this issue as an election plank, with little thought to the truthfulness or sustainability of their position. So-called environmentalists will use the issue as a club to drive their often-deplorable agenda forward. Barack Obama will be elected president.

All these things are true, but ultimately not relevant. We must figure out how to stop our oil dependency, not just for our own immediate comfort and national security, but for the benefit of those who will come a thousand generations hence.