Bob McDonald - The Future Is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Todays Technologies

Lets start with the good news. The technology to produce energy without carbon emissions already exists. There is as much solar energy beaming down from the sky onto the Earth every hour that humanity consumes in a year. Energy blows on the wind, boils out of the ground, and literally grows on trees. There is thousands of times more non-fossil fuel energy available than even our hungry consumer mouths are swallowing. And we have the means to gather it up and put it to useful work.

The challenge is not just constructing the wind turbines, solar farms, geothermal plants, tidal stations, biofuels and other alternative energy devices, the big elephant in the room is giving up the most convenient, versatile source of energy that has driven civilization since the Industrial Revolution and turned humans into a superspecies. Black gold.

Fossil fuels are incredible. They pack an amazing amount of energy into a very small space. Gasoline has one hundred times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, and the batteries are about fifty times heavier. Fossil fuels are easy to carry around, can remain in storage without losing energy until we need them, and, besides providing the power to keep trains, planes, and automobiles on the move, can be broken down into many useful products, from plastics to synthetic fabrics, fertilizer, even coffee whitener. No wonder theyre so popular.

Too bad that the way we burn them is changing the climate.

Alternatives to fossil fuel energy are everywhere, but clean sources such as solar and wind are spread over large areas, so it takes large technology covering a lot of land to gather it up and concentrate it into useful forms. Fossil fuels come out of the ground already densely packed with energy, which is why they have been the fuel of choice for centuries. And why we burn a lot of it.

Our thirst for oil is insatiable. Worldwide, we consume around 100 million barrels of it every day. All we had to do was dig this black gold out of the ground and light a match to reap its many benefits.

Look around you. Everything that powers up, gets warm, or moves is using energy. From the alarm clock that wakes you in the morning to the lights in your home, the heat to cook meals, and the vehicles to transport you. And we assume all that energy will always be there. Flip a switch and lights come on. Plug in a device and it automatically charges up. Turn up the thermostat and your home becomes warmer. Press the accelerator pedal and your vehicle moves. And for the most part, that energy is invisible. We dont see the electricity that came from a generating station and into the wires of your home, the gas in the pipelines that feed a furnace, or the combustion inside an engine that turns the wheels.

We also dont see where that energy comes from, whether from burning coal, oil, or natural gas in generating stations, water falling through the penstocks of a dam, or the nuclei of atoms smashing into one another in a nuclear reactor. All these forms of energy are simply there when we need them, and they have become so entrenched in our lifestyles that we cant live without them. The only time we get a sense of how much we consume is when the monthly bills come in and it hits us in the pocketbook. But trying to quantify just how much energy all of humanity consumes is as difficult as trying to count the stars in the universe. The numbers are incredible.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), our global energy demand from all sources is about 120 million tons of oil equivalent, known as Mtoe, every year. Thats a lot (a gross understatement). We use it in such quantities because oil contains a huge amount of energy. One 45-gallon drum, seen being used by the military or shined up and played as an instrument in a Jamaican steel band, is a standard barrel, or 159 litres. To measure the energy in a barrel, another unit is used, the metric joule, which is how much work that energy can do. One joule is the energy used to lift 1 kilogram up 1 metre. So pick up a small bag of oranges from the floor and your muscles are burning one joule of energy.