Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "energy"

Coal Wars: the Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet by Richard Martin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

With good story telling, Martin paints a picture of coal's history—its hearth-warming blessings of cheap energy, its future-bashing dangers, and its slow demise, leaving too many lives disrupted. Meanwhile, our future is seriously compromised by an overdose of coal's signature, carbon dioxide.

Martin shares his personal experiences while visiting the coal country in Appalachia, Wyoming, Colorado, Ohio, and four areas in China. The picture he paints helps us understand the importance coal has played in human energy-dependent history, how it has created mining cultures whose roots go deep in China, Europe and the United States, and now why its demise is raising difficult questions.

The author doesn't preach answers at us. He makes a strong case, however, for recognizing that "market forces are going to kill off coal..." (Other sources have reported that there are more jobs now in solar than in coal, which is being out-sold by cheap gas.)

Three principles, he says, could lead to a "set of solutions." 1) Coal burning must shut down before carbon dioxide does us in: "A sustainable energy strategy requires making choices." 2) "We can't abandon the workers." They need a "GI bill" to provide support while acquiring education and training for new jobs. It would cost only 1 dollar per ton of coal. 3) "the Solution must be global," and the "...only mechanism...a price on carbon... [i.e.] stiff penalties for greenhouse gas emissions."

It's a dilemma not easily faced, for coal gave us the energy to build our technological cultures, and there is still a lot of it available. Like our dependence of gasoline and cars, it's hard to imagine how we could get along without it. But, unlike transportation, the alternatives are not only obvious but urgent, if we are to rescue the future.

In this book author Nick Lane, biochemist at University College, London, defines in exacting logic where life may have begun on Earth, why archaea and bacteria got stuck "... at the bacterial level of complexity for more than two billion years," and why the jump to complex eukaryotic life, to critters like us, was made possible by difficult, perhaps unique, endosymbiosis events—the engulfing of one microbe by another.

All this is of interest in our search for exolife. If we understood how life began on Earth, we would know better how to look for life elsewhere. The author goes into great detail describing the alkaline hydrothermal vents on Earth's ocean floor. They most likely provided the ideal environment for harnessing the proton exchange required to get simple life started here. We would do well to learn more about those vents before we study possible life-starting environments on Europa, Titan, and Enceladus.

He points out that RNA is far too complex a molecule to start with. He stresses the need to consider the energy requirements of cellular and genomic activity. He describes in detail the alkaline hydrothermal vents and how they could provide the gentle environment to get simple prokaryotic life (the archaea and bacteria) started.

As a result of endosymbiosis between simple organisms on a 2-billion-year-old Earth, cells that became complex eukaryotes plus endosymbionts: mitochondria or (later) chloroplasts (to make plants). Lane says, "...the singular origin of complex life might have depended on their acquisition..." because this endosymbiosis provided energy efficiency.

The author does a masterful job of introducing and exploring critical questions. Why did the bacteria never evolve into more complex critters? Perhaps they stayed stuck due to a "constrained structure" that limited their ability to capture energy.

The uniqueness of complex life in the universe was suggested in Ward and Brownlee's RARE EARTH. They give us many geologic and astronomic reasons why Earth lucked out in the effort to produce complex life. Now we have Lane's bioenergetic arguments to add to our luck.

Life Without Oil: by Steve Hallett and John Wright, Amherst New York, Prometheus Books, 2011.

I awoke one morning recently realizing how this “old” book mirrors The Archives of Varok, my 1970’s attempt (updated this decade) to explain why we “Must Shift To a New Energy Future.”

My dad saw it coming in the 1960’s--this need to pull back on our runaway economy and population bomb--when he could not find, anywhere in the world, matched rosewood to build a xylophone.

In Life Without Oil, the authors (writing before 2011) tell us that “The party’s over.
Technology will not save us, that “…globalization accelerates our destruction and deepens our vulnerability…” so we had better make “…communities and nations…more resilient to the coming collapse and more able to recover thereafter.” They make a detailed, well-documented case with extensive reference notes and Index.

The authors’ suggestions are just as valid now as they were eight years ago: sustainability must replace the current “…ethos of growth, where people share and conserve, rather than compete and consume.” I.e. don’t send food; support local production and “sustainable ecology.” Manage the commons. “Allow immigration” to solve problems of declining populations.

Europe is a good example of how population growth can reach a “rate near zero.” This world does not need to be another Easter Island, where ten communities competed for resources until the land was stripped bare.

We need to “…forego short-term economic needs” and invest in alternative energy technologies, “replace fossil fuels” while protecting the land and maintaining the wilderness, productive farmland, clean air and water.

Industry must be required to pay “…the economic price and the ecological price for the materials they use and the goods they produce and distribute…” . How? With careful planning. Remove subsidies “from polluting industries.” Increase their taxes when they pollute, trade emission permits and enforce regulations in the financial industry, especially where the natural environment can be protected.

The authors recognize that all situations can differ, but it makes sense that the pros and cons of various regulations can be balanced--just as we balance the right of way at a four-way stop on our highways. We all honor the rules: the car on the right goes first if two cars get to the intersection at the same time. Otherwise we simply take turns--first one there goes first.

The Coal Wars: The Failure of Energy and the Fate of the Planet, by Richard martin, New York, Palgrave Mackillan, 2015.
This is the story of the demise of the coal industry, the history of coal and its use, and its effects on three or more generations in the U.S. south, Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming, Ohio and Colorado, some zones in China and in The Ruhr, Germany.

The author notes that “…nostalgia for a vanishing way of life is leading to a form of cannibalism…kids can’t be fed and educated on rage…not all chance entails betrayal…natural gas has become cheaper and easier to use, as has robotics, so jobs are lost in coal country. Economics is changing”

Coal has been used in China since the “Fourth Millennium B.C.” Now its industry is outdated and “inching toward absolute caps on both coal consumption and carbon emissions.” Taoism and Confusion values are both focused on protection of the natural world, so there is hope that China’s dependence on coal and the damage done to these values may end some day.

In the U. S., the battle may center in Ohio, and in Europe on the Ruhr. In any case, the author argues that coal may be shut down in the end, but we must not “abandon the workers. Any solution must be global.” The final solution: “…a price on carbon.”

Life Without Oil--Why We Must Shift to a New energy Future by Steve Hallett with John Wright, Prometheus Books, Amherst, 2011.

Note the publication date! 2011!! This book should have been entitled “The Beginning of Our End.” It begins with a historical overview of humanity’s use of Earth’s resources and the failed example of Easter Island, in which the first resource to be exploited was the bird life, then the big trees. The authors make the point that “Creeping environmental degradation such as this is occurring around the world today.”

Why didn’t Easter Islanders see their problem? Why don’t we? They were divided into territories that competed-- as we are divided into nations.

The impressive Mayan example of disaster is summarized next. Its “…colossal pyramids and stairways were gradually destroyed by 800 CD.E., as they fought over resources.” Their real…enemy was their own exploitation of the environment.”

The Fertile Crescent is a similar, more current example. Questions about the fall of the Roman Empire have arisen. There is good evidence that it depleted its landbase by its “…overuse of wood and clearing trees for agriculture.” The Dark Ages came next.

The authors state that now there are signs that the world is full. Like the “demise of past societies,” we have “over-exploited our sources of energy, [done] environmental damage, [and strained] agricultural productions.

Are we too blind to the evidence from previous civilizations? The author argues in 2011 for a shift away from our addiction to oil. Coal, oil and natural gasses are finite resources. The special constitutional rights of corporations, their limited liability and their shareholder mandate for “wealth increase…to deliver…high levels of productivity” mean they may not be able to respond to the long-term historical dangers this book outlines. The next century will see the “decline, demise, and disappearance of oil.”

During this “petroleum interval… of glittering progress “we have tripled our population, destroyed forests , turned farmland into wasteland or urban sprawl, filled our oceans with plastic and vacuumed them for fish, emptied freshwater aquifers, shaved mountains, sent untold species into extinction (and culture too)….drained lakes and rivers, and stuffed the atmosphere with climate altering gases.”

We need to reduce, reuse, repair and recycle. Now! Maybe that should have been the title of this book. And I’m only referencing up to page 115. The details fill the rest of the book--the false assumptions we keep making: 1)that human well-being requires continued economic growth and all that implies, 2) that the marketplace and its competition will provide the energy, resources and competition to keep it growing, and 3)that resources are unlimited and our “life-supporting processes” cannot be damaged. These are all “false assumptions.”

The author concludes by saying that we can recover from “the coming depression” by replacing sustainability for growth and by sharing , conserving, and NOT competing