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Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air
Preface
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more
than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science.
James Lovelock
I recently read two books, one by a physicist, and one by an economist.
In Out of Gas, Caltech physicist David Goodstein describes an impending
energy crisis brought on by The End of the Age of Oil. This crisis is
coming soon, he predicts: the crisis will bite, not when the last drop of
oil is extracted, but when oil extraction can’t meet demand – perhaps
as soon as 2015 or 2025. Moreover, even if we magically switched all our
energy-guzzling to nuclear power right away, the oil crisis would simply
be replaced by a nuclear crisis in just twenty years or so, as uranium
reserves also became depleted.
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg paints a completely
different picture. “Everything is fine.” Indeed, “everything is
getting better.” Furthermore, “we are not headed for a major energy
crisis,” and “there is plenty of energy.”
How could two smart people come to such different conclusions? I
had to get to the bottom of this.
...
This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much
energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and
with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public
debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge
amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language
is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to
know how the one ‘huge’ compares with another ‘huge’, namely our huge
energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not
adjectives.
Where numbers are used, their meaning is often obfuscated by enormity.
Numbers are chosen to impress, to score points in arguments,
rather than to inform. “Los Angeles residents drive 142 million miles
– the distance from Earth to Mars – every single day.” “Each year, 27
million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed.” “14 billion pounds of
trash are dumped into the sea every year.” “British people throw away
2.6 billion slices of bread per year.” “The waste paper buried each year
in the UK could fill 103 448 double-decker buses.”
If all the ineffective ideas for solving the energy crisis were laid end
to end, they would reach to the moon and back. . . . I digress.
The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are
inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop.
...
In a climate where people don’t understand the numbers, newspapers,
campaigners, companies, and politicians can get away with murder.
© David J.C. MacKay. Draft 2.1.7. June 20, 2008
Creative Commons licenses: Sharealike;Attribution-nocommercial-sharealike.
Free e-book available from
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sust ... ex/cft.pdfDavid MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University. He obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His interests include machine learning, reliable computation with unreliable hardware, the design and decoding of error correcting codes, and communication systems for the disabled. His textbook on 'Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms' was published in 2003.
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