A Step Farther Out

by Jerry Pournelle

  That doesn't mean the energies in our waste aren't worth recovering. It's particularly true in the case of animal wastes: methane generators aren't very sensitive to scale. Once you get up to a couple of tons a day, larger methane cookers don't cost much less per pound processed. Thus quite small operations could feasibly build them; and, like garbage, both animal and human wastes must be disposed of anyway, and dairies ought to be encouraged (through higher sewage fees and the like) to catch that energy and feed it into the national pipeline. Once again, though, each case must be examined individually: distance to pipeline; availability of water (methane cookers take lots of water); and other such factors enter here.

  But having done it, we haven't saved ourselves.

  * * *

  If we got 5% of the 1974 energy budget from sewage and garbage (which we can't, because 5% comes only with 100% efficiency), we'd still have to depend on Arab oil. What else can we do?

  Not too long ago there was in vogue a scheme to grow crops for alcohol and run much of our transport system on that. It was even worked out quite elaborately: take sewage and transport it (means not specified) out to marginal farmlands; take the urban poor off the welfare rolls and give them small holdings of that marginal land; and let them grow alcohol crops, thus relieving unemployment, getting people out of the cities, and solving the energy crisis—as well as dealing with sewage.

  It sounds good. It sounds marvelous. Why don't we do it?

  Well, alas, there are some problems. For one, many of those urban poor have just come to the city from marginal farms on which they couldn't make a living. It might require a larger police force and army than we have to make them go back But leave that. Let's assume we have the labor force or can get it.

  What crops produce the most alcohol? You already know that: corn (maize, as they call it everywhere but in the USA); wheat; barley; in other words, cash crops. If they grow well they'll be grown: gone are the days of our big farm surpluses. They are also all crops which respond best to agro-business techniques: there are enormous economies of scale. It doesn't cost anywhere near a thousand times as much to keep 40,000 acres in cultivation as it does to keep 40 going.

  Then there are the costs of collection. The alcohol must be transported and distributed: first, though, the crops themselves must be carried around to the fermenting vats (since the costs of providing each farm, or small community of farms, with its own generation facility would be colossal); then the resulting alcohol must be piped to where it will be used.

  All this is in competition with food crops. True: the United States probably could, at hideous capital costs, grow enough alcohol to run its transport system, and thus be free or nearly so of imported petroleum. We could even afford to do it. It would have one monstrous side effect, though: as we are now one of the few food-exporting countries of this world, we would condemn a lot of people to starvation. I suspect that the very ones who now clamor for our energy-independence achieved through croplands growing alcohol would be the first to denounce such callous behavior.

  But: it is in precisely this area that research can be made to pay off. Right now growing plants are very inefficient things. They don't really convert much (1% or so) of the sunlight falling on them into useful energy. Over the millennia man has selectively bred some plants (such as maize, wheat, barley, etc.) to do a much better job than most; now molecular biology may allow us to double that efficiency in a few years.

  The potential is enormous. If we had 3% efficient crops and grew them continuously, then some 2% of the US land area would provide fuel for all our electrical generators: 25% of all the energy we use, and this without fusion or plutonium or coal or oil. Well worth continuing research. A year or so ago I discussed the need for a national "Manhattan Project" in plant efficiencies. It's still needed. The development of more efficient agricultural plants would do more toward solving the energy problem than all the solar towers and windmills we'll ever build.

  * * *

  Finally, what does it all mean? I'm tempted to give Mr. Natural's answer, but I won't.

  What it means is this: there aren't any single answers to our energy problem. No magic solutions. No fads. No mysterious "them" who prevent us from solving all our problems with a few tricks.

  What it takes is high technology and a lot of research, neither of which looks too healthy right now, given our tax laws. It takes capital accumulation, incentives, a chopping away of bureaucratic red tape. I've covered a lot of that in previous essays.

  I don't want to leave this before making one point that glared at me out of the research I did for this article. Were I energy czar of the US, I know what I'd do (I think—after all, I've only taken a first cut).

  Our transport system uses a full quarter of all energy, and 80% of our petroleum; it uses all of the imported oil. The efficiency of the US transport system is 8%, based on a figure of 0.16 kW-hr (6 x 1012 ergs) per ton-mile. Electrical vehicles can at least double that efficiency, even taking into account losses in transmission over wires, charging batteries, and all the rest. If we also include the costs of pollution control, the advantage of electric vehicles looms even greater.

  At the moment there's no incentive to develop electric cars and trucks and the like: there's not enough electricity. If tomorrow morning all our cars were magically converted into electric vehicles, we'd be paralyzed.

  We have non-polluting means of generating electricity: nuclear power plants. No. Modern fission plants are not the long-term solution to the world's energy problem, nor are they entirely safe (although compared to the health costs of coal they come off rather well). They produce plutonium which has a number of problems associated with it. But they'd get us past any current energy crisis, and if we had enough electricity we would develop—finish, really, because we've just about invented it—the technology to convert from internal combustion to electric transport; that in itself would save more energy than we could get from burning all our garbage and sewage—and it would move us a long way toward energy independence.

  Meanwhile, for long-term I'd finance a lot of research into more efficient energy-fixing crops; I'd put development money into ocean-thermal energy (useful because a good bit of the research goes into low-heat turbine systems which can be used as bottoming cycles on existing power plants even if they never got to sea); I'd change the tax laws to give lower property taxes to those who insulate their houses and install solar heaters (rather than the ruinous fines called "increased property valuation" that the city now levies on you for insulating), and I'd put a bit more into fusion. Finally, I'd change the tax laws to let all kinds of private enterprises do research in the field of energy conservation and efficiencies, even if that meant lower tax revenue and thus laying off some bureaucrats. But that's a dream world, no more realistic than the dream of those who'd run the US of A on its own garbage.

  The Moral Equivalent of War

  There are times when I am certain I have lost my senses. I hear put forward, by supposedly sane and rational people, propositions so mindless that I doubt my sanity. Could I bet that Wrong?

  One such experience happened while listening to the President's energy message to the people. Here was the President of the United States; a man who presumably can obtain the best advice from the world's most intelligent and informed people; and what I heard came out as nonsense.

  After further study it still seems nonsense.

  The best summary I've heard is quoted in ACCESS TO ENERGY, an excellent newsletter published by Dr. Petr Beckmann, of the University of Colorado ($9.00 year, Box 2298, Boulder, Colo. 80306, payment must accompany subscriptions order; highly recommended). In Beckmann's latest there is a quote from an independent oil producer, "I find it; I develop it; I operate it; I take all the risks; I get $2.50/bbl; the government gets $8.25/bbl and the price to the consumer goes up."

  That's an energy policy?

  Now, were these enormous new taxes—the greatest tax increase in US peacetime history—to be applied
to development of new energy resources, we would be involved in a sensible debate: should energy research be directed by the government, or left to private industry? One might rationally take either side of the issue, and the disagreement would be "legitimate"; I would not have this mind-boggled sensation.

  But—in the President's speech for the better part of an hour, research was mentioned precisely once, and then only in passing. Fusion was mentioned not at all. Neither were Space Power Satellites. There was plenty talk of "windfall profits" to the oil companies but very little of why many major oil companies love the new policy: it eliminates all hope of competition. There was nothing about alternate fuel sources, reclamation of sewage, or agricultural research; nothing about geo-pressurized domes (of which more later).

  Out in the fusion research laboratories they're laying off scientists as I write this.

  President Carter has declared war on the energy crisis, and his first marching order was to disband the armored divisions.

  * * *

  So what might be a sensible energy policy? Understand, I don't claim to be the world's greatest expert on the subject; perhaps it's possible that Carter and Company can refute what I'm saying; but I do claim that what I propose makes sense, and on the evidence mine appears a better policy than the one we seem doomed to adopt; and I have heard no refutation, not even a discussion, from the "experts."

  I say this up front because recently I received an amazing letter from a professor in a state college. He had, it seems, been given a copy of one of my columns, and he wrote to tell me that he intended to use me as "an example of those who hold the view that since technology got us into our ecological dilemma, it can get us out of it." Then followed a rather imperious demand for my qualifications as an expert. I gather that creeping credentialism abounds at the professor's institution.

  He signed himself as an "ecologist." That's just as well, since he can hardly call himself a logician. I cannot think where I have ever said anything as amazing as that! I don't accept that "technology got us into our ecological dilemma," and I certainly don't accept his syllogism. I tried to tell him in my reply that I am willing to discuss specific problems and specific technologies, but that evidently did not appeal to him, for he never answered. Perhaps I do not have the right credentials to engage in correspondence with an "ecologist."

  The first job in forming an energy policy is to look at time spans and constraints. It makes no sense to put together a policy which insures a crunch a few years downstream.

  Democracies have no very creditable record of planning for the future. Aristocracies and monarchies have sometimes worried about the next generation, simply because it's likely that the children of the ruling class will have to live with the problems created by present governors. One might think this would apply to democracies as well, but so far that's been rare.

  Yet: energy policy affects the future in an all-too-real sense. Unless we are willing to face massive cutbacks in our real standard of living, we must prepare for the future; and by "we" I mean us, those my age and those just coming of voting age, and by "the future" I mean our future.

  It's a well-known fact that there was a "baby boom" in the late Forties and early Fifties. As a result we have a work force that's fairly large compared to the total population.

  This has resulted in relatively high unemployment among the young unskilled; but it has also enabled the work force to support everyone else. The Social Security program was never an actual insurance system; it always frankly depended on requiring the young workers to support the aged and retired—and even with the large numbers entering the work force over the past few years, Social Security is bankrupt.

  What happens when the "baby-boom" children, those born between 1945 and 1955, retire? Who will support them? You see, the fertility rate in the US is quite low, below replacement; and for the next twenty years at least there cannot be much increase in the size of the work force. Even were we to have a new "baby boom" the effects on the work force would not be seen for nearly twenty years—and there are some fallout detriments to a sudden increase in population. One suspects that a campaign to increase the number of children per US family would not be an optimum solution.

  But if the workforce stays constant or decreases, and the number of retired greatly increases, what is the result? We've seen it already: people don't retire, they just get poor. Even ownership of a home does little to cushion the blow: property taxes are far higher than the mortgage payments, and Social Security and retirement income generally can't meet the tax bill and leave anything left over.

  So: either the productivity per worker increases, or we have a hefty decline in real income for an increasingly large part of the population—and precisely that portion of the population which has time for political activities, and has been around long enough to have some idea of how the political system works.

  What will the result of that be? There are a number of possibilities, none very pleasant. Probably the least unpleasant would be a backlash against "ecologists" and "concerned" people, the scrapping of conservation programs, and a crash program to increase productivity at any expense.

  The alternative to waiting for the crunch is to plan for increased worker productivity: and that means to expand the energy supply. The productivity of the work force has always been dependent on the availability and price of energy.

  Meanwhile, across the world there is a rising tide of demand: what, when I was in college, the professors called "the revolution of rising expectations." Some of those foreign beggars are actually demanding enough to eat! In many "developing" countries there is an actual expectation of development.

  I suggest that it is much harder to raise real per capita income from $100 a year to $150 than to raise it from $5000 to $7500; that if it is to be done, it is likely to be done only with technology; and that takes energy. (It also makes it likely that the Western nations will grow even wealthier with respect to the poor ones; but see Matthew and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard on that. I should have thought it takes a twisted logic indeed to prefer an income of $100 yearly while the West stays put to having 50% more while the West does the same.)

  Well, all right; we'll have to have energy; but can't conservation do it? Or windmills? Or tide? Or magic?

  No one seriously thinks so, and few say it except some "ecology" publications more dedicated to ideology than fact.

  But can't we go back to the land? Conserve?

  How? The productive land is in production; sending any large part of the population "back to the land" would simply reduce the amount of food available. There is land that is not economic to farm; but to suggest that we "retire" our poor and aged onto inadequate farmland requires a callous disregard for human values almost beyond belief Subsistence farming on poor land is appealing only to hopeless romantics who haven't tried it. There may be a few who like that sort of thing; but politically it's an impossible solution, requiring armies and police and the abrogation of democracy.

  No. To provide for the non-working among us, both unemployed and aged, we need higher productivity; and that requires energy.

  For the near term—say between now and the year 2000—there are only two certain sources of energy in the quantities we will need.

  Coal and nuclear—and perhaps, just perhaps, a third, one just discovered which does not yet figure into anybody's energy estimates.

  Coal has problems. For each 1000 megawatts of coal-fired electrical plant, there is created each second: 600 Lbs. of carbon dioxide; 10 pounds of sulfur dioxide; 30 pounds of bottom and fly ash; and a lot of other stuff.

  If you prefer annual figures, that's nine million tons of CO2, 157,000 tons of SO2, and 474,000 tons of ashes; not to mention a million or so tons of sludge generated in the scrubbers. There is also put into the atmosphere considerably more radioactivity (in the form of radium and radon not removed by scrubbers) than a comparable nuclear plant releases.

  Disposing of the wastes from coal-f
ired plants is not a simple problem. Meanwhile, by the year 2000, we will be ripping from the ground about nine billion tons of coal each year. That coal must be shipped about the country, and the number of miners and railroad workers killed each year will not be zero. The ashes and other wastes must also be shipped, and disposed of, and that's hardly a trivial activity either.

  On purely humanitarian grounds, coal is inferior to nuclear power: the number of people killed per kilowatt is about 100 times greater for coal than nuclear, when you examine the entire power cycle from mines to waste disposal; while the ratio with respect to members of the general public killed cannot be estimated, because no member of the public has ever been killed (or injured) by a nuclear power plant. As I write this, ironically, there lies on my desk an article about a bursting dam killing 31 people.

  But we do have coal, and we can survive through its use; and if we get on with the job we can live with the result, hard cheese though it may be for miners with black lung (my wife's father died of silicosis). I would have thought, though, that those truly concerned for the environment would prefer the nuclear option.